Sorry, I'm really not getting what you're saying here.

I know what I am, and I'm glad I'm a man, and so's Lola.

the issue is whether the universe is designed or not. — TheMadFool

At this point, I'm not even sure there's a coherent question here. I'll try to get back to you on that. I am convinced that the approach taken by the argument from design is worse than useless, and I'm not giving it any more of time. (I learned some stuff arguing with you, so it's all good.)

I remember telling you a while back that you were looking at the universe through the wrong end of the telescope. At the time, I wasn't really sure why I said that. Now it makes sense.

intensional definitions — Mongrel

What are those?

Sure.

If that were the case then my claim that I have Schnarrglop's syndrome would be false if my doctor didn't tell me that I have Schnarrglop's syndrome. But of course that's wrong. My claim is false if I don't have Schnarrglop's syndrome. — Michael

That's a good point, and I agree.

There's the sentence you actually utter, and it can be true or false independent of how you're using it. Suppose the doc told you that you have Schnarrglop's syndrome, but he meant to say "Schnarrglob's syndrome," and then you misremember and tell someone you have Schnarrglob's syndrome. What you say is true, even though it's not what you meant to say, or what the doc meant to say.

The question then is whether my "elliptical sentence" idea is any good. I'm not sure. I'm trying to say that in the context, you're not even claiming to understand what you're asserting, that the context makes it clear that you're just trying to repeat what the doc said. So there's something like ellipsis here when you just baldly state, as if you know what you're talking about, that you have whatever syndrome.

Does that make sense?

Against psychologism, same as Frege. Husserl wages the same war on a different front.

Perhaps, but the dance itself is the movement, not the intention. Dances happen on the dance floor, not in your head.
— Michael
Wrong. You can dance anywhere you want - all you need is the intent. You can imagine you are dancing in your head. — Harry Hindu

Knowing how to write "cat" doesn't make the word appear on the paper. You also have to know how to move your hands and hold a pencil and then tell your hand to move in such a way in order to do it. — Harry Hindu

I don't get it.

To you? Or you mean to someone else? Because I've already explained it to someone else.

If my doctor tells me I have Schnarrglop's syndrome, but I don't know what that means, and then I tell someone I have Schnarrglop's syndrome, I think the second sentence is really elliptical for "My doctor told me I have Schnarrglop's syndrome." If the person you talk to says, "What's that?" it's coherent to answer, "I don't know. That's what the doc told me."

It looks like kind of a corner case of the use/mention distinction, but I think it's not. Think of it instead as the first baby step in learning to use the expression "Schnarrglop's syndrome." You've learned a little bit about how to use the expression, but not much. Your doctor knows a lot more about how to use the expression. Use starts with bare mention, but doesn't end there.

EDIT: Not even bare mention. Even the first use will be connected to circumstances that make it appropriate, even if you're not sure what that connection is.

Use vs. mention

Sure, if what you mean by "use" is to refer to a particular idea or thing or state-of-affairs that you intend to convey. Sure, if what you mean by "common usage" is the common idea, thing, or state-of-affairs that the word refers to. You can use words all day long, but if the other person doesn't know what the words refers to, then you can never understand it's use. Sure a congenitally blind person may copy someone's use of phrase, "The sky is blue". But do they really know what "blue" means? Knowing how to copy someone else's use of words doesn't entail that you know what the words mean - only how to use words. Would the congenitally blind person really understand what they are saying? Could the blind person then use the word, "blue" in a sentence that they have never heard? Could they then make their own sentence with the word, "blue" and it mean something? — Harry Hindu

Saying what someone else says just to say what they said rather than to mean what they meant is not use, it's mention. A congenitally blind person cannot learn how to use color-words, only how to mention them. It's really that simple. Using a word is not just saying it, it is using it, with other words, arranged in a particular way, to do something linguistically--make a statement, ask a question, give a command, etc.

No, = is what you use between objects, ⟷ is what you use between statements. Another symbol sometimes used for equivalence of statements is ≡.

I feel stupid.

As I was working on a response to your last post, there were some things I was puzzled about and obviously you've been puzzled by some of what I was writing recently. I started to worry that we were losing the thread of the argument. So I decided to go back through everything and I realized there was something about your position that I had fundamentally misunderstood.

A long time ago, you admitted that the argument from design is not deductive but inductive. I had been assuming that the issue, since then, was how to make that induction work, and I've gotten caught up in the details of that. I now realize that, as far as you were concerned, the inductive argument was actually complete at that moment, as soon as you agreed that it was an inductive argument. From your point of view, the conclusion of the argument, that order is always attributable to conscious agency, was established a long time ago. That the universe, being ordered, must be the work of a conscious agency, is just an application.

There are two peculiarities about this. One I should have understood, because it's pretty fundamental to the way the argument from design works. The other is interesting.

At first, a lot of us reached for examples from nature of things that are ordered, apparently without any conscious agency taking a hand--crystals, normal distributions, complexity, etc. None of this was relevant, as it turns out, because of the way the argument works.

It's an induction. You throw every ordered thing you can find into a box, then take them out one-by-one and check to see if they are the result of conscious agency. There's trillions upon trillions of human artifacts in the box--the usual watches, tidy rooms, and 747s--and then there's the universe. The whole universe. A single object that is ordered, like one of the billions of watches in the box. Although a typical scientist might see what humans have done as an unimaginably small dataset compared to all she could conceivably learn from looking at the vastly hugely mind-blowingly big universe, here the tables are turned: the entire universe is just one more ordered thing, just another wristwatch. Of course, that's how the argument from design works, and I feel stupid for having forgotten that.

But here's where it gets interesting. Say you have a hypothesis that all ravens are black. You put every raven you can find into a box, then take them out one-by-one and check to see if they're black. Suppose among all those ravens--black, black, black, black--there's one that somehow is indeterminate in color. From one direction it looks blackish, from another kinda grey, from another nearly brown. You could stop, and decide that the induction fails because here's a raven that is not definitely black. Who knows how many more of these there are? Doesn't matter anyway, one's enough to scuttle the project. Or you could decide, weird raven, let's set it aside for now and check the rest. You go through the whole box, find nothing but black, and conclude that the induction is still pretty strong. Now what about that indeterminate-color raven? Having finished your work, can you now say, my inductive argument shows it must be black? Er, no. It's still indeterminate in color, despite the strength of the induction. It's not even probably black.

Now suppose that the one indeterminate-color raven is, for some reason, kept, unexamined, in a separate box, and you go through the entire box of black ones first. Then you can conclude, without even opening the box containing the last one, that so long as there's a raven in there, the inductive argument shows that it's black.

So that's exactly what happened here. Every possible instance of order in nature was lumped together as one single data point, the universe, and then that data-point isn't even examined. It's held back until we've gone through all the watches and tidy rooms and 747s, the conclusion is established, and then we apply our inference to the universe--it's ordered, must have been ordered by someone.

Well, that's cheating. It's not supposed to matter what order you examine your data points in. If you reach an instance of order that isn't clearly the work of a person--maybe it's the first one you pulled out of the box, maybe it's the 587th--you're done. Even if you decide this is just an outlier and set it aside, once you're done you don't get to go back and say the induction showed that the universe must be the work of a person. It's still an outlier, induction or no induction.

The argument cheats. It compresses almost all of the data available into a speck, and then it even hides that speck to make sure we don't look at it and wonder why it's not obviously like everything else.

Side notes:
(1) "Science is just as bad." I had forgotten that this was your real point. Well, no. After the raven study, a scientist will report that very nearly every raven is black, but there's at least one outlier, and conclude that we'll just have to learn more about the process of raven pigmentation.
(2) "It still makes it likely that the universe, being ordered, is the work of a conscious agency." True enough, if you treat every doodled smiley face as a datapoint equal to the entirety of universe, oh yeah the odds are going to be on your side. If, instead, you actually look at nature instance by instance, you'll find overwhelming evidence of self-organization at every level can you think of, all of it happening without any sign of a conscious agent behind it all.
(3) "It's no less likely that the universe is the work of a conscious agency." Could be, but I'd spend a lot of time in point number 2 before reaching a conclusion.

That test is really odd. I got it to spit out "Empiricism" which I'm vaguely okay with, but I knew that's what I was making it say because I like the other options in the poll even less.

I feel dirty.

Luck is the residue of design. — Branch Rickey

On topic too.

There's a neighboring idea, roughly that as you widen the extension you decrease the content. If your predicate applies to the entire domain of discourse, you're no longer saying anything. Not only has that been an ineffective argument, there's something about it I feel a little skittish of.

No property possessed by the whole universe can be knowable. Agree? — Mongrel

Those who accept the argument from design not only disagree, but think their view is obviously correct.

I tried maybe four or five variations on this theme and got nowhere. We're trying something else now.

I'm just allowing, for the sake of argument, that the concept could be innate and usable. (Someone might have cleverly bestowed this concept upon us, after all.)

I'm not seeing how composition helps. There would still have to be a concept that you can just know applies to the universe without comparing the universe to anything else. There may be concepts you can manage because you get to compare the universe to parts of itself, but in the case of designedness, all the parts fall under the concept too.

EDIT: fixed an autocorrection.

Looking back, I think there's a spot where I skipped a step.

The problem we encounter immediately though is that concepts are comparative by nature. Even though it is conceivable that, having acquired, say, the concept [red], you could tell something is red without comparing it to anything not red, you could not possibly acquire such a concept in the first place. — Srap Tasmaner

This is unclear.

A concept more or less neatly divides the universe into things that fall under it and things that don't. That matches up just as neatly with how we acquire concepts: here's something that's red and here's something that isn't. (Allow me a bit of simplification here.)

I'm also allowing the possibility that you could apply a concept you have, even if you don't have to hand something that falls under it and something that doesn't.

I also argue that the concept of designedness you need cannot be acquired in the usual comparative way, so if we have such a concept it must be innate. The concept itself is also somewhat odd in that is true of the universe as a whole and everything in it, but I am not relying on that, as I have explicitly allowed that you might still be able to apply the concept if you have it.

The question that's left is whether we do possess such a concept and possess it innately.

Good one.

No, you don't have to devote yourself to math. I'd like to say it's logic you want to learn, but it's not that either. Logic is the formal way of doing something that's much broader than logic, namely reasoning.

To improve your reasoning skills, you're looking, to start with, for what they call "critical thinking" in schools these days. There are lots of introductory textbooks out there. (I have no idea what to recommend.) They'll all cover the basics of evaluating arguments, spotting fallacies, etc.

A couple of books you might also want to look at are Thank You For Arguing which is about rhetoric-- most CT texts I think treat this only as something for you to be wary of someone else using: and How Not to Be Wrong which covers a lot of the mathematical concepts you might find useful.

Beat you to it.

It's easy enough to form expressions that seem to refer to something, like "the millions in my bank account." If you substitute that expression for one that does refer to something, say, "the dozens in my bank account," you can form sentences that seem to be about something that isn't. But they aren't. At least if you understand "about" in the most natural way.

I just don't have it in me, man. If you ask me a more specific question, I'll try to answer.

That deflationary impulse is powerful too, I'll grant you. I'm keeping an open mind for now.

We do want to preserve the intuition that a proposition is true if things are the way it says they are, don't we?

You might have to introduce the two conditionals first, just depends on what rules you have, but yes.

I read a bit about truth-makers after I posted this, and what you say here makes sense. I'm going to think about this stuff some more.

I can't understand you. Can you simplify? — TheMadFool

If there's something specific you don't get, ask me.

I'll play devil's advocate.

The object that makes it true that Bernie Sanders is not the President is Donald Trump. [ Being POTUS ] is a property only one object can possess at a given time. Since Trump possesses this property, no other object does.

Alternatively, if we're not locked into objects, it could be the fact that Donald Trump is POTUS.

One other point, just on Quine, is that he not only believed he could happily get along without modal logic, he also believed classical logic had no use for singular terms at all.

And now I'm done speaking for Quine. I still think his work is a pretty good place to start doing philosophy, especially if you come from logic and mathematics.

Of course, the mere fact that we can define substitutional quantifiers in terms of objectual quantifiers and vice-versa already shows that a facile reading of Quine's maxim is at least problematic... — Nagase

The conversation between Barcan, Quine, and Kripke (and who else?) is interesting reading on this point.

Play nice boys. Philosophy is fun!

Once again, you have inconsistent premises. P1 says LH is true; P2 says RH is true; P3 says LH and RH don't have the same truth-value. But you just said they do.

The problem is P3. You're trying to say that having a left hand or a right hand doesn't necessitate having the other. That's not what P3 says.

Take another shot at it.

I can give hints if you get stuck.

ascertaining the validity of the underlying quantification — TimeLine

I don't know what this means.

Are you talking about Quine specifically or about the usual semantics for classical logic?

Thanks. I was hoping you'd stop by.

If W. wasn't saying that then he must be implying that there is more to meaning than simply use. So maybe we shouldn't be calling it a "meaning is use" theory. — Harry Hindu

Maybe you should stop thinking "use" is a synonym for "emit" and then a lot of this would seem less idiotic to you.

If you're just starting to do philosophy, trying to define existence is not the place to start.

It is also possible to construe quantifiers substitutionally. This means you take "∃n F(n)" to mean "There is an expression we can put in place of 'n' such that 'F(n)' is true." So in a way, the quantifiers range over linguistic expressions rather than objects. There's something quite natural about this approach. You explain "∀x F(x)" as meaning "F(x) is always true," and so on. I'm still not clear on the advantages and disadvantages of the two approaches, but taking variables as standing for objects is by far the more popular approach.