Srap Tasmaner

In defence of weak naturalism
It is the shared meaning of the word that I learned. — Harry Hindu

If "the idea in someone's head that triggered the use of the word is what the word means," how can this be shared?

Maybe you mean something different by "the idea in someone's head" than I think you do. (I think of that as, more or less, "what comes to mind," when you hear a word.)

By "the idea in someone's head," do you mean an intention of theirs? (The intention to speak, to communicate a thought, to be understood to be attempting to communicate--there are lots of intentions.)
In defence of weak naturalism
The idea in someone's head that triggered the use of the word is what the word means, as the intent to communicate that idea existed prior to the use of the word. The meaning of words has nothing to do with their use. It has everything to do with the intent of the communicator. If "meaning" were use, then the word, "God", wouldn't refer to anything - not even the idea in someone's head. It would only refer to the use. So, god isn't a divine entity, not even an imaginary one? God is simply some use of some scribbles? Does that make sense? — Harry Hindu

What do you learn when you learn the meaning of a word? Is it the idea that is in your head? Is it the idea that is in someone else's head?
Do You Dare to Say the "I" Word?
I can give you another example of this sort of thing.

After the Abu Ghraib videos came out, there was controversy, liberals were appalled, but then a Republican senator famously said he was "outraged by the outrage."

In response to that, Robert Siegel of NPR reminisced about when he was with American troops during the first gulf war. Iraqi soldiers were surrendering as fast they could--looking for Americans to surrender to. Siegel described how the troops he was with would bring the Iraqis blankets and bottled water, even light cigarettes and place them in their mouths. They were so gentle, he said.

And the point is, Americans want to be believe that this is who we are, that the response to what happened at Abu Ghraib should not be, "So what? They're the bad guys and we're at war!" The response should be, "We're better than this. This is not who we are."

Similarly, it was inspiring for this guy, in the presence of a terrorist committing a violent act, to resist equating his act with Islam, and to engage him as someone who has beliefs, that you could argue with, that you could call out for being wrong, not just as "the enemy." That's who we're supposed to be.

ADDED: So some of this is me projecting. His point was only to distinguish between the pure evil of ISIS and Islam. But it's still inspiring that someone could keep that distinction in mind face-to-face with a guy wielding a knife.
Do You Dare to Say the "I" Word?
Here's a story from the Washington Post that includes the original video and the "social media response." (Of course I americanized "bruv" into "bro.")

What was exciting about it at the time was that it seemed to be a spontaneous recognition by a witness to a terrorist act that what he was seeing was not an expression of religion, and he addressed the terrorist exactly at the level of claims to be acting in the name of Islam.

I think a lot of us assumed at first that the comment made the most sense coming from a Muslim, but that was not the case.

It was still powerful, still represented just the response you would hope for in a liberal society--for comparison, it's easy to find video from Trump rallies where people are yelling "Fuck Islam!"--but it lacked that additional sense of "taking back Islam." I think we imagined Muslim communities around the world standing up to extremists, maybe even some of those young, impressionable extremists doing some soul-searching, etc. Alas, the world again failed to change.
Do You Dare to Say the "I" Word?
Remember "You ain't no Muslim, bro"?

That was powerful. I really thought there was a chance then that the conversation would change.
Philosophy is Stupid... How would you respond?
But, I am in the habit of taking philosophy classes and reading philosophy. — anonymous66

So you enjoy it.

What you're running into here is a question of taste. People are often really invested in their tastes. (I think Alain de Botton has a book about this.) To some people, you are what you like. It can be hard to understand how someone can like something you don't. You might even take differing taste as an implied critique of your own taste, of your identity. It gets emotional.

So you could just say, de gustibus non est disputandum. But if you were thinking you could give them, you know, reasons why philosophy isn't stupid, you've got to recognize that that's you thinking like a philosopher. Any reason might be taken as just more stupidity.

You enjoy it, and you're not hurting anyone. That's enough reason. (You might even try to find some way to get across to them what you enjoy about philosophy. That would do more than some lecture on What Makes Philosophy Important and Valuable to Humanity.)
Philosophy is Stupid... How would you respond?
How would you respond? — anonymous66
TPF Quote Cabinet
One might almost say that oversimplification is the occupational hazard of a philosophy, if it were not the occupation. — J. L. Austin
PSA: This site supports MathJax
Thanks guys!

Despite some limitations, should be good enough for our proposes.
Ontology of a universe
It seems I misinterpreted your meaning of U. You define it (tentatively) as everything that exists in the sort of way I am seeking, not as 'our universe' which is just the chunk of spacetime to which I have access and includes "all the stuff I see and can imply from it".
Taking your definition of U, your statement above is just restating the problem in my OP. — noAxioms

Restating your position was the whole point. It wasn't my definition, not even tentatively. I don't think you intended what you said as a definition of "existence," but I wanted to point out that you could use it that way. Or you could use something else. Whatever. Use it and see how well it works.

(Btw, what you said offhand is really not bad. It amounts, in an informal way, to "science": what I can directly sense plus what my model tells me must exist even though I can't directly sense it, so, you know, atoms and shit.)

Our universe is presumed to 'exist', and not just by being a member of itself. I'm asking what that means. I'm questioning that it means anything at all.

Gracious. If you want to figure out what something means, take a stab at defining it and see how it goes. I'm just pointing out that you've kinda already been doing that, but you keep jumping around to other stuff.

I'm not saying this method is guaranteed to work. (Chisolming is a thing.) But you'll probably learn something.

Look, offhand, it looks a bit like a classic "category mistake." (Ryle's original example was the guy looking around at the buildings of Oxford and asking, "But where is the University?") But there's no reason for you to even entertain that conclusion yet. Do not look at solutions until you're clear what the problem is.
Compositionality & Frege's context principle
Oddly enough, though, between two people, there often are such words. I go walking with a mate every Tuesday and he gets a text at some point during the day. 'Milk' means, 'Please stop at the store on the way home and get milk.' ' — mcdoodle

No, that's just ellipsis, and the rest of the sentence is understood from the wider context of the relationship between these people, their housekeeping habits, the rigors of communicating on mobile devices, etc. "Milk" still just means milk. (That whole sentence will never appear in a dictionary as one of the meanings of the word "milk," and for good reason.)

The word "milk" is also ambiguous, but it's pretty clear that the parties to this exchange have a usual agreed-upon meaning, so the ambiguity is not an issue here for them. You could also think of this as part of the context of their exchange.

None of this is really the sort of context at stake in Frege's context principle.

You cannot perform a complete linguistic act with just a word or any bunch of words. (Except, as noted, elliptically.) Sentences are special. So you want to say something like, "the meaning of a word is its use in sentences." (We can get much fancier about formulating the context principle if needed.)

The trick (besides dealing with the potential circularity) is to avoid denying compositionality. You can end up thinking the sentence, or the wider context of its utterance, "gives" the words in it meaning, which they lacked until they appeared in that sentence (or until its utterance in a particular context, etc.). This is patently false. If it were true, language would be impossible.
Ontology of a universe
Yeah, I don't understand the significance of being a member of some set. If some means any, then anything you can name is a member of any number of sets. If it is some particular set, then the burden of definition is shifted to defining that set. — SophistiCat

That last bit was where I was headed. Would have been clearer if I had said "a special set, let's call it U." That's what @noAxioms seemed to want to do, and I was just helping him along, as it turns out, mistakenly.
Poll: Religious adherence on this forum
Don't worry, spiders,
I keep house
casually. — Issa, translated by Robert Haas
In defence of weak naturalism
There are no reasons so far as I know to think that the nature of the mundane world is physical to begin with, in any substantive ontological sense — The Great Whatever

Maybe if you told us what would count as a "substantive ontological sense," then we could understand what you mean by this:

It's generally taken for granted that physical things exist and everything else has to prove its existence. But this is a prejudice and so far as I can tell nothing supports it. — The Great Whatever

I'd guess a lot of us might grant that it's a "prejudice," but a prejudice that comes from being physical beings, so we're pretty attached to it. (We're not talking about thinking you won't like Indian food.)
Top Philosophical Movies
If you are into "mind-trip" movies, I would add Being John Malkovich and The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind — SophistiCat

Seen 'em. I do love Eternal Sunshine. Will definitely see more Tarkovsky. Thanks!
Ontology of a universe
No, the U is arbitrary, and usually means all that stuff I see, and all the rest that is implied by it. The far side of the moon exists despite the lack of its direct accessibility to any of my five senses. — noAxioms

Hey look! You did it. You could define U as "all the stuff I see, and all the rest that is implied by it." Would love be a member of U? Would our universe? (Don't assume U="our universe.") Would stuff implied by the MW interpretation? Would the set U be a member of itself? (Sometimes that's okay.)

I know you want to skip ahead. Your real question is, "If existence means being part of our universe, what does it mean for our universe--or some other one--to exist?" Slow down. Look carefully at the words you're using, at how you're using them, and think through it.
Ontology of a universe
Ontological existence seems to be distinguished from nonexistence as being a member of some set. So my car exists if it is a member of things that are in this universe — noAxioms

So you want set and set membership to be the starting point, and to define existence in terms of those. Something exists if it is a member of some special set U.

How do we define U? Here's where you start to have trouble, because so far you've only defined U as "the set of all things that are members of U." That's not going to help much. Obviously, you can't define U as "the set of all things that exist," because then you do have circularity.

So what's the next move? How could you define U in a way that does some work?
Compositionality & Frege's context principle
↪jkop
I was mainly expecting indifference, misinterpretation, maybe a little ridicule. ;)

Compositionality and the context principle are two of the absolutely central concepts of philosophy of language, but I for one have been having difficulty seeing how they fit together. Dummett has trouble explaining how they fit together. If it already made sense to you, that's cool.
Top Philosophical Movies
↪ssu
Just finally watched Interstellar because of this post. WOW!
Compositionality & Frege's context principle
↪jkop
srsly?
In defence of weak naturalism
↪Mariner
Maybe we can pick this up again another time.
In defence of weak naturalism
↪The Great Whatever
Got it. Not what I was thinking then.
In defence of weak naturalism
It depends on your prior assumptions. Nothing qualifies as evidence simpliciter – but if you look at the priors, there's no evidence for them either, and so on.

All ordinary experience is perfectly compatible with everything being 'supernatural.' There's literally no reason to believe one or the other. — The Great Whatever

Or any of the "infinite number of other hypotheses," it seems.

I'd like to understand this better. Am I right in thinking you're really talking about the relationship between theory and evidence in general, and not just this particular case?

So Theory N has one set of assumptions, and they determine what counts as evidence for Theory N; but Theory S has a different set of assumptions that determines what counts as evidence for Theory S. Since -- by definition -- there's no evidence for the assumptions of either, you can choose whichever assumptions you like, and in that sense all ordinary experience is compatible with either Theory S or Theory N. You cannot possibly have a reason for choosing, say, the assumptions of Theory N, because assumptions -- again, by definition -- are just what we don't have reasons for.

Do I have all that right?
Top Philosophical Movies
Greatest jump cut in film history.
In defence of weak naturalism
So, Trump is not merely the person or the card, it is also the idea of tripping someone up -- assuming you interpreted my intent correctly.

Curious.

Words can refer to things that are not in their dictionary definitions ("Trump" just did that), depending on the context. — Mariner

Surely not.

Even if we assume that
that's not at all the same as
Tripping him up was what you intended to achieve by what you said; it's not the meaning of what you said.
Top Philosophical Movies
↪VagabondSpectre
This sounds fantastic and I will bump it up in the watching queue. Thanks!
Top Philosophical Movies
Maybe Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven.
Top Philosophical Movies
Shawshank Redemption — Agustino

Good call. There's a lot going on there.
In defence of weak naturalism
Meaning is not derived at all from context? Not even a little bit?

Let's test this theory.

Trump.

What do I mean by that word? — Mariner

Are you just talking about disambiguation? If we're talking about bridge, it'll mean one thing; if about politics another, and so on? Wouldn't you still need to rely on the speaker following Grice's "Be relevant" maxim? And then we're back to intention. Wouldn't it be reasonable to say we look to context for clues to the speaker's intention? (And assume they're following the maxims, etc.)

All that is a long way from saying that the meanings of words are *derived* from either context or speaker's intention. It's important to remember that compositionality is a thing. We use the words we do to form novel assertions (questions, commands, etc.) because of the meanings those words have.
Two features of postmodernism - unconnected?
↪Mongrel

Don't diss the clams, man.
Two features of postmodernism - unconnected?
Do you see them as liberative or oppressive?
— Srap Tasmaner

I find this very dichotomy oppressive. The scientific method is neither good nor bad. It's just a tool. It can produce good results in the hands of responsible people and bad results in the hands of irresponsible people. — Thorongil
You're right of course.

OTOH, speaking broadly (and uncomfortably) in a history-of-ideas way, there was a narrative in the period, say, between the second world war and the rise of post-structuralism and friends, that saw modernity as the problem, that painted National Socialism as "rationality run amok" or something. I don't find that view persuasive.
Two features of postmodernism - unconnected?
It's hard. My first post in this thread was dismissive, and I feel bad about that.

I think in some ways it's mainly a difference in attitude toward logic and science. Do you see them as liberative or oppressive? There's a touching passage in Tarski's little Introduction to Logic that I'll quote in full here:

I shall be very happy if this book contributes to the wider diffusion of logical knowledge. The course of historical events has assembled in this country the most eminent representatives of contemporary logic, and has thus created here especially favorable conditions for the development of logical thought. These favorable conditions can, of course, be easily overbalanced by other and more powerful factors. It is obvious that the future of logic, as well as of all theoretical science, depends essentially upon normalizing the political and social relations of mankind, and thus upon a factor which is beyond the control of professional scholars. I have no illusions that the development of logical thought, in particular, will have a very essential effect upon the process of the normalization of human relationships; but I do believe that the wider diffusion of the knowledge of logic may contribute positively to the acceleration of this process. For, on the one hand, by making the meaning of concepts precise and uniform in its own field and by stressing the necessity of such a precision and uniformization in any other domain, logic leads to the possibility of better understanding between those who have the will to do so. And, on the other hand, by perfecting and sharpening the tools of thought, it makes men more critical--and thus makes less likely their being misled by all the pseudo-reasonings to which they are in various parts of the world incessantly exposed today.

That's Tarski writing from Harvard in 1940, having fled Poland before the German invasion.

Some of us still cling to the hope and the heritage of the Enlightenment. And for us, clarity is itself a value.
Top Philosophical Movies
Gattaca
— Srap Tasmaner

I love this one so much. — StreetlightX

Nice to meet another fan!

This thread's a little weird because we're mostly talking about sf or fantasy, and Gattaca's the movie I always reach for as coming closest on film to what sf is on paper. (People always used to say the original Solaris, but it's been many years since I saw that & I haven't seen the remake.)

I guess it's okay for something like philosophy to show up in movies mostly as these "what is reality?" sorts of puzzles. Gotta start somewhere.

There are ethical dilemmas in lots of movies; does that make them "philosophical"? I think Peter Weir's Witness might be. I feel stuck between wondering what could possibly count as philosophy and what could possibly not!
Two features of postmodernism - unconnected?
↪andrewk

You are clearly right that they needn't be related. (Goodman's a pretty extreme constructivist and not at all obfuscated.)

On the other hand, it seems to me that the first characteristic underwrites the second. There are things we're careful about on the more scientific/analytic side of things that don't often seem valued on the other side:
- whether a result has actually been established (to the relevant standard)
- whether we are correctly interpreting or applying said result
- whether we are accurately representing another's views
- whether the views we put forward are consistent so far as we can determine their consequences
I find almost all these, as it were, "canons of accountability" ignored in the kind of writing I think you have in mind. Thus
- scientific jargon is misused
- scientific results are misinterpreted and misapplied
- the works of others exist mainly as forests to be poached--fair representation of said author's views is not even one of the goals
- within your own work, all you need do is suggest something, as an aside, as an analogy, and then within a few pages you can rely on it as established fact (y'know, as established as anything else) and start building on it
Argumentation is almost completely replaced by rhetoric. (God I sound like such an old fogey!)

Another side-effect is the need to move fast. Without the expectation of actually establishing anything, there's no need to take your time. In fact, it's easier to carry your readers along and keep them from noticing the shortcuts if you move quickly.
Top Philosophical Movies
Other thought-experiment/phildickian stuff: Donnie Darko
Chris Nolan's other movies (The Prestige, Memento)
Top Philosophical Movies
Gattaca

(The Truman Show was also written by the writer-director of Gattaca.)
I guess Waking Life

I actually liked Youth Without Youth, but I'm not sure many did.

Stranger Than Fiction

Those are some with obviously philosophical content. I'm not quite sure what to say about the philosophical content of Magnolia, but it is an extraordinary, overwhelming masterpiece. (The Master is also interesting, also by P. T. Anderson.)

Besides Blade Runner, almost anything adapted from Phil Dick--he's kinda the gateway drug. (The Truman Show might as well be a Phil Dick adaptation. Minority Report. etc.)
Philosophy, questions and opinion
Is there a discussion among other people in the methodology of philosophy? — kris22
Oh my yes!

The question of how "best" or "properly" to do philosophy is part of philosophy, and always one of the most widely discussed issues. There are different "camps," to put it broadly, but even people within the same camp disagree vehemently on methodology.
A beginner question
↪wax1232

An American philosopher named Wilfrid Sellars said this:

The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.
Welcome to philosophy. We hope you enjoy your stay.
A beginner question
↪TheWillowOfDarkness
As best I understand your last post, you're claiming there's something it's always pointless or meaningless or incoherent to talk about, that our language doesn't even allow us to talk about, and then you tell me what that is we can't actually talk about.

I still don't know what the OP's purpose was in asking the question he asked, because he hasn't told us. It might be, on closer inspection, incoherent. But I think it was prima facie meaningful.
A beginner question
I happen to find it interesting that language can reach beyond the actual, beyond the non-actual, and even encompass the impossible. No doubt this outsize capacity leads us astray, but I like to think we could learn something about how language works if we really understood that.

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