we always have (by acquaintance) known its effects. — Janus

Jolly. Sellars's thing is that the postulated entities explain correlations often already known. Which, yeah, of course.

C'mon, you know I was baiting you.

Not that I don't believe what I said!

Still at work, but while you're waiting for me you could go ahead and explain why the PLA entails that there is no such thing as private experience.

I doubt this line of thinking is worth the effort, since some of the precursors are lost to time. Suppose some ancient philosopher said, "It is in the nature of most things to fall when released but of some to rise"; is that for or against the idea that we've always known what gravity is? I wouldn't bother unless I were doing history of science.

which is not to say I understood it all — Janus

I'm starting to get the hang of it, but holy cow...

the discovery of Neptune — Janus

The key there is that there are equations and the equations describe a force not like anything else in the universe. That's your framework. With rough carefully done observations, you can, as the saying goes, do the math. But observations alone won't get you there. The prediction of a planet is not the big posit here, but gravity.

I've argued for there being no private language, and hence that knowledge cannot be built on private experience — Banno

Knowledge can't be built only on private experience. But of course there is private experience and of course it is a key contributor to our knowing things.

I think this is largely right, but there are different kinds of details to fill in: roughly, (a) where our conceptual framework comes from, and (b) how we use it. That's my evolving view.

I take it that you mean non-propositional by non-epistemic. — Dfpolis

Well, you get to pick your poison.

While the datum (the phantasm) is not a judgement, by abstraction and identification (division and reunification), we can use it as the basis for sound judgement. — Dfpolis

Abstraction from what?

If the datum is raw, unconceptualized, it's going to be useless for knowledge that's supposed to be inferred from it. If it is already conceptualized, then it's not independent.

Remember above you did end up reaching for an infallible foundation after all, but justified this move by it being knowledge by acquaintance, not propositional. Is this knowledge conceptualized? Is it "I'm experiencing that" or "I'm experiencing the red triangular facing surface of an object"?

The question is how you are to give knowledge a foundation you acknowledge is non-epistemic.

I think you could have saved yourself some typing if you read the whole post before responding.

I'm going to save myself some typing by saying that this

Raw experience is infallible, because whatever we are aware of is what we are aware of. Still, there is a difference between being aware of something (knowledge by acquaintance) and making judgements. Since we are infallibly aware of whatever we are aware of, there is no question of its truth, but there is a question of the truth or falsity of judgements. That question derives from abstraction. — Dfpolis

is perilously close to traditional empiricist foundationalism, which is a mistake. Read "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind."

Here's my reconstruction of the argument in the OP:

(1) We are committed to the truth of some judgments we cannot prove are true.
(2) We have limited representational capacity; therefore our judgments about the world cannot be exhaustive, but must leave out features of the object of the judgment (abstraction).
(3) The features of the object of knowing included in our judgments are those features adequate to our needs.

But what is the argument?

For example, I do not think I was lying when I taught freshmen engineering students Newtonian physics without fully explaining how relativistic quantum physics falsified it. — Dfpolis

You tell the students something; it leaves something out, therefore it is an abstraction, adequate to their needs. What you tell them is, for their purposes, true, even though for other purposes what you are telling them may be false.

But this is not what (1) claimed. This is

(1') We are committed to the truth of some judgments we can prove are false.

In this case, the proof would come in a different context. Your claim is that there is no requirement to take into account the contexts in which the judgment is false; we only think there is such a requirement because we imagine a context in which we have knowledge not relativized to our needs, "objective" knowledge, which would therefore be exhaustive.

Let's go through the argument again:

(i) We know that our knowledge is not and cannot be exhaustive; we are limited.
(ii) Therefore we know that our knowledge must leave things out.
(iii) What we leave out are features of the object of knowledge irrelevant to our needs.

But here it seems you are on the verge of claiming

(iv*) Therefore if we leave out a feature of the object of knowledge, it must be a feature irrelevant to our needs.

which is clearly false, and does not follow from (iii). (iii) is "If it's irrelevant, we leave it out"; this is the converse.

But do you rely on (iv*) to justify the claim that what you tell your students is true?

What are you leaving out is that you know what you are telling your students to be false. That it is false will not matter to them, because what you are telling them is true "for all practical purposes"; it is an approximation, and will serve in the contexts in which they will make use of it.

So we have this claim:

(a) Because it will not matter to them that it is false, relative to their needs it is true.

And since truth is always relative to our needs,

(b*) If a judgment is true relative to some needs, it is true.

which, like (iv*), is also clearly false and not what you want to say.

I think what you want to say is that (b*) is just nonsense. "P is true" is incomplete, and says nothing. The complete formulation would be "P is true in context C", or "P is true relative to needs N" or something like that. (b*) imagines there is truth relative to no particular needs, that there is (I can't resist) "needless truth".

But you must still avoid (iv*) because (iv*) is a license to sophistry. How will you do that?

It seems that the burden of determining truth is shifted from some imagined exhaustive and needs-indifferent adequacy to the the object itself, to whether the judgment is genuinely adequate to the circumstances of its assertion.

How will you determine this? It's clear enough that structural engineers and high-energy physicists have different needs; you are able to relativize truth by comparing those needs.

This sounds reasonable enough, but if we want eventually to come back to (b*) and define "truth (full stop)" as "truth relative to human needs", we will engage in further abstraction, but what will we compare humans to? Is abstraction enough to get you there, or will we compare humans to other animals, and then be forced to talk about the judgments of animals?

I didn't read the OP that closely, but I would have assumed the idea is that foundations need not be infallible, rather than a requirement of fallibility.

It's an interesting example, but do you want to wade into "true by convention" waters?

What's riding on the word "foundational" here?

I think a layperson's reaction to Descartes is often something like, he is pretending not to know.

But pretending can be given some force. Suppose you have hidden Easter eggs for your children and you want to provide advice on how to search without really providing hints on where they are. You can pretend not to know where they are and describe how you would look. (You don't need to look inside the salt shaker, because it's too small, that sort of thing.) Pretending here means, roughly, not relying on what you know, not using what you know in the search process.

A belief then might be something you rely on, use in reasoning, and might be something you know or something you don't. If you reason from something you don't know, you're either talking hypothetically or making a mistake.

Am I in the neighborhood of your approach?

I always suspected that was your doing.

Also: Grice's maxims.

That's interesting. When someone says, for example, "You should have known how many were left," what they mean is probably, more or less, you should have counted, should have put yourself in a position to know.

I want to hear more about belief and knowledge. You gloss "believing that such-and-such" as being committed to the truth of such-and-such. Does that come in degrees?

Do you treat "knowledge" as a primitive, not to be glossed or explained?

Compare my door example to the discovery of Neptune: one involves postulating a person at the moment not visible to you because he is occluded by a solid object; the other involves the prediction of the existence of an as-yet unobserved planet based on mathematics, within a framework that includes gravity as described by Newton's equations. In a sense, the deduction is careful or systematic common sense, just math and inference, but the framework is not common sense, it's Newtonian physics.

My main point, to reiterate, has been that the very act of positing invisible entities, of whatever kind, is a feature of all cultures, and is thus itself commonsensical. — Janus

Okay, it's clear now we've misunderstood each other in a couple ways, mostly my fault. Apologies.

I never intended "common sense" to be something like "what most people believe", and certainly not "what most people have ever believed throughout all of human history".

In fact, in the essay I've been relying on, Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man, Sellars actually stipulates that there are two images based on two different approaches to understanding man's place in the world: the correlational (the manifest image, my "ordinary everyday reasoning") and the stipulational (the scientific image). It's not an empirical distinction. I kinda pretended it was for purposes of this discussion because (a) I didn't want to try to rehearse Sellars's entire argument, and (b) in the modern world I thought the distinction between how people get along in daily life -- driving, working, buying groceries -- and creating complex theoretical frameworks that posit new types of entities to explain what goes on in the world -- I thought that distinction would be clear enough.

I should have recognized there was a problem when you mentioned animism. When I said there was a different just-so story I could tell, but then didn't, it was Sellars's story about something a bit like animism: this is the original form of the manifest image. This original manifest image treats everything in the world as a person. He's careful to say this is not a matter of postulating a spirit that lives in the mountain, but that being a mountain is one of the ways of being a person, and as a person you can do things like get angry and make grumbly noises and throw shit. This is still a worldview that only includes sensible objects, it's just that they're all persons.

He does not discuss religion at all except to include it in the manifest image, and here again I took a shortcut, because the manifest image is not exactly ordinary reasoning about medium-sized dry goods, but an elaboration and refinement of that, and an attempt to hold it together in the face of science.

Why doesn't he talk about religion? We are accustomed these days to talk sometimes of science and religion as competing theoretical frameworks, or in some cases as exactly the same framework with exactly one more theoretical posit, a supreme being. Or we tell stories about man's attempt to understand the world going from superstition to religion to science: all are explanatory frameworks, all have theoretical posits, but when we get to science we have a procedure for testing and a criterion of falsifiability. On this view, the new-atheist approach of treating religion as a competitor in the same market, at least insofar as it offers supernatural rather than natural explanations of phenomena, is perfectly reasonable.

And indeed it's a little messy mapping this onto Sellars's distinction:

the contrast I have in mind is not that between an unscientific conception of man-in-the-world and a scientific one, but between that conception which limits itself to what correlational techniques can tell us about perceptible and introspectible events and that which postulates imperceptible objects and events for the purpose of explaining correlations among perceptibles. — PSIM

So religion, if not animism, goes on the postulational side, right? We say things like, the Greeks explained the behavior of the oceans by having an ocean-god, the behavior of the skies by having a sky-god, volcanoes get a volcano-god, and so on. In the same way that science posits gravity to explain why apples fall to the earth, the Greeks posited Aeolus to explain the winds. Same thing.

The other link I keep posting, is an excerpt from an interview with Richard Feynman. The point of that reference is two-fold: (1) the use he makes of "framework" as part of my argument that without theory it's not science; (2) what he says at the very end:

But I really can't do a good job, any job, of explaining magnetic force in terms of something else that you're more familiar with, because I don't understand it in terms of anything else that you're more familiar with.

The Greek gods -- those are persons, clearly, famously, like us, with emotions and everything. In the stories they're even perceptible, you can talk to them and fight with them. The god of Abraham is a person. Whether these categories hold perfectly is not quite the point. Religious concepts are elaborated and refined like anything else, and we may end up with descriptions that don't quite fit the person category, at least not the one we use now, all that well.

But still, maybe we're talking about persons, but we're still postulating those persons, right? And this is the point of the Feynman thing: the posits of science are not something you already have elsewhere in the framework, but different kinds of entities. If I open a door that swings away from me and it thumps to a stop after a opening a little and there's an "Ow!" sound from the other side, it's, to use your phrase, common sense that I've just whacked someone with the door. You might think of that as a theory you have quickly whipped up that includes a postulated person, and I'm not going to deny you that. Go ahead. Cognitive science tells stories like that too. But what you're not doing is positing a new kind of entity. You're gathering some evidence and doing some deducing, or your brain is, whatever. But that's not all science is.

And I can already hear you saying "that's exactly what it is", so please stop and think about how theoretical frameworks work, what is involved a positing a new type of entity, and so on. Maybe you could find another source besides me to explain how science works. Maybe you can come back and tell me I'm all wrong. We've probably already reached the limits of my understanding here, so I'd be happy to stipulate that I have no more to offer by way of further explanation.

The one that leapt to mind for me was Kant!

What I thought. Good to have clarification though. Much appreciated.

Appreciate it.

Talking about it, fine. Living it out in front of me, no thanks. There's a whole big internet out there.

Atheism is not an ideology. — JerseyFlight

Then you would agree the word "atheism" should be added to the guidelines, right next to religion.

I know what @Dfpolis is. I don't care. So long as he's talking philosophy, we're good. Maybe he does have some nefarious scheme. I don't care. I'm a grown-up.



You are in a better position to know how things are going overall than I am, no question.

I still firmly believe it should be in the guidelines. If you believe atheism is already covered by "ideology", then nothing is changed by specifying it.

I want both sides gone. I do not want this to be one of the best places on the internet to talk about whether you personally believe in God or not and what that's like for you and what you think other folks should believe.

Sure, being "hellbent" on an endless, anti-religious tirade devoid of any sort of deeper philosophy is not a quality post but, hey, emotion. It is how it is, eh? — Outlander

I don't know how much more clearly you could make my case for me.

Of course this subject can be deeply emotional. For obvious reasons. Why did this happen, why does this occur, etc. Especially when it comes to loved ones who may have been screwed over or worse by supposed "loving Christians" or worse, at a young age by again supposed Christian (or whatever the persuasion) "holy men". — Outlander

None of this has anything to do with philosophy. Reddit and Twitter are right next-door.

No idea what you're saying about my proposal.

There are lots of Christians on this site, one meets them everywhere. — JerseyFlight

So what? As long as they're talking philosophy I don't care. 7 out of 10 Americans self-identify as Christian. Some of them just might come here to talk philosophy. Some of them might not ever mention their religion.

It seems that humans have always imagined hidden forces to explain observed phenomena. — Janus

Yeah? Look at the quote you're responding to. If you step outside your house on a nice day and suddenly a tree limb cracks and crashes to the ground, you think it would be perfectly normal, just common sense, to spin out some tale about invisible gremlins collecting wood for their home, or about a tree-pruning force that must have swept through your yard and snapped that limb, or ...

That would be perfectly ordinary. That's what you're claiming.

Of course there is a connection between how we ordinarily go about our business and how we do science. But there is also clearly a difference between how we generally talk about what sorts of things there are and how they behave, on the one hand, and what scientific theories say. To deny that difference is to misrepresent both.

Watch the Feynman interview.

If you're really gung-ho, read Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man.

Good for you!

Truth and knowledge are also normative concepts. You should believe what is true, and should believe it because it is true. To do so is to have knowledge. "Getting something right", "doing something right" and "doing the right thing" are not just homophonically related.

@Banno was arguing for the forced move of religious threads to the Philosophy of Religion category. That would -- since you can just exclude that category from your homepage -- serve the purposes of all members except those who happen to be non-religiously into the philosophy of religion. Such forum members would just have to deal.

You're suggesting a new category be created in addition to Philosophy of Religion -- with, I'll note, no hope of keeping them separate. That looks to me like an endorsement of this as a place to post theology. Give it a few years and the place might get renamed The Philosophy & Theology Forum. After a few more, people will be surprised there's a philosophy section tucked in next to the bustling theology discussion forum. Eventually the comparatively low traffic in the original section will lead to long emotional debates about whether to just put it out of its misery, and then one day the coin will drop, and this will be The Theology Forum.

Logically, we know none of this is given to us just by using the perfume but it doesn't really matter though, the truth has become a side concern. — Judaka

There might be a different argument in these sorts of advertisements -- still not valid, but different. Something like

You know what kind of guy wears this perfume? Guys like this. So if you wear this perfume, then you must be one of those guys, you must be a guy like this.

So it's not a claim that the perfume will make you that guy, but that you buying it and using it will be proof that you are that guy. And this can have weird psychological layers:

• you can appeal to the target's egoism -- maybe they do secretly or not so secretly believe this;
• you can appeal to their aspiration -- it's a test, are you worthy yet;
• you force them to choose -- which are you gonna be, are you gonna stay the way you are or be this;
• you appeal to their autonomy -- who's to say you can't be this guy, people are always holding you back.

It just goes on and on.

Agreed pretty much all around, and congenial to my usually Gricean way of looking at things. We can, for purposes of theory, or in difficult cases, distinguish between the bare meaning of a sentence and what someone meant by saying it in the context that they did. Leaving out a relevant piece of information, for instance, doesn't make what you say false, so much as misleading (and violates Grice's maxims).

Truth is a species of goodness, that appropriate to judgements and the propositions expressing them. — Dfpolis

Is this Aristotle?

The production team is targeting a clear demographic, they know who buys the advertised products and they aim to have the best possible understanding of why. In the perfume example, they have little time and a few goals, first to capture our attention, then to communicate the purpose of the product, what makes it unique and the general explanation. This explanation is enhanced however it can be, whatever makes a good impression. Overtly and subliminally, we are enticed to purchase, consciously and unconsciously. — Judaka

Some ad-related thoughts: (1) perfume is mostly purchased by men, for women, so the target is definitely men, one reason for the male voice-over; (2) ads do often seem just to present an exemplar, like a bunch of cool, attractive twenty-somethings inner-tubing (or some other healthy outdoor fun) and all of them are smoking the same brand of cigarette or drinking the same energy drink; (3) a chunk of this, as you note somewhere, maybe more than once, is not at all about the product itself but the social context of its use -- or of its being gifted, which is one sort of use for a bottle of perfume -- and that's what the exemplar usually is, not just a description of the thing.

Broadly, I would think in these terms: (a) there's what you say; (b) there's how you say it; and (c) there's what you mean by what you say. I'm thinking of language use, but it seems obvious this can be extended. The thing about (b) and (c) is that they're really not "just" psychological; the distinctions between (b) and (a) and between (c) and (a) are largely public, built-in, you might even say, to how we use language. You may end up attributing a psychological state to someone based on your understanding of what they say, but that's also pretty much built-in.

Those terms seem pretty straightforward to me. Do they help make sense of the ad at all?

(For (c), by the way, I'm mostly thinking of "conversational implicature" but there are both simpler and more complex examples, I'd guess.)

I don't need the United States to be an atheist nation; I just need Christians not to turn it into a Theocracy.

Here's something I do worry about: because Christian fundamentalism has an anti-intellectual bent, shall we say, it is not known for its institutions of higher learning. Where then to find agreeable candidates for the Supreme Court? So now we have this:



Sotomayor is Catholic and liberal, but there could easily come a day, and that not far off, when a religious minority changes the law of the land for let's face it religious reasons. I think at that point Americans might notice that the religious make-up of the Court is a little odd, and that might spell trouble.

It appears the survey only relates to young adults, which kind of makes sense. — 3017amen

It also appears you only clicked on one of the links.

While the drop in Christian affiliation is particularly pronounced among young adults, it is occurring among Americans of all ages. — The one you missed

Given what Jesus is said to have said about money and wealth, one would think the use of the slogan on currency would be more suggestive of a lack of Christians than an abundance of them. — Ciceronianus the White

He's going to take a shot, here it comes -- it's in the net! Goal for Ciceronianus!

Christianity is not going to change, here in America, like it or not... — 3017amen

There is actual research. From the first citation:

The Christian share of the U.S. population is declining — Pew

You were saying?

Truth is not correspondence to reality. Why? First, because our knowledge is not exhaustive, but leaves an untold amount behind. It is only a diminished projection of what we encounter. — Dfpolis

But why must it be exhaustive? If a state-of-affairs includes aspects A, B, C, D, E, and F, and we only describe it as having A, B, and D -- is that not true? It would be false if we claimed it only had aspects A, B, and D, but we needn't claim that. We know we're leaving things out. What we want is correspondence between what we claim is there and what is there. You can reasonably say "correspondence" should be a bijection, not an injection, but that's just semantics. What really matters is the difference between my A-B-D claim and someone else's A-B-M-N-O-P claim. That's not an injection, because the state-of-affairs does not include M, N, O and P. And then there's the A-B-C-D-E-F-M-N-O-P claim: that's exhaustive but also excessive, and also no good.

To be true, our judgements must be adequate to the context under consideration. Remembering that what we know is not exhaustive and based on an abstractive process, that our judgement will be adequate if what we ignored in our abstractions is irrelevant to our present endeavor. — Dfpolis

And I think this is exactly what you recognize here. "To say of what is that it is" while avoiding saying "of what is not that it is", and so on.

I don't see a plausible alternative either.

Here's still more stuff for your armchair time, and this brings us back to the sorts of stuff @Pfhorrest was talking about: from our point of view as conscious agents, and to the psychologist that will mean up here in System 2, how do we manage the relations between System 1 and System 2? We now have experiments revealing all sorts of cognitive biases. I don't even know what the state of play is for theories explaining why we have these biases, but the facts alone are both fascinating and knowledge of them useful. So "now we know": beware of System 1! It's awesome, it keeps you alive, but it's not really designed (heh) to tell you the truth. Beware!

But -- not everything that goes wrong is System 1's fault, now is it? Up here in our System 2 paradise we're theorizing away about this and that, but System 2 being where reason hangs its hat doesn't mean everything that goes on in System 2 is reasonable. What we do consciously, reflectively, may in every case be an attempt at reasoning -- otherwise no one would have rung up System 2 for help -- but there can clearly be errors in reasoning that are not System 1's fault, not cases where we think we're reasoning but are really listening to the slightly paranoid but canny fellow in the basement. Or maybe we don't make a mistake but just hit an impasse, can't reach a decision. What do we do on reaching an impasse, and how could we have avoided some of our mistakes?

We send it back down to the lower court, and ask for more data. So "empiricism" could be a name for that: the System-2-level recognition that it is dependent on System 1 not just for the conceptual apparatus but also for the data we will slot into that apparatus when attempting to reason. But that description is way wrong.

And here is exactly why we need philosophy. (1) The data always comes packaged. System 1 won't give you the raw data, you couldn't use it even it did; it packages it up using whatever concepts it has. This is the major blow struck repeatedly against classic empiricism, the assumption that reason works with the raw data, the Myth of the Given. But that means there is a role for philosophy in understanding how the data is packaged: you may never be able to say "this wrapper is the concept" and "this part left over after I remove the wrapper is the data" -- that's very nearly Quine's first dogma, the futile attempt to distinguish analytic and synthetic; but you may at least be able to recognize the wrapper and know why it's there and how it relates to other elements of the conceptual apparatus, get a sense of the effect of how it was packaged. I also think we can send back what we get and ask for it to be repackaged in a different way. (2) Even though in some sense System 2 is the big leagues, where the stuff we find interesting happens, it's also the feeder system, the minor leagues, for System 1, right? Play enough chess and a lot of the stuff you had to agonizingly work out with step-by-step analysis when you started becomes habit, pushed down to System 1 and handled now in a flash. Stuff you know you know how to do, and could have explained back when you learned it, can become an ability you have trouble articulating. So there is a role for philosophy in making sure that what we do in System 2 is done well, since it's going to end up a habit. And that includes the conceptual apparatus itself; if you get in the habit -- I just mean "habit", still System 2 -- of sending back data packaged in a certain way, because it's not appropriate for your reasoning, System 1 will get the message, move that packaging to a less accessible part of the warehouse, and maybe eventually quit using it at all.