This condition, "the condition that everyone conforms" is artificial though, it's made up as a way to make sense of the problems created by the category error. There really is no such condition at play here. What is the case, is that we conform because we want to conform, we apprehend conformation as beneficial to ourselves. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah, that's the whole point of conventions. I prefer to conform on the condition that everyone else conforms. There's no particular benefit to me driving on the right side of the road unless everyone else does, and everyone else feels the same.

Nailed it.

You just have to get used to how quantifiers and negatives go together. "All" is the same as "There isn't one that isn't" and "There is" is the same as "Not all aren't".

¬∃¬ can be traded for ∀
¬∀¬ can be traded for ∃

The assumption that there is a correct definition of brick is the assumption that someone else has made a correct judgement, someone has correctly judged what it means to be a brick. The attitude of confidence is the assumption that I have made the true judgement. So this is where we find truth, in the assumption that I have made the true judgement, not the assumption that I am following the judgement of someone else, because it is correct. — Metaphysician Undercover

"Brick" is the English word for what Tim wants to buy.

Sorry for the confusion -- I was formulating the negative, "Nothing comes from nothing."

Yours is the negative of mine, so it's all good.

Suppose that everyone says "2+2=4", such that this forms the descriptive rule, "human beings say 2+2=4". There is nothing here to imply the prescriptive rule, "human beings ought to say 2+2=4". To produce that prescriptive rule we must refer to something further, and this something further, might be found in the meaning of "2+2=4". — Metaphysician Undercover

But the problem is precisely here: the people who all say "2+2=4" have access to its meaning, if you like, and they all do say it because they all ought to. And they all ought to because they all do -- that's what it means to be part of speech community. You're in a loop flipping between prescription and description.

The approach that makes the most sense to me at the moment is Lewis's: we each prefer to conform on the condition that everyone conforms, and it's easy to get from there to normative conventions.

Yeah, that's interesting. I think I was imagining something like crystals constantly forming and falling away, or a crystal that constantly morphs into new shapes.

It's tempting to think that repetition could lead to a shape locking in, or at least making it harder for it to change shape.

I don't understand.

That's really plausible, absolutely.

When I posted, I almost said "hundreds, or even thousands" but didn't, and then afterward it occurred to me I was really talking about something like attention. So now I'm tempted to say "millions".

I guess I'm just resisting the idea of cognitive habits hardening into worldviews because I'm feeling skeptical about conceptual schemes these days.

But I see a way of putting our ideas together: attention can flicker, different ways of looking at things are always offering themselves to you; some of that you filter out just to stay functional, or to carry through on your intentions.

But if you actively tamp down other ways of looking at things when you don't have to, that's what makes you dogmatic. It's not that your theory makes it impossible to see certain things; it's that you make an effort not to, that you insist on sticking to one way of looking.

What I'm talking about is something like this:

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny ...' — Asimov

I thing that even further than that, frames organize the very details of what we're seeing, making somethings stand out, and others remain in the background, and the same information doing different work in our frames. — Wosret

If I scan the room looking for my keys, I look at it one way; if I'm deciding where to set up Catan to play with my kids, I look at it another way. If those are frames, I create, I dunno, hundreds of them every day.

*Spencer-Brown: "There can be no distinction without motive, and there can be no motive unless contents are seen to differ in value." — StreetlightX

Hmmmmm.

Why can't I do all of that the other way round?

Here's a shelf of books; here's shelf of CDs. When I'm looking for something to listen to, I "valorize" the CDs over the books. If I just need an example of "human cultural artifact", either will do -- which is not the same as not distinguishing them, it's just including them both in a larger class.

Even here, it seems odd to say I "value" the CD when I want something to listen to, rather than just saying I recognize a functional difference between CDs and books. Only a philosopher would say you could also listen to the book but are unlikely to find the experience rewarding.

Better would be a two-place predicate, since "nothing" is an English quantifier, so the principle would be:
¬∃x¬∃y(x came from y)
which is the same as
∀x∃y(x came from y),
which is "Everything came from something" (and not to be confused with "There is something everything came from").

I don't remember who said it, but there's also this: facts may very well be theory-laden, but we also want our theories to be fact-laden.

(The sort of thing I was talking about here.)

One can, of course, make all sorts of distinctions for all kinds of purposes: — StreetlightX

In fact, it seems more and more of our discussions around here are ending with this point: that if you have such and such purpose, you distinguish A from B, but if you don't, then you don't. (@Fafner, @Pierre-Normand and I had longish discussion about sortals that ended this way.)

I'm feeling an overwhelming impulse to look at that more closely: what does it mean to say a distinction is "purpose-relative"? How does that work?

From the point of view of individuation, it is not at all clear that one can make an in-principle distinction between the kinds of processes involved in either the construction of mountains or molehills. For someone like Manuel Delanda, for example, the processes at work in the formation of both mountains and societies, are, at a certain level of abstraction, exactly the same: "Sedimentary rocks, species and social classes (and other institutionalized hierarchies) are all historical constructions, the product of definite structure-generating processes" ... which Delanda describes, but I'll omit for reasons of space. In any case, the conclusion being that "this conception of very specific abstract machines governing a variety of structure-generating processes not only blurs the distinction between the natural and the artificial, but also that between the living and the inert." — StreetlightX

I can see doing this "at a certain level of abstraction" with a particular explanatory purpose in mind, but I'm not convinced that being able to do this somehow proves there is no distinction to be made, or that no distinction can be made; for other purposes we won't lump together the processes that lead to mountains, to trees, to anthills, to the convention of private property. My ability to describe balls and shoes as "sports gear" at a highish level of abstraction, does not prove no distinction can be made between balls and shoes at lower or even at equal levels of abstraction.

My concern, expressed earlier, was the loss of agency. Discipline and Punish is interesting because Foucault shows us something that looks a lot like a purposive action, but no one did it. I'm just not convinced we have to take that as a general rule, rather than what we find (or don't) taking this approach. There are other approaches.

Which oddly echoes what we're talking about here. There's a distinction we can make between what our theory describes and explains and the theory. God knows, that distinction isn't perfectly straightforward, but there is a difference.

Time out to revisit Ryle:

The University is just the way in which all that he has already seen is organized. When they are seen and when their co-ordination is understood, the University has been seen.

For instance, one answer to "Where is the University?" might be, "Oh, the government abolished education years ago. The buildings remain, and are used for other purposes, but this is no longer a University." And that goes back to pumpkin patches and sewing machines, etc. The "organization" Ryle refers to is social, in at least one sense. You can tear down either one without destroying the other.

And there is agency at work there. We change what we use the buildings for, and thus whether there is or is not a University here.

Now when it comes to, say, physics, tearing down the buildings (i.e., physical reality) is not even an option. But we can designate some as this entity, some as that, propose relations that hold among them, etc. And we have some agency here, power over our own theory to change or abolish it. Seeing this, some people are inclined to treat physical reality itself as a construction we have made, to say, for instance, that particles exist only insofar as we call something in our theory "particle". There is an obvious sense in which that's right, but it's extremely misleading. Using a bunch of nearby buildings now as a university or now as a barracks, doesn't turn stairs into quads, or rooms into storm drains.

So it still seems to me that one of the natural ways to sort things is into what we can change and what we can't. On the the "what we can" side will be things we constructed and things we didn't. The method will be different for each, but just as we could abolish universities, we can blow up a mountain but we cannot abolish the natural forces that formed it. We can describe those forces variously in our theories, but they are what they are regardless of our descriptions.

That's basically it.

One conceptual step that might help:
If you have premises ¶ and want to derive the conclusion Q, then you want to show that the conditional ¶→Q is true. Assuming that conditional is false should lead to a contradiction. As it happens, ~(¶→Q) is ¶ & ~Q. So if you show that the conclusion Q being false leads to a contraction, then you've shown that the premises do imply the conclusion.

See I'm not even sure about this either: I think that if taken to the limit, deconstruction entails that there are, as it were, constructions other than those of the social. That is, the word 'social' in 'social construction' ought to be understood as something that qualifies scope. There are asocial constructions, constructions of biology, of geology, of celestial dynamics, and then there are constructions that pertain to 'the social', each of these with it's own specific mechanisms and modes of functioning. I understand 'social construction' in an entirely naturalist way, as it were. And I think, moreover, this is how it should be understood. — StreetlightX

Okay, I think I've got it. The "social" bit is easy, The hard bit is understanding what happens to agency, and to the distinction between organism and environment. You can keep that distinction by situating construction not at the level of organism, as something an organism might engage in (a bird building a nest), but a level up, so that construction can be a process that includes both organisms and their environment.

Even setting aside my qualms about this, I'm still going to want to distinguish between construction processes dependent upon organisms acting within an environment and constructions processes that require only natural forces. But if I'm allowed to pick out something and call it an agent, something that can bear responsibility, without denying that its actions are embedded in an environment, then I'm going to question the point of the ascension in the first place.

I hope I haven't misunderstood you, because it's starting to get interesting.

if the social is real, if it belongs on the side of the real, then the distinction to be made is no longer oppositional; one cannot neatly parse the social and the real not because of some limitation on our 'finite', human selves - the attempt to go beyond which would be "hubris" - but because the concepts themselves no longer lend themselves to any such neat parsing. — StreetlightX

But then we still have the question of how to distinguish what is (real and) constructed from what is (real and) not constructed. I can't tell whether you're suggesting that "neat parsing" is only available when there is an opposition of real and unreal, rather than just a distinction between

• one real thing and another real thing,
• one sort of real thing and another sort of real thing, or
• one way of being real and another way of being real,

whichever one of those you'll go for, or think we should all go for.

One issue as you noted is the problem of knowing what people really believe.

But I agree with just about everything you said. I'd be okay with describing my view as "Changed minds are necessary but very far from sufficient for social change."

I think there is a widespread feeling, or even "prejudice", that nominalism, if not simply true, is at least the default position, and that any theory that makes use of non-particular entities requires justification, and that this justification is likely to be vaguely pragmatic or instrumental. ("Natural kinds" is just an oxymoron, on this view.)

Concepts become something that is, by definition really, imposed on reality. I haven't quite figured out what image is driving this idea. It seems to have something to do with granularity: we imagine the conversion of our incomparably rich and detailed visual field into grainy pixels, or a paint by numbers, a process something like rotoscoping, boundaries separating one thing from another, foreground from background, drawn in an arbitrary and heavy-handed way, reflective of our needs, desires, preconceptions and preferences rather than reality.

That's not quite it, but it's close. I'm convinced there's an intuition pump at work here, but I can't quite nail it down.

Needless to say, something about this view feels off to me, but I haven't figured that out either.

I think we can do better, but let me think a bit. It goes everywhere.

But maybe not. When Hume, he of the "is/ought gap" says "the wise man proportions his belief to the evidence," maybe we just take that as a fact, no implication that people ought to do this. But isn't rationality something we aspire to?

Do have we made any progress on your question?

Sure, but I think rationality is normative in a non-moral sense. I don't think it's just a matter of expecting conformity, but there's "should" and "must" everywhere.

Sometimes you'll hear economists talk about credit, and the economy at large, this way: that it is sustained by faith or trust, and if something undermines that trust, the world could come tumbling down.

Oh yeah. In fact stealing and using or selling an identity is criminal as such, I assume.

That's really interesting, how the system creates the opportunity for violating some of its terms by following others.

Do we have a right not to identify ourselves? I don't remember anything about that. Even if we do, it may in a given case be outweighed by another social interest. (I'm just talking legally.)

What I'm wondering is this: if we analyze assertions to which we attach the additional normative claim -- "You should believe this" -- would that capture all the cases we usually describe as truth claims? Would it capture too much?

ADDED: Need to backtrack. This is all going to end up being about knowledge. What is claimed to be true is what you claim to know; it's the content.

What is 'generally accepted' imposes itself on me as real, as a physical constraint. I'd better not take pumpkins from someone else's pumpkin patch, or there will be consequences. — unenlightened

Maybe another way to say this is that the behavior of people is of course quite real, and some of their behavior can be described as participating in the convention of property, or maybe as "practices constitutive of" the convention of property.

. I'm inclined to say that a sewing machine or a pumpkin patch is not a social construct as I mean it, precisely because it is a physical presence. Whereas the notion of property 'that it is my sewing machine or my pumpkin patch' very much is. — unenlightened

Yes that's helpful.

But it seems clear to me that the institution of property could conceivably wither away or be abolished or dramatically changed, not by an individual of course, but collectively.

And what if we stop using the term "gravity" in our theories?

I would add: there's a difference between, say, fiction and human institutions. Telling a story doesn't make the story true. What is made, and what has effect in the world, is not the content of the story, but the story itself and the telling of it. With institutions, the content becomes real. If you christen a ship, it now has the name you gave it.

If you want, you could say everyone behaves "as if" this is the ship's name, but that just kicks the can down the road. You'll still have to explain the difference between one kind of fiction and the other by explaining what "acting as if" is.

Gravity is found; human rights are fabricated. Both are quite real. When you make something, it's real, isn't it? The difference between gravity and human rights isn't that one is real; it's that we don't have the ability to change or abolish gravity, which we do with human rights.

People don't consent to the social contract; it's an "as if" thing.

On the other hand, I used to be fascinated how in old movies like The Postman Always Rings Twice, John Garfield can just come walking up dusty from the road and get a job and a place to stay and there are no forms, no cards, no papers, no nothing. That kind of anonymity has mostly disappeared. Presumably it lives on in the underground and illegal economies, and can reappear sporadically in carnival circumstances, but not for us normies.

(1) subjective pleasure, physical or emotional, (2) ethics or duty, and (3) necessity, like health and safety. — Samuel Lacrampe

It's really not obvious these three stand on their own. Plenty of people will reduce (2) to (1). You could reduce (3) to (2) or (1). Some might claim that (1) and (2) are actually in the service of (3).

Plus foundationalism here has an odd result: the only things that will count as ends in themselves are things that serve no other purpose, that is to say, things that are, in some sense, pointless. People are inclined to reduce everything to pleasure-seeking because pleasure seems pointless to them, that is, something that is not desirable for some reason but just desirable as such. Avoidance of pain might have an even stronger claim than pleasure here.

For instance, I'm betting that you'll pick (1) from your list to explain this:

I am sure that I could find a coin or a paper currency that is no longer legal tender but some collector would love to keep. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Collectors derive pleasure from their collections. I'm not sure that's wrong exactly, but I'm also not sure it illuminates or explains the collector's behaviour more than just letting him say he sees these things as having value in themselves. "We love the things we love for what they are."

Sure. I should've been clearer. I wasn't talking about including "whatever talk creates" in the social. I was thinking more of the role of engaged civic discussion. I honestly believe that informed citizens sharing their views with each other is crucial to change. Changed minds is a necessary if not a sufficient condition for social change, and talking is how you get there.

It's not what we think and believe as much as what we do and produce through collective activity that's important to making social products. — Moliere

That's persuasive, but would you include talking among what we do?

I think you're on the right track.

I haven't read Frankfurt's book, but my sense of the bullshitter is that he is not just a subjectivist but indifferent to questions of truth and falsity. You say what you say just for the effect, for instance as a move in a negotiation. Might be true, might be false, who cares? I think there is a concern that the bullshitter can naturally morph into a confabulist who isn't even sure when he's telling the truth.

I'm pretty sure LW thought all he had to do was show us how foolish we were being and we would quit it of our own accord. There would be no need for him to tell us what to do (prescribing) so long as he could show us what we were doing (describing).

Finally, by 'felt reality', I simply mean that if you're about to be lynched by mob because you're black, it will do little good to plead that 'race is a social construct'. — StreetlightX

That's really nice. Well said.

Happily we also have this point:

I think the primary motivation for understanding something as socially constructed is that it is, by the same methods of being built, capable of being re/un-built. — Moliere

So if we believed race and the inherent inferiority of one race to another were part of the natural order, there wouldn't be much room for the idea that lynchings should stop; or, having had such a heterodox idea, it would surely be more difficult to convince people to change their behavior.

I've been looking for a way to build a sort of "economic" model of truth within a population and I think I've gotten something I can use from the test-taking scenario, namely how one's certainty can affect another.

I'm thinking of building on how Grice talks about meaning (simplifying a bit):
A tells B that p,
(1) intending B to believe that p,
(2) intending B to recognize that A intends B to believe that p,
(3) intending B to fulfill (1) on the basis of (2).
(The levels can be multiplied here without end ...)

We could do something like this with certainty: surely A is also expressing to B some degree of certainty that p, and intends B to recognize this, and intends B to embrace p in part on the basis of recognizing A's degree of certainty, and intends that B's degree of certainty that p be reflective of A's degree of certainty.

That's the ideal case, but in real life we often form a judgment about a speaker's entitlement to the degree of certainty he has expressed. So we would have to add that A intends B to recognize A's degree of certainty to be justified.

***
Before trying to flesh all that out, there's another candidate (i.e., another factor we might be able to analyze without talking about comparing statements to reality and such).

Truth is normative. I don't just mean in the sense that one should tell the truth. Generally speaking, one should believe what is true and one should not believe what is false.

So we could do this:
A asserts that p to B,
(1) implying B should believe that p,
(2) intending B to recognize that A believes B should believe that p,
(3) intending B to believe that p on the basis of (2).

(It's tempting to rewrite this using "expect," but unfortunately "expect" is ambiguous between merely predicting and demanding conformance to a norm. One reason for a parent to tell a child, "I expect you to behave," is, oddly, that they don't expect them to behave.)

There is a natural linkage between this normative sense of truth and the certainty calculus I've been playing with. You ask me where your keys are; if I tell you I think they're on the kitchen table but I'm not sure, I do not also think you should believe they're on the kitchen table. I might even think you should not believe this on the flimsy basis I've provided, but you shouldn't rule it out. But if I tell you I saw your keys next to the computer, I think you should believe that's where they are.

Anyway this looks promising.

Should also have mentioned Donald Barthelme. Maybe Robert Coover. I never read Gaddis. John Hawkes is the same era but it always seemed to me he had his own fish to fry. The Blood Oranges and Second Skin were two real favorites of mine, beautiful novels. It's too bad nobody reads him anymore.