"This is the meaning you should go by if you want us to have a meaningful conversation about chairs without you being a pain in the arse by making up your own meaning"
— S

Which of course is already putting social pressure on them. If they don't use the meaning you're calling "correct," they're being a pain in the ass. — Terrapin Station

First off, I notice that you quoted me out of context. But yes it is (if expressed), and yes they are.

Or are you going to claim that "pain in the ass" is only descriptive, too? — Terrapin Station

Doesn't even matter. Like I said, the original statement we were talking about isn't even prescriptive (Magnus Anderson is right about that), and the phrase you're quoting there was taken from a potential accompanying thought rather than from the statement itself, although I can't stop you reading things into the original statement if you're set on doing so.

I do, however, think that he's nitpicking and missing the point. — Magnus Anderson

He is.

In my first post I explained clearly the difference between "the correct" and "a correct" and stated that I disagreed with your use of "the correct". — ChrisH

Well, that makes no sense, unless you disregard the implied circumstance he had in mind and insert your own, but then your criticism wouldn't apply to his point, because you wouldn't be talking about the same thing. It's not difficult to imagine a circumstance where there are multiple correct answers, and where a chair being the thing you sit on is just one of many, but that has no bearing whatsoever on his point, because it's clear to me that that's not at all what he had in mind.

I do find it rather silly that some people in this discussion apparently feel the need to point out, as though we are oblivious of the fact, that, say, "chair" can also mean the person in charge of a meeting, or idiosyncratically anything you want it to, and that these meanings can still be correct in a sense. That is simply missing the point.

Well, that makes no sense, unless you disregard the implied circumstance he had in mind — S

"Implied circumstance"?

May I suggest we drop chair-gate now and stay on-topic?

That has nothing to do with what I asked you. I said, "If S is not trying to match the convention, then telling S that they're not matching the convention is irrelevant."

You're positing S not matching the convention and S telling U that U is wrong. — Terrapin Station

The way I understand you, what you're saying is that it makes no sense to criticize someone for not using words the way most people do if that's not what they are trying to do.

Is that what you're trying to say? If so, my response is an adequate one.

On conformity and all that jazz. It's precisely the fact that there is a (non-absolute) standard of correctness by which you can be judged to be wrong about usage that makes an individual relationship with the concept possible and not only that but allows for exactly the organic deviations that over the course of time redistribute concepts among the structural relationships they inhabit. In other words, the openness of language only persists in a recognition of the boundaries that bring it into meaningful existence in the first place.

Yes, the implied circumstance. Did you think he was just saying what he said in absolute terms, context free? :brow:

No. By applying the principle of charity, I don't think it's difficult to make sense of what he said. Just compare it with what he has previously said in this discussion. The correct meaning, given x, y, z. It's just that that last part was left implicit.

Hmm... :chin:

Needs more chair.

Alright: Say the chair tables a motion that the motion of chairs and tables should be considered the tabling of chairs in motion, then rather than chairing the chair in victory we should table him along with the tables in order that that motion should be chaired not tabled.

↪ChrisH Yes, the implied circumstance. Did you think he was just saying what he said in absolute terms, context free? :brow: — S

When I said that the correct meaning of the word "chair" is "a separate seat for one person, typically with a back and four legs" I had no specific context in mind. I was talking about what the word "chair" means in general. So yes, I do think that @ChrisH is right. However, it's an insignificant mistake that was made on purpose + it's not true that I was being defensive (I merely failed to understand what he was trying to say the first time I responded to him.)

The correct meaning of the word "chair" is far too complex to be a part of a short forum post. This is why I had to make it simpler than it really is by disregarding all correct meanings except for the one most widely in use. I could afford to do this because my point wasn't to define the word "chair" in the best possible way. My point was to illustrate that there are correct and incorrect definitions of words.

The way I understand you, what you're saying is that it makes no sense to criticize someone for not using words the way most people do if that's not what they are trying to do. — Magnus Anderson

Well, or I'm asking if you'd do that and why. S using a word unusually and saying something to U, who is using the word conventionally, where S doesn't realize this, is not what I'm talking about.

But what the chair means in general, when analysed, is found to require a specific set of circumstances, otherwise it wouldn't mean what it does at all. And that specific set of circumstances includes the kind of things which we were talking about earlier, like consensus among a community of language users. It requires a history, a familiarisation, a learned association. It also requires cooperation, or playing by the rules. And what I meant there was that you had in mind just this sort of case, and not the kind of idiosyncratic scenarios of Terrapin's imagination.

I for one would never dream of doing that, because apricot.

Haha--yeah, I realized after I typed the first example that "S" might be read as referring to you rather than being a variable.

Concepts are residents of the realm of reflection and analysis. Retrojecting them into unified experience is a natural thing to do, but it produces philosophical problems when we notice a priori features of concepts.

In spite of that, we do retroject, and in the process we construct an analyzed world.

It's a matter of confusing the dismantled cuckoo clock for the unified one. We do this reflexively and then laud that it "works" and therefore must yield a solid foundation for a kind of realism.

Agree?
5d — frank

Hey sorry, I'd missed your response here. I think I agree mostly tho I still have some additional thoughts that muddle it up a little ( & big caveat: I'm mostly thinking out loud on this thread and I don't have much canonical philosophy to back any of this up. (I guess this all vaguely Deleuzian, but with none of the rigor. )

I think that there are degrees to which a concept is clear and distinct, that they're on a continuum on this regard, and that most concepts are halfsubmerged in a preconceptual muck that secretly sustains them and gives them sense. They emerge as cognitive solutions to transconceptual problems, and thinkers are, at best, half-medium, half constructor. (That's why thinking seems to follow grooves, to be guided by existing landscapes of thought, and why sui generis creation of a concept is all but impossible.)

Another way to say this that i think they grow organically, like everything else, and the activity if reflection simply sharpens them, like cutting a diamond.

To recreate reality from dismantled pieces is, yeah, definitely a temptation and a confusion, since concepts are one part of reality itself. Though their 'working' (as opposed to simply being internally consistent) is still a sign of some kind of realism, because it means they're linked up to something beyond thought.

Does that make any sense? I don't know how well I expressed that.

Does that make any sense? — csalisbury

I think so. What I didn't like (I don't think you were saying this, I just made it up as I was trying to understand) was the idea that reality is out there doing its thing when we arrive and discover problems due to our fumbling attempts to engage it, so concepts appeared the same way lungs and thumbs do: they randomly emerged and then stayed because they opened the door to a certain kind of life being able to perpetuate itself, and so became part of that lifeform. Let's call this Realism 1. It's basically indirect realism and the assumption is that reality is pretty much as we see it.

Carlo Rovelli said that the way we perceive time is a side-effect our point of view, in the same way the sun moving through the sky is. Recognizing this, we see that any true statement about Realism 1 is only true from a certain point of view. Let's call this Realism-POV. We're still in the truth business, but our truths are all POV dependent. So as Rovelli discussed what the universe looks like from near a black hole, it seems mind bending because you can't look out of your own eyeballs and see what he's talking about. His report is profoundly conceptual. Realism-POV tells you to ignore what you see; to ignore all the ways you embrace Realism-1 in your daily life.

What I struggle with is imagining a POV that has no conscious witness. I don't think there is any such thing. We always put a phantom person there and give her a pencil and paper. Without any conscious witness, what we have is Realism-POV without any POV. There are no true statements that can be made about it?

What I struggle with is imagining a POV that has no conscious witness. I don't think there is any such thing. We always put a phantom person there and give her a pencil and paper. Without any conscious witness, what we have is Realism-POV without any POV. There are no true statements that can be made about it? — frank

That's interesting because it's more or less the opposite of my ontology, where I'm a realist but I don't think it's coherent to be absent a "POV" (which is probably not the best name for it, but I'll go with your terminology).

That's interesting because it's more or less the opposite of my ontology, where I'm a realist but I don't think it's coherent to be absent a "POV" (which is probably not the best name for it, but I'll go with your terminology). — Terrapin Station

I wouldn't say incoherent. It's the Realism-1 I was talking about: its says that the world as we know it would be just as we know it without any witness.

the world as we know it would be just as we know it without any witness. — frank

I agree with that view as long as we're strictly talking about objective stuff (hopefully that makes sense--it's the simplest way to say it), but I still think that it's not coherent to suppose anything can be absent a "POV."

It's probably too much to get into (I've explained it in some detail on the board, but I don't recall the thread or who it was in response to), but basically the idea is that properties are different (not necessarily, perhaps, but most are) at different points of reference ("POVs" in the terms above), and there's no way to have a "non-POV POV" for properties to be some way from.

Yes. If I say: "this is how it was when there were no humans...", I might be about to assert a non-POV POV.

Maybe better: if humans had existed at the time, this is what they would see or realize: