one is often at liberty to say that the addition of a single grain creates a heap where there was none before. — Snakes Alive
it is Premise 2 that is false — Snakes Alive
Hence an argument in which it is assumed there is an exact way of using "heap" is grammatically inept.we don't use heap in an exact way is the datum — Snakes Alive
Emerson and Heidegger both have the image of closing our (human) hand and everything spilling out. — Antony Nickles
Ok, I didn't realize heaps were an understood matter of consensus. You asked me if a single grain can change a heap to non-heap; rather insisted it couldn't. If your defining heaps by grain number; the only possible context in which your question becomes answerable and therefore implied to be the case, then yes. I can identify that transitional grain. I'm a little lost to what I was supposed to be believing, but it's been a pleasure. Thanks for the feedback.I wasn't trying to prove anything. Only to look for examples we can agree on. I don't see the relevance of criteria. Unless you want to say, being a billion grain collection is a criterion, or a sufficient condition. Fine. Bring it on board. How does it help? — bongo fury
And do I take it that you disagree with the epistemicist position, that if we each recognise said threshold at different places then fewer than two of us will be correct? — bongo fury
The epistemicist has the 'atomic number' model of metasemantics, — Snakes Alive
whether we choose to apply the word 'heap' or not, and so construe it as correctly applied or not — Snakes Alive
Like the children we make, the meanings we make can have secrets from us. — Nigel Warburton, aeon article
something is a heap iff the word 'heap' is correctly applied to it, 'iff' being read as material equivalence). — Snakes Alive
They are indefinite quantifiers. They seem to arise because the level of precision they express suffices for certain purposes.Why do you think this vagueness of the predicates such as a "heap" or a "hole" arise in language? — Shawn
I certainly do. Ridiculous as I find the 'hidden step', I think that ordinary usage deserves some kind of recognition of its ability to distinguish between correct and incorrect, in some way that doesn't fizzle out to 'relatively correct'. Usage can sometimes be a matter for negotiation, and adjudication, but sometimes not. We know that anything black is an obvious counter-example to white, and is therefore anything but minimally white, and similarly for off and on, bald and hairy, etc.
Hence my readiness to restart, and invite you to consider an absolutist position on a single grain. E.g.,
[1] Tell me, do you think that whether a single grain can be correctly called a heap in common English is a matter for negotiation or adjudication in context?
I appreciate fully that you may well see no need at all to deny that proposition. (I'll have to bluster that you don't speak English, but never mind!) But if that's because you have embraced anything like the half bell curve as a picture of usage (or of fuzzy truth), then notice that you are, after all, ditching P1 and not P2. — bongo fury
The grain doesn't transform a non-heap into a heap. An assertion without negation does. — Cheshire
Of course, I would not reject P1, because I think using 'heap' in such a non-standard way is pointless and confusing. — Snakes Alive
All these things are a matter of adjudication. You could choose to use a word in a highly nonstandard way, and people could go along with it – but they often won't, and they'll be more unwilling to, the farther you move away from an established usage. But if you decide to use 'heap' to refer to a single grain too, then sure, go ahead, that's also a pattern of usage that could be established. It would be 'incorrect' in virtue of some prior pattern of established usage, but so what? Patterns of usage can be re-negotiated as well. — Snakes Alive
This is a matter of how to apply the word, not an interesting inquiry either into the nature of language, or the nature of sand and piles of it. — Snakes Alive
The epistemicist, in appealing to a strict notion of 'correct usage,' is invoking a kind of magical view of language. — Snakes Alive
to say a word has a meaning is no more and no less than to say the word has certain causal powers in virtue of a community of speakers coordinating to use it in a certain way. — Snakes Alive
When someone says a certain usage is correct, they might either mean: (i) as a descriptive matter, this is how people tend to use the term, as summed up by some statistical measure (based on prior usage or an inference about disposition to future usage, or whatever), — Snakes Alive
or (ii) as a normative matter, that some use is to be singled out as to how the word is to be used. — Snakes Alive
But neither of these are descriptive facts about words having meaning as if that were something else beside how people use a word. — Snakes Alive
They can be bent, but not too far, and obviously how far is the puzzle. — bongo fury
So, you do reject P1 with respect to general usage, in English, of the word 'heap'. I accept that you accept P1 with respect to your own usage. Your personal threshold is perhaps much further along than one. But you appear happy to acknowledge that usage as a whole allows for literal application of the term to a single grain. A linguist or dictionary compiler may beg to differ. They would offer a single grain as an obvious example of incorrect usage, or opposite meaning. — bongo fury
As a little check and balance I'm trying to use answers that would hold for heap making or hole(non-specified dimensions) digging at the same time.I kind of agree. Does it matter who asserts and who negates? Are you equating 'heap' with 'allegedly a heap' or with 'unanimously a heap'? (Or both or neither, or something else.) — bongo fury
The problem is this is not true. — Snakes Alive
You seem to be hung up on the false idea that a magical barrier exists preventing people from using words in certain ways. — Snakes Alive
they can even move the bishop non-diagonally – try it yourself... — Snakes Alive
I accept P1 because I wouldn't apply 'heap' to a single grain. — Snakes Alive
it is a matter of arbitrary decision whether we choose to apply the word 'heap' or not, and so construe it as correctly applied or not — Snakes Alive
You seem to think that because 'heap' has some property preventing it from being applied to a single grain, therefore P1 is true because people 'can't' apply it to a single grain. — Snakes Alive
But you've got it backwards. — Snakes Alive
It's because people don't use 'heap' for a single grain that P1 is true. — Snakes Alive
We could turn around and decide to start applying it to a single grain, if we wanted to, and declare P1 false as a result. — Snakes Alive
I just wouldn't want to, — Snakes Alive
Surely, though, pretended things aren't so? — Snakes Alive
we all know precisely well what we mean by saying they do or don't exist, and no one is confused. — Snakes Alive
Is your position that we ought to pretend there is a single correct use of a term, — Snakes Alive
, and in the case of vague language, pretend to be epistemicists? — Snakes Alive
But here, as we discuss this now, we presumably aren't pretending — Snakes Alive
so shouldn't we say epistemicism is false? — Snakes Alive
But then, I have to admit I fail to see the value in acting like vague language determines precise boundaries. — Snakes Alive
Sure. Not because we aren't pretending (we are) but because the game is better described as tolerating dissent. — bongo fury
So if epistemicism neither captures people's metasemantic awareness of their own language, — Snakes Alive
nor does it seem to describe anything 'objective' in the practice itself, — Snakes Alive
what is its utility as a hypothesis? Are you defending it in any capacity, — Snakes Alive
or just using it as a springboard to talk about the difficulties with vagueness? — Snakes Alive
I could see the proposal to act like it's true, — Snakes Alive
What you seem to be saying now, however, is that epistemicism isn't really true in any sense — Snakes Alive
it just helps us highlight some features about vague language that are puzzling to us — Snakes Alive
I think vague language is vague, [...] but that doesn't make it puzzling, — Snakes Alive
It does if you accept any responsibility for the care of P1 as well as P2, and try to apply logic. — bongo fury
Even as you seem to be closing your hand around an argument only to have it slip out. I don't see in your post anything specific enough to disagree with. — Banno
this vagueness that irritates philosophers.
— Shawn
That's a psychological problem for philosophers, not a philosophical problem. — Banno
It's a novelty — Cheshire
We'd all produce a different cubit if measured to the micron. — Cheshire
We'd all be right relative to our arms and wrong relative to the others. — Cheshire
So, people don't use tight tolerances — Cheshire
for measures with unbounded variances. — Cheshire
Using a cubit instead of visual verification highlights the issue in a physical way. The cubit system is based on the measure of one's own arm. As long as everyone measured with their arm they are technically right as I understand it.No, some of us would be obviously right relative to the cubit system, some of us obviously wrong, and some of us neither. — bongo fury
You don't add or subtract length to your arm to meet a standard, so this is incoherent.And then the puzzle is to specify the smallest (or largest) number of microns that is no longer a cubit. — bongo fury
Industry term for a small margin of error. The narrower the tolerance, the higher degree of measuring precision.Narrow tolerances or precise tolerances? — bongo fury
It's the length of your forearm to middle finger. If your working with multiple people then I imagine the "foreman's cubit" is fabricated and used as a local standard.Unbounded precisely, i.e. not graph 4; or unbounded ever i.e. graph 2? Or unbounded how? — bongo fury
As long as everyone measured with their arm they are technically right as I understand it. — Cheshire
And then the puzzle is to specify the smallest (or largest) number of microns that is no longer a cubit. — bongo fury
You don't add or subtract length to your arm to meet a standard, so this is incoherent. — Cheshire
It's the length of your forearm to middle finger. — Cheshire
So, people don't use tight tolerances for measures with unbounded variances. — Cheshire
Unbounded precisely, i.e. not graph 4; or unbounded ever i.e. graph 2? Or unbounded how? — bongo fury
I think you might have removed some context to create the appearance of inconsistency. In present day measurement 'a standard' is a fixed value. In this context a standard is a definition. So, we do not in fact change the length of a thing to meet a physical value in the cubit system. It's simply a comparative measurement to one's arm. There is no micron equivalent that holds true across cases. I imagine there's a distribution of arm lengths and as a result a very, nearly exact distribution of cubits.How about now, any clearer? — bongo fury
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