Do we know what it is for everything to be a convention? Does that include the people engaged in the instituting the convention? Does it include the fact of their agreeing to the convention? Hard to see how they could agree to agree without already agreeing, and without already existing. — Srap Tasmaner
But what's that supposed to mean? Are we granting that we are in fact organisms, entities of which it is permissible to posit behavior? If this too is only a matter of convention, then that's to say it's only a matter of our behavior (how we think and talk) that we are organisms that engage in a certain sort of behavior. How could such behavior be ours, how could it be behavior? — Srap Tasmaner
I'm mostly interested in what a realist theory of language might be. — Tom Storm
How Does Language Map onto the World? — Tom Storm
This is kind if a misuse of the original intention of this kind of terminology.
To talk of ‘intersubjectivity’ in relation to ‘reality’ is kind of a contradiction if one understands the intent of phenomenology. — I like sushi
Language does not always map on to the world.
In addition to statements and assertions, there are questions and commands and exhibitions. In addition to narratives there are policies and instructions and poems and nonsense. This by way of noting that "mapping on to the world" is only part of what we can do with words.
But sometimes we say things that are true. To call that a "mapping" might be to adopt too referential a theory of the way language works - the credulous, overly simple view that all words are analysable as nouns.
Sometimes we say things that are true. That's pretty much what realism claims. Denying that sometimes we say things that are true strikes me as a verbal form of self-evisceration. — Banno
If Dawson's target is more political and social than methodological, then the outcome is Putin and Trump and Johnson, and in Australia Scotty from Marketing and Mr Potato Head. In denying that there is any truth, he gives such turds permission to say and do whatever they like. — Banno
Lawson definitely argues there are better and worse positions to take in terms of social policy and government. — Tom Storm
Well, on what I have read Lawson asserts this, but without argument. Have you seen something with a bit more substance? — Banno
I hear you and thanks for your responses. Lawson definitely argues there are better and worse positions to take in terms of social policy and government. He is committed to reducing suffering. But like a number of post-modern thinkers, he seems to be straddling a fine line. Rorty too argued that truth was chimera and yet he affirmed very strong reformist left politics. I think there's a thread of its own on how they do this. In Rorty's words, certain approaches are better for certain purposes. I am interested in his foundational justification for this and haven't read enough to know how it works. How can a criterion of value emerge from all pervasive devaluation? — Tom Storm
I have read a number of interviews and papers on line — Tom Storm
...it might be worth looking at the phenomenological approach maybe? Especially when talking about our experience, knowledge and perceptions of the world in context of individual perspectives. — I like sushi
You can get around this by bootstrapping the convention non-conventionally, and that means granting that not everything is conventional. — Srap Tasmaner
The first should be "Useful for whom?" — Banno
Do you believe it or do you doubt it? How are you going to proceed here so as to minimise your uncertainty? — apokrisis
Habits — apokrisis
Lawson holds that, Wittgenstein abandoned metaphysics as a direct consequence of his having concluded in the Tractatus that a realist theory of language was not possible because it falls to the self-referential paradox that it is unable to give an account of itself.
Is this problem insurmountable or overstated? — Tom Storm
I don't have a wonderful alternative, but I'm not comfortable with this sort of "reality is whatever we agree it is." I get the impulse, and I think there's a kernel of truth there, but I also think that kind of formulation is probably incoherent. — Srap Tasmaner
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