I don't know whether Williamson is closer to my view or yours. — Srap Tasmaner

Neither do I.

But yours is a provocative post. I think maybe we might look back to the difference between an absolute and a relative measure - to being hot or cold. Do we need an absolute criteria for clarity? Perhaps not. Perhaps we might do with a sufficiency, enough to be getting on with.

A mathematical proof is never completely clear - there is always more to be said, more for the mathematician to clarify. There is still work being done on ZFC. But there is enough clarity for mathematicians to get on with other questions in the mean time.

And while what is clear to one mathematician may not be clear to another, it may be clear enough for them to agree and move on.

There's more here, that could be related back again to PI §201. We reach a point in our explanations at which we stop asking questions and just act.

I've heard of the judgement stroke, but no-one has ever explained to me what it does before. Thank you for that. — Ludwig V

Cheers. See A challenge to Frege on assertion for a bit more, if you are interested. Frege set the force of an utterance aside so that we could look to other aspects of it's structure. As I said there, the "a" in

is the same in both occurrences. This is how Frege might represent ∀A∀B(A→(B→A)), reading from bottom to top, something like "we judge that in all cases "a" gives us that "b" gives "a"". Notice that the whole expression sits within the scope of one judgement stroke, the "⊢" on the first line - that's the force of the utterance, the judgement or belief or what have you. The "⊢" is nowadays reduced to "it's true that..."

All this talk of assertions is making me think about speech acts. — Ludwig V

Yes, good point. The issue seems to be what Searle called the "sincerity condition", which requires that the speaker genuinely possesses the mental state expressed by the speech act. In this case making an assertion involves the speaker in committing themselves to the mental state of holding what is asserted to be true.

Could we not say that clarity has more than one value? — Ludwig V

I'll go along with that. We could fill in the details of how an aesthetic value relates to an obligation, and I'd also agree that we have an obligation to each other to be clear enough to be understood. Taht was part of what is behind @Moliere's thread on aesthetics, I believe.

Added: This might be a better account: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/931997

"Yes, I'm saying this, and it's most likely true -- close enough that I'm willing to assert it." — J

Can you do this without therewith judging that it's most likely true -- close enough that you are willing to assert it?

Yes and no. An analytic philosopher can talk *about* values, the roles they play in discourse, all that sort of thing, but by and large is determined not to offer a "wisdom literature." So it might be able to "clarify" (hey Banno) that it's the values at stake in a dispute, rather than something else, but it's not, as a rule, espousing a set of values. — Srap Tasmaner

Seems to me that we can posit clarity as an aesthetic value. As something that we might preference not becasue of what it leads to, but for it's own sake.

Seems @Moliere agrees, but perhaps you do not. That's fine. Perhaps at the least we might agree that some folk value clarity, and not just as a means to an end. Then we might wonder if Williamson is one of them.

I'm increasingly unconvinced that Banno is willing to provide his ends at all. — Leontiskos

"Ends" are a figment of Aristotelian framing. So, no.

Question - suppose that the speaker does know that the cat=jack. Then, by substitution, the speaker believes that Jack is on the mat. Is that not the case? — Ludwig V

Sure. Frege's judgement stroke is a way of showing this, by clarifying the scope of the judgement:

⊢(the cat is on the mat, the cat is jack, therefore Jack is on the mat)

but not

⊢(the cat is on the mat)
⊢(the cat is jack)
⊢(therefore Jack is on the mat)

The substitution between seperate judgements is not countenanced.

To me this talk of "ends" appears hollow. If, after Wittgenstein, we should look to use rather than to meaning, you might supose that a use is an end. That's a stretch, "end" drags in to the discussion so much baggage that might not be found in "use". It also does not follow that language must therefor have an end.

...surely there has to be some notion of the end this language is "better for." — Count Timothy von Icarus

"Surely" is a word to watch out for in an argument. It indicates that the conclusion doesn't follow as tightly as he proposing the argument would like.

Adding teleology here is making presumptions of Aristotelian metaphysics. It's already loaded.

I'm claiming that all three statements have different truth conditions. — J

Sure. Does any one suggest otherwise?

J and Banno may be "saying the same thing," but the statements are not. — J

The "that" in both "J judges that to be true" and "Banno judges that to be true" both have as referent "The cat is on the mat". That is why they are "saying the same thing".

I'm puzzled that this is an issue.

...stipulative... — J

That's what I had in mind. I don't see how you could assert a sentence without thereby stipulating that you judge it to be true. Asserting the sentence counts as judging it to be true.

Again, is there something here that is problematic?

"the cat is on the mat" and "Jack is on the mat" two propositions or one? — Ludwig V

I should have been clearer - my apologies. It's if the speaker does not know that jack is the cat's name. So we have

The cat is on the mat
The speaker believes that the cat is on the mat

The cat=jack

And by substitution,

the speaker believes that Jack is on the mat

Which is not the case. I'm just pointing to the opacity of propositional attitudes.

My question is whether "I judge that sentence to be true" ever follows from "That sentence is true"? If I assert the latter, have I also committed myself to asserting the former? — J

The answer is straightforward. From "That sentence is true" it does not follow that "I judge that sentence to be true". Neither does it follow from "I judge that sentence to be true" that "That sentence is true. The context is not extensional.

If you assert "That sentence is true" you have also committed to "I judge that sentence to be true" on the grounds that to assert a sentence counts as to judge it to be true. This is not an entailment but a performance.

I don't think any other discipline has asked for philosophy's help or wants it. — Srap Tasmaner

Philosophers don't wait to be asked...

This is the same issue that bedeviled the other thread, that you need something to dissect. — Srap Tasmaner

There's no shortage, is there? starting with how many legs does a spider have, and working on from there...

Williamson would absolutely agree to carefully examining theories, with the goal of improving them or producing better ones, not with the expectation they'll all be left dead on the dissecting table. — Srap Tasmaner

I suspect that the philosophers now working on metametaphyscis and so on see themselves as working on the same issue, but re-cast as a result of the considerations from, amongst others, Williamson, Chalmers, Dummett and so on.

It's not an autopsy.

I don's see that this is not captured.

• The cat is on the mat.
• J judges that to be true
• Banno judges that to be true.

Indeed, they amount to much the same view... — Banno

I don't think there's any fact of the matter regarding shared nor individual intentionality — frank

Then how do you explain a football game?

It might be worth pointing out that intuitionistic logic is a proper subset of classical propositional logic: everything provable in intuitionistic logic is provable classically, but not the other way around. It’s consistent, and it has a semantics—Kripke models, for example—that is both sound and complete.

What it doesn’t assume is the law of excluded middle or double negation elimination. That’s the point.

Dummett made use of it in his work—especially in his arguments against classical realism about meaning.

If we are tempted to agree with Dummett might give consideration to what it is we are agreeing.

If we are tempted to disagree with Dummett we might do well to understand the solidity of the foundation on which he stands.

Why do I feel like I just walked into the Meno? — Srap Tasmaner

:razz:

Do you think that "learning" in philosophy amounts to becoming clear about what you already know? Or can philosophy provide us with knowledge we did not have before? — Srap Tasmaner

Isn't becoming clearer about what you already know a way to improve your knowledge? At the least, I'm not convinced that they are mutually exclusive...

I've in mind Midgley's plumbing model of philosophy. We get the plumbing right, and then are we still doing philosophy? I'm suspicious about that. I do think philosophy can to some extent provide a service to other disciplines, fixing the leaks and bad smells.

Back to the demarcation criteria I suggested: philosophy happens when we stop doing things with words and start looking instead at how we do things with words; how those words work. Doing philosophy involves going back and looking again at what we have said, and checking how it hangs together. Dissection.

Now, a corollary of that: it remains undecided if what is left over when we get the plumbing right is still philosophy, or has become something else.

So "learning" in philosophy is at least becoming clear about what you already know, but maybe philosophy might provide us with knowledge we did not have before, after it gets through fixing the pipes. I remain unconvinced.

But "What is a proposition?" would make an excellent thread...

I'd suggest some sort of shared intentionality, social intent, along the lines proffered by Searle. Shared intent as opposed to individual intent. That for a non-extensional account.

Alternately, after Davidson: aren't "the cat is on the mat" spoken by J and "the cat is on the mat" spoken by @frank both true under the very same circumstances? That is, they are extensional equivalent - so what's the issue?

Yep!

Yep. Chalmers et al took themselves to be working on the same problem, as can bee seen in his Ontological Anti-Realism - he's explicitly re-casting the problem as about metametaphysics, and arguing an antirealist case from there. But the upshot appears to have been a move past the realism/antirealism dichotomy, a re-framing of the activity.

Inter-disciplinary work has developed well in recent decades... — Ludwig V

A result of philosophers being forced to pay their way, perhaps - of economics, rather than largess on the part of philosophers.

I'm trying to bring in the 1st person judgment. We can stipulate that we will use "assert" so as to mean that "The cat is on the mat" and "It is true that the cat is on the mat" assert the same thing. Indeed, this is very often how we use "assert." But does this get us to "I judge that the cat is on the mat" or "I judge that it is true that the cat is on the mat"? Are these formulations also meant to say the same thing? How? — J

I'm lost here. We have it that "the cat is on the mat" can have a particular interpretation, understood whether it is true or not; and we have it that "I judge that sentence to be true" is a distinct, albeit not seperate, item.

Is that not so?

But nowhere here are we talking about arguments showing that people actually agree, or argument as a means of clarifying, or any of the things you said and that I was asking about. Are we just moving on? — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, the argument did indeed move on. Disenchantment with the global framing of the debate led to the rise of localism, Phil os science moved away from examination of method and towards examining scientific language and culture, and modal theories of causation. Philosophers moved to metemetaphysics, after the book by that title, a sideline of neo-Aristotelian approaches as a reaction against Quine, another sideline on the construction of social reality, and so on. Pholsophers got board with the lack of progress and moved on.

...do you think that clarity tends to dissolve disagreements because it shows most disagreements to have been merely verbal? — Srap Tasmaner

Sometimes, not always. It also can bring out differences in aesthetic, in what the proponents are seeking.

I think Williamson considers the end goal knowledge. — Srap Tasmaner

Ok, lets' settle on clear knowledge... :wink:

But I can't see that "The speaker holds true..." is at all helpful. What's unclear about "X believes that the cat is on the mat"? — Ludwig V

Well, there's the issues of substitution. If the cat's name is "Jack", does the speaker also believe that Jack is on the mat? It seems not. And yet Jack = the cat.

Hence the analysis "The cat is on the mat" and "The speaker holds that true", where that indicates the previous sentence. This has the benefit of separating the belief from the fact.

Davidson was not able to give up the search. — Ludwig V

I missed something.

"Better" in virtue of what? — Count Timothy von Icarus

If you have trouble deciding, I'll do it for you.

One side should eventually have an argument that the other side accepts ― if not as entirely dispositive, then convincing enough that they consider their own position discredited and abandon the fight. — Srap Tasmaner

One might think so, but this is not what happened in the realism/antirealism argument. No solution was found, no one side was shown to be discredited. So was the argument pointless? I don't think so.

It slowly sank in that there was not one, but many questions here - that what is real in mathematics is not the same as what is real in science or as what is real in ethics. Global discussion gave way to discussions about the kinds of objects particular discourses commit us to. Antirealism was seen to be dependent on internal accounts of reference that were difficult to explain. The turn was towards metametaphysics - and still is, I suspect. So the issues now concern metaphysical methodology.

So clarity may still be the end goal.


Metaphysics is not discovering the deep structure of the world per se, but proposing better ways to conceptualize and systematize our thought and language.”

Is the point of an argument to show that? — Srap Tasmaner

Might be.

What if the disagreement is not just about how to say what we agree on? — Srap Tasmaner

Might be.

...why you would reach for the word "argument" at all instead of, say, "explanation" or some other word. — Srap Tasmaner

An argument is variously a quarrel or a line of reasoning, and sometimes both. And sometimes the quarrel concerns a difference that may be sorted by a line of reasoning - an argument that dissolves an argument, as it were.

Williamson is advocating explicit and clear lines of reasoning. He's doing this in order to move past the discussion being a mere quarrel.

Yep. That she feels cold is not a matter of opinion. Not even her own - she's just cold.

Further, that I judge that she feels cold is a seperate issue - not entirely unrelated, of course, but my judgement makes no difference to her feeling cold.

Interesting that such a simple example should require so much finessing. Again, showing the need for detail.

Why would you or I bother with arguments at all? — Srap Tasmaner

Perhaps when someone thinks you and I have the same instinct about this, that there's really one shared human perspective, but say the same thing in different ways? Working out if there is agreement, or not, and what any disagreement might amount to, seems a worthy pastime.

We've gone off Williamson, sorry. — J

He wasn't that bad... :wink:

Since we got here from that paper, there must be a path from there to here.

Somethign to do with this, perhaps:

Banno's position here is interesting because he is strongly committed both to the primacy of natural language and the usefulness of classical logic. The argument he often makes is that classical logic is not something you find implicit in ordinary language, as its hidden structure, say, but you can choose to conform your language use to it. — Srap Tasmaner

Or is this just an extension from @sime, and not relevant to the topic? Was Sime's post a response to this...

She will be huddled under blankets while I am comfortable in my tee shirt. But we at least agree that she is cold while I am hot; that this is the fact of the matter. And this will be so regardless of what the thermometer shows, it would be impertinent for me to say she was mistaken here. So let's not suppose our differences to be merely subjective. — Banno

...which was in turn a response to Srap's differentiation between relative and absolute senses of "discipline". Back here:

At issue was the place of semantics as a discipline. The discussion since shows that there is a lot going on with semantics, and we might need include pragmatics.

This relates to our PM discussion of the difference between an argument as convincing someone that something is the case, and an argument as working out how best to say something that we agree is the case.

And I'll read Williamson as advocating the latter.

It's this idea that every assertion X(p) has to be a judgment. If I assert, in this special sense, "The cat is on the mat," I'm understood also to be asserting, "I judge that the cat is on the mat." — J

Have you said more here than that to assert "the cat is on the mat" is to assert that "the cat is on the mat" is true? Not seeing it.

The judgment stroke serves to seperate out the interpretation from the use - here it might be best to thinking terms of the extension of the sentence. "the cat is on the mat" will be true exactly if the cat is one of those things that are a member of the things on the mat. And this is so whether you are asking, demanding, asserting, convincing or judging.

Between the string of letters and the judgement sits the interpretation...

...does this construal allow for us also to say things like "The speaker suggests that 'The cat is on the mat' is likely to be true"? This, to me, isn't simply the same as saying "The speaker holds possible the sentence 'The cat is on the mat'." It's not just that the speaker is pointing out a possibility; they're also opining on a likelihood. I'm trying to work this back around to the ways we actually say things, which are so often in various grades of assertivity and certainty. The more I think about this, the more I appreciate the assertion-stroke! — J

We seperate the semantics from the pragmatics... and judging, holding the possibility, pointing out that possibility... these are all treated as part of the pragmatics. syntax - semantics - pragmatics; the letters or sounds, the interpretation, and what we are doing with them.

The Fregean account shows us how these bits fit together, the Wittgensteinian account reminds us that they are inseparable.

What has any of this to do with the topic of this thread - an account of the distinction between having a philosophy and doing philosophy?

Can someone relate it back to the theme?

What has any of this to do with the topic of this thread, which is a specific paper by Williamson?

Can someone relate it back to the theme?

Better, perhaps, not to use "proposition" here at all. The philosopher's finesse is usually to move from sentence to statement to assertion, although Davidson If I recall dropped "statement" and "proposition" both, leaving the gap between syntax and use as wide as possible.

He might write ""The speaker holds true the sentence 'The cat is on the mat.'" This makes clear that the speaker is doing something with a sentence.

Well said.

's point perhaps stands, in that the judgement (belief, act of making an assertion) can be seen as an association between the speaker and the proposition.

There are those amongst us who apparently seem to see no distinction between the syntactic structure and the illocutionary act.

The syntax of "the cat is on the mat" is that of a statement, to be contrasted with "Is the cat on the mat?", which has the syntax of a question.

But each may be used to the same ends. One can use "The cat is in the mat" to ask if the cat is on the mat, and one can use "Is the cat on the mat?" to make an assertion.

We must take care not to equate sentences with beliefs without anchoring them in a speaker's use.

Can they both frame assertions? — J

Both are second level predications, perhaps.

It is true that the cat is on the mat
it is possible that the cat is on the mat.

Both have the form X(the cat is on the mat), or X(p) were p is a proposition.

But they are payed out in very different ways. "the cat is on the mat" will be true IFF the cat is on the mat, but "the cat is on the mat" will be possible if the cat is on the mat in at least one possible world.

"the cat is on the mat" is the same in each. That this is so is a stipulation that allows us to talk about possibility and truth sensibly. That's to stipulate that we are playing by Frege's rules, keeping "the cat is on the mat" constant in order to look at "it is true that..." and "it is possible that...". We might alternately stipulate Wittgenstein's approach from PI, and look tot he use of "the cat is on the mat" - a hedged assertion, or an expression of hope or fear, or a counter to someone's denial.

This is much the same point as I tried in your thread p and "I think p".

It's just not the case that one and only one of these ways of talking must be the correct one in all circumstances.

To be recognised, there must be a pattern...

Duck-rabbits and frog-horses - is it really a duck, really a frog? No, it's a Duck-rabbits and it's a frog-horse. It makes no sense to ask which came first, which is it really.

Discovering and producing as the very same thing.

The even larger problem: many people don't wish to acknowledge that it is undecidable or even that their shit is made up... — Janus

See this again:

She will be huddled under blankets while I am comfortable in my tee shirt. But we at least agree that she is cold while I am hot; that this is the fact of the matter. And this will be so regardless of what the thermometer shows, it would be impertinent for me to say she was mistaken here. So let's not suppose our differences to be merely subjective. — Banno

Is it hot or cold? Or is it undecidable? Or is it just shit we made up?

None of these quite work.

I've been interested in the comments on this thread which focus on aesthetics, — J

My mention of aesthetics wasn't so much about style as about what we admire.

well, ask a silly question...


We could all go learn some physics?