I didn't realize he was a thorough platonist. So you are as well? The image on the mirror is the sharable sense? — Mongrel

That's the idea. It's not the object referred to but still objective.

I was thinking about meaning today. I have a problem with the concept of a sign. It's supposed to be a signifier/signified combo. I don't think an isolated sign has any meaning, though. I think it has to appear in a complete thought (a complete sentence?) in order to be meaningful. Could be off topic?

That would be a version of Frege's context principle. It can get a little weird.

Oh yeah--am I a platonist? Not by temperament. But I find it hard to talk about language, logic, and mathematics without drifting toward a Fregean sort of platonism. I'm not quite convinced that means you have to be what's usually called a platonist, but there's something there that has to be taken seriously.

All that anyone can tell you is propositions that match facts in their judgment. And that's what I did. We can and certainly do have different judgments, and we can't somehow get beyond the fact that we're making judgments about how propositions link up with facts. Propositions can't somehow match up with facts or not independent of us. Meaning is something that we do as individuals. Objectively, the sentences that we count as propositions are just text marks or sounds. — Terrapin Station

Scenario (1): A and B have a box of propositions, and they each have opinions about which ones are true. They take turns sorting them into boxes marked "true," "false," and "not sure." Maybe neither of them have some special status that allows them to know what is true, but they can at least see the different ways they sort the propositions. A might be surprised to see B put something in the "true" box that he wouldn't, but B might convince A that he should, because of some others he put in.

Scenario (2): A has his own box of propositions and B has his own box. They might as well sort at the same time, without paying any attention to each other, and they can even share the boxes they sort into. Doesn't matter. What difference could it make to A what B does with his box of propositions?

I took you, perhaps mistakenly, as going for scenario 2, rather than scenario 1.

A third scenario you may find more congenial is suggested to me by Grice's talk of types.

Scenario (3): It's more like kids each sorting their own collections of baseball cards. They can each have a copy of the same card-- not numerically the same, but same player, year, series-- and they can have cards that they count as the same in different ways. "Do you have a Clayton Kershaw?" can be answered "yes" whichever one of the various Clayton Kershaws that have been issued you have.

Scenario 3 is more appealing than 1 in some obvious ways, so long as we can make the type stuff work.

My mind was blown the first time I came across a person who even considered the notion that an idea might be somehow owned by the stuff in an individual's skull. And Frege was part of the discussion... it was about abstract objects like numbers.

How would Frege's view fit with a platonic account? — Mongrel

Leaving aside whatever there's room to debate, Frege's a pretty thorough platonist.

The owning ideas thing he explains with a telescope: there's the actual object out there it's pointed at, say the Moon -- this will be the reference -- then there's the image on the mirror, which is not the object but is still objective -- that's the sense or the thought -- and then there's the retinal images of whatever individuals look through the telescope, which are subjective and unshareable, and that's what Frege calls ideas.

You misunderstand. I was not insulting or dismissing you.

On your own view, you cannot tell me the truth, only your truth. No matter what I claim, my truth cannot contradict your truth. (Something happens in my brain; something happens in your brain. Period.) It is in that sense that your truth is and can be of no consequence for me. Even if you wanted to provide an argument for why I should take your truth into account, how would you proceed? We are incapable of both assenting to the same premise.

Your truth is of no consequence for me.

What you gain is that you say something that's true rather than something one would simply like to be true. — Terrapin Station

"What you gain is that you say something that's true to you rather than something one would simply like to be true to one."

Fixed that for you.

Here's an example that has real-world consequences:

In Pew Research Center polling in 2001, Americans opposed same-sex marriage by a margin of 57% to 35%.

Since then, support for same-sex marriage has steadily grown. And today, support for same-sex marriage is at its highest point since Pew Research Center began polling on this issue. Based on polling in 2017, a majority of Americans (62%) support same-sex marriage, while 32% oppose it.

http://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage/
Changing beliefs don't directly cause the laws to change, but it's hard to imagine the latter happening without the former. What's more, you have to assume the aggregate shift represents either many individuals changing their minds or generational replacement, but that leaves unaddressed why younger people would have different views than older people.

But I can see you have a more teleological or even eschatological view of things than I do. I still can't help but think what people think matters.

Oh, it's not that difficult to deny that. — Terrapin Station

I'll bite, against my better judgement...

Whether it's difficult remains to be seen. It's clear enough what Frege gains by not denying it; what do you gain by denying it?

It says to me that culture structures intellectual functioning and that policing my own personal "beliefs" won't change anything at the group level--that something like a Kuhnian paradigm shift is needed to prevent outcomes like war, genocide, impoverishment, etc. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

We're still waiting, as Billy Bragg said, for the great leap forward.

But you're back in the usual bind here. Granting for the sake of argument that Kuhn is right about how one paradigm replaces another, and that the reasons are extra-scientific, it remains that the coming paradigm has to have been created, has to be seen as a contender, has to have achieved some prestige for it to be in a position to take over when the old guard retires or dies.

People still have to do stuff for change to happen, even if you can't just make change happen by doing stuff.

Ah, so your question was exactly that: is there anything on the Geertz side, say, that at least aspires to scientific rigor as Harris did? Harris may not have succeeded but at least he properly identified the goal. Yes?

So what do you think of the sort of cracker-barrel statistical approach I presented earlier?

I think the issue @WISDOMfromPO-MO was raising is a kind of oversimplification people reach for, especially when religious beliefs are on the table. Snyder comes in here not as someone denying that beliefs are important, but as resisting that oversimplification. For instance, he says you misunderstand Hitler's radicalism if you think of him as being really, really, really anti-Semitic. He refuses to explain what happens in Lithuania, for instance, by saying that Lithuanians must be more anti-Semitic than other Europeans. Snyder is controversial, but the book is absolutely worth reading.

You might also want to check out Timothy Snyder's Black Earth which repeatedly explains the events of the Holocaust in terms of the local political situation instead of attributing everything to anti-Semitism.

I think there was something that historians (and maybe anthropologists) used to call the "intellectual fallacy," which was supposed to be overstating the importance of culture and beliefs relative to the material conditions of life. There's the stuff Marvin Harris did in anthropology, for instance. (I had forgotten this one, but Wikipedia says he argued that Aztec cannibalism can be explained by protein deficiency instead of religion!)

Yes, so long as you distinguish syntax and semantics:

Gödel specifically cites Richard's paradox and the liar paradox as semantical analogues to his syntactical incompleteness result in the introductory section of "On Formally Undecidable Propositions in Principia Mathematica and Related Systems I". — Wikipedia

Grice speaks of 'the belief-types' and 'the beliefs of particular peoples'. Isn't that use of 'the' the equivalent in his nomenclature to Frege's 'the sense'? — mcdoodle

Maybe? But why go through the type business at all? Why not just say, as Frege does, that we each have the belief that such-and-such?

As for Grice - isn't his argument a form of psychologism? — Wayfarer

Maybe? But the main problem with psychologism is just that Frege has such a strong argument against it.

Compare the example of phonemes (or cheremes) which are explicitly defined as equivalence classes of sounds (or gestures). You could think of propositions, for instance, as equivalence classes of utterances, thus utterance-types, and thoughts as equivalence classes of psychological states, e.g. belief-types.

One question is, how do you get these equivalence classes rolling? What is required to be able to take something as a member of a class, or as a token of a type?

But where we want to start is the observation that, in uttering an allophone (within my speech community) for /a/, you are taken to have uttered the phoneme /a/. It might be helpful to put off the question of universals for a little while and look at how that transaction works.

Even if you start from the idea that individuals make their own choices based (or not) on their beliefs, it might be that in the aggregate you can make predictions or offer explanations that treat beliefs as conditions or causes like anything else. That's not completely crazy.

Say you do a study and find that 70% of your subjects choose X given information A, but only 20% choose X given B. If you then want to guess the behaviour of 100,000 people you know have information A, you'll figure most of them will choose X. Each decides individually but you get an aggregate result. (You would have to do a whole lot more work than my little sketch here though.)

Since you don't want to personify the crowd-- it doesn't think this or that, decide this or that. So you end up giving the usual, vaguely causal explanations.

1.) It is one thing to say "I had this belief, B, and B caused me to do action A".

2.). It is another thing to say, "I had this belief, B. I had to decide what to do. I decided, based on B, to respond with action A".


1.) is passive.

2.) is active. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Right. I think folk psychology endorses (2) and (1) is just a sloppy attempt to express (2) in most cases.

I couldn't tell you what the scientific support for (2) is. Certainly there are studies that address how people's attitudes and choices vary depending on the information you provide them. There are also studies that show reasons aren't everything, that people make choices that differ from what you'd predict given their self-identified reasons.

I can think of a bunch of other ways to put this too. Suppose I believe you are an armed and dangerous intruder in my home, and I shoot you. I could say I shot you because I believed that you were ..., that my belief was a or the reason I shot you, that it was a contributing factor in my shooting you. I think we would only say it was a or the cause of my shooting you or that the belief caused me to shoot you if we were speaking very loosely indeed.

What if, instead of saying your beliefs caused your actions, I said only that you had acted on your beliefs, or acted with your beliefs in mind? Would you still object?

If it is wrong to procreate, is it also wrong to allow others to procreate?

How do you feel about the suffering of non-human animals capable of feeling pain? Is it wrong for them to procreate?

Depends on how "can" is interpreted, whether that means in principle or in fact. Depends on how "connection" is taken, whether that means there's some response, either possible, again in principle or in fact, or actual.

It looks a little creepy to me. Even if you're going to allow we can care about people we have never and will never meet, it looks like it could rule out caring about people in a coma, caring about an unborn child, caring about people with certain mental disorders. That's if "emotional connection" is taken to imply some reciprocity.

Most people recognize caring to be an asymmetrical relationship. I can care about you whether you do or even could care about me. It looks like your definition is designed to undercut people who claim to care about things you think they really don't or shouldn't. (E.g., you can't care about a tree.)

Here's a list:

1.) An idea: A as manifested in your mind.
2.) A physical embodiment of A outside of your mind.


You ask what if it is determined that there is no 2.).

Okay, let's delete 2.) and update the list.

Here is the updated list:

1.) An idea: A as manifested in your mind.


We still have A. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Fine. It's an idea. What is it an idea of?

Some of this comes down just to avoiding implied onlies and merelies. Once science is in fight for it's very existence, defending science is also a cultural move, but not only or merely that. Similarly, opposition to science is by and large, in my country anyway, not only or merely a cultural move, but also religious. It needn't be; some people oppose science for political-theoretical reasons, and that can lead to some nastiness within the walls of academia, but the main fight is outside.

Cool. We're not on the clock here.

In Only A Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul, Kenneth R. Miller shows that the Intelligent Design movement is not about evolution. The Intelligent Design movement, he shows, uses evolution as a smokescreen to hide their actual agenda: changing the definition of science and in the process subjugating or destroying science. If I recall correctly, it all started with a small meeting in the home of Michael Behe.

Again, it is not about truth, spiritual well-being, improving the human condition, etc. It is various interests struggling to gain and maintain power. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

If you have a group of people trying to find the truth as best they can, and another group of people who oppose the first groups efforts for political or ideological or religious reasons, it doesn't follow that what the first group was doing was motivated by political or ideological or religious reasons. It also doesn't follow that what the second group says is false; only that their methodology was designed with some purpose other than finding the truth in mind.

I think for now, contrary to my last post, we'll have to focus after all just on reports of emotional experience, just to keep this manageable.

I have a few more thoughts. I think it may be difficult to sustain the distinction between propositional and non-propositional reports or to assign priority to one over the other. For one thing, explanation can go either way:

"How did you feel?"
"I felt angry."
"What does that mean?"
"I felt like hitting someone."

"How did you feel?"
"I felt like someone was staring at me."
"What does that mean?"
"I felt nervous, uncomfortable."

I'm not sure there's a clear choice here. It's at least intelligible to look at either the propositional or the non-propositional as more descriptive or explanatory.

I'm not sure raw emotions are separable. Anger is very often anger at someone and/or about something. It's my understanding that people who suffer from PTSD may experience rage that they cannot understand at all, that is unconnected with people and events around them. That might provide some reason to think that you can distill the raw emotion of anger present in an episode of being angry at someone about something.

But can you say that the anger is something we have direct access to while the rest was interpretive? That in such a report the reliable part is only that you were angry, not that you were angry about something or at someone? I don't think that would match most people's experience. What's more, it's not hard to find a psychologist who would tell you that when you think you were angry at me for not calling, you were actually hurt that I didn't call. So it's at least intelligible to claim that even applying a label like "anger" is an interpretive step.

Note, I'm not saying you said it wasn't. We're still just trying to sort out what part of a report of an emotional experience-- originally the experience of the presence of God-- is interpretive, and requiring justification, and which part isn't. It's still not clear to me.

Have you looked at this?

I'm afraid we're just going to keep taking past each other, Harry, so I'll take my leave. Happy philosophizing.

Have another look at my post. You'll notice some numbered propositions and a question about them.

You didn't.

So you're not going defend your claim that "and" has same reference as "the addition of other things"?

What context means in this context.

Thanks for playing along here.

(1) Is there a candidate for a general rule here, that if the content is propositional, it involves more interpretation than candid reports that don't?

(2) What do we say now about the report "I felt like someone was staring at me"? We accept that there was some 'underlying' feeling, I take it. If the person who had the experience can think of no other way to describe it, are we forced to refer to it as "the feeling you describe as feeling like you are being stared at"? Is there anything else we can say?

(3) Do we require more justification for the description of the experience if it is more interpretive? Would we say any of the following? "That's not what you feel." "You feel something, but not that." "What you describe isn't a feeling." What kind of justification for describing the feeling in this way could someone conceivably provide?

I don't want to restrict this just to feelings, though. If I report that I am right now watching my brother eat the cake, that's propositional. Similarly if I report that I remember seeing him eat the cake. Is there any reason yet to think we need to treat reports of perceptions, memories, thoughts, and so on, differently from reports of feelings?

So would you say that "I felt like someone was staring at me" contains more interpretation of the experience than "I felt angry"?

(minor edits for consistency with previous posts)

There's something I never see come up in these discussions, and I wonder if it's because I have this completely wrong. (Here's where I admit not bothering to research the issue, because I'm not that motivated to at the moment.)

I remember learning years ago that the law is just the observed regularity in our observations, and the theory is the explanation for why those regularities occur. So, massive bodies do predictably behave in a certain way, which we can describe mathematically, and we call that description the the law of gravitation. It's nothing like an explanation for why massive bodies behave this way, just a description. General relativity would be a theory that attempts to explain why massive bodies behave the way they do.

Do I have that distinction wrong? Or is there some other way people talk about this now?

There's the person reporting their experience, interested third parties judging that report, and then there's theory.

A person might very well distinguish, within their own thought, between a part that is reliable and a part that isn't: "I saw something, but it was hard to tell what at that distance, might've been a man." They might also distinguish between a part that requires justification and a part that doesn't: "He was standing right in front of me. I knew exactly who it was because I had just seen him at the diner and he had that same tie on." It might be a little harder to distinguish what is interpretive and what isn't, because language, but sometimes people will resort to a sort of homegrown phenomenalism: "I could see a patch of dark red on the carpet, it was shiny, and appeared to be spreading." That's interpretive insofar as it's English, but minimally so, I would say.

How an interested third party would determine whether someone's report is credible might be very different from the process of making the report with the intent to be truthful. An individual may have sole access to their own experience, but there are things others can see clearly about a person that they can't. If I'm a confabulist, it could be everyone knows it but me. I could be doing it right now!

I think for the purpose of developing a theory of "eyewitness accounts" or of self-reported experience we want to be able to take in both the perspective of the one making the report and those interested parties who might judge its credibility, and we might draw the boundaries differently from either of them. We might, for instance, claim that everything about self-reported experience requires justification, but the part people often think doesn't is just the part for which they usually do have justification. ("He was standing right in front of me" could be taken either as needing no justification or as the sort of case where justification comes readily to hand.)

Back to our example. You said of the feeling that I am being stared at:

It doesn't strike me as being quite like anger, for example, which is more instantaneous and recognisable. The feeling you describe seems to be fundamentally something more basic, a funny feeling, which is then interpreted to be something more specific, more complex. — Sapientia

I'm going to say that "I felt like someone was staring at me" is as complete and honest a description of my experience as I can give. If you ask, "What does it feel like to have someone staring at you?" I will not know what to say; this is just what it feels like. I may know perfectly well that having this feeling is not evidence that someone is staring at me, but that doesn't matter. If I have a neurological condition and one of the symptoms is this feeling, which patients with this condition often report, then my neurologist doesn't care whether anyone was staring at me. He'll be satisfied by my report. If something I consider embarrassing just happened and I had this feeling, I would say that's why I had the feeling, but that doesn't affect my description of the feeling at all.

None of that is theory; that's just the data. How do you see the boundary here between what is interpretive and what is more basic, the inchoate funny feeling?

If I understand you correctly, I think what you want is a definite description.

You've done some math? You know how in many proofs there is the existence component and the uniqueness component? That's how definite descriptions work, at least according to Russell.

You could formalize the idea something like this:

∃x [ Perception(x) & Pippen's(x) & ∀y ( Perception(y) & Pippen's(y) → y = x ) ]

That says that there is something that is a perception and it's Pippen's (existence) and anything else that is a perception and Pippen's is the same as that thing (uniqueness).

Don't think of this as a proof though. It's just one way of formalizing what ordinary language expresses by means of definite articles like "the".

"My nose" is probably a definite description because usually I only have one of those; "my shoulder" probably isn't because usually I have more than one and you need context to determine whether I meant either or meant one specifically. You would still have to argue that a perception of the world is the sort of thing you can only have one of (at a time?). Formalizing that, as above, at best clarifies what you need to provide arguments for. (Philosophy rarely deals in incontrovertible proof.)

Suppose I have the thought that Earth might have another moon, call it "Luna2." If I determine that there is no celestial object that actually qualifies to be called a moon of Earth, I'll say, "Luna2 does not exist."

You will say that Luna2 does exist, as an idea. Okay, Luna2 is an idea. What sort of idea? Is Luna2 an idea of something? If so, what?

Found it. I'll give it a read soonish. Thanks!