or “without acting”.

Aleister Crowley once defined magick as, "The science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with Will." — Bret Bernhoft

Did he really?

That seems broad enough to include regular, non-magickal action.

There’s a bit of the argument that strikes me as a little odd.

1. Bees and humans perceive the flower differently.
Therefore,
2. We cannot know what the flower itself is like, but only how we perceive it.
Therefore,
3. Jack and Jill know only their individual perceptions of the flower, not the flower.

In (1) we’re comparing the perceptions of species but in (3) of individuals. That makes the “we” in (2) ambiguous: it could refer to anyone qua human being, or to anyone qua individual human being.

Why don’t we feel the need to distinguish how each individual bee perceives from how every other bee perceives?

What in the comparison of the perceptive ‘styles’ of species underwrites distinguishing the perceptive ‘style’ of one human being from another? If (2) says “Members of a species can only know how members of that species perceive the flower,” how do you infer that Jack knows only how he perceives and Jill knows only how she perceives?

found as far back as at least Platonic “knowledge of” vs, “knowledge how”, and later in Russell’s “knowledge by acquaintance”, and a veritable myriad of similarities in between — Mww

I think the issue reaches pretty deep: roughly, is the rational, the cognitive, derived from the non-rational, the non-cognitive? This is, it seems, the principal issue in philosophy of mind. It is the issue Sellars was dealing with in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”, in which he argued, broadly, that there is no magic thread to stitch the two together — “magic” here meaning: has one side that counts as non-cognitive and connects cleanly to the non-cognitive (our senses) and has another side that counts as cognitive and connects to our conceptual judgments and so forth. (It’s “sense impressions” of some sort that are supposed to pull this off, and Sellars argues nothing can possibly be what they need to be for empiricism to work.)

It’s also the issue that Wittgenstein was dealing with in arguing that the foundation of, well, everything we do, is, well, what we do, i.e., our practices, and our practices are something we are trained in, and must just accept, not something we analyze and judge and understand rationally. (Sellars was here too, and has a much more complicated version of the same stuff in his article about language games, offering a solution to the problem that apparently it would be impossible to learn a language game.)

That there are these two realms seems inarguable. The choices seem to be basing one in the other, or treating each as sui generis. One source of the temptation to base the rational, the cognitive, and the linguistic ,i.e., everything we think of vaguely as λόγος, in something not λόγος, is that children seem to make the passage from not having such capacities to having them, and mankind, we assume, made such a transition at some point. Darwin has complicated that question somewhat, and Chomsky after him.

It is also possible to read Wittgenstein as denying that are two realms and denying there is such a transition to be made: maybe words like “know” and “true” and “meaning” are just words like any other words that we learn to use in certain ways and not others, and maybe they shouldn’t be thought of as ‘special’ or ‘central’ for philosophy. You could read the ‘language-game’ approach as suggesting that there are rather more than two realms, but they’re all just a matter of how we use language in different ways for diverse purposes in varying circumstances.

I don’t purport to be able to dismantle the model of “knowledge that” underlying everything we do, at least not right here and right now. I think it has a somewhat dubious provenance — what we might call an “intellectualist prejudice” — and I think a great deal of its attraction lies in making analysis tractable. It is also resistant to empirical critique because any calculation or inference that it is plainly implausible to suppose we do, whether in going about our daily lives or in performing some extraordinary feat of skill, can also be swept into the rational and plenty-fast-enough but unconscious processes whirring along in our brains, whether those processes are merely postulated or actually supported by some evidence.

But I do think there’s room for an alternative story, one which doesn’t begin by stipulating that the foundation of all our interactions with the world amount to predication — observing objects and events and classifying them, making inferences from our classifications, and so on. I think it is possible to take other ways of interacting with things as more fundamental.

One example I’ve had on my mind for a little while is reading. My daughter mentioned to me recently that now and then she kind of burns out on reading and begins to actually notice letters on the page rather than reading them. When you have mastered the skill of reading, and your brain isn’t messing with you, we would have to say both that you see the letters, obviously, else you’re not reading, and that you do not see the letters, that you see right through them and your mind is filled only with their meaning. You have to see them without noticing them. Heidegger talks somewhere about the tool nearly disappearing from the craftsman’s mind as he works, and that it only stands out as something to be contemplated when it’s broken, or missing, or the wrong tool for the job at hand. So it is generally when we use rather than mention words — you pass right through however the words are physical inscribed (in ink or air) to the meaning, and maybe right through the meaning to a response, an action, a reaction, a feeling, a reflection, an occasion of knowing something new. We begin learning to read by looking intently at each letter, assigning the proper sound to it, and all that, and perhaps to become skilled at that process of observing and classifying individual stimuli as a b or a d or a p means precisely for it to become faster and unconscious (to move from System 2 down to System 1), but it is still an open question what supports even those steps of learning that are later ‘automated’ to become ‘second nature’. Learning to read is a specific sort of activity, embedded in a terribly sophisticated environment, and only possible for an already very sophisticated person, who can already speak their native language fluently and understands quite a bit about learning new things.

I don’t have a knock-down argument that the cognitive (rational, linguistic) is grounded in the non-cognitive (non-rational, non-linguistic). I’m not sure there can be one. On the other hand, the arguments in the other direction come so easily that they are unconvincing, and involve a disconcerting amount of handwaving. There is, for instance, a story about a music student who was writing a paper about Coltrane and he agreed to talk to her about his music. She brought along a transcription she had made of one his solos that she wanted to ask about. He tried to play from her transcription, but, after a couple of tries, he gave up and told her it was “too hard”. How hard would it be to concoct some explanation about the sequence of decisions he ‘must’ have made when he improvised that solo and all of the factors he was taking into consideration every, say, tenth of a second, and explain the entire performance as if he were doing a peculiar bit of math, rather quickly, in his head, and unconsciously. It’s easy to describe such a ‘mechanism’ but pointless, because there is no chance at all that you could describe an algorithm that could predict what he was going to play. All you’ve really achieved is an alternative description of what he actually did and then claimed that it was perfectly understandable because we could so describe it. (It’s a sort of ‘argument from notation’.)

My instinct is that we see in the way a musician or an athlete or a craftsman acts, in the ‘decisions’ they seem to be making, an involvement with the things in the world, a responsiveness, that underlies everything we do, including knowing. It’s just a bit more spectacularly on display when it’s Coltrane playing saxophone than when it’s just me making a pot of coffee. I’d like to think of this ‘involvement’ as being prior even to the distinction between cognitive and not, but I think inevitably from the cognitive side it’s just going to look like ‘not’. Oh well.

How do we know what it is that makes knowledge possible. — Mww

Maybe. But there are two other ways to ask that question: (i) what makes human knowledge possible? and, in a somewhat different vein, (ii) what makes human beings knowers?

So, yes, one version of the question would make room for an argument that language ‘comes first’, or some conceptual apparatus, or history and culture, or biology. Indeed, how do you make rabbit stew?

The other version might be brought out by the tired analogy of describing the progress of a game in terms of its rules: that everything happening on the field or on the board is in accordance with the rules leaves out almost everything about what people are doing when they play. And not just their motivations, but everything about the way they play.

Ever watch little kids playing soccer? It’s like watching a flock of birds chase a soccer ball around the field. They are playing in accordance with the rules (mostly — offside is confusing), but their understanding of the game of soccer is not the same as you would find among adult players. One reason for that might be readily described as cognitive: there are things about playing soccer they do not know. But there are also things they do not know how to do in the other sense: they cannot do them; they lack certain skills. And there are things about playing soccer you cannot understand if you lack those skills. The development of a skill new to you can change how you understand the game; the development of a skill new to those you’re playing with can change their understanding of the game. (Imagine only one player on the field figuring out how to chip — deliberately rather than by accident — and how that would change everything.)

My question was meant to land around here. You could produce an account of playing soccer that looks a bit like the rulebook, but you will miss almost everything, not only about why people do what they do when playing soccer (leaving aside why they play at all), but also how they play, how they understand the game, how they understand what they’re doing, and some of that is not a matter of cognition but of skill. If having some skill is a prerequisite for having some cognition, then by ignoring skill you would miss an entire class of cognition, and mischaracterize what’s left.

... the limit of knowledge ... the limit of knowledgeable things ... a limit on knowledge ... a limit on experience.

... some say experience is knowledge ...

... that which we can know about ... a limit on knowledge itself ... to know of them ...

... new knowledge ... old knowledge ...

And we don’t even know what we don’t know.....

AAARRRGGGG!!!! — Mww

Suppose we wondered, is knowledge either the fundamental way human beings relate to the world or one of the fundamental ways human beings relate to the world? If either of these is the case, you should be able to abstract away the rest of the human being, and their other ways of relating to the world, and still produce a full account of human beings qua knowers. (Knowledge in this sense would have, at the very least, logical co-priority, so to speak.)

As a step halfway toward answering that question, you might abstract away the rest of the human being and see whether you can produce a full account of knowing. (You could, for the sake of the experiment, ‘pretend’ that knowing is fundamental.)

How would you know if you had failed?

That is, suppose, for the sake of argument, that knowing is not quite fundamental, and in abstracting away the rest of the human being you had cut away something essential to understanding the character of human knowing.

How would you know that the account you produced was not an account of human knowing, but only of how human beings would know if they were completely different — that is, if knowing really were fundamental?

Is this the sort of thing you’re talking about?



My son tells me this sense of living through the collapse of civilization is pretty common among twentysomethings.

There was also an episode of RadioLab about the curious rise of nihilism in popular culture (“In the Dust of this Planet”).

What do you conclude from this? — frank

That one day I'll have to study Kant, because I can't make any sense of the version of Kant presented here. I don't feel warranted to conclude anything more than that.

If you want a speculative answer, I could say this: the connection between the footprints and the man who left them, that the one indicates the other, that's "part of the world". By that I mean, this connection is not something we impose on the world, but something we encounter in it. That connection is what grounds our inference, from the footprints in the flowerbed, to the man who was there. The world we find ourselves in, is intelligible.

One reason this matters -- aside from whether you get mileage out of 'evidence' as a metaphor -- is that evidence is intelligible. Footprints are a natural sign; like other sorts of evidence they indicate something else in the world. Those sorts of connections make the world intelligible.

The issue here is a sort of sleight-of-hand: something defined as being unintelligible is introduced as if it were part of the intelligible world, like the airplane represented by a radar blip, or the flower represented by its scent. These are connections we are familiar with. Some of us even know something about how those connections work. Whatever we're attempting to say about the plane 'in itself' or the flower 'in itself', it's nothing like this.

Maybe I can be even clearer:

When@Hanover talks about phenomenal experience, he uses the word "evidence", as if phenomena could be understood as evidence for noumena. I don't see how, do you? In what sense is the relation of the two evidentiary?

Not sure my point really came through.

Footprints in the flowerbed are evidence of a man because there is a connection between a man and his footprints, which we'll tend to call 'causal', and because we're familiar with this connection, so we say things like, "We know that men leave footprints."

If we smell the scent of gardenias, we expect to be able to find gardenias somewhere nearby, because we know they're the sort of thing responsible for that scent. If we knew nothing about gardenias, we wouldn't take such a scent as evidence that they are nearby.

So I'm wondering how our senses can give evidence of something that we not only know nothing about, but can know nothing about.

I keep wondering how the idea of 'evidence' is being used here. Footprints in the flowerbed are evidence of a man, who was standing there, or of his having stood there, but can they be "evidence" of something we, in principle, can know nothing about? How? How would we establish the evidentiary relation between the footprints and the something or other? What could we mean by claiming that there is such a connection?

"You get nothing! You lose! Good day sir!" — Baden

But that was a test. The banned cannot return his everlasting gobstopper, and you will never say, “So shines a good deed in a weary world.”

Just as well.

But one needs to be aware that our handed-down grammar biases us toward a certain way of thinking — Joshs

Well, there's a lot to say about language. I wasn't wading into those waters, and I'm still not, but don't let me stop you.

You do admit though — TheMadFool

Of course I don't. I explained an idiom, and its bearing on a quote, that's it.

I was just explaining what Josh posted, which would make no sense whatsoever if you didn’t know the German idiom Heidegger refers to. No, the point is not to study grammar to understand being.

It helps if you know that the common way to say ”There is ...” in German is “Es gibt ...”, which is literally “It gives ...” It’s an impersonal construction like “It’s raining.”

can I appeal to you personally — god must be atheist

Sure.

What would you do, Srap Tsmaner, if somebody said that to you? — god must be atheist

You should have flagged it.

But consider the post of yours that started this little love-fest:

The greedy capitalists are NOT inciting you to drive your car, wear clothes, heat your apartment, cool the inside of your fridge. YOU are doing it, and so am I; time to stop blaming THEM, the greedy capitalists. They are not using, per head, or per capita, more energy than you and I use, and blaming them for providing us what we want and demand is HIGHLY HYPOCRITICAL. — god must be atheist

You have wrapped the argument that everyone who enjoys the benefits of living in a modern industrialized society shares some measure of blame for climate change in a claim that for them to say otherwise is hypocritical. That strikes me as kind of an odd way to frame the point. It suggests that you are more interested in whether people are being hypocritical than what they’re being hypocritical about. And okay maybe that’s a sentiment philosophers are prone to, but don’t be surprised if the people you express this view to take it personally.

Each of you have a position to argue. I do not understand why you are both more interested in talking about how appalled you are that the other has taken the position they have.

If you must argue about who’s to blame for climate change, argue about that.

The world I find myself in is the world as it is, preemptive of my considerations of it. — Mww

Well, this can’t be the first thing you say. It’s a conclusion, right? You have to have some ideas about the world and what’s in it, and yourself, and how you relate to the world. There’s just a lot presumed here. Maybe we say this later, but it can’t be how you start.

we don’t care that we find ourselves in a world — Mww

Basically, yes — at least in the sense that we might recognize a tendency to overlook the fact that we’re in a world, that in everyday life we take it for granted, and in philosophizing ... that’s a long story.

I mean, where else would we be found — Mww

But, see, that’s gold! That’s an a priori claim, right? So this is a reasonable starting point, and all Heidegger does is take exactly this and think it through: alright, so what is a world? what does it mean to be in one? why don’t we notice, since, with just a little reflection, you’re inclined to think it is an obvious truth that there’s a world and we’re in it?

if we are found in the world, then everything else we can know about must be found in the same world — Mww

And then this is the next thing — although Heidegger keeps fiddling with the order in Being and Time, because reasons. Are the things we find in the world “in” it the same way we are? How hard is it to see that the answer has to be “no”?

When Wittgenstein mentions the possibility of writing a book called “The world as I found it,” he intends to make the point that the “I” in the title can’t be in the book. But we just agreed that it’s perfectly obvious we find ourselves in a world, so what gives? The natural thing to say is just that we’re ‘in’ the world in a way that is different from the way things that can go in the book (the proverbial tables and trees, say) are ‘in’ the world.

This is all Heidegger is doing in Division I of Being and Time, working through the consequences of these thoughts.

when we really want to know what constitutes the world that we’re in — Mww

And that means not just considering the things we find there, but also what makes the world we find ourselves in a world. One maneuver here is to, shall we say, ‘situate’ the confrontation between subject and object: he notes, almost in passing, that the sort of paradigm case for philosophers — looking at a table, that kind of thing — is actually a specific behavior, and a little odd, and shouldn’t be assumed to be representative of how we deal with the things we find in the world. He’ll flesh that out by giving his analysis of how we do usually interact with things, at length.

At the very least, there’s the simple point that the universe does not consist of a philosopher and the table he gazes at thinkingly; there’s the whole rest of the world around them and they’re each in it.

Any of this seem sensible to you? My Kant-fu is weak, and I’ve only lately been reading Heidegger again after many, many years, so my Heidegger-fu is similarly limited. I’m explaining as best I can as I go.

Hmmm....is it correct to say, then, that Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology is a priori? — Mww

It’s at least partly correct:

The question of Being aims therefore at ascertaining the a priori conditions not only for the possibility of the sciences which examine entities as entities of such and such a type, and in so doing, already operate with an understanding of Being, but also for the possibility of those ontologies themselves ((here he probably means Kant)) which are prior to the ontical sciences and provide their foundation. — B&T, H 11

But what do we mean by ‘a priori’? What did Kant mean? What does Heidegger mean here?

The way we got into this was the question of the relationship between philosophy and psychology. It’s a question I have been puzzled about for a very long time. Part of what Heidegger means here is that philosophy is not a kind of anthropology or psychology. What does that mean?

Science, as I understand it, sees the world as a result. An explanation of why people behave as they do, or why trees grow and die as they do, or why there are galaxies with stars and planets, provides a framework that, given some input (cosmology is a bit different), predicts that we will observe what we observe. That’s one sort of understanding, what we might call ‘genetic’, how the world comes to be as it is. Insofar as you do this sort of thing in philosophy, you are doing proto-science.

The other possibility could be summed up by a phrase from Wittgenstein’s great burst of a priori thinking: “The world as I found it.” Eventually he will say, in so many words, that philosophy must strive for pure description and nothing theoretical. Phenomenology pursued a sort of pure description. In working through his troubled relationship with Kant, Strawson hit upon the phrase “descriptive metaphysics” to summarize his own project of keeping the ‘good bits’ of Kant. What all such descriptive projects have in common is the idea that we may theorize the world as a result, as science does, but we do not find the world as a result.

It’s mildly paradoxical that pure description lands in the not-empirical-science bucket where we find a priori theorizing, since description must be description, you know, of something, and that means of something already encountered or experienced or cognized. But insofar as you describe not this or that encounter of something in the world, but the nature of all such encounters, then I guess that’s what we take ourselves to mean by ‘a priori’. And that’s very much what Heidegger is up to: before you can do the sort of ontology he attributes to Kant, as a way of grounding the natural sciences, you need to write “The world I find myself in”.

No matter how you slice it, this here is a minority game. Yep, nature loves to be a big tease. I don't know why, not like she cares. — Manuel

But we do, and not just philosophers. People do care about and want to understand their own lives and their world. Philosophy can be understood not as an obscure academic enterprise, but as one way of doing that. Art is another. Trying to be a good person or a good neighbor or a good citizen, those are others.

Not for nothing, but Heidegger specifically notes that understanding is something we chase, that nature seems to be teasing us, that it’s as if ‘the answer’ is hiding from us, and he makes that a central component of the analysis.

Ramsey again:

Where I seem to differ from some of my friends is in attaching little importance to physical size. I don't feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens. The stars may be large, but they cannot think or love; and these are qualities which impress me far more than size does. I take no credit for weighing nearly seventeen stone.

My picture of the world is drawn in perspective, and not like a model to scale. The foreground is occupied by human beings and the stars are all as small as threepenny bits. I don't really believe in astronomy, except as a complicated description of part of the course of human and possibly animal sensation.

Philosophy must be drawn in perspective. Kant and Heidegger each in their own way are exploring that this is so and why and what it means for the doing of philosophy as a way of caring about and trying to understand yourself and your world.

Frank Ramsey’s version (I think he was talking about aesthetics, but it’s tempting to apply it, shall we say, more broadly):

Philosopher A: I went to Grantchester yesterday.
Philosopher B: No I didn’t.

But there’s a serious question here: what does it mean for a philosophical point to depend on a matter of fact?

One answer, and I have some sympathy with this answer, as I think we all should, is that you must be doing science not philosophy because philosophy is a priori. Some of us may not really want to say the last part out loud, but it’s there nonetheless. That way of putting it distinguishes philosophy positively, but in our time I think it is mainly understood negatively: whatever the methodology of philosophy is or could be, it’s clearly not the same as whatever scientists do — whether we’re happy to call that particular ‘not the same’ a priori or not.

Another answer is that we don’t have the option of starting from nothing. Something is given to us as we begin doing philosophy, whether that’s a conceptual scheme, or a language, or something else. We can think of ourselves as studying that, or we can think of it as where the hermeneutic process just happens to begin. Austin, for example, is explicit about this, when he says that ordinary language may not be the last word but it must be the first. Philosophy has to begin not at the beginning but in the middle.

But there’s one more answer, and that’s to note that we already know what’s in the second answer. We know that we will begin from something given to us, whatever that is, and we can spend a little time thinking not just about that — not focused only on our categories, our concepts, or our language, say — but also about this given-ness, and this process by which we take an initial understanding and transform it into another, something we are evidently unable to avoid. If you notice that this very process is itself given, then you close the loop and have found something really worth thinking about. Above all what’s given, as we begin doing philosophy, is that we will start somewhere and go on from there.

That has something of the flavor of an a priori investigation about it; it doesn’t sound like empirical science. But on the other hand, everything I’ve said points at what we could reasonably think of as facts: that something is given, that we start somewhere, that we know we do, and so on. That’s a curious thing, then, that in one sense this approach is as dependent as could be on fact but not dependent in the way empirical science is.

That’s my pitch for what I understand to be Heidegger’s pitch for phenomenological ontology. Sounds to me like it’s worth a shot.

If you wanted to do the research, I am confident that you would find — Michael Zwingli

Not only would such “research” not be probative — you’re telling me you haven’t even done it? You haven’t even googled to support this spurious point?

We’re way off topic now, so that’s a good excuse for me to be done here.

Feelings and cognitions are irrefutably separable, not because of affects they have, but that upon which the affects are directed. — Mww

I’m honestly thinking of changing teams though. The preferences & expectations (our old friends, passions and reason) model has run its course for me. Anyway, I’m in the mood to try something else.

I also think that to think the something else is a kind of psychology misses the point entirely!

I don’t have a position to defend, though, so I can learn more by listening.

Kant’s metaphysics is telling a causal story. — Joshs

Huh.

From here it looks like there is, for you, no real distinction between philosophy and psychology, or you take philosophy to be a sort of ‘theoretical psychology’, as we talk about ‘theoretical physics’, meaning ‘not quite ready for the lab’.

Odd place for this thread to end up...

causal — Joshs

But Kant, for instance, isn't telling a causal story about cognition.

hypothesis — Joshs

And that story isn't open to experimental disconfirmation. If Damasio's theory doesn't hold up in the lab, you have to change your tune, but Kant can ignore the whole process.

Every object I see either fulfills or fails to confirm my prior expectations in some measure. This validation or invalidation is felt, and the feeling doesn’t follow the perception , it is simultaneous with it. — Joshs

This is a fair sample of your approach, I think.

The question is whether "fulfills" is fully describable in conceptual terms such as @Mww would use, sans affect.

You expect something, for reasons describable in affective terms -- even for Hume -- something about goals and preferences maybe, what *matters* to you. Then action and new data.

That the feeling of success or failure is "simultaneous", that's a tough sell, but suppose it's true: does that mean you have a double response to new input? One conceptual and one affective? Or is it two aspects of a single response?

It still looks like @Mww can grant whatever you want on the affective side, since goals and preferences get updated too, but he can also stick with the conceptual side and it alone being cognitive.

So long as affect is just something that accompanies or directs cognition, even if it always does so, @Mww can ignore it for his analysis of cognition. You have to destroy the presumed conceptual apparatus, or make affect constitutive of it, to make what you're saying more than psychological obiter dicta.

I stand by that suggestion, and think it obvious. — Michael Zwingli

I don't. Intelligence, to start with, isn't one thing, and certainly isn't the same thing as academic success.

Besides that, I don't think it a secret that law enforcement tends to attract a certain type of domineering personality, though this is by no means universal within the ranks. — Michael Zwingli

More armchair sociology. I think there are some studies about "type A" being overrepresented in the military, but there are a lot of subcultures in the military. Mostly they're ordinary people.

I do not see any necessary connection between either intelligence level or a dominant persona and racial prejudice, do you? — Michael Zwingli

I just wondered why you were so comfortable sketching out the psychology of the typical citizen in uniform (not too bright, likely a bully) but suddenly felt a pang of intellectual conscience at attributing racial bias without some very specific sort of evidence (statistics showing disproportionate use of force, for instance, don't count, it seems). Why so skittish just on this point?

We have no basis to make such a judgement, since we do not know the minds of said particular cops. — Michael Zwingli

This after your speech about how stupid and thuggish police officers are?

That fictional sentences may be true within the fiction? — Banno

Maybe? It's just hard to be sure what we mean by this.

Broadly, I'm not opposed to some kind of analysis that distinguishes internal and external frames of reference, however you do that, but it's not perfectly obvious how to do that formally.

What's more, people freely cross that boundary: "But in Chapter 3, Harry said ..." That sort of thing makes me suspect the "internal" frame of reference might actually just be shorthand for the external, just a condensed manner of speaking.

But I'm not wild about that approach either. For one thing, whatever analysis we arrive at for fictional objects ought to be able to support the fact that people care about fictional objects very nearly as if they were real. (At least as far as psychology is concerned, that suggests we're using some of the same machinery for understanding fictional worlds, and their furniture, that we use to understand the real one.)

Absolutely we expect fiction to be largely logical, except when it deliberately isn't. (William Burroughs, say.) That's a chunk of Mark Twain's critique of Cooper.

I guess if I really wanted to do this, I'd assume fiction is a type of counterfactual, so you get your extensional semantics via possible worlds. Your nonsense category will show up as impossible worlds, I guess. That doesn't solve crossover problems directly. Doesn't Kripke write about this somewhere? How there can't turn out to be a "real" Sherlock Holmes, for instance.

Can you see a future in the US where police officers carrying firearms is unusual? — I like sushi

Not until there are far, far fewer guns in the hands of the public, so never. It is true that there has been a militarization of police departments in the United States, but it was already true that it would be hard to find any place on earth, outside of a warzone, where so many people are so well armed.

For the logical analysis of literature, I would start here.

Do you think of Kant and Heidegger as psychologists?

In classical logic, to make the inference you would have to presume the predicate "... is a leprechaun". How you understand that predicate remains moot; and one can play on that ambiguity.

This is the ambiguity ↪bongo fury apparently traded on in the Being thread.

If one supposes that all ∃(x)(Lx) says is that something is a leprechaun, one need not conclude that one might meet a leprechaun walking down the street. That there are leprechauns says nothing more in this context than that we can predicate being a leprechaun to something - fictional or otherwise.

Some folk see this as problematic. Seems to me to be just an ambiguity in the use of "is". That Shamus is a leprechaun does not imply that you might meet him in the pub. — Banno

What?

You are claiming there’s an ambiguity to avoid existential quantification meaning exactly what it says and what everyone agrees it means. @bongo fury wasn’t trading on any ambiguity; sentences found in fiction are literally false, and that’s fine. (Lawrence Block wrote a book about fiction writing called “Telling Lies for Fun and Profit”.)

If you take away existential import there’s no way to put it back just when you want. “There is something under the bed” will just no longer mean there is something under the bed.

Also, what is “presuming a predicate”?

When we are "busy "being" (coping, interacting with, engaging with, "on the way to," etc)" is it not always now that we are doing that? — Janus

What is our life: it’s looking forward or it’s looking back. And that’s our life. That’s it. Where is the moment? — Glengarry, Glen Ross

time exist because cycle exist — Nothing

cycles exist because of time — Mww

Suppose we did not live in an environment of natural cycles, no sun rising and setting, no moon waxing and waning, no predictable seasons. That’s presumably how we first measured duration. Would we have even formed such a concept as ‘duration’ without an obvious and always available way to measure it? Without natural cycles, life might be somewhat more dreamlike, chaotic, and it could mean time would also be experienced quite differently.

Jus’ speculatin’.

No, not the Kant, which doesn’t mean much to me.

I think it was something about the phrase “occur in a certain mode of our being,” which is terribly vague, but I found myself thinking about how mathematics could be seen as something we add to our own world, and that can mean not that mathematical objects have our mode of being, but that they can be part of it. It’s a funny thing, the way we make sense of the world in part by furnishing it with the things we use to make sense of it, all of which have a sort of human feel about them, although it can be hard to notice with mathematics. Those things we make can form a sort of fabric that holds the rest together.

Maybe it just clicked for me while you were standing there!