The debate as far as Wayfarer is concerned is about explaining the collapse of the wave function, which sometimes goes by the name "the measurement problem". — ProcastinationTomorrow

The question is largely over the exact status of the states in superpositon: is it epistemic or ontological? And if it is either, what would it imply for our understanding of reality? These are real, interesting, and productive questions. But they do not turn, except in the most banal formulations, upon understanding 'measurement' as an act of consciousness. The quote from Rovelli makes this quite clear. John Wheeler, whose 'participatory universe' idea is often taken up by quantum mystifiers, is even more explicit: "'Consciousness' has nothing whatsoever to do with the quantum process'". One can of course wheel out physicist after physicist who will say the same thing, and you will still have sophists like Wayfarer who think the QM problem is located somewhere where it is not.

I have an intense dislike of charlatans.

Of course, if you set the equipment up one way, you get one result, and so on - not at all relevant to my point. — Wayfarer

This is the only relevant point in the debate, and if you can't see that, then you don't understand the debate.

Sorry, but this entire post is hogwash. First, you literally put words into the mouth of Andrew, who nowhere speaks of physical measurement systems, but of physical systems tout court. The upshot being that 'measurement' systems are a subclass of physical systems that are designed to capture what happens out there 'in the wild' anyway. So your question about 'physical measurement systems' being 'constructed' has no force at all. This of course, is part and parcel of the your usual intellectual dishonesty, which, no, deserves no civility at all, and ought to be treated like the intellectual poison that it is.

Second, to say that an apparatus is an observer is not question begging because it is a scientific result. I realize that your understanding of the science is tenuous at best and nonexistant at worst, but the basic point is that if you set the apparatus up in one manner, you will get one result, and if you set the apparatus up in another manner (with or without a which-path detector) you will get another result (wave or particle). The observer is the apparatus because it can be shown that the set-up of the apparatus exerts a causal influence on the measurement outcomes of a quantum system. This is not a 'speculative point', despite your attempt to muddy the waters and flat-out misrepresent the debate.

To put it quite shortly: there is no debate about what constitutes an observer, expect in the minds of the ignorant. Every elementary text of physics will quite clearly specify that an observer is an apparatus (or a physical system) and that this follows as a matter of fact, and not interpretation. Again, none of this is to say that QM does not raise interesting philosophical questions, but they are not of the kind that you try and foist on it with your bad faith misrepresentations and ignorant fabulations.

Interestingly, later Wittgenstein was all about being attuned to the contexts of useage, and he too would have demanded that we pay strict attention to the language-game in which 'observation' is being used. If anything, the attempt to equivocate between meanings would be an exemplary instance of language-on-holiday, which he relentlessly and rightly criticized. Again, yeah, it may be better not to use the word 'observation', but this is a trifling point, and anyone with a mediocum of intelligence ought to be able to sort one usage from the other.

Sure, and that normal usage is irrelevant when it comes to the issues at stake, so trying to leverage that normal usage to try and address those issues is a sign of either total incomprehension or vicious dishonesty.

Claiming that an apparatus constitutes an observer is the only ‘sophistry’ in play here. — Wayfarer

Right, because your inability to get past how words were used in primary school means that science is other than it is. As if your failure of intellect meant anything other than that.

So - it's acknowledged to be 'observer dependent', but by designating the observer as 'a reference frame' rather than as an actual scientist, then the pesky 'observer problem' with its attendant philosophical problems of 'mind' or 'consciousness' is removed from the equation. Or so it is said. — Wayfarer

Step 1 in quantum sophistry: reverse the terms. Pretend that a reference frame designates the 'observer', rather than the other way around; Step 2: imply that some kind of problem has been removed, rather than created by the abuse of the English language.

With these two easy steps, you too could botch the science and pretend QM implies things it does not! Order now for an extra dose of snake oil.

One would be using the word "observer" in a most unusual way if one were to say that "lamps are observers", and to avoid misunderstanding it would be better not to use that word at all in that context. — ProcastinationTomorrow

Perhaps it would be better, and perhaps it might put a stop to the endless swarm of psuedo-scientific troglodytes who, too thick to understand that langage is what we make of it, aim to milk grammar from the stone of science to substantiate their idealist fantasies without a care in the world for the actual science. Perhaps. But then, that is their problem, and not science's. Witness Wayfarer, who thinks an irrelevancy is a 'philosophical observation', again content to play in toy-room of words as if there was any substance to it at all.

Okay, sure, but I didn't offer an 'argument' about 'points of view' - I didn't even use the phrase, let alone discuss it - I simply cited Nagel as a reference that might help shed light on Chalmers' hard problem. So I still don't know what you're trying to say, nor it's relevance, if any at all, to my initial comment.

I'm not sure you're talking about the same thing I am. I'm referring to Nagel's 'What Is It Like To Be a Bat' paper - which Chalmers cites - which isn't about 'points of view' regarding events.

Without commenting on the rest of your thread, Chalmers's 'hard problem' is quite specific: it asks why consciousness is experienced as so, where 'as so' refers to a certain qualitative aspect of 'feeling' (Nagel's 'what it is to be like'). Why is red experienced like that. So the two questions you say can be 'distilled' from the paragraph you quoted (why/how consciousness?) do not at all belong to the kind of problem that Chalmers is trying to capture. It's about why consciousness feels the way it does, its affective charge; It's a quality of consciousness and not consciousness per se that Chalmers is after an account of.

I absolutely agree that interpretations of QM have both relevant and interesting philosophical implications. But I would also insist that any attempt to wrangle those implications out of it do so with the utmost care. QM is a playground of intellectual abuse by those who harness its complexity to prey on the ignorant in favour of whatever pet metaphysics they'd like to peddle, so it's worth insisting, every now and then, on a bit of conceptual clarity.

But in the example at hand, you're grounding the type-token relation on the intention of the speaker/writer to use the relevant type. — Nagase

Not the intention, the fact of it being asserted to be so (and not: 'the fact of it being asserted to be so').

A more prosaic example may be the following: x is soluble iff if x is put into water, then x dissolves (this is a very rough characterization of solubility---a more exact approach would need to use counterfactuals and ceteris paribus clauses, but bear with me for the moment). The property of being soluble is not an atomic property, but a complex one, since it is structured. My point is: Jumblese cannot capture this internal structure of the property. — Nagase

I need to respond to this in more depth in a bit, but I don't see why this would pose any problem, in principle, to a treatment in terms of metalinguistic illustration: there is a way of speaking about an x, such that, when the thing so designated an x dissolves in water, we call x soluble. And to learn this way of speaking, is to understand just that language game involving certain rule-governed correlations between linguistic and non-linguistic objects.

One response is along the lines "the probability of finding a particle to be at a particular location" and straight away you see a notion involving conscious activity being introduced (i.e. "finding"). — jkg20

No, again, this is just equivocating on seemingly ambiguous words to create pseudo problems. 'Finding', of course, means being interacted with: probability is a question of the chance of physical interactions taking place at the time of measurement at a particular point, where measurement, again, just is physical interaction. It's telling that so many of the responses here hinge on basically abusing the English language, trying for 'gotchya' moments: 'ha, you used the word finding!', or 'ha! you used the word appear!'; 'observe!' - consciousness prevails! But these are nothing more than middling attempts to substitute elementary school word play for science. It's intellectual laziness at best, sophistic fraudulence at worst.

From where do you derive your certainty concerning the meaning to be given to terms like "observation" and "measurement" in QM? — jkg20

I don't know what to tell you other than that that's just what those terms mean. Observation is measurement is interaction. And at no point in any of this is there any reference to conscious observers. Nothing in the theory implies it. Nothing in the data, or the formalisms, either. One can wrangle over semantics, but science will trump the dictionary every time. Unfortunately, there are those here who think the dictionary ought to decide the state of reality. It's understandable, of course. It's much easier to reach for the dictionary than it is to acquaint oneself with the basics of QM.

In a nutshell: in order to “observe” things at a quantum level, it requires specialized devices, which necessarily “interact” with whatever is being observed in order to work.

= clumsy experimenters. — Wayfarer

I've always wondered what it's like to not know how to read the English language while attempting to conduct discussion in it.

Greene is correct: it isn't the effect of clumsy experimenters, it is the nature of quantum effects to be determined by the physical appartus in that manner. Greene is rightly inveighing against those who think such effects are incidental and not a necessary aspect of QM. Patterson of course, also doesn't say anything about 'clumsy exprimenters', so one can only wonder here about clumsy readers. Or, more likely, dishonest and deliberate bastardizations by peddlers of ignorance.

Still not seeing how 'measurement' means anything different at all in QM — snowleopard

That much is clear.

It's pretty simple dude. Measurement means something very specific in the context of QM, and that specificity has nothing to do with 'consciousness'. If you want to ask a question about a different sense of the term measurement, that's your prerogative, but don't pretend that you're talking about the same thing.

Perhaps that's a good question, but it is one that has nothing to do with quantum physics.

If the event caused is an appearance (or a disjunction of appearances) then we still seem to have "observation" in a more psychological sense imported into QM don't we? — jkg20

Only if you understand 'appearance' in a non-causal way, which of course, you shouldn't. One could say: 'will cause interference effects (wave) or non-interference effects (particle)' and you'll have the same thing. The alternative is of course to substitute primary-school grammar lessons in place of understanding the implications of the science, but no one with the slightest grain of integrity and intellectual honesty would, one hopes, do that.

Some further reading: http://steve-patterson.com/quantum-physics-abuse-reason/

Everytime you see the word 'observation', replace it with 'interaction'. The specific physical set-up of a (quantum) measurement device will interact with the quantum phenomenon in a specific way, with one set-up leading to one (measurement) outcome, and another set-up leading to a different (measurement) outcome. This is what is meant - what has always been meant - when it is said that the measurement of a quantum system is observer-dependant. This would remain the case if every single living and conscious thing died in the next five minutes.

No, you misunderstand. The 'observer' in QM has a causal role: the physical set-up of the apparatus will determine, in a double-slit experiment, light to appear as either a wave or a particle. Whether or not 'someone' is around to record what happens has nothing to do with the phenomenon under consideration. There are, perhaps, metaphysical questions regarding the role of knowledge after-the-fact or whatever, but this would have nothing to do with the science, and would be a more general question regarding the role of any phenomenon whatsoever, and would not be QM-specific in the least.

Buzz off, sophist.

'Observer' in QM has always meant a physical apparatus. Always. If this has caused confusion among those unversed in QM, then so much the worse for them.

However, I guess what interests me most is that with perception (which is where adverbialism applies) we (at least seem) to be as close as we can get to a non-linguistic contact with reality, and so perception might have a role to play also in deciding which forms of language should be preferred. — jkg20

One interesting thing about Sellars, in this regard, is that - again, as far as I understand it, and I'm still working through it - he actually takes perception to be modelled after lingustic categories. So to perceive something as something, is already to operate in the space of reason and conceptuality, and thus in a cognitive or intentional capacity. Thus Sellars distinguishes sharply - in a Kantian manner - between perceiving and sensing, where only the former belongs to the conceptual order. Like truth then, I think Sellars will argue that our very perceptual forms will in-form what it is that we perceive in a way that is not just 'out there' So there's definitely a connection to your concerns here, although I can only trace it somewhat elliptically.

"It is not up to philosophy, in the usual manner of science, to exhaust the phenomena, to reduce them to a bare minimum of propositions. On the contrary, philosophy wants literally to lose itself in everything that is heterogeneous to it, without bringing it back to ready-made categories. It would like to nestle in close to what it isn’t, the way that phenomenology’s program and Simmel’s wanted, in vain, to do. Its aim is undiminished kenosis, self-emptying. ... Philosophy would, unstrictly speaking, become infinite ... [once] it would find its content in the multiplicity of objects: ... It would really and truly surrender itself to them, would not use them as a mirror in which to discern only its own features, mistaking its reflection for concretion. It would be nothing other than full and unreduced experience in the medium of conceptual reflection."

- Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics

And the classic!:

"Idealism — and Fichte most emphatically — is governed unknowingly by an ideology which says that the not-I, l’autrui, anything, finally, that reminds one of nature, is worth almost nothing, so that the unity of the self-sustaining thought can devour it in good conscience. This vindicates the principle of thought and, equally, whets its appetite. Philosophical system is the belly turned mind, just as rage is the defining mark of idealism in all its forms ... The view of the man in the center of the world is akin to contempt for humanity: to leave nothing uncontested or unchallenged."

And this is where we disagree. As I said, Jumbelese can (perhaps) handle simple translations for atomic properties, but what about logically complex properties? How do you represent the property of (S) [my addition - SX] "for every e>0 there is d such that for every x if |x-a| < d then |f(x) - f(a)| < e"? That is, how do you represent the iterated quantifiers and the implication sign? — Nagase

I suppose I don't quite understand how (S) is a property, at least in the sense that 'redness' or 'triangularity' might be a property. I honestly mean this out of sheer ignorance - what is the subject of that property (the iterability is confusing me! - I'm much better at natural language than math)? How do you make sense of (S) as a property?

But here you end up with the problem I pointed out before. What is it that makes it the case that this particular inscription is a token of, say, rouge? What binds all the tokens of rouge together in a single class? Notice that, if you are a nominalist about properties, you can't even invoke any property that all the tokens share; are we supposed to just take that as a brute fact? — Nagase

Surely it's the fact of it being asserted to be so. This might be a disappointing answer but I really think that's it: consider the case of one misspelling (as I used to do alot!) rogue and rouge, where I meant to say rouge. Where someone to call me out on it, where it's obvious that I mean to use rouge (esp. in the context of 'rogue [sic] is red'), my immediate response would be something like 'oh shut up you pedant and deal with the point at hand'.

This is why I've insisted so strongly upon the fact of exemplarity at work here: examples are neither tokens nor types, but are, as it were, tokens that assert their own typicality. To put it in a strong manner: everything is exemplary: the very capacity to assert something as token or type is parasitic or derivative upon exemplifying a token as a token or type as type (each typically in relation to each other of course...). This is why I particularly like Sellars' example of { 'und' (in German) means 'and' } where the first thing he points out is that 'and' is obviously not functioning here as a sentential connective, before going on to point out that this sentence "doesn't merely tell us that 'und' and 'and' have the same meaning; it in some sense gives the meaning." In truth I think that even thinking in terms of tokens and types as anything other than useful shorthand or tools for conceptual organisation is philosophically dangerous and should be kept to a minimum.

My problem with adverbialsim, and it may also have some bite against Sellars jumblese idea, is that even if you can recast the form of a statement in such a way, the question will always remain as to what makes the statement true, and if John senses redly is made true in the same way that "John sees a red afterimage" is made true, then we are still at liberty to think that the adverbialist's statements are made true by the existence of strange objects called afterimages. Do we need a theory of truth before we can decide if jumblese makes sense as an idea? — jkg20

Hey, sorry, I didn't mean to ignore this, I just literally only had time to make one reply the other day! As an immediate point I think yes, any attempt to treat the language-world relation in the way Sellars does would require - I'd prefer maybe to say entail - a particular theory of truth. Sellars only deals with truth in a relatively schematic way in the book I'm referring to (I'm not super familiar with his work outside of it, although I am reading Science, Preception, and Reality right now!), so I can only sketch an approach.

As far as I understand - which is not far - the very concept of truth for Sellars cannot be thought of outside of the normative rules that govern what might be called 'games of truth'. At the very least this implies that the truth of a statement is not only given by the fact that it corresponds to some state-of-affairs (as he puts it: "This connection of features of 'a is triangular' with ought-to-bes suggest that the truth of 'a is triangular' is itself an ought-to-be"). There needs to be something 'in language' as well (and not just 'in the world') which enables statements to be true. This 'something' is what - I think - Sellars calls 'semantic assertibility' where "the specific varieties of truth-in-L, e.g., true atomic sentence of L, would arise from the varieties of criteria for the semantical assertibility of specific kinds of sentence in L".

Exactly how to think about semantic assertibility and it's role in enabling truth is something I'm somewhat fuzzy on right now. At best though, I just want to say that truth is definitely at issue here, and it isn't foreclosed by a nomianlist approach to predicates.

Hence, there must be a further argument as to why we should think that Jumblese is better suited to our ontological needs. — Nagase

I think there's a misunderstanding here. It is not the case that jumbelese is better suited to our ontological needs. Ordinary language is fine enough. All jumblese is is a pedagogical tool - Sellars uses it to show what is already at work in expressions like f(a) or [Apple is red]. Jumblese isn't doing anything that ordinary language isn't already doing, it just makes what it is doing more obvious. Let's use Sellars' own example(s). He asks us to consider two expressions, both of which express the same thing, the first in ordinary language, the second in jumbelese:

(1) Red a
(2) A

Here is Sellars: "it must be stressed that nothing in or about (2) is doing the job done in (1) by 'red.' Obviously the fact that (2) is in a certain angular style is essential to the semantical role that it is playing. But that fact does not do the job done in (1) by 'red.' Rather it does the job which is done in (1) by the fact that 'a' is concatenated to the left with the token of the word 'red.'" (my bolding). That is, even in (1), the predicate qua predicate isn't doing anything. Jumblese simply makes clear what is already going on in expressions with predicates. Perhaps to really understand what's going on, it's worth briefly going through Sellars' theory of meaning, which expressly invokes both types and metalanguage... in a particular way. Here is an expression:

(3) 'Rouge' means red.

How does Sellars read this? He reads this as correlating the function of an unfamiliar word ('rouge' in French) with the function of a familiar word ('red' in English). The focus on functions is crucial and tells us that 'red' in (3) is not being used in a normal way, but in a metalinguistic manner: it is functioning as what Sellars calls a 'illustrative sortal', where a sortal is, roughly, a 'count word'. To make this clearer, Sellars will reformulate (3) as:

(4) 'Rouge's' (in F) are 'red''s (in E).

(3) and (4) exhibit and show how 'rouge' functions, it does not say the meaning of 'rouge'. So much for 'red'. 'Rouge', in turn, is also functioning in a metalinguistic manner, but instead of an illustrating sortal, it functions as what Sellars refers to as a 'distributive singular term' (DST). A DST functions like the expression 'the lion' in the sentence 'the lion is dignified': the singular term 'the lion' refers distributively to particular lions existing in space and time: hence, a distributive singular term. So what you have with (3/4) is a correlation of two types of metalinguistic functions: the correlation of a distributive singular term ('rouge') with an illustrating sortal ('red'):

(5) DST :: Illustrating Sortal

The purpose of all this wrangling is to show that what are being correlated here are particular linguistic tokenings rather than abstract linguistic types. There is, in other words, a kind of short-circuit between types and tokens, insofar as meaning is a matter of illustrating functions 'all the way down'. At every point you simply have exemplars. Functions are exemplified by other functions, and at no point do you reach a 'hard-core' of 'fact'; instead you simply have (particular) linguistic objects correlated to other (particular) linguistic objects and whose rules of correlation are themselves functions of uniformities of behaviour by language using animals.

I'm apologize for the density of this presentation, but I've tried to fit a theory of meaning in three paragraphs! The point of all this wrangling is that for Sellars, language already functions in the way that jumbelese does: it is already free from commitment to properties. Jumbelse just makes it easier to 'see'.

I'm not very optimistic about the whole endeavour.

In the context of this thread, I'm thinking that abstract objects are at most part of discursive practices - stuff we do with language. Steps linking each abstract object to each other are moves in games with well known but modifiable rules and scoping contexts. The abstract objects themselves are nothing but their roles in the game, and reference to one is a kind of summary of its roles. — fdrake

I think this is basically exactly it. One way I like to think of it is that all 'definitions' - whether of words, names, concepts or whathave you - are, at the end of the day, stipulative. This being the case even when we appeal to historical precedent, as when we say, 'this word means such and such because that's how it's always been used': the fact that we appeal to historical use is itself a stipulation: 'this is how I want you to treat the word/concept'. As you say, 'it comes down to how we've set it up and nothing more'.

And this is perhaps nowhere more true than in philosophy itself, which can perhaps be called the ars conceptualis par excellance, in that one generates concepts which allows one - or rather commits one - to parsing the world in such and such a manner, and milking that parsing to see what falls out, as it were. And this is of a piece with Sellars' basic move in his rejection of the given, which is basically the idea that the sensual order has intelligible or propositional form. In rejecting this idea, the question is then how then to track aspects of the real using a process (i.e. language) which does not mirror that real. And it's the recourse to stipulation - with whatever attendant commitments that follow from any such stipulation - that allows one to do that.

Haha, I wanted to throw a 'meh' in there.

The blog post is weird in that it acts as though it's exposing some hidden or esoteric aspect of science that scientists have been doing their best to keep secret for fear of embarrassment or something. Which would be interesting if it wasn't for the fact that scientists deal with possibility all the time, and that wrangling with possibility is incredibly run-of-the-mill for everyday work both in and out of the lab,

Not only in the example given, but also in modelling exercises, which aim to do nothing less than track possibilities among actual systems. One can also think of the relevance of statistical thinking in biology and thermodynamics, not to mention quantum physics. Hell, cosmology even creates entire toy universes to play with so that they can shed more light on how our universe works. Feynman's sum-over-paths method of measuring particles literally assumes that a particle travels along all possible paths to get to a destination. It does this by quite literally mathematizing possibility. The idea that 'science only concerns itself with the actual' seems bizarre to say the least, and seems to evince nothing other than a poor and unrecognizable conception of science shared by no actual scientists. To this degree the blog seems to be beating on a wide open door, or at least an imaginary one.

If there's a grain of truth in the blog post it's that the exact ontological standing of 'possibility' is often left untheorized, but for the simple reason that it doesn't really need to be. If a prediction comes out right, or your model correctly tracks the phenomenon under investigation, then you've done your work as a scientist. One can employ possibility without ontologizing it. At the very least the post reeks of the same kind of arrogance and one-upmanship that it so dislikes, and so is as much a part of the problem it tries to diagnose.

He's a far more accessible writer than Sellars, but then almost everyone is. — Srap Tasmaner

Man, I was just thinking the other day that I'd take an essay of Heidegger's over a page of Sellars anyday, stylistically speaking.

Also, you had me wondering when in the world Schelling wrote a book called 'Micromotives and Macrobehavior', but I figured it out eventually, lol.

I see. But then we have another problem. In the passages, Sellars talks about inscriptions of the X above Y variety. How are we to interpret such inscriptions? Are they sentence tokens? If so, they must be instances of sentence types. And as soon as we admit types, then nominalism is out. So the problem is less with "redness" or "triangularity" and more with "Xness", "Yness" and "aboveness". — Nagase

If I understand you correctly, this is something Sellars actually addresses pretty early on, with respect to Russell's presentation of the problem. Sellars grants that yes, "even the simplest sentence which is capable of truth or falsity must consist of more than expressions for particulars. It must also contain expressions which are not names of particulars, for example 'white' or 'to the north of'". But he continues: "Well, suppose that Russell is right and that we do need such words. Grammatically they are predicates. He has not shown that we need abstract singular terms. ' White,' yes, but not 'whiteness.' 'Resembles,' yes, but not 'resemblance.' We need expressions which are not names of particulars. Do we need expressions which are names of non-particulars?"

Similarly, with respect to your point, I think the rejoinder will be: we need 'sentences', yes, but not sentencehood; 'above', yes, but not above-ness. Having winnowed away what he calls abstract singular terms (anything which can have a suffix like '-ity,' ' -hood,' ' -ness,' ' -dom,' and '-cy'), the challenge is then to show that we can treat 'sentences' and 'above' in the nominalistic manner so outlined in the OP. That is, he answers the dangling question above in the negative: no, we don't need expressions which are names of non-particulars: we need expressions which are linguistic objects, which cannot in turn be treated as attributes with ontological standing. That types must be admitted is unavoidable, but - to put it cheekily - what kind of types?

OK, just to be clear, it is not just that predicates are dispensable that is important, it is why they are dispensable that matters. If the latter can't be grasped then neither can the significance of the former.

Cool.

You tell me.

So, what is a predicate? Is it not a linguistic object or symbol denoting a particular meaning, or having a particular function? And, is it not its particularity which gives it meaning? We must understand that this linguistic object is, or functions as, in particular, a predicate, in order to understand the meaning. — Sapientia

But the point is that this is exactly not the case. A predicate does not denote a particular meaning, and it is not its particularity which gives it meaning. It is only it's role as a linguistic object, concatenated with two other linguistic objects ('X' and 'Y') in a certain graphical manner and embedded in a larger network of rule-governed linguistic behaviour, that lends the expression - as a whole - meaning. Another way to put this is that on it's own, a predicate is meaningless: "Names are part of the natural order but only insofar as they are meaningless" (Brassier).

I really don't get how 'X' above 'Y' is any different from 'Q(x,y)'. — Sapientia

Sellars actually spends an entire section of the essay dealing with this. The question is not how they are different - Sellars' point is precisely that they are the same - but what 'X above Y' illustrates about Q(x,y). The basic point is that 'X above Y' illustrates that Q does not pick out a universal or name (Q) that X and Y share or are related by. The point of putting X above Y is to place the accent on the graphic relations between X and Y which is not obvious in the Q(X,Y) formulation, which, on it's own, looks to treat Q as a name for a fact and not a mere linguistic object concatenated to the left of 'X,Y'. In a slogan, Q looks like it is signifying and not occupying (a place), when in fact, it's the latter that allows it to play a role in meaning.

What matters, in other words, is the 'matter-of-factual' (graphic, inscriptual, physical) relations between X, Y and Q, which show but do not say, the relation between X and Y. Which is another way of saying that Q does not denote and does not signify. It is a physical pattern which we respond to in rule governed ways.