• On behalf of definitions and defining terms.
    Word
  • Flaw in Searle's Chinese Room Argument
    Searle argument simply [works on refutes] a wrong model of understanding [as syntax] which he obviously takes as being [universally too widely] accepted as correct, but that is a wrong assumption, which once might have been true though. But today it really should be clear he simply starts with the wrong model and then proves the wrong model is wrong, it’s a farce. — Zelebg

    He might agree with that :wink:
  • Flaw in Searle's Chinese Room Argument
    Then Searle's argument makes a wrong presupposition that it is an adequate model of how understanding works. — Zelebg

    It doesn't offer a model of understanding, though. It uses a clear case of non-understanding (you processing symbols in a language you don't understand) to show that showing syntax isn't showing semantics.

    So I don't see what your gremlins are. Semantics? You don't see meaning and understanding as required for consciousness? Ok...
  • Flaw in Searle's Chinese Room Argument
    That’s worse. Then it makes a wrong presupposition — Zelebg

    What does? My post or Searle's argument?

    ... that his example — Zelebg

    What, the Chinese Room?

    ... is an adequate model of how understanding works. — Zelebg

    So - not the Chinese Room?

    Can you be a bit clearer?
  • Flaw in Searle's Chinese Room Argument
    It’s like arguing chemistry is just stupid atoms following laws of physics, so they can not possibly give rise to things like biology, language or consciousness. Where is the confusion? — Zelebg

    Oh, so right there. Searle doesn't say that symbol manipulation can not possibly give rise to consciousness. Only that it needs to at least produce meaning within the system (have a proper semantics). And showing symbol manipulation isn't showing a semantics.
  • Flaw in Searle's Chinese Room Argument
    signal-meaning pairs, — Zelebg

    Whatever flaws you might ever turn up, the point is Searle caught cognitive scientists confusing semantics with syntax. Signal-meaning pairs, as you put it, with signal-signal pairs. Understanding, with signal-processing. Intentionality, with script-reading, or program following.

    If that's what you are doing too, as I expect, you are in the respectable company of nearly everybody. It's a catastrophically tempting confusion.

    The semantic ability that humans alone (so far) excel in, and start delighting in in infancy, is kind of like a game of word-fetch. Understanding how words are tossed into the world and predicting where they have landed. When AI robots can interact with the world with enough facility to find a ball in a garden, they might be in the position to start learning to sniff out meanings.

    You seem to be hoping to by-pass that evolution and achieve results merely by suggestive labelling of the modules of an obviously non-conscious computer system. So Searle's argument clearly hasn't alerted you to any important difference between semantics and syntax. And, unfortunately, it isn't guaranteed to have that effect.
  • Truth
    ↪Banno


    Ha ha, probably :joke:
  • Truth
    All else is sophistry. — Banno

    Or worse still, semantics! :wink:

    You propose that if we let the beast semantics on our land at all, we shackle it with the T-schema? Allow, if we must, theoretical talk of linguistic entities and their semantic relations with cats and mats, but be prepared to exchange it for talk about only the cats and mats, as in proper science?

    Fine if so, but mustn't you then stay out of arguments about kinds of assertion and belief, and how we learn to recognise them?

    Ready to hear why not.
  • Truth
    ↪Banno


    Are you in the state of denying the redundancy theory?
  • Truth
    #2 Can we justify justification? — Monist

    Not, according to Carroll's Tortoise
  • Mathematicist Genesis
    This reminds me vaguely of a philosophical or logical problem I read about once, and can't remember the resolution to at the moment. — Pfhorrest

    This?

    can't remember the resolution — Pfhorrest

    Lack of one is cool for inscriptionalism. No sign of a consensus on wiki.
  • Schools for Leaders, their need and their conspicuous absence

    Agathon: I'm afraid the word is bad. You have been condemned to death.

    Allen: Ah, it saddens me that I should cause debate in the senate.

    Agathon: No debate. Unanimous.

    Allen: Really?

    Agathon: First ballot.

    Allen: Hmmm. I had counted on a little more support.

    Simmias: The senate is furious over your ideas for a Utopian state.

    Allen: I guess I should never have suggested having a philosopher-king.

    Simmias: Especially when you kept pointing to yourself and clearing your throat.
     — Woody Allen, 'My Apology'
  • An hypothesis is falsifiable if some observation might show it to be false.
    ↪sime


    Yes, if the thread is about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability#Criticisms
  • An hypothesis is falsifiable if some observation might show it to be false.
    It's a complex, ill-posed and frankly outdated assertion. Firstly, an observation O can only materially entail the contradiction of a hypothesis H in a closed finite world. For in an open-world, the meaning of the material implication O => ~H isn't empirically reducible to observations, and is instead an auxiliary hypothesis, A, which isn't itself entailed by some other observation on pain of infinite regress. So in an open world we have A => ( O => ~H) , and hence O => (~A OR ~H) — sime

    And secondly?
  • An hypothesis is falsifiable if some observation might show it to be false.
    this problem that you're referring to. — creativesoul

    I am?

    But the question is whether there is any problem with saying that a particular piece of butter (a particular statement) satisfies "melts at some temperature less than 100°C" (satisfies "renders counter-examples verifiable") even though it never got the chance to melt (to render a counter-example verifiable), because I ate it cold (because it had no counter-examples). — bongo fury

    Just to be clear, the question was meant to be rhetorical, and the answer no.
  • An hypothesis is falsifiable if some observation might show it to be false.
    I find no issue with that, so it's something to keep in mind. If we arrive at something which contradicts it, we aught pause and reconsider. — creativesoul

    Missing the point of the thread, which I take to be: what clarification of that vague and ambiguous assertion (the one you are pleased that I find vaguely agreeable) would convey the scope and central tendency of the un-packings that Popper and his followers would likely give it, so that the wiki article might (with this clarification) better help the reader avoid common mis-readings and (from the falsificationist point of view) spurious objections, such as yours.

    I might worry that my formula had failed its task in your case, if you didn't already admit to being uninterested in likely falsificationist unpackings of the assertion.
  • An hypothesis is falsifiable if some observation might show it to be false.
    To be falsifiable is to be able to be shown as false.

    Agree?     — creativesoul

    Well yeah, vaguely, but that's exactly where the thread started. My formula (with modal inflection if required, but it's implied, so 6 words, and I think I win) is just a straight guess at a gloss that would (to me) explain and justify the widespread acceptance of the notion.

    "Butter melts at less than one hundred degrees" — creativesoul

    But the question is whether there is any problem with saying that a particular piece of butter (a particular statement) satisfies "melts at some temperature less than 100°C" (satisfies "renders counter-examples verifiable") even though it never got the chance to melt (to render a counter-example verifiable), because I ate it cold (because it had no counter-examples).
  • An hypothesis is falsifiable if some observation might show it to be false.
    It would take observation of particles produced by sub atomic decay that did not subsequently 'exhibit' identical properties to falsify the statement — creativesoul

    Yes, but not to qualify it as falsifiable. It takes heat to melt a piece of butter, but not to qualify it as "melts at less than 100°C", even though I ate it cold.
  • An hypothesis is falsifiable if some observation might show it to be false.
    True statements are unable to be shown as false for they never are.

    Better?     — creativesoul

    How could it be when it ignores my formula and the clarification?

    Do you have an example that demonstrates your proposed scenario/situation? — creativesoul

    I dunno... any universal claim that currently looks like it could be true.

    F = (within some tolerance) ma?

    Any pair of particles produced by sub-atomic decay are entangled?

    They are the kind of statement so conducive to experimental testing as to convince us that some of their counter-examples, if they had any at all, would be observable.
  • An hypothesis is falsifiable if some observation might show it to be false.
    no true statement is falsifiable. — creativesoul

    I don't see why not, if it is the kind of statement that would make its counter-examples, if it had any, verifiable.
  • An hypothesis is falsifiable if some observation might show it to be false.
    ↪creativesoul


    You lost me.
  • An hypothesis is falsifiable if some observation might show it to be false.
    ↪creativesoul


    Go on.
  • An hypothesis is falsifiable if some observation might show it to be false.
    ↪creativesoul


    Nobody claimed otherwise.
  • An hypothesis is falsifiable if some observation might show it to be false.
    A claim that renders counter-examples verifiable.
  • Are necessary and contingent truths necessary?
    Saying that a proposition is necessarily true is really no different to writing the word 'true' in capital letters. — Bartricks

    I agree, but I wouldn't stop there. I would say: saying that a proposition is true (or TRUE) is really no different to expressing (asserting) the sentence.

    And so doing (asserting a sentence) is really no different to pointing the predicate (e.g. adjective) of the sentence at the object denoted by the subject of the sentence.

    And so doing is really no different to producing (writing and uttering) tokens of the sentence. It's all hot air.

    I don't expect you will approve of any of these steps. From such madness I do get to explain (away?) both truth and necessity. But since you seem to believe in truth on some abstract level, you won't (I expect) like the way I dispose of both. Here goes, anyway.

    Truth is unanimity, or consistency of all tokens produced. We've been here before:

    "True" is what we call sentence tokens that bear repeating on their own terms, which is to say, without contextualising in the manner of "... is untrue because..." or "... would be the case if not for..." etc.

    Such contexts are potential predators, and must be fought off and dominated.     — bongo fury

    Truth is not the name for some practice of ours - our practice of calling some sentences 'true', for clearly we could have that practice and some of the sentences we call true could be false. — Bartricks

    Not without contradicting other sentences we call true. — bongo fury

    IOW, I admit that truth is relative to a system: any more or less expansive and enduring but non-ultimate lake or culture of sentence-propagation (and predation). Of which there will many.

    Whereas, you envision a singular system overseen by "Reason".

    Truth is, as I have argued, the assertive activity of Reason: a proposition is true when Reason asserts it. — Bartricks

    And I like the image (by which I might assimilate your vision to mine) of Reason throwing new fish in the water and overseeing a perfect ecology. (Perfectly consistent or at least stable.)

    Anyway, necessity then is (potentially, if we have the time and inclination to argue logically or hypothetically) just the claim or observation of some reliable pattern of population growth in some class of systems grown (in petri dish or sandbox) from scratch, from small families of premises, and with clear rules of reproduction and predation.

    Although, more usually, we just join the fray of reproduction and predation in a larger and less civilised sea of sentence tokens. But we join it armed (in aid of rhetorical fitness) with more or less clearly formed ecological predictions which we call "truth" and "necessity".
  • Karl Popper's Black Ravens
    Ergo, by Popper's account of what a scientific claim is, statement A is not disproved and given [that there are some ravens that are black that statement A is falsifiable], statement A acquires the status of a scientific theory - to be taken as [true for all intents & purposes a theory as yet unfalsified and worth testing]. — TheMadFool

    If you want more, fine, there's always induction :smile:
  • Karl Popper's Black Ravens
    ↪bongo fury Thanks for noticing the error in my post. I made the necessary corrections.

    Sure it is. But it's a problem for induction: for deciding between equally as-yet-unfalsified hypotheses.
    — bongo fury

    How is it a paradox when you agree that falsificationism requires those who make hypotheses to look for counter-evidence by searching outside the domain of the subjects of hypotheses? The statement, all cats are animals is falsifiable precisely by looking for and finding a non-animal that's not a cat.     — TheMadFool

    Same confusion here. Corrected:

    It's a paradox and potential embarrassment for confirmation theory because it appears to entitle those who make hypotheses to look for confirming evidence by searching outside the domain of the subjects of hypotheses. The statement, all cats are animals is apparently confirmable precisely by looking for and finding a non-animal that's not a cat.

    Take rumours of the death of induction with a pinch of salt. (A good habit.) I.e. the embarrassment isn't fatal.

    Try to stop confusing the two, though.
  • Karl Popper's Black Ravens
    This would be letting confirmation back in through the same door that Popper just tossed it out. — Pantagruel

    Agreed. Hempel induce. Popper deduce.

    Hempel confirm. Popper falsify.
  • Karl Popper's Black Ravens
    So, falsifying confirming the claim A can be done by only considering non-black things that need not necessarily be ravens. That is we may look at a green apple or white clouds and be secure that the claim A [not only] hasn't been falsified [but has also been positively confirmed]. — TheMadFool

    Which is a potential embarrassment for confirmation theory (induction), but not for falsification theory (hypothetico-deduction), which doesn't pretend to compare and rate equally unfalsified hypotheses according to their confirming evidence.

    So long as we don't encounter a non-black raven, we can, according to Karl Popper, invest our trust in the, as yet unfalsified, claim A = all ravens are black. — TheMadFool

    But no more so (according to Popper, as far as I know) than for the equally unfalsified claim that not all ravens are black.

    In other words, the Raven paradox is not a paradox in a scientific sense — TheMadFool

    Sure it is. But it's a problem for induction: for deciding between equally as-yet-unfalsified hypotheses.

    an inability to falsify a claim counts as support for whatever the claim is — TheMadFool

    You mean confirming evidence counts as support? But how to measure confirmation?

    we may believe it, given that there's also positive evidence (black ravens) to back the claim. — TheMadFool

    But what about the equally positive (but intuitively less compelling) evidence of non-black non-ravens? There's the puzzle. (For induction.)
  • Do colors exist?
    A pre neural-network (pre 80's) computational picture of the brain?
    - bongo fury

    Is there any other picture of the brain where sensory visual input is not first encoded into serial electric signal in the eye before it even reaches the brain?     — Zelebg

    :up: :up: :up:

    Nearly there.
  • Do colors exist?
    Colors do not really exist in the brain — Zelebg

    Yay

    where light waves are encoded from sensory input to form a signal or whatever electrochemical kind of abstract information. — Zelebg

    A pre neural-network (pre 80's) computational picture of the brain? Wherein you doubt neural colours but assume correlative neural symbols? Like pixel information in a computer chip, awaiting (arguably)

    an agent or “self” [...] to decode, understand or perceive those signals as colors — Zelebg

    ?

    If you say colors do actually exist, then I think you in fact must be proposing a separate realm of existence for their being, some kind of parallel dimension — Zelebg

    True, so, if you are desperate to give your psychology a pure physical ontology then why not treat colours as labels/adjectives?
  • Do colors exist?
    in what case you would say colors do exist, — Zelebg

    Wherever it makes sense to parse them as objects, e.g. objects of a semantic verb like denotes/describes/points-at/refers-to/applies-to. [edit: or is-true-of, as remarked above.]

    and what are the possible cases where you would say colors don't really exist? — Zelebg

    Wherever it makes more sense to parse them as labels, i.e. subjects of the semantic verb.
  • The Notion of Subject/Object
    Btw

    It permeates the philosophy of language (Quine's "Word and Object"), cognitive sciences, etc. — Xtrix

    Or rather... Chisholm's "Person and Object"?

    Ockham to Quine's Roscellinus. On my analysis.
  • The Notion of Subject/Object
    Funny how even behaviourism doesn't resist the "idea" idea.

    That is, if it ever did (as so often charged) espouse an initial blankness of slate.

    A slate or screen or stage in the head, and pictures or words in the head. And then, or already, intermediate images, impressions, echoes, traces, affections, representations, at all points in a continuous channel of re-processing, imagined as stretching from "object" all the way in to... er, yes, how does it end? Where and what is the "subject"? Plenty of controversy there. But virtually none for the image-or-text-processing analogy that implies video and text symbols arising within the organism.

    And we can't blame modern technology. The analogy probably (I speculate) always pervaded cultures that produced physical symbols.

    But of course animals (and neural networks) don't commit events to memory by processing and storing physical traces (like an electronic camera), but rather by training themselves to respond to stimulation (internal and external) with appropriate activity. Most of which, in humans uniquely, involves manipulation of, or preparation to manipulate, actual, external, symbols.

    ...What we mistakenly theorise as the presence of actual, internal ones.

    So, cheers to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roscellinus, the only clear (and probably spurious) example of bucking image-ism that I can find, before Goodman and Quine.
  • Negation across cultures
    I would like to know a little about how members here interpret negation. — Mapping the Medium

    1) As a word's (or other symbol's) happening not to point at an object

    2) As some corresponding negative's (or antonym's) happening to point at the object

    Each of which probably implies the other, in some way that would help explain global patterns of word-pointing. Such as, the tendency of a scheme of words towards "sorting" of a domain of objects, through pointing out of (more or less) mutually exclusive but jointly exhaustive sub-domains.
  • The Notion of Subject/Object
    Or at least Ockham.
    — bongo fury

    Hmm, really? That's interesting. Never read Ockham. Where does he touch on this?     — Xtrix

    ... and Aristotle, apparently.

    Now I say that utterances are 'signs subordinated' to concepts or intentions of the soul, not because, by a proper acceptance of the word 'signs', the utterances always signify the concepts of the soul primarily and properly, but rather because utterances are imposed to signify those same things that are signified by the concepts of the mind. In this way the concept primarily signifies something naturally, and secondarily the utterance signifies that same thing...

    [...] And the Philosopher says as much, [saying] that utterances are 'marks of affections that are in the soul'[4];So also Boethius[5], when he says that utterances signify concepts. And generally all writers, in saying that all utterances signify affections or are the marks of those [affections], do not mean anything other than that the utterances are signs secondarily signifying those things that are primarily conveyed by affections of the soul...

    [...] the concept or affection of the soul signifies naturally whatever it signifies, but a spoken or written term signifies nothing except according to voluntary imposition.
     — http://www.logicmuseum.com/wiki/Authors/Ockham/Summa_Logicae/Book_I/Chapter_1

    Hence the etymology of "idea" involving "image", as in a photographic trace. (Natural as opposed to conventional.)

    And the undeniably fruitful connection of (the notion of empiricism in) philosophy of science to (the notion of empiricism in) developmental psychology. How we learn to read messages from nature.

    Still, I see Goodman and Quine as reasserting convention, and rather kicking against...

    This way of talking about the "outside world" of objects and the "inner world" of thoughts, perceptions and emotions — Xtrix

    E.g., Quine's behaviourism, and Goodman's semiotics-without-the-mentalism.
  • The Notion of Subject/Object
    at least since Descartes. — Xtrix

    Or at least Ockham.

    "Idea" is the great interloper, an unnecessary middle man between word and object.
  • Can Hume's famous Induction Problem also be applied to Logic & Math?
    It's gibberish, a contradiction, it does not compute, and being semantically invalid statement it can not be sanely reasoned about. — Zelebg

    So, on waking that morning (OP), we might all seize and catch fire like confused robots.

    But we might do that anyway if we took any logic too religiously, and felt obliged to believe all the consequences of our (inevitably) inconsistent beliefs.
  • Can Hume's famous Induction Problem also be applied to Logic & Math?
    Imagine a flower is a vacuum cleaner. — Zelebg

    Ok. I did that.
  • Can Hume's famous Induction Problem also be applied to Logic & Math?
    The problem is semantic, it is about constructing a formal system for common meaning to help us communicate. Imagining then some other system of reference meanings does not speak about actual change in the outside world, but about personal interpretation module. Dealing with it would manifest with difficulties in communication. — Zelebg

    Sure. My difficulty was with making sense of,

    knowing for a fact it is named Earth. — Zelebg

    How to know such a fact. Perhaps you meant, agreeing to assume?
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