For one, that definition would exclude caterpillars, larva, etc. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Isn't that a bit petty? Ok, adult insects have six legs. I've already pointed to this short coming, and how it doesn't seem to help those who think in terms of essence.

You still haven't made clear what an essence is. Are you now saying that they are "discreet wholes"?

How can an essence be called upon to explain change unless we are clear about what an essence is? Is it what stays the same when all the other properties of something change? Then in modal terms it is the name of the thing that changes... If you refuse to set out what you think an essence is, then there is nothing here to which others might respond.

I find it very difficult to make anything much of what you are trying to argue.

Sorry. If I'm to be candid, the post looks to be hand-waving.

Sorry. If I'm to be candid, the post looks to be hand-waving

If that's all you got from that long post then you're either debating in bad faith or it simply is beyond your ability to grasp or my ability to explain. If I wanted to be "hand-waving" I would simply say that species essences share a "family resemblance," and refused to elaborate.

I haven't. I pointed to what makes organisms and life distinct. If you have an objection to the idea that life is goal directed and that life forms can be more or less self-organizing, or self-determing, feel free to make it. Some people do deny these things, they claim they are entirely illusory. If you have an objection to the idea that lifeforms come in different types, feel free to make it.

You seem to be hung up on: "if the word 'essence' or 'nature' is employed anywhere it must mean something like rigid metaphysical superglue."

Isn't that a bit petty? Ok, adult insects have six legs. I've already pointed to this short coming, and how it doesn't seem to help those who think in terms of essence.

How is it petty? Yes, you did point out these problems vis-á-vis your misunderstanding of essences. Now you are ignoring them when you try to explain extension. You seem to think referring to extension this way is unproblematic, but that it would be problematic for whatever you suppose and "essence" must be." Why? If we can grab distinct sets with discrete members with our words, what's the problem with what you seem to think "essence" refers to in the first place?

Anyhow, you're still leaving out the ant missing a leg and letting in non-insects. The ant with a birth defect is out, the rare human born with extra limbs is in. Etc. This method of defining extension won't do, not least because word's referents change with context.

Your own attempt to explain extension is just the old "metaphysical superglue."

↪Count Timothy von Icarus The fully eliminative response (not van Inwagen's almost fully eliminative response) is that you and I do not exist. You are just a collection of atoms arranged Count-wise, I'm just a collection of atoms arranged Sandwich-wise. The collection of atoms arranged Count-wise collectively experience all of the things that you said. If there's n atoms, it would not be parsimonious to say that there is one more thing (i.e., n+1), such that the thing in question is you. And the same goes for me.

Right, it works something like:

P1: If things exist, they must be properly defined/delineated in exactly this sort of way (insert rigid, unworkable definition, often made in terms of "unique particle ensembles" or bundle metaphysics).
P2: This sort of definition/delineation doesn't work.
C: Therefore, we don't exist.

If the conclusion is absurd and clearly false, and an argument is valid, then the obvious conclusion is that at least one premise is wrong. P2 can be shown pretty convincingly. P1 seems immediately dubious. Yet so much philosophy doesn't work this way. Perhaps this is due to the incentives for novelty and provocation in order to drive citations. Instead, the absurd conclusion gets affirmed.

The whole "things are not but clouds of atoms" and "particles are fundamental" line has become far less popular in physics and philosophy of physics, yet I have not seen this shake down to philosophy yet. It would be more in line with popular trends in physics to say something like: "the universal fields are in flux cat-wise." But then, the recognition that things cannot be defined in terms of a supervenience relation, in terms of "particle ensembles," etc., would seem to suggest a move towards process metaphysics, not "no things exist." The problems the eliminitivst points out are noteworthy, but they reach the absurd conclusion because they are unwilling to challenge their presuppositions about what an adequate solution must look like.

1) There is no ontologically significant difference between bikinis and fouts.
2) If so, then: if bikinis exist, then fouts exist.
3) Bikinis exist.
4) So, fouts exist.

Eliminativists can resist this argument by denying the third premise: bikinis do not exist. Conservatives would reject the first premise: there is indeed an ontologically significant difference between bikinis and fouts. But that difference can't have anything to do with the question about scattered objects, because bikinis are scattered objects just as much as fouts are. Instead, the difference must be that bikinis are artifacts while fouts are presumably natural objects. In that sense, there were creative intentions involved in the making of the bikini, but no creative intentions were involved in the creation of fouts.

The artifact/natural object distinction seems like it might act as a kind of red herring here. I do agree that it is a relevant distinction, but is it relevant in virtue of something more fundamental?

Consider that some diffuse, incorporeal things do seem to exist. Are hurricanes real? Weather systems? Economies? States? Economic recessions? I think information theory gives us some good tools for thinking about how something like a market, a meme, or a recession might exist.

My take is that the difficulty arises from an inability to question presuppositions about what an adequate response can even look like. This is aided by a tendency for people to only look for solutions that they have prexisting tools to formalize. But this is not how formalism often advances. Often, we develop the concepts first, then look for a way to formalize it.

Artifacts are (for the most part) not self-organizing. A bikini isn't. A bikini is a lot like a rock. It isn't even like a star or storm, which at least have "life cycles" and act to sustain themselves. A rock is fairly arbitrary. It isn't entirely arbitrary, but obviously we can blast a cliff with dynamite and form very many rocks, pretty much at random. This is not how storms work, or stars, or life.

Hence, I would point to the research on dissipative systems, complexity studies, systems biology, etc., since these explain how we get self-organizing, self-determining systems that are arranged into wholes with proper parts. In living things, parts are unified in goal-directed pursuits. What makes a cat a cat then is primarily its being alive, and its being a specific sort of living thing, not its being comprised of some unique particle ensemble or fitting the rigid criteria of some bundle of properties.

Artifacts are (for the most part) not self-organizing. A bikini isn't. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'd like to think about this for a while. When you were talking about tigers a few pages back, you suggested there were two things that were important:

Divisibility/Unity and Self-Organistion.

Now you're saying that a bikini isn't self-organizing. I find this obvious at first glance, but it becomes less obvious when I look at divisibility: A bikini is already divided to begin with, in a physical sense, and is only a whole on a social background. Other clothes follow this pattern: shoes, socks, gloves... the bikini stands out by not being symmetric. So we sell pantys and bras seperately, but we sell bikinis as a unit?

I'm thinking it might be useful to think in terms of system-integration, here, too: while we may be self-organising in terms of being an organism, we're not self-organising in terms of society, so we're not necessarily self-organising in the subsystem that includes bikinis. But that we're self-organising as organisms is part of the way society self-organises. So a bikini is only a bikini within the context of a self-organising system (such as society) that also includes us.

How does this lead us back to Quine's inscrutability of reference? If society self-organises, and we're agentially involved with this, but also "self-centered", and if what a bikini is emerges from that self-organising process, then what we, each of us, think that a bikini is does not necessarily exhaust what a bikini is on the higher system level, so that no two people in concrete situations will ever topicalise the totality of it, and the difference in attention/meaning attribution is one of the mechanisms that give rise to inner-system dynamics.

In other words, reference needs to be inscrutable on the organism level, as organisms aren't made to operate on higher organisational levels.

I'm not going to defend any of this. This was mostly an exercise in brainstorming. I'm playing around, if you will. But that's not meant as a sign of disrespect; it's how I best think through abstract topics that don't really come intuitively to me. It's a way not to reject them outright.

While I'm just putting stuff out there:

t would be more in line with popular trends in physics to say something like: "the universal fields are in flux cat-wise." — Count Timothy von Icarus

While I was googling terms in order to better understand this thread, I came across Karen Barad's agential realism. Sounds like a variation on this, maybe? Basically, if I understood this correctly, the relata in a relation don't pre-exist, but emerge from an "intra-action" of... not sure what.

Organisms are quintessentially beings instead of mere heaps (existing according to a nature, not solely as a bundle of external causes) because they are self-organizing, self-governing, and most of all, goal-directed. The parts of an organism are proper parts of a proper whole because they are unified in terms of a goal that is intrinsic to the organism. This is the idea of "function" and teleonomy in biology. The parts of a flout or rock are not organized in this way.

And perhaps, ↪Arcane Sandwich, this is also a way of finding a via media between permissivism and eliminativism.
— Count Timothy von Icarus

Conservatives would reject the first premise: there is indeed an ontologically significant difference between bikinis and fouts. But that difference can't have anything to do with the question about scattered objects — Arcane Sandwich

Some of this reminds me of the interesting view of Bayesian mechanics / Free energy principle. A framework for exploring thingness in a statistical sense. Whats interesting is it was originally a framework for describing how the brain works... then all life... then eventually people looked at it as vacuously applying to any thing with different grades of complexity.

The idea of an ontological potential endows even simple physical systems, such as rocks, with a kind of weak coherence and ‘monitoring’ of internal states...

Namely, the FEP covers a broad class of objects as cases of particular systems, including adaptive complex systems like human beings, simpler but still complex systems like morphogenetic structures and Turing patterns, and even utterly simple, inert structures at equilibrium, like Objects that have no structure or no environment, either of which fail the FEP for obvious reasons, exist at one extreme...

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=7909771384315425233&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5 (Elan Vital section)

I don't think a flout would "fail the FEP" if a rock does, but it would be interesting whether a kind of statistical approach could be used to analyse how or why we might have different intuitions for something having thingness. As noted earlier, the Bikini case is also a scattered object - why do we tend to endow it with more thingness than a flout (while at the same time lacking the kind of "autonomy" of a more complex or living thing)? And there maybe some kind of analysis for this regarding how systems or things nest within each other in a statistically meaningful way, like the human use of bikinis as opposed to sme other properties / lack of properties in a flout. Ofcourse this is all just complete speculation whether this kind of analysis can even coherently be done in this kind of framework at all. I also suspect you could probably get some unintuitive results, but I guess it just reflects how my attitudes and inclinations would want to approach this kind of issue ideally.

Rather than asking "what makes this a a thing", it makes more sense from my own outlook to ask why we have certain intuitions about thingness, since all my perceptions about things in the world come through my brain which is processing all the statistics of perception and leading me to say "that ia obviously a fish", even in different contexts where I refer to say a living animal or just a slab of meat in the fridge.

I guess this attitude is also analogous to the kind of research programme some have proposed regarding the meta-problem of consciousness - "what causes our intuitions and understandings of our own consciousness and experiences?". But I don't think you necessarily have to do this kind of research programme and go so far as the statement: "consciousness doesn't exist!". I would rather just clarify the limits on what I can and cannot coherently say, the caveats, about what I am identifying as consciousness rather than completely eliminating the intuitively useful uses of words or perhaps being too permissive and pushing some kind of panpsychism or idealism. I think thats preferable to trying to resolve the hars problem - I do not think it is resolvable and I think metaphysics always has to be from the purview of what we perceive, so notions independent of that don't mean much. I think the most generic, fundamental way we can talk about the universe is that it has structure - we just want tomake our organization if these structures coherent from our perspectives in a way that is informative to us, while acknowledging all the caveats.

P1: If things exist, they must be properly defined/delineated in exactly this sort of way (insert rigid, unworkable definition, often made in terms of "unique particle ensembles" or bundle metaphysics). — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'd say that the antecedent is true ("things exist"), while the consequent (everything else after "things exist") is false. The burden of proof is then on the eliminativists to defend P1 by means of a secondary argument. They might do so in the following way:

P3) Ockham's razor favors eliminativism over conservatism and permissivism.
P4) If so, then: If things exist, they must be properly defined/delineated in exactly this sort of way (insert etc.)
P1) So, If things exist, they must be properly defined/delineated in exactly this sort of way (insert etc.)

The idea behind P3 is that eliminativism is more parsimonious than its metaphysical rivals (conservatism and permissivism). Its ontology has fewer elements. I think this is impossible to argue against. So, if we wish to resist this secondary argument, it seems that the only option is to deny P4. But then the burden of proof is on us to explain why we believe that eliminativism is indeed more parsimonious while saying at the same time that things (if they exist) should be defined in some other way. Leibniz's Law arguments might do the trick here. We would need to find, for each thing, a property that the thing in question has, that its collection of atoms arranged thing-wise don't, and/or vice-versa.

My take is that the difficulty arises from an inability to question presuppositions about what an adequate response can even look like. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Could be.

Artifacts are (for the most part) not self-organizing. A bikini isn't. A bikini is a lot like a rock. It isn't even like a star or storm, which at least have "life cycles" and act to sustain themselves. A rock is fairly arbitrary. It isn't entirely arbitrary, but obviously we can blast a cliff with dynamite and form very many rocks, pretty much at random. This is not how storms work, or stars, or life.

Hence, I would point to the research on dissipative systems, complexity studies, systems biology, etc., since these explain how we get self-organizing, self-determining systems that are arranged into wholes with proper parts. In living things, parts are unified in goal-directed pursuits. What makes a cat a cat then is primarily its being alive, and its being a specific sort of living thing, not its being comprised of some unique particle ensemble or fitting the rigid criteria of some bundle of properties. — Count Timothy von Icarus

By permissivist lights, fouts (and troutkeys, trogs, and other strange mereological fusions) are not alive. In other words, a permissivist wouldn't say that the scattered object composed of a fox and a trout is a living creature. It's more like a mathematical set, "fout = {fox, trout}". This is similar to how the Axiom of Pairing works in Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory:

If x and y are sets, then there exists a set which contains x and y as elements, for example if x = {1,2} and y = {2,3} then z will be {{1,2},{2,3}} — Wikipedia

With that in mind, the permissivist can make one simple, humble philosophical move: she can declare that metaphysics, while not being identical to set theory, is nonetheless similar, to the extent that any two things "a" and "b" always compose a third thing "c", just as any two sets "x" and "y" are always elements of a third set "z". Therefore, if foxes exist, and if trouts exist, then fouts exist as well.

She might go on to say that if a bikini is like a rock (as you say), and if a fout is like a bikini, then it follows (by modus ponens) that a fout is like a rock (assuming that the relation of "likeness" is transitive). Arguably, none of these three objects are self-organizing, but that doesn't mean that they don't exist. Shorter: a fout is not like a cat, it's like a rock. And by permissivist lights, it exists just as much as rocks do.

Again, this seems to me, quite honestly, to be all over the place. So this:

I haven't. I pointed to what makes organisms and life distinct. If you have an objection to the idea that life is goal directed and that life forms can be more or less self-organizing, or self-determing, feel free to make it. Some people do deny these things, they claim they are entirely illusory. If you have an objection to the idea that lifeforms come in different types, feel free to make it. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Why are we now talking about life? Is your position now that essence is something only living things have?

Or this:

You seem to be hung up on: "if the word 'essence' or 'nature' is employed anywhere it must mean something like rigid metaphysical superglue." — Count Timothy von Icarus

The piece you quote is your phrasing, not mine. I think a proper name is best treated as a rigid designator, since doing so allows us to deal coherently with modal contexts, int he way Kripke and others have shown.That is, a proper name can be used to refer to the same individual even if the attributes of that individual change. Your phrase "metaphysical superglue" is both pedjorative and misguided.

Or this:

Yes, you did point out these problems vis-á-vis your misunderstanding of essences. Now you are ignoring them when you try to explain extension. You seem to think referring to extension this way is unproblematic, but that it would be problematic for whatever you suppose and "essence" must be." Why? If we can grab distinct sets with discrete members with our words, what's the problem with what you seem to think "essence" refers to in the first place? — Count Timothy von Icarus

That paragraph rambles. I've repeatedly asked for you to set out what it is your think an essence amounts to. Your answer is something like "what makes a thing what it is", which is pretty useless. If I am to understand what an essence is for you, then you will need to explain how this is supposed to be of any use. Extension is a pretty simple idea - two sets that contain the same items are the
same sets. If you see it as problematic, set out how it is problematic. If you want it to be compatible with essences, set out what an essence is so that we can see how it is compatible.

Or this:

Anyhow, you're still leaving out the ant missing a leg and letting in non-insects. The ant with a birth defect is out, the rare human born with extra limbs is in. Etc. This method of defining extension won't do, not least because word's referents change with context. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I quite specifically dealt with this here.

It would be nice if we could step back from this mere acrimony, and try to get a handle on what the difference is between our positions. So, yes, there is a problem with communication here. So let's try to set out what it is you are claiming.

Am I right in understanding that you think essences are necessary to fix the referent of a proper name?

Can you explain why or how?

And what does any of this have to do with whether things are self-organising or not?

Now you're saying that a bikini isn't self-organizing. I find this obvious at first glance, but it becomes less obvious when I look at divisibility: A bikini is already divided to begin with, in a physical sense, and is only a whole on a social background. Other clothes follow this pattern: shoes, socks, gloves... the bikini stands out by not being symmetric. So we sell pantys and bras seperately, but we sell bikinis as a unit?

Artifacts are an interesting case because they are organized around a purpose, it's just that their purpose is extrinsic to them. The goals and purposes attached to them is not essential to what they are, rather their form is a function of their intended use. They can be very complex (e.g. a self-driving car), and could conceivably be designed so as to try to maintain or replicate their own form in the ways organisms do (although this goes into the realm of sci-fiction), but they lack the intrinsic goal-directedness of organisms.

Now, something like a synthetic lifeform would be an interesting case here, since it would be the product of goals and intentions, but also have its own intrinsic goals and intentions. However, I don't think such a thing is actually all that novel. We have bred domesticated organisms in this manner for millennia and people are obviously (more or less) intentional about who they chose to have children with. Eugenics wasn't a wholly sui generis innovation either.

I'm thinking it might be useful to think in terms of system-integration, here, too: while we may be self-organising in terms of being an organism, we're not self-organising in terms of society, so we're not necessarily self-organising in the subsystem that includes bikinis. But that we're self-organising as organisms is part of the way society self-organises. So a bikini is only a bikini within the context of a self-organising system (such as society) that also includes us.

:up:

Somewhere, St. Thomas says "all the efforts of the human mind cannot exhaust the essence of a single fly." Things are not only always changing, but they can always come to exist in new contexts. This is as true of things as words. Robert Sokolowski says something similar about never being able to "fully grasp" the intelligibility of things, but of course we can grasp them more or less well. So, the establishment of substances (things) in metaphysics isn't, in my view, about offering something like an exhaustive account (impossible) or some sort of unique lookup variable or set, but avoiding the slide into "everything is context all the way down," viz. "either there are no things, or else an infinite number of different things superimposed over any thing."

Societies and other human organizations are self-organizing to some degree. They can also become more intentional about how they develop themselves. Data collection, analytic departments, etc. are in some sense the "sense organs" of a state or corporation. Yet states and corporations presumably don't have experiences, goals, their own desires, etc. So they are an important sort of thing in the world, but their being is parasitic on people.

I don't think it's any surprise that we see a slide towards "there are no things," in the modern period. The successes of mathematical physics have led to attempts to do philosophy without taking any account of the phenomenological aspects of being, essentially pumping all the subjectivity out of an account of the world. This occludes the obvious existence of individuals in terms of ourselves.

In other words, reference needs to be inscrutable on the organism level, as organisms aren't made to operate on higher organisational levels.

I wasn't sure exactly how to take this. My position given earlier in the thread is that elimination arguments from underdetermination are not good arguments. Showing that something is underdetermined doesn't demonstrate that there is "no fact of the matter." Such arguments don't just affect reference, they work just as well vis-á-vis the validity of induction, all scientific knowledge, all historical knowledge, etc. Are we to also maintain that there are "no facts of the matter" because these are underdetermined? That seems like an absurd conclusion to me. For example, that there is not "no fact of the matter" about who won the last World Series simply because all of my (or anyone else's) observations might be consistent with there not having really been a World Series last year. The focus on reference obscures how widely virtually the same argument can apply.

I don't think even merely skeptical arguments from underdetermination account for much. They amount to "you cannot know whatever you can imagine yourself to be wrong about." But we can imagine that we are wrong about anything.

And there maybe some kind of analysis for this regarding how systems or things nest within each other in a statistically meaningful way, like the human use of bikinis as opposed to sme other properties / lack of properties in a flout. Ofcourse this is all just complete speculation whether this kind of analysis can even coherently be done in this kind of framework at all. I also suspect you could probably get some unintuitive results, but I guess it just reflects how my attitudes and inclinations would want to approach this kind of issue ideally.

:up:

The "nesting" is indeed interesting. You have subatomic particles in atoms, atoms in molecules, molecules in organelles, organelles in cells, cells in organs, organs is bodies, bodies in communities, communities in ecosystems, etc. From an information theoretic perspective, you can see this in the way you can measure a message but also measure the substrate it is encoded in. Terrance Deacon has some interesting stuff on the relationship between physical entropy and Shannon entropy.

I think metaphysics always has to be from the purview of what we perceive, so notions independent of that don't mean much. I think the most generic, fundamental way we can talk about the universe is that it has structure - we just want tomake our organization if these structures coherent from our perspectives in a way that is informative to us, while acknowledging all the caveats.

Indeed, and presumably there is a causal explanation that can be had for the phenomenological experiences of beings (plural), even if it is imperfect. Sometimes explanations of these sorts seem to err by only looking "inside the brain," though. However, no perceptions (or consciousness) occurs in a vacuum and all the evidence suggests the properties of the objects we perceive is constitutive of perception (e.g. leaves look green because of their composition, not just because of how our eyes work, but the interaction of the two, which is how Aristotle saw things).

So, to return to signs, C.S. Peirce and John of St. Thomas had it that the causality proper to signs was to make us have one thought rather than any other. "Fish," makes us think of fish, dark clouds and low pressure cause us to think of rain. This could probably be explained in other frameworks though. Obviously, it is dependent on learning, although I don't think it can be reduced to just correlation, since there is a phenomenological component.

The idea behind P3 is that eliminativism is more parsimonious than its metaphysical rivals (conservatism and permissivism). Its ontology has fewer elements.

An ontology with just one thing (or nothing!) would be more parsimonious. But this seems to me to be in the vein of the eliminitivist who wants to get rid of consciousness because it messes with their models. If you're ontology doesn't describe what there actually is, what good is it for it to be parsimonious?



So "insect" unproblematically refers to the set of all insects? But then "gavagai" can just refer to the set of all rabbits. And "the rake in this room" just defines a set with one element. Hardly inscrutable.

At least until we get to the solution of defining the set where: "insects are just whatever we want to call insects." "We" collectively of course, because if meaning has anything to do with a speaker's intentions we will have Humpty Dumptyism, yet if we multiply the problem it vanishes.

And also "insects existed before anyone was around to want to call anything by any name," even though what an insect is remains entirely dependent on how humans use the token "insect" at present.

I think this might also be problematic. If "what a thing is" depends on what we decide to count it as, then at one point in the past, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide were the same thing, being indistinguishable. Then we distinguished them, and they became two different things, but in a sort of retro causal action, it also became the case that they were always two distinct substances. Or perhaps the same words just refer to different sets depending on current usage?

If that's the case though, then even "what counts as a set" is always subject to revision. If mathematics changes, then what will have been a "set" will also change, since what things are is what we decide to count them as. And in this case, I don't see how it won't be the case that every proposition isn't subject to having its truth value change. After all, the "things are what we want to count them as" solution implies that when the use of "insect" changes, what insects are changes. But this entails that what is actually true of insects, sets, extension, reference, etc. is also subject to change. Not only will it be subject to change, but the change in truth values will reach backwards in time. For instance, if we decide to count giraffes as insects, they will have always been insects.

That seems problematic to me. It's Humpty Dumpty just scaled up. Now, you might say "but we wouldn't ever call giraffes insects." And I'd agree, because language admits of causal explanations, which you've tended to denigrate in the past. But, IMO, that's what is at the heart of all scientific explanations, a grasp of causes and principles.

An ontology with just one thing (or nothing!) would be more parsimonious. But this seems to me to be in the vein of the eliminitivist who wants to get rid of consciousness because it messes with their models. If you're ontology doesn't describe what there actually is, what good is it for it to be parsimonious? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Of course. This is why some eliminativists are monists. They claim that there exists a single, giant thing, and nothing else. They differ as to what that giant thing should be called. Some call it "The Universe", in the hopes of making eliminativism compatible with ordinary speech. Some call it "The blobject", a portmanteau of "blob" and "object". Or maybe it's just one gigantic quantum field, or "quantum froth". Or even a sort of colossal, cosmic "soup".

The question then is if this giant thing changes, as Heraclitus would have it, of if it doesn't change, as Parmenides suggests.

An even more extreme position would be the one favored by Gorgias: nothing exists, not even the single giant thing that eliminative monists postulate.

So "insect" unproblematically refers to the set of all insects? But then "gavagai" can just refer to the set of all rabbits. And "the rake in this room" just defines a set with one element. Hardly inscrutable. — Count Timothy von Icarus

No, "gavagai" refers to the set of all gavagai. Quine was asking whether that set is the very same as the set of rabbits. That's the bit that is inscrutable.

You think Quine thought only foreign languages were inscrutable?

That you suggest this might be understood to indicate a lack of familiarity with the argument. No.

Have another look at https://medium.com/@ranjanrgia/thought-experiment-1-gavagai-70ae1bfc792a

@Count Timothy von Icarus
Extensionality was introduced in this discussion because the theory that a name refers to whatever it's speaker intends it to refer to is not extensional.

Extensionality is not a theory of reference.

I am familiar with the argument. I wasn't sure if you were given that remark, since the idea seems to be that the word "rabbit" corresponds to a unique set of all (and only) rabbits.

See above. Extensionality is not a theory of reference.

What wouls you call it if you thought only one type of thing existed but there were innumerable number of them?

Good question. I think that many philosophies are compatible with those conditions. For example, the ancient atomists like Democritus thought that there is only one type of thing, -the atoms-, and they are innumerable. But there might be other cases. One might believe instead, for example, that there are innumerable spirits, and that is all that there is, and all of them are the same type of thing: spirit.

If I were to phrase it in more technical terms, I would say two things:

1 The thesis that there is only one type of thing can be called "qualitative monism".
2) The thesis that there is an innumerable number of such things can be called "quantitative pluralism".

So, both ancient atomism and the sort of spiritualism mentioned above would be qualitatively monist as well as quantitatively pluralist.

I personally think "what is useful determines what is true," is a fairly disastrous way to do science and philosophy. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Just the kind of pragmatism that Peirce wished to distance himself from!

"What counts as an insect" is much the same question as "How should we use the word insect". — Banno

How we should use the word "insect" is not constrained by what seems to count as being an insect?

I'm curious about it, since it sounds like a real word. — Arcane Sandwich

It always seemed obvious to me that it is a play on "epistemologist". I also wondered whether the "pus" bit was of any significance.

Probably worth noting that neither Quine nor Davidson would agree with "What is useful determines what is true".

Nor Banno, for that matter.

:up: Me neither.

It always seemed obvious to me that it is a play on "epistemologist". I also wondered whether the "pus" bit was of any significance. — Janus

To me it sounds like Apus, the southern constellation that represents a bird of paradise. The "ti" part, I've no idea. The "melogist" part, could have something to do with "melody".

Recondite! Closer to home it could be expanded to be Apastimeologist, but I guess we all fall into that category.

How we should use the word "insect" is not constrained by what seems to count as being an insect? — Janus

Isn't what seems to count as an insect part of what we do with the word "insect"? So yes, what seems to count as an insect can inform how we use the word. An interplay between world and word, neither determining the other.

I agree, definitely there is interplay, but I give some priority to world over word. After all things first had to stand out for the human in order for language to begin. And judging from their behavior it seems obvious that things stand out for prelinguistic beings such as children and animals.

...things first had to stand out for the human in order for language to begin — Janus

They had a use, yes.

To my eye the arguments about animals, such as as those in the recent Davidson thread, somewhat misfire. Doing stuff comes first, and language is a way of doing stuff. So there is a continuity from prelinguistic to linguistic behaviour. but I think it a one way path. Once the divide is crossed, once language occurs, it is very difficult to go back.

I agree that what stands out for humans as well as other animals is probably largely what affords a use. We don't know whether things also stand out for animals because they are spectacular or beautiful (as we might reasonably think so for humans), but it seems reasonable to think the threatening aspects of the environment would be gestalted.

If I understand Putnam correctly, he says that a mind-independent world would explain the being of an external entity. But our language does not have that property, it only possesses words and signs that explain the being to the reference. So access to such a mind-independent world is problematic and rather illusory. Putnam believes that reference does not escape language and is trapped in it.

It is similar to saying that the thing we perceive does not escape perception, all the references we perceive are always being perceived.

For me antirealism is an almost irrefutable point of view. The only way out of idealist enclosure is a theory of the sign that can include the Non-perceivable, that can be extrapolated beyond language and that can be applied to experience itself.

The antirealism of the linguistic turn is a reflection of subjective idealism. What is present continues to dominate the notion of language that you see in the development of this topic.

There are accounts of primates looking at waterfalls and rainbows in apparent awe. And elephant funereal rituals. And the cat hides from thunder in obvious trepidation.

Once the divide is crossed, once language occurs, it is very difficult to go back. — Banno

If it's possible to go back, it's certainly not possible to express that going-back in language.

Yep. Thereby hangs many a thread.