Do you understand that your reasoning here is faulty? — Srap Tasmaner

What's so problematic about it? Mind explaining?

Yeah. Bits and pieces of ideas, among which a good one bubbles up once in a long while... Even the most dishonest trader has to deliver the real stuff every now and then.

Maybe he is — Ansiktsburk

Indeed!

An asshole, though. — Ansiktsburk

Then I suspect he will be slapped on the wrist by some here if he ever posts from hell.

Olivier5's opinion is that Hegel was a poseur. That strikes me as idiotic whether Hegel's your guy or not. — Srap Tasmaner

And that strikes as a bit naïve, if you don't mind me saying so.

1. Since there's been trade, there's been fake trade. Pliny the Elder wrote about it, how the guys in Puntland could mix up and fake their frankincense for instance.

2. Philosophy is a trade and always has been. There's money and power in it, however small at present.

3. Therefore, it's to be expected that at least some philosophers may have sold snake oil.

That is to say, there is no reason to believe that all philosophers are intellectually honest. There are only human, traders like everyone else. That's a truism, I know. But then if this is the case, does it matter? Should we be concerned about it, or is it unimportant that there be fake (disingenuous) philosophy out there?

The answer to that question depends on whether one thinks philosophy is important or not. Also on whether one believes in "fair trade" as some sort of public good, à la Kant.

I believe in philosophy as a serious and useful trade. That's all. And all trades have their freewheelers and fakers.

It sounded to me like you said the great bulk of philosophy written in English in the last century was

a narrow-minded use of philosophical talent, that is generally used as a posture rather than to do any actual productive work
— Olivier5

I'm not being super-subtle here. — Srap Tasmaner

Quite true, that last bit.

My ire is aimed at the fakes only, or those I consider fake, not to all AP (assuming this is a meaningful category). So that's one distinction. There is also a big difference between 20th century English-speaking philosophers and AP. Granted that the two sets overlap quite a bit but it's not an equivalence.

I don't know if Searle is considered AP but I like him a lot. Popper is Austrian (like Wittgenstein) but wrote much in English, and he is a favorite of mine... So no, no sweeping generalization is due. But they ARE some poseurs, yes, and I listed a few I believe are poseurs, including a French guy and a German...

We're cool, you can get down your high horse now.

It was not a defense, rather a series of question. What type of discourse is appropriate (or inappropriate) on a board such as this one, according to you?

I'm trying to figure out your position, your critique.

From my position, all philosophers are not necessarily nice people. Some of them I dispise. But this is not out of anti-intellectualism, it is just because I happen to care for what philosophers actually do and contribute to society.

For example, Hegel, Wittgenstein, Derida have done more harm than good to society with their thinking, in my view. Because their thinking was wrong and yet people adhered to it.

They might have been very polite, so if you judge by that, they were good guys, but their words did some damage nevertheless, in my judgment.

I am genuinely puzzled by this, because it sounds like the sort of anti-intellectualism I expect to find anywhere but on a philosophy board; it sounds like the sort of sweeping generalization I expect to find anywhere but on a philosophy board; it sounds like the sort of baseless impugning of other people's motives I expect to find anywhere but on a philosophy board. — Srap Tasmaner

So what type of discourse do you think is appropriate for a philosophic board? One that doesn't ever question anyone's motive? One that respects intellectuals, always and without distinction? One that forever gets lost in details without ever attempting a generalization?

Once I attented a basic analytical philosophy course at the University of Peshawar, of all places. I was totally into Popper at the time, and knew from reading him how much contempt he had for the likes of Wittgenstein, so I was curious, but I left before the august teacher could reach Wittgenstein. Fredge and the foundation of set theory was good stuff, I must admit, and if analytical philosophy as ever "won" anything, that may be in helping found set theory.

Then he moved on to Russel, which proved a big disappointment. Minuscule, sluggish thinking, especially on linguistics, where I knew something and could compare with the structuralist approach started by Saussure... I became impatient.

Then at some point the question was raised, of whether the following proposition is true, false, meaningless or what: "The king of France is bald."

<sigh>

I left the course a little after that. By then I understood Popper's contempt for poseurs, and shared it. He was writing about how to define science, and how to defend democracy against mounting fascism, while down the corridor at Cambridge, some clowns were wondering if a non-existent French king could be said to be lacking a non-existent hair...

So here is one negative: at least some analytic philosophy is futile, a vacuous game that distracts from real and important problems.

I was not the first student to leave the course. Imagine them young Pakistani boys (there was no girl in the class) trying to enter life in a poor and dictatorial country, having to go through a painstakingly slow interrogation of the purported baldness of imaginary French kings... The difference between their real life and the vacuous word games of some philosophers couldn't be brought in sharper contrast.

And that brings me to the second negative: it drive people away from philosophy.

Analytic philosophers are very good at being half of a philosopher. — MSC

That sums it up for me. It's a narrow-minded use of philosophical talent, that is generally used as a posture rather than to do any actual productive work.

"Another reason this [Analytical Philosophy] is fruitless is that the analyses we devise would not be particularly useful, even if one of them were widely accepted. The analyses that epistemologists now debate are so complicated and confusing that you would never try to actually explain the concept of knowledge to anyone by using them. So what is the point?..." Michael Huemer — JerseyFlight

Thanks for this quote. Got me googling. Here is the (oh so true) source:

https://fakenous.net/?p=1130

Summarized by the author as: "Analytic philosophers focus too much on playing with concepts, and not enough on thinking about the parts of reality that matter."

Or tell me about the value of Analytical Philosophy in general? — JerseyFlight

As often the case, the term is also a way to define oneself in opposition to the other, i.e. "continental philosophy" in this case. Moreover, the word "analytical" in this context functions less as a methodological commitment to analysis (as opposed to say, synthesis) than as a critique of "continental philosophy" as generally "non-analytical" (mystical, poetic, intuitive, fun to read perhaps but not logical and rational).

By defining him or herself as an analytic philosopher, one is therefore saying: "I'm none of them heady continentals. I'm the dry, rational, English-speaking type of philosopher".

Other than that, what? How do you define the class of all 'analytical philosophy'?

So you didn't like my definition of 'meaning'. You couldn't play with it the way you wanted. Now that's too bad. Allow me to apologize for not meeting your high standards.

Do you mind telling what's your definition of it? :-)

it is not legitimate to say "I have a pain in my knee". That was rather Isaac's point. — Banno

Whatever the merit of this assertion (EFL here), I don't think it was Isaac's point.

You can indeed replace specific instances of meaning by the class of all meanings. But a word is not a meaning, so you cannot replace a word in a sentence by its meaning, and then generalize to the class of all meanings, and hope to make any sense.

You don't say: "I have a meaning of pain in my knee", do you?

As you might guess, my inkling is that you missed his obvious mistake: that of confusing a word with its meaning.

Let me try the tedious analytical route, see if that works... You don't say: "I have a meaning of pain in my knee", do you? So you cannot replace the word 'pain' in that sentence by the words 'meaning of pain'. Why then would you think that you can replace the word 'pain' by another symbol meaning the class of all possible meanings?

If one could legitimately say: "I have a meaning of pain in my knee", then one could transpose that meaningfully into "I have a {meaning} in my knee". But since one cannot legitimately say: "I have a meaning of pain in my knee", then one cannot assume that its transposition into "I have a {meaning} in my knee" ought to yield anything other than nonsense.

I hope this dots all the i's and crosses all the t's.

Might it be, just possibly, that they are trying to show you something important that you may have missed or perhaps misunderstood? — Banno

Or vice versa.

What you did, technically and factually, is take out the word 'pain', and replace it by another, the word (or symbol) '{meaning}'. That's what you did, period. And I don't actually understand why you did that.

You guys are very confused. Not sure I can do anything more at this point... Maybe the idea that words have meaning will sink in after some time. You never know...

“Nothing can be imagined which is too strange or incredible to have been said by some philosopher.”
-- Descartes

“There is nothing so absurd which some philosophers have not maintained.”
-- Thomas Reid

“There is… no banality so banal that no philosopher will deny it.”
-- Louise Antony

Source: The Consciousness Deniers, by Galen Strawson
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/13/the-consciousness-deniers/
(an excellent text, somewhat related)

"I have a pain in my knee" <> "I have some specific {meaning} in my knee" — Isaac

You are replacing a word by the class of meanings. Of course it's different. That's like replacing an apple by the class of oranges... Duh.

Words are tokens that code for meaning, but they are not meaning themselves. That's the classic distinction between 'signifier' aka 'sign' (word) and 'signified' (meaning or concept). The word is different from the concept meant by the word.

You want to claim (contra Davidson, Wittgenstein etc..) that "Language conveys meaning". That when we talk, the purpose (and so the preserved value in translation) is some property of the utterance - it's 'meaning' - which is conveyed from one speaker to another. — Isaac

Exactly. Let me know if you actually disagree with that claim.

The analytical approach lends itself to getting lost in the weeds, because it ignores the need for a constant back and forth between synthesis and analysis. Like a painter who takes a step back to look at the whole picture, the philosopher needs to « zoom out » once in a while, This allows him to briefly check that he is making sense at the aggregate, big picture experience level, before diving in the weeds of analysis again.

That it’s biggest problem: too detail oriented, not enough big picture coherence. Another issue is that some fake philosophers used this propensity of analysis to get lost in details intentionally, as a way to hash out facile, fake, meaningless philosophy that bewilders the average Joe, so this brings it a bad reputation.

Is Isaac misusing language — Banno

He is misusing logic, rather.

The idea of ‘thoughts’ has been added.

« Cup » and « tea » are part of the class of words. Therefore, you want a {word} of {word}? That would be the right way to substitute an instance by a set it belongs to. Words are not meaning. They are just signs, tokens for meaning.

I don't think simply being a mental event can be sufficient to identity something as a 'meaning'. — Isaac

Why yes. To qualify as linguistic meaning, an idea has to be formulated in a symbolic language. A meaning is whatever thoughts are conveyed by a text. It’s always the meaning of some words (or other symbols).

You’re confusing a general category (meaning in general) with its individual instances (a specific meaning).

You use words to communicate, right? But the sentence: « Word word word, word word. » is not correct. Same mistake.

So in a specific instance you might say « I have a pain in my knee » and you would mean something specific by that, which is to describe a sensation you’re having.

what determines members of the class {meanings}? — Isaac

Mental events and structures: Anything you can think of, perceive, feel, plan and do, remember, or imagine. And any thought about that thought, and endless combinations thereof.

I take Oliver to here be advocating, roughly, first meaning. — Banno

Not advocating anything in particular, just stating the glaringly obvious. Language conveys meaning. That’s its main function, and why it exists. When someone (other than an analytical philosopher) uses language, it’s often to try and communicate something.

But nobody did even try this as they understood what a useless bickering match would it all have ended up with countries demanding their famous persons to be put in euros. And this shows how these historical people are linked to a national heritage. Even if Charlemagne was the "father of Europe", he surely was a French king, especially for the French. — ssu

Europe is trying to be more than a collection of rabidly aggressive self-centred microstates. European nationalism killed millions, least we forget. We are trying to become something different than a bunch of nationalist idiots. So of course we have an identity problem...

Charlemagne was of course not French because this identity didn’t exist back then. He too had an identity problem: he was ruling romanized folks with the help of a Roman Church, but he was Frankish... so he worked on symbols, to help forge some synthesis here, like the EU bureaucrats do. And one such symbol he used was the emperor thing.

Glad you liked it. I was fascinated by some bits and pieces, like the Aṣṭādhyāyī, or the idea that missionaries translating the Bible were a major force in the discipline.

Primarily, this is to flag that philosophers discussing language could make much more sense if they followed the development of the related scientific disciplines.

I think semiotics studies signs and symbols, over and beyond articulated language, their evolution, etc.

To what extent was Medieval Europe a continuation of "barbarian" Germanic tribal culture? There just seems to be a sort of gap when discussions of "barbarians" during the Roman Empire turn into Feudalism after the Roman Empire. — schopenhauer1

I see that you have already provided quite a few answers. Generally speaking, it was as you said a progressive cultural convergence between the German rulers and their Roman or Gallo-Roman subjects, helped and catalysed by the Church as one big melting pot or unifier (later divider) of European identity. The same thing happened in England after William's conquest: he removed the leaders only, and replaced them with French speaking kinghts who had fought for him. A progressive melting of two cultures into one then took place, ultimately creating modern English.

Many of these barbarian kings were already Romanized to a degree, eg Theodoric. His Roman subjects loved his rule.

Kings kill people. That's part of the job description.

Hadrian's war against the Jews killed hundreds of thousands. Ceasar's conquest of Gaul led to an estimated 1 ml deaths. But Charlie is the bad guy because he killed 4500 Saxon warriors?

Thanks for pointing at the Franco-German connotation, evident in the Division Charlemagne. Note that the alliance between these two acts as an informal European leadership of sorts. Hence Charlemagne in EU symbolism also evoke Franco-German ties.

First, a brief historical overview of the discipline(s):

The Journey of a Psycholinguist

In this episode of The Joy of Science, Shambhavi Chidambaram speaks to Professor Shravan Vasishth, an Indian-origin professor of psycholinguistics at the University of Potsdam in Germany. [...]

Shravan Vasishth (SV): Alright, so there’s a general misconception about what linguistics is in the lay world. What typically happens to me in day to day life is that when somebody finds out that I’m a linguist, the first question they ask me is how many languages I speak. From a professional perspective, linguistics is a very different ball game. It’s all about the study of linguistic structure. The meaning of language, language constructs, the syntactic structure of sentences, and the study of sound. Studying the statistical properties of language is another thing. Linguistics also includes the historical development of languages, and the connections between languages, regarding how language contact changes.

SC: But linguistics, as a field, seems to have had quite a rapid change in its approach in the last one hundred years or so. Where did it start and how has it proceeded?

SV: Linguistics, as we know it today, is very different from the way it was in the 1800s and before that. All the action really began with Pāṇini, and his work, the Aṣṭādhyāyī.

Editor’s Note: The Aṣṭādhyāyī is Pāṇini’s most famous work, a text on Sanskrit grammar. Known for the brevity, sophistication and logical perfection of its rules, and has influenced linguistic theory up to the present day.

SV: Once that became known in the West, a lot of Indologists started studying not just Sanskrit but also the connection between European languages and Indian languages. They discovered that there were some historical connections there, and this led to the development of something called historical linguistics—the study of how languages connect with each other, how they have evolved over time and what the proto-language was. They tried to infer the properties of the dead languages, like the classical Vedic language and so on.

SC: Starting with the Aṣṭādhyāyī, now has the study of languages changed over the centuries?

SV: The Indologists, who were mostly Europeans, were studying these connections, and this study of language, from a language comparison perspective, slowly evolved into a school of research called structural linguistics, where people started to look at the linguistic structure and develop templates and patterns that they could draw generalizations from. This then became a very big area of research, especially in America, because of Leonard Bloomfield and others, who were inspired by the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist. Saussure wrote a very famous textbook in the 1800s that had a big influence on the American linguists and this led to the creation of structural linguistics. Up to the early 1900s, structural linguistics was the dominant paradigm both in the West and in India. The Christian missionaries played a major role in developing this methodology because their goal was to translate the Bible into local languages. They would go into parts of the world that were obscure for them and study the language there using this methodology. They’d eventually figure out the sound structure, the linguistic structure of the language and then write the Bible in that language. In the 1950s, a now-very-famous linguist turned up—Noam Chomsky. He created a new paradigm in linguistics, which came to be known as generative linguistics. This methodology involved consulting your own intuitions about what is possible and what is not possible in language. This was a brilliant new way to unpack the structure of languages, of your own native language. You could sit down and think about your language and develop a very elaborate syntax and semantics and phonology—the different sound patterns. Thus, it became mainstream and is still the mainstream approach in linguistics. It’s now called theoretical linguistics to distinguish it from the other strands which developed later.

While Chomsky was developing the generative linguistics approach, in the 1950s there was a computer revolution. That’s when all the action started on the computer side and what happened was that people started to develop machine translation systems to automatically translate languages. It was a very ambitious program. Although the initial attempts were miserable failures, today this has become a very sophisticated new approach, and you see that in tools like Google Translate. These systems are able to do very sophisticated translations and are really very good at it! This area is known as computational linguistics. Linguists actually work for Google and other companies, developing the basic linguistic software. All this has its origins in this core linguistic work. In parallel to that, what happened in the 1960s was that linguists started working with psychologists, and started talking to them about how language works in the brain. This field went in a parallel direction from classical theoretical linguistics. It was an independent stream of research that eventually became psycholinguistics. There are connections between psycholinguistics and linguistic theory, but psycholinguistics is to a great extent an independent body of work, that is slightly divorced from theoretical ideas.

SC: So, that same linguistic structure that people had been studying theoretically for so long, they just took it to an empirical level that way?

SV: Exactly. Data entered linguistics from the computational side.

SC: Great! But what about related fields like phonetics? Where do they come into this, exactly?

SV: Well, phonetics is actually a part of linguistics. You can think of linguistics at several levels. There’s sound—that’s where phonetics and phonology come into, which are parts of core linguistics. Then there’s semantics—meaning—that is also a core part of linguistics and involves studying formal logic to understand how language and meaning are put together. Then there’s syntax—the structure of words— the word order and how sentences are structured. These are the core areas but there are also related areas that fall under linguistics, like pragmatics, where you study implied meaning—that is, what is not actually said, but what is inferred from the sentence.

SC: That’s sharing a border with poetry, isn’t it?

SV: That is indeed where all the action comes from. In poetry, there are all these implied connotations, which you don’t actually state but feel from the language. It is also part of linguistics.

SC: Then it should also border with the social sciences, shouldn’t it? Because you’ve also got politics there, with these kinds of implied meanings, where certain things mean something specific for certain groups of people. It is probably at the overlap of semantics, linguistics and politics, for example.

SV: Yeah, that social and cultural aspect of language also evolved into its own field and that’s called sociolinguistics. The cultural and social implications of language. [...]

More:
https://researchmatters.in/news/joy-science-journey-psycholinguist

Still around in kicking in 800 AD. Including in Italy. — Olivier5

It may thus be that what Karl der Gross was trying to do when getting crowned Western emperor was to push back against Irene, empress in Constantinople, telling her: "I got this side of your old empire covered, thank you very much".

In that same swoop he got leverage on the pope and an influence on the Church's direction... That was a big move.

But the guy didn't stop there: he soon proposed Irene to marry her, which would have made him the Big Boss of the whole empire... She didn't take the offer.

the flame of Rome hasn't extinguished in 800 AD... Please man... — Gus Lamarch

The Roman Empire was still in existence in 800 AD, in the East, and it rulled over Sicily and the South of the Italian peninsula. The division between a Western half and an Eastern one was little more than an administrative conveniance to better rule ONE huge empire. And sometimes the Eastern emperor(s) could not agree with the Western one(s) and they quarelled and fought battles, but it was still conceptually one empire, not two.

Still around in kicking in 800 AD. Including in Italy.

What is you point exactly? You keep changing track all the time.

My point is that Charlemagne tried to be Western Emperor for a reason: it was politically useful, it was filling a void, as the memory of the Western Rome empire was still alive. The mark it left was just to big to vanish in 3 centuries...

In Arabic and Persian, a European is called a "rumi", literally a 'Roman'. The great Persian poet Rumi was called such because he was from Anatolia.

This is a bearing on analyticity as opposed to language. — JerseyFlight

Yes. It also speaks of the blindness of some philosophers to linguistics as a science. Witgenstein should have read Saussure, it would have avoided him much embarrassment. And Davidson should have read Chomsky.

Charlemagne lived in a period that even the ashes of the ancient flame of Rome had already been forgotten — Gus Lamarch

Oh is that why he went to Rome to be sacred emperor by the pope? You're being ridiculous.

He was an autocrat. The empire was already dead anyway.

hy we have about 100 to 200 more years — Gus Lamarch

You know, the prevalent feeling when Rome fell was disbelief. Many couldn't accept the fact that it was over. They kept going on with the fiction that it would rebound...

We're exactly at this stage now, I think: the system is already dead but we can't see it yet.

I just hope the Easter empire (Europe) lingers on a bit longer than the Western one (US), like the first time around.