Here are some other questions you might consider:

(1) What is a law of nature?
(2) Why are the laws of nature the way they are, and not some other way?
(3) Have the laws of nature always been the same?
(4) Why are there laws of nature at all?

I think those are all pretty good questions. I can't answer any of them.

Btw, you forgot to tell me what conscious agency was responsible for the behavior of the bean machine.

Natural law. — Terrapin Station

But where there's law, there must be a law-giver.

Let's say, because we're doing philosophy, that I believe you are responsible for tidying up the living room because I see you doing it. That would be empirical evidence.

Let's say I didn't see you do it, but I knew you were home and I have known you to do it before. That's more complicated but clearly a reasonable if defeasible inference. Note that there is empirical evidence here too; it's what I am inferring from.

Let's say I'm in an office I've never been to and it's tidy. I have empirical knowledge of how offices are run, and I infer the custodial staff does a good job and the other people who work here are not slobs. Again, reasonable and defeasible. I could fill in lots of details about how I acquired my knowledge of offices and the people who work in them.

Are you saying that you are watching God create order right now? No.

Are you saying that you've seen God create order in the universe before? No.

Are you saying that the order in other universes you know of was created by God, and you can fill in details (which will look like the first two options) of how you came to know this? No.

But to do anything otherwise would be jumping to conclusions. — TheMadFool

Is the evidence for the existence of a conscious agent that created the universe anything like the evidence on which we base other beliefs?

A normal distribution is just a discovery that when studying large samples, values under study tend to be arranged (ordered) in a particular pattern. It however doesn't claim the origin of such order is chaos. If andrewk explains he'll disappoint you because he believes random (the normal distribution) is NOT chaos. Rather he thinks randomness arises from unknown order. — TheMadFool

Sure, I can see that, and what @andrewk says above is helpful.

Only now we've traded talk of an ordering agency of some kind for talk of order (known or unknown) leading to more order. If every example of something apparently disordered is going to be explained away as either revealing an order we did not previously perceive or indicating the presence of an order we cannot perceive, then I'm left wondering what it was conscious agency was supposed to explain. Were they creating order? Of course not, there was already loads of order. The conscious agent was order. If you reinterpret everything this way, your analogy evaporates, no?

Is it possibly true that there was a conscious agent who created the universe? Sure, I guess.

Is it rational or reasonable to hold that belief? No.

This is the part that seems to bother you. You want everyone to say, "We just don't know," and everyone ends up on an equal footing. That equal footing represents to me an abhorrent laziness.

There could still be a question of whether that projection is reasonable, we could develop standards, etc.

(Phil Dick once said that true paranoia is not when you think your boss is out to get you-- he probably is-- but when you think your boss's phone is out to get you.)

Now, I think we spoke in the language of gesture to each other. But do you think that this sort of gesture is 'prior to language'? — mcdoodle

We treat children as potentially competent speakers of our language right from the start, in part because they begin understanding speech earlier and faster than they can produce it. (Talking's hard.) I think this charming scene fits in this general pattern of behavior. We also use lots of gestures and facial expressions with children as they learn our language.

Normal distributions. Watch the video.

There's lots more to talk about after you accept that as an example. (At which point I'll beg @andrewk to explain some stuff for me, because he knows a helluva lot more about this stuff than I do.)

I just have a resistance to Quine.

And the label doesn't matter. I don't think doing philosophy should be like choosing a breakfast cereal. ("I really like this one, but I know this other one is supposed to be better for me.")

All I want to demonstrate is the logical error an atheist commits by refuting the argument from design. — TheMadFool

Given this argument:

(1) If there is order, there is an orderer.
(2) There is order.
∴ (3) There is an orderer.

If I deny (1) or (2) and conclude that there is no orderer, I have committed a fallacy, sure. I deny (1) and conclude that I have still been given no grounds for accepting (3). If it comes to that, there are loads of propositions, actual and possible, that I have never been given grounds for accepting. For some of those, it is clear what I could count as grounds for accepting them; for some it isn't.

I lean away from holism. I'm not clear on all the labels, but I think my camp might be molecularism.

There's something mysterious about the notion of something being transferred - why think along those lines?

Why not just suppose that we learn the use? — Banno

No more mysterious than information, or energy, heh heh.

Analogies for language always come up short in some way. The sharing of semantic content just is exactly what language is for. When I speak to you, there's stuff in my mind you don't get, can't get. But there's something you do get that doesn't belong to me; Frege calls that the thought expressed by what I say. Like our mental contents, it's invisible, but like physical objects it's, um, objective.

I think from my side, the question is whether you take seriously the word "use." The words we utter to ourselves or others have content; they aren't just signals. Compare:

(1) When I say, "Go!" go.
(2) When I say "Brang-glubble!" go.

Where the word "go" is mentioned, it does not have its usual content. But to understand either of these instructions, you have to understand the content, which includes the word "go" being used. (Notice the similarity of (1) to a T-sentence.)

Wittgenstein's quasi-behaviourism is just continuing Frege's fight against psychologism. Understanding (1) or (2) has nothing to do with getting the same images or whatever I have in mind when I speak them. Understanding means acquiring the content, which is not peculiar to me or to you. If you leave content out, you're leaving out what makes language different from signaling.

Exactly. Frege argues that what you happen to have in mind, your ideas, associations, and so on, cannot be the meaning of what you say, because that's non-transferable. He calls whatever it is that is transferable, the thought. You could call it semantic content. Whatever. But he argues at length that there is something transferable and that it cannot be just reference.

That Phosphorus and Hesperus are the same is a better example for your purposes. But again, when we find out that Hesperus is Phosphorus, did we really find out something more than a novel use for the words "Hesperus" and "Phosphorus"?

That is, is sense any more than use? — Banno

I hope not? Use is what we expect here, so I'm not sure why that's a problem.

To start with expressions: "my" and "car" have senses, but not until you combine them into "my car" do you also have a reference, namely the car I own, the object. The senses of "my" and "car" determine what the expression "my car" will refer to.

With a sentence, the sense is the thought expressed by the sentence, and for Frege this is completely objective, public, shared. Reference for sentences is just truth-value. We don't go around just telling each other "True" and "False."

So yes, the sense of a word is its use.

Sure. You could also say it's the stuff that logic can ignore, lovely though it may be, just as it ignores the difference between "and" and "but."

Unfortunately-- or fortunately, since I find this stuff interesting-- it's not perfectly simple to say what logic can ignore and what it can't. Indexicals (I, here, now, etc.) are hard to ignore. If a sentence is elliptical, so that some of it is understood from context, you have to drag in what was understood but not stated. It's still a distinction you have to make if there's to be any point to logic at all.

Exactly. It's why an equation can be informative. Remember that Frege came up with the whole sense/reference business to explain why saying "The morning star is the evening star" is different from saying "Venus is Venus." The first could be informative, but the second couldn't. That takes some explaining if reference is all that matters.

But they also have the same extension. I don't see how your example works for you. — Banno

Yeah, reference and extension on one side; sense and intension on the other.

Yeah, utterance is actually saying something, in a particular situation. Or at least that's how I use the word, and I think it's at least close to standard.

In general, you can mean something by what you say, and have it be different from what you literally say. Example I was cooking up: You and four other folks are heading for a life raft that will only safely hold four; when you point this out, one of the others points a gun at you and says, "Five minus one is four." Okay, the literal meaning of that is one thing, but what's meant by it is another. The literal meaning is what logic deals with; the other is pragmatics or something.

I'm more or less just defending Fregean orthodoxy these days until I'm convinced to stop.

There was a time when I was inclined to say that words never refer to things, but that people, by their utterances, refer to things. Only I think logic needs reference and doesn't need utterance, so I can't hand reference over to utterance.

Oh sure, I agree it can't be done. And I didn't mean at all to admonish you. I was going to reach for a more or less technical use of "reference," in which case it wouldn't be a synonym for "meaning," and just wanted to make it clear that's all I was doing. It would hardly be fair of me just to say, "That's not reference, you dunderhead!" and not say I mean something particular by the word "reference."

Also, not to nitpick, but just in good faith, how accurately can we do this? Is this a deal-breaker? I could take the entire following paragraph that you wrote in your post that I just quoted and analyze the terminology, but could I nail down the terminology beyond a reasonable doubt? If we had to do this with every paragraph written and communicated, we wouldn't actually communicate anything. — Noble Dust

I'm not clear about this. Are you talking about the impossibility of defining everything, or about some sort of indeterminacy?

I think it's clearest with an example: "2+2" and "4" both refer to the same object, 4, but have different senses. Thus "2+2=4" and "4=4" express different thoughts. Just as "2+2" and "4" have the same reference, so "2+2=4" and "4=4" have the same truth-value.

This is what Davidson tried to bring out by translating natural languages into first order language. It didn't quite work. — Banno

But Davidson wants to treat language as purely extensional. We Fregeans have sense as well as reference.

Just nailing down the terminology.

I would say this: the meaning of a word is the contribution it makes to the meaning of a sentence in which it is used. (That's more or less Dummett's version of Frege, and I'm happy with it at the moment.) The key word there is "used": in distinction from "mentioned" of course, but also in the sense that the sentence is the unit of doing something linguistically--making a statement, placing a bet, asking a question, etc.

"Hello" just is the greeting; it doesn't refer to it.

Some of the issue here may be terminological, because it's perfectly clear that not every sort of word has anything to do with things: the logical constants, syncategorematic words, the list goes on.

In general, it's only names that carry the reference to some thing with them; other words can be combined to form expressions that refer, such as "my truck."

That's not to say that words that don't refer don't mean anything, only that there's more to meaning than referring to things.

Sure; only we can pretty much drop "meaning' in favour of "use"... Look at what we do with words rather than mean with them. — Banno

Change of vocabulary is no help, as they suffer from almost exactly the same ambiguity.

There's what words mean, as used in sentences, and then there's what we mean by them, as used in, you know, life. There's the use of words in sentences, and the use of words to tell people stuff, ask them questions, pronounce them guilty, etc.

We have good reasons for distinguishing between these sorts of things, but they are intimately linked, so it's no surprise that the same words end up smeared across the whole domain. Word-meaning and sentence-meaning are pretty different, but they're far from unrelated. And they're different again from what we mean by uttering a sentence in a particular context, but the meaning of the sentence, and hence of the words of which it is composed, is usually far from irrelevant.

Indeed; it depends entirely on what "prior" might mean... — Banno

I guess I'm okay with it as indicating what's being explained in terms of what. If A is explained in terms of B, then B is prior to A. That could be conceptually prior, metaphysically prior, who knows. If we've ruled out circularity, or mutual dependence, etc.

If there's no way to explain what language is, how it works, how it's used, whatever, without talking about meaning, then I guess that would make meaning prior to language.

Hmmm. Doesn't Austin point out that when the judge says, "Guilty," he has done something with words besides mean something?

More to the point of the thread, if meaning is something we can do by various means, language among them, then doesn't that suggest that meaning is "prior" to language? I'm not wild about "prior" talk, but it seems your position would lead you to agree with him.

Meaning is not separable from language because meaning is what language does — Banno

So meaning is separable from language, because we can mean something with a painting, but language is not separable from meaning because all we can do with language is mean things. Is that right?

Meaning is what we do with language. — Banno

Counting, and meaning, are the action; number, and language, the tool. — Banno

Meaning is not separable from language because meaning is what language does — Banno

Meaning is not a function of language; meaning is something we do with language.

But better: forget about meaning altogether and just look at what we do with language. — Banno

You seem to be saying several different things, Banno.

If language is a tool we mean things with, then it's conceivable we could mean things with something else. If you're saying there's nothing else we can mean things with, you'd need to argue for that.

Unless it turns out you were defining the word "meaning" here as "what we do with language." Then you could save the tool talk, I guess: "meaning" would mean "using the tool language." On the other hand, how informative would such a definition be?

The question is really as to whether nature is merely a brute existence or if intentionality (telos) is behind its workings. Empirically speaking we simply don't know, and I don't believe we ever can know by means of purely rational or empirical enquiry. There doesn't seem to be any imaginable way we could know by those means. — John

That's the bit I had in mind. If you take the additional step of linking the truth of a statement to a conception of what could count as evidence for it, then your statement here would be a textbook antirealism about the intentionality of the universe, i.e., a denial that the law of the excluded middle applies here, so that you do not feel compelled to consider such statements true or false. Since people generally have a revulsion to messing with the "laws of thought," it's more likely you intended only to claim that whether there is a fact of the matter or not-- and the assumption is usually that there is-- we cannot know it. (But then what are you saying?) Anyway, you've got options here. I don't have a horse in this race.

I'm no expert on alternative logics, but there are lots of ways to tinker. For the stuff I'm interested in, there can be motivated restrictions of the application of the law of the excluded middle, but the law of contradiction stays put, and I can't imagine what could be gained by ditching that under any non-literary circumstances.

I'm going to pass on commenting on the rest of what you say here, interesting thought it is. I've already spent more time at this altitude than I consider healthy! I'm going to head back to earth.

Thanks for the exchange, John.

Many other species have some ability to communicate, have calls and such that might qualify as symbols. I am coming to believe that the peculiarity of language is that it is a far more powerful tool than we could have needed just for communication at the time when language emerged. Granted, we now use it for more nuanced sorts of communication than any other species, but those other species get along pretty well with what they have. I think either language answered to other purposes (than communication) from the beginning, or, my guess, it's an accident that we ended up with so much more than we needed.

It's just speculation. But if you're going to explain what language is or how it works, you ought to try not to leave out whatever it is that makes language distinctive from other sorts of animal communication.

(I see @Wayfarer has chimed in with a related point as I was writing.)

I just assume the natural numbers 1,2 and 3 — Pippen

You really need to get the basics squared away, man. 1, 2, and 3 do not have truth-values. They cannot be premises.

The expected ordering of my thoughts is not coming along, so I'll just indicate a few of the things on my mind.

It seems to me there is a broad sense in which Hume and Kant give a similar explanation for what you here mark out as "self-evident," namely that it has its source in our own nature. Hume calls the principle of human nature that leads us from bare experience to cause and effect "Custom." For Kant, it's the transcendental aesthetic, yes? (Kant I have neglected.) At any rate, both, again broadly, say that we cannot help but think in such terms. We think the way we think because we do. (I'm sure that's a travesty of Kant, and welcome clarification while I continue to put off studying him.)

"Cannot help but" suggests that "self-evident" here may mean "cannot be doubted."

And yet: Quine was an anti-realist about meaning, and thus denied there was any "fact of the matter" about the correctness of a translation (among many other things). @andrewk, you'll no doubt recall, is an anti-realist about causation, so he neither affirms nor denies propositions such as "a caused b." The general form of the argument here is, as Michael Dummett explains, to deny the applicability of the law of the excluded middle to the questioned domain. That may seem a steep price to pay, but there's reason to think all of us are anti-realists about some domains. What we argue about is with regard to which domains we are willing to abandon the law of the excluded middle. Intuition will play its usual role here, though: if you can produce a proposition that the anti-realist feels compelled to consider either true or false, then he must abandon his abandonment and join you in realism about that domain.

That "feels compelled" there is odd. Compelled by what? Self-evident truth? Human nature? Custom?

I think often the sense of being compelled comes from linguistic habit. That by itself is not to say you are being steered away from or toward truth. I also think language is precisely what enables us to overcome the sense of compulsion, for good or ill.

Added: You yourself, John, espoused an anti-realism about the intentionality of the universe.

Thanks, John! This is an excellent response. You tie together several things nicely here. I have loads to say about this, but I want to try to set my thoughts in order first.

I'm not at all saying "we're just completely guessing"! Humans cannot be "empty zombies". I believe this because I intuit it, not because I have any purely rationally based empirical evidence to support it; I don't, and neither do you. — John

This struck me as an interesting position to take. I suppose I think of an intuition, philosophically, as a belief for which no reason comes readily to hand (if ever). As such, intuition is indispensable to get any thinking done at all. But I'm curious, because of the way you put things here, how you think of the epistemic value of intuition.

There's a remark of Frank Ramsey's I often think of -- I think he was talking about aesthetics, but it seems to apply more broadly. He said too many arguments have this form:
Philosopher A: I went to Grantchester yesterday.
Philosopher B: No I didn't.

I think somehow the "unity of science" hasn't been explicitly addressed in this thread. I'd guess you have your doubts, but If like to see arguments from each side.