It's quite painfully simple.

Someone says "the cat is on the mat"

You respond that positions like "the cat is on the mat" are part of a modern trend of seeing cats as being located on mats, but in the past people used to think of cats as being more likely on armchairs.

The question being asked is how such a response has any relation to the question of where the cat is.

I never said all historical arguments can be justified in this way, and certainly not that they're all good. You can use any method to make bad arguments. I said they make sense in certain contexts.

I'm not going to defend the idea that "people used to believe x," is itself an argument, although it might be interesting and tangentially related to an argument. But that hardly means all arguments from history lack weight or relevance unless you invoke some sort of overarching project vis-á-vis the history of ideas.

Use the frequentism example. You can't just "argue on the merits of Bayesianism or propensity," if your interloceturs are firmly entrenched dogmatists who keep saying "but look, frequency IS probability just like a triangle is a three sided shape. It's what the word means, it's an analytical truth." Something has to be done to address the foundations of the dogma. This is particularly true for ethics, where, for example, it used to be the norm to support nonvoluntary, painful medical treatment to "cure" homosexuality. You'll note that people often refer back to earlier treatment of homosexuals when addressing contemporary issues with transgender individuals because it makes for a good argument from analogy as well (another reason to bring up history.) People have a very hard time seeing past their dogma, that is the nature of dogmatists, but a trip through history can show how the seemingly necessary (e.g. probability defined as frequency) is actually contingent.

No doubt it also helps for emotional appeal that the main champions of frequentism as dogma were eugenicists; it's logos and pathos and ethos after all.

Or take: "n/0 has to be undefined or else bad things will happen." This could be met with "no, n/0= ∞, x, y, and z genius polymath agreed. But more importantly, people did math fine all the time back then despite the problems you listed, so clearly it isn't the problem you say it is. DAX and other popular data analysis languages use n/0 = ∞ for legit reasons. Take the limit of 1/0.000000...01 and tell me what it is!"

I'm not going to defend the position that n=∞, but obviously there is a pragmatic argument that can be bolstered by the history of making division by zero undefined, because it shows that the problems being fixed don't really affect many applied uses for arithmetic anyhow, and even that n/0 = ∞ was better for some applied use cases.

You respond that positions like "the cat is on the mat" are part of a modern trend of seeing cats as being located on mats, but in the past people used to think of cats as being more likely on armchairs. — Isaac

Also @Wayfarer

I think there is a place for this kind of argument, as a proxy for a much longer essay. I'm just gonna go hard on it to the point of self parody:

The birth of analytic metaphysics placed the meaning of words and their correspondence to the state of things as the essential character of the relationship between thought and being, or action and environment. The problems of metaphysics thus become articulated in terms of the connection between language items and world items. This means their discussion takes its cues from analysing the privileged relation between statements and the world; through the analysis of statements' truth conditions, and what impact ascribing truth to a sentence would have on the sentence's semantic content.

Thus the canonical examples of statements in these problematics; "the cat is on the mat", "the cup is red"; force the adoption of a perspective where factual disputes of the nature of things must accord to the analysis of representative statements whose truth conditions mirror (or fail to mirror) the environmental activities they are articulated in conjunction with.

In that regard, pointing out a mere factual dispute between whether "the cat is on the mat" is true or false constraints the problematics surrounding the relationship of thought and being to orbit around the intuition that the two naturally mirror each other, and that the true order of things is to be found in the form attempts to state the truth take. Rather than the gulf between thing and semantic content.

Thus focussing upon whether the cat is on the mat, as a paradigmatic example of the form of truth seeking dispute, brings with it a set of assumptions that render alternative problematics of the connection between thought and being next to impossible. They cannot be justified in the tacitly demanded terms.

...

And at that point there's just too much. So I do think there's some room for this argument style as an attempt to continually upend the chess board, if you're inclined to do that.

You can't just "argue on the merits of Bayesianism or propensity," if your interloceturs are firmly entrenched dogmatists who keep saying "but look, frequency IS probability just like a triangle is a three sided shape. It's what the word means, it's an analytical truth." Something has to be done to address the foundations of the dogma. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You can't argue anything if your opponents are 'firmly entrenched dogmatists'. I suspect they would disagree and therein lies the problem. As such, I'd say something needs to be brought to bear to demonstrate that (to their resigned satisfaction), and I still don't see how any potted history of the idea is going to do that. That the word used to mean something else doesn't have any bearing on any current claim to its meaning being an analytic truth. It's a good argument against analytic truths in general (one I'd be happy to go along with), but you've not made the case in favour of historical analysis being an appropriate tool to demonstrate the weakness of such a definitional approach.

You'll note that people often refer back to earlier treatment of homosexuals when addressing contemporary issues with transgender individuals because it makes for a good argument from analogy as well (another reason to bring up history.) — Count Timothy von Icarus

Again, it makes an argument from analogy. I fail to see how it makes a good one; other than by it coming to a conclusion you already happen to prefer. As a step in a rational argument it doesn't seem to contain any data. "They used to do that with homosexuals" is an empty argument without your interlocutor already agreeing that homosexuals and trans people share the same status... and if they agreed on that, there'd be no argument in the first place. You couldn't argue against the incarceration of child molesters by saying "they used to do that to heretics". It was wrong to do it to heretics, it's right to do it to child molesters. The argument is in the case, not the history.

a trip through history can show how the seemingly necessary (e.g. probability defined as frequency) is actually contingent. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Can it? Or does it just seem to you to show that in cases you already believe? You may well gain some vainglorious satisfaction from the obvious righteousness of such an insight, but I suspect your 'dogmatist' interlocutors would simply say that previous uses were simply wrong, after all, people sometimes are. The argument that they weren't is the important bit, not the mere past occurrence.

people did math fine all the time back then despite the problems you listed, so clearly it isn't the problem you say it is. DAX and other popular data analysis languages use n/0 = ∞ for legit reasons. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Again, the quality of this argument depends entirely on the fact that these other languages work, not that they tried. They may have worked in history, work contemporaneously, or work hypothetically. It's the working that matters not the place held on the timeline of ideas.

It is not...

the history of making division by zero undefined — Count Timothy von Icarus

...that matters here. It's the success. That might be historical, contemporaneous, or hypothetical (with a good argument); the demonstration required for rational argument is of it actually working, not of it having been once thought to work.



It seems you're only looking at history through the lens of one who already agrees with the points you want to make. From that perspective, of course history looks like it supports your position, it's confirmation bias, not compelling argument.

Thus the canonical examples of statements in these problematics; "the cat is on the mat", "the cup is red"; force the adoption of a perspective where factual disputes of the nature of things must accord to the analysis of representative statements whose truth conditions mirror (or fail to mirror) the environmental activities they are articulated in conjunction with. — fdrake

That's fair. I haven't helped matters by picking the most analytical proposition out there.

Let's say instead that the proposition in question were something more like, say, enactivism in psychology. I'm still not sure that switch renders the case any differently. It still seems that saying "enactivism is part of a recent trend and people used to be more reductionist" carries no weight as a rational argument against it. Whether analytical or not, merely pointing out that a position is currently in favour or has recently lost favour doesn't seem to have any bearing on the argument itself, but does seem worryingly like a veiled insult (as I said, it's as if the argument is 'you only believe that because it's fashionable', or 'you're behind the times')

But maybe I'm still missing something. Does your counter still work against my example of something less sharply analytic?

Am I being clear enough? — Srap Tasmaner


Answer: definitely not, but don't go to any further trouble. — Wayfarer

In for a penny, in for a pound...

A: We should take the car.
B: Train.
A: Why should we take the train?
B: Trains have been carrying passengers traveling for both work and for pleasure since the mid-19th century. They were once the primary form of transportation, but with the advent of gas-powered automobiles in the early 20th century and the modern highway system, particularly in the wake of the Second World War, they were largely displaced by cars, buses, and trucks.

You're doing @Joshs not @Wayfarer, and they're actually quite different.

It's quite painfully simple. — Isaac

Yes it is. I understand that most argument in philosophy is informal. I understand that inferential connections are sometimes implicit, even here, although here most people understand that's a problem, and explicit is better. I'm not only open-minded about these things, I actually like informal reasoning, so it's not like I'm demanding two-column proofs.

On the other hand, even informal arguments have a form and a content. Many faulty patterns of informal argument have acquired names we toss around (ad hominem, argument from authority, strawman, blah blah blah). Not really my thing, but it indicates that the difference between the form and the content of even informal arguments is widely recognized here, even though one could raise objections to that idea or at least muddy the waters considerably, if one so chose.

@Wayfarer my question to you in this thread was always and only about the form of argument you were employing, not the content of those arguments. Whether Peirce is an idealist is irrelevant to the specific question I raised.

My very first words even set out the form as a schema, with Xs and Ys and everything, and gave it a name, without committing to it being an informal fallacy.

Why didn't I just accuse you of committing an informal fallacy?

Because I recognized that you probably see what you post differently, that you probably perceive an argument in such posts that I do not, only you left it implicit without realizing that you had -- it happens to all of us, failing to connect the dots, even though they are clearly connected in our minds -- so I thought you might be able to explain how these little historical essays you post are not just non-sequiturs.

And because it occurred to me that there was an interesting larger issue here which members probably have quite different views on. (That turned out to be partially wrong because almost everyone was "Yay for history!")

And because I'm tired of playing the forum's logic cop. It's my own damned fault: no one appointed me to that post and no one wants me to do it. It narrows my thinking in a way that I have grown very weary of, but I need to be convinced there's a good alternative. I have no stomach for what @apokrisis called "talk that is free", philosophy as belles lettres. It's just not me, much as I'd like it to be sometimes. I thought this thread might be an opportunity to explore some alternatives. I think @Count Timothy von Icarus attempted something like that, but the social dimensions of discussion are not new territory for me. I was really hoping for something like a revaluation of all argumentation values. @Isaac's got one of those, but while I've come almost entirely around to his point-of-view on many things, I'm still looking for something a little different.

I like it. — wonderer1

Thanks!

A: We should take the car.
B: Train.
A: Why should we take the train?
B: Trains have been carrying passengers traveling for both work and for pleasure since the mid-19th century. They were once the primary form of transportation, but with the advent of gas-powered automobiles in the early 20th century and the modern highway system, particularly in the wake of the Second World War, they were largely displaced by cars, buses, and trucks. — Srap Tasmaner

:up:

'Because trains are cool.'
Perhaps there's also a tacit assumption of a narrative of the forgetting or repression of...

It's a requirement for me that the approach I end up with is science-friendly. Narrative and metaphor have some traction, because you can do actual research on these things. But what Derrida did is adapt models drawn from Marxism and psychoanalysis, and those just aren't science. What you end up with is a free-for-all.

And because I'm tired of playing the forum's logic cop. It's my own damned fault: no one appointed me to that post and no one wants me to do it. — Srap Tasmaner

Hasty generalization!!! I want you to do it. :razz:

I see what you did there.

I expected a couple "The hell you are"s and maybe a "Get off your high horse," but not this treachery.

:lol:

even informal arguments have a form and a content. Many faulty patterns of informal argument have acquired names we toss around (ad hominem, argument from authority, strawman, blah blah blah). — Srap Tasmaner

This is also where I am at. Discourse is a game of sorts (not implying a lack of seriousness though), and like any game it has rules. The rules here are, like Ramsey's habits, not arbitrary, they seem to work [political] albeit to an increasingly lesser extent these days [/political]. You cried 'foul' on a move and that's a fair part of the game (I know you were much more charitable even than that, but I'll happily take that position myself). One of the great things about this game is that even the rules can be discussed, and that's what this thread's for. Far from the ref's decision being final, @Wayfarer gets to make his case.

But we can't even have discourse if there aren't any rules. It's a social enterprise. Without rules we have a noticeboard and a series of private blogs, not a discussion forum; and I'll happily stick my neck out and say one of those rules has to be that the response needs to modify the proposal in some way (lend it more support, make it more suspect, expose flaws, shore it up, link it up...) It has to do something to it, otherwise all we have is a soapbox.

Of course, the psychologist in me wants to say that very few people ever actually play this game, but rather use its general form to play a much more earnest game of power and group dynamics. That's why the rules are so often broken. It's not that they're unclear, or disputed. It's that they sometimes don't serve the actual purpose. Despite its great potential, much of language hasn't moved beyond birdsong.

But this isn't a psychology forum...

I agree with all of that, but would like an approach that doesn't require switching hats. Maybe that's a mistake, and being self-consciously multidisciplinary is the best way to get what I want.

A lot of this intellectual soul-searching comes from realizing I have been on the wrong side of arguments with you and @Joshs, in particular by defending the border between philosophy and science. I'm writing from the middle of a paradigm shift, so that's a mess, and it makes me resentful of returning to old habits of analysis. I think the points I want to make are more or less okay, but I only have the old way of putting them, and I no longer find that satisfactory.

It's a requirement for me that the approach I end up with is science-friendly. — Srap Tasmaner

I relate, but I also like to see this heroic identification with science from the outside, as part of the performance of that heroic role. Is it a form of asceticism, an epistemological veganism?

I sometimes think we tend to kneel beneath the god of engineering. It's not so much careful reasoning that convinces but naked power. I like the countercultural edge of philosophy (it's way too easy to side with the machines) and tend to respect the scientific status of someone like Husserl.

I'd also suggest that Freud and Marx were sometimes scientific. Popper is great, but his own status is akin to that of Freud and Marx as another instance of radical thinking about thinking (emphasis on the root metaphor.) 'Science' functions politically as a marker of authority and contact with the Real. Philosophy of science, articulating/determining this elevated species essence, is like theology (ultimately political too). As I see it, we are never done clarifying / inventing the concept of the rational / scientific. As a little mortal creature of my age, I have to trust experts like anyone. I'm biased toward those who can do math, those who measure, etc. So I get it. But theory makes observation possible, and even math depends on metaphor.

↪fdrake You're doing Joshs not @Wayfarer, and they're actually quite different. — Srap Tasmaner

Aw. What did I get wrong?

Is it a form of asceticism, an epistemological veganism? — plaque flag

My third time posting this! Enjoy.

My taste is for keeping open house for all sorts of conditions of entities, just so long as when they come in they help with the housework. Provided that I can see them work, and provided that they are not detected in illicit logical behaviour (within which I do not include a certain degree of indeterminacy, not even of numerical indeterminacy), I do not find them queer or mysterious at all…. To fangle a new ontological Marxism, they work therefore they exist, even though only some, perhaps those who come on the recommendation of some form of transcendental argument, may qualify for the specially favoured status of entia realissima. To exclude honest working entities seems to me like metaphysical snobbery, a reluctance to be seen in the company of any but the best objects. — Paul Grice

I won't say that institutional science doesn't have its shortcomings and its blindspots, but that's just the nature of institutions. Science itself is not some close-minded affair, but the best way we know of overcoming closed-mindedness. That's what I want to stay connected to.

What did I get wrong? — fdrake

I could answer but I've already gone way over the line discussing the posting styles of members here. I allowed myself to start this thread for the wider issues it might raise and never intended to get into a back and forth about how people write. I had my reasons for giving in and doing just that, but no more.

I could answer but I've already gone way over the line discussing the posting styles of members here. I allowed myself to start this thread for the wider issues it might raise and never intended to get into a back and forth about how people write. I had my reasons for giving in and doing just that, but no more. — Srap Tasmaner

Good call!

Science itself is not some close-minded affair, but the best way we know of overcoming closed-mindedness. That's what I want to stay connected to. — Srap Tasmaner

:up:

I think 'philosophy' also works. Or really it's the idea of open-mindedness itself, right ? A metaphor too. Open, permeable, inclusive, ...

I won't say that institutional science doesn't have its shortcomings and its blindspots, but that's just the nature of institutions. Science itself is not some close-minded affair, but the best way we know of overcoming closed-mindedness. — Srap Tasmaner

An intellectual institution must be large enough to contain its contradictions … because dialectics. :razz:

I think 'philosophy' also works. — plaque flag

Philosophy's a big tent, so it gives the impression of open-mindedness. But it's a fact that the practice of philosophy does not much resemble the practice of science. There are handful of famous (to maybe a hundred people) changes of mind (half of those are Hilary Putnam), but otherwise?

I'm not dumb enough to think scientists come in to work, grab a cup of coffee and check the reports of last night's observations so they know which theory deserves their credence today. It's slow. But revision large and small is built into the enterprise. Over in philosophy, the revision we see has the character of an arms race. --- I meet your objection through a small adjustment to my theory; you raise a new objection, and I make a new adjustment. Whole different deal.

Watched an episode of Nova the other night about the footprints at White Sands. Cool stuff, but how old? Most were guessing 12-13,000 years because the oldest Clovis site dates to 15,000. Results of carbon-dating: 23,000 years. There will be debate, and some new tests to replicate the date, but eventually everyone will agree to reshuffle our understanding of the populating of the Americas. Nothing like this is even conceivable in philosophy.

But it's a fact that the practice of philosophy does not much resemble the practice of science. — Srap Tasmaner

An understatement of impressive magnitude.

There will be debate, and some new tests to replicate the date, but eventually everyone will agree to reshuffle our understanding of the populating of the Americas. Nothing like this is even conceivable in philosophy. — Srap Tasmaner

Scientists seek truth, while philosophers argue the definition of truth. Interesting interplay.

A: We should take the car.
B: Train.
A: Why should we take the train? — Srap Tasmaner

You don't make any point by trivialising the argument. The issues at stake are considerably more subtle, and more significant, but I won't try to explain them again.

I sometimes think we tend to kneel beneath the god of engineering. — plaque flag

Only sometimes? :lol:

The birth of analytic metaphysics placed the meaning of words and their correspondence to the state of things as the essential character of the relationship between thought and being, or action and environment. The problems of metaphysics thus become articulated in terms of the connection between language items and world items. ...

Thus focussing upon whether the cat is on the mat, as a paradigmatic example of the form of truth seeking dispute, brings with it a set of assumptions that render alternative problematics of the connection between thought and being next to impossible. They cannot be justified in the tacitly demanded terms. — fdrake

:100: I say this is because the 'illusion of otherness' is a deep but unstated premise in post-Enlightenment philosophy, arising with the ascendancy of individualism. Natural philosophy, in that context, acts with the implicit presumption of the division of subject and object - hence the emphasis on objectivity and replicability as the sole criteria, assuming a correspondence theory of truth. The profound underlying difficulty is, however, that we're not actually outside of, or separate to, reality, as such - an awareness which is found throughout phenomenology and existentialism (not to mention non-dualism) but rarely, it seems to me, in Anglo philosophy.

Natural philosophy, in that context, acts with the implicit presumption of the division of subject and object - hence the emphasis on objectivity and replicability as the sole criteria, assuming a correspondence theory of truth. — Wayfarer

But this is more “bad history”. Pragmatism arrives at a theory of truth based on the usefulness of a way of looking at the world. It finesses the dilemma of the epistemic cut by saying that it is the feature and not the bug.

Science took off when Newton threw up his hands and proclaimed “I feign no hypothesis”. The idea of gravity as action at a distance made no sense. Descartes battled on with the “realism” of aether type theories of jostling corpuscles. Newton moved forward by leaving the metaphysics a blank because the equations worked.

This was a key psychological moment. But of course science still found metaphysics necessary. It came back to try to fill in the blank. The latest go is gravity as an entropic force. However it did make a break that allowed science to understand its truth-making in terms of pragmatic modelling.

All this is relevant history that ought to change your position here. I point this out because the problem is not the application of history to philosophical argument. It is the pushing of narrow views of that history.

Of course one can always point to “Scientism” that butchers intellectual history by telling the story from its winner’s point of view. And that creates the losers who identify as “other” in their memory of what had happened.

But even history is an institutional discipline that evolves its habits of truth telling. To give an accurate historical account of Peirce - as a juicy example - would involve a heck of a lot more genuine engagement in the “history of ideas”.

But this is more “bad history”. — apokrisis

I don't agree. This sense of the division of self-and-other, the Galilean division of primary and secondary attributes, the Cartesian division of mind and matter - these are huge influences in today's culture and commentary on them is voluminous. It is not bad history, it's simply history.

the problem is not the application of history to philosophical argument. — apokrisis

You're quite right. The problem is the attempt to apply scientific criteria to philosophical problems.

Well said. I should probably clarify. When I talk about philosophy, I'm thinking of 'Shakespeare' -- something that ruthlessly transcends but also includes academia. Socrates earned himself a drink of hemlock. I definitely want to include thoughtcrime, 'inadmissible' views. I don't mean that I want to approve of them all. I mean that I want philosophy to be that radical of a concept. I don't like the idea of it being the pet of respectable people or limited to (shine of the crawls, sin of the cause, sign of the gross) what one can say on campuses.

The idea of radical thinking is (I claim) 'possibility rather than substance' -- a necessarily vague intention leading to unpredictable results, an identity crisis that drags a partially constraining history behind it. Socrates was a corruptor of the youth. At least I prefer him as that kind of unsentimentalized and undecidable figure -- foolosophy as pharmakon, as poisoncure poured in the porches of my near.

The consensus achievable in 'science proper' is beautiful. I was unwordly enough to go to grad school for pure math myself (not exactly science but). Lately I'm studying Joyce. Ulysses is not not science ! More seriously, I personally prefer a broader conception of what knowledge is and how it's obtained and communicated. Is there knowledge in music? In visual art ? If not, that'd be logocentrism -- a term that of course preceded Derrida. It's not automatic of course that logocentrism is bad, and it'd be questionable to argue such a point. It's more about pointing out a horizon, gesturing toward the vastness of the space of possibility. [But I'm incapable of believing in ghosts, however fun it looks. So there's that. ]

but rarely, it seems to me, in Anglo philosophy. — Wayfarer

Aye.

It amuses me that we agree on that but for completely opposite reasons. Ah well. Another time!

Only sometimes? — Wayfarer

Yes, only sometimes. But often!

You don't make any point by trivialising the argument — Wayfarer

I make a point about the form of the argument.

The issues at stake are considerably more subtle, and more significant, but I won't try to explain them again. — Wayfarer

Ansel Adams had a young photographer friend, and once a year they'd get together to talk (and maybe drink, I don't know), and the young photographer would bring a stack of prints with him. Adams would go through them, giving his feedback, and sorting them into 'yes' and 'no' piles. One time, he stopped and said, "Every year you bring this one, and every year I put it in the no pile. Why do you keep bringing it back?" Answer: "If you could see the climb I had to do to get that shot --" "Doesn't matter how hard it was to take the picture," responded Adams. "It's still a lousy shot."

Doesn't matter how subtle or significant the issues are, you've still got to follow Grice's maxims, and you've still got to connect one point to another, just as you would arguing about where to eat.

I'm open to being convinced there's another approach available, but I'll tell you what's not going to work for me, that it just comes down to choosing sides. You write as if you're rooting for your team, and it's always a good time to make any point that supports your 'side', whether it's directly responsive to anything, whether it's even connected to the last point you yourself made. I don't call that dialogue but cheerleading.