...why should the laws of causality... hold true either? — schopenhauer1
By way of background, I'm pointing to the issue of definite descriptions, claiming that the arguments to the effects that one does not need a definite description in order for reference to function are pretty convincing. — Banno
I don't have much background in Aristotle, but suspect that logic has come some way since his time. — Banno
Russell was puzzling over how sentences such as "The King of France is bald" are to be understood. "The King of France" doesn't refer to anything; so how are we to make sense of the sentence? Is it false, or is it nonsense? Russell made sense of them with some rather clever logic. — Banno
Sure, he has a description. That description fails to pick Thales from all the other men who lived a long time ago. So I don't see how it helps choose between them, in such a way that the student is talking about Thales... which I had taken to be the point of having a description handy. — Banno
By way of background, I'm pointing to the issue of definite descriptions, claiming that the arguments to the effects that one does not need a definite description in order for reference to function are pretty convincing. — Banno
But if we do not need definite descriptions in order for proper names to work... — Banno
Further, you seem now to be saying that we can know which object is being identified from any description, and not just a definite description, which I find quite enigmatic. As if "The fish nearest to Corinth" were adequate to give the essence of Thales. — Banno
So I find a lot of these debates about reference come about because of oddly sticking to this idea of language pointing out individual entities. It is seen in Russell's On Denoting (there exists a unique x such that x is...). It seems to be in early Wittgenstein. I don't get why this emphasis on having to pick out a unique set of properties in an individual and it not just being a class (like it seems Donnellan allows for in attributive notions of reference). Can it just be that this is just debates on wrong initial premises causing confusion? Is there good reason Russell made this move to care for picking out individuals in the world? Is there reason to keep correcting this if that assumption is not even a good basis for names to begin with? — schopenhauer1
More generally, this whole line seems related to modern philosophy's obsession with what I would want to call infallibility. "But how do we know that we are correct?" "But how do we know that a description is truly definite, or that a name truly designates uniquely?" The simple answer is that we don't. At least not with the certainty and precision that modern philosophy seeks. — Leontiskos
I'd also like to posit that logicism and language approaches to solving epistemic and ontological problems do not seem to be a fruitful way of going about it. I think Russell and other early analytics (Meinong, Frege, etc.) ran into trouble because they tried to limit themselves to what can be said via symbolic logic, and lost the forest for the trees. — schopenhauer1
I should begin by saying that it has been some years since I have worked extensively with Aristotle's primary texts, so a strict Aristotelian may quibble with me on this point or that. Still, I think I will give an accurate account. — Leontiskos
An essence is what something is in virtue of itself, and the definition describes the essence. It will also be useful to note that for Aristotle the standard beings are substances: things which exist of themselves and which possess their own mode of being and acting. So hammering would be an act of a substance, in particular an act of a human substance. — Leontiskos
A hammer is an artifact, not a substance, but be that as it may, we still need to understand what a hammer is before we use it. For Aristotle definition is not restricted to a means by which one shares knowledge. To understand what something is is to have its definition, and to have partial knowledge about what something is is to have a nominal or partial definition.
So when you approach a hammer for the purpose of manipulation you have already formed a partial definition of it. It is a physical object (which can be manipulated physically). It is graspable by the hand. It possesses a kind of leverage. It has a hard head which can be used to hit things without incurring damage. All of this is part of the definition, and is already implicit in one who manipulates a hammer. For Aristotle it wouldn't make much sense to say that you manipulate a hammer without some understanding of what it is. — Leontiskos
Is it possible to act without knowing? — Moliere
What, now?There exists a non-existent class (present King of France)... — schopenhauer1
We understand what "present King of France" means... so there might have been a present King of France. That there isn't one does not mean that one could not even exist....for which no referent or predicate can even exist. — schopenhauer1
This could have been written as a summary of the difference between the Tractatus and the Investigations.Logic is a system devised within language, and not how it is naturally used. Thus, when using it to define language, it is a category error, and it's not even worth doing because it never was meant to fit in the first place. — schopenhauer1
Sometimes names do not work. But sometimes they do. Your conclusion that names do not work is odd. I gather I must be misunderstanding your point here. — Banno
The idea is apparently that description is insufficient to account for naming because names are capable of picking out a unique referent whereas descriptions are not. — Leontiskos
I remain unsure of what sort of thing you think an essence is. — Banno
You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot. — Matthew 5:13
Sure, the class of present kings of France is empty, but it can't both exist and not exist. Indeed, attributing existence to a class is itself problematic - what could it mean, except that the class is either empty or not? — Banno
This could have been written as a summary of the difference between the Tractatus and the Investigations. — Banno
Logic is a useful tool for showing up confusions, as above. — Banno
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descriptions/#MotForRusTheDesI don’t get why Russell structured his logic such that a non existent referent makes the statement false and not vacuously true. — schopenhauer1
Well, one ought be willing to accept the consequences of the structure you propose. So accepting a contradiction leads to explosion, which is not very helpful.you can break up and build up the world in any symbolic way you want! — schopenhauer1
When studying language, one could heed Wittgenstein's suggestion to delve into the anthropological route. — schopenhauer1
The Donnellan arguments show that a name may work even when the associated description fails.
And that it follows that the name's referring is not dependent on the description. — Banno
But it is absurd to speak of any name at all without a nominal essence; if a name can be without a nominal essence, there can be no right or wrong about its repeated use. — Elizabeth Anscombe, On Russell's Theory of Descriptions
In this passage Locke shows that he supposes it to be understandable what individuals are called Wewena, Chuckery and Cousheda without its yet being determined whether these are proper names of men or what. To point and say ‘That is Wewena—and I mean that “Wewena” is the proper name of that’ should prompt the question ‘That what is Wewena?’ Or, what comes to the same thing: ‘And how am I to go on using the name Wewena?’ Locke writes as if an intelligible reply would be ‘so long as it is the same individual’. And hence the question which often concerns philosophers: ‘What is an individual? What is a particular?’
That a word is a proper name is some information as to its meaning: it means that it has a very special kind of use; this is parallel to the information that a word is the name of a colour. The further enquiry ‘What kind of thing is it a proper name of?’ should elicit an answer such as ‘a city’, ‘a river’, ‘a man’, ‘a trumpet’, which we may reasonably say gives the full meaning, or connotation of the word. Thus Mill would have been nearer the truth if he had said that proper names have both denotation and connotation, but predicates only connotation. A small boy gave a moving spot of light that appeared in his room the proper name ‘Tommy Noddy’. Locke writes as if one could know what individual Tommy Noddy was without knowing that this was the proper name of a spot of light. To see the mistake in this, imagine that someone who had grasped that ‘Tommy Noddy’ was a proper name, asked to have Tommy Noddy pointed out to him. The child points to Tommy Noddy at a time when the spot of light is on a human being.
That is to say, with every proper name there is associated a predicate x, such that when a proper name is assigned to an x, the proper name is rightly used for the future to name the same x. The information ‘Tommy Noddy is the name of a spot of light’ thus gives the sense (meaning, connotation) of the proper name. . . — Elizabeth Anscombe, On Russell's Theory of Descriptions
that [Russell] is wrong in that conception of ‘logically proper names’ which demands the existence of a logically guaranteed bearer for every real proper name; — Elizabeth Anscombe, On Russell's Theory of Descriptions
I fear the correct reply to this may seem to muddy the clear waters of logic; but that may be an illusion, and at any rate I have no doubt it is correct. We should distinguish between a formal and a real assignment of a proper name. The assignment is formal when it is simply an assignment to a bound variable in the narrative. King Arthur is a character of uncertain historicity: thus ‘There was a man—and only one—who was King in Britain such that the stories of the Arthurian cycle derive from or are embroideries on stories about him’ may be true, but it is not certain; and the assignment of the proper name is a formal assignment to the variable in ‘an x such that x was a man who was King etc’. (In ordinary language the bound variable is represented by ‘who’, ‘which’ and the personal pronouns when they have e.g. ‘someone’, ‘anything’, ‘no one’ as antecedents.) But when such narratives are (a) certain, (b) secondary to the use of the proper name itself, as in ‘There was a man called Churchill who was Prime Minister in England for the greater part of the Second World War’, then the assignment of the proper name is real and not formal and is prior to the existential narrative. An historical assignment can be real and not formal when we have the proper name by tradition from those who used it of its bearer.
Where the assignment, necessary for an ostensible proper name to be a real one, is real, then the proposition containing that proper name (or any sub-clause containing that proper name) is a genuine predication and is true or false if the predication makes sense for φs, where φ is the identifying predicate associated with the proper name. Where the assignment is pretended or clearly only formal, then there is no genuine predication (except within the scope of the existential quantifier) and no proposition either true or false. When the assignment is neither pretended nor real we can say that we do not know if a genuine predication has been made; and that an analysis of the proposition will show the relevant formal assignment. — Elizabeth Anscombe, On Russell's Theory of Descriptions
The role of this history leading up to a present use of a name has almost always been neglected by those who accept the principle of identifying descriptions. The sort of description generally mentioned as helping to pick out, say, Thales, is such as 'the Greek philosopher who held that all is water'. Nothing is made of the fact that such descriptions are given by us derivatively. We might be pardoned if we supposed that the referent of 'Thales' is whatever ancient Greek happens to fit such descriptions uniquely, even if he should turn out to have been a hermit living so re- motely that he and hisdoctrines have no historical connection with us at all.
But this seems clearly wrong. Suppose that Aristotle and Herodotus were either making up the story or were referring to someone who neither did the things they said he did nor held the doctrines they attributed to him. Suppose further, however, that fortuitously their descriptions fitted uniquely someone they had never heard about and who was not referred to by any authors known to us. Such a person, even if he was the only ancient to hold that all is water, to fall in a well while contemplating the stars, etc., is not 'our' Thales. — pp. 352-3
To a large extent it was to sort out ambiguities of scope. If anything, the situation is more complex than Russell supposed, but we've benefited from his drawing attention to it. — Banno
Analytic thinking is not monolithic. The detail here is considerable, and the gloss you give above is far from accurate....If everything that is true has to exist... — schopenhauer1
Analytic thinking is not monolithic. The detail here is considerable, and the gloss you give above is far from accurate. — Banno
If your point is that Russell's descriptive account is problematic, then we agree. — Banno
The converse of the issue you describe is presumably that folk such as Kant and Schopenhauer are perhaps too quick to develop a "full-fledged construction of metaphysical theory" without due attention consistency. — Banno
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