I would have to go into much detail to make any real sense of what i've said so far but we're already deep into the rabbit hole. It may be better to see how or if you want to refocus this discussion on the specifics of the op. — Joshs

I don't see much relation to the terms in the thread, I can see how you've substituted the general concepts in, into which house, flower, and turns into transform. The phenomenology of that 'turns into' would be pretty interesting, as you'd actually be giving a description of a phenomenal event of context constraint which occurs during the interpretation of the phrase. Related to the 'folding the transcendental into the empirical' sub-theme in the thread.

I wrote a ridiculously superficial summary of what I was after. My point wasn't to present a completed argument to you. It was to see if I could get past your hostility and already formed presuppositions about what I had in mind, in order to open up a space to examine certain parts of your op. I don't want to annoy or threaten or bore you. If something that I am trying to present is off-topic, I don't want to derail the discussion. But i can't know what is off topic without your help. If it will help you to call me an idiot or a sycophant of the most tedious tendencies of the Derrida brigade, I don't mind. I'm just hoping to get more of a glimpse of your analytic skills and less of your invective. Just try and pretend for a moment that there is a tiny chance I am not the realization of all your worst assumptions concerning Derrida. — Joshs

I would actually be interested in you applying these ideas to the OP to see what happens. I'm sorry for my earlier hostilities too. It's not really your fault I've had many incredibly frustrating experiences with Derrida fans.

Is it limited to what's possible re x? Possible in what sense? — Terrapin Station

That's the key question really. You can see the different interpretations of 'houses are turning into flowers' as ways of ascribing a notion of possibility to the transformation. For Michael, mine apparently makes little to no sense, you seem to want to allow imagination to rule like I did.

Take that we brought different interpretations to it as data, the important thing to notice is how we did it, how we ascribed the notion of possibility, not the mechanics of that notion of possibility (in terms of accessibility relations if you must). I assumed that it was really natural to interpret it as poetic, Michael assumed it was really natural to interpret it as a physics problem.

What matters is that we supplanted a context to the phrase based upon some interpretive process, and we did so as a matter of interpretive habits. Nothing about the phrase tells us precisely how to make sense of it - the existence of various interpretations going against the grain of the usual understanding of houses and flowers attests to that.

If you're demanding that I precisely define 'what makes sense to say of houses' in order for you to understand the phrase, I counter demand you precisely define every single word and phrase in your post before I claim I understand what you're trying to say. I won't play that game.

If things like 'houses can be made of mud, concrete, bricks, wood...', 'people live in them' don't help you understand what I mean by 'things that make sense to say of houses', I don't know how to teach you what things are sensible to say of houses. Or flowers, for that matter. Consistent with the usual conventions of use of those words.

Because we're talking about real houses and flowers, not cartoon houses and flowers? — Michael

I wasn't. My intuition was to turn the phrase into a truth by supplying the context of a poem. In that regard I understood the phrase 'houses are turning into flowers' as part of a post-apocalyptic story where the houses were all decaying and nature was colonising the architecture, making it a metaphorical description of fictional events.

Atoms had far less to do with my understanding of the phrase when true than the poetic connotations of the phrase.

I was still talking about an imagined real poem. Your invocation of the laws of physics, in this regard, is just as much an interpretive fantasy as mine. Only yours has the benefit of your interpretive habit of equating what is real (edit: or possible) and what is consistent with the laws of physics. Mine, of course, has the much better benefit of being a realistic scenario in which the truth of the phrase would be encountered; houses turn into flowers in fantasies. Note that my story too was consistent with the laws of physics, but did not require the reduction of houses and flowers into atomic configurations.

Whether science could determine if houses could really turn into flowers is irrelevant to my interpretation.

Trying to study things rigorously when on marijuana doesn't work so well, usually. I tried. A lot. It probably depends on the strength of it too, if you're smoking crazy-ass skunk I'd be surprised if you could muster the mental discipline to check your thoughts even if you make many more associations than you would while thinking sober.

There's only one time I've found it helpful, specifically for revising one idea in maths I knew the formulas and algorithms for inside out, but didn't really understand precisely why the formula was defined the way it was. It required a ritual of sorts. I studied the definition (soberly) thoroughly for about 3 hours straight, focussed on the definition, taking apart every term in it and linking it to a sketch of the idea, but I couldn't synthesise all the sketches and sub-formulas in my head at once. I got frustrated, because I'd been banging my head against a conceptual wall for hours, and decided to lock myself in my room and smoke up while studying the definition and the sketches.

I can still remember the definition to this day 'the pair correlation function of r of a spatial point pattern is the rate of change of the expected number of points in a ball of radius r divided by the volume of the ball with respect to the ball radius normalised with the average intensity of the pattern', and the trippy visualisation I got for it.

But that was it working well once. After.... err... many other failed attempts on other things.

In summary: I don't think it actually helps you think rigorously, but it might help you make associations if you already understand something rigorously.

I don't see the relevance of that. People understood the Sun long before they knew anything about plasma or nuclear fusion (and that's true of lots of people today) but it either is or isn't a fact that the Sun is hot plasma and undergoes nuclear fusion at its core. So we can understand houses without understanding the physics of atoms but it either is or isn't a fact that the type of atoms which make up our houses can turn into the type of atoms which make up flowers. — Michael

Let me play devil's advocate for a bit. Personally, I understand houses and flowers largely through the medium of cartoons. What you're saying doesn't make any sense, because the laws of physics don't apply in cartoons. So 'houses are turning into flowers' is true.

Why is your interpretive context the only appropriate one?

The brick enclosure which keeps me dry and warm losing/gaining protons and/or neutrons in such a manner that they transmute into complex proteins of the sort that I would gift my mother on her birthday when I remember. — Michael

Saucy.

Yet people understand houses and flowers before understanding proteins, protons, neutrons, 'enclosures', changing atomic numbers, complexes, the relationship of atoms with solid objects... At least personally, I have to do some perverse exercise of imagination to identify a house as a complex of atoms transforming in some non-specified-way-I-gloss-over-the-details-of into a flower.

Perhaps you really do understand houses in terms of atomic physics. I personally doubt that though. I think it's more likely that you're stipulating a context of understanding for 'houses are turning into flowers' precisely because it generates lots of interpretive difficulties. I doubt that your understanding of 'houses' differs too much from 'houses' in 'houses are turning into flowers' when reading:

'Houses are turning into a poor investment nowadays'

you certainly wouldn't need to specify physical transformation in that scenario.

were it physically possible for houses to turn into flowers). — Michael

That's exactly the kind of stipulation of context I was trying to highlight in my post. I take one of the major points the OP is trying to illustrate is that such stipulation is a response to weird shit going on. If some weird shit wasn't going on, we wouldn't need to stipulate a context, or possible world, in which it made sense! This act of stipulation being a pre-requisite for an interpretation of the phrase signals a shift from the usual way we interpret the words. What was the meaning of 'houses are turning into flowers' before any of these stipulations?

If this were the case then surely it wouldn't have made sense to say that the morning star and the evening star are the same thing, as "appearing in the evening" isn't part of the morning star sortal, but as a matter of fact they are the same thing – Venus. — Michael

The issue is alleviated here by both being stars, the new information about their identity doesn't violate any rules of sense, it rather allows us to reconcile one sense with another through the discovery of 'morning star' and 'evening star' co-referring.

Edit: an analogous situation to the co-reference would be a house that is a flower, which is quite different from a house turning into a flower, even if you could interpret someone saying 'houses are turning into flowers' after watching a cartoon in which a person lived in a flower. It still requires an act of imagination to construct the example, in contrast to recalling norms of use.

How is that any different to simply stating that it's false that houses turn into flowers? — Michael

If you want a mathematical gloss on it, I'm thinking of it as something like:

We have a sortal concept of 'house', some things count as a house, some don't. Embedded in this sortal are all the things we'd call houses. Imagine this as a set (which is already a simplification). If you consider associating with this sortal a set of expressions which make sense to say of houses. Like "houses are where people live', 'that house is crumbling' and so on. Further imagine that we've collected all things that make sense to say of houses, and associated this with each house in the house sortal - call this the 'philosophical grammar' of the house sortal.

So, say, if I were to describe a mud hut as 'made of concrete', that would be false, but it would still be something I could produce from my understanding of houses (the house sortal) and the kind of things I could say about houses. Analogise this to the distinction between a not-well formed formula of a logic and a falsehood of a logic; like "P & &" is not a well formed formula of classical propositional logic, but "P & not-P" is a well formed formula but is always false. So this set of 'well formed formulae' is the set of things we can express of houses (as a sortal) because it works for every house.

Do the same thing for flowers, make a flower sortal, and all the things that could sensibly be said (even if false) of flowers.

With this set up 'houses are turning into flowers' isn't true or false in either logic, it's not a well-formed formula of either system of objects and sensible statements about them. So to say 'houses are turning into flowers' is simply false is to stipulate a different sortal concept of house/logic of house expressions or a different sortal concept of flowers/logic of flower expressions. One in which 'houses are turning into flowers' is a well formed formula.

We absolutely can do this; we could set up an interpretation of 'turning into' that makes sense of the phrase, be it through raw degredation as @Banno suggested, a physical transfer of atoms as @Marchesk or @Michael suggested, or allegory as I suggested. Edit: note, these tellingly all contain an act of imagination!

But the fact that you can set up such an interpretation introduces a context in which 'houses are turning into flowers' is a well formed formula of the logic, which is required before assigning truth or falsity to it. A mathematical gloss on this is that we tweak the relationship between the house-sortal and the flower-sortal to range over various meanings of 'turn into', which can be truth-apt given some alternative interpretation of the house sortal, the flower sortal, and the relationships between them.

You could say that we may interpret this 'completely literally', perhaps against the usual norms of the words (here identified as sortals) 'houses' and 'flowers', and since physical houses don't actually turn into physical flowers through some act of magic, it would be false. But in a cartoon, it could be true.

That has more to do with Nazis rebranding themselves as 'ethno-nationalists' or 'identitarians' rather than the usual connotations of (left liberal) identity politics.

Edit: though those doctrines are about as 'identity politics' in the strict sense as they come.

Childhood sexuality among consenting children is a taboo when it probably shouldn't be. Pedagogy students for nurseries here (Norway) are now being taught to be quite accepting of child sexuality among children, and this comes along with educating children about consent from a very young age. I don't know how long this has been going on for, but it looks to be an important shift.

At least when I was growing up, sexuality was treated either as a matter for human anatomy or shame, and people largely got their first knowledge about sexuality from word of mouth or porn mags (the internet was still too young for widespread porn videos). Cue hilarious misunderstandings from young men thinking women pee out their buttholes.

Though towards the end of college (16-18 year old), sex ed included explicit lessons about sexual consent. Whereas the previous sex ed (at 12 years of age) consisted of watching a video of anthropomorphic (and suspiciously colour coded, pink=female white=male) rabbits fucking.

Anyway, welcome to the asylum. You're unlikely to find anyone prejudiced against the mentally ill here, and if you do find your treatment uncomfortable personal message a mod and we'll try and deal with the issue.

I asked roughly the same questions on the first page.

I wasn’t saying this. I was stating what I recall Peterson saying about Foucault; as I said “rightly or wrongly” that appeared to be his claim. — I like sushi

Yeah, that's the equivocation Peterson uses all the time. Zizek 'agreed' with it in the debate, but it was pretty clear that Zizek thought the old framework of class was supplanted by the framework of the 'identity politics' bogeyman. So Peterson emphasised the equivocation as a criticism of Marxism, Zizek emphasised the equivocation as signalling the death of Marxism as a political project.

If you're willing to aggregate to 'analysis of power' = 'oppressed vs oppressor narratives' = 'Foucault' = 'Marxism' you may as well call Marxists left liberals.

Anyway, Foucault's methodology is very much non-Marxist, he traces cultural shifts using art works, tropes, systems of ideas - eventually subordinated to the master concept of 'discourse', and he looks at the interface between discourse and social life and social institutions a lot. There's no central emphasis on 'material conditions' or class antagonism as you would expect from a Marxist, even if you could broadly call what he writes as creating a historical critique of ideology in something similar to the Marxist sense of the term.

Even the sense of 'oppressor and oppressed' as an intentional, causal relationship between identity groups isn't really present, power relations in Foucault is far more diffuse and systemic, arising as mechanisms of relation between social institutions, people and discourse.

You can find some sympathy with Marxist critique, but it's largely historically limited.

I'm not a Foucault scholar though, I've read Madness and Civilisation recently and The Order of Things a long time ago, so take what I say with a pinch of salt.

Rhetorically, I don't think you should really treat it as a debate. There were no pre-planned points of contention, just vague terms: 'happiness, communism, capitalism'. Zizek also wasn't really talking to Peterson, Zizek was using it as an opportunity to speak to Peterson fans.

There were plenty of points where Zizek could really have hammered down on Peterson; just look at Zizek's bitch face when Peterson's floundering for examples of 'Post-Modern Neomarxists' or when Zizek corrects him on Foucault (Foucault wasn't a Marxist, he was a major critic of Marxism). But he didn't, why?

Zizek really wanted to exploit the cognitive dissonance of him agreeing with Peterson on most major points, when it's likely people (extreme fans) were expecting one to 'own' or 'destroy' the other.

In that interview with Russia Today, Zizek frames it like that too, apparently Zizek agreed to the debate but wanted to set the terms for it. The terms of the debate allowed lengthy exegesis before critique, so Zizek could present his idiosyncratic worldview criticising the same points Peterson would - simultaneously undermining Peterson's arguments (based on an inaccurate caricature) and appearing attractive to his viewer base.

The whole alleged problematic about needing to protect the singularity of a context from abstract logic, it seems to me, implies the assumption that singuality and generality can be thought coherently in separate terms. — Joshs

This is exactly the Derridean response I was expecting.

I see I'm fighting a losing rap battle. — S

I have no idea why but this made me laugh a lot.

like that tat amor fati
ideas are all skin deep
a reactionary knee
jerk if you disagree

Brap, shout out to mandem.

I like to imagine a world where people who end up having unpleasant arguments on the internet have to release a diss track against their foe. People who end up having lots of unpleasant arguments will end up with terribly rushed diss tracks, whereas more innocent people can spit pure words of wickedness that they merc the riddim wid.

This is where my Derrida-Heidegger come in. rather than focusing on "articulating the suspension(bracketing) and its impacts on metaphysical reasoning", in my reading, they move within the very heart of context itself and notice an almost imperceptible mobility within what has been rendered as structure, presence, state, form, scheme, element, being, the 'is', as the most supposedly irreducible origin of epxeience. What's most remarkable about this 'split' within the 'I" moment to moment is not that it leads to opposition , incommensurability, negation, suspension. On the contrary, it lends to the ongoing temporization of experiencing, in and through all contexts, a radical consistency, integrity and intricacy that is missing from other approaches. Whether you buy this or not, the implication is that what happens BETWEEN supposed normative regime of understanding to another becomes utterly uninteresting, becasue it is now understood to be only an abstracted and derivative way of thinking the basis of transformation in meaning. The real action has not been made visible yet to those who begin from centered contexts and their transformation. — Joshs

The problem here is such 'centres' aren't always metaphysical presuppositions sustained through being inattentive to aporetic shifts in context, they're often non-conceptual in nature. If you want to chart the perturbation away from this centre induced by the singularity of some event, you don't subordinate its terms of expression it to a pre-established logic of perturbation and singularity, you use its singularity to tailor concepts to it. There's a historical element here, you always end up using some tradition of concepts to articulate the singular, but to thematise (and then give an account of) something singular requires you to cash it out in terms inspired by the thing rather than the generalised logic of singularity perturbing conceptual schemes/interpretive habits. You use the thing to tailor the history of concepts you apply to it, it 'organises' the cognitive elements of your historicity if you want to put it in phenomenological terms. Or more prosaically, you let it shape how you think and what you bring to the problems it poses.

It's certainly of philosophical interest to talk about that generalised logic of singular perturbation - what it does to metaphysical accounts - but you can't articulate any singularity through blind iteration of the way singularity as an idea perturbs concepts.

The real's both far more banal and far more rich than any conceptual distinction, all we can do is allow it to permeate our thought from the ground up.

Edit: notice how we're talking about a generalised logic of singularity rather than any specific instance of it? This is a shift from the realm of language convention the thread's problem was posed in.

Visually, I can do as far as a triple, presuming 'seeing' the sentences counts as thinking them. My auditories, if I'm trying to deliberately create them, seem to cancel each other out. — Baden

Can you do more if you visualise filling out a naughts and crosses board with the sentences?

I like----|I like----| I like
oranges| apples | bananas
-------------------------------
I like----| I like----| I like
pears---| grapes-| kiwi

And so on.

I don't get any auditory impression when I visualise the board, but for the 'two speakers' one I did. I can't get any auditory impression past 2 either.

I imagine we both had the same kind of 'quasi-auditory echo', I don't want to say that I literally experienced sound, or even something like a memory of sound, though it was probably closer to the latter than the former.

Funnily enough, I didn't think it was possible until I tried. — Baden

Me too. What's it like for you? I have to bend my mind a bit with a visualisation to bring on the auditory effect of both at once. If I try to picture 'saying' it myself I can't 'say' both at once, but if I imagine two different speakers speaking at once (they need to be familiar voices) I can hear 'I like oranges' and 'I like bananas' at the same time.

Get rekt scrubs. Not impossible.

I don't intend what I wrote to be a criticism of Derrida, I was actually trying to satirise your posts in the thread. The on topic posts were about how 'houses are turning into flowers' and like phrases engender a change from the usual understanding of houses and flowers to understand - perhaps it's a cartoon, or a child's fantasy, or a poem -, and usually we don't notice these contextual changes despite them occurring seamlessly in the usual way we interpret stuff.

If you like, as I believe you did, you can present this as a suspension (or bracketing) of the regime of understanding which categorises things into houses or flowers, and the possibility of a suspension reveals a structure of decision to categorise in that way.

You could fork the inquiry in two here, you could either tread the now well trodden ground of articulating the suspension and its impacts on metaphysical reasoning, or you could focus on the singularity of the utterance as a call for context sensitive methods of reasoning and similarly constrained creativity. The first one changes the topic - rather it suspends all discussion except the results of deconstructive impulse; here a methodology without a method and a method without a problem - the second one stays on topic; treating the differences/perturbations brought about by things like the OP as calls for theorising. Prosaically, differences are opportunities for distinctions.

For all the emphasis on attending to singularity and the perturbation of categories, in my experience epigones of Derrida (or Heidegger, really) end up having the same conversation almost every time.

Ah yes, the world's most problematic metaphysical distinction, the distinction between houses and flowers. The house is privileged over the flower through the ideal structure of instrumental rationality, whereas really houses are derivative of flowers as the sense of revealing in a flower is transcendentally prior to the mechanistic ideology of houses. Given that houses are just a subordination of the flower concept their metaphysical structure cannot be distinguished from that of a flower. One picks a house when one is looking for a place to live, and one also picks flowers, or is that too much identity between the two? If one instead views the flower and the house through the non-metaphysics of difference, one will see that the notions are parasitic of one another and thus the distinction is merely another philosophical pretension of binary between the irreconcilable that has always already been reconciled.

Am I the only respondent that can actually do the OP's challenge? Weird.

You're unlikely to get any responses from old posters in this thread, considering it took place 3 years ago.

(1) On the merits of extending formal semantics from declaratives to other speech acts: You say that, in a mathematical setting, fruitfulness is assessed either by the production of more theorems or by the exactness of the modelling activity; if I understood you correctly, you say that neither of these obtain the case of formal semantics. Well, I disagree. Obviously, as you pointed out, I believe that formal semantics is a worthwhile enterprise. And it's simply a fact that the formal semantics of declarative sentences is currently a well-developed research program. So why not extend this approach to other speech acts? In fact, that is precisely what formal semanticists have been doing. I claim that the fruitfulness of this approach can be assessed in the same way as a mathematical research program, in particular, in the exactness of the models produced. I would also add a further dimension, also analogous to mathematics: in many cases, it's less important to prove theorems than to coin new definitions (e.g. Dedekind's ideal theory), which serve to unify phenomena that were previously considered separately (e.g. the behavior of primes in certain number fields and the behavior of curves in function fields). This, explanation by unification, is one particular case of a virtue of a mathematical theory, namely its explanatory power. Now, I want to argue that formal semantics do provide us with added explanatory power. In particular, by showing what is common to apparently distinct speech acts (or moods), it allows us to explain a greater variety of phenomena than we could before. — Nagase

I think formal semantics is a worthwhile area of research, but I think you're treating the conditions of adequacy for theories in it as far too much like pure math and far too little like applied mathematics or statistics. The subject matter of formal semantics, when applied to natural languages, is natural languages. Whether a formal semantics in this case explains anything must be done with reference to the natural language (or natural languages) targeted, not simply extensions of the theory. Let's look at an example.

The Lotka-Volterra equations in mathematical biology, say, are induced by an intuition linking predator-prey species pair abundances to the abundance of the other animal population; predator numbers depend on prey numbers due to resource availability, prey numbers depend on predator numbers due to killing rate.

You could, at this point, say that 'predator prey dynamics can be explained by calculus', but that wouldn't be the whole story. As a model, the Lotka-Volterra equations are terrible. They do not reproduce most phenomena in predator-prey webs, and don't accurately match even the simplified predator-prey dynamics they target. The reality is much messier than those equations suggested.

In the same sense, I believe the extensions of formal semantics from propositions to general speech acts should be checked against language, not just against consistency with previous research in that area. The truth of an account of natural language should be measured by its accord with natural language, not vouchsafed as simply an extension of a theory of a subset of it. It has to be a good model, as well as consistent with the theory, to count as an increase of explanatory power.

I agree that he gives prides of place to communication here (he is pretty explicit on this), and that there is little room in his account of conventions for the more creative aspects of language use as explored by Austin. But I see this as a reason to modify his account, not to reject it outright, perhaps by emphasizing the non-conventional aspects of language use. — Nagase

I don't think an appropriate extension to the project would look to non-conventional aspects of language use, this allows convention to be equated with Lewis' account of conventions for truth-apt (or derivative of truth apt) sentences. "I do" is part of our conventions for marriage, "I love you" is as much performative as declarative and so on. We all understand this because such things are conventions of language use.

I mean, look at "I do", how would you explain to someone what that means? You'd have to explain the institution of marriage, the legal status of being married, the emotional commitments involved, it makes sense upon a background of sexual relationship and moral norms like fidelity and honesty. You will get a lot more insight into the meaning of "I do" by describing the role it plays in language than by describing a sentential function that maps it to the propositional content of "X assents to marriage with Y at time t in place p". Even if we have filtered out the propositional content, the meaning of "I do" is to be found in the relation of its propositional content to context of its propositional content and an exegesis thereof would care little about whether "I do" itself is truth apt.

Maybe my intuition is the opposite of yours, I see it as much more intuitive to 'feed pragmatics into semantics'.

That is, there are conventions in place which makes us behave as users of a given language. Given that the coordination problem involved is defined in terms of actions and beliefs, and these can only interact with sentences (or utterances of sentences), it makes sense for him to focus on a very coarsed grained view of languages, which focus on the interpretation of sentences. This also chimes in with the idea that semantics feeds sentences into pragmatics, so to speak. — Nagase

Well yes, of course this makes sense, it makes sense in exactly the same way that the Lotka-Volterra equations model real world predator-prey dynamics. They are a toy model to demonstrate a principle relating the feedback between the predator abundance and prey abundance, and when held up to real predator prey dynamics are found sorely lacking in scope. I'm left with the feeling that a narrowly circumscribed model is being mistaken for the real dynamics it targets.

Nevertheless, I don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water, sentences and truth apt expressions are an excellent playground for philosophical theories about how language interfaces with the world, sufficiently simple to allow the development of precise formalisms which nevertheless have quite general scope.

(3) Lewis's account is entirely focused on declaratives: Correct, though he does offer an extension, even in "Languages and Language" (this is one of the objections he answers), which is similar in spirit to the one in "General Semantics". Incidentally, in "General Semantics", the mood of a sentence is not simply associated with the sentence, but it is built in into its structure as one of the nodes in the phrase marker. Given that the performative is actually the root of the phrase marker, one could identify the performative with the whole tree; then the sentence radical will be the root of a subtree of the phrase marker, and will thus be indeed embedded into the performative. So I think Lewis's terminology is apt here. — Nagase

It's embedded in 'the sentence' when 'the sentence' is treated as containing a mood operator. The convention to put the mood operator at the beginning of the parse tree's terminal nodes rather than as an operator on a parse tree of a sentence is really arbitrary here. To say it is embedded in the sentence is to say the mood is part of the sentence content, but the possibility of 'falsehood' of the mood in Lewis' sense shows that this isn't the case. {command, "Go to bed"} is false when I'm not commanding someone to go to bed, despite saying so. If I utter the speech act {command, "Go to bed"} how am I to make sense of the fact that I was, say, joking with my friend, solely through the 'falsehood' of the speech act? There are far more ways not to be a thing than to be a thing.

You might rejoinder that this would simply be a different speech act {joke, "Go to bed"} but I could make precisely the same kind of argument towards that. Regardless of this, Lewis is leveraging our folk-theory of language to do such parsing, which is little more than an invitation to understand ""Go to bed", Sally joked" as {joke, "Go to bed"} with "Sally" as an indexical. In that regard it's hardly an 'account' of language use at all, it is little more than a procedure to mathematise expressions into a far more comfortable formal set+function form than the nuanced messiness of their original utterance.

Another rejoinder here references Chomsky's innateness hypothesis with regard to grammars, which you've leveraged elsewhere. I'm quite happy to grant that this provides some insights about the possible grammars for languages, but I don't think it's particularly relevant to including mood terms/indexicals in the parse tree considering one is a mental state or pro-attitude and one is a sentence or proposition. To be sure, command can be modelled as being in a grammatical imperative mood, but Lewis does seem to interpret the truth conditions of these moods as when their corresponding mental state occurs during the utterance. Do you really understand anything more about imperatives by attaching them as indexical prefixes to a parse tree or as an operator on a parse tree? It seems to me, again, the focus here isn't really on understanding imperatives, it's on providing a procedure to mathematise imperative expressions All the 'explanatory power' in the account for understanding natural language is given by folk-theoretic categorisation of speech acts into sentences with a grammatical mood or the structure of parse trees on those sentences. Once one has recognised an imperative, it will be represented thusly... how do we understand imperatives to make these constructions? Beyond the scope of these papers.

Carlo Rovelli makes an example in one of his talks about simple harmonic motion and pendulums, that we do not care about the 'love stories of bacteria' inside the pendulum when modelling it as a simple harmonic oscillator. What we do care about is, well, how the whole thing moves. Of course, simple harmonic motion would go on forever, and the real pendulum stops which is unanticipated from the theory and invites an extension (including a damping term). In this manner, the real world shouts "No!" to our simple model.

How does the real world shout "No!" to a formal semantics for a (subset of) natural language?

Perhaps a more precise form of this question: let us grant that all speech acts are to be understood as derivatives of declaratives, how does this 'derivativeness' show up in either the use or acquisition of language?

Edit: for clarification, I don't mean this in a vulgar verificationist sense, I mean how does natural language inspire formal semantics and how can a formal semantics be checked for adequacy beyond internal consistency and 'philosophical fruitfulness = being part of the hard core of a research program"

Seeing as OP is banned I'm closing the thread.

First, the references you asked for: for my general approach to semantic matters, I think the essays by Lewis are invaluable (even if you end up disagreeing with him). In this connection, I recommend especially "Language and Languages" and "General Semantics", which you can find, along with his other papers, in this website; note that the latter essay also contains a discussion about how to reconstruct the other moods in terms of declarative sentences. Since I'm not a semanticist (though I'm largely sympathetic to formal semantics, in particular the tradition stemming through Montague and developed by Barbara Partee), in the specific case of the semantics of questions I just gave a quick glance at the relevant article in the Cambridge Handbook of Formal Semantics (I can send you a copy of the handbook if you like), just to check that I wasn't misremembering the partition approach. — Nagase

I just realised that we glossed over a really important pragmatic distinction. A question pragmatically is much different from a request. One asks a question to get an informative response, one makes a request to ask someone to do something.

From the point of view of associating speech acts with referring terms in them with declaratives, perhaps this distinction doesn't matter very much, as one could say a request for someone to do X is associated with "someone did X for me" (or "someone did not do X for me" for the other class) as a declarative, and claim that the reference mechanism for the term in the request is derivative of that in the (equivalence classes of) declaratives.

Going back to the discussion, note that the two situations you described are not symmetrical. We have a reasonable well-developed semantic theory for declarative sentences (say, Montague grammar and extensions thereof). But we don't have a well-developed semantic theory for questions (and other "moods") that is independent of truth condition semantics, or of declaratives more generally. So we may hope to extend our analyses of declarative sentences to other types of sentences, but there is little hope of going in the reverse direction, since we don't even know where to start in that case. That's why we try to understand questions in terms of "answerhood" conditions, whereas no one (that I know of!) has tried to formulate a semantics for declarative sentences in terms of "questionhood" conditions. — Nagase

This is a kind of mathematical justification, Lewis does the same for possible worlds, claiming it is 'philosophically fruitful' to think of things that way because it allows one to address many problems assuming the felicity of the account. What this is really backed up by, though, is the existence of research programs that deal primarily with truth apt expressions, and a vital part of those research programs are attempts to extend their scope; just as one would do when researching mathematical methodology irrelevant of the field.

A major difference between these types of extension of theory, however, is that the extensions in mathematical research either result in the production of theorems, which are true given their assumptions by definition, or modelling techniques which are checked against the phenomena they model. The kind of model produced by extending a semantics of declaratives to other speech acts, however, does not have this virtue and so must be assessed on its merits differently.

The kind of model suggested in the paper you linked (Languages and Language by David Lewis) characterises a language as a symbol set S and a meaning set M and a function from the symbol set S to M which associates the meaning of M to S. This is later expanded to ambiguous or polyvalent strings by mapping each polyvalent element of S to a subset of M. You can thus write a language as a triple {S,M,f} where f maps each s in S to its meaning m in M.

This is worthwhile examining. The first comment I have is that M needs to be a structured set, there are intended meanings/responses for speech acts as well as interpreted meanings/responses. How would one go about constructing such a function f or structuring the set? How would one impose this dyadic structure on M? The selection criterion for associating s with m through f is precisely already having 'access' or successful interpretation of (one sense of) s. One could construe this as a strength, in a similar sense that Lewis characterises the status of accessibility relations, because we do not specify a structure of f any f can be used for modelling purposes. But consider for a specific language, constructing f means encoding the meaning of s as m for each pair, and the means of that encoding is precisely our pre-theoretic understanding of the strings in S. In that regard, Lewis has not given an account of any language, or even any general structure of language, he has given us a procedure for associating strings of a language to meanings of strings given that such an account of meaning and strings has already been developed.

Elements of S are then associated with attitudinal properties, specifically that elements of S (when well formed) are uttered truthfully in normal circumstances. This is fine when dealing with elements of a language which are truth apt, but one of the modelling assumptions, a set of principles Lewis characterises what it means for a community to use a language constrains that use to sentences which are truth apt. This paints a picture of language as communicative, and when not communicative derivative of communication. Rather than as a historical, expressive practice whose use does things (pace Austin).

At face value anyway, this has a rather problematic link to the treatment of non-declaratives in 'General Semantics'. The treatment is, if I have it right anyway, to parse a command like: "Go to bed!" into a pair {command, "it is the case that you are in bed"}, where the latter sentence has some tree-based parse structure. The latter's called the sentence radical - which by construction is truth apt. However the full structure is not truth apt.

Lewis, however, gives us a remedy for this hole in the account - a way of associating truth values with general speech acts. What this requires, however, is reinterpreting truth and falsity to be consistent with the demands of the semantics of performatives.

Hard but possible: you can be play-acting, practicing elocution, or impersonating an officer and say 'I command that you be late' falsely, that is, say it without thereby commanding your audience to be late. I claim that those are the very circumstances in which you could falsely say 'Be late!'; otherwise it, like the performative, is truly uttered when and because it is uttered. It is no wonder if the
truth conditions of the sentences embedded in performatives and their nondeclarative paraphrases tend to eclipse the truth conditions of the performatives and non-declaratives themselves.

It is a bit rich to say that the sentence is 'embedded' in the performative when it is merely associated with it. Anyway,

A performative is uttered truly when the intension (like {command} in the previous example) is the state of mind of the utterer, and falsely otherwise. While this is a way of assigning two categories to performatives (at least those which can be parsed as an intension and propositional radical), there is little reason for labelling these as true or false in precisely the same sense 'It is raining.' is true just when it is raining. A proposition like that is true if and only if the propositional content occurs, whereas something other than the propositional content of the sentence radical must occur for the performative to be 'true' or 'false'. So, I would grant Lewis that he has found a way of associating a function with a boolean image to each sentence which can be parsed in that manner, but I very much doubt that this function is a mapping to truth values with their usual interpretation.

I couldn't see the construction of equivalence classes explicitly in either paper, but I might've missed it.

Edit: I suppose what's at stake in our discussion is really the same thing whether we're talking about the equivalence class construction or the constructions in the two David Lewis papers you linked; is language primarily a means of communication? Does it make sense to account for language use by giving an account which renders all language use derivative of declaratives?

Edit2: hashtag changing 'boolean function' to 'function with a boolean image' because you're talking with a logician.

Can you walk us through an example please?

Stahp, please. This is obviously unpleasant for both of you. (this post is not written as a mod, it's written as someone who wants to keep a good discussion on topic)

Searle? — Banno

Dunno where this is going really. It was just a side topic from another thread that was so involved discussing it would derail the original thread.

Provisional belief? — Banno

Yeah. There are times when you entertain a position without assenting to it.

You also asked about semantic content. As I said, the semantic content of an expression is its contributions to the truth conditions of the sentences in which it appears. My contention is that the semantic content of a name just is the referent of the name, since that is what contributes to the truth conditions of the sentences in which it appears. — Nagase

I'd like to begin with saying I'm not trying to advance a descriptivist theory of reference, or any particular theory of reference. Specifically, what I'm interested in is the sense of names and whether this is just the referent of the name.

'Jake is under 2 meters tall.'
'Can you please get me some water Jake?

The first is truth apt, the second isn't, Jake in the second does not contribute to the truth condition of the sentence because the sentence does not have truth conditions to begin with; but "Jake" is still meaningful and it refers. I would be surprised, considering that "Jake" refers in both of them, if "Jake" referred in a different way in each of them. The first instance of reference has Jake partaking in the truth condition, the second doesn't, nevertheless Jake still picks out Jake.

I raise this issue because a theory of meaning which associates any term with its effect on a truth condition could not account for the meaning of that term in a non-truth apt expression. At least not without a theory which applied in the case of non-truth apt expressions - at which point I'd wonder why reference changes behaviour between proposition and request without any prompts from our folk understanding of reference.

Though, I imagine we'll have a better discussion if we restrict ourselves to sentences with truth conditions; propositions.

I'm not entirely sure what you are calling "behavioral regimes", but I think it's entirely clear that they are contingently associated to the referent. Clark Kent needed not be a journalist. Consider: DC had a nice line of comics that mimicked Marvel's "What if..." series. In one of those, the rocket containing baby Kal-El did not land in Kansas, but rather near Gotham. So Kal-El was adopted by Thomas and Martha Wayne, instead of Jonathan and Martha Kent. There, he was called "Bruce Wayne" (though, obviously, he wasn't Bruce Wayne, since Bruce Wayne didn't exist in that world, as Thomas and Martha Wayne didn't have a biological child there) and never became a journalist. Still, he was Clark Kent, which is why we can truthfully say (or rather, would truthfully say if those were real people and not fictional characters) "Clark Kent might have been a millionaire in Gotham and never have become a journalist".

Yeah, I agree with that. This is essentially saying, along with Kripke, that reference is stable over counterfactual stipulation (and because of this descriptive accounts of reference fail). What I'd like to make is a distinction between properties of cognitive significance which inform (normatively) the usual functioning of a name in a linguistic community and dispositions held by specific agents towards the referent of a name. The former is a facet of language use in a community, the latter is a mere dispositional relation to the referent by a member of that community. 'Superman' still means Superman even if I think he's a bellend, but 'Superman? Yeah I saw him barking at the moon and riding on Green Goblin's disc last night while punching an old man to death' transgresses the usual function of the word 'Superman' by placing it in a sentence which is unlikely to be produced if we both understand the pattern of reference and Superman's behaviour.

You may say that yes, Superman would still be Superman if indeed he did that (to be honest he probably did in some point in the Crisis on Infinite Earths), but postulating a world in which he did so would be postulating a world with much different linguistic communities insofar as they relate to Superman.

So, the modality associated with 'must' and 'contingent' in my post was closer to a normative 'must' that comes along with the usual function of a word within (the history of) a linguistic community, rather than the counterfactual stipulation associated with Kripke's analysis. We could use 'Jake' to refer to Jim if we wished, but that would go against the usual norms of use. Jim is called "Jim", not Jake. In that sense we must not call Jim 'Jake' or apples "oranges". What is contingent with respect to these uses are, for instance, the age of Jake, how long Jake's hair is, his occupation and so on; counterfactual stipulation allows us to filter out incidental features of reference after a referring relation between Jim and the word "Jim" has been set up. But such filtering only applies to a referring relation when it is already present, and leaves unanswered any questions about the (history of) behaviours of a linguistic community which vouchsafe the reference; the cognitive significance of Superman's part in their form of life.

I suppose this leads to a meta-discussion on what a good theory of reference needs.

@prothero's a good one to ask.

This, I think, goes some way towards assailing ↪fdrake's worries about the Clark-Superman example. Indeed, to some people the different names may carry different information and thus suggest different courses of action (though not to everyone, obviously: if Lois already knows that Clark is Superman, in most contexts it would be indifferent for Batman to tell her that Clark is looking for her or that Superman is looking for her). But this is not a semantic property of the name, so it doesn't tell against Kripke's points. Note that this is also not a "quietist" stance: there may well be a valuable theory to be developed about how semantics interact with cognitive psychology, or even a more general science of information. It just won't be a theory about semantics. — Nagase

I'm not certain that the distinction between referring using Clark Kent and referring using Superman is just a difference in psychological or behavioural disposition towards their referent. If that were the case, I would expect such psychological or behavioural dispositions to be contingently associated with the referent, whereas in this case we need to associate the referent with at least one of two behavioural regimes in order to refer in that way.

Clark Kent is a reporter who is a citizen of Metropolis, Superman is an alien superhero from Krypton. Superman secretly is Clark Kent, and Clark Kent secretly is Superman. These aren't behavioural dispositions of a referrer towards Clark Kent and Superman, they are behavioural regimes of the referent.

The surprise from learning Clark Kent is Superman comes from learning that two isolated patterns of reference actually have the same referent - forcing us to reconcile one's behaviour with the other. While this will change the referer's disposition towards Clark Kent/Superman, it will also connect two series of facts that are still isolated in the linguistic community.

Maybe this illustrates the point better: 'Who is Clarke Kent?' and 'Who is Superman?' can have different answers despite the two expressions co-referring, and the use of 'Clark Kent' to refer does not mirror the use of 'Superman' to refer. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's Clark Kent, obviously.

Whether these patterns of behaviour should be read into the sense of a name, I'm not sure, because I'm not really sure what counts as the semantic content of a name.