- It's remarkable how habituated you are to burying your head in the sand.

Show that you have understood the argument that Quine presented. You entered this conversation with "Yes, it is clearly wrong". Show us how by addressing the gavagai problem.

You entered this conversation with "Yes, it is clearly wrong". — Banno

Where?

Yes, it is clearly wrong. — Leontiskos

- Was I talking about Quine? Go have a look. :roll:

Davidson was talking about Quine, so yes.

Address the Gavagai problem. It's the basis of this thread.

Davidson was talking about Quine, so yes. — Banno

:lol:

You're a joke, man. You're straight up lying about things, such as the idea that I've said, "Yes, [Quine] is clearly wrong." Or when you just remove quotation marks from my words to claim that I am saying something I am quoting. Stop lying. Stop being dishonest.

You are attacking me instead of addressing the topic.

Show us where Quine is wrong. Or agree with him. At the very least, show some recognition of the actual arguments involved.

You are attacking me instead of addressing the topic. — Banno

My interlocutor keeps lying. Quite relevant.

Show that you understand the gavagai example.

@Count Timothy von Icarus, This is a lecture that is very good in setting out the stakes of essentialism, especially vis-a-vis 20th century logic. You would probably enjoy it. Gyula Klima is great when it comes to these sorts of issues, and I might try to find a paper of his for a thread. Indeed, this whole conference was supposed to be quite good.



(Oderberg would be another source that comes to mind.)

My interlocutor keeps lying. — Leontiskos

Interesting. One of mine refuses to engage in the topic at hand.

"has not shown that he understands any of this." Why don't you, "Show that you have understood the argument that Quine presented."

From my first post here:

It just says that one cannot be certain as to which name refers to which thing. Not so much about multiple words for the same thing as one word potentially referring to various things - so gavagai might refer to a rabbit, a rabbit's tail, a rabbit leg or a potential hot meal. For Quine, there is no fact of the mater. — Banno

Now, what do you make of the gavagai example?

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. — Leontiskos

Things have characteristics, not essences. So, what's the problem if one or a few characteristics are neglected? It would only be a problem if some other object possessed all the same characteristics, and the few that have been omitted by the list were the very ones the other object did not possess.

It's not a matter of listing every part that constitutes a car (or tiger), but of listing that set of attributes which only cars (or tigers) possess.

The important thing here is to set out what one believes Quine's intended conclusion was. I would suggest avoiding vague words like 'fact' in setting that out. — Leontiskos

What do I "make of it"? It seems clear to me that translation is underdetermined to some extent. What is Quine's intended conclusion? I don't think it is as radical as is being assumed. In a 1970 paper he says that the gavagai example is very limited, and demonstrates the inscrutability of terms rather than indeterminacy of translation of sentences.

In a 1970 paper he says that the gavagai example is very limited, and demonstrates the inscrutability of terms rather than indeterminacy of translation of sentences. — Leontiskos

(Quine uses the terms “ontological relativity” and “inscrutability of reference”, as well as “indeterminacy of reference”. Some philosophers have sought to distinguish these doctrines, but in later work Quine makes it clear that he uses the terms simply as different names for the same thing. See Ricketts 2011, Roth, 1986, and Quine 1986d.) — SEP

__________________

It seems clear to me that translation is underdetermined to some extent. — Leontiskos

Good. So will we agree that

because we have different words that we use for the same thing that there is no one referent for a specific thing and that therefor translation in speech wouldn’t be possible — Darkneos

is a misapprehension of the argument Quine makes?

I have a laundry list of things I think are wrong with the presuppositions in play, but let's just start with a naive bit plausible, obvious rebuttal, which is that Quine is simply defining what it would take for words to have a reference wrong. Words refer to whatever we intend then to refer to. They are signs we produce in accordance with our ends and thoughts.

After all, when someone says "my head hurts," or "that car outside," (and there is only one car outside) they mean to specify something unique and every competent speaker of the English language can figure out what they are referring to.

Now, there is an obvious problem with that thesis, which is that sometimes people use the wrong word to refer to things. Someone says "the capital of Illinois," to refer to Chicago, or refers to your sister as your girlfriend, etc

Of course, it doesn't seem Quine can avail himself of this objection to "reference is intended reference" given his commitments, but that's ancillary.

Other thinkers have thought that, because of this, we should make a distinction. There is intended reference and then there is stipulated reference vis-a-vis what words refer to in a language. This is similar to "speaking truthfully" as saying what one believes to be true, as distinct from "speaking truthfully" in terms of saying what is true. Not unrelated, but not the same thing.

Anyhow, for the sake of argument, let's provisionally grant this thesis. There is at least reference as intended reference. Afterall, the rebuttal to this would need to claim that we never intend to reference things uniquely, which seems obviously false.

What does this do to Quine's conclusion? We might think it still mostly holds, only now it is a skeptical thesis. We can never know what other people intend to reference. (Essentially, we have thrown out the empiricist supposition that something must be "third person observable" to be said to exist, and granted first person intentions re reference existence.)

Now, we might look at this skeptical thesis and say: "wow this looks mighty familiar!" Because it's basically the same argument Wittgenstein has us consider about rule following. Whether any person is following a particular rule is always underdetermined. There are perhaps an infinite number of rules covering every previously observed pattern. But Wittgenstein is just making a special case of the more generalized arguments of undetermination. The problem with rules applies just as well for any thesis about regularities in nature. And unlike language and rule following, we cannot rely on empathy or a language community to help us out with nature.

But underdetemination applies to almost everything. It applies to the reliability of induction itself.

Crucially, it applies as much to all other mental states, qualia, etc. as to intended reference. Presumably, people actually do fall in love. Yet how do you ever know that someone is really in love? Just consider incel anthropology. They claim all "love" is just transactional; it has nothing to do with sentiment (or sometimes, "only men can love, never women, they just manipulate for material gain"). But love would seem to be an intention, like intended reference. People can and do successfully fake it. Show me the set of "stimuli," in Quine's behaviorist terms, that ever uniquely specify love?

But if we cannot verify love using third person empiricism, have we thus demonstrated that no fact of the matter exists? Love doesn't exist?

And obviously, this would apply to all sorts of things. It would also apply to clearly insane delusions. Chesterton gets at this:

The madman's explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness. If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do. Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ's.

Nevertheless he is wrong. But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large... Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable mark of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction.

Is this good reasoning? Hume, for his part, admits we should, and must, write of the Problem of Induction for all practical matters. Quine, for his part, has us denying the the existence of what we cannot uniquely specify. But are the conditions he sets on there being facts about reference appropriate? If we use the same conditions, it seems we must not only be skeptical about all manner of things, but confirm that they don't exist.

And I don't know what you mean by "view from nowhere" behaviorism. What work is that from?

He couches his arguments in behaviorist terms from the very lines of Word and Object. "In acquiring [language] we have to depend entirely on intersubjectively available cues as to what to say and when."

That's a bold premise. People might claim we understand words, at least in part, through private sensations and our own phenomenological experiences. They might further argue that phenomenological awareness is full of discreet, distinct objects, proper parts and wholes, that are given to awareness, and that this helps us learn language. For example, toddlers pick up the names of animals easily because animals stand out as discrete wholes from the background.

Such premises seem eminently reasonable to me.

kind of wanted you to stop guessing at what Quine's views are and zero in on what he actually thought.

"One must know where one rabbit ends and another one begins - that does not work by pointing (ostension) - where does a Gavagai end and where does another one begin? "

I forget if he argues for mereological nihilism in Word and Object, but I am fairly certain he does elsewhere unless I am confusing him with a disciple.

The point was that nothing settles the issue of whether the speaker was referring to a whole, or referring to a part. Do you disagree with that? If so, what would tell the linguist what the speaker was referring to? What state of the world? What fact?

Yes I disagree with it. As shown above, if you can only say things exist by specifying them in terms of unique stimuli then all sorts of things don't exist. This is exactly the sort of argument some eliminitivists give to claim consciousness and qualia don't exist. Show me the unique stimulus corresponding to any qualia using Quine's behaviorist presuppositions about what can count as evidence.

It's a bad criteria. The conclusion should be a warning of that.

Things have characteristics, not essences.

...

It's not a matter of listing every part that constitutes a car (or tiger), but of listing that set of attributes which only cars (or tigers) possess. — Janus

"Only" is an interesting claim, but you're presumably espousing some form of modal essentialism, which is a characteristically contemporary form of essentialism. That is, "Characteristics, not essences," is a non-starter given that essentialism is now most often defined in terms of characteristics (properties). See, for example, the SEP entry on Essential vs. Accidental Properties.

is a misapprehension of the argument Quine makes? — Banno

Sure, — Leontiskos

It's not a matter of listing every part that constitutes a car (or tiger), but of listing that set of attributes which only cars (or tigers) possess.

Here is the issue I spot. Tigers are animals, and being an animal seems essential to what a tiger is. But not only tigers are animals. Likewise, being a tree is essential to what an oak is, but not all trees are oaks.

What is unique to oaks (assuming there is something outside of being an oak) doesn't seem like it would necessarily be what makes oaks oaks.

For instance, if only rhinos had horns, that would be unique. However, it wouldn't be the case that only rhinos had horns in all possible worlds (if the idea is modal), nor that if anything else with a horn came into being it would be a rhino (nor that rhinos would cease being rhinos if other horned animals came into existence).

What's interesting is that:

listing that set of attributes which only cars (or tigers) possess. — Janus

...we could take the set as a whole as what is unique. So revise it to, "which all and only cars (or tigers) possess," and the inclusion of 'only' vis-a-vis the set is actually a shift in the direction of traditional essentialism, insofar as we are honing in on a reality that is uniquely differentiable from all other realities. That is, Janus is not merely casting a net to collect entities of a particular type, but is also concerned to affirm a unique and repeatable constellation of characteristics. In modal terms this would be saying that essences do not ever strictly overlap.

Ah, that would resolve my issue. I may have misread

Sure, it can be said that things have essential properties in the sense that they would not qualify as whatever those essential properties would qualify them as if they did not possess those qualities. To say this is very different than saying there is some essence we might refer to as "tigerness' or 'carness".

Here is the issue I spot. Tigers are animals, and being an animal seems essential to what a tiger is. But not only tigers are animals. Likewise, being a tree is essential to what an oak is, but not all trees are oaks. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That's true. I think the individual characteristics are all necessary but only the whole set is sufficient to identify an entity or a kind of entity. And if there are other entities or kinds of entities that have the same set of characteristics then it would seem there must be at least one extra characteristic which is not shared by that other entity. I'm not sure I've expressed that in a way that is not open to equivocation, but let's see.

:up:

Interesting post. Quine's insight only eliminates agreement among us if recognition of another's reference is entirely empirical. My interest in the topic isn't so much in defending or killing it. It's more like part of a flow diagram. If you don't allow any innate language capability, you need to jettison folk ideas about communication. Take your pick.

My interest in the topic isn't so much in defending or killing it. It's more like part of a flow diagram. If you don't allow any innate language capability, you need to jettison folk ideas about communication. Take your pick.

That is very much my take as well. Quine is in many respects a lot like Hume. He is a great diagnostician, running down the dominant assumptions of his time to see what follows. If what follows is prima facie a conclusion that could be considered a reductio, we should have questions about the starting assumptions.

Hume does the same thing with causation. It should make us question Enlightenment era views if causes of they force his conclusions on us.

Quine's insight only eliminates agreement among us if recognition of another's reference is entirely empirical

Yes, provided we accept his definition of what counts as properly "empirical." This is what I mean by the assumptions being something like the "view from nowhere." It's a certain sort of restricted empiricism. That we intend to refer to things is something we experience, not something born of a priori knowledge. That we experience things —wholes—through the senses, is known through sense experience. Wholes are known empirically in that sense. So the question is, should we accept the premises that lead to the restricted form of empiricism?

The larger problem though is that if concerns over underdetemination are valid, then induction is also radically questionable (Hume). If we take the more radical position that, "either something is empirically verifiable (given Quine's version of empiricism), or there is no fact of the matter about its existence," then it seems there cannot be facts about all sorts of things, including regularities in nature. This strikes me as straightforwardly self-refuting, in that it undermines the support for empiricism of this sort in the first place, since presumably we're supposed to accept it because of its successes (or the successes of the natural sciences it claims for itself).

However, I do agree with Quine that reference and meaning are, in some sense, ambiguous. Heisenberg had a neat theory of meaning based on his work in quantum mechanics where as you try to specify something more and more you lose meaning as you gain percision. I think you could also refer here to cognitive limits on how much of a description we can consider at once.

But I also think unconscious process do a lot of lifting in understanding. For example, if we know chaos theory well, we need not "unpack" complex principles in conscious awareness in order to grasp them and make judgements about them, even if slow, self-conscious discursive reasoning was originally required to understand them.

I think a lot of modern theories of mind would merely have this as "data compression," but this seems to necessarily leave out the phenomenal side of understanding and the phenomenal/intelligible "whatness" of things. Hence, the prior turn in the discussion to essences. Do we face an unintelligible noumena, some sort of soup of "constraints" and atomic bits, from which we must construct all intelligibility, or do things like tigers, people, and trees exist, with us equipped for knowing them?

Skepticism is the first principle of much modern thought (rather than sense wonder, which was the old popular candidate). So the idea is that we must withhold judgment on such questions until they are demonstrated (perhaps "with certainty." Likewise, we must withhold any judgement on first philosophy or any ordering to philosophy until it is demonstrated. This implies that one can start on language without needing to address if distinct things to refer to even exist, in either phenomenal awareness or the world. But obviously, skepticism can come close to begging the question here if arguments are to proceed with the idea that "we must reach our conclusions about language without essences because they are not proven," which simply cuts the legs out of many philosophies of perception and language.

Nor does it seem we can begin from nothing and decide what constitutes valid demonstrations, and yet all knowledge is assumed to be demonstrative in a lot of skepticism. For more radical empiricism, either something can be demonstrated or there is no fact about it at all.

Yet can anyone demonstrate that all knowledge is demonstrative or that knowledge is merely justified opinion? Since ancient times, people have observed the problem that, if all knowledge requires justification then one has to traverse an infinite chain of syllogisms to know anything. But here is a syllogism from another thread:

P1: If all knowledge was demonstrative we would need an infinite chain of justifications to know anything and one cannot consider an infinite number of syllogisms in a finite lifespan, making knowledge impossible. (This could be its own syllogism).
P2: But we do know things.
C: Therefore, not all knowledge is demonstrative.

If one rejects P1, they have rejected the grounds for complaining about "justification stopping somewhere." Either they affirm that we can consider an infinite chain of syllogisms or that we don't need to.

If they reject P2, then they are committed to the claim that they do not know if either P1 or P2 are true.

Popular interpretations of On Certainty, where Wittgenstein is essentially retreading Aristotle on this issue hit P1. "All knowledge is demonstrative, but it is ultimately demonstrated from what is not itself known." I am not sure if this is very helpful, as the extremely diverse interpretations of the consequences of this show, some of which are truly bizarre and essentially recreate the radical skepticism Wittgenstein wanted to avoid. And at any rate, it falls afoul of the, IMHO reasonable assumption in the Posterior Analytics that for proper demonstrations the premises should be better known than the conclusion. Whereas here, all demonstrations flow from what is not known at all.

Sure, it can be said that things have essential properties in the sense that they would not qualify as whatever those essential properties would qualify them as if they did not possess those qualities. To say this is very different than saying there is some essence we might refer to as "tigerness' or 'carness". — Janus

"Tigerness" (if you like) for a modal essentialist would just be the essential properties of a tiger. If you think a tiger is defined by its essential properties then you're proposing some form of essentialism. I don't actually think that anyone is truly a non-essentialist, so it's not surprising that your intuitions lead you here.

To say this is very different than saying there is some essence we might refer to as "tigerness' or 'carness". — Janus

When people start bringing out ideas like this I would say they have to try to justify their sine qua non historically. "If [insert absurdity] is not true, essentialism fails." The response, "Show where you are getting the idea that [absurdity] comes with essentialism." Objections to essentialism tend to be strawmen through and through.

When people start bringing out ideas like this I would say they have to try to justify their sine qua non historically. "If [insert absurdity] is not true, essentialism fails." The response, "Show where you are getting the idea that [absurdity] comes with essentialism." Objections to essentialism tend to be strawmen through and through. — Leontiskos

This notion of a perfect form, eidos or essence is the traditional understanding of essentialism. You admit that essentialism is not monolithic, and yet you call criticism of the traditional thesis a strawman on account of its failure to be a cogent critique of, and even though it does not purport to be critiquing, what you call "modal essentialism". It seems that any strawmanning here is on you.

This notion of a perfect form, eidos or essence is the traditional understanding of essentialism

Not "perfect," just a substantial (type-of-thingal) form (actuality), which could be rendered "actual type of thing" or "what-it-is-to-be of certain types of thing."

The straightforward translation of essence is just "what-it-is-to-be" and form is what anything is, any whatness it has, and so to be anything at all, instead of sheer indeterminate potency (nothing) involves form.

I think what you've suggested is largely in line with that view, although there would be the further question of if what-a-thing-is is properly decomposable into properties. If it is, and say we have a set of properties like "animal" are these further decomposable? Is animal then a set of "living," "sensible," etc.? And if so, are these all decomposable? Certainly we can define and identify things in this way, so it makes sense that this might be "what makes them what they are," but there are issues.

For instance, if we answer affirmatively for all of the prior questions, it seems we face either an infinite regress of decomposition or else bottom out in some sort of atomic properties that are not decomposable (and thus all properties are made up of some combination of these basic properties). But I think it's fair to question either of those. Whereas, if various high level properties like "living" are not decomposable, why not "tiger" as well? Maybe a judgement call on each?

There is a phenomenological side to what things are, which is captured by eidos's original meaning, that seems particularly hard to reduce as well.

Where your definition would also differ from the traditional view is that the traditional essence is not simply definitive but rather constitutive due to a notion of formal causality. Being a tiger explains why tigers do what they do. And this is why artifacts don't have essences, and organisms are more proper beings with natures/essences than rocks, which are largely heaps of external causes. Proper beings exhibit more resistance to division, more self-determination, self-government, and self-organization, and so exhibit more of a principle of unity. And the nature/essence is that principle of unity in a particular sort of thing (substance). It's called in, in the Physics, to explain change. Why do things change like they do? Presumably not for no reason at all. The nature answer is, to some extent "because of what they are," although obviously nothing is fully self-determining nor self-organizing ex nihilo, and different natures interact in "chance" encounters.

What makes organisms most paradigmaticly possessing of essences is that they are ends-directed and seek aims. That could be considered just a property. It depends on the role such a principle would play in a full metaphysics.

It's rather difficult to form an opinion concerning essence while what an essence is remains obscure.

Sure... — Leontiskos

So after all that wind, you agree with what was said.