I meant logical predicates, sorry, not grammatical. (It’s grammatically subject and predicate, as usual, or one noun phrase and one verb phrase, and the verb phrase has a predicate nominative in it.)

Of the thing in question, ‘__ is a pencil’ can be truly predicated, ‘__ is a rocket’ cannot; and there’s a thing in question.

So that’s two (logical) predicates and some existence.

I’m not in love with that analysis, but it’s the usual way people do it.

There’s a difference between pretending you’re a lion, and pretending you’re really a lion.

From Ruth Krauss. I think it’s in A Hole is to Dig but it might be Open House for Butterflies.

J K Rowling is an author and Harry Potter is a magician. J K Rowling exists and Harry Potter doesn't. That's four things I've learned in total. In this case existence is very predicaty isn't it? — Cuthbert

So far as the surface grammar goes, sure. “Exists” is after all an English verb, so it’s something English noun phrases can do.

You can imagine someone — many years ago now — who had not heard of Harry Potter coming into the middle of a conversation and asking who Harry Potter is. When we say, “He’s a character in a book by a woman named ‘J. K. Rowling’,” are we saying he doesn’t exist but she does? Or are we saying he exists in one way in she in another? Or are we saying he’s one sort of thing and she another?

Here are some different comparisons. Does Robert Galbraith exist? He’s J. K. Rowling, so he must, right? But he doesn’t exist as Robert Galbraith. Did J. T. Leroy exist? Not like J. K. Rowling. Someone did write the novels, and someone did appear in public answering to the name “J. T. Leroy” but they weren’t the same person. Does Oobah Butler exist? Oobah Butler wrote the articles that won awards — about a restaurant that didn’t exist but then did — but sometimes the person who showed up to collect the award, answering to “Oobah Butler”, was no more Oobah Butler than Savannah Knoop was J. T. Leroy. Does Erin Hunter exist? Someone writes the Warriors books, but not always the same person, and none of them are called “Erin Hunter”.

Honestly, I don’t think any of these puzzles are any help in understanding existence, not on their own. They are all — Harry Potter, Robert Galbraith, J. T. Leroy, Oobah Butler and the Shed at Dulwich, Erin Hunter — instances of one sort of pretending or another. Pretending is very interesting, but I’m not sure it’s the ‘master key’ to understanding existence.

It adds a layer to be analyzed; maybe that helps clarify the layer that was already there, but maybe not. This pencil is not a rocket. Two predicates there and some existence. If I pretend this pencil is a rocket, does that make it clearer in what sense the pencil exists? Or even in what sense it exists as a pencil but not as a rocket? Or in what sense no rocket exists where the pencil is? Maybe? If you incline to a ‘the pencil is a mental model’ view, then you kind of want to say everything’s pretend, all we do is pretend, so maybe the cases of obvious pretense are helpful if you can show they’re not different from ‘normal’ cases in any important way.

Pretending a pencil is a rocket is pretending something is a rocket, and that’s different from holding up your hand in a certain way and saying, “Pretend I’m holding a pencil.” Is that a funny way of saying, “Pretend I’m holding something you (and I, and everyone else) would pretend is a pencil”? (You’ll have to spruce up your vocabulary, because you only can pretend a pencil is a pencil if you mistakenly think it isn’t. Fun!) Even if it is, have you learned anything about the difference between having something in your hand and not?

And so we may regard the disagreements as not about the facts but as due to differences in the conventions-adopted in organizing or describing the space. What, then, is the neutral fact or thing described in these different terms? — Goodman

In English, that’s a field, and that it is a field, is a fact. For speakers of English, the fieldhood of that field is as neutral as it gets.

“In English, we call that a ‘field’, but who knows what it really is.” What could that possibly mean? **

Conventions don’t block neutrality; they create it.


**
Some variations:
“In English, we call that a ‘field’, but maybe we’re wrong.”
“In English, we call that a ‘field’, but that’s just what we call it.”
“In English, we call that a ‘field’, but maybe real fields aren’t like that at all.”

It's like asking if there is some standard by which we judge chess games. — Sam26

Are you saying something like this:

"Is Bb5 legal?" -- Depends on the position.
"Is Bb5 good?" -- Depends on the position.

I first read Being and Time nearly forty years ago. Just started re-reading it yesterday, so I will return with all the answers shortly.

But they are, as described, oriented toward the field as something, and that something is different in each case. In turn, that changes what they will notice about the field, what they will pay attention to, and so on.

None of which is too say 'the field' isn't there, or is constructed. I just to want to allow that they are, in one sense, doing the same thing, and in another, doing three different things. A veteran cattleman will also look at the field differently from someone less experienced. All of these distinctions are 'off the rack', though not wrong for being stereotyped.

Nothing here strikes me as decisive.

they all see different things — Wayfarer

I agree with the gist of what you're saying, and the language I quoted is so suggestive that it must capture something essential, must be somehow right. I don't really want to say, that's just a metaphor and pass on by. But there's a reason philosophers in the analytic tradition have felt themselves pushed toward externalism. There's a reason we find it hard to escape the idea of culture. Even someone in the trenches of cognitive science like @Isaac finds a need for social roles in behavior that are not merely the individual agent's 'conception' or 'idea' of that role, but more like borrowed scripts they act out.

In short, anything that paints what's going on when two people 'see different things' is going to come up short if it treats them as isolated beings confronting the world on terms that are theirs individually, uniquely, and alone.

Even the rituals surrounding pumping gas reflect the superordinate differences in worldview between people — Joshs

Except that they really don't seem to. You can work alongside someone for years, or see them at the grocery store every few days, and never have any idea what their political or religious (or ...) views are.

Yes, the same action can carry different meanings. It's one thing to throw a pitch during warm-up and another to throw it facing a batter.

Do you think a fight between a rightwing supporter of Trump and a far left supporter of critical race theory occurs against the backdrop of overwhelming agreement about the world? — Joshs

Full responses will have to come later for me, but I can give you a quick idea of why I say 'yes' here with a joke:

"A conservative and a liberal pull into a gas station" -- I'm actually done already, but if you want more -- "and then do *exactly the same thing*." They'll both put the car in park, turn off the engine, get out, stick a card in the machine, put card back in wallet, pump gas, replace the gas cap, blah blah blah, even if one is headed to a Trump rally and the other to a Sanders rally. That's what I mean.

have you ever heard him offer a suggestion? — James Riley

Yeah, I have. I know exactly what he believes in, and what I assume he gets up to when he’s not posting here. So what? What does who he is or what he’s said before have to do with whether Biden should be auctioning offshore drilling rights? He shouldn’t be. SX just pointed out that he was. And SX disapproves, as do I, for all the good it does. But we are here just to talk, and, you know, pursue truth. And the topic of the discussion is Joe, not SX.

I’m confused. Do you two approve of what @StreetlightX pointed out the Biden administration is up to with oil drilling? Why are we talking about Trump at all here? Doesn’t Biden deserve to be roasted for this?

They talk past one another , as we see in today’s polarized political world. — Joshs

One more thing along these lines.

There’s a heartbreaking story Tim Alberta did for The Atlantic about the chairman of the Michigan state house committee that investigated claims of fraud in the 2020 election, and then wrote the report saying it was all crap. This is a middle-aged Republican, farmer, church-goer, who now has friends who hate him. Despite knowing him and trusting him for decades, they believe some dickhead on Facebook rather than him. That takes some explaining. It’s not just ‘different worlds’ to me; one of them has had a toxin deliberately introduced into their system. Polarization in my country has a basis in diverging cultures, in our absurd inequality, but it was also engineered by people who benefit from it. How much of the difference between one person’s world and another’s is down to the choices someone (or many someones) made, perhaps neither of them?

There is no recognition here that the most important source of conflict is a differences in the way that people interpret socially relevant facts (different worldviews) completely independent of motive. — Joshs

Scenario 1. Two, let’s say, scholars disagree over the meaning of a text because they interpret it differently, despite having a shared interpretive framework, which they simply apply differently.
Scenario 2. Two scholars disagree over the meaning of a text because they interpret it differently because they use very different interpretative frameworks (maybe one’s a Marxist and the other a Freudian, like that).
Scenario 3. Two scholars disagree over the meaning of a text because they interpret it differently, despite having a shared interpretive framework, because they’re actually interpreting different editions of the text, and the words to be interpreted aren’t even 100% the same. We still refer to these alternatives as the ‘same’ book (don’t tell MU) even though they vary.
Scenario 4. 2 + 3, you get the idea.

When you drop in the word ‘interpretation’, you don’t mean to suggest something like scenario 1 or 2, but more like 3 or 4, right? Competing interpretations aren’t even of the same text, since there are no facts (like, say, the actual words of a specific edition of a text) to interpret.

One thing that feels off to me comes out in the idea of different editions of a text: the overlap between editions of some classic novel, say, is staggering. There may be a correction here, an emendation there, an addition or a deletion, but they are overwhelmingly the same. Davidson, among many others for different reasons, has made the same point, that people overwhelmingly agree about the world, and we fight over our differences against this backdrop of agreement.

Your talk of worlds makes them seem so separate. Don’t your world and my world have some things, many things, in common? It would be awfully surprising if they didn’t, given that we both speak English, live at the same time in the same part of the world, talk a lot about philosophy and psychology. Our individual worlds share some ‘sources’, it seems to me. We didn’t have to intersubjectively construct that commonality, since we filled our plates, at least partly, at the same cultural salad bar, and we took some of the same stuff. Is it ‘transformed’ once I make it part of my world, so that it’s not the same as what’s in your world?

How far off is the International Brotherhood of philosophers from you? — Manuel

If they have a building where they meet, that might also be called ‘the club’, so there’s some ambiguity there, but I meant the club as an abstraction, an organization to which human beings belong. I don’t belong to the building.

The point of the examples was that if you want to define ‘location’ in terms of some thing, it has to be a thing we think of as having a location, and that’s circular, and not in helpful way.

My hope was to start with a location that is special in some way, and ‘here’ is such a location. My thinking was, roughly, that here is where I encounter the rest of the cosmos, interact with it. Here is where the air I breathe is (even if it came from elsewhere in a tank), here and only here is where I can act (I can only act elsewhere through someone or something else), here is where my senses are operative (even if the light that reaches my eyes came from millions of light-years away), and so on. I intended to look at ‘here’ as something like the immediate environment of an organism, the realm in which things that are not me are available to me, to be used, encountered, wondered at, for me to take or destroy, and where I am available to such things, to be changed by them, to be helped or hindered. Here would be where things mean something to me.

And then the idea was to proceed from understanding what ‘here’ is to understanding other location terms like ‘there’, ‘elsewhere’, ‘where’, ‘somewhere’, and so on, on the basis of ‘here’. We never get to say that the universe is there, or elsewhere, right? We’re always within it, and we are always here, so the question — for me — was whether those ideas are the same, or related to each other, or what. For instance, some location words like “here” are flexible in their boundaries, and can encompass as little as my knee to as much as the whole universe.

Again, it’s easy enough to see why a question like “Where is the universe?” is ill-formed and unanswerable. But why is it so tempting, and can we approach the idea of location in such a way that we are not tempted to think of the universe as there, somewhere? It’s one of those perfect nine-year-old philosophy questions that we are too sophisticated to understand.

I assume you're using the club as a metaphor for the universe. — Manuel

No, no, a club. The International Brotherhood of Amateur Philosophers. That’s a thing that’s not me, but we can’t define my location relative to it. Or relative to 7. Or relative to ‘conformity’. Or relative to July 3rd, 1807.

the body becomes an essential component of the identity of here-ness we are trying to understand — Manuel

But not just as a body, but as my body, and only so long as I am a going concern. Once I’m dead, what you’ll call ‘his body’ doesn’t tell you where I am.

We have a location here on Earth — Manuel

My location, then, is to be defined relative to a thing that is not me. But not just any thing. If I am a member of a club, my location cannot be defined relative to the club. Why not?

So you're tying space to a location, here, namely where your body is. — Manuel

Not where my body is, but where I am; I am not my body, but a person, a living, thinking organism.

I mean, if you can, tell me something that isn't relational and then maybe we can proceed. I can't think of a single example. Or maybe you have some different concept of relation than what I'm using. — Manuel

This looks like a mistake to me:
1. What does it mean for me, for instance, to have a location?
2. It means that, given something else that has a location, I have my location relative to that.
3. Okay, but what does it mean for that thing, relative to which I have a location, to have a location?
See what I mean? It’s circular in a non-helpful way to define something having a location in terms of something else having a location.

So the natural thing is to start with a location that has an extra feature, as my location does, by being an instance of ‘here’. And that seems doubly right as an entry point because here is always where we are and the universe is always where we are.

We get a little more to go on too, in my recognition that there’s always a here for me, which is not true of my jacket, which also always has a location, or my phone, which always has a location but only knows ‘here’ as its location, and only relative to other things. That’s not the way my here works, because I know what neither of those does, that I’m spatial and must have a location, and that location is always at least ‘here’, whatever it is in relation to other things.

I don’t need to deny that location is relational exactly; it’s just not obviously helpful as a place to start. If there are things we want to say about it later that have a more relational form, at least by then we should have a little more to say about what that relation is and how it works. How much could we say about the relation we tried to start with? It’s like we were just doing trigonometry and then calling it a day.

What the relation is between ‘here’ and other locations, I’m trying not to prejudge; whether other locations are the same kind of location, or locations in the same sense, as ‘here’, I’m also trying not to prejudge.

The concept "universe" is relative to me, the creature asking the question.

I may be part of the universe, but I can scrutinize it in a way that it seems unable to do, absent someone asking a question. — Manuel

Or us. It’s where we are.

A post or two in, it occurred to me that reversing the relational definition is probably the inevitable way in. We get the three usual ways to deal with the relational thing: one’s independent, the other’s independent, or they’re mutually dependent. Starting with science in mind, it feels natural to reach first for counting the external (objective, natural, public, manifest) as independent: this house defines a space and I am in a specific part of that, relative to the house; the grocery store has a known, fixed location, and I’m about a mile from there in some direction. That way of answering ‘where’ questions fails immediately for the universe.

The third option, I’m holding off on a bit.

The second option, taking ourselves as independent and thinking of location relative to us, seems to have some promise. I was confused at first that you and @Miller seemed almost immediately to start talking about solipsism, but it makes sense if that’s how you see starting from us.

I think I didn’t see solipsism here because I’m not allowing myself to assume that location is relational, or at least not relational in a way that I already understand.

I think we could start with ‘us’ and ‘where we are’, but there’s no need to rush past understanding what ‘where we are’ means. In essence I’ve been arguing that the title of the thread, “Where are we?”, is exactly the way into answering “Where is the universe?” by turning it into “Where is here?” first of all, and thinking about location (what is ‘here’?) this way first, but knowing that we’ll need to end up with a sense of location that also works for ‘there’ and ‘that stuff’ too. (Does it need to be the same sense? Unclear.)

@Manuel

Look at this way. My phone has GPS. It knows that it is somewhere, only operationally, only insofar as it knows where it is in relation to other things. My jacket does not have GPS, and knows neither where it is, nor that it is somewhere. But, unlike my phone, I know that I am somewhere even when I don’t know where that is. Now you can say that I always know a little about where I am, that I’m on Earth and so on, but do I seem to know even more than that: I know that I must be somewhere because I am spatial, and insofar as I am at all, I am located. What is that sense of being located, that’s what I want to get at, and what I think “Where is the universe?” can force you to confront. I don’t think you get to say that I know I must be located only in the sense of being located relative to other things, because we cannot claim already to understand what it means for those things to be located somewhere. And obviously we can’t say where the universe is in relation to anything else, but we can still say that it’s right here, or that it’s ‘all around us’.

But you‘re asking, “How I can know where I am?” aren’t you? And that’s another thing entirely.

So far we have:
(1) Where is everything?
(1a*) Where is everywhere?
(2) What does it mean for something to be somewhere, for anything to be anywhere?
(2a) What does it mean for me to be somewhere, to be anywhere?
(3) How can I know where I am?
(3a) How can I know where anything is?

The 3’s don’t seem to leave a lot of room for the sort of answers that the 1’s and 2’s might require. It’s hard to imagine an answer to a 3 as anything but ‘where-in-relation-to’. Why is that? Why is knowledge so insistently relational?

If I answer the question “Where am I?” with “here”, then presumably we can ask “How do I know that I am here?” If ‘here’ is simply relational, then that’s the same as asking “How do I know I am not there, for all values of there?” But that’s just another way of not facing up to the question. When you answer “Where are you?” with “Here,” you give no location, in one sense, not even a relational one; it’s like saying, “I am wherever I am”, or “I am wherever this place is” or even “I am in whatever this place is.” Is that a location? It’s not saying “nowhere”.

Or not: ‘wherever I am’ is also relational, but marks place by reference to me. We have the same answer available for ‘all of us’ or for ‘everything’. The universe, too, is wherever it is, and since we’re in it, that’s where we are. Or, maybe better, the universe is wherever we are.

Of course we’re going around in circles, which is not necessarily bad, but it feels like we keep running past points where the questions might connect to each other. If we could say, clearly, how we can know where we are, or know where anything is, would that tell us what ‘being somewhere’ is? If, for instance, the question, ‘how can we know’, has to be restricted to ‘how can we know in relation to (something else)’ — and, of course, we haven’t shown this yet — then would be entitled to say that ‘being somewhere’ is only ‘being somewhere (relative to something else)’? That is not clear to me at all.

One other question we passed over is “How do I know I am somewhere?” or “How do I know something is somewhere?” Not ‘what is its location?’ but just ‘that it (or I) have one’. I counted this as a non-question by saying it’s just a property of us, or other things, to have a location. And it doesn’t seem to be a property of the universe. But how do we know that? Is that something we know?

Open question, then, for me. How we know which sorts of things have locations, and which don’t, how we know what those locations are, or don’t, might help us understand what having a location is, or might not.

And so on. In absence of a relation to something else, you can't say to be anywhere. — Manuel

The question itself is “Where is the universe?” and so fails because it’s like asking “Where is everything?” or “Where is everywhere?” and neither of those leave anything to be related to.

But it’s curious that the title of the thread is not “Where is the universe?” but “Where are we?” (although the conversational emphasis would probably be “Where are we?”). So the question could be, “Where are we, in relation to everything?” which sounds a little different, a question about, as people say, ‘our place in the universe’, which is not a question about location at all.

And maybe the conversational emphasis is the right one. What does it mean to be the sort of thing that has a physical location? That’s a defining characteristic of us, but what does it mean to have a location? Can my having a location only be described in terms of the location of other things or beings that have a location? That still doesn’t say what it is for anything — those things, me, us — to have a location. The simplest way to block even thinking you can answer my location question by talking about the location of other things, is to ask “Where is everything?”

And that’s a very good question. Not ‘where am I in relation to (something else)’, but what is ‘being somewhere’?

And how do we explain the Olber's paradox if it really is infinite? — Echoes

I had forgotten about Olber’s paradox, so thanks for that.

Assuming our universe is finite, what lies beyond it's edge? Where is the universe located in the first place? What lies above and below the universe?
Even if we assume we're in a multiverse, what lies outside the multiverse? — Echoes

I like this question very much, even though it’s clearly incoherent. You could read up on cosmology and get some idea how cosmologists tame their intuitive sense of ‘space’ or ‘location’ so that they don’t get into this sort of mess, maybe learn some tricks for almost visualizing how it works, but the fact remains that the question itself is incoherent and you won’t ever get an answer to it. We have never been waiting for science to figure out where the universe is, so whatever cosmologists say, it won’t be that.

But it’s still a lovely question. Because we know it’s a question that cannot be answered, we have some new things to think about:

(1) Why would we think, at first, that we could answer such a question?
(2) Why is it so easy to ask a question that, we might say, makes no sense?
(3) Does the way the question fails tell us anything else interesting?

* And lots more, but that’s a place to start, not finish.

Haven’t you thought about the origins of logic? Wouldnt a primordial theory of Being have to begin with the conditions of possibility for logic rather than simply presuppose it as a starting point? — Joshs

That sounds like you’re invoking the ‘rule’ against explaining something in terms of itself — not so much a rule as a definition of failure — but you’re not, which is curious. (The ‘rule’ would be violated if you presupposed logic as a starting point in your primordial theory of logic, not Being.) But if logic can only be explained (or grounded, or theorized, or even primordially theorized) in terms of Being, and Being in terms of logic, then we would have circularity.

The word ‘presuppose’ is tricky though: the rule proscribes explaining something in terms of itself, not relying on it in your explanation. Using logic while explaining logic is not circular.

For instance, I cannot fix this hammer using this hammer (our no-circularity rule), but I can fix it using another hammer, or using anything else as a hammer. So far as logic is concerned, we’re talking about predication here. But it looks like there may be room for an analysis of hammers and hammering and things with which you can hammer — roughly, of the usability and intention-answering possibilities of things — which could function as an account of predication, rather than the other way around.

That only clearly gets you to phenomenology. But in Being and Time, this is the first step in an analysis of the being of things, right? Maybe it’s taking that step, from phenomenology to ontology, that most needs clarification.

Sometimes Quine is lumped in with the pragmatists, I'm not sure why. — Manuel

Because he said it himself, in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, and when asked about it over the years, he shrugged a lot. I think he was kind of drawn to the idea because he thought of science as a pragmatic enterprise, so it made sense that philosophy, being continuous with natural science, would be too. I think somewhere he says that, once he read him later, he felt closest to Dewey out of the classic trio, for just that reason.

You can defend the existence of the state without accepting some libertarian’s equating of the state with socialism. You can also defend socialism, but it’s opposed to libertarianism only insofar as it is one way of organizing the state.

FEMA is not the greatest example. It has gone through more reforms due to its failing responses than it has had successes. — NOS4A2

That’s not an argument that the trailers don’t count as help.

You could, if you were willing, argue that it’s less helpful ‘in the long run’ than letting people suffer the consequences of their poor choice of where to live. That’s still, before even getting to the other challenges of arguing such a position, which strike me as monumental, admitting that it is, to these people, in these circumstances, helpful.

If you could show that there is a performative contradiction in espousing libertarianism
— Srap Tasmaner

I did. — James Riley

I don’t think you did, at least not here.

I think it is true that the state can guarantee your ability to advocate for there being no state, among other things, and I think it’s true that providing such guarantees is one of the reasons people accept the necessity of state authority. Otherwise, only the strong have free speech.

Is that the same thing as socialism?

All we can be sure of is that they’ll take our money, they’ll spend it, but we don’t know whether it’s “helping others” or buying a politician’s neck-ties. — NOS4A2

Really? When FEMA shows up and gives you a trailer to live in because your house was destroyed by a hurricane, that looks a lot like help.

Libertarians are socialists who hate themselves for it, because they want an autonomy that comes with being a big guy, and they can't have it because they aren't big guys. They rely on the state to protect them from big guys and they hate it. Colonel Colt helped, but he can't make a libertarian hate themselves less. — James Riley

This ‘genealogical’ critique specifically doesn’t speak to whether libertarianism is a sound political philosophy. If you could show that the ideas of socialism are implicit in the ideas of libertarianism, that would be interesting. If you could show that there is a performative contradiction in espousing libertarianism — that you cannot do so without an unacknowledged commitment to socialism — that would be interesting.

One problem with this sort of ‘analysis’ is that it invites more of the same: how hard would it be for me to pass right over whatever you’re saying and instead ‘diagnose’ your attraction to this sort of critique? Would you find that a satisfying way for me to engage what you have to say about libertarians? Even when grounded in a thorough historical reconstruction, this sort of thing only makes sense if truth is off the table. It is seductive but dangerous, and we’d be better off if Nietzsche had never thought of it.

There are a couple things to note about this. One is that "Don't you have a headache?" is a yes-or-no question...
— Srap Tasmaner

Wouldn't we say it is more in the sense of "Hey, I thought you had a headache."--as in confused, requesting confirmation; rather than a question (despite the question mark). — Antony Nickles

Which goes to my point that we often distinguish — and need to distinguish, for conversations to make any sense — the literal, conventional meaning of what we say from the use we are making of it in the circumstances. "Don't you have a headache?" does not mean "Hey, I thought you had a headache" or "I am confused about your headache status," but we can use it that way.

Wittgenstein shows us that all language is essentially behavioural, social and public, so the grammar of the word "know" is based on behavioural verifications, not on inner objects. — Luke

I'll grant you can get that out of §246. But there's a couple peculiarities to that remark I'd like to ask about.

One is that Wittgenstein suggests that to say of me that I know I'm in pain is just to say that I'm in pain. But then if "He's in pain" is not nonsense, how can "He knows he's in pain" be nonsense? Do they have the same use or not?

The argument seems to go like this: the trouble with "I know I'm in pain" is that you would only choose this expression over "I'm in pain" if you have a mistaken understanding of the privacy of our sensations. You may only end up saying (what amounts to) "I'm in pain", but you are trying (and failing) to say something else, and that something else is nonsense.

But that means it's something like your intention that makes "I know I'm in pain" nonsense. Wittgenstein worries an awful lot about how we picture things working, how we understand them, for someone who's supposed to be a behaviorist.

This much is true: it makes sense to say about other people that they doubt whether I am in pain; but not to say it about myself.

And I have one little question about the last paragraph. Everyone seems to take this as an anticipation of On Certainty and finds it completely convincing.

But suppose instead of the §246 we have, we had this:

246. In what sense are my sensations private? — Well, only I can know whether I am really in pain; another person can only surmise it.

This much is true: it makes sense to say about other people that they surmise (guess, suppose, suspect) I am in pain; but not to say it about myself. — Not Wittgenstein

That too is pretty convincing, even if you choose to dance around "know" a little. I wasn't even thinking about §246 when I said of my claim to be able to play the tuba, "I'm not guessing." **

There's a language-game that relates knowing and guessing, isn't there? It's the one he rejects, the one that pictures our sensations as secrets we know and others can only guess. When I say I'm in pain, I'm not guessing, and that makes it, as he notes, natural to say I know I'm in pain. (Note also that the defense of others knowing I'm in pain is just that we do in fact use the word "know" this way — that settles the question even before he gets to the stuff about learning of my pain from my behavior — but he doesn't consider that defense for "I know I'm in pain.")

I'm not rejecting Wittgenstein's entire analysis here, but I'm uncomfortable with the suggestion, often made, that Wittgenstein has demonstrated there is one and only one correct way to use the word "know": it belongs to the knowing-doubting-justifying game and no others, and if you try to use it any other way it's just nonsense. It's his own damn fault, but it doesn't seem like this should have been his legacy.


** I was in fact thinking of King of the Hill.
Hank: "Do you know where I can find 4 D batteries for my flashlight?"
Mega-Lo-Mart clerk: "Aisle 30, I think."
Hank: "This is aisle 30." [It's obviously the toy department.]
Mega-Lo-Mart clerk: "15? 3!"
Hank: "Stop guessing. Either you know or you don't know."

Because if an evolutionary theory is thought of that way, then it may end up applying to itself. — onomatomanic

Yes, I wasn't explicit about it, but I meant to imply that when I said

We're now very comfortable seeing evolutionary processes in language and culture and science itself. — Srap Tasmaner

I saw this as reinforcing your sense, if this is the right way to put it, that scientists might expect to see "in nature" just the sort of thing they go through themselves when theorizing about nature, but it might be the other way around. The belief that nature is "finished" suggests that you could write out a perfect equation that explains what goes on out there, and maybe already have. What do scientists think now? Certainly no one thinks science is done; no one thinks nature is done, as is, since we still have the heat death of the universe to look forward to, but maybe the "laws of nature", including those damned laws of thermodynamics, are done, and the clockwork is just more complicated than we thought. Lee Smolin thinks maybe not, but I'm not sure how seriously that's taken. I've now somehow switched around to suggesting that the universe is still kind of static and our science too. Maybe this is the real story, some continual swing back and forth between the two poles.

I think it's a good question, but so long as we're speaking very broadly, I'd be tempted to distinguish roughly between before and after Darwin. Newton's 'clockwork universe' is not dynamic in the way we now expect nature to be, with galaxies and even matter itself 'evolving', if that's the right way to put that.

We're now very comfortable seeing evolutionary processes in language and culture and science itself. It could be there's a general expectation now that an understanding of what something is must be directly connected to an understanding of how it came to be. But I'm not sure that's new at all; the ancients recognized that connection. And it's even possible to see change over time as predictable, 'empires rise and fall', that sort of thing, which has a static vibe to it.

But I still think you're right that there's something different about the modern view, and I still think it's probably Darwin. I just can't put my finger on it.

claims to knowledge can typically be checked by others and ourselves. You might claim to be able to play the tuba or how to speak Russian, and we could test your knowledge by asking you to demonstrate. But how can we similarly discover or learn whether or not I have a headache? How could my knowledge be tested in order to demonstrate to myself and to others that I really do (or don't) know whether I have a headache? — Luke

Alright, so imagine I claim I can play the tuba, but there's not one handy to *prove* it. (Have to come back to this.) Suppose someone else says, "No really, I've heard him play the tuba." I think it's reasonable to take that as a claim to *know* that I can play the tuba, because they have experience that put them in a position to know. At this point, you can choose to trust them, to take their word for it, or demand further evidence. But that's the same choice you faced with my initial claim that I know how to play the tuba, and the presumption that I'm in a position to know whether I can. I'm not guessing.

Suppose someone finds a tuba and I play a bit of a song. All we know now is that I can play what I played, and maybe that's it. (Kind of a "Slumdog Millionaire" situation.) How much do I have to play? How much knowledge do I have to demonstrate? At some point, I think it comes back to trust that I possess still more knowledge and capability than I've actually demonstrated.

I think verification gives you reason to trust, but a claim to knowledge is a claim that, on the matter at hand, what I say can be trusted, can be relied upon.

This is why at least most reports about my current condition or my mental states, past and present, can readily be treated as matters of knowledge. When Sam Spade tells Brigid O'Shaughnessy, "Maybe I love you and maybe you love me," she responds, "You know whether you love me or not, Sam."

It's not that people cannot be confused or uncertain about this sort of thing, of course not. It's not even that when they make a claim about their mental state, they must be right. It's that we by and large accept each other as authorities on our own mental states, because, as the saying goes, "If you don't know, who should I ask?" We are the only ones in the position to know a great many things about ourselves.

It isn't gibberish, but you'd still probably ask for clarification because it's such a weird question.

I think anytime people ask for clarification, they're trying to make an utterance useful. They're trying to find the missing context. — frank

Right. The standard Grice 101 examples are nearby: I ask if you want to stop here to eat and you say, looking at your phone, it's more than two hours to the next town.

That implies a yes, but it's not definitely a yes -- it's "cancellable", you might follow up with "I can wait if you want to" -- but taken literally it's a non sequitur. Grice's theory is that when a maxim (in this case, "Be relevant") is violated, we look for an entailment that will maintain the cooperative spirit of conversation, so you reason your way from a comment about geography back to a response to the question, or a suggestion about what to do, and so on. That's "conversational implicature" in a nutshell.

It gives you another way of approaching that sense we might have that many of the things a philosopher might find herself saying would be very peculiar, pointless, or somehow inappropriate, in everyday conversation. That this is true, is not the same as the sentences in question being nonsense or not being truth-apt.

Depends on how we're using the term meaningful. — Sam26

I meant it just in the sense of 'has a meaning', 'can be understood', and, for these cases of indicative sentences, 'can be assigned a truth-value'.

One reason for distinguishing meaning (sentence meaning) from use (speaker's meaning) can be seen somewhat clearly in Antony's example:

Maybe when you've made it aware to me that you have a headache, then, when I see you a little while later and you have an ice pack on your knee, and I point to your head and shrug, saying "Don't you have a headache?", you might look at me (like I'm an idiot) and say "I know I have a headache." -- but this is in the sense of "Duh, I know", as in the use (grammatical category) of: I am aware. — Antony Nickles

There are a couple things to note about this. One is that "Don't you have a headache?" is a yes-or-no question, but does not receive a yes-or-no response. If we take "I know I have a headache" as an affirmative response, is that to say that, in this case, the sentence "I know I have a headache" means "Yes" because that's the use of it in this language-game? (If I know I have a headache, then I have a headache, etc. There's an entailment there we can work out.) We might also say that the point being made by saying "I know I have a headache" is something like, "You're being an idiot. Obviously I have also injured my knee. The two are unrelated." Should we say that's the meaning of "I know I have a headache" here?

The alternative, mainly deriving from Grice, is to say that the literal meaning of the sentence has not changed; if we take "I know I have a headache" as "Yes" or as "Don't be an idiot", it's for other reasons that have to do with how conversation works. "I know I have a headache" still just means what it usually means, but you can mean "Yes" by saying it.

On such an approach, the trouble with sentences like "Here is one hand" or "I know that is a tree" is not that they are meaningless, in fact both can be simply true; they usually ought not be said because to do so would violate a norm of conversation (Grice's maxims). That's the gist.

And this sort of analysis requires a distinction:

The precept that one should be careful not to confuse meaning and use is perhaps on the way toward being as handy a philosophical vade-mecum as once was the precept that one should be careful to identify them. — Grice

This doesn't seem right — Sam26

No, it doesn't, and I'm not wedded to the "necessarily true" bit. I'm not sure how else to characterize sentences that we seem unable or unwilling or unmotivated to consider the contrary of. While writing the last post I began to suspect that it may be something entailed by such a claim that must be true.

I'm glad you flagged that --- I'll work on it tomorrow.

Can you sensibly say that you don’t know you have a headache? — Luke

Consider saying "2 + 2 = 5". Is that meaningless, is it utterly unclear what someone would mean if they were to say this, or is it just false? Or consider @Banno's example: "Paris is the capital of lemongrass." Is that meaningless or is it just false? (Lemongrass, not being a country, has no capital; a fortiori Paris is not that capital. )

Now for our example. It's supposed to be nonsensical to say "I don't know that I have a headache" and therefore nonsensical to say "I know I have a headache." What about other sentences nearby? Suppose someone said, "I don't know whether I have a headache." I would certainly find this a puzzling thing to say, and I'd be tempted respond, "How could you not know whether you have a headache? Surely, if you had a headache, you'd know it." To my ear, that's not only meaningful but true, and the negative I'm dismissing as if it were simply contradictory. I understand them to be saying they do not know something which, I believe, if it were the case, they would know it. "I don't know I have a headache" seems to entail, if not itself to be, a contradiction.

Again, it's not that there's nothing odd about a sentence like "I know I have a headache." The question is whether its defect is semantic. For instance, if that sentence can only be true, it's not perfectly clear it can be asserted, that saying it would count as a "claim" at all. Then what use can be made of such a sentence? Not altogether clear. (We haven't touched on one of the other uses of "I know ..." which I think of as 'concessive': "I know it's Saturday, and I know I said I wouldn't check my work email today, but I have to nail down a schedule for next week." That's not a claim to knowledge but admitting that you have it. And there are others. @Antony Nickles offered some possibilities too.)

The question I am focused on is whether, in denying that a sentence is useful in some circumstance, do we deny that it is meaningful? Do we deny that it could carry a truth-value?

If you agree that the statement is nonsense, — Luke

As I understand the usual take on LW, if a sentence has a use, if it's useful, if it's a valid move in a language-game, then it's meaningful, because that's what meaning is--- use in a language-game. If a sentence is not useful, then it's nonsense.

That's the view I'm questioning, the complete identification of use and meaning.

So I don't assume the sentences in question are nonsense, even if they are odd or pointless or otherwise lacking an obvious usefulness. I'm suggesting such a sentence can still be meaningful and even true.

Right. If you can sensibly say one, you ought to be able sensibly to say the other. Negation also comes up here: if you can sensibly say you know you have a headache, you ought to be able sensibly to say that you don't know you have a headache.

One alternative might be to say that "I know I have a headache" is necessarily true, and that the apparent failure of the negations or of the 'doubt' version, regardless of context, show that. The peculiarity of saying "I know I have a headache" would not be, then, due to a semantic catastrophe (that it's nonsense) but something else.

That it is an odd thing to say, a thing perhaps one rarely has any reason to say, is not in question; whether the reasons not to say it are semantic, is the issue.