;) perhaps. There is so much of this sort of waffle that it must have some purpose.

It's not an epistemic question. It's metaphysics. — frank

Well, neither is quite right. It's a question about meaning. What do we claim when we say "Jenny can add"? And more generally, what do we claim when we say that someone follows a rule?

And the sceptical answer is that there is no fact of the matter. This is Kripke's great argument against realism.

Well, yep. And that bit about whereof one cannot speak...

All this is not to say that there is nothing profound, or transcendent, or whatever misnomer one might use; but to point out that no sooner do you put god into words than he ceases to be divine.

Maybe the set of all truths? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Interesting.

That's not dissimilar to logical atomism, as found in Russell and the early Wittgenstein, and brings with it most of the problems thereof. It has the singular advantage of admitting the point that it is propositions that are true or false, rather than gods.

So

God is Truth — Isaiasb

would be interpreted as "God is the conjunction of all true propositions"

But that is not what Christians worship on Sunday.

So it remains that "God is truth" and such aphorisms do not convey factual information. Theology, taken literally, is nonsense.

Nice.

"How do you know that your present usage of "plus" is in accordance with your previous usage of "plus" ?" — sime

There remains a problem for teachers, asked to mark off that little Jenny has learned how to add. We test Jenny on 2+3, 7+9, and so on, for some finite number of examples; and yet we give Jenny the epithet "Able to add numbers of any length". This is not justified by any number of examples, but perhaps it is by her showing mastery of the iterative process involved; she can cope with each of the limited number of cases - carrying, adding zero, and so on, and so there is no reason to think that she could not add together numbers of arbitrary length.

The proof of the pudding here is in the doing.

It isn't obscure, it's Truth in the Platonic sense, which means that it is Truth that does not change, it just is. Since God is Truth, which implies it's tied to his nature. So it never changes. — Isaiasb

You know this makes no sense? At best, it is a hand-wave at the mysterious.

It's propositions that are true or false. Not gods.

It’s #308. — Antony Nickles

Ah, that works.

The first step,

1) There must be an X in the world — RussellA

looking so innocent. But see §48. What is the simple here? Here is a slab; there, a block, for the purposes of the game; what could it mean for there to be a slab and a block in some absolute sense? And that's where poor @RussellA gets caught, again and again, looking for the slab-in-itself or the concept-of-slab, when these are not only unnecessary but a hinderance to seeing what is happening here.

42. But have even names that have never been used for a tool got a meaning in that game? —– Let’s assume that “X” is such a sign, and that A gives this sign to B a well, even such signs could be admitted into the language-game, and B might have to answer them with a shake of the head. (One could imagine this as a kind of amusement for them.)

A common sledge is to send the apprentice to the bloke at the far end of the shed to fetch the long weight. "I'll get it for you when I finish this..." comes the reply.

And see how long it is until he realises it was a long wait.

Some of the error is to think of "mwanasesere" as having any meaning at all apart from the place it has in the games we play. As if our words all have meanings apart from what we do with them. Davidson address this again in A nice derangement of epitaphs; our jokes undermine the idea of language as following rules.

How can you successfully use the word "bamba" in a sentence if you don't know what it means? — RussellA

:rofl:

You just did.

Now someone will start bleating about use and mention. As if mentioning wasn't a use.

Thanks.

Except the bit where it doesn't matter in the slightest what the builder and the assistant have "in their heads" so long as the assistant brings the slab to the builder.

That you made the same mistake in another thread is not a good thing.

Actually no, RussellA has a point. — schopenhauer1

The blind leading the blind...

This thread gets better and better.

You repeat the same misunderstanding over and over.

I don't think there is any helping you.

If Absolute Truth exists outside of God who determines it? — Isaiasb

As I and several other folk have pointed out, the difference between truth and "absolute truth" remains obscure.

#305 — Antony Nickles

Where?

I’m not that interested. My question was quite specific.

That's not addressing my question.

Sure. That's not what I was asking. Schop hasn't interested me enough to move past tertiary sources. I wondered why Wittgenstein admired him, if somewhat begrudgingly.

One could call Schopenhauer an altogether crude mind. I.e., he does have refinement, but at a certain level this suddenly comes to an end; he is as crude as the crudest. Where real depth starts, his finishes. — Wittgenstein

On a quick search, I wasn't able to find the source of this. Is it apocryphal? Does anyone have the original location?

Oh, I wasn't referring only to that post. Just generally, the Wittgenstein you talk about bears little resemblance to the one with which I am familiar.

But that should be obvious.

I'm not going to go into any great detail here, the conversation doesn't much warrant it. @RussellA seems incapable of stepping aside from reference, having moved full circle from "slab" getting its meaning form the thing in the world to it's getting it's meaning by referring to private concepts. He seems constitutionally incapable of considering the implications of meaning as use.

And the Wittgenstein I have read and read about is unrecognisable in 's version.

But the builder game can be pressed further. It does not matter if the word "slab" refers to the slab, or to this or that "concept" of slab, or even to some transcendent, universal, absolute form of "slab". What matters is that when the builder calls "slab", the assistant brings a suitable piece of stone.

Many things follow from this, but two are central here. The first is that we do not need a theory of the meaning of "slab" in order to do the task at hand - to build the structure. All we need is the activities involved in calling for a slab and having one brought. The meaning of "slab" is not important so long as the activity proceeds.

We don't need a theory of meaning, since we have the way the word is being used.

And the second is that there are slabs to bring. Whether the slabs are material objects or ideal forms or transmogrified souls is irrelevant, so long as the assistant brings them and the builder stacks them.

The great thing here is the cleaving of the analysis of meaning away from all the metaphysical paraphernalia associated with it by millennia of philosophical speculation.

Again, putting the word "absolute" in front of "truth" does nothing helpful. Verbal handwaving.

Like saying "god is truth".

It can't be made sense of in any of the usual ways we use such words.

It arguably has a place as a clarion call to other theists, or as "here be dragons" for non-theists.

The implication that the main, or perhaps even the only, alternative to a theistic morality is relativism ignores the history of Ethics back to Aristotle. It's just ignorant.

And we might add the obvious retort from Euthyphro, which so much as I am aware still lacks a satisfactory response.

In short,

That seems to be some pretty mediocre apologetics... — Tom Storm

Same old religious pap.

Wittgenstein and religion

This might give an idea of the discussions surrounding Wittgenstein and god.

No need for me to repeat them. — schopenhauer1

Yep.

But you will.

Not a metaphor. @schopenhauer1 apparently expects Wittgenstein to comply to the very form his approach undermines. He claims Wittgenstein doesn't address ontological concerns, while the first hundred remarks of PI do exactly that. Meanwhile @RussellA begins yet another loop around his loop of reference. @Sam26 has gone quiet again.

Of course someone who cannot see the duck for the rabbit will become frustrated when the conversation moves on to other examples of ambiguous figures. But equally, folk who can see the duck rabbit will want to move away from conversations about eyes and bills. This once promising thread is mired in the misunderstanding of a small few.

But that's how the forums work.

As for seeing Wittgenstein in different ways, there's a long overdue thread on Moyal-Sharrock's Understanding Wittgenstein’s On Certainty that should be started. Have you read it?

Wittgenstein didn’t provide a recipient for fruitcake, either. Presumable some think this a problem with his philosophy.

Cheers. The literature on this topic is vast.

perhaps I should be moving away from Wittgenstein and towards Sartre. — RussellA

I think that is a very good idea. Wittgenstein is not for you.

What's fun here is how few folk on a philosophy forum understand what a fallacy is.

That is barely discussed in PI. — schopenhauer1

Risible.

typo — Leontiskos

Yeah, fixed. The link should be to your first post on this thread. Point being that the topic here is essence, and the other thread is about belief. Moot.

But modal logic does not have a copyright on the word "necessary." — Leontiskos

Hmm. Any account of necessity that as incompatible with modal theory would need a pretty substantial defence. Fine's is certainly in line with modal theory, but at one stage you seem'd to reject Kripke, which would be very brave in this context.

So where now?

I think he wants to blow open a hole and pour a different flavour of essence in. — fdrake

Well, he did that, in that I had more or less taken Essence as a dead end, but what we have here gives it a bit of freshness. It harks back to some of the stuff I did on Individuation in my Honours year.

I would have said that our discussion of essences commenced here: ; before moving over to the other thread, where it sat uncomfortably under the heading of "belief". I don't think one can read Fine as rejecting modal accounts of essence, so much as refining them. Otherwise one would be rejecting the conception of essence as necessary and sufficient... do you want to go there, too?

He does not deny that some words refer to objects. What he rejects is that EVERY word functions in this way. — Fooloso4

Yep.

I think it worth adding that he also shows that pointing, referring, and indeed ostension of any form are already aspects of some language game. They cannot therefore serve as a foundation from which language games are to be built. Reference does not ground language.

And yet one can be deceived about one's own hand. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3125296/#:~:text=The%20Rubber%20Hand%20Illusion%20(RHI,the%20participant%27s%20own%20occluded%20hand. — unenlightened

I can't decide if this shows hands to be illusions or reinforces their corporeality...

I think your cynical self is asserting fundamental presuppositions which the article is challenging, rather than engaging with them on their own terms. — fdrake

Maybe. I don't see much by way of an argument in favour of essences, a reason that we need take them into account. I agree, of course, that our language games are constrained by the way things are, although that way of expressing it lacks a certain symmetry that I take as central – it's not just that we are constrained by the world, but also that we also constrain how things are by our speech acts. Here, I'm not thinking of Sapir-Whorf, so much as of money and boarders and social status, the paraphernalia of our social lives. So I usually prefer to talk of our language being embedded in the world, something akin to a form of life or confirmation holism.

I'll also here make note of FIne's own argument against names having a sense, the novelty of which is what drew me to reading more of his work. I started a thread on the Bruces, but it garnered little attention.

The SEP article on reference gives four approaches, but I think there are good arguments against all. Descriptions we have talked about here. The causal theory remains incomplete; rules in language are more post-hoc rather than proscriptive, leaving intent as a strong contender mostly by default. Reference seems to function despite, rather than because, of each. And we should keep in mind that often referring expressions fail to refer. So I find myself again in rough agreement with Davidson, that reference has a function only within broader theories of truth (or meaning), and there can be no coherent theory of reference per se.

And i continue to think this leaves essence orphaned.

My cynical self says that, having been unable to provide a suitable account of essences in ontological terms using modal language, Fine moved essentialists over to epistemology and now seek to give an account of essences as how we know (understand, conceive, etc.) that something is what it is. It pictures essence as a lost soul looking for a home; or as a misguided picture of how things are, looking for a way to fit in.

My prejudices come from the discussion of simples in PI, from around §46 on. What we take as a simple depends on the task at hand - on what we are doing. I read PI as a rejection of the Augustinian essentialism expressed in §1, and might roughly be expressed as a rejection of real essences.

It is not obvious that such a view is at odds with Kit FIne's essentialism.

So I am happy to talk of staying on it's own colour to be an 'essential' property of Bishops in Chess games. But doing so is not to suppose something profound about Bishops; it's just to set out what we do with Bishops.

Thank you.

So reflecting this back, Fine shows that there are necessary truths (the singleton) that are not true of the essence of Socrates, and so that the set of necessary truths is not identical to, or constitutive of, the essences. A dictionary definition might set out the characteristics that serve to differentiate an individual from other individuals - the "what makes it what it is", and these would be some subgroup of the necessary characteristics?

So the essence is some, but not all, of the necessary characteristics of the individual in question? And it can be given as a definition?

Not much. The terms in each premise do not match. On a generous reading the last three might form a syllogism, but that leaves the first out. For it to be included he's need an additional premise.

Like Dogberry, this learned constable is too cunning to be understood.

But for a mystic, that's probably the point.

Mystics claim to know the truth — FrancisRay

Trouble is, from a claim that you know such-and-such, we cannot conclude that such-and-such is true.

After all, we do sometimes say "I thought I knew..."

13. For it is not as though the proposition "It is so" could be inferred from someone else's utterance: "I know it is so". Nor from the utterance together with its not being a lie. - But can't I infer "It is so" from my own utterance "I know etc."? Yes; and also "There is a hand there" follows from the proposition "He knows that there's a hand there". But from his utterance "I know..." it does not follow that he does know it.

Wittgenstein, On Certainty.

By way of relaunching the discussion of the Fine article, I might offer the following rough summary. Kit Fine pretty much accepts that the modal account of essences does not turn out well for those who look to Aristotle. His solution is to claim that the modal account of essences diverges from Aristotelian account, which he says is to be given in terms of definitions rather than necessary characteristics.

He is not offering a criticism of modal logic, but accepting it's results while claiming that Aristotle is talking about something else.... definitions.

I have not understood how essences as definitions differs in salient ways from essences in terms of necessary properties. Isn't a definition a set of necessary and sufficient properties?

I figure there must be something in FIne's account I am missing, and hence this thread is in part an effort to elicit the missing piece.

43. For a large class of cases of the employment of the word “mean- ing” a though not for all a this word can be explained in this way: the meaning of a word is its use in the language. |21|
And the meaning of a name is sometimes explained by pointing to its bearer.

If Wittgenstein is against theorising, then why did he write that the meaning of a word can be either i) its use in language or ii) what it points to. — RussellA

He clearly didn't write anything of the sort. He wrote that one of the ways in which words can be used is to point.

The Wiki article leaves much to be desired. Check out it's history and talk. It needs attention from a dedicated team, or a specialist in the topic.