anyone with eyes can see that there is no stronger bond of solidarity and unity than among capitalists themselves. There is plenty of unity and brothery love. Dead Ukrainians be damned. — StreetlightX

Dead Ukrainians, dead Russians, dead Belarusians perhaps.

How do all these dead serve Capital?

Did Putin invade Ukraine to enrich himself? Someone else?

Maybe the world's arms merchants are buying additional vacation homes this year, but no other sector has much use for war. Businesses like predictability, stability. And Capital, at heart, wants a borderless world. (Since the world still has borders, you might as well use that, but at bottom politics is a nuisance.)

"Liberal democracy" literally sustains itself off the back of corrupt thugs like Putin — StreetlightX

As I said, in dark moments I wonder if liberal democracy (without scare quotes) is a sham, there is no social contract, and the whole enterprise is propped up by the threat of violence. I think this is essentially the worldview of Trumpists. It's a world in which everyone is out to exploit everyone else and you can't even trust your immediate family, friends and co-workers.* Even if they're wrong to believe this is just "the way it is", they can make it so by behaving as if it is true.

There are tens of millions of Americans who will tell you that gun rights are the most important rights because they are the guarantor of the others. That sounds like failure to me.

These people believe that all social control is ultimately backed by the threat of violence. But even if that's true (and I doubt it), so long as the masters rely on other means of control, there's a chance of finding a way of opposing them. People strike, protest, organize, withhold rent, and so on -- but you can't do any of that with a bullet in your head. Putin has made it clear that he has no reservations about just having you killed if you're in his way. Not manipulating you into buying a new car; not cutting your hours if you make a stink with HR; not raising the interest rate on your credit card debt a few percent; just having you killed.


History is what it is, so the history of liberal capitalism is entangled with something else that might have played out much the same even under very different sorts of political economy: oil. It is surely no coincidence that a number of repressive regimes sit on top of oil fields. It's not only American and European oil barons who put up with these thugs: it's all of modern civilization, powered by fossil fuels, and we might very well have made the same deal with the devil even if no one were making obscene profits by doing so.


*

imagine trusting the US — StreetlightX

This is a harrowing read: George Packer's piece on the evacuation of Kabul for The Atlantic.

For me and Christoffer, what Putin does is the most interesting thing. — ssu

I find him very troubling. His annexation of Crimea seemed to me at the time like thumbing his nose at the liberal world order, calling their bluff. "Suppose," he seemed to say, "Suppose I don't play nice. Suppose I just take what I want. What are you really prepared to do about it? Public statements denouncing me? I'm quaking in my boots." It's disturbing to see in modern times such a brazen commitment to violence, such a brazen disregard for norms and institutions.

And then my country elected Trump president.

I'm not blind to the problems of modern liberal capitalism, but at least it leaves some room to maneuver, to try and make something better. In the United States, for instance, there has always been some hypocrisy in our talk of freedom and equal rights; we all know that. But some of our talk, and our publicly stated beliefs, amounted to "fake it until you make it". How people behave can, over time, change how they feel and how they think.

The Trump era might have shown this doesn't really work, that American racism, narrow-mindedness, anti-intellectualism, nativism -- the whole basket -- were there all along, hiding from public view. (Imperfectly, of course, because there has always been open racism too. But ordinary people just behind the times had learned to watch their tongues.)

But it might have shown only that such a scheme is fragile, and vulnerable to loss of confidence. If people don't agree even to play along, you can lose a lot of ground quickly. (We're not exactly starting over from scratch. The United States is a better place than it was a hundred years ago.)

That's what bothers me about Putin. He behaves as a non-believer, and like Trump can encourage others to give in to their doubts about the whole game. Why shouldn't I just outlaw the opposition party? Fuck 'em. Why shouldn't I skip even that much legal nicety and just take what I want by force? You hear this sort of embrace of the primitive, of a sort of hyper-masculine approach to politics from Trumpists all the time. (Trump practically bragged about cheating at everything. So much for the social contract.)

I have two worries: (1) that they're right, that it's all been a sham (in the strange way that Trumpists and the left share a lot of talking points); (2) that our progress has been real, but it requires our belief and it turns out this is easily undermined, creating a sort of run on the liberal bank.

So Putin bothers me as another sign that the wheels are coming off.

Residents of a village in northern Ukraine (sorry, US-backed neo-Nazis) trying to stop Russian tanks with their bare hands: — SophistiCat

Jesus.

Thanks for sharing that.

I'll try a different approach.

You propose a hierarchy of existence: light is lesser than material elements; material elements are lesser than living things; living things are lesser than God.

Taking physical elements and adding to them a lesser thing, such as light, to create a living being would be an absurdity.

Taking physical elements and adding to them an equal thing, such as other elements, to create a living being would be an impossibility.

Taking physical elements and adding to them a greater thing, such as a living being, to create a living being would be a redundancy.

But taking physical elements and adding to them a greater thing than a living being, such as an omnipotent being, to create a living being would be a metaphysical possibility. — Joe Mello

Your principle relates the levels of this hierarchy:

No combination of lesser things can create a greater thing without something greater than the greater thing added to the lesser things. — Joe Mello

It is possible to create a thing of level $n$ out of things of level $n-1$, but only by adding something of level $n+1$. The canonical example of this is God creating living things out of non-living matter.

Are there any other possibilities? Can living things create matter out of light? If there were something less than light, could matter create light out of it? Could there be a higher level of divinity that could create God (or gods) out of living things?

I'm asking in all seriousness, because your principle is explicitly stated in these hierarchical terms, "greater" and "lesser". Are there any other examples of how the levels are related?

One more question. I assume the hierarchy goes something like this:

1. impossible that it be living (light);
2. possible that it be living but not necessary (matter);
3. necessary that it be living (god).

And then we can subdivide (2):

2a. capable of living but not living (objects, let's say);
2b. living.

Have I understood you correctly?

What are we doing here, Joe?

First off, if there's an us, folks already hanging around this corner of the internet, and a you, the newcomer -- assuming for a moment that's a reasonable way to sort the participants in this thread, which I'm not sure about at all, but it's come up repeatedly in your view of the thread -- then I'm going to remind you that you came to us.

Now, why did you do that? You had something to share with us.

Did you come for an exchange of ideas? That's plainly "no". You may not agree with me about that, but I don't know how else to look at what's happened here. You came to inform us.

Did you expect your ideas to be tested? Maybe you assumed they'd be rejected or challenged, as you seem to be used to that, and if you've been hanging around with people into Sam Harris, before coming to us, then evidence suggests you have been seeking out people you expect to disagree with you.

But then what? You offer no intellectual defense of your views -- which is odd, and I'll come back to that -- but instead distinguish between yourself, who has had particular, special experiences, and been divinely singled out for the reception of special revelation, and, on the other hand, everyone else who lacks that special experience and did not receive such revelation.

I don't have much to say about your experience. I don't know what it would make sense for me to say about it. But then what are we to talk about?

So I'm still puzzled about why you're here, and what you expected. I have had no such experience. I think it's interesting that you have, but I don't know how we're to talk about it. In particular, I don't know how we're supposed to talk philosophy about it. I can look at Rothko's paintings or read Herbert's poems and try to open myself to some inkling of their religious experience. I don't think they intend me to analyze their work as I might some argument in philosophy.

But then there's also the matter of what you came to share with us. And oddly enough, what you had to tell us has an oddly analytical ring to it. It's not the sort of thing you expect to hear from a mystic. And apparently, rather than passing right by science, it's supposed to be open to scientific scrutiny. After all, you complain that scientists -- or, not enough anyway -- don't seem to understand this principle and incorporate it into their work, and you hold out the possibility that it could be refuted by some scientific discovery, only it hasn't been.

All of which would seem to indicate that what you came to share with us is entirely effable, rational, analysable. Again, that seems a bit odd, and it leaves you in the position of defending an idea that doesn't look all that mystical by reference to your personal experience of revelation. They make an odd pair, your life story and the results of your unique experience.

It's a little like going to a math forum and explaining that you have meditated for eleven years and know for a fact that the Continuum Hypothesis is false and offering in support your life story but no mathematics, and then, on top of that, deriding everyone who questions your claim as narrow-minded nobodies who have not been granted the revelation that you have.

So what's the deal? Are we supposed to talk about what you told us or not? And how are we to do that? I won't ask what you expected in coming here, but what did you hope for?

Creating a great forum on the Internet is far from a reality. It always becomes home to wannabe know-it-alls. — Joe Mello

Welcome, brother.

the Metaphysical Principle that I discovered — Joe Mello

How? How did you discover it? How did you know it was a Metaphysical Principle -- which is what exactly? like the law of identity, that sort of thing? -- rather than, say, a thought or an idea? Were you looking for Metaphysical Principles or did you just stumble upon it?

People do tend to read that statement taking "language" as the ground term, and deriving the limits of the world from language's limits. But it could be the other way around, as you point out: the limits of language are derived from the limits of the world, and its logical structure, leaving room, as you also point out, for the transcendent. That looks like a somewhat Kantian move...

The thing is, the logical structure LW finds in the world is clearly deduced (not to say "projected") from the logical structure of language. That's fine for logical primacy -- what's discovered is the conditions of possibility of the given -- but there's a whiff of circularity about such an inference as a philosophical act. Which is also fine -- at least I think so, since I don't see a way around that sort of hermeneutic circle -- but ought to be faced up to, acknowledged, and looked at squarely.

as Russia's sovereignty strengthens and the power of our armed forces grows

I mean ...

Understanding is always understanding something in terms of something else — SophistiCat

I like this answer enough that I have given it myself on this forum several times, and even referred to Feynman in doing so.

But I still have some questions.

It's as if we're describing explanation as solving for an unknown in algebra: there is some leveraging of known information, using it, referring to it, describing the unknown in terms of the known, the known determining the unknown, and so on. How far does this analogy generalize?

For instance, how does one bootstrap such a system? If we are born with no information, then we can acquire none. If we are born understanding nothing, then we have nothing "in terms of which" to understand or explain anything. Do we then conclude, as Chomsky urges us to, that there must be something "wired in", as they say? The only explanation anyone will offer for such wiring is Darwin, and it's not obvious that even is an explanation.

Another issue: to say we understand something new (to us) "in terms of" something old (to us) makes sense, and everyone has had such experiences, but it also gives people the willies: everyone nurses doubts that they are doing justice to the novelty, to the strangeness, of the new, and we are all also familiar with cases where this enveloping of the new by the old is to some degree a sham. Ordinary people worry about this sort of thing with relationships -- that is, projecting past experiences, memories of previous relationships and so on, onto new relationships. That phrase "in terms of" is a little scary, and with good reason. (It's why the arguments about relativism and incommensurability don't go away: it's cold comfort that you wouldn't recognize a genuinely alien perspective as either alien or a perspective, as you choose.)

What about circularity? Is that an option? Might we explain X given framework A, and an element Y of framework A in terms of framework B, eventually -- the longer the chain, the safer -- working our way back around to X? Within each framework, you're fine, but only by artificially defining the boundary of the "framework" so that circularity lies outside it...

Is there no rock bottom? It begins to look like the institution of science is embedded in an already given, "taken for granted", as you say, system of cognition. This sense of a science being embedded in something else can be disconcerting. One area I know a little about arises in philosophical logic: look at a dozen introductory textbooks and compare how they introduce the "schemas" or "templates" that will make up the bulk of the book; there's no agreed upon way to introduce these things, no agreement on what they are, what their logical status is, and so on. Each author seems to go his own way with this because if you want to use logic for problems expressed in a natural language, you have to cross that divide somehow. (There's something similar in getting mathematics going, teaching kids what sets and numbers are, and so on.) There is no obvious way to do that, so textbook authors take a variety of approaches with varying amounts of hand-waving. It's hard not to wonder exactly what you're ending up with if this messiness is apparently required around the edges, and particularly required somewhere uncomfortably near the foundations of your science. (And again, mathematics and sets.)

Your reference to vision suggests that some of what's going on here just isn't what we think it is, that we are consciously building systems to try to understand how we are unconsciously managing so well, and so, in that sense at least, it is just ourselves we are always trying to understand. As you note -- much to your credit! -- there is more to cognition than science, and more to us than cognition. There's religion and spirituality, gestalten and feelings.

And now we come all the way back around, because if cognition, and, in particular, scientific cognition, are embedded in us, then we have to face up to our uncertainty about what is being understood "in terms of" what. To what degree are we alien to ourselves, or at least to ourselves qua scientists? The newborn of the empiricists is always presented as a small, admittedly inexperienced but astonishingly capable scientist, observing patterns and theorizing about them. Put so baldly, we can't take that image seriously, but I wonder if we don't secretly believe something very close to it. But what if we are not scientists in human clothing? Can we understand our own strangeness if we only have frameworks that will filter out that strangeness?

Eh. Thanks for a lovely response I don't think I've done justice to. I'm just rattling cages again...

Maybe we could say something like this:

(a) The goal of science is to understand everything.
(b) The process of science is to separate what you understand (about a given phenomenon) from what you don't, and then of course try, gradually, to enlarge the bits-we-understand part, shrinking the bits-we-don't part.

We corral what we don't understand into a we'll-get-to-you-later holding pen. Insofar as there's anything to the unity of science, we might find the not-yet-understood bits of various domains overlapping, leaving one last (hopefully little, and smaller all the time) pocket of things we don't understand yet.

One concern perhaps relevant to this discussion is to remember that this is what we're doing: it's all too easy to think that by naming what we don't yet understand, we do understand it. Thus we use words like "energy" and "matter" and "force" as if they mean something. We can show how we use those terms in our theories, and thus how they connect up to things we consider explained and understood, but there's some lingering suspicion that we don't really understand our explanations. (If some of our variables are still unbound, the logician might remind us, we don't yet have a proposition -- only something like a proposition generator.)

That's a sort of engineering take. The philosopher in me would like to approach the issue backwards:

Why don't we understand everything?

Seriously, why don't we? Most people are just going to say, well, you know, human finitude and all that, of course we don't. Is that an explanation, or is it just putting a name on what we don't understand?

Why aren't we gods?

Why isn't the way the world works perfectly clear to us, with nothing hidden?

Why should it take effort to understand something?

And here maybe the response will be more specific: something about our senses, information, modeling, all that sort of thing. Which would be fine -- to see ourselves as science does leads to no inconsistency -- except it seems to create an unsolvable problem: what about the stuff in the not-yet-understood box?

In a suitably limited domain, our partitioning procedure worked just fine; you can circumscribe what it means for a tool to work, and what will count as an explanation relative to the stuff you're not dealing with. You can puzzle over the interpretation of statistical data without saying, "Hang on -- what are numbers anyway?"

But this perfectly reasonable and practical process does not generalize: we have no way of establishing that our research tools (our own minds) are in good working order (there's no standard we could possibly reach for) -- and if that's the case, just what do we think we're doing? We don't know. We'll have no way of saying whether what we don't understand belongs to us or to the domain.

So I'm not convinced you can just science your way to an understanding of why we don't understand everything.

Of course the question I'm asking -- why don't we understand everything? -- is almost equivalent to asking why we need science. I'm just going to point out (again) that there is a funny doubling-back of the question: we do science because we don't understand everything -- which is just a presumption here -- and we do science by separating what we understand from what we don't, and we also presume we can do that. Can we? How would we know whether we can do this?

(Does it make sense to say, maybe we do understand everything but think we don't? Why or why not? Is it possible to be mistaken about whether you understand something?)

@Manuel, what do you think? Why don't we understand everything? -- Oh, and maybe I should ask, do we just happen not to? Or is this the same as asking, can we understand everything?

What would the opposite look like? If the world was rich, and our nature poor, I'd expect all species to have essentially the same cognitive capacities, which doesn't seem to be the case. — Manuel

So precisely because we are so intellectually gifted, our ideas are not to be trusted. Where does that come from? Is that suspicion of the smooth talker, the over-educated, the city slicker? It’s not without foundation, but it’s an odd peg to hang a worldview on.

I cannot get a fix on what the source of your anxiety is. Each time I think I have it, you veer off into something else. But it’s been an enjoyable exchange all the same.

Your predicament seems to have this structure: reason tells you that color, objects, music, and so on, are things you or we have added to the world, and, by telling you that, at the same time reason tells you that you or we can take all that away, at least imaginatively. Thus we can say, that's not really a mountain, it's just a bunch of particles or fields or something that we happen to call a "mountain"; <mountain> is not really there, but something we add to the world.

I'd want to look closely at how this argument works. For instance, is this the real argument, or is the real argument the other way around: that is, because we can imaginatively subtract, we conclude that we must have added. Just how strong is this argument, in either direction? How do we imagine this adding and subtracting business to work? What convinces us this is how it works?

Instead of (one of the versions of) the epistle I could post here, I'll just say this: your principal concern seems to be with the perceived conflict between our everyday understanding of things and the scientific view; my principal concern is that we don't generally understand our everyday view at all. For me, the value of the step of wonder or bafflement is to see the everyday view as a view, to scrub off the patina of "natural" it has acquired. (Really don't like the word "view" here, much less "theory", but there you go.)

The apple falling does make sense to us and probably should — Manuel

There's nothing in experience that guarantees that apples won't go up next time they "break away" from a tree. — Manuel

I guess in our context here, the idea is that we can see no reason for the apple to fall, but we have observed the constant conjunction of <apple detaching> and <apple falling> so we have induction to justify the reasonableness of the apple falling — but nothing justifies our use of induction. This is tricky territory if we expect making sense and being justified always to go together. Or maybe not — if we allow that induction itself doesn’t actually make sense!

The wonder thing — it’s got two sides: there’s mystery, the confrontation with what exceeds our understanding; but then there’s seeing what’s familiar in a new light, and that involves a step of defamiliarizing — the temporary mystery — but the experience is completed in an illumination of the familiar, a deeper understanding of what we had understood somewhat superficially. We can, sometimes, through discipline, defamiliarize the ordinary, but that’s not the final goal. (I’ll keep quoting poets, this time Eliot from Four Quartets: “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”)

At a glance, it looks like the first sort would be primary, and that we defamiliarize the ordinary because we have had the experience of confronting something new, and then learning to understand it. We aim to mimic that experience by making the familiar new. Sometimes this may be more or less forced upon us — if we’re brought up short, if our expectations of how something familiar would be behave are not met. But it’s hard to see how we could mimic that experience. Instead, it looks like we need to begin with something like a suspicion that perhaps there is more here than meets the eye. We have to imagine that our understanding — which has proven its adequacy — is incomplete. That’s a curious thing. Having merely opened the door there, it’s generally not hard to begin asking questions that are difficult to answer. — But maybe it takes no such effort of imagination; maybe most of our beliefs show themselves inadequate at some point, and we’re just adept at ignoring their shortcomings. In that case, the trick would be catching yourself in the act of sweeping problems under the rug.

The problem starts when we become puzzled about this common sense. — Manuel

Yes, one result of this sort of thing might be a scientific theory that works, whether we exactly understand it or not, or do in some senses but not others. (It's Asimov, right? Discoveries begin not with "Eureka!" but with "That's funny...")

On the other hand, you might note that the apple falling makes sense to you, but shouldn't.

In both science and philosophy, theorizing ought to save the appearances, even when that's our own habitual worldview. For example, a theory that we have nothing like what we think of as free will ought also to explain why it seems to us that we do. Or, in the case of the falling apple, there ought to be an explanation for why we don't find its behavior surprising.

But first there's the imaginative leap (something like Pound's "Make it new!") of seeing the ordinary as strange. It's the crucial step for everything from science to poetry to political activism. And by definition, that step is all about us, about, at the very least, our expectations and prejudices. You can see this beautifully in Plato's dialogues, when Socrates's interlocutors so often experience a sort of vertigo. ("I thought I knew what love is, but now that you ask, I don't know.") And there again it's a question of how our various capacities hook up one with another -- not everything you understand can readily be put into words, for instance.

What then, after all, are we up to when doing philosophy?

But one must imagine that when great new theories are put forth, it's only possible because of our imagination, thus, there's something about it which is more accurate as to the nature of the world than perception. — Manuel

As we gain sophistication in terms of mental power, we pierce further in the universe. — Manuel

This is a good point, and one that hadn't occurred to me. But the question seems to be whether we can form a "clear and distinct idea" of what we theorize. And, as you suggest, maybe we can't, but that's just the way it is, and the products of our imagination, in one sense, reach beyond what we can imagine, in another sense. If so, that in itself is an interesting result. That something like this goes on is old news -- mathematicians routinely deal with many-dimensional spaces that they cannot picture, and so in that sense can't imagine, for instance. What remains at issue would be the claim that in doing so we understand the theory, not the object treated of by the theory.

On the other hand, the cognitive scientists are going to tell us that all we've ever understood are theories we generate unconsciously. But there may still be a difference in kind, if our "native" theorizing hooks up to particular cognitive capacities that our scientific theories don't.

There’s an essay I read many years ago, I think it must have been by Howard Nemerov, where he defines poetry as “getting something right in language”. His example, if I recall correctly, came from a journal of Audubon’s — I forget the details, but it was something like this: he described some species of bluebird as looking just like a sparrow that had been dipped in blue ink. Now, of course, that’s not something one could actually do with a living bird, and even with a dead one it would not have the effect Audubon suggests, and yet as an image it strikes home. We understand it, and Nemerov seizes on just this sort of feat of imagination as characteristic of poetry. (Perhaps in this essay or in another, he devotes several pages to Herbert’s metaphorical description of prayer as “reversed thunder”.)

So yes I agree that imagination belongs here, and in particular as a perhaps unlikely source of understanding — “unlikely” because we might be tempted to align understanding with, you know, reality, and imagination not. Or we might say something about the value of hypothetical thinking (in counterfactual reasoning, prediction, and so on) and reduce imagination to a sort of technique we use for grasping reality analytically. But it could very well be the other way around, that it’s imaginative understanding we seek, and in some cases analysis can help us achieve that — if it provides a way to leverage understanding we already possess.

I want to say, first, that I approve of your sense of wonder.

@SophistiCat, I read a lot of what you post and generally find it both well-informed and level-headed, but as long as I’ve been reading you, you have remained, shall we say, unimpressed by such expressions of wonder and bafflement. For you, if there’s a theory that works, all strangeness of the phenomena accounted for is banished, and no strangeness attaches to a theory that is successful. I’m exaggerating, I suppose, but have I mistaken your attitude?

I'll venture out on a limb. What I often find most interesting in philosophy is something that looks like it might not be philosophy at all, but rather “psychology of philosophy”. I’m thinking of the way Wittgenstein describes us as held captive by a picture we have of how language works, or Sellars’s discussion of the myth of the given or of the manifest and scientific images of man. It seems more and more to me that the “deep structure”, if I may put it that way, of philosophy (because, of thought) is not really logical at all, but something more like this. This might be in the neighborhood of Lakoff with his metaphors, or even Jung with his myths and archetypes. As I said, I’m out on a limb here.

Now, @Manuel, when you say that today’s scientists, and by extension those of us who have realigned our worldview to theirs, to whatever degree, only understand their theories, not the world, I wonder if we could take this as an inability to form a new picture (or metaphor) to go with the theory. “Inability” would support the idea of a limit to what we can understand; perhaps it’s enough to say that we haven’t yet come up with such a picture. The old picture still holds us captive, and perhaps we’re stuck with it, as a bequest from Darwin. (Sellars thought it was inevitable that the manifest image be replaced by the scientific image, but that it was an uncomfortable process, and he advocated a “stereoscopic vision”.) Or perhaps not. But these things tend to be old, and, until someone brings them to light, unnoticed. Jung specifically places this sort of thing in the unconscious, apparently with good reason, so you have to wonder just how much they are within our “control”. (And of course Wittgenstein is widely read as suggesting that what’s needed to deal with such a complex is therapy.)

It does seem to me that understanding might find its home around here, in this sort of pre-logical, perhaps metaphorical or pictorial layer, and this is worlds away from knowing how to operate a theory like a bit of machinery.

Perhaps you are trying to follow too many discussions at once.

And I’m still confused why you think the forum should require other members to write in a way more to your liking. Does that not strike you as a little self-centered?

Maybe on a post by post basis the OP can set a min and max words for replies? — TiredThinker

I don't understand why you think this is a reasonable proposal. I see no burden on you it would relieve.

To philosophize is to pose (big? small? unbegged?) questions in such a way as to make explicit the limits of questioning (i.e. reason's limits). — 180 Proof

I like that you always emphasize questioning, problematizing, etc.

I've been thinking about an analogy to something people are sometimes inclined to say about art, sport, warfare, literature, chess, business -- in short, every creative field: there are interesting cases where people "break the rules", where "rules" means something like "received wisdom". And just as often, people will say that you have to know the rules, have to master the standard techniques of, say, painting, or playing saxophone, or rock climbing, whatever, before you can break the rules. (And alongside this, there is recognition of the occasional masterful folk artist or untutored genius who doesn't even know the rules they're breaking. The exception that proves the rule.)

I've been thinking there may be an analogy here to philosophy's relationship to reason, because philosophy requires going beyond reason, but reason is often the best first step. I don't think reason can be self-grounding, define itself, judge itself, apply itself. There must be something more, and even if we can't pin it down, that more, that something else that might stand above or beyond even reason, is philosophy.

Fair enough

Interesting stuff, particularly Daniel Dor. I am in your debt.

My sympathies tend to be with the communication-first side, but of course language as a technology for communication is enabled by capacities not necessarily evolved for that. That’s saying nothing, so an example: I’ve never forgotten my German linguistics professor demonstrating the original purpose of vocal chords by lifting the end of a table as he spoke (they close the windpipe to maintain air pressure in the chest under load).

In a related way, I find the speculation that language was originally gestural rather than vocal interesting, because vocal language also involves very precise gestures we don’t think of that way because they are done with the tongue and the mouth; thus not only are there obvious advantages to switching to sound as your medium, you may get to repurpose the brain’s existing skill at orchestrating complex fine motor movements. Which obviously also has other uses. Pure speculation.

In that spirit, I have tried to leave room for what I think of as language to be dependent on something more like what Chomsky thinks of as language, which looks more like a mathematical symbol system. I do wonder if the communication-first, social technology sort of view — which, as I said, is where my sympathies lie — can quite reach to certain fundamentals: the distribution of sign tokens into buckets via systems of differences (as in phonology and morphology); the ability to take a sound or a mark or a gesture as a sign at all, to treat it as referential.

It’s hard to shake the intuition that communication is late to the party in some respects, that certain key abilities must already be in place before we can talk about communication, language as a technology for solving coordination problems, and so on. So, as I said, I’ve tried to leave open the possibility that Chomsky’s little syntax engine, even if it’s really a machine for assembling a syntax engine, is one of those things, but that’s all.

Again, really interesting stuff, Street. Much appreciated.

I recall the thread, and I believe I deleted what appeared to me to be a later duplicate post of the OP. I remember looking a couple times to figure out what was up, and assumed it was a mistake. I left the discussion standing as it was, I believe.

Entirely possible I botched this operation somehow, and if so I apologize.

Your OP was short, broad, and open-ended. Another mod may have looked askance at that.

If you're still of a mind, just take another whack at it.

That’s quite helpful. Thanks.

Grammar simply has to 'fit' what is already in the theory, which accounts for all of grammar from the get-go, the only question being how. — StreetlightX

I’m not sure this is fair, historically. The search for “deep structure” may fail, but is analagous to the search for “logical form” — which Wittgenstein also concluded had failed. But it begins as an attempt to explain known phenomena: back in the days of transformational grammar, for instance, as an attempt to systematize the apparent connection between the syntax of statements and questions. Montague, who did his Ph.D. under Tarski, denied there was a distinction — as Tarski had assumed — between formal and natural languages. He seems to have believed that so-called natural languages are just more complicated, but just as a systematic as, say, first-order predicate logic.

But for such a research program, the proof is in the pudding: can you produce a model that accounts for all the data? Tomasello is right that there is something suspiciously ad hoc about what various people think goes in the core — but it’s ad hoc precisely because it’s trying to track the data, again rather like geocentric astronomy. You see the claim that there is a core syntax as the equivalent of the assumption that the heavens revolve around the earth, the assumption that both adds complexity to the theory and limits it. People working on UG might agree that what they have so far is a bit Keplerian, but they’re all looking for that Copernican breakthrough simplification. To make your analogy hold, you, or Tomasello, would have to show that by dropping the assumption of there being a UG at all, you can produce a dramatically simpler and convincing account of syntax. Is that what’s happened?

There’s another argument I think is lurking in the background: y’all have been at this for 65 years; if you haven’t figured out the elements of UG by now, it’s not gonna happen. You’ve been chasing a ghost. That’s not a terrible argument, but it’s not a great argument either. We’ve had quantum mechanics for a hundred years, and I don’t think anyone’s happy with the state of things, but our failure to finish it doesn’t mean we ought to just abandon the whole thing and start over.

In a word, essentialism vs. materialism. — StreetlightX

Okay, but you’re answering a different question.

As I understand you, you’re saying Chomsky’s — I don’t know — “underlying” philosophy or even metaphysics is suspect, and therefore to oppose Chomsky is to oppose him as a philosopher who belongs to the opposing school of philosophy. No more, no less.

But you don’t see two scientists with different ideas here at all. And therefore there is nothing for philosophy riding on what some might see as an intramural conflict between scientists. There are genuine scientific disputes — I’m only assuming you agree — because evidence is incomplete and theories are imperfect, but this isn’t one of those at all.

You chose your philosophy (or even metaphysics) first, and then offer your support to the professor who is more closely aligned with your philosophy, and you oppose the professor who seems more aligned with an opposing philosophical camp. Is that right?

Can you explain to me like I’m five why it’s important for philosophy that Tomasello is right and Chomsky is wrong? What’s riding on this for philosophy?

Tomasello wants to make a name for himself by going after Chomsky, but is as convincing as Everett -- who's a complete fraud. — Xtrix

I don’t have a pony in this race, but Tomasello looks like a guy worth learning about.

The reality is that there has been much written about both mathematics and music -- including ideas about how they may be piggybacking off of language. — Xtrix

It did occur to me that there may be another option: perhaps what Chomsky has hypothesized as necessary for getting language going is the same thing that’s necessary for getting math or music going. He may even have said as much, I don’t know. Montague used to say that linguistics is a branch of mathematics (though he also thought Chomsky was full of shit).

Because it's the best we can do to study thought. Language isn't the same as thought, of course, but it's related. — Xtrix

Hmmm. This is a mess, but I want to say that thought is a psychological phenomenon, but something else too. Maybe it’s only the having of a thought that is a psychological phenomenon. There are related problems with language as, on the one hand, a means of either expression or communication, but on the other hand as something symbolic. — There is at the very least Frege’s little argument against psychologism and for the ‘third realm’, that it makes no sense to speak of “my Pythagorean theorem” and “your Pythagorean theorem” but only of “the Pythagorean theorem”. Frege, Platonist that he was, certainly saw something, shall we say, objective in thought and language, something beyond what’s in an individual skull. It may be possible to locate that sense of objectivity in very many skulls and their history, but David Lewis tried to do exactly that in Convention and couldn’t quite pull it off.

Right. The question was whether more general learning mechanisms could account for learning language as well. More or less as old-timey empiricists might have imagined.

But it looks like a bad question to me now. We already know (as @Manuel reminded me) that linguistic functionality is localized in the brain, predictably so in normal, healthy brains, so it seems to be more a matter of activation, rather than learning or acquiring. — At least for certain aspects of linguistic capability.

Do we know something similar about mathematics? It would make sense. Music I would guess is more complicated. (I remember hearing many years ago that when listening to music, it’s the left brain for musicians and the right for non-musicians that lights up, or some such thing.)

I’m honestly not that interested in the brain science. I am interested in what philosophical hay we expect to make of all this. Thoughts? Why should current findings in neurolinguistics matter to us?

similar sounding noise doesn't activate it — Manuel

I’m almost certain there’s something similar with dogs. Did you hear about that little study? Somebody put a few dozen dogs into an MRI and had people speak to them. The result was that the dogs were responding not just to tone of voice, as one might speculate, but to specific words, because if you said some nonsense or some inappropriate words with the same tone and prosody as you usually said, “Good dog, Ginger!” the brain did not light up the same way. Dogs are able to learn to recognize specific words, as I suppose any serious dog trainer might tell you.

On the point of learnability: there are certainly things we want to say based just on the fact that language can be learned — that we must acquire a system for producing and consuming language, on demand, not just a bunch of language, not just, say, the meanings of a large number of sentences. Just as interesting, it must be acquirable in stages and usable, if limited, at each step of acquisition.<note> That’s a whole different sort of structure, the sequencing of acquisition.

I know that for concepts there’s work suggesting children generally start roughly in the middle on a spectrum of abstraction: you learn “dog” before “mammal” or “cocker spaniel”. I don’t know how the language story goes, but there are things about language use you clearly have to have some language to learn. (This is nearby the old criticism of older speculation about language acquisition, that people will tend to imagine it as learning another language, having already mastered one, and all the habits of thought that go with it, rather than genuinely imagining what it’s like to start from nothing.)

It’s not perfectly clear what philosophical hay can be made of any of this, especially since mistaken views about mind or language that might be corrected by the science were not exactly philosophy anyway, but armchair science.

I suppose what I’m wondering is whether learning more about how language is implemented will tell us more about what exactly it is — and that’s not perfectly clear, though it seems like it should. As noted above, we already know a little something of the constraints on what language can be just from knowing that it must be something that can be physically instantiated in a human being, and be acquirable. I suppose, in a sense, the controversy around Chomsky’s views is precisely about what could not conceivably be acquired and must simply be inherited.


<note>
(There is exactly one programming language I know of that took this lesson to heart — Raku, nee Perl 6 — because its designer, Larry Wall, did linguistics as an undergrad: you’re expected to speak “baby Raku” at the beginning, and be successful at that, and only gradually add more sophisticated constructions as you learn them.)

It is curious not that the functions of a human brain are ‘localized’ to some degree, but that they are localized in the same places, which suggests existing and inherited specialization waiting to be activated rather than very general learning capacities. But maybe not, depending on what we take ‘activation’ to mean. After all, linguistic ability being localized is not quite the same thing as there being a ‘language acquisition module’ of some kind — which of the linguistic modules is the one responsible for acquisition, and what happens to it after the lion’s share of your language learning has been done?

Anyway, leaving all that to one side, what does this evident brain specialization, however the details work out, tell us about the nature of language?

But that there exists in the human brain a capacity for acquiring language is hardly metaphysics. — Xtrix

Isn't the question whether that capacity is specialized to language?

Reminds me of one of my favorite jokes:

King Frederick of Prussia gathered his court scientists (i.e., philosophers) and asked them why a dead fish weighs more than a live fish. They each in turn offered a theory to explain this curious fact, and then he pointed out that it does not.

His research was flawed and useless, but there's other research that concentrates on color. — frank

I remember being under the impression that Sapir-Whorf had been straight-up refuted by the color research, and being disappointed to find it isn’t quite that simple, because research is fucking hard.

One way to read this: people who speak languages that don’t have separate words for blue and green can still reliably distinguish blue and green color samples; one way to look at that is that this strongly suggests they are capable of learning a language that does have words like “blue” and “green”. So, perhaps, “my language” doesn’t mean English or German or Xhosa or something, but something more like “my linguistic faculty”. And then we could say the limits of what I could grasp, conceivably expressed in a conceivable language, are the limits of my world.

I have no reservations, no, but the vocabulary is reserved for representing the conceptions of speculative metaphysics, in order to separate value as a quality from value as a purpose. — Mww

Mmmm. I think that’s a good answer, even though I’m not sure what you mean.

I’ll say this much: I am weary of the answer to every question being “it’s purpose-relative”. First, I am wary of the feeling that comes along with this that there is something arbitrary about the relation between the individual and the purpose they pursue, the feeling that we ought generally to think of purposes as choices or preferences. That feels weak to me. Oxygen is useful and valuable relative to the purpose of the respiratory system, which is in turn useful and valuable relative to the purpose of remaining a going concern. Swell. But that’s not a choice or a preference in any simplistic way. (And I want to say that, the fact that we can choose to prevent ourselves from breathing, doesn’t mean that each moment we don’t we must have chosen to continue. Bollocks.)

What’s more, even supposing you have some analytically arbitrary purpose — based in a free choice or a preference/passion — then you don’t also choose to value things relative to that purpose: it’s automatic. Given your purpose, the world presents itself to you a certain way, things announce their suitability or insuitability to your purpose, or occasionally, but not universally, as ambiguous, requiring reflection.

(As above, at the modeling level, as they say, there’s no doubt something classificatory going on — we imagine this like a Terminator’s heads-up-display, identifying objects in the immediate environment one after another and running them through a “writing-implement-recognition protocol” or something, but of course it’s ridiculous to imagine that every time we need a pen we do a brute-force search through all the objects in sight — nope, bowl; nope, book; nope, spoon, though that’s ‘closer’ in shape; nope, glasses; ... — and at any rate, above that level of the “biological interface”, this is not at all how we experience “looking for a pen”.)

On the one hand, I could simply note that a human life doesn’t start over again from scratch, from moment to moment, but is always layered with ongoing purposes, passions, and interests; thus the “raw” unvalued world never really gets a chance to present itself to us. (Or better: it is normal for it not to, and perhaps there are practices that can peel off some of those layers, as art students learn to overcome the biases of color constancy and finally see something more like the actual colors presented to the eye rather than the simplified version we’re accustomed to.) But I also wonder if there isn’t a regress lurking: choose your purpose; now choose how to achieve it; now choose to follow that process; now choose how to follow that process, ad infinitum. At some point, the world and the things in it must be understood in a certain way, things presenting themselves as what we want or not, etc.

But if we classify something as valuable, value is then a contingent assignment, and cannot be existential in that to which we assign the value — Mww

Do you have any reservations about this vocabulary — that we classify something as valuable or assign it value?

I just don’t think we experience the world that way — not universally. Maybe in some cases, we do something like “assigning” value, I don’t know. I think we mostly recognize value, understand things to have value. In this, I tend to think to think we are much like other animals: the world has things in it to be sought, and things to be avoided. Those are facts, not choices, not assignments.

I mean, I get that a biologist or a psychologist is going to say things like this: the organism, or some subsystem of it, classifies a given entity encountered as “food” or “predator” based on this or that, and assigns it a role, as if the world were a play the organism is putting on. I’m not disputing accounts of how it’s done, what the mechanism is. But that’s not the organism’s experience, which is of a world populated with good things and bad things. We’re capable of theorizing that, of seeing around our own corner to some degree, so we’re in a position to say, it’s all assignment all the time: nothing has inherent value. But of course you can only say that and mean it if you’re not a human being or a dog or an amoeba, if you’re not a living thing at all. So it looks to me like an answer to the wrong question. We want to know how we find value in things and what it means for us, and end up describing what that would be like if we were completely different from what we are. Yes, we could happen to have grown up elsewhere, at another time, speak a different language and have different customs and traditions, but none of us only happen to be human beings and could happen to have been something else.

his efforts to make communication a mere auxiliary of language - rather than its raison d'etre — StreetlightX

basically an allergic reaction to behaviourialism — StreetlightX

I was thinking he gets to the former from the latter via the competence/performance distinction...

Can I just ask, what’s going on here philosophically? You accuse Chomsky of promoting various sorts of pseudo-science, which suggests you see the role of philosophical analysis of linguistics as demarcation. Is that how you see what you’re doing here?

I’m just always confused by these discussions that pit one scientist against another. We’re amateurs at philosophy, and presume to pick winners and losers in various fields we’re even less qualified to judge than philosophy, not only that but presume to say who’s a real scientist and who’s a charlatan, even if he’s been teaching at MIT for a lifetime and the acknowledged leader of his field (though never without controversy).

Is linguistics so easy that we can swoop in and settle all the outstanding issues in the field of an afternoon? Is it slightly easier or slightly harder than the other topics we discuss on this forum, such as evolutionary biology or quantum physics?

This is all a far cry from that philosopher who felt his only advantage was that at least he didn’t think he knew what he didn’t.