But "specifying a domain" is flagging up a likely rupture of your individual discourse from the wider "web" :wink:, e.g. your specified domain might be fictional, or (per the OP?) hypothetical, or for other reasons resist identification with any more widely recognised domain. — bongo fury

I'm not seeing what you're seeing, so maybe you can fill me in. I don't know why sortals would be especially problematic. It's still just public language, public conceptual apparatus, picking out individuals in the way a speech community does. "Dogs". "Those dogs over there." "Some of those dogs over there." What struck you as uniquely problematic about this, more problematic than what we do with predicates?

Anyway it seems natural to me that insofar as trouble arises, the parties to a conversation will negotiate through it, as my dogs and coyotes example runs right into. (I think David Lewis talks about this in Scorekeeping, which I ought to reread.) I'm just splitting the negotiation into (a) what are we talking about? and (b) what are we saying about it?

Does that seem terribly unnatural to you?

I'm good with that. We agree on so much, I think the remaining differences are mostly semantic. If I have new thoughts I'll come back to this.

It was a good discussion and I look forward to seeing you elsewhere on the forum.

So tactically I agree with you, and I have my own reservations about how "privilege" plays into America's self improvement thing.

On the other hand, I think there are interesting things to say about positions of dominance people are unaware they hold. When I see a young man and a young woman at a coffee shop and the guy is talking 90% of the time, I think, "I used to be that asshat." (And there's data on speaking time in conversations between men and women.) I think that kind of thing is worth knowing about for so many reasons.

It also occurs to me that what I'm calling "sortals" here might be how we specify the domain for our variables on the fly.

If I say, 'Some dogs over there are howling,' I'm attributing "howling" to some of the individuals in the domain "the dogs over there". But suppose they're coyotes, not dogs. There may be dogs over there and they're not howling, and that would be one kind of error; but the main error seems to be picking the wrong collection of individuals to consider attributing "howling" to. That looks to me like a very different kind of mistake.

But what if there aren't any dogs over there, howling or otherwise? I've implied there are. When corrected, I might say I thought the coyotes were dogs.

It's plain enough what I mean, but the plain language of that sentence is ludicrous. I'll only add that I couldn't have said this before being informed that there were coyotes over there, and if I had known that beforehand I wouldn't have been tempted to say that the coyotes over there are dogs, and they're howling.

You understand that in the last paragraph of mine you quoted I was speaking for the position I intended to refute in the paragraphs right after that, yes?

Also "blanket" is kind of a weasel word. Statistics don't show, don't expect to show, that every white household has more money than every black household.

Also this post is not about what I would call "white privilege" but about systemic racism.

All that said, I tend overwhelmingly to agree with your post, and with the approach to remediation you champion. (Baby bonds are also interesting.)

Thanks for coming back to this.

Since I've already made such a hash of things, I'll continue! (Apologies to @Pfhorrest.)

What makes me uncomfortable about the predicate calculus is that sortals aren't really like attributes, and sortals are the natural way to talk about what exists. 'To be' is substantive hungry: if you say 'X is', the question is, 'Is a what?'

We now have coyotes where I live, but we didn't when I was a kid. On first hearing them howl at night, I might remark, 'Listen to those dogs howling.' If someone else tells me, 'Those aren't dogs; they're coyotes,' they're not telling me I assigned the wrong predicate to an object, they're telling me I picked the wrong sortal. A coyote might or might not be howling -- that's a predicate; but could a coyote be a dog, or a block of cheese, or a representative democracy? And we recognize this in our grammar: 'is ...' is not the same as 'is a ...' We'll never say that a coyote is a howling, though it might be a-howlin'.

I think this is why I'm inclined to bring up the old syllogistic and the square of opposition when talk turns to existence. It feels like there's room there to make the distinction I want.

I could make the statement, X = "all vampires are bloodsuckers" = Ax(Vx -> Bx). Is X true/false? There are no vampires, at least to the extent we're aware, and so the statement X is false. — TheMadFool

No, it's vacuously true. The suggestion you make toward the end of your post:

universal statements like "all vampires are bloosuckers", because they're translated as hypotheticals (if...then...) can be assigned the truth value TRUE even when the subject term, here vampires, is empty. — TheMadFool

That's already what we do. You can do the proof yourself:

1. (x)(~Vx)
2. ~(x)(Vx → Bx)
3. (∃x)~(Vx → Bx) ...... 2
4. ~(Va → Ba) ............ 3
5. Va ........................... 4
6. ~Va ......................... 1

O statements — TheMadFool

Par for the course. Obviously I meant A.

Many hours ago we had a weird exchange, which left me with a vague feeling that I hadn't answered a question or that there was something I meant to come back to. (I've had kind of a confusing day.)

I'm a little confused now, but it's probably my own fault! — Srap Tasmaner

So I've come back thinking I'm now in a frame of mind to figure out what was bothering me.

We were talking about why the O form (All As are Bs) doesn't carry existential import, I linked the SEP article about the square again, and then in follow-up you said something that struck me as way wrong, though I wasn't really tuned in just then:

Ex should also be neutral on the matter of existence like its companion Ax. — TheMadFool

And eventually I posted the above and also this:

absolutely the existential quantifier has existential import, and the universal quantifier doesn't -- it's just a kind of souped-up conditional. — Srap Tasmaner

Which, I mean, wtf?

I can see how it happened. You had switched from talking about "universal statements" -- like All As are Bs -- to universal quantification, like ∀xFx, and I only half realized it. You can see that in the "conditional" comment there, in which I'm clearly still thinking about the O form even while I'm typing "universal quantifier"! Didn't this confuse the shit out of you?

So, for the record, these are nothing alike. With modern unary quantification, such as ∃xFx and ∀xFx, you don't have the same question of who has existential import and who doesn't. Variables like x range over a domain of discourse (giddily unspecified in natural language), a bunch of objects that you have already stipulated to "exist" (in whatever sense); all you're doing is figuring out which of them satisfy which predicates.

Since ∃ and ∀ can readily be defined in terms of each other, either they both commit you to the existence of, let's say, things that are F, or neither does. Quine more or less started this particular way of talking, and he says they do. If nothing satisfies a predicate F, you can say, 'There's nothing that's F' or 'There are no Fs,' etc.

tl;dr: 'Everything is a unicorn' and 'Something is a unicorn' both commit you to there being unicorns. 'Nothing is a unicorn' doesn't. 'Something is not a unicorn' (equivalently, 'Not everything is a unicorn') doesn't, but be careful with this one.

that’s what I’m advocating — Pfhorrest

I was just thrown because you hadn't said anything suggesting this is where you were headed -- nothing about changing what kind of variables we quantify over, for instance.

There's some equivalence of course, but I don't think anyone is going to convince mathematicians to quantify over expressions instead of objects.

Still, I do often find myself thinking it's an attractive option for at least some cases in natural language.

And of course you trade whatever is a pain-in-the-ass about existence for whatever is a pain-in-the-ass about truth.

for some value of x, [formula involving x] is true — Pfhorrest

That's exactly the "substitutional interpretation" of quantifiers.

I'm a little confused now, but it's probably my own fault!

I put on my "speaking for the received view" hat to address a couple of your questions, and if I'm still wearing that hat then absolutely the existential quantifier has existential import, and the universal quantifier doesn't -- it's just a kind of souped-up conditional.

If you want me to put on a "reforming logic" hat, I don't have one of those.

I do have a "logic is swell for math and generally ham-fisted dealing with ordinary language" hat and I'm almost always wearing that one, enough that I forget to take it off even when I meant to, which might have happened in this thread, I'm not sure.

No sarcasm -- it's just that, I used to be pretty well-versed in the position I take you to espouse (there's a lot of Quine and Goodman on my bookshelf), not so much anymore and not enough to have the discussion it deserves. But if you give me a raincheck, we'll do this sometime.

Ex should also be neutral on the matter of existence like its companion Ax. — TheMadFool

Whoa! No. That is not the conclusion you should draw.

So by the time we get to asserting all of modern science every time you ask for the salt, you'll still be fine, because holism, right?

But also because you don't mean the same thing I do by "assert".

If I recall correctly, the modern interpretation of universal statements don't make an existential claim for some reason I forgot. Aristotelian universal statements do make existential claims. — TheMadFool

That's right, although in everyday day speech universal statements still tend to carry existential import: from 'Everyone on the ship got sick' you may conclude 'Some people on the ship got sick'.

You can see in the SEP article how this leads to trouble with empty terms, but Parsons also makes the intriguing point there that weakenings, deriving a "some" from an "all", were not traditionally of much interest, much as empty terms were ignored. Indeed, what is the point of concluding that some people got sick if you know everyone did?

Still the modern version preserves our ability to say that if everyone on the ship got sick and so-and-so was on the ship then they got sick, which is all math needs. It saddles us with all the Martians on the ship having gotten sick too, though, but in fairness that's not just an issue with universal quantification but with the material conditional.

If you tell me that a dog is barking, are you also telling me there are such things as mammals?

If all you're interested in is truth values, then maybe "A dog is barking" can be rendered into philo-English as "There is something which is a dog and is barking".

But does anyone think that, in saying "A dog is barking", you are asserting the existence of dogs? You're assuming or presupposing there are dogs, and so far as that goes you are committed to the existence of dogs, in Quine's sense. As above with truth values, if what you're looking for are the ontological commitments of a theory, the translation does what you want.

But the existence of dogs isn't even your assumption; it's background knowledge. Not only you but everyone you know is aware of the existence of dogs. In particular, whoever you're saying "A dog is barking" to is one of those people who already knows that dogs exist.

If the usual translation is taken as an explication -- what we're "really saying" or something -- then at least half of what people tell us everyday is stuff we already know, and that they know we already know.

(Math doesn't suffer from this weirdness because the domain is always specified. It's not like when you conclude that there is a point within this interval such that ..., you are asserting the existence of points, whatever that would even mean.)

Meinongian quantifiers.

More fun reading on the existential import of quantifiers.

Yes certainly I should have been clearer that there's a presumption that Method 2 is a refinement of Method 1, motivated by the shortcomings of that method. I was a bit distracted by trying to clarify the differences between them -- and then on figuring out how you might make the leap from one to the other.

But now I'm also thinking it's important to recognize the role of Method 1, which at least gives us a start and something to revise. Without the formal method, mechanically applied, as a test, you can't know enough to know whether you need to revise.

I still don't have clearly in view how to take the application of a method. A method should be a procedure that can be mechanically followed, and may need to be for purposes of reliable reconnaissance, but the sort of "pathologies of method" you describe are failings at the, I don't know, monitoring and supervision level, maybe what you mean by "methodology".

This is all a bit abstract -- hence the socks! -- but I think what we're talking about is finding a reliable approach to making use of formalization without becoming beholden to it, without letting it dictate terms ("looking where the light is best" and related problems).

Is this how you see it?

I started this thread because I thought of different ways of putting on socks as an analogy for different approaches to problem solving, and thus of doing philosophy, but it occurs to me now that it can be an analogy because how humans do this reveals human practical intelligence at work: there is remarkable flexibility and reflexivity in carrying out even these terribly mundane tasks.

I think that's why I find them so interesting, and of philosophical value, though others would rather be discussing the un-concealment of Being, or whatever. Just ask a researcher trying to design a robot smart enough to put on a pair of socks.

Since we're still talking about socks, I guess it's only fair to mention hybrid approaches: you can start at the top and pull only until the resistance increases noticeably or an alignment problem is detected, and then switch to pulling and aligning the heel in the middle of the sock, twisting the toe as needed to keep it straight, and then go back to finish the top at the end.

This also is sometimes a good way to work on a problem, jumping around from section to section, adjusting and redesigning components of the machine you're building to keep the parts working together smoothly.

Yes, I think your focus on the point of greatest resistance is part of the story. When I suggested that one effect of a mechanical, unreflective application of "pull" ends up stretching out the top section too much, this is what I had in the back of my mind.

What I had in the front of my mind -- without saying it -- is solutions arrived at this way are often somewhat "brittle": the method barely works, and works only by extracting everything the method has to offer. The fact that the entire sock has been pulled as snug as possible makes alignment errors very difficult to correct; the alternative solution focuses on getting alignment right by making getting alignment right easier, at the expense of requiring extra -- but themselves quite simple -- bunching and unbunching procedures.

The swing example shows a similarly brittle solution that will eventually have no reasonable way of proceeding -- not to mention having along the way removed so much of the tree that the whole point of a swing is lost.

While we might not want to conclude that focusing on solving the hardest part of a problem first is always a stellar strategy, even figuring out which parts are easy and which hard is an improvement over just diving in. And certainly having a sense of how hard the hard part will be and what resources you'll need to deal with it can give you a sense of whether a solution to the hard part is conceivable, achievable, etc., and could save you spending time and energy on the parts that, while easier, don't come for free, only to end up in a dead-end.

Either will be more productive than further torturing statistics. — Banno

I admit the human element seems to have failed us here.... (But) I don't think it's fair to condemn a whole program based on a single slip-up. — Buck Turgidson

<shrug>

Maybe it doesn't come to anything because there's lots of interplay, but if it's interplay -- say, of deduction and abduction -- the distinction is still interesting.

Also: for my swing example, I left out a popular option, replacing a section of the tree's trunk with something that you stipulate as holding up the tree while allowing you to swing through it. (Insert Russell quote about theft and honest toil.)

I certainly will.

I admit I haven't quite figured out the best way to describe or explain the fallacy here, but that it is a fallacy should be clear. Your conclusions make it clear something has gone wrong, don't they?

Alright, then for both my urn and your urn, we'll say the sample space is { the marble I picked was red, the marble I picked was blue }, so in both cases the chances are 1 in 2 that you picked a red marble. Sound good?

Yes, and that's how I characterized it in the "Evolution of logic" thread, but I wanted to leave that out because I'm not sure it's quite that. But, yes, you're on the right track.

Here's another analogy.

There's an old cartoon gag where you build a swing by tying ropes to limbs of the same height on either side of a tree. When you discover that you can't actually swing this way, you cut out the section of the tree's trunk that's in the way and happily swing through the gap.

Now imagine that as a philosophy research project. You either keep swinging through the gap because no one notices you've violated a universal law, or the trunk collapses (and in cartoon physics there's always a delay) and you have to cut the gap again. And again. And again. What do you do when you finally get to the section of the trunk where the rope-supporting limbs are?

In the alternative approach, you size up the situation ahead of time and realize that both ropes will have to be on the same side of the tree.

So stop saying they are.

Well, yeah. The point is not knowing whether P and not knowing anything at all about the likelihood of P are really obviously not the same thing.

Sure. But you can't generally insert male into female starting in the middle, only in this case you can by modifying the shape of the receiving object so that a cross-section from the middle is now the mouth.

To come back a little toward my original motive here, the new process "cheats" a little in how it handles the top section: your foot still passes through it, but you allow it to pass through in a temporary and deliberately incorrect way so you can focus on getting the lower section right first.

You can imagine following Method 1 but bunching the top a little, not deliberately or at least not as a step toward Method 2, and then seeing that you could bunch a lot more on purpose. Or maybe you bunch the top a lot because you're trying to reduce the evident strain on the fabric there, and then you realize it makes alignment easier.

There are probably lots of stories you could tell about the evolution of Method 2 from Method 1, but none of them look like trial and error to me. What did you have in mind?

I place 98 red marbles and 2 blue marbles in an urn; then I blindfold you and have you select a marble from the urn.

Do you, before removing your blindfold, know what color marble you have selected? No. Do you know what color you've likely selected? Obviously.

X doesn't know whether O is real/not and that in probabilistic terms means that, insofar as X is concerned, O is as likely to be real as O is likely to not be real. — TheMadFool

This is the same thing you said before and it's plainly false, so I'll ask again why you think it's true.

I began with not knowing whether X is real or not i.e. I admitted to not knowing whether it's more/less likely to be real. — TheMadFool

What's before "i.e." there doesn't entail what's after. Why do you think it does?

Anything wrong with it? — TheMadFool

That it is wrong is a fact; it's a bizarre misapplication of the principle of indifference, but a mistake that looks like it's worth understanding. I'm going to think about it a bit.

When I posted this last night, it didn't occur to me that this is really close to the distinction I was making in the "Evolution of Logic" thread about building a bird's nest:

A nest-building bird that followed a procedure mechanically -- add a piece to what we have so far by entwining it in a certain way, leaving ways to use it for the next bit, and preserving a local curvature of such-and-such -- could consistently produce nests with no knowledge of the overall shape its procedure leads to. — Srap Tasmaner

or putting together a jigsaw puzzle:

If I put together a jigsaw puzzle by selecting a piece at random and then performing a brute-force search for pieces that connect to it properly -- matching shapes and colors, the usual rules -- and then repeat this process with the new edges of my work in progress until the puzzle is complete, I can be successful without having any idea what the final form will be. — Srap Tasmaner

In that discussion I wanted to say it's curious that, on the one hand, we have an image of ourselves as behaving in ways that are less "mechanical" than our less brainy cousins, but also we have System 2, which allows us to use formal methods of reasoning that aspire to the mechanical. What I wasn't thinking about then is that how you apply the rules is the interesting bit.

The socks thing is a case where we have in hand a formal method -- lining up the top and pulling -- perhaps originally arrived at through a System 2 analysis, but if applied mechanically, by System 1, then the results are often unsatisfactory. So we can refine the method by lining up the middle of the sock and then pulling, and adding procedures to bunch and unbunch the top section.

Lining up the middle of the sock instead of the top now strikes me as a really curious leap of insight in itself -- though last night I was primarily thinking of it as sensitivity to the desired result, like looking at the picture on the puzzle-box.

you don't have to respond to every post in a thread — Judaka

Not even if they're addressed to you!

This seems rude at first, okay it is rude, but this is crucial advice for enjoying the site.

(As they used to say on Usenet, but with ascii art, don't feed the trolls.)

For those reminiscing about the good old days: was anyone else here on Rodrigo Vanegas's ANALYTIC-L? That was easily the best experience I've ever had on the internet. I've been a wanderer in the desert since it folded.

The relevant probability for W being real - as in existing independently of X's mind and thus perceivable by both Y and Z, is 50% — TheMadFool

Wait wait wait -- please tell me this is the probability because either it's real or it's not. Did I get it?