• The ineffable
    So plumbing is incommensurable with origami. They say, as you say, totally different things. Sure, I've used the same argument, taking it from Mary Midgley. — Banno

    Can you give a reference for this please? Really want to read the paper.
  • Mathjax Tutorial (Typeset Logic Neatly So That People Read Your Posts)
    :sparkle: But yes AFAIK mathjax isn't supposed to be space dependent, I'm imagining that whatever renders ( y ) into (y) passes through the text first, is substituted, then something which isn't mathjax code gets passed in - it's some css markup type that the math environment outputs, which probably corresponds to the (y).

    test2: = 
    :up:
    = 
    :sparkle:

    Edit: yes, it's substituting in whatever class would be replaced with the emoji as a text string within the math environment. Plushforums issue with mathjax.
  • Mathjax Tutorial (Typeset Logic Neatly So That People Read Your Posts)
    I gather the (y) gets processed before the math? Seems odd. Isn't spacing supposed to be irrelevant in Mathjax? — Banno

    I imagine it's part of how plushforums parses the math environment.

    test: 
    (y)
    (y)

    Seems to be just the math environment which has the weird parsing issue. Odd.
  • Positive characteristics of Females
    And men improve with age because their hormones change with age. — Athena

    I shall inform the old bastards in my local.

    Of surgery, yes. Of therapy, no. There's a massive difference. I disapprove of medicalising the effects of intolerance. That includes surgery, pharmaceuticals and blame-based therapies, but it does not exhaust all forms of treatment. — Isaac

    Perhaps I have missed this, but don't you need to establish that a trans person's stated need for transition is caused by intolerance? Same with younger people who want to take puberty blockers to give them more time for their gender identity to fix, why intolerance there?

    I'm also interested in what's made you so worried about the availability of puberty blockers?
  • Mathjax Tutorial (Typeset Logic Neatly So That People Read Your Posts) 


    [math]\exists (x)(Px ) \exists \left( y \right) ( Py)(x=y)[/math]
  • Defining "Real"
    Bring in the moderators. — Banno

    You rang?
  • Positive characteristics of Females
    A 'rough sketch' of the likely 'web' seems another viable alternative, or 'as many plausible connections as you can manage' is another. I share your concern about pragmatic limits, but it doesn't seem too difficult to me for an institution like https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance in my country to consider social impacts. It already considers economic impacts. I accept it'll never cover everything, but I don't accept it's thereby under no obligation to even try. — Isaac

    You probably already know this, but GPs, therapists and the whole healthcare system violates the nice guidelines everywhere. They're guidelines and do almost nothing to change the behaviour of healthcare professionals as far as I'm aware. It has a moral obligation to try, it usually just pretends to.
  • The ineffable
    ↪Banno


    Was a summary of your point, rather than an argument for it. The premise and the conclusion are actually the same thing!
  • The ineffable
    There's the constant tendency to talk about the mooted pre-predicative, and as soon as one does one has left it and moved to the predicative. — Banno

    Point needs arguing rather than asserting!
  • Why Science Has Succeeded But Religion Has Failed
    I appreciate your "constructive criticism" by contrast with 180boo's dueling physicists. Although you have been influenced by the anti-design arguments, you remain open-minded to alternatives*1. — Gnomon

    Stop the name calling. You are more than capable of criticism without insults. Or ignoring them.
  • The ineffable
    An account of the genesis of sense cannot be given, precisely because it assumes what it purports to explain. In other words no account can get outside of sense in order to explain it, and gaining a perspective form outside in order to gain a comprehensive view is just what is expected of giving an account of the genesis of sense. — Janus

    I don't buy that argument.

    ( 1 ) In order to give an account of X, we need to obtain a perspective outside of X.
    ( 2 ) Gaining a perspective outside of X presumes presupposing a perspective within X.

    If it's taken literally, it applies to any concept which behaves like articulation or one of its conditions of possibility.

    In order to give an account of language, we need to get outside of language.
    In order to give an account of space, we need to get outside of space.
    In order to give an account of time, we need to get outside of time.
    Same with history, culture... All those things.

    Yet it seems there are accounts of those things which are successful, and even methodological discussions in each type of study. So there's a salient distinction somewhere which renders those discussions meaningful. I believe it goes as follows.

    Yes, being embroiled and otherwise interacting with X has some conditions of possibility of involvement with X, but there's no guarantee that those render the articulation of X and its conditions of possibility from within that involvement impossible. You can't get outside of the involvement, but you don't need to to articulate within the involvement. In fact, you'd need to interact with X someone to give an account of it - that also holds for the mechanisms by which accounts are given in general and their presuppositions. Like space, time, history, culture, language, perception...

    It reads close to one of those "we have eyes therefore we cannot see" arguments!
  • Positive characteristics of Females
    Alien limb syndrome is almost an exception, but to the extent there is negative feeling, it is precisely because it is not felt as oneself. — unenlightened

    You can probably predict my response based on this.

    "It is no part of anyone's essence to be ashamed of themselves or have any negative feelings about their body, (or for that matter, any pride or positive feelings). Such feelings can only arise in a social setting through comparison with others." — unenlightened

    I think you believe the same as me, that people are what people make of them. Identity isn't in the head, it's in what people do together and have done together - personality as internalised patterns' constraints on people's potential actions. So some kind of comparison is in the essence of identity, right?

    The next point I've got to make is that people do have predispositions, perhaps some bodily, which constrain how patterns can be internalised into identity, which constraints work and which don't. That manifests as a constraint on someone's propensities for development, who they become depends on how they're set up to grow and set up to adapt, even though all the potential is not determined in advance.

    So I think you can grant that shame is not part of someone's essence, but negative feeling about the body could result in a discrepancy between someone's essence and their current state, which is indeed a comparison, but perhaps of the first kind. A desire to become who you know you are, rather than a desire to become someone else. The shame isn't necessarily felt, just commonly felt.

    If shame is the feeling that your essence is in error - "I am wrong" rather than "I did wrong", it isn't surprising that shame often follows such a fundamental discrepancy.

    Seem about right to you?
  • Positive characteristics of Females
    I hate your parents for fucking up your upbringing. — Benkei

    Not appropriate.
  • The ineffable
    So my question isn't so lazy @Joshs-

    I entered into this conversation with a critique of formal logic that focuses on its inability to indicate in its terms what you call the becoming of sense. I’d like to expand on that a bit. In the early 1960’s Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published. In it he characterized the participants in competing scientific paradigmatic communities as living in different , incommensurable worlds. He believed that this incommensurability was bridgeable, though, due to the fact that there was enough commonality in the larger experience of various empirical communities to allow for a basis of translation of empirical concepts. Paul Feyerabend had a more radical view of incommensurability, arguing that it isn’t just scientific paradigms narrowly construed that separates members of empirical communities , but larger cultural worldviews.
    Furthermore, the shifting foundation of the meaning of scientific ( and cultural) concepts doesn’t only take place during scientific revolutions , but also during periods of what Kuhn called normal science. We can find even more powerful ways of thinking about the role of transformation of sense in everyday discourse in writers such as Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Deleuze, Foucault and Rorty.
    It is no coincidence that central to the work of all these thinkers is a critique of propositional logic.     — Joshs

    If I read right you're using scientific paradigms and their broader cultural conditions as examples of relatively demarcated systems of interpreting the world. They had fundamentally different ways of doing things in them, of making sense of the world.

    That's analogised to those thinkers, who all had a criticism about the given-ness of the world in propositional form.

    ( 1 ) later Wittgenstein in rejecting "the picture of the world" contained in the logical form of propositions
    ( 2 ) Heidegger's criticism of propositional logic as derivative of more fundamental capacity of interpreting the world which already operates within the use of propositional logic and extensional understandings of meaning
    ( 3 ) Deleuze highlighting propositions can only be expressed in other propositions and thus can't explain the genesis of sense
    ( 4 ) Rorty's criticisms of representation - showing that we shouldn't think of expression as a representational mirror of the world.

    And I don't know anything about the Foucault one!

    The theme those accounts seem to have in common is that in order to give a good account of sense, you need to give an account of the genesis of sense. Requiring that sense be articulated in terms of propositional forms stop that question being asked despite needing the question to be answered in one way. This is circular, we can't speak about that which cannot be rendered in propositional form, because propositional form is all that can be stated.

    Employing the concept of the pre-predicative; meanings, interpretations and concepts which arise in tandem with but not coextensively with that which can be put in propositional form is used to break out of the circle. The pre-predicative also forms (at least) part of the conditions of possibility of propositional form using expressions.

    The use of propositional form as the vehicle of sense makes use of the given-ness of the interpretations which parse the world into propositional form; which is the interpretive structure of the predicative. That which we do to interpret the world into familiar objects and relations to parse it into statements of the form "x is P" are the interpretive activities which generate the predicative; the pre-predicative. All of that work is treated as completed and presently available, a given, when fleshing out sense in terms of articulated propositions. You thus need to look at the prepredicative to get at the genesis of sense, and away from givenness.

    An account of the genesis of sense fills the hole created by successfully breaking the circle with a criticism of the given (insofar as it's propositional).

    Then the account of ineffability you've given locates the ineffable precisely in the genesis of sense. Why?

    In sum, word use is creation, pure and simple, and no component of a logical proposition involves the recycling of an extant meaning. My understanding of ineffability has to do with this impossibility of recycling, the fact that we can’t return to a prior sense of a meaning, there is no repetition of an identity. So what is slightly out of reach isnt the future of language but its past. Language is itself ineffable in the sense that to repeat, represent and recognize is to transform. Notice that this idea of ineffability makes it intrinsic to recognition, comprehension, intelligibility, relevance and meaning rather than something opposed to it or outside of it. Ineffability is the condition of possibility of understanding. — Joshs

    In order for an expression to work, what is expressed must be sufficiently stable. But that stability has to come from the coordination of interpretive acts - which may later coalesce into articulable propositions. Thus there is necessary instability in what is expressed, otherwise nothing could be stably expressed at all. Coordination of speech acts over time aligns itself with repetition - iterability and the necessary publicisability of sense. For something to be senseful it has to be repeatable in a communal fashion (beetle in a box comes in here too).

    Per the emphasis on the prepredicative genesis of sense, what is unstable isn't just the idiosyncrasies in the expression of propositions, like "I like eggs the most foodwise" vs "eggs are my favourite food", they're rooted in the interpretive practices which generate sense to begin with. Furthermore, instead of imagining language as a flat field in which statements linger, focussing on the generation of sense and its relationship to repetition means you have to think of statements dynamically - expression is unstable in time. Today's "Good morning" is not yesterday's "good morning". What's stable in them is a coordination of speech acts, but that leaves unsaid the contextual factors of each speech act that render it utterly singular - expressions always in a unique context.

    The Derrida I saw in this was taking the singular and showing that it was required in establishing the iterable. That a wish of good morning is the same as no other, always, provides the contextualised acts (history) which is used in solidifying sense through repetition, and it could be no other way. It looked like the Derrida trick of taking a dyad where one term was suppressed, then showing it was actually at the centre of the dominant one as ground/condition of possibility. In this case expression/ineffability as dominant/suppressed. It reads as a gesture toward a deconstructive argument.
  • The ineffable
    Notice that this idea of ineffability makes it intrinsic to recognition, comprehension, intelligibility, relevance and meaning rather than something opposed to it or outside of it. Ineffability is the condition of possibility of understanding. — Joshs

    Am I right in thinking that you're drawing really heavily from Derrida for this account?
  • The ineffable
    ↪frank
    But I'm just going to ask what the pre-predicative is, and of course it can't be said, so that goes nowhere. — Banno

    Guess there's no point going into it then. To be fair to myself, I did predict the response:

    and Banno may protest by asking for an example of a statement which doesn't rely (entirely) upon a propositional form for its semantic content.

    Checkmate atheists.
  • The ineffable
    Thing is, reducing the discussion to a personal disagreement doesn't do much to resolve it. — Banno

    Eh, I think having the discussion about the pre-predicative I highlighted, in an exploratory fashion, would. But maybe you disagree.
  • The ineffable
    ↪Banno


    Yes.
  • The ineffable
    ↪frank


    Given-ness is a communal supposition that the world works in a certain way. The supposition is generated through collective engagement with the world. The world collaborates in generating that supposition by presenting articulable structures, which are then engaged and modified, and incorporated back into given-ness. Given-ness is the name of that ongoing process of negotiating the intelligible structures in the world which are pragmatically supposed in our activities.

    The connection between the world's capacity to be articulated and the communal suppositions which form in it is that the world presents itself intelligibly in practical, perceptual and cognitive engagement with it. Patterns in that intelligible form can be articulated discursively, but are not necessarily of a discursive nature. An ongoing disagreement between @Bannoand @Joshs is twofold.

    Firstly there is an issue regarding the role propositional form plays in the articulation of the world's intelligible structures, to my knowledge Banno construes propositional form as simultaneously the primary mediator and sine qua non of articulable collective engagement with the world's intelligible structures, Josh construes propositional form as a means of discursively articulating the world which is rooted in our (embodied) capacities of practical and conceptual engagement with the world. The major constrast there is that Banno construes what may be articulated as necessarily discursive; indeed admitting of propositional form; whereas Josh construes engagement as involving but not reducible to any parsing of the world in terms of propositional form despite involving discursive practices and concepts. That renders the dispute between them about the ineffable difficult to reconcile, as I believe Banno finds it mindbending to sever articulation of intelligible structures from propositional forms - unless they are "silent" or "passed over", whereas Josh construes articulability as a broader category which uses but is not primarily constrained by grasping the world discursively as or through propositional forms. This means what Josh finds perfectly articulable with a broader conception of intelligibility Banno finds ineffable as intelligibility is confined to discourse and intelligibility in discourse is confined to propositional form.

    Secondly there is an issue regarding the role broader rule governed discursive behaviours; language and/or what enables language practices to be intelligible. Banno construes articulating these objects as senseless, with the intention of connoting because they are generative of propositional forms, they are not thereby propositionally formed and thus are not (discursively) articulable. Josh instead construes such practices as articulable due to their broader construal of the intelligibility and its relationship to sense.

    The issue regarding intentionality is derivative of this distinction, as the aboutness of a mental state targets that which can be put in a propositional form (and for Banno, that which can be stated), whereas for Josh intentionality again is a broader category which can be directed to any intelligible structure. They both seem to agree that articulating X connotes an intentionality regarding X, in other words speech acts about X, they do not agree about the target of that intelligibility. With Banno construing discursive expressions of semantic content which involve mental states as part of their expression ultimately being irrelevant to the semantic content of what is expressed, and Josh construing it as relevant with a different concept of what is mental. Ultimately they disagree about interiority of mental states, neither of them think mental states or their relationship to semantic content are interior, but because they have different conceptions of what it means for a mental state or agent-level/dispositional property to implicate itself in an expression. Josh has mental states being "external" in some regards because aboutness is semantically communal (like the patterns in snow which intention is directed toward and congeal into articulable structures), whereas Banno has (propositional) semantic content being the sine qua non of what is publically expressible (read, expressible) and intentions simply target those propositions/events/states of affairs without informing the semantic content, but definitely informing the act of expression.

    Banno thus ends up believing that Josh construes sense "externally" but relies on "internal" (privative, insufficiently relational) drivers for it (like intention), which parses as gobbledeygook. Whereas Josh believes that Banno artificially constrains what an intentional state regards, and since intentional states are "already public" they can, do, and must inform what is expressed in speech acts, which parses as an intellectual straitjacket.

    It's the same argument with the same interpersonal confusions the two have had several times over the years. Banno can't read Josh charitably due to Josh's resistance to translating his observations out of the vocabulary of his tradition, and Josh can't read Banno charitably because Banno will tend not to engage with Josh in an exploratory fashion. Broadly speaking these tendencies are exacerbated because they both find it difficult to get outside of their intellectual backgrounds. I think they would would be more able to recognise how similar their perspectives are if they got over those hurdles. Or at least have a more productive disagreement about how important the distinction is between the pre-predicative and the predicative... Which is a discussion that has occurred many many times on this forum and the last, and I miss @photographer's and that guy with the Hulk Hogan avatar's contributions to the discussion. Some things change, some things stay the same eh.

    As rejoinder, Josh when reading this response may protest at my use of "mental" and "discursive" for being reductive and not grasped appropriately as a mediating category, and Banno may protest by asking for an example of a statement which doesn't rely (entirely) upon a propositional form for its semantic content.
  • The ineffable
    ↪frank


    And your father smelt of elderberries!
  • The ineffable
    ↪Banno


    The thing about a lifeworld which allows someone in it to cotton onto a rule in one of its discursive practices.

    Then generalise that to an arbitrary judgement, perception or practical activity. What it is about (the relationship between us, the world, and what we make of it) that lets us cotton onto it and renders it cotton-on-able.

    And keep that it's "shown in the doing". Showing is the giving that makes given-ness.
  • Positive characteristics of Females
    My instincts are different. 'Thou shalt not be icky' is indeed a powerful commandment, but at the same time, anyone who does not conform to extremely narrow stereotypes of appearance and behaviour is already icky, and thereby in physical danger all day, every day. And under this lifelong threat, people "choose" whatever desperate measure promises a chance of sainted 'normality' and if not real acceptance, at least some blessed invisibility. The hatred of difference is already visible even in this very tolerant discussion site. — unenlightened

    I think that is a plausible motivation for an individual, internalised hatred. But there's a question of which internalised hatred - is "fleeing toward surgery" the same motivation as "minimising a discrepancy from gender stereotypes"? Perhaps these things are not mutually exclusive effects or motivations. If trans people adopted a sainted normality as an aesthetic choice - and god knows who must choose it with more vigour -, it may equally be their essence showing itself.

    Some abstain from adopting those norms expressively - or conforming -, are they more pure?
  • The Limits of Personal Identities
    :scream: You have no idea how painful that was for me to read! — universeness

    You know that arc where the cylons entrap the Centauri and make a base on their home world?
  • The Limits of Personal Identities
    No, Babylon 5, since it first came out!
    The Vorlon main question 'Who are you?'
    The Shadows main question 'What do you want?'     — universeness

    I get those two series confused all the time.
  • Positive characteristics of Females
    This is just a tad suspect. It is a mental health condition. Alien limb syndrome is not treated by surgery, and generally it seems that to treat psychological conditions with surgery is suspect, at the least. — unenlightened

    It's worthy of analysis, yeah. Normally you'd expect therapy or pills or other lifestyle changes to help someone with a mental health condition, if it were treatable by those means. I don't think there's evidence that it is treatable by those means though. The closest cosmetic surgery analogue, IMO anyway, is restorative cosmetic surgery after an accident. In this case, an accident of "having a mismatch between brain and body" - not that the brain in wrong body story is particularly accurate, but it's a good starting point for a more nuanced discussion.

    I don't see much difference between surgery for mental health conditions and surgery for (classically considered) bodily ones. I can feel it in my gut but it doesn't survive thinking - which usually connotes the presence of ideology or emotional reaction for me. What reasons motivate surgery? Two angles maybe?

    The first angle - alleviating suffering. Harm minimisation.

    Seems to me to alleviate suffering, surgery being the best option to alleviate that suffering, and the patient believing that it is the best course of action to alleviate that suffering. That's a medical sounding perspective on it. It definitely alleviates suffering, and patients believe it is the best course of action - but is it the best course of action? I think there's a persuasive argument there, considering how long the delays for treatment are and how many hurdles there are to it, it's a miracle people don't give up more often if it wasn't seen as essential to their welfare.

    There's a sub discussion there regarding whether trans people suffer a delusion regarding their gender, but I don't see what the delusion would be specifically. That they're "really" the gender normally/normatively associated with their natal sex? That seems to be aligning delusion with ideology rather than distorted perception. Though your mileage may vary on how much ideology and norms of perception are distinct.

    They don't seem deluded in general, AFAIK they've got to jump through a lot of hurdles to prove they've got insight, are making an informed and rational decision to get transition surgery etc.

    The second angle - informed cosmetic surgery being fine regardless of underlying ideological considerations.

    I think it's fine? The things which would make it not fine are a good chance of regret (demonstrably false) or there being a coercion to transition. There doesn't seem to be a coercion by force for transition, like there is for female genital mutilation or circumcision. Social exclusion from family and friends etc. There are maybe some people who believe you're not a real (Gender) unless you transition, but that's quite different from it being the societal expectation+conformity pressure. If anything the conformity pressure directed at trans people seems overwhelmingly to be "don't be trans", right? Rather than "thou shalt medically transition". @Andrew4Handel definitely seems to be a good example of people emphasising how bad medical transition is, those are my lasting impressions regarding the peer pressure surrounding transition - the peer pressure steers you away.

    Though most people don't really care what others do with their bodies. Either way the norm seems to be that transition is permissible but not mandatory. If it were seen as mandatory it would be easier to obtain, no?

    It is at least legitimate to wonder whether it is ethical to allow, let alone encourage conformity to such social norms through surgery, and to pretend that individual wishes in such matters are not very heavily socially constructed would be ridiculous.

    FGM is outlawed because it results entirely from social pressure, and the relation to gender dysphoria is obvious. The tendency to overemphasise the autonomy of the individual and ignore the huge force of social pressures is itself the result of a current social pressure to conform. Body shaming is the basis of a huge, huge industry, that pretends it bears no relation to those primitive customs.     — unenlightened

    I think there is an interesting discussion to be had about whether supporting a right to transition entrenches norms of body shaming. My instinct on that is that transitioning isn't seen as mandatory, just as permissible. People seem to want it despite societal expectations and perceptions of ickiness. "Thou shalt not be icky" and "thou shalt respect no one who desires the ick" are hallmarks of conformity pressure away from the seen-as-icky thing, like the true variation in feminine bodies or homosexuality... But the seen-as-icky thing in this case is transitioning, and the transitioned body. "Thou shalt ick" is the opposite tendency.
  • The Limits of Personal Identities
    Ok. It's just that after the worldwide trans phenomenon, the ability of straight peeps to tell man from women has been brought into question. The onus then naturally falls on trans folk to edify and enlighten us (if it isn't just a "felt account"). I've watched a few video interviews of trans people and they seem as confused as everybody else. — Agent Smith

    Aye. This is one of the hurdles. The widespread acceptance of the identity potentially perturbs a lot of norms and ways of thinking. One might be, as you're saying, that people don't understand who they are to the degree that they can give necessary or sufficient conditions for constituents of their identity. The hard part of wrestling with this for me is that whenever something seems remarkable about how widespread acceptance of trans identities impact discourse, it's largely in recognising something which was true already but either neglected or uncomfortable to admit.

    Like people not being able to understand who they are or why they are the way they are. Being able to do that means telling a story more complicated than the one in this thread. Fortunately that also applies to any identity. Why are you you? Why are you a man or a woman? Do you know? On what basis? Is that basis adequate?

    All of it permits many a devastating tu quoque. As soon as something seems remarkable, it turns out to be a mirror of unarticulated aspects of our own lives. Meaning what we took for granted we can't any more. Genie will not go back in bottle, even if rubbed the right way.
  • The Limits of Personal Identities
    ↪Agent Smith


    When I grow up I'm going to have a face.

    “We find ourselves already thrown into some “abilities-to-be” and not others, in a meaningful situation whose salient significance is responsive to how we press ahead into those possibilities. Both whether to continue in those roles, and what those roles would demand of us, is not already determined, however, but is at issue in whether and how we take them up. If I am a parent or a teacher, what it is to be a parent or teacher is not already determined but is continually worked out in how I take up those roles and respond to what they make salient in my situation. What I and others have been doing all along is at issue in those ongoing responses, along with what the practice and its roles and disclosures would thereby become. The disclosedness of my role or vocation is the space of intelligible possibility opened by our mutual involvement with one another in ongoing patterns of practice whose continuation and significance are not already determined but are instead determinative of who and how we are.” — Joshs

    If you can translate this out of Heideggerese for the purposes of this thread, I'd really appreciate it. I do think there's good things to pursue in that approach, but I don't think it's right to turn the discussion into more Heidegger quibbles.

    1. Who are you?
    2. What do you want?     — universeness

    Have you been watching Battlestar Galactica?
  • Positive characteristics of Females
    Phalloplasty and Vaginoplasty are literally genital mutilation extreme genital mutilation which stops the organs from function and makes them infertile. More severe than widely condemned FGM female genital mutilation. — Andrew4Handel

    A few things here.

    Firstly, forced circumcision is seen as unethical because it's forced - doesn't require consent. It inflicts a substantial harm on the person without their consent. Gender affirming surgery is done with consent. This is not a fair comparison.

    Secondly, the premise is wrong, F2M genital surgery doesn't stop pregnancy unless the womb is damaged or removed. Even wiki has an article on Transgender Pregnancy. Similarly, M2F surgery can still allow reproduction - people plan ahead and store sperm. It goes without saying, but anyone with male natal sex and the ability to produce sperm can impregnate anyone with female natal sex who is fertile. That can happen regardless of the surgery (so long as reproductive aids are in play) or gender identities of anyone involved.

    Thirdly, it doesn't stop the organs from functioning. M2F and F2M surgery recipients can still pee and orgasm. There might be complications with these things... But they don't stop peeing y'know. They also don't necessarily become infertile - see article regarding trans people with wombs and trans people who can produce sperm.

    The low levels of regret are obviously highly suspect because most surgeries should have a substantial level regret due to inevitable complications in some people. I don't know before I have a surgery if it will have complications that I may regret. — Andrew4Handel

    Well, regret expressed for gender affirming surgery is <1% rate. That came from a meta analysis. I trust that over my own intuitions, I think you should too. Before reading the study I thought the rate would be much higher.

    Complications but no regret is suspect as well. But knee surgery is to improve mobility and knee function. — Andrew4Handel

    They can also make it prohibitively painful to walk, kill you, give you lasting chronic pain and/or fatigue. I don't think your attitude towards surgery is consistent here. Either apply your disgust to knee surgery and the like or remove it from gender affirming surgery. Some consistency in your ethical preferences please.

    Vaginoplasty and orchiectomy destroy function of the penis and fertility. — Andrew4Handel

    See above. People prepare for this, it's preferable for the people (See informed consent), the rate of regret is low blah blah blah.

    Disgust is sometimes an appropriate emotion. It can be a sign of rationality, ethical sense and confronting dysfunction and injustice. — Andrew4Handel

    Disgust is appropriate. Disgust toward a group without reason is prejudice. You're showing us the latter, not the former.

    Have you heard of Autogynophilia? — Andrew4Handel

    As far as I know, autogynophilia is now a fringe explanation of transgender identity rather than a mainstream one. See here, also as far as I know the popular sources which use it are transphobic. As in, they express revulsion towards trans people and condemn their behaviour.
  • Positive characteristics of Females
    Claims of regret are actual irrelevant to the issue of whether the surgeries are ethical and whether people can become the other sex/gender. — Andrew4Handel

    Here's an argument that the aggregate absence of regret impacts how ethical it is.

    ( 1 ) If a surgery is not regretted, it was either not felt to be harmful long term, felt to be beneficial or incapacitated the person so much it made such an assessment impossible. (seems an exhaustive disjunction)
    ( 2 ) Gender affirming surgery is not regretted. (it is rarely regretted, <1% regret rate)
    ( 3 ) Gender affirming surgery is felt not to be harmful long term or felt to be beneficial or incapacitated the people... (instance of 1)
    ( 4 ) It didn't incapacitate the people. (It just doesn't remove insight from people)
    ( 5 ) It therefore is felt not to be harmful or felt to be beneficial. (3,4)
    ( 6 ) If a decision is felt to be harmful long term, it would be likely to be regretted.
    ( 7 ) Gender affirming surgery is not likely to be regretted. (citations available).
    ( 8 ) Gender affirming surgery is not felt to be harmful long term. (7, 6)
    ( 9 ) Gender affirming surgery is felt to be beneficial long term. (8, 3, 4 - disjunction elimination).

    I'm sure you can see how you'd adapt the argument in terms of tendencies rather than strict statements. Like "If a surgery is not regretted by the majority of..." etc.

    The surgeries causes well documented complications and in the case of children who transition complete sterility/infertility and anorgasmia.

    Less complications than routine surgeries, also gender affirming treatment for young people doesn't tend to have long term consequences - like puberty delaying drugs etc.

    What about the testimonies of trans and detrans people about their surgeries? — Andrew4Handel

    What about the literal thousands of people the world over wanting gender affirming treatment, surgery and support? What about the tiny rate of regret?

    “The whole process is constant body horror,” Berrian said at one point — after he’d told me that the penis-tip discoloration I was worried about might just be sloughing tissue that’s dying off, which is also fine. And this was a recovery with no complications that required surgery. The overall proportion of phalloplasties that need surgical revision, while lower for some surgeons (including mine), is about one in two. The highest number of corrective follow-up surgeries needed by anyone I know personally is 12. — Andrew4Handel

    There are three issues here.

    The first is that the force of this argument derives largely from trying to make people disgusted, it's an emotional appeal using disgust. That is not a pleasant thing to do in this context, and it is also a bad argument. Rhetorically effective maybe, demonstrative definitely not.

    The the second thing is that the rate of complications is rather different from whether the surgery is advisable. EG, someone who will 90% die without surgery X and 50% die because of surgery X should take the surgery. Similarly, someone who will suffer a lot more without surgery X than without surgery X should take the surgery. The overall thrust of your argument there is just invalid.

    The third thing is that the premise is at best misleading and at worst wrong. You seem to have used the quote to suggest that this complication is typical, and furthermore that it presents sufficient risk to stop the widespread use of surgeries.

    A quick search will show you that the complication rate is lower than typicality 32.5% from a meta analysis, and the paper stresses that the surgery is still of utmost importance for the people who take it. That's M2F genital surgery though. F2M breast removal has much lower rate, approximately the same for F2M genital surgery though. I didn't look up the other surgeries required for it.

    The people who need these surgeries give informed consent, they will be extensively briefed on the risks and what can happen. They still consent.

    These complication rates also aren't dissimilar to other surgeries - eg here you can see for shoulder arthoplasty, there is at least one complication which occurs about 60% of the time. And this is not seen as an argument against shoulder surgery is it?

    Focussing on complications is also worse, I believe, than focussing on rate of regret. Why? Regret is individually based. Attitude after the surgery simultaneously gives you the overall appraisal of the subject (whether it was a good idea, improved their life etc) regardless of the complications and better tracks quality of life changes induced by the surgery. Someone could have a complication and not care, someone could have no complications and think the surgery wasn't worth it.

    In that context, the rates of regret for transition are much, much less than common surgeries.

    https://journals.lww.com/prsgo/fulltext/2021/03000/regret_after_gender_affirmation_surgery__a.22.aspx
    https://archive.nytimes.com/well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/27/regrets-after-prostate-surgery/
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4779800/
    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6652388/

    Transitioning, prostate, knee, leg in that order. <1% of people who receive the surgery regret it... And there is not widespread disgust toward prostate, knee or leg surgery.


    Finally, the article you linked was a good read. You seem to have cherrypicked it though, while the process was body horror, the overall impact of the surgery was identified as strongly positive by the person who had it. They wanted to have a penis, they just didn't want to have only a penis.

    This time, I refused to internalize it. There isn’t, I breathed deep, anything wrong with me. I got myself ready and walked on set and stood, nearly nude, compassionate and angry and proud. Whatever was happening around me, I was centered, in my body and in the shots I could see on the monitor, beautiful, accurate — perfect. Days before my penis’s first birthday, the warmth and weight of it lay against my vulva, each supporting the other, holding me.

    The only thing in this which forms any sort of argument is a disgust reaction, your disgust, and it's not very nice!
  • Positive characteristics of Females
    There are hundreds of identities and people are having bizarre frankly unethical surgeries like having their nipples or part of their breasts removed to express their androgyny and non binary identities. (I can present photos and links) — Andrew4Handel

    This reads to me like an expression of disgust towards trans and gender non-conforming bodies. While your confusion toward all this is understandable - the issue is complex, expressing yourself in this manner is not. You must keep it respectful.
  • The ineffable
    IMO you both agree on almost everything substantial about given-ness, just one of you says it can't be said and one of you says it must be. — fdrake

    It strikes me there's a lot of possible wrangling about "propositional as structures" vs "hermeneutical as structures" from Josh's side, but I've chosen to ignore it because that's a non-starter.
  • The Limits of Personal Identities
    :up: It's consistent to believe I'm not a man while it's in fact the case that I am a man or in more general terms it is consistent to believe x while it's not x and vice versa. Doesn't bode well for the LGBTQ community I'm afraid. It boils down to the difference betwixt facts and beliefs - not the same thing and the problem is more widespread, it's almost everywhere, this. — Agent Smith


    Can you pass the hooch please? The inference that this is how statements of trans identity work is yours. It could be that someone asserts they're not a man when they are a man, that doesn't mean this characterises trans women. It characterises people who say they're not a man when they're a man. Your view on gender alone characterises what would be false or true in it...

    Anyway, the assumption that trans identities work by "the felt account" is wrong anyway IMO. As @Vera Mont pointed out, people almost never makes the assertions in "the felt account" without having the behavioural commitment. Whether the behavioural commitment being real + the felt account suffices for an identity to be appropriately ascribed isn't something we've discussed yet.

    I'd tend to "no" because institutions also decide identities. People definitely can be murderers without feeling like one (behaviour and accurate identity ascription without felt or stated identity), people can consistently behave like a thing without being it or identifying as it- the police officer example, a reluctant owner and attendee of Star Wars objects vs a fan - and people can definitely be socially identified as Jews (as far as the Nazis are concerned) just by being branded as such. Feelings or behaviour be damned.

    So it seems to me what you've done is
    1) Assume the "felt account" accurately describes assertions of gender identity.
    2) Assume a specific theory of how gender identity works ("facts vs beliefs")
    3) Read 2 into 1.

    C'mon man.
  • The ineffable
    Seems our AI friend has a scientistic bias: "it is not a science that has been heavily studied in the metaphysical context". — Banno

    Chat GPT's use of "science" derives from the more primordial signification obtained in the German "wissenschaft", which signifies a systematic as well as practical attitude toward what it concerns. It thus refers to an analysis of humour in a systematic fashion; as a discipline; in a metaphysical context rather than an analysis of humour construed as a science.

    Shitposting aside.

    For example, I don't understand "To think the word ‘snow’ is to think about snow in some manner of givenness" — Banno

    I think this is rule following. @Joshs. There is a way of showing what a rule is in the doing, which includes thinking or intending toward snow. What is shown is snow, and that would not occur without the following of a rule+the rule's connection to practical activity. Those two together are a "given-ness" of snow, the intelligibility which allows sense to prosper in the world. Considered insofar as it relates to snow.

    And "One cannot intend more than one meaning at a time". It's not obvious that this is so. We do have double entendre, after all, which seems to do exactly that. — Banno

    IMO a charitable more analytic gloss on what @Joshs said might be: "every expressed intention can be stated in a propositional form". Emphasis on the "a", meaning there's one of them. If there's lots of ways of saying the same thing, then they still express the same intention. A double meaning then isn't expressing two things at once, it's expressing something which can be interpreted in at least two related ways. The difference there being the first has expression (as an operator) working on articulated aspects of a speech, whereas the second restricts expression to the totality of what was expressed in the speech act.

    EG: "I want sausage and egg" might be parsed (Express(I want a sausage) and Express(I want an egg)), or you could parse it as Express(I want a sausage and an egg)". In the "double meaning" context it might be: "That's a brave idea" could be parsed: "Express(You are proposing something courageous) and Express(It is a stupid idea)" vs "Express(You are proposing something courageous and it is stupid)".
    *
    (not that I'm convinced expression distributes over conjunction...)
    . The latter is a better parsing since there's eg the speech act "John said you are proposing something courageous and also said it is a stupid idea" satisfies the first (two speech events)" vs the second "John said it was a brave idea", which is a single speech act that displays the internal tension in the double en-tendre.

    IMO you both agree on almost everything substantial about given-ness, just one of you says it can't be said and one of you says it must be.

    The other day, characters in a spy thriller we were watching repeatedly used the word "sneg". It caught Wife's attention because it is the pet name for Daughter's snake. Turns out it is the Russian word for snow. Seems we were thinking of the Russian word for snow without thinking of snow at all, at least until we Googled it. — Banno

    This isn't too persuasive. The word "sneg" considered outside of the speech act it arose in doesn't guarantee expressing the same sense. Sneg in your context of evaluation meant the snake, it meant snow in Russian. The two contexts are sufficiently different that, as you know, the resemblance is a coincidence and says nothing about either.

    The relevance of the above point is that intention is expressed as part of a speech act by an agent (daughter, sneg), not toward one of its constitutive words by no one (Russian language, common usage). I believe pursuing that issue further would derail the productive discussion you're having.
  • The Limits of Personal Identities
    If the SS say you're a Jew, it really doesn't make much difference what you feel, say, or do. Just get in the cattle truck. Psychiatrists, social workers, doctors immigration officials and judges are all empowered to decide your identity for you. Or indeed against you. — unenlightened

    Absolutely! I think this is something which the felt account, and an account based on behaviour also miss.

    Will detail an "only behavioural" account for it now. I'll call it the "only behavioural account".

    (Only Behavioural Account): The following suffice for someone to have an identity X:
    ( 1 ) The person acts characteristically of how people with identity X act.

    So someone will count as being a Star Wars fan if they act as one. That now includes going to see the films, owning Baby Yoda models and all that. The things which would be expected of a Star Wars fan. For this account, if someone said "I'm not a Star Wars fan" while behaving characteristically as one, it wouldn't matter... They would still be a Star Wars fan. Their feelings and intentions toward Star Wars don't matter, only whether they've eg. bought stuff and gone to movies.

    Looking at this in terms of Moore's Paradox statements reveals an asymmetry between the Only Behavioural Account and the Felt Account. The assertion "I identify as X but I am not an X" is very Moore-ish, because both statements with the but between both act as identity claims, the first identifying with X and the second expressly not identifying with X. But trying to asset having behaved characteristically of an identity category doesn't ring as wrongly. Why it doesn't ring as wrongly I believe says something about how we understand identity.

    Eg: "I've been to all the Star Wars movies, have read all the books, but I've never been a Star Wars fan", it would be improbable behaviour, but doesn't strike as a contradiction in terms as the felt account's assertion did. When someone asserts an identity of themselves, "I am an X", they are not thereby committing themselves to a list of concrete events immediately, just the general understanding of what an X is. Star Wars fans may argue about whether someone can even count as a Star Wars fan if they've not read the 1990s Bounty Hunter trilogy. Thus no definitive list of characteristic behaviours of a Star Wars fan is both necessary and sufficient for being a Star Wars fan as the predicate "is Star Wars fan" is commonly ascribed. This characterises "is a Star Wars fan" as more like a property cluster than as an extensional definition of sub-predicates which every Star Wars fan satisfies.

    Some proper subsets of the cluster may be necessary, some may be sufficient, but pulling it apart goes against the normal use of the phrase. If you've behaved characteristically of an asshole, that hasn't made you an asshole.

    I can see two major holes with the Only Behavioural Account. Firstly, it doesn't seem to work with all identities, secondly property clusters might provide a list of features to take into account for an assessment of whether a person has identity X - but it doesn't provide a social mechanism for them having identity X.

    Examples;

    For the first issue: a vigilante may behave characteristically of a police officer. Patrolling a beat, stopping crimes, checking in on families, removing people selling illegal goods from bars... Satisfying a large chunk of a property cluster... But they are not a police officer. Similarly, someone who is a police officer in Poland is not a police officer in the UK and vice versa, even though their behaviours would overlap in the property cluster of the identity "police officer" a lot.

    For the second issue: let's say I presented you with the question:

    This person does the following things: patrols a beat, stops crimes, checks in on families, removes people selling illegal goods in bars, stops fights, arrests people, provides largely untrained counselling to the mentally ill... What's their job?

    You'd rightly be able to answer "police officer". But if you applied that to police officer in Poland, it would not suffice to demonstrate that they are a "police officer" in the UK. Even though they:

    ( A ) Exhibit the same property cluster and
    ( B ) Locational properties are not part of the property cluster. You can tell someone's a bobby from the list, you don't need to know where they are.

    In that regard, if a police officer in the UK asserted "I am a police officer", truthfully they must count as a police officer in the UK under the law, not just as a police officer by the property cluster.

    In both examples, external norms seem to render identifications as determinative. This, secretly, is also part of the Behaviour Only account, as what counts as a characteristic property for an identity is also - at least partially - determined by an agent's relationship with binding norms. Eg, the general understanding of what it means to be a Star Wars fan, and what institutional rites need to apply to the agent to make them a police officer over and above the constituents of the property cluster.

    Just as @unenlightened said, when you look at personal identity closely, not even the bits which are "in you", or that "you feel" come even close to establishing your identity. In that regard, personal identity is deeply impersonal. Thus something like an institutional account of personal identity needs to be explored.

    My problem with felt account is: where would such a feeling and commitment originate, if not from previous positive experience? Why would anyone imagine himself a Star Wars fan without having seen and admired the films? — Vera Mont

    Absolutely. In normal circumstances someone would not assert they like something truthfully unless they behave as if they like it. This logical gap between personal expression and behavioural commitment is what I wanted to highlight with the account; folk understanding of identity I believe bundles behavioural commitments and expressions of sentiment together - as a correlation. And perhaps as a larger property cluster.

    Edit: I forgot to bite the bullets for the only behaviour account, I shall try to do so soon.
  • The Limits of Personal Identities
    I think religious identities, special status and such are all socially imbued on a person. So there is a meaning to them beyond the silliness of being different due to a title. The public, the pnyotos, as the old Greeks called it, fears a person, or trusts a person or follows a person... these are not illusionary, but socially established. — god must be atheist

    There are primal fears, and fundamental taboos in play in this discussion. The careful exposure of these to the insight of all participants is the prerequisite for anything approaching a rational or philosophical analysis. — unenlightened

    I'm glad you immediately went there, so to speak @unenlightened. Let me try to make a "babies first" account of personal identity so that it can be ripped apart.

    The first account, I'll call it the "felt account":
    (Felt account): The felt account goes like this, people are who or what they identify with. What suffices for a person to have the identity X is:
    ( 1 ) The person can truthfully say "I identify as X".
    ( 2 ) The person expresses a behavioural commitment to behave like an X.
    ( 3 ) The person feels like they are an X.

    I think that's what @bert1 was calling the "subjective account". It seems to work, at face value, for some things. It might work for X="A star wars fan". If they say they are a star wars fan, express their like for Baby Yoda plushies and has a positive disposition (feels like) towards Star Wars... Then they're a fan.

    Even in that case though, there are some things which are unsaid. Some holes. You can say you're a Star Wars fan, you can feel like one, you can express a behavioural commitment to be a Star Wars fan... But if you don't watch the movies, don't know any of the lore, haven't read any of the books, played any of the games... You can say you're like that, you can express a commitment to Star Wars, but you don't act on it at all. That doesn't seem like a Star Wars fan at all. Why? Because the person behaves indistinguishably from someone who is not a Star Wars fan. And allegedly the statements of the "felt account" sufficed. This is a wedge between having an opinion+feeling it and behaving as if you have that opinion and feel like it.

    The bullet could be bitten, and we could assert that what someone identifies with like in the "felt account" really is the person being that identity. In that respect committing to an identity doesn't make anyone need to behave in any characteristic way associated with that identity, just express a commitment too. The "hole" is between planning and execution, and it could be seen as a natural one.

    There do seem to be stronger violations of the felt account though, falling in line with these characteristic properties. Someone can satisfy all of ( 1 ) through ( 3 ) but isn't, as was previously stated, a police officer. Why? Because they don't act like one. If insist on the felt account, it would mean someone can sit in their home, have no police training, never go to work as a police officer, but still be a police officer.

    *
    (I have been italicising words so that "commitments", "characteristics" and "identification" are all emphasised together)


    That bullet, too, could be bitten. An identity in the "felt account" could be entirely severed from any social role. Someone could identify as a police officer without working as one. And in that regard an the identification is severed from social commitments entirely. I think that is odd though, at least contrary to common sense understandings of identity. Why?

    You could say something like: "I identify as a police officer but I am not one" or "I identify as a Star Wars fan but I am not one"... Those make very little sense. They seem to be akin to Moore's paradox, in which a commitment to a state of affairs is expressed, but the state of affairs is negated. "It is raining but I believe it is not raining"; the act of assertion itself is a claim to truth on the part of the speaker. Similarly, the act of asserting identity seems to be a claim to being one. That goes against the felt account.

    The first species of holes is between who I feel I am and who I am. It seems that feelings alone don't cut the mustard. The nature of those holes is brought into relief by inverting the account, which brings us to the second account. Focussing entirely on behaviour.

    Any comments before I word vomit more?
  • Do you feel like you're wasting your time being here?
    Yes, looking at the present. At any given point in time, discussions can feel simultaneously too in depth and too superficial all at once. Though I've felt the same thing in more academic contexts too. That coincidence is a good sign.

    But an emphatic no to the time wasting based on the number of times chatting with people here has changed how I act IRL for the better.

    Examples:
    ( 1 ) Learning about emotivism here years ago has helped out talking with some very angry people ranting about injustices in their lives.
    ( 2 ) I've gotten a lot better at taking on much different points of view from my own engaging here over the years. A steelman Devil's Advocate is good practice for empathy. This has helped me process strong disagreements with others.
    ( 3 ) In line with processing strong disagreements, a distinction I've practiced thinking in terms of here is one between opinions expressed with words and those expressed in actions. People can believe diametrically opposed things and act in the same way; makes the words matter less.
    ( 4 ) In line with making the words matter less, playing about with arguments for years has helped me both notice and construct my own rhetorical dark arts. Noticing and making emotional appeals, knowing when to smooth concepts over to make a point despite not fully committing to them. Lying and noticing lying with skill, to put a fine point on it.

    I guess it's what is to be expected from learning though. Most events along the path are run of the mill, you do not notice their incremental effects.
  • What is the Idea of 'Post-truth' and its Philosophical Significance?
    I'm interested that you say this is difficult to check. Are you saying it is hard to tell if there are multiple interpretations regarding a given concept? — Tom Storm

    It was a nod to attacks on relativising narratives requiring a fixed background to articulate the relativising critique in. How do you even start doing anything without some conceptual framing device or shared standard of intelligibility?

    Can you provide a few points more on this? — Tom Storm

    Broadly speaking, Kant thought humans have concepts which configure our interpretations of the world. Without them, interpretation would be impossible. These are innate ideas like space and time, if we didn't have those we couldn't make sense of any experience.. To stress (again very roughly) Kant thought some of them were innate. Postmodern thinkers historicised that mechanism which shaped information which goes into interpretations, meaning that historical context can come to literally change how people interpret the world at a fundamental level. You move from the structure of the intellect/cognition structuring experience to that and historical and social circumstances. Foucault is particularly notable for their analysis of institutions and "epistemes", which are roughly epochs of knowledge and their social institutions.

    Regardless of these commitments, people still experience stuff in common ways, and the underlying reality itself doesn't need to change much between interpretive paradigms. Two different methods of thinking bout physics can still agree on gravity, even if there is no context above and beyond the development of science to judge those claims (and thus no "context independent justification". These themes are different over all the thinkers AFAIK, but there's some commonality in a theme of contextualising judgements and tracking epochal shifts in how humans interpret things. You can't guarantee an interpretive paradigm is true (except from the vantage of another paradigm), but you can agree on what moves are valid and produce truths within it. In that regard there is a distinction between constraints on entity interpretation and how those entities manifest within the the context - for Kant the context of manifestation is the cognitive (ideal) structure of our minds (roughly), for eg Foucault it's relative to social institutions, for Derrida it's relative to (destabilising potentials in) discourses...
  • What is the Idea of 'Post-truth' and its Philosophical Significance?
    ↪Banno


    I'd argue those T sentences aren't really "iffs". Since they are either sufficient but not necessary (truth is a concept requiring an exact match of a statement to a value, so may imply accuracy but not the other way around), or necessary but not sufficient. EG, a good interpretation of the kettle boiling might be that it was boiled for tea, there's nothing about an interpretation which means it has to be identified solely with the event referenced by the statement/its truth maker or equivalent event, even if it's granted that the equivalent event must have happened for the interpretation to be good.

    You also picked a very easy example. Try parsing it for the original post. I'm not really interested in another discussion about whether the kettle is boiling and its T-sentence. I would be interested in you trying to address the argument regarding how the concepts can be recursed and thus are inequivalent by your original argument. In addition, you made each concept in the cluster all 'iff' each other with your repeated T-schema; the kettle is boiling is accurate iff it is a good interpretation; which a sneaky way to reject a claim of inequivalence without arguing against it.

    I would also be interested in you trying to parse the post you originally responded to with this argument. Pick the first path or the second, otherwise I'm out.
  • What is the Idea of 'Post-truth' and its Philosophical Significance?
    Oh, as for comment on OP: the philosophical analysis of the truth of sentences does little to explain a social transition towards how narratives' relationship to truth has changed.

    'What has happened in recent years is that the shrinking of the moral arena from 'We' to 'I' has converged with the new technologies of communication to a damaging effect. What was once a public respect for truth has been replaced by the noise of the social media...'He also introduces the postmodernist perspective and its querying of objective meaning. This is what makes the concept of 'truth' in itself questionable. — Jack Cummins

    Two things, postmodernism, as much as it is a philosophical concept with one meaning, is a bunch of arguments and analyses about how concepts are unstable in interpretation. That claim itself is true or false, but difficult to check. That the discourse has presumptions (stabilities) might make various destabilisations (regarding meaning, single senses of words, access to uninterpreted reality) within it performatively contradictory. However performative contradictions are commonplace in reality, and still have social presence. The bunch of philosophers in that group are as varied as metaphysicians (Deleuze), psychoanalysts (Lacan), philosophers of language and interpretation (Derrida) and social theorists (Foucault).

    The second, postmodernism didn't arise from nowhere. Philosophically it was prefigured by Kant; he was the trope codifier in the Western tradition of relativising judgement to humanities interpretations without relativising accuracy of those judgements with respect to what's judged (though Kant people will hate me for writing that). But socially, you have to remember the context was after the second world war, the rise and fall of social revolutions and the Soviets, a transition of economic paradigms, the death of socialism, the fragmentation of popular political projects like unions and the incredible rise of communication technologies and mass media. These things served to speed up communication, make society more interconnected, but at the same time totally destabilise any sense of order. You had simultaneous acceleration of the fragmentation of the social body at the same time as the proliferation of new representations of it (like movie theatres, personal TVs, broadcasting...). The world also became increasingly secular over this time period, making religious fixed references unable to re-stablise the growing chaos. Postmodernism itself is a product of this climate, and so inherits or reacts against these themes; the death of institutions, the reimagination of the human subject, the destabilisation of narrative, the growth of interconnection and the domination of representations over what they represent (movies more real than reality).

    "post-truth" is an inevitable consequence of this fragmentation and accelerated communication; but you will probably have noticed that fixed reference points and stable subgroups do believe the same things. "post-truth" is not really an attack on truth; things still fall down due to gravity; but a result of how banjaxed people came to realise sharing common frameworks, and even the idea of common frameworks, actually are in practice. You can easily come to agreement about the trivial; things fall down;, but the chaos makes agreement over what matters most in life and what guides society largely a matter of ideology (which is oscillatory, destablised, isolated in echo chambers, containing internal contradictions, known to be historically conditioned etc etc). "post-truth" is a statement of the irrelevance of truth to the world's trajectory except on things which are either trivial to verify; things fall down when dropped, you need water to live...; or sufficiently contextually demarcated; scientific knowledge in a given paradigm, legal interpretations. And even then, the latter two can have its presumptions doubted; the validity/incommensurability of paradigms + the suspicion towards the narratives of experts and the class bias introduced into law by who gets to lobby for its changes.

    The social role of truth changed. Or it was realised to never be as it seemed to be.
  • What is the Idea of 'Post-truth' and its Philosophical Significance?
    ↪Banno


    Mmm... I agree that the cluster of concepts is inescapable, but not that any particular one is. They also don't seem to be equivalent concepts as there's matters of degree, qualitative evaluations, one has only two distinct values (that's truth), might have many values, have fuzzy boundaries, and the cluster elements are partially articulable in terms of the others. Implying that an account which features one also needs to account for the others and their interdependence, as well as their fuzzy boundaries and differences. None more fundamental than the others.
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