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?

Yeah, there's two views here that might seem antithetical.

The one is that there are ordered laws of nature, and they are there becasue god said so.

Now this is not much of an explanation, since whatever way the universe is, this view explains it.

The other is that the universe just is this way, that there is no reason for it being this way rather than some other.

And the same point applies: no mater how the universe is, this view works, so it doesn't serve to explain anything.


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

I'm pleased you understood my argument.

For example, the motion of the planets around the sun? This of course is due to the law of gravity governing such motions — kindred

Is it? "Due to..." that is

The law of gravity governs the motion of the planets? Does the law cause the movement of the planets? How can a law cause such a thing?

Isn't what we call a "law" here just a description of how the planets indeed move?

And if the other laws are also just descriptions of what happens, then the answer to "why are there laws of nature?" is just "Becasue that's how we describe what happens".

If one defines regressiveness as the regurgitating of older systems of thought, then Kripke’a work is no more than a variation — Joshs

And Picasso was regressive; he was no more than a variation on Cézanne.

I agree with this, with the caveat that there is nothing wrong with "making shit up" provided we don't take it to be real, or to be the truth. — Janus

Some shit we made up might even be true.

The question is, how do you decide which is which?

My point was simply that he need not explicitly situate himself at all — Janus

Yes, fair enough. Others will situate him, of course, but that's their problem, presumably.

No, Kripke didn't use "textbook analytic philosophy".

Where traditional analytic philosophy (especially mid-20th century varieties influenced by logical positivism or the ordinary language movement) emphasized linguistic analysis aimed at dissolving philosophical problems, verificationist or deflationary attitudes toward metaphysicsand and an a priori, often conceptual, methodology, Kripke brought back robust modal metaphysics (possible worlds, necessity vs. contingency, essentialism), causal-historical accounts of reference instead of descriptivist theories, and a more realist attitude toward necessity—one that didn’t reduce it to analytic truth or linguistic convention.

In that sense, he was doing something strikingly new: not abandoning analytic philosophy, but expanding its scope and rehabilitating kinds of metaphysical argument many thought had been permanently discredited. So while he was using the tools of analytic philosophy—careful argumentation, attention to language, etc.—he was not merely repeating its "textbook" methods or conclusions.

So again, the premise of your thread - that there has been a decline in the quality of philosophy - remains unsupported.

Do you think Russell and Wittgenstein, after 1930 -32, could have managed something like this? I'm really not sure. — Srap Tasmaner

Excellent example.

[He] has a kind of mystic insight, and seems to think ordinary language is good enough for philosophy. I do not agree." — Russell, letter to Gilbert Ryle, 1945

I think what Williamson wants is for you and I to be rigorous enough that if we disagree it is clear that we do, and, in the best case, we can agree on what would count as resolving the dispute, and, in the very best case, we agree on a way of getting there and know what it is. — Srap Tasmaner

Well, it's clear enough that Russell and the later Wittgenstein disagreed; could they resolve the dispute?

Curious that Russell put so much effort into ethics - especially in his later life; yet so little into aesthetics. But I think Russell recognised that Wittgenstein had moved on to doing an aesthetics of philosophy; and didn't like it. So no resolution between them; however we might be able to see what their differences were, and to articulate the psychology that prevented Russell from dealing well with Philosophical Investigations.

Russell could not reach an accomodation with Wittgenstein, but we might at least see what was of concern in their disagreement.

And we head into issues of Charity. We may not be able to agree on a method of resolution, but we can try to interpret the disagreement charitably enough that we understand what was at stake for each of them.

So whether we make use of formal logic or natural
language in service of philosophy, if our focus is on reducing our experience of the world to fit the idealizations of logic or the categorical universalities of language we are failing to address the most fundamental philosophical question; what is the nature of our subjective comportment toward the world such that it makes possible the invention of abstractions which leave out the relevant and purposeful way in which we encounter the meaningful world? — Joshs

Seems to me as examining "the nature of our subjective comportment toward the world such that it makes possible the invention of abstractions which leave out the relevant and purposeful way in which we encounter the meaningful world?" just is examining concepts and categories - language.

The mistake here would be restricting such contemplations to "subjective".

And that's why I'm sceptical about phenomenology.

There is, for example, no actual philosophical work by anyone anywhere in this thread. At least on this view. Strictly speaking. — Srap Tasmaner

Did I misunderstand you here? I had understood that this was becasue of the topic, not the degree of formality...

I think I'm having trouble with the apparent juxtaposition of formal and natural languages. I understand formal language as a subclass of natural language, not as its antithesis. "A = apples" is as much a part of English as "May I introduce you to George?" The difference is in the rules around "=" that permit substitution extensionally...

Formal language is just natural language with more explicit restrictions and explanations.

So what is philosophy? The demarcation criteria I've suggested a few times, to little effect, is that doing philosophy involves going back and looking again at what we have said, and checking how it hangs together.

So 's nephew is applying and doing a bit of nomenclature, but not philosophy. If he had been challenged to count the legs on a spider - an activity that might have involved some discussion of the difference between pedipalps and legs, and quite a bit of fun - and then challenged to decide whether a spider is an insect, or whether insects have six legs - then he might be doing philosophy, by giving due consideration to the way he was using "insect", "Spider", "octopus" and so on. The key shift is from naming to examining concepts and categories.

In this account, any formalisation is a tool for doing philosophy well.

@Ludwig V, this also is a part-answer to our PM chat about the place of logic in the analysis of language.

So, in a way, I do think that the idea of formal logic as regularization of natural language is simplistic, though not wrong. — Ludwig V

I like simple.

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

Yep. I'm pleased and flattered to see this clear reflection on my view. Thanks.

I think that view actually rhymes quite well with the description I've been trying to develop of how formal, technical language can be embedded in natural language, much as mathematical language is and must be embedded in natural language. — Srap Tasmaner

And again, very much Yep!

We end up using multiple disciplines because experience warns us that we ought to. — frank

I think this is pretty much it.

Ok, and that, in so far as it goes, is not a poor position to adopt?

So regardless of Williamson's odd metaphysical notions, we might have some agreement?

The whole point of the lecture is that you should make sure you are properly disciplined, so this must be something you can do, and you must be able to know whether you are doing it or not. Otherwise, it's just "try to", which he's clearly not going to countenance. — Srap Tasmaner

Perhaps it will suffice to be disciplined enough.

If you and I agree, will that suffice?

Thanks for that. Interesting.

I think part of the problem here is that "disciplined" is being used in two different ways ― not quite two different senses. It's rather like the way we use the word "hot" in two ways: you can ask if something is hot or cold, and you can ask how hot something is (or similarly, how cold). Similarly, discipline seems to be, on the one hand, a matter of how firmly your inquiries are guided by other disciplines, and by how many; but on the other seems to be something that can be achieved, and that stands as the contrary of "undisciplined". — Srap Tasmaner

Relative and absolute senses. 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.

Perhaps Williamson needs a thermometer and thinks it will solve his problem. But we don't, since we can easily see what is the fact of the matter. It doesn't stop us from adjusting the thermometer.

So the issues is, can we find a setting that is comfortable for us both?

*"The phenomenologically reduced perceptual experience is not just a method but an *existential shift*—what he elsewhere calls "the philosopher’s genuine rebirth" . — Joshs

thought Williamson didn't go far enough in naming names.

Excellent post. Yes, one cannot write without writing rhetorically. It's no depreciation of the paper to point out that it is rhetorical or aesthetic.

Acknowledge that there are different styles of philosophy with very different aims — Janus

...discourse and dissection. So I'll go back to the suggested demarcation criteria, that we stop just making shit up when we start dissecting, and that this is what marks the move form myth making to doing philosophy.

Is Williamson "blind to his philosophy's historical situatedness? — Janus

He explicitly situates himself within realism within the realism/antirealism debate within analytic philosophy. But the expectation is that he explicitly situate himself in Heidegger's history.

"What I'm saying is true, but don't you dare claim that it is 'understandable.' That would be to turn it into a technology."

What I really think: This is all rhetoric of a bygone moment in philosophy. We can find plenty to think about in Being and Time without worrying about whether H was often defensive and hyperbolic. — J

The work done on Heidegger that made progress was that which interprets it in analytic terms, and dissects it accordingly - Dreyfus, Brandom, Carman...

All somewhat tangential.

So from Williamson's standpoint, @Joshs is doing bad philosophy—obscure, unstructured, and unconcerned with convergence or clarity.

But from a Heideggerian or Derridean standpoint, Williamson is doing bad philosophy—blind to its own historical situatedness, epistemologically naive, and overly committed to scientistic ideals.

How do we move past this?

~~

But different discursive communities can’t rely on good will to overcome incoherence in interpretation between groups — Joshs

Sure. But absent good will, and there is no hope at all.

Williamson finishes by explicitly acknowledging that his own essay does not meet the criteria it advocates.

He couldn't, becasue the essay is not an argument as such, so much as an aesthetic critique. He is showing us again what is beautiful in philosophy, and what isn't.

Despite all the talk of rigour, logic, clarity, and convergence, Williamson’s piece is fundamentally rhetorical: it persuades not by example, but by tone, stance, and value judgment.

Is transparency and clarity enough? We might add a need for responsiveness, a desire to be both understood and to understand. That, too, is a constraint.

But that is an attitude, and so depends on what one wants, on what one is doing here.

What is philosophy for?

That's the question that will decide what you think philosophy is, and how you will do philosophy.

Nietzsche consistently positioned his philosophy as being ahead of his time, written for future generations who would be capable of understanding and implementing his ideas about value creation, self-overcoming, and the rejection of traditional moral systems. He saw himself as preparing the ground for future philosophers and cultural creators who would build new foundations for human flourishing. — Joshs

But is that admirable? It could also be seen as a mere dog-whistle to those who would think of themselves as part of an intellectual elite, pretending to understand words that were hollow.

Is he a radical voice ahead of his time, misunderstood because of the profundity of his insight? Or is he a clever ironist, whose appeal to future generations flatters the vanity of self-anointed "deep thinkers," regardless of the actual content?

All this assumes procedural constraints and shared norms can be willed into existence on the basis of some imagined neutral playing ground. — Joshs

Willed into existence, yes, but not on some "imagined neutral playing ground", so much as by the hard graft of making oneself clear and explicit.

And a certain amount of good will.

This is @J's particular genius.

When law and order break down, the result is not freedom or anarchy but the capricious tyranny of petty feuding warlords — p. 17

Without agreed-upon constraints, philosophical debates become dominated by style, authority, and local jargon—each little sub-school operating as a fiefdom, each debate carried out on terms untranslatable to others. Sound familiar? has a point. It was rather neatly described elsewhere as

...people building drone view pyramids of arguments... — Ansiktsburk

It captures a recurring phenomenon in both contemporary philosophy and in this forum: the appearance of rigour—complicated argument-mapping, textual scaffolding, with little real pressure placed on foundational assumptions or cross-framework intelligibility.

Williamson's suggestion:

We can reduce it by articulating and clarifying the constraints. — p.17

Indeed, and this requiers agreement, convergence. This is Williamson’s minimalist prescription: no methodological revolution, just a re-commitment to being explicit. What logic are you using? What counts as evidence? What assumptions are you allowed to make? These are, in a sense, procedural constraints, shared norms that allow for adversarial argument without descending into chaos.
Williamson isn’t pushing a single method (e.g., scientific naturalism or conceptual analysis), but calling for transparency: if you’re doing verificationist semantics or paraconsistent logic or metaphysical grounding, say so. And make it intelligible.

It went down hill from soon after the opening post, a result of the contributions of those who could not abide what that post said.

I'm just going to congratulate myself for being directly on-topic and move along. — Srap Tasmaner

Thank you.

The paragraph, at the top of page sixteen, on the aesthetics of definitions is harder to follow. An example might have helped.

The criticism of Dummett in the next paragraph is clear enough. ‘Either a mammoth stood on this spot a hundred thousand years ago or no mammoth stood on this spot a hundred thousand years ago’ is either true or it is false; false for my case since there were no mammoths in Australia. Clumsy stuff, on Dummett's part? Or mischaracterisation?

As I recall, Dummett moved from a classical logic to an intuitionist logic, since the absences of warrant for the conclusion, in an intuitionist logic, permits the rejection of the law of excluded middle - we just don't know for sure whether there was a mammoth were Dummett stood, a hundred thousand years ago - and saying "I don't know" is commonsensical.

But we can still take on board Williamson's point: it is important that we are clear what logic - what "constraints" - we are using. It's just that Dummett may be using intuitionistic logic rather than just relying on Williamson's common sense.

Onward. The thoughts at the bottom of page fifteen parallel those I have expressed elsewhere in terms of completeness and coherence. It is easy to construct a complete theory, since any contradiction will, by the principle of explosion, result in an explanation for anything. Harder, though, to construct a coherent theory, one that does not involve contradiction.

And yes, that's a trite argument. Yet

...it is rigour, not its absence, that prevents one from sliding over the deepest difficulties, in an agonized rhetoric of profundity. — p.15

Consistency is a necessary precondition for explanatory adequacy. While the point is logically elementary, it bears repeating: in philosophy, the real danger isn't just explicit contradiction, but the glossing over of inconsistencies in the name of elegance or rhetorical flourish. That’s where Williamson’s critique really bites.

It's worth noting that this paper was delivered at a conference on realism and truth. That likely accounts for why Williamson spends so much time on the realism-irrealism debate. — J

Cheers. Worth noting. Here I am reading the text as a more general critique and defence of analytic method - I think that's how @Srap Tasmaner intended me to see it when he suggested the paper.

You there, Srap? Have we lost you?

We don’t need anything external to our preferences to fix them. — Joshs

I agree.

...the analytic methods Williamson chooses to apply to world are considered as external to that world... — Joshs

How do you ground that? It seems a hollow accusation, given the ambiguity of "world".

What, exactly, is "being concealed, forgotten , ignored and flattened over"?

...what philosophy should genuinely be concerned with... — Joshs

What's that, then, and why should we take your word for it?

All this by way of showing that you are doing the sort of thing that Williamson complains about.

Now I'll give my own summation and evaluation when we have finished working through the paper, and I suspect that at that point we will find ourselves not so far apart. But let's not jump to the conclusion quite yet.

Yep. Convergence is not itself normative, so this idea is problematic.

Perhaps his point can be seen as pragmatic, that convergence, many folk working together on an issue, indicates a problem worthy of consideration.

Added:

It doesn't seem to indicate a problem for biological evolution. — GrahamJ

Yep. Convergence might indicate utility, if nothing else.