• What does Quine mean by Inscrutability of Reference
    It seems to me that it will be harder to find agreement on things like truth and goodness because those are extremely general principles
    — @Count Timothy von Icarus

    I don't think that's the problem. Rules of math and logic are also extremely general principles, but we don't have trouble finding agreement there.     — J
    I'll go a step further and suggest that we have overwhelming agreement as to what is true and what is good.

    The stuff we focus on is the stuff about which we disagree. That misleads some to think that we disagree about stuff. But our agreement about what the world is like is overwhelming. And our agreement about what things folk ought and ought not do is pretty broad, too.


    The relevance is the Principle of Charity, to do with understanding what someone is saying by assuming that they hold the same beliefs as you do.
  • Mathematical platonism
    ↪Janus
    :up:
  • Mathematical platonism
    ↪Wayfarer
    R. L. Franklin, not Jim. Very different fish. Long ago.
  • p and "I think p"
    ...a new way of conceiving something... — J
    New?

    It's just (illocutionary force(predicate(subject)), what is done with the proposition, or Frege's judgement stroke.

    But it remains that we can consider the propositional content apart from the judgement stroke.
  • Mathematical platonism
    ↪Wayfarer
    I was for a while at ANU with Passmore and Smart, but mostly influenced by Peter Herbst. Then UNE, and the eclectic mix of Franklin, Londey, Birchall and all. Franklin built a small Department that managed to span a multitude of approaches.

    The relevant point is that philosophy in Australia has never been monolithic.
  • Australian politics
    ↪ssu
    It's warmed up a bit, high thirties.

    Gentlemen may remove their jackets.
  • p and "I think p"
    Those who are, possess a finer sense of self-awareness than those who don't. It's called 'discriminative wisdom'. — Wayfarer
    Hmm. I can think that I am thinking the Oak is dropping its leaves. Or I can think that the oak is dropping its leaves. Surely being able to either at will shows a higher degree of discrimination than those who are stuck only on "I think..." :wink:
  • Mathematical platonism
    ↪Arcane Sandwich
    No.

    I'm having a great time here, it's the best Forum I've ever seen. A bit "rambly" at times, but it's a nice atmosphere. I like the colors, green is actually my favorite color. — Arcane Sandwich
    Fifty posts a day is a lot. Make sure you take time to step away from the screen.
  • p and "I think p"
    So, if Pat is right, #4 is a good response? — J
    I'm not sure.
    4. If your report is accurate, then the thesis that “the ‛I think’ accompanies all our thoughts” has been proven wrong. — J
    To be sure, there are no thoughts that could not be prefixed by "I think..."; but that is a very different point to the suggestion that all our thoughts are already prefixed by "I think...". That just looks muddled.

    That there is a difference between a proposition and one's attitude towards that proposition - thinking it, believing it, asserting it, doubting it - is so ingrained that I have difficulty making sense of the alternatives.
  • Mathematical platonism
    So are you an Australian Realist, yes or no? — Arcane Sandwich
    Philosophy in Australia is not that simple.
  • p and "I think p"
    Or is there another response that seems better? — J
    Yep - that Pat is right.

    Is this in part a response to Davidson's argument against conceptual schema?
  • Mathematical platonism
    ↪Janus
    Yep. The way we do integers is such that there is no largest integer.

    Salient bit is that it's not a pretence that there is no largest integer, it's just what we do with integers.
  • Mathematical platonism
    2/4 = 1/2 — Arcane Sandwich

    That's an equivalence, not a reduction.

    The sort of reduction in question occurs when one language game is thought of as a part of anther. In this case you are in effect claiming that mathematics is a game within biology, and not a distinct, seperate activity.

    Seems pretty plain to me that this is a mistake. Maths is no a variation of biology any more than Chess is a variation of Poker. They are very different activities.
  • Mathematical platonism
    Math has to be absolute, in the formal sense that "it's not up for debate", it's not for the community of mathematicians to decide. — Arcane Sandwich

    The 'solution' on offer not only agrees with this but explains how it comes about. "Counts as..." illocutions set up new games to play. If you decide to move your Bishop along a row, you have ceased to play Chess, and your piece no longer "counts as ..." a Bishop. If you decide that 3+4=8, then you have ceased to do maths, and your "3" and "4" no longer count as 3's or 4's.
  • Mathematical platonism
    ↪Wayfarer
    That by way of agreement? Can we cure @Arcane Sandwich of his reductionism? :wink:
  • Mathematical platonism
    ↪Arcane Sandwich
    So you are now saying that there are not infinity many integers?

    We can quantify over things that are not physical. You appeared to understand this, a few days ago. But it's late in your party of the world.
  • Mathematical platonism
    ↪Arcane Sandwich
    Seems to me to entirely miss the most important bit; that π is communal.

    We don't pretend that there are infinitely many integers, because there are infinitely many integers. That's how integers work. And they work that way not just in this or that mind, but as an activity performed by our community.
  • Mathematical platonism
    It can be argued (as Mario Bunge has argued in print) that all numbers, including infinitesimals, are really just brain processes occurring in the brains of living humans. — Arcane Sandwich
    I'll repeat a simple argument against this.

    If π is a brain process in your brain, and also a brain process in my brain, then it is two different things.

    But if that were so, when I talk about π I am talking about a quite different thing to you, when you talk about π.

    When we each talk about π, we are talking about the same thing.

    Therefore π is not a brain process in your brain
  • Mathematical platonism
    ↪hypericin
    Yep.
    To count "brown animals" requires knowing an animal, an organic whole, as a unit. — Count Timothy von Icarus
    Rather, to count "brown animals" requires seeing an animal as an organic whole, as a unit. That's a fair bit less than "knowing".
  • Mathematical platonism
    And , if I understand Davidson correctly, there cannot be conceptual schemes thanks to what Rouse calls Davidson’s assumption that semantic meaning is grounded in the ‘token identity of mental and physical events,’ — Joshs
    Is that a criticism or an explanation?

    It's not a poor description of Davidson's approach. But Davidson's explanation is not an assumption so much as a description of how nouns work. "Joshs" refers to Joshs, but Joshs is the fellow who wrote that post. Asking which of these Joshs is mental and which physical makes as much sense as asking which of them are made of cheese.

    But then it is the presumption that things must be either mental, and hence not physical, or physical, and hence not mental, that underpins much of the confusion expressed hereabouts. Descartes legacy.

    Added:
    A way of treating something as something is a convention. How can a convention pre-exist the existence of human beings on the planet? It’s one thing to say that there was a world prior to the arrival of humans and our conventions of language, but it’s another to specify the nature of that world (two birds, or a cat and a dog) on the basis of our contingent discursive accounts of it. It is neither true nor false to say that there were a countable number of animals prior to the arrival of humans. — Joshs
    That last sentence is wrong. There were indeed a countable, but unknown, number of animals in the world at any point in the past. That this is so follows from the number of animals being a natural number that is not zero nor infinite.

    So we might well perform a reductio, and see which assumption of the argument is in error. Of course a convention can be used to talk about the past. One Million BC is a year. We can talk about how many animals there were back then. Supposing that doing so makes no sense is a philosopher's conceit.
  • Australian politics
    ↪Arcane Sandwich
    :rofl:
  • Australian politics
    ↪Arcane Sandwich
    Yep. And we do whatever we want, soon as we hear what that is from Washington.
  • Australian politics
    ↪Arcane Sandwich
    Australia is an independent nation state. We only keep Charlie so that Sky News has something to write about when Trump is quite.
  • What does Quine mean by Inscrutability of Reference
    I suggest that it’s this sort of intransigent approach that can benefit from considering Quine’s point about gavagai. — J
    Yep. He was part of a general broadening of the philosophical understanding of language in the middle of the last century. Lots of good stuff followed from that, much of it stuff Quine would not have liked.

    He's not going to get a sympathetic hearing from the present audience.
  • Mathematical platonism
    ↪Count Timothy von Icarus
    Ok.
  • Mathematical platonism
    My point would merely be that, when paleontologists unearth two fossilized birds who fell into a tar pit together when the branch they were sitting on snapped 2 million years ago, they (and we) are justified in thinking that there were indeed two birds that fell into the tar pit. This, despite this event being prior to man or any human languages. — Count Timothy von Icarus
    Did you think that somehow this is incompatible with the account I gave? How?

    It seems to me that claims like "there are never two tigers in a clearing, two stars in a binary star system, etc. but that man speak or think of them so," — Count Timothy von Icarus
    Again, how would such an oddity follow from the account given? If someone counts no tigers when there are two, they are in error.
  • Mathematical platonism
    There's more we might do with the OP. Might attract @Michael back from his holiday. Might even interest @jgill.

    Michael chose infinitesimals with due consideration. There's an issue as to whether they exist or not... odd little things as they are.

    ε is an infinitesimal iff 0 < ε < 1/n for all n ∈ ℕ

    But this sort of account doesn't tell us what they are, only what they are not — they are not the reciprocal of any natural number. This pisses constructivists off, becasue they like to have an account of what something is before they commit to it's existing. IF there are only natural numbers then there are no infinitesimals.

    The account I offered is more permissive than constructivism, since it says that since we can pretend that there are infinitesimals, we might as well say there are infinitesimals. After all, all numbers are just such pretence - "counts as".

    This permissiveness might be my downfall.
  • Mathematical platonism
    ↪J
    That was an excellent thread. Yep, as you said there, it's not that conceptual schemes can't be relative, but that there can't be conceptual schemes.

    "This," sans interpretation? — J
    And again, PI§201. There's a way of understanding that is not seen in giving an interpretation, but playing the chord - or maybe changing the key of the tune.
  • Mathematical platonism
    It sounds like you've moved to talking about what it would take to have that concept — J
    Well, yes, in that to have the concept and the concept amount to the same thing... the actions performed.

    Again, it's not that someone can play various major chord, record and read them, and recognise them when they hear them, and yet not have, or not understand, what a major chord is, because they are missing something more... the concept.

    So the "counts as" locution stops with the demonstrative? — J
    All language stops with showing and doing.

    But again, I don't think I've quite understood your point.
  • Mathematical platonism
    That is what is at issue: the ontological status of such objects of reason — Wayfarer
    Is that an objection to my proposal?

    I'll go over the first part of the argument, again, since it's a while it was addressed and it answers what you have said. But let's move away from numbers for awhile.

    We can set up a domain of discourse that contains Alice, Bob and Charlie. Alice and Bob are brave. Charlie isn't.

    Simple logic tells us that since Alison Bob are brave, something is brave. That's a first order application of existential generalisation. We can fiddle with the grammar and say things like since something is brave, there are brave things, or braveness exists. Doing this does not commit us to there being anything "in the world" except Alice and Bob and Charlie. Our domain of discourse, and our ontological commitment, remains unchanged.
  • Mathematical platonism
    ↪J
    Not sure I'm following you.

    So the Major is the root, third and fifth. It's that string, that string, and that string - and usually the root, again. That's a doing. Then you slide it up and down the fretboard, and set it out in tab or notation. More doing.

    if someone blithely says that the major is the root, third and fifth, but doesn't play or listen, do they understand the concept of a major chord? Does an AI have the concept, becasue it can form the words?

    On the other hand, if someone can form the shape and slide it up and down the fretboard, but can not tell us about thirds and fifths, do they "have" the concept?

    The concept is what we do, and that includes the conversation.

    "Wouldn't it have to follow that 'being a piece of wood' is a way of treating Object A" — J
    Yep. This counts as a piece of wood.

    But here I am relying on the grammar of the demonstrative, with all that this implies. This is shown.
  • Question for Aristotelians
    ↪J
    I studied De Anima in detail as an undergrad. I've forgotten most of it. To dismissive?

    Would it be surprising to find a Wittgensteinian interpretation of Aristotle only after Wittgenstein? Not so much. And if there were such a thing before Wittgenstein, then Wittgenstein would be an interpreter of Aristotle...

    There's much of just-so stories in exegesis.
  • Mathematical platonism
    I'm wondering whether, by choosing "seven" as our example concept, we haven't picked an outlier. — J
    Seven only exists as part of an extended language game that includes one and two and a few other things. And a chord is dependent on the scale in which it sits. The first, third, fifth and seventh sound distinctly different, as does a minor chord.

    But I'm not clear as to what you are getting at. If you understand that the major is the root, third and fifth, while the seventh chord is the root, third, fifth and seventh note of the scale, is there again something more that is needed in order to have the concept of major and seventh?

    In a sense perhaps putting your fingers on the right strings to produce each? The doing?
  • Mathematical platonism
    Everyone alive was born into a world where the rules of chess and counting were already well established. — hypericin
    Sure. What remains is that being a bishop is a way of treating that piece of wood, being a dollar coin is a way of treating that piece of metal and being two animals is a way of treating that cat and dog.
    it seems odd to say that the logic of the game, and all its implications (i.e. the value of the pieces) was somehow contained in the speech. — hypericin
    Yep. it's the doing that has import here. There needn't even have been an explicit speech act that commissioned the practice. What's salient is the idea that we can count something as something new or different, and build on that.
  • Mathematical platonism
    ↪Count Timothy von Icarus
    You are making much the same point I made to @Joshs earlier. Yes, of course these acts take place and are limited by the circumstances around us. Speech acts are part of a language game, an interaction with the world. So yes, the choice is not arbitrary. Better to count the male and female eagles separately, if your purpose it to breed eagles. An odd choice for your example. But we do sell cattle by lots, not just by individuals, and you could certainly buy half a sheep, in various multiples, from the local butcher when I were a wee lad.

    Or consider two drops running down a window pane and coalescing. One plus one makes one.

    One might mention gavagai here, but Quine's rabbit takes an approach to language that may be quite foreign for you.

    So sure, there is a cat and a dog, and there are two animals. The salient bit is that number is a way of thinking about (talking about, treating, approaching) the animals. Being two things is not strictly a state of the world. nor strictly a thought, but a combination of the two. The dichotomy between realism and idealism is misleading.

    The notion of "first philosophy" is somewhat antiquated. Aristotle appears to have been obsessed with hierarchy - perhaps it was the only tool he had at hand. More recent thinking might be a bit more holistic - we can do ethics without a complete epistemology or metaphysics; indeed, we probably have no choice about this. Arguing about what comes first is superficial.

    But language is a common ground for all philosophy - amongst other things - so having a good grounding in how it works might be helpful.

    The choice of what counts as a numeric unit is fairly arbitrary. — hypericin
    Yep.
  • Mathematical platonism
    You probably mean declarative speech acts. — hypericin
    Yeah, my error. i used "Commisive" for acts of commission, much as "declarative", now the term is used for acts of commitment. I'll fix it. Thanks.
  • Mathematical platonism
    ↪Arcane Sandwich
    You kinda learn who when you learn your first language, as you learn to use words like "one" and thereabouts. You are part of a community. Them.
  • Mathematical platonism
    Yes, IF you have one unit. — Arcane Sandwich
    What counts as one unit? We get to choose.
  • Mathematical platonism
    ↪frank
    Sure.
  • Mathematical platonism
    ↪hypericin
    Pretty much right.

    One can account for this by understanding commissive speech acts. These are speech acts that bring something about. An example would be "I name this ship the King Charles", performed by the designated dignitary at the proper time and place - before that act, the ship has another, or even no, name. After, and in virtue of, that act, the ship comes to be named the "King Charles".

    The act counts as naming the ship.

    The bishop on a chess board can be moved in any direction, along a row, along a diagonal, picked up and put in the place of the opposing queen, and so on. But only a move along a diagonal counts as a move in a game of chess.

    That "logical landscape" of which you speak is constructed using this sort of structure - taking something and making it count as something new. So yes, "If you have one unit, and combine it with another unit, you get two units, no matter how you define what a unit consists of" because that now counts as two units.
Home » Banno