We can talk about "such things as unicorns." What, if anything, we mean by such talk is a secondary question, — SophistiCat

To be fair, "such things as unicorns" usually expresses impatience to clarify exactly what, if anything, can possibly be referred to, given that meaning of some sort is happening.

Retreat here is against the rules defined by context. :wink:

But you basically agree with me about the trouble.

We can refer to unicorns in thought and in speech. — SophistiCat

By "unicorns" do you perhaps mean unicorn-stories, or unicorn-pictures? Or something more psychological such as unicorn-ideas or unicorn-thoughts? Or something even more exotic?

Or is your notion of reference itself exotic? Can you point at something which isn't there? (Any more than riding or stroking it?) Does reference never fail?

Either way, if so, why claim to be retreating to syntax?

I had the same syntactic sense in mind in both cases. — SophistiCat

Please advise?

any subject of a sentence, anything to which we refer. — SophistiCat

Trouble is, a unicorn can be the first but not the second.

What if for an alien's brain, 2 plus 2 equals 100? I can see how that could work. — Gregory

Ok, is that like their Romeo copping off with their Tybalt, and it working as drama, perhaps... or it being canonical?

Or is it, after all, a matter of their having a system of symbol-pointing that we could reasonably interpret as equating certain (or all) quadruples with certain (or all) centuples, in some way that works for them?

It is an elemental conception of the 20th century. Please read:
Popper, K. R. (2002): Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography, London & N.Y.: Routledge [1978], 7, pp. 15 ss. — Borraz

Haha, ok.

:roll: (seems the nearest emoticon for "unconvinced"... don't mean "roll")

Aren't they only fictions? — Gregory

If you like. Although wasn't Frege and Russell's logicist project roughly (I think I'd better stress the roughly) about construing them as kinds of quantities? And then isn't there also the option of treating equations as pure syntax?

But ok, settling on the popular course of deferring literal translation of our grown-up math talk just as we do with our Romeo and Juliet talk, and just agreeing to play "pretend", what then is your question? Which numbers or classes of numbers are you supposing do or don't share a nature, and under what assumptions?

I am not doing what jgill says. — Gregory

I hope I didn't misrepresent @jgill; his description just put me in mind of a possible contribution to that other thread.

If reality has no common natures, why should numbers share a nature necessarily? — Gregory

Numbers construed how? As fictional characters, or concrete quantities?

incredulous — StreetlightX

Incredible, Shirley? (I know you're a stickler.)

What makes for a good philosophy? — A Seagull

Exploring of apparent implications under threat of reductio ad absurdum in order continually to clarify, revise and construct?

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/397745

I see this kind of argument here not infrequently. :roll: — jgill

What, exploring of apparent implications under threat of reductio ad absurdum in order continually to clarify, revise and construct? If only!

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/397746

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/334932

It seems to destroy math actually. — Gregory

How so?

Nothing is exactly alike because individuality is what defines things in this philosophy. — Gregory

:ok:

Letters have a pragmatic function in the structure of the word, and words have a pragmatic or technical function in the formulation of theories — Borraz

You said that before. Please elaborate?

simple spelling or grammar — Pfhorrest

is a direct applications of my

for which were are simply not

without concerning itself with what anyone might be communicating about what [about which of the various possible?] attitudes toward them.

My struggle with that one may be due more to my philosophical prejudice against attitudes than to any capital problem for the sentence. Can't quite tell.

And so on with all those we can replicate [:?] implication,...

whether there are, or or whether

reality being describable by a formal language would be either that ome

, continuous with the one we find ourselves in and the of same nature as it;

the question of whether were are

Interesting and worthwhile. Thanks for sharing.

If your intuition is that the Planck length is represented as fixed because it is a physical constant, — fdrake

More like, that some error threshold imposed by the Planck length is represented as fixed.

What if we put in an error threshold of the Planck length, — fdrake

That would be a dp thing rather than sf?

Yeah fine. They both cause rounding errors, but Planck length would be a dp thing rather than sf?

The internet told me floating was sig figs not dp?

Helpful post, thanks. Possible typos:

t = 0 to t = t. They they — fdrake

t = 0 to t = T?

They then? Obvs.

If you can only represent 3 decimal places, — fdrake

Fixed not floating, then? (And fixed by Planck length, if I understand you.)

I don't understand this comment. — Xtrix

Damn! I thought it was droll.

I long ago gave up the appalling vanity of trying to stay awake whilst meditating, but lately I have, perhaps ironically, become moderately skilled at prolonging self-awareness whilst falling asleep. I can, sometimes, observe the surreal failures of logic building incrementally, instead of the (still) usual pattern of suddenly waking (with a jolt), unable to retrace the train of thoughts back to the last fully wakeful one. I'm convinced this method of amusing myself (which is derived from a roughly similar practice of Salvador Dali's) is relevant to the quest of explaining consciousness. For example the issue of 'executive' control of thought, often associated with 'self'. How rambling and linearly uncoordinated can a stream of consciousness become without being in fact (or perhaps I should say, being by definition) unconscious? I'll stop here in case I prompt a similar question about the nature of a post.

Interested in people's reports about this kind of thing, however (inherently) unreliable.

Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa... didn't they all have selves? — Shawn

Hence the joke of the original title of Life of Brian: "Jesus: Lust for Glory".

we understood death better than other animals — christian2017

https://www.theonion.com/scientists-successfully-teach-gorilla-it-will-die-somed-1819594897

No worries.

I'm having a ridiculously shitty day so I'm just gonna be curt here. I feel like there's something you're really missing somehow. — Pfhorrest

Forgive me. (Describe me as forgivable!) I was impatient to debate the content.

“exactly” is idiomatic here, the point is that “wrong” doesn’t bring to mind any specific descriptive indication, but rather a more general imperative prescriptive force. — Pfhorrest

To be fair, "wrong" brings to mind countless specific descriptive indications: examples of actions or behaviours that are indicated, described, denoted, labelled, pointed at, by the word.

Sure, those are cases to be proscribed, and alternatives prescribed. Right and wrong are roughly co-extensive with prescribable and proscribable, respectively. That doesn't stop an ethical choice from being one of correct description: finding appropriate descriptive application (pointing) of the ethical words.

I do see that in "specific descriptive indication" you are looking rather for guiding associations, connotations, precedents. That won't be a problem if you really don't mean "exactly", and they don't have to amount to a definition. "Causes pain to someone" is indeed a helpful guide in correct usage of "wrong", even though causing pain to someone isn't always wrong. Actions correctly described as the one are often correctly described as the other, and the association, even though not exact, so that Moore is right to find his question open, enables usage of each to guide the other. So a specific indication in this sense isn't lacking either.

What exactly is being described of an action when one decides that "wrong" is an applicable word to it, though? — Pfhorrest

Nothing exactly. Why would you expect that a word's applying to an object in a language deserved some exact explanation or justification or definition?

So, for example,

the limited domain of specifically descriptive statements:

I don't think this domain is nearly so limited as you think it is. Ethical discourse seems to me to be about deciding how to describe and (thereby) classify human behaviours, e.g. deciding whether "wrong" denotes this behaviour or that. Aesthetic discourse is about deciding how to describe and classify artworks and sensory qualities. The standards of verification or stipulation guiding such decisions in those two broad areas of discourse may differ in kind from each other and from the parallel standards operating in scientific discourse, but that wouldn't indicate that the discourses differ in whether they are fundamentally descriptive.

The fact that ethical and aesthetic statements can be treated naturally enough as descriptive, when construed with an appropriate (and natural enough) choice of domain and descriptor, as when we see that (or debate whether) the word "wrong" applies to a certain kind of killing, indicates that your distinction between descriptive and prescriptive may be a relatively shallow one, based on a passing linguistic tradition.

More fundamentally, all human discourses are cultures of word-pointing and picture-pointing (and sound-pointing and colour-pointing). Some of them (especially the political and social) excel in the positing and sorting of domains of mental entities and processes: ideas, expressions, intentions, desires, feelings etc. That doesn't necessarily make such entities and processes appropriate as the basis for analysis of the discourses.

Ok, I've ended up admitting that your analysis is far too mentalist for my taste. But regardless of that, I'd be interested in how you feel (or think) about my proposed literal and descriptive construals of ethical questions.

I knew there was another: "without impressing that opinion on anymore".

simple spelling or grammar errors, — Pfhorrest

Humeaniam and abstration. :wink:

Does that buy me a brief whinge about speech act theory?

my philosophy of language hinges on how "merely" describing something is itself still doing something by speaking — describing is an action

Hooray, so would mine. But,

- and that speech can do many other things besides just describe,

boo, if "just" means "merely" after all. As is apparently the case in a lot of speech act theory. E.g.,

I hold that the meaning of all speech can be found by paying attention to what it is that someone is trying to do by uttering that speech.

Thing is, I fear that you will roll your eyes if I hold that what that thing is, that someone is trying to do, could be anything so naive as a matter of describing something, pointing a word or picture at it. It must (according to the widespread dogma) be something else entirely that we need to notice.

What will upset me even more, actually, is casual acceptance that, of course, such naive language games are perfectly playable, but that (such being the dogma) they are uninteresting, because unrepresentative, parochial.

I think the allegedly simple and uninteresting question of which words and pictures are being pointed at which objects, and how they thereby carve up their domains, is complex and difficult enough to explain all the allegedly different species of speech act. For example, I don't see the distinction between description and prescription as fundamental.

Whinge over.

Roboticists need to rethink their approach to the subject in a fundamental way. — TheMadFool

And they did. The price of the neural network revolution was giving up (or at least severely compromising) the model of the brain (or computer) as a processor of stored symbols - internal words and pictures representing external objects. Ironically, it had to revert to Skinner's behaviourist model, a "black box". Training, without necessarily understanding the learning.

How Justin does it is as much up for speculation as how we do it.

https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~jxb/PUBS/AIRTNN.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjC56ut4qHoAhX3WRUIHWRVDsEQFjABegQIARAB&usg=AOvVaw1RdayKc25rZVAjdcLrK0D7

If the sentence was something like "John believes that the present Queen of America is bald," where "the present Queen of America" does not denote any real object or person - how do their respective theories still argue that such a sentence can be true? — RyanFreeman

Russell says it can be true that John believes a false proposition, a proposition expressed by the sentence "the present Queen of America is bald". Frege says it can be true that John (like Russell) believes that the sentence expresses a proposition.

3. Relational - Einstein, Kantians

I think I get the first two, but it's not clear to me that we presently live in an age if relativism. — frank

This reminded me (I'm biased it's true) of this:

... that mainstream of modern philosophy that began when Kant exchanged the structure of the world for the structure of the mind, continued when C. I. Lewis exchanged the structure of the mind for the structure of concepts, and that now proceeds to exchange the structure of concepts for the structure of the several symbol systems of the sciences, philosophy, the arts, perception, and everyday discourse. The movement is from unique truth and a world fixed and found to a diversity of right and even conflicting versions or worlds in the making. — Nelson Goodman, 'Ways of Worldmaking'.

(The seventies, when relativist often meant modernist and rationalist.)

Neither. It's a response to the idea of pictures in the head. — Marchesk

Haha, sarcasm, then?

Fine, although I do think that the "neural representations" favoured by the likes of Dennett and Frankish (thanks for the links) are questionable as being probably ghosts of "the idea idea", and other mentalisms. Hence the prevaricating in 3.3 Who is the audience?. And the possible own goal, if

An appearance of something which isn't there. — Marchesk

gets supposed as a thing located in the head, to the delight and justified exasperation of dualists everywhere.

Er, so...

A homunculi watching moving pictures in its head. In color, with sound. — Marchesk

Is this your position or your proposed reading of theirs?

A homunculi watching moving pictures in its head. In color, with sound. — Marchesk

Oh, I get it. You come to expose the illusionists, not to praise?

It [panpsychism] “explains” why my socks and bubblegum are conscious, even though no one thought they were, but it doesn’t explain why the human brain is conscious the way the human brain is conscious, which is what we actually want to know. — Zelebg

Yes, well put.

what the illusionist is saying is there are no ineffable, intrinsic, private and immediately apprehended sensations. There is no redness of red. Instead, there is an appearance of something which seems to have those qualities. — Marchesk

A picture in the head?

Or did you mean the other way round: what, if anything, distinguishes concepts from mere words?

Depends who you ask, of course. Word du jour is "illusion". As in no, nothing. (My vote, indeed. Casting of which I hereby perform. )

Does the illusion of consciousness go right down to the level of bacteria and virus?

True, but it's also being used as a metaphor. Illusionists aren't saying there's literally a computer-like graphical display in the brain. — Marchesk

Oh dear. Did I suggest that? I'll read what I wrote and see if I'm to blame... But your response was awfully quick. Not saying I expected you to meditate on it with any great reverence, but blimey.

Also because vision is just one of the senses, and we should be mindful not to base too much philosophical argument based on vision alone. — Marchesk

But I did say "read".

Btw, grateful for your links on this...