Because we could never be surprised to find that Aragorn was not king of Gondor, or that "Aragorn was king of Gondor" is false. Surely we know our collective fiction (which is the model, which is the world) in exactly the same way, and with the same level of surety, that we know Aragorn was king of Gondor. So, whence surprise? — Luke

I prefer to say that the world is a collective representation... which is constantly changing. The ways of representation are manifold.

The events surrounding fictional characters are forever fixed...unless further is written about them such as to change, perhaps even contradict, what was previously told in some way. Who but the original author could have the authority to do such a thing?

The situation with history is a little different because it is not simply an arbitrary tale: rather histories purport to, or at least strive to, present past events veraciously. Historical research is based on studying and comparing the accounts of past historians and archived documents. New documents may come to light, so there can be surprises even regarding what happened, or what is thought to have happened, in the past.

When it comes to the collective understanding of the world, this is ever-changing in line with new experience, so of course there may be surprises.

:up:

Could I be said to have known it all along? — Janus


Yes. — Srap Tasmaner

Right, so the example was remembering after a long time something I have forgotten. Is my remembering it the criterion for saying that I knew it all along? What if I never remember something I once knew, but have forgotten, is it then the case that I nonetheless know it? If so would the criterion for saying that I know it be that I once knew it? Once known, always known, then?

The main thing is to recognize when propositional attitude verbs are factive. If I remember that today is Joe's birthday, then today is Joe's birthday. When I see that a package has been delivered, a package has in fact been delivered. If I regret leaving my car window down, it's down. — Srap Tasmaner

So, you seem to be saying that if I remember or regret something, then that something is a fact, and that even though it seems like I might remember or regret something, if that thing is not a fact, then I am not remembering or regretting it, but merely think I am remembering or regretting?

I would call the passage from ignorance to knowledge learning. You learned your mother's name from her or from someone else who knew it. On your usage, by remembering you would learn your mother's name (again) from someone (yourself) who doesn't know it. — Srap Tasmaner

The thing is there are probably many facts I have learned which I cannot remember, and continue to be unable to remember, let's say even for many years. But one day the memory may surface and I know a long forgotten fact again. Could I be said to have known it all along? Does it depend on how long I forget something, or how often?

Did you come up with this usage of "know" yourself? — Srap Tasmaner

Sure, I'm not committed to it; it just occurred to me as an alternative usage, and I thought I'd give it a run to see whether it causes more or less confusion, sharpens anything up and so on. Perhaps it's an example of something that comes from knowing myself (in the Biblical sense). :wink:

Yes of course, there is a big difference. To expect is to think of a future event, that it is likely. A belief is a strong conviction concerning what is. — Metaphysician Undercover

That's your definition of those terms. Mine is different: I'd say to expect something will happen is to believe it will happen. Of course, if in the moment you consciously thought about it you would realize there is a chance that when you turn the key the engine will not start. In that case you might not be said to believe it will happen, but that it is likely, or more likely than not, to happen.

I would say the same about your expectation: after such conscious consideration of the possibilities you would not expect that it will happen, but expect that it is more likely to happen than not. So, I'm not seeing much, if any difference between the meanings and implications of the two terms 'belief' and 'expectation'.

just turn the key, with the expectation that the engine will start, anticipating. — Metaphysician Undercover

Is an expectation not a kind of believing? Is there a salient difference?

If you mean, why do I think knowledge is, at least relatively, persistent --- I'm not quite sure what to say. I could say (a) it's part of our concept of knowledge for it to be persistent (not my favorite argument) or (b) there's an embarrassment of evidence that knowledge persists, for varying durations, certainly, but it's not ephemeral like perception; and maybe (a) derives from (b). — Srap Tasmaner

I think both are right: that is, we do think of knowledge as relatively persistent, and also that it is not as ephemeral as perception. But then the salient qualification is "relatively".

Generally, if we know how to do something, we don't forget it so quickly. I used to know how to play the 'Moonlight Sonata', but I haven't kept up practicing it, so now I can remember only the first ten bars or so (strange that I generally seem to remember the early, and not the later, parts of pieces I have forgotten how to play the whole of).

Are you a citizen only when you're showing your passport? Do you know how to ride a bike only while you're actually on a bike? Do you know your mother's name only when you're using it in a sentence? — Srap Tasmaner

I don't see the "citizen" example as being relevant given it is not about knowledge, but about how one might be classified. As for the others: I know how to ride a bike if I can get on one and ride it, and I know my mother's name if I can use it in a sentence.

I would say that if I had forgotten my mother's name temporarily, then for that temporal period, I did not know her name, even if I could be said to have the potential to know it, since it would likely come to me soon enough. But as I said before, I think this is a matter of definition more than anything else.

One reason I'm not so fond of the idea of meaning as use, is that use is vast and possibly diverse, and we each may have our own different ideas or impressions of what "standard" usage is. That said I'm OK with the idea that meaning is shown by use because that can be perfectly consistent with there being different meanings of terms, and disagreements about those meanings, since there may be different usages.

Except, remember that by stipulation I don't know what he said, so what am I remembering? If I recreate his words from something, what is that something? I don't mean that as question for neuroscientists; it can obviously be that too, but for us, it needs to be something that's capable of engendering knowledge. That's the whole point of this, to say that there are these separate instances of knowledge and I create a new one when I need it. How do I do that? — Srap Tasmaner

What you are driving at here is not so clear to me. Could you add some flesh to the bones, or give an example to make it clearer?

.

The assumption is that the world of a lion is different enough, i.e., it's ability to think and use concepts would be so different from our own, that understanding the lion would be a great challenge, if we could understand at all. That's my take. — Sam26

Right, but then that raises two questions; firstly do thinking and using concepts require language? If the answer is yes, then presumably if the lion were able to speak English then she would be able to think and use concepts in the ways that English enables her to.

The other question is as to whether animals are able to think and use concepts at all, If the answer is 'yes' then perhaps it would follow that the ability to acquire language relies on the ability to think and use concepts, in which case the lion would never, if her thinking and concepts are so different, be able to acquire the ability to speak English. Personally, I don't believe a lion's thoughts would be so different to our own. I think human exceptionalism is way overblown.

I don't see our "forms of life" as being incommensurate, but as having a family resemblance. Although, with the lion example, I do see it as being incommensurate. We don't share much in common with a lion's form of life, which is why we wouldn't understand a lion if it could talk. — Sam26

The lion is an eater of flesh as many of us are. The lion is active sometimes and rests at others. The lion sleeps and perhaps even dreams. The lion seems to enjoy playing sometimes and cares for the young. The lion copulates. In all its vital features of life the lion does not seem so different to us.

I never understood that saying of Wittgenstein's, that we would not understand the lion if it could speak, to make any sense. If it did not speak English or a language we are familiar enough with, then of course we would not understand it, just as we don't understand anything spoken in an unfamiliar language. If the lion spoke in a familiar language, then why would we not understand it?

Are you thinking of knowing how or knowing that or both. And then what about knowing with: the knowing of familiarity? It seems to me all of these are distinct and yet obviously related too.

The idea of switching from knowing where Tim was going to not knowing and back to knowing again does not seem problematic to me. Why should possession of knowledge be a static unchanging thing?

I suppose it could be said that the body knows constantly in those kinds of cases, and the knowing being conscious comes and goes. That would be one kind of way to characterize knowing that you know. So, then whether one would be said to know or not during the times when access to the information is not operative would become merely a matter of definition of the term 'know' and one's preference as to which definition to adopt.

Cheers for the Williamson book recommendation; I'll take a look if I can find the time.

I've just never found this compelling. I always immediately think of cases where people are as confident as they can imagine being, what they would naturally describe as "certain," and they're wrong, or cases where someone nurses unwarranted doubts about knowing what they do indeed know. — Srap Tasmaner

I would say that in the former kinds of cases, they don't know, but merely believe that they know. Remember that saying certainty is necessary for knowledge does not entail it is sufficient, and that feeling certain does not equate to justifiably being certain.

In the latter kinds of cases I would say the information is there, but access to it is not, and I would not count such a condition as knowing. To count as knowing, I would say it is necessary to have the appropriate information; in other words to know that you know.

The question I would ask you is whether you can think of any examples where someone could be said to know something without feeling certain, as well as justifiably being certain, about it. Also I want to remind you that I acknowledge that any knowledge is relative to contexts, so I am not wanting to bring the possibility of radical skepticism to bear on the issue, because that would be to demand of all knowledge that it somehow be absolute, independent of all context, which I think is obviously absurd.

Ah, I thought that might possibly be the case; very subtle!

Academia is like a sewer: what you get out of it depends on what you put into it. — Bitter Crank

Whatever you put into a sewer, what you get out is sewage, Is that really the analogy you were looking for?

Even if you want to say, as I've been inclined to lately, that knowledge is not a kind of belief but a "first class" mental state in its own right, distinct from belief -- which is enough to keep our positions from conflicting -- we may still want to say that knowledge entails belief. (I'm undecided, but I see the appeal.) If S knows p, then S believes p -- and that can be true even if you don't analyze knowledge as belief + some other stuff. — Srap Tasmaner

I am mindful that we are talking about ideas in the form of words when we talk about belief or knowledge. We have common usage, to be sure, but just what that is is not so easy to establish. We have all heard these words used many times in many different situations and contexts, and I think we probably all form our own idiosyncratic senses of what they denote.

For me, then, to know is to be certain. I have come to think that knowledge cannot be fallible; if something we think is knowledge turns out to be mistaken, then it either never was knowledge or the conditions have changed such that it no longer qualifies as knowledge. We can feel certain that we know this or that, but can we ever be certain? What could being certain mean? So, if all we can manage is feeling certain, can we ever be said to know anything? I'm inclined to say that all we can be certain of is that what seems to be present right now seems to be present right now. This is not to say anything at all about what that which seems to be present "really" is.

So, our experience moment to moment is absolutely certain; not in the sense that it is definitely this or that, but just in the sense that it is our present awareness or lack of awareness. For the rest we move among our collective representations, claiming this or claiming that, as if anything could ever be definitively established. At least our discourse hangs there long enough for us to be able to play these assertoric and possibilistic games.

I don't share your optimism. We know in the sense of being familiar with what pre-linguistic human experience might be like if we pay attention to our own. We can guess that the experience of animals ought to be closer to our own pre-linguistic experience the closer they are, constitutionally, to us. To my way of thinking that's about the extent of it. But (thinking) humans seem to be diverse: we all place our faith in different things, so we shouldn't expect to be able to agree about everything. The best we can hope for is to understand one another.

but because the inseparability of model and world means that there are as many empirical worlds as there are models. — Joshs

Yes, that's it precisely!

Suppose we do not have access to the neighbourhood, but instead only to the models of the neighbourhood. — Banno

We have experiential access to what gives rise to the models we call "the neighbourhood"; the neighbourhood itself is never an object of perception, but only ever concept or model. That experiential access allows us to check if details of any model accord with what is to be seen.

How do we(or you) avoid anthropomorphism? — creativesoul

Since it is always we who imagine or posit this or that about what we think or imagine animals might experience, can we avoid anthropomorphism?

Perhaps you would find it helpful to adjust your expectations regarding what we can do with language. — creativesoul

I'm not suggesting that we can say nothing at all about our pre-linguistic experience; after all it is our experience. I believe we can understand it very well, but that when we attempt to articulate it in a precise way we are left with static representations that don't do justice to the dynamic actuality of experience..In the poetic vein we can also talk about how we imagine different animals might experience.

It is the languages of art, music and literature, particularly poetry, and not discursive analysis, which best evoke the living experience, in my view.

In the bottom quote above you are doing what you said we could not do in the top quote. — creativesoul

No, I'm not; I'm just saying what we all know; that we know, in the most basic sense, pre-linguistic sensory experience, which our language cannot capture without losing its living quality and distorting it into a world of fixed entities and facts; which, in other words our language cannot adequately capture even though it can express linguistic truths and falsities which pertain to that collective representational schema we call the world.

To say otherwise would be to claim that animals do not experience anything at all.

If the world is a collective representation, why can it not be false. — Janus


I'm not saying the world as a whole could be false, but that even some things which are taken to be facts might turn out to be inconsistent with subsequent experience. — Janus — Tate

This, my friend, is garbled. I think we're done here. — Tate

The second statement quoted there explains the first. So, why bring it up again? In ancient times the collective representation of the world said the Earth was flat; this turned out to be inconsistent with subsequent experience.

Leaving aside that I may have expressed myself poorly or ambiguously, what is it exactly you want to disagree with? On the other hand if you're done you're done, and I don't care; but in that case you have shown yourself to be uncharitable and unwilling to address what I am actually trying to say.

See the post below, which is saying the same as I have been, probably more clearly than I have been,

You made the mistake of asserting that the world can somehow be false. By definition, it can't.

It went down hill from there. — Tate

No I never asserted that the world can be false. Perhaps you could quote where I've said that. The RHS expresses a state of affairs, which may or may not obtain; if it fails to obtain the the LHS is false.

I'll comment further on this:

The RHS is a linguistic expression that can be in accordance with, correspond to, this collectively represented world or not. — Janus




Remember the RHS is not to be thought of in this context as a linguistic expression,. — Janus


You can't seem to make up your mind. — Tate

I'll try one more time, since I can see the possibility of perceived ambiguity lurking in the quoted statements above. The RHS is a linguistic statement describing some state of affairs, could be real or imagined. It is a linguistic usage. The LHS is a quotation (mention) of that linguistic statement, which refers to the statement itself, rather than the state of affairs the statement refers to. This stuff is not easy to talk about to be sure, but I think we all know every well what "X is y" is true iff X is y, since it just shows the logic of correspondence which is common in everyday use. We understand ourselves to be able to talk about a shared world and say things both true and false about it.

I'm quite familiar with use/mention. Your account of the t-sentence is garbled. — Tate

So, tell us what your understanding is and just how you think my account is garbled, just what errors you think I have made in that account. If you can't do that your unargued comments are pointless.

If you tried making sense, maybe I'd under you a little better. — Tate

What I said is in line with the well-worn use/ mention distinction which you apparently don't understand.

That's the bit directly above that seems to be untenable in the same way that Kant's Noumena is. — creativesoul

I don't have anything like Kant's noumena in mind, so it seems that you are not understanding what I;m saying. The "pre-linguistic actuality" I have in mind is our basic experience of images, smells, sensations and impressions as well as recognition of repetition and pattern. I'm saying we can gain no conceptual purchase on that basic experience because to do so would change it into something else; something schematic and conceptual. Nevertheless it is the primordial stuff out of which we have woven our ideas of a world of entities and relations and the totality of facts about them

You can't seem to make up your mind. — Tate

I'd say it's more that you can't seem to get the distinction.

Then what's the LHS? — Tate

Have you encountered the 'use/ mention' distinction? The LHS is the mention of the linguistic expression itself. Remember the RHS is not to be thought of in this context as a linguistic expression, but as the state of affairs it posits. So "snow is white" says that snow is white; it is not talking about itself but about the fact that snow is white.But ""snow is white"" is talking about "snow is white" the linguistic expression.

Thanks. I don't find anything to disagree with what you say there. What I meant by "self-evident", though, is something like "immediately apparent"; when I think about my experience taken as a whole it seems immediately apparent that it is not the world. perhaps I can say it is of the world, but then the world is not an object of any perception.

Even the empirical objects of the everyday are not (taken as wholes) objects of perception, because all I perceive are images or impressions (of them). I put "of them" in brackets because the idea that our images and impressions are of empirical objects is an inferentially derived collective representation, an inference to what certainly seems to be the best explanation, or so it seems to me, anyway.

Not necessarily use against what you said so much as attempting to makes sense of how the 'actual world' posited earlier fit into the carving. You've also said that we don't see the world, but rather our perceptions, conceptions, impressions, and things of a nature which sound like a denial of direct perception. — creativesoul

Just to be clear, I haven't posited an "actual world"; I've talked about the distinction between experienced actuality, meaning actual experience, which I'm saying is of images, sensations, impressions, and the world, which I'm saying is the idea of the totality of things, facts and relations that we think gives rise to actual experience.

Of course actual experience also involves recognition of invariances or repetitions and patterns of image, sensation and impression, and I'm saying that it is both from these, and communication via language with others, that the idea of a world is constructed. So, I'm agreeing with Davidson, Wittgenstein and Kant that there is no substantive distinction between world and schema.

Maybe. But I can say that Jabberwokies are tall hairy creatures with purple noses. I can instil in your mind the notion that one might reach for the word 'jabberwocky' on seeing such a thing. I can do all this without jabberwockies having to actually exist.

Your trigger and your response can both exist without the causal object existing. — Isaac

Sure, but this is purely arbitrary confabulation as opposed to what we say about tables, kettles and cups, which is a conventional store of practical wisdom derived from actual invention and use.

. It could be summed up with "truth and meaning are both prior to language". — creativesoul

I would put that differently: actuality and non-linguistic meaning are both prior to language. For me truth is linguistic correspondence with our ideas of the actual (ideas which are themselves not necessarily or wholly linguistic).

Here we are entering territory that is very tricky to speak about; in fact I would say impossible to speak about unambiguously, but we can and do get a sense of it. We understand it even if we cannot definitively enframe it. Discourse is by no means the "be all and end all".

So, I had no choice but to abandon the idea that a language less creature's belief could not be existentially dependent upon language, because some of them clearly are. — creativesoul

There is, however, a clear distinction between the sense in which a belief might be thought to be existentially dependent on language because the believer is a language user, and the sense in which the believing or expectations of a non-language user might be thought to be existentially dependent on language because the object the belief is about would not exist had language not existed.

Yeah, so treating something as a Jabberwocky is what something's being a Jabberwocky is. Jabberwockies (or kettles, or tables, or teacups...) are not ready-made items, we construct them enactively, we interact with those hidden states and by our interaction construct those boundaries (between kettle and not-kettle). — Isaac

The difference being that we can say what kettles, tables or teacups are, but not so Jabberwockies, it would seem.

Ya, they're all sensory experiences. You're not saying it's all subjective are you? — Sam26

I don't much like the subjective/ objective framing. I was just pointing out that the absurdity of carving initials on a perception, which creative was attempting to use against what I had said, is inapt since the whole experience: carving, initials, tree and all the rest are all of the same perceptual fabric.

What's all perception? Are you referring to what we mean by truth? Sorry, I haven't read everything in the last three pages. — Sam26

Creativesoul asked:

Are you carving your initials into a tree or your perception, conception, and/or impressions? — creativesoul

What I meant is that seeing a tree, feeling its bark and leaves, carving your initials into it, climbing it and so on are all perceptual.

Are you carving your initials into a tree or your perception, conception, and/or impressions? — creativesoul

It is all perception: I perceive trees, carving my initials, climbing and so on.

Why not link the linguistic and the pre or non-linguistic, so that we can say it is not language per se that constrains and limits the intelligibility of the world, but each persons’s integrated history of understanding in general that ‘blocks’ some ways of thinking while enabling others? I would argue that the most important superordinate aspects of our ways of understanding the world, those with the greatest potential to limit what is intelligible to us, is often too murky to be linguistically articulated by us, and yet it drives our greatest hopes and fears. I would also add that our discursive schemes are only partially shared, which means that they are contested between us in each usage. Linguistic interchange doesn’t just assume what is at issue, it determines anew what is at issue in the interchange. — Joshs

It seems to me that perception must be conceptually mediated even for animals insofar as it seems that animals are capable of "seeing as". This ties in with Gibson's idea of "affordances"; that the environment provides animals with means of survival that must be recognized. To re-cognize would seem to mean seeing and responding to recurring perceptual patterns. Fully articulated this ability to recognize leads to generalities and categories.

I agree with you that the most basic (pre-linguistic) ways of understanding what is experienced (I won't say "the world") cannot be linguistically articulated, and that discursive schemes are only partially shared: each individual has their own unique set of of associations, images, impressions and feelings which make up their experience, and that these give rise to our primordial hopes and fears, which themselves are impossible to adequately articulate. The partially shared nature of our discursive schemes, what I would refer to as general vagueness and/ or ambiguity ensures that there is room for as much misunderstanding as there is understanding between us...a constant process of renegotiating ideas.

I was thinking of ambiguity, and the fuzziness of our categories. We generally get by, though.

I agree with you about the vagaries of ordinary language, and the limits of logic's capacity to formalize what we do with ordinary language. All our talk is only ever approximation when it is about the world that is collectively conceived out of experienced actuality, and when we try to formalize our talk with logic, it ceases to be about the world, except in the most general structural sense.

This approach has the advantage of at least spelling out correspondence, I'd say. The world is, indeed, English-shaped (or concept-shaped, I suspect) so matching is a matter of equality (or perhaps another specifiable relation?) between the concept believed and the world. — Moliere

I think this approach is in line with Kant, with Wittgenstein's "the world is the totality of facts..." and with Davidson's proposal to dissolve the distinction between schema and world. It's also always a matter of terminology though; I am not using 'world' to refer to any purported actuality beyond human experience, and I understand that some might use it that way. Using it that way creates the central problem for correspondence theory; if we understand the latter to consist in positing truth as accordance between word and world..

Then the world is something like a set rather than a place. It's the set of things that are taken to be facts?

The RHS is an element of this set? — Tate

The world is understood to be the totality of facts, things and relations. It cannot be a place, because places have locations; where would the world be located? It is not merely a set, because it is understood to be infinitely complex, with parts interrelated. The RHS is a linguistic expression that can be in accordance with, correspond to, this collectively represented world or not.

Well said. The subtleties can be finessed.....but generally, well said. — Mww

Thanks Mww, I'm interested in any "finessing" you may care to offer.

If that were the case, then there would be no substantive difference between illusions of trees and perception of trees. — creativesoul

Not so, if I see what I take to be a tree, all I have to do is go up to it to feel its bark and leaves, and if I have a pen knife carve my initials in its bark or if I have a saw, cut off a branch, or if I am feeling agile I can climb it. If none of these are possible then I know I am confronted with an illusion, not a tree. That said, such a thing has never happened to me, and I have taken plenty of psychedelics. So, this kind of supposed counterexample is really a red herring in my view.

You posited an actual world then clearly stipulated a forbidden access/purchase to/upon that actual world. You then posited your experience as another entity completely unto itself as distinct from the aforementioned 'prelinguistic actual world'. If we have no access to that world, if our words cannot gain purchase upon it, then we cannot possibly compare anything to it.

In order to know the difference between the two, we must have access to both. You've already said that we cannot. That is a problem called untenability. — creativesoul

I posited an actuality we experience; i didn't say it is an actual world. I said that the world is a collective representation that we do have discursive, but not direct perceptual access, to. In other words the world is not an object of perception but a complex conceptual schema.

LOL, I wasnt talking about the Earth.

Really? The whole world? What does it look like?

How can you know that if you cannot access it, if your perception and conceptions cannot have purchase on it? — creativesoul

Our perceptions and conceptions evolve out of experience, individually and collectively. We know that we experience images, we never perceive whole things, and we never perceive the world at all, but just images of the objects we understand to constitute it. We have conceptual purchase on the world just because it is our idea, we certainly don't have experiential purchase on any such totality.

You're saying the world is an idea. In what sense could it be false? — Tate

I'm not saying the world as a whole could be false, but that even some things which are taken to be facts might turn out to be inconsistent with subsequent experience.

How else can you know that the one is not the other if not by performing a comparison/contrast between the two purportedly distinct things? In order to compare the two things, you have to know what they both are. The problem, of course, is that you've defined the one in such a way as to suggest that it is impossible to know.

The position reminds me of Kant's Noumena, or any other position that denies direct perception.

Earlier you said it was difficult to talk about these things. I found it to be much easier after abandoning those kinds of frameworks. — creativesoul

How do I know the world is not my experience? It is self-evident. My experience is a constant succession of ideas, associations, images, sounds, feelings and impressions. The world is a static schema of the totality of facts, things and relations.

Can you rephrase that? I don't understand. — Tate

We don't experience the world, we experience images and sensations, and due to pattern, repetition and recognition, and in conjunction with communication with others and received culture, we form a "picture" of the world with all its facts and relations. This static picture is not our lived experience but the idea of what exists in general and in common, and it is to this static factual picture: the world, that all our propositions correspond, or not.

If the world is a collective representation, why can it not be false. Lived experience cannot be false, but anything we say or think about it can be.

Would like to see a discussion on how the RHS relates to the world, and how it differs to correspondence. — fdrake

As I've said already, I think the RHS relates to the world, but the world is a perceptually and conceptually evolved static collective representation, not a dynamic lived experience. I mean we can say the world is a dynamic lived experience, sure, but that saying is just another part of the common conception. All our discursive lives revolve in that static conception, except insofar as it it comes to life for each of us in the vividness of our lived experience, which can never be adequately conceptually explicated due to the loss of life such explication entails.