I think there's a larger issue. — Wayfarer

Whatever. I was pointing to the prose style in my two quotes.

This must come up for translators of epics all the time as a more practical concern. They all make a habit of referring to people, places, etc. by circuitous names. "Son of..." "he who was last upon the battlements err the Achaeans breached the gates of fair Ilium," "that long bearded warrior, fiercest among the Franks," etc., where the phrase is primarily serving as a name.

Virgil identifies himself initially with this whopper:


‘Sub Julio’ was I born, though it was late,
And lived at Rome under the good Augustus,
During the time of false and lying gods.

A poet was I, and I sang that just
Son of Anchises, who came forth from Troy,
After that Ilion the superb was burned.

Is the last tercet equivalent with: "I am the poet who wrote the Aeneid?" (which would be equivalent with "I am Virgil?") Can we consult the truth tables?

It would be fun to see the Iliad or Beowulf rendered in logical form.

Edit: I just realized that McDowell's lecture is on a different book by Rödl with a slightly different title: Self-Consciousness and Objectivity (2007). Doh!

-

I listened to a talk by John McDowell on Rödl's book. It was helpful in understanding a bit of what Rödl is doing, but it was also useful to me because McDowell uses Anscombe's interpretation of Aristotle to critique a central piece of Rödl's project. The critique is basically that Rödl turns practical reasoning into speculative reasoning, and I would say that this is a very common and understandable Aristotelian mistake. The talk is exceptionally clear.

The foundational claim McDowell makes is that, for Rödl, <Practical reasoning has as its conclusions thoughts of the form "I * [should] do A">, and that this is also what Anscombe rejects.

Given that he starts with Anscombe and brings in Davidson, it may be more accessible to the folks interested in contemporary philosophy. If in one way or another Rödl casts thinking as practical reasoning (which it arguably is), then on McDowell's thesis it is easy for me to understand why Rödl would want to say thinking is self-conscious.



(Unfortunately I wasn't able to find a copy of the pdf that McDowell used for his talk.)

---

- Good thoughts

- It would be the real vs. logical distinction catalogued <here>.

It would be fun to see the Iliad or Beowulf rendered in logical form. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I asked our digital friend to oblige. They came back with:

Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus,
that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.
Many a brave soul did it send hurrying down to Hades,
and many a hero did it yield a prey to dogs and vultures,
for so were the counsels of Jove fulfilled
from the day on which the son of Atreus, king of men,
and great Achilles, first fell out with one another.

I've posted their rendering in symbolic logic in image format as it is difficult to render it in plain text:



(Incidentally, they also said 'That's a delightful challenge'.)

///

I listened to a talk by John McDowell on Rödl's book. I — Leontiskos

Very good, but I note that he says it's a wonderful book and 'almost' perfect. I will try and find time to listen.

I will try and find time to listen. — Wayfarer

Read my edit above before you do. :nerd:

:grin: Well, you don't have to. . . . — J

Yeah, I meant can I understand that idea fairly quickly, in order to be able to continue reading.

As a short cut, forget about "thought1" -- this is just me trying to specify some terminology -- and focus on the idea of a thought as being merely entertained qua thought, as something to ponder or question. — J

As opposed to what??

Are you familiar with the force/content distinction? — J

Never heard the phrase.

The OP of "A challenge to Frege on Assertion" gives an overview. Take a look and then I'm happy to try to clarify. — J

I wondered what that was about when you started it. I'd never seen the name Frege before. And a book named Thinking and Being sounds fantastic! But I couldn't make head nor tail of the op. I'll try again.

Thank you for your time.

Aha! Still seems overall positively disposed toward Rödl. I've seen McDowell's MInd and World mentioned here numerous times but it's just a book too far....(perhaps Robert Brandom is of a vaguely similar ilk?)

A belief is true if it corresponds with what exists in a mind-independent world.
The insurmountable problem is how can the mind know about a world that is independent of the mind.
Therefore, truth about a mind-independent world is unknowable
Therefore, knowledge about a mind-independent world is impossible.

However, this is why we have axioms in logic, science and mathematics and hypotheses in general life. — RussellA

Ok, all seems a lot better making sense now. But formal logic cannot tell you truth about the world. Formal logic can only tell you if the axiomatic formulas are valid or not.

For analysing truth of the world, you need to use material logic i.e. the logic which studies on the contents of the statement, propositions and terms rather than the movements of the inferences which formal logic is about.

Remember validity is not truth. Validity just means the connected formulas (statements) are derived from the premises. Many folks here seem to misunderstand validity as truth, and go on about the formal logic for finding truth of the reality. It is always failure and misunderstanding in the results. Some of them also seem to think formal logic is the only logic there is to use. No, there are 100s of different alternative logics in use.

Formal logic is made for mathematical problems, not the world problems.

I think this very close to the thrust of Rödl's arguments, which I presume explains Rödl's focus on Nagel. — Wayfarer

Rödl treats Nagel as the last exit from the highway of absolute idealism:

The aim of this essay, as an introduction to absolute idealism, is to make plain that it is impossible to think judgment through this opposition: mind here, world there, two things in relation or not. To dismantle this opposition is not to propose that the world is mind-dependent. Nor is it to propose that the mind is world-dependent. These ways of speaking solidify the opposition; they are an impediment to comprehension. — SC&O, Rödl, page 16

This seems to be where Rödl also moves beyond Kant (as referred to here). The need to oppose solipsism in the Critique of Pure Reason has been dissolved.

Your think1 and think2 seem to parallel the difference between an utterance and a proposition — Banno

Is that what you have in mind on your think1 and think2? — Banno

I think it's very close. "Think1" is meant to refer to the "utterance" of a thought, if you will -- the specific time and place when the thought occurs in a brain. "Think2" is meant to be, quite simply, a proposition, same as in Davidson's discussion of "said." If you or anyone else is interested in really exploring these parallels, it's fascinating to read through "On Saying That" and substitute, as you read, "think" for "say" or "said" (and all the other various cognates). You get things like:

"We are indeed asked to make sense of a judgment of synonymy between thoughts . . . as an unanalyzed part of the content of the familiar idiom of indirect quotation of a thought. The idea that underlies [this] is samethinking: When I say that Galileo thought that the earth moves, [and so do I], I represent us as samethinkers."

and

"[Quine] now suggests that instead of interpreting the thought-content of indirect discourse as occurring in a language, we interpret it as thought by a thinker at a time."

This is indeed what I'm trying to clarify with thought1 and thought2.

Why, then, do I say "very close" rather than "exact"? I do see a difference between thought and speech, as follows:

We all know what it means to quote a sentence, an utterance, but it is not so clear what we mean when we talk about "quoting a thought." To quote an utterance is surely to quote the language used; but must that be true of what we report about a thought? Intuitively, it seems wrong. My thought in English is going to be the same as your thought in Spanish, even at the level of quotation. To put it another way, what makes a thought "thought1" rather than "thought2" is not a matter of holding the language steady, but of occurrence in time: "thought1" specifies my thought or your thought at times T1 and 2; "thought 2" specifies what we are both thinking about.

This difference (if it is one) between saying and thinking is illuminated by the last idea Davidson offers us in "On Saying That":

If we could recover our pre-Fregean semantic innocence, I think it would seem to us plainly incredible that the words 'The earth moves', uttered after the words 'Galileo said that', mean anything different, or refer to anything else, than is their wont when they come in other environments. — Davidson, 108

In other words, the Fregean separation of utterance and proposition does create a certain artificiality in our analysis of what words do. What might this suggest about thinking? Is it "plainly incredible" that we should even make a separation between thought1 and thought2 if that separation is supposed to treat thought1 as a "quoted" item with no semantic content? Undoubtedly that is what some reductionist psychologists might prefer to do. But I'm suggesting that treating thought1 as "extensionally equivalent" (cut me some slack here!) to "neurons 4545d + 2234v doing XYZ at Time T1" is going too far.

Thank you for your time. — Patterner

You're welcome. I don't at all mind trying to explain this stuff -- if I can't do it, there's something wrong with either the ideas or my understanding of them!

focus on the idea of a thought as being merely entertained qua thought, as something to ponder or question.
— J
As opposed to what?? — Patterner

This introduces the force/content distinction. When I say, "I think X," in ordinary language it can mean two things (and probably more). It can mean, "Right now I'm considering the thought X, just as an idea. [content]. I don't know whether it's true or false, and I'm certainly not prepared to say I believe it. I'm just formulating the thought." Or, it can mean, "Yes, I think X, I believe X is true. [force]" This is giving an assertoric force to the thought of X: not only are you thinking X in the first sense (which you would have to do in order to have any opinion about it), but you are judging it to be true.

Compare:

"I think, 'E=MC2' -- hmm, interesting idea, wonder if it's true."

and

q. Do you think that E=MC2"
a. I certainly do.

But I couldn't make head nor tail of the op. I'll try again. — Patterner

Yeah, see if it's any clearer. And not too far into that thread, @Banno gives a good overview of how Frege (a late 19th century logician) first formulated all this.

But what do we do about "To know something means consciously knowing something"? Which sense(s) of "thought" is being appealed to here? — J

No sense of thought is being appealed to.

I can only have knowledge of things inside my mind, such as pain. Everything outside my mind can only be a belief.

If my hand hurts, then I know my hand hurts. If I know my hand hurts, then I consciously know that my hand hurts. To know something means to consciously know something.

Present time

Let Think1 = I think "my hand hurts"
Let Think2 = I think my hand hurts

Think1 means that I am thinking about the proposition "my hand hurts". I can think about the proposition regardless of whether my hand is hurting or not. I can know that my hand hurts and think about the proposition "my hand hurts" at the same time, but my hand hurting does not require Think1. I have no propositional attitude towards the proposition.

In Think2, "I think" means "I believe". Therefore Think2 means "I believe my hand hurts". But this is not a valid expression, in that if my hand hurts, this is not a belief, it is knowledge.

If I know my hand hurts, no sense of thought is being appealed to.

Future time

At a future time, I can reflect on my past experience.

Let Think1 = I think "my hand hurt"
Let Think2 = I think my hand hurt

Think1 means that I am thinking about the proposition "my hand hurt". I can think about the proposition regardless of whether my hand hurt or not. I can know that my hand hurt and think about the proposition "my hand hurt" at the same time, but my hand hurting does not require Think1. I have no propositional attitude towards the proposition.

In Think2, "I think" means "I believe". Therefore Think2 means "I believe my hand hurt". But this is not a valid expression, in that if my hand hurt, this is not a belief, it is knowledge.

If I know my hand hurt, no sense of thought is being appealed to.

On the one hand I saw Santa Claus in person at Hamley's Regent Street store when I was very young, yet have never seen Barak Obama. On the other hand, many people have told me that Santa Claus is not real.

Do I believe what I have seen with my own eyes, or what people tell me? — RussellA

Isn't that the question? If "I think...." is inherent in every thought including the perception and recognition of an oak tree and its behavior of shedding leaves, and "I think..." also inherently expresses uncertainty, then which sensory impression can you have a higher degree of certainty of?

Do you still believe that the person you saw when you were young is Santa Claus? Why or why not? It seems that you can only ever change your knowledge is by making more observations that you seem to be saying that you cannot trust, so how can you ever say that you learn anything? What does it mean to you to learn something, or to learn from a mistake?

The Direct Realist believes that there is a book on the table. However, the Indirect Realist would disagree. — RussellA

Why? What does the "Realist" mean in "Indirect Realist"? It seems to me that the only difference between a direct and indirect realist is the complexity of the causal path from between object and percept, but they both still get at what the object is - a book.

I think the direct vs. indirect debate is a false dichotomy. If I am neither a direct or indirect realist (I'm just a deterministic realist monist) then how is it that we have been able to agree on our use of scribbles on this screen to the point where we have been able to carry on a meaningful conversation? You must agree that there are scribbles on the screen, or else please explain what it is you are doing when reading this page and formulating a response and submitting it.

The problem is, how is it possible to know about something that exists in a mind-independent world when all we have is our minds. — RussellA

That's a problem of dualism. The mind is not independent of the world. It is firmly implanted in the world. This is not to say that the world is mind-like (idealism). It is to say that the nature of the mind is no different than the nature of everything else. The world is not physical or mental. It is relational, informational, processual.

The same effect can have many different possible causes. I see a broken window, and even if I know that something caused the window to break, one particular effect can have many different causes. There is no certain means of knowing what the cause was, a stone the previous day, a rock the previous week, a seagull the previous week, a crow within the hour, a window cleaner, etc.

The cause may determine the effect, but the affect could have been determined by many different possible causes. — RussellA

Then I'm sure you are living in fear of the authorities arriving at your door to arrest you for a crime you claim you did not commit (as your uncertainty cannot explain how it is you arrived where you are in the present and cannot account for where you were earlier) and the authorities may have been wrong in determining the causes of a crime (the identity of the criminal, etc.). You keep talking about uncertainty but you don't seem uncertain in what you are saying, in your perception of scribbles on this screen and what they mean, how to use a computer, etc. You keep asserting that you can only ever be uncertain of what your senses are telling you yet you exhibit certainty in what they are telling you. There must be some set of rules you are using to determine what you can be more certain about than uncertain. What are those rules?

You're contradicting yourself again. First you define knowledge as "justified true belief". You then say that you can justify your belief, but then say you cannot know things-in-themselves.
— Harry Hindu

From SEP The analysis of knowledge
The tripartite analysis of knowledge is often abbreviated as the “JTB” analysis, for “justified true belief”.Much of the twentieth-century literature on the analysis of knowledge took the JTB analysis as its starting-point.

From Wikipedia Thing-in-itself
In Kantian philosophy, the thing-in-itself (German: Ding an sich) is the status of objects as they are, independent of representation and observation. — RussellA

You have also said that truth is a relation between the state of the world and the mental representation in ones mind. If knowledge is justified TRUE belief, then how is it that you are not getting at the thing-in-itself via one's justified true belief?

Given the level of uncertainty you have expressed, you must even be uncertain that you actually are not getting at the thing-in-itself. When pouring a glass of water, do you make a mess and any water that actually makes it into the glass is accidental? Are you not aware of the dimensions of the glass and its relation to the pitcher you are pouring from? If I were to observer you interact with your environment would it seem to me that you are perceiving the environment as it is, or would I think you to be blind, deaf and dumb? I think you are assuming to much that things are more complex than they are, or that there is more to things that what you can represent in your mind, when there isn't. You are assuming that there are things that exist that you cannot prove either way. Your version of indirect realism seems to be more like solipsism, as your level of skepticism shows that you have no ground to stand on to support your idea that there is even a mind-independent world.

That is my point. What is important are our senses and our reason. What exists the other side of our sense is open to debate. — RussellA

This makes no sense because you have done nothing but question your senses and reason. All you do when you question your senses and reason to such an unhealthy degree is that you end up pulling the rug out from under your own positions you have established using your senses and reason.

How to get from what we experience in our senses to what exists the other side of our senses, and whether it is even possible, has no agreed solution. — RussellA

Yet we have agreed on the use of scribbles on this screen. You're just contradicting yourself at this point.

I know that I think the moon exists regardless of whether I can prove or verify that I know that I think the moon exists. — RussellA

Haven't you proven that you know that you think the moon exists by expressing as much here on this forum? I mean, you just wrote, "I know that I think the moon exists". How did those scribbles get on this screen in the correct order for other English speakers to read and understand as such, if you don't not only know what you think, but also know how to use a computer?

You might say that you could be an AI bot submitting these posts, but then I would simply ask, what does it mean to know that you think something and be able to provide proof for? Again, what is it like for you to prove to yourself that you know you think some things? Your thoughts are just as "external" to me as the moon is and you said, "I could prove "the moon exists", as the moon exists external to me," yet make some unwarranted special case for your thoughts that are external to me. How can we prove the moon exists when it is external to us, but not your thoughts if both are part of the same shared world?

But formal logic cannot tell you truth about the world...................For analysing truth of the world, you need to use material logic — Corvus

The problem is that Material Logic is an inductive logic, where the conclusion may be likely but not certain

Premise 1: The sun has risen every day for the past thousand years.
Conclusion: The sun will rise tomorrow.

Formal vs. Material Logic: A Comparative Analysis

Even Material Logic cannot tell us the truth about the world.

Things participate in the world by interacting, as the old scholastic adage goes actio sequitur esse, "act follows on being." — Count Timothy von Icarus

:up: When science describes "physical" objects as being the interaction of ever smaller objects, we never get to anything actually physical - only interactions or relations. It's all relational.

Let Think1 = I think "my hand hurts"
Let Think2 = I think my hand hurts

Think1 means that I am thinking about the proposition "my hand hurts". I can think about the proposition regardless of whether my hand is hurting or not. I can know that my hand hurts and think about the proposition "my hand hurts" at the same time, but my hand hurting does not require Think1. I have no propositional attitude towards the proposition.

In Think2, "I think" means "I believe". Therefore Think2 means "I believe my hand hurts". But this is not a valid expression, in that if my hand hurts, this is not a belief, it is knowledge. — RussellA

You've got the "think1/think2" distinction down perfectly. If I understand the issue you're raising, it's whether an experience such as "my hand hurts" can be said to have a thought2 version, in the same way that "The oak tree sheds its leaves" can. I'd have to give this more reflection, but I see the point you're making. I'm inclined to agree that our beliefs about private sensations don't add force to a proposition such as "My hand hurts."

What I'm wondering is, do you think this challenges the thought1/thought2 distinction as such, or is this a special case involving what used to be called "incorrigible knowledge"?

It seems that you start off disagreeing with me, and end up agreeing. Certainly, our ancestors used things other than words to symbolize other things. We still do. But words and language is a huge step above anything else when it comes to communicating specifics, and let's us think about things I doubt think we could think about without it. — Patterner

Sure, because of the sheer number of scribbles and rules for putting them together in strings, not because of some special power of the scribbles have apart from representing things that are not scribbles. When communicating specifics, do the scribbles invoke more scribbles in your mind, or things that are not just more scribbles, but things the scribbles represent? To represent specifics you must already be able to discern the specifics the scribbles represent. Do the names of new colors for crayons create those colors, or do they refer to colors that we can already discern?

I agree. But if you don't find a way to store sign language outside of memory, like in writing, you won't get as far in some ways. — Patterner

Sure, but we could use anything to store information, not just scribbles on paper, which is arguably perishable. We could hammer marks in a rock and come up with arbitrary rules for interpreting the marks on the rock.

It's making similar sounding words in succession. — Patterner

And words are just scribbles and sounds. What does a language you don't know look and sound like?

What I'm wondering is, do you think this challenges the thought1/thought2 distinction as such, or is this a special case involving what used to be called "incorrigible knowledge"? — J

I don't think it challenges the think1/think2 distinction, but only extends it.

As I see it, I have knowledge about things inside my mind, and have beliefs about things outside my mind.

Inside my mind

Think1 = I know "my hand hurts" means I know the proposition "my hand hurts". This seems reasonable because the proposition is inside my mind.

Think2 = I know my hand hurts. This is valid.

Think1 = I think "my hand hurts" means I am thinking about the proposition "my hand hurts". This is not a propositional attitude. This seems reasonable as I do think about things.

Think2 = I think my hand hurts. This is invalid.

Outside my mind

Think1 = I know "the oak tree is shedding its leaves" means that I know the proposition "the oak tree is shedding its leaves". This seems reasonable as propositions exist in my mind.

Think2 = I know the oak tree is shedding its leaves. This is invalid, as I cannot know things that exist outside my mind.

Think1 = I believe "the oak tree is shedding its leaves" means I believe the proposition "the oak tree is shedding its leaves". This is invalid, because it is not a propositional attitude, and I can only have a belief in a propositional attitude.

Think2 = I believe the oak tree is shedding its leaves. This is valid, as I can have a belief in things that exist outside my mind.

We all know what it means to quote a sentence, an utterance, but it is not so clear what we mean when we talk about "quoting a thought." To quote an utterance is surely to quote the language used; but must that be true of what we report about a thought? Intuitively, it seems wrong. My thought in English is going to be the same as your thought in Spanish, even at the level of quotation. To put it another way, what makes a thought "thought1" rather than "thought2" is not a matter of holding the language steady, but of occurrence in time: "thought1" specifies my thought or your thought at times T1 and 2; "thought 2" specifies what we are both thinking about. — J

An utterance does occur at at a time and place. Indeed, you seem here to run two ideas together - the first, rejecting the notion that a thought occurs in a particular language, the second, accepting that a thought occurs at a particular time.

And you seem to fluctuate between though2 as "I think that the tree is an oak" and "The tree is an oak". From what Pat said, don't you need it to be the latter? But on that account, Rödl is on the face of it mistaken, since these two sentences are about quite different things.

You've got the "think1/think2" distinction down perfectly. — J

See the problem? Is Think2 "I know my hand hurts" or is it "My hand hurts"?

"I know my hand hurts" — Banno

Is pain a suitable subject for the analysis of propositional content? I searched Rödl's book for an instance of 'pain' and the only return was from p37:

For, holding on to the force-content distinction, we arrest ourselves in incomprehension. It is painful to be at sea. But it is infinitely better than to be under the illusion of understanding something one does not understand.

where it's obvious that pain is being used metaphorically. The apodictic nature of first-person knowledge or feeling of sensation is not, so far as I can tell, discussed elsewhere in this text.

I only use the example because @J did, after @RussellA. I might have asked which of "I know the tree is an oak" or "The tree is an oak" is an example of think2.

Some further notes:

Chapter 2>2.1 Force and Content Distinction

In Frege’s terminology, the “act of assent” refers to the force of a judgment, which is the act of agreeing or accepting a proposition. This act is distinct from the content of the judgment, which is the proposition itself, or what is being assented to. The distinction between force and content is meant to underline the objectivity of thought, locating objectivity in the content rather than in the act of judgment. In other words, the content is understood to be just so, irrespective of the act of assent on anyone's part. The force, on the other hand, refers to the act of assenting to or affirming the content.

Implicitly, this distinction is used to 'prize apart' the act of thinking and the subject of thought so as to defend the objectivity of the content. The force-content distinction is used to separate the act of thinking (force) from the subject of thought (content) in order to defend the objectivity of the content. This distinction aims to ensure that the validity and objectivity of thought depend on the content itself, rather than on the subjective act of assenting to it. By doing so, the objectivity and universality of thought are located in the content, independent of any individual’s act of judgment.

The discussion then distinguishes between first-person thought and examining first-person thought from an external perspective. First-person thought inherently involves self-consciousness, where the act of thinking is internal to what is thought. When viewed from an external perspective, the focus shifts to understanding the objectivity of thought, which is seen as independent of the subject’s characteristics. This distinction highlights the tension between the subjective nature of first-person thought and the objective validity sought in philosophical inquiry.

Furthermore, we constantly shift between third- and first-person perspectives without being consciously aware of so doing. This transition is significant in understanding how objective validity and self-consciousness interplay in judgment. The first-person perspective involves self-conscious thought, where the act of thinking is internal to what is thought. In contrast, the third-person perspective treats judgment as an observable act, external to the self-awareness of the thinker. Rödl suggests that while judgment can be analyzed from both perspectives, the self-consciousness inherent in first-person thought is not a separate viewpoint but is integral to the act of judgment itself. It's very important to notice this perspectival shift, it is very much what Rödl means when he says that he's not advancing a novel argument, so much as calling attention to ingrained habits of thought.

I'm beginning to doubt that it is worth continuing with this.



Thanks again for your notes.

Separating force and content is to do with extensionality, not with objectivity.

And again, it may be worth explaining what extensionality is. It's simply that {a,b,c} and {c,b,a} and {a,a,b,,c} are the very same - that the order of the elements and number of times they are listed is discounted. It is about avoiding equivocation.

This is mentioned in the page you cited earlier.

When someone reasons p, if p then q, therefore q, then the same must be thought in the first and in the second premise, if the inference is not to rest on an equivocation. However, to assert if p then q is not to assert p. So the force, the assent to the proposition, cannot be inside the proposition to which it is the assent. The force-­ content distinction enables us to describe and understand all ­ these phenomena. Thus it has ­ great explanatory power. — p.37

But this is muddled. "...the same must be thought in the first and in the second premise, if the inference is not to rest on an equivocation" is ambiguous - the same what? p and p⊃q are clearly not the same thought. What extensionality demands is that the "p" in the first and the "p" in the second refer to the very same thing; it does not demand, as Rödl implies here, that the "p" and the "p⊃q", are "the same".

Perhaps this is again an issue of style. It does not aid in taking Rödl seriously.

I'll only note that the passage quoted is suggestive of the non-duality of mind and world.

I'm realising that I have to take Rödl's book in a few sections at a time. Today I've read 2.1-2.3 and made some notes on those sections. I might have skipped ahead to p37, but I'm not up to it yet.

To your last point: yes, I think it is just a question of style. Rodl expressed himself sloppily, and your interpretation is correct. I think that’s what he would have wanted to say.

I hadn’t responded to this and similar points earlier because it seemed to be based on a misunderstanding and I wasn't sure how to clarify it. The "I think" is not supposed be some simultaneous, conscious "thinking about thought" or "thinking that I am now having thought X." (Maybe the term "the I think" is ill-chosen, since it can suggest that misapprehension.)

But now this occurs to me: Is it possible that you don’t countenance the idea of any thoughts that are not conscious? So therefore the “I think”, on that understanding, would be either present to consciousness or nonexistent? Or another possibility: You countenance the idea of various un- or subconscious processes that accompany thinking, but want to reserve the word “thought” for what happens consciously?

Is any of this close to how you see it? — J

This has been an interesting read for me. Expressing how I see it would involve undermining the entire project. In order to do it effectively, the distinction between thought and thinking about thought would first need to be clearly explained. Then, only after it is obvious that that distinction has been neglected, could the consequences of that error begin to have light shed upon them. The scope is dauntingly broad and exceedingly pervasive. I'm not sure that that is an appropriate path. It's a subject matter in its own right.

I appreciate this thread as well as the general tone within it. Well done! I would not want to dampen it, and so I will not. Better to keep my piece for another time.

Cheers!

Paine I'll only note that the passage quoted is suggestive of the non-duality of mind and world. — Wayfarer

Rödl is more specific about where Nagel and Moore miss the mark:

Thomas Nagel and Adrian Moore confront it. We will discuss their thoughts in Chapter 5. While both are oriented by the understanding we have of judgment in judging, they fail to appreciate the significance of this; they fail to appreciate the significance of the self-consciousness of judgment. They hold fast to the notion that the objectivity of judgment resides in its being of something other, something that is as it is independently of being thought to be so. In consequence, their result is an ultimate incomprehensibility of our thought of ourselves as judging and knowing. — ibid. page 14

Put that way, "non-duality" sounds like a bridge between the terms as opposites where I read the text to say that objectivity, as such, is accepted as a dynamic that distinguishes the first person and her thought as a first person from objective judgement.

I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts as you read the book, . :up:

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Thanks too for your summaries, @Wayfarer. :up:

Thanks to you and to Wayfarer. Whatever else comes from the book, it is a different way to approach what has often been discussed on the forum before.