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. — Harry Hindu

I don't know what you mean by power. I can't imagine anything about them I'd use that word for.

I can understand what you're saying. I differentiated different kinds of thoughts, in regards to baseball. What is the significance of it all? Is this a first step toward something?



How about this sentence, spoken by someone who lost a leg in an accident, but is in traction, can't see it, and hasn't yet been told:
"My foot hurts."

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?

This seems to be a common issue. A conflation of sign vehicles and signified, and of sense/interpretant and referent.

My hunch is that the dominance of computational theory of mind and computational theories of reason/rationality are sort of the culprit here, since they can be taken to imply that everything, all of consciousness, is really just symbols and rules for shuffling them. Logic gets demoted to computation in this way too, and on some views the whole of physics as well.

I'm not saying these theories don't get something right, but they seem inadequate, and might be misleading when it comes to language, meaning, perception, etc. It doesn't seem they can all be right, for if pancomputationalism in physics is right, the saying the brain works by being a computer as CTM does explains nothing, because everything "is a computer."

Of course, when stream engines were the hot new technology the universe and the body was said to work like a great engine, and while this wasn't entirely wrong, it also doesn't seem to have been particularly accurate.

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. — RussellA

I am not sure if that web site's articles are all high quality in its contents.  I have very little faith on most of the internet sites (not all !!) information supplied via the links.  Because anyone can go and set up internet sites like that, and write up whatever they feel like claiming what they imagine is true.

For material logic, they are not all 100% inductive logic.  I will need to consult my logic book on the details, and will get back on that.

For telling about the world, inductive logic is good enough.  It is not about the absolute truth, but it is about the probability of the truth, and you can see what is high probabilities and what are low probabilities of the truth, and they are good guidance for our knowledge.

At the end of the day, there is no one in this world who can see the world 100%.  Most of them may see the world perhaps less than 1 or 2% in their life or even less than that.   Hence why worry about inductive logic cannot tell everything about the world?   

I don't know what you mean by power. I can't imagine anything about them I'd use that word for. — Patterner

It's a term I'm using to refer to your idea that scribbles can somehow do more than what is logically possible. You are free to use a different term to refer to this idea of yours.

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. — Banno

Yes, I'm trying to develop a sort of checklist of what has to constitute an utterance and a "thought utterance" (thought1). For a (spoken) utterance, we want to say that it consists of a particular piece of language, spoken at a particular time and place. But do we want to say this for a thought1? I was proposing that the "time and place" criterion is necessary, but found myself uneasy about the "particular piece of language" one.

Possibly I wasn't clear about the reasons for my unease. It's mostly about common usage -- with the caveat that there isn't much common usage to call upon here, as "quoting thoughts" doesn't come up too often. My own experience of thinking suggests that language is supererogatory to thought. Countless times I've had a fully formed thought, and even a response to said thought, occur much more quickly than it could be "said" or comprehended in language. So would we want to allow that a thought1 -- the "utterance" of a thought -- could transcend a particular piece of language? Or is such a transcendence the very thing that makes it a thought2 -- a piece of content that can be the same from mind to mind, time to time?

I'm going to leave that alone for now, as I'm not sure how much depends on a decision.

And you seem to fluctuate between thought2 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? — Banno

My concept of a thought2 is of a proposition -- "The tree is an oak." So yes, Pat and I are talking about the latter.

But on that account, Rödl is on the face of it mistaken, since these two sentences are about quite different things. — Banno

That would be true if the two sentences are meant to occur in two thoughts, two thought1s. But Rodl tells us this is not what he means: “This cannot be put by saying that, in every act of thinking, two things are thought: p and I think p.” If that is the case, it must also be the case that there aren't two thoughts. At least that's how I read Rodl. I suppose one could argue that "one act of thinking" could be imagined as including "two things" being thought, and that this is what Rodl denies. But I think he's saying something simpler: His claim about the "I think" is that it "accompanies" all thoughts in the sense of structuring them or constituting the conditions for their occurrence. I believe I mentioned somewhere earlier that the very term "the I think" may be unfortunate, as it suggests an activity on a par with regular thinking*. A lot of the back-and-forth on this thread is trying to understand what the nature of this "I think" could be . . . or is it just neo-Kantian wordplay?

*And a reminder here that we've noticed how Rodl probably has only propositional, discursive thinking in mind in this essay.

This seems to be a common issue. A conflation of sign vehicles and signified, and of sense/interpretant and referent.

My hunch is that the dominance of computational theory of mind and computational theories of reason/rationality are sort of the culprit here, since they can be taken to imply that everything, all of consciousness, is really just symbols and rules for shuffling them. Logic gets demoted to computation in this way too, and on some views the whole of physics as well.

I'm not saying these theories don't get something right, but they seem inadequate, and might be misleading when it comes to language, meaning, perception, etc. It doesn't seem they can all be right, for if pancomputationalism in physics is right, the saying the brain works by being a computer as CTM does explains nothing, because everything "is a computer."

Of course, when stream engines were the hot new technology the universe and the body was said to work like a great engine, and while this wasn't entirely wrong, it also doesn't seem to have been particularly accurate. — Count Timothy von Icarus

If this reality is a simulation, then it is possible that everything is a computer.

Steven Pinker addresses this:

Why should you buy the computational theory of mind? Because it has
solved millennia-old problems in philosophy, kicked off the computer
revolution, posed the significant questions of neuroscience, and provided
psychology with a magnificently fruitful research agenda.

Generations of thinkers have banged their heads against the problem
of how mind can interact with matter. As Jerry Fodor has put it, "Self-pity
can make one weep, as can onions." How can our intangible beliefs,
desires, images, plans, and goals reflect the world around us and pull the
levers by which we, in turn, shape the world?

...along came computers: fairy-free, fully exorcised hunks of
metal that could not be explained without the full lexicon of mentalistic
taboo words. "Why isn't my computer printing?" "Because the program
doesn't know you replaced your dot-matrix printer with a laser printer. It
still thinks it is talking to the dot-matrix and is trying to print the document
by asking the printer to acknowledge its message. But the printer
doesn't understand the message; it's ignoring it because it expects its input
to begin with '%!' The program refuses to give up control while it polls the
printer, so you have to get the attention of the monitor so that it can wrest
control back from the program. Once the program learns what printer is
connected to it, they can communicate." The more complex the system
and the more expert the users, the more their technical conversation
sounds like the plot of a soap opera.

Behaviorist philosophers would insist that this is all just loose talk.
The machines aren't really understanding or trying anything, they
would say; the observers are just being careless in their choice of
words and are in danger of being seduced into grave conceptual
errors. Now, what is wrong with this picture? The philosophers are
accusing the computer scientists of fuzzy thinking? A computer is the
most legalistic, persnickety, hard-nosed, unforgiving demander of
precision and explicitness in the universe. From the accusation you'd
think it was the befuddled computer scientists who call a philosopher
when their computer stops working rather than the other way around.
A better explanation is that computation has finally demystified mentalistic
terms. Beliefs are inscriptions in memory, desires are goal
inscriptions, thinking is computation, perceptions are inscriptions
triggered by sensors, trying is executing operations triggered by a
goal. — Steven Pinker

It's not that everything is a computer. It's that everything is logical, and there are patterns anywhere you care to look, some of which might be to small, to big, to fast or to slow for us to perceive. But only brains that think logically and can discern patterns would be the types of brains selected to survive and procreate.

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! — creativesoul

And cheers to you. I certainly like it when a thread's tone is inquisitive rather than dismissive or dogmatic. I'll watch for an OP from you . . .

I differentiated different kinds of thoughts, in regards to baseball. What is the significance of it all? Is this a first step toward something? — Patterner

Hopefully. The OP was examining a common but still controversial claim -- that when we think, there is some accompanying "I think" that characterizes the act of thinking, and which according to some is also a type of self-awareness or self-consciousness. In order to give this proper consideration, it seems we have to do a lot of discriminating and disambiguating around "think" and "thought." I thought your post about baseball was very useful in that regard.

I for one would like to understand this issue better. I guess that's the "something" toward which I'm heading. Its significance might be to give me a better self-understanding, a clearer feel for what being me in the world actually is, thought I don't mind admitting that I find the topic interesting in its own right, regardless of any further insights.

Is pain a suitable subject for the analysis of propositional content? — Wayfarer

Why not?

A propositional attitude is a mental state towards a proposition (Wikipedia - Propositional attitude). I know is a mental state towards the proposition "my hand hurts".

For telling about the world, inductive logic is good enough.  It is not about the absolute truth, but it is about the probability of the truth — Corvus

:up:

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? — Harry Hindu

Zero-knowledge proof
In general, the more observations the better one's conclusion ought to be. However, in practice, most people are entrenched in their positions, regardless of how many new observations they make.

Even so, this does not take away from the fact that observations cannot be guaranteed to be trustworthy, as anyone reading mainstream media would testify.

However, this doesn't mean that certainty cannot be discovered from uncertainty. Zero-knowledge proof is an interesting concept, and not only in computer sciences.

Wikipedia - Zero-knowledge proof

In cryptography, a zero-knowledge proof is a protocol in which one party (the prover) can convince another party (the verifier) that some given statement is true, without conveying to the verifier any information beyond the mere fact of that statement's truth.

The YouTube video Zero Knowledge Proofs I found interesting.

Santa Claus
I see an oak tree in France shedding its leaves, and someone else sees an oak tree in Brazil shedding its leaves.

An oak tree can exist in different locations at the same time because the oak tree is a concept that can be instantiated in different locations at the same time.

Santa Claus as a concept can also be instantiated in different locations, and can exist in Regent Street, Times Square and Greenland at the same time.

It depends what you mean by Santa Claus.

The OP was examining a common but still controversial claim -- that when we think, there is some accompanying "I think" that characterizes the act of thinking, and which according to some is also a type of self-awareness or self-consciousness. — J

As I see it:

Every act of thinking requires an object being thought about and a subject doing the thinking.

In every act of thinking, the "think" is accompanied by both "I" and "p".

Frege and Rodl

Frege and Rodl would agree that i) "I" requires "think" and "p" - ii) "think" requires "I" and "p".

Frege believes that force is outside content, such that "I think" is outside "p". This means that "p" doesn't require "I think".

Rodl believes that force is inside content, such that "I think" is inside "p", meaning that "p" is "I think".

Self-awareness
In every act of thinking, I am aware that it is "I" that is doing the thinking, not someone else, such as Pat

This self-awareness precedes the act of thinking

It could equally be the case that "I run", "I eat", "I laugh" or "I think"

The expression is "I think p", not "I "I think p"", which would lead into the infinite regress homunculus problem.

Re-wording
When I think p, accompanying "think" are both "I" and "p", where the "I" is self-aware.

I don't know what you mean by power. I can't imagine anything about them I'd use that word for.
— Patterner
It's a term I'm using to refer to your idea that scribbles can somehow do more than what is logically possible. You are free to use a different term to refer to this idea of yours. — Harry Hindu

Ok. Well, Human languages are much more complex than any non-human language that we are aware of. With them, we can discuss things, and kinds of things, that cannot be discussed in any non-human language. Things that are not thought by any non-human.

Humans created systems using scribbles in order to make lasting records of ideas that can be expressed in those languages. Presumably, the motivation for creating such systems was the desire to communicate those utterances, both to distant people and to future generations. The squiggles can record and communicate relatively simple things that can be communicated in non-human languages, and also things, and kinds of things, that cannot be discussed in any non-human language.

The result being, when we look at the scribbles, we can, and very often must, think things, and kinds of things, that cannot be discussed in any non-human language, and which are not thought by any non-human. Also, they are often things the one looking at the scribbles has never thought before.

I don't know what's not logically possible in any of that. And I don't know how any power can be read into any of it. At least not in the magical/fantasy sense that I believe you mean it.

But these scribbles are signs that can pass extremely complex ideas, in great detail, from the mind of one person into the mind of a person living thousands of years later, who never had any inking of those particular ideas, or kinds of ideas. That's pretty darned special.

I for one would like to understand this issue better. I guess that's the "something" toward which I'm heading. Its significance might be to give me a better self-understanding, a clearer feel for what being me in the world actually is, thought I don't mind admitting that I find the topic interesting in its own right, regardless of any further insights. — J

And that is as worthy a motivation for pursuing this as any other.

The OP was examining a common but still controversial claim -- that when we think, there is some accompanying "I think" that characterizes the act of thinking, and which according to some is also a type of self-awareness or self-consciousness. — J

It seems somewhat akin to a sentence like "Throw the ball." The subject of the sentence is You. That's not in question, or ambiguous, despite not being spoken. I think it might not even be thought, and omitted from the spoken command because, being certain and clear, it's not necessary. I'm not literally thinking "You/J throw the ball" when I say "Throw the ball." Still, it seems it must be part of my thought.

Maybe Frege's idea is a bit more involved than that, but it came to mind.

Frege believes that force is outside content, such that "I think" is outside "p". This means that "p" doesn't require "I think".

Rodl believes that force is inside content, such that "I think" is inside "p", meaning that "p" is "I think". — RussellA

This is what a lot of the controversy on TPF has been about -- whether it's proper to consider merely thinking p as giving it some kind of force. Frege did indeed believe that force is separable from content, but he probably wouldn't agree that therefore you have to separate "I think" from "p" -- because he didn't believe "I think" gives "p" any force at all. Unless we're using "think" in that ambiguous way that can also mean "aver" or "believe".

Makes sense. The more I work with this, the more I'm realizing that the idea of "accompanying" a thought can be given so many interpretations that I wonder if it's even helpful.

Cheers.

There is a logical error that consists in treating something as being firm and clear when it isn't.

"Thought" may not be the sort of word that has a firm and clear use. Certainly, not all thoughts are assertions. I jus thad a thought - what if it's not an oak tree?

My concept of a thought2 is of a proposition — J

So "The tree is dropping leaves" is a thought, but what about that the tree is dropping leaves? I gather that, being an idealist, Rödl wants that to be a thought too. That strikes me as somewhat odd.

If the conclusion is that "what if it's not an oak?" is not a thought, but that it is dropping leaves is a thought, then something has gone quite amiss.

Rodl probably has only propositional, discursive thinking in mind in this essay. — J

Most of it, yeah. From which implies discursive judgements. When he talks like this, however,…

“…. In these cases, the validity of my judgment depends on something that characterizes me as the subject of the judgment: the time when I judge, the visual system whose deliverances my judgment expresses, the values that inform my judgment…”
(5.3)

….the notion behind it, is aesthetic judgements, re: necessary subjective quality thereof.

While you’re more to the point than not, I think the aesthetic kind of judgement has more to say than he’s giving it space. Meaning, I think it hard to deny that all judgement is conditioned by the quality of how the subject feels about it.

Maybe if or when he gets into moral judgements later on in the essay, that kind makes its appearance.

The more I work with this, the more I'm realizing that the idea of "accompanying" a thought can be given so many interpretations that I wonder if it's even helpful. — J

It does seem to be a bit of a bother. But many things are worth the bother.

The OP was examining a common but still controversial claim -- that when we think, there is some accompanying "I think" that characterizes the act of thinking, and which according to some is also a type of self-awareness or self-consciousness. — J

Did you mean a type of evidence of self-awareness or self-consciousness? Or did you really mean a type of self-awareness or self-consciousness?

Is pain a suitable subject for the analysis of propositional content?
— Wayfarer

Why not?

A propositional attitude is a mental state towards a proposition (Wikipedia - Propositional attitude). I know is a mental state towards the proposition "my hand hurts". — RussellA

Because pain is intrinsically first-person in nature. John can report that 'my hand hurts' but absent any visible injury or determinable cause, this can only ever be something known to a third party such as Bob, in a different way to the subject (or not at all, in the event of no visible condition). Pp 23-24, the text discusses first-person propositions which are specific to a subject, which by nature are private and inaccessible to others. These propositions are objective in that their validity depends solely on their truth - John really does have a pain in his hand - not simply on the subject making the claim. However, their objectivity lacks the usual feature of being affirmable by other subjects. The text suggests that while only the referent of a first-person thought can affirm its content, others can only affirm correlated contents. For example, if John thinks “my hand hurts,” only he can affirm this, but Bob can affirm a related proposition like “John has cut his hand,” understanding the correlation. This framework allows private facts to be apprehended as common truths through correlated propositions. Rödl then goes on to argue against the possibility of first-person propositions as such, suggesting instead that the first-person pronoun is not a form of reference but an expression of self-consciousness. He criticizes Frege's account, which views the pronoun as a way of singling out an object (i.e. a specific person), and instead proposes that understanding the first-person pronoun requires understanding the implications of self-consciousness, which undermines the force-content distinction. Remember, that distinction suggests that thought can be objective only if it is detached from the subject who thinks it. However, first-person thought (I have pain) challenges this by showing that the act of judgment is self-conscious and cannot be isolated from what is judged.

The more I work with this, the more I'm realizing that the idea of "accompanying" a thought can be given so many interpretations that I wonder if it's even helpful. — J

Perhaps you're over-thinking it. Rödl's point is that the truth of propositions can't be 'mind-independent' in the way that Frege's objectivism insists it must be. (I can't help but think that book you once mentioned, Bernstein's 'Beyond Objectivism and Relativism', might also be relevant to this argument.)

edit

…..only ever be something known to a third party…. — Wayfarer

Something un-known???

Subject of Chapter 2: Propositions>2.2 Fregean Propositions - an argument to the effect that the idea of a 'first-person proposition' is incoherent.

On the Fregean account, we cannot approach the thought we quote any closer than we do in referring to its sign. There is no such thing as disquoting this quote. And we must not say: yes there is, for she who thinks the first-person thought can disquote. For we apprehend her disquoting only in quotes. And our question is what we can make of these quotes. The Neo-Fregean “I”, or SELF, or :flower: , is the undisquotable quote, the uninterpretable sign, the enigma itself.

(It's very difficult to cherry-pick Rödl's arguments so as to convey the overall gist. The section I quoted is at the end of 2.2.)

'Undisquotable' stopped me, I had to look it up, but essentially, we can only ever refer to first-person statements, e.g. 'my hand hurts', as if in quotes - quoting what John is saying. In the Fregean framework, first-person thoughts are problematical because they involve a self-referential aspect that cannot be ‘disquoted’ or fully expressed from a third-person perspective. This means that while we can refer to, or quote, a first-person statement like “my hand hurts,” we cannot adequately convey the subjective experience it conveys in a third-person proposition. The term ‘undisquotable’ highlights the idea that first-person thoughts maintain an intrinsic self-reference that eludes complete external articulation or understanding. ('Facing up to the problem of consciousness' comes to mind!)

Did you mean a type of evidence of self-awareness or self-consciousness? Or did you really mean a type of self-awareness or self-consciousness? — Patterner

I think either interpretation could make sense, but the "hardcore proponents" a la Rodl probably mean the latter: Some actual self-consciousness is meant to accompany the thought of p. As opposed to a "soft proponent" like Descartes, who would presumably say merely that thinking p provides evidence that I must be conscious, and aware of being so.

I don't yet know what I believe about all this myself -- still locating the pieces on the board. (My own model might as well be, "I think p ...but slowly." :smile: ) So, sorry if I sound like I'm waffling.

So "The tree is dropping leaves" is a thought, but what about that the tree is dropping leaves? I gather that, being an idealist, Rödl wants that to be a thought too. That strikes me as somewhat odd. — Banno

Just to be clear, would the full thought you're referring to, which I bolded, be "I think that the tree is dropping leaves"?

Rödl's point is that the truth of propositions can't be 'mind-independent' in the way that Frege's objectivism insists it must be — Wayfarer

Interestingly enough, I agree with that. However, my reasons may differ from Rödl's, or I suppose the biggest difference may be methodological. Part of the interest I find here has to do with some of the notions/ideas being talked about and the interplay between them within evidently incommensurate, but coherent views. However, I'm relatively certain that the notion of "mind independence" I'm working from is significantly different from convention. For me, it's a matter of existential dependency/independency.



Riding the coattails of , it seems that some things we say/think are accompanied by what is commonly called a/the subject of the sentence, even when not consciously considered at the time of utterance/thought. In that sense, "I think" certainly accompanies positive assertions(assuming sincere speech), despite it not needing to be articulated silently. If and others are correct and Rödl's target is assertion, and/or propositions, there may be other unexamined problems underwriting the project, such as the accompanying(pardon the expression) common view regarding what counts as the content of the thought/proposition.

This means that while we can refer to, or quote, a first-person statement like “my hand hurts,” we cannot adequately convey the subjective experience it conveys in a third-person proposition. — Wayfarer

This is a generous, sense-making interpretation, but I'm not sure Rodl is really talking about subjective experiences like pain, for instance. I think he's saying, more radically, that any 1st person statement resists translation in the ways we're used to, such as quoting. And his reasons for thinking this -- one of which you gave -- are still unclear to me. More on this another time . . .

Just to be clear, would the full thought you're referring to, which I bolded, be "I think that the tree is dropping leaves"? — J

:grin: That's close to what I just asked you, I believe, concerning think2:

Is Think2 "I know my hand hurts" or is it "My hand hurts"? — Banno

Is the thought "The tree is dropping leaves" or is it "I think the tree is dropping leaves"?

Well, one might well think either! But Rödl, on the account give here, says that one cannot think "The tree is dropping it's leaves". That looks very odd.

But this is a bit different, since that the tree is dropping leaves is not a thought. It's a tree, dropping leaves.

Now it seems to me pretty apparent that, that the tree is dropping leaves can be called the"content" of a thought, and that what being "the content of a thought" is, is worthy of some consideration. However, since what a thought is, is not all that clear, there are compound issues with being clear as to the content of a though. Perhaps this explains much of the puzzlement hereabouts.