And Jersey as well then.

I doubt anyone can productively analyse the concept of truth, because as pointed out by Jersey, one needs the concept of truth to analyse anything. It's a fundamental element of our thinking.

It's like one of those .dll files in the Windows operating system: you can try and delete a line of code in them, but the next time you boot, the line of code you deleted reappears in the file. Like magic. That's because the system won't work without it, so there's a routine that fixes the tampered file before launching the operating system.

We humans can't boot without truth. It's too important a part of our operating system. You can try and write it off your thinking but it will instantly reappear.

I'd rather be obvious than illogical. Pretentious thinkers who play with words and never make any sense often THINK that they are subtle but in fact they are just confused.

I assure you that Davidson is not claiming that truth does not exist. That's not what you were saying, is it? — Banno

I couldn't care less about Davidson. I was just stating a broad generalisation: when a guy tells you that truth does not exist, he often think it's true.

The same applies to meaning, Banno. When you told me a few days ago that there's no such thing as meaning, I suppose you really meant it.

And to language. When some lunatic tells you that "language does not exist", he often uses some language to say it... (usually English nowadays)

The scientific method is a tool. Tools evolve out of, from, the practical hands-on experience of workmen who develop tools to accomplish specific tasks — tim wood

Yes, and philosophers like Aristotle or Newton developed tools while practicing their science.

Generally, philosophy has "succeeded" in generating and methodologically normalizing many, if not most, of the natural and social sciences. — 180 Proof

Yes, and the scientific method itself is a product of philosophy.

Peter Singer — Banno

What's so wrong with this guy?

Yes of course, Nietzsche is a case in point. Derida too in my view, in the sense that his particularly terrorist (Foucault's words not mine) and toxic form of post-modernism produced a generation or two of 'post-truth' confused people. One should be careful with one's words, they can do damage.

In other words, our sense of truth may not be translatable into words, but that doesn't make it any less domineering in our mind's workings. It's a fundamental, and not disposable part of thinking. And so as I'm wont to say, when a guy tells you that truth doesn't exist, he usually thinks it's true...

I’m interested in the connection between: how to govern, with: understanding our discourse. As if, if we found out what mattered, how it matters, how it is lost or abandoned, we would do what is right. An epistemology not of knowledge or ethics would lead the republic, but of method, of possibility, of the conditions of our consent and agreement? — Antony Nickles

Well, a democracy is a set of methods to decide who’s boss and for how long, so yes it’s about methods. Democracy is a governance technique, a mean to an end. A way to chose leaders that allows for their replacement, in case they screw up too bad (harder to replace a king than an elected president).

And it only works when voters are reasonably well informed, as it’s based on their collective wisdom. Therefore, if one wants to undermine or influence a democracy, media are key. There are other tools of course like education (or miseducation), culture and entertainment, and of course overt political activism and discussion, but mass media are one key tool. So yes, it’s about language, how it is bent to serve the masters through mass media. How it is weaponized to teach you hatred of your neighbour. How the mind viruses of QAnon are eating up poor, simple, uneducated/miseducated defenseless souls out there, because nobody every taught them to beware of false prophets, and what their tricks are.

Murdock’s project is to make his readers and viewers stupid, and it’s working. Hence Brexit and Bush and Trump. CNN is less obvious in its weaponized reporting, softer in its biases. FOX is a psychosis, CNN a neurosis.

Exactly. Who said that thoughts can’t be things?

This demand for (whatever) philosophy to justify itself in terms of its measurable value to society ought to be resisted. — SophistiCat

At the least, it’s reasonable to ask that philosophers try not to do too much harm, I think.

A bit of a mouthful, language wise. But these things are aquired tastes, maybe I should have kept up with the style a little more to get used to it.

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne — Pantagruel

Could not finish it. :(

I'd give a fortune(in knowledge, cuz I'm broke) here to anyone who can guess what it is I really resent the most, based on this short story. — MSC

You mean the fancy, and ultimately useless collapsible javelin used dogmatically as a metaphor for formal academic philosophy à la AP? And the hand-made javelins that end up being more useful code for the self-made individual philosophies, pragmatic, in a whatever-works kind of way?

Edit: assuming the above hypothesis is correct, let me see where it leads, in terms of resentment.

In the metaphor, the fancy javelin buyer / academic philosopher has good reasons to be pissed, because the amateur casually picked and threw his fancy javelin much further afield than him. While the gifted amateur has no good reason to be pissed, because what, he met an angry entitled idiot? C'est la vie!

So if you indeed identify with the gifted amateur, and if the whole metaphor works, I don't see why you should feel resentful; instead the academic guy should feel resentful, like in the story...

So there's something that the story doesn't say. Some secret envy of the amateur for the fancy javelin, for instance... Or his desire to be recognized by the academic javelin thrower as tallented.

Further reflections: I know I'm really going on a limb here but what's the worse that could happen? I could look like a fool? Already done. :-)

So then, why the title of the thread? The Bias of Buying. What is our friend MSC trying to tell us here? Maybe that the act of buying in a particular strand of philosophy, however fancy, the very act of adhering to it and investing in it leads to the death of our philosophical pursuit, now hanged like a fancy javelin on the wall, shown up to our friends, but never actually used to do any real throwing, any projection, any philosophy... Because we're afraid to break it.

Whereas a more opportunistic user of whatever philosophy he finds good can get some results, the picky, proprietary defender of one tradition never actually produces anything new with it. He just tries and protect or show off his tool. That's the bias of buying.

He¨s not throwing them aside as BS. What he says is that capitalism can be controlled, with institutions in a nation, limiting the possibilities for the market to ursurp the citizens, with laws and regulations. He specifically mention social democraties in western Europe to be successful examples. — Ansiktsburk

He does refute historicism. But yes, Popper was always a socialist, in fact a theorist of social democracy and advocate of social enginering.

Like, for better or worse, Marx changed the course of history. — Olivier5

That's basically the thesis of Popper's "Open Society": philosophers since antiquity have taken side. He starts with Aristotle, teacher of Alexandre at the Macedonian court. One should not expect Aristotle's political philosophy to be pro-democratic. That doesn't invalidate other parts of his philosophy though and I think Popper lays it a bit thick on Aristotle. But that's only the mandatory liminar remarks about antiquity. What Popper is really after is German political philosophy in the 19th century, which according to him gave rise to both Communism (via of course Marx) and Fascism (via Hegel). Popper analyses their philosophy to show how it is "Historicist" i.e. based on the idea that history has laws like physics.

In other words, Popper is not dong motive questioning or label shaming: he is not saying "Booh booh Marx was a communist, how dare he". He is instead comparing Marx and Hegel's historical theories with practice, using his criteria of falsifiability, and showing it's pure BS. Those guys essentialize history as some grand necessary trajectory that has nothing to see with reality.

In doing so Popper explains why Nazism emerged in Germany, one of the most philosophy-oriented culture on earth at the time: it was not in spite of all their smart philosophers that the Germans descended into the abyss. On the contrary, some German philosophers led them to the abyss.

In theory, all philosophy is political. Philosophers speak from somewhere, they have political inclinations like everybody else, and they often act on them, including in their writing.

I think that the formal political engagement of philosophers is interesting to study because it says a lot about where they come from and what their theory means to them in practice. But I don’t think philosophers make good politicians. They tend to lack what’s called (I think) street smarts. And beside the politics of the authors, what’s interesting is also the politics of their writings. I.e. how are these interpreted and quoted and used politically, what’s the impact of their ideas on political discourse and action.

Like, for better or worse, Marx changed the course of history.

Who are the socially active philosophers? who are we talking about? — Banno

Err, Heidegger was politically engaged in the 30s and 40s...

Grand systems, by their very nature, are wrong — Banno

What a nice grand system you got there...

If Alice is thinking something, must we conclude there is something that Alice is thinking? — Srap Tasmaner

The answer is yes.

Have you any interest in Žižek? — Banno

Never heard of him. Seems he is a Lacanian, which raises a few flags for my unquiet soul. I liked Freud a lot at some point, but it proved a bit too esoteric and fact-free for my taste. He was clearly onto something though. Then I landed on Bateson, a brilliant mind (English-speaking all right) who made much more sense to me, and I never went into Lacan. My sense is that Freud 'goes on a limb' (produces much non-empirical theory, as pointed by Popper again), and that Lacan goes on that limb even further...

Some AP guys go around on the same old beaten track all the time. Some continental philosophers do the exact opposite: they rush as fast as their mind can go, like Willy the Coyote, way beyond the cliff of empirical facts.

Another flag is his use of language. BS philo producers tend to use opaque convoluted language to look like Kant and fool their preys. Certainly that's a mark of Hegel and Heidegger and Derida. And Lacan also uses his own esoteric, sui generis language instead of plain French. At best, it raises the cost of entry into his thinking, comparatively to other philosophers. Life is short. At worse, it's a smoke screen.

But if someone like Žižek can boil Lacan down for us, I'm all for it.

I can learn a bit of that...

I went to church yesterday for the first time in a decade or two... A wedding. I didn't get all the sermon (in Italian) but the priest kept coming back to the importance of charity, the most important among the three Paulinian virtues according to him (faith and hope being the other two, if anyone needs to know)... I took that as a piece of marital advice to the bride who's a bit control-oriented. And then I thought that maybe in my very secular approach to philosophy I had forgotten about the importance of charity. Certainly in that quote above.

So let me ask forgiveness from the priest, his God, and all the good folks out here, you @banno included, if I was less than charitable for a moment.

I would once have used the very same words. About that Continental junk. — Banno

What changed your mind?

Not if you realize that we're circling around agreement here.

I think the important point here is that all language is an act, an action of a person with some sort of intent. Locutors are operating within a certain historical, geographic and social context which has certain economic, political, and other dimensions and one needs to keep this context that in mind to figure out what a locutor is trying to do with his words.

Now if you apply this quite reasonable principle to philosophers, what do you see? You see that motive questioning is a perfectly valid line of enquiry in philosophy. Because philosophers too do act with their words, and have intentions which are important to eek out.

Some philosophers have done a lot of politics with their words. Some good politics, some bad. And some of them were a bit too slavish to power in my view, like Hegel, who peddled propaganda for the dictatorial state that was paying his salary for his tenure of the chair of philosophy, inherited from Fichte, in the official (Humboldtian) Berlin University. Hegel became the leading quasi-official philosopher of the Prussian state. And that's precisely the context in which he wrote his Philosophy of Right. In the preface, he justifies the state censorship of another (liberal) Prussian philosopher, Jakob Friedrich Fries, before proceeding to lay the conceptual foundations for Mussolini's fascism. The book is a political act. Hegel was licking up the hand that feeds him by grandiloquing on the State as God's way on earth...

And if you want to understand that, if you have to take context into consideration, then you have to question his motives. To take this sort of philosophy as merely a set of propositions that can be true or false misses the point. It's a con act, posturing as genuine descriptive philosophy in order to sell you snake oil.

Some German-speaking philosophers saw right through this act because they are intimate with the context of Hegel's work. Popper is one (Hegel is one of the 'enemies' in 'The Open Society and its Enemies'). Marx another:

"Hegel goes almost as far as servility. We see him totally contaminated by the miserable arrogance of Prussian functionaryism, which, from its narrow bureaucratic mind, looks down on the self-confidence of the (subjective) opinion of the people. Everywhere here the "state" is to be identified with the "government".
-- Karl Marx in a recession on Hegel's Philosophy of Right

But human language is fundamentally ambiguous, and that's also a strength, not just a weakness. It's about being flexible. — Olivier5

It's also about being economical, word savy. A child doesn't need 20 pages of machine code on addition. She needs 10 seconds to grasp the concept of putting one set with another. Explain it to her in 10 seconds then. That's another function of language plasticity: it saves you words. The fact that one can apply words metaphorically, and twist and turn them almost at will, helps us to keep the total number of words to learn and remember manageable, and the length of our statements short.

"Perhaps" indeed! My criticism of Wittgenstein is that he made a futile and pretentious attempt at philosophy for computers in the Tractatus, realized his mistake (a cookie for him) and then forever wallowed in ambiguity, rather than reckon with ambiguity and fight a bit with it. Hence his lack of attempt at building coherence between his bits and pieces -- he is afraid of having to be coherent. Once bitten twice shy.

Bertrand Russell's mathematical logic. — Banno

Not to make too fine a point of philosophical history, but the Principia Mathematica, to which your quotes certainly refer, were authored by Whitehead and Russel, in that order on the cover. Russel was Whitehead's student. They both authored it, and Whitehead was in the lead.

If the analytic tradition exists, and if it has any claim to fame, it is because of PM. And mind you, you will find no mention of French kings anywhere in its three volumes.

PM break down logic into it's fundamental bits and in turn, describe arithmetics into purely formal logic. In doing so, it indeed made it possible for machines to understand, or rather perform, logical and arithmetic operations. Hence the information revolution, computers etc. The price to pay is that they needed dozen of pages to define the addition. Something a kid can grasp in less than 10 seconds was painstakingly broken down in myriads of elementary statements covering dozens of pages. In other words, machine language. Code.

Why is it then that Whitehead, the lead author of this seminal work, is rarely mentioned or even remembered? That has a lot to see with what he wrote AFTER, which was at a brutal variance with AP.

By then, AP had become "the reigning tradition" (aka a dominant force in the halls of English-speaking academia). A host of AP professors disliked Whitehead's quasi mysticism with all the passion they could summon. Granted that was not very much, but that's why you never hear of him. He's been ghosted.

So in my understanding of what historically happened, AP, based on the success of PM in making arithmetics understandable by machines, proceeded to make philosophy understandable by machines... Whitehead saw that this was going too far. I guess he figured that his 'code' needed dozens of pages to describe what a kid could grasp in 10 second, so translating Kant in formal logic seemed undoable... There's only so much formal logic can do. In any case, he went another way. The AP's just fossilized progressively into philosophy for computers. A few of them woke up a bit late to the idea that language always has a human context, a locutor, interlocutors, intentions and the likes, and therefore (gasp!) that ambiguity exists. Irreducible, central to the philosophical pursuit.

At a fundamental level, philosophy is about the ambiguities of the human condition, which we try to clarify and disambiguate. So precision is indeed necessary, to the extent possible, and I appreciate that care. But human language is fundamentally ambiguous, and that's also a strength, not just a weakness. It's about being flexible.

Isaac Asimov once said that scientific discoveries begin not with "Eureka!" but "That's funny..." — Srap Tasmaner

Exactly. A sense of humor is useful in philosophy...

Turing's machine was born out of the Polish Bomb, not of some riddle. Thank God for that.

Yes, so?

Are you aware that this little riddle led to the revelation that mathematics can never be complete? — Banno

Thanks for the laugh.

Oh I'm glad they did. Image what the world would miss if that question was left unanswered... It's be a scandal!

Soames is still marred in his analyses of propositions though... He must not have been told.



What I'm wondering is: did they find out in the end the solution to that little riddle, about whether that French king was bald or not?

Grammatici certant et adhuc sub judice lis est.
-- Horace
("Grammarians argue and it's yet to be decided", about who invented the elegiac style)

Thanks for Austin, didn't know him.

I see ordinary language philosophy as more a refutation of AP and its obsession with logical propositions and perfect T-languages. A return to sanity, in short.

It's a very natural way of thinking, very 'continental' too. Natural languages have much wisdom to teach, if one cares to listen. Ethymology is always a good start to understand the meaning of a word for instance. It can be overdone too of course, like anything.

Soames appears to define himself as AP, so his enthusiasm may affect his diagnosis. I'm not looking for an hagiography.

I had a look at one of his books:

Rethinking Language, Mind, and Meaning
Scott Soames

In this book, Scott Soames argues that the revolution in the study of language and mind that has taken place since the late nineteenth century must be rethought. The central insight in the reigning [sic] tradition is that propositions are representational. To know the meaning of a sentence or the content of a belief requires knowing which things it represents as being which ways, and therefore knowing what the world must be like if it is to conform to how the sentence or belief represents it. These are truth conditions of the sentence or belief. But meanings and representational contents are not truth conditions, and there is more to propositions than representational content. In addition to imposing conditions the world must satisfy if it is to be true, a proposition may also impose conditions on minds that entertain it. The study of mind and language cannot advance further without a conception of propositions that allows them to have contents of both of these sorts. Soames provides it.

He does so by arguing that propositions are repeatable, purely representational cognitive acts or operations that represent the world as being a certain way, while requiring minds that perform them to satisfy certain cognitive conditions. Because they have these two types of content—one facing the world and one facing the mind—pairs of propositions can be representationally identical but cognitively distinct. Using this breakthrough, Soames offers new solutions to several of the most perplexing problems in the philosophy of language and mind.


Sounds like fascinating stuff, doesn't it? And it comes with a nice attention-grabbing title, too. It should sell well.

insofar as philosophers range more widely than they did in the first three quarters of the 20th, they do so with a rigor that academic philosophy these days takes as a requirement, a rigor that was achieved through the analysis of reasoning and language carried out by our forebears. — Srap Tasmaner

I'm curious. You have an example of any clarity brought by the analytic tradition? Or, alternatively, of such rigorous modern philosophers?

Well, I have no reason to doubt your word that almost all English-speaking are academic philosophers, whether they agree or not. I haven't got a clue, statistically speaking, nor do I know of a good criterion to tell AP and non-AP apart... But it's not my understanding. I understand the term to have a more limited extension in time, to be a bit passé now.

In short, you may be talking of a set much broader than the one I'm talking about.

That was an oversight right? — Srap Tasmaner

Indeed it was. So almost all it is. Are you confident that almost all English-speaking academic philosophers self-identify as analytical?

I know a few American thinkers who make perfect sense most of the time, but they don't waste their time wondering if the king of France is bold, or if there is anything called "meaning" or "the self"... They deal with our rapport to the environment, the mind, ethics, language as a fact of life, culture as a tool of domination, scientific paradigms, etc.

all the academic philosophy in the English-speaking world — Srap Tasmaner

I have already answered that. They are quite a few academic English-speaking philosophers who don't define themselves as analytical philosophers. Who's making a sweeping generalization now?

I had the misfortune of reading Nietzsche when I was young. [...]

This is terribly dangerous for a young person — Srap Tasmaner

Possibly so... I read Nietzsche as an old person.

I honestly tried to read Hegel, I did, also Wittgenstein. The latter is never even attempting to structure any of his intuitions much. It's bits and pieces. It feels a bit like a flee market. The former was evidently a very smart guy who managed to explain how it's okay to hold two diametrically opposite ideas, as long as you say something like 'Well, both are kinda true at the same time, you know?".

Most importantly, in Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel told the Germans that helping the poor through social programmes or charity is dishonorable, that "it is only through being a member of the state [Prussian, supposedly] that the individual himself has objectivity, truth, and ethical life", that the state is God's march on earth, that the state is that "objective spirit that subsumes family and civil society and fulfills them." Etc. Etc.