Not seeing much philosophical content.

Should be in the Lounge.

It seems there are a lot of people out there taking the absurd position that, "You cannot be what you are, because I do not know what you are." — Questioner

Excellent.

Were the USA deserves full credit is the Marshal Plan and the rebuilding of Europe. That was brilliant, the high point for US civilisation.

A bit different to now.

America's military-industrial complex is what beat the Nazis. — BenMcLean

Actually, it was China and the Soviet Union. The USA came in late and gave itself the credit.

But we are not supposed to point this out.

On mine, judgment is essentially answerable to how things are in a way that allows us to say that a practice-embedded, norm-governed belief nevertheless misrepresented reality. — Esse Quam Videri

We might sort all this by introducing triangulation, alla Davidson.

In that framing, I interpret your beliefs not just in relation to my own, but on the presumption that your beliefs are pretty much the same as my own - the Principle of Charity. So my interpretation is triangulated with your utterances, and my beliefs as to how things are in the world.

Are you familiar with it?

...but that has to do with grammar and the rules of language, not the ships out there versus the ships in my head. — Hanover

That's good, because I hope there are no ships in your head. What little metaphysics I am indulging claims that there are things such as ships, and that we can talk and think about them. I'd hope for agreement on at least this.

That is, I push back on your comment above to the extent you see the distinction between the hallucination and the ship is one of difference in referent. — Hanover

The hallucination of a ship has no referent, if our domain is ships and such. This is not a difference between the objects seen, since the hallucinator, by the very fact that they are hallucinating, does not see some thing; they have the hallucination of seeing something. That's kinda what hallucinations are.

My point is that there is no need to get into the weeds discussing how our brains work — Hanover

Yep. It's a point about how we talk consistently on these topics - that is, a conceptual, philosophical issue. The indirect realist invents something to be the thing the hallucinator sees, and that is their error. The direct realist points out that the hallucinator only thinks they see something.

I'm just trying to argue straight Wittgenstein, more out of my attempt to just understand Wittgenstein. — Hanover

The idea of a Mental image must surely be anathema to someone who has an understanding of the private language argument. What marks an hallucination is how it differs from the usual circumstances. Austin is better here, going into sense and sensibilia in some detail. And not incompatible with Wittgenstein.

Whether there is a ship at all consistent at sea with what we perceive is unknowable and meaningless. — Hanover

This, and the stuff around it, seems also incompatible with Wittgenstein. There's a ship if the ship has a place in our language games. There's a ship if there is a ship in the domain of discourse. What remains unclear is the nature of that ship. Our perceptions here have a place in our language games, but do not underpin it in the way that (naive?) phenomenology supposes. And it's not here being argued that the ship is exactly as we see it - that would still be sticking to the phenomenalist picture. Of course we might be in error - and poignantly, that would be to be an error about the ship, not about some phantasmic mental-image-of-ship.

I think there's merit to that, although it's entirely unsatisfactory, — Hanover

...ok...

And from there I go down a very theistic path — Hanover

Ok. I had suspected this. Thanks for being candid.

I responded to your the modal and relational points. Nice, but they don't get a guernsey.

Your quote says: "you can't have P and not have Q follow it", which is about as clear an account of material implication as one might have.

I'll leave you to your ruminations.

Yes, and hallucinated voices are mental phenomena. — Michael

Yesterday I wrote at length arguing that this was an error.

The most obvious is the move from "There is a phenomenal state" (a constipated way of saying "I see something") to "There is something that is seen". The argument is that naively, when we see a ship, there is a ship, so when we hallucinate a ship, there must be a thing that is hallucinated; and so philosophers invent the "mental image" as a reification of the hallucination. But of course what we have in an hallucination is not seeing any thing - the things hallucinated are of course not there. Talking as if there were a thing that is seen in an hallucination is a mistake.

It's worth noting that what marks an hallucination most clearly is that others do not see what the hallucinator sees. Hallucination is social. This is particularly important because in an hallucination there is nothing to fix truth; and that's were the "blur" example you give falls. You suggest — Banno

Can you explain that to me? — Fire Ologist

the history of our interactions in this forum would suggest not.

What does the following say?
"...you can't have P and not have Q follow it"

I interpret it as "If P, then Q".

Hoe do you interpret it, otherwise?

It's basic propositional logic.

Your quote does not rely on " how people mean 'entails' in natural language". It gives a clearly truth-functional definition of entailment: "...you can't have P and not have Q follow it".

I'll have to leave you to it at this rate. A shame, since there are good points to the conversation. But if we can't agree on these basics, there's not much point in continuing.

I thought these were two different questions. — Fire Ologist

There's your problem.

if you take my view, which is that for things to have a sufficient reason, they essentially must, like if P is a sufficient reason for Q, that's the same thing as saying that P entails Q, you know, that you can't have P and not have Q follow it.

The "you can't have P and not have Q follow it" is "if P is true, then Q is true", that is, P→Q.

Now P→Q is not in the list of paradoxes in the Wiki article. For good reason.

And further, if we understand, as the quote suggests, that if P→Q then P is the sufficient reason for Q, then any truth will be sufficient reason for any other truth.

Please, have a look at the argument I gave concerning causation and answering questions. It shows why we can't have purerly logical accounts of causation. A corollary would be that determinism also collapses.

Sure. Better approaches.

The entailment used in the podcast is not amongst the so-called paradoxes of material implication. IF the aim is to firm up the notion of cause, or of sufficient reason, by using material implication, as is set out in the quote form the podcast, then any truth will suffice. And that's not what we want.

There are modal theories of causation. These rely on limits to accessibility between possible worlds - so are somewhat arbitrary. For example, suppose we seek to explain that the rock broke the window when it hit it, we'd say something like that form every possible world in which the rock hits the window we can only access possible worlds in which the window broke. But what is missing is why only those worlds are accessible. Here we haven't explained the cause so much as repeated a description of the cause.

Relevance logic is quite interesting. In the example, the rock hit the window and the window broke, so there is the shared "variable" window. In one interpretation, it takes the accessibility relation to include a third world, so

A→B is true at a world a if and only if for all worlds b and c such that Rabc (R is the accessibility relation) either A is false at b or B is true at c. — SEP article

would be understood as that "The rock hit the window"→ "The window broke" is true at a world a if and only if for all worlds b and c such that Rabc either the rock did not hit the window at b or the window broke at c. As it stands, this also does not give a causal explanation. Something more is needed. And if we treat R as causation, then the account again becomes a description of a causal relation, not an explanation.

In none of these do we have, just form the logic, an explanation of why the antecedent brings about the consequent.

Now I suspect there is a deep reason for this, much the same one I mentioned earlier in this tread, to do with the nature of explanation. An explanation is useful when it is sufficient to stop us asking further questions. So if we ask "why did the widow break?", the answer "it was hot by a rock" might be sufficient to finish the discussion. But there is no reason form logic alone that we should stop here. SO for instance if we were interested in breaking more windows, we might continue the discussion with something like "but when I hit the window with this smaller rock it didn't break. Why?" And answer with an explanation of the rock needing to have sufficient momentum (mass times velocity) in order to break the window. And that might be enough, or we could continue with a discussion of different strengths for various panes of glass...

And the point here is that what counts as being a satisfactory causal explanation is not being a logically final answer, but being enough to stop further questions.

All this by way of pointing out that a sufficient cause is only sufficient for some particular circumstance, and never absolutely sufficient.

nope — flannel jesus

A brilliant response.

if you take my view, which is that for things to have a sufficient reason, they essentially must, like if P is a sufficient reason for Q, that's the same thing as saying that P entails Q, you know, that you can't have P and not have Q follow it.

You can't have P and not have Q follow it. If P is true, then Q is also true. Truth functional entailment.

Make up your mind.

That crows are black would be sufficient reason for seven to be three less than ten.

Then your use of "entails" is not truth functional.

This is a bizarre take — flannel jesus

Yep.

Without listening to the podcast, if P is a sufficient reason for Q, is the same thing as saying that P entails Q, then every truth is the sufficient reason for every other truth. A somewhat explosive result.

If P and if Q then P entails Q.

Somewhat explosive.

I'm very pleased that we've found some agreement.

Of course, "counts as" is not merely stipulative, either, in that not just any stipulation will do. So perhaps we agree there, too.

Interestingly, it seems we agree in rejecting the phenomenal as in any way foundational.

What you here call judgement corresponds closely to what I might call intent. Putting the case far too briefly, I'd draw on Anselm's distinction between directions of fit, pointing out that we stipulate what things are in order to allow for our talking about them. This counts as a ship, while that counts as a tree.

I quite agree with your last paragraph.

But I think that's the ultimate point of analytic philosophy — Hanover

No. It's rather to take our words seriously, and try to use them consistently. To do metaphysic properly.
Anyway, is as analytic as they come. His method and mine correlate nicely.

Arguing that schizophrenics don't hear voices, only hallucinate voices, is such a pointless argument — Michael

Of course. They hear hallucinated voices. If we ask those around them if they hear the voices, how do they answer? It is the mark of the misfire implicit in an hallucination, that there are others who do not participate. The appeal here is not to "one true" meaning, it's to the difference that makes an hallucination worthy of note. It is remarkable that the voice is heard only by the hallucinator.

You might want to use the phrase "I see X" only if there's the right kind of physical interaction between your body and some distal X... — Michael

Not quite. Rather we can make the observation that this is the typical situation, against which we note the exceptions. The exception can occur only against this background.

Again, the salient difference is that a direct realist sees ships, while an indirect realist never can. That in itself should be enough to show that the indirect realist has gone astray.

Thanks for showing the folly of reading these issues as purely phenomenal; of trying to understand what is a process embedded in our interactions with the world and with each other as if it were purely an interaction between a disembodied mind and a mooted object.

Is the perception I have the actual ship that is? — Hanover

That million dollar question is a fraud, one that pretends to a difference between the ship and the actual ship.

We can track some of the errors here. The most obvious is the move from "There is a phenomenal state" (a constipated way of saying "I see something") to "There is something that is seen". The argument is that naively, when we see a ship, there is a ship, so when we hallucinate a ship, there must be a thing that is hallucinated; and so philosophers invent the "mental image" as a reification of the hallucination. But of course what we have in an hallucination is not seeing any thing - the things hallucinated are of course not there. Talking as if there were a thing that is seen in an hallucination is a mistake.

It's worth noting that what marks an hallucination most clearly is that others do not see what the hallucinator sees. Hallucination is social. This is particularly important because in an hallucination there is nothing to fix truth; and that's were the "blur" example you give falls. You suggest

If I see a blur of what is a is far out at sea, I don't "see" a ship to the extent that blur is not a ship (but is instead a distortion). — Hanover

But if there is a ship, then you see the ship as a blur. Those on board will hopefully have a clearer view, as perhaps will the person next to you who did not forget their glasses. Again, the problem with phenomenology is the presumption of solitude. And indeed, that solitude is a variation on the homunculus, siting inside your head looking out, requiring an inner “viewer” who reintroduces the very subject–object split under dispute.

Those last two paragraphs don't make much sense to me. I think you are attributing a view that I do not hold.

So again, what is rejected here is the picture of an epistemic test layered on top of a private state that phenomenology takes as granted. What is suggested instead is an interaction between world and word, language games embedded in a community.

Now Hanover, I think you know this stuff. I suspect you agree with me, but find it more fun to disagree. As do I.

I accept all of those. It’s to the consequence that misrepresentation reduces to misuse and that inquiry no longer answers to anything beyond its own norms. — Esse Quam Videri

Of course that doesn't follow. Our language games are embedded in the world, not determinate of it.

Your proposal is something like, reality → judgment. I'm not proposing judgment→ reality, so much as judgment ↔︎ reality. This mutual dependence does not collapse misrepresentation into misuse

It’s about whether truth is exhausted by practice or essentially involves answerability to how things are. I don’t really see a neutral way to adjudicate that any further. — Esse Quam Videri

I think we can proceed by looking at the best theories we have of truth. And that's Tarski. We know that the semantic theory of truth is coherent. It also holds for any of the other more substantive theories. '"p" is true IFF p' is pretty much undeniable without a loss of coherence.

So the question is, is it complete?

And now our differences centre on, "does truth require more than what our best semantic theories already provide?"

Now this was Davidson's program, half a century ago; and it gave way to various forms of deflation concerning truth, together with what have been called "pragmatic" views, although they differ greatly from the substantive views of the early pragmatists.

For the purposes of this thread, what we might reject is a recourse to the necessity of judgements matching reality. That Great Juxtaposition of how things are against how we say they are has been shown wanting.

The judgment and the fact that satisfies it are still distinguishable in kind. — Esse Quam Videri

Special pleading. The judgement and the fact are the very same.

Error is only impossible in this case because answerability is immediately fulfilled, not because it has disappeared. — Esse Quam Videri

An answer that repeats the question is not an answer.

Calling it a limit case is correctly identifying it for what it is. — Esse Quam Videri

Such judgements appear to be a limiting cases because they are constitutive of the background that makes judgement possible.

Norms of truth are constituted in practice as norms of answerability to reality. — Esse Quam Videri

Norms are constitutive of what is the case as much as what is the case delineates norms, as is shown by "what is right" being itself a judgement.

Practice and reality are mutually dependent and inseparable.

Back at you — Richard B

Ok. That's fine. Is a glass of 99.8% H2O, 10ppm Na, 30 ppm Ca, 2 ppm Mg, 5 ppm SO4, 25 ppm Cl, 30 ppm HCO3, 0.1 ppm Fe, 300 ppm HDO, and 20 ppm D2O, a glass of 99.8% water, 10ppm Na, 30 ppm Ca, 2 ppm Mg, 5 ppm SO4, 25 ppm Cl, 30 ppm HCO3, 0.1 ppm Fe, 300 ppm HDO, and 20 ppm D2O?

I say yes. What say you?

. , what if we revers the wording - is a glass of pure H₂O a glass of water?

I say yes. What say you?

I can't follow that. Is there a typo?

Something is necessarily true iff it is tru in every case. Hence, if it is false in a given case, it cannot be necessarily true. I can't see you disagreeing with that.

And if something is contingent, then it is not necessary. I can't see you disagreeing with that.

Both Kripke and the Tractatus would agree here.

...he appears to reify necessity as a worldly fact — Richard B

Not at all sure why you would suppose that. Possible worlds are arrangements of how things might be, in logical space, which is pretty exactly in keeping with the Tractaus.

It's not up to others to explain "Kripke’s metaphysical framing doesn’t violate Tractarian structures" so much as up to you to show how it does, if that is what you think.

I don't believe you address how a proposition with sense implies something about a proposition without sense? — Richard B

If you want a reply on this, you are going to have to explain what you are claiming. Are you trying to say something like: "If 'The cat is on the mat' is false (a proposition with sense), how does this imply anything about 'The cat is on the mat or the cat is not on the mat' (a tautology without sense)?" If so, the answer is straightforward: it doesn't imply it in the usual sense. Rather, the tautology is true independently of whether the contingent proposition is true or false. The relationship isn't one of implication but of logical independence—which is precisely the point about necessary truths being "empty" of empirical content.

I think your reply helps move the discussion forward, so thank you for spelling it out. — Esse Quam Videri

You are welcome, as Americans say, but I didn't do any more in that last post than repeat myself.

I don't think the “reading” case provides a counter-example to my claim that judgment presupposes answerability to how things are. On the contrary, even here the judgment is true because things are a certain way, and would be false if they were not. — Esse Quam Videri

I'll try one more time. You are reading this now. We ask, "what is presupposed by the judgement that I am reading?" And the answer is, exactly and only, that I am reading. What is judged to be the case and the presupposition are the very same. No explanation has been provided that was not already at hand. Also, you said previously that "judgment presupposes answerability to how things are and the intelligibility of error.". I'll italicise the latter. Now how can one be in error about your reading this, here, now? There seems to be no such possibility.

If the answer is the same as the question, no "presupposed answerability" has been provided.

It will not do to try to maintain all judgment presupposes answerability to how things are by saying "limit cases" are simply trivial instances; that's indulging in special pleading. That you are reading this now is not obviously a limiting case in any special sense.

And indeed such are not limiting cases so much as constitutive cases. What you are now doing counts as reading, now. If what you are now doing is not reading this, then what could we mean by "reading, now"?

You are assuming that fulfilment of your conditions requires something outside the judgment itself but this is precisely what is being questioned by the reading example.

Truth would be normatively grounded in reality, not practice. But it seems that practice alone can provide the criteria that constitute correctness. This is a fairly direct consequence of Wittgenstein's considerations of rule-following.

Yep, spot on. Searle was Austin's student, but took Austin's ideas in an interesting although perhaps overly formal direction in the interest of making them clear.

's account is fair. Searle might downplay conditions of satisfaction in favour of intentionality as the way content is "fixed". When one looks at a ship, the intentional content (what the looking is about) is not an image-of-ship; it's a ship. Overstressing “content” risks sliding back into precisely the mental-image / representationalist picture that both Searle and Austin reject.

Now we are well into all the usual muddle that the idea that what we see isn't the thing but a mental-image-of-the-thing brings with it.

Folks, when you look at a ship, you see the ship, not some mental image of the ship.

And when you hallucinate, you don't see anything - that's kinda the point.

Those half-baked philosophical ideas of things-in-themselves and mental images are leading you up the garden path.

Austin sorted this stuff out int he middle of last century.

Ok, think about the logical space of the Tractatus. In that space, any proposition can be stated. Amongst those propositions are some which happen to be true, given the way things are, and a whole lot that happen to be false. Now some of those false propositions might have been true, had things been slightly different. that's what modal logic seeks to make coherent.

1. Saying that "....then this fact about the world is a necessary one" seems incorrect. A fact about the world is not because of the nature of logical structure, but whether a possible state of affairs is true or false. — Richard B

There are some statements that could not be false, no matter how the things in logical space are arranged. Mathematical and logic truths are amongst these. These are in a relevant sense independent of how things are. These are among the necessary truths. They are true in every state of affairs.

2. Saying that, "Well, if something is false, it's obviously not necessary true." How can proposition that that says nothing, follow from a proposition that says something? From a proposition that says something about the world, how is it obvious that it implies a proposition that shows logical form but states nothing about the world. — Richard B

Necessary truths are true in any arrangement of logical space. So if a statement is false, at the very lest, it is not true in every arrangement of logical space. But that doesn't mean that is says nothing. That it is not true that the cat is on the mat does tell us something about how things are arranged in logical space.

Or are you thinking of necessary propositions as saying nothing? That's one notion form the Tractatus. "Well, if something is false, it's obviously not necessary true" is consistent with this. A proposition that is necessary tells us nothing about how things are arranged in logical space, because t is true in every arrangement. A statement that is not necessary will be false in at least some arrangement, and so will tel us something.

The exception is contradictions, which are of course the negation of necessary truths, and false in every arrangement of logical space. Together tautologies and contradictions form the boundary of logical space.

The logical space of the Tractatus is a precursor to possible world semantics. It consists in different arrangements fo the things in the world, and each of these arrangements can be considered a possible world. In those terms, the Tractatus presaged possible world semantics.

Does that help?

However, when we bring in the metaphysical talk of possible worlds and rigid designation, I start to squirm. — Richard B

Yes, I can see your discomfort. Can we perhaps work on that?

§80 and §81 concern the extensibility of language. In §80 he is showing how natural languages are open to the unexpected. In §81 he is pretty much expressly rejecting the idea from the Tractatus that our natural languages are approximate to some more perfect formal language, in part because formal languages do not have the openness mentioned. §80 is about how we use natural languages effectively despite the absence of rules that will guide us in every case, and §81 is about how formal systems ought not be considered as showing the true form of our natural languages.

Now this is quite compatible with what Kripke is doing. He's saying that if we are to keep our talk of possibilities consistent, then we must keep our use of proper names and kinds consistent. This is the point made previously, that when we consider how things might have been had Nixon not won the '72 election, our considerations are about Nixon, and not about someone else.

Formal language does not perfect our natural language, but it can guide it.

That seems to me, again, to be unnecessarily hanging on to an outmoded presentation of what is going on.

As does the indirect realist. — Michael

Yep. The difference in science is not in the basic physiology. At least you now agree with me here.

...but the direct realist argues that there's a much more substantial relationship; one in which information about the mind-independent nature of the ship is given in the sensory experience... — Michael

Scratch out "mind-independent" and you have it.

"the phenomenal character of experience is determined, at least partly, by the direct presentation of ordinary objects" — Michael

Are you willing to claim that the character of experience is not determined, at least partly, by things in the world? Surely not.

Your ideas of token identity might be interesting, but I wasn't able to follow what you were arguing. Neural nets are not representational, so it might well be that notions of tokens are irrelevant, covered by the Markov blanket, as it were.

We don’t really know what mental phenomena — or as scientists of perception call them, percepts — are, — Michael

Percepts, in such an account, would be some stage in various layers of Markov blankets, just one of the levels of the internal states within the nested, hierarchical Markov blanket architecture. The perception is inside the Markov blanket, but not disconnected from what it outside. Crucially, The system does not “see” the percept; rather, the system sees by being in that state.

But frankly the percept is an oversimplification of what is going on.

I believe most indirect realists believe — Michael

Indirect realism is still realism, so I don’t understand the relevance of those references. — Michael

They're not intenced as such. Your claim concerned what "most indirect realists believe", but there is no evidence on which this might be based.

Here's another account. A direct realist believes that when we, say, look at a veritable ship, what we see is the ship. They hold that light is reflected from the ship, focused by the eye and incites certain neural pathways associated with things of that sort, and that this process is what we call seeing a ship.

An indirect realist, in contrast, holds that what we see is not the ship, but something else, sometimes called a "mental image" of the ship, that is presented to us by the process of light being reflected from the ship, focused by the eye and inciting certain neural pathways associated with things of that sort.

The most obvious difference here is that the indirect realist one way or another relies on a homunculus, a mind being presented with various stimuli, while the direct realist is embedded in the world. (Edit: I've bolded this, since it seems to me to be at the very heart of the issue)

We could, if it were deemed worthwhile, re-write the distinction between direct and indirect realism in terms of Markov Blankets.

Indirect realism effectively treats the Markov blanket as opaque, the system having only access to internal states in the form of the mooted "mental image". External states are inferred, never directly encountered, and what is “perceived” is confined to what is inside the blanket (representations, images, models).

Direct realism treats the Markov blanket as causally, but not epistemically, isolated, the system having access to external states through the mediation of the blanket. Seeing the ship is an interaction, not an appearance, and perception is a skilled engagement with environmental states across the blanket;
there is no inner object that perception terminates on.

Now on this account, I take direct realism as telling the better story.

China's general influence in South America? — jorndoe

:rofl:

This suits China down to the ground!

Xi says major countries should take lead in abiding by int'l law, UN Charter

I don't see it. Can you explain how?