We're even now

Accelerationist!

Tankie — frank

For the record, no, not at all. Just realistic. I tell my son, who's further left than I am, though perennially at war online with the tankies, that as far as I'm concerned there's an empirical case for capitalism and I point at Why Nations Fail. I think that analysis is pretty sound and capitalism is fundamentally inclusive. That it eats through institutions has often been a good thing. But it'll eat through ones we don't want to, that's all, as it's eaten through American democracy.

There aren't any states per se. — frank

Sure, my simplistic history was *not* talking about the modern nation-state, which comes after and out of feudalism, but central authority. "State" the way anarchist historians talk about it.

No matter, you're much better versed in the history than I am, I think, so my thumbnail is going to be a tough sell.

One of the cool things about capitalism is that money is never bigoted. It doesn't matter who you are, if you have cash, you have power — frank

That's the official story, certainly, and honestly I tend to agree, but I recognize that this is not the story as some people read it. I'm thinking of anti-colonial theory in particular. From one way of looking at history, the rise of capital is an incident in the history of race. And I'm sure there are people who see it as an incident in the history of patriarchy.

I tend to see capital as indifferent. If chattel slavery's working, fine, but if it becomes a source of inefficiency then it's got to go. In the long run, capital is an acid that will eat through any institution you've got. Roughly how I see it.

One thing I've been thinking about as this thread rolled along is that I don't feel any desire to be a "real man" as that phrase is used today, but I'm still pretty invested in being "a good man". I don't know how women think about that sort of thing, not quite sure I could articulate what I mean by it, but I'm pretty sure I don't mean the same thing I would mean by "a good person".

That resonate with you?

Any other guys feel that way?

Sure, but here's the thing. The simplest history of power seems to go like this: first comes patriarchy, then the state, then capital. We have some reason to believe that the shift from 2 to 3 was a displacement, that the state is still around but serves at the pleasure of capital.

But what about the shift from 1 to 2? Certainly it looks like men invented the state, but what's the dynamic there? Is the state just another way of advancing men's interests, or did the state move to the top of the food chain, leaving patriarchy in place but making it subservient, using it?

Does capital just build on and make use of patriarchy as it does the state? Or is it men pursuing the good of men all the way through, using the state and using capital?

Even if the state and capital use patriarchy, are they also dependent on it as a foundation? Take down patriarchy and capital falls?

All of these options are the pretty stupidly reductionist, but it may be one of them has the main story right and just needs some nuance.

All of that's true -- I also thought of the example of Henry Louis Gates who, even before he was arrested for trying to enter his own house, lived every day of his life knowing he carried a "risk factor" for arrest he could do nothing about.

But none of that addresses @Isaac's specific claim (I mean, he wasn't actually specific) that economic oppression is more important than any of that stuff, real though it is. He might argue that all of these other sorts of oppression are just tools of capital, and addressing that is how you deal with racism, sexism, whatever. But I don't actually know what he'll say.

I have absolutely no respect for anyone who can't tell the difference, and until the former is sorted, any space wasted on whatever minor inconvenience the latter might have to endure is a travesty. — Isaac

It's true, you are a tanky!

For the sake of argument, someone might hold the view that the two sorts of oppression are related, and for evidence would point out that the child whose image you posted lives in world men have arranged to suit themselves.

You'll point out that it wasn't just men but wealthy and powerful men. And that's true, but that just brings us back to the same issue: the sort of wealth and power we see in the world, and the means of acquiring and accumulating them, the whole system traces back to men, since before there were such disparities.

Or so I imagine someone could argue.

I suppose there's something to be learned from anthropology here. Do we have examples of highly stratified but non-patriarchal societies? Do we have examples of patriarchal but (otherwise?) generally egalitarian societies?

I had to look that up! — Isaac

Did you use Yahoo! or did you get someone to help you ask Siri?

In other words, we take our best guesses as to the goals of the people we're interacting with into account when we model their behaviour all the time, language is no different — Isaac

There's something David Foster Wallace said about the appeal of fiction, and it's kinda heartbreaking since he ended up taking his own life: because we get to peek into their minds or otherwise get an explanation for why they do what they do, fictional characters are understandable, and it's pleasurable to think (or pretend) that real people might be understandable. What I don't think he said out loud is, It gives you the idea, or the vain hope, that someone might understand you.

I've been reading a lecture of James on "The Sentiment of Rationality." He makes a point, from physiology, that the pleasurable feeling of calm and order we associate with understanding and rationality is not just that of unimpeded thought and action -- which he emphasizes elsewhere -- but release under tension. It's impedance followed by free flow. Solving a problem, grasping an idea you struggled with, and so on, all obvious examples.

Together those tell a story about the friction in a conversation and why we engage in it anyway, but something's missing, right? We have communication in the first place because the cost of listening to you is lower than the cost of finding out everything for myself, you know, assuming you know something it would be helpful for me to know.

Talk is cheap. Listening is pretty cheap, but if you don't know anything I don't, it's not cheap enough, unless it's also a way to do something else, strengthen social ties, manage status, that kind of stuff.

Now we can say that we engage in the kind of conversations we do here because we're in the habit of sharing our knowledge and learning from each other, and that all adds up to a communal process of learning. Swell. It's just that in a given conversation, I won't know at first if you're any help, to me or to the project. So now there's this whole process of exploring your ideas just to find out if it's worth exploring your ideas. That's a lot of friction, and it's starting to look like a pretty heavy investment on a speculative basis. I'm gambling with my time and energy when I talk to you.

Anything up to here you'd disagree with?

Next steps then would be all about managing risk, reducing the time until I know whether the investment was a bust, improving the reliability of my guesses about whether I'm going to learn anything or otherwise aid the social project, and so on. And the rules of discussion would be about risk management. Make sense?

maybe rudeness and blue hair will cure global warming — Isaac

Okay Boomer

That's exceptionally gracious of you.

a lot of what you write in response to my posts is not to me, but about me — Wayfarer

Well in this thread, yeah, and I feel bad about that.

I acknowledge that my general stance is contrarian with regards to philosophy as it is nowadays understood and taught — Wayfarer

Which is fine by me. It's just hard to engage with you because every argument you present quickly morphs into all of your arguments. We start out changing an oil filter and end up taking apart the whole car.

Okay, occupational hazard, Issues connect to one another, arguments depend on one another, there are assumptions to suss out, all that. And there's a place for synthesis as well as analysis. I wouldn't lay down some rule that we only deal with one thing at a time and everything else is off-limits. Philosophy just doesn't work that way, and shouldn't. But we have to be mindful of the cats we're herding and take the opportunity to control the complexity when we can do so without doing violence to the discussion. The best discussions move up and down gradients of abstraction and connectedness, taking now the wider view, now the narrower, bringing in new issues at one moment and keeping things out at another.

You don't make any point by trivialising the argument — Wayfarer

I make a point about the form of the argument.

The issues at stake are considerably more subtle, and more significant, but I won't try to explain them again. — Wayfarer

Ansel Adams had a young photographer friend, and once a year they'd get together to talk (and maybe drink, I don't know), and the young photographer would bring a stack of prints with him. Adams would go through them, giving his feedback, and sorting them into 'yes' and 'no' piles. One time, he stopped and said, "Every year you bring this one, and every year I put it in the no pile. Why do you keep bringing it back?" Answer: "If you could see the climb I had to do to get that shot --" "Doesn't matter how hard it was to take the picture," responded Adams. "It's still a lousy shot."

Doesn't matter how subtle or significant the issues are, you've still got to follow Grice's maxims, and you've still got to connect one point to another, just as you would arguing about where to eat.

I'm open to being convinced there's another approach available, but I'll tell you what's not going to work for me, that it just comes down to choosing sides. You write as if you're rooting for your team, and it's always a good time to make any point that supports your 'side', whether it's directly responsive to anything, whether it's even connected to the last point you yourself made. I don't call that dialogue but cheerleading.

I think 'philosophy' also works. — plaque flag

Philosophy's a big tent, so it gives the impression of open-mindedness. But it's a fact that the practice of philosophy does not much resemble the practice of science. There are handful of famous (to maybe a hundred people) changes of mind (half of those are Hilary Putnam), but otherwise?

I'm not dumb enough to think scientists come in to work, grab a cup of coffee and check the reports of last night's observations so they know which theory deserves their credence today. It's slow. But revision large and small is built into the enterprise. Over in philosophy, the revision we see has the character of an arms race. --- I meet your objection through a small adjustment to my theory; you raise a new objection, and I make a new adjustment. Whole different deal.

Watched an episode of Nova the other night about the footprints at White Sands. Cool stuff, but how old? Most were guessing 12-13,000 years because the oldest Clovis site dates to 15,000. Results of carbon-dating: 23,000 years. There will be debate, and some new tests to replicate the date, but eventually everyone will agree to reshuffle our understanding of the populating of the Americas. Nothing like this is even conceivable in philosophy.

What did I get wrong? — fdrake

I could answer but I've already gone way over the line discussing the posting styles of members here. I allowed myself to start this thread for the wider issues it might raise and never intended to get into a back and forth about how people write. I had my reasons for giving in and doing just that, but no more.

Is it a form of asceticism, an epistemological veganism? — plaque flag

My third time posting this! Enjoy.

My taste is for keeping open house for all sorts of conditions of entities, just so long as when they come in they help with the housework. Provided that I can see them work, and provided that they are not detected in illicit logical behaviour (within which I do not include a certain degree of indeterminacy, not even of numerical indeterminacy), I do not find them queer or mysterious at all…. To fangle a new ontological Marxism, they work therefore they exist, even though only some, perhaps those who come on the recommendation of some form of transcendental argument, may qualify for the specially favoured status of entia realissima. To exclude honest working entities seems to me like metaphysical snobbery, a reluctance to be seen in the company of any but the best objects. — Paul Grice

I won't say that institutional science doesn't have its shortcomings and its blindspots, but that's just the nature of institutions. Science itself is not some close-minded affair, but the best way we know of overcoming closed-mindedness. That's what I want to stay connected to.

Where were most of the Tory male leaders educated? — Amity

This is a thing. I could hunt up the name of the author -- believe I heard her interviewed on Intelligence Squared.

Anyway, she wrote a book about party leadership and the Oxford Union, citing Boris Johnson as an example of what you get. The Union encourages a certain performance style, a kind of charm and an ability to think on your feet, but mainly the ability to say things that have a convincing ring to them, even if you're making it up. Britain, she claimed, is run by men very good at sounding like they know what they're doing, but who in fact have only the most superficial grasp of policy.

I agree with all of that, but would like an approach that doesn't require switching hats. Maybe that's a mistake, and being self-consciously multidisciplinary is the best way to get what I want.

A lot of this intellectual soul-searching comes from realizing I have been on the wrong side of arguments with you and @Joshs, in particular by defending the border between philosophy and science. I'm writing from the middle of a paradigm shift, so that's a mess, and it makes me resentful of returning to old habits of analysis. I think the points I want to make are more or less okay, but I only have the old way of putting them, and I no longer find that satisfactory.

I see what you did there.

I expected a couple "The hell you are"s and maybe a "Get off your high horse," but not this treachery.

It's a requirement for me that the approach I end up with is science-friendly. Narrative and metaphor have some traction, because you can do actual research on these things. But what Derrida did is adapt models drawn from Marxism and psychoanalysis, and those just aren't science. What you end up with is a free-for-all.

Am I being clear enough? — Srap Tasmaner


Answer: definitely not, but don't go to any further trouble. — Wayfarer

In for a penny, in for a pound...

A: We should take the car.
B: Train.
A: Why should we take the train?
B: Trains have been carrying passengers traveling for both work and for pleasure since the mid-19th century. They were once the primary form of transportation, but with the advent of gas-powered automobiles in the early 20th century and the modern highway system, particularly in the wake of the Second World War, they were largely displaced by cars, buses, and trucks.

You're doing @Joshs not @Wayfarer, and they're actually quite different.

It's quite painfully simple. — Isaac

Yes it is. I understand that most argument in philosophy is informal. I understand that inferential connections are sometimes implicit, even here, although here most people understand that's a problem, and explicit is better. I'm not only open-minded about these things, I actually like informal reasoning, so it's not like I'm demanding two-column proofs.

On the other hand, even informal arguments have a form and a content. Many faulty patterns of informal argument have acquired names we toss around (ad hominem, argument from authority, strawman, blah blah blah). Not really my thing, but it indicates that the difference between the form and the content of even informal arguments is widely recognized here, even though one could raise objections to that idea or at least muddy the waters considerably, if one so chose.

@Wayfarer my question to you in this thread was always and only about the form of argument you were employing, not the content of those arguments. Whether Peirce is an idealist is irrelevant to the specific question I raised.

My very first words even set out the form as a schema, with Xs and Ys and everything, and gave it a name, without committing to it being an informal fallacy.

Why didn't I just accuse you of committing an informal fallacy?

Because I recognized that you probably see what you post differently, that you probably perceive an argument in such posts that I do not, only you left it implicit without realizing that you had -- it happens to all of us, failing to connect the dots, even though they are clearly connected in our minds -- so I thought you might be able to explain how these little historical essays you post are not just non-sequiturs.

And because it occurred to me that there was an interesting larger issue here which members probably have quite different views on. (That turned out to be partially wrong because almost everyone was "Yay for history!")

And because I'm tired of playing the forum's logic cop. It's my own damned fault: no one appointed me to that post and no one wants me to do it. It narrows my thinking in a way that I have grown very weary of, but I need to be convinced there's a good alternative. I have no stomach for what @apokrisis called "talk that is free", philosophy as belles lettres. It's just not me, much as I'd like it to be sometimes. I thought this thread might be an opportunity to explore some alternatives. I think @Count Timothy von Icarus attempted something like that, but the social dimensions of discussion are not new territory for me. I was really hoping for something like a revaluation of all argumentation values. @Isaac's got one of those, but while I've come almost entirely around to his point-of-view on many things, I'm still looking for something a little different.

Why did you choose that as a hypothetical example? — Wayfarer

It was an arbitrary choice. Good reasons: it is a position with no known current adherents; it is widely known to have no known current adherents; it is widely known to be a position that once had a great many adherents, to enjoy a position of prestige now long past. Biographical reason, why it came to mind: my computability textbook used Zeus as an explanatory aid -- Zeus can list all the integers even though there are infinitely many but not even Zeus can list all the reals. Stuck in my memory. It's also just damned interesting that something once so important that the founder of our vocation was put to death for ever so obliquely challenging it, is now just a bunch of old stories.

** Added: I looked back at the post you ignored all but a sentence of and remembered the other reason. Since it's no secret my sympathies are with science and naturalism, and I believe you generally have me pegged as a materialist or physicalist or some such, I found it amusing to make myself an advocate for an unlikely religion -- I ever so briefly considered going with Zoroastrianism -- and I thought it might be amusing to you as well, since it's so obviously out of character for me. **

Is it because you have me pegged as a religious-or-spiritual type, therefore this must be typical of the way that I think? — Wayfarer

No. Really. If I wanted to do that, I would have put the argument in your mouth instead of mine. Stop psychoanalyzing me and just read what I write.

My claim is that, from the outset in Plato, down to the end of the 19th century, there was a soteriological element in Western philosophy. — Wayfarer

Here's the problem. For purposes of this thread, I don't care what you think. In the argument from reason thread, yes. There we argued about what you think. This thread was not an attack on your worldview or your philosophy or your understanding of history or anything. None of that is relevant.

Maybe someday, maybe soon, I'll change my mind about this, but for now I still have enough invested in the ideas of logic and inference and argument that I am only raising in this thread an issue about your method of argumentation. That's all. The content of the argument is of no interest to me, not in this thread. In other threads, yes. Not here.

Here, I have only been concerned to understand how what I assume you must think is an argument is put together, because these posts I have described do not look like arguments to me. They have no logical connective tissue that I can see. Giving you the benefit of the doubt, and recognizing my past prejudice against historical reasoning, I asked for an explanation.

But you keep making substantive posts about your worldview, like this one. I don't care. I don't care what you're saying, I'm only asking about how what you're saying is put together so as to make an actual argument.

Am I being clear enough? It has nothing to do with my attitude toward your views, whether I agree or disagree. It's entirely about the logical form of the arguments you present, because I cannot work out that form for myself.

And it is not some modern prejudice of mine. You can thank Aristotle for noticing that how arguments are assembled is indifferent to the contents.

The notion I take Srap Tasmaner's OP to be gently poking a stick at is exactly that missing step. Simply saying that idea y arose alongside, for example, an enlightenment rejection of the supernatural, says absolutely nothing about whether such coincidence was reasoned, accidental, or peer-pressured. That case is left entirely unmade. — Isaac

If you are making a counterclaim or counterargument, you should be able to explain how it undermines your opponent's point. In that regard, what specific claim does your appeal to the history of ideas undermine? What force makes your claim need to be addressed on pain of being unreasonable? — fdrake

Thank you both for at least understanding what the hell I was talking about. (And you too, @180 Proof -- I saw that, but I'm trying to be polite for god knows what reason.) Also thank you . As a matter of fact I've presented the general case against disagreement before.

The only guess I have is that you seek to portray an opponent's conclusion as a contingent event of thought; which it is, their thought just happened as part of the history of ideas. Nevertheless a claim can be a necessary consequence of another through rules of reasoning. — fdrake

I did this all over again above, I hope you don't mind.

Fair enough. — fdrake

Not really. — Isaac

Puzzled me too, but I won't tell @fdrake which battles to fight.

While I've enjoyed the responses to the wider interest I expressed in starting this thread, it has been frustrating watching the narrow point of the OP be so thoroughly missed. That's on me, I expect, but I'm glad a few of you understood.

The history of an idea can also show where a tradition when [ went ? ] wrong in ways that simply looking at where the current tradition is today can't. — Count Timothy von Icarus

As it happens, that is very much my reason for invoking it. — Wayfarer

I'll address this.

Let's say I believe we ought never to have given up belief in and worship of the Greek gods. That's my position. I believe, and I want you to believe.

Someone asks me why I hold this belief.

Shall I say that people used to believe in the Greek gods? Does that look like an argument to you? It might do as a demonstration that such belief is possible, but no such demonstration is necessary; I am already all the proof you need; I'm a believer. What other point could I be making? That there was a time, unlike now, when quite a few people would have agreed with me? Still not an argument, but maybe a demonstration that my belief is not entirely idiosyncratic. So that's a little defense, but still not an argument in favor.

Shall I say that Western Civilization took a wrong turn when it abandoned the old religions and Christianity became ascendant? Does that look like an argument to you? Of course I think that's where things went wrong; that's when people stopped believing what I believe; that's when people started believing something else; that's when people started disagreeing with me. It's not an argument, but a restatement of what you already know, namely that I believe in the Greek gods, which perforce means Western Civilization went wrong when people stopped doing that -- unless I want to be the onliest special believer all by myself, and that's not on the table, because I am trying to convince you to join me.

Suppose I say that people only stopped believing in the old gods because Christians bullied them and tricked them into it. Is that an argument? Not quite. The claim is that people did not stop believing because they had good reasons to -- realized it was all bullshit, for instance -- but stopped believing for bad reasons or because they were forced. But it fails to give any good reason for their original belief! See how that works? You can have a stupid belief arrived at for stupid reasons and give it up for equally stupid reasons. Discovering that your reasons for giving up a belief aren't any good might make you rethink giving it up, might present a prima facie case for suspending your rejection of the belief, but that's still not in itself a positive case for holding the belief.

What if I say this: as a matter of fact the reasons the ancient Greeks gave for why they believed were pretty strong, and those reasons were never refuted, it's just that times changed, Christianity came along, a lot of the reasons behind the old beliefs were forgotten, but here I can explain them to you...

Now we're talking! I could just present the positive case by itself, but people would be suspicious: if the old religion was so great, why did everyone abandon it? At some point I'll need to offer some explanation for why people stopped believing in the old Greek gods, and that explanation will have to show that people did not have damned good reasons for jumping ship, but there are non-inferential reasons they did, historical reasons. That's not strictly necessary from a logical point of view, but the demand for such an explanation is reasonable.

Do I need to go on?

I agree with a whole lot of that.

But there is some tension here I don't think I've mentioned before, which makes it particularly odd in the cases that caught my attention: to explain why you hold the opinion you do by pointing to the history of the idea and its cultural uptake, is to discount your stated reasons for holding that opinion and substitute an historical explanation -- or at least supplement the given reasons with historical circumstances, forces, trends, what have you.

As it happens, @Wayfarer is hostile to explanations of an agent holding a belief in terms of causes of any kind; beliefs are explained solely in terms of reasons, from which they are rationally inferred, or in terms of causes in which case those beliefs do not count as rational. That's an exclusive "or". We had a whole thread about this, and he made his position quite clear.

There is, of course, an out -- which I know I've mentioned somewhere -- namely: other people's beliefs have causes; mine have reasons. Example: "I don't believe in God because I've considered the arguments and evidence; you believe in God just because your parents raised you to, all your friends do, and you've never questioned it." I think this is in fact a view people quite often take when someone disagrees with them. It might be so common as to be the default response.

On this forum, however, it would indicate a belief that only the position advocated is even rationally arrived at, and everyone who disagrees is just caught up in the zeitgeist, not making up their own minds at all but parroting the received view.

Now I'm even more confused, because surely @Wayfarer does not intend to claim that those who disagree him are behaving irrationally, but if their beliefs are rationally inferred then no historical explanation for their holding those beliefs is even possible.

'there's plums in the icebox' being confirmed when one goes to the icebox — plaque flag

As a matter
of fact, no,
there aren't.
Deal with it.

Still no.

First quote was me offering a couple of riffs on Clarky's response, drawing out ways of reading his response or extending it, not expressing my position. The word right before your quote begins was "Or".

Second was a response to you, and same deal. You suggested intro science classes exude an air of authority in presenting the results of settled science, but into philosophy ought not. I took that as likely meaning that there's no equivalent set of results, nothing to be certain about. (In fairness I never went back and finished that paragraph. I mentioned how even what you learn in intro science classes might not be permanently true, but I never got around to finishing the point that it's still a reasonable pedagogical approach: teach them the not-really-certainties and let them find out how messy things are later...)

Quote three describes various ways I have read philosophy, which I distinguish pretty sharply from the doing of philosophy, as I would have thought was pretty obvious by now.

I don't know why quote four is there. How does that make the case I consider philosophy just a pleasant pastime? Anyway, that again was not a statement of my view, but of a view I expected someone to take.

Besides -- it sounded like you'd be disappointed if I thought what you said I did. Take my assurance that I don't and be happy!

Relating this to the OP, Srap Tasmaner sounds to want philosophy to be an open and unstructured kind of thing. A pastime with no real purpose or stakes. It is talk that is free and not to be constrained by grand ends. — apokrisis

Interesting, but if anyone cares, no.

Nice conclusion. — Tom Storm

Honestly, probably not. Okay as a theory of communication or of social interaction -- I mean, still preposterously reductionist! -- but not an account of language at all.

That's the thing. Even if you take the kind of sociological view of language (and oppose the sort of representational view), you might still want to explain what kind of a thing language is that it can be used for communicating or other social functions (signaling of various kinds, etc).

On the other hand, even if language has features you don't find in other animal signaling systems -- and it does -- that could be only to say that our signaling is more complicated but not different in kind.

I guess my remark landed somewhere around there, but I couldn't guess whether that's right.

Hence the point is not to understand language but to use it. — Banno

The point of what?

Thought I'd address the actual topic for a moment.

While we may wish to reject the materialist realism of science as a form of metaphysical prejudice, we cannot do so in favour of an alternative metaphysical framework that also claims to describe an ultimate reality be it a new form of idealism, panpsychism, or some Hollywood influenced Matrix version of 'we are living in a simulated reality' without having a theory of language that explains how any of these realist claims are possible. — Lawson

I think the beauty of Lawson’s promise (which I still don’t understand) is that if there’s no realist theory of language then discussions about effete topics like idealism and panpsychism bite the dust for good. That would be an interesting development. — Tom Storm

But also apparently materialism, all of which just amounts to this:

Most of the issues that raise a ruckus in philosophy are metaphysics. They are matters of point of view, not fact. — T Clark

But I'm a little confused why he cast this in terms of language and how the claims are made. Presumably because verification is off the table from the start? And the claim that there is something wrong with the very words in which idealism, say, is proposed -- that *is* the old logical positivist diagnosis, that you're not even really saying anything.

On the other hand, if you don't think of language as the home of claims about reality, there's no particular problem with metaphysics. If your endorsing panpsychism gets you a job or gets you laid, it's just another day at the office for language.

Of course language might also be useful for doing science. In which case we're back to

Such an ephemeral ontological object cannot really be the subject of any serious investigation — Isaac

Or to

I'm not sure what's to be gained from lining up on two sides to say "There's one kind of thing!" or "There's two!!" More interesting is what you can do with such a claim. Naturalism is pretty straightforward as a working assumption, rather than a dogma; you know how to proceed, what sorts of things to look for, how to design experiments, how to craft a research program. I'm not clear what the other side offers except a defense of people's common pre-scientific beliefs. — Srap Tasmaner

(@Isaac likes it when I quote myself.)

It feels like a pragmatist take on language ought to fit better with science-engendering prejudices (or metaphysical assumptions) than with science-blocking ones, but it's beyond me at the moment.

Cool. I don't anything about that stuff.

Honestly, I'm probably over-fitting by suggesting it was even a communication-related selection.

I've often found the gestural origin of language somewhat appealing because speech production is still gestural once it moves from hands to lips and tongue and vocal cords. Anything that gave us fine motor control might have jump-started the ability to make more variegated and precise sounds, so that could be part of the story.

Not the whole story though. Speech production is complicated, and I've always heard that children understand far more speech than they can produce, so it doesn't make sense here either to give people an ability they just layer language on top of.

For a quick illustration. Grice tells the story of a guy that some college at Oxford wanted to offer a fellowship, but he had a dog, and the rules forbade dogs, so the fellowship committee "deemed" his dog a cat.

Grice only comments that our use of language may involve quite a bit of deeming.

(And he himself proposed a theory based on infinitely deep chains of intensions and recognitions -- you recognize that I intend that you recognize that I intend that... And he admits that can't ever really be completed; hence you'll have to "deem" some level complete. In a very similar way, David Lewis concludes that probably no one ever really quite speaks a Tarski-style language, so he works a bit at how they might count an approximation or an equivalence class as success.)

One thing that's really tricky about the question of realism in language is that it's not just a question of theory; even if our best theory says that language does not map onto the world, the idea that it does is part of our practice. What looks like it could be a misconception, or an unreachable, unreached, or even un-aimed-for goal, is operative within our use of language, plays some kind of role.

Language is a crowbar, a smokescreen, a mirror, all kinds of things. — plaque flag

Another way I've looked at that is that we use language in place of the grunts and calls and mating dances and dominance rituals and grooming and all that other communication non-linguistic animals engage in just because, well, we've got language and it's usable for that. Which is to say we engage in what amounts to non-linguistic use of language, and that muddies the waters if you're trying to figure out whether language is different and how.

But maybe language is just animal communication only moreso. Animal communication with better tech (recursive syntax and all that). It's of course true that people write sonnets to get laid -- or claim the mantle of "truth" to control others -- but you won't see anything else if you don't look for anything else. I used to say it's an accident that in slightly upgrading our capacity for communication, evolution selected for something that was far more powerful than we could possibly have needed -- and here we are, a globe-spanning civilization. Evolution aimed for better chitchat and gave us language, and we're still trying to understand what happened.

The acquisition of capability for learning linguistically is secondary to learning from interactions with the world. — wonderer1

But (1) language production and consumption is interaction with the world, social interaction, and (2) one of the things I wanted to get at -- and in a way, try to push back on the "map" metaphor -- is that it's not like children first acquire a complete conception of the world and then "paint" language onto it -- they have to do it all at once.

It seems obvious that a lot of basic learning mechanisms are common to us and our non-human relatives, but it's also apparent there are mechanisms specific to acquiring language, and it's a question whether some of the basic mechanisms are a bit different since they're part of a system that is also acquiring language. Is there an additional constraint on at least some of the concepts we form that they must be, so to speak, language-able?

a pragmatic understanding of language, which doesn't address the question of realism — Tom Storm

That was the idea, yes, but I'm not sure it excludes what we want out of realism. This is precisely a question about the cognitive capacities and behavior of language-users. One reason to focus on learning when faced with such an issue is to "catch it in the act." Children are the ones who have to manage this mapping somehow; if it's a real thing (heh) then they're the ones who have to connect "ball" in their mouth to ball in their hand.

Put another way, if you're going to see it anywhere, you'll see it there, so look at the research on language learning and if that's not what it looks like, then this mapping is a myth.

I can give a small example of what I have in mind -- I think I'm remembering this from Rosch's prototype theory of concept acquisition. If you imagine a bunch of concepts arranged along a scale of abstractness, something like cocker spaniel-dog-mammal, then children tend to come into that scale in the middle, learning dog before the more specific or the more general.

Now we can ask how this partial language maps onto a partial world. Dog applies to every breed, and adults are fine with that. But what about in the other direction? Indeed children will over-generalize their use of a concept while they lack the more general term, so, if dog is the first mammal concept they acquire, or the first four-legged mammal, they'll apply it as if it were what we use mammal for: cows are "doggies", cats are "doggies", and so on. (In Monsters, Inc Boo calls Sully "kitty" -- those guys at Pixar are smart.)

Realism finds its clearest expression in the model-theoretic description of language, where you have a complete, closed set of symbols and a complete, closed set of objects, and they are matched up to each other according to some scheme. (It might be more precise to talk about systems of differences among symbols and among objects.) But to talk about natural languages, you have to allow the collection of symbols to grow, and allow the collections of objects that satisfy those symbols to shift, because the satisfaction scheme shifts, most dramatically when the collection of symbols is still small, but growing rapidly, as it is with children.

This is just one approach I remember a bit of, and only a tiny start on confronting the issue of realism using this research. What do we say about the child seeing a field full of cows and excitedly announcing "doggie!" or "doggies!"? One thing is clear, that the child would not have been "trained" to say this, because that's not what adults say, so an account that passes by issues of categorization is missing something. Is it plausible to focus only on categorizing the communicative situation, and describe the child as thinking, this is an appropriate occasion for uttering "doggie"? There's still over-generalization, but it's different. --- And what happens when the child does acquire cow but still doesn't have mammal? Does that mean cows are, to them, a kind a of dog?

One thing is clear from trying to write about this: hard as it is, it's easier to talk about a partial language than a partial world, but I think we have to find a way to get at the latter as well. If you don't know anything about chess and watch a game, you see everything the players do, under one scheme of description, but I really want to say that "black's king is in check" is not a possible fact for that observer -- neither true nor false if you must -- and you could describe this as not being able to categorize positions by whether black's king is in check. We might say the observer's world is not partial in the sense that it has less stuff in it, but that it makes slightly less sense. But it's also true that the observer cannot see check, and so there is something in the world of the players that is not part of the observer's world. (I think James somewhere gives an example of a dog, seeing perfectly the interactions among humans but attaching necessarily different meaning to it.)

So there's some stuff about realism.

Yeah, that's not bad. I've figured out what philosophy really is dozens of times, but I'm starting to think you can just not do that.

Just realized there's another way to put this: just as DNA is in some sense instructions for physical growth, I'm using "framework" to mean something like instructions for mental growth, what I was reaching for with the word "learning".

@Janus quoted Bateson the other day, from Mind and Nature, and in that book he talks about his little "how to tell this thing was once alive" test and it comes down to growth, living things have to have grown into the shape they have. So it is with an individual mind, a community, a culture, all things that grow and learn and adapt.