His response was. — Vera Mont

I see. So the idea is that D2 reacted in this way to tell Scruffy that he was getting worked up over nothing. Interesting. (And his nonchalance might have been a deliberate reminder that he's no pushover.)

small isolated societies — PhilosophyRunner

This is an interesting point.

I want to just agree, because I think it's clear that there are things that change once society reaches a scale where you interact everyday with strangers, rather than kin and nearly kin you've known your entire life. We probably need to talk about that, the institutions we rely on to guarantee trustworthiness and so on.

There's something else I wanted to say, but I think it might rely on what amounts to a myth that traditional societies as not only homogeneous but static. My thought was that homogeneity could also cut the other way because members of such a society would have so little experience of divergent views -- disagreeing with how something is done might be unimaginable or if broached then something like a sign of madness. On the other hand, we're used to it. People in modern societies can all name a dozen religions -- bedrock stuff for a great many people, and we're casually aware that there's variation. We know about different political views, differing tastes in food and fashion and art and sport, in lifestyle, in everything. We're in some ways old hands at something small homogeneous communities would find at least puzzling if not shocking.

---- But that just might not be true. It sounds plausible, but I don't really know anything about how traditional communities deal with relatively serious divergence. (Only thing that comes to mind is a story from some French ethnographer of a small tribe in which sometimes there might be a man who did not find the hunting lifestyle of the men suited him, and the other men agreed so he would be left with the women, who didn't particularly want his help with their tasks, so he would make pots and baskets as they did, but his work being unnecessary, could spend time creating new designs and patterns for them. So there you go, gay men invented art here by being 'extra'.)

The young of the more sophisticated species are taught by their mother the rudiments of expected behaviour, and the social ones have their education enhanced by other members of the pack, flock or troop. — Vera Mont

Right, there's certainly training of some kind in something, but it's hard to pin down the details. There may be some convention in there. Maybe it doesn't matter, but convention looked like an easy point of attack for misunderstanding, in theory anyway: if other animals communicate without conventions and never misunderstand each other, that might suggest that reliance on convention is necessary to misunderstanding, and that would give us a way in. Since it's so hard to tell, we'll just have to do without.

Thou hast zinged me. — fdrake

But I did so knowing there would be a perfectly cogent explanation for why the more flexible locution was preferable.

I'll get back to you on the other stuff.

I've really been going hard on the Sellars huh. — fdrake

I kinda like the way he writes, torturous as it is. (There's at least one long audio-only lecture on YouTube, and it helps to hear his prosody. He tends, as I do, to overdo it with the parenthetical constructions.)

On the other hand, there might be no harm in replacing

the semantic resources of folk vocabularies — fdrake

with something like

words

YMMV

I suspect it does not happen. And I suspect vervet monkeys never mistakenly make the wrong warning call, i.e. misspeak. (On a related note, I believe they only call out "snake" is they believe there are other monkeys nearby to warn; it would also be nice to know if they ever mistakenly call or keep silent, but that's a side issue.) But there's no point in guessing and the world is a surprising place.

But your interpretation of Scruffy works for my purposes of misunderstanding one another: D2 was not challenging Scruffy, Scruffy interpreted it as a challenge and issued their own challenge, D2 shuffled off.

I'm not sure this is exactly right, though -- but I'd say that because my thought has more to do with symbolic meaning than communication: the meaning which signs have. — Moliere

I didn't say this before, but you could reasonably restrict the word "misunderstanding" to misinterpretation of intentional communicative behavior. If I didn't say a word to you, how could you have misunderstood me? But you can always interpret my behavior, whether I intend you to interpret it or not.

What I was asking @Vera Mont about was really this restricted sense. Conventional (what Grice calls "non-natural") meaning leaves an opening to attach the wrong meaning to an utterance; it's just not clear to me how this works with other animals, whether a vervet monkey might think you meant "snake" when you meant "leopard" or whatever. We know for a fact with humans that the particular sign is arbitrary because there are multiple human languages. Not clear to me whether there's anything conventional about signaling systems among other animals or not. I just don't know. It would be interesting if there were cases of a non-human misinterpreting a signal, or if there were never such cases.

If Scruffy happens by just then, he takes this as an affront to his status; it could be a challenge. He doesn't just shove his larger head into the bowl, forcing the other one aside, as the outside cats assert seniority; he makes an issue of it. He huffs, flattens his ears and utters that low throaty mwaaa sound. — Vera Mont

Right, so this is tricky for the thread. It's Scruffy who makes a communicative display and vocalization, which is correctly understood by D2, who backs off. D2 was not attempting to communicate anything to Scruffy by his behavior, he was just eating. But Scruffy seems to have taken this behavior as potentially a challenge, so he responded accordingly, and we want to say here that Scruffy has made an incorrect inference about D2's intentions, or at least had has taken action to determine whether it was a challenge. (And it makes sense that Scruffy's repertoire would include a range of behaviors that starts at maybe-a-threat.)

Back to the topic: this might or might not be what @Moliere is interested in. D2 did not engage in a misunderstood communicative behavior, but may nevertheless have been misinterpreted. (That's word's a little tendentious, but who cares.) Now if we say that the reason we (a big enough "we" to include cats) interpret each other's utterances is to divine each other's intentions, same as with other behaviors, since utterance is verbal behavior, then what Scruffy did is what we're interested in, since it's where verbal interpretation ends up.*

But there may still be a problem, because D2's behavior, unlike speech, and unlike Scruffy's display and vocalization, was not intended to be communicative. That would seem to put this event outside @Moliere's theme. Unless we want to say something deflationary about communicative intentions, which we certainly could.


* There are alternatives: we can insist that there's a difference between understanding what you mean and understanding what you intend, which is fine. But we could also say that even if the whole point of verbal interpretation is divining your intentions (aka "mind-reading") -- "point" being shorthand for why we have such a skill -- it is still an ability I now have and can apply for other purposes, like just trying to understand you even if I don't care about predicting your actions, or placing your verbal behavior in some wider context. All arguable in different ways.

Functionalist approaches here work like an acid, annihilating salient distinctions as well as irrelevant ones — fdrake

I accused @Isaac of almost exactly this a long time ago, of more or less ignoring the truth-value of an individual's statements and treating them simply as, shall we say, "responses," such as a social psychologist might elicit when doing research. The interesting thing about responses (mostly, not entirely) is not whether they're "true" but what buckets we can classify them into, how they correlate with other observables, etc.

But the other part of @Isaac's approach is some version of pragmatism, so "truth" was already off the table. People say what they say because it works for them, for whatever definition of 'works,' probably dependent on context. And obviously functional accounts are designed to answer the question, works at what? So not only does pragmatism create an opening for functionalist explanations, it invites them. Some people are going to think they're pushing back on the functionalism, when they're really pushing back on the pragmatism; that's clear enough in this thread, where it's natural to take identity claims as having a truth-value, and some will even insist that they do.

All of which is to say that in part this discussion struggles with anti-realism of the sort Dummett described. If I believe there's no fact of the matter about someone's gender, what I say might strike you as ignoring a crucial question of truth, namely the proper extension of a predicate.

What you describe as eating through all distinctions captures that anti-realism, but it's not the functionalism it's the pragmatism, and it's only all distinctions if pragmatism amounts to a super-mega-ultra functionalism, which it kinda does. But there are stopping points along the way, and that's obvious in the sort of functionalism you find in anthropology and linguistics. There are structures that are relatively fixed because the behavior analysed is said to play a role advancing a goal, which is also treated as relatively fixed. (Communication, social cohesion, etc.) You can always take one more step on the pragmatist highway and ask what purpose those goals serve, and eventually, but maybe very eventually, you'll land at homeostasis (if you're Damasio) or surprise minimization (if you're Friston) or maybe apo's thing.

That's my understanding, and that's another post not really advancing a position. I will try to come back to this later. I do want more biology and less culture than @Isaac, I think, which won't endear me to anyone.

(Btw, have you looked much at Sellars's inferential semantics? All I remember is that he starts with an explicitly functional account, "English •red•s are German •Rot•s" and so on. I never got very far in those papers. And I don't do Brandom, because I'm not that cool.)

I know it happens, from domestic interactions I've observed — Vera Mont

Could you give an example?

Have you come across anything in your reading to suggest that other animals sometimes misunderstand each other?

So the problem of meaning, in scope, is the problem of misunderstanding. We frequently understand one another, and frequently don't, and the latter has become more apparent over time -- or perhaps we have actually lost some ability to understand one another too. — Moliere

It would probably help if you gave a worked example. Show us an exchange that you would characterize as people misunderstanding each other, and why you would call it misunderstanding rather than something else.

In passing, I'll note that people often feel the impulse to reduce misunderstanding to (unrecognized or unacknowledged) disagreement, and disagreement to (unrecognized or unacknowledged) misunderstanding. There might be a problem with that.

I wish you fucking foreigners would leave the US politics to we Americans. — T Clark

Wrong.

The sons of bitches should leave the US politics to us Americans. — BC

Right.

"Americans" is an appositive, identifying "us." In a sense this means "Americans" and "us" are 'co-objects' of the verb, or you can you think of the appositive as elliptical for a relative clause, whatever. It's a very compressed form. Under no circumstances can "we" function as an adjective, even if "Americans" were the sole object of the preposition.*

Another rhetorical option in a case like this is repeating the preposition:

You should leave US politics to us, to Americans.

And it's obvious now that you can reverse the order, to change the emphasis.

Or you could elaborate the appositive to be another clause, going either way:

You should leave US politics to us, because we're actually Americans.

You should leave US politics to Americans, and that means us.

Etc.

@BC you were right the first time.

* Almost no circumstances, because English.

The world that encompasses this flesh is at the same time always strangely given through this same flesh. — plaque flag

Damasio emphasizes that a brain's first task is keeping the body it's in in the homeostatic happy zone. The brain only models the world in order to better maintain the body it's responsible for.

Methodological solipsism even looks to be the proper approach if applied at the level of the species. — plaque flag

I think this is right. There's an argument people make that because humans and bees perceive flowers differently, every human being lives in their own private Idaho.

I think we have to accept both that what we experience as the 'external world' is a construction, and that we know this precisely because we do know something about how this construction is done.

Hume figured this out, and noted that he lacks the power not to believe in the persistence of objects, and concluded that there are things Nature deemed too important to leave to our frail reason.

The modern philosophers gave themselves a task not entertained by the ancients, to master nature. Philosophy was no longer about the problem of how to live but to solve problems by changing the conditions of life. — Fooloso4

Perhaps true, but it's not like no one built houses or roads or engaged in agriculture until Bacon. Man had been changing the conditions of life for millennia by the 16th century.

Thanks. It's nice to get a report from the field.

Interesting that you highlight the idea of introducing a bit more organization or discipline into people's thoughts and discussions. Obviously value in that, and it's value people associate with philosophy, so that's something.

I think there's something there. Much of scientific practice is analytic, in the sense that the aim is to find a way to isolate one factor from among the great many that go into producing any phenomenon we might be interested in. This is very difficult. I was surprised to find, when watching an episode of Nova, that once you've carefully gathered your samples it can be like another year before you get the results of carbon-dating. Every step is work.

So that's one thing. The enormous time and energy put into getting answers to questions made as specific as they can be, or as they need to be, whichever is achievable.

I think the main features of science as an enterprise are that it is communal and self-correcting. I don't know if that fits exactly in the traditional "method" box, but it's the crucial add-on to the carefulness above: for all the work dozens of people put in, they might miss something, so no one believes that there is any process available that marks your results as The Truth. They're just results, and the better the process the more weight they'll carry, but mistakes at either the level of practice or of theory are just expected.

Thus passeth away the relevance of philosophy.

if the becoming has no end then there can be no ultimate convergence — Leontiskos

How did the word "ultimate" get in there? There are obviously infinite sequences and series that converge without ever reaching what they converge on.

Some envision progress as the movement toward universal agreement. — Fooloso4

It's hard not to think of Peirce, asymptotic approach to 'truth' and all that, but even if you do conceive a project as aiming for universal agreement, that doesn't mean you expect to get there.

We're talking about the thesis that philosophy has a determinate pull (link). Saying, "There will always be points of divergence and points of convergence [among philosophers]" doesn't seem to help us in addressing that thesis. — Leontiskos

Sure it does. If the direction is determined statistically, we're just talking about evolution, which may not have a telos but does have at least local directionality.

the input of a professional ethicist I found to be valuable — LuckyR

This was, relatively speaking, an outsider to your field?

I'd heard that "ethicist" is a profession now. Was their expertise helpful? Can you describe that for us a little?

We haven't outgrown yet religion, politics or science, all of which require critical analyses and reflective interpretations. — 180 Proof

I think there's maybe a default tech-worshipping pragmatism where a philosophy 'should' be but never actually was. — plaque flag

I thought about this idea of philosophy as critique, but why should practices be incapable of self-critique. After all, that's what we would require of philosophy. I'm not saying it would be the norm. I understand something of institutional dynamics. But I think there's something presumptuous about philosophers, who lack the expertise and knowledge, however flawed and limited, of a field's practitioners, swooping in to pass judgment on their work. Better to cultivate the practice of critique among the producers of knowledge.

I think for a lot of people encountering philosophy might be transformative, might spur a sort of reflection they had never engaged in before, but I don't think philosophy has a monopoly on that. It wasn't transformative for me, but more like finding my tribe, where my peculiar bent was more or less normal.

I think science is most of what philosophy was trying to be for most of its history, so the emergence of modern science is almost like the maturation of philosophy, its fulfillment. In a world with actual physics and cosmology, psychology and neuroscience, sociology and anthropology and linguistics, what philosophy has to offer on the nature of reality or thought or human social life is, shall we say, quaint.

The bits of philosophy likely really to engage people still, I'd guess, are ethics and political philosophy, but that's because people already love arguing about what's right and wrong, and philosophy just provides opportunities to do that. We have a great body of writing about ethics and politics, but whether there's any knowledge there is hard to say.

For all that, there is something a bit magical about Plato, something that isn't trying to become science. I don't quite know what it is, and I don't think the history of philosophy since Plato gives much of a clue either, but maybe there was something worthwhile besides embryonic science in there all along.

If it's not empirical, and it's not mathematics, it's irrelevant.

Maybe that leaves room for something we could still call philosophy, I don't know.

If there is, at least in principle, a way to tie values back to something outside the individual, — Count Timothy von Icarus

That might be reinventing the wheel, if language is outside the individual in some sense, even if it's not outside all individuals in the aggregate, outside at least in the sense of being explicitly a technology of cooperation. And then there's @Isaac's narratives, which serve multiple purposes as language does.

then that provides a framework — Count Timothy von Icarus

This might be a mistake, looking for a framework. It could be we have many sorts of conversations and they have different sources and structures. I care about my kids and I care about democracy -- is that the same thing just because "care" is in both descriptions? Do we talk about these the same way?

understanding how value claims gets communicated without an infinite loop of translating mental state to mental state — Count Timothy von Icarus

Same problem we have everywhere, and I don't know how to solve it. is a persuasive statement of the view, and much as I'd like to, I don't know how to get around it, and I'm not willing just to reject it by fiat.

When I come up with a solution, the forum will be the first to know.

Our sense of values did have to emerge out of something after all. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, and I don't see a better candidate for rock bottom than biology. I think everything goes back to being a living organism, first of all, and being whatever sorts of living organisms we are, which is to start with whatever we were crafted to be by evolution.

I've had some sympathy for the sort of emotive account you can get from Hume and Smith. (The moral sentiments.) I see all sorts of material to work with in the theory of cooperation, from Axelrod to Grice, which I think we can also assume has a biological basis.

My gut instinct (heh) is that we are not that different from the first Homo sapiens, and that our biology is much closer to the surface than we realize.

I don't think social norms work for this because they are too malleable, we need a more general principle that stands behind social norms, hence looking to how animals view fairness. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Obviously I think this is exactly the right approach.

I would put forward that the problem is not a misunderstanding of the word, rather that the word is being used as a short form for more than just itself. Simple elaboration clarifies the misunderstanding. — PhilosophyRunner

Is this assuming nominalism? That there is no "justice," or "good," that people can point to that extends outside the frame of "my desires and preferences?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't think that's what he meant. I think @PhilosophyRunner meant that often when people talk they assume that their words will be interpreted as they interpret them, from their point of view, with all of their assumptions. Sometimes people recognize the need to spell out those assumptions, but often they don't. Philosophy is obsessive about spelling out assumptions -- witness you here bringing up nominalism -- but ordinarily people aren't, hence @PhilosophyRunner's suggestion that understanding can be improved by what he calls "elaboration," which I take to mean people spelling out their assumptions, their point-of-view. That's all.

Of course, your examples suggest, @PhilosophyRunner, that people agree less than they appear to, that for instance people who all say they want "justice" might have in mind very different things, but there may be examples that go the other way, where people don't realize they want the same thing because they use different words for it.

No matter how much a community of agents might appear to agree (or disagree) that "such and such is true of "the" real world", as far as linguistic designation is concerned they are merely talking past one another and gesticulating towards different and unsharable private worlds corresponding to their individuated mental processes. — sime

You said, "in AI", but this is supposed to apply to the psychology of animals as well, right?

You talk about your model and I talk about my model, but we're never actually talking about the same things.

as far as linguistic designation is concerned — sime

Can you explain why this qualifier? Is there some other way in which agents do share a world?

?

I know this is a thread about the war in Ukraine, but I was addressing the general question about how countries in the US sphere of influence develop.

You're suggesting that the US's net influence is to make other countries better than it can even manage of itself? Is the theory that it nobly sacrifices it's own people's freedoms to help improve those under it's sheltering wing? — Isaac

Well no, but something like what's in the first sentence wouldn't surprise me honestly. The US has a lot of problems but a biggie is the legacy of chattel slavery. If we provide aid and support to country not burdened by such a history, they might very well do better than we do.

Plus, there's that whole "do as I say not as I do" effect. I'm just saying a result like this might not be that ludicrous.

I wondered how we would be able to talk about the 'behavior' of things like signposts, and I'm sure we could come up with something, but it could also be that we inevitably face problems with artifacts like this.

I'm reminded of a very clever check fraud scheme I heard about once. Guy had gotten hold of the magnetic ink that's used to print routing and account numbers on checks so they can be read by a machine. He made some fake checks that had one bank's routing number encoded but another bank's name actually printed in English on the checks. When these checks went to the merchant's bank, they would sort them first through the machine and the ones that kicked out would then be sorted by the bank they went to. Then a loop would start, where one bank's machine would reject an account number and it would land on the trouble desk, someone would glance at the bank name on the check and say, oh that's not us, then send it to the other bank, whose machine would say, wrong bank, and then it would go right back. These checks would loop back and forth for months until some human finally noticed.

It is a terrible mistake to think that every trait possessed by all individuals in a population must be there because it is or was beneficial. — GrahamJ

Oh absolutely! Sexual selection is certainly real, generic drift, isolation, lots of factors I don't know about, all of which is why I always try to keep the focus on reproduction rather than adaptation.

There is in principle no difficulty answering Srap Tasmaner's argument in relation to 'procreative genes'. If cultural transmission made them only mildly advantageous, they could go the same way as the vitamin C enzyme.

I do not think this has happened. I do not think cultural transmission is reliable or powerful enough to explain what we see — GrahamJ

This is very much what I was trying to argue, that genes that drove procreative behavior would be very unlikely to get replaced by culture alone, and that natural selection would unquestionably have favored such genes in our ancestors. The evidence for their existence is only the ubiquity of reproduce behavior, I guess, since I just don't know if there's research.

So I'm not seeing how honesty is serving the purpose you've assigned it (making communication functional). If I ask you where the train station is, I'm far less interested in your honesty than I am in where the actual train station actually is. I want you to be right, not honest. — Isaac

(Btw, there's a game-theory based argument for truthfulness and trust in David Lewis's Convention, the details of which are not leaping to mind.)

It's an interesting question. Obviously in the short term sense, misinformation and disinformation will have the same effect, and the cause of the inaccuracy is irrelevant, assuming you rely on the 'information' to the same extent.

Over the longer term, you're of course also assessing the quality and reliability of the source. I think we do distinguish between sources that are untrustworthy because they're regularly mistaken and sources that are regularly deceitful. The question would be, how do we that and why is it worth the trouble?

One thing that comes to mind is that you get very different results for predicting the source's behavior: mistaken guy can be expected to act on his mistaken belief, but deceitful guy we would expect to act on his genuine belief. Hence "actions speak louder than words" is the corrective heuristic for "talk is cheap."

Cool.

I'd responded to the "creek" vs "crick" for small stream as a functional difference analogy you made — fdrake

Right, "stream" and "creek" are different words that denote the same things, meaning -- at least in this case, maybe not in all cases -- they also have the same function within people's regional dialects. That function relates regularities in the physical environment to regularities in speech behavior. It's not that functionalism ends up having no role here, because it's functionalism that identifies the equivalence of "stream" and "creek," so functionalism can answer the question "Why do say 'creek'?" but it can't answer the question "Why do you say 'creek' instead of 'stream'?"

Your first point was that gender might not be an observable regularity like a creek, so an object like 'man' might be in part determined by whether people say 'man' of it, and so on, practices, comportment towards, blah blah blah. This would speak to @Isaac's constructivist tendencies, 'man' as off the shelf narrative for making sense of things.

I have deep reservations about that account because there are extremely salient observable differences between people because humans reproduce sexually and always have, just like our ancestors who lacked speech and culture. I think it likely we make almost exactly the same sort of intuitive inferences about the sex of members of our species as other mammals do. The question would be whether those intuitive inferences play a major role in our speech and culture or have they long since been swamped by other factors. Unclear to me, but even infants seem to distinguish male and female early, so I'd count that as evidence the machinery I'd expect to be there is there.

But we're not nearly done with functionalism, because one key question is whether everyone saying "I'm a boy" is even doing the same kind of thing. Such a claim could be overwhelmingly down to the sex-determining mechanism evolution bequeathed you, or it could serve a psychological or a social role. Or all of the above. But even before trying to figure that out -- which looks daunting -- we have to think carefully about where the functional account takes hold and where it doesn't. That is -- and now we're coming back to creeks and streams -- there might be a nice functional account of why you say "I'm a boy" but not of why you say "I'm a boy" instead of "I'm a girl," because that might be just a matter of personal history, like saying "girl" instead of "femme" or "Fraulein", or like saying "creek" instead of "stream".

Sorry that's a lot of words that don't advance any particular claim or the discussion. Just really clarifying for myself as much as anything where I think the discussion stands.

But I do point out that that option that we do have, that you outline, is a moral imperative arising from the social nature of language, that it is shared. — unenlightened

We're on the same page here. Humans have always lived in cooperative groups, and language is a cooperative enterprise in furtherance of other sorts of cooperation. Dishonesty violates the social contract, more or less -- except when being a little dishonest upholds it. Someone like Trump thumbs his nose at the idea he is under any sort of social obligation, and that extends to his use of language. But that potential is built in: one of the selling points of language is that utterance is, for the individual, inexpensive, but that also means that talk is cheap.

Upholding the cooperative use of language is upholding the cooperative basis for society per se. If you want to describe that as an obligation to mostly "tell the truth," I won't complain. The way we talk about truth serves our social needs, but I think it's a mistake to construct a theory out of that talk.

Cultural change couldn't stop Tinky Winky from being purple, but they could turn Tinky Qinky into a queer symbol. — fdrake

I don't actually get the point here. Tinky Winky wearing a frilly tutu can arbitrarily be a queer symbol, or can be one by aligning with our hyper-local conditions, but there's no reason to think this symbolism has any essential connection to queerness beyond that, is there? So in time pointing to Tinky Winky as a queer symbol will seem distinctly peculiar. You'll have to explain when and where and why they were taken as such.

Are you making a comparison between this sort of opportunistic symbolism and a person's gender identity? I don't want to guess.

What type of intuitions are you talking about Srap Tasmaner? — fdrake

Let's say, the conscious output of unconscious processes of inference (often performed by mental modules that are domain specific). Meant really as a replacement for "belief" which has all the wrong connotations.

And you can test for them. You can do research. The part I'm iffiest on is whether they must be conscious, because I don't see why, but that's just the problem of consciousness, and it seems like they often are. Maybe that's just because in doing research you elicit self reports.

That's a great example, thanks — fdrake

Thank goodness. I wasn't sure at first why that occurred to me.

The act of treating something as manly, womanly etc informs what it means to be a man or a woman. — fdrake

Does it? I mean, you say this, and it fits the usual way we talk about socially constructed whatever, but it's exactly what people are fighting over. The claim is exactly that your treating me as a woman or as a man doesn't make me one, anymore than treating slaves inhumanly made them inhuman. (How's that for a pointed comparison?)

This is exactly the sort of thing that made me wary of picking a level or a style and then crafting an explanation for that framework. You will always be able to do that, but the evidence that doesn't fit might be on another level. I think.

I thought you were addressing an arbitrary functionalist, rather than specifically Isaac. — fdrake

You might be right. (I wanted to make sure you didn't think it was you, and that it was clear I wasn't saying it but mentioning it.)

My reference point here is the manifest and scientific image concept in Sellars. — fdrake

Yeah I noticed you'd been in that recently.

If we end up saying the social categories don't mean anything, what question are we asking again? — fdrake

There's still behavior to be accounted for, including verbal behavior. One of the key linguistic markers for what region of the US you grew up in is whether you say "stream" or "creek" or "crick" (possibly also "kill" though I think that's preserved more in names than speech). There might be others I'm forgetting. Point being, there's no distinction at all among these, each is a Nash equilibrium, but they do indicate something about your personal history (statistically). On one level, they're equivalent; on another, a key distinction. Denying that they denote distinct types of small river doesn't change the differences in usage patterns.

I'll try to give another answer to this later.

Your sense of your gender, or your identity more broadly, comes to you as an intuition. Seems obvious to me.
— Srap Tasmaner

I think as a "manifest imagey" conception this makes a lot of sense. — fdrake

Dang. It was meant to be scientific.

we could all agree that the sole criterion for being a man, in this sense, is an honest report that one is — fdrake

Ah, now that's a whole different thing. I'm not sure the sort of intuitions I'm talking about could bear that kind of weight, and I wasn't anywhere near proposing that they should.

What's the difference between psychological, physical and social explanatory styles? — fdrake

Hmmm. You left out philosophical. Maybe I'm just excessively interested in psychology at the moment but I don't really want to make this kind of distinction. I think talking about behavior, human or otherwise, requires moving relatively freely up and down these levels. Maybe it's just that I've also recently sworn off boundary policing. Maybe it's that I think finding the right explanation means finding the right level at which to give an explanation.

If we go the other way and climb from "bottom up", all of the social categories we were trying to "climb toward" would dissolve since they're not derivable from, or identical with, their neural-dynamical conditions of actuation. — fdrake

I get that. It's like Fodor's argument for the ineliminability of the 'special sciences'. (You can't just absorb meteorology into physics.)

On the other hand, my first commitment for 'what we're climbing toward' is "saving the appearances," so I want the bottom-up theory to explain why we hold the usual view, but I don't know that we need to preserve its categories and explanations. It's crucial to Fodor's argument that meteorology is an actual science. That it can't be reduced to physics is not at all the same as saying that pre-scientific ideas about weather and climate would need to be reconstructed for physics to be a threat to them. If those categories are inadequate, we can pass right by.

I'm okay saying that because my interest is almost entirely 'scientific' rather than political, so that's a limitation to my approach.

Your functionalism is just unwelcome.
— Srap Tasmaner

Yeah! — fdrake

Was it clear that the "you" there is @Isaac? (And also that I was again speaking in another voice.) Just checking.

gender is a performance — fdrake

I do still think we end up there, and maybe I like the word "performance" here because once we're this far along even I will have given up disentangling the cultural and the biological.

On the other hand, I'm pretty strongly committed to what I came up with after this, which is that identity, and so gender identity, seems obviously about intuitions. It has all the earmarks. You just know the answer when asked, even if you have trouble explaining it, you might not think about it much otherwise, sometimes the words for expressing it strike you as inadequate, there's confusion about whether you should even have to defend it with reasons, on and on. It's textbook. Your sense of your gender, or your identity more broadly, comes to you as an intuition. Seems obvious to me.

But that doesn't tell you much about where that intuition comes from. Your intuitions about how language works might be innate, but your intuitions about your native language are learned through socialization. We can have socially formed intuitions, and those will be realized in biology, but that doesn't make them biological meaning "innate". So the source and purpose of identity intuitions -- open question for me. @Moliere tells me the self is entirely social (I think), and for the record that strikes me as nuts. As nuts as thinking our ideas about sexuality are entirely cultural. But I don't have a theory to offer about our identity intuitions, and if I did have one it wouldn't be worth much. That's a research program, far as I'm concerned.

@fdrake

One thing on my mind is that both the hypothetical explanatory accusations I was considering are functionalist: one points to sociological function, one to psychological.

Functionalist explanations of speech behavior are going to be inherently unsatisfying to some people because they appear to ignore the content, or at the very least to ignore the truth-value of the content. (We had that discussion a long time ago too.)

The other thing is that functionalist explanations are most convincing when there's no competition (why on earth do they do that?) or when existing explanations have a serious flaw. (My example for the latter is Mercier and Sperber's explanation for why reason appears to have defects, the answer being that it doesn't if you recognize what it's actually for.)

And I think some of us see a prima facie case against the currently offered explanations for why someone with the anatomy of one sex would claim to be of the other sex. Some might see no need of an explanation at all, but it needn't be a political issue just, you know, the spirit of inquiry. The explanations on offer seem to depend on (a) ideas about identity or (b) ideas about language. Your objections to (a) and (b) are what provide the opening for a functionalist explanation. But not everyone accepts those objections, so to them you're just offering a competing theory, but on ground functionalism does not find congenial. Your functionalism is just unwelcome.

snarled sentence — BC

It's a lovely sentence.

"I'm not here because I'm awaiting a sentence, I'm here because (something to the effect that I'm minimising some neurological loss function defined over my body states)" - and it would be true. — fdrake

Right, right. I used to have this argument with @Isaac, the space of reasons vs the space of causes, that sort of thing. Driving a car isn't just moving your arms and legs in a certain way. Been there done that.

I do tend to stop at some level above surprise minimization, although I think it's fair to keep that in mind. Damasio gets a lot of mileage out of homeostasis. You can use that lowest level as a constraint: if your theory requires something where the cost would outweigh the biological value, it's a non-starter. (Okay, at species level. Individuals get up to all kinds of shit.)

I suppose I assume that to get anything that will look like an explanation to me -- of identity, for instance -- you have to move at least in the direction of biology, so down to the level of mental mechanisms that would produce intuitions about identity, say. But it also makes sense to move up, to take essentially a functionalist stance -- what social purpose could this behavior serve?

Best to do both, right? I worry that there's a little more room for bullshit moving up rather than down. But either way you almost immediately run into these unresolvable differences -- "You're only saying that because you're a lackey of Capital," "But you're only saying that because it makes you feel special and in-the-know." The first is probably an abuse of "because" and what it really means is that by saying that you *become* a lackey of Capital. The latter is too general and would account for any heterodox view I might hold, and so doesn't account for my Marxism.

I think there is a consistent pattern here. Cultural explanations tend to overdetermine individuals, biological to underdetermine them. It's another way to put the point you were making: the farther down you go, the greater the range of behavior accounted for, which is fine, unless you wanted an explanation of *this* behavior. If apo is right, I stop at this specific store, for milk, after work, in order to accelerate the heat death of the universe. That is not an answer to any of the everyday questions I might be asked. (Why *this* store? Why milk? Why after work?) But it is an answer to some question.

I need to work and think some more about the kind of explanations I want, but am I in the neighborhood of your concern here?