Good question. Isn't the issue that they do seem incompatible. We can express this in more than one way. They are different language games, different categories, different perspectives. At any rate, they seem incommensurable. Yet we know that a physical process can result in a logical conclusion. If it were not so, computers would not work. Indeed, if it were not so, calculation by pen and paper would not work, either. — Ludwig V

If they are incommensurable explanations, then it would seem to follow that they cannot exclude one another.

If you say "Raining," is your utterance necessarily either an assertion or a non-assertion? — Leontiskos

Good point: 'raining' does not have the assertoric grammatical structure that 'it is raining' could be said to have.

In this view, mental states, including beliefs, are determined by physical processes in the brain, which are themselves the result of evolutionary pressures and biological mechanisms. Whereas, reasoned inference works by different principles, relying on the relationship between propositions where the truth of one proposition logically necessitates the truth of another. — Wayfarer

Why should one explanation preclude the other? Another point is that most of our reasoning is inductive or abductive, where there is no logical necessity in play at all.

It occurred to me after you responded, that in that video we have a demonstration of Kahneman's fast and slow thinking occurring in a dog. (And literally fast and literally slow.) — wonderer1

Right, I am only passingly familiar with Kahneman's work, but I think I see the point.

Propositional knowledge is a form of know-how. So your dismissal of "know-how" is unjustified. And, as I said, you want to reduce "knowledge" in general, (which would include all forms of know-how) to one specific type, knowing how to explain things through the use of propositions, to serve your purpose. That's not productive, we need to go the other way, to see what all the different types of knowledge have in common, if we want to understand "knowledge". — Metaphysician Undercover

You are still misunderstanding the point. I realize that propositional knowledge can be understood as a kind of know-how, but that is not relevant to what I've been saying. As I already said we can easily explain how we know that something is the case if we've witnessed it and we can easily see that we know things deductively in logic and mathematics and when it comes to know-how we can easily see that we know how to do something when we are able to do it.

Now I've challenged you to come up with some other kind of purported knowledge, and to explain how it is that you know that it is knowledge.

Put differently, in asserting, "If p then q," we are asserting something about p and q. Is the takeaway then that assertoric force is not binary? And yet, is assertion binary? — Leontiskos

An interesting question. "If p then q" seems to be inherently an assertion about the relationship between p and q. It is an inherently asymmetric relation: "if q then p" is not entailed.

"It is raining" has the form "x is y", just as "it is green" does, and yet they are not the same. To state that it is raining, I could just say "raining", which would seem to indicate that assertion is not always binary.

I hope I've understood your question; I'm pretty confident about working out the logic of natural language, but I'm not great with formal logic.

:up:

You narrow down the definition of "knowledge", to make the word refer only to one specific type of what is commonly called "knowledge", to produce an argument which supports your prejudice. — Metaphysician Undercover

No, I apply the word 'knowledge' only to those cases where we can clearly explain how it is that we know. It is obvious that we know things propositionally via observation and via logic. If you can point to another mode of knowing (other than know-how and the knowing of acquaintance or recognition, because those are not the subjects at issue) then do so.

I don't know what you have in mind with "structure", and whether it is relevant to the following, but I don't think it reasonable to see what is shown below as merely a matter of instinct. — wonderer1

:up: Fascinating! This seems to confirm what I have always believed: that dogs are capable of deductive inferences, rational thought.

It seems nothing will convince the diehard human exceptionalists; probably because their thinking is rooted in some religious dogma or other.

OK, so you support what I said then. Your use of "arguably" indicates exactly my point, we really have no consensus on what warrants "knowing". — Metaphysician Undercover

If a slime mold can do something self-initiated then it knows how to do that thing. I'm not claiming that it experiences itself, or understands itself, as knowing.

Anyway, know-how has not been the focus of my part in the discussion, but rather 'knowing that' or what is called 'propositional knowledge'. We can warrant that we know things via empirical observation and logic. We cannot warrant that we know anything propositional in any other way I can think of. If you can think of an example that involves and demonstrates another way of knowing-that then why not present it for scrutiny?

Does a slime mold have "knowledge" for example? — Metaphysician Undercover

Slime molds arguably have know-how. It's not a matter of a "hard and fast prejudice" but of being cautious ascribing the "honorific" 'knowledge' to cases where we cannot explain just how they could count as such.

We know we have empirical knowledge in the form of observations, logical and mathematical knowledge in the form of deductions and know-how insofar as we are demonstrably able to do anything. How would you justify for example a belief that one might hold that they had an experience wherein they knew God or "the true nature of reality"?

The burden would be on you to explain how such claims to knowledge could possibly be warranted.

So . . . which sentence are you referring to as mentioned? (or all three?) — J

I'm not sure which three sentences you are referring to. I was addressing 'if p then q'. Us talking about this sentence is an example of 'mention'. We are not concerned with whether it is true, and are not claiming that it is true, so there is no intentional assertion going on in our referring to the sentence.

It is not hard to say what warrants as knowledge the basic forms of knowing—about what it is that we experience, the empirical and what is self-evident to us, the logical. Know-how is also easy to demonstrate. It is any other type of experience which is purported to be a kind of knowledge which seems to be impossible to warrant as such.

If I experience a revelation or a "higher' insight, what is it about the experience that warrants it as knowledge? This is the question that proponents of "direct knowing" can never answer.

One thing i do know just for myself is that there is always in principle a way to know what is currently unknown. — punos

Right, there are many unknowns. Some of those unknowns could be unknowables, so I'm wary of the idea that there is always a way to know what is currently unknown. In those cases where there is something to be known about what currently is universally unknown special expertise is required. We won't do it from the armchair.

But my whole point is that there is no such thing as non-temporality, either before or after the Big Bang. — punos

If there is no temporality before the Big Bang then there is no "before the Big Bang".

For me, an existent is something that "acts". — Benj96

Hence existents are said to be actual.

By "mention" I meant simply that you might reference the sentence as we are doing here, without asserting anything about its truth. So "mention" refers to the whole sentence under consideration..

The probabilistic nature of QM is not an aspect of QM, but an aspect of our state of ignorance and uncertainty. — punos

That may be so, or it may not be so. How are we to assess the likelihood of either one or the other being the case? Better, I think, to admit our ignorance in such matters.

Interesting, can you elaborate a little further on this issue of differential perspectives? What do you mean by doesn't belong to "that perspective"? — punos

I mean that it seems unjustifiable to apply what seems obvious to us from within our temporally conditioned perspectives to what we imagine might lie altogether outside of temporality.

Its just a device to explain one aspect of what i'm trying to explain. — punos

Well. sorry, I'm not getting it at all.

I can only know after the fact, not that i made it happen. — punos

I agree that you can't know you made it happen. But you can't know you didn't make it happen either. I don't have a problem with the idea of measurement (understood as being any kind of macro event) causing the collapse of the wave function.

So if time and change would not have never begun, then how does anything begin? — punos

The idea, as far as I understand it, is that the overall conditions that we understand as time and change never did begin. The point is that you are trying to understand something from an intuitive temporal perspective that seems obvious to you, but that doesn't belong to that perspective, and is thus not coherent in terms of that perspective.

Because we have reasons for doing things we do, we find it hard to grasp that the Universe could have evolved as it has purely on the basis of random accidents, and that our ideas of temporality and atemporality are most probably inadequate for assessing anything outside of our own limited ways of thinking.

There is no reason to think that we should be able to understand the nature of reality. The best we can do is to try to sort out what we can honestly say we do understand within the limited context of our knowledge and thought.

and without it the stick remains unchanged — punos

How can the stick "remain" if there is no time?

I can measure how much my stick with a joint moves, but it's not what allows for the movement itself. — punos

Do you mean it is not the measurement which allows for the movement? How do you know this. One interpretation of QM would have it otherwise. Which is not to say that it is only we that measure.

If time is change, and there were no time (no change), then what could possibly change for things to begin changing? — punos

In that scenario time and change would not have begun. You seem to be still thinking in terms of there being something temporally prior to time, which would be a contradiction in terms.

It seems to me since this event has at least happened in this universe then life is a necessity of non-life irrespective of time frames. — kindred

It seems you are basing that on some kind sense of likelihood. I don't think we can do any calculation of likelihood in this kind of case, so your conviction remains an intuitively or psychologically, not a rationally, motivated one. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, but I think it's important to "call a spade a spade".

It seems coherent to me. The alternative is what seems incoherent to me, like i explained. — punos

It might "feel" coherent to you, but I bet you cannot give a coherent explanation of what it means.

First let me ask you what you think time is, just regular time as you understand it? — punos

Even ordinary time is not so easy to explain, but I don't think that helps your case. Is time just change, or is time a kind of "medium" in which change occurs?

But apparently it did follow... literally. — punos

The fact that it apparently did follow does not entail that it must have followed.

Is it my concept of absolute time? — punos

I have no idea what "absolute time" could mean.

That is why everything exists inside time, never outside it (as that makes no sense). — punos

I agree that we cannot find the idea of non-temporal existence coherent. We cannot think a 'before time'. But we equally cannot find the idea of an infinite quantity of time coherent. Where do you think that leaves us?

The point is that it happened, and so we know after the fact that it was inevitable. — punos

That simply does not follow. For the rest I have no idea what you are trying to say.

Since current physics (quantum physics) supports the view that some physical phenomena are non-deterministic then life was indeed a possibility yet it emerged and actualised but given enough time (eternity) then this possibility becomes an inevitability. — kindred

I'm not sure we would be warranted in claiming that it was inevitable even given the context of thinking in terms of no time limit. I understand 'eternity' to mean 'non-temporality' not 'an infinitely great amount of time' because I think the latter idea makes no sense.

What would you say this is, if anything? — punos

I would say that I don't see much reason to believe such a thing. In the early universe, according to current theory, there were no atoms and hence no chemistry. Without chemistry life and intelligence as we know and understand them would be impossible. Was the evolution of atoms inevitable? How could we know?

Now since life did actually emerge from non-life as we know, we do at least know that non-life has the potential to transform into various types of molecule up to a multicellular organism. The question is whether it did so in prior to this universe. We do also know that in this universe it was inevitable…why couldn’t it be inevitable prior to this universe too ? — kindred

We don't know that it was inevitable in this universe though and that is because we don't know whether the universe is deterministic or non-deterministic. Current physical theory suggests the latter, and if the latter were the case, then life and intelligence should not be thought of as inevitable but merely possible.

This may be somewhat dumb, but isn't it also the case that we (humans) are conducting the assessment here? Notions of 'intelligence' and 'reality' and 'the universe' are constructs of ours based on defeasible positions and knowledge which is constantly evolving. Is it even clear that reality can be understood by human beings? We are certainly able to build tentative theories and through some of them make predictions with results, but are we perhaps getting a bit ahead of ourselves in seeking to answer the OP's question? Thoughts? — Tom Storm

I don't think that's dumb at all but a very good question. We always assume that we know what we mean when we talk about 'god' or' universe' or 'necessary' or 'inevitable'. Even if we do understand what they mean in the context of our own thinking, or the epistemological context, we have no idea what relevance they might or might not have in what we might imagine as the "ontological" context.

I took the OP's question as being something like "are we warranted in saying that intelligence pre-existed existence". So we can ask whether that is even a meaningful question or whether it is a case of "language gone on holiday". Under the latter interpretation how could we be warranted in claiming something that we don't even understand?

All that being said how can we even know whether or not we understand these kinds of questions let alone answer them? I think you and I are of a similar deflationary spirit.

As I said if life and intelligence were inevitable evolutionary eventualities of our universe it still would not follow that they are necessary potentialities of any and all existence, but merely of our own universe.

If life and intelligence were not inevitable evolutionary eventualities, that is if it is the case that they might not have evolved, then they are not necessary potentialities. Is there a valid distinction between possible and necessary potentialities according to you?

The other point is that whether or not life and intelligence were necessary or merely possible eventualities it is not appropriate to refer to them as properties prior to their advent.

If nature were completely deterministic then your argument might in part follow, since on that assumption, given initial conditions (the Big Bang) intelligence would have inevitably evolved. But even then it does not follow that it was "there all along" only that it was there as a necessary eventuality. On the other hand, if nature is indeterministic, then the evolution of intelligence would not seem to be inevitable, but we could still say that it was a potential eventuality that may or may not have been actualized.

The same would seem to be as true of life as it is of intelligence or consciousness.

I’m making the rather bold claim that intelligence is an inherent part of nature whether this is existed just post big bang is debatable and that in fact it has existed before. — kindred

How are we to understand what this claim that intelligence is an inherent part of nature even means? And even if we understood what the claim means possible rational or empirical reason would we have to believe such a thing?

Note I'm not denying that one might have emotional or psychological reasons to believe such a thing.

Perhaps nothing more, in that simple case. But as this thread demonstrates, "assertion" gets used in some much more complicated and ambiguous contexts. As Banno points out, above, Frege didn't think in terms of actual illocutionary acts such as the one you're using as an example. And Russell talks about a "non-psychological sense" of assertion whereby we can say that "If p then q" asserts an implication without asserting either p or q. And I would add, though Russell doesn't, that the implication "If p then q" can be asserted on paper, so to speak, without anyone claiming it's true. — J

I missed this until now.

I mentioned earlier that a sentence such as "it is raining" can be mentioned without asserting its truth, while to use the sentence would seem to be to assert its truth. I also see that there is a sense in which such sentences have an inherent assertional logical or grammatical structure. Is there any more to it than that?

Are fictional assertions true? — Leontiskos

They are fictionally, as opposed to actually, true or false, or their truth or falsity may not be sepcified in the work. I still don't see a problem, just a matter of different contexts.

But what is a "fictional assertion"? Isn't an assertion supposed to "judge p true"? Kimhi calls this case "assertion by convention" but I don't think that helps either.

This would be a fairly minor point were it not that this thread is trying to understand the exact connection between assertion and truth values. — J

I must be missing something. I can see no more of a problem with fictional assertions than I can with fictional imaginings, fictional events, fictional places, fictional characters and so on.

I'm also not clear on what an "exact connection between assertion and truth values" could be. If I claim something is the case I am either right or wrong depending on whether what I've claimed is the case or not. I can't see what more could be said about that.

I would have thought that whether a sentence which could be said to be in the propositional mode is assertoric or not depends on whether the sentence is being or has been used or mentioned.

I don't see a problem with fictional characters asserting stuff—fictional character/ fictional assertion.

As Michael argues, color is not within the external object, but it is within brain. — Hanover

Of course the experience or the appearance of colour is not within the object. So it all comes down to what you mean by saying that colour is or is not in the object.

It's 'percepts not 'precepts'. Michael has been arguing that colour is nothing but "mental percepts". I formed the impression you were supporting this claim. If I am mistaken then my bad.

Then red is more than merely percepts.

How would you know the image contains no red if red were nothing more than a percept?

:up: