Truth is a property of sentences. — Michael

Is it? Shouldn't it at the very least be a property of a pair <sentence, interpretation>? (Or a triple that includes as well a world.)

Here's an analogy.

Suppose you have a little wagon, and the wheels are held on by cotter pins but one's broken. You bend a paperclip so that it stays in place as the cotter pin did, and then test it, concluding "It's holding, for now anyway."

Is "holding" a property of the paperclip? If you remove it, would it still be "holding"? Was it "holding" before you bent it into a cotter-pin shape?

Same statement (“This is pencil”), different “uses” (usages, made explicit), or as he also calls them: interpretations. Not that the use is given by me. — Antony Nickles

Okay. I still can't tell if this is a minor verbal difference between us.

If he picks what we call a "banjo" we might say "he has given the word 'banjo' the correct interpretation"; if he picks some other instrument ― "he has interpreted 'banjo' to mean 'string instrument'".

We say "he has given the word 'banjo' this or that interpretation", and are inclined to assume a definite act of interpretation besides the act of choosing. — p. 2

So do you read Wittgenstein here as rhetorically casting doubt not only on the assumption noted ― about the separate, mental act of interpretation ― but also on the idea of giving a word an interpretation, or interpreting a word to mean something?

a usage/interpretation is more than something I do, what with history, context, others’ judgment, multiple uses, etc. (even though I can consider, choose words, plan, hope). — Antony Nickles

I would say that an interpretation is not private to me, certainly, because it is not a special mental act that I perform.

I want you to remember that words have those meanings which we have given them; and we give them meanings by explanations. — p. 27

Whenever we interpret a symbol in one way or another, the interpretation is a new symbol added to the old one. — p. 33

In the early example with the banjo, it is clear that the context does not determine the interpretation, because the person might give "banjo" this one or that one.

But there's something left unclear in the initial discussion of the banjo case, when he shifts from (1) explanations that translate from "banjo" (or "tove") to some other words to (2) the discussion of behavior when told to pick out a banjo. I think we're not asked to say that his behavior is another kind of wordless language; instead, we attribute to him an interpretation in words (such as "string instrument") we utter but he doesn't. We are the ones explaining his interpretation of "banjo", so we are the ones adding a new symbol to the old one.

This is the point where people say that understanding or meaning or interpretation "drop out", because Wittgenstein is insistent that anything you try to grasp as standing behind the words will be just another sign. There is something genuinely radical, or at least strange, going on here.

I think of that as asking why we are so good at doing it. — Paine

if you're talking about our ability to improvise and make novel uses of signs, it's good point and one I think Wittgenstein ought to have given more emphasis.

On the other hand, I'm having trouble following this, @Antony Nickles:

but it’s not a matter that words are tools we manipulate then of which “well established usage”(p.3) something is like — Antony Nickles

Wittgenstein gives "this is tove" as an example of an ostensive definition, and then points out that ostensive definitions are, at the very least, ambiguous. It's a point worth making because sometimes people expect that the explanation of what a word means ― and we're only on page 2, so we're still on explanations of the meaning of a word ― will bottom out in ostensive definition. People think that for lots of reasons, but one is the evident role of something like ostension in teaching language, or explaining to someone who already has a language the meaning of a word they don't know. He covers that case as well ("this is a banjo").

Introducing the list with which he will make this point, he says

I will give a few such interpretations and use English words with well-established usage. — p. 2

He then discusses the issue of this approach just being more signs, and goes right into the question of whether we have to attribute an interpretation (of "this is a banjo") to someone based on their behavior, and then into whether this interpretation is a mental act, all that.

But you seem to be suggesting something else I don't quite understand. There would be no point in offering more words that either Wittgenstein's audience or the person being told "this is tove" don't understand; that wouldn't help explain "tove" to anyone. ― There's an issue here about how anyone can learn language from scratch, but the "banjo" discussion points at how we expect that to work: you have to look to behavior to see whether they're getting it. Does the two-year old pick out the red one when asked to, etc.

Do you think he was making some different point when he mentioned that he was using words his audience will understand?

An utterance is not judged as, or as not, a ‘use’ of words; an utterance has a use—it is a plea, or a threat, or points out a difference; as are the examples regarding the pencil—depending on the context. — Antony Nickles

And this too I'm not following at all. Do you take Wittgenstein to have been saying that "this is tove" might mean any one of

"This is a pencil",
"This is round",
"This is wood",
"This is one",
"This is hard", etc. etc. — ibid

depending on context?

But you're right that Wittgenstein generally asks what "the use" of an expression is, rather than asking how an expression is being used.

To the statement "I feel in my hand that the water is three feet under the ground" we should like to answer "I don't know what this means". But the diviner would say: "Surely you know what it means. You know what 'three feet under the ground' means and you know what 'I feel' means!" But I should answer him: I know what a word means in certain contexts. ... But the use of the expression "a feeling of water being three feet under the ground" has yet to be explained to me. — p. 9f.

He speaks of "the grammar" in a similar way:

The grammar of this phrase has yet to be explained to me. — p. 10

But he doesn't exclusively use "use" as a noun; introducing language games he uses the transitive verb:

These are ways of using signs simpler than those in which we use the signs of our highly complicated everyday language. — p. 17

So first he says, "I don't what this means", and then "The use of this expression has not been explained to me." The latter is, in essence, an explanation of the former. It's worth noting that we could go around again: having received an explanation from the diviner, Wittgenstein might find himself, in a completely different context, talking to someone else who uses the expression "a feeling of water being three feet under the ground", and he would have to say now that he knows the use of that expression by a diviner looking for water, but only in that context, not this one.

Even within a given context, it's plain that an expression can have more than one use, so we don't have to make too much of Wittgenstein's habit of saying "the use" or "the grammar".

What about my distinction between "mere" utterance and "genuine" use? For now, I'll stick by it, though these aren't Wittgenstein's words.

Consider the diviner: the first explanation given, the one quoted above, is not enough, as Wittgenstein points out. He goes on to consider other explanations the diviner might give, about how he learned to associate a feeling of tension in his hands with the presence of water below ground, and so on.

The importance of investigating the diviner's answer lies in the fact that we often think that we have given a meaning to a statement P if only we assert "I feel (or I believe) that P is the case. — p. 10

The implication here is that having given a meaning to a statement is something you can be mistaken about; this is roughly what he will say about many of the examples he draws from philosophy, that there is an assumption of sense where sense has not yet been given.

We could call such uses of signs "infelicitous" or "misfires" or something like that, as Austin does, in a different context. Or we could say, as I did, that when the grammar of what you're saying is all mixed up, it's not quite a use at all. The terminology is not all that important.

People using signs are alive. They give life to the signs through their use. Wittgenstein recognizes that a process must be happening organically that makes thinking, speaking, and listening possible but sees his work as something entirely different from investigating that — Paine

I'd like to come back to this for a moment. These are important milestones for Wittgenstein.

But if we had to name anything that is the life of the sign, we should have to say it was its use. — p. 4

And on the next page:

The sign (the sentence) gets its significance from the system of signs, from the language to which it belongs. Roughly: understanding a sentence means understanding a language. — p. 5

The latter passage does have a whiff of what we could call "structuralism" about it: as if to say, the sentences of a language ― however you imagine collecting them all ― form a system, and the meaning of a sentence is the role it plays within this system, its function. (Maybe not inconsistent with the Tractatus's sense of language.)

But this is not quite what Wittgenstein says, because before that we get the point about the life of the sign ― in response to Frege's dismissal of formalism in mathematics. And Wittgenstein's answer is not that mathematical signs form a system, and therefore mathematical propositions are meaningful because they have a specified role or function within that system. What brings those dashes on paper to life is that they are used to do mathematics.

So, what does using a sign consist of?

Speaking or writing it, certainly, or even thinking it, but we know that's not enough, if nothing else because we know the difference between use and mention ― if you're talking about a sign (or doodling mathematical symbols, whatever), you're not using it but mentioning it.

Something else is needed then. What? We know one answer Wittgenstein rejects: the other thing that makes an utterance (or inscription, or thought) a use is something special going on in the speaker's mind.

As part of the system of language, one may say, the sentence has life. But one is tempted to imagine that which gives the sentence life as something in an occult sphere, accompanying the sentence. But whatever accompanied it would for us just be another sign. — p. 5, the very next sentence

But one natural test of whether an utterance is a use is whether the speaker means it, or is just quoting or fooling around or something else. This is the sort of thing that context ― another candidate for what's needed ― can't really provide on its own. Wittgenstein does not ignore the issue of intentions.

Suppose that the question is "what do you mean by that gesture?" and the answer is "I mean that you must leave". The answer would not have been more correctly phrased: "I mean what I mean by the sentence 'you must leave'." — Philosophical Grammar, p. 40

"What did you mean by those words?" "Did you mean those words?" The first question is not a more precise specification of the second. The first is answered by a proposition replacing the proposition which wasn't understood. The second question is like: "Did you mean that seriously or as a joke?" — Philosophical Grammar, p. 41

So Wittgenstein is not going to ignore the fact that, generally speaking, to count as use we must mean what we say; but he is going to deny that meaning what we say is a mental phenomenon or a mental activity.

Much to argue about there, but we can be pretty clear that he is not looking for a psychological explanation of what use is, or of what makes an utterance of a sign a use of it.

So what does?

As we head with @Antony Nickles into language-games, we find this:

We are inclined to think that there must be something in common to all games, say, and that this common property is the justification for applying the general term "game" to the various games; whereas games form a family the members of which have family likenesses. — p. 17

To keep it short, I believe this is our answer regarding use: there is nothing common to all uses of signs that distinguishes them from mere utterances. Use has no essence. I don't happen to know how Wittgenstein got here ― after beginning to doubt that there is such a thing as the "general form of a proposition" ― but it would make sense if use was the very first case of "family resemblance"; language-games come along, after all, to explicate use.

And with that move, the whole world opens up. Now Wittgenstein can say things like this:

Now does this mean that it is nonsensical to talk of a locality where thought takes place? Certainly not. This phrase has sense if we give it sense. — p. 7

That doesn't mean every utterance is some kind of use, but it means that the uses of a sign are open-ended. Whatever 'grammar' describes, it is not a fixed set of rules that must be followed when using a sign; 'language games' illustrate use, but do not exhaust the possibilities of use.

If I give someone the order "fetch me a red flower from that meadow", how is he to know what sort of flower to bring, as I have only given him a word? — p. 3

W's question needs to be prepared for; it involves abandonment of our ordinary understanding and a peculiar way of thinking about the whole process. — Ludwig V

Normally, if I did worry about those possibilities, I would be already doing philosophy. — Ludwig V

The question here ― how can the word "red" be any help getting a red flower ― is wrong-footed, a question that seems to involve selectively forgetting what words are for. (In that sense, it's a little like what he says later on about the question "How can one think what is not the case?")

Useful for Wittgenstein as an example of philosophy going wrong, but maybe helpful in another way, because if we can see we can see how it goes wrong, we can learn something about language.

Part of what's going on here, I think, is that Wittgenstein wants to say that looking for a psychological explanation for how words work is looking in the wrong place. The wrong place not because psychology (or anthropology or linguistics) doesn't work, but because that kind of explanation is not the business of philosophy.

That is, the problems philosophy worries over arise not because we don't know enough ― about the psychology of language, the nature of reality, whatever ― but because we misunderstand the nature of language or the grammar of particular words.

I don't at all like the phrase "the nature of language" there, but I'm not sure how else to put that. By pointing at use itself, Wittgenstein is offering no theory at all. Even to talk about someone understanding the grammar of a word is just another way of saying they know how the word is used, what it's role in the language is. 'Grammar' is an important word for him, but it's descriptive, not explanatory.

So to come back to the death of philosophy, on the one hand there will be criticism of philosophical positions that derive from misunderstandings of grammar, but there is also room to do this on purpose as a first step in exploring the grammar of our expressions, and you could maybe still call this "philosophy".

One might say that the subject we are dealing with is one of the heirs of the subject that used to be called "philosophy." — p. 28

At least that's what I think he's up to.

Recognizing the difference between the word as a noise and the word as an order is the critical step. — Ludwig V

A critical step of what? Of understanding an order? Does it go "Step 1: recognize the other person is not just making a noise; Step 2: ... "?

What if you forget to do step 1? Or do people just always remember?

When you give an order, do you worry that the other person might forget, and think you were just making a noise? -- Or maybe it will just happen at random: "I understood some of what you said, but there were a couple times you were just making noises."

(As a matter of fact, written exchanges like this differ from spoken conversation by leaving out the noises -- and the gestures -- we habitually make while talking. Those noises are also communicative, but in a different way.)

If the intention is truly the end of perplexity, Deleuze was right in declaring the "Wittgenstenians" as the assassinators of philosophy. — Paine

The only answer I ever heard was that people would go on making the same mistakes, so the cleansing process would go on. — Ludwig V

Philosophy has never shown any inclination to roll over and die.

Of course there are two, and maybe three, senses of "philosophy" in Wittgenstein: there is what philosophers do, which is entrench an everyday misunderstanding into a "problem", and then offer "solutions"; and then there is the sort of work Wittgenstein is doing in The Blue Book, showing that the solutions are not solutions and the problem is not a problem but a muddle.

But there may be a third sort of philosophy, which is the more or less deliberate cultivation of perplexity so that it may ― one hopes! ― be resolved. And this is interesting because until you have the resolution, you are rather in the position of the moviegoer who doesn't really believe the main character is going to die but is scared for them anyway. This cannot be a real problem, you say to yourself, but for the moment it sure seems to be.

If I give someone the order "fetch me a red flower from that meadow", how is he to know what sort of flower to bring, as I have only given him a word? — p. 3

Where does this question come from? It's not an ordinary question, not the sort of problem people raise in everyday life.

If I give anyone an order I feel it to be quite enough to give him signs. And if I am given an order, I should never say: "this is only words, and I have got to get behind the words". And when I have asked someone something and he gives me an answer I am content ― that was just what I expected ― and I don't raise the objection: "but that's a mere answer." — Philosophical Grammar, p. 40

Getting behind the words is also in the early pages of The Blue Book:

Frege ridiculed the formalist conception of mathematics by saying that the formalists confused the unimportant thing, the sign, with the important thing, the meaning. Surely, one wishes to say, mathematics does not treat of dashes on a bit of paper. Frege's idea could be expressed thus: the propositions of mathematics, if they were just complexes of dashes, would be dead and utterly uninteresting, whereas they obviously have a kind of life. — p. 4

Frege says that we have to get behind the signs to the meaning, precisely what Wittgenstein notes it never occurs to anyone to say about the signs we exchange in everyday life.

So this is where Wittgenstein's odd question in The Blue Book comes from. You might say he shows the folly of Frege's view by taking it seriously and imagining the consequences of it in everyday life ― but that's not quite right. In the philosophy of mathematics, there is debate, there is worry, about the nature of mathematical practice, insofar as it is the handling of mathematical signs; but in everyday life, there is no worry about this, and no complaining that we are just passing signs back and forth.

Wittgenstein's non-everyday question has this point then: why is there worry in the philosophy of mathematics but not in everyday life? To ask that question, he does indeed have to bring Frege's idea into the world of everyday behaviour and see what it would look like. But not as a refutation; to be a refutation, he would have to say we are formalists in our everyday lives and there has been no catastrophe. That is not quite what he says; instead he notes that these sorts of questions, and the concerns they would express, just never arise. They could, as they do in the philosophy of mathematics, but they don't. Why not?

Now we have something a bit like a problem to work on, philosophically. A deliberately induced perplexity. I think there's something characteristically philosophical about this sort of puzzle: "Why don't people ...?" It requires a particular sort of imagination to notice what people do not do and what they do not worry about, and a particular sort of imagination to make it plausible that they would.

Hume convincing you that if you knew nothing about the physical world, you would have no idea that the impact of one billiard ball on another would cause the second to move. The issue here is not why the second ball moves ― that's for physics to say ― but that we never wonder whether it will move, we never worry that it won't as we never worry that tomorrow the sun will not rise. And Hume asks himself, why not?

If that's right, then there are three sorts of perplexity: everyday muddles, many, but not all, of which can be addressed through logic and mathematics; philosophical muddles, which are sometimes based in everyday muddles and are sometimes due to habits characteristic of philosophers (generalizing and such); and then there are the oddball questions which lead either to science (why does the second ball move? is also a very good question) or to philosophy.

Absolutely. And it can go the other way -- you can guilt-by-association traditional philosophy, art, religion, anything of the past if you think society is so much better now than it was in the bad old days.

I should add, I don't think it's a matter of "reducing" someone's philosophy to their politics, or their aesthetics, or vice versa. But I do believe William James was right to sense that there were different temperaments, I guess we could say, and that attitudes toward various things tend to come in clusters. Or if not temperaments then styles, different ways of approaching things, of defining and trying to solve problems.

the same realm viewed with different eyes — Wayfarer

I like this.

Through the lens of clinging and aversion, the world is fragmented and suffering (dukkha). Through the lens of insight the same world is seen as interdependent, luminous, and spontaneous. — Wayfarer

That certainly has the ring of truth!

It does also sound like the sort of difference that you might attribute to affect or mood.

But that can go either way: you could also say that your mood derives from "which world" you're seeing.

intuitive vision or insight into the real nature of existence — Wayfarer

There's just too much literature on all this for us to do more than scratch the surface.

I'll add something else, which is a little closer to your point about self-realization. There's another sort of insight which maybe concerns something like freedom. I've acquired a sort of homegrown Buddhism: when I'm worried about something (and there is so much to worry about), I tell myself "This is just a thing that is happening" and I can let go of the feelings I attach to those worries. I tell my son, "You gotta be Taoist about this shit." -- Henry Miller used to talk about being a happy rock, that the river flows over but cannot move or change.

Alan Watts — Wayfarer

My oldest son and his friends have read it, along with Nietzsche, Marx, Camus. The hippy reading list is alive and well in some quarters.

the salient idea there is indeed that that of a 'truer realm', which is what 'the sage' has come to realise (in both senses of understanding to be true and bringing to fruition.) — Wayfarer

it's the implicit background for the idea expressed in the 'great chain of being', which is where this started. — Wayfarer

Through the philosophical ascent we 'come to our senses', as it were, and begin to 'see truly'. — Wayfarer

I think you're right to see all these dots as connected, and right to think people reject the whole package because they reject a particular dot, for they see them as connected too.

I think we should have a conversation about the truer realm, because that intuition -- that this world isn't all there is -- is so persistent across cultures and ages. In the modern world, we've mostly corraled it into religion, but the intuition itself is interesting.

So here let me ask you: my hunch is that this intuition, that there's something else, something more, comes first and beliefs about the other realm after. Do you think that's right? Or do you think that people, maybe a smallish number, have experiences that are, well, unusual, that they take as experiences of another realm -- that such experience comes first? I could see either. What do you think?

my difficulty with the OP is that we are trying to get degrees out of the substance/mode binary. — Leontiskos

Which btw I didn't see coming. I think that comes from @Wayfarer's stuff about the 17th century.

What's in it for me? (See what I did there?)

Or, on the other hand, to associate the position you oppose with the past well lost.

That's what I meant when I said he was engaged in a degree of cherry-picking, naming approaches he particularly dislikes and making them exemplary. — J

I think there's a real question whether supposed views of the past are ever really in play in a contemporary debate, or are people staking out contemporary positions in that debate but using the past to give their position the lustre of authority.

terms like "objective" and "subjective" come to take on meanings that are in some ways the opposite of their original meaning and which lead to incoherence because their original framework has been not only abandoned, but forgotten. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is the vision of cultural transmission as a game of "telephone". @Wayfarer frequently makes such suggestions.

Two questions though:

(1) Is the original message necessarily the most important? (Dewey, for a counterpoint, talks about philosophical problems not being solved but abandoned, passed by, because they are no longer "live" to later generations.) The word "necessarily" provides an easy out; make it, why should we think the original is important at all, except as a matter of historical interest?

(2) How much time-place-language-conceptual-scheme-culture relativism are we committed to? Just enough that certain people "no longer understand" the old ways, but not so much that the dedicated scholar can't "recover" or "reconstruct" what has been lost?

(2) is particularly "fraught," as the kids say. When you dip into such a debate, you'll first read someone claiming that the original meaning of such and such was this, because in their conceptual scheme blah blah blah. And you think, wow that's really interesting, and the shift in perspective is exciting. But then you find out that every little detail is subject to endless debate among specialists, and it gets harder to believe anyone really knows the "original". -- And all that comes before considering whether you're even capable of entering into the worldview of a thousand or three thousand years ago, given a mind stuffed with 20th- and 21st-century ideas. How alien are the ideas you're supposed to be able to grasp? How can you know you've done so, that you haven't just played another round of "telephone"?

Make Philosophy Great Again — J

!

There are a two main strands to the thread, and this isn't one of them. Which is fine, I was just spitballing.

I still find it interesting that ordinary people routinely think truth can land on a spectrum, that there can be more or less truth in what you say.

And in a similar way people describe ideas, accounts, views, as more realistic or less, on a spectrum like accuracy (which @fdrake brought up).

I find that sort of thing awfully interesting, but this thread is about what sort of existence properties have, whether things that have more property-types have more existence, and whether there's a truer realm beyond this one.

Srap Tasmaner's notion of "degenerate cases" — Leontiskos

For the record, it's not my notion, it's what mathematicians call them. A triangle with interior angles of 180/0/0 would be a degenerate triangle. It allows you to say that any three points in a plane determine a triangle instead of saying that any three non-colinear points do. Mathematicians are generally pleased when they don't have to make special rules to cover edge cases.

Really no idea, at this point, why this OP got started. — Wayfarer

Btw, it was started to give you a platform for explicitly discussing and defending an idea you often mention in passing, an idea you feel is often rejected out of hand.

The further purpose was to specifically not reject the idea out of hand and encourage others not to, and to set an example by trying to make sense of an idea I don't naturally have much affinity for, in my own clumsy way, of course.

I find this thread dizzying. — Leontiskos

Don't tempt me. I'll start a thread in your honor next.

But, so what? — Wayfarer

Just wondered. Canticle is brilliant, yes.

The survivors, lacking the overarching context, attempt to reconstruct science using these remnants. — Wayfarer

I read that book a million years ago and forgot he does this. Does he mention that this whole scenario is borrowed from A Canticle for Leibowitz?

Well, there's a lot here, and I won't address remotely all of it.

But I have a simple question. Is this real?

For example, there's this quote from Robert Wallace:

In this way, rational self-governance brings into being an additional kind of reality, which we might describe as more fully real than what was there before, because it integrates those parts in a way that the parts themselves are not integrated. A person who acts “as one,” is more real as himself than a person who merely enacts some part or parts of himself. He is present and functioning as himself, rather than just as a collection of ingredients or inputs.

We all from time to time experience periods of distraction, absence of mind, or depression, in which we aren’t fully present as ourselves. Considering these periods from a vantage point at which we are fully present and functioning as ourselves, we can see what Plato means by saying that some non-illusory things are more real than other non-illusory things. There are times when we ourselves are more real as ourselves than we are at other times.

There's plenty here that sounds plausible, and it's nice to see it put in somewhat practical-sounding terms.

But are the terms used here ― "depression" for instance ― only practical-sounding? There is a unity of psychology and philosophy here that may have much to recommend it, but is it based on the study of human beings? Is it based on therapeutic experience? Is it real, or are terms like "rational self-governance" counters in a game of philosophy?

I really don't mean these questions rhetorically, or as an indirect way to say "What a load of crap."

But I do worry that the "person" here is not a real thing at all, not someone you could meet, or could be, but a fiction. For a direct comparison: I never studied economics in school, and the sort of stuff I would gather from the news was the usual macro-economic guesswork that economists provide journalists. When I first glanced at economic theory, I was genuinely surprised that an enormous amount of economics is not empirical at all, but pure theory. (And it turns out many economists noticed the same thing and decided that maybe they should try doing actual research.) And famously much of that theory revolves around a fictional being called homo economicus. Which is not to say it's useless ― it's a model, an idealization, and interesting and useful in the ways such things are. But it's not descriptive of the behavior of human beings under scarcity, or of human beings making decisions under uncertainty. For that, you have to do actual research.

Look how confidently Wallace uses the indicative: rational self-governance brings into being, it integrates; a unified person is more real, is present, and so on. Are these observations or stipulations?

A great deal of the history of philosophy makes it into your post in one way or another, and I envy your command of the tradition. But is any of what you quote or analyze based on anything at all like research? And if not, what kind of knowledge is this?

Hence, man is, of the sensible things we know, the most able to become unified, precisely because man has access to transcendent aims — Count Timothy von Icarus

If you reach such conclusions by reason alone, do you not worry that it all just hangs in the air, that it's like an economics theorem circa 1950, true within the game being played, but without any empirical grounding and without the genuine possibility of any practical application?

A sign or symbol has an identity that transcends the material constituents from which it is composed. — Wayfarer

Ah, well it's my fault then for picking a well-known geometric shape. I only meant that the sticks are arranged in such a way that they make up a thing, temporarily anyway.

Arrangements of things into other things is, in some circles, a core problem of metaphysics. And it's something a little different from the problem of collections, which is why I mentioned them both.

And it does raise questions of hierarchy in a straightforward way. Each of the sticks is a part of the triangular whole. I didn't want to rehearse all the usual arguments here (triangles of Theseus, and so on), but just see what we might say about hierarchy, since that's our topic.

It's basically levels of ontological dependence (whether per se or per accidens). — Leontiskos

Go ahead and explain that. Some of us are uneducated.

Or, in pastiche of Berkeley, everything exists in the mind of God. And then what? Does He care more about some of His thoughts than others? Find some more interesting? Forget some?

There really is no deciding between the world being one or being many, and some of this overlaps that. I think.

If your intent is to make shit up, it's an excellent scale, imposing minimal constraint on your creativity. "Like our Heavenly Father, Everest is great ..."

What's the answer when you've got one property and you're measuring how well something exemplifies it? — fdrake

Quick note: some of what you say about Spinoza suggests "is God" or maybe "is like God" as an interesting predicate, and then you get @Wayfarer's great chain of being by asking of each entity "How close to being God are you? How much of God is manifested in you?" something like that. One predicate to rule them all, one scale with which to measure being

Oh I never got nearly that far!

It's an old question. I think he mentions it in connection with negation because there's an argument (attributed there to Geach, I think) that we pick Socrates as the subject and mortality as the predicate because mortality can be negated but Socrates cannot. Which is a stupid argument, and also entirely misses Frege's point about force.

But that's a sideline of a sideline.

Yes, I'm talking about Forms. Why not say Mortality is manifested in, among others, this little temporal object called "Socrates", but Mortality is itself more enduring, more perfect, more real than such objects?

It is curious that the substance/mode or subject/predicate thing somehow gets tangled up with an historically somewhat religious question about whether there is some deeper, truer reality behind the reality we experience. And it's hard not to associate that tangling with Plato, and whatever cultural currents Plato was in touch with. (It comes up in Kimhi, I think, in discussing why we say mortality is a property of Socrates rather than saying Socrates is an exemplar of Mortality.)

Jason De León's book — Srap Tasmaner

Last night won the National Book Award for Non-fiction.

Moral: “real” doesn’t have any single meaning whose correct application you can argue about. — J

Not quite in the spirit of the enterprise though.

I've taken two approaches so far: one is to see if I might have any use for saying something has a higher degree of reality than something else, and I can imagine this being so, although it's a little weird; the other is examining what @Wayfarer in particular might find interesting about it, as he understands it, beyond it being something people used to think.

If it's just a marker of the difference between religious and secular worldviews, it is not interesting in itself. But if it is, at least in part, constitutive of that difference -- that is, if it makes more sense to say you're religious because you have such a belief than to say you have such a belief because you're religious -- then the idea has independent interest and could conceivably find a place in a hybrid worldview, or even in a secular one. But if it can't be made sense of without the support of religious conviction, I don't know that there's much to talk about. Philosophically.

Maybe. But there is a certain sort of discourse that says things only appear to be a certain way, but are actually another way, but says so non-lazily, offering an explanation for why things appear to be a way they aren't really. It gives a bit of 'substance' to the appearance itself, doesn't treat it as just a mistake. (Which is an option for everyday cases of taking an illusory view of something ― you're mistaken, indefensibly so.) The only reason I thought you might settle on degrees here ― rather than just appearance/reality ― is if you make this move more than once, so there are layers.

It's not important. Insofar as it's just a manner of speaking, it's probably not independently interesting but borrowing from our culture's religious conceptual inheritance. I guess.

And therein lies a considerable proportion of semiotics, among other things. — Wayfarer

Could you spell this out a bit?

I can make no sense at all of "degrees of reality". Reality is not something that can be measured, the idea 'real' is the binary opposition to 'iimaginary' or 'artificial'. Something cannot be partly real and partly imaginary or artificial in its wholeness. — Janus

Same for truth, right? A statement is true or false. And yet, there's an idiom that rarely finds its way into philosophy: "There's some truth in what you say." I find it pretty interesting that people sometimes assign a degree of truth to what someone says, rather than following the binary, all-or-nothing model typical in philosophy.

Two readings of that idiom come to mind: (a) some of what you say is true, and some of it is false; (b) some of the truth is encompassed by what you say, but some of it isn't.

Most of the time, we're talking about an aggregate of statements, a whole story, for instance. We can go with (a) and count the individual statements that make up the story as true or false, and the 'degree of truth' would be something like a ratio. I just want to note, first, that there's a pronounced atomism to this approach, so if you have any objection to atomism, you ought to be a little uncomfortable with that. Besides which, this is not how philosophy usually treats aggregates of statements: we and them all together, and if any one of them is false, the story as a whole is false. ― At least that's how we're used to dealing with arguments. Even if it's defensible there, it looks pretty bone-headed for dealing with anything but deductive arguments. Admitting that a story can fall somewhere on a spectrum between true and false, as people often do, is clearly more sensible.

And then there's (b), where you've gotten some of the truth, but not the whole truth. Obviously this doesn't mean treating every speech as an account of the entire universe; it's usually a judgment that something importantly relevant has been left out. "Yes, I did all the things you say, just as you said, but you don't know why, so your story is incomplete in a way that makes a difference." Something like that.

I think this is, to some degree, central to @Wayfarer's approach. A materialistic account of life or consciousness, for instance, is fine so far as it goes, but it leaves out something important. This is what @Wayfarer says about science broadly, that it leaves out the first-person perspective and this is no incidental omission. There is some truth in natural science, according to him, but not the whole truth, and not because we're just not finished, but because we are excluding something important. More than not looking for it, when we stumble across it, we push it back out.

So that's a defense of the idea of 'degrees of truth'. My previous post attempted to straightforwardly apply the idea, and forthrightly say there's more or less reality in an account or a discussion, and I think that would work in both the (a) and (b) senses.

It doesn't seem to have much to do with the hierarchical ontology @Wayfarer is talking about, but I wanted to see if I could find a use on my own for something we might call "degrees of reality".

I am little surprised that so far no one has suggested another approach ― maybe again because it tends to be treated as a binary. That would be claims that there is a hidden reality, a deeper reality than the one we know. I suppose people don't usually say that makes this one less real, but simply illusion. Always the binary. But if there's a reality behind or beyond this one, couldn't there be another behind that? Why assume there are exactly two, rather than admit that if there's more than one, there may be any number? In which case, it seems to me more natural to assume such realities are on a spectrum. (Even scientists sometimes seem to talk this way, if not in terms of reality then in terms of "what's going on": it seems to us one thing, but it's really something else; and behind that there's something even stranger; and we don't know what's behind that, but maybe the universe is a simulation, or a calculation, or something else quite different from what we expected a hundred years ago.)

Now if you hold such a view, your ontology of the entities in this "plane" might also be hierarchical, because some creatures are sensible of the other reality (or realities) and some aren't. Or at least have that capacity. Some can leave the cave of this reality and experience a higher or a deeper reality, and some can't. Most Christians seem to believe something a bit like this: we're only in this reality temporarily, and this whole reality is itself temporary; rocks and plants don't have an afterlife ahead of them, but we do, and we're not sure if Fido does. Entities here are of different 'ranks' because they have a different relationship to the deeper reality.

And so the question remains ― and I suppose this is for you, @Wayfarer ― whether the great chain of being and related ontologies are inherently religious in nature.

I've sketched some pretty mundane uses for 'degrees of truth' or 'degrees of reality'. Is there anything in between, any use for the idea that isn't religious or logico-linguistic?

Thanks. (I was at work when I asked, so not chasing links.)

It sounds so very much like subject & predicate, the small, boring result of a long and tangled history, I'm sure.

There is a sort of example that comes to mind that only fits this paradigm in a particular way.

Say I have three pretty straight sticks, and I arrange them to make a pretty good triangle on the ground. Does the triangle exist? Surely. Does it exist in the same way the sticks do? ― Apparently not. The sticks can be arranged in other ways, and remain relatively invariant throughout the process of arranging them, but the triangle ― well, the triangle only exists just so. It is apparently somewhat more ephemeral than the sticks.

One other point about this "arrangement of things" sort of example: no matter how they are arranged, not one of the sticks can bear the predicate "triangular". You might say that a given stick "becomes" an edge, or an edge of a triangle, something like that, and that's interesting. (What happens to the edges when you pick up the sticks?) But to get something that "is a triangle" you have to first take the collection of sticks altogether; you have to grant that "these three sticks" is the sort of thing that can take predicates like "make up a triangle". And what kind of reality does "these three sticks" have?

So shall we say that the collection of sticks and the triangle made from them have less reality than the individual sticks do? I could see it. It's hard for me to see why I'd want to say it, rather than make the specific spatial and temporal distinctions I can make, but there's something to it.

Anyway, none of this is about modes or predicates and what sort of existence they might have. Collections and arrangements have a different shadowy sort of existence. But they're all clearly related too.

When I dream of something — Moliere

(There's a thread over there about non-existent objects, but I haven't looked at it. ― No, there's two of them.)

Sometimes workbooks for children have a kind of puzzle in them, where you're given a little group of pictures and are told to put them in order to make a story. They often rely on thermodynamics ― you're supposed to know that broken pieces of a vase don't rise from the ground (defying gravity as well) and assemble themselves into a vase on the table.

Let's call the world where that sort of thing doesn't happen "the real world." If you tend to tell yourself and others stories where that sort of thing does happen, then I'd be tempted to say your world is "less real" than mine. And insofar as people's beliefs are real, or at least a useful way of categorizing their behavior, and insofar as their behavior has consequences in the real world, I'd be tempted to say that people are capable of increasing or decreasing the reality of situations they are involved in. (It's like the response to "facts are theory-laden": let's make sure our theories are fact-laden.)

If we start with social groups and their behavior ― instead of starting with epistemology or cognitive science, and whatever conclusions we draw from that ― why shouldn't we make good use of words like "realistic" and "unrealistic"? Some people bring more reality to our discussions and our decisions; some people sap reality from our deliberations, lead us step by step into a fantasy world that is just less real, even though the actions we take in our fantasy world ― taking a stand against the baddies ― may have counterparts in the real world, like locking up real Japanese-Americans.

I also have in mind the sort of thing you can see in Peter Jackson's film Heavenly Creatures, where the characters begin to slip back and forth between the real world and their own fantasy world. We all do a bit of this, and it seems quite natural to put how much we do it on a scale. Mistaking a windmill on the horizon for a grain elevator is one thing; mistaking it for a dragon is another. At least grain elevators are real, and windmills and grain elevators are both members of "rural towers". But dragons ...

Is this Socrates as variously encountered through Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes (probably not the latter I assume), and then "reconstructed?" Or the Socrates of the Platonic corpus? — Count Timothy von Icarus

It's a mythical Socrates that suits my purpose here. Long tradition of that.

And possibly also it's Socrates stating his creed about how wisdom is to found: in dialectic, not in armchair inquiry. — J

I don't know that Socrates would say that any wisdom emerged from those conversations, not as a product of them, not as "we talked about justice for a few hours and together we figured it out." But if you have all these conversations and nothing comes of them, you can reach some kind of conclusion based on that experience ... Different thing.

All I can say is that I think philosophy must be a sort of dialogue. We don't do research to test the ideas we come up with, on our own or in conversation, so it's not like the sciences, not even like mathematics. (An idea for a proof is not a proof.)

What that means exactly, I'm not sure, and whether that dialogue "produces results" is not clear to me.

But we have only each other to talk to. The animals listen, and they respond certainly, but you can't talk with them, not really. Many people pray, some even believe God speaks to them ― I don't know if people who have that experience consider it similar to the way we talk amongst ourselves.

There's an old story I love about two rabbis arguing over some point and God Himself appears and takes the side of one of them in the debate! The other objects, and tells God He's out-of-order, that this is for them to hash out. God agrees with him, more or less apologizes for butting in, and withdraws.

We have only each other to talk to, whether it leads it to anything, whether we hope it does, we're all the company we have.

One of the reasons I posted that, was that I've been mulling this over for the past few days:

Socratic philosophy is rooted in opinion. The examination of opinion does not mean the transcendence of opinion. — Fooloso4

And what you quoted from me was written with Socratic practice in mind.

Lots of us still do philosophy the older way, where the object is reality ... — Leontiskos

― So the pre-Socratics? Or ―

and not primarily the text of some dead guy.

have I completely mischaracterized Socrates, who swore up and down that he did not inquire into the heavens and the earth like some others, but only asked people questions?

Someone else out there has to do the mind numbing work on logic and language as well. — Tom Storm

Philosophy is a peculiar discipline: it's almost entirely conversation. It's not much like science, for the most part, because you don't do research. It's also not much like literature or the arts because people respond directly to you about your work and you're expected to answer those responses.

It's a strange thing, a field that mainly consists of people talking to each other, and the main thing they talk about is what they or someone else, not present at the moment, has already said.

Along the way, people got very picky, picky about exactly what someone said, or didn't say, picky about whether the different things people say are consistent, whether all the things someone says go together to make an argument, and so on. And people notice this, and then talk about it.

And there's no stopping, because we don't do anything about any of it, we just talk. Or I guess you could say, that's what we do.

It's all we've ever done, even before the sciences one after another left the nest. Now that they're gone, there are some topics we don't bring up much, because those were things we talked about when the kids were still at home. But we still sit around and talk, and a lot of it is rehashing the same old disagreements we've always had. When the kids visit, they're either bemused or bewildered that almost nothing has changed.

enthymeme — Leontiskos

Hmmm.

Do you make any distinction between premises and inference rules?

He is basically saying, "If a conclusion is inferentially reachable from the premises, then the argument is valid, even if the argument does not present the necessary inferences." — Leontiskos

I'm trying to understand this. Are you arguing against the cut rule?

In practice, we show only the inferential steps we don't assume the audience can fill in for themselves. The overwhelming majority of mathematical proofs are not "complete", don't show every single step. For good reason.

As a practical matter, if your audience can't fill in the missing steps, they may not find your argument persuasive. But if you can show them the missing steps on demand, you should be on the same page.

We've talked about the equivalence of P -> Q to ~P v Q, but it's often more intuitive I think to use another equivalence ~(P & ~Q), and to read this as "no P without Q" .

The short-circuiting is still the same. Once you have ~P in hand, you know that ~P v anything is true; you also know that P & anything is false. When you have ~P, no P without Q is true for every Q, because there are no P; you'll never find a P unaccompanied by Q, because you'll never find a P.

The other is to move from sound arguments to the soundness of the soul and sound judgment, in a word phronesis — Fooloso4

Yeah that really leaps out in the passage quoted. Socrates doesn't offer a distinction among types of arguments, but among people who hear them or make them.

Gadamer's word here, "hollowness", is really interesting.

It's reminiscent of that Wittgenstein quote about "working on yourself."

We spend so much time arguing about how strong particular arguments are -- are we missing something?