Ah - I like that.

The post in which I invoked @RussellA was a reply to , where he had in turn replied to my post concerning Austin's point that the Ayer had been somewhat disingenuous in his use of the Argument from Illusion...(!)

The point Austin makes against Ayer can be made against those who suppose that we only see in two dimensions - that the evidence is to the contrary! To think otherwise one must have somewhat extreme and external motives... an ideology.

Yes - in Tolkien's words, the tale grew in the telling. And still does.

So we can read as continuing a fine tradition of appropriation? Or is it plagiarism?

It's interesting that he includes Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism but not Islam, as "provid(ing)... a way to live right, become free from suffering, and seek what is transient." Islam cannot be seen as "prefiguring" Christianity, and so... doesn't fit.

"It" was a dog's breakfast of conflicting views and accounts that needed hundreds of years and much violence to even begin to appear consistent. "It" then, as now, is rife with schism and division.

Christianity has always stolen its ideas. The one original contribution is charity. No small thing.

Christianity borrowed heavily from other religions or philosophical traditions — Ciceronianus

Indeed,

...I have come to see the respective systems of thought as preannouncing the message of the gospel... — Dermot Griffin

...looks to be an idea borrowed from Islam, with the Prophets "preannouncing the message of" Mohamed.

Reading Lecture X, I'm struck by how much of the argument is dependent on a view of the structure of language that I have taken as a given, but that might not be so obvious to all. To a large extent that view is expressed in Austin's How To Do Things With Words, but it is also found elsewhere and is accepted cannon. Lack of familiarity might explain earlier misunderstandings. A rough outline might be useful.

Perhaps this should all be in a different thread, since it runs the chance of leading us off topic. but I'll drop it here to see what transpires.

Words can be strung together into sentences. Those sentences are of various sorts - statements, questions, commands, and so on. These can to a large extent be marked by differences in the sequence of words: "The door is shut", "Is the door shut?", "Shut the door!" and so on.

Philosophers have a tendency to give priority to statements, mostly because it is these that are either true or false, and that are constitutive of beliefs.

Sentences can be used in "utterances", somewhat of a term of art for philosophers, since it includes verbal and written texts. An utterance is a particular use of a sentence to perform some act - make a statement, ask a question, issue a command. It's of course not necessary for the sentence to match the utterance - one can ask a rhetorical question, which can be to use the sentence form of questioning in order to utter a statement.

Our utterances are of course actions. There is a further step where we do things using an utterance. "I name this ship the Queen Mary" in the appropriate circumstances names the ship. "I now pronounce you husband and wife" marries the couple. These are not only the act of saying something, but are an additional act performed by or in saying something.

Austin's contribution was to carefully seperate out these elements, to elucidate where they might on occasion go astray - infelicities of misfire and abuse - and to begin a classification. His student Searle ran with the classifications, turning it into a career. Austin attempted to explain language in terms of convention, but this was later found inadequate without also including intent.

I'm not suggesting that this is the only, or even the correct, way to understand how words work, just that it is implicit, and sometimes explicit, in Sense and Sensibilia and so ought be understood. Nor was Austin the only one suggesting ideas along these lines.

Cheers. Davidson has some powerful ideas. This is not one of his more central papers, but part of a program he instigated intent on showing how to interpret natural languages in first-order logic. Metaphors had been offered as a counter instance, since if metaphorical expressions had two meanings the question arrises as to which meaning is the correct translation; so it became important for him to show that metaphors had but one literal meaning, and to add that they had a further pragmatic force, allowing us to see something afresh.

Davidson is certainly not amongst the natural language philosophers. He is among the next generation who returned to examining language in formal terms. He was certainly influenced by Wittgenstein; I'm not sure how much Austin was present in his thinking, although the separation of literal and pragmatic meaning can be traced to How to do things with words.

And despite all that, it is far from clear what any of this has to do with the contention that we only see in 2 dimensions, which is just plain wrong.

https://hartzog.org/j/davidsonmetaphor.pdf

it's a good read, showing that understanding a metaphor involves understanding its literal meaning.

What I deny is that metaphor does its work by having a special meaning, a specific cognitive content.

But yes, what this has to do with seeing in two or three dimensions remains obscure.

I tried to tag everyone doing the reading — Antony Nickles

Which raises the question, who is actually doing the reading?

..we precisely do not see the sense data, (patches of identical grey) but the interpretation thereof. — unenlightened

I'll agree, perhaps with some reservations about "interpretation".

There was a recent, very odd discussion in the Case for Transcendental Idealism thread - , and apparently insisting that they see only in two dimensions, only imagining the third... I couldn't make sense of it.

But the reason I drove her home was that I promised - an ought from an is, in a manner of speaking, that at least superficially contradicts your "Reason cannot get an ought from an is...". There's more here.

...the only advantage that I can see would be to maybe remove the possibility of being wrong — Ludwig V

That is why Ayer invents sense data, and it is what Austin shows to be misguided.

...that having the same truth value isn't the end of the story.. — Ludwig V

Yep, but it is perhaps a minimum achievement for an interpretation or translation of a statement in one language into another.

Have you looked at the Ngram for your own name? Mine peaks in 1987, but is first mentioned in 1865. My nom de plum dates to the 1600's.

Austin directly addresses that we can choose which way to say what we “see” (p. 99) — Antony Nickles

It's so close to meaning as use, that what we say is so much more contextual than had been previously supposed - and is still supposed by many today, it seems, amongst those who think language is just "communication" or "information", as if that were any clearer, or as if that might account for everything we do with words.

The zeitgeist was primed for ordinary language to come to the fore. Anscombe would not have been the only one moving between Oxford and Cambridge. Anscombe would have been at lectures presented by Austin. She seems to have preferred the mysticism of Wittgenstein to Austin's dry pragmatics. "She believed that attending Wittgenstein’s lectures freed her from the trap of phenomenalism that had so plagued her". Many hereabouts remain trapped in phenomenalism.

I agree entirely that one major theme running through these pages is that the issues here need not have one solution, or even any solution. The plot twist in this story, as we find in Lecture X, is that - spoiler alert - Ayer's Logical Positivism derives not from the argument from illusion and not the two languages or anything other than his desire for "incorrigible" proposition - for there to be only one solution.

Supose someone were to say that the cake you are about to make can't exist because they can't measure it.

Simply that moral statements are not intended to tell us how things are. They are intended to tell us how things ought be.

But the different descriptions might make a serious difference. — Ludwig V

Of course.

Yet Ayer has to maintain some sort of equivalence in truth value between sense data language and material object language if he is going to maintain that the difference between them is no more than linguistic. If the truth value changed with a change in wording, then how could the two be saying the very same thing?

But it would be odd, wouldn't it, to say that "the wooden door" and "the painted piece of wood" are interpretations of anything. — Ludwig V

"You kicked the door" IFF "You kicked the painted piece of wood"

If the door is the very same as the painted piece of wood, this has to be so.

So in the end, I think that Austin hasn't thought these examples through. — Ludwig V

I think the point you are making is much the same as the one Austin is making. Austin treats such stuff in more detail in A Plea For Excuses, a prime candidate for a follow on thread. HE talks about shooting donkeys rather than targets or the heir to the crown.

It's just how often the term appears in Google Books, as a percentage of total words. Indicative, rather than serious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Ngram_Viewer

http://storage.googleapis.com/books/ngrams/books/datasetsv2.html

How do we find out that we are mislead? By other empirical observations. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Our conversation is now spread across two threads, this and my thread on Austin. Might have to choose one.

It is not obvious what counts as an empirical observation, and what counts as theoretical. All observations are interpretations. And we are very selective as to what we choose to see.

As for pragmatism, sure, you might as well believe what is useful, but it's a good idea not to think that because it is useful it is true. You seem not to disagree with this. doesn't:

...we are continually having to pragmatically recalibrate our criteria of truth and falsity. — Joshs

I'm afraid I haven't been able to follow what you are saying here.

..this is why Austin characterizes it as being able to say anything you want... — Antony Nickles

I took this as a sideways swipe at Carnap, another logical positivist. Carnap does think that we can say anything we want - his "protocol statements" need only be consistent with each other, not needing any formal "correspondence" to the world. Ayer and Carnap clashed on this issue.

So Carnap might well have taken

4.211 It is a sign of a proposition’s being elementary that there can be no elementary proposition contradicting it. — Wittgenstein Tractatus, 89

to heart, thinking that all that was needed was for elementary propositions to be consistent; while Ayer took his elementary propositions to be something like "I see a red square".

Camouflaged to look like a barn (?). — Fooloso4

:smile:

The "broad church" metaphor was used by formed Prime Minister John Howard to describe his Liberal Party - an amalgam of progressive liberals, libertarians and conservatives, unwieldy and incompetent. It's as if the 'mercan Democrats and Republicans were one party, ranged against a socialist Labor Party and the Greens...

"Analytic Philosophy" is similarly an uncomfortable adjunction of very different ideas.

We could just refer to color and shape as a thing’s color and shape — Antony Nickles

...the core Austinian argument against qualia...

I was not entirely happy with the discussion of "see as"... — Ludwig V

It's just that there can be more than one true statement for any given fact. Did you kick the door or the painted wood?

This needs to be pointed out because Logical Positivism speaks as if there were only one. That's probably a consequence of it being an adaptation of the Tractatus; it's assuming a form of logical atomism as its foundation.

So logical positivism starts at perception and supposedly builds material objects from there, then natural laws from material objects.

Now "I kicked the wooden door" might well be logically equivalent to "I kicked the painted piece of wood". But it is harder to say "I see a rabbit" is equivalent to "I see a duck".

Austin shows how logical positivism grossly oversimplifies the things we do with words, and so also the way we understand what is going on around us.

Incorrigible. An interesting choice which aroused my curiosity. Not certain, as I have used. So in the OED, there are three senses for the adjective:
1. 1340– Bad or depraved beyond correction or reform: of persons, their habits, etc.

2.1541–1804 Of something faulty or defective: That cannot be improved or set right. Of disease: Incurable.

and the third, the one used by Austin...
3. 1611– Not liable or open to correction; so good that it cannot be improved. Also, not verifiable; that cannot be proved false.

And the source for this third? Well, the earliest listed, from 1611, is "The Reader being well instructed..may, without any further labour, make a good and incorrigible peece of worke" - R. Peake

And the second, from 1956? Why, "Experiential statements are not incorrigible in the sense that once they have been discovered to be true they cannot subsequently be denied", from our very own A. J. Ayer, Problem of Knowledge, p 55.

It's not Austin's word, it's Ayer's.

Another of Austin's jokes? I like to think so. He loved his OED.

IX continued...
Ayer had proposed two different senses of perception words, one in which we infer the thing "seen" exists, and the other in which no such presumption is made. Austin shows the weakness of this account by again exposing it to a barrage of counter examples. Then oddly,

I have argued that there is no reason at all to suppose that there are such different senses. Now it might be expected that this would be a serious matter forAyer's argument; but curiously enough, I don't think it is. For though his argument is certainly presented asifit turned on this doctrine about different 'senses' of verbs ofperception, it doesn't really turn on this doctrine at all. — Austin p.102

The actual argument is that philosophers have invented a way of using "see" and similar words such that what is seen must really exist. They then "discover" that material things are inadequate to the task of being the things that really exist; so they invent a new thing, and put this in the role

You can hear the glee in Austin's voice as he points out that this argument doesn't use either the argument from illusion or the two languages argument.

So what is it all about? It's about certainty. All this frippery hides Ayer's actual interest, which is to find (or invent) firm grounds for our statements about the way things are.

And so to Lecture X.

I would put my money on bacteria. — Agree-to-Disagree

They've already won. Always have. Plants and animals are just bacterial megacities.

After all, saying it is "meaningless" to even talk of certain things is, in an important way, to make a metaphysical claim about them.
— @Count Timothy von Icarus

Quite so. That's the essence of what the "analytic" philosophers believed, and explains why they spent their time talking about language. — Ludwig V

Not sure how to understand this, but it's probably worth pointing out that not all analytic philosophers think metaphysical claims are meaningless. While it was roughly true of logical positivists, and is often (somewhat erroneously) taken to be true of the early Wittgenstein, it's not true of Russell and Moore, nor of the Oxford Realists or Popper's intellectual children, and Quine naturalised metaphysics but would not call it that.

Analytic philosophy is a broad church...

A large part of the focus on language should be seen as working out the varieties of metaphysical statements so as to choose between them.

Plato's point isn't that we are tricked by the stick in the water. It's that we can be tricked, and so our naive judgements aren't always going to lead us to the correct conclusions. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yeah. But so many folk take this as showing that it is never going to lead us to the correct conclusions. That's muddled.

OK. Did you notice this...?

So a translation (interpretation) would have the form :
(This collection of sense-data statements) is true IFF (this statement about a material object)
A rough example, the ubiquitous cup...
(I see a red quadrilateral and a red ovoid and another ovoid) is true IFF this is a red cup.
Now I hope it is plain both that this is the consequence of Ayer's position, and that it is absurd. A cup is not equivalent to a collection of sense data. And it's not just that it is entirely possible to have the sense data and not the cup, or the cup and not the sense data, but that the supposed equivalence is between entirely different things. The analogy is not like the mistake in saying chalk is a type of wood, but like saying chalk is a type of democracy. Material objects are not sense data. — Banno

That seems to be what Ayer has in mind, and it doesn't work.

7s — frank

??

Thanks. I won't disagree with what you have said. For the last few days Markov Blankets have been at the back of my mind. One might place a sequence of explanations between the tree and the experience, and set out the events in every one, and still have someone say "That's all very well, but you still have not explained the experience"...

But I invite you to take a look at the titular book for this thread.

I think Ayers would say that whether there are two senses or not should be decided empirically. — frank

I have to differ. He is saying that the difference is purely linguistic - his so-called "two languages" theory.

I had thought that was what you meant by

he's saying that the sense data theorists isn't offering us any needed revisions to everyday speech, but rather offering jargon that's helpful for special purposes. — frank

It strikes me as most absurd that folk think there is no reason to supose the world continues on when unobserved - when one has been unconscious, for instance.

Perhaps this comes from such folk confusing reason with deduction?

Far and away the simplest supposition is that when you are asleep, the world continues on without you. This accounts for both the overwhelming continuity and small changes that have take place when one wakes, and agrees with the accounts of what occurred, as given by those who stayed awake...

But to rationalise in this way is also preposterous. It's not as if such a justification could be better grounded than what it is supposed to be justifying!

Realising that the world continues in your absence is a key step in developmental psychology, one that it seems folk here have either skipped or unlearned. But I'm confident these folk will demonstrate their understanding of object permanence outside of the Philosophy Forum, and that this is the sort of aberration suitable for @Ciceronianus' latest thread.

That is, I call bullshit.

The biggest knock against Popper's theory.. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Good argument, but Lakatos' research projects or Watkins' "Confirmable and influential Metaphysics" had the potential to overcome this problem. The real knock-out blow was Feyerabend's careful historical falsification, for philosophers, and Structure of Scientific Revolutions for everyone else.

What progressed was a spurning of attempts to found science on a "formal" system that ensured or at least explained it's capacity to produce truth, or truthiness, or some such, in favour of a "sociological" approach, explaining success in terms of such things as open discourse, reproducibility and honesty.

And that, interestingly enough, corresponds nicely with Lecture X of the book at hand.

...saying it is "meaningless" to even talk of certain things... — Count Timothy von Icarus

The biographic accounts I have read put this approach, at least in Oxford, firmly on Ayer. Before the war the Dons were apparently beset and confounded by earnest young men clutching Language, Truth and Logic, interrupting their lectures on Kant and Hegel with "But I do not understand what you mean by...".

I share your preference for embodied cognition, but unfortunately I will have to echo the young men here, since I do not have a clear way to unpack what you have said in the remainder of your post.

Ayer.

...different senses... — frank

I think it clear from Austin that there are not here two differing senses of "see". But I take it you are setting out what Ayer is claiming, rather than evaluating it?

In the first case, what I saw does not exist as a material object. Therefore, it's a sense datum. — frank

Yes, that seems to be his argument. It's dreadful.

In other words, he's saying that the sense data theorists isn't offering us any needed revisions to everyday speech, but rather offering jargon that's helpful for special purposes. — frank

Ok.

(@Banno even feels Ayer might be misrepresented). — Antony Nickles

Well, yesterday I thought the argument so bad that I must be missing Ayer's point. Today I still think the argument extraordinarily poor, but still can't see an alternative. Ayer is presenting a very poor argument.

He's deluded by the overwhelming need for certainly, as Austin continues in Chapter X.

...we want a moral rule or goal so that we don’t have to be good, we can just do what has been determined is good, and thus we are absolved because we can just claim, “I followed the rule!” — Antony Nickles

This was Philippa Foot's criticism, wasn't it? The boys want certainty, so they can avoid responsibly. The War overarches all of these considerations - it's hard for young folk to understand the way in which it provides the foundation for this whole exercise. All of these men served with distinction, and all had to find some way to come to terms with what they had to do. What's true of Hare is true of Austin and Ayer and Wittgenstein. They fundamentally need to understand why they set aside personal responsibility ot the greater cause. It's an unfair question - addressed in The Cain Mutiny.

So can we not conclude that the two versions are not equivalent and hence not inter-translatable? — Ludwig V

I think the conclusion, after Austin, is that this whole framing of the issue is muddled. However if we do take the framing as granted, then "statements about objects just are statements about sense data" is not an observation or conclusion but a piece of what is variously called metaphysics, or definition, or invoking a rule. That is, statements about object just count as statements about sense data. In those terms it cannot be false, or even wrong, but is rather misplaced.

So a translation (interpretation) would have the form :

(This collection of sense-data statements) is true IFF (this statement about a material object)

A rough example, the ubiquitous cup...

(I see a red quadrilateral and a red ovoid and another ovoid) is true IFF this is a red cup.

Now I hope it is plain both that this is the consequence of Ayer's position, and that it is absurd. A cup is not equivalent to a collection of sense data. And it's not just that it is entirely possible to have the sense data and not the cup, or the cup and not the sense data, but that the supposed equivalence is between entirely different things. The analogy is not like the mistake in saying chalk is a type of wood, but like saying chalk is a type of democracy. Material objects are not sense data.

This is why one cannot answer the questions @Corvus is so insistent on. They are not coherent enough to have an answer; or if you prefer, the answer is Sense and Sensibilia.

IX continued...

Ayer says

The conclusion that I have now reached is that in order to account for our perceptual experience, it is not necessary to maintain that any of our perceptions are delusive — Foundations, p.19

So if not because of problems with illusions, what are Ayer's reason for holding to sense data?

I've over-read the texts here, and now find it difficult to see what Ayer is arguing. He really does seem to think that the only two possibilities are that we see material objects or we see sense data; that there is no nuance and no alternative. that's the only way in which I can see his argument reaching the conclusion it does.

So his argument is that we can only perceive either material objects or sense data; that we cannot perceive material objects; and that hence we must perceive sense data.

Two premises; both just wrong. The argument is so poor it's almost gormless.

So here's a question for anyone who cares to delve deeper. That seems to me to be the argument in Foundations, found on pp 24-25. If not that argument, then which?

And if that argument, then Austin.

IX continued...
A bit more about Ayer, perhaps, since it's arguable that Austin is addressing a caricature, rather than the real McCoy.

The SEP article on Sense Data starts its account by listing things generally agreed:

• In perceiving, we are directly and immediately aware of a sense datum.
• This awareness occurs by a relation of direct mental acquaintance with a datum.
• Sense data have the properties that they appear to have.
• These properties are determinate; in vision, we experience determinate shapes, sizes, and colours.
• Our awareness of such properties of sense data does not involve the affirmation or conception of any object beyond the datum.

Consider the last of these. There are some who supose that our sense data provide information about the things in the world; while others will claim that we there are issues if we move beyond the sense data to make claims about the state of the world that is supposed to bring them about. Ayer has a compromise. So some will say, of a coin viewed obliquely, that the sense data is oval in shape, while the coin remains circular; others would say that the coin viewed obliquely changes shape from circular to oval. Ayer, to his credit, argues that the difference between these two accounts is linguistic, that this is not a difference in ontology but in semantics.

For Ayer, statements about objects just are statements about sense data.

(For my part, that this discussion should take place at all shows something of the poverty of the sense data theory).

I think those like Austin show that in most cases, if not in all of them, the "naive view" starts to "become insurmountable" only due to confusion and error. — Ciceronianus

Someone should start a thread about that...

Well, one is left wondering if some professional philosophers were unduly pretentious. If not He of the Great Moustache, then certainly some of his acolytes; Feyerabend, maybe - Hero of the Left as he was; a few more recent French "thinkers", perhaps...

But one's prejudices will show: I'm authentic, you are ostentatious, he's a wanker.