Okay, I'll bet you could devise an experiment that would show that dogs can pick out the longest of a set of levers, or the shortest, or whatever. I don't see a concept here, but there's something. What is it? — Srap Tasmaner

But I'm not arguing for the innateness of concepts.

Is it conceivable that someone could be born (as a result of a mutation or whatever) with the WRONG sorts of concepts? Do we have a method to check this? — Fafner

Evolution would weed out concepts too out of sync with the environment. But it's probably more of an ability to form and build upon fundamental concepts, such as space, time, other minds, etc, which allows for a great deal of flexibility.

Evolution would weed out concepts too out of sync with the environment. But it's probably more of an ability to form and build upon fundamental concepts, such as space, time, other minds, etc, which allows for a great deal of flexibility. — Marchesk

But I'm asking what would it mean for our concepts to be out of sync with reality? A concept is simply not something that you can either get right or wrong, so all this talk just doesn't make sense.

No no, of course not, but animals do stuff that looks like cognition, so I feel a little uncomfortable with theories (like Whorf-Sapir) that tie even stuff like perception to linguistic competence. Maybe it's something like this: dogs can (hypothetically) know which of two levers is longer, but they can't provide justification for their knowledge. There's a causal chain, but no logical one.

That's why I reference Kant earlier, and how he showed that certain categories of thought were necessary to make sense out of the noise of sense impressions. Empiricism can't get going without that. — Marchesk

Perhaps, but what Wittgenstein clearly saw (and perhaps Kant didn't) is that innateness or aprioricity cannot make something into a concept, but instead we should consider its use, and so having a concept is not a matter of psychology, as if it is something that we can find ourselves born with (and I think that Kant already understood this); but rather concepts is something the we shape and create, and they cannot be forced on us from 'outside' (whether by experience or innate nature), because otherwise they would cease to be concepts in the logical sense and will be nothing more then behavioral instincts.

Where did I link concepts to linguistic competence? I brought up this whole topic about the standard meter to illustrate how something which is not linguistic can nevertheless symbolize.

but rather concepts is something the we shape and create, and they cannot be forced on us from 'outside' (whether by experience or innate nature), because otherwise they would cease to be concepts in the logical sense and will be nothing more then behavioral instincts. — Fafner

So it's a sociological explanation of meaning.

So it's a sociological explanation of meaning. — Marchesk

Not quite. When it is 'decided' that this and that would count as 'a length of an object' then it's not merely a claim about the society (though it certainly in some sense is), but also a claim about how objects are (say) measured, which by itself has nothing to do with sociology but the things in the world.

Of course the concept of 'length' is something the we have created. It really doesn't make sense to 'perceive' a length in an object as an empirical discovery, and for a simple reason: you must already have the concept of length in order to perceive something as having a length, otherwise how could you know that what you are perceiving is 'length' and not some other property? — Fafner

I don't think I disagree with anything here-- maybe-- but I think you mustn't take the further step of saying you can't perceive the length of an object without having the concept of length. You may not perceive it as a length, as something falling under a concept, but critters without concepts perceive things, know things, etc.

You may not perceive it as a length, as something falling under a concept, but critters without concepts perceive things, know things, etc. — Srap Tasmaner

Well it depends on what sorts of creatures we are talking about (and there is a sense of 'perceiving' which is not conceptual), but why shouldn't we say that the more sophisticated creatures do have concepts despite lacking language?

why shouldn't we say that the more sophisticated creatures do have concepts despite lacking language? — Fafner

I can't help feeling it's an empirical question, and that bothers me. I'd rather be clearer on what connection there is between language and concept. I can imagine arguing several different positions easily.

I don't think that it really matter that much (philosophically at least), and it's not clear exactly what 'concepts' are to begin with... Maybe this is one of the reasons that Wittgenstein coined the term 'language game' so that we will consider the phenomena simply as they are, without trying to force them into this or that philosophical preconception.

Well, Wittgenstein gave up on the idea of logical analysis but not everybody did, and I think the jury is still out. Logic and linguistics march on.

Actually I don't think that he ever did, he just changed his method of logical analysis (and his views on what it means to do a logical analysis).

(I remember reading that he told his pupil Rhees that the Investigations is a book about logic as much as the Tractatus).

I could agree with that.

As I read the history, and I'm not quite an expert, one of the things that happens in the LW and immediately post-LW era is the rise of the Oxford school, "ordinary language" philosophy. Despite the considerable differences, there's some overlap to sort out. What I find really interesting is what happened to OLP. Austin, Strawson, and Grice--much as they fought among themselves--are all taken up by linguists building out the new sub-specialty of pragmatics. As a school of philosophy, OLP seems just to disappear, but what actually happened is that it decamped to another department. There's stuff in Wittgenstein that you can also see as reaching for a field of pragmatics that doesn't exist yet, so he has to work really hard to show what he's getting at. And this is still a kind of analysis, absolutely.

Thinking that the mind has some magical ability to simply 'mean' things is an illusion. — Fafner

We can think about things, and that probably doesn't require language; thinking about things just is meaning. The meanings of words and sentences reflect that "thinking about things".

If in saying "It's raining," one is saying he believes it's raining, then it is logically contradictory to say "it's raining but I don't believe it's raining."

The contradiction arises because it's implicit that the speaker who states it's raining is the same speaker who states his belief that it's raining and it's assumed that a speaker can only assert beliefs even should he proclaim his statement as truth.

Contextually and implicitely you're saying "I believe it is raining but I don't believe it's raining," so you have a direct logical contradiction.

A performative contradiction (e.g. " I am dead" or "I ate my mouth") states an impossible performance. I cannot tell you I'm dead because death eliminates speech. I can't eat my mouth because my mouth does the eating.

The raining example you gave is 2 seperate propositions, and of a different form than my examples above.

I think Moore's paradox shows that use is an element of meaning but not exhaustive.

If we consider the statement "It's raining but I believe that it is not raining" then we quite rightly take it to be an absurd thing to say, even though "it's raining" and "I believe that it is raining" do not mean the same thing. And that's because in saying "it's raining" one is (usually) indicating that one believes that it is raining, and so the statement "It's raining but I believe that it is not raining" is a performative contradiction even if not a logical contradiction (thanks to The Great Whatever for this insight). — Michael

If in saying "It's raining," one is saying he believes it's raining, then it is logically contradictory to say "it's raining but I don't believe it's raining."

The contradiction arises because it's implicit that the speaker who states it's raining is the same speaker who states his belief that it's raining and it's assumed that a speaker can only assert beliefs even should he proclaim his statement as truth.

Contextually and implicitely you're saying "I believe it is raining but I don't believe it's raining," so you have a direct logical contradiction.

A performative contradiction (e.g. " I am dead" or "I ate my mouth") states an impossible performance. I cannot tell you I'm dead because death eliminates speech. I can't eat my mouth because my mouth does the eating.

The raining example you gave is 2 seperate propositions, and of a different form than my examples above. — Hanover

Shouldn't you be claiming that "It's raining but I believe that it is not raining" is equivalent to ""I believe it's raining and I believe I believe that it is not raining"? Then where is the direct logical contradiction?

"It's raining" is not equivalent to "I believe it's raining," nor does the former imply the latter, but arguably the former conversationally implicates the latter. What's odd here is that the implicature is apparently not cancelable. I honestly don't know what conclusion to draw from that.

If in saying "It's raining," one is saying he believes it's raining, then it is logically contradictory to say "it's raining but I don't believe it's raining."

The contradiction arises because it's implicit that the speaker who states it's raining is the same speaker who states his belief that it's raining and it's assumed that a speaker can only assert beliefs even should he proclaim his statement as truth.

Contextually and implicitely you're saying "I believe it is raining but I don't believe it's raining," so you have a direct logical contradiction. — Hanover

If that were the case then if I believe that it is raining then my claim "it is raining" would be true, even if it isn't raining. That doesn't seem right. My claim is true only if it is raining.

Perhaps I wasn't clear with what I said. The proposition "it is raining but I believe that it is not raining" is not a logical contradiction, but the speech act is contradictory (in the sense that telling someone that you don't want to hurt them whilst at the same time stabbing them is contradictory). "Performative contradiction" seemed like an appropriate term for this, but I now see that it has a differently defined use already.

There is a meaningful distinction to be drawn between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief. The latter requires metacognition. The former does not. Only written language allows a creature to be able to isolate and identify it's own mental ongoings. Metacognition requires naming mental ongoings. Any time we talk about belief that, we're talking about metacognition. Creatures without written language are in capable of such. Thus, it is a big mistake on our parts to expect that it is even possible to accurately represent such a candidate with such a framework.

The complexity of a language without meaningful marks is severely limited.

To talk about an animals' language without considering the differences between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief is to aim quite precisely at quite the wrong target.

Of course, in ordinary usage, people sometimes treat "believe" and "know" as, well, not quite opposites, but they don't treat believing as an ingredient of knowing the way philosophers often do. There's nothing at all unusual about someone saying, "I don't believe we're going to win tonight, I know we are!"

So I wonder what Moore's paradox looks like with the factive verb: "It's raining but I don't know it's raining." As before we treated "It's raining" as implicating belief, do we also take "It's raining" to implicate a claim to know it's raining?

The psychological function which produces meaning (an idea which can be described by attribution or reference) is categorisation: the assertion of a relation between a class (subject) and a category (predicate).

Whereas, a concept is an adventitious or factitious idea which denotes a class and specifies its attributes.

Concepts (e.g., categorisation) can be categorised (i.e., considered to be a member of other categories, such as "psychological functions").

Mental modelling is the cognitive and/or intuitive process of constructing a set of related concepts, arranged to represent a composite concept or system.

Mental modelling may be verbal and/or nonverbal.

Again, you refer to some state-of-affairs with your words - just like every post in this thread and every thread in this forum. The only way you can use words is to refer to things, or to make artful noise (like in a poem or on a philosophy forum).

And the relevance of this is?

It doesn't really solve the philosophical problem of meaning to say that there are some 'ideas' in your mind. The fact that something is in your mind as opposed to behavior doesn't magically solve everything. It doesn't explain meaning (or rather, it doesn't tell you what meaning is), because if there is a puzzle about how mere words can represent something, there's equally a puzzle about how 'ideas' in someone's head can do the same thing. Thinking that the mind has some magical ability to simply 'mean' things is an illusion.

I already quoted some passages from Wittgenstein where he gives an argument (especially the sections about the cube picture) against views like yours, but you however completely ignored that argument. — Fafner

I have already stated that "meaning" is the causal relationship between causes and their effects. Minds, which are just sensory information processing systems, are able to establish associations with different experiences. Hearing a voice speak is no different than hearing the waves of the ocean. It's all just noise until you establish some link, or association, with some cause of hearing some thing. Once I hear and see the waves crash, or a person speak, then I'm able to establish to a connection between the sounds and what I see.

Tree rings in a tree stump mean the age of the tree, and this isn't the result of some magical property or illusion. The tree rings are the result of how the tree grows throughout the year. The tree rings are the effect of how the tree grows which is why tree rings mean the age of the tree and it would still mean the age of the tree if no one was there to look at the tree rings.

We all believe the world is how we see it, which is why "seeing is believing" is a common phrase. Seeing something makes us think that is how some thing actually is, or exists. We seem to instinctively think that the wave isn't the sound we hear, but the thing we see, and being that the sound occurs from the direction of the thing we see, we establish an association between the sound and the visual. This is the exact same way we learn language. This is why teachers show a word and a picture so students can easily associate the word with the thing - a visual thing. Because we are visual creatures, and receive most of our information visually, most of our words are visual terms.

I keep making the argument that every time you write or say anything you are simply making noises or referring to some state of affairs. No one has yet been able to prove otherwise. All they do is say it is irrelevant to "meaning is use", or that I don't know what I'm objecting too. All these things they say is still a reference to some state-of-affairs, not some use of words, and still don't seem to understand that they continue to prove my point, not theirs. What you and the others on your side seem to think is that is all there is to language - simply using words. But that just can't be because how is it that we lie and say things we don't mean? How is it that when you simply use words but don't refer to anything with them, your words become useless and meaningless?

How is it that when you simply use words but don't refer to anything with them, your words become useless and meaningless? — Harry Hindu

I don't understand what you mean by this. Perhaps you could explain the difference between saying to me "the cat is on the mat" and not referring to anything and saying to me "the cat is on the mat" and referring to something.

I've been in discussions with you before and when a point is made that shows how wrong you are, you question the validity of the statement being made. If words can be relevant or irrelevant, then there must be more to language than just using words.

If words can be relevant or irrelevant, then there must be more to language than just using words. — Harry Hindu

A handshake can be relevant or irrelevant, but there isn't anything more to it than its use.

Because? Is no one able to make arguments in this thread?

I don't understand what you mean by this. Perhaps you could explain the difference between saying to me "the cat is on the mat" and not referring to anything and saying "the cat is on the mat" and referring to something. — Michael

How is that NOT referring to anything? Are you not saying that there is an actual cat ON an actual mat? Is not your visual of a cat on a mat a visual of a cat on a mat, not a visual of scribbles on a screen and that is what the words on the screen refer to? That is the visual I got when reading your words. Your words were simply a temporary replacement for the visual of a cat on a mat in order for you to communicate that there was a cat on the mat. If I were there looking at the cat on the mat with you and you say that, wouldn't it be redundant? It is redundant because communicating is simply sharing information about some state-of-affairs, and if I already see the cat on the mat, saying so would just be a waste of breath.