I can think of a number and not tell you or anyone about it. It is impossible for you to know what number I am thinking of. — Michael

But is it possible, in principle, for timetravelling scientists from Neptune to figure it out with scanners ? With 99.875% accuracy over 100000 trials ?

In other words, that's a time-bound empirical claim. At the moment, it's implausible. We aren't aware of the technology for that. But I don't believe in some radical separation of mystical mind stuff and equally mystical (complementary) pure matter.

But is it possible for timetravelling scientists from Neptune to figure it out with scanners ? With 99.875% accuracy over 10000 trials ? — Pie

I don't know. That depends on how the hard problem of consciousness is solved. If your only argument against solipsism is that some hypothetical people with a sufficiently advanced technology might have the means to detect either mental phenomena or the physical phenomena which necessarily gives rise to mental phenomena then this doesn't refute the claim that you, right now, cannot know what number I am thinking of, or that I am thinking of a number at all. But I still might be thinking of a number.

This really is a self-evident fact. If your understanding of language denies this very fact then your understanding of language is wrong. — Michael

Concepts are public ? I can use them incorrectly ? But what I mean, behind my rashly chosen words, is correct. You can't see into my box, but I give you my word. I do mean the right thing.

this doesn't refute the claim that you, right now, cannot know what number I am thinking of, or that I am thinking of a number at all. — Michael

Who would bother to refute it ? Who doubts it ? The issue is whether you take the essence of mind to be so radically immaterial and apart from the causal nexus that it's impossible, even in principle, to discover that number.

The issue is whether you take the essence of mind to be so radically immaterial and apart from the causal nexus that it's impossible, even in principle, to discover that number. — Pie

It's impossible in principle to discover what is happening outside our light cone, but (at least according to the realist) stuff is happening outside our light cone.

It's impossible in principle to discover what it happening beyond our light cone, but (at least according to the realist) stuff is happening beyond our light cone. — Michael

It's impossible according to one of our best empirical theories. That's not the kind of 'absolute' (grammatical, metaphysical ) 'in principle' I'm talking about.

The X that, when sprinkled on a P-Zombie, produces a real boy....has no definition at all. It's an empty concept, basically mystical. Or am I wrong ?

"You know it directly. It's unmediated. It's just there. Pure presence. "

"But how do I know if my 'pure presence' is your 'pure presence' ? Don't signs get their meaning from their positions relative to other signs and what people do ?"

"No. Meaning is present. It is given directly. You know it better than anything else. Words are just conventional tags on the Eternal Forms and Sensations which shine in the darkness...except not for P-Zombies."

It's impossible according to one of our best empirical theories. — Pie

And the same could be true of solipsism. It is an empirical fact that knowledge of other minds is impossible, in the same way that it is an empirical fact that knowledge of events outside our light cone is impossible. Or it could be that knowledge of other minds is only impossible in practice, since we lack the technology to detect mental phenomena.

I'm not saying that knowledge of other minds is grammatically impossible. I don't even know what this means. Whereas you seem to be trying to argue that there being other minds is grammatically necessary, which is absurd. You can't define things into existence. It doesn't work with God and it doesn't work here either.

That's a silly objection..... — Pie

Alrighty then.....

Sorry if I offended you. I did not intend to be rude. I tend to drink too much coffee.

As Saussure might saw, each individual language user carries around some imperfect copy of the language system with him. I can survive in the woods for months perhaps, because I have a few great survival books with me, which concentrate centuries of human trial and error.

This individual body is trained into the language system, which includes developing the skill of making a slew of reliable noninferential reports such as "this banana is brown" or "that coffee is hot." This body is also taught to use the public, norm-governed token 'I' and to be 'responsible' for itself. "One is one around here." "Your hand smacked your sister, so your body stands in the corner." From this POV, it's a mistake to think the self or ego is just given, and this mistake is part of the general approach of building the world from the first-person POV, forgetting its reliance on the third-person POV. We would never dream up a veil-of-ideas if we didn't see sense-organs and medium-sized-dry-goods causally connected in a social world first.

It is an empirical fact that knowledge of other minds is impossible, in the same way that it is an empirical fact that knowledge of events outside our light cone is impossible. — Michael

This seems problematic.

How does one prove impossibility empirically ?

Does this mean that our best psychological theories don't currently allow for ESP ? Confirmation of consciousness ?

Does empirical science work with concepts without an operational definition ? Presumably psychologists like to know what it is they are talking about ? @Isaac

If there is such a definition, it's bye bye hard problem. If there isn't and can't be, then that's precisely the grammatical impossibility I've been talking about.

Note that grammatical impossibility is just logical impossibility minus the superstitious sheen that takes Forms or something like them for granted, as if tautologies were deep truths about the universe and not just community speech norms.

Presumably psychologists like to know what it is they are talking about ? Isaac — Pie

Psychologists always know what they're talking about!

I claim that the minimum rational intelligible epistemic situation is a plurality of persons subject to the same logic and together in a world that they can be right or wrong about. — Pie

Note that rational is important here. We rational ones need not assume (cannot assume?) that insanity or irrationality it impossible. For me the issue is what a philosopher can afford to doubt coherently, which is to say without lapsing into irrationalism and dropping the ideal or possibility of rationality itself.

The philosopher is an individual among others, offering and justifying claims presumably because others are possibly unaware of either those claims as possible truths or of their justifications as possibly warranting their adoption as beliefs. The philosopher as such (and this is especially manifest on a text-only site) exists largely 'as' this set of beliefs and justifications. Such online philosophers are, to some degree, whatever they take themselves to be. Their self-presentation...their public claims...are not secondary or superfluous in our making sense of them...but rather what we have to go on. Just as important, however, is how and whether that philosopher assimilates criticism, whether they abandon refuted beliefs or loosen their grip on beliefs with absurd implications.

Crucially, I can be incoherent when asserting P without you having to be incoherent in asserting P, because I may have a personal commitment/belief Q such P & Q => Z, where Z is something I cannot believe (something absurd, for instance, or something contrary another of my commitments.) You, however, having not adopted Q, do not obviously implicitly commit yourself to the absurdity or outrage Z. Or perhaps you have adopted Q, but Z does not contradict any of your beliefs.

The big point here is that we have to track the rationality of the players individually. Nothing forbids our individually constructing extravagant, differing systems of conjectures --so long as they are cohere.

Thinking is public. The negation of this statement is unintelligible. But claims that the 'we' has priority over the (linguistic) 'I' are easily misunderstood to deny a central role for (the concept or the performance of) the self.

One of Hegel’s big ideas is that creatures with a self-conception are the subjects of developmental processes that exhibit a distinctive structure. Call a creature ‘essentially self-conscious’ if what it is for itself, its self-conception, is an essential element of what it is in itself. How something that is essentially self-conscious appears to itself is part of what it really is. This is not to say that it really is just however it appears to itself to be. For all that the definition of an essentially self-conscious being say what such a one is in itself may diverge radically from what it is for itself. It may not in fact be what it takes itself to be. But if it does mistake itself, if its self-conception is in error, that mistake is still an essential feature of what it really is. In this sense, essentially self-conscious creatures are (partially) self-constituting creatures. Their self-regarding attitudes are efficacious in a distinctive way.

For such a being can change what it is in itself by changing what it is for itself. To say of an essentially self-conscious being that what it is for itself is an essential element of what it is in itself entails that an alteration in self-conception carries with it an alteration in the self of which it is a conception. Essentially self-conscious creatures accordingly enjoy the possibility of a distinctive kind of self-transformation: making themselves be different by taking themselves to be different. Insofar as such a difference in what the essentially self-conscious creature is in itself is then reflected in a further difference in what it is for itself – perhaps just by in some way acknowledging that it has changed – the original change in self-conception can trigger a cascade. That process whereby what the thing is in itself and what it is for itself reciprocally and sequentially influence one another might or might not converge to a stable equilibrium of self and conception of self.

Because what they are in themselves is at any point the outcome of such a developmental process depending on their attitudes, essentially self-conscious beings do not have natures, they have histories. Or, put differently, it is their nature to have not just a past, but a history: a sequence of partially self-constituting self-transformations, mediated at every stage by their self-conceptions, and culminating in their being what they currently are. The only unchanging essence they exhibit is to have what they are in themselves partly determined at every stage by what they are for themselves. Understanding what they are requires looking retrospectively at the process of sequential reciprocal influences of what they at each stage were for themselves and what they at each stage were in themselves, by which they came to be what they now are.

Rehearsing such a historical narrative (Hegel’s ‘Wiederholung’) is a distinctive way of understanding oneself as an essentially historical, because essentially self-conscious, sort of being. To be for oneself a historical being is to constitute oneself as in oneself a special kind of being: a self-consciously historical being. Making explicit to oneself this crucial structural aspect of the metaphysical kind of being one always implicitly has been as essentially self-conscious is itself a structural self-transformation: the achievement of a new kind of self-consciousness. — Brandom

https://sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Texts/SDR%2009%20Brandom%20071389.pdf

Psychologists always know what they're talking about! — Isaac

:up:

Philosophers seem to find freedom in the right kind of bondage, the perverts.

Autonomy is self-government, self-determination. I think the Kantian conception of
autonomy can be summarized like this: one is self-determining when one’s thinking and
acting are determined by reasons that one recognizes as such. We can think of
“autonomy” as labelling a capacity, the capacity to appreciate the force of reasons and
respond to it. But determining oneself is actually exercising that capacity. That is what it
is to be in control of one’s own life.

https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/voices.uchicago.edu/dist/f/106/files/2011/04/Autonomy-and-Community.pdf

Kant made the autonomy of reason — its non-subordination to anything else — an explicit theme. Rhetorically, of course, he also famously talks about limits on reason, but really what he wants to limit are extra-rational accretions woven into Cartesian and Wolffian rationalisms — various received truths, and so on. Descartes had quickly moved from hyperbolic doubt to question-begging acceptance of many received truths as intuitively reasonable. Wolff and his followers, to whom Kant was primarily reacting, did not even pretend to doubt.

If reason is to be truly autonomous, it cannot start from received truths. Kant himself was sympathetic to some of these received truths, but too honest to pretend they were self-evident or derivable from reason alone. Kant is often misunderstood as mainly a critic of reason, and certainly not its unconditional defender, but he is actually clear that the autonomy of reason is unconditional. Too often, readers of Kant focus too much on autonomy of a subject rather than autonomy of reason, but the practical autonomy attributable to a so-called subject in Kant is actually derivative, based on the putative subject’s participation in the autonomy of reason. In Making It Explicit, Brandom says where Descartes had focused on our grip on concepts, Kant focused instead on their grip on us (p. 9). (See also Kant’s Groundwork.)

Hegel has been widely misunderstood as an example of the autonomy of reason gone mad. Brandom, Pippin, and Pinkard have performed an invaluable service in clarifying what Hegel was really trying to do, which was in part to sincerely take up Kant’s honesty about received truths and to push it even further.

Aristotle said that of all things, reason most deserves to be called divine. He does not use a word like autonomy, but the effect is the same. Nothing is higher. (See also Interpretation; Brandom on Truth.)

I think of the Kantian autonomy of reason as necessarily involving something like the free play of the Critique of Judgment. The Reason that is truly autonomous in the Kantian sense will be a hermeneutical Reason (see Brandom and Hermeneutics).

https://brinkley.blog/2019/05/15/the-autonomy-of-reason/

I’m far too old and been around far too many blocks to be offended by anything but the most egregious. But thanks for the sentiment.

The philosopher is an individual among others, offering and justifying claims presumably because others are possibly unaware of either those claims as possible truths or of their justifications as possibly warranting their adoption as beliefs. — Pie

“.....it does not deprive the speculative philosopher of his just title to be the sole depositor of a science which benefits the public without its knowledge. This can never become popular and, indeed, has no occasion to be so; for finespun arguments in favour of useful truths make just as little impression on the public mind as the equally subtle objections brought against these truths. On the other hand, since both inevitably force themselves on every man who rises to the height of speculation, it becomes (a) manifest duty (...) to enter upon a thorough investigation of the rights of speculative reason and, thus, to prevent the scandal which metaphysical controversies are sure, sooner or later, to cause even to the masses. It is only by criticism that metaphysicians (and, as such, theologians too) can be saved from these controversies and from the consequent perversion of their doctrines. Criticism alone can strike a blow at the root of materialism, fatalism, atheism, free-thinking, fanaticism, and superstition, which are universally injurious—as well as of idealism and scepticism, which (....) can scarcely pass over to the public.....”
(CPR, Bxxxvi)
—————

I can survive in the woods for months perhaps, because I have a few great survival books with me..... — Pie

Having the books with you and surviving, does not prove you could not have survived if you didn’t. Which immediately transforms the implied causal necessity of language into a mere conditional possibility. Cum hoc ergo proper hoc doncha know......

And by including the relational qualifier “perhaps”, only turns the cum hoc mistake into a post hoc mistake. I did survive because of having the books becomes if I do survive it will be because of having the books. Neither condition is necessarily true in itself, conditioned by merely having the books.

All I’m saying is hopefully there are formal pro-language arguments less susceptible to self-destruction than that one. And the first thing required for that, is a commonality of presuppositions, which is missing in your proposition. You have the books and your presupposition is that you read them and transform the contents into the physical means for your survival. I, in merely reading your proposition, have no such presupposition, insofar as I’m concerned, you have the books, and although as books their primary purpose is to be read, I have no ground to presuppose you actually did read them merely from the fact you have them and perhaps survived.

Your thinking, given its presuppositions, and my thinking absent those presuppositions, makes explicit each ends in a private determination belonging to an individual subject, which in turn contradicts the notion that.....

Thinking is public. The negation of this statement is unintelligible. — Pie

The negation of that statement, re:, thinking is not public, or, no thinking is public, is both logically sustainable and intelligible, given the axiomatic principle “thought (the process of thinking) is cognition** by means of conceptions”
(CPR A69/B94, my parenthetical; **”knowledge” in Kemp Smith, 1929, “cognition” in Guyer/Wood, 1988)

The totality of private thinking, the compendium of all subjectively determinable cognitions by means of conceptions, does not authorize thinking as being more public than private. Even if it is true that everybody thinks, in itself such is no justification for the claim that thinking is grounded by communal necessity. Communication of private thinking by means of language, on the other hand, requires reciprocity, which in turn requires a more than singular private subjectivity, but mere expression of private thinking, also by means of language, requires neither reciprocity nor community and only a singular private subjectivity. It follows that absent both communication and expression of private thinking, language has no absolutely necessary function whatsoever.

“.....if some of the moderns have thought to enlarge its domain by introducing psychological discussions on the mental faculties (...), or anthropological discussions on (cognitive or personal) prejudices, their causes and remedies: this attempt, on the part of these authors, only shows their ignorance of the peculiar nature of logical science. We do not enlarge but disfigure the sciences when we lose sight of their respective limits and allow them to run into one another....”
(CPR Bvii)
—————

This individual body is trained into the language system....... — Pie

Yeah.....no. The idea is, upon reception of “your shoe’s untied!!”, the body immediately proceeds to go through the motions of rectifying the implication of the received language. The body first yanks the strings to gather the requisite material for tying, crosses one string over the other, etc., etc., etc. But none of those actions are contained in the given language.

So the argument is that all those actions were trained into the body at some anterior time, given by their own anterior language reception. Now arises the absurdity that the body can never go through the motions of tying shoes if it hadn’t been trained in a language system.

A body could never have a “shoe” to tie if not for a language system that trains it as to what a “shoe” is?
(A protective covering on the foot is only possible because of language training?)

A body could never have a “foot” to cover if not for a language system that trains it as to what a “foot” is?
(That one thing is to be contained within another thing can only happen because of language training?)

.....and through the series of deductive inferences, at last is concluded the absolute necessity that even given all the conditionals dependent on language training, there is nothing whatsoever in any of the training, that assembles the manifold content of it into an activity perfectly satisfying the training. There just isn’t enough language to be trained by, nor precise enough language quality to promise strict compliance with, to facilitate the exchange of every empirical occasion with another. Something else is requisite, antecedent to and more powerful than language, such that tying a shoe is accomplished, but after three or four steps, that damn tying is not again undone, or that tying a shoe is accomplished but not with that by which the tying can never be undone.

Where in the language game is it that the guy, howsoever trained in the language system for shoe-tying, walks around with them untied, simply because he can’t be bothered with his training.
————

The links concerning Kant are full of holes, as the respective original texts would show.

If nothing else, I appreciate being given the subject matter and thereby the opportunity, to talk too much. As you say: mass quantities of my sole remaining vice......exceptionally good coffee.

I’m far too old and been around far too many blocks to be offended by anything but the most egregious. But thanks for the sentiment. — Mww

:up:

Excellent. Let the game continue then.

Having the books with you and surviving, does not prove you could not have survived if you didn’t. — Mww

Irrelevant, it seems to me. The point is that of course the individual is an individual. Once out of nature, trained in the lingo of the tribe, I can wander lonely as a cloud, keeping a journal. The grand interior monologue of Hamlet is impossible without its humble beginnings in a child's making a poo poo in his mouth. Or is it a boo boo ?

Here's the real Descartes: https://historyofyesterday.com/dina-sanichar-the-feral-child-who-was-raised-by-wolves-32dec8e22e8d

given the axiomatic principle “thought (the process of thinking) is cognition** by means of conceptions” — Mww

Concepts are public. For the negation might as well mean the toast on Pluto is diaphanous. This does not mean that something some would call 'thinking' wasn't going on in wolf-boy Descartes above. Consider also Sellars' Jones. We could invent 'thoughts' as postulated, explanatory entities. But the concepts that matter, as a minimal epistemic given, are public. The rest is a mute soliisism.

Now arises the absurdity that the body can never go through the motions of tying shoes if it hadn’t been trained in a language system. — Mww

It arises for you perhaps, but I never made such a claim, nor should such a claim be inferred from what I did say. Is it so hard to grasp what's almost trivial ? That children learn language, including the proper use of 'I' and 'my' and 'yours' and 'hers' and 'shoes' as bodies in a world together, handling the objects they speak about, encouraged and discouraged in their usage ? Am I to think that you imagine the possibility of a Kant without some rich culture that birth and trained him, gave him the very languages of his art ?

For instance, Bakhurst (2011, 2015), following McDowell and Brandom as well as Vygotsky, characterises Bildung as a process of enculturation during which the child, by means of acquiring conceptual abilities, is transformed from being in the world to being a subject capable of thinking and acting in light of reasons, thereby taking a view on the world and herself. As Bakhurst points out, this ‘gradual mastery of techniques of language that enable the giving and taking of reasons’ (2015, p. 310) is an essentially social process, because in acquiring concepts the child essentially learns to participate in a social praxis. Similarly, by adopting an approach to pedagogy that draws on both Vygotsky and Brandom, Derry (2008, 2013) emphasises the importance of a normatively structured learning environment in which adults provide opportunities for children to engage in the social practice of giving and asking for reasons in order to gain understanding of the inferential relations that govern our use of concepts.
...
It is also very close to Brandom's view, which interprets intentionality as a fundamentally social phenomenon, namely as the ability for deontic score-keeping, that is the ability to ascribe and acknowledge justifications to others and oneself. Thus, on this view, human thinking, understood in terms of the possession and use of concepts, consists essentially in the ability to participate in the—necessarily social—game of giving and asking for reasons.

The essentially social nature of the development of human rationality is also stressed in recent empirical research, in particular in Tomasello's (2014) influential evolutionary and developmental account.11 On Tomasello's view, human rationality is essentially characterised by what he calls ‘we-intentionality’. He claims that our ability for objective-reflexive-normative thinking is the result of a ‘social turn’ in cognitive evolution, which was necessitated by the need for increasing social cooperation. This ability is thought to have developed in two steps over the course of human evolutionary history, which are thought to be mirrored to some extent by human ontogeny. The first step consists in the development of shared intentionality, which children acquire around the age of 9–12 months. Shared intentionality is characterised by the ability to take into account another's perspective (without necessarily explicitly distinguishing one's own perspective from that of the other), for instance when jointly attending to an object with a caregiver. Ultimately, this enables children to engage in cooperative communication and two-level collaboration with another person. The second step consists in the development of collective intentionality. Thus, from the age of about 3 years onwards, children begin to be oriented not just towards a specific other, but towards the group and they begin to communicate conventionally. That is, they learn to evaluate and justify their reasoning according to the standards of the group. Taken together, the development of ‘we-intentionality’ is thought to have provided early humans with crucial survival advantages over groups who were not able to engage in reasoning of this kind (Tomasello, 2014)

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-9752.12407

Something else is requisite, antecedent to and more powerful than language, such that tying a shoe is accomplished, but after three or four steps, that damn tying is not again undone, or that tying a shoe is accomplished but not with that by which the tying can never be undone. — Mww

But who said the world or learning was all just language ? It's my understanding that the brain is the most complex worldly object we humans are aware of (until we finally build that moon-sized supercomputer.) The human hand isn't bad either. My focus on language is simply that of an epistemologist trying to figure out a philosopher's minimum commitment.


Was it not clear that my point was about language acquisition ? I oppose the view that (most) concepts are 'pre-given', as if existing fixed and eternal somewhere, graven on the soul or hid away in Heaven, apart from the doings of the animals who perform and refine them simultaneously. That we can arrange utterances into functional equivalence classes (translate 'hello', etc. ) need not force upon us obscure doctrines of spiritual entities or 'hard problems' that may be merely language traps.

The links concerning Kant are full of holes, as the respective texts would show. — Mww

To me that's no issue, for Kant (he won't like this) is a mere means here. Brandom has his motives for presenting his own philosophy in historical terms (themselves presented historically).

We learn from others, and it feels like cheating not to credit those who first got the piece of progress down, and we forgive them their absurdities as we hope our descendants will forgive us ours.

If nothing else, I appreciate being given the subject matter and thereby the opportunity, to talk too much. As you say: mass quantities of my sole remaining vice......exceptionally good coffee. — Mww

:up:
Same here !

Let the game continue then. — Pie

Not much point, really. I am he who unabashedly “rises to the level of speculation”, you are not, by your own admission.

Here's the real Descartes: — Pie

Nahhhh. Here is the real Descartes:
https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/descartes1637.pdf;
https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1008&context=philosophy#page50
https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/descartes1644part1.pdf.

Concepts are public. — Pie

As with thinking, no, they are not. They may have public exhibition, but they are not themselves public.

We could invent 'thoughts' as postulated, explanatory entities. — Pie

....which merely asks how inventions are possible. The common mistake of confounding the thing with the use of the thing. For those bent on misappropriation of logical systems, it is unintelligible that the thing IS its use.

but I never made such a claim..... — Pie

......but in each case of the claims you do make, what I say may follow without violating the LNC. Not for refutation of, but as expansion on, such claims.

I understand your dukkha - something's wrong, I second that motion.

How did you ask me why I asked you what it means to exist if existence isn't a public concept? — Pie

From the fact that 'existence' is a public word it does not follow that existence is a public concept. We each have our own range of associations, intuitive feelings and idiosyncratic understandings of the meaning of the word. What is a concept if it is not understood? And who understands concepts? Individuals.

It seems we are similarly constituted beings, so why would we not share, in the sense of, at a minimum, "find understandable", the understandings others have of concepts? You seem to be conflating understanding, which is of the individual, and private in the sense that no one will know what it is unless she tells them, and use, which is obviously public.

There is a certain limited number of ways of imagining what existence could be. and it seems to me plausible that that is likely to be the determining factor that establishes the range of publicly manifested interpretations, and maybe some others we haven't heard of because those who imagined existence that way didn't speak about it (make it public). Your claims seem to be deploying a very strange interpretation of "public", although it is not one I haven't heard before. :wink:

On what grounds do you claims a private understanding of 'exists'?

I get the distinction you're making between our mental activity (which is private) and our language use (which is not), but then you make this jump to saying that some of that private mental activity is privately packaged and delineated as being the private mental activity which constitutes the private concept 'exists'.

How would you know that? Or even suspect that? I can't see any link at all from saying that mental activity is private to saying that the categorisation of mental activity is private.

On what grounds do you claims a private understanding of 'exists'? — Isaac

I have my own understanding of what it means and you won't know what that is unless I tell you. Of course in telling you my understanding will be made public, even if only to a limited audience

How would you know that? Or even suspect that? I can't see any link at all from saying that mental activity is private to saying that the categorisation of mental activity is private. — Isaac

I haven't said that categorization is necessarily private, although of course it can be. Initially it is individuals who categorize things in the ways imaginable, and other individuals who follow such seminal categorization, and thus render them conventional. Note, seminal understandings have already become public once the seminal understanding has been communicated for the first time.

.

I have my own understanding of what it means and you won't know what that is unless I tell you. Of course in telling you my understanding will be made public, even if only to a limited audience — Janus

Do you? How would you know?

I haven't said that categorization is necessarily private — Janus

OK, but you said that we have a private understanding of the concept 'exists' and your argument seems to be that mental activity is private. That's insufficient. To show that we have a private concept of 'exists' you need to show not only that mental activity is private, but that the grouping of some of that mental activity into a clear concept called 'existence' is also private.

OK, but you said that we have a private understanding of the concept 'exists' and your argument seems to be that mental activity is private. — Isaac

Don't you agree that mental activity can be thought of as private in the sense that I can be thinking or imagining a whole plethora of things and not tell anyone about it. Take that sentence I just wrote; it's perhaps plausible that that precise sentence has never previously been uttered. And in that case, that precise thought, formulated in precisely the way it is in that sentence would be private. I'm not denying that much, or at least some, of our thinking relies on a public language to make it possible. But the fact that a private(ly formulated) language is impossible doesn't logically entail that experience,judgement, thought and understanding are public (although as I said, of course they can be).

in that case, that precise thought, formulated in precisely the way it is in that sentence would be private. — Janus

We don't formulate sentences that way. We can actually see sentence formation and have a pretty good idea of the way it works from various cases of patients with damages to the language processing areas of the brain. You don't form a sentence first, then say it. It doesn't exist in your mind prior to being spoken (or going through the motions). It's created as it's being said. The idea that it pre-exists is a post hoc construction of you memory.

The point being that the privacy of mental events is hinging on a preliminary scientific understanding (no ESP, no thought-sharing spookiness, mental events take place in brains, etc). So having gone that far, it's incoherent to then deny further scientific understanding about how those brain actually process thoughts.

What you think is happening in your mental events is not what's actually happening. It's a post hoc construction made up after the event. That's a scientific fact (insofar as such facts are obtainable). If you're going to ignore it and say that phenomenologically, mental vents just are how they seem to you to be, then you cannot simultaneously say that they are private. It sometimes 'seems to me' as if my wife knows what I'm thinking. It sometimes 'seems to me' as if a crowd are of one mind on a matter. It's only my scientific understanding of how brains work which tells me that cannot actually be the case.

So it seems either mental events are private because of the way brains work (in which case we don't have private 'concepts' floating about in there), or we say that mental events are only loosely correlated with brains, in which case there's no reason at all to think they're private.

You don't form a sentence first, then say it. It doesn't exist in your mind prior to being spoken (or going through the motions). It's created as it's being said. — Isaac

I haven't said that sentences are preformulated; that has nothing to do with what I have been arguing. I've been arguing that categories are initially created by individuals who first imagine them, and that they are , in that sense, private until communicated publicly.

I've been arguing that categories are initially created by individuals who first imagine them, and that they are , in that sense, private until communicated publicly. — Janus

And the evidence you have for this is?

A newly minted category must have been created by an individual initially, no? Or even if it was first thought by a number of individual...simultaneously? It's possible, I guess, but scarcely plausible that the idea could have occurred to everyone at once.

In any case, it doesn't affect the argument that the judgement that constitutes the category was initially private, and remained so until made public. And even then a new idea has to command wide assent in order to become canonized and part of the public store of judgements, even if only among a significantly sizeable groups. How large would the group have to be to be considered significant, do you think?

A newly minted category must have created by an individual initially, no? — Janus

I don't think so, no. It can be created collaboratively by process of trial and error. I can merely live my life, including using words to get others to do things, and then observe the categories which emerge from those interactions.

it doesn't affect the argument that the judgement that constitutes the category was initially private — Janus

Insofar as any given moment in time, I'll grant this, but judgements are also not things which float about neatly packaged in the brain, they are moment to moment inferences updated, often as frequently as every few milliseconds. If asked, if engaged in, say, philosophy, a social practice, you'll try to construct a meaningful report of those judgements that your other community will understand. You'll use social meanings to do that. Prior to this exercise, you had no unified 'judgement' only a continually changing flow of updating inferences.

How large would the group have to be to be considered significant, do you think? — Janus

From birth, I think two. Just another person, but obviously, for ethical reasons no-one's been able to test that.

After a while though, one is sufficient because we can engage the social imagination and use the public concepts we imagine are available, even if they aren't.