It's also my brand of (nominalist) physicalism.

Then your nominalist physicalism is phenomenalism.

:cheer:

If phenomenalism posits that only unique physical stuff exists, perhaps. That's not how I normally understand stock phenomenalism, but if you want to say that's what it's positing, then okay.

A phenomenalist says that all there is, is properties.

A phenomenalist says that all there is, is properties. — frank

Properties are unique physical things.

Properties are unique physical things. — Terrapin Station

That's why I like talking to you. You're incorrigible.

Well, the point is kind of that I don't think that my view is actually just phenomenalism.

It would probably be better to learn more about what my view actually is rather than trying to squeeze it into some template you're already familiar with.

:grin:

(Of course, if I'm wrong and it is just phenomenalism, then that's fine. But I'm pretty sure that phenomenalists aren't saying just what I'm saying, so if you're interested in my view, it would be better to focus on my view as my view rather than trying to assimilate it into something that it's not.)

I get that you're a physicalist, but you also want room for various realisms.

That leaves you redefining things like propositions and properties as (emergent?) physical things, processes, arrangements, etc.

I think this trail eventually opens up to contradiction. To continue on, you probably need to adopt a little anti-realism, which can just manifest as not knowing. You know?

The idea that properties would be somehow separable from physical things, from substance, is completely incoherent.

Properties are simply the characteristics of substances/(dynamic) relations of substances. You can't have something/(dynamic) relations of things without them being/behaving some way. That's all that properties are.

I don't buy "emergence" as that's usually characterized.

Likewise, you can't have the way that physical things/dynamic relations of physical things are, you can't have their characteristics, without actually having the physical things/dynamic relations. Thus you can't have properties sans physical stuff/relations either.

Philosophy started going way off track with this with Aristotle, because he tried to separate properties from substances (well, although maybe we can blame Plato because of forms). He made that initial incoherent move. It's just because they were confused about the relationship of thinking, concepts, language, etc. to the world in general.

Ok.

So we've already been through that language isn't just information transfer, we can stipulate that that is one of its many uses; one thing we can do with words is communicate facts to each other.

Let's take the bit of language that we might be tempted to characterise as information transfer. Specifically:

(A) "Can you tell me the capital of Mongolia?" asked Bob sincerely. "Ulaan Baator", answered Sally.

Imagine describing (A) as a channel between Bob and Sally. Along this channel, Bob submitted a question, Sally submitted "Ulaan Baator" in answer. This seems to be the kind of imaginative exercise required in classifying the speech act this way. Then let's imagine that we have to explain (A) to someone; how would you do it? What presumptions do you have to put in place for your explanation?

I think if you wanted to form an account there, you'd need to know about questions and answers, what it means to ask a question, how that connects to the desire for an answer, what it means for those speech acts to be sincere...

So I think to characterise any instance of language as "information transfer", this is a higher-order characterisation based off of agglomerating different speech acts together that involve "information transfer". I imagine the converse would be like trying to teach a student what it means to transmit information along a channel, what bits mean and so on, without having any analogies in place for framing.

Whether you lose anything from the agglomeration probably depends upon the analytic context. Someone interested in modelling the semantics of questions based upon the semantics of propositions probably will not give too much of a crap, a student of pragmatics might give all the crap in the world.

Edit: though, it might be interesting to consider textual speech acts here. You literally transmit encoded information on sites like this, and it's decoded. I'm still 'explaining' and 'providing an exegesis' and 'giving examples', which are the kinds of thing one might do when making a post on a philosophy forum.

For added complication, writing does not share all relevant features with speech. Writing might piggyback its elements on some in speech ects, but share some essential characteristics differ from conversation. Text is asynchronous, gestural elements are encoded differently: emoji are a thing, emotes are gestural - rhythmic elements are gestural in some way in text; salient units for interpretation have different demarcation strategies available for them - purely visual ones are most common @StreetlightX.

My model is based on my own experience somewhere on the autism spectrum. I agree with Chomsky that a fair amount of speech and communication is innate.

When Bob speaks, Sally can tell on an emotional level that he's asking something. Not being autistic, Sally isn't even aware that she aligns her frame of reference with his (looks through his eyes) in order to understand what he's asking.

I think the components of this kind of frame of reference are partly innate, partly cultural, but influenced in varying degrees by an individual's personality and experiences. For instance, if Sally thinks all men named Bob are condescending assholes, she might assume that Bob is belittling her, not realizing that she isn't capturing Bob's frame of reference clearly. In some cases, this kind of failure to capture can result in miscommunication, but it doesn't have to.

So there isn't much in the way of transfer (Meno's paradox).

So we've already been through that language isn't just information transfer, — fdrake

It's the other way around.
It's not that language isn't just information transfer. It's that language is part, or a kind, of information transfer.

Priest: Alice, do you take Bob to be your lawful wedded husband?
Alice: I do.
The priest nods: Bob, do you take Alice to be your lawful wedded wife?
Bob: I do.
Priest: Let's table that discussion for later, I will take your input into consideration.

One thing I brought up in another thread about this is that we could say that two things "match" when they're structurally similar--for example, two shirts that we'd loosely call "the same shirt."

But when we're talking about the correlation between a proposition and a state of affairs, surely we're not saying that they're similar in that way, are we? (And beside that, extramentally, we have nothing to make a determination that they're similar.)

With the DNA example you use, we're talking about a physical process that manipulates materials in a particular way. If we're proposing this for a way that correspondence can work when it comes to something like truth value, what analogous (to DNA) physical process are we talking about? — Terrapin Station

The issue is "meaning". I think there is far more meaning in two extremely complex things like DNA which happen to match, than there is in the correlation between a proposition and a state of affairs. In comparison, the correlation between a proposition and a state of affairs is extremely simplistic, while the correlation between replicated DNA is extremely complex. Don't you think that the complex correlation is far more meaningful than the simplistic correlation?

I cannot overlook the backdoor smuggling of agency when there is none warranted. All talk about information being within cells, rna, dna, etc. dubiously presupposes meaning where there is no creature/agent capable of drawing correlations between different things. — creativesoul

The issue is "meaning". I think there is far more meaning in two extremely complex things like DNA which happen to match, than there is in the correlation between a proposition and a state of affairs. In comparison, the correlation between a proposition and a state of affairs is extremely simplistic, while the correlation between replicated DNA is extremely complex. Don't you think that the complex correlation is far more meaningful than the simplistic correlation? — Metaphysician Undercover

QED

Start with Shannon entropy. Information about X reduces it by reducing the range of expected states of X. But we can reduce Shannon entropy by barking commands or laughing contemptuously. The analysis of language rarely places enough emphasis on context, because it is impossible to gather all contextual evidence. But if I call you Boo-key it might mean the world to you, or it might mean nothing, depending on our shared history.

An important role in language is preparing the reader/listener for ... possibly nothing ... but possibly something important that would have otherwise have been missed. By redirecting the sensitivity of the listener, language does not always deliver the message in person. "Look!"

As I said, if you plan to argue that there is no agent involved in the correlation between replicated DNA, I think you have a very silly argument on your hands. Activity implies agency, necessarily. Directed activity, like we find in DNA replication, implies activity with a purpose, which is a special type of agency described by "final cause".

The issue is "meaning". I think there is far more meaning in two extremely complex things like DNA which happen to match, than there is in the correlation between a proposition and a state of affairs. In comparison, the correlation between a proposition and a state of affairs is extremely simplistic, while the correlation between replicated DNA is extremely complex. Don't you think that the complex correlation is far more meaningful than the simplistic correlation? — Metaphysician Undercover

Meaning is something that individual people do. It's an associative way of thinking about things--making associations, thinking in terms of connotations, references, etc. I don't think it makes a lot of sense to try to quantify thing/process A versus thing/process B as "more meaningful"--at least not in general. It can make sense a la the report of an individual, where they're telling us something about the extent to which they think about A versus B in terms of meaning.

In any event, this is avoiding the point I was making and what I was asking. I explained how it makes sense to talk about DNA "matching" something. That's referring to a physical process, inherent in the properties of the substances involved, that results in something with similar structure, etc. being fashioned out of particular substances. In what similar way would we be talking about matching when we're talking about propositions and states of affairs?

Thanks for the example of information transfer. You actually give two examples of information transfer. The transfer of information between Alice, Bob and the priest. And then you transferring the information about their conversation to me.

You informed me not only of what they said but how they said it, or what words they used to say it.

If meaning is use and if they could have used other words to say that, then how could they mean the same thing by doing (using different words) it differently?

One of the commonly known properties of consciousness is "aboutness". The aboutness of consciousness has to do with consciousness being a structure of information.

What it was meant to highlight was that "I do" there is not just communicative, it registers consent. Functionally, it marries rather than transmits. Of course, it also communicates, but it does more.

Edit: unless you have a much more general account of information transfer, typically it's a rather passive process of transcriptive encoding and decoding.

I am guessing that few here would say that Google translation understands the meaning of the texts it uses. It works on information at the level of syntax. — Banno

I would never say that. I'm sympathetic to Searle's argument. Syntax is not meaning. Google and Siri don't converse.

That's all that is needed for moving information about. Using language is far more than that, which again shows the poverty of the conduit model.

Language is not moving information about. — Banno

So computers move information about, but language is something more. It's fundamentally a social enterprise where we participate in these language games for all sorts of reasons.

computers move information about, but language is something more. It's fundamentally a social enterprise where we participate in these language games for all sorts of reasons. — Marchesk

Is computer voice recognition part of a social enterprise?

(4) Is there one all-encompassing game (or potential-game) all other games can be (in principle) translated into? — csalisbury

This is an excellent question.

It's about how Davidson and Wittgenstein might mesh.

Wittgenstein never says it, but folk tend to be left with the impression that language games are incommensurable.

Davidson offers a very strong argument for the commensurability of conceptual schemes. Indeed his conclusion is stronger than that - that the very idea of a conceptual scheme is in error.

But I don't think these views incompatible. Language games are not conceptual schemes.

The "Slab!" game and the counting apples game could be played by the very same person. But in what sense could we translate one into the other?

to integrate it into an existing set of correlations, — Possibility

I don't see that this helps. It just replaces meaning with correlation.

Is this discussion about information or meaning? Or knowledge? Or something else? — Luke

Yep.

Unless there is an argument that (moving) information is equivalent to meaning and knowledge (and more?)... — Luke

What I'm arguing would be closer to saying that moving information is not moving meaning or knowledge. That much more is involved.

Information

I'm pretty much using the physical definition here - the difference in entropy of two systems, the minimum number of bits needed to encode a signal, and Shannon's equation that shows these are the same.

I think this trail eventually opens up to contradiction. To continue on, you probably need to adopt a little anti-realism, which can just manifest as not knowing. You know? — frank

Anti-realism is just the wrong term to use. The world is always, already, interpreted. Hence, there is a world. Calling this view anti=realism is obfuscation.