Meinongian quantifiers — Srap Tasmaner

The substance and conclusion of which appears to be pretty much "nothing to see here". As in, no answer to Quine.

If I write "This Dodo is brown" it's logical equivalent is ∃x(Dx & Bx) but we know Dodos are extinct and the logical translation of that is ~∃x(Dx) — TheMadFool

Right... were you unsure whether these would turn out to be compatible or not?

But, the million dollar question is, Does the existential quantifier, ∃, need to make a distinction between fact and fiction? — TheMadFool

No.

The word "exists" has a metaphysical meaning — TheMadFool

Matter of opinion :wink:

Statement 3 makes an existential claim i.e. unlike statement 2, statement 3 asserts that unicorns exist but that's not true — TheMadFool

Fiction generally isn't.

Clearly, ∃x translated as "there exists..." is an issue. — TheMadFool

Why?

Still, that settled by following Quine's clear preference...

Both quantification functions, ∃ and ∀, only specify how many values of the variable they quantify make the statement that follows true, — Pfhorrest

Yes, i.e. they specify how many (actual, existent) things in the domain of discourse the predicate or open sentence is true of. So no call for the "only".

and the statement doesn't necessarily have to be asserting the existence of anything, — Pfhorrest

Do you mean in something like the way talking about numbers (or fictional characters) leaves it open whether they actually exist?

Sure, but that way is to talk as if they do actually exist. So ∃ still specifies that at least one (actual, existent) thing (number or unicorn) satisfies the predicate.

Another possible source of disagreement and quandary is "value of a variable", which equivocates badly between word and object, as "numerical value" equivocates (but shouldn't) between numeral and number.

I was about to continue: "That settled by consulting a dictionary..." but no such luck. So yeah, very likely source.

But there just is no fact of the matter whether a word or picture is pointed at one thing or another. No physical bolt of energy flows from pointer to pointee(s). So the whole social game is one of pretence. — bongo fury

Unless you're a biosemiotician? :chin:

I am opposed to abortion but do not think the state should decide. — NOS4A2

Exactly my position on metaphysics.

To think, to legislate, to act with intelligence, one has to draw a line — unenlightened

Or two lines. If far enough apart they can be as blurred as you please, yet maintain an absolute distinction.

But my question was really about what point the whole sentence was intended to make. — Janus

This one:

A nominalist suspects that the motivation is a mystical fascination with abstractions (e.g. "the cat's being on the mat") and the possibility of grasping them; — bongo fury

... or of combining them with mysterious forces.

Sure, if it works, why not. My interruptions were just a shout out for the more down to earth option.

A calculator understands maths in much the same way as the room in the Chinese Room analogy understands chinese. — Malcolm Lett

Yep.

It has some non-negligible understanding of the maths that it's programmed to work with. — Malcolm Lett

Surely not.

If it had no understanding, then it wouldn't suffice as a calculator. — Malcolm Lett

Why ever not?

The explanatory gap is what a mechanical conception of nature creates. — apokrisis

Couldn't it just be what a wrong conception of consciousness creates?

Hence why biologists and neuroscientists are arriving at semiotics as an alternative conception of nature. — apokrisis

Great, but have they seen the difference between syntax (automatable) and what Searle (somewhere) calls a "proper" semantics: the ability to follow and predict the entirely pretended and conventional connections between words and actual things?

Or are they (or you) mistaking an efficient, automatic, syntactic correspondence (e.g. of proteins with DNA sequences) for the other, far more sophisticated social game?

How exactly does the liar sentence require mucking about with any other kinds of sentence than the declarative, assertoric kind?

The only kind, after all, that we ordinarily expect to divide up into true and false instances?

And why, when we do happen to be focussed on that kind, the sudden skepticism about them so dividing, and the addiction to complicating the issue by introducing beliefs, assertions, propositions, attitudes etc?

A nominalist suspects that the motivation is a mystical fascination with abstractions (e.g. "the cat's being on the mat") and the possibility of grasping them; where one ought to be content to point the predicate "is on the mat" at a cat. (Or the predicate "is on" at a sequence of two appropriate objects.)

I'm going to muddy the waters a bit. — Srap Tasmaner

I'd be thrilled if anyone in this thread were prepared to dissolve statements, assertions, beliefs, propositions and truths into one colour. But belief in the abstractions and the supposed distinctions is no doubt too dyed into the wool.

Bare unspoken sentences that implicitly assert themselves are quite handy for doing logic, of course. — Srap Tasmaner

Arguably, no statement is ever entirely bereft of any illocutionary force, and [such that it?] might be considered a "dud ticket". But we use them quite routinely when doing logic, so I'm not too concerned about that.
— Banno

Great, and when you do logic, aren't you writing (or uttering) tokens, and excluding or contextualising (e.g. attaching "not" tokens to) contradictory ones, from within a system of proliferation of assertive tokens? — bongo fury

We are token-producing agents, in the material world.

What did you mean by "Nowt (presumably "not"?) so abstract as 'semantic content'"? — Janus

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/there%27s_nowt_so_queer_as_folk

Janus

Even taking "proposition" as a term of art, it's not at all clear that this is what we ascribe truth to. Some concept of force, and in particular assertoric force, seems to be required. — Srap Tasmaner

Ah, propositions not abstract enough...

So, examples please of sentences (or if you must, propositions) that are truth-apt only when asserted?

There is a distinction between the statement "there is a fire in the next room" and the assertion "there is a fire in the next room.
— Banno

The second is a sentence token having, like a money token, currency and value in a system of interpretation. As such, within that system (of interpretation and production of sentence tokens as assertions), it is licence to produce more tokens, with similar value.

The first, if not an assertion, is outside the system - a dud ticket, a void note, an invalid vote. — bongo fury

Is the first somehow unable to be false?

I haven't said semantic content is "abstract". — Janus

A concrete example, then?

More modestly I would say that a proposition is the semantic content of some sentences or statements. — Janus

False modesty. :wink: Nowt so abstract as "semantic content".

Yes, of course, obviously the meaning of words, what they refer to, is established by convention, by praxis. How else? — Janus

:100: :up:

You're misunderstanding; I am not promoting platonism. — Janus

I don't want to be the Spanish Inquisition, but you did seem to think it absurd that true and false could apply to strings of words; and while this might have been for completely other reasons than the concreteness of words, or belief in beliefs and other mental or otherwise abstract entities (propositions and states of affairs) as the only rightful subjects for such predication, such beliefs do seem rife in this thread, and they seem to me an unnecessary cause of confusion.

The logic behind what I said is simple; the same proposition can be expressed in many different sentences, and when we say a sentence is true the meaning of 'sentence' as 'proposition' is the appropriate one. No platonism required. — Janus

By platonism I mean commitment to abstract entities, and so I would be glad to withdraw the charge (of an excess in this tendency) if it turned out you just meant to recognise a potential fuzzy set of (the "many different") sentences that were rough paraphrases of each other. Have true apply to any and all paraphrases by implication whenever they applied to one. But it seems clear you want to warn me that people round these parts believe in propositions as a separate class of entity. Well that's what I meant by "unnecessary platonism".



Talking of paraphrase, here are some nominalist paraphrases of "this sentence is not true":

• "this sentence fails to point its predicate at the object identified by its subject"
  
  
• "this sentence fails to point its predicate at its subject"
  
  
• "this sentence purports but fails to point its predicate at itself"
  

Where the subject of the sentence is the phrase "this sentence", and the predicate is the remaining word string.

A sentence is just a string of words; how could a string of words be true or false? — Janus

How could a word denote an object? How could a coin have a value? How could a hammer have a purpose? How could a note be a quarter-note?

By convention / a game of pretend.

I think it is more in keeping with what is commonly meant to say that sentences express propositions, and that it is propositions which may be true or false. — Janus

Unnecessary platonism.

the immediate connection between the Liar Paradox and the incompleteness theorems — Kornelius

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagonal_lemma?wprov=sfla1

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/342838

by predicating 'not true' of itself, the Liar claims to be a member of the class of sentences that are true or false, and perhaps it is this claim that turns out to be false, making the conjunction of its claims false. — Srap Tasmaner

An inscriptionalist only wants to add to that that turning out to be false can just mean (for this particular claim) being rejected by the system of token-producing agents, who will judge deduction to be an inappropriate treatment for the sentence (i.e. any token of it), and will thus invalidate it in respect of its constituting a licence to print unlimited copies (of itself and other consequent sentences).The speakers will, in other words, put a brake on application of logic to this particular bit of natural language.

:ok: (imv)

Ah, sorry, I get you. Yes, the token is about itself, in such a way as to cause an explosive mess of contradictory tokens in a deductive context.

The token is about the things it is about. The proposition is an unnecessary abstraction?

added a link. Also,

speech act theory, which seems to have continued an anti-abstract trend away from positing of (as entities) propositions to only sentences to only statements on particular occasions. (Yay, tokens! ... utterances, inscriptions.) — bongo fury

Beliefs can be true, propositions can be true, mathematical equations can be true...sentences themselves can't. It's like saying "This horse is true", I don't know what it would even mean? — Isaac

Maybe something analogous to "hammers are for hammering", "this coin is worth two cents", "this note is a middle-C", etc.

I agree that a hammer has a purpose to us in the here and now because we exist. But if thinking beings cease to exist, wouldn't the hammer cease to have a purpose, and be just a collection of atoms, subject only to purely mechanical forces of nature? — Ash Abadear

if you simplify irrelevant details out of a replica you get a map or model, — Pfhorrest

Only on certain conditions: if the replica were already a complete map or model, every detail already relevant in the sense of referring to some detail or aspect of the subject matter, and you just removed some of that already relevant detail; or else, if details not removed were made relevant and significant in that way, even if they hadn't been, before.

In other words, you are still confusing the referential function of a map or model (or description or representation) with replication. Which is what "the map is not the territory" (but equally well also your excellent example of the voice-coded bit-map) should remind us are separate.

The most naive view of representation might perhaps be put something like this: "A represents B if and only if A appreciably resembles B", or "A represents B to the extent that A resembles B". Vestiges of this view, with assorted refinements, persist in most writing on representation. Yet more error could hardly be compressed into so short a formula.

Some of the faults are obvious enough. An object resembles itself to the maximum degree but rarely represents itself; resemblance, unlike representation, is reflexive. Again, unlike representation, resemblance is symmetric: B is as much like A as A is like B, but while a painting may represent the Duke of Wellington, the Duke doesn't represent the painting. Furthermore, in many cases neither one of a pair of very like objects represents the other: none of the automobiles off an assembly line is a picture of any of the rest; and a man is not normally a representation of another man, even his twin brother. Plainly, resemblance in any degree is no sufficient condition for representation. — Nelson Goodman: Languages of Art, p3

and if you add sufficient detail to a map or model you get a replica. — Pfhorrest

Only if you insist on (and have some way of) making the enhancement of referential function of the map coincide with an increase in the degree of physical resemblance. But obviously this is not how scientific models are typically enhanced.

Whatever you can do in real life but can’t do with the map, it’s because there’s some detail that’s been left out of the map. So a map that did include absolutely every detail would just be a replica of the territory it is a map of. — Pfhorrest

Only if you assume maps are meant to be replicas. "The map is not the territory" reminds us that this is far from being the case, and that they (maps) function rather as descriptions: which is to say, symbolically, like sentences (in the relevant respects).

You seem to be trying to convince yourself that,

Whatever you can do in real life but can’t do with a description, it’s because there’s some detail that’s been left out of the description. So a description that did include absolutely every detail would just be a replica of the territory it is a description of.

You may even have succeeded, I don't know.

So a “map” of reality that includes every detail down to the most fundamental physical level would be a replica of reality. And it would thus include humans like us in it, who would function just like we do, and experience that “map” as their reality. — Pfhorrest

No, unless the map (or description or theory or representation) were your fantasy of a map (etc.) as an imperfect replica.

There is thus no reason to think that maps and territories are ontologically — Pfhorrest

It goes on like this. :roll:

I am explicitly endorsing the equivalence of physical reality and a mathematical object, — Pfhorrest

So am I.

[*] an abstract mathematical structure in the sense of model theory. Potentially instantiated: in which case, a piece of the world; but otherwise only fiction [/possibility etc.]. — bongo fury

But I'm not confusing the object (whether actual or only fictional/possible) with a representation/description/map of it... which I think you are doing. (No idea why.)

so pointing to that as an absurdity is unpersuasive. — Pfhorrest

I was pointing to what I hoped were clear enough cases of said distinction.

All maps, models, etc, are effectively descriptions, — Pfhorrest

Good...

even if they are not descriptions in human-readable verbal languages — Pfhorrest

Sure ...

A visual map can be encoded in binary on a computer, and a human could read off those ones and zeros, even if they didn’t understand what they were reading. All the information in the picture would be retained in the sound of the human voice. — Pfhorrest

So this seems to me an excellent example of the obvious differences to be found between an object (whatever it was, a still life?) and its representation or description (the vocalised bit map). The map is certainly not the territory.

If that picture were to be perfectly detailed down to the subatomic level, it would have to be animated — Pfhorrest

If you mean represent temporally successive states, gradients etc. then, sure. If you mean represent them by a temporal succession of symbols, then surely not? Why? (I know the bit map is vocalised as a succession, but thus far that aspect was irrelevant to what it described, and could continue to be so, I would have assumed.)

or at least include temporal information in it like momentum, and all of the structural details that give a complete picture of its function, — Pfhorrest

Sure, why not. We're on a flight of fancy as regards the level of precision achieved by the description, but that's ok. Bolt on another hard drive (or immortal chanter) to store the whole bit-map.

and contain within it all the exact information that the physical thing the “picture” it is of does. — Pfhorrest

(Interesting syntax... reminds me of "no head injury is too trivial to be ignored" ;) )

Do you mean, "the physical thing that the picture is (a picture) of: the thing it depicts; the bowl of fruit?

Ok, the picture/bit-map/description must be as complex as the physics of a bowl of fruit; but was this paragraph meant to show how the bit-map must become a replica of the bowl of fruit? That's what I'm not getting.

If you were to make a truly complete map or model of something, you could not help but replicate its function, and so build a replica, a simulation. — Pfhorrest

Clearly not the case, since map is such a near synonym for description (which indeed was your starting point), or theory. Completeness of a description (or map or theory or representation) implies no similarity between descriptors and objects. This is as true for mathematical descriptions as for any other kind.

it is a general feature of mathematics that whatever we find things in reality to be doing, we can always invent a mathematical structure that behaves exactly, indistinguishably like that, and so say that the things in reality are identical to that mathematical structure. — Pfhorrest

Yes.

One may be tempted to say that that does not make the description identical to reality itself, as in the adage "the map is not the territory". In general that adage is true, [...] But a perfectly detailed, perfectly accurate map of any territory at 1:1 scale is just an exact replica of that territory, and so is itself a territory in its own right, indistinguishable from the original; — Pfhorrest

No, I reckon not. Fine to gloss description as map or model, but not map as working model or replica or simulation. Neither description nor map typically imply these. Indeed "1:1 scale map" is an obvious and reasonably good joke. Scale model is admittedly an intermediate step, but the gloss (from map to replica) is misleading. Map correctly suggests the potential gulf between symbols and objects in a system of interpretation, hence the adage, which you can't just turn on its head; nice try!

"Mathematical model" is ambiguous between

• a computational or mechanical simulation that is to some degree a "working model" but always also a description or map; so, a piece of language; and
  
  
• an abstract mathematical structure in the sense of model theory. Potentially instantiated: in which case, a piece of the world; but otherwise only fiction.

In a thread about mathematical Platonism, one fears that playing on this ambiguity risks encouraging the worst kinds of philosophical excess as typically perpetrated by fans of The Matrix.

But whatever model it is that would perfectly map reality in every detail, that would be identical to reality itself. — Pfhorrest

You mean (we hope), the reality would provide a real instance of the otherwise fictional structure described by the theory. But you encourage simulation-hypothesising. :roll:

perfectly accurate models of people like us would find themselves experiencing it as their reality exactly like we experience our reality. — Pfhorrest

I mean, really.

There necessarily must be some rigorous formal (i.e. mathematical) system or another that would be a perfect description of reality. — Pfhorrest

Yes, no reason to put limits on the scope of scientific (or artistic) representations. But as Putnam and Goodman both point out, no reason either to assume limits on the variety of right ones.

"To make a faithful picture, come as close as possible to copying the object just as it is". This simple-minded injunction baffles me; for the object before me is a man, a swarm of atoms, a complex of cells, a fiddler, a friend, a fool and much more. If none of these constitute the object as it is, what else might? If all are ways the object is, then none is the way the object is. — Nelson Goodman: Languages of Art, p6

Is it just me, or oughtn't everyone here (and on similar threads) to clarify which of these two related but separable questions they are addressing?

• is my external red the same as your external red?
• is my internal red the same as your internal red?

Also, in aid of trying to critique or deflate the second one (assuming the first to be answered roughly in the affirmative), is there any use in assimilating it to,

• is my internal up (down) the same as yours, now you've been wearing the upsidedown goggles for some time?

? Just an idea.

To be is to be the subject of a predicate. — Banno

If by "subject" you mean some thing the predicate is (maybe) true of, then fine. If you mean a phrase further along in the sentence, then you are megafogging.

Not saying Santa can't change, if he really wants.

Beauty is not the same exact thing as “rightness” though. [...] It’s more like beauty is a quality that we project on things — Pfhorrest

Ok, and (is this right?) beauty is the suspicion or seeming of rightness? I would buy that, vague as it is. Leave beauty to roam free in meaning and, like Goodman, analyse rightness more carefully. It would be one way to make sense of the OP's first sentence, where the operative word is (as also later on) "seems".

But from the next sentence on, it's clear you make no such distinction, and feel free to gloss rightness itself as the suspicion or seeming of rightness. Main culprit: "apprehending", used here as "representing" (describing or prescribing, and potentially having rightness) and there as feeling or suspecting (rightness).

But hey, I'm being pedantic. Everything is everything. Art is pleasure. :roll:

I do mean it all of those ways, as I went on to elaborate. It could be "right" as in true, or "right" as in good, in many different senses of "true" and "good". Just any kind of feeling of agreement, a "yeah!" kind of feeling -- which could be "yeah, that's a thing I want!" or "yeah, that's how things are!", etc. — Pfhorrest

So "right" isn't any clearer than "beautiful", or even vaguely distinct from it? You might as well have said,

I hold that beauty is, broadly speaking, the experience of apprehending something that seems, in some way or another, right beautiful. This rightness beauty may be either of a descriptive or a prescriptive nature: the feeling of apprehending some truth, or of apprehending some good. — Pfhorrest

No?

I hold that beauty is, broadly speaking, the experience of apprehending something that seems, in some way or another, right. This rightness may be either of a descriptive or a prescriptive nature: the feeling of apprehending some truth, or of apprehending some good. — Pfhorrest

So is it rightness of representation, or of things represented, or either or both? Or is it the pleasure in or anticipation of a representation or a thing? You seem to have it all of those ways. Which needn't be a problem, except the vagueness seems wedded to abstractness (whereby truth and goodness are relatively "concrete"?!), so it's a problem for me. Is it a necessity for you?

I'm interested because Goodman and Elgin pursue "rightness" as "cognitive efficacy" (of symbolism), which maybe isn't a world away from,

[facilitation of] the successful comprehension of [that] complexity by way of [the] underlying simplicity. — Pfhorrest

On high and low... perhaps one reason that the distinction so often fails, as when the supposed low art of one age or social class becomes revered in the next, is that artworks are identifiable as physical objects or sets of them. As such, they are potentially inexhaustible sources of insight and revelation. Critical judgements presuming to rate the sophistication of one whole artistic culture relative to another must always underestimate this potential.

I found that difficult to follow. — Banno

I've been clearer.

But then I don't see much use in the type/token distinction. It seems to me to introduce unnecessary metaphysical entities. — Banno

That would indeed be ironic and a shame, since a focus on tokens is usually (e.g. in Carnap and Goodman and Quine, I don't know about Peirce) motivated by a nominalist aspiration to remove unnecessary metaphysical entities.

Doubly ironic that you contrast it with speech act theory, which seems to have continued an anti-abstract trend away from positing of (as entities) propositions to only sentences to only statements on particular occasions. (Yay, tokens! ... utterances, inscriptions.) Trouble is, Austin then starts multiplying unnecessary psychological abstractions (the forces, yuk). And the abstract metaphysical entities (states of affairs, yikes) have sneaked back in, as "content".

I read Goodman as saying, observe the discourse instead as a proliferation of sentence tokens which are acts of predication i.e. pointing of symbols at things.

Arguably, no statement is ever entirely bereft of any illocutionary force, and [such that it?] might be considered a "dud ticket". But we use them quite routinely when doing logic, so I'm not too concerned about that. — Banno

Great, and when you do logic, aren't you writing (or uttering) tokens, and excluding or contextualising (e.g. attaching "not" tokens to) contradictory ones, from within a system of proliferation of assertive tokens?

There is a distinction between the statement "there is a fire in the next room" and the assertion "there is a fire in the next room. — Banno

• The second is a sentence token having, like a money token, currency and value in a system of interpretation. As such, within that system (of interpretation and production of sentence tokens as assertions), it is licence to produce more tokens, with similar value.
  
  
• The first, if not an assertion, is outside the system - a dud ticket, a void note, an invalid vote.

So, in this,

It's raining [on fire in the next room] but I don't assert that it is [on fire in the next room] — bongo fury

... we are confronted with, either:

• a system of contradictory assertions, one of them denying the true nature of a certain other one; or else,
  
  
• two different systems; or else,
  
  
• one system, and a dud token valid in no system.

"Belief" is (arguably) just a customary way of separating out a system of assertions peculiar to one or more persons (or momentary time-slices of a person), separate from some more general system. In which case, the same choice of analyses applies for "but I don't believe it" as for "but I don't assert it".

the ability to define things. — unenlightened

...by pointing symbols at them.

:cool: :up:

Ergo all matter is photosynthetic :snicker: :roll:

What? Talk about human reference? As in, "Peter", "Jane"? — Banno

No, I just meant study of meaningful discourse and communication. "Mental talk" meant mentalist talk: study which is of that subject matter and is of a mentalistic bent, tending to imply mental entities.

Do you suppose that beliefs sit in your mind like you sit in your comfy chair? — Banno

I'm not a believer: in minds, or beliefs, as such. So I was recommending translating that kind of picture into one making do with representing speech acts, and so on. Glossing beliefs as mental assertions seemed a plausible enough first step, although I'm not especially surprised if that gloss would outrage some people's, er, beliefs.

Then I'll not pay much further attention to your recommendations. — Banno

I wasn't presuming otherwise.

"Mental talk" - what sort of thing could that be? — Banno

Talk about human reference which uses theoretical terms implying mental entities such as beliefs.