Sure, I mean, the history of ideas is really interesting. Love that stuff.

My question was not whether it's worthwhile in general, but how does talk about the history of ideas contribute to philosophical discussion? I mentioned a couple of the answers I'm somewhat familiar with. I could also have mentioned its central role in exegesis, evident in the reading threads we've had dealing with texts by Plato, Hume, Descartes -- texts far enough removed from us that you have to restore some context to understand them well. I've always been inclined to call that sort of thing "history of philosophy" rather than philosophy "proper" -- but I'm not wedded to that view.

It's an open question to me what the place of the history of ideas, and of the history of philosophy, should be in our discussions, and I expect people to give very different answers. My starting point was wondering what @Wayfarer's point was in telling @apokrisis what he did, as quoted above. What effect did he expect that paragraph to have on apo's views?

"But -- but -- isn't it true that there are true statements?!"

It can be hard to convince yourself -- hard even to see the possibility -- that the answer to that question does not matter.

Be clear. — Banno

I can be more specific, at least, and we'll see whether it's any clearer. This is the end of what I quoted:

The anti-realists failure to commit amounts to a failure to understand how language functions; "the ball" is the ball. — Banno

That's quite a dichotomy there, but the interesting bit is after the semicolon: what's the nature of that little "is" there?

"the ball" is the ball

My issue here is not the apparent use/mention violation. It's that "is" suggests there is a fact of the matter about what "the ball" refers to. You are, of course, extravagantly on record endorsing a Wittgensteinian "meaning is use" and everything Davidsonian, so you cannot possibly mean there is a fact of the matter about whether "the ball" is the ball.

Yet there it is, an emblem of the fundamental failing of anti-realists, that they don't understand such self-evident truths.

Honestly, I'm not interested in either of your options. The fact that you think there is a war between realism and anti-realism, and that one of them is true and the other false, well, that's just your realism working overtime, it's realism about realism, as if there is a fact of the matter about realism. This is exactly the structure of debate Dummett was trying to clarify, that realists tend to put anti-realists on their back foot by forcing them to give yes/no answers to questions that suit the realist but not the anti-realist. It's why @Isaac -- though he considers himself a kind of realist -- considers words like "real" and "true" useful mainly for bullying your opponents.

So a realist says the ball has a mass of 1kg; the anti-realist might say that saying that it has a mass of 1kg is useful, or fits their perceptions, but will not commit to its being true. The anti-realists failure to commit amounts to a failure to understand how language functions; "the ball" is the ball. — Banno

That is to say, realists take the context of claims for granted, and pretend there isn't one, while everyone else admits that truth is relative to exactly the sort of framework you deny exists. Even Tarski is pretty clear that truth is truth within a given (formal) language under a given interpretation -- never just truth straight-up. (And when model-theoretic semantics is extended as possible-world semantics, you also get 'true at w'.)

It's going to be the same issue for facts, observations, what-have-you. You can follow Quine and plump for holism -- and that means some whole "framework" of some kind, however you make that palatable -- or you can explain how this atomistic approach to truth is at all defensible.

Animals move around and plants don't move around, although they may be moved by wind, while remaining in the same places. — Janus

This is as a good a thing as any to quote because it's the opposite of something you seem to suggest now and then that bothers me a little, roughly that we "piece together" the world out of our various bits or sorts of experience.

I think the whole ought to have some priority -- even the blooming, buzzing confusion is a whole, within which we make distinctions and so forth.

My thinking is that when it comes to oysters, say, it's not a matter of acquiring the oyster concept by having the oyster experience, as if that could be perfectly sui generis and then you stick a name on it and add to a list of things that are part of the world. Rather I'm thinking that you'll experience oysters as like and unlike other things, in various ways, and make a place for them within the distinctions you already know, but also -- and this is the main point I want to get to -- modifying your total conception of the world by making room for oysters. To find out there is something on the taste gradient between fish and -- I don't know, doesn't matter -- crab or whatever, that alone might be a surprise and change your conception of what else oysters relate to in your experience, because now fish are also on the oysters gradient, and all the others that criss-cross there, texture and smell and look and origin and presentation and how they pair with beverages and which condiments are best and worst, all that foody crap.

So I want to say you're always remaking the whole world while you acquire new experiences that don't come to you in neat packages, just being exactly what they are, but experienced from the beginning as like and unlike things that already belong to your world. I think you're always working on the individual concept and the whole battery it belongs to, the system it's part of.

Obviously there should be similar dynamics with the accrual of facts rather than concepts, although the structures at issue will look more narrative.

On the great big other hand, how all this happens is clearly a matter for proper research, and there's been plenty of neat work done on concept acquisition, so my preference for a decidedly holistic take only counts for so much. Some of what it counts for might be that the piecemeal assembly of the world ought to turn out to be incoherent, and Sellars strolls around this territory sometimes, like a good Kantian. It's batteries and clusters and systems and hierarchies of concepts, never just one at a time, that we deal with, and so some of the back and forth here that treats the experience of oysters as this perfectly self-contained sui generis qualia-in-waiting strikes me as misguided. Unless I'm completely wrong.

Not, by the way, ascribing the view attacked here to you, but you've said a few things a little like that so I'm just highlighting the issue.

one neither passively absorbs, nor jointly negotiates the normative practices of that culture, but validates one's own construction of the world using the resources of that culture — Joshs

The cultural control we see is one which is within the person’s own construct system and it is imposed upon him only in the sense that it limits the kinds of evidence at his disposal. How he handles this evidence is his own affair, and persons manage it in a tremendous variety of ways. — Kelly

Didn't really respond to this. It's an interesting idea, but I'm not quite sure what "limits the kinds of evidence at his disposal" means. It sounds kinda like cultural determinism through the back door. Maybe it's just put a little too strongly here for my liking, but the focus on validation is itself interesting, since he's making the supposedly neutral pole of worldview construction (evidence, facts) the locus of something like cultural bias.

And in some sense that has to be right if you define a culture as what nobody contests, what everyone takes for granted -- that means, in effect, what counts as fact for that culture whether they conceptualize it that way or not. Interesting.

How does each individual respond to their culture inheritance? — Joshs

I think your characterization is pretty good. It's obviously just false that people are locked into the culture, religion, morality, language, they are born into.

I don't know much of anything about what mechanisms psychologists hypothesize for cultural uptake. What I mean is, we can count on evolution leaving in place dispositions that generate a more or less predictable world model given a particular environment -- can't quite say niche with us because we are very adaptable and there appears to have been considerable selection pressure for adaptability and even evolvability. We generate the models we do because we're designed to generate them given the right sort of input, roughly. Evolution has some ideas about what sort of environment an organism needs to thrive in.

So how does something like that carry over to culture? Are the mechanisms of cultural uptake a repurposing of our basic model-building gear? I really have no idea.

Even evolution seems to leave us with only something like very strong tendencies. It makes it easy (both efficient and effective) to build the usual thing because here are the tools you need and the instructions. And obviously culture's hold on us is considerably weaker, and our interaction with it considerably richer, the way we reshape and extend our partial inheritance as we go.

I'd also note here that 'sensorily' takes the sense organs existing in an environment for granted. What I call the constructive approach seems to want to take an interior as given and construct the exterior from this interior --but this conception of an interior seems to quietly depend on common sense. — plaque flag

Or at least dependent on how much of the science of organism-and-environment has become common knowledge. (Phenomenalism as a philosophical approach being subtly dependent on knowing that the eye registers 2D images, that sort of thing.)

One way constructivism is right but misrepresents itself is in presenting the individual as constructing the world all by themselves, kinda from scratch, the mind as a perfect little scientist. It's true, of course, that each individual organism needs to construct their own, in some sense 'private', model of the world (and themselves in it), because that's what brain development just is, but it's not true that each organism constructs the framework they will use to construct the world from scratch. There's an inheritance. A lot of 'choices' have already been made for you (by evolution, and on top of that by culture) so you build your own, sure, but not completely idiosyncratically -- and not incommensurably -- but using the same inheritance as everyone else, for the base level, and as everyone in your culture, your speech community, and so on, for others.

That gives a pretty clear way of allowing that the world is a construction -- because there are just so many ways in which it obviously is -- but accounting for agreement among people of the same species, the same culture, and so on.

Ontogeny gets to recapitulate phylogeny rapidly because what used to be endlessly branching little pathways are now high-speed rails. As Hume put it, there are questions Nature has deemed too important to leave to our own fallible and imperfect reason.

But the scientific search for 'what is the mind?' will always be bedevilled by the epistemic split between knower and known, because in the case of mind or consciousness, we are what we are seeking to understand - mind is never an object to us. And I say there's a profound problem of recursion or reflexivity in the endeavour to understand it objectively, given in the Advaitin aphorism, 'the eye cannot see itself, the hand cannot grasp itself.' — Wayfarer

This is a known problem for the individual, that when exercising a bias, say, you are not, and perhaps in some cases cannot be, aware of it. But other individuals can be aware of your biased perspective, as Browning memorably pointed out.

It's just not obvious that the issue arises for types rather than individuals, and it is only the type that science studies. We all feel the pull of recency bias, of color constancy, all those myriad quirks of the way our minds work, none of which stopped scientists from designing experiments to reveal these quirks. We know that we can essentially eliminate consciousness through the use of general anesthesia, without the entire human race having to fall unconscious to find that out.

I may not be able to treat my own mind solely as an object -- though I can surely take it also as an object -- but it's not obvious what the barrier is to me treating your mind as an object of my study, and since it is your mind, not mine, I can only take it solely as an object and never as subject. That object is the also the subject of your experience, so in studying your mind, I am studying your subjectivity, and thus studying subjectivity itself. Where's the problem?

I don't know the background of the guy you've quoted. — javra

Gregory Bateson

You reply as though I’m pushing you into buying something and you’re not yet prepared to buy it — javra

Sorry if it came across that way. I just don't understand, that's all.

So I’ll now ask you in turn for your own perspective — javra

Yikes. My views are in flux, even more than usual at the moment.

Do you find that the basic laws of thought are fixed for everyone today, yesterday, and tomorrow? — javra

As far as I can tell, this means the world has a logical structure, so any belief that violates the usual canons of logic cannot be true.

I'm going to lean "no". I think the picture presented here is of a static world modeled after the medium-sized dry goods we are used to interacting with. But the universe wasn't always like this, which means insofar as we see order around us it is not eternal but temporary -- it had to emerge and it will go away.

What's more, our intuitions about things at our scale don't translate well to the much larger or the much smaller. Space itself bends -- what the hell? And I don't have a clue what's going on at quantum scales, but the stuff @Andrew M has tried to explain to me does not match how my keys and my breakfast cereal and my books behave.

So I'm inclined to think these laws of thought -- phrase I really detest -- are an approximation, in almost exactly the way that Newtonian mechanics is an approximation. It's only an approximation and even that only applies because of where and when we live.

That's not to deny its utility at all, but its utility is the point, hence my leaning harder all the time toward pragmatism.

The twisty journey that all must take from lumpen realism, to the body shock of idealism, to the eventual resolution of enactivism and pragmatism. — apokrisis

That's how I read Hume, and it would be true of me except I've never found idealism appealing so there are things about the predictive modeling view that wouldn't bother an idealist but freak me out a bit, as I'm getting it all at once.

If not, on what coherent grounds do you find that reasoning and logic can serve as means for discerning what is real? — javra

As above, because that's all they're for, at least as predictive approximations.

You seem to accept the thrust of the argument from reason, that if materialism is true then there really isn't anything you'd call logic. I think there's no real argument presented at all, but there is something like a conflict of definitions. This discussion has at least forced me to consider which side of the fence I want to be on, and if I have to give up the eternal truths of logic to stick with natural science, then so be it.

I've taken the opportunity to choose, but I don't think it's actually forced by the argument. Denying that the universe comes with a built-in logical structure we discover does not require us to deny that systems we have ourselves constructed can have the logical structure we give them. To say otherwise looks like a simple genetic fallacy to me. The logic I "find" in the world is an approximation I make; the logic in a mathematical proof or a computer program or a game of chess is fact, because we made it so. Is there some other sense in which the logic we imbue these artifacts with is eternal and unchanging? If so, it's something different from what we've been talking about.

We can start in the middle of things — apokrisis

Hey that part I understand and, for what it's worth, agree.

the logical inferences of materialists when it comes to their metaphysics result in the conclusion that all logical inferences are relative - such that one might as well declare that "to each their own equally valid logic and reasoning". — javra

Wait, really? I thought the relativism at stake was to the ordering of nature, but you meant relative to the individual reasoner as a bit of ordered matter? Is materialism really committed to that sort of simplistic perspectivism? Why cannot materialism call on the laws known to hold in this material universe, logical and natural, and leave it at that? This universe is logical, and so logical inference is appropriate here -- no eternity needed. --- Or is the materialist unable, in your view, to recognize that, say, the law of non-contradiction holds in our world?

I'm missing something. Apologize if I'm just misreading you.

Can you better explain what you mean by "immaterial entities" in this context? — javra

Just a placeholder for "not reducible to matter", since that's the other thing. I think I've got it now with the distinction between numbers and angels, although I do wonder why the problem with angels is that they're not physical and the problem with numbers is nothing at all.

how can materialism and physicalism uphold their own rational validity when their rational validity is (for reasons so far discussed) undermined by the very metaphysical stance they maintain? — javra

And naturalism gets around this, on your view, by countenancing laws of thought as "natural, though immaterial, givens"; that is, you get to rely on logical inference and the materialist does not. Is that your position? I mean, that seems like cheating, like the Russell line about "the advantages of the method of positing."

Whatever I end up thinking naturalism amounts to, I don't think that'll be it.

What it boils down to is the logical principle that whatever doesn't self-contradict is free to be the case. — apokrisis

If I'm following this, one point is that logic (at least in these sorts of discussions) is often conceived primarily as a constraint, contradiction is forbidden, non-identity is forbidden, and so on, but that's clearly not the whole story because you need some generative principle as well. (Hence tychism?)

But much of what you write is about how constraints themselves are generated, rather than simply being given, and this is where symmetry breaking comes in, yes?

It would certainly be more satisfying to have a story in which a single process gives rise to the constraints on its continued operation. Without such a story, you in effect imagine the universe to exist within a bigger universe in which there are already certain rules in place -- the rules of universe creation, these laws of thought -- and you simply decline to explain that one. You would face a similar problem if anything simpler and more general than your story were conceivable -- but you knew that going in and have aimed at maximal simplicity and generality.

Do I have any of that right?

I only know of thinking as something of which I do, the negation of which is impossible — Mww

Heh. My poster disagrees with you:

Sometimes I sits and thinks. Sometimes I just sits.

At any rate, you don't really mean it's inconceivable that you are not thinking; you mean it's impossible for you to think, "I am not thinking" -- well, you can think it, but it's necessarily false and a performative contradiction.

Now it's curious that there's one sort of event that licenses contradiction: the death of a person. People will speak of the body of the dead person as they did when he was alive, "He looks so peaceful," that sort of thing. I'm not saying that's a contradiction. But the same person might say, if there had been a long illness, that the man she married was gone long ago. People don't mind switching between identifying the personality and the body as the person. They might even say "He's in a better place now" suggesting his real self is his soul -- and say that right after saying he looks peaceful!

What's the point of all this? That we have confused intuitions about the self? Indeed. But they all have to do with life. Our confusion arises because of the transition from living to nonliving; that which was never living poses no challenge at all to our intuitions -- there's just no self where there's never been life.

What's relevant to a law of thought's occurrence is not our conceptual grasp of it as such but that it ontically occurs. It is only in this manner that laws of thought can be discovered - rather then invented - by us. — javra

I thought that might be what you're saying. That makes such a law a fact about the universe (if I understand "ontic occurrence" as you intended). There are two questions that naturally arise:

(1) What is the real difference between such a law and other natural laws, such as the laws of thermodynamics?

(2) How can we tell whether such a law happens to hold in our universe, or whether it must hold? What would make it necessary, and how could we know?

(Okay the second one's two questions. My bad.)

Naturalism, on the other hand, specifies that all which does and can occur is that which is natural - thereby nature at large - this in contrast to that which is deemed to not be natural (again, for example, angels, deities, forest fairies, etc.). — javra

Huh. For discussion I'll go with it -- especially since all I mean by "naturalism" is, roughly, "amenable to scientific investigation," and that's not much of a definition either. My ersatz definition is essentially an exclusion of magic, behavior that is inherently unlawlike and thus incomprehensible to science. Your version of naturalism countenances immaterial entities so long as -- what exactly? They are not traditionally identified as supernatural?

Considering the history of whaling, it's a wonder they don't also fuck with humans. — Janus

Remember Crocodile Dundee and the kangaroo shooting back at the hunters? Love that.

global constraints on what is and can be — javra

I'm not sure we can reach quite that far. There may be a halfway point, a sort of anthropic principle -- if that's the right word for this kind of selection bias -- that I gestured at above, what sort of universe could be intelligible to creatures somewhat like us.

We're pretty far afield here, but I want to mention another way of approaching this, instead of pondering the status of possible constraints on the physics of a possible universe.

We have good reason to believe infants acquire the concept of object permanence before the concept of object identity. Think about that for a moment. That means it is possible for a creature to live in a world in which, so far as they can tell, ducks sometimes turn into trucks, but they never simply disappear. What's going on there? At some point -- I'm not sure how old -- they would no longer accept the possibility of such a transformation, but it appears there is a time when they do. Can they reason yet? Hard to say, but they express surprise when there's no object where they expect one, so the predictive machinery is certainly running already, it just doesn't need object identity to get going.

In effect, small infants live in a different world from us, with different or perhaps only fewer laws of thought. They transition to ours, mostly. Are they discovering more about how our universe works, about how any universe must? Maybe. Are they making richer and more rewarding predictions about their environment? Certainly. But they did live in that other world first, as we all did.

Is that world devoid of reason because the law of identity is absent? Maybe. Must we say so? What would be the point of saying so? There is a class of predictions the infant does not make that we do, and they are the poorer for it, presumably. We can say that, from our position, having been successfully relying on the law of identity; we know, that is, what they're missing out on.

But do we know what we are missing out on? Is it impossible that there are other laws of thought of whose operation we remain ignorant? That to some alien race we might appear like infants unable to conceptualize the simplest facts about our universe?

Still working at your last few posts, @javra. Might help me make sense of them if you compared your use of the terms "materialism" and "naturalism". (I've never been very comfortable arguing the merits of isms, hence my reliance on whales and infants and play-writing hominids.)

Notice this rhetorical sleight-of-hand which re-frames necessary truths as contingent. — Wayfarer

That implies intent to deceive or mislead, which I assure you was not present.

Look, I'm between the devil and the deep blue sea here. I've been on almost exactly the other side of this argument, right here on this forum, many times. I have defended philosophy against the encroachment of psychology. I had a long argument with @Metaphysician Undercover over the necessity of object permanence to counting!

I am not *comfortable* allowing logic itself to be something like a fact of our universe -- maybe it is something more like a necessity for any universe, or at least for any intelligible universe.

The reasons for my decision here are several: I have never found an account of the status of logic or mathematics I like, never, and it comes up over and over again; I'm not sure we have much to show for defending our turf against psychology, which seems to have been making more than a little progress without our help; something in @javra's phrasing really crystallized the choice for me, a heaven of eternal logic versus naturalism; and finally I've been reading William James, whose approach to pragmatism really does feel informed by his work in physiology and psychology. James was famously open to the supernatural, to religion and spirituality, even to the paranormal, so his pragmatism is not a matter of dogmatic anti-supernaturalism, but his starting point is always life.

So I think maybe I'm ready to give up the idea of necessary truths. But maybe I'm not, we'll see. Quine waffled on this very issue for decades, with a set of commitments and inclinations similar to mine. It's hard.

we - here, in the world we inhabit - could only fathom any such alternative world only if it were to abide by the law of identity, and then other laws of thought that could be argued derivatives of this one — javra

Oh yeah, that's a mess. Hmmm.

If you have further thoughts, do post, and I'll try to give better responses later.

all principles of logic/reasoning are, when ontologically addressed, a relativistic free for all—this relativity existing in relation to the order of underlying material constituents from which these principles of thought emerge—a relativism that, again, is thereby devoid of any impartial, existentially fixed standards (in the form of principles or laws) by which all variants of logic/reasoning manifest — javra

It's a very good question, and I thank you for it.

As I read your response more closely (which I shouldn't be doing since I'm at work!), it seems the question cashes out like this: would logic be the same, and thus the rules of valid inference, even if nature were very different?

That's a very difficult hypothetical, but I am inclined to say no. I think we think the way we do, and find success thinking the way we do, because nature is the way it is. We do think of logic as being above natural law, as being prior to it, but in a universe that behaved very differently than this one, if there could even be creatures like us to speculate, insisting upon the logic that works in this universe would look foolish, and nothing like the high road to truth.

That's to say, what counts as logic for us presumes a universe in which that version of logic is reasonable, is successful, does tend to lead to truth.

So I'll put my chips on what seems to me a naturalist and pragmatist view, and find some way to fight off the threat of nihilism.

logic/reasoning — javra

Short answer is that I wouldn't write these with a slash between them. Logic is a system of relations among propositions; reasoning is something people do, and they can do it well ("logically") or poorly ("illogically").

@apokrisis would have me say that even logic is just habitual, patterns of inference that have proved their worth, but he's got a whole metaphysics that makes that the natural move, and I'm not there yet.

So I don't think insisting that reasoning is something living creatures do requires me to reduce logic itself to biology.

That's along the lines I was thinking. In particular:



How is the statement "This thinking belongs to me" like or unlike the statement "This breathing belongs to me"?

We only know of thinking as something organisms do. I understand that the intent here is to set such particulars aside, to consider only what is essential to the concept of thinking per se. I can see the value in that, but how do you know you have excluded all and only the right sorts of things? Why is the body excluded? Why is life?

Starting from nothing, with no preconceptions, how would you even come up with the category of 'thinking' as something to investigate, without the examples of living organisms that think before you, without yourself being one? Would a disembodied mind 'living' on a lifeless rocky planet compose treatises about breathing and metabolism and reproduction? How?

You do that.

Hmmm. Chess is closer to mathematics, and the beauty in it is similar. One of Capablanca's little combinations is like a neat proof -- here is both the evidence that you can't play that move and an explanation for why you can't, and you should now understand where you went wrong. There's not much room for argument with a proof -- not as regards the result, though there are aesthetic considerations and other things.

I'm not sure the same sort of thing is really available to philosophy, or to other sorts of debate, because the outcome is never so clear. I'm trying to think who might be the philosophical equivalent of Capablanca and no one comes to mind really.

And we're still on topic, because the problem is achieving that clarity and simplicity that's so characteristic of Capablanca. Hard to do that with philosophy. I think you might find something similar in wisdom traditions and in religion. Confucius has a clarity and a directness that is reminiscent of great chess players, and when he reminds his students of something fundamental they generally accept that he has said everything that needed to be said. Other religious teachers can achieve something similar. But in our tradition? I don't know. People who express themselves with the certainty of a Capablanca in this context tend to be a little scary. We have reasons for our nuances and complications.

Did you know that humpback whales -- I think I'm remembering this right -- fuck with orcas?

It's a curious thing. When orcas are trying to kill seals and such, sometimes a couple whales will intervene. They will even scoop up a seal by rolling over and diving under it so that they surface with the seal on their belly, where the orcas can't get to it. There's even a case of whales remaining in the area to protect the dead body of a seal the orcas killed, just to keep them from actually eating it.

At first the theory was that they look enough like whale calves that it's kind of a mistake. But it turns out they will also interrupt the killing of sea turtles, of just about anything. They go out of their way to fuck with orcas.

The current theory is that it's more or less revenge. Orcas do attack whale calves, and so the whales have a clear sense of who the enemy is, and they side against them, for no other reason, with nothing to gain from it. Two whales swim in and call other whales from miles away, and they'll all swim in a ring around the seals or whatever keeping the orcas at bay, and they'll do this for hours, were still doing it at dusk when the researchers observing them headed back to shore.

I feel there's a distinction here that you're not seeing. — Wayfarer

Oh I'm pretty sure I know what you think you see, I just think it's not there.

That we do things other creatures don't? Of course we do. And other creatures do things we don't. Where does the transcending biology come in? Is being a living thing not extraordinary enough?

Now and then, I look around the yard, trees and grass, deer, birds, squirrels, and I think there is really only one life form on earth -- it's DNA and cells packed with protein machines everywhere you look, the rest is just details, specialization. We share about half our genes with those trees, and more than half with the squirrels and deer. Is that not extraordinary enough? That cedar tree is my kin. That moth too. How we all got this way is an interesting story, but I don't see the transcending of life anywhere in it.

If we are capable of extraordinary things other plants and animals aren't, science and art but also weapons of mass destruction and chattel slavery, it's because life is capable of those things, and we just happen to be the specific form of life realizing those possibilities. We are apes that wear clothes. We have Mozart, but we also kill each other for made-up reasons. The "rational animal," sure we are.

Finally, a question I had, that came from looking into Capablanca a bit... Wikipedia says, '...Bobby Fischer described him as possessing a "real light touch".'

I'd like to hear your perspective, as speculative as it may be, on what Bobby Fischer might have meant by that. — wonderer1

Yeah I get that. I think he was a great influence on Fischer, although I'd say Fischer's real progenitor is Alexander Alekhine. Lasker is important to him too, but I don't know Lasker's style as well. Fischer used a famous quote from Lasker as the epigraph to My 60 Memorable Games:

On the chessboard, lies and hypocrisy do not survive long. The creative combination lays bare the presumption of a lie; the merciless fact, culminating in the checkmate, contradicts the hypocrite.

I heard some writer on the radio once claiming that the great chess champions were all sadists, and Fischer is kinda the poster child for that. He didn't just beat his opponents, he humiliated them. I think somewhere he talks about this sense of the struggle, which he learned from Lasker but turned up to 11, the point of chess being to destroy your opponent's psyche. Fischer punished you for being wrong. He was Caissa's avenging angel.

Capablanca didn't so much punish you, as correct you, point out to you your mistake. The level of chess was admittedly a bit lower back then, so maybe it's true that when Capablanca revealed your mistake to you, the answer seemed quite simple because it was.

But I think it's more about Capablanca's clarity of vision about the game. He didn't go in for speculative play -- and neither did Fischer or Alekhine really. In fact, the only player who had Fischer's number was Mikhail Tal. Fischer, someone said, maybe it was Tal in his book, didn't like irrational positions, and Tal specialized in irrational positions. I think he's the only player who had a plus score against Fischer in international competition.

But now Capablanca, who like Fischer strove for clarity and directness, eschewing speculative play was also rarely taken in by it. Chess as he played it was clear and simple. He was oddly famous for little combinations that would simplify and clarify the position leaving him with a winning advantage, which you knew he could convert, given his level of technique. But he didn't push. His play was not particularly aggressive, as Fischer and Alekhine were -- and just about all modern players are in this mold. Fischer liked to play "sharp", force the game to a decisive point. Put up or shut up. But not Capablanca. His play was elegant, to the point in a way that seemed effortless.

So there's a particular sort of Augustan beauty about Capablanca's play. It's hard not to be a little awed by him, even if Tal or David Bronstein -- another great romantic swashbuckling player -- are more exciting, more appealing as characters. But Alekhine in particular ushered in a more uncompromising approach that Fischer picked up and almost everyone since plays more like that.

I probably haven't quite answered your question, about the "light touch." Maybe I have. I find it fascinating that chess despite being fundamentally a sport, and in so many ways unlike any number of media we would consider art, is very much like art in providing tremendous scope for having a personal style, a full expression of the personality, and the opportunity to create something beautiful, for there is certainly beauty in chess.

One of my favorite moments in writing about chess comes in David Bronstein's Zurich 53, his book about the great tournament to select a challenger to face then world champion Mikhail Botvinnik. There's one game, maybe Averbakh-Kotov but I don't remember for certain, where a truly extraordinary queen sacrifice is played. Bronstein brings play up to that point, gives a diagram of the position, and then begins "Creativity in chess ..." or something, anyway, he launches into a two-page essay about creativity and beauty before showing you the next move, indeed one of the most beautiful moves ever played.

But I see a radical break - an ontological distinction, in philosophical terms - at the point where humans become fully self-aware, language-using and rational creatures. — Wayfarer

Yes. I've read one or two of your posts. Is there a radical break when creatures started living on land? When they took to the skies? When they started using tools? No? When they developed communication? When they developed the ability to navigate across thousands of miles by sensing the earth's magnetic field? No? When they developed social structures? No?

None of the things characteristic of any other species count as transcending biology. Why on earth would something unique to us? Why do we alone transcend biology?

And I ask that, still not knowing what it means, or how it is supposed to have happened. Was it a biological process by which we transcended biology? Is there any way to know whether dolphins have too? Or maybe octopuses?

Are you advocating such a view? — wonderer1

He very much is, yes.

I don't have a wonderful alternative, but I'm not comfortable with this sort of "reality is whatever we agree it is." I get the impulse, and I think there's a kernel of truth there, but I also think that kind of formulation is probably incoherent.

Habits — apokrisis

Sure. I used the word "convention" because there was all this talk of what we agree on, and that's a pretty specific model I'm not sure can take in what it was trying to take in here.

It's a class and category thing. The first premise claims that rational and biological are classes, and a given phenomenon can be in one or the other but never both. The response (beginning with Anscombe) has most often been that rational and biological are categories, and there's no reason at all something can't be both. (Calling these both 'dualisms' obscures the distinction.)

Here's a bit from the conclusion of the article you linked:

In the early years of his career he was an absolute idealist and in no way could be considered a materialist. The second stage of his thought on this question, reaching definitive proportions with Experience and Nature, revealed him to be a neutralist: the ultimate reality is neither physical nor mental, but such that it permits the ascription of those properties through inquiry. The sense in which he might be considered a materialist at this stage is in his disavowal of mind as an independent entity shaping the destinies of matter. In the final period of his thought Dewey still affirmed the ultimately neutral character of natural events, but saw their transactional phases so inextricably linked in the situational complex that the hope was provided that with the advance of scientific inquiry someday the necessary and sufficient conditions for mental behavior might be given in terms of its physical matrix. Thus, if the hypothesis that the proper manipulation of the physical properties of the human organism can assure control of its mental properties is materialistic, then in his last years Dewey was indeed a materialist.

I've only begun reading Dewey, so I don't know him remotely as well as I should. His early essay on the importance of Darwin and how evolution ought to reshape philosophy I thought extraordinary. (Might make more sense for y'all to reach for James, who, though a genuine working scientist, always left more than a little room in his philosophy for spirituality and religion.)

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. How are we to investigate the transcendence of biology? Is there a way to do that scientifically? If so, bring it on.

This is why I have tried to force y'all to be more specific. If you say, here's something evolution can't do, what do you mean by that? Are you in the trenches of biology, offering an alternative theory? Evidently not. Are you challenging science's approach to knowledge production? No one will say so. If you're saying that here's something that by definition evolution can't do, then you're playing semantic games and the rest of us can ignore you.

What it means for one's credence to be 1/2 rather than 1/3 is a secondary matter. — Michael

Here's another stab at it.

Ramsey has that ingenious example when he's originally arguing for the very idea of subjective probability and both the possibility and the necessity of putting numbers on credences. You're walking from one town to another, but come to a point where you're not sure you're going the right way; there's a farmer working in a field alongside the road. You can count the steps you would take -- going out of your way -- to reach him and ask directions: the more steps you'd be willing to take, the less certain you are that you know the way, the fewer you'd take the more certain you must be that you know the way.

That's brilliant, but note there are no percentages here to start with, but there is specifically the possibility of comparing one level of confidence to another, and that leads directly to percentages, because you can say how much more confident one answer is than another.

But how does this analysis actually work? Is there a possible world in which Frank walks seventeen paces and another in which he walks thirty? It's all hypothetical, counterfactual even, and experiments that are not performed (I am told on good authority) have no results.

What it means for one's credence to be 1/2 rather than 1/3 is a secondary matter. — Michael

For my post too which expressed curiosity about what "1/2" means in this context.

I understand this is a sideline to the Sleeping Beauty discussion, but what "subjective probability" could possibly be is also kinda what the whole puzzle is about. I just thought we could pause and consider the foundations.

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth. — Whitman

Your use of the word 'finally' clearly suggests goal-directedness. — Wayfarer

'Finally' clearly suggests 'last', the last item in my sequence, since we have not seen further speciation since modern humans emerged.

This little inquisition to determine whether I have sinned against Science is pointless anyway. I was not telling the story of evolution but of the story of Shakespeare, beginning from the first mammals, so I know where my story ends (or 'finishes') and the plot highlights those events that lead there.

But that with the development of language and reason, we transcend purely biological determination in a way that other animals do not. — Wayfarer

A quick search yielded a couple of nice popular articles on the problem-solving abilities of crows: one at Ars Technica on a specific experiment and one from the BBC that ranges somewhat wider. Both articles struck me, as a layman, as pretty balanced. Both seemed to assume, more or less as I do, that our intelligence is on some kind of continuum with other animals. "Continuum" is not a great word there, though, because it may not be a matter of having more or having less of one thing, general intelligence, but of having more or having fewer cognitive skills, particular abilities. (I think the BBC article mentioned that chimps seem to have better short-term memory than we do, which I didn't know.)

I don't know how to fit your talk of "transcendence" with the way scientists and science journalists talk about intelligence in animals, including us. Language, for example, allows displacement, the ability to communicate about objects not in our present surroundings; you could describe that as "transcending" the limit of referring only to what other animals can or do perceive. What's not clear is in what sense displacement would transcend "purely biological determination," since it's not clear what that is, and if we have transcended it what other sort of determination is at play in what we actually do in our humble, biological way.

I took it as a reference to — Wayfarer

Good lord, yes, of course it is.

often invoked as an account of how life could have started as a consequence of chance — Wayfarer

Okay, maybe, sure, someone might've said that, but the use of the image for various purposes is long established, it wasn't invented just for talking about abiogenesis or for talking about evolution, though yes it's a favorite crackpot argument of creationists, which is why people like me refer directly to it in rebutting them. Do you really not understand how this works?

evolutionary threshold — Wayfarer

Define. Better yet, define it non-circularly so that Fodor's ghost doesn't haunt you.

capabilities which I don’t believe are reducible to biology — Wayfarer

Neat. Did we acquire these capabilities biologically?

By the way, what does it mean for a capability to be reducible to biology?

t threw up mammals, then simians, then hominids, then finally something like us. — Srap Tasmaner

I think you will find that any idea of there being progress in this sense is rejected by mainstream biology — Wayfarer

You may notice that the connectives there are then's -- not and then even better's. I could have said what you think I said, but, as it happens, I didn't.

But you read it that way, which means you assumed I was talking about progress, which means you ought to be chiding yourself not me. Go easy on yourself though.

Another way to read what I actually wrote was from the general to the specific, just taxonomy spread out chronologically, something speciation tends to do.

I agree that reality, in the determinate sense, is what is agreed upon intersubjectively. — Janus

We do know by example what it is for a group to agree upon a convention, either explicitly through negotiation, or implicitly through action.

Do we know what it is for everything to be a convention? Does that include the people engaged in the instituting the convention? Does it include the fact of their agreeing to the convention? Hard to see how they could agree to agree without already agreeing, and without already existing.

You can get around this by bootstrapping the convention non-conventionally, and that means granting that not everything is conventional.

Or you could say the point is not about what is real, but about how we talk and think about what is real, how we use words like "real" and "reality", and it's the use of these words and our ways of thinking and talking about reality that are conventions. The conventions at stake are conventions of our behavior.

But what's that supposed to mean? Are we granting that we are in fact organisms, entities of which it is permissible to posit behavior? If this too is only a matter of convention, then that's to say it's only a matter of our behavior (how we think and talk) that we are organisms that engage in a certain sort of behavior. How could such behavior be ours, how could it be behavior?

I'm not yet convinced there's a coherent way to make the claim you're making. I get the impulse, I think, and I even sympathize to a degree. But I can't help thinking this is an analogy that's been pushed to the breaking point.

You know, if you had seen little Will Shakespeare as an infant, as a toddler, you wouldn't have thought him capable of writing Lear, if only because until he did it, nobody knew it was a thing that could be done. And, of course, because his feet were muddy and he didn't know very many words yet.

But that child does grow into Shakespeare, a wonder of human history.

Well so it is with his species. To see those little furry things skulking about, burrowing underground or climbing trees to avoid being eaten my those freakin' reptiles, you couldn't guess their descendants would include Will Shakespeare, or that they would one day transform this planet's ecosystem or build machines that could take them into space. But we don't have to guess because we know it did happen.

(This isn't a rebuttal of anything you said, just some further thoughts in response.)

It's just the old "Make an apple pie from scratch" joke.