I remember reading that article some time ago. Gave it a re-skim. I have two comments on it.

The transformation problem applies in much the same way to money prices and direct prices. What you observe is the money price, and only the money price. Similar theoretical guarantees are required to translate direct price dynamics into money price dynamics. Are they a strictly increasing or decreasing function? No, again it's a complicated relationship. After productive equilibrium is reached, the money price is still characterised as oscillating around the direct price induced by the present socially necessary labour time as expressed in direct price. The means of that expression is left blank - and that absence is the transformation problem rephrased.

Unless I've really missed something.


I think the article misses the mark in terms of monetary theory too.

When we talk about the prices of all commodities, we are by definition leaving one commodity out—the one commodity in the capitalist economy that does not have a price. And what commodity by definition has no price? The money commodity. Since the money commodity serves as the standard of price, it itself cannot have a price. Only if we imagine that money is not a commodity can we talk about the prices of all commodities. Let N equal the total quantity of commodities. The total sum of commodity prices will always leave one commodity out. We can add up the prices only of N – 1 commodities. — Critique of Crisis Theory

This is completely artificial, currency exchange as the exchange of money commodities is a thing, you can't just say people are actually exchanging the raw general equivalent as values aren't exchanged, money prices as an expression of their direct prices in the exchange are.

Have you seen that scene in Rick and Morty where Rick sets the value of the Intergalactic Currency to 0 and immediately this makes the galactic economy crash? It's worth 1 of itself, but also 2 of itself and so on... Nevertheless goods would still exchange at relative values and there's an equivalent form which can root a general equivalent again - just set it back to 1, call it a Galabuck, use all the same infrastructure and you're done. The impossibility of this in the real world is precisely why the network of money commodity exchange can't be externalised from the 'real' economy of commodities; which has real manifestations like inflation from the California gold rush or (appropriately distributed as in the theory) quantitative easing.

Yes, I recall one fairly valid criticism of Marx's concept of Value was that a commodity with a higher socially necessary labor time should correlate to higher prices, but this is often not the case as you point out. But to Marx's credit, his general method throughout Capital is to work from an abstract ideal of Capitalism, outside of external forces, in order to demonstrate that Capitalism, as posited by the Bourgeois economist, in its abstract-logical workings, contains internal contradictions, manifesting themselves into substantive conflicts. But I think this also limits his arguments in some areas as well. — Maw

I think we said essentially the same thing. I'd want to stress that the 'abstract ideal' is fundamentally a process model of capital, and what makes it still relevant today is that it still captures the essential features of what it's aimed at. It had some predictive validity too, even if the rate of profit behaviour isn't exactly as pictured. Maybe time will bear it out though.

Another weakness in Marxist theory (not of Marx) is that it's got almost no emphasis on econometrics - if you give a well read Marxist an economic time series they'll probably have absolutely no idea on how to make predictive inferences for it except in very broad qualitative terms. I think this is mostly an institutional feature of Marxism in the academy though; it's the anthropologists, sociologists, historians and political scientists that study Marxist theory, rather than econometricians or systems theorists (despite the latter's historical indebtedness to Marx).

So is Crises of Neoliberalism worth picking up then? I remember when it first came out, but it's been sitting in my Amazon cart for many years. — Maw

I don't remember much of it if I'm honest - I gave it a skim read because I felt familiar enough with the account by proxy at the time. But it is well respected.

As far as I'm concerned, the point of Harvey is that it's not like that in Marx either. Value might be produced during the process of production but is realised in the market and when it's not, you'll eventually have a crisis. — Πετροκότσυφας

Exactly. Marx uses the distinction a lot, and clearly knew that changes in value don't have to correspond to changes in price. Nevertheless, some features of Marx's account require a mathematical correspondence between them - like the initial analysis of cotton looms suggesting direct proportion between value and price - and later on that surplus value, fixed and variable capital are conformable and enter into a ratio. There is a lot of wiggle room in how you quantify these things, which leads Kliman and his programme to affirm the falling rate of profit and Levy and Dumenil to reject it.

I never could square myself with it though. Value's clearly something quantitative as it tracks socially necessary labour time, but it doesn't have a particularly simple relationship with price. There are situations where the price can be much lower than the one suggested through socially necessary labour time (like what results from a production subsidy), but there are also situations where it can be much higher (like an import tariff). Supply and demand fluctuations can produce the same effects. So it's not like one is a simple function of the other in reality.

The only way I can see it as empirically relevant is as a baseline expectation or a model of how things would work in the absence of such externalities. So it does reasonably well when you blur out the specifics; the account Marx gives prefigures differences in productive efficiency and production cost facilitating price undercutting, and the induced tendency to replace workers with fixed capital while repressing wages. Those two things, together with the assumption that the expenditure of labour power is the sole site of surplus value creation, suggest the falling rate of profit argument. But people who believe in that are pretty niche. Crises of Neoliberalism is the paradigmatic account (last time I was involved in academic Marxist circles anyway) of contemporary capitalist crisis, which goes against the falling rate of profit argument. But there are those like Andrew Kliman (The Failure of Capitalist Production) and his research circle which still go for it. The central hub here is the discussion of the transformation problem.

I think the trick with reading Capital usefully is to keep track of the context Marx is assuming for his models; which hold (in some sense) 'in the aggregate' and absent the 'counterveiling tendencies' in his account of capital. So I'm still very fond of the focus on production, the logical structure of money, and treating the commodity and wage labour as the essential features of capitalism. But seeing how those things actually work requires studying of real political contexts and distribution networks, contra 'orthodox Marxism' and those who still hate 'reformism' and have Naxalite wet dreams.

Marx has his own value theory, it starts with the distinction of use value and exchange value, that road leads up to the different historico-logical money forms that culminates in money as the general equivalent, then some of its uses. There's a thread developed in tandem (in contradiction if you prefer) in Vol 1 concerning labour and production, where the 'value' (not price) of a commodity halves (or at least decreases, depending on reading) if the socially necessary labour time for the commodity halves.

Coming from this is the idea of 'surplus value' coming from labourers producing things worth more than it takes to pay them to make those things, which Marx gets at through the distinction between labour time (how long it takes to make a thing) and labour power (the capacity to work).

I don't see how anyone could come through Capital without registering the distinction between value and price.

You've made lots of threads with low effort contentless original posts. I will keep deleting them. I left one locked after I gave the explanation of why they were deleted. This one will be locked and sunk too.

You can't make an opening statement entirely out of unsubstantiated metaphors. This is the reason why I deleted the rest of your threads - lack of philosophical content. Read the guidelines, structure whatever ideas of teleology or other themes you want to explore or exhibit, then write them as well as you can.

Finished Monbiot's Out of the Wreckage, How Did We Get Into This Mess? They're argued with excellent rhetorical flourish but are a little weak on discussion of source material, most of the time the source material looks quite transparent though so I'm still impressed.

The strongest essay I remember is on compound growth and differential resource consumption - convincingly arguing that overpopulation is a massively exaggerated problem when tied with an analysis of differences in consumption and consumerism. @Baden's made this point with similar alacrity before - that a high and increasing number of consumers is the root assumption of the overpopulation scare. The world can stand more, a lot more, people with their needs and sensible wants met but it can't stand the economic arrangement that enables the number of suburban McMansion SUV yatch parties to be sustained or grow.

I followed with Harvey's 17 Contradictions of Capital, which while attempting to provide a contemporary entry point to Marxist theory unfortunately doesn't jettison the theoretical jargon of alienation and value theory, so it's still unfortunately mostly another good contribution to Marxist scholarship. The major rhetorical contribution it makes is that it does 'dialectical analysis' from the ground up and without much reference to Hegel. Making the Marxist notion of contradiction something intuitive - as a conflict of interests or prescribed actions inherent in a doctrine or social arrangement - which nevertheless does all the theoretical work it's supposed to is pretty excellent.

The most memorable insights are the maxim 'capital doesn't resolve its contradictions, it moves them around geographically'. It comes with a discussion of how conditions in sweatshops in Asia and Africa are still much the same as Marx describes in the factories of England in his day. That he does this without leaning on 'third-worldism' as a political paradigm is refreshing.

After that, I finally manned up and decided to tackle Manufacturing Consent. Besides the methodological criticism that the authors are using training data as test data, it's still a very well documented exhibition of how the media, the government and influential/monied groups (some of them media organisations) construct the meaningful context and acceptable bounds of political discussion. Considering mainstream skepticism of the media and its relationship to governments in the US, Europe, Russia and Australia, it reads as a little outdated. I'd like if someone could tell me where to look to find discussion of how 'skepticism management' fits into this as a companion piece - one needs only to look at the memetic character of 'fake news' to see that the game's changed a bit since the book was published.

if we start with a particular ontical context, and then cite the general transcendental conditions that make ontical context possible, there is no way to make known or explicitly get at the specific existentiell possibilities, involvement structures, specific ways of being concernfully engaged, specific moods that disclose things as that ontic context, etc so as to explain what the specific meaning or Being of that particular ontic context/event/occurence/entity is. Heidegger's analysis gives no criterion for determining these specificities given that all we have to work with is a particular ontic context and the general transcendental structure of Dasein. So even though a strict-Heideggerian explains the broken-leg example in terms of the general structure of Dasein, he still hasn't explained with enough specificity. While Heidegger does not deny that there is such specificity, he doesn't give a clear or satisfactory method to explicitly get at it. AHHH interesting. — Dan123

I think this is close to what I meant, but articulated much better. I'll try and build on it. But at a later date. This is fun, thanks. :)

Also, Are most people on this forum grad students/philosophy students/professors, etc? People who just enjoy philosophy? Both? — Dan123

There's a mix. Most of the long term members have been studying philosophy as a hobby for a long time, AFAIK practicing philosophers are pretty rare on here. But also AFAIK there are quite a lot of people who studied philosophy, at least a little, at university. If you're interested in Heidegger or Wittgenstein people here are generally motivated to discuss and quite well informed on either or both - you just happened to strike upon an interest in Heidegger scholarship shared by a fair few regular members.

Ok so your main beef with Heidegger is, not only that his existential-ontological analysis can't account for many ontical contexts, but more so that he considers many aspects of life/what it is to be human to be 'ontic' that are in fact ontological and as such necessarily constitutive of life/everyday life/etc. In a sense I think I agree with you on the body: it seems that the body is for the most part always-already 'linked up with the whole of me' as I engage in milieus of meaning. If the world is opened up to me in such a way, my body automatically operates within the understanding that it helps to co-constitute, I guess. Though I think, for Heidegger at least, cases like broken-legs or the workday are for the most part already covered by the ontological analysis: a broken-leg disclosed as "broken" or how a broken-leg effects my self-identity is grounded on my-self understanding that is already in turns of mood-related and socially-constituted possibilities that I project and am thrown into. The workday can be explained as what it is by the web of spatial and social referential structures to which I am embedded and understand my workday through. — Dan123

I explicitly anticipated this kind of response in my post, though it was a long post so it's understandable it wasn't a particularly memorable part. But I'll use that you picked up on the theme to give some more elaboration of my point.

What I already wrote:

Now for the more interesting way to charge Heidegger with solipsism, you have to change solipsism's meaning a bit to 'shows insufficient regard or emphasises poorly the role other people play with regard to human subjectivity'. More precisely, the allegation is that the formal conditions of Dasein, like thrownness, fallenness, projection, dispositions, comportments etc despite being ontologically primary and thus present in each person, Dasein's ontical constitution vis-a-vis social organisation and the Other (or more general ontical constraints like the body) is given insufficient emphasis. Problems here look like: the formal character of facticity does little to facilitate the understanding of how the workday effects people, the formal character of thrownness does not suffice to facilitate the analysis of moods like depression or joy. The analysis of Being and Time agglomerates the specifics of these things to their general constitution - and this is an inherent feature of the method Heidegger uses. Recursive exposition of transcendental/conceptual structure. — fdrake

You played the agglomerative part out exactly here:

Though I think, for Heidegger at least, cases like broken-legs or the workday are for the most part already covered by the ontological analysis: a broken-leg disclosed as "broken" or how a broken-leg effects my self-identity is grounded on my-self understanding that is already in terms of mood-related and socially-constituted possibilities that I project and am thrown into.

This is pretty much what I'm pointing out. When you have a how question, the Heideggerian response is to immediately to give its transcendental preconditions without batting an eyelid on the more mechanistic/procedural aspects of the question. If you will allow a change in vocabulary, I think of it like: saying that X is grounded in Y is saying that Y is (a) condition of possibility for X (or that they are co-primordial). But! X being grounded in Y should contain an account of how X is grounded in Y as a procedural component of an entity's behaviour. Heidegger, and Heideggerian analysis, very rarely actually does this.

So, a question like - how does a broken leg impact a person's life? It's answered just like you did: we've already taken this into account with the thrown-ness/disposition couple. Ontologically sure, Heidegger's doing the job as he sees it well - ontically that's just saying 'a person's got a broken leg and it effects them somehow'. The epoche Heidegger performs on the ontic makes it very difficult to ask this kind of question.

Maybe the epoche is fine, but the recursive exposition (hermeneutic spiral/circle) he does needs to permit of taking comparatives or ontic differences as a theme, which is a bit of a change from the 'first philosophy' feel of pre-turn Heidegger.

And asking this kind of question is really important, it opens up questions of comparative differences in Daseins - for example, people with broken legs or chronic mobility issues evaluate distances differently from those who are closer to the every-day Dasein. Is this a mere ontical difference, or does the fact that human senses of spatiality differ over individuals highlight a weakness in dealing with humanity only as far as the analysis of a strictly generic individual (which never actually exists)?

The thinking of being is just as much the thinking of beings as of being alone.

Or, just for shits and giggles: Being being beings is being being.

So, there are (at least) three potential ways to accuse Heidegger of being a solipsist. The first two are misinterpretations, but the third interpretation may be well founded. One by one, they are... — Dan123

I'm sure there are more than 3 ways to do it, but those 3 jumped out at me. The first two were things I've seen before on the internet, the last one is me wrestling with some discomfort I've grown to have with Heidegger's thought since I stopped seriously studying him.

1) to interpret Dasein as a present-at-hand entity/Cartesian subject. Take Being-with to be an internal capacity for 'grasping the social relationships/actions/meanings/etc within my subjective experience'. All the people and things I encounter within my experience are made possible by my internal capacities. My experience is private, and my experience is all there is or all there that can be known to be, ergo solipsism. — Dan123

Yeah, I think that's pretty close to what I intended with the first subargument. If you start an analysis of human being from the perspective of a knowing subject and known objects you end up missing a lot. So what I tried to do here is frame solipsism as arising from (what Heidegger thinks) is a Cartesian outlook on human being; as a subject with its 'internal' properties - seemings/sensations - and objects with their 'external' properties -density, luminescence, colour etc-. Then I applied an abbreviated form of Heidegger's critique of Descartes to the idea. Which I think pulls out the rug from under the feet of people who would claim Heidegger is solipsistic in this way.

SEP has a very good exegesis of Heidegger's critique of Descartes here, but it might be more useful as a consolidation for someone who is already comfortable with the vocabulary. Its key quote is:

What we ‘first’ hear is never noises or complexes of sounds, but the creaking waggon, the motor-cycle. We hear the column on the march, the north wind, the woodpecker tapping, the fire crackling… It requires a very artificial and complicated frame of mind to ‘hear’ a ‘pure noise’. The fact that motor-cycles and waggons are what we proximally hear is the phenomenal evidence that in every case Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, already dwells alongside what is ready-to-hand within-the-world; it certainly does not dwell proximally alongside ‘sensations’; nor would it first have to give shape to the swirl of sensations to provide a springboard from which the subject leaps off and finally arrives at a ‘world’. Dasein, as essentially understanding, is proximally alongside what is understood. — Heidegger, (Being and Time 34: 207)

The references I was making to the private language argument are really for @Banno, who is a big fan of Wittgenstein but thinks that Heidegger's phenomenology is solipsistic. I didn't develop the reference much, it was more of a signpost to mark that Heidegger's account of being-with is very consistent with the semantic externalism that comes from Wittgenstein's private language argument. And such externalism is a pretty good answer to solipsism - which minimally claims that 'it's all in the head'.

2) to reduce The Others I encounter within-the-world to myself. I always-already project meaning such that everything I encounter is of sense or intelligible to me in terms of my concerns/projected possibilities/motivations or goals - "We're personally involved whenever we're involved". That is to say, I am the kind of Being who always and only understands through personal involvement [As essentially Becoming, I am thrown into a world that I grasp in turns of projected possibilities-for-myself. This opens up a world of sense that discloses to me that which I encounter.] Being-with is part of the formal structure of the possible social ways that I am involved or embedded in-the-world-that-is-personal-and-only-personal (where "personal" does not equate to 'private', but to "in terms of my concerns/goals/myself/etc". This is close to 1), without the Cartesianism, I think. — Dan123

I think that's a good summary of the distinction between private and personal. That what's personal is still lit up upon a shared background is part of being-with. Whatever we do is always social, and the structures of the world are shared. Again, this has a symmetry with Wittgenstein's conceptions of rule following and externalist consequences of the private language argument:

Directly following the rule-following sections in PI, and therefore easily thought to be the upshot of the discussion, are those sections called by interpreters “the private-language argument”. Whether it be a veritable argument or not (and Wittgenstein never labeled it as such), these sections point out that for an utterance to be meaningful it must be possible in principle to subject it to public standards and criteria of correctness. For this reason, a private-language, in which “words … are to refer to what only the speaker can know—to his immediate private sensations …” (PI 243), is not a genuine, meaningful, rule-governed language. The signs in language can only function when there is a possibility of judging the correctness of their use, “so the use of [a] word stands in need of a justification which everybody understands” (PI 261). — SEP, Article on Wittgenstein

which is from here. Being-with has a normative dimension which operates upon the background of shared meanings (linguistic or expressive patterns) and a shared structure of the world. This is why I tried to frame being-with as sociality outside of the Heidegger jargon. I thought that framing it as sociality would achieve three things:

(1) Everything about meaning occurs socially and comes with a normative component.
(2) Sociality occurs at the same time as we do stuff, even in the absence of others; it's a capacity we're always exercising.
(3) If we didn't have the potential to be social in this way, we wouldn't have any social phenomena to begin with.

(1) and (2) link it to the previously referenced semantic externalism, (3) goes a little deeper into the account and references the distinction between sense and intelligibility; we make sense of the world in the same sort of ways because we inhabit the same world and understand that world in the same sorts of ways.

So onto the final subargument, (3).

3) to view Being-with as an aspect of Dasein's existence structure that leaves much to be desired in the explaining-subjectivity/sense-through-others-department (can't believe I just wrote that). Heidegger's existential-ontological analysis of what it is to be a human-being does not A) satisfactorily ground nor account for a vast array of different ontical contexts that Dasein can find itself in or B) give us any interesting or advancing insight into the more specific structure of many ontical contexts so as to tell us something important about them. "Ontological structures and substructures" such as spatiality and Being-with don't tell us much of anything interesting or relevant about many ontical contexts. — Dan123

I think of my third subargument as a kind of 'master criticism' of Heidegger that all my other discomforts with his metaphysics fall under. I think it is true that Heidegger passes over the richness of things which are 'merely ontic', but the main thrust of my criticism is that this is a necessary feature of his methodology rather than an incidental one, and that this stops him from seeing how some 'merely ontic' phenomena actually take part in the ontology of human being.

The story I'm trying to tell here is that there are some really glaring omissions from his phenomenology; there's the body, there's human development, there's parts of the everyday which have huge consequences for the understanding of human being like the workday and fatigue. These are incidental features in Heidegger's phenomenology; their specifities get absorbed by the features of facticity.

The workday, for example, is fundamentally a thrown-ness disclosed through varying dispositions rather than one of the biggest constraints on human activity with its own character. You can say the same about an illness - say broken legs, it'll change the phenomena which realise thrown-ness and projection but you won't notice that distances expand, it brings about conflict in your identity (say if you do sports) etc. This doesn't even begin to deal with the changes brought about in people's lives when they have kids, have chronic mental illness and so on.

The only way you're going to incorporate such things into the ontology of human being is through comparative accounts. You can't get at this stuff through raw formal indication and recursive interpretation - you have to treat people's bodies, moods, illnesses, lives as ontical experiments just as much as you posit human being in general as the subject for analysis to get at human being more thoroughly.

This is why I said such things can only be gotten at comparatively; the structural (ontic) ways human beings differ is just as important as their constitution ceteris paribus for the ontology of human being.

Charging Heidegger with solipsism because of how 'being-with' works is something I've not seen before. I can think of two ways of doing it with misinterpretations, the first boring the second not, and one way of doing it more faithfully to the text.

To get the misinterpretation out of the way, the human standpoint which engenders solipsism - the language game + form of life if you're looking at him from a pragmatic or Wittgensteinian view - just isn't the one that Heidegger's describing with Dasein. The conceptual landscape of solipsism opposes a thinking subject and its sensations from all objects and its properties; they are separated by an uncrossable epistemic boundary. This just isn't the every-day standpoint of a human - which Heidegger denotes Dasein -, in which we knowingly do stuff with things driven by motivations and goals. Framing things the thinking subject + sensed object way occludes most of the questions Heidegger wants to ask.

Heidegger's critique of Descartes operates similarly to this, he indicates that the thinking subject, the objects it encounters in appearance, and their relationship are posited as present-at-hand in the structure that makes solipsism makes sense. Present-at-hand can essentially be read as 'just a thing', which is a bit different from how we relate to things in general - which is always exercising competences in some meaningful context.

Looking specifically at 'being-with', you can translate it harmlessly as sociality - the capacity for social phenomena; making relationships with others, finding others actions' intelligible or meaningful, that kind of thing.

By ‘Others’ we do not mean everyone else but me—those over against whom the ‘I’ stands out. They are rather those from whom, for the most part, one does not distinguish oneself—those among whom one is too… By reason of this with-like Being-in-the-world, the world is always the one that I share with Others. — Heidegger, (Being and Time 26: 154–5)

You can find that quote and more exegesis on SEP here. Far from being solipsistic, for you Wittgensteinians reading it like @Banno, being-with operates like a 'private language argument' on the level of intelligibility rather than sense. Sense is public, but so are the intelligible structures we encounter.

So yeah, that's the first boring misinterpretation. The slightly more interesting second one I see here is:

Just turn the question around. Heidegger drops a little sentence about this the term "Dasein" obviously implies first to be and then to be with, but that this "with" means basically with itself. — Heiko

Which is making an argument like: Heidegger's account of Dasein is solipsistic because it encounters other Dasein in the world, which are equivalent (in an unspecified sense) to Dasein.

It's a bit more interesting, because it highlights a methodological subtlety in Heidegger. When Heidegger's describing Dasein, he's aiming at describing the conceptual structure of our every-day experience - what processes underpin and constitute it. So it is a little confusing to think things like for the general person the life they live is theirs as being equivalent to the live Dasein lives is mine. On one level, this is restating the banality that when something happens to someone, it happens to them. On another, this 'stuff that happens happens to me' is a general feature of human experience, all the stuff that's ever happened as far as my life-world is concerned has involved me - that's just what it means for me to be personally involved in things. We're personally involved whenever we're involved. That second we're is in the ontological register that Dasein inhabits - as a generalised subjectivity, it must be present in us all just as much as each is personally involved.

You augment this conception with 'being-with', which Dasein is always, and you end up with something similar to the private-language argument operating in Heidegger's thought again. Even though everything we experience is a personal involvement, it's fundamentally social since intelligibility and sense are structures of the world we inhabit.

Yes, it can be confusing, but saying being-with is solipsistic is just like saying sociality is solipsistic.

Now for the more interesting way to charge Heidegger with solipsism, you have to change solipsism's meaning a bit to 'shows insufficient regard or emphasises poorly the role other people play with regard to human subjectivity'. More precisely, the allegation is that the formal conditions of Dasein, like thrownness, fallenness, projection, dispositions, comportments etc despite being ontologically primary and thus present in each person, Dasein's ontical constitution vis-a-vis social organisation and the Other (or more general ontical constraints like the body) is given insufficient emphasis. Problems here look like: the formal character of facticity does little to facilitate the understanding of how the workday effects people, the formal character of thrownness does not suffice to facilitate the analysis of moods like depression or joy. The analysis of Being and Time agglomerates the specifics of these things to their general constitution - and this is an inherent feature of the method Heidegger uses. Recursive exposition of transcendental/conceptual structure.

With a little less jargon, Heidegger's placed himself methodologically as describing an everyman, which he terms Dasein. Dasein is the name of the conceptual structure of human subjectivity. So while he's operating from a place that will give insights into one regime of commonalities of people - ontological structures and substructures - perhaps a case can be made that this circumscription of ontology necessarily elides the true alterity of ontical conditions and the role they play in subjectivity. Things like chronic diseases, long term relationships, heartbreak, political involvement, community etc. The shared intelligibility indicated in being-with doesn't ring as relevant in a world where people think and feel so differently, where their minds appear to work with different motivations, with different propensities of moods and so on, but why is this a methodological problem rather than work Heidegger provided the prolegomena for (and many followed in his wake)?

The crux of the matter as I see it is that maybe the conceptual structure of these ontical conditions can only be grasped intellectually and upon reflection, thus as present at hand, but the ontical conditions' effects can be read comparatively into human subjectivity as an ontological feature - like Levinas does with the other and Merleau-Ponty does with the body.

Aww. And I PM'd him (mr Phil) a list of browser based solutions. Nevermind.

Long story short, a thing happens which resists interpretation (or how you use 'habit') so much that it makes a load of difficult problems for everyone involved. Usually these problems are circumvented or ignored and become either an irrelevance after the fact (like canonising) or a suppressed undercurrent (like the long lasting impacts of slavery and racism). Occasionally they're addressed powerfully and when this happens it transforms what people do in its wake; a lived 'solution' to the 'problem' of the encounter.

In academic discourse it works like a paradigm shift brought on by a problem, and the encounter as a stand-alone concept is a lot like a generalisation of a paradigm shift to other strata of phenomena. Like (inter)personal encounters of transformative love, politics or art.

Nah. Encounter in the POMO sense you hate.

I think that post was unnecessarily technical. What I highlighted can be condensed a lot.

While it's true that the formalisms for limits and continuity are stated without reference to the infinite, I think you have to remember the context in which they were made. The epsilon-N criterion for convergence applies to infinite series, the definitions for continuity can be restated in terms of preserving the convergence of infinite sequences. So, it's an excellent bit of tinkering that tames infinity in terms of arbitrary closeness and unboundedness, but the problems it addresses are those which were engendered by an encounter with infinite mathematical objects.

I'd rather not put it like that, as it seems to imply that we need to 'go to infinity' in order to make sense of the limit. Then before we know it, people like the apologist William Craig are butting in making ignorant statements about the possibility of 'going to infinity', as if that actually meant something. — andrewk

I imagine that threads like this are a safe space where we don't need to worry about giving William Lane Craig more misguided ideas about infinity.

Yet limits can be, and usually are in formal maths texts, defined using purely finite concepts. — andrewk

That's the ingenuity in the definitions, really, You can deal with limiting process with the nice substitution of arbitrarily small difference and becoming arbitrarily large (unbounded increase). So yes, what you're saying is exactly correct about the formalism of limits. It neatly avoids infinity as a concept by replacing it with functionally equivalent substitutes, so that when people think about limits it doesn't matter if they think of 1/infinity = 0 or something similar, because you can just say 'I really mean this formalism' rather than the imaginative background that surrounds it.

The formalism also gives you means of defining derivatives and integrals in a manner similar to the original ideas but with the problems regarding infinity and 0 removed. It also, with some approximation theory added, lets you evaluate indeterminate forms through limiting arguments.

We need unconstrained divisibility, but not a notion of infinity. — andrewk

We do need the ability to iterate a process as long as we need to though, even when that need is infinity to produce the limit. If you were asked to terminate a sequence tending to 0, you don't get 0, you get something close to it. Similarly, if you were asked to terminate a divergent sequence, you get something arbitrarily far away from infinity rather than something arbitrarily large. That the whole process - the infinitude of steps - has already terminated is dealt with by the 'for all epsilon' quantifier. Just as we shouldn't ask for the 'last term' of a convergent infinite series, we should involve the infinity of steps in the progression of the series as equivalent to its culmination.

I see it as the utility of dealing with infinitely small increments in pre-rigorous calculus gave a need for a formalism to make sense of them. The formalisms would be wrong if they didn't produce the pre-established sensible ideas of derivatives and integrals.

But it is true that Zeno's paradoxes don't require the real line, infinite divisibility occurs in the rationals first, I was going to bring that up too but I thought it wasn't very relevant to the theme. The reason the real line is the family home of analysis is that it's a complete space (every set with an upper bound has a least upper bound). You don't get that with rationals (think of a sequence of rationals that would converge to Pi or e in the reals then demand that all numbers are rationals, boom, no least upper bound).

I think that point just displaces the debate to another level, we need a number line with no suspiciously convergent looking sequences failing to converge. It's another conceptual repair which seems inevitable or even a priori when considered ex post facto. Which is part of the thrust of the OP - we tinker with mathematical ideas while working with a mathematical canon which is composed by past ingenious tinkering, which is forgotten as math appears as a giant book of pre-established theorems and rules God wrote - as a self sufficient and eternally true realm apart from human activity. Arguably anyway.

This was a reply to a PM by Street, but I'm going to post it here because the discussion here is going in the same direction.

I think there's a way of believing in such a regulative ideal (a Pythagorean-ish one) without hypostatising it to a nascent theory of everything. I don't know exactly what it would entail, but I'd like to be able to have the ability to distinguish good from bad models based off of general but problem specific criteria. The faith in the regulative ideal wouldn't then become a nascent global system, but it would let you espouse sensible regulative ideas - like double blinding and experimental design that accounts for confounding - for subjects of study. Aiming your inquiry towards the phenomena (or imaginative background of a formalism) is kind of an empty regulative idea in that when it is generalised over topics of inquiry it espouses nothing, but when you particularise it there are things which block or impede inquiry (like measurement error) and things which make it grow (like new types of model that work). I think Heidegger's idea of truth is pretty prescient here.

And I would resist having a global system of systems on empirical grounds too; when you look at different topics of inquiry and their methodologies, it's pretty clear that there's as much mismatch as there is commensurability between them. So if you're an anthropologist doing participant observation, that generally won't have much relevance to experimental design or modelling fluxes with differential equations. They speak differently because the phenomena demand it.

A good example of the transcendental illusion brought about by scientific posits is homo economicus; the rationally self interested utility maximiser in a condition of good scarcity falls out of the equations because that's precisely what's assumed to get all this utility maximisation formalism going. Whenever the models are seen to work, it projects truth down to their assumptions (per Lakatos).

Pure mathematics also has a good example of why a complete system is impossible, the very idea of a final theorem which allows everything to be derived from it is silly. The final theorems resemble axiom systems in terms of their function rather than results derived from them. That inquiry into mathematical structures could ever terminate after proving all that is provable is not just curtailed by Godel's theorem and the halting problem - which give a formalistic picture of the bottomless depth of mathematical structures - but also that different applications of mathematics greatly differ in conceptual structure, even when formally equivalent (like cuts and Cauchy sequences in characterising the reals).

I don't think pure mathematicians in general think that they're aiming for an architectonic system of all mathematics, rather they're working in specific domains of objects which are interesting for some reason - which includes relations between structures. But I do think that the structures in pure mathematics behave quite similarly to natural phenomena for the purposes of research; you can be guided by mathematical phenomena in much the same way as you'd be guided by nature or the real. I don't mean this in the Platonic sense that there's an abstract population of regulative mathematical ideals with an illusory substance, but it's certainly true that mathematical objects are suggestive in a similar way to real processes are. The example I used above with cuts and sequences is one I've used a lot to make this kind of point - the cuts emphasise the irrationals as holes in the rational number line, the sequences emphasise the irrationals as a dense set in the number line. So with the cuts formalism it's easier to think about the rationals as an incomplete space (you formalise the holes), with the sequences formalism it's easier to think of the reals as a complete one (you formalise the filling). That holes and fillings are equivalent from the perspective of the real number line is something which can be proved, and it's pretty nice, regardless of the different imaginative backgrounds for each formalism.

The danger is in 'transcendental illusions' fostered by successful modelling so that one begins to believe that the phenomenon at hand is essentially (in it's 'being') modelable, and that the universe as such is calculable qua encompassing cosmos (rather than Deleuze and Guatarri's/Joyce's 'Chaosmos' - perched half-way between chaos and cosmos).
— StreetlightX

Even that mathematical objects are computable in principle is an illusion. Real numbers which can be approximated with arbitrary precision by an algorithm - computable numbers - take up 0 volume in the real number line.

It is true, however, like with Rosen's highlight that Borel sets are nongeneric in the power set of the reals, that the objects which mathematicians study are rarely generic mathematical objects. It's just true that the interesting ones are sufficiently well behaved, that's what makes them interesting. Of course, some people like to catalogue counterexamples of structures - like there's a book called Counterexamples in Topology which is a catalogue of thwarted intuitions between mathematical formalisms of 'nearness' of point like objects in a space. The ones that are studied are non-generic precisely because the generic ones thwart useful analogies and relations of properties.

So what the Zeno paradoxes essentially mark is the irreducibly of incommensuribility. Making the irrationals the limit of a converging series of rationals in order to save commensuribility is a bit like trying to suppress a half inflated balloon: short of breaking the balloon, all one can ever do is shift the air around. One of the take-aways from this is that the very idea of the (continuous) number-line is a kind of fiction, an attempt to glue together geometry and arithmetic in a way that isn't actually possible (every attempt to 'glue' them together produces artifices or problems, either in the form of irrationals, or later, in the form of Zeno's paradoxes - and, even further down the line, Godel's paradox). — StreetlightX

I'd draw a distinction between paradoxes of intuition and paradoxes of formalism, not that they're mutually exclusive. Paradoxes of intuition are what occur when a mathematical idea is a very strange one to imagine, paradoxes of formalism are what occur when a mathematical construct has strange provable properties. Paradoxes of intuition can be posited as resolved for the further development of mathematics related to the paradox, paradoxes of formalism act as a roadblock to further development.

Zeno's paradoxes are paradoxes of intuition. This is because it's quite easy to circumvent Zeno's paradoxes with sufficiently precise definitions of what limits and continuity are; the celebrated epsilon-delta and epsilon-N constructions of Weirstrass. You can go on as if the paradoxes are resolved because pure mathematical inquiry is largely a conditional enterprise; given these assumptions (which characterise a structure), what can be shown and what does it do? You can posit yourself past the paradoxes if you so wish, and as is usually done.

Real numbers in either case aren't paradoxes of intuition any more - they are widely accepted. The historical/cumulative nature of mathematical development brushes issues of intuition and imagination; insight about what mathematics should do; aside. So if you ask someone with mathematical training to picture a number system, they'll give something like the integers and something like the reals as their paradigm cases. The reals are treated differently than the whole numbers because they're a natural starting point for the field of mathematical analysis; which, with a coarse brush, is a study of continuity and limits. The historicality of mathematics gives playing about with axiomatic systems a retroactive effect on the very intuitions that mathematicians have, and thus what seems like a fruitful avenue for further study.

The 'cut' issue Wittgenstein is highlighting is a feature of the Dedekind cut construction, with that formalism it isn't immediately clear that the irrational numbers are a dense set in the number line (which means there's an irrational arbitrarily close to every other number), whereas the sequential construction presents the density of the irrationals in the reals in a natural way; it piggybacks on top of the density of the rationals in the real numbers; which is clear from how the decimal representation of numbers works.

I also wouldn't emphasise a contemporary disjunct between arithmetic and geometry - when you teach them to kids they're presented in an essentially unified context of Cartesian algebra (the stuff everyone is exposed to with functions and quadratic equations etc); where arithmetical operations have geometric analogues and vice versa. This is after giving them the prerequisite basic arithmetic and basic geometry.

Cartesian algebra is posited as 'after' the resolution of Zeno's paradoxes, as while it works it sweeps those issues under the rug. The same goes for calculus; which, again with a coarse brush, can be taken as the relationship between the arithmetic of arbitrarily small and arbitrarily large quantities through limiting processes.

In contrast, Godel's incompleteness theorems, treated as a paradox, are a paradox of formalism. They mathematically show that there are limits of using formal systems to establish properties of formal systems. You're either inconsistent or incomplete, and if you can show you're consistent you're not consistent. Any formal system that would circumvent Godel's theorems has to do so by being out-with the class of systems to which Godel's theorems apply. Contrast Zeno's paradoxes, which stymie some intuitions about any treatment of infinitesimals. but formally prohibit no current formalisations of them.

Just wanna come back and address these together as they all hit on similar points that I think deserve to be expanded upon. The idea as I understand it is this - there is in fact one way to 'save' the assumption of commensurability after the introduction of the irrationals, and it is this: to treat irrationals as the limit of a convergent series of rational numbers. In this way, we don't actually have to deal with incommensurate values per se, only rationals (Rosen: "At each finite step, only rationalities would be involved, and only at the end, in the limit, would we actually meet our new irrational. This was the method of exhaustion...") — StreetlightX

Something under-appreciated about the mathematics of limits, which shows itself in the enduring confusion that 0.99... isn't equal to 1, is that when you're evaluating the limit of something; all the steps to reach that limit have already happened. So 'every finite step' misses the mark, as the limit is characterised as after all steps have been done. This means when you characterise irrationals as convergent sequences of rationals, the infinity of the sequence iterates has been 'done in advance'. If you truncate the series at some point you obtain an approximation to the limit, but really the limit has 'already been evaluated' as soon as you write it down. Similarly, you can conjure up the reals by augmenting the rationals with all such sequences; since the sequences have already terminated in advance.

Sorry @Srap Tasmaner!

I quite like imagining the beetle being there though. A shadow cast by language equivalent to its agreed upon shape. A spilling of ink with each stroke of the pen. A useful metaphor of meaning/intention/mental state as a composite which we often use something like in real life ('what did you mean by this', 'when you said that, what did you intend?'). It's very close to working like this when two people are earnestly disagreeing like in the thread. People try to triangulate on intended meaning. Similarly in a relationship conflict, understanding intentions is often a good way of addressing it.

While you can read PI 199-201 as the culmination of an argument about mental states not having expressible patterns, a general skepticism about meaning and a whole host of other things, I take it to be mostly suggesting to pay serious attention to what you're doing so that you don't end up framing things in a stupid way. With reference to the 'queer process', the only thing which made it objectionable is that looking at the conditions of possibility with respect to an inappropriate framing device; looking for underlying features of language games with much different structures. Every standpoint holds all else equal on its contours.

Stupid framing is probably more often achieved on here than in the literature; endless threads of silly questions with horrible framing because the framing is treated as transparent. Of course the use is present in 'some sense' and isn't equivalent to a deliberate interpretation. Ironically enough different dogmatically held Wittgensteinian positions are probably symptomatic here.

There being a way of following a rule 'which is not an interpretation' connotes the resistance people feel with language - gesturing towards hereditary and transforming uses followed again by us (while 'spilling ink' as above) - while simultaneously using it adaptively for our situated desires. This exposes that language is always (already) public as much as it enables the interpretation of language as a series indifferent to particular senses or followed rules; both of which are grists to its mill.

In contrast to (my version of) Sam I like to stress the opacity of language, how it resists our uses through heredity, and how the undercurrents (box rattling = beetle) make us navigate it. Probably because this is how I see it as relating to philosophical methodology.

Mental content and opinion expression is a reasonable approximation to philosophical discourse. When what someone wants to do or express with their language (their opinion) and how they use what's available to do that (how they make the point). But it frames things badly when trying to use this rough and ready approximation to do philosophy of language, linguistics or philosophical methodology/metaphilosophy.

I like this. I think it highlights that all of the things which we build or do with language have piggybacked on other things bodies do. I think this is somewhat related to the Heideggerian distinction @Arne referenced earlier between sense and intelligibility.

Intelligibility, when referenced on PF, is often expressed as our capacity to 'read off of the world', this is a pretty good characterisation when dealing with humans. So much of what we do with intelligibility has found a voice in our use of language, permitting us externalised memories like customs and traditions, and allowing our habits to shape those externalised memories. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that codification - a transposition of intelligibility into norms of meaning like word use- provides a full account of intelligibility as such. Something must be an understandable part of the world; a patterned being, process or event; in order for us to transpose it into sense and treat it as a goal or guiding direction of use. With more philosophical reference, this is the phenomenological point that intelligibility is a condition for the possibility of sense.

It could be doubted here whether performatives like wedding vows fit into this framework, but intelligibility doesn't care so much for its substrate. A social tradition serves just as well as a throbbing temple in terms of a pattern which can be transposed into language; expression is not the only use of language and performatives attain their sense upon the customs (a form of social pattern) which they inhabit. Again, like in my response to @Sam26, this is intimately related to how types and tokens relate to sense. EG, particular wedding vows attain their sense as wedding vows, wedding vows as a social process attain their sense as commitments of relationship durability and fidelity. The take home message here is that regardless of how language is characterised, sense makes sense upon the background of intelligibility.

I'm feeling particularly self indulgent today, so I want to take that point further. Intelligibility's status as a condition for the possibility of sense doesn't do much to describe its character. It provides the logical structure of the relation between sense and intelligibility but not a functional one. Since intelligibility must be something that humans do, it is always at work, the logical structure of this does not suffice for a positive account of intelligibility. What does a positive account of intelligibility look like, what does it do?

And this is where @unenlightened's nice comic fits in. Intelligibility is a structured relationship between one set of patterns and another. It is a pattern made of correlated patterns in which each correlate has a conformable function. This idea can be projected onto the above account of sense.

We have norms of linguistic acts. EG, there are patterns of word use which becomes associated with the particulars of their use; a fuzzy cluster of relevance for the meaning of each word, a fuzzy syntax with which they are expressed interpretably. Speaking simply, these are patterns of language which we use and whose use is equivalent to language. But what are they for? What tethers the generality and constraints of customs and norms to the proclivities and dispositions which are the driving motivations of language (use)? Something which is intelligible but unexpressed or unperformed, for now. In other words, another pattern. Be it of feeling or sensation for the subject, of a theme blossoming in a painting, or the regularities of natural processes expressed in equations; we live in the liminal space between the customs at work the particularities at play. With every utterance we give voice to the difference between conformability and mismatch; which then serves as another pattern for its own mechanism, yielding the fungibility of meaning as use and the dynamical character of linguistic norms.

I take it that the private language argument shows that, well, language is necessarily social. This means that senses are established with reference to shared phenomena. Initially when people learn how words work, they'll have to mimic how they're used.

What I'm trying to say is that feelings like pain, dread, despair, joy etc are already part of the social ensemble/community of language users. This means that they are public phenomena not just because their senses are fixed with reference to what is shareable, but we inhabit a world where their expressions and embodiment are commonplace. People sufficiently competent with the language that contains those words can understand not just the words as shared, but the feelings underlying them as shared too.

This then means when I say something like 'I have pain in my foot', a feature of the meaning of the phrase is my pain. When I feel that way, it's ground so well trodden that everyone else can discuss my pain. If someone asks 'is it throbbing?' I would reply 'No, it's sharp'. And everyone would know what it meant.

The language game of describing my pain, say, doesn't just consist of expressions whose meanings are established in the community. It also consists in me using those meanings to paint a picture of my pain. In that regard, what I'm aiming at with the descriptions is an adequate account of my pain - the features of the pain guide my expression. This is not to say that the meaning of my expressions is what I intend by them, nor to say that the word pain means my feeling or a set of feelings.

What I'm getting at is, to borrow some Sellars from the recent threads, is that pain here is functioning as a token (the particularities of my expression in the pain discussion language game and how they relate to my current pain) as well as a type (the general patterns which give pain its shared sense). I'm using pain language to express my pain, and thus my pain can't easily severed from the understanding of the words (so long as the interpreter is playing the usual part).

In a similar regard, I'm trying to express my opinion on our disagreement, you're behaving in the way that's expected. We're both working towards a common understanding, which means transforming and expressing both our notions of what's going on. You can treat these posts as examples or attempts (tokens) of expressing my opinion, where my opinion also is functioning as a guiding type. Much the same for pain talk in the way I meant above.

Use is fluid, use modifies the meaning of words, language is dynamic, two competent speakers of English know how to use the word pain just like we can shout 'ow' when we stub our toes. Nevertheless the contours of sense have been determined beforehand, and apparently I cannot mean what I say.

We use established meanings, interpersonal understandings to push the envelope all the time. There's enough of a communal understanding of pain for me to go 'I have a pain in my foot' and people will understand that I'm expressing my pain. I take it as a given that 'I have a pain in my foot' expresses my pain, and thus my pain is bundled up interpersonal project of meaning, interpretation, innovation and habit that makes sense make sense.

What part of saying 'I have pain in my foot' to my partner is private? I'm referring to the pain, she's a competent speaker of English, we both have the prerequisite social background which roots the word pain to pain behaviour...I can express my pain as part of the sense of that phrase.

Note two things about this: First, you've already learned the correct use of the word within a social context; and second, correction is done in a social context. So if you were referring to the pain in your foot, but later I find out that you weren't using the word to refer to pain, but to a feeling of joy, then of course there was no sense to what you were saying. But generally people use such words correctly to refer to their inner experiences, but only after learning how to do it in the social context. — Sam26

Once everyone knows how to use the words, I can say I've got foot pain, and the meaning is the pain? The use is to refer to the pain, meaning is use, so the referent is the meaning... This is rather strange to me. Because on one hand we've used the private language argument -which is a-priori, demonstrating a necessary feature of sense that it doesn't come into contact with any beetles in boxes -, and nevertheless we're using words in a way that makes the pain part of the sense!

I've not been following the thread so I'll be of no help.

I'm trying to see things from the beetle's point of view. People can be quite skilled at feelings talk, to the extent where from the sense of their behaviour; involuntary or habitual expression; you can read their inner states quite well. I take it that we can assess others' states of mind, feelings and emotions from what people say and how they say it, the latter is still part of sense. This is somewhat inferential, as @StreetlightX pointed out, but it can also be an accurate certitude depending on people, feelings, previous experiences etc.

The tendency to associate peering into people's mental lives; how they embody and express dispositions; as some kind of philosophical confusion - rather than something that we do all the time when engaging with each other, is part of what I'm criticising in (what I read as) your approach. So when you say things like:

I agree, although I wonder about the use of mine, i.e., these feelings I have are mine. I think this may generate confusion, viz., the tendency to associate meaning with my feeling, as opposed to the shared social construct of language. There is a tension here that seems to force us to acknowledge that there is a private world, but this private world doesn't give meaning to our linguistic expressions, but it's necessary. We also don't want to restrict language to the point that we don't allow for novel thinking and expression. So sense is not a fixed or contrived border, but moves and expands, but ever so slowly around the fixed point (fixed point may not be the best choice of words) of what we already know or believe. — Sam26

it's actually very clear when I refer to 'my feelings' outside of Wittgensteinian ordinary language analysis, you mean how you feel about things. Or, with a philosophical veneer, you mean something which you take as equivalent to your feelings (not identical). So when I say my piles are a 'sharp, throbbing' pain, you have a very good idea of how I feel if you have the prerequisite experiences and are familiar with the words. 'sharp, throbbing' is my formative transposition of the feeling into language, just like these posts are a formative transposition of how I see us philosophically at odds.

If I were to describe a less common affective state, say 'bodily dissociation' which comes with a chronic illness I have. You could find out what dissociation is and get an idea of what it's like to be in that state. You get 'an idea' of it, but you probably don't get 'the feeling' mapped to a similar one that you have had. What is said of an affective/embodied/sensorimotor state is a good substitute (sense being a good substitute for sensation) for having had that state.

I believe what I've said is in tension with your account. I'm not really sure where, it may just be a difference in emphasis. There's certainly some grit in our oyster, but I need help from you finding out where it is.

However, maybe what you're observing about my concentration on particular Wittgensteinian ideas, is not that I, or anyone else, is neglecting other important aspects of language, but that this emphasis is important to our understanding of philosophy. — Sam26

I think that's a fair appraisal of it. What do you think the differences in our viewpoints are?

Perhaps I missed it, but one point that doesn't seem to come out clearly in your exchange is that language use includes non-linguistic elements, which include private, personal, phenomenal experiences -- however you'd like to put that. People's actual pain is part of the "talking about pain" language-game -- even if only by its absence, as in shamming, lying, exaggerating, etc., and its absence would be important. (The blocks too are part of the builders game.) — Srap Tasmaner

I agree with this absolutely. One of the motivations I had with picking a bone with @Sam26 was to draw attention to the undercurrents of language. There's a lot of expressive, delicious and vital parts of language use that are pulled along by them.

When you have the (( (language game) background ) form of life) schema, it's easy to remove all the passions and ambiguities from use by bracketing them in background and form of life, with the means of bracketing being epistemic access and the public/private distinction. The public/private distinction and that all language is public(izeable) is all well and good, but it's often used in a manner which displaces attention from the background and forms of life and onto followed rules. At least by us armchair philosophers on here.

My posts tried to achieve this by situating the public/private distinction within the use of language and that, often, we spend our time wantonly disregarding it by bringing how the beetle rattles about into the realm of sense. This changes the beetle; passions, moods, sensations, dispositions; from a passive exterior of sense to its guide.

As Banno puts it, we spend our time effing the ineffable.

The way I view this is that all uses of language, even when used in private, even when an inner monologue, even a 'half formed' thought are parasitically social. That is to say they must be expressible in some way, even if that expression is one of the ambiguity or conflict within the 'private' episode. I don't imagine this possibility as something external to language, a contingent fact which happens not to obtain now in a separate possible world.

Instead I imagine it as the ability for a person to put words to their thoughts and feelings with varying degrees of difficulty depending on the thoughts, feelings and how the person inhabits those emotive or thinking states; even when the states themselves are conflicted like cognitive dissonance, deliberation and dysphoria.

So I'm with you insofar as yes, language is necessarily public. And yes, this comes with the idea that senses are historically constrained as a positive feature of their expression (I cannot use this word, but there are many I could use). Also, this comes with agreeing to the idea that rule following is not something that can be 'done' without at least a parasitic dependence on the norms of expression that are in play.

What I'm trying to say is that if I express a feeling and its concomitant behavioural tendencies, that expression can be taken as the expressed feeling with no additional linguistic constraints. You either can or cannot see the aspects put forth in linguistic acts. You might make a new box of correlates, like I have done with dysphoria; something my beetle has never felt. But which it can interpret by correlation, analogy, and notional equivalence.

The privacy of feelings; that all feelings which are felt in my lifeworld are mine; can make it difficult to express the private thing, to guide the possible interpretations with the right words so that the other can cotton on to how that feeling is for me. The same goes for ideas that we have or opinions that we hold; it is always difficult to take the amorphous and half-formed and codify it into our shared canon of experience and language use.

There is a struggle against the trappings of what is shared to express what is novel and singular; what is not already a habit or established permutation of language use. The private/public distinction paints the borders of sense as something demarcated beforehand; as a necessary condition for language use the beetle is not allowed out of the box.

Really, all I have is a suspicion that as uses of language are dynamic, languages evolve, uses are introduced for novel phenomena, and the box the beetle is in shrinks. Just as much as use is a contingent and yet constitutive activity of language, just as much as language is enmeshed in cultural norms, use frames language as the collection of the codified already sensible. Forgetting that use is as much the codification of the new as the reference of the established.

The beetle screams and we are its voice.

Nope.

Is this what you think I'm saying, i.e., that there is some transcendental precondition to word use? Because I definitely don't believe this. — Sam26

I don't think I'm trying to paint a picture of word use where words like pain attach to a pain. To be sure, in cases like the pain in my right leg, I could describe it and it would resonate in some way with you - but this is more of a function of our shared history of language use than any pointing to my pain. The sensation would drive my expressions (motivating how I use language, constraining which words are adequate), but the words never have the meaning of the pain I feel, they don't attach to each other in a bizarre marriage like 'red' and 'red-ness' in the 'sense of the word is identical to the feeling'. Rather, the words do something like correlate with our shared heritage of language and we interpret this fuzzy composite of correlates in a way that links it to feelings I have or have had. It's use all the way down.

By equivalence of pain event with linguistic acts I meant that 'rough accord' you mentioned, in my terms a fuzzy cluster of correlates, which nevertheless enables more precise exposition.

To see if we're disagreeing or not, do you think that the public criterion is a necessary feature of language use? If it is necessary, why is it a necessity?

Bah, quitter.

I'm trying to make the point that the public/private distinction is something that we regularly circumvent in conversation or usual language use. It has a strange position in being a precondition on the types of account that are admissible for the sense of linguistic acts, while doing nothing to limit the expression of sensations, emotions or dispositions. IE that language isn't just shared contingently, it's necessarily shareable. Since events of emotion, disposition or sensation aren't shareable in some sense - you don't feel mine exactly -, they make a poor candidate for the sense of linguistic acts. One reason for this is because your sensations aren't accessible to me; I can't feel how they feel for you. This easily leads to I can't know how they feel for you.

But we can, really. This is because language can be used to express the private, and we can establish an equivalence between a linguistic act and the 'private' event of feeling just by talking about it. This is not to say that the words are the things, or that emotions are things 'attached' to words, but to say that there are much richer senses of equivalence at work in the construction of sense than intimated by the public/private distinction; strict identity. The feelings, insofar as they permit expression, are already 'public'.

Then what I'm trying to say is because the private stuff is already public insofar as the private drives a language game, the distinction dissolves in use.

EG: people had no problem saying 'I felt the same' in your recent thread on dread. This isn't to say that they felt your dread, but that the feeling of dread is already expressible up to posited/established equivalence in the use of language. EG, we can establish equivalence between dreads by matching descriptions with our feelings. Or, as works in general, match the of the word with this or that particular emotion, sensation or disposition that I have had.

Equivalence is a lot richer than identity.

Oh go on, indulge me. How do Lewis and qualia relate to what I said?

I still have no idea what that means, sorry.

I don't understand this either Banno. If it's a joke I don't get the subtext.

I don't understand your post very well. Can you add some more detail please?

I'm not sure of your point here. Are you saying that we have knowledge of private experiences, i.e., "I know I'm in pain?" Let's clear this up first. Much of what your saying I agree with, but this isn't clear to me. I'm specifically referring to your use of the phrase "epistemic access." — Sam26

By epistemic access I imagine a relation between a person and thing such that the person can come to know the nature of the thing. Which is a bit of a fuzzy idea. What I'm trying to say with reference to epistemic access is that what is 'private' is beyond our reach - epistemically inaccessible - and what is public is not.

Then I'm trying to say that this is a bit weird, as that each sensation, disposition or emotion can be made equivalent to a series of expressive linguistic acts. The privation associated with any sensation is only the privation of the event of feeling only ever happening to one person, but absolutely nothing to do with the sense of speech acts about it. This works in the real use of language as if the privation can be circumvented by the use of language (which pace the Wittgensteinian background we're working in is language simpliciter) to treat my pain event as equivalent to another's pain event within a language game.

Another way to put this is the private/public distinction isn't something outside of language, we can go from one to the other by treating a sensation with language; expressing it. This renders the sensation equivalent to the expression despite that the sensation itself is not identical with the sense of the linguistic acts. Equivalence, there, is a rule to be followed and negotiated in talk of feelings and sensations.

I like that this treats language as external; constituted by public criteria, dealing with things (in a general sense) in our shared world; even when describing something internal, allegedly like our mental states. Broadly speaking, linguistic expression draws from and is part of a communal knowledge.

But I don't think this goes far enough. The inner/outer or public/private schema is driven, or perhaps haunted, by a personal criterion of epistemic access. What I mean here is that because it isn't possible to feel another's pain, the language cannot be about, or be have the meaning of, particular instances of pain, only pain insofar as it plays a part in language games.

Which is fine, mostly. We don't feel particular dispositions, emotions or sensations from others, even if two people, A and B, are subjected to the same pin prick, A does not feel the pain that B feels and vice versa. But why should this entail that A's pain and B's pain cannot be part of the language game? Contrast this to A's pain event and B's pain event, which will never be the sense of the words about them. My point is that A's pain event and B's pain event can still be part of a language game, because a comparisons can be made.

Seemingly because A's pain event and B's pain event are not the same event. Is it possible for them to be the same event (not just occur at the same time)? Probably not, at least out of the realm of sci-fi. Why should this entail that A's pain (not A's pain event) and B's pain (not B's pain event) cannot be the subject of a discussion, or the difference between them a driving force in a language game? Again, I read these two things being equivocated as a symptom of epistemic access.

So, what problem do I have with epistemic access being used as a criterion to demarcate that which may be a sense of a word (its use) and that which may not be the sense of a word (the invisible or maybe impossible referent of pain)? Just that epistemic access itself is part of a language game of knowing, philosophically transposed into the realm of language use simpliciter.

If we pay attention to the words people use when describing private sensations, emotions, states of mind, we can establish a kind of equivalence between them. Like two alcoholics on TV describing addiction unfelt by the audience. Establishing equivalence between things is something we do with words.

During the language game of pain comparison, people can offer a lot of adjectives to describe qualities of the pain. Some common ones are; sharp, stabbing, throbbing, blinding, maddening, dull, intense. There are words which connote different intensities of the sensation; like agony and discomfort. Those intensities can clearly be part of the language game, so why not something which is equivalent to the pains themselves within the language game?

If philosophy really is, ultimately, a form of therapy, it would be strange that it cannot discuss the preferences and proclivities which underly every linguistic act. Especially when real therapy is founded upon this idea.

Long story short: epistemic access and establishing equivalence are both part of word use, rather than a transcendental precondition of them.

That's basically what I said. If worlds couldn't access themselves then they wouldn't be a live possibility... with respect to themselves! — MindForged

Yeah, was rephrasing what you said to show we're on the same page.

I don't think I equated actuality with reflexivity, I brought that up when I was trying to think of what else you might have meant by "possibility in this world" Besides physical possibility. I think only on a modal realist's account is actuality just an indexical property. Arguably, that is a really attractive view in how to define actuality, though the rest of the theory is a bit... much. — MindForged

Do you think that the potential energy the rock we've been talking about has isn't actual - part of this world?