Nice. This plays well into my dislike of "objective" and "subjective", a dichotomy I think causes far more problems than it solves. Part of the problem is that folk think in terms of objective and subjective objects, a nonsense that might be partially replaced by thinking in terms of objects and processes.

Is reading The Blue Book necessary for this?

Yes, but, importantly (though not in disagreement), not a physical process, or a conceptual process structured on the criteria for an object, but the process of the logic of a practice to judge (afterwards): what qualifies as understanding something; how we have a conversation about what is meaningful about what I said; or the difference between what we determine to be thought compared to just the voice inside your head, slogans, being polite, etc.

I mean… it’s not gonna hurt (it is a dense 70 pages though). I hope it would help and be easier to scan through the discussion for the posts labeled Section___ that dig into the text of every 3-5 pages, as the above is a summary of those 20 posts, though those are still only what caught my eye. If there is anything of particular interest, I can point to my notes and the section of text.

The motivation for an “answer” is a desire for “reliability, and solidity”. To picture “what I mean” (p.65) as “information” is to need it to be in the framework only of knowledge. Our personal experience is pictured as an internal object to be “the very basis of all that we say with any sense about [being a human]” (p. 48). He also says we are “tempted to say that these personal experiences are the material of which reality consists.” (p. 45) The skeptic really wants to be “inhabited” by the exceptional, in a way that “others can’t see”. Thus the creation of the object, that is a 'mind' or 'subject', is to make me inherently important and unique; as if within me would be “that which really lives”. — Antony Nickles

Looking through what your thread has focused upon, and what we have discussed as differences of method by different thinkers, I resist the idea that thoughts about "the object" come down merely to a psychological motivation.

I resist the idea that thoughts about "the object" come down merely to a psychological motivation. — Paine

Is this to say you think I’ve made a mistake in reading? or that you disagree with him? And, to try to say this again, I’m not arguing this is the only thing to be learned, but I wouldn’t say it is insignificant (“merely”). And I still don’t understand what a “psychological motivation” is meant to distinguish, and differentiate from what. I mean, does pointing out that they are logical errors as well (generalization, forced analogy, abstracting criteria, etc.) make it seem less… personal, individual… ethical? And not to mince words, but I take him to be investigating why we take a particular framework of how we think about objects and impose it on how to think about thought, meaning, and understanding. I just need a little more, or to understand what I’m supposed to justify/explain if that’s the case.

One starting place is to ask why W wants to separate psychology from thinking. The separation is a stumbling block to explanation.

I take your point that we often impose one set of meanings to replace others. That does not explain why W does not reduce one set of signs into another.

One starting place is to ask why W wants to separate psychology from thinking. — Paine

Well, without a further explanation of what “psychology” means, I’ll assume we are talking about the kind of thing the skeptic pictures as a “thought” in us (as an object), or when they imagine thinking as a mechanism in a “queer kind of medium” that would “explain the action of the mind” (p.6). I take the method here is to show how (and why) the skeptic pictures thinking this way by contrasting it with (and perhaps in this way “separating” it from) the logic and reasons of our ordinary ways of judging what is a thought and what is considered thinking (as I mention above). I would conjecture that other reasons for differentiating these two versions of thought would be to show that our ordinary criteria are more varied, substantial, and illuminating than we had considered (been blind to). But I’m interested to hear what you take thinking to consist of, and why psychology would be a part of it (or thought to be), one that needed to be separated, and for what reason.

that we often impose one set of meanings to replace others… does not explain why W does not reduce one set of signs into another. — Paine

I’m not sure what the “set of signs” are, that they would be different (irreducible). The things he has us say are the same. “I can’t feel your pain.” etc. He just shows there are multiples senses of such a phrase which apply different (types of) criteria—allowing us to see the demands of the skeptic. He does say we can “construct new notations, in order to break the spell of those which we are accustomed to” but that is just an exercise to highlight the distinctions we make or could make.