it only has this power of persuasion because of it's logical implications. — Banno
The stuff that binds all of us is just clear water (for us.) But the stuff that binds most of us is, I claim, what the greats, among other things, make explicit and therefore optional. (That which is closest is hardest to see, like forgetting your glasses are on your nose.) — Pie
We punish one another for dishonesty or irrelevance or incoherence. We simultaneously enforce tribal norms and attempt installing new ones. — Pie
"So you say truth can't escape from mere expediency? is that true?"
Whatever you posit as a theory of truth already relies on a foundation of truth... — Banno
While conservatives and modernists debate which side is rational or irrational, and what foreign(French) influence to blame for it, postmodernists assert that it is not irrationality that leads to fascisms and totalitarianisms but rigid or one-dimensional notions of the rational and the true. — Joshs
...I'd have to see a stronger argument that matters of eagles and snakes, of cake in the fridge, actually impact all that much on meaning on society, because it seems to me at first glance, that the vast majority of societal functions and meanings depend overwhelmingly on concepts and belief so complex that 'truth' and 'lie' just don't really apply. — Isaac
I've a keen interest in reconciling Wittgenstein and Davidson. Been at it since I were a lad. In a way Davidson's semantic theory might be a more recent and sophisticated version of the formalisation of language found in the Tractatus, an attempt to explicate what is important in our natural languages by setting out the conditions under which our utterances are true. — Banno
Consider, then, the case of the scientist who fabricates the results of his experiment. Imagine that this becomes endemic to the extent of near 50 % of published papers. Science, surely then, is dead, it has become completely unreliable and thus meaningless. — unenlightened
Do you seriously think even remotely close to 50% of scientists could get away with lying about their results? The conspiracy would have to be enormous. — Isaac
P is true is just fancy talk for P. — Pie
"true" denotes "snow is white" iff "white" denotes snow. — bongo fury
This should be quite obvious to anyone not seduced by philosophy.
— Fooloso4
Dude. Seriously ? Windmills — Pie
.. what I talk about and what is are not the same.
— Fooloso4
Tell me what is then.
No, but what I am saying is that we are seeing science being hijacked by commercial interests to some extent, and by career considerations, and so on, and that fuels conspiracy theories and radical scepticism. — unenlightened
Do the hijacked scientists actually lie, or do they pick their results carefully, craft their statistics, twist their wording...to support the narrative the commercial interests prefer? — Isaac
We have to trust our institutions where we defer to experts whose actual opinion we're not capable of judging. I agree with you about the threat this represents to society. I think the solution, though, is more acknowledgement of uncertainty, more openness about modeling assumptions, more discussion of theory choice (where the evidence underdetermines)...
In other words, less talk of truth and lies. More talk of pragmatism and expediency. — Isaac
↪Fooloso4 While I appreciate your efforts, I'm too far removed from Hegel to see the relevance of your explication. You've lost me. — Banno
But idealism is tied to antirealism, — Banno
How's this ? The meaning of the assertion, the sentence in use, seems to simply be the world(-as-understood). If we jettison apparent nonsense like the world-in-itself...the world is just that which is the case. To me this is not correspondence. There's just use/mention. 'P' is a string of letters. P is piece of a world, a truth (or an attempted truthery.) — Pie
But no, expediency and pragmatism result in cover-ups and distortions and exaggerations 'for our own good' and they always get exposed eventually and are always corrosive of trust and meaning. We have to trust our institutions and experts, therefore it is essential that they are trustworthy, and that means not pragmatically or expediently truthful but brutally honest and truthful about their own limitations — unenlightened
In response to the claim that there is more to reality than what we talk about, you ask for more talk, for me to tell you what is. — Fooloso4
https://iep.utm.edu/sellars/#H3What then is required for knowledge of our own inner, private episodes, say knowledge that I’m having a sensation of a red triangle, if it isn’t just that I am sensing a red triangle? What else is required besides the actual sensation? In short, knowledge requires concepts, and since concepts are linguistic entities, we can say that knowledge requires a language. To know something as simple as that the patch is red requires an ability to classify that patch, and Sellars thinks the only resource for such rich categorization as adult humans are capable of comes from a public language. — link
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phintro.htmWe can no longer talk of things at all,i.e.,of something that would be for consciousness merely the negative of itself.
...
Thought is always in its own sphere; its relations are with itself, and it is its own object.
...
...it takes for granted that the Absolute stands on one side, and that knowledge on the other side, by itself and cut off from the Absolute, is still something real; in other words, that knowledge, which, by being outside the Absolute, is certainly also outside truth, is nevertheless true — a position which, while calling itself fear of error, makes itself known rather as fear of the truth.
— Hegel
Can the word ‘axe’ be used to chop down a tree? Or are ‘trees’ nothing more than unchoppable words? If sentences in use are the world, then there is no use-mention distinction. — Luke
We can no longer use language to talk about the world if it is the world. Mention and use collapse into one (another), together with language and the world. — Luke
He concludes that metaphysics are "ticklish". By that he means that a person whose metaphysics are challenged would typically become rather aggressive towards the challenger.
I found his analysis convincing, and believe it does explain why there tends to be some aggressiveness in philosophy, contrary to a naïve cliché of the serene philosopher. Philosophy cuts deep, and it hurts. A philosopher is only serene to the extent that his or her metaphysics remains unchallenged. — Olivier5
We really, really want others to adhere to our solutions.
The simple (eagles and snakes) version of 'truth' is secondary because we don't believe what we believe about those matters because we've done the equivalent of looking in the fridge, we do so because of who we trust, our faith in statistics, beliefs about the intentions of institutions... — Isaac
the vast majority of societal functions and meanings depend overwhelmingly on concepts and belief so complex that 'truth' and 'lie' just don't really apply. — Isaac
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_LysenkoLysenko forced farmers to plant seeds very close together since, according to his "law of the life of species", plants from the same "class" never compete with one another.[4] Lysenko played an active role in the famines that killed millions of Soviet people and his practices prolonged and exacerbated the food shortages.[4] The People's Republic of China under Mao Zedong adopted his methods starting in 1958, with calamitous results, culminating in the Great Chinese Famine of 1959 to 1962, in which some 15–55 million people died.[note 1][4]
there can be wolves in sheep's clothing, but as a rule it must be sheep in sheep's clothing, otherwise we would call it 'wolves clothing' wouldn't we? — unenlightened
:up:There cannot be a complete collapse of faith and a complete collapse of meaning, because the lie loses meaning at the same rate as the truth. But people stop listening - they stop listening to the media, to the government, even to each other. — unenlightened
To say it's true there are plums in the icebox is (basically) to say there are plums in the ice box. — Pie
https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/biographical/sellars-wilfrid-stalker-1912-89/v-1/sections/epistemological-perspectivesFor Sellars, inference itself is always a normative affair, a matter of the judgments one ought to or is entitled to make. He defuses the circularity which threatens such an account by arguing that our knowledge of what implies and follows from various claims is, in the first instance, a practical ability to discriminate, that is, to respond differentially to, good and bad inferences. Rule-governed linguistic behaviour develops out of multiple repertoires of ‘pattern-governed behaviour’, behaviour which exhibits a pattern because the propensity to produce behaviour belonging to that pattern has been selectively reinforced and contrary propensities selectively extinguished (see language, social nature of; Meaning and rule-following). The pattern-governed behaviour characteristic of language includes ‘language-entry transitions’, propensities to respond to non-linguistic states of affairs (such as sensory stimulations) with appropriate linguistic activity; ‘language-departure transitions’, propensities to respond to a subset of linguistic representings (for example, such first-person future-tensed conduct-ascriptions as ‘I shall now raise my hand’) with appropriate corresponding behaviour; and ‘intra-linguistic moves’, propensities to respond to linguistic representings with further linguistic episodes (only) in patterns corresponding to valid theoretical and practical inferences. Linguistic roles or functions, Sellars suggested, are ultimately individuated in terms of the structures of positive and negative uniformities generated in the natural order by such pattern-governed activities.
In the Kantian tradition Sellars insisted that, in contrast to the mere capacity to be sensorily affected by external objects, perception of how things are requires not only systematic differential response dispositions but also the ability to respond to sensory stimulation with a judgment, that is, the endorsement of a claim (see Perception, epistemic issues in). Sellars went on, however, to propose that reports of how things look or seem, rather than employing ‘more primitive’ concepts, result instead from withholding these characteristic endorsements. This account enabled him to explain the incorrigibility of ‘seems’ judgments that Cartesianism takes as its fundamental datum. Their incorrigibility is simply a matter of their tentativeness; a ‘seems’ judgment expresses a perceptual ascription without endorsing it. It follows that ‘seems’ judgments do not express a special class of immediate cognitions. Applying the concept ‘looks red’ requires the same mastery of inferential articulations, the same inferential ‘know how’, as does applying the concept ‘is red’.
Sellars’ analysis of the Cartesian incorrigibility of perceptual ‘seemings’ is one strand of the philosophical dialectic most frequently associated with his name, his comprehensive critique of the ‘Myth of the Given’. Basic to this critique is his insistence on the irreducibly normative character of epistemic discourse. Characterizing an episode or state in epistemic terms is not giving an empirical description of it but rather placing it within a social framework of justifications, of having and being able to give reasons for what one says. All knowledge that something is the case – all ‘subsumption of particulars under universals’ – presupposes intersubjective learning and concept formation. It follows that the ability to be (epistemically) aware of a sort of thing rests upon a prior command of the concept of that sort of thing and cannot account for it – and this holds equally true for concepts pertaining to ‘inner episodes’. The first-person reporting role of such concepts, a use Cartesians interpret as evidencing the ‘privacy’ of the mental and one’s ‘privileged access’ to one’s own mental states, is necessarily built upon and presupposes their intersubjective status.
I’m trying to get clear on your use/mention analogy. Is this correct:
Mention = “It’s true that P”
Use = “P”
Is that it? — Luke
I suggest that it's true that snow is white and snow is white do the same thing when used, have the same meaning. — Pie
Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.