...not because anyone involved is consciously following rules, but because it's following a well worn pattern, — frank

Hmm. What is a pattern, if not some sort of rule-following? OR perhaps, there are two ways of showing that you understand a pattern - by setting it out explicitly in words, and by continuing it.

So here's the problem. Consider "101010..."

Someone says "you are writing a one followed by a zero, and you intend us to understand this as continuing in perpetuity"

Someone else says "The complete pattern is "101010010101", a symmetrical placement of one's and zero's".

A third person says "The series continues as "101010202020303030..." and so on, up to "...909090" and then finishes".

Our evidence, "101010...", is compatible with all of these, and much more besides.

It's not the absence of rules that is puzzling, it's their abundance.

Yes, explicit rules are in a way post hoc.

Sometimes names do not work. But sometimes they do. Your conclusion that names do not work is odd. I gather I must be misunderstanding your point here. You repeat that "in order to understand the unique referent, one must begin with a description", but without explanation or argument and in the face of the counterexamples provided by Donnellan. Sure, if Thales had never existed, that Thales did not exist would be true, and about Thales. Was there something in the article that had you thinking otherwise?

Sure, why not. Yours was also a valiant attempt to drag the thread on to something more compelling than @RussellA's misreadings. Happy to continue on in that vein. I'm reasonably familiar with Kripke, but not so much with Cavell.

It will be interesting to see what @Sam26 has to say.

There exists a non-existent class (present King of France)... — schopenhauer1

What, now?

Sure, the class of present kings of France is empty, but it can't both exist and not exist. Indeed, attributing existence to a class is itself problematic - what could it mean, except that the class is either empty or not?

...for which no referent or predicate can even exist. — schopenhauer1

We understand what "present King of France" means... so there might have been a present King of France. That there isn't one does not mean that one could not even exist.

So what you are saying here seems misguided.

Logic is a system devised within language, and not how it is naturally used. Thus, when using it to define language, it is a category error, and it's not even worth doing because it never was meant to fit in the first place. — schopenhauer1

This could have been written as a summary of the difference between the Tractatus and the Investigations.

Logic is a useful tool for showing up confusions, as above.

Here's the danger, of back-reading Kripke into Wittgenstein. The paradoxes of rule-following are from Kripke, not Wittgenstein. Characterising @RussellA's responses as "realist" skips the many contradictions they contain. They are not coherent enough to be given such a title.

As Wittgenstein writes in PI 253 "Another person can't have my pains." — RussellA

You might re-visit this. The remainder of the section is a rejection of that suggestion.

And see

Be clear as to the philosophical point here; The way in which Salinas talks about feeling another's pain is self-consistent. There is no logical problem with speaking in this way. The language game has a purpose. — Banno

A good read. I liked

For Wittgenstein, philosophy comes to grief not in denying what we all know to be true, but in its effort to escape those human forms of life which alone provide the coherence of our expression.

Cavell would not be my got-to for this stuff. There are others who had more direct contact with Wittgenstein. That's not to say that what he says is wrong, so much as that the emphasis may be skewed. In particular, it seems to me that the essay follows Kripke into rule-scepticism, which I think absent from Wittgenstein.

Thanks.

yep.

I gather that Labor had its heyday in the States with the new deal, dropping off after the war, but in Europe and Australia that heyday came post-war, leading to greater social reform than in the States - Galbraith's 'affluent society', the end results of failure to invest in the common wealth being the social disparity that incongruously leads to support for oligarchs...

Odd times.

Yes, it's tragic. I'm suggesting it goes hand-in-hand with the lack of a strong relation between unions and a political party.

In fact, sometimes we agree to give words new meanings without negating the other meanings those words have in order to discuss philosophy better. — ToothyMaw

Of course you do. It's an insidious habit, leading to all sorts of problems - see Wittgenstein. Here, you think that you have explained how important duty is, when all you have done, as I and others have pointed out, is to say that leaders are manipulative.

You think you have done something profound, when you have only done something silly.

BTW, it was unions that established the principle of the employer paying for health insurance. — BC

That's interesting - an act of desperation? The result is a health system that is overly expensive.

Australians receive free health care at public hospitals. Other types of health care are covered by a combination of private and government payments. The scheme is an unstable compromise between the ideologies of the two main parties, one of which is a Labor party funded in the main by unions. We also have a seperate scheme to support folk with disabilities, another Labor initiative.

That business of locking health care to employment is insidious.

...why should the laws of causality... hold true either? — schopenhauer1

There might be something there, a modal argument against a causal theory of reference. But that the causal theory might be wrong does not weigh in on the argument at hand, that the descriptive theory is indeed wrong. Maybe there is a third option...

Russell was puzzling over how sentences such as "The King of France is bald" are to be understood. "The King of France" doesn't refer to anything; so how are we to make sense of the sentence? Is it false, or is it nonsense? Russell made sense of them with some rather clever logic.

Fair enough, so far as it goes.

My point might be seen as that the word "subjective" makes the situation more problematic rather than clearing anything up. There is, after all, a truth abut the elephant, that it's tail is like a rope, it's ear like a fan, and so on. It's not that there is no truth as to the description of the elephant; and that truth is not subjective.

Yep, folk disagree. Concluding that therefore there is no truth to the issue is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It doesn't follow. Some folk think the world is flat. Do you conclude that therefore the geometry of the Earth is subjective, a question of mere opinion, and hence there is no truth of the matter?

By way of background, I'm pointing to the issue of definite descriptions, claiming that the arguments to the effects that one does not need a definite description in order for reference to function are pretty convincing.

One view is that a definite description sets out the essence of the individual involved. The individual just is that which satisfies the definite description. But if we do not need definite descriptions in order for proper names to work, then we do not need such essences, either.

Yes, , Kripke expresses arguments along these lines, but his emphasis, for obvious reasons, is on modality. Proper names are rigid designators that pick out an individual in any possible world in which it occurs, and regardless of it's attributes. The therefore do not rely on definite descriptions.

I decided to go back to Donnellan because it seemed to me that his, earlier, approach might cover both modal cases and Fine's use of definitions.

Something seems to have gone amiss with the post window. It neither grows nor scrolls, making it clumsy to navigate editing a post of more than a few lines.

Just my browser?

I am saying that different people can hold different opinions about whether something is good or bad without one of them being "wrong". — Agree-to-Disagree

And I'm saying that, for example, if someone says that it is fine to kick puppies for fun, they are wrong.

Mine seems a more useable approach. I have grounds for a reprimand, perhaps even a sanction, while you only have grounds for expressing your disapproval.

it turned out that your example failed... — Leontiskos

This...?

Contrary to your claim, the novice already has a description of Thales and he wishes it to be filled out. His description involves things like, 'Thales was a man', 'Thales lived a long time ago', etc. — Leontiskos

Sure, he has a description. That description fails to pick Thales from all the other men who lived a long time ago. So I don't see how it helps choose between them, in such a way that the student is talking about Thales... which I had taken to be the point of having a description handy.

But in order to know which object is being identified, we must have a description of the object. — Leontiskos

I think I've shown that this is not the case. Further, you seem now to be saying that we can know which object is being identified from any description, and not just a definite description, which I find quite enigmatic. As if "The fish nearest to Corinth" were adequate to give the essence of Thales.

No, I'm not following your argument here at all.

Names can just refer, sans description.

Ok, so names require a description, even if it is a wrong one that does not "pick out" the individual being named.

Not sure how that would help.

Again, it is not apparent to me that we need any sort of description to be attached to a name in order for it to function.

But the one who inquires about Thales already has some notion of Thales, and this should count as a description. — Leontiskos

So any description will do? even one that is wrong?

Supose the student thought Thales was a Spanish fisherwoman.

Oh, OK. The article is paywalled on the links I found, so I guess we will have to take your word for it. Nice crevice.

Yep, the generally agreed view is that the problem Kripke posits is not found in Wittgenstein, that Kripke should not be seen as engaged in exegesis.

Kripke is wrong... — Leontiskos

About what? Everything?

Are you saying that you are the ultimate authority on what is good or bad — Agree-to-Disagree

Are you saying I should take your word for it rather than trust my own view?

If names do not require descriptions, then why are descriptions needed to communicate names? — Leontiskos

I don't see that they are.

A novice who asks "Who is Thales?" does not have at hand a description of Thales, and yet they are asking about Thales.

If Thales did none of the things which are attributed to him, that would be a fact about Thales.

Reference can be successful without being associated with a definite description.

But good and bad are subjective. — Agree-to-Disagree

What could that mean?

What you see as a good action I may see as a bad action. — Agree-to-Disagree

And if you did, you would presumably be wrong.

This makes the topic of this discussion even more difficult to answer. — Agree-to-Disagree

Then perhaps you need to think about it differently.

...metaphysical... — Antony Nickles

Hmm. I think I'm still missing your point.

Following Anscombe, which I take as being as close as we might get to how Wittgenstein might have dealt with intent, the Parrot's action can be spoken of as intentional under a certain description... "Oh, he does that when he wants his bowl filled". There is no metaphysics here, just as with pain. The intent is part of the way we explain actions with reasons – I'm baulking at calling it a 'causal' explanation because of the baggage therein – and is not naming things in the world.

I think we agree on this.

Oh, Tullianus, you cynical ingrate. You should be giving thanks to for explaining how things are. After all, it's not as if anyone else around here ever shares a lifetime of such original thinking...

There's a basic flaw in the assumptions of this thread; actions are what are good or bad, not people, and not genes.

Pretending otherwise has profound political implications, always along the lines of "our" genetics being good and "their" genetics being bad. There should be no need to list examples.

Shite begets shite.

You are pissing upwind, my friend.

...you aren't interested in Aristotelianism... — Leontiskos

Not beyond a slight historical curiosity, no. As discussed, I think more recent approaches more... interesting.

Are you committed to the modal view that Fine is addressing? — Leontiskos

Well, no. I don't see what it does. Why do we need it, if at all?

I'm not sure what proper names would have to do with definitions. — Leontiskos

Well, I take them as a good place to begin. And so far we don't seem to have a common ground, a stoa in which we might have a decent chat. The logic of individuals informs the logic of predicates, so proper names are at least not irrelevant.

In that case I think the description will be implicit in the name relation. — Leontiskos

Sounds like descriptivism to my ear. Surely not? Hence my reference to Thales, a simple case I think pretty convincing. Names do not refer in virtue of some description.

So perhaps you might share what "description will be implicit in the name relation" when we talk of Thales? IS that a way to proceed?

Nowhere do I say that duty is what one "ought" to do, but rather is a subjective motivator that can be manipulated by good leaders to good ends — ToothyMaw

Ah, OK, so you are not actually talking about duty on your thread of that name, but instead about manipulative leadership, and pretending that we call this "duty".

I'll leave you to it. You have enough problems here already.

Hmm. Not sure how this is going to work.

I've written a bit about Kripke elsewhere.

The article here agrees that there is a distinction to be made between the essence of an object and those properties which are necessarily true of it. It follows that the essence of an object cannot be the properties it necessarily has. I think we can take this as read.

The article goes on to proffer a view of essence based on definitions. I gather you think this a better approach, whereas I remain unconvinced. It seems to me that we do not need definitions in order to "pick out" individuals - the classic case here being Donnellan's Thales. (Chosen as much because it has some novelty here as that it is appropriate).

, it seems to me that using definitions in the place of modality does not save essences based on definitions. I don't have satisfactory answers to give you.

So taking a bit more care, I am going to say that I do not know of a way of talking about essences that is of much use, and that I am quite confident that we do not need to be able to provide an account of a things essence in order to talk about that thing.

See how that works.

...but isn't it the case that a single word may have a meaning but no use? — RussellA

"Ouch!"; "Hello"; "Fire!".

No.

But it is not a request; not because of the lack of something (magic, intention), but just that birds can’t meet the requirement of asking something of another — Antony Nickles

The parrot might have an intent to elicit a peanut, so yes, that seems right. Those requirements are the "form of life", presumably? Good stuff, although I don't follow the overall argument.

That seems to suggest that there's a certain potential associated with humans — frank

Yep. That "potential" is usually thought of as "intention", and hence Anscombe's interest in that topic.

That the baby and farmer mean the same thing by "peanut"? — frank

:cool: And what is the purpose of this question - what is it's use? Let's look at it as Wittgenstein might, by checking the use rather than the meaning; so instead let's ask "Do the baby and the farmer use 'peanut' in the same way?".

And I hope it is clear that the answer is "No."

Show me a parrot that runs a peanut farm. Parrots do not participate in what Witti called the "form of life" in the way that farmers do. That is, there is more to the use of "peanut" than saying things - there is participating in growing, trading and selling, for a start.

Language games are not restricted only to language use. We are embedded in them in all our day-to-day activities.

The interesting case might be, say, ChatGPT, which apparently uses words correctly just on the basis of a large scale statistical analysis. And yes, I am incline to say that ChatGPT does not participate in the world to the degree requisite to say that it understands the words it uses. It lacks the "magic" if you like.

Wittgenstein's approach is not unproblematic.

...that your fellow humans have linguistic capability is part of the assessment. That's part of the grounds. — frank

Yep.

Maybe I missed something in the OP. — Mikie

The argument is clear, and valid: Doing your duty is you first and highest duty.

Just not all that convincing.