I recognize this way of writing. There is an effort, even here in a work written for non-philosophers, to be quite precise in distinguishing the several different questions that may come to mind in talking about price gouging. Sandel intends to be rigorous, precise, careful. He's not talking about language and logic, but justice, and he is doing so in a way that owes much to the sort of care you can see at work in Austin's treatment of speech acts. — Srap Tasmaner

What? Even if what you're saying is accurate in terms of Sandel... (so very strange you're making it sound like Sandel is contingent on Austin)... you're trying to argue that logical precision is credited to Analytical Philosophy. Then what did we have in the world before this school came into existence? Further, nearly all of the branches within the social sciences do not use Analytical Philosophy, their procedures are scientific, observation, and they also make use of reason, but not because Analytical Philosophy imparted this ability to culture. Even more so, the social sciences are conscious of their methodological procedures, and here one does not find a discourse on the value of Analytical Philosophy. Look up any textbook on Sociology, Psychology, Biology, you will not find Analytical Philosophy, but you will find the scientific method.

While Analytical Philosophy is critique, the kind of critique it is pulls humans away from the world and locks them in a web of idealist abstraction. You have a good mind, you could have spent it helping children develop their ability to speak, cognitive communication studies, instead of analyzing the ideals of language, you actually could have made progress in language theory, like so many people are now doing and have been doing. Perry is trying to figure how to fix humans that have missed vital stages in their development, what you are doing is analyzing grammatical and linguistic structures because it tickles your intellectual fancy.

I see ordinary language philosophy as more a refutation of AP and its obsession with logical propositions and perfect T-languages. A return to sanity, in short. — Olivier5

Well there was a fight between different camps that went on for a while. But if you read anything written after OLP's heyday, you'll see that everyone learned the lesson, that you need to be very careful how you treat linguistic usage.

Soames is still marred in his analyses of propositions though... He must not have been told.



What I'm wondering is: did they find out in the end the solution to that little riddle, about whether that French king was bald or not?

Grammatici certant et adhuc sub judice lis est.
-- Horace
("Grammarians argue and it's yet to be decided", about who invented the elegiac style)

did they find out in the end the solution to that little riddle, about whether that French king was bald or not? — Olivier5

Did you have it explained to you, while doing that course, that what was at stake was our capacity to render what we say into a logical form? Are you aware that this little riddle led to the revelation that mathematics can never be complete? Do you understand that the workings of your mobile phone stem, fairly directly, from those considerations?

you're trying to argue that logical precision is credited to Analytical Philosophy. Then what did we have in the world before this school came into existence? — JerseyFlight

I'm really not saying anything that simplistic.

I think in the Chalmers survey from maybe a decade ago, David Hume won the sweepstakes as the favorite of English-speaking philosophers. What we value about Hume is not primarily, or at all, specific doctrines but his clarity, plain-spokenness and attention to logic. He's the spiritual founder of analytic philosophy, to me anyway.

The actual founder most would say is Frege, who of course was German. That Frege substantially improved the logical tools available to mathematicians and philosophers is, I hope, beyond question. That those developments had an outsize impact on English-language philosophy is a matter of historical chance. It means that analytic philosophers, broadly construed, expect you to be careful about issues resolvable by the use of formal reasoning. That's it.

We are people who understand that "four" in "The king's carriage was pulled by four horses" does not play the same role in that sentence that "black" plays in "The king's carriage was pulled by black horses." (The example is Frege's.) Understanding that is worth doing, but it is especially worth doing if that sort of analysis helps you better evaluate arguments that could directly impact human wellbeing.

did they find out in the end the solution to that little riddle, about whether that French king was bald or not? — Olivier5

Yes.

Oh I'm glad they did. Image what the world would miss if that question was left unanswered... It's be a scandal!

Are you aware that this little riddle led to the revelation that mathematics can never be complete? — Banno

Thanks for the laugh.

Thanks for the laugh. — Olivier5

An odd reply. You have heard of Kurt Gödel?

Yes, so?

Do you have any idea what the point of the example was?

I'm accused of playing word games but you're pretending to think that generations of philosophers were genuinely uncertain whether the non-existent king of France is bald.

Isaac Asimov once said that scientific discoveries begin not with "Eureka!" but "That's funny..."

So you understand that the theory of definite descriptions was part of the same research, and that this led to Turing's development of the mathematics of computing.

Good.

That'll be an end to it then.

:up: :up:

:up:

Look up any textbook on Sociology, Psychology, Biology, you will not find Analytical Philosophy, but you will find the scientific method. — JerseyFlight

That's like saying 'when studying music you find music theory but not mathematical logic'. So what? Not even so-called "analytical philosophers" confuse what they're getting up to with science (in contrast to the quasi-scientistic likes of e.g. Leibniz, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, Husserl, Cassirer, Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Althusser et al do, respectively, with their 'concept-systems') as you insinuate they inadequately do, Jersey, with that "textbook" remark. Apples and oranges - yeah, both are fruit - should not be compared, or one reduced to the other, if intellectual clarity in philosophizing via avoiding nonsense, etc, is what (I assume) you're after.

That said, comrade, my bias (blindspot?) is sympatico with yours, but qualified:

I need to make it clear, for me the distinction is not between Analytical Philosophy and Continental Philosophy, but these taken together in contrast to Dialectical Philosophy, or if you will, Idealism versus Materialism. — JerseyFlight

Yeah, but they're "Idealisms" IFF their respective concepts (or methods) are reified; otherwise, as I understand the distinction

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/375491

as complementaries they are compatible with both classical atomism and (varieties of) methodological materialism. To wit: dialectics (critique) versus dogmatics (ideology, apologetics); perennially: philosophy versus sophistry.

I never did go back to that Wiki page to edit it.

Turing's machine was born out of the Polish Bomb, not of some riddle. Thank God for that.

Alan Turing drew much between 1928 and 1933 from the work of the mathematical physicist and populariser A. S. Eddington, from J. von Neumann's account of the foundations of quantum mechanics, and then from Bertrand Russell's mathematical logic.

It is readily shown, using a ‘diagonal’ argument first used by Cantor and familiar from the discoveries of Russell and Gödel, that there can be no Turing machine with the property of deciding whether a description number is satisfactory or not.

Alan Turing: The Turing Machine and Computability

Isaac Asimov once said that scientific discoveries begin not with "Eureka!" but "That's funny..." — Srap Tasmaner

Exactly. A sense of humor is useful in philosophy...

Bertrand Russell's mathematical logic. — Banno

Not to make too fine a point of philosophical history, but the Principia Mathematica, to which your quotes certainly refer, were authored by Whitehead and Russel, in that order on the cover. Russel was Whitehead's student. They both authored it, and Whitehead was in the lead.

If the analytic tradition exists, and if it has any claim to fame, it is because of PM. And mind you, you will find no mention of French kings anywhere in its three volumes.

PM break down logic into it's fundamental bits and in turn, describe arithmetics into purely formal logic. In doing so, it indeed made it possible for machines to understand, or rather perform, logical and arithmetic operations. Hence the information revolution, computers etc. The price to pay is that they needed dozen of pages to define the addition. Something a kid can grasp in less than 10 seconds was painstakingly broken down in myriads of elementary statements covering dozens of pages. In other words, machine language. Code.

Why is it then that Whitehead, the lead author of this seminal work, is rarely mentioned or even remembered? That has a lot to see with what he wrote AFTER, which was at a brutal variance with AP.

By then, AP had become "the reigning tradition" (aka a dominant force in the halls of English-speaking academia). A host of AP professors disliked Whitehead's quasi mysticism with all the passion they could summon. Granted that was not very much, but that's why you never hear of him. He's been ghosted.

So in my understanding of what historically happened, AP, based on the success of PM in making arithmetics understandable by machines, proceeded to make philosophy understandable by machines... Whitehead saw that this was going too far. I guess he figured that his 'code' needed dozens of pages to describe what a kid could grasp in 10 second, so translating Kant in formal logic seemed undoable... There's only so much formal logic can do. In any case, he went another way. The AP's just fossilized progressively into philosophy for computers. A few of them woke up a bit late to the idea that language always has a human context, a locutor, interlocutors, intentions and the likes, and therefore (gasp!) that ambiguity exists. Irreducible, central to the philosophical pursuit.

At a fundamental level, philosophy is about the ambiguities of the human condition, which we try to clarify and disambiguate. So precision is indeed necessary, to the extent possible, and I appreciate that care. But human language is fundamentally ambiguous, and that's also a strength, not just a weakness. It's about being flexible.

At a fundamental level, philosophy is about the ambiguities of the human condition, which we try to clarify and disambiguate. So precision is indeed necessary, to the extent possible, and I appreciate that care. But human language is fundamentally ambiguous, and that's also a strength, not just a weakness. It's about being flexible. — Olivier5

Wittgenstein would perhaps have agreed.

"Perhaps" indeed! My criticism of Wittgenstein is that he made a futile and pretentious attempt at philosophy for computers in the Tractatus, realized his mistake (a cookie for him) and then forever wallowed in ambiguity, rather than reckon with ambiguity and fight a bit with it. Hence his lack of attempt at building coherence between his bits and pieces -- he is afraid of having to be coherent. Once bitten twice shy.

But human language is fundamentally ambiguous, and that's also a strength, not just a weakness. It's about being flexible. — Olivier5

It's also about being economical, word savy. A child doesn't need 20 pages of machine code on addition. She needs 10 seconds to grasp the concept of putting one set with another. Explain it to her in 10 seconds then. That's another function of language plasticity: it saves you words. The fact that one can apply words metaphorically, and twist and turn them almost at will, helps us to keep the total number of words to learn and remember manageable, and the length of our statements short.

Well, that's not the Wittgenstein I see. But hey, go for it.

I think the important point here is that all language is an act, an action of a person with some sort of intent. Locutors are operating within a certain historical, geographic and social context which has certain economic, political, and other dimensions and one needs to keep this context that in mind to figure out what a locutor is trying to do with his words.

Now if you apply this quite reasonable principle to philosophers, what do you see? You see that motive questioning is a perfectly valid line of enquiry in philosophy. Because philosophers too do act with their words, and have intentions which are important to eek out.

Some philosophers have done a lot of politics with their words. Some good politics, some bad. And some of them were a bit too slavish to power in my view, like Hegel, who peddled propaganda for the dictatorial state that was paying his salary for his tenure of the chair of philosophy, inherited from Fichte, in the official (Humboldtian) Berlin University. Hegel became the leading quasi-official philosopher of the Prussian state. And that's precisely the context in which he wrote his Philosophy of Right. In the preface, he justifies the state censorship of another (liberal) Prussian philosopher, Jakob Friedrich Fries, before proceeding to lay the conceptual foundations for Mussolini's fascism. The book is a political act. Hegel was licking up the hand that feeds him by grandiloquing on the State as God's way on earth...

And if you want to understand that, if you have to take context into consideration, then you have to question his motives. To take this sort of philosophy as merely a set of propositions that can be true or false misses the point. It's a con act, posturing as genuine descriptive philosophy in order to sell you snake oil.

Some German-speaking philosophers saw right through this act because they are intimate with the context of Hegel's work. Popper is one (Hegel is one of the 'enemies' in 'The Open Society and its Enemies'). Marx another:

"Hegel goes almost as far as servility. We see him totally contaminated by the miserable arrogance of Prussian functionaryism, which, from its narrow bureaucratic mind, looks down on the self-confidence of the (subjective) opinion of the people. Everywhere here the "state" is to be identified with the "government".
-- Karl Marx in a recession on Hegel's Philosophy of Right

Sure, that's an interesting approach, but let's not pretend it is the whole of philosophy. The analytic approach has its own merits. The two approaches need not be antagonistic. Indeed, they are complimentary.

So a thread such as this... has negative social value...

Not if you realize that we're circling around agreement here.

Some folks surf the latest waves. Some folks, however, dive deep. And some folks just kick-up sand on the beach. Another thread's washed up and now rots.

That sums it up for me. It's a narrow-minded use of philosophical talent, that is generally used as a posture rather than to do any actual productive work. — Olivier5

I would once have used the very same words. About that Continental junk.

This thread is of no value. I'm sure we could find something more productive to talk about.

I would once have used the very same words. About that Continental junk. — Banno

What changed your mind?

What changed your mind? — Olivier5

I became more polite.

(Stop laughing, @Baden...)

I can learn a bit of that...

I went to church yesterday for the first time in a decade or two... A wedding. I didn't get all the sermon (in Italian) but the priest kept coming back to the importance of charity, the most important among the three Paulinian virtues according to him (faith and hope being the other two, if anyone needs to know)... I took that as a piece of marital advice to the bride who's a bit control-oriented. And then I thought that maybe in my very secular approach to philosophy I had forgotten about the importance of charity. Certainly in that quote above.

So let me ask forgiveness from the priest, his God, and all the good folks out here, you @banno included, if I was less than charitable for a moment.