Yes, of course you're right. It's just that that it isn't like the resemblances between one dog and another, but between a dog and a sculpture of it. We wouldn't confuse a fossil with a living member of the species, would we?
Family resemblance isn't intended as a basis for biological theorizing. The notion of family resemblances is not intended to do any intellectual work for a biologist.
The "oh, now I get it, moment" you mention is definitely included as part of enacting or demonstrating understanding, and I have many times had that kind of thing in mind when thinking about it.
The idea is not to resolve indeterminacy. The idea is that we enact appropriate behaviors even when a characterization of them is simultaneously indeterminate in principle. Social interaction doesn't make rules less indeterminate. We learn how to act appropriately by interacting with our environment, including the appropriate use of words when we interact socially, para-socially or whatever.
It would be vacuous for a biologist to say "all life shares a family resemblance," and to stop there. Whatever "all life," is it must surely have some sort of resemblance to be deemed "all life" in the first place. What biologists do in reality is posit a constellation of features that make up this "family resemblance," e.g. having a metabolism, undergoing selection, etc. If one stops at the metaphor and introduces nothing else one hasn't said anything. All of being can be said to resemble all that is in some way or another. — Count Timothy von Icarus
67.” I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than "family resemblances"; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way.— And I shall say: 'games' form a family. And for instance the kinds of number form a family in the same way. Why do we call something a "number"? Well, perhaps because it has a—direct—relationship with several things that have hitherto been called number; and this can be said to give it an indirect relation ship to other things we call the same name. And we extend our con cept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres. But if someone wished to say: "There is something common to all these constructions—namely the disjunction of all their common properties"—I should reply: Now you are only playing with words. One might as well say: "Something runs through the whole thread— namely the continuous overlapping of those fibres.
But it is appropriate for the linguist, philosopher of language, or semiotican? Don't grunts and screams share a family resemblance with speech? The issue is that you still need the "right sort of family resemblance," since all things resemble each other in at least some ways. — Count Timothy von Icarus
If someone's behavior is expanded to include their thoughts, experiencing, etc — Count Timothy von Icarus
isn't saying much of anything. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Ok, but wouldn't this hold for all activities, not just social ones. And wouldn't this be true or animals as well? — Count Timothy von Icarus
I do think Wittgenstein brings in social interaction to fix the underdetermination problem. That part seems fairly straightforward. I think I might disagree that it actually addressed the problem though. The argument from underdetermination is too strong, it proves too much. — Count Timothy von Icarus
I would say the intention is to dissociate the idea of categorizing actions, based on some rule which is inherently indeterminate, from the actions themselves. We act regardless of the indeterminacy — Apustimelogist
Kripke understands Wittgenstein's “skeptical paradox” to be that since rules and, by extension, the meanings of words can be interpreted in indefinitely different ways, “there can be no such thing as meaning anything by any word. Each new application we make is a leap in the dark; any present intention could be interpreted so as to accord with anything we may choose to do. So there can be neither accord, nor conflict. This is what Wittgenstein said in §201.” 48 This is the problem that reveals the need for social interaction for both Kripke and Davidson. But, as has been pointed out many times, PI §201 continues past where Kripke stops reading:
“it can be seen that there is a misunderstanding here from the mere fact that in the course of our argument we give one interpretation after another…. What this shews is that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call ‘obeying the rule' and ‘going against it' in actual cases.” 49
The skeptical paradox that Kripke fixes on is actually being presented as “a misunderstanding,” a pseudo-problem produced by the artificial perspective that gets foisted on us when we cease interacting naturally:
“the confusions which occupy us arise when language is like an engine idling, not when it is doing work.” 50
When we stop performing the daily activities in which understanding comes easily, strange possibilities pop up that cannot be ruled out by reasoning alone. This is when it strikes us that “any interpretation still hangs in the air along with what it interprets, and cannot give it any support.” 51 Rules suddenly look terrifyingly unsupported and we are tempted to cry out in despair, as Kripke does, that “the entire idea of meaning vanishes into thin air.”
Luckily the point of PI §201 is not the endless interpretations but the non-interpretive immediate grasping that occurs “in actual cases.” The infinite interpretability functions as a reductio of the idea that we are interpreting rules rather than just following them in a more direct and practical sense. 54 If we can recover this mundane understanding, overlooked because of its ubiquitous inconspicuousness, 55 then we will dismiss the skeptical paradox the way Hume's philosopher laughs at his own bizarre thoughts once he gets a good beer and a pool cue in his hands.
“‘How can one follow a rule?' That is what I should like to ask. But how does it come about that I want to ask that, when after all I find no kind of difficulty in following a rule? Here we obviously misunderstand the facts that lie before our eyes.” 56
Wittgenstein considers his job to be assembling reminders of our normal immersion in the meaningfulness of everyday life.
Sociality then becomes this invoked as this "causal" mechanism. Obviously though this is not much of an explanation by itself and I think probably much too restrictive. The deeper answer IMO is brains, which cannot be inherently be interpreted representationally (human-interpretably symbolic to be more specific [since the word representation can be plausibly used in an extremely vague sense]), interacting with the environment, and sometimes other brains. — Apustimelogist
Isn’t the naturalized, empirical concept of brain an attempt to rescue a picture theory of meaning by recourse to a causal physiology as a ground for the seeming ungrounded indeterminacy of symbolic interaction? — Joshs
that was replying to . But became too long I thought just make new self-contained post.blindly — Apustimelogist
"On a moment-to-moment basis, the brain is assimilating dynamic, multidimensional information about the world in order to produce rich, context-dependent behaviors. Confronted with such complexity, experimental neuroscientists traditionally design controlled experiments to reduce the dimensionality of the problem to a few factors conceived by the experimenter (Fisher, 1935). This reductionist program relies on a core commitment to the assumption that the neural computations supporting many of our cognitive functions can be decontextualized and decomposed into a handful of latent features, that these features are human interpretable and can be manipulated in isolation, and that the piecemeal recomposition of these features will yield a satisfying understanding of brain and behavior.
In parallel to the research in neuroscience and psychology laboratories, artificial neural networks (ANNs; see Box 1) are attaining human-level behavioral performance across many tasks ... This research program effectively abandoned traditional experimental design and simple interpretable models ... Such models learn how to recognize faces or respond to natural-language inquiries directly from the structure of the real world by optimizing millions of parameters (“big” models) over millions of examples (“big” data;
LeCun et al., 2015)."
"Although the human mind inspires us to touch the stars, it is grounded in the mindless billions of direct-fit parameters of System 1. Therefore, direct-fit interpolation is not the end goal but rather the starting point for understanding the architecture of higher-order cognition. There is no other substrate from which System 2 could arise. Many of the processes in System 1 are shared with other animals (as in perceptual systems), and some are unique to humans (as in grammar learning), but all are executed in an automatic, fast, and often unconscious way. The brute-force direct-fit interpolation that guides learning in these systems, similar to evolution, can go further than we previously thought in explaining many cognitive functions in humans (e.g., learning syntax in natural text without imposing rule-based reasoning; see Box 2)."
"It can be tempting to impose our own intuitive or folk-psychological interpretations onto the fitted model, but this is misguided. If a generic network learns such a rule, this rule is likely inherent in the training set and is thus not so much a meaningful property of the network as it is a property of the data (see Figure 2). These interpretable rules arise incidentally, as an emergent byproduct of the fitting procedure. The incidental emergence of such rules is not a “goal” of the network, and the network does not “use” the rules to extrapolate. This mindset, in fact, resembles pre-Darwinian teleological thinking and “just-so stories” in biology [as opposed to blind Darwinian natural selection] (Gould and Lewontin, 1979, Mayr, 1992). Evolution provides perhaps the most ubiquitous and well-known example of a biological fitting process that learns to act in the world while being blind to the underlying structure of the problems and their optimal solutions."
Without further elaboration/clarification, I am not sure what I see written here is much different from Kripke's sceptical solution. Rules are indeterminate but we act coherently anyway blindly. — Apustimelogist
Isn’t the naturalized, empirical concept of brain an attempt to rescue a picture theory of meaning by recourse to a causal physiology as a ground for the seeming ungrounded indeterminacy of symbolic interaction?
— Joshs
I don't really understand what's been asked here. The brain can provide an explanation for blind intelligible behavior without symbolic interpretation. The brain as a prediction machine that can correct or update the parameters (from "error") responsible for its behavior, and underlies our ability to act coherently — Apustimelogist
Evolution is a blind fitting process by which organisms become adapted to their environment. Does the brain use similar brute-force fitting processes to learn how to perceive and act upon the world? Recent advances in artificial neural networks have exposed the power of optimizing millions of synaptic weights over millions of observations to operate robustly in real-world contexts — Apustimelogist
“[t]he world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject who is nothing but a project of the world; and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world that it itself projects”
If one accepts the interpretation of what it is to know something implicit in this claim, you are right. But trivially so. I see this as a variation of argument like "Mary's Room" and "What it is like to be a bat?" It is true that most people think there is something special about one's "mother tongue", one's upbringing and education. There is. But I don't think anything follows that is relevant here.and yet, you will never know how it is to be Chinese, because you were not raised in China, it wasn't the culture within which you learned about the world, you didn't attend Chinese middle school and your first friends weren't Chinese. — Lionino
That seems obvious. However, I think one should respond to scepticism, whether of the kind Wittgensteing discusses or the points made under the heading underdetermination by adding: -Here's my contention:That someone is following a rule is shown by what they do. — Banno
That's right. Apply the metaphor to games. Asked about why any two games are both games, and we can give quite precise answers from the range of possible criteria. For example, there is, or used to be, some controversy about whether viruses could be considered to be alive, because they are incapable of independent reproduction. They have to hi-jack the reproductive machinery of a cell in order to replicate. That debate seems to have been settled now, but the issue is quite well focused. (Of course, there's another "vague" issue buried in it, because which systems of reproduction count as independent needs to be clarified. But again, that's not a particularly vague issue)Of course not. But if one wants to explain why we don't confuse them one has to move from the vague metaphor to something more concrete. — Count Timothy von Icarus
I'm not sure what 4EA approaches are, but I'm fully in sympathy with the recognition that everything interacts. It is perfectly clear that the brain is deeply integrated into all the physical processes of the body, which itself interacts constantly with the "outside" world. I'm a bit cautious about the implications of listing brain, body and mind. It seems to me to be as peculiar as "She came home in a flood of tears and a sedan chair". Perhaps I'm just a bit paranoid about dualism and reductionism.In recent years P.P. models have moved closer to fully embodied 4EA approaches in recognizing the inseparable reciprocity of interaction between brain, body and environment. — Joshs
Put differently, Kripke comes up with rules describing the behavior of an autonomous subject which are not indeterminate, and then attempts to use them to explain the indeterminate use of rules in social situations. — Joshs
We cannot say that we all respond as we do to '68+ 57' because we all grasp the concept of addition in the same way, that we share common responses to particular addition problems because we share a common concept of addition. (Frege, for example, would have endorsed such an explanation, but one hardly needs to be a philosopher to find it obvious and natural.) For Wittgenstein, an 'explanation' of this kind ignores his treatment of the sceptical paradox and its solution. There is no objective fact - that we all mean addition by '+', or even that a given individual does - that explains our agreement in particular cases. Rather our license to say of each other that we mean addition by '+' is part of a 'language game' that sustains itself only because of the brute fact that we generally agree. (Nothing about 'grasping concepts' guarantees that it will not break down tomorrow.) The rough uniformities in our arithmetical behavior may or may not some day be given an explanation on the neurophysiological level, but such an explanation is not here in question. 77
Note again the analogy with the Humean case. Naively, we may wish to explain the observed concomitance of fire and heat by a causal, heat-producing, 'power' in the fire. The Humean alleges that any such use of causal powers to explain the regularity is meaningless. Rather we play a language game that allows us to attribute such a causal power to the fire as long as the regularity holds up. The regularity must be taken as a brute fact. So too for Wittgenstein.
This leaves us in the thrall of a Cartesian skepticism, a gap between the subject and a social world outside of the subject (parallel to neural models positing an internal prediction machine adapting itself to an impervious external world). — Joshs
How does agreement emerge in the case of a term for a sensation, say 'pain'? It is not as simple as the case of 'table'. When will adults attribute to a child mastery ofthe avowal "I
am in pain"?80 The child, if he learns the avowal correctly, will utter it when he feels pain and not otherwise. By analogy with the case of 'table', it would appear that the adult should endorse this utterance if he, the adult, feels (his own? the child's?) pain. Of course we know that this is not the case. Rather the adult will endorse the child's avowal if the child's behavior (crying, agitated motion, etc.) and, perhaps, the external circumstances surrounding the child, indicate that he is in pain. If a child generally avows pain under such appropriate behavioral and external circumstances and generally does not do so otherwise, the adult will say of him that he has mastered the avowal, "I am in pain."
Since, in the case of discourse on pain and other sensations, the adult's confirmation whether he agrees with the child's avowal is based on the adult's observation of the child's behavior and circumstances, the fact that such behavior and circumstances characteristic of pain exist is essential in this case to the working of Wittgenstein's sceptical solution. This, then, is what is meant by the remark, "An 'inner process'
stands in need of outward criteria." Roughly speaking, outward criteria for an inner process are circumstances, observable in the behavior of an individual, which, when present, would lead others to agree with his avowals. If the individual generally makes his avowals under the right such circumstances, others will say of him that he has mastered the appropriate expression ("I am in pain," "I feel itchy," etc.).
Where is the social component in the operation of this prediction machine? — Joshs
To put the question in enactivist terms, does it make sense to analyze behavior in terms of subpersonal mechanisms solipsistically ensconced within a brain? This is the critique often leveled against active inference predictive processing approaches. In recent years P.P. models have moved closer to fully embodied 4EA approaches in recognizing the inseparable reciprocity of interaction between brain, body and environment. — Joshs
What’s missing here is the crucial normative character of perception and cognition. Perception is not not a one-way fitting process between organism and world in which the organism must adapt its perception to the facts of an environment external to its functioning. It is instead a reciprocal process where the nature of the ‘external ‘facts’ confronting the organism arrive already pre-interpreted in accordance with the organism’s normative purposes and goals. — Joshs
"Our affordances are constrained by our bodies and brains, and there is an intimate relationship between how our bodies and neural networks are wired and what we can learn."
"Direct fit, as an algorithmic procedure to minimize an objective function, allows neural networks to learn the transformation between external input to meaningful actions, without the need to explicitly represent underlying rules and principles in a human-interpretable way.
A major task taken up by the school of ecological psychology was to characterize each animal’s objective functions, conceptualized as affordances, based on the information the animal needs to behave adaptively and survive in the world (Gibson, 1979, Michaels and Carello, 1981). For cats, a chair may afford an intermediate surface for jumping onto the kitchen counter, whereas for humans, it may afford a surface on which to sit while eating. Like in evolution, there is no one correct way to fit the world, and different direct-fit networks, guided by different objective functions, can be used in the same ecological niche to improve fit to different aspects of the environment. Furthermore, as argued by the school of ecological psychology, information is defined as the affordances that emerge in interactions between the organism and its ecological niche. As opposed to strongly representational approaches common in computational neuroscience, the direct-fit approach learns arbitrary functions for facilitating behavior and is capable of mapping sensory input to motor actions without ever explicitly reconstructing the world or learning explicit rules about the latent structure of the outside world. Marr (1982), for example, speaks favorably of Gibson’s theory of vision but, unsatisfied with the theory’s vague treatment of information processing, instead suggests that the goal of vision is to recover a geometrical representation of the world. In contrast to the representational stance, the direct-fit framework is aligned with Gibson’s treatment of the goal of vision: to recover information in the world that affords the organism its adaptive behaviors.
Gibson believed that animals are entangled with their environment in a closed perception-action feedback loop: they perceive to act and act to perceive. Furthermore, actions and affordances are shaped and constrained by the structure of the environment and the organism’s physiology. Similarly, from the direct-fit perspective, neural networks implicitly learn the structure of the environment as a means to an end, but this learning is ultimately driven by internal objectives aligning perception to action with an eye toward adaptive fitness (see Box 3)."
I see this as a variation of argument like "Mary's Room" and "What it is like to be a bat?" — Ludwig V
But I don't think anything follows that is relevant here. — Ludwig V
I might say that our direct aquaintance with our own intelligence is accompanied by an ineffability because it is automatic, unconscious, "brute-fitting". — Apustimelogist
I feel like the emphasis on sociality comes from the feeling that language for insular, private individuals is redundant and unnecessary — Apustimelogist
This sounds a little reductionist. Sure, I am all for this kind of predictive/enactive/semiotic understanding of the neurobiology involved. The brain and nervous system are the basis of the modelling relation we call "consciousness". But then on top of neuro-semiosis is stacked socio-semiosis – humans learning how to think and behave at the level of "parts of a larger sociocultural organism".
Socio-semiosis shares all the same general processing principles. The same Darwinian and thermodynamic logic. Yet it is still a further level of "embodied intelligence". — apokrisis
I would put it the other way around. The requirement for becoming the higher level thing of a social organism is to have a culture that can shape all its individuals into precisely the kind of self-regulating and socially-cooperating agents that would allow such a social organism to exist. — apokrisis
So that's a critical difference. — apokrisis
I would say the intention is to dissociate the idea of categorizing actions, based on some rule which is inherently indeterminate, from the actions themselves. We act regardless of the indeterminacy. I would also say such a view is in direct contrast to views where thinking is something more than sequences of our surface experiences, e.g. computational theories of mind, "language of thought hypothesis" and views that there is some intelligible, determinate semantic representations / symbols / modules underpinning those sequences.
Put differently, Kripke comes up with rules describing the behavior of an autonomous subject which are not indeterminate, and then attempts to use them to explain the indeterminate use of rules in social situations.
— Joshs
I think this is ass-backward. He starts with indeterminacy of rules and then uses sociality to explain why we seem to pick out specific concepts for our experiences when they are in principle indeterminable. I find Kripke's interpretation of Wittgenstein very agreeable; it makes sense to me and I have never been tempted to look at Wittgenstein in a way incompatible with the Kripkean view of rules. — Apustimelogist
The evidence justifying us to assert or judge that Jones means green by “green” is our observation of Jones’s linguistic behavior, that is, his use of the word under certain publicly observable circumstances. We can justifiably assert that Jones means green by “green” if we can observe, in enough cases, that he uses this word as we do or would do, or more generally, as others in his speech-community are inclined to do. This is the only justification there is, and the only justification we need, to assert that he means green by “green”.( I.E.P)
As commentators continue to instruct Kripke's interpretation, Wittgenstein's discussion is a reductio of traditional conceptions of thinking. He is not bringing to light a profound discovery that exposes a heretofore unknown vulnerability of understanding, but charting a particularly virulent distortion introduced by philosophical contemplation. The philosopher's bafflement before suddenly mute or excessively permissive signs is an artificial product of the characteristic philosophical behaviors discussed in chapter 1: stopping ongoing usage and staring.
Wittgenstein writes:
“It is felt to be a difficulty that a rule should be given in signs which do not themselves contain their use [that is, which are not meaning-objects], so that a gap exists between a rule and its application. But this is not a problem but a mental cramp. That this is so appears on asking when this problem strikes one. It is never when we lay down the rule or apply the rule. We are only troubled when we look at a rule in a particularly queer way. The characteristic thing about all philosophical problems is that they arise in a peculiar way. As a way out, I can only give you examples, which if you think about them you will find the cramp relaxes. In ordinary life one is never troubled by a gap between the sign and its application. To relieve the mental cramp it is not enough to get rid of it; you must also see why you had it. (AWL 90)
..we cannot appeal to social regularities or collectively presupposed norms within a practice: there are no such things, but more important, if there were they would not thereby legitimately bind us. Any regularities in what practitioners have previously done does not thereby have any authority to bind subsequent performances to the same regularities. The familiar Wittgensteinian paradoxes about rule following similarly block any institution of norms merely by invocation of a rule, since no rule can specify its correct application to future instances (Wittgenstein 1953). Practices should instead be understood as comprising performances that are mutually interactive in partially shared circumstances.
The intelligibility of performances within a practice then depends upon the anticipation and partial achievement of appropriate alignment with others' performances and their circumstances, toward what I described above as their "end," as Aristotelian energeia. Through discursive niche construction, human beings have built up patterns of mutually responsive activity. These patterns make possible newly intelligible ways of living and understanding ourselves within this discursively articulated "niche.""
"Brandom's talk of "norms" is then misleading: norms are not already determinate standards to which performances are accountable but are instead temporally extended patterns that encompass how we have already been living this part of our lives as well as the possibilities open for its continuation. Just what this pattern of practice is-what we are up to, and who we are in our involvement in it-is always partly ahead of us, as that toward which the various performances of a practice are mutually, but not always fully compatibly, directed. The temporal open-endedness of our biological niche construction and that of social practices are two ways of describing the same phenomena."
"This understanding of conceptually articulated practices as subpatterns within the human lineage belongs to the Davidsonian-Sellarsian tradition that emphasizes the "objectivity" of conceptual understanding. Yet the "objects" to which our performances must be held accountable are not something outside discursive practice itself. Discursive practice cannot be understood as an intralinguistic structure or activity that then somehow "reaches out" to incorporate or accord to objects. The relevant "objects" are the ends at issue and at stake within the practice itself. "The practice itself," however, already incorporates the material circumstances in and through which it is enacted. Practices are forms of discursive and practical niche construction in which organism and environment are formed and reformed together through an ongoing, mutually intra-active reconfiguration.
models do not learn simple, human-interpretable rules or representations of the world; rather, they use local computations to interpolate over task-relevant manifolds in a high-dimensional parameter space. — Apustimelogist
).Note again the analogy with the Humean case. — Apustimelogist
models do not learn simple, human-interpretable rules or representations of [categorizations]; rather, they use local computations to interpolate over [categorization]-relevant manifolds in a high-dimensional parameter space. — Apustimelogist
The only form of justification that can be used legitimately involves determining assertability conditions in the public realm . — Joshs
There is no fact of the matter that can determine whether the meaning for me of a rule like the plus sign is the same as I apply it now as when I applied it last year — Joshs
Kripke doesn’t deny that we form meanings of words that bring with them determinate (by determinate I mean that they are unchanging in their sense for as long as they are in effect) instructions , rules and criteria on how to apply them. — Joshs
Kripke thinks of a word meaning as an interpretation, a picture that determines how it is used, and we swap out pictures all the time. — Joshs
we cannot appeal to social regularities or collectively presupposed norms within a practice
Any regularities in what practitioners have previously done does not thereby have any authority to bind subsequent performances to the same regularities.
“It is felt to be a difficulty that a rule should be given in signs which do not themselves contain their use [that is, which are not meaning-objects], so that a gap exists between a rule and its application. But this is not a problem but a mental cramp
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