Seems to me that we can posit clarity as an aesthetic value. As something that we might preference not becasue of what it leads to, but for it's own sake.

Seems Moliere agrees, but perhaps you do not. — Banno

I think by and large I don't see clarity itself as a goal, as I believe you do.

I don't know whether Williamson is closer to my view or yours.

If you think about mathematics, there can be a sense in which a mathematical theorem or a construction or whatever can be clear, because nothing is hidden, the rules are known, everything can be made explicit on demand, and yet be complex enough or counter-intuitive enough that it remains difficult to understand, despite having industry-standard clarity.

The other natural point to make here is that what is clear to one mathematician may not be clear to another, so it's a little uncomfortable making the "psychological" clarity of the producer or consumer of the work a measure of anything.

No, I agree that I can't. So if I merely assert the sentence, without you and I stipulating what an assertion is going to mean, are you able to come to a conclusion about whether I think it's true, or only quite likely to be true?

in natural language "assert" is normally taken to imply "assert to be true". — Ludwig V

Right, that was more or less my point. It's not a logical entailment or something that's true by definition. We have to agree on it.

I've heard of the judgement stroke, but no-one has ever explained to me what it does before. Thank you for that. — Ludwig V

Cheers. See A challenge to Frege on assertion for a bit more, if you are interested. Frege set the force of an utterance aside so that we could look to other aspects of it's structure. As I said there, the "a" in

is the same in both occurrences. This is how Frege might represent ∀A∀B(A→(B→A)), reading from bottom to top, something like "we judge that in all cases "a" gives us that "b" gives "a"". Notice that the whole expression sits within the scope of one judgement stroke, the "⊢" on the first line - that's the force of the utterance, the judgement or belief or what have you. The "⊢" is nowadays reduced to "it's true that..."

All this talk of assertions is making me think about speech acts. — Ludwig V

Yes, good point. The issue seems to be what Searle called the "sincerity condition", which requires that the speaker genuinely possesses the mental state expressed by the speech act. In this case making an assertion involves the speaker in committing themselves to the mental state of holding what is asserted to be true.

Could we not say that clarity has more than one value? — Ludwig V

I'll go along with that. We could fill in the details of how an aesthetic value relates to an obligation, and I'd also agree that we have an obligation to each other to be clear enough to be understood. Taht was part of what is behind @Moliere's thread on aesthetics, I believe.

Added: This might be a better account: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/931997

I don't know whether Williamson is closer to my view or yours. — Srap Tasmaner

Neither do I.

But yours is a provocative post. I think maybe we might look back to the difference between an absolute and a relative measure - to being hot or cold. Do we need an absolute criteria for clarity? Perhaps not. Perhaps we might do with a sufficiency, enough to be getting on with.

A mathematical proof is never completely clear - there is always more to be said, more for the mathematician to clarify. There is still work being done on ZFC. But there is enough clarity for mathematicians to get on with other questions in the mean time.

And while what is clear to one mathematician may not be clear to another, it may be clear enough for them to agree and move on.

There's more here, that could be related back again to PI §201. We reach a point in our explanations at which we stop asking questions and just act.

So if I merely assert the sentence, without you and I stipulating what an assertion is going to mean, are you able to come to a conclusion about whether I think it's true, or only quite likely to be true? — J

I'm not sure what "without you and I stipulating what an assertion is going to mean" is doing here.

But I do think that if you make an assertion, we are entitled to conclude both that you think what you assert is indeed true, and that you have judged it to be so.

This does not mean you cannot assert something tentatively, or for the sake of argument - but again, the issue is one of the scope of the assertion.

Right, that was more or less my point. It's not a logical entailment or something that's true by definition. We have to agree on it. — J

Call it a performative entailment, rather than a logical entailment, if you like. If you assert something that you think is false, or judge to be false, your assertion misfires - it is insincere.

Good old Austin.

So if I merely assert the sentence, without you and I stipulating what an assertion is going to mean, are you able to come to a conclusion about whether I think it's true, or only quite likely to be true? — J

In a general sense if you φ and we don't know what it is to φ then we don't know what you have done. In fact if someone doesn't know what it means to φ then it makes no sense for them to claim that someone has φ'ed.

A mathematical proof is never completely clear - there is always more to be said, more for the mathematician to clarify. — Banno

None of this business about absolute or relative clarity was at issue.

Here we are again, where the question is: Is making things clear, to whatever degree, the goal of mathematics? Your description here of what's always left for mathematicians to work on ― it sounds like that's what you want to say.

Now, I'm always talking about good proofs and bad proofs, but that's all about communication and especially pedagogy. The real work of mathematics is producing the proof in the first place, because that's how you produce mathematical knowledge.

There is still work being done on ZFC. But there is enough clarity for mathematicians to get on with other questions in the mean time. — Banno

Great. They have enough clarity to get on with what exactly? Making other parts of mathematics clear? And in the meantime of what? Of making set theory even clearer?

None of this business about absolute or relative clarity was at issue. — Srap Tasmaner

Odd. Seems to me the very point of contention.

Is making things clear, to whatever degree, the goal of mathematics? — Srap Tasmaner

A goal, at least.

Great. They have enough clarity to get on with what exactly? Making other parts of mathematics clear? And in the meantime of what? Of making set theory even clearer? — Srap Tasmaner

Yep.

Given two proofs, the clearer is preferred. On that we agree?

Perhaps it might help if I went back to this, regarding the philosophy conference in Presocratic Greece

My response: Those who jump too quickly to an answer to "what are things made of?" fall; not water, not fire. The doubters have it right: we can intelligibly ask what bread is made of, but not, at least amongst the presocratics, what everything is made of. It is a step too far to ask what things in general are made of. It was exactly by answering questions like "what is bread made of" that we were able to progress towards the broader question. The answerable questions have a large part in this progress. Understanding the nature of grain and water and heat, and how they interact, lead by degrees and indirectly to the questions of chemistry and physics that constitute our present start of play. — Banno

The trouble is, "What are all things made of?" is not as clear as "What is bread made of?". I'd suggest that progress came from iterating clear questions: "What is φ made of?" - "what is bread made of?"; "What is water made of?"; "what is Hydrogen made of?"; What are protons made of?" And that this has proved more agreeable than just-so-stories about water and fire.

None of this business about absolute or relative clarity was at issue. — Srap Tasmaner

Odd. Seems to me the very point of contention. — Banno

I have no idea why you think that. @Moliere and I were talking about the norms of analytic philosophy, and I don't think either one of us ever mentioned it.

Given two proofs, the clearer is preferred. On that we agree? — Banno

I don't know where you're headed with any of this.

I don't think there's a standard measure of how clear a proof is.

If there were ― contrary to fact ― what would come next? That a clearer proof is more mathematical? Maybe "better mathematics" where "better" means more aesthetically pleasing, but that's not a measure of truth in mathematics, or a criterion of knowledge. It wouldn't make one proof truer than another.

A good proof aids in concept formation, as I've said more than once. An interesting proof might show connections between theorems, or even between branches of mathematics, that you didn't expect. Might be more worth knowing such a proof because it's an aid to your work, to understand that.

All of this is lovely.

But none of it amounts to the goal of mathematics being clarity of anything. I don't even understand what that would mean.

***

The trouble is, "What are all things made of?" is not as clear as "What is bread made of?". I'd suggest that progress came from iterating clear questions: "What is φ made of?" - "what is bread made of?"; "What is water made of?"; "what is Hydrogen made of?"; What are protons made of?" And that this has proved more agreeable than just-so-stories about water and fire. — Banno

I think Williamson is drawn to the ambition of the bigger question. It provides motivation for the smaller questions. (Much as he suggests a theory should be able to handle toy examples.) We can talk more about that.

My point right here will be that, once again, clarity is a means, not the goal. "What is everything made of?" unanswerable because it's not clear how to proceed? Fine, we'll do it by cases, and keep breaking bigger questions into smaller ones until we have one we can finally answer. (This used to be called "analysis".)

But the point is answering the questions. Gaining knowledge. Putting all the knowledge you acquire together into a theory.

As you say, clear enough to get on with it is clear enough. And what we want to get on with is acquiring knowledge, not making things clear. Means, not end.

There is a more definite take on all this available, but I can't name anyone who holds this position. (@J, @Moliere, @Count Timothy von Icarus, @Leontiskos, anyone come to mind?)

The claim would be that philosophy does not aim at knowledge, as science does, but at understanding. I don't know whether you would say this, @Banno, but some might describe Wittgenstein's famous "quietism" this way, and I suppose that's plausible.

I think it's clear this is not Williamson's view at all.

If you assert something that you think is false, or judge to be false, your assertion misfires - it is insincere. — Banno

But this assumes what I'm calling into question. Why are the only alternatives "true" or "false"? I'm pointing out that ordinary speech doesn't work this way. I don't have to be insincere to assert something that I think is merely quite likely to be true, or quite unlikely to be false -- we do that all the time.

What I'm pressing here is the idea that "to assert", limited to true and false things, is technical, it's talk in the Philosophy Room. We don't have a warrant from ordinary language to say that anyone who asserts something they believe may conceivably be false -- though it's highly likely it isn't -- is either misfiring or insincere. "May be false" covers a huge amount of territory. Why must we insist that the only sincere use of "to assert" is in a case when we believe there is no possibility whatsoever that the sentence is false? Or if that's too strong, where should we cut it off? "Very very very likely"? "Analytically true"? It all goes back to your point about "counts as" -- we have to agree on the usage.

There's also the Sellars line from PSIM:

The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term

where the verb is "understand" not "know".

Moliere and I were talking about the norms of analytic philosophy, and I don't think either one of us ever mentioned it. — Srap Tasmaner

It seems to me that you are advocating absolute norms while @Moliere (and I) advocate relative or comparative norms. I may be mistaken.

I don't think there's a standard measure of how clear a proof is. — Srap Tasmaner

Yep. There need be no absolute measure. But if you and I agree that this proof is clearer than that, then we might proceed. A comparative measure.

My point right here will be that, once again, clarity is a means, not the goal. — Srap Tasmaner

For you, sure. But why shouldn't clarity also be a goal, if not for you, then perhaps for others? And so an aesthetic.

What I hope my example shows is that working with small, clear questions may lead to progress on big, vague questions.

This used to be called "analysis".) — Srap Tasmaner

And hence analytic philosophy... dissection over discourse.

Mary Midgley, perhaps?

This is where my view is at odds with that of Williamson. I am on the side of the doubters at the philosophy conference in Presocratic Greece, rejecting the discourse of Thales and Anaximander in favour of dissecting the bread.

Good stuff. I hope you are enjoying this, too.

Why are the only alternatives "true" or "false" — J

They're not. The point is that the scope of the "⊢" takes in all the propositions, so as to maintain extensionality - and this is so whether we understand "⊢" as "It is true..." or as "I judge..." or as "perhaps..." or even "quite likely...".

Why must we insist that the only sincere use of "to assert" is in a case when we believe there is no possibility whatsoever that the sentence is false? — J

But this is not what is being pointed out. Someone might go ahead and assert that the cat is on the mat despite it being blatantly obvious that the cat is not on the mat. What we are entitled to conclude from their assertion is not that the cat is on the mat, but that they hold it to be the case that the cat is on the mat, provided we take them as sincere.

I'm really not seeing the problem.

The aim of philosophy...

Teleology.

We need not assume that meaningful discourse requires a teleological structure. - that we must have an aim. I don't grant that assumption—it's a relic of an Aristotelian metaphysics that I'm not committed to.

Teleology is metaphysically extravagant and misleading. Galileo, Descartes, and Newton sought mechanical rather than final causes. Hume warned against inferring purposes from observed regularities. Darwin replaced natural teleology with natural selection. Wittgenstein urged philosophers to describe how things are used in practice, not to seek hidden purposes or essences. So today, to speak of ends in the Aristotelian sense is to reinvigorate a discredited metaphysical picture. Best left alone, unless one explicitly defends that framework. As, indeed, some do.

My point right here will be that, once again, clarity is a means, not the goal. — Srap Tasmaner

For you, sure. But why shouldn't clarity also be a goal, if not for you, then perhaps for others? And so an aesthetic. — Banno

I mean, sure, it's an aesthetic value, of course.

And of course it can be a goal, alongside others, or sometimes the goal, in specific cases ― we're not making progress, so let's rethink this.

But see there again, I'm going to tend to think you need to clarify a problem to stand a better chance of solving it. And I think this is certainly Williamson's view.

This is where my view is at odds with that of Williamson. I am on the side of the doubters at the philosophy conference in Presocratic Greece, rejecting the discourse of Thales and Anaximander in favour of dissecting the bread. — Banno

Yeah, this is a funny thing, because the question "What is bread made of?" isn't obviously clearer than the question "What is everything made of?" They're both pretty simple questions, in form anyway, and pretty easy to understand.

What's quite different is how you'd go about answering them. For one thing, bread is artificial, so we already know what it's made of because we make it.

What isn't clear is (a) how you'd go about figuring out what everything is made of, and (b) that everything is made of the same "ingredients". The question might not have the same kind of answer that the bread question does, and it's very hard to see how you could figure out it has that type of answer.

What Williamson says, is that it's not clear what the various proposed answers even mean. Another way to put that might be to say that it's not clear in what sense they are answers to the question.

So there's all sorts of clarity we might want. First, we'll want to be able to tell when we have an answer, and it should be clear. Second, we want to know how to proceed toward finding an answer. For some sorts of problems, this is clear ― maybe you just need to do a calculation. But for a whole lot of questions, and I think the ones Williamson is valorizing here, we absolutely are not clear how to proceed, what procedure will, if carried out, produce an answer.

And here, not only must we begin without clarity, but we cannot really expect to have clarity about the effectiveness of our procedure until we see some positive or negative results. Even then, the results may not be enough to tell us whether we're on the right or the wrong track. Clarity will come only at the end, when you reach your destination or a dead end.

So what's the advantage with bread? That we already know? What about the ingredients of your bread? What's water made of? Or wheat? Is it clear how you'd answer those questions? Were the Greeks capable of answering them?


Bonus anecdote on one sort of clarity.

My father drew building plans for a living, for much of his career. I loved his drawings. They showed his experience, the way he would work in notes on exactly the tricky things the men at the job site might struggle with. (And I loved watching him work. He'd step back from the drafting table, still looking at the drawing in progress, pull a cigarette from his breast pocket without looking, light it, take just a few puffs while he was thinking, then rest it in an ashtray and back to it. I looked in his office once and there were three cigarettes still burning in three different ashtrays, and he was hard at work on the drawing.)

The thing that made his drawings beautiful to me was that he knew what would make them most useful, and you could see that he knew, and he made sure it was there, right where it needed to be.

Sure, it was pretty common to see the highest goal of philosophy as intelligentia (understanding), as above scientia (knowledge), wisdom (sophia) being a higher sort of virtue than science.

At first glance, this notion might seem to be quite a bit different from what moderns of an analytic persuasion have in mind. I don't think it's completely dissimilar though. In both cases it suggests the superiority of the intuitive and holistic over the discursive and demonstrative. In pre-modern thought, the former is normally seen as being in service to the latter. In modern thought, a focus on discursive justification and method tends to crowd out the latter (not that it isn't there, but it's role in epistemology becomes decidedly muted).

In the tradition that comes out of the Egyptian desert, there are three stages of progress. The first is praxis, largely defined by ascetic labors, study, and meditation. The next is theoria, the knowledge of the uncreated through created things (the third is "theology" which is irrelevant here). But theoria is precisely not instrumental knowledge. It's quite the opposite of the Baconian mastery of nature. The whole idea is that the holistic ordering of the cosmos is revelatory, and it is beings' relation to whole that is grasped (a theme of some great naturalists as well). A "linear," diabolical (in the original sense of the term) thought process that is focused on the ends of the appetites and passions is contrasted with a spiral, and then circular movement of the nous, which is contemplative and tends towards unity in both the movement of the mind and its object.

Obviously, ancient and medieval Christianity might recall Hindu thought or Taoism more than modern Western thought in this respect. Yet in the modern move from "knowledge" to "understanding" I think there is still normally something of the intuitive and even aesthetic that hangs on, or even the notion that to understand, to contemplate, is an end in itself ("all men by nature desire to know.")

Consider Wittgenstein in On Certainty on Moore attempting to win over the person who has been raised thinking that the world has only existed since they have been born:

Remember that one is sometimes convinced of the correctness of a view by its simplicity or symmetry, i.e., these are what induce one to go over to this point of view. One then simply says something like: "That's how it must be."

But, as I see it, the difficulty in later contexts is that the focus on justification and method make explaining such a focus, let alone that it is choice-worthy, next to impossible. One can only be silent about it or attempt a sort of breakout from discursive justification, at least of the highly demonstrative sort.



That quote fits nicely.



I don't think it presupposes any robust sense of final causality to ask: "what is the purpose of philosophy?" or more specifically "what is the purpose of this particular area of philosophy?" How could we ever agree on methods if we do not consider what we want to accomplish (i.e. our end)?

Imagine you are giving an introductory lecture on metaphysics. You tell your class: "Metaphysics is not discovering the deep structure of the world per se, but proposing better ways to conceptualize and systematize our thought and language.”

And then a hand shoots up, and you decide to take a question and it's:

"Professor Banno, can you please explain what makes some conceptualizations and systemizations of our language better than others?"

It hardly seems adequate to say simply: "if you can't choose I'll decide" without offering an explanation. And if the next question is: "but what is the aim of even doing this?" I am not sure if it's fair to dismiss that question as "loaded" or somehow commiting us to "Aristotlianism."

To say: "'[some]thing speaks for [or] against it...' presupposes a principle of speaking for and against. That is, [we] must be able to say what would speak for it." That's Wittgenstein, On Certainty 117, not Ol' Slick Ari.

Likewise, I hardly think one can invoke Darwin as eliminating the explanatory function of aims within the context of intentional human practices. Darwin didn't think he had shown that human science is without aims. A denial of final causality, misguided as I might find it, is still a flying leap away from the denial that human practices possess proper aims. This seems to be conflating final causality related to forms, and the entire notion of aims and goal-directedness. Now arguably, you do need the former to adequately explain the latter, but plenty of thinkers don't think you do.

It would be problematic, for instance, if we had to say that medicine is just whatever it is that doctors just so happen do, without respect to any "aim of medicine." For example, it would make identifying quacks difficult. More to the point, we'd face the difficulty that doctors themselves certainly do think their field has an aim. But so too for philosophers (this article being one example).

Well said.

The advantage of the question What is bread made of?" is that there is a pathway to answering the question, that we might well answer the question. You have the answer when you can make bread.

Seems pretty direct.

My classes did not begin with broad statements of what metaphysics is, but proceeded by doing metaphysics, self consciously, examining what we did as we proceeded.

Becasue we do not start with a definition—we start in the middle. We do not start with a definition becasue we are not only teaching a body of beliefs, but also providing a set of tools.

Nice rhetorical move on your part.

The advantage of the question What is bread made of?" is that there is a pathway to answering the question, that we might well answer the question. You have the answer when you can make bread.

Seems pretty direct. — Banno

So the moral of the story is: don't ask questions you don't already know how to answer, or don't just already have the answer to.

Exciting stuff.

More like: Look for questions that look answerable, or at least for which you have some way of recognising the answer.

Right, that was more or less my point. It's not a logical entailment or something that's true by definition. We have to agree on it. — J

Yes. There are two points that one can make to articulate the difference. The first is that the relationship is what is called "defeasible". That means that sometimes, in particular cases, there is that evidence that the speaker is lying, or joking, or intends the statement ironically or sarcastically. In those cases, the link is broken. The second is that it helps to think of an assertion as what is called a speech act, and the link with "X judged that..." or "X believes that..." is part of what is done when one asserts - one gives the audience a basis for recognizing that I have judged, or that I believe. That would be, I believe, an example of illocutionary force.

Defeasibility, speech acts and illocutionary force are ideas that are quite well established in philosophy. But you may not. So if you have come across them, please forgive me if I seem to be teaching my grandmother to suck eggs.

So the moral of the story is: don't ask questions you don't already know how to answer, or don't just already have the answer to. — Srap Tasmaner

More like: Look for questions that look answerable, or at least for which you have some way of recognising the answer. — Banno

Well, there is the possibility of working out how to answer a question, if you don't know. But it will help to answer the questions you do know how to answer, and approach the big question through them.
But it's also worth setting aside the possibility that the big question will ever have a final answer. There's a sense in which the big question here - What is everything made of? - has still not been answered. It would seem that each version of the answer generates a new version of the old question.
This is a bit vague, but I take it that it is obvious that I'm writing in the context of the question that Williamson describes as "one of the best questions ever asked".
BTW, Williamson doesn't mention the fact that an atomic theory was developed in the 5th century BCE, and there are, apparently, even earlier precursors. The modern theory is, of course, a very different thing, but these earlier theories could count as precursors. He paints a picture which is not exactly wrong, but which suits his purpose. But then, it's only an introduction.

"Professor Banno, can you please explain what makes some conceptualizations and systemizations of our language better than others?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

It may help here to steal an idea from the study of the arts. There, you don't get an answer to the question what makes some novels or pictures, etc. better than others. What you do get is a collection of examples which have been widely accepted as good examples. The expectation is that you will not be limited to imitating them (although that might be a useful exercise). The expectation is that students will be enabled to create new work by developing a critical judgement from those examples. The examples are collectively known as the canon.
True, there are various theories about what makes one work better than another, and students are taught these, or some of them. But they are taught as theories, subject to criticism. Again, the expectation is not that those theories will dictate what students will do. It is that those theories will be the basis of developing new ones.

They're not. The point is that the scope of the "⊢" takes in all the propositions, so as to maintain extensionality - and this is so whether we understand "⊢" as "It is true..." or as "I judge..." or as "perhaps..." or even "quite likely...". — Banno

I'm inclined to think that some concept rather like that of the proposition, as usually understood in philosophy, may be useful or even necessary. But I'm also inclinded to think that a definition along the lines of "a proposition is a sentence with its use" has potential. So maybe it will help if I try to disentangle what I think it wrong with the usual understanding.

Two quotations from Stanford EP - Structured propositions:-

Proponents of propositions hold that, speaking strictly, when speakers say the same thing by means of different declarative sentences, there is some (non-linguistic) thing, a proposition, that each has said.

The grammar here slips. One can't say a non-linguistic thing. It is true that there is a collection of sentences that say that the cat is on the mat in diffferent ways. I deliberately do not say the same thing, because actual synonymy is very rare in natural languages, so "the same thing" is not appropriate. Compare the argument that because there are many shades of red, there must be something in common - the universal. But the universal is a metaphysical object and so nominalism is born. I repeat - all we need is a collection of sentences that say that the cat is on the mat in different ways.

A declarative sentence is true or false derivatively, in virtue of expressing (in the context in which it is uttered....) a true or false proposition.

I really don't see why one should not say that a declarative sentence is true or false. Natural language has a commonplace variation of this - "It is true that the cat whose name is Jack is on the mat". I think we can manage with that and the variant of nominalism I outlined above.

So today, to speak of ends in the Aristotelian sense is to reinvigorate a discredited metaphysical picture. Best left alone, unless one explicitly defends that framework. As, indeed, some do. — Banno

I'm afraid I think there is a lot to be said for Aristotle's hierarchy of purposes and actions done for their own sake. But not for his idea that there is only one such hierarchy, topped off by The Good. Ryle makes use of the former idea quite unself-consciously. Peters famously builds the latter idea into his philosophy of education.

I repeat - all we need is a collection of sentences that say that the cat is on the mat in different ways. — Ludwig V

This looks like slipping grammar to me. How does a sentence say something? A sentence is just a series of words that form a unit.

Quite right.

How about "collection of sentences that enable us to say that the cat is on the mat in different ways"
or "collection of ways to say that the cat is on the mat".
Suggestions welcome.

How about "collection of sentences that enable us to say that the cat is on the mat in different ways"
or "collection of ways to say that the cat is on the mat".
Suggestions welcome. — Ludwig V

:up: If you note the part I bolded, that's what we call a proposition.

:up: If you note the part I bolded, that's what we call a proposition — frank

Um - forgive me. But that's what I call a sentence; I would say that when it is used - to tell someone where the cat is, for example, - it becomes a statement in that context. However, I've learnt the philosophical dialect and so I know what you mean, in one sense. However, the SEP article seems to want to say that a proposition is what is in common between a number of sentences or statements. That's what I don't get.

Moliere,
Classic battle between a “what” thinker and a “how” thinker I am getting at on your Matter of Taste thread here (https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/999316).

↪Count Timothy von Icarus
My classes did not begin with broad statements of what metaphysics is, but proceeded by doing metaphysics, self consciously, examining what we did as we proceeded.

Becasue we do not start with a definition—we start in the middle. We do not start with a definition becasue we are not only teaching a body of beliefs, but also providing a set of tools.

Nice rhetorical move on your part. — Banno

I post this point here because, Banno said two things here and left the one thing Count was asking overlooked. Banno said “no broad statements” and no “start[ing] with a definition”. Banno’s reply to Count pointed out “proceeded by doing” and “examining as we proceeded.” And “we start in the middle.” All of these are solid methods for the “how” first thinker.

But as I said we all need to ask all of the questions, Banno mentioned in passing he proceeded by doing “metaphysics”, and admitted that while doing other things he was “teaching a body of beliefs.” These are the objects of the question “what”.

So Banno basically classified Count’s line of thinking as a rhetorical move toward an aesthetic of “what” by making a rhetorical move towards an aesthetic of “how”.

They should be more open to fully addressing the issue along both lines. Banno is ignoring “what” he is doing, and saying Count is ignoring “how” he is doing it.