So leave it.

What, the fact that you don't seem to have even grasped the very basics of what you're talking about?

Tell you what, essences and essential properties are still very popular in philosophy. If your argument actually dispatches them in a few sentences, instead of failing to understand what an essence is, you should have absolutely no problem getting it published. It should quickly become one of the most cited articles in metaphysics. Go for it.

Your own grasp of the intelligibility of things and understanding of what it is to be human. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Our eyes are not on our backs, and so we'd have no idea what we are identifying. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think you're pointing to there being limit-cases in all of this, which is fine. Neither I nor (I believe) Quine is trying to say that translation is impossible or even, in most cases, especially problematic. Rather, we're trying to shake up a very common assumption among philosophers, which is that there is some sort of binding action (I called it "metaphysical Superglue" elsewhere) that makes a word inseparable from its object or meaning or concept -- take your pick of these imprecise terms. ("Cannot be grounded in any infallible a priori knowledge," in the words of the SEP article.) One of the pernicious effects of this belief is that, if someone wants to argue for a conceptual change, they're told they can't because "that's not what the word means."

Let's assume for the sake of argument an older, realist perspective. Things have essences. Our senses grasp the quiddity of things. — Count Timothy von Icarus

OK, for the sake of this argument, that would mean that a rabbit has an essence, a quiddity, that the linguist grasps, right? And on some version of charity, he's going to attribute that same grasping of essence to the native. To me, all this reveals is that "gavagai = rabbit" is a likely guess, because we do indeed associate "thingness" or quiddity with objects that are spatially distinct from their surroundings (and in the case of the rabbit, it can also move about, a further point of distinction). Does this help us understand the relation of word and object, which I believe is Quine's point with "gavagai"? Not a rhetorical question -- you may well be seeing something here that I'm not.

There is a sort of parallel between this and what Rodl is saying about not removing the thinker from thoughts. — Count Timothy von Icarus

There may well be. Rodl devotes an entire chapter to discussing Nagel's "view from nowhere," and one of his criticisms is this problem of the "loss of the viewer" -- what it does to 1st person propositions.

Rather, we're trying to shake up a very common assumption among philosophers, which is that there is some sort of binding action (I called it "metaphysical Superglue" elsewhere) that makes a word inseparable from its object or meaning or concept -- take your pick of these imprecise terms. ("Cannot be grounded in any infallible a priori knowledge," in the words of the SEP article.)

Who held such a position though? I find this whole area of philosophy to be filled with straw men and ghosts. It's obvious that different peoples use different words for different things and that anything can be said in many ways. Poetry as far back as Homer and the Bible makes use of this.

This was, if anything, likely more obvious in ancient and medieval times when dialects, language groups, and practices varied over relatively tiny geographic areas. Today we live in a globalized, and so homogenized world. Whereas Herodotus, Xenophon, or Marco Pollo seem acutely aware of the dramatic differences between their culture and the "barbarians." An understanding that meaning varies with context, or that use helps to determine meaning is also very old. One could not identify fallacies of equivocation or develop theories of analogous predication otherwise.

I take it that Quine is mostly responding to his own immediate tradition, to Russell, the early Wittgenstein, Carnap, etc., yet I find nothing so naive as this in their own understanding, even if I do agree that something like the translation of language into logic or falsification conditions is probably unprofitable.

Yet if the point is that translation doesn't involve one single string of syllables or characters, the point is trivial. However, the conclusions drawn, e.g. the inscuratabiliy of reference, tend to be much more radical than this. The point of inscrutability isn't that we can also call Rome "the Eternal City," "capital of Italy," or "the largest city on the Tiber," or New York "the Big Apple," but rather the (initially at least, bizarre) claim that one can never refer to exclusively to Rome or New York City, but that we alway refer just as much/just as plausibly to very many other things (on some views, an infinite number).

Does this help us understand the relation of word and object, which I believe is Quine's point with "gavagai"? Not a rhetorical question -- you may well be seeing something here that I'm not.

Sure. One doesn't even need to assume some sort of realism, we could just assume a sort of loose scientific realism and reject meteorological nihilism (i.e. there are true/proper part/whole relations). Organs are a great example of proper parts.

Let's say our linguist is trying to discover the word heart. He sees the natives butchering a rabbit and, since he is an active participant, picks up the heart (which has been separated because, being a different organ with a different function, it is made of tough muscle and requires prolonged cooking that would spoil a liver, etc.). He gets a word in reply. He moves around the cook fire and picks up a deer heart. He gets the same word. Then he points to his own chest, and gets an affirmative response.

I would conclude that it is pretty obvious what the word means now. Different cultures have different words for the same organs because organs are distinct parts. To assume that the word might as well apply to any number of assemblages of empirical observations seems to me to presume that there aren't proper parts for us to identify.

Now, against this someone might complain that the word could just as well mean blood, or tough (because heart meat is tough), or chest. This already doesn't seem plausible, but we can just consider here that the linguist is going to have a vast number of interactions where they can actively pursue such distinctions. You could reference a pot of blood sausage being prepared for instance, if the concern is that "blood" is what is meant.

An opponent might backtrack even further and say that there is no way to know when one has received an affirmative or negative gesture. This just seems implausible; one doesn't need a common language to signal assent or dissent. Indeed, we can even understand other animals on this front, because communication is important. Someone who has never seen a dog before doesn't stand in utter confusion as to the dog's attitude towards them when they see it growling, bearing it's teeth, and readying to pounce, just as a sheep doesn't need to be exposed to dozens of wolves to know it should flee from them. The first is enough.

There may well be. Rodl devotes an entire chapter to discussing Nagel's "view from nowhere," and one of his criticisms is this problem of the "loss of the viewer" -- what it does to 1st person propositions.

Right. Hearts are the types of things people have words for. The idea that some "set of behaviors" referencing hearts could just as well be applied to any number of bizarre, counter intuitive assemblages of properties, needs to take the human out of the learning process and leave nothing but a "set of observations" to be mapped to other sets of observations.

But to assume that human language could be arbitrary in this way seems to me to have already implicitly presupposed the very thing in question.

Who held such a position though? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Plato, for one. When Socrates questions Euthyphro about the meaning of "piety," they are both assuming that there is a word, eusebeia, that corresponds correctly with a certain content or concept. Since they can't look it up in a dictionary and get a definition, they try out various possible concepts that the word might correspond to. So what is this about? Is it about conceptual investigation? Or is it about the meaning of a word? Would Plato be open to the idea that eusebeia is not wedded to a particular concept?

It's obvious that different peoples use different words for different things and that anything can be said in many ways. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But think about this re Socrates. I believe he'd dispute it vigorously. Or at best he'd say, "Yes, this is no doubt true about what people do, but they shouldn't. Words mean one thing and not another. Hence my quest to understand the meaning of troublesome words like piety and justice -- surely someone can tell me what they mean?"

(In other words, don't take Quine literally as writing about translation problems only between languages.
This is about the word/concept relation generally.)

I also take MacIntyre's idea that we've lost the meaning of classical terms to exemplify this. The assumption seems to be a kind of "one word, one meaning" theory, so that if A comes along and says,"I'd like to use 'virtue' and 'essence' in the following ways" (giving cogent reasons, we'll assume), B replies, "No, you can't, for that is not what 'virtue' and 'essence' mean."

But it's the general tendency I'm more concerned about, and I think Quine was concerned about too. We see it here on TPF. People will quote dictionary definitions or squibs from SEP as if these could lock down the connection between word and concept. There are of course many words you can do that with, but precious few, I'd argue, in philosophy. "Gavagai" means "rabbit"? Fine, but does "justice" mean dikaiosyne? Does "justice" pick out the same things for us that dikaiosyne picked out for Plato? How do we tell? And does it matter as much as we might think it does? Isn't the conceptual map itself more important than the shifting labels?

I want to respond to a couple more points you raised but I'm out of time right now . . . later!

To start, it might be helpful to recall that, pace modern practice, when Aristotle is talking about definitions he is talking about the definitions of things, not words. From what I understand, this was common practice, and this certainly seems to be what Socrates is involved in. A key idea here is that definitions can be more or less correct; a definition is not just "however a word is currently used." This is obviously not how dictionaries come up with their definitions. They add a sense when a word begins to be commonly used in an equivocal manner. It's closer to scientific classification, or questions like "are viruses a living organism?" (i.e. proper per se predication re viruses).

Anyhow, in the Euthyphro I think Plato is getting at knowing what piety is, not what the word piety means. I don't see how he is committed to the idea that some particular combination of syllables or characters uniquely maps to it. Indeed, a big thing he focuses on is that we often fail to reach such concepts in our words and propositional thought.

The notion of pros hen, analogical predication is his student Aristotle's, but the grounds for it in his own work is pretty clear.

Indeed, Plato denigrates words in a number of places. Words can only speak to relative good, not the Good. D.C. Schindler has a pretty good treatment of this in "Plato's Critique of Impure Reason," but it can be found most explicitly in Letter VII, where he explains why he has never and will never write something like a dissertation on metaphysics. Rather, such knowledge must be gained by "a long time and a life lived together, as one candle flame jumps to another."

But think about this re Socrates. I believe he'd dispute it vigorously

But this would be to elevate the mutable, contingent sign to the level of what it is a sign for (confusing the mutable and immutable/intelligible). IMO, St. Augustine, probably the most influential Platonist, stays pretty true to Plato in his semiotics, in which corporeal signs only direct our attention to what is intelligible. The triangle drawn in chalk that directs our attention in geometry class is not the triangle grasped by the intellect.

Now, in Augustinian semiotics these problems in translation could be overcome because one understands the intelligible by looking "inwards and upwards.," not by comparing sets of behaviors and conducting statistical analysis on them or something of that sort. Knowledge is a sort of self-knowledge. The relationships between mutable and corporeal (not to mention contingently stipulated) signs and mutable objects is decidedly not the sort of thing one "grasps noetically." To focus on them is to swan dive into multiplicity.

But we might suppose there is also a happy medium between the high flying "noesis-focused" approach of Augustine and limiting ourselves to a "third-person" view that requires us to consider how some sort of blank slate Bayesian AI would come to corelate words with phenomena based on a data feed of empirical measurements. As Gadamer points out, you can't begin any analysis without some prejudices, and so we need not attempt to flee from them, which wouldn't work anyhow.

I also take MacIntyre's idea that we've lost the meaning of classical terms to exemplify this. The assumption seems to be a kind of "one word, one meaning" theory, so that if A comes along and says,"I'd like to use 'virtue' and 'essence' in the following ways" (giving cogent reasons, we'll assume), B replies, "No, you can't, for that is not what 'virtue' and 'essence' mean."

It's probably helpful to take a look at MacIntyre's inspiration, A Canticle for Leibowitz. There, people have lost most scientific knowledge and are just aping the forms of science as a sort of a blind tradition.

On most views, all scientific knowledge claims are not equally correct. Hence, the problem here isn't supposed to simply be one of conceptual drift, with any and all concepts having equal standing and the only difficulty being translation. Rather, the problem is that the degenerated "science" is muddled and incorrect, misunderstanding its subject matter. In some sense, what is left is the form/signs and not the intelligible content.

But the assumption here isn't "one word, one meaning." It is "there are ways to be more or less correct about virtue." Thracymachus has his reasons for asserting that justice is whatever is to the advantage of the stronger. He is simply wrong about what justice is. Disputes over the "meaning of justice" are only going to appear totally irresolvable if one already starts off by assuming that there is no way to be more or less correct.

The essential idea isn't "the word justice → justice" but rather that thereis such a thing as justice, it is not simply a bundle of mutable associations.

Lots of good stuff in your reply. Let me begin by focusing on this:

A key idea here is that definitions can be more or less correct — Count Timothy von Icarus

How would we know when one was correct?

How would we know when one was correct?

Well, suppose someone gave a definition of "tiger" as: "a large purple fish with green leaves, a tap root, and horns." Clearly, this is off the mark and we can do better or worse (although in this case, not much worse).

Anyhow, to return to the difference between words/signs and what they signify, we could consider "Samuel Clemens" and "Mark Twain," which would seem to extend to the same person, having the same referent, such that everything that is true of one is true of the other.

Yet:
"Samuel Clemens's pen name was Mark Twain"
Cannot be swapped with:
"Mark Twain's pen name is Samuel Clemens."
And remain true.

Likewise: "Mark Twain topped the best seller list for much of the late-19th century" is true. Swap in "Samuel Clemens" and we might still consider it true, but in another sense it isn't, since one could search the lists and find nary a mention of "Samuel Clemens."

It's obvious that people aren't their names. Samuel Clemens is 13 letters long, but the man is not composed of letters or syllables, nor is Mark Twain 13 letters long. And obviously we might replicate some of this with man and homo sapiens, etc.

Sense versus reference. But in natural language, reference is often ambiguous, and for abstractions like, say, "justice," some will claim that there either is no reference or that the reference and sense collapse. Whereas a realist would presumably claim that there is a referent, be it an "abstract object/form" or else a principle. I would argue Socrates generally wants to get to the reference of "piety," "justice," etc., and is dealing with something like muddled senses/intentions. Thracymachus wants to refer to justice, but what he means by "justice" isn't justice, or is a cloudy, inadequate sense of justice.

Or, to introduce other terms, neo-scholastics might grant Hegel and co. that something like "concepts" evolve. But they instead like to say our "intentions" evolve, hopefully becoming more clear. Or as Sokolowski puts it, we "more fully grasp the intelligibility of things through the course of the 'Human Conversation.'" But for them, the "concept" stays the same, because we're thinking about the same thing. For instance, when we say "water is H2O," we still are referring to the same water our cave man ancestors knew quite well.

With a principle, we might have it unequally realized in a diverse multitude, as with beauty, goodness, justice, etc. And we might want to predicate this term analogously of different things, and I guess that's where the use of modern terminology breaks down because analogy has proven difficult to formalize (but also began to be neglected on primarily theological grounds originally).

So, if the Good is "that to which all things aim," and what is "choiceworthy," it might still be the case that things are good in very different ways, as signs of goodness, symptoms of goodness, etc. And obviously goodness will be contextual. I think St. Thomas uses the example of "walking being healthy for man," (and so presumably good for man), but obviously not if you have a broken ankle. Yet it is good to walk on a broken ankle if you need to escape an artillery barrage.

Anyhow, confusingly, I think Plato (or at least Platonists) would often want to have it that there is one referent, a Good, referred to in all goodness, even as respects what merely appears good, yet also that there are many goods. There is "the human good," and "finite goods," plural, and these can also be referents in some sense. I don't think the idea of unequal "possession," "participation," or "virtual quantity," plays all that nice with a lot of modern terminology here. Plato's analogy of the sun might be best. Everything is light in virtue of the sun's light, but they all reflect light differently and in doing so reflect their own image, and they really do have their own image, but it's also only in virtue of the sun that they can possess and reflect this image.

↪J

How would we know when one was correct?

Well, suppose someone gave a definition of "tiger" as: "a large purple fish with green leaves, a tap root, and horns." Clearly, this is off the mark and we can do better or worse (although in this case, not much worse). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Good. But putting the question in terms of "correct" rather than "incorrect" has a point, so if you wouldn't mind playing interlocutor with me, I'll ask again: How would we know the correct definition of "tiger"? This is going somewhere if you'll bear with me!

Presumably if it specifies the things in virtue of which all tigers are tigers, while not having anything that isn't a tiger fall under the definition. "Animal" for instance, seems essential. DNA, by contrast, won't work (or won't work alone) because a tiger liver or tiger blood has tiger DNA, but is not a tiger.

How this is accomplished might vary. Aristotle, for instance, allows for many types of definition. One way, given certain metaphysical assumptions, would be a substances genera and species-specific difference. Another way, provided one assumes that reality is adequately mathematically describable, might be to look at things as information-theoretic structures and identify all the morphisms shared by some type of thing. This is impossible in practice though. The other difficulty here is that the things that we might think most properly have essences are living things, and they have natures precisely in that they are goal directed, but how to get goal-directedness, let alone intentionality, from information is anyone's guess (if it can be done). So we might well be missing a key component. Likewise, any phenomenological aspect of something seems difficult to account for in this way.

I'd argue that a key part of what makes discrete things discrete is their resistance to divisibility (unity) and capacity for self-organization. And while this might be greatest in living things, it also shows up in atoms and molecules. These are divisible, but it normally isn't easy to divide them, which is part of why they are often offered up as the paradigmatic "natural kinds" outside the example of living things (although stars, planets, galaxies, etc. might be similar in this respect).

That furnishes a fine example, the periodic table. "Atom with 79 protons," seems to cover gold pretty well. It also seems possible to give a definition of stars such that it doesn't allow anything in that isn't a star, nor exclude any stars. But it's also important to note that a definition doesn't need to be something like a set or some sort of mathematical description. Whether such things would be appropriate depends, I suppose, on metaphysical assumptions. I'd argue that, at the very least given current tools, these methods fail because they cannot capture the quiddity of things and so are a poor match for defining the "what-it-is-to-be" (essence) of things.

What, the fact that you don't seem to have even grasped the very basics of what you're talking about? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Perhaps. I had in mind Fine's rejection of Quine's holism. Kripke's origin essentialism works well. One might make sense of essences by using Searle's status functions; something along the lines of Fine's argument but using "counts as..." to set up what Fine calls a definite.

That is, remaining on it's own colour might arguably be a part of the essence of being a bishop, since a piece that did not remain on it's own colour could not count as a bishop.

But that might not sit well with your suggestion that things have essences that are grasped rather than granted.

But leave it. Let's see where @J is going.

Plato, for one. When Socrates questions Euthyphro about the meaning of "piety," they are both assuming that there is a word, eusebeia, that corresponds correctly with a certain content or concept. — J

This looks like an invalid argument:

• Socrates and Euthyphro assume there is a word that corresponds correctly with "piety."
• Therefore, for these men there is "a binding action that makes a word inseparable from its object or meaning or concept"

Rather, we're trying to shake up a very common assumption among philosophers, which is that there is some sort of binding action (I called it "metaphysical Superglue" elsewhere) that makes a word inseparable from its object or meaning or concept -- take your pick of these imprecise terms. — J

Like @Count Timothy von Icarus, I have never in my life heard of any philosopher falling into such a position. Socrates regularly recognizes that others are using words differently than he is. He could not spend so much time trying to refine and correct the meaning of words if he didn't think they could be used differently.

Socrates knew, for example, that people who speak languages other than Greek can also talk about the same things that Greeks talk about.

- Let me try to clear up some of this confusion by quoting from a paper by Gyula Klima, which we could perhaps have a thread on.

There is a strong tendency among some philosophers to attach a name to a thing or a concept with metaphysical Superglue, such that, if there is a question about translation or clarification, we’re told we can't suggest a name change without also changing the thing named. In the case of the rabbit, that seems wrong. If for some reason we decided we needed a new (better?) name for Leporidae, that could be effected with minimum difficulty, since we could always point to the creature itself if anyone had doubt, and say, “No, the object remains the same. This is only a recommendation for a terminological change.” — J

Why would we change the name? What would it mean to have a "better" name? What is characteristically happening here is that you are confusing naming with signification (and this is common among Analytics). The reason philosophers appeal to a "super glue" is because they want to talk to each other, and they can't talk to each other without using words in the same way. It isn't a metaphysical point, it is a dialogical point. Hence "immediate signification":

In fact, Buridan would distinguish not only between meaning and naming, or in his terminology, between signification and supposition, but even between two different sorts of signification, namely, immediate and ultimate signification, and, correspondingly, between two different sorts of supposition, namely, material and personal supposition.

What a term immediately signifies is the mental act on account of which we recognize the term as a significative utterance or inscription, as opposed to some articulate sound or discernible scribble that makes no sense to us at all. If I utter the sound ‘biltrix’, it might sound like a word of an articulate human language, and in fact there may be a human language in which it is meaningful (I don’t know), but as far as I can tell, it is only Boethius’ example of a meaningless utterance in his commentary on Aristotle’s On Interpretation to illustrate the difference between articulate sounds that do and those that don’t make any sense to us.

The latter sort of utterances lack signification precisely because they do not generate any understanding in the mind of the listener. That is to say, upon hearing such an utterance we literally have no idea what the speaker intends by it, if anything at all, because such an utterance simply gives rise to no act of understanding in our mind. Thus, those utterances that do have signification are meaningful precisely because they are associated with some act of understanding, or, in late-scholastic terminology, because they are subordinated to some concept of the human mind, whatever such a concept is, namely, whether it is some spiritual modification of an immaterial mind or it is just a firing pattern of neurons in the brain. The point is that without a subordinated concept an utterance makes no sense, since for it to make sense is nothing but to evoke the concept to which it is subordinated.

But this is not to say that what we mean by our categorematic terms are our concepts... — Gyula Klima, Quine, Wyman, and Buridan: Three Approaches to Ontological Commitment, 3

-

This is much harder with abstracta. If A says, "Let's change the name of Goodness to 'Rational Self-Interest'," it's unclear what B, who objects, can point to in protest. B can say, "That is not how Goodness has traditionally been used” or perhaps even “That is not what Goodness means” but if A’s reason for wanting to make the change is because A believes the previous usage was mistaken, what are we to say? — J

This is another example of confusing naming with signification. The retort you offer is significant, "That is not what Goodness means." Meaning and naming are two different things.

Buridan would briefly reply that the objection mixes up two distinct functions of terms, namely, meaning and naming, or in his terminology, signifying and suppositing. — Gyula Klima, Quine, Wyman, and Buridan: Three Approaches to Ontological Commitment, 2

-

But the type of philosopher I referred to above (call them C) wants to disallow the argument, on the grounds that it isn’t coherent to change the name of Goodness to something else. If you do that, C urges, you’re no longer talking about Goodness. Name and concept are metaphysically wedded together. — J

I think that if we reflect on this, we should be able to overcome the strawman which says that what is at stake is a name-concept pairing. What is really at stake is a conceptual matter: the disagreement is that both parties agree that, for example, 'good' = the desirable, and yet they are disagreeing on what is truly desirable (i.e. "Rational self-interest"). The substantive dispute is over the question of whether rational self-interest is foundationally desirable, not over the question of whether the token g-o-o-d must always be attached to a particular concept.

The reason confusion arises in these contexts is because we almost never think in terms of material tokens or phonemes (and so we are prone to misunderstand when someone is using a token differently). But because of this, disputes are not usually simply over material tokens or phonemes. When someone says, "That's not what goodness is," they are not saying, "That's not what the material token g-o-o-d-n-e-s-s metaphysically attaches to." They are arguing over a normative concept, such as desirability or proper conduct or somesuch thing.

Well, suppose someone gave a definition of "tiger" as: "a large purple fish with green leaves, a tap root, and horns." Clearly, this is off the mark and we can do better or worse (although in this case, not much worse). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yep, and if we want to say that this is not a tiger then we are already appealing to the idea of an essence.

Folks like to say, "Well, unless you can give me the perfectly correct (real) definition of a tiger, I won't accept that essences exist," which looks like sophistry to me. It's like saying:

• Do you have a car?
• Yes.
• Prove it. List every part that constitutes your car.
• *Gives a list of tens of thousands of parts.*
• This list omits a rear-left brake pad. Therefore you don't have a car.

It's just that there's no fact of the matter regarding a speaker's reference.

On Quine's account, yep.

Do you disagree?

It's complicated. :wink:

:up:

How would we know the correct definition of "tiger"? — J

Presumably if it specifies the things in virtue of which all tigers are tigers, while not having anything that isn't a tiger fall under the definition. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sounds reasonable. Now suppose there was a disagreement about the first part. A and B offer different specifications of what the essential tiger qualities are. How would they resolve this?

Again, I know this sounds a little baby-stepping, but if you'll indulge me? I just want to lay out the reasoning as simply as possible, with your help.

the disagreement is that both parties agree that, for example, 'good' = the desirable, — Leontiskos

But they don't. That's the whole problem.

That is, remaining on it's own colour might arguably be a part of the essence of being a bishop, since a piece that did not remain on it's own colour could not count as a bishop.

Potentially. In its original context and much philosophy since, a chess piece is not the sort of thing that has an essence though. Artifacts wouldn't have an essence. What is a chair? Well, you can use all sorts of things to sit on and you can also make tiny chairs no one can sit on.

Essences would belong to organisms most properly, maybe other natural kinds. Bundle theories are big in analytic philosophy so it has focused on essential properties instead of essences, and often on modal definitions. Aside from the problem of allowing for seemingly arbitrary essences and making random unrelated logical truths part of any essence, this has the difficulty of being completely unable to distinguish between per se accidents and what makes something what it is, e.g. all plants grow, but growing isn't what makes them plants, or all men have flesh and bones, but this doesn't specify them as men.

I think a crucial distinction missed in most analytical attempts to return to essences is that they aren't supposed to be something like a mathematical/logical entity. To assume this would be to presuppose that "what it is to be" something is reducible to such a thing.



What are you talking about?




Can you give examples of philosophers who don't think goodness has anything to do with desirability? Emotivists and nihilists tend to say something like "goodness is just personal preference," which is obviously talking about desirability. Kantians refer to desirability, as do utilitarians, as do advocates of rational self-interest. I can't think of anyone who claims goodness has nothing to do with choiceworthyness. And I can't think of any common language usage where "this is a good car," or "Chris is a good man," doesn't speak to choiceworthyness either.

How would they resolve this?

By considering what tigers are.

You seem to be getting at "but people disagree, hence there can be no fact of the matter." But people disagree about the shape of the Earth, the germ theory of disease, the rules of chess, if the Holocaust happened, or whether one should be allowed to rape and pillage by "right of conquest" too. Does disagreement imply there is no fact of the matter?

Conversely, does agreement imply there is a fact of the matter? Because, in the case of tigers, toddlers from across the world can already pick them out as distinct animals and languages across the world identify them as a distinct species, as does zoology. But again, levels of agreement and disagreement, while perhaps rough evidence, would only be decisive is one has already assumed that there are no essences, no such beings as tigers, but merely bundles of properties and sense data that can be correlated with stipulated signs based on various morphisms.

Anyhow, if persistent disagreement were evidence that there is no fact of the matter then virtually nothing is true.

I will just repeat what I said above: "I think a crucial distinction missed in most analytical attempts to return to essences is that they aren't supposed to be something like a mathematical/logical entity. To assume this would be to presuppose that "what it is to be" something is reducible to such a thing." And we could say the same thing of substantial form, eidos, etc.

This is in some sense, to assume something like the "superglue" you mentioned, no? But that's how a lot of questionable philosophy is done. We take a bad assumption, like the "superglue," show it cannot be right, and then assume that we've dispatched some tangentially related notion on the grounds that "if not-A, then B." But essences don't presuppose that there is some unique formal entity that specifies what it is to be something, they presuppose that there are such things as ants and tigers.

What are you talking about? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Quine's inscrutability of reference. It's that there's no fact of the matter regarding a speaker's reference.

Can you give examples of philosophers who don't think goodness has anything to do with desirability? — Count Timothy von Icarus

On my understanding, the Kantian deontological approach is not about goodness as desirability. It is about goodness as following the dictates of practical reason. A person who does this may be called good, though as you know Kant focused more on "right" as the key ethical term.

Now of course you can reply, "But isn't following the dictates of practical reason desirable?" or "Shouldn't we desire to be good in this way?" But that cannot represent the moral motive, as Kant sees it. To insist on desirability here is simply to misunderstand or disregard what Kant is arguing. For him, it's all about what is right, not what is desirable. Whether I find the good desirable is neither here nor there.

This is a huge topic. Do we really want to pursue it here?

How would they resolve this?

By considering what tigers are. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sure. But please be patient with me and describe the process a little bit. Let me show you where I'm heading: It's got nothing to do with disagreement = no fact of the matter. Only a skeptic or a sophist would say there's no way to decide what a tiger is. Rather, I'm working toward understanding what we need to refer to in order to resolve a disagreement about what I'll call "essentiality" (or perhaps you have a term you prefer). And this in turn will set up, I hope, the problem of how this transfers over to philosophical disagreement about words. It's all in aid of clarifying the very important distinction you brought up between defining a word and "defining" an object. (Though I will also argue that we should drop that latter usage on grounds of awkwardness and ambiguity.)

If you find this tedious, just say so. I like it very much as a philosophical process of inquiry, but I know it's not for everyone . . . very slow-moving.

But they don't. That's the whole problem. — J

You think they are just disagreeing over whether an arbitrary set of letters should be correlated to a concept? And that that is what Quine was worried about? Do you honestly think that when people argue over what goodness means, they are arguing over which concept we should correlate with the text-token g-o-o-d-n-e-s-s?! You are deflating these disagreements into vacuous, non-existent disputes. The point Quine is actually making is that communicating an "immediate signification" is never guaranteed or sure.

"Rational self-interest" is not a name, it is a concept. That's your basic error.

- :up: :fire:

For Kant practical reason refers to the capacity of human beings to determine what they ought to do. On your view, does Kant not think it is choiceworthy for people to do what they ought to do?

This strikes me as bizarre. Kant absolutely does think that people should choose what they ought to do. Hence, he thinks it is desirable.

Your disagreement might make sense on the common modern definition that "desire absolutely only ever relates to appetites and passions" and that whatever is "desirable" is only ever what we currently have a passion or appetite for. In that case, sure, we might not have an appetite or passion to do what we ought. This is simply equivocation, though, desire as specifically "a (current) passion or appetite" versus desirability as "any aim actually worth pursuing." The word is used in both ways, so just take "choiceworthy."

Kant thinks doing what one ought is an aim actually worth pursuing, and utilitarians think happiness or pleasure is worth pursuing, and nihilists think there is no fact of the matter as to what is worth pursuing, but that people use "good" to signal their preferences on this matter, whereas the relativist thinks desirability is entirely relative to cultural preferences. But no one says that a culture that thinks courage is good is also a culture that doesn't think people should be courageous, or that "raping is bad" says nothing about the choiceworthyness of being a rapist. A nihilist might claim that others saying "raping is bad" says nothing about the choiceworthyness of rape, but they can hardly remain coherent and allow that an individual who thinks raping is bad also thinks that, all else equal, they should choose to rape.

OK, thanks for explaining.

Not really familiar with "choiceworthy." Is that a synonym for "desirable"?

Again, the meta-ethical dispute seems a long way off from Quine and reference, which was what piqued my interest.

You seem to be getting at "but people disagree, hence there can be no fact of the matter." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Right, and some postmodernists are dogmatic skeptics even to the extent that their inner demon compels them in this way, "There can be no fact of the matter, therefore..." This is pluralism-as-first-principle, and it comes up in J's posts a lot. For example, "There can be no fact of the matter, therefore these people must be arguing for 'metaphysical super-glue', a sheer impossibility." One thus begins to look for ways to prop up intractable disagreement, in part by shifting attention towards grounds for intractability, however fictional. This isn't super common. Moral philosophy aside, I think the only other poster who moves in this direction of pluralism as a first principle is Moliere.

Not really familiar with "choiceworthy." Is that a synonym for "desirable"?

It can be. Like I said, if desirability is taken as just referring to feeling, desire as "whatever we currently have an appetite for" then it doesn't seem that it should be a synonym, since we can clearly have an appetite for something and not think we should choose to act on that appetite.

But then "desirability" and "desirable" are normally predicated of things, often in the third person, and so the association of desire with current personal sentiment alone, seems insufficient. The two only collapse if one assumes that nothing is actually more or less desirable, but that desirability is solely a function of what people currently desire, which seems to be saying something very similar to "nothing is truly good" but "good" is "a function of our current preferences." For, to say "x is truly most desirable," that this is fact and not opinion or mere feeling, seems equivalent with saying "x is truly best."

I suppose the equivocation shows up depending on if one assumes that there is an appearance/reality distinction in desirability. Not only "what we desire" but "what we ought to desire," or "what we would desire if we knew the truth."

To return:

Rather, I'm working toward understanding what we need to refer to in order to resolve a disagreement about what I'll call "essentiality" (or perhaps you have a term you prefer).

Well, given we agree that there are such things as tigers, stars, and daffodils, it would be whatever makes those things the sort of thing they are and not anything else.

Here might be a helpful lens, even though I don't agree with it. Existential Thomists speak of a primary "act of existence." Everything, in existing, participates in this act. However, there are different sorts of things in the world. So they don't all participate in this act in the same exact way. The differences in how they participate are their essence. Essence is "what something is," existence is "that it is." And this is how you get to the idea that essence doesn't explain existence. What a tiger is doesn't imply that tigers should exist.

Now, of course this isn't quite right, because things have accidental properties. A tiger with green paint stuck on it, or a severed leg, doesn't stop being a tiger. So the "what it is" is restricted to the type of thing something is, what makes something a star, ant, etc. I don't know where you would look for this but "in" the things and our knowledge of them. Aristotle says essence isn't "in" things, but you might say it is "in" them in a trancedentalese sense. That is, essence isn't a component of things, a part, or spatially located in things, it's what they are.

Bundle theory suggest everything is just a bundle of properties. So to find essences, look for properties you cannot remove without changing what a thing is. Hylomorphism suggests that what something is is a function of its form/act, and that the type of thing a thing is is due to substantial form. The difference is that it is not clear that substantial form is decomposable into properties, atomic or otherwise. It's not reductionist in the way bundle theories are. We might suppose that being a man or ant is irreducible. To perhaps misleadingly mix areas of philosophy, we might say substantial form is emergent on any underlying matter substrate.