Money counts as legal tender in our economy; This piece counts as a bishop in chess; Zelenskyy counts as the Ukraine's president in Ukrainian government.X counts as Y in C
The bishop is made of wood
The laptop has a keyboard
Zelenskyy is human — Banno
That that piece of wood is a bishop, or that that thing is a laptop, or that humans are these kinds of things - these are just as much 'institutional' as "This laptop belongs to me", etc, no? That is, for anything to count as something is to always introduce a degree of 'institution' that cannot be so easily set off from 'non-institutional' facts. To "count-as" (judgements) is simply always 'institutional' by virtue of being judgements at all. — StreetlightX
Again, this is unclear to me. Do you think you could play chess without pieces that count as bishops? What could it mean to take it for granted that this was a bishop? Isn't that just to grant the special status that Searle is talking about?But to the degree that there is something that seems to distinguish the first set of examples from the second, I don't think its the presence of absence of 'sociality'. It seems to me to be what we can take for granted or not, given the (relatively stable) forms of life which we have. — StreetlightX
Sure. Again, I don't see that Searle would deny this, nor that it runs counter to his account.That we don't (generally) put into question what is (read: "counts as") human, is because we are not under attack by shape-shifting aliens which make line hard to demarcate (for example). — StreetlightX
Briefly and dogmatically, Searle contends that
We-intentions do not reduce to I-intentions; they are basic, — Banno
Suppose you intend to visit the Taj Mahal tomorrow, and I intend to visit the Taj Mahal tomorrow. This does not make it the case that we intend to visit the Taj Mahal together. If I know about your plan, I may express (or refer to) our intention in the form “we intend to visit the Taj Mahal tomorrow”. But this does not imply anything collective about our intentions. Even if knowledge about our plan is common, mutual, or open between us, my intention and your intention may still be purely individual. For us to intend to visit the Taj Mahal together is something different. — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/collective-intentionality/
A piece of wood will be a piece of wood regardless of what we say about it. That is counts as "a piece of wood" - that we use those words to talk about it - I understand that Searle would agree indeed an institutional fact. So are you here just denying realism? — Banno
The point is that it's 'counting as' all the way down. — StreetlightX
since at the base the bishop is a piece of wood — Banno
it seems to me that you have grabbed hold of the least interesting part of the argument. — Banno
you think what we call wood is a theological given? Or that the role of a bishop is too? Word use is a human institution. It cannot be otherwise. — StreetlightX
isn't "the bishop is made of wood" institutional too by virtue of the institutional fact that "that's the kind of thing 'wood' is". — Isaac
Word use is a human institution. It cannot be otherwise. — StreetlightX
For us to intend to visit the Taj Mahal together is something different. — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/collective-intentionality/
The bishop is made of wood — StreetlightX
A realist would say that the bishop is made of wood, regardless of how we might present that using our social institutions. — Banno
I can't see why that is confusing. — Banno
I think it's more the case that "this is a bishop" is an institutional fact but that "this is wood" isn't. — Michael
But we're not obligated by God to group all the products of trees into one grouping are we? Maybe the material from Oak is not the same thing as the material from Beech. There need be no such thing as 'wood'. It's an institutional fact that there is. — Isaac
In the case of the former we're describing an object's chemical composition — Michael
No, we're assigning an institutional grouping to the entire collection of sensory data the object has (the realism part - we're assuming there is definitely an object with the properties our senses seem to detect). Is an object with 26 protons and 27 neutrons still iron? We've just decided it is. It could have been otherwise. We call it an isotope of iron rather than give it some completely new name.
So saying "this is iron" is saying that this is the sort of thing iron is. What sort of thing is and isn't iron is an institutional fact. We decide what criteria we want to use to determine membership of that class of materials. — Isaac
We can't turn lead into gold just by deciding that it's gold, but we can turn a stone into a bishop just by using it as such on a chess board. — Michael
Of course we can turn lead into gold just by deciding that it's gold. We only need say that the definition of gold is now anything with between 79 and 82 protons. Voilà, lead is now gold. — Isaac
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