The general algorithm is a logical division of things into figure and ground, signal and noise, information and entropy. — apokrisis

That's not what I had in mind. I was thinking more of a specific set of instructions for carrying out a procedure or solving a problem. That is, there are those who hold that any worthwhile theory of language must set out a specific set of instructions giving how meaning is to be determined.

The distinction I wish to make is as that between seeing that and seeing as.

And I don't see how these could be construed as two extremes of a continuum. It's more like seeing the duck or the rabbit, and realising that the same drawing gives rise to both.

I was just reading Wittgenstein’s forgotten lesson. — Banno

So isn't this another false dichotomy we have to break through to discover the right dichotomy?

One can oppose science and the arts as both being forms of life and so set the stage for which counts the higher form, which the lower. Who is our champion, who is the horrid bastard.

Or you can play the other game of just shrugging your shoulders and saying it is just two different things. Higher or lower? It's all relative. There is no essential difference if everything is a form of life, some kind of internally coherent system of communication. The question of commensurability is irrelevant as the question of incommensurability is also irrelevant.

I of course take yet another route of saying well we need to discover the complementary kind of dichotomy that brings some proper synthesis to the whole debate.

With the opposition of the sciences and the humanities, what could this be?

Pretty obviously it maps to the usual opposed poles of metaphysical being - the realm of the world and the realm of the mind. Or more pragmatically - the semiotic view of the mind~world relation - the sciences are focused on depersonalising our point of view, the humanities have as their own natural counter-goal the object of socially constructing what it means to be "most human". An ideal self.

So in the "stepping right back from it" pragmatic view - the one that starts with the "form of life" metaphysics that Wittgenstein nicked unattributed - the sciences and the humanities should make a healthy opposition that can be more than the sum of its parts. We use them as inquiries to sharpen our notion of the world and of ourselves - as the two elements in semiotic interaction.

Now this does conflict with many peoples' notion of humanistic inquiry. The advice there is to find "yourself", or worse yet "express yourself". Really, the advice needs to be "construct yourself". And as we are all socially constructed as "selves" (with a good dash of genetics of course) then we need to be able to talk about the "technology" of that construction. And even the purposes that would guide any such effort.

That ought to be the fundamental business of the humanities. And what it finds in that direction ought to inform the sciences in their own matching voyage of "discovery" - or rather, its construction of the world as a useful image. A model of reality that has the anchoring point of view of a humanistic centre.

So I guess I take a rather industrious view of both the humanities and sciences as academic disciplines. :smile:

The difference isn't about science merely analysing reality while the arts are about properly living it, being in it, feeling it, discovering it as some deeper level or experiencing it on some higher plane. All the culture wars rhetoric of which stands above the other, or is the proper ground to the other - whatever it takes to be the primary, making the other secondary.

Instead, a pragmatic/semiotic view - a form of life view - would argue that both "the world" and "the self" are the two halves of a joint construction. And progress lies in constructing the better total model. They are not separate exercises. The problems of modern life lie in the way they got disconnected pretty fast after a moment of unity in the Enlightenment. Scientism and Romanticism began the business of "othering" each other in an unhelpful way.

Fetishising either the self or the world is the mistake. We need to be consciously engaged in a co-construction of these aspects of being alive and mindful. [Insert all the usual utopian visions of that here.]

That's not what I had in mind. .... It's more like seeing the duck or the rabbit, and realising that the same drawing gives rise to both. — Banno

So the disproof of the Gestalt argument is ... a Gestalt argument?

There is no difference that makes a difference in the stimulus as such - from your "physicalist" point of view. But you can create a difference that makes a difference by shifting your state of interpretance - your "mental" point of view.

A bad example if you want to dispute my position.

Sure; all that's pretty obvious from your other writing: Difference that makes a difference, crisp and vague, and so on. Nor was I interested in Monk's juxtaposition of humanities and Science, which I don't see in Wittgenstein. It was rather that distinction between the explicit and the ineffable, the said and the shown.

A bad example if you want to dispute my position. — apokrisis

I didn't so want. It was more that I wondered how you might answer @Harry Hindu. Is there in your opinion an explication of the meaning of "word"? Can you tell us what "word" means?

Edit: I should qualify that by asking if you think such an explication could be complete.

It was rather that distinction between the explicit and the ineffable, the said and the shown. — Banno

If your "saying" is based on metaphysical reductionism, then of course it can't speak to the holism that is the greater attainable view. You might be reduced to showing, rather than telling.

But let's not get bogged down by the usual point that the only way to learn tennis or drive a car is to be shown how to do it - grab a racquet, get behind the wheel, and start understanding the ineffable essence of being a tennis player or car driver.

There are grades of semiosis. Each is its own "linguistic community" in terms of the system of symbols that underpin it. Some of the major grades underpinning life and mind are genes, neurons, words and numbers. To learn the game of tennis, one must do that in the language understood by your neurons.

Social concepts like "that is the service line, this is how you score" need to be communicated too. Words are good. Mathematics is better.

Is the ball half on the line, in or out? Hawkeye can apply an algorithm to give the correct answer and remove any shred of human ineffability. If no-one umpiring is really sure and can't speak the truth, a calculating machine can ... to a millimetre or two. Differences agreed not to make a difference.

So humans are complex beasts that live a life that spans multiple levels of semiosis. Ideally, they are all aligned in some kind of holistic harmony.

But some folk never even develop a mathematical level of self. And some folk become so mathematical as to lose sight of life lived at those other integrative levels.

It all comes down to a productive balancing act again. Arguing about dichotomies like said and shown, explicit and ineffable, is only a useful exercise if the argument eventually reveals the way they are two halves of the same whole.

Have you yourself got there yet with this particular question?

Can you tell us what "word" means? — Banno

In the linguistic sense, I think that is one thing Pinker managed to get right in talking about the dichotomy of words and rules.

That was the answer I gave a few posts back - https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/438849

So words and rules are how we fracture an attempt to express an idea into a set of semantic parts arranged into a syntactical whole.

A word is whatever constitutes a semantic part within such a structure.

It's all pretty plastic and flexible. The plasticity is the feature and not the bug. So "cat" could be the semantic component. And cattery, is two words - cat and -ery - combined via a rule.

The rule is that the general idea (a cat) is constrained by the general idea of a type of purposeful facility. Draw the Venn diagram and form the right logical conclusion. The intersection is now a new more specified or particularised semantic unit - a "cattery". And that can get slotted recursively back into some syntactical adventure. We can speak of this cattery and not that cattery. The cattery that occasionally houses dogs or occasionally is empty.

The ability to make further semantic distinctions via syntactical constraints is recursively infinite in principle.

And a word is thus defined as the semantic aspect of what goes on. The novelty or significance that gets meaningfully shaped into being upon coming into interaction with the structuring habits of a rational grammar.

Of course, "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." That sounds as though it ought to be carrying some cargo of semantics. It is "perfectly" grammatical. And there are words. But we understand it to be nonsense. The words don't go together in a way that is rationally grammatical. No self~world state of intentionality that we can recognise is being expressed.

That is, words - as in the single items we might look up in a dictionary - are a very reduced notion of semantics. The idea of speech as a concatenation of individually meaningful signs is another reductionist exaggeration.

A speech act - whole phases, sentences, even diatribes - can be "words" in the sense of conveying the holism of a complete mind~world intentional stance. A point of view worth distinguishing from the many others that might have been available but are now neatly rendered "unspoken".

Syntax is the structure that pins down meaning to something that cannot be merely nonsense - some jumble of urgent noises or scribbles in the dust. Then individual words - like cat or cattery - are where this constraint on semantic interpretation hits the point where we become pragmatically indifferent to any remaining uncertainty.

The boundary of "a word" is defined not by the information it contains - the dictionary approach - but by the information its serves to exclude. The negative space its serves to signal. There is no need to penetrate further to find the word's meaning. It simply marks the moment where digging more would be redundant in terms of fulfilling some particular communicative intention.

Rabbit is whatever is not not-rabbit. Duck is whatever is not not-duck.

A duck-rabbit is whatever is not not-duck-rabbit. So an old lady-young damsel is not a duck-rabbit. But oh, they are both Gestalt illustrations of the constraints based approach that perception takes.

Seems it is semiotics all the way down then.

What makes a particular sound coming from someone a word? — Harry Hindu

Sounds are not 'made into' words, they are sometimes referenced by words, sometimes even byt eh word 'word', but I can't make any sense of them being 'made into' words.

Once you learn it and become an expert at its use (which takes time and using it more than once, so using them takes practice and while you are practising you haven't yet rerouted the information from consciousness through your subconscious yet), then you don't need to focus on it any longer. — Harry Hindu

Which is all I was saying. If there are circumstances where one doesn't need to focus on the image/concept anymore then there are circumstances in which the use of the word is not pointing to that image/concept anymore.

I asked you what if you used some word and I didn't respond as you predicted? Does that mean you used a word or not? — Harry Hindu

What else would I have used?

When that happens wouldn't you mentally revisit what you learned and consciously try to re-learn it's use, just as when something new happens when riding your bike or driving your car, you have to refocus your attention on what it is that you are doing and using? — Harry Hindu

No. I'd probably just say it again, but louder.

You and Banno are avoiding answering the necessary questions. — Harry Hindu

Right ho then. You tell me where to look and I'll do the legwork. where do I need to look to find out what sounds constitute a 'word'?

And yet you insist on our providing a definition. One might be tempted to conclude that you have not followed what is going on here, Harry. — Banno

And (I believe) it was my first reply to this thread that words aren't defined by other words, as they can be defined by pictures. I also asked if we were telepathic, would we use words.

So I asked you more than just that. You obviously aren't interested in being intellectually honest here. Maybe if we take baby steps, Banno.

If someone makes a fart noise with their mouth, does that qualify as a word being used? — Harry Hindu

"Success in communication is judged by smoothness of conversation, by frequent predictability of verbal and nonverbal reactions, and by coherence and plausibility of native testimony. — Banno

Then words communicate. What do they communicate, Banno? I would agree that they don't communicate more words. They communicate ideas, which are made up of images, sounds, feelings, etc.

Is making a fart noise communicating? If so does that mean that a word was used. Does that mean that every sensory impression is a word? Is the smell and taste of an apple a word? Does the smell and taste not communicate to me that the apple is ripe vs rotten?

When using language, can I not glean more from your language use than just your use of words? Don't you also communicate to me what your native language is and how well your grasp of it is?

Pffffffth.

:roll: What are you saying - that any sound that you point to with scribbles is a word?

Pffffffth. — Banno

Phewee! Ugh!

What have you been eating?

Sounds are not 'made into' words, they are sometimes referenced by words, sometimes even byt eh word 'word', but I can't make any sense of them being 'made into' words. — Isaac

You are't going to be intellectually honest either, I see. The question is simple, so stop trying to skew it into something that I did not ask.

Who, or what, determines what sound or scribble is a word, or is it your belief that everything is a word, even the smell and taste of an apple?

Which is all I was saying. If there are circumstances where one doesn't need to focus on the image/concept anymore then there are circumstances in which the use of the word is not pointing to that image/concept anymore. — Isaac

I know what you were saying. What I was saying is that you are wrong. The fact that you don't need to focus on it any longer doesn't mean that it no longer points to it. It seems to me that you believe that when something is out of sight/mind, it no longer exists.

Think about it this way. If I were to write a computer program for a robot to execute a certain behavior when it hears the sound, "Duck!", I'd have to link the sound with the behavior. When the program runs, you might say that the robot isn't conscious at all and is merely performing actions based on stimuli and how it was programmed. What I'm saying is that learning is the same as being programmed. It has to be programmed into you what is expected of you when hearing the sound.

If the sound didn't point to the behavior any longer then the program wouldn't work as expected. You wouldn't behave as expected when hearing that sound. This also shows that some sound can point to some behavior. Behaviors aren't words, but can be pointed to with words.

I asked you what if you used some word and I didn't respond as you predicted? Does that mean you used a word or not?
— Harry Hindu

What else would I have used? — Isaac

Hand gestures? Facial expressions? Are hand gestures and facial expressions words?

No. I'd probably just say it again, but louder. — Isaac

Are you sure that the only possible problem here is that I didn't hear you? How do you know the problem wasn't misunderstanding?

You and Banno are avoiding answering the necessary questions.
— Harry Hindu

Right ho then. You tell me where to look and I'll do the legwork. where do I need to look to find out what sounds constitute a 'word' is? — Isaac

Wow. It appears that you actually DO understand, as you are now asking where to look to find out what makes some sound a word, as you are asking me to point you in the right direction.

Phewee! Ugh! — Isaac

So the sound of someone gagging is a word?

We can use anything to point to something else. We could use a hand gesture of pointing your finger down your throat to symbolize the behavior of gagging. Does the fact that we can use scribbles to point to a sound, or gestures to point to a behavior is just indicative of how our mind establishes correlations and relationships, especially for communicating those things to others.

Is all symbol-use word-use?

Who, or what, determines what sound or scribble is a word — Harry Hindu

The community of language users using the word 'word' for a shared reason.

The fact that you don't need to focus on it any longer doesn't mean that it no longer points to it. — Harry Hindu

How? If I say "duck!" just because I've learnt to say that word when a golf ball is flying towards someone, and you duck just because you've learned to do so when hearing the word "duck!", you're claiming the word still points to 'ducking' even though neither party involved thought of ducking. So the word had a property {pointing to ducking} despite the property not being attached to that word in either brain. I may be mistaken, as I thought you were a physicalist, if not, then I'm sorry for having wasted your time, if so, then where is this property, if not in either brain?

appears that you actually DO understand, as you are now asking where to look to find out what makes some sound a word, as you are asking me to point you in the right direction. — Harry Hindu

Deflection is not an answer. No one here has said that words never point, so this line of argument is useless, and it still doesn't answer the question. You seem to think there's a fact if the matter about what constitutes a word. I'm asking you where that fact is to be found.

So the sound of someone gagging is a word? — Harry Hindu

No. "Ugh" is a word.

Instead, a pragmatic/semiotic view - a form of life view - would argue that both "the world" and "the self" are the two halves of a joint construction. And progress lies in constructing the better total model. They are not separate exercises. The problems of modern life lie in the way they got disconnected pretty fast after a moment of unity in the Enlightenment. Scientism and Romanticism began the business of "othering" each other in an unhelpful way.

Fetishising either the self or the world is the mistake. We need to be consciously engaged in a co-construction of these aspects of being alive and mindful. [Insert all the usual utopian visions of that here.] — apokrisis

It's hard to think of a more canonical 'romantic' figure than Wordsworth and his Prelude is, explicitly, a long meditation on how the world and self are inescapably intertwined and co-constructing. He isn't just saying clouds and druids are what's up - check out the poem. Sartre (oof!) described a spurious operation of thought whereby two inseparable things are separated in order that the separater can then go on - tada! - to synthesize them, and slash down the gordian knot he himself tied.

There was (a) the Enlightenment where the balance was at least close to correct, then (b) the split where there was set in opposition (i) a focus on the self vs (ii) a focus on the world... and we should then do (c) a harmonious reconciling of the two? This sounds like a cliffnotes summary of the introduction to 'History of Ideas' by Idea Historian.

Instead of seeing the world as two cosmic forces in great battle, resolved triadically, its makes good pragmatic sense, in my mind, to see that there are personality types within the world as doing a thing where they reframe it all in terms of two forces, and then resolve them triadically. Salesmen often end up talking to everyone by using their first name and identifying their interests, keeping them at arms length outside their commercial needs. Photographers see everything as potential photos. King Midas can't hug his kids, because it's gold gold gold. There're a lot of ways to develop a universal hammer for a universal nail and here is one more. (It's important to understand - I think this is the core - that finding fault with this way of framing things is not simply inhabiting its mirror image any more than playing basketball instead of painting is simply a form of 'not-painting' that requires painting as a backdrop.)

Of course, if you want to frame the world in terms of big triads, there is plenty of material to fuel your quest. Just as there is for any number of things. There's a whole sea of background you can pick from to get the right foreground.

yet so many begin their discussion with "let's first define our terms". — Banno

The hope seems to be that if we wire them (the terms) up to the right bits of the world in the first place, we can ignore semantics and rely on syntax.

tldr; I think it's crucial to understand that, among adults, arguments are often (usually?) about different ways of synthesizing the ten thousand things (some of which fall into thought/world/self) rather than arguments about Self Vs World and so on. Going into a space, and sifting it for a dichotomy ripe for triadic resolution, is like doing marriage therapy from a textbook. You're only listening to each party for the sake of identifying the glittery points which hearken back to the book; those you respond to. You do it brilliantly, vindicating the textbook approach. You will see these things in the field; you respond thusly. Of course yours was a response to that Wittgenstein article, itself strongly dichotomizing, but your response was to oppose a correct dichotomy, the right kind, susceptible to triadic reconciliation. One would think a pragmatic approach would prevent one's chronic alienation of one's interlocutors, but maybe it's just that what works in the real world fails to work on those in the real world who just won't let themselves be worked upon in the real world. It's not pragmatism's fault if the real world isn't ideally pragmatic.

Not to speak for @apokrisis, but I don't see dichotomies, I see continuums. So there is not any "third thing" which resolves dichotomies, other than the realization that they are not truly dichotomies.

This sounds like a cliffnotes summary of the introduction to 'History of Ideas' by Idea Historian. — csalisbury

That's exactly what I spent my three month lockdown sabbatical on - researching a defence of Hegelian history!

Instead of seeing the world as two cosmic forces in great battle, resolved triadically,... — csalisbury

Yada, yada. If you don't like the idea of synergistic resolutions then I'm sure that a lack of them is the view you build into your every encounter with life.

How's that working for you?

That's exactly what I spent my three month lockdown sabbatical on - researching a defence of Hegelian history! — apokrisis

If someone posts a bunch of pictures of them doing skateboard tricks. And then I say, looks like you've been photographing yourself doing skateboard tricks!! And then they say: 'oh you think I've been doing skateboard tricks do you?" then my response is: yeah....? And then they say 'you think I'm doing Rodney Mullen type skateboard tricks do you?!' I'd say 'No, I never brought up Rodney Mullen, I brought up the tricks you were doing, that you posted pictures of, why are you bring up Rodney Mullen?'

But I wasn't impugning your use of time during quarantine (???) though it appears you are impugning mine. To be clear, are you responding to my post by asking if I'm having a rough go of it?

If so, I will respond. But I want to make sure I understand first.

I don't see dichotomies, I see continuums. — Janus

Dichotomies are the limits to continuums. So they are necessary as the division that provides then the mediating spectrum - the actual world of concrete possibilities that lie inbetween.

Its another intricacy of Peircean logic. Thirdness - as regularised order - enfolds also secondness and firstness. It is all aspects of the one whole.

So you need raw potential, you need a symmetry-breaking that reveals there could be a symmetry, you need then the symmetry that is the globally generalised state of habit - the continuum that is revealed by the emergence of asymmetric limits to the possibilities inherent in mere vague potential.

So dichotomies are the mediating step - secondness or the actualisation of asymmetry. And in revealing those complementary limits, a continuity of all the places inbetween is also revealed. Actuality is measureable in terms of its relative distance from the opposing poles of being.

Is everything a matter of mere chance? Is everything a matter or strict necessity? Nature tells us all actual being is relative to those two bounding extremes.

The false dichotomy lies in having to claim one state is primary. The true dichotomy is the dyad that is resolved triadically rather than monistically. It describes the matching limits on actual existence, and so neither limit itself actually "exists". They mark the end points of a continuum where existence lives.

I see dichotomies as the absolute dualistic conceptions of the extremes of continua. So the dichotomy between determinism and chance or freedom is false only as long as one insists that nature must be one or the other. Nature shows us both; in varying blends or degrees, or in various contexts or perspectives, I suppose.

I don't know much about Peircean semiotics, so I can't comment on that.

but your response was to oppose a correct dichotomy, the right kind, susceptible to triadic reconciliation. I — csalisbury

Yep. That's the trick.

You are against such totalising, even when it is a well proven success. You try to dismiss it as "pragmatic", as if being useful is a dirty word. You will blather on about poetry or feelings or other tribal artefacts of the anti-totalising brigade.

It's funny. Proper metaphysical strength Peircean pragmatism offends the objectivist and the subjectivist alike.

But that is because they are happiest trapped in that Cartesian dialectic. If its dichotomistic inconsistencies were resolved, they would no longer have anything to write poems about, or realist polemics about.

You are down that dark hole. I can hand you the ladder out but I can't make you climb. You have to want to leave the angry gloom that is the anti-totaliser's fate. [ Joking tone adopted ]

But I wasn't impugning your use of time during quarantine (???) though it appears you are impugning mind. To be clear, are you responding to my post by asking if I'm having a rough go of it? — csalisbury

I was responding to your Cliffnotes jest....

There was (a) the Enlightenment where the balance was at least close to correct, then (b) the split where there was set in opposition (i) a focus on the self vs (ii) a focus on the world... and we should then do (c) a harmonious reconciling of the two?

I just found it funny that I had paid some special attention to exactly that as a historical dynamic. Hegel is (in)famous for his dialectical claims about the German state representing an end to history to the degree that it had achieved a natural rational order - a state of Enlightened self-governing.

Neoliberalism felt it had achieved the same natural enlightened state of arriving at the end of history - at least according to Fukuyama.

So the question arises what is the true dichotomy that human history keeps trying to resolve in a synergistically valuable fashion? That was my research topic.

Clearly it is in some sense the balance between the forces of labour and capital - to follow the Marxist analysis. Or free competitive action within the cooperative space of a collective market - the neoliberal story perhaps.

My own answer is thermodynamic - the basic view of natural systems. Humanity stumbled on a fossil fuel bonanza that could be harnessed by industrial age machinery. If we learnt to think like machines - form a mathematical level of semiosis with "reality" - then we could burn through this bonanza at an exponential rate.

So the dichotomy is between extropy (energy available for work) and entropy. Or between a source and its sink. Humanity could be gas guzzling and ride that a rocket-fueled economic curve - escape the mundanity of a life wedded to all being farmers living within the limited means of the daily solar flux.

The unresolved part of that economic dichotomy is the balance is all source, no sink. Burning fossil fuel for useful work produces also all its entropic waste products - mainly heat. That is a problem when you need to dump that heat into deep space but it gets trapped by the atmosphere. You have no sink as part of the equation.

Anyway, you see the Hegelian trajectory I have in mind. The economic system of life was always thus. An entropy gradient from source to sink. An "enlightened" world needs to pay for its sinks as well as its sources to have an economy that can last.

Something like neoliberalism becomes objectively wrong to the degree it doesn't balance the equation in that fashion. We can measure how out of line it is as we have a definition of what could count as creating a system with a long-run future.

So no, its nothing about your "rough go's". I just think its funny that the worst things I could be doing in your eyes - well I will be doing them!

So the dichotomy between determinism and chance or freedom is false only as long as one insists that nature must be one or the other. Nature shows us both; in varying blends or degrees, or in various contexts or perspectives, I suppose. — Janus

That's it. The trick then is to see how both sides of the dichotomy are equally "good" as each is the creator - the definer - of the other.

We don't want to eliminate indeterminism by speaking of determinism. We don't want to eliminate order by speaking of chance. We want to draw attention to these being the limits in terms of what could be. And how both are needed to then have anything actual at all - as the blended outcome.

That is why the maths of reciprocals captures the logic of the dichotomous relation. It makes the business explicitly dialectic or self-referential. It is all about the reciprocity that connects the apparent dyadic divide.

That is why it is a healing influence in our divided world - a semiotic bridge over all the Cartesian divides.

(Well, not. Everyone hates happy endings apparently. :smile: )

...there are those who hold that any worthwhile theory of language must set out a specific set of instructions giving how meaning is to be determined. — Banno

Or perhaps... how it always has been, still is, and will continue to be... 'determined'.

You are against such totalising, even when it is a well proven success. You try to dismiss it as "pragmatic", as if being useful is a dirty word. You will blather on about poetry or feelings or other tribal artefacts of the anti-totalising brigade. — apokrisis

I don't think 'pragmatism' is a dirty word, Apo. I've been reading William James all week and deeply enjoy his writing. Nor did I have plans to 'blather on' about 'poetry' or feelings.'. I do like poetry and feelings -uncontroversial I hope - but 'poetry' and 'feelings' seem charged with a special sort of meaning for you. You seem quite literally disgusted with them; I'm not sure how this fits into your holistic solve-the enlightenment-split-frame, but the disdain is palpable. Almost in drag.

You seem to be very confused about what poetry is about, like you think poems are people saying 'nature' in front of a bulldozer that says 'science.' Everything you've said has no relation to anything I've said. But you really seem to think it does. You seem upset with a type. In any case, none of what you've said, characteristically, has anything to do with anything I've said. If I'm not saying 'FREE LOVE IN OPPOSITION TO THE MACHINE" you glitch out and tell me I'm saying that. It would make things easier, granted, but that's not what's happening.

respond to the rest in the morning

I've been reading William James all week. — csalisbury

William James is a dirty word to the true pragmatist. Peirce was so offended by his disciple that he had to relabel the original as pragmaticism. :rofl:

like you think poems are people saying 'nature' in front of a bulldozer that says 'science — csalisbury

Keep inventing the straw man that is your ideal match up here. :yawn:

respond to the rest in the morning — csalisbury

Is it worth it? Only if you can focus enough to justify your gripes against a totalising discourse that actually produces results,

Who, or what, determines what sound or scribble is a word
— Harry Hindu

The community of language users using the word 'word' for a shared reason. — Isaac

What would that shared reason be?

The fact that you don't need to focus on it any longer doesn't mean that it no longer points to it. — Harry Hindu

How? — Isaac

Read your own post:

If I say "duck!" just because I've learnt to say that word when a golf ball is flying towards someone, and you duck just because you've learned to do so when hearing the word "duck!", you're claiming the word still points to 'ducking' even though neither party involved thought of ducking. So the word had a property {pointing to ducking} despite the property not being attached to that word in either brain. I may be mistaken, as I thought you were a physicalist, if not, then I'm sorry for having wasted your time, if so, then where is this property, if not in either brain? — Isaac

So the word, "duck" points to what you learned, just as how you use a bicycle points to how you learned how to use the bicycle. Once you master riding the bicycle, you no longer think about maintaining your balance, but then you wouldn't be able to not focus on maintaining your balance without having learned how to do that. Causes/effects point to their effects/causes.

Deflection is not an answer. No one here has said that words never point, so this line of argument is useless, and it still doesn't answer the question. — Isaac

Then I guess you weren't paying attention to StreelightX's posts. If you agree that words do point then I don't know what we're disagreeing about.

I think there are 2 kinds of words: ones with “composite” meaning and ones that serve as pointers. “Pointer” words are those that cannot really be defined, they serve to “point” to a concept or understanding we come prepackaged with. Like “space”. You can’t really define space using simpler words, but everyone knows what space is. Same as “color” and “shape”. Composite words just combine these concepts so a “tree” is a combination of:

A particular shape
A particular texture to the wood and the leaves individually
A particular color to the wood and leaves individually

You can comprehend all these basic constituents of the tree (shape, color, texture) but you can’t know what “tree” means until people agree to bundle those constituents under the tag “tree”


Or at least these are my intuitions on the matter. I don’t know what words wouldn’t work like this but there probably are some.

What would that shared reason be? — Harry Hindu

Anything.

So the word, "duck" points to what you learned, just as how you use a bicycle points to how you learned how to use the bicycle. — Harry Hindu

A somewhat idiosyncratic use of 'points'. I don't think you quite mean by it the same thing as others do. To say 'points to' seems ti me to be about drawing the attention. No attention is being paid to either ducking or riding a bike. If what you want to say is just "words have consequences", then I'd agree, I'm not sure many wouldn't, but that seems a rather trivial thing to assert.