All of that is external to chess itself, the play of which is perfectly settled, and has been for a long time.
Generally though, the analogy is not always used like this. Chess pieces are said to only be intelligible in terms of the other pieces, (the formalist mantra: "a thing is what it does") but chess itself sits off alone in analytical space as a self-contained entity. — Count Timothy von Icarus
I think the lens for looking at this probably depends on your questions. If your goal is an analysis of rules and games, it makes sense to think of them as discrete entities. — Count Timothy von Icarus
DKL includes tables in his domain. PVI does not. Both make use of the very same rule for quantifier introduction.DKL: “There exist tables”
PVI: “There do not exist tables”
The deflationist: “something is wrong with the debate” — p.3
An adequate explanation of "what quantifier variance is" would show the difference between at least two forms of quantifier. The quote says that there are two differing forms of quantifier, but does not say how they differ. — Banno
Elsewhere:
DKL: “There exist tables”
PVI: “There do not exist tables”
The deflationist: “something is wrong with the debate”
— p.3
DKL includes tables in his domain. PVI does not. Both make use of the very same rule for quantifier introduction.
No case has been presented for a variance in the quantifier introduction rules, as opposed to a variance in the domain. — Banno
intelligible — Count Timothy von Icarus
what do you believe our heroes are promoting? — fdrake
I'm not one of the people making these analogies, but I don't see any harm in distinguishing "how to play chess" from "why to play chess" or even from "why to play this game of chess this way." I can belabor the point if you'd like. — Srap Tasmaner
Edit: To clarify - in terms of other explanations that cannot be explained by "the human sensory system, psychology, neuronal structures/signaling, etc."
Now consider the different sorts of questions you might ask about what someone said, or the different sorts of explanations you might have to give in different circumstances. Some of them, particularly with children, are very much on the "how to play" level, some on the "how to play well" level, and others are past that, and amount to actually playing -- but again, only in accord with the sort of rules you yourself were taught as a child. (Or not. Rules change. And sometimes you help change them.)
To simply assume that a whole swath of discussions in philosophy must only arise from philosophers' "confusion," rather than real problems is not charitable. At its worst it's question begging. For example, to say that Przywara must be switching languages or domains with the analogia seems to be saying he is wrong in an important way, or even moreso, just refusing to take his thought the way it is intended. — Count Timothy von Icarus
For example, when Eriugena discusses his five modes of being, he clearly is intending one domain — Count Timothy von Icarus
This definition, at least taken in isolation, seems to avoid the issues above to some degree. "...either because there is no such notion of carving at the joints that applies to candidate meanings, or because there is such a notion and C is maximal with respect to it." It is more the bolded part that leads towards relativism, not different uses of "exists/subsists/etc." — Count Timothy von Icarus
The "is" of predication, identity, and existence are not separated out in the same way in this tradition. In part, this is because they were seen as deeply related. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Given the view that things just are their properties (which are relational), a not unpopular view in contemporary metaphysics, the the sum total of what can be predicated of a thing is its identity, or at least something very close to it. — Count Timothy von Icarus
In such a view, there is no Porphyryean tree that has infinite and finite being alongside each other. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Conceptual relativism on stilts. Which honestly I'm not absolutely against (unlike both Banno and @Leontiskos) but I'm unsympathetic with the whole approach and nothing I've read was at all persuasive. — Srap Tasmaner
The debates about univocity of being can apply between parties or within the thought of a single party, but quantifier variance occurs between two parties using two different notions of quantification. If the two parties have five different sub-quantifiers, and they agree on all of them, then quantifier variance is not occurring. ...All of this is also reminiscent of the duplex veritas debates of the Middle Ages.
What I would say is that the bolded part leads to a more thoroughgoing conceptual relativism, but the latter option is still a form of conceptual relativism. It's just that in the latter case both candidate meanings do a good job, and an equally good job, of carving at the joints.
My thinking was, if you assume QV, then when people who embrace those sorts of systems have disagreements, in a way, QV seems to assume that they are either wrong in their metaphysics or else not saying what they are saying. So the original example I thought of was comparing something like the classical Christian tradition to Shankara. In ways, the conception of infinite being is similar, but Shankara denies the existence of finite being, it being entirely maya—illusion. If QV is maintained by a third party, it seems like they can't take either of these claims in the way they are intended, which doesn't seem charitable. — Count Timothy von Icarus
It is to ignore the possibility that one person might be right and the other might be wrong about what they are intending to claim. This is another instance of the sort of relativism that Nagel generally opposes in The Last Word, for the legitimacy of the two philosophers' first-order arguments are precisely what is being dismissed when one thinks it could only be a conceptual or terminological dispute. Conceptual-or-terminological is a second-order reduction. — Leontiskos
I had a similar discussion with Joshs re truth being true withing a given metaphysics versus being true universally. It seems to me that if you tell a lot of people, "yes, what you're saying is true...but only in your context," you're actually telling them that what they think is false, because they don't think the truth is context dependent in this way. — Count Timothy von Icarus
I guess my intuition, which might very well be wrong, was that if they do an equally good job then there would be an morphism between them, and so it's pluralism of a limited type—perhaps the way some models for computation end up equivalent. — Count Timothy von Icarus
I'm not quite against conceptual relativism. You might recall my fascination with Midgley, who emphasises the difference between various conversations, ways of speaking, in her essays - her evisceration of the scientism of Dawkins, her defence of personal identity and free will and so on. I pointed to one form of relativism earlier in this thread, where a bowl of berries contains strawberries and blackberries at breakfast, but bananas and grapes in the botany class.Conceptual relativism on stilts. Which honestly I'm not absolutely against (unlike both Banno and @Leontiskos) but I'm unsympathetic with the whole approach and nothing I've read was at all persuasive. — Srap Tasmaner
Th thread should have finished there. Logic does not have ontological implications.I don't think quantifiers have much of anything to do with existence or being or any of that. — Srap Tasmaner
Well for one, an explanation of the words "dog" or "swimming," seems like it should require reference to dogs and water respectively, rather than just neurons. Explanations that draw a line around the brain seem to forget that brains do not work in isolation and do not produce consciousness in isolation. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Suppose the target language involves contradictions: a phenomenon all too common among anthropologists and that Evans-Pritchard faced when studying the Azande in Africa. The very idea of a proper translation would require one to preserve the inconsistencies when translating the target language into the home language. Otherwise, rather than translating the target discourse, one would be amending, correcting, and distorting it. — Quantifier Variance Dissolved
Logic does not have ontological implications.
I don't think many people arethat reductive.
I get the impression you won't disagree with what I say and maybe you have been just attacking this truncated version of use you briefly mentioned which is not intuitive to me.
To be fair, is this obvious? — Count Timothy von Icarus
Well, yes. First order predicate calculus does not render ontological conclusions.To be fair, is this obvious? — Count Timothy von Icarus
:grin:It is obviously false. — Leontiskos
The aversion to disagreement is a child of the aversion to wars, and "charity" is just a mask for "peace." — Leontiskos
I wouldn't say that logic is the last line of defense, but if we can't even avoid relativism when it comes to logic then we're probably too far gone. — Leontiskos
I shall be very happy if this book contributes to the wider diffusion of logical knowledge. The course of historical events has assembled in this country the most eminent representatives of contemporary logic, and has thus created here especially favorable conditions for the development of logical thought. These favorable conditions can, of course, be easily overbalanced by other and more powerful factors. It is obvious that the future of logic, as well as of all theoretical science, depends essentially upon normalizing the political and social relations of mankind, and thus upon a factor which is beyond the control of professional scholars. I have no illusions that the development of logical thought, in particular, will have a very essential effect upon the process of the normalization of human relationships; but I do believe that the wider diffusion of the knowledge of logic may contribute positively to the acceleration of this process. For, on the one hand, by making the meaning of concepts precise and uniform in its own field and by stressing the necessity of such a precision and uniformization in any other domain, logic leads to the possibility of better understanding between those who have the will to do so. And, on the other hand, by perfecting and sharpening the tools of thought, it makes men more critical--and thus makes less likely their being misled by all the pseudo-reasonings to which they are in various parts of the world incessantly exposed today.
Does any one else see this as a bad argument? @Count Timothy von Icarus? @Srap Tasmaner?if logic had no ontological implications then there could be no historical progression in logic vis-a-vis ontology, there could be no better or worse logics vis-a-vis ontology, — Leontiskos
I would say it is generally taking arguments in the strongest, most compelling sense possible. However, if one starts to think that the most compelling sense of the arguments is to take them as... — Count Timothy von Icarus
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