Could you answer the question that was asked, please. What were you agreeing on?

Musing a bit, that is part of the problem I have with apokrisis's epistemic "cut"; the cut could not be a private thing. — Banno

The cut is another relative thing, never absolute. And it creates the "private" realm from which either communities or individuals would construct meaning in terms of a sign relation.

So the entirety of you problem is that you haven't understood the concept. That tends to happen when you are lazy about reading the literature.

What would sharing it with yourself look like? — Banno

As I've said, speaking creates the speaker. A linguistic identity, a psychological construct of self, develops by mastering the habits of language use.

Being a self is a particular kind of language game. One that is baked into the general communal game. It is right there in the grammar - me, you and them - as Mead pointed out.

So if I have a beetle in my box, I can talk about it to myself. I can construct the view which says there is this "me" and there is this "other".

But this is not of course a whole private language. It is some private vocab. It refers to the world that only I see because only "I" could have such a point of view. It is that tightly tied to any claims to identity that "I" might have. Hence why qualia are treated as the height of the private and ineffable.

In general, our "I" is socially and culturally constructed. It encodes the communal "I" as the point of view from which a generalised and linguistically sharable selfhood arises. So most of our speaking remains speech from a collective cultural identity. As I said about wine-tasters, this becomes true even of talk about ineffable qualia.

Thus again, this is about degrees of the private or public. In the end, the speaking "I" is still largely a cultural self. But every person lives in a different body. We all have some unique point of view as well. So there is scope for private language to construct that as the private experience of some solipsistic notion of "myself".

A private language would be one that cannot be shared with anyone even to begin with. — celebritydiscodave

But you could share it with yourself?

Foolish me. I expected that for once you might be trying to engage. We are so quickly back into time-wasting attempts to extract any clarity.

So when you said you agreed with this statement - "So the private vs public dichotomy speaks to two opposed ideal limits." - what did you mean by saying you agreed?

I said your absolutism was unwarranted. Language could be only relatively private or relatively public. So it is all a matter of degree.

Now you say you agree with that and yet disagree with that. And then you have the gaul (sic) to complain about my testy response.

If your sole intent is to waste my time, let me know.

The difference is that a private language is one that cannot be made public even in principle. — Banno

Well, I would not say it like that, but yes, I agree. — Banno

So you now disagree with yourself?

As usual, you chose to be gnomic in your response, leaving others to guess at what you could really mean.

The only time you get more fulsome in your replies is when you complain about my "bad attitude". You can see why I might regard that as hypocritical given that I find your "terseness" rude and unhelpful. It doesn't fit the usual definition of a discussion - a free give and take of ideas - does it?

For the sake of completeness, I should remind that Peirce was famously working on a logic of vagueness. So that was about the unbreaking of broken symmetries.

He could have gone beyond his musing about abduction if he had crystallised that logic. But we can see its outlines in the way he opposes vagueness to generality in terms of the three laws of thought.

Vagueness is that to which the PNC does not apply - to be vague is to be such that saying something of it is neither true nor false. (While generality is that to which the LEM fails to apply - a generality excludes neither one nor the other.)

And then Peirce also sought to move beyond regular logical methods by founding logic in diagrammatic argument. So rather than an algebra of symbols, he felt that a geometry of constraints or relations drilled down to the deepest level. It is in diagrams that reasonableness of logical truths becomes the most self-evident and undeniable.

Again, this was a move to strengthen the connection between human constructed principles of thought and the way the world physically exists.

Spencer-Brown famously picked up this move in his laws of form.

So formal predicate logic - the focus of your typical philosophy course - is a rather restrictive view of logical relations and their possible models. There is a heck of a lot that seems "outside" of that, as Peirce was so good at showing.

The difference is that a private language is one that cannot be made public even in principle. — Banno

Absolutism is always the wrong move. Relativism is the way to go.

If you stick to relativism, then you can actually have limits that behave as limits - absolute in being the "place" that reality can approach with arbitrary closeness, but never actually arrive.

So all language use exists in the space between the limits of the absolutely private and the absolutely public.

Some kinds of experience - like the smell of a rose - seem ineffably private. Yet wine and coffee tasting professionals have a vast vocabulary by which they can analyse what they experience and share it in reasonably reliable fashion with a community.

Indeed, making the "umwelt" point about semiotics again, once you can think of hints of cat piss or whatever, then you become equipped with the language that allows you to look for these particular analytic signs. Your raw experience becomes linguistically structured so that you experience the wine as a collection of particular references. You can measure how close the wine gets to some ideal in terms of a type.

Anyway, there is no experience so private that we can't create a language that shares it. Indeed, the very idea that there could be a "private language" is already saying that is so.

And likewise, there is no language so public that we can be sure every member of a linguistic community will experience the words the same way.

If you say "cat", then I could have some very different mental image spring to mind. Yours might be a brindle tom. Mine might be a white persian.

So the private vs public dichotomy speaks to two opposed ideal limits. And the reality is then all that takes place within the bounds of these limits. All speech acts are relatively private or relatively public to the degree that either the speech acts translates freely or awkwardly.

Translation can never be ruled out even if achieving commensurability in points of view is always going to be a work in progress.

It's main categorizations are informal and formal logic. Informal including inductive reasoning, and abductive reasoning. Formal mainly being deductive. — MonfortS26

I agree if what you are saying is that reasoning has this natural psychological structure that Peirce describes. The same method applies across the board in critical thinking as an epistemic necessity. So the three stages are really fundamental.

But as you say, abduction and inductive confirmation are informal. So you will come up against resistance from those who want to refer only to the formal part as "logic". At this point, it becomes a meaningless argument over terminology.

No such intervention is required by logic, which can freely float above world in perpetuity without in the least encountering any worldy resistence. — StreetlightX

Sure, rules are just rules. Generalised syntactical structures are by design separate from the semantics that particular grammatically-correct statements may claim. So floating freely above the world is central to the semiotic deal. It provides a general means to structure propositions.

But then to interpret a sentence does reconnect the whole business to the world. The act of measurement or inductive confirmation is where logic meets resistance from potential falsification.

So the world is present in the grammar of predication, or whatever. It is present in its most generalised possible form. It is a view of how the world works boiled down to a most abstract view about the necessity of certain relations.

It floats above the world as pure form - or as pure and immaterial as we can imagine it. (A Turing machine still needs the physics of a gate and tape, a Boolean circuit still needs connections and switches. So the divorce is never absolute.)

But then the grammar gets particularised as some material claim. It becomes some actual structure of constraints that "say something meaningful" - or not, as the case may prove to be.

My main question, is there an application of logic that falls outside this cycle? — MonfortS26

I can't think of any. Although again, the question might be better phrased as to whether there is any other reasonable method of reasoning. :)

The live issue is probably that we don't have a good handle on abduction. Even Peirce was notoriously mystical sounding about the psychological details.

So somehow we seem to be unreasonably good at jumping towards the most productive guesses when it comes to finding the right foundational generalisations, whether it be hypotheses, axioms or principles.

It happens too often just to be luck - a random search algorithm. And we can't really go along with supernatural inspiration.

But there are semi-formalisable processes for taking abductive leaps, nevertheless.

What we are usually trying to do is guess the general causal mechanism - the wider rule - behind some particular state of affairs. So we are trying to unbreak a broken symmetry. We are trying to de-individuate some individuated state of being. And this is where logical methods - like dialectics - come into play. We can think retroductively, looking backwards from the variety of the particulars to the generality of some dichotomy which had to be the initial breaking of a symmetry.

So retroduction seems a semi-formal logic to me. There is a method behind the apparent freely inspired guessing. You know what you are seeking to get things started. Generality is a symmetry. And you want to see through the variety, the detail, to recover the dichotomy that must be at root of that variety. The simple break represented by that which was "mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive".

That is, abduction already knows where it wants to land. It must leap backwards from the particular to the general. It must leap from the fractured variety back towards the first fracture. It is looking for a complementarity of opposed possibility that is always the starting point for any process of development or evolution.

So - as Peirce was sort of saying in citing Galileo's il lume naturale - the psychological architecture of human reasoning works because it mirrors the actual evolutionary logic of the Cosmos.

It all starts with a symmetry or a vague and undifferentiated potential. Then the symmetry gets broke in some dialectical fashion and unleashes a flood of direct consequences. Constraints or regularities emerge from this confusion to create some persisting order. The broken symmetry achieves an equilibrium, a global rule of habit or law.

So nature itself expresses this reasoning method. It starts with a symmetry breaking - the primal leap that is the retroductive target of abductive thought. It follows with a direct mechanical unfolding of consequences - the deterministic interactions that are "deductively" played out. Then finally some global rule of law emerges as the symmetry breaking finds its steady equilibrium. The world is now in a position to inductively confirm its own existence. It has habits that measure its state of being and check that local individuated actions are "in line" with its "beliefs".

Well? :)

You always have to make it personal Banno. Just stick to responding to the arguments and you'll be fine.

Here we go. Now the self-pitying soliloquy for the imagined onlooker.

You forget I've seen every play in your book many times now. So just get on with your reply. Stop pretending to worry - while turning your head and throwing mournful looks to the cheap seats - about what attitude I will adopt.

Uluru isn't what Ib]I[/b] say it is; it is what we say it is. — Banno

Same general semiotic principle. Language embeds the notion of the self that speaks with meaning. So cultures do form vocabularies to serve their pragmatic interests. And we become socially constructed as selves by participating correctly in that language game.

You could check out GH Mead of symbolic interactionism fame here. He applied Peirce to early sociology. Or Lev Vygotsky for the Russian version.

You seem to have built your view as a series of deductions from inside your self, or something like that; — Banno

I haven't built anything. It just pragmatist philosophy and social psychology as far as I'm concerned.

So it is a position built from scientific observation of human society, human development and human psycholinguistics. So induction not deduction.

but Wittgenstein is suggesting that one stop and look first, at what happens when language is used. — Banno

Strewth. How revolutionary. You mean like social psychology? Like symbolic interactionism or social constructionism?

The self doing the speaking is as much a social construct as the language that self is using. — Banno

Did you say that or are you quoting me there? Honestly, I can't tell.

Removing the Self from where Descartes had placed it in the middle of philosophy is one of the net things about Philosophical Investigations. — Banno

Well we've already been though how Ramsey whispered the secrets of pragmatism in Wittgenstein's lughole.

As I say, Peirce was fixing Kant who was fixing Descartes. Wittgenstein is pretty irrelevant.

There's this really nice old paper of how Kant's cognitivism was fixed by Peirce's semiotics - http://ecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1905&context=luc_theses

From what you have said it would seem that the speaker can decide in one way or the other if the stone is part of Uluru or not. But that's not what I would say. It's not the speaker who makes such decisions, but the community being addressed. And what is being asked is not about the ontology of Uluru so much as the way we use parts of that sacred rock. — Banno

The speaker could take a view. The community could take a view. All that matters so far as a pragmatic view of truth goes is that each party would be forming some general theory about "sacred Uluru" and would see the stone in evidential terms. Either the stone will be ruled by identity-justified constraints, or the party in question would feel a justified indifference.

So the threshold might be determined by something physical - like the size or the degree of attachment. Or the criteria could be anything. The person wanting to souvenir the stone might be a tribal magic man or a state authorised geologist with a permit in his pocket. All that matters is that there is a theory that covers the issue and there is a way to "tell the truth of the matter" as some act of measurement. Some attribute of the stone has to become a sign of whether it is imbued with this quality of sacredness or not.

The key here is that there is a habit of interpretance in play. There is a belief. And then the world is understood in terms of the belief. The belief knows what kind of signs or acts of measurement fall within its scope.

The stone is stony enough, or sacred enough, or whatever enough, to count as such. Or not, as the case may be.

The radical psychological claim is then that all experience is like this. Semiosis doesn't just apply to language use, it applies to the basic neurobiology of experience, and even of course to biology in general.

But then I don't have a clear idea of what this "cut" is - apparently between me and it, as if an individual could have a private language. — Banno

You could look it up. Just google Pattee and epistemic cut. Or von Neuman and self reproducing automata. Or Rosen and modelling relation. Or....

You get the picture. Stop being such a lazy sod and make an effort. You might finally learn something. Imagine poor fated Ramsey whispering in your lughole too.

I know this is misrepresenting you, Apo, — Banno

Well why not pull your finger out and do your research.

How will you reply? What attitude will you adopt? — Banno

Always the psychodrama, Banno. You want to play the game of "pretend to respect me and I'll pretend to respect you." And worried you won't get that, you try to play the authority figure. You set yourself up as the judge of whether someone's behaviour conforms to some proper standard.

Well bollocks to that as you know. If you want respect, make an argument that works. Stop pretending that you are somehow in control of how this goes.

What your opinion of the height of Everest is, perhaps? — Banno

But I already sketched the argument in this very thread and have just elaborated it in terms of your latest mountain obsession, Uluru,

Others have been rifling through the archives for you.

Take the height of Mt Everest. As a mountain climber, it doesn't really matter if it is X metres high, give or take another minute or two of climbing. At some level of truth-telling, our interest fuzzes out. The pull of the moon might have some measurable effect on Mt Everest so its "true height" changes by nanometres constantly all day. But this becomes noise - unless we establish some purpose that makes a more exact measurement seem reasonable.

So it is BAU. You asking a question and ignoring the answer.

I realise that your preferred tactic is to frame questions which it might sound silly to deny. Are these my hands I see before me? This may dazzle the epistemologically unworldly. But it ain’t going to wash here.

Indeed I don’t think we differ by much from apokrisis’a actual position, were he able to present it rather than simply atack his own straw construct. — Banno

Is this what you mean by passive-aggressive?

Time and again I give a full account of my position. And then you pretend I'm "refusing to explain".

I'm calling you out Banno! (Heh, heh, remember those fun old days?)

But it does mean that When we talk about Uluru, we are talking about that very thing, and not about some concept-of-Uluru that is distinct from the rock.

This view will be mischaracterised as a defunct version of realism. It will be asserted that I am somehow talking about a mystical Uluru-in-itself. That critique fails to recognise that the the thing-in-itself can only persist as a reasonable idea if one maintains the distinction between thing and scheme. — Banno

So what this summary misses is that our talk about Uluru is also talk that defines "the person speaking".

This is obvious just in that the correct term was Ayers Rock when I was a kid. That spoke to the identity of a particular linguistic culture. Just as saying "Uluru" is identity-defining for Aussies today.

So that is why you need a larger semiotic framework. The self doing the speaking has to be included as part of what the act of speaking must produce. An attitude of mind has to take responsibility for the words which construct "its" world.

This "idealist" correction to the naive realist story applies all the way down. If I pick up a stone while climbing Uluru, is that part of Uluru or not? The fact of the matter becomes a social construct. Sure, the legal view will attempt to cash out in the physical facts. But essentially the view will be based on cultural identity values.

Am I going to be penalised for picking up a souvenir grain of sand, or get fined for the Uluru dust that gathers on my clothes? Chipping of a chunk is an obvious no-no. But where is the proper borderline? It can't be in the material facts as rock is rock whether it is rock dust or rock grain or rock lump or rock mountain. So it has to be in the cultural facts - how much rock is enough for people to want to care?

The principle of indifference applies. A semiotic relation with the world is based in interpretance. And interpretation takes acts of measurement as its appropriate signs. Uluru as a qualitative concept in our minds must be pragmatically quantified in terms of some perceptual judgement. We care about tourists chipping away. We don't care about the dust on their clothes - even though we could care if there was a reason, a value, for doing so in our minds.

So yeah. Banno's theory of truth is lacking the distinctions needed to be an actual theory.

A triadic semiotic theory says we do construct our understanding of the thing-in-itself as a "scheme". But this scheme has its own two parts - the interpretant and the sign. There is the "self" - the individuated habit of interpretation that we call "us" - and then the system of signs that are the "evidence" of the kind of world this self could have in mind.

It is the same structure as science itself - the whole point. There is a theory of the world, and the acts of measurement what confirm that theory. The world is still out there beyond.

And this disconnect - this epistemic cut - is the necessary basis of knowledge. It allows the model to be separate from the world so that it can continue to learn from the world, continue to adapt.

And needless to say, the "I" at the apparent centre of knowing things, is also able to develop and become individuated as part of that virtuous cycle of adaptation.

So a theory of truth that justifies the scientific method and is psychologically realistic in a way that Kantian cognitivism never was. Who could want better? ;)

and now when asked to explain yourself you take the role of a fanatic. — Banno

How so? If you want to say something Banno, you should learn to just spit it out.

What have I been asked to explain?

In what way is situating my position in a relevant context of academic research being a fanatic?

Why do you think I don't know what I'm talking about? I had a ring-side seat on the whole neural synchrony saga.

I explained over and over what I mean by brain states, — Sam26

Well, it seems that it is in fact a specific supervenient/identity theory story about neural synchrony and not some generalised notion of "brain activity". So I was spot on correct in my understanding from the first.

But yes, plough on. You have shown that you don't want to engage with informed criticism of a brain states approach.

LOL.

I remember reading this far...

It's my contention that brain states "are synchronized neuronal activity in a specific frequency," — Sam26

...and switching off.

But thanks. The paper nicely places the metaphysics in the space of identity theories as I suggested. And it fetishes neural synchrony in exactly the way that was in vogue in philosophy of mind in the early 1990s.

So it is precisely the kind of supervenience-based reductive nonsense I was criticising back then, and still doing today.

The value of what I think, for me, consists primarily in how it influences what I do. — Janus

Well Peircean semiosis is about placing value there at the heart of things. Of course Pragmatism has been misunderstood as being simply about the value of "usefulness" - some kind of reductive utility. But really, it is broader than that. Certainly Peirce himself got rather mystic and carried away when he started to talk about evolutionary love or agapism. However a triadic sign relation does say we see the view of the world that is useful to us ... the view that indeed defines "us".

So semiosis says belief or truth-telling is rightfully self-centred. It has to be as a sign relation is how a self - an interpretant - can arise at the centre of its world, or unwelt.

And that fact - that any proposition rightfully also speaks to an interest - is clearly what is missing from the usual reductive AP or philosophy of language approach.

AP tries to make true the reductive ontology that got science off to its flying start. Reality could be reduced to logical atoms. Formal and final cause could be neglected as what counts as foundational is material and efficient cause.

And so questions of the self, or value, etc, just fell out of the AP picture. Of course, that way of thinking never produced the great final rationalist theory that folk like Russell and Whitehead were expecting. But the aspiration still leaves its clear mark.

It is the reason Banno goes stum whenever pressed to account for the knower along with the knowledge. To even admit that such a question hangs over the business of truth or belief is to confess that AP simply doesn't have a story on formal and final cause. It has built its house on nominalism, atomism, materialism, mechanicalism and the rest. So Banno's tactic is to fight the strawman of Kantian representationalism and pretend the solution is some kind of monism - we just are at one with the world in some mystical, yet apparently metaphysics-eschewing, fashion. :)

I of course argue that Peirce set things right before AP even really got going. Though circumstances meant Peirce was not widely understood in his own time. Ironically, the second acclaimed phase of Wittgenstein can now be traced to a mumbled, unattributed acceptance of what Peirce was saying, as heard via Ramsey in particular.

I can see that it makes no sense to think of the scheme on one side and the world on the other. This would create an unbridgeable gulf. On the other hand we cannot sensibly say that the scheme just is the world, surely...? — Janus

You got it. Kantian representationalism was a step towards working it out. But it is too dualistic. We need to take the next Peircean step that is triadic. We need to speak about the holistic interaction in which both world and self emerge via a sign relation.

What would be silly is to then collapse any distinction by pretending there just is no epistemic issue to discuss. To reduce knowledge to "meaning is use" is a trite slogan. Even if Peircean semiotics was also saying that meaning is about embodied usage - the interaction that is the "self" in "its world".

You're taking this too far into neuroscience — Sam26

What, you don't think that identity theory and functionalism are positions in philosophy of mind?

You accused me of misinterpretation. I am replying that I understood you in terms of a mainstream community understanding of your jargon.

All that's needed, is to understand that there is brain activity that precedes or coincides with our actions, and that some actions are expressions of beliefs, quite apart from statements or propositions. — Sam26

And I've explained why I think that is inadequate. Any theory of truth needs to distinguish between the different levels of "thought" or "belief" involved. As I said earlier, discussions such as these trip up on the difference between linguistic semiosis and neural semiosis.

It is not easy to disentangle the two in humans, as we are soaked in a linguistic enculturing from birth. Even the physical world we grow up in is structured with paths, walls, doors and other linguistically-derived constraints.

Yet to make a correct connection between our propositional-style rational thinking and our bare sensory experience of the world requires taking account of this complex layering of semiotics.

That is why I object to the ontic commitment implicit in talk about "states of affairs" - physical or mental. It is a dualistic and representational framing of the situation. It is not an embodied, semiotic and triadic framing of the situation.

So it is a philosophy of mind that remains mired in Kantian cognitivism and has yet to move on to Peircean pragmatism, the modern semiotic view.

OK then. I am familiar with what that would mean to both neuroscientists and in philosophy of mind. My comment stands. Talk of the brain having states is quite a strong commitment to a particular ontology compared to some vaguer phrasing such as talk about activity.

The distinction might be critical for distinguishing between an identity theorist and a functionalist, for example.

I never meant for the term brain states to be defined in a very precise manner (not that you're necessarily doing this). It's simply a term that refers to mental activity that precedes our actions, and I don't think that when philosophers and others use the term, that they had in mind some one-to-one correspondence between one's belief and a particular brain state. — Sam26

Sorry but I’m more familiar with the language games of neuroscientists than your private language. So “brain states” is a phrase expressing a commitment to a particular physicalist ontology - one where a particular state of conscious experience would be uniquely specified by a particular state of neural affairs.

If you had said “brain activity” or “neural goings on”, then the hand waving generality would have been clear. But you chose the words you chose.

Furthermore, a hand waving notion of “whatever activity was the case to stand as a belief” simply says that however a belief was caused, then that was how it was caused. You have not grounded anything really, just said effects must have a cause. A “state” can be presumed, whatever the heck a state is.

And unless you said something further to make it clear, the very framing of this - as a correlation between a state of physical activity and a state of mind - is dangerously representational. It sounds like you are committing to a general ontology that treats the mind as some kind of passive display rather than a meaningful semiotic interaction with a world.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/145789

Again, if you want a discussion, say something interesting. There’s a post what I wrote not a page back, yet you just want reruns of your dullest one liners. Show you can actually engage with other people in an actual conversation for once.

Thanks for confirming that you can’t answer a direct question to save your life.

It's like saying that we can't know real truth, because as soon as anything happens it's in the past, and we can't be absolutety certain about what we've sensed, and our memories, so let's just define truth in terms of pragmatic consequences. — Metaphysician Undercover

What waffle. The proof that we understood the past is the degree to which we can use it to predict our future.

Same old tune, Banno.

If you want to say something, I outlined a position just a couple of posts back. Have a go at that.

So... We think about our own thought and belief. That requires language. Thinking about thought and belief first requires that we form and/or hold thought and belief. Thus, we form and hold thought and belief prior to language. — creativesoul

So to think doesn’t require language, but to think about thinking does require language?

Doesn’t really work, does it. If thinking is thinking, it either does or doesn’t require language. So the usual equivocation at work here.

None of modern cosmology makes any sense other than to keep some priests busy. — Rich

It's like the little boy exclaiming the emperor wears no clothes. Except this little boy is standing so far at the back of a tall crowd he sees nothing really. He just enjoys the sound of what he says.

It has been my understanding that this particular version of the multiverse is unverifiable, thus meaningless. — T Clark

Any argument based on inflation is speculative metaphysics. But it might be worth stepping back to think about how science can even operate at the limit of the observable.

You will never be able to experiment in some direct controlled and repeatable way - the gold standard - when it comes to investigating the origins of the Cosmos. That's obvious. Your apparatus to make measurements that could replicate the energies involved would turn into plasma, or collapse into blackholes, themselves.

So the only course is to identify the most fundamental constraints on any possible theory - like the fact the universe looks almost perfectly flat and thermalised from the beginning. And then you can search for a mathematical mechanism that would predict such an outcome.

Maybe that mathematics will just pop out of pure mathematical considerations themselves - like the permutation symmetries that have been so successful at predicting the fundamental particles.

Or else the maths will come from other physics internal to Universe - the kind of physics of mechanisms we can confirm via laboratory experiments, such as the kind of mechanisms that explain condense matter structures, or whatever.

So all we can hope to do is work our way towards the most fundamental known constraints on a final theory. And then make some judgement about which mathematical model best makes predictions that manage to fall within the bounds of that set of constraints.

So of course any final theory is "unverifiable" if we are insisting on some scientific method so strict that we know it could never be applied. But we can still be scientifically systematic in a way that respects the rules of some epistemically well-grounded game.

And exactly what the rules ought to be is a matter of loud argument in science. As it should be.

Inflation theory is an example of where the ease of producing mathematical models has fuelled an academic industry. Unconstrained imagination has been allowed to run riot to build CVs. Whereas really the fecundity of inflation as a research topic ought perhaps be sounding the alarm bells.

Hence we are now seeing the same kind of pushback that string theory got four or five years ago - http://backreaction.blogspot.co.nz/2017/10/is-inflationary-universe-scientific.html

And multiverse thinking is this issue on steroids.

As I say, what is happening is we are trying to paint the final theory into a corner. We are using what we know about the universe at an observable scale to narrow down a space of possibilities. Then in that corner, we explore all the mathematical structures that can fit into its tight space.

Yet it is a generic fact that every time we seem to trap a very particular kind of mathematics in the corner, it turns out to have unbounded fecundity. The same equations can still spit out an unlimited variety of alternative universes even if they seem to have only a few free variables to play with.

This is what happened with string theory. As the maths was perfected, it sprang a leak. It could generate a "practically infinite landscape" of alternative physical realities.

My view is that this shows the maths itself has a problem. We aren't good at modelling self-constraining systems. That is something that has only got going as a field of research this past 40 years. So we can't build models in which the constraints themselves emerge to rein in the very infinities that the maths will otherwise, in unconstrained fashion, generate.

After string theory, many expected loop quantum gravity to do just that. It has tried to apply a condensed matter mindset to the problem. But that also splintered into a great variety of possible mechanisms and as yet no breakthrough is being celebrated. Strings are even back in fashion.

So my answer is that inflation theory has the problem that it can sort of still be tested. For instance, better resolution of the CMB might detect the gravity waves that some inflation theories predict. Yet it is fundamentally a free parameter model. The "inflaton scalar field" is extreme hand-waving with no direct evidence. So if one version of inflation is falsified - we find no gravity ripples - the knobs of the basic model can be twiddled to predict that outcome too.

Inflation is not unverifiable and therefore meaningless. It just reflects the fact that we can paint the mathematical possibilities into a corner - which would be meaningful science - and yet maths tends to still have unbounded fecundity even when trapped in apparently the tightest physical spot.

So more attention has to be directed at this epistemic issue. Science ought to be favouring mathematical models that can predict their own emergent constraints, not just stay within some set of observable constraints while spewing out a vast variety of alternatives from within that confined space.

It seems that it is the human ability to think symbolically that allows for "holding beliefs"; where holding a belief is conceived of as being in an unchanging state of assent towards an absolutely fixed content. — Janus

I think that's a really important point. Language shifts belief into a timeless register. It makes a truth claim transcendent of the usual continuous active engagement of the world. And then the truth-making is also turned into a search for "the facts", the "states of affairs".

Which is where Banno and Sam go astray in trying to treat the truth-makers as some uninterpreted ground of experience. It could also be where Creative goes wrong, but after many years, I still have no clue what thesis he is trying to promote. He can't seem to answer a single straight question about it.

So anyway, that is what is important - what I keep referring to as Pattee's epistemic cut (which was also von Neumann's deal with self-reproducing automata and Peirce's triadic metaphysics). The animal mind is embedded in the flow of the moment. It is responding directly to the here and now in terms of some adaptive system of conception and exploration. There is just no mechanism to transcend that flow. So an animal doesn't "hold beliefs" in that it could objectify a thought and wonder whether it is actually true or not. It just expresses a belief in interpreting the world a certain way. And the "truth" is then discovered in terms of the pragmatic consequences. The animal prospers or suffers.

But language gives humans a mechanism to objectify their own "states of belief" and compare them to "states of the world". And as I stress - or as Peirce and other modelling relations guys like Robert Rosen stress - The states of the world are understood as acts of measurement. They too have to be translated into the transcendent register. We don't check the world directly to see if a belief is true. We check our conception of what the world would look like if such a belief were the explanation of some particular set of measurements.

We are looking not for the thing-in-itself, but the signs we conceive as speaking the truth of the thing-in-itself. The umwelt. And that is conceived of in the same timeless and placeless fashion - despite being a conception about some "physical state that exists at a time and place".

Take Banno's confusion over mountain heights or Sam's attempts to tie mental states to brain states.

Banno is imagining that if he got out a ruler - a measurement in terms of some transcendent co-ordinate system - he could tell you how high a mountain "really was". Well he can tell you the results of a measurement act in terms of some world transcending viewpoint. But already he is imagining a measurement act in an ideal Platonia where mountains aren't eroding or still growing, or where he never makes an error as he lays his ruler end over end several thousand times, while trying to keep count.

Likewise Sam is imagining that the brain has "states". At some instant in time, you can take that instantaneous snapshot view which gives you a timeless representation of how the brain was, in a way that will forever after be recorded as such. But the causality of neural activity is spread over multiple timescales. There's habits that take decades to form. There's attentional action that spans seconds. There's working memory action that spans minutes. There's neural level processes anywhere between 5 and 100 milliseconds. You have the biological pace of activity inside the cells that is just a frantic blur.

So any neurobiologist knows that no timeless snapshot could capture the temporally-complex structure of what the brain is doing. The best we can hope for is to figure out what collection of measurements might best match the predictive needs of some theory. We can't just measure "the reality". We already have to have formed a mental picture of what signs or observables can meaningfully stand for our concept of "a brain state".

So the measurables - the truthmakers - are not grounded in "the world", or even "our direct experience of the world". The truthmakers are grounded in our conception of how the world should look in terms of some set of signs, some set of measurements, that usefully converts a running temporal reality into the kind of timeless representation of reality that our theories of the world can deal with.

Yet in post after post, you just get folk claiming that minds perceive the state of the world in untroublesome fashion. The beliefs might be conceptual things, but the perceptions are veridical things. But what are qualia except our efforts to imagine a timeless and placeless version of the experience we would otherwise just live? And in objectifying qualia, we might get to say something useful, yet we also leave behind so much that we haven't manage to say anything about.

So truth is a pragmatic choice about how much of reality we can afford to ignore. We gain something by objectifying and creating a set of signs - a set of "timeless facts" that serve as truthmakers. But it is an art, a skill. And good epistemology is about bringing out the tricky nature of what we claim to do.

If people are conceived of as being able to hold beliefs in this kind of static sense, it would seem that they routinely do it without 'thinking about thinking', though, and that is why I said it has nothing to do, necessarily, with metacognition. — Janus

Creative has some special private understanding of metacognition. He certainly hasn't managed to explain it to me, or relate it to the literature.

I think it is a bad term in fact. It is normally used by psychologists who don't take a linguistic or discursive view of the human mental difference. The construct of metacognition presumes that the human ability to recollect, or be self-aware, or to have voluntary control over attention and imagination, are all aspects of some higher genetically-evolve cognitive faculty. So the thesis is not that the structure of language gets internalised to structure individual minds, but that the minds evolved that structure, therefore that's why they knew how to speak. In evolutionary history, the thoughts were there before the means of the expression.

So metacognition is how a cognitivist would think about things. And a social-constructionist would see metacognition as merely the kinds of things you can learn to do once you live in a community where speech is a shared thought-structuring skill.

But as you say, most people "hold beliefs" in the sense that they don't think you are crazy when you ask them to give explanations for why they just did whatever they just did. They accept the rules of that particular language game and will play along. They will come up with a reason that seems reasonable, according to whatever cultural context is in play.

Psychologists can then argue over what this "metacognitive" discourse tells us about the structure of human cognition.

No. It's not. That's the point. i is a number but it's not a quantity. — fishfry

Perhaps this is pedantic, but even in terms of rotations in the complex plane i does have a couple of associated quantities with its notion of multiplication. It represents an anti-clockwise rotation of 90 degrees and a magnitude of 1 in terms of the size of complex numbers — fdrake

Fdrake is right. If we want to ask what i quantifies, it quantifies the number of dimensions that a number is constrained by. So i is a widget to rotate a real number into an orthogonal direction that turns the number line into a number plane.

The number line stands for the most constrained notion of continuity. Complex numbers relaxes that strong constraint and allow numbers to wander in two dimensions. And the numbers still behave like numbers - objects that meet the functional criteria of associative division algebras.

We can continue to relax the number of dimensions in play. We could consider a three dimensional number. But now it doesn’t behave arithmetically. It is not a suitable object of algebraic structure - a fact of undoubted physical significance when it comes to why space winds up being three dimensional.

Then with quarternions, we have four dimensions and a bounce back to a large amount of algebraic structure. Five, six and seven dimension again see that structure disappear. Then the octonions provide a last echo.

So i is a good example of structualism at work. We can define some basic relational properties that numbers are meant to have. The associative division algebras do that. And then we can see how the “hard structure” emerges as constraints are added.

As we constrain the dimensionality that defines the continuous space in which discrete mathematical objects are meant to move, we can see the role those constraints play in actually defining the mathematical properties those objects are understood to have.

The limits maketh the objects and not the other way round.

I noted that there is no general definition of number in mathematics. A well-known and true observation. For whatever reason, this simple and harmless statement triggered several people. I still don't understand why. — fishfry

Either people were triggered or they thought there are some good approaches worth discussing in philosophy of maths.

Shapiro and Resnik hold that all mathematical theories, even non-algebraic ones, describe structures. This position is known as structuralism (Shapiro 1997; Resnik 1997). Structures consists of places that stand in structural relations to each other. Thus, derivatively, mathematical theories describe places or positions in structures. But they do not describe objects. The number three, for instance, will on this view not be an object but a place in the structure of the natural numbers.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/philosophy-mathematics/#WhaNumCouNot

If you can't be bothered to do that, then this is not a discussion. — Pseudonym

You’re right. I’m not bothered.

It is sufficient justification for me to maintain my belief that no-one has yet provided a testable, pragmatically true, proof that neurobiology does not proceed deterministically, it is not incumbent on me to prove that it does in order to justify my belief. — Pseudonym

Eh? You can believe what you want without proof because you are free to ignore opposing positions when they offer proof?

Seems radical.

Show me a single biology textbook which states that life depends on randomness. — Pseudonym

Peter Hoffman has written a really good book - Life’s Ratchet: How molecular machines extract order from chaos.

I summed up the guts of it in this post...
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/105999

If all you're going to do is suggest that anyone who continues to disagree with you after the presentation of one article must be closed-minded and have no interest in hearing challenging positions, then you might as well go door-to-door proselytising. — Pseudonym

I just thought you might appreciate some help with concepts you seemed to be struggling with. Would you think it better if I were to follow your approach of just making up my own shit rather than offering arguments based on actual philosophical and scientific positions?

This site (as I understand it) is for actual debate. — Pseudonym

Sure we could debate Pattee when you are up to speed on the biosemiotic position I’m citing.

If we can't even pick a random number without our pre-existing mental state influencing it towards one decision out of the supposedly 'free' choice, then I don't see much hope of demonstrating that our important choices in life are anything other than determined in advance by the dispositions we already have. — Pseudonym

A disposition is an untroublesome form of “Determinism”. But I guess a “problem of personal inclinations” doesn’t have quite the same dramatic ring to it.

Using the English language.

equivocal - ɪˈkwɪvək(ə)l - adjective

- open to more than one interpretation; ambiguous.
"the equivocal nature of her remarks"

- (of a person) using ambiguous or evasive language.
"he has always been equivocal about the meaning of his lyrics"

I'm not saying animals don't believe, I'm saying that they don't form or hold beliefs. — Janus

Yep. They don’t act on a belief. Their actions simply show they believe. Where we - linguistically, hence metacognitively - can also speak of the belief upon which we might, or might not, act.

Our observations clearly show us that animals attribute causality. That requires thought and belief. To think that fire caused tremendous discomfort is to believe that touching fire causes pain. It is to draw mental correlations between one's own actions and what followed. It does not require, nor can it, propositional content(unless you want to argue that propositions aren't dependent upon language). — creativesoul

Thought is even more equivocal than belief here.

Sure, animals can think in some non-linguistically structured fashion. They can be smart and adaptive in their planning and responding.

But to call this thought, with no further attempt at distinction, is to perpetuate a confusion.

I would agree that ordinary language doesn’t give us a lot to work with here though. Folk psychology terms do not handle the difference that language makes to cognition very well.

Compatibilists, unlike libertarians, believe even the internal constraints are deterministic. It is true that some libertarians believe that whatever someone actually does freely, he or she ought to have been able to refrain from doing it (or to do something else) in the exact same circumstances regardless of the antecedent causal constraints on the action being internal or external to the process of deliberation and decision. This is the strongest possible version of the so called 'principle of alternative possibilities' (PAP). But that is a rather minority positions among defenders of the possibility of free will. — Pierre-Normand

This is an excellent summary. What I want to add is that even if the internal deliberation was as rational and optimal as possible - completely determined by those ideal constraints - reality is still unpredictable. We can only guess that a choice is likely the best. And our own actions impact on the world in a way that produces some of that unpredictability. Stepping into a muddy river, I might step on a crocodile.

So an ideal rationalist has to second guess their own actions in terms of intended consequences. That uncertainty is a product of any decision and part of the internal milieu. It can’t be computed from some prior state of perfect knowledge, as we might argue about a best guess. It is an irreducible residue of indecision when doing our best to make a decision determined by “all the available prior information”. As a guess about a guess, it is information that only follows the action that causes it to be the case.

In short, there is an irreducible uncertainty at the heart of any model theoretic approach to reality - an observer effect that dogs all rational models. We are entangled with our environments when we make a decision. The decision that results in an interaction is the same as the act of measurement that disturbs the state of the very system it hopes to measure.

If only I had known, I wouldn’t have stepped on the crocodile. But it was only in stepping that I could have known.

The line between internal constraints and external constraints is a fuzzy boundary and not a sharp one. In the final analysis, strict determinism fails as the actor and their environment can’t be absolutely divided.

Mostly decisions can be relatively determined by internal information. A decision had only that one possible optimal outcome and so we had no real choice. However often the reality is the information is ambiguous. We can only discover the rationale after acting.

Hence Buridan’s ass. You just have to make a plunge when no choice is clear.

If you were in fact a deterministic computation, you would blue screen. Your decision making would gridlock. So a good thing we aren’t designed that way. A good thing noise still exists in the system to tilt decisions in less constrained fashion.

In summary, folk want one or other extreme to be true - absolute determinism or absolute freedom. But as you outline, a sensible position depends on zeroing in on the tricky border where both sides seem to be saying something believable. And zoom right in and the very distinction itself evaporates.

Any theory thus has to recognise the further fact that observers and their world’s can’t in the end be completely unentangled in either direction.