also want to reiterate how our education and means of production are involved with each other. Expressed another way, the way we work and what is taught are bound up with each other. A significant change in one is talking about a significant change in the other. — Valentinus

The problem as I see it, having tried to advance education in the past, is that people are really no longer interested in teaching truth. Skills are taught to fit personal and social agenda. If a truth does not fit those agenda, no one wants to teach it in compulsory courses, because no one wants to learn what is against their own agenda, and teachers have no power to teach it. Students dont take the course if its not a valued agenda and elective. As a result, there are no elective courses that dont fit with current agenda either.

The example I chanced upon for this is rather fundamental. Jefferson based his natural rights theory on that of Locke. His argument includes the idea that 'pursuit of happiness' must be a right because betterment of the life of others results in a lasting and more permanent happiness, rewarded in the afterlife if not this one. Similarly liberty allows people to suspend desire and act for the good of others.

In current thought, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are purely hedonistic or otherwise self-oriented entitlements. This required the new deal, and new bureaucracy, you call fascist because the rich no longer saw any reason to support the poor, but instead just wanted to keep as much as possible for themselves.

And the situation is now irreversible because there is total and absolute zero interest in the truth of the USA's natural rights. By extension the founding father's intent cannot even be acknowledged in the supreme court, which to keep the peace instead implements Rousseau's social contract to directions acted in accordance with the will of the people. Other issues aside this has exacerbated the income gap between the righ and poor because there is no contrary force to stop those who have power from gaining more, and those that dont from losing it except palliatives such as legalization of marijuana and so on, enacted in an Huxley style to opiate the masses, while divorcing accountability or action to solve resulting drug problems via a cloak of federalism. So I would agree that the democratic republic in the usa is collapsing and eventually civil war seems inevitable.

Currently the USA military spending is so enormous, we could instead tell every single active soldier just to hand out $5,000/hour to anyone they want. I just want to point out, if we did that, no one would ever attack the USA again and we'd be the most popular nation in the world. the entire planet would rush to our defense if we ever needed it. That's simply to say how absurd it is to think a general should be president too. The inanity has already exceeded all bounds of reason.

I think actually intent itself is a motivation caused by desire towards an objective, and a goal is the result of achieving that objective.

The problem is that too many people have made an emotional investment in what they believe. They have connected their emotional state with their beliefs. It's not so much that they need to be right to be happy, it's that the belief itself makes them content, or that they are "disposed" towards a particular belief because other beliefs simply put them off and they can't mount a proper argument against it. It's just how they feel about it. — Harry Hindu

That's because people commonly think what they believe true shouldn't be contradicted by fact. Philosophers should be able to consider their beliefs are wrong, regardless of facts demonstrating them true, and vice versa.

I think your definition of persuasion is a good start. As I tried to explain, I don't think it has anything to do with propaganda.

no wonder that we have no brains left to think with. — Bitter Crank

that's exactly how I feel about myself 99% of the time. I feel like all the thinking I have was actually inserted into me by other people. Some have tried to dissuade me of that, but the feeling persists!

For starters this discussion really depends on what we mean with persuasion. — Benkei

Well, that was what I was trying to say. Rational persuasion makes no difference in methods of 'brainwashing,' and all propaganda is about brainwashing. It takes a love or hatred in a situation, and a possibly unrelated condition, then it repeats that the condition causes the love or hatred in all situations, based on the example situation.

After sufficient repeating, the brain is conditioned to associate the feeling with the condition. It's purely Pavlovian.

It has nothing to do with persuasion.

No discussion of Bernays, especially with reference to Nazism, should be absent of Hitler's own statement about effective propaganda:

"Propaganda must always address itself to the broad masses of the people. All propaganda must be presented in a popular form and must fix its intellectual level so as not to be above the heads of the least intellectual of those to whom it is directed. The art of propaganda consists precisely in being able to awaken the imagination of the public through an appeal to their feelings, in finding the appropriate psychological form that will arrest the attention and appeal to the hearts of the national masses. The broad masses of the people are not made up of diplomats or professors of public jurisprudence nor simply of persons who are able to form reasoned judgment in given cases, but a vacillating mass of human children who are constantly wavering between one idea and another. The great majority of a nation is so feminine in its character and outlook that its thought and conduct are ruled by sentiment rather than by sober reasoning. This sentiment, however, is not complex, but simple and consistent. It is not highly differentiated, but has only the negative and positive notions of love and hated, right and wrong, truth and falsehood.
Propaganda must not investigate the truth objectively and, in so far as it is favorable to the other side, present it according to the theoretical rules of justice; yet it must present only that aspect of the truth which is favorable to its own side.
The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted, and their understanding is feeble. On the other hand, they quickly forget. Such being the case, all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped formulas. These slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward.
Every change that is made in the subject of a propagandist message must always emphasize the same conclusion. The leading slogan must of course be illustrated in many ways and from several angles, but in the end one must always return to the assertion of the same formula."
- Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler (Berlin, 1928)

While Bernays did present propaganda as a positive force in advertising to help people, for example, like eating margarine instead of butter, the other side of his method has had equal force in driving hatred.

Perhaps in rational communities, you would be right. But with respect to the kind of persuasion Hitler is describing, there is NO PERSUASION. It is an OUTRIGHT STATEMENT OF SIMPLE BINARY FALSITY, repeated sufficiently that no one can escape thinking of the falsehood in association with the target. As Hitler, says, there is no objectivity in it. It's brainwashing. It has nothing to do with argument at all. A lot of people seem to miss that.

American culture tends to produce people who are overconfident, given the anti-intellectualism and faux intellectualism this country seems to specialize in — Chany

While I agree with you in principle, I think it is the other way around. In the USA, lower-class culture teaches children that intelligent and educated people are elitist and untrustworthy, so as adults they tend to believe themselves more successful than they are. There is a paradox, though, that people who wrongly believe their skills in language and maths to be higher are putting themselves in the class they despise. More interesting is the reverse tendency for skilled people to underestimate their abilities, which seems less explicable in cultural terms. It seems more explicable that people with more knowledge have a better idea of the limits of knowledge.

There are justifications under natural rights to prevent market monopolization

Only, I dunno, I'd call "entailed meaning" or something like that, meaning that actually does require the surrounding context to make sense of. Things that require inference, thought, putting things together. — Wosret

It's interesting you raise the point in parallel, I had just answered this in a comment currently at the end of https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/1349/wittgensteins-mysticism-or-not-/p1 here, in response to the example in the post at the beginning of the thread.

you're welcome.

While I agree with you along lines of principles of rationality, if you have ever tried to have an argument about whether it is raining or not with a hungry wife, I'd hope for your sake you'd reach a different conclusion. A better solution, from my own experience, is that if your wife is on a diet, then cook very, very slowly!

Marchesk suggested 'it is raining' as an example of a proposition which can be known as either true or false, and I constructed the conversation in reply to him.

That's very well put, but all it seems to be saying is that sometimes we're not interested in the truth value of a stated proposition, or its boundary conditions, or a scientific account. Instead, the proposition encodes for another unstated meaning. — Marchesk

I had to think about this quite a bit, sorry for the intermission. What you suggest is a rational solution--and rationally desirable. But what I conclude is that there is no way to determine what the uncoded meaning is. If you tried asking Alice, she could very well deny she was hungry. If you tried asking Bob, he could very well deny he was feeling lazy. Bob could say he was too busy. Alice could say she just wants to get jobs done so she can relax.

So I thought about whether it could be possible that history of prior occurrences could in some way result in a better prediction. But I can't think how that works either, from an axiomatic perspective, because people can say the same thing for different reasons at different times, and there is no clear method to determine if the intent. In fact, according to best of game theory, the intent for the same utterance, or the utterance for the same intent could well have been altered by the speaker since the last occurrence, in order to 'win the game.'

This is in fact why W. says the connection with reality is 'mystical.' There is no way to determine unstated meanings, so in the end we have to hope for some mystical connection between Alice and Bob that would enable them to understand each other regardless what they actually say, and all that can actually be known is what they say.

The inference is, therefore, methods of translation to some scientific account cannot ever be certain that the inference they make is correct; as I observed in a prior article in truth, the most that scientific theories can ever do is not be unproven.

That is because you started by saying that a desire for acts of kindness and love are not the reason people want to keep private experiences themselves. As I said already, part of the point of the positivist attitude, and the reason why 'positivism' was chosen as a label, is that the general experience of the human race has been that cultures which encourage acts of kindness and love are more successful in the long term, and contrary to your own desire, that is why Santa Claus controls 15-20% of the world economy, that is why the idea of falling in love as the basis of marriage continues to take over in more cultures, and that is why the GOP listed charitable giving as the very first deduction they would not remove from their tax reform. If it were otherwise, or if the GOP changes its mind, then you would be right, but as far as I can discuss it with you, I've now cycled back to exactly the first point: in a system of communication where private experience exists, like it or not, if you seek evil, you will find it. As you yourself demonstrate now for the sixth or seventh time in our dialog, which apparently you repeat to so many people you can't remember it. So I don't expect you ever to be persuaded that people might actually be better than you think, and it is time for me to feed my cat and go to bed. good night.

Actually, we've had this conversation before, probably you don't remember. Anyway, that's an admirable MORAL virtue, but there is a problem extending it into ethics, because this is not only about 'private thoughts' but about outright lying. It is undeniable that the only reason the entire planet is not in perpetual war is because enough diplomats have learned how to lie to each other gracefully, and it is too frequently the case that in-laws don't cause divorces is because they lie when they have to. So just like Santa Claus, when we get older, enough of us are wise enough to lie diplomatically to keep the peace, and quite a number of us know the other is lying too but learn that there can be higher values at stake. And this is not a case for arguing the ethics of that, but rather, to honor the most the morality of those who know how to tell the truth in adverse situations without lying, yet not cause tragedies, for they sadly are far too rare.

While I appreciate YOUR sentiment there, the general consensus of the human race has been in the opposite direction, but in my personal experience, not for the actual reason you state. The reason starts with the parent's desire to please their children and telling them Santa Claus exists. And this has grown so much in popularity that Santa Claus, whether he exists or not, now controls 15-20% of the world economy. So the general inclination, as far as Ive since I started figuring this out, is that people WANT there to be effective communication based on private secrets which are not shared from a very early point in life, leading to ideas of 'falling in love,' even as the basis of marriage, and mutual trust on the effectiveness of altruism. But if the GOP actually manages to eradicate the charitable giving tax credit, you will have to call me wrong! :)

(At risk of getting in trouble) I did put the same text, with a few minor enhancements here, where I will be maintaining changes: http://www.yofiel.com/writing/essays/wittgenstein

I can understand that, and I've known people who found a lot of comfort in it, especially if they had early emotional problems, because it does allow a definitive clarity.

On thinking about it briefly, I do remember a discussion of indirect versus direct perception somewhere later, but I don't have all the books here, and they are very expensive now. I really should wait before saying anything deeper myself, until I have access to a library, I think in June I might be able to look it up. It depends how good the library is.

I don't know enough in detail, and all I could say is that he did change his mind about what he was saying, so what he said earlier might not be the final, and what he said later might not be completely thought out. So my initial response would be, even from W's own words on that, there could be no clear answer what his theory should actually imply that way.

When doing philosophy, I have certain meanings in mind, and not all the other uses of words, because I'm engaging in philosophy, instead of trying to avoid going out in the mist or cooking dinner. — Marchesk

Well I could trust that to be true, but it is not W's point. The point is that when people are engaged in natural language, they are NOT attempting to define truth perfectly. What I observe is many people call themselves philosophers, but what they are actually engaged in some kind of religious crusade to convince everyone of their own intellectual superiority and superior insight, so I learned to be cautious.

Oh, well it is possible to interpret the private data,' being incommunicable, as solipsist. But what I tried to explain, via the analogy with cryptographic key exchange, is that it still enables fruitful communication with others possessing their own private colors, via mixing with the correct public shared color. It seems to me the real issue for the argument is that the definition of such public shared color so that it enables communication, and what that might be. Frankly I have not thought so deeply about that in the past, but if the analogy makes sense to other people, then I could try to map it to some existing concepts which would provide more insight into it.

True, but that was placed in an entire 'new light,' as I try to say positively, by the investigations.

Well, I don't think 'sentiment' is quite the right word for it, but yes, his thought is that you have to possess an innate trust in there actually being an intended correspondence for it to exist, and to know when your own 'private key' is capable of interpreting it. The idea of private experience being incommunicable and influencing all communication might not extend to deductions in mathematics and propositional calculus; but it rather changes the significance and purpose of engaging in such activities, because all intentional acts become a means to an end, and the 'end,' per se, is ultimately unknowable. It can only be chosen through belief. So that's why I say I try to put a positive attitude on it: we can make the world more pleasant for ourselves and others by accepting beliefs in shared happiness. Of course, there is no necessity for that either, and one can see a lot of philosophers these days falling into rather depressive solipsistic skepticism.

Ah! But not necessarily. I did explain that properly here:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/1349/wittgensteins-mysticism-or-not-

Thank you for the compliment.

That's a common misconception arising from early positivism.

Wittgenstein actually is telling you that everything you ever thought was truth in your entire life could be wrong. It does take a little time for that to sink in.

What I did learn in my own life is to put that in a nice way )

Well, I will let W speak for himself on that.

What I give is the morphology of the use of an expression. I show that it has kinds of uses of which you had not dreamed. In philosophy one feels forced to look at a concept in a certain way. What I do is suggest, or even invent, other ways of looking at it. I suggest possibilities of which you had not previously thought. You thought that there was one possibility, or only two at most. But I made you think of others. Furthermore, I made you see that it was absurd to expect the concept to conform to those narrow possibilities. Thus your mental cramp is relieved, and you are free to look around the field of use of the expression and to describe the different kinds of uses of it.
Lectures of 1946 - 1947, as quoted in Ludwig Wittgenstein : A Memoir (1966) by Norman Malcolm, p. 43

What I did, with a little time, was roll up the prior discussion into a separate thread:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/1349/wittgensteins-mysticism-or-not-#Item_1

It's not quite the standard view, but as I am describing the mysticism part I felt I could take a little license on it. Thanks for the conversation.

What I did was add a little clarification to these thoughts and put it in a separate thread here:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/1349/wittgensteins-mysticism-or-not-#Item_1

It's not quite the standard view, but as I am talking about W's mysticism I exercised a little license on it to make it more intelligible. thanks for the conversation )

lol, I likewise have something very long along those lines that I also can't share here )

W had an idea of intent and causality, but he did not agree that a theory of descriptions is necessary. He rather avoids topics like 'meaning' and 'metaphysics' because they are not useful to his point, so he doesn't have anything to say about them. That leaves it up to other people to decide whether meaning exists and what metaphysical grounds there are for it, and that's why there are different derivations from his theory, but all W had to say was that there can be effective communication without a theory of descriptions, that is, he REALLY did not agree with Russell/Whitehead. Kripke is compatible with both approaches so he's often cited as a resolution.

So here is how it works in w's theory:

Alice [secret] is hungry ->
Alice says 'Bob please bring in groceries from car.'
Bob hears 'Alice wants me to get dressed to outside.'
Bob says 'It is raining'
Alice hears 'Bob is not hungry.'
Alice says 'it is not raining.'
Bob hears 'Alice insists I get dressed to go outside.'
Bob says 'if you think it's not raining, you bring in the groceries, and I'll cook dinner.'

Wittgenstein's point is, it is totally irrelevant to the conclusion whether the proposition 'it is raining' is true or not, Bob doesn't know Alice is hungry, and Alice doesn't know Bob doesn't want to get dressed, and yet even so, the conclusion is logically coherent, and there has been effective communication.

Sure, here I'll explain the algorithm in simpler terms, by using a shared color code of modulo 10 base 2:
Alice has private color code 100
Bob has private color code 200

Alice says 17 modulo 10 base 2, that is 1
Bob says 33 modulo 10 base 2, that is 1
Alice hears 1 base 2 modulo 100, that is 1
Bob hears 1 base 2 modulo 200, that is 1

Now Alice and Bob have a shared secret 1. Neither of them know the private color code of the other. That's the basis of the theory, but picking shared color code that works for all numbers is not quite as simple as that (they both have to be primes and the modulo has to be in the base range), but it gives the idea.

Here is an illustration of a shared secret generated by individuals with their own private colors. Each one can still understand the other without knowing the others' private color.

I guess the only thing I have to add to that is, while I wake up, is that I also had a problem with W's mysticism, until I learned about how HTTPS authentication works, bizarrely. This is the use of a thing called a 'certificate' to establish a 'shared secret.' The thing about it is, neither party in the authentication exchange actually knows what the other party knows, but both sides can authenticate the other party from their own private data. After I understood that, W. made perfect sense to me.

The original shared secret theory is called Diffie and Helman 'key exchange," described here. One doesn't easily find more abstract explanations on the web due to security concerns.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie%E2%80%93Hellman_key_exchange

There you will see this basic diagram showing how shared secrets work. A and B (Alice and Bob) can communicate with each other successfully after encrypting their communications with a private color, but neither party knows what the other's private color is.

Strangely, I just had a long conversation last night with another person explaining W's point, starting at the end of page 2 here. https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/1314/wittgenstein/p2

And I only got 5 hours sleep. So if you'll excuse me, that took several hours to write to Marchesk, so if you have a problem with it being baloney, please comment on that there.

Now I again have to point out that you are both overextending the cynicism of positivism. The significance of positivism is that it is possible for communication to take place without a theory of descriptions. In a positive way, not a negative way.

So W demonstrates that a more sophisticated theory is not necessary. However that does not imply that more sophisticated ideas of meaning do not exist. It's only so much as to say that more sophisticated theories are not necessary. Calling that 'deflationary' and saying that metaphysics does not exist is far beyond postivism's objective.

This is a very common confusion about the issue of a domain of mind existing separate from a domain of matter. While you speak of energy, energy itself may be nascent in potential and causing no movement; therefore it is more sensible, in considering the actual movement in the world, to consider POWER. Of that, there is a distinction between two kinds: the power in the material world, which causes the motion of all physical objects; but that power, though manifest in motion through time, is merely PASSIVE POWER, which acts insofar as we can construe it in an automatic manner, in accordance with the scientific model or material realist we consider controlled by the 'laws of physics.'

In contrast, movement in the domain of mind is controlled by human volition. While some consider there to be more elemental 'phenomena' and 'energies' in the domain of mind, such as mathematics and experience, their existence is without movement unless acted upon by volition; and the motivation of that volition is the human will, which changes the world in accordance with that we perceive, in our limited senses, as freedom of choice. Whether that freedom exists or not in absolute terms is just as much not the distinction as are the 'phenomena' or 'energies' which might be the basis of such a domain. Rather, the distinction lies in that freedom of choice is an ACTIVE POWER, controlled by mind, and not by rules of physics.

The general confusion between PASSIVE and ACTIVE power persists, because of how those argue their case who consider only the passive rules of material reality control all change. They consider it sufficient to explain that the mind is made of physical elements, and therefore the appearance of freedom of choice is an illusion, created by limited knowledge; and if the knowledge were perfect, all actions could be explained in accordance with the rules of physics alone.

Yet that case, whether true or not, does nothing to explain the difference between domains of mind and matter. Consider for example the nature of experience in acting upon one's apparent freedom of choice, whether the apparent freedom is real or not; and if one chooses some action that causes the experience of pleasure, could one describe that experience in terms of the ones and zeroes of software code? And if you think it could, then ask another to consider those many trillions of ones and zeroes necessary to model the human mind's experience; and from their look of consternation, as they read though each line of code, you will appreciate immediately how the experience may be produced by some physical phenomena, but no one can know what the experience feels like by reading lines of code.

Instead, the experience is some different quality resulting from the exercise of our active power. To understand the movement of our active power in the world, a mechanical explanation is no more than attempting to explain color to a blind man; and attempting to explain the domain of mind in terms of raw physics alone is just as meaningless.

Notwithstanding, those who persist in explaining the nature of all that exists in terms only of the movement of passive power in the world will continue in their efforts to tell a blind man what it is to see a color. Yet while impressing us all with the extent of our understanding of the physical world (and which indeed has advanced so much in recent years to baffle even the most advanced thinkers with its extent and complexity), for all their efforts, and all their protestations, the blind man still cannot understand the experience of seeing the artistic genius in a dab of paint by Vermeer; a transcendental mural of Michelangelo, or a pastoral scene rendered by vivid eye of Van Gogh; not only in the experience so rendered directly on the senses, but moreover, by recognition of the active power of expression, which drove each and every brush stroke of those who created such masterpieces. For that, the physical explanation, however much written in detailed lines of code, and however accurately described, can never offer knowledge of that experience.

For which reason, the description of the movement of atoms, and their subcomponents, in all their orders of assembled sophistication, will never amount to any more than an empty description of passive power, over which the human will continues to move and create anew that which could only be described, and never truly appreciated, except in conceiving a domain of mind through which our will navigates the motion of experience.

What do you think Dawkins was countering? His was hardly a work of philosophy let alone of ethics. — mcdoodle

This was a much earlier work of Dawkins. I did eventually find the model for the interaction on the Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_game_theory#Hawk_Dove

Well, that does not run contrary to W's view. He would state that words are simply tools that we use as convenient, so if one word is useful to refer to different things, then we use it to refer to different things. He doesn't hold that there is therefore some abstraction in the world of mind that binds the different uses together.

To formal logicians, W's approach could be valid, perhaps. Nonetheless it is not as fruitful as considering abstractions and representing them with symbols, which allows derivation of more complex explanations.

My own opinion, for whatever that is worth, is that there is no necessity for any one metaphysics to be that which we use in all situations. I don't regard arguments as to 'which is true' to be meaningful. I rather consider which approach is more fruitful in different situations. And I certainly would not attempt a scientific experiment to prove my wife wrong about whether it is raining or not when she wants me to go outside, so W's view does have merit in that situation!

I'd say, if she thinks it not raining, then she can fetch things from the car while I cook dinner. That's a far more likely inference to result in mutual agreement. And it doesn't actually matter whether it is true that it is raining or not, solving the problem entirely.

Actually, as I did mention, I do happen to agree with you with respect to formal logic. However, in the world of real language, W does make a valid point, and that is, the purpose of a statement can be more important than its actual truth.

However W has not generally won in persuading people to that. For example, he held that Popper's view that he was 'threatening with the poker' actually proves this point. It's transpired that's a little too obscurantist for most people.

Well, I think Wittgenstein's point here is that what you trivialize by saying 'it's just because language is flexible' is entirely the real issue about truth and reality. There was a whole book on this called 'Wittgenstein's Poker' -- from the Wikipedia:

On 25 October 1946, Popper (then at the London School of Economics), was invited to present a paper entitled "Are There Philosophical Problems?" at a meeting of the Moral Sciences Club, which was chaired by Wittgenstein. The two started arguing vehemently over whether there existed substantial problems in philosophy, or merely linguistic puzzles—the position taken by Wittgenstein. In Popper's, and the popular account, Wittgenstein used a fireplace poker to emphasize his points, gesturing with it as the argument grew more heated. When challenged by Wittgenstein to state an example of a moral rule, Popper (later) claimed to have replied "Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers", upon which (according to Popper) Wittgenstein threw down the poker and stormed out. Wittgenstein's Poker collects and characterizes the accounts of the argument, as well as establishing the context of the careers of Popper, Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell, also present at the meeting.
The book follows three narrative threads, each pivoting off the 1946 confrontation at Cambridge; the first is a documentary investigation into what precisely took place and the controversy over the differing accounts from observers; the second, a comparative personal history of the philosophers, contrasting their origins in Vienna and their differing ascents to philosophical prominence; and thirdly an exploration of the philosophical significance of the disagreement between the two and its relevance for the great debates in the early 20th century concerning the philosophy of language.[1]

People have generally agreed Wittgenstein did lose his temper, by the other accounts, but W. to the day of his death insisted that he was simply using it politely like a lecture pointer, and did not 'storm out' as Popper claimed.

I just answered that )