And Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, and Byron have a lot in common since they all focus on Poetry of the self, hence they are Romantic — Thanatos Sand

See, this is the sort of thing that makes sense if you want to do literary history or cultural history as a science. From my point of view, reading Don Juan is about as different an experience as you could hope to have from the experience of reading The Prelude. From that point of view, lumping together Wordsworth and Byron is bizarre. That's not a critique of your approach; it is a statement that my purposes in reading and discussing poetry are different.

For your purposes, everything you said may make sense. I have no doubt that it makes sense to someone like Jameson. But I am not interested in doing literary history or criticism as a science. That's why I'm not rebutting each and every one of your points. I'm not doing science. I explained my historically based usage of the term "postmodernist" and it is avowedly unscientific, but it provides, I think, a complete explanation of why I don't apply the term the way you do. My usage has a certain provenance. Pre-Jameson & friends it was the standard way to use the word. It may not work in your circles, but you're not claiming some sort of "ownership" of the word, are you?

Btw, do you really think Barthes couldn't have given Hawthorne a postmodernist reading if he had wanted to? I'm betting he could have. Guy was a magician.

P.S.: It is not a good habit to assume that the people disagreeing with you just don't know what they're talking about, haven't heard of or haven't read certain authors, etc. Sometimes people might just disagree with you.

Btw, have you read D. H. Lawrence's book about American literature? He describes Poe in terms that would strike the contemporary ear as "deconstruction." Might be up your street.

You seem to have taken what I said as a claim to know for a fact that, for instance, Phil Dick is not a postmodernist writer, rather than an expression of my opinion that he is not. Perhaps instead of saying your list was "strange" I should have said it was "surprising," to me at least.

Given a precise definition of "postmodernist," I suppose it could be a fact that Dick either is or isn't a postmodernist. By and large literary criticism does not achieve this level of precision. For example, it has never seemed to me that Blake and Wordsworth and Keats and Byron have all that much in common. I don't particularly care if someone wants to call them all "Romantics," but I remain largely skeptical of "schools" of art except where a group of artists are demonstrably self-conscious about it (as with the Surrealists, say). Even then, differences regularly overwhelm similarities.

So you are working with a definition of "postmodernist" broad enough to encompass these diverse writers, and given this definition and your method of applying it, it is a fact that the authors you mention are postmodernists. If I could be compelled to embrace this definition and the method of applying it, then I would be compelled to accept it as a fact that Phil Dick was a postmodernist. We would be doing literary history as science.

But part of the point of any science is what it cares about and what it doesn't. If you're doing orbital mechanics, the color of the bodies involved is irrelevant. If you want to select particular features and ignore others, you can of course classify authors however you like, and those classifications are objectively right or wrong, relative to the criteria of classification. What do you choose to ignore about a writer's work? Not only is there room for debate on what to count and what to ignore in a given artist's work, it is clearly acceptable to ignore nothing at all, and forego doing science here at all.

I don't have any such science. I think of certain authors as postmodernists, and have some rough and ready reasons for doing so: there was a cohort of authors coming up in the late fifties and sixties who began taking the conventions of fiction as something they could play with within their works of fiction. They produced fiction that was noticeably odd by the usual standards. I call those guys "postmodernists," not least because John Barth did, and because some of them were self-conscious about it. It's also the point in history when most writers become academics. Since then, this reflexivity has itself become a sort of convention. I don't see Phil Dick doing anything remotely like that, despite being a contemporary, so I don't think of him as a postmodernist. That's about the depth of my interest. I don't claim there's a fact of the matter here.

I know I'm going to regret this, but ...

That's a really strange list. DeLillo and Pynchon, sure. But not Dick, Faulkner, Gibson, McCarthy, or O'Connor. (Roth and Morrison I haven't read.)

Calvino's the other obvious choice. Maybe Vonnegut? Maybe John Barth. Maybe DFW?

Not poking fun at you. (That is a strange idiom.)

Here's how this happened: to me, the schoolboy examples make it obvious that truth is not the same thing as knowledge or certainty; but the response I got was disheartening. So I wanted to do something with testing where you take away the "objective" part -- the answers -- and the only thing I could see to put in its place was consensus.

As it has happens, there are people around here who hold exactly this view: that truth is just what people individually or collectively say it is. So now I have a model where the truth is literally determined by vote. As I said before, I didn't foresee the cheating issue, but I agree with you it has some obvious real world analogies.

The smilie means you don't actually think I am, right? I never know what those things are supposed to mean.

Contribution: something given freely without recompense.

I appreciate your contributions here, Srap... — creativesoul

I don't want to seem stupid but it looks to me as though I'm a pound down on the whole deal.

In the case at hand, if reality meets expectation, then the students have gotten it right. That is, they've hedged their bets correctly as a means of getting what they want. — creativesoul

I think we can use concepts of correctness or success without being forced to treat their appearance as an instance of truth, if that's what you were suggesting.

Obviously we can make it that, but I don't think we have to. If we absolutely have to then there's just no way to do this sort of analysis at all. Which might be true. It might be true that truth can't be analysed or explained at all. But I'm trying.

Here's another wrinkle.

How do the conspirators choose which answer they will give? A randomly chosen answer will pick up some support, but if it's quite unpopular, though the needle will move they risk still coming out in the minority. They're better off doing some pre-test research to find out what the popular answers are and then going all in on those to make sure they win and our conspirators get the reward.

That raises two issues: the reward will be shared with a lot more people, and that's bad; interestingly, if two answers are roughly equal in popularity, our conspirators get to pick the winner. (The best scenario is to be in the minority who get the answer right, but still better right than wrong.)

So there's some push here toward the consensus representing what most people actually believe, but where there's controversy we're right back to manipulation.

What would count as looking like truth, if not looking like some pre-conceived notion of "truth"? — creativesoul

In this case, it's having the answers you give on the test marked as correct.

In our world, what's on the test is also submitted to scrutiny; there's such a thing as complaining that the answer in the back of the textbook is wrong and getting it changed.

So the question will be whether the way test grades are handed out in my made-up world is similar to the way grades are handed out in this one, whether what "counts as true" for them is similar to what "counts as true" for us. I'm not sure yet.

It's also not a bad idea when trying to explain X to avoid using X in the explanation, so I'm trying to avoid even covert uses of standard ideas of "truth," so no comparing the answers to reality.

On my view, thought/belief always uses correspondence with/to fact/reality, including situations when that presupposition goes unnoticed and/or unmentioned. — creativesoul

Sure, that's a point of view. I want to see what I can do without appealing to that at all, since people are always saying this view is fundamentally "mistaken." Okay, let's not use it -- or any other idea of truth --
and see if we can still get something that looks like truth.

I think most students are asserting their actual beliefs with their actual level of certainty, but some definitely aren't. But then instead of measuring their answers against an "objective" standard like a test key, we are measuring them against the consensus of their community. — Srap Tasmaner

Here, I can make this easier. Assume the great majority of students believe the test is being graded with a key, but a small number find out it isn't, and some of those collude to manipulate the results.

(I don't care whether the key is "objectively correct" because the key is the stand-in for "objective reality" here. Comparing it to something else isn't necessary for the scenario to work.)

Perhaps you could penalize a student for claiming high confidence and getting the question wrong, but that would be very complicated. — Metaphysician Undercover

That was part of the model but I left it out by mistake. It's no more complicated than the rest of this. And it naturally equates your level of certainty with the risk you accept and the potential reward you can receive.

Do you agree that you have made a distinction here between what the student believes is right, and what the student believes will be marked as right? — Metaphysician Undercover

Right. We start with the usual "objectively correct," then shift to "what test-giver wants," and then shift to "consensus." I'm not conflating these; I'm seeing what we can get out of the model by subsituting one for another and avoiding talking about being "objectively right."

The correct answer must be the one believed by the oneself, not by anyone else. So when I am confident that I have the correct answer, I am confident that the answer I have is the correct answer, regardless of how the teacher will mark it. — Metaphysician Undercover

I think most students are asserting their actual beliefs with their actual level of certainty, but some definitely aren't. But then instead of measuring their answers against an "objective" standard like a test key, we are measuring them against the consensus of their community.

You want to use the word "correct" for whatever a student sincerely believes. What about the test-givers? Do they just give everyone a "100"?

I agree with the thesis of Fight Club. The test is whether the subject ever really gave up... abandoned all hope. — Mongrel

I like the big showdown in Matrix 3, when That works for me.

The question is whether the Nietzschean creating his own values or the Sartrean choosing his own life project are recycling a model that needs something in the slot marked "God".

---- Michael beat me again.---

The hope was that something we'd be willing to call "truth" would show up.

I think the hinge of the analysis I have so far is this: if your degree of certainty or confidence in asserting something is like a wager, then you can deliberately manipulate the betting market by expressing certainty; on the other hand, your degree of certainty or confidence is the only thing we have to to differentiate your views from another's, so socially it becomes your reputation. Given a choice, it makes sense to cheat off the more confident student. And that will continue to work if the people you are imitating are colluding to manipulate the consensus.

We're avoiding using any sort of "objective" standard of correctness for now.

EDIT: 'cause phone.

Have you already read Eric Wolf's Europe and the people without history?

Here's what I've been working on...

Imagine students taking a standardized test. Their goal is to select answers that will be marked correct. In selecting what they believe is the right answer, they must also have confidence that this is the answer the test-preparer will consider the right answer, that the test has no misprints, that it will be graded correctly, etc. In short, that if they do their part in selecting the right answer, the test-givers will do their part in marking it correct. On the test-giver's side, they have to believe they have made the test properly and that the answers they will mark as correct are the ones well-prepared students will select.

Now suppose you want to cheat. You don't know the others, so you don't know who's worth copying off of. If you could compare their answers to the key, you'd know who to copy off of, but if you could do that you wouldn't need to. No joy there.

Now suppose that in addition to selecting an answer, you rate your confidence in selecting that answer, say on a scale from 1 to 5. You could imagine the test-givers using this as a sort of wager, and giving students more points for confidently selected right answers than for guesses, but otherwise it wouldn't change much for them.

But it would change a lot for the students. Now you have an obvious way of deciding who to copy off of.

Now suppose the test is actually not being graded against a key, that instead the answers selected by the students are being tallied as votes and the biggest vote-getter is treated as the right answer. Without the confidence mechanic, and assuming the students are relatively well-prepared, this makes surprisingly little difference. (I've been running some little "simulations" in Excel. If students mostly choose the right answer and wrong answers are randomly distributed, the right answer still usually wins.)

But with the confidence mechanic, things can get weird, because students can collude to move the answer. As I tried testing this, it looked like it only took two students out of ten so colluding to make a noticeable difference, and three was overkill. (The idea is for the conspirators all to confidently select the same answer; they'll pick up some help from whoever believed this answer actually to be right, and often enough swamp other answers, including the right one, selected with only random confidence. Thus their choice tends to win more than it should.)

What's the point of all this?

I wanted to see if we could build up a community's idea of truth from scratch. Test-taking makes a good stand-in for truth because there is a mechanical sense of correctness here, which we can exchange via voting for something like consensus, and we have a way of adding in confidence or certainty as a factor -- socially this would be something like reputation. The goal is to model a speech community without using the concept of truth, but rather explaining their concept of truth.

But the test-taking example leads naturally to the idea of cheating. In broader social terms, you can imagine cheaters as people who value prestige and standing above truth, and it turns out even a smallish group can collude to manipulate the community's consensus. And by manipulating the consensus they can reinforce their reputation as the people who know and speak the truth, despite having other goals entirely.

So I'm a little stuck. I hadn't foreseen the cheating issue, and I'm not sure where to go with this next.

Here's some more chess analogizing...

There's an idea known as "the move the position demands." Among more accomplished players, this is the maxim that the move you want to play, even and perhaps especially if it seems impossible, is the move to look at. It may not be playable immediately, but maybe it can be prepared, and the threat of it can force your opponent into something undesirable. But sometimes it is playable immediately -- you just have to look pretty deeply to see why. You have to calculate.

Calculating variations is the sense-making part. The idea of the move is important, but the variations give it substance. The best ideas are grounded in the concrete position on the board, rather than in your preconceived ideas or your preferences. If you can look at the position on the board with an open mind, it will tell you what to do. Sadly, you have to be a damn good player for the board to talk to you.

So there are two steps: begin by letting the data lead the way -- a candidate move is much like an hypothesis and the best ones practically hold up a neon sign, IF you are tuned into the data (the board) the right way. But then there's the analysis, which is first of all a check on your intuition. But it can be more: your first idea might fail, but if it had something to it, it should provide an entry point to understanding the position better, and the right move will show up in your calculation. (Bad candidate moves don't touch the essence of the position on the board, so the variations you get for them can go right by the best move without so much as a hello.)

Continuing my metaphor, one sense of "doing the work" would be to say you have to go all the way down the alley to find out if it's a dead end, but on the other hand, I think what I was reaching for with the idea of "failure-sensitivity" was that it would surely be nice to be able to recognize that an alley will turn out to be dead end before going all the way down it.

If the character of philosophical problems is "I don't know my way around here," the question is how best to learn your way around.

None of this has the constructive flavour you had in mind though. When doing mathematics, it's as if you build a special flashlight for each problem that will allow you to see what you need to see. You make your tools. So that's one way.

I've been wondering if maybe instead of talking as if you choose from preexisting domains, the domain is something you construct with the question. Theoretical entities are in an obvious sense constructed, and maybe these are the members of the domain you construct. Asking a question would be the first step in building, rather than finding, an answer.

I can see how you might take what I wrote that way, as if the goal were just to avoid mistakes and avoid failure. I don't think I really brought out how much can be learned from finding yourself in a blind alley.

But I don't want to be stuck in one. ("But the answer must be here.") I'm talking about recognizing when you were wrong and getting out to see some more of the world instead of staying in your alley because it's the right alley.

Something else I remember Ryle saying, though I can never remember where, might be relevant here; it was something like this: there's an idea that philosophy deals with perfectly ordinary questions about really peculiar stuff (minds and such), but actually it deals with really peculiar questions about perfectly ordinary stuff.

A few more examples would be good, to put that hypothesis to the test. Unfortunately my mind is a blank right now as I search for examples of category errors. — andrewk

I am happy to provide a supporting reference, the first example Ryle gives in The Concept of Mind to explain his newly coined term "category-mistake": a visitor being shown around Oxford and told about all the buildings, finally asks his guide, "But where is the University?"

His mistake lay in his innocent assumption that it was correct to speak of Christ Church, the Bodleian Library, the Ashmolean Museum and the University, to speak, that is, as if 'the University' stood for an extra member of the class of which these other units are members. He was mistakenly allocating the University to the same category as that to which the other institutions belong.

I don't think you'll find category mistakes limited to definite descriptions though.

Perhaps one of the confusions underlying this area is the 'domain of discourse' within which such discussions take place. — Wayfarer

On the one hand, I think there is never not a 'universe-of-discourse', as you put it - and this is the case irrespective of the times or the medium or what-have-you. On the other hand, I think this has become more obvious in recent times, where one can no longer take for granted that someone else shares the same universe of discourse as you — StreetlightX

And I think this is directly relevant to Ryle's original point: that people sometimes ask a question with a mistaken idea about which box they should look in for the answer. (So for Ryle, there's the Cartesian myth that human behaviour is explained by special stuff found in the special box.) But I recently claimed elsewhere that you have to specify a domain -- what else can you do? Look everywhere? At everything?

But it is nevertheless possible to make a mistake in specifying the domain where your question's answer will come from, or to formulate the question in such a way that the answer must come from someplace that it cannot possibly come from. We want some failure-sensitivity, to know when we've gone up a blind alley.

But you have options then: even if you determine there is no answer to your question in this alley, what does that tell you? That the question has no answer? If the question forced you into that alley, you know at least that this formulation of the question yields no answer. But maybe there's a better question to ask, a way to reframe the issue that led to the question. If the question didn't force you into the blind alley, maybe you just made a wrong turn and can take your question elsewhere. I wouldn't expect a sharp distinction there, but they feel different. Failure can instruct in different ways.

For instance, in those two paragraphs I said "the answer" several times and this suddenly looks prejudicial to me. Do you know setting out that your question has only one answer, rather than various answers? Even if you find an answer in Box A, how do you know there's not another, different answer in Box B, and maybe even in Box C?

In the OP @StreetlightX, you talk about running out of sense-making resources, which is nice, and is the kind of failure-sensitivity I had in mind. I think your sense-making is much broader than what I've got here (question reformulation and domain redefinition) but this is just the bits I get from Ryle's original idea.

But all of this discussion of the truth values of statements about fictional entities, are red herrings (IMO) in the discussion of whether existence is a predicate. — fishfry

Every discussion about existence ends up being a discussion about negative existentials!

But I agree. And I stand by what I said earlier:

Existence is not a predicate because it is something else, namely a quantifier. It's just a matter of getting it in the right logical bucket. — Srap Tasmaner

Frege makes the point that "The king's coach was pulled by four horses" has a very different logical structure from "The king's coach was pulled by black horses." That's the right place to start, in my opinion.

Wouldn't the (2) style claim be "All sports kill for humans"? — Sapientia

No, the pair of conditionals was (1) sufficient condition and (2) necessary condition, so the other way to say that is "All x are y" and "Only x are y."

Oh wait, you were kidding.

I largely agree, but only that (1) is probably more of an insult. If "All men are fools" is on the table, why not "All women are fools" too? Subtlety has already been tossed aside.

The thing is, we all know that generalizations like (1) are usually, well, stupid. It's more damming of the person saying it. But (2) style claims sometimes fare better. Compare:
1. All humans kill for sport.
2. Only humans kill for sport.
(1) is dumb, but (2) is disturbing if true.

it does not logically follow that women can't be fools. — Sapientia

But it does follow from (2) that no women are:

1. If a man then a fool.
2. If a fool then a man.

I still say the implied comparison in (1) doesn't have much bite if all or nearly all women are also fools; same for (2) if no or nearly no men are fools.

You could argue that being called a fool is bad whether anyone else is or not, but since the insult is targeted at whole classes (men, Americans, whatever), it's hard for me not to see an implied comparison between members and nonmembers of the class.

Have I failed the test?

I'm looking for something simpler. — TheMadFool

Then admittedly I'm not your guy.

Works for me, though. I enjoyed the analysis and it's something I had never thought about. I fully expect to use it again on something else.

Yeah that's Russell's solution, to take the name as an abbreviated description.

I think we also want a way to talk about fiction (hypothesis, supposition, etc) "in world." So there are two answers, say, to "Does Santa fly in a helicopter?" One is "No, because he doesn't exist," but another is "No, it's a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer." Both have their use.

Vulcan rotates.
Pegasus flies.
Santa wears a red suit.
Etc. are false WFF where the subject terms do not exist. — Owen

Not helpful.

Russell would take all of these as false, but not as predicating anything of Vulcan or Pegasus or Santa.

How do you predicate, truly or falsely, of an object that does not exist in your domain of discourse?

Pegasus exists, is a sensible wff that is false. — Owen

And its logical form is what?

There are no true propositions that have non-referring names or non-referring descriptions as their subject. — Owen

But on your view, "Pegasus does not exist" should be true, shouldn't it?

For "Ga" to be a wff, doesn't a have to be an object in your domain of discourse?

What sense can be made of asserting "Ga" if you don't already know that a exists?

I don't know about the insult business, but I think you do have a kind of point here.

There's an implicit comparison between two groups.

Let's say all Americans are fools. It could also be that all non-Americans are fools too, in which case neither group is less foolish. People do often respond to attacks in just this way. If it's unlikely that all people, American or not, are fools, then it is likely that Americans are the more foolish group, maybe very likely, but that's all, and it could be that nearly all non-Americans are fools, and thus Americans are only barely more foolish.

Now let's say all fools are Americans. Then we would have to say there are no fools in the class of non-Americans, and therefore the non-Americans are a less foolish group.¹ But it's true even if there's only one American fool (I don't see why we should name him), so again maybe Americans are only barely more foolish. Not that it seems likely there's only one fool, so it's also likely that Americans are more than barely more foolish.

(1) leads to squabbling over how many non-American fools there are; (2) leads to squabbling over how many (American) fools there are. Both can result in comparisons that fall on a gradient, including near parity of the two groups, but both making it likely that Americans are noticeably the more foolish group, I think.

(2) sets a maximum to how much of humanity can be foolish; if it's thought that many people are fools, (2) is strengthened. (1) sets a minimum; the bigger the proportion of fools, the weaker (1) gets.

I think which is the more damning claim would have to depend on where you estimate the proportion of fools to fall.


1. To make that really work, you must also assume that there are fools, and therefore foolish Americans, but that's not much a stretch. And in real life the universal carries existential import anyway.

There does not exist a predicate (x) in language (S) which has the meaning, 'exists' (φ). — unenlightened

I think that may be the wrong approach. It's a little like saying, "There does not exist a predicate (x) in language (S) which has the meaning, 'and' (φ)."

Existence is not a predicate because it is something else, namely a quantifier. It's just a matter of getting it in the right logical bucket.

[retracted]

Hmmm. To me science makes more sense the other way around, where you have some idea what your domain is -- and you might get that wrong and have to change it -- and the question is either "What in my domain has the properties my effect needs it to?" or "Does anything in my domain have such-and-such a property?"

The formalism was developed for mathematics, where you always specify the domain. Science has no choice but to follow suit. What are you going to do? look everywhere? at everything?

if knowledge consisted of absolute certainty, which it does not — Metaphysician Undercover

... because certainty is a different issue entirely from knowledge ...

It is quite evident that when we say "X is true" we do not have absolute certainty, and some times the belief which was said to be true turns out to be false. — Metaphysician Undercover

... and from truth.

The Lucky Schoolboy is our two-for-one special today: Your teacher asks you when the Battle of Hastings was fought. You haven't done the reading, know nothing about the Battle of Hastings, and for all you know this is a trick question and there is no such "Battle of Hastings." You take a wild guess and answer, "The Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066."

What you say is true, even though you don't know it. What you say is true, despite your complete lack of certainty or confidence that it is true.

The Lazy Schoolboy gets us the rest: In this case, you've skimmed the book, and when asked, a bunch of dates swim through your head, you nearly give half a dozen different answers, but something just seems right about "1066?"

In this case, you arguably do know the right answer -- you got "1066" from reading the book after all -- but you have almost no certainty to go with your knowledge. A rising inflection when you answer is appropriate.

It is quite evident that when we say "X is true" we do not have absolute certainty, and some times the belief which was said to be true turns out to be false. — Metaphysician Undercover

You really don't need all this business about changing the meanings of "truth" and "knowledge." That horse has lost before it even gets out of the starting gate.

There's still time to change the road you're on, and I see at least two paths you can go by:

(1) Stop talking about knowledge and truth at all, and instead talk about rational belief. If you do that, everything you want to say about conviction and degrees of certainty finds a home. You could even be a Bayesian if you're so inclined.

(2) Just assert the argument from error: we have been mistaken before, and there is no criterion we can find that enables us to know that our current beliefs will not turn out to be false ... (some intervening proofy steps) ... Therefore knowledge is impossible. The defense usually plays with the definition of "knowledge" to defeat this attack. It is a serious challenge, but leads to the dark heart of scepticism.

It is not perfectly clear that you can start at (2) and claw your way back to (1), but of course you can just leave (2) alone and plump for (1) immediately. You can even secretly believe (2) if you want.

I think that "true" refers to an attitude which we have toward expressing our beliefs to others, such that we are open and honest in our communications. It is closely related to sincerity. A true belief is one which is expressed openly and honestly, not held in secret for the purpose of deception. When you express your beliefs in the way that you really believe them to be, you are expressing true beliefs. — Metaphysician Undercover

That's candor, not truth.

I have only responded to how "S knows that P" has been used in this thread. It is quite clear that P stands for a proposition. If your claim is that "S knows that P" may be used in many different ways from this, that fact is irrelevant, because you are just taking "S knows that P" out of the context from which it was used here, then basing your defence in this unrelated usage. — Metaphysician Undercover

Read again what I said. We may, as theorists, describe something using propositions, without claiming that what we so describe has propositional form. It's practically the point of indicative speech.

For instance, when early Wittgenstein made the additional claim that reality has something like proposition form, most demured, but went on describing reality using propositions. Simply saying "S knows that P" doesn't commit you to thinking S herself entertains the proposition P.

I don't quite understand this example. It is clear to me that Buzz and Woody don't mean the same thing with the word "flying". On what basis do you assume that they do? — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't know how you could think that if you've seen the movie.