Yep. Thanks.

↪Joshs To be sure, progress is a normative notion. So modal logic is an improvement on predicate logic, despite modal logic being in a formal sense reducible to predicate logic.

So nothing need "guarantee the fixity" apart from our own preferences. If we agree that modal logic represents an improvement on predicate logic, what more is needed?

You (or Tim) may argue that we need something external or absolute or a platonic form or some such to fix the judgement. But that there is such choosing to abide by such a thing is itself a normative judgement. And yet we judge. — Banno

We don’t need anything external to our preferences to fix them. While the analytic methods Williamson chooses to apply to world are considered as external to that world, this is not the case when we submit formal logic , mathematics and empirical methodology to a Wittgenstienian or Husserlian analysis. We can find the ground for analytic methodology from within the structures of our use of preference, judgment and norms, as what is being concealed, forgotten , ignored and flattened over.
Williamson illustrates how the distinction between analytic and continental is more than geographic. He believes we have made progress in understanding our analytic methods; we know much more about topics like modal logic, possibility and necessity, and the technical aspects of truth than previous generations.

In Wittgenstein’s sense , Williamson champions improvements in precision, clarify and integration in what for Witt is a picture theory of judgement. Williamson takes for granted methods derived from the natural sciences, mathematics and formal logic and uses themes as his starting point, but it never occurs to him to inquire back to the basis of those methods. Doing so allows one to take account of the possibility that those methods may at some point be replaced by a different set of methods without disturbing their ground.

Wittgenstein, Husserl and Heidegger would all agree that All three would likely agree that Williamson's "progress" is actually regress** - a movement away from what philosophy should genuinely be concerned with. They would also agree that mathematical/scientific methods are inappropriate for philosophy's fundamental questions, and that the problems philosophy addresses require a different kind of approach than the one Williamson advocates.
Williamson's critique of "continental" philosophy misses the point* the apparent obscurity reflects the difficulty of the phenomena being investigated, not methodological sloppiness.

Each would argue that Williamson's paper represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what philosophical thinking involves and what kinds of problems it legitimately addresses.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

it can really help to pare down a post to a couple of carefully expressed questions or observations. — J

Got it.

I’m firing off a few, what I think are, sufficiently pared down ideas, hoping maybe one will stick.

So, ignore what I just said. All I’m saying is, thanks for the above tip.

OK, I'll be the one to ask the obvious question: The idea that there is something that "philosophy should genuinely be concerned with" -- how does that enter the story?

My question is simply what is the aim of the translation project now? Is it the same, or something different? — Ludwig V

Excellent question. Long answer, again.

The original aim was to provide a foundation for maths in logic. This was not entirely dropped as a result of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. While it's right that the whole of mathematics cannot be deduced from a single logical foundation, it's not quite right to suppose that mathematics cannot be given a basis.

Gödel didn’t show that mathematics is not logical, but that not all mathematical truths are derivable from within one particular formal system. It didn’t show that reduction to logic is impossible, but that no axiomatic system will do everything originally hoped. ZFC set theory and type theory are alternative logical foundational systems.

Philosophers came to see that formalisation often misrepresents the richness, context-sensitivity, and performative dimensions of ordinary language. But to walk away from formalism was to give up a valuable philosophical tool. Better to see if and how that richness can be treated formally, to see what can be done.

While other logicians provided formalisations of various aspects of language, Davidson provided a methodological basis for such an approach using Tarski's work of truth. Oversimplifying, Davidson suggested using a truth conditional semantics to develop an interpretation of aspects of natural languages in an extensional first order logic. With Russell and the Tractarian Wittgenstein the aim was to replace natural language. With Davidson, it was to understand it.

Davidson deliberately moved from talking of "translation" to talk of "interpretation" in order to make clear this methodological difference. So Davidson accepted that meaning cannot be separated from use, while still looking for ways to understand language in more formal terms.

Logicians and philosophers now look to see both where formal systems can display the structure of natural languages, and were aspects of natural languages can suggest ways to develop new approaches within logic.

Yep. Convergence is not itself normative, so this idea is problematic.

Perhaps his point can be seen as pragmatic, that convergence, many folk working together on an issue, indicates a problem worthy of consideration.

Added:

It doesn't seem to indicate a problem for biological evolution. — GrahamJ

Yep. Convergence might indicate utility, if nothing else.

We don’t need anything external to our preferences to fix them. — Joshs

I agree.

...the analytic methods Williamson chooses to apply to world are considered as external to that world... — Joshs

How do you ground that? It seems a hollow accusation, given the ambiguity of "world".

What, exactly, is "being concealed, forgotten , ignored and flattened over"?

...what philosophy should genuinely be concerned with... — Joshs

What's that, then, and why should we take your word for it?

All this by way of showing that you are doing the sort of thing that Williamson complains about.

Now I'll give my own summation and evaluation when we have finished working through the paper, and I suspect that at that point we will find ourselves not so far apart. But let's not jump to the conclusion quite yet.

It's worth noting that this paper was delivered at a conference on realism and truth. That likely accounts for why Williamson spends so much time on the realism-irrealism debate. — J

Cheers. Worth noting. Here I am reading the text as a more general critique and defence of analytic method - I think that's how @Srap Tasmaner intended me to see it when he suggested the paper.

You there, Srap? Have we lost you?

↪Joshs OK, I'll be the one to ask the obvious question: The idea that there is something that "philosophy should genuinely be concerned with" -- how does that enter the story? — J

That notion only begins to make sense when we have a way of peering within what is taken for granted as an irreducible basis for philosophy. In Williamson’s case, what is taken for granted is a set of abstractions common to mathematics, formal logic and empirical science. For him this is a genuine beginning for philosophy, because he fails to see the ‘plumbing’ making it possible. Now of course, this is just my assertion… that is, until you see what I see. Then Williamson’s efforts become a perfectly respectable superstructure. Not wrong, but not grounding questioning and thus not genuine philosophy, just the regurgitation of an unexamined technical method. Williamson is aiming to improve a technology, but technology is not philosophy.

Onward. The thoughts at the bottom of page fifteen parallel those I have expressed elsewhere in terms of completeness and coherence. It is easy to construct a complete theory, since any contradiction will, by the principle of explosion, result in an explanation for anything. Harder, though, to construct a coherent theory, one that does not involve contradiction.

And yes, that's a trite argument. Yet

...it is rigour, not its absence, that prevents one from sliding over the deepest difficulties, in an agonized rhetoric of profundity. — p.15

Consistency is a necessary precondition for explanatory adequacy. While the point is logically elementary, it bears repeating: in philosophy, the real danger isn't just explicit contradiction, but the glossing over of inconsistencies in the name of elegance or rhetorical flourish. That’s where Williamson’s critique really bites.

The paragraph, at the top of page sixteen, on the aesthetics of definitions is harder to follow. An example might have helped.

The criticism of Dummett in the next paragraph is clear enough. ‘Either a mammoth stood on this spot a hundred thousand years ago or no mammoth stood on this spot a hundred thousand years ago’ is either true or it is false; false for my case since there were no mammoths in Australia. Clumsy stuff, on Dummett's part? Or mischaracterisation?

As I recall, Dummett moved from a classical logic to an intuitionist logic, since the absences of warrant for the conclusion, in an intuitionist logic, permits the rejection of the law of excluded middle - we just don't know for sure whether there was a mammoth were Dummett stood, a hundred thousand years ago - and saying "I don't know" is commonsensical.

But we can still take on board Williamson's point: it is important that we are clear what logic - what "constraints" - we are using. It's just that Dummett may be using intuitionistic logic rather than just relying on Williamson's common sense.

Not wrong, but not grounding questioning and thus not genuine philosophy, — Joshs

What you say is clear enough, but I'm still missing the warrant for "genuine philosophy." I appreciate questions about grounding very much, and consider them important, but by what standard is it genuine, as opposed to ersatz, philosophy? Are there some uninterpreted "grounds" that are meant to be obvious?

Or more simply, on the narrow view, are Nietzsche and Dostoevsky even philosophers anymore? — Count Timothy von Icarus

(@Fire Ologist)

What is one to say to the claim that philosophy studies language, or is engaged in plumbing, or “leaves things as they were”, or must focus on precise tools? I think the response is simply that, more than anything else, we know that philosophy and Plato go together. When one wrestles with Plato’s dialogues he is most surely doing philosophy. This does not exhaust philosophy, but it is the most certain orientation for an understanding of philosophy.

Now if Wittgenstein was right, or if philosophy only studies language, or is only engaged in plumbing, or “leaves things as they were,” then Socrates and Plato were not philosophers at all. But this is absurd, just as it is absurd to claim that Wittgenstein was a more paradigmatic philosopher than Socrates or Plato. It would be absurd to claim that things like Plato’s Republic or his Symposium are not philosophy, and what this means is that none of this about “plumbing” is remotely correct. Philosophy can do lots of things. It can even do “plumbing” if it likes. But the idea that it is restricted to such menial work is not at all plausible. Such theories are parochial, both temporally and geographically.

There is virtually no disagreement on the fact that Socrates and Plato are paradigmatic philosophers, and therefore I think this is the most decisive argument against strange reductionisms regarding language or “plumbing.”

Not wrong, but not grounding questioning and thus not genuine philosophy, just the regurgitation of an unexamined technical method. — Joshs

This is basically correct. If Williamson or others refuse questioning and refuse to examine their premises, they are failing to do philosophy. A superstructure with no capacity to examine the foundation is an example of that. The Wittgenstenian who refuses to go beyond their "hinge propositions" and tries to end the argument with "it just is" is another example of a non-philosopher.

Much appreciated.

Just trying to engage, see if I could learn anything useful.

I’ve been forced out of the neighborhood at this point. Like an undocumented migrant philosopher. Don’t speak the language.

You have the property developer, the architect, and the carpenters and builders. You even have the folks down at Home Depot. I never have any problems speaking with any of them. Analytic philosophers seem like code enforcement - all post hoc and redundant when they don’t point to some rule book violation that usually only actually matters to other code enforcement officers.

We need code enforcement, but we need all the rest. And so do code enforcers.

Logicians and philosophers now look to see both where formal systems can display the structure of natural languages, and were aspects of natural languages can suggest ways to develop new approaches within logic. — Banno

Thanks for the explanation. It would seem that there has been considerable progress on this issue since the bad old days.

I was taught by Williamson as an undergrad for a year. Don't remember a thing. I'd be much more interested now.

For Husserl reason returns to itself in the self-affecting presence to itself of the present moment, the speaking that hears itself speak in the same moment that it speaks. Once we bracket off all that consists of reference to all that which is not present and can never be present ( the idealizations of logic and empirical science) , what is left is the presence-to-self which grounds reason as pure self-identity.

Right, but is this even a "grounding" or just mere description, tracing the way reason shows up in experience? How does this justify the authority of reason? And doesn't this risk absolutizing the epoché?

There is also the question of individual judgement here. For Hegel, sheer sense certainty is contentless, it needs to go beyond itself to be anything at all. Instead of being pure immediacy, it turns out to be pure abstraction, and in a sense, a myth, since it is always already caught up in the Concept, which is mediated and self-developing. I suppose Hegelians and Husserlians can both accuse the other of falling into different illusions, but that hardly seems to go anywhere.

So, first, we have the difficulty of judging different conclusions drawn from sheer sense certainty. Then we have to ask, from whence these different judgements?

But as noted before, something of the materialist's presuppositions seem to still loom large in Husserl. The concrete particular is "most real," despite this elevation coming from what is supposed to be a methodological move in the order of our knowing (not the order of being). Yet even if one accepts that "everything in the intellect is first in the senses," this wouldn't necessarily imply any sort of ontic priority to the giveness of sensation itself.

If the immediacy of experience is the ground of being (as opposed to merely first in the order of knowing) wouldn't this imply that it is subsistent in itself? And yet it seems radically contingent, with causes outside itself, always being referred outside itself. How is this not supposing a spontaneous move from potency to act if sheer experience is said to be ontological ground, and thus prior to all things? That the transcendental ego is always already active doesn't explain why this is so.

So for instance, Stein recognizes the need for metaphysics to complete the description, Jean-Luc Marion recognizes that giveness exceeds the subject and must come from without, Ferdinand Ulrich probably extends this the furthest, countering the forgetfulness of being with an understanding of being as gift.

The paragraph, at the top of page sixteen, on the aesthetics of definitions is harder to follow. An example might have helped. — Banno

Agreed. "Ugly, convoluted, and ramshackle" need some specific instances.

I've sometimes wondered whether aesthetic criteria are more like correlations than causes. In other words, let's not say that the beauty or elegance of a definition somehow explains why the definition is a good one. Rather, we could note that good definitions -- ones which we approve for other reasons -- will often have the characteristic of also being aesthetically admirable. We might even be able to make a tentative identification of useful, fruitful definitions by first noticing their elegance. And vice versa. Emphasis on "tentative."

in philosophy, the real danger isn't just explicit contradiction, but the glossing over of inconsistencies in the name of elegance or rhetorical flourish. That’s where Williamson’s critique really bites. — Banno

This is one of the real dangers, true. Another that I think is equally important is the danger of becoming attached without warrant to a method that assumes what it sets out to prove -- usually something about consistency or the role of logic. Of course, "without warrant" is the argument-starter here!

So for instance, Stein recognizes the need for metaphysics to complete the description, Jean-Luc Marion recognizes that giveness exceeds the subject and must come from without, Ferdinand Ulrich probably extends this the furthest, countering the forgetfulness of being with an understanding of being as gift. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, the religious phenomenologists (and we could include Henry, Scheler, and perhaps even Zahavi and Levinas in this group) believe that to exceed the solipsistic self-givenness of the subject requires metaphysics. But why? How does the transcendence of the subject toward a substantive in-itself (the Goodness , Height and Righteousness of the divine other) not represent a backsliding away from Husserl’s content-free ground towards an arbitrary substantive beginning? How does it not end up reifying both subjectivity and alterity? If we want to critique Husserl’s ground of pure presence as excluding Otherness, we can follow the path set by Nietzsche, Deleuze, Heidegger and Derrida, who don’t fall into the trap of imprisoning transcendence with a substantive divine content.

I’ve been forced out of the neighborhood at this point. Like an undocumented migrant philosopher. Don’t speak the language.

You have the property developer, the architect, and the carpenters and builders. You even have the folks down at Home Depot. I never have any problems speaking with any of them. Analytic philosophers seem like code enforcement - all post hoc and redundant when they don’t point to some rule book violation that usually only actually matters to other code enforcement officers. — Fire Ologist

:lol:

We need code enforcement, but we need all the rest. And so do code enforcers. — Fire Ologist

Yes, well said. :up:

We need code enforcement, but we need all the rest. And so do code enforcers. — Fire Ologist

I have no problem with the code on this (or other) forums. But laying down, and enforcing a code on philosophy as such seems like a futile project.

Think of it this way. One cannot legislate for language. What determines the language is the continuous use of the language and the consensus of users determines what works. (Yes, there are exceptions in France and Sweden. But those systems depend on acceptance and application of the code.)

Philosophers are a big enough and disparate enough community to make observation and enforcement of a code very difficult to impossible. In the end, what gets accepted by philosophers is what philosophy is. Yes, there are social forces at work here as well as the core reading and responding to texts. They may pollute the ideal, but one must acknowledge their existence.

Not wrong, but not grounding questioning and thus not genuine philosophy, just the regurgitation of an unexamined technical method. Williamson is aiming to improve a technology, but technology is not philosophy. — Joshs

I just don't think that's quite fair.

I agree with @Leontiskos that one particularly appealing way to figure out what philosophy is, is to look at Socrates and Plato. Whatever they're trying to do, it's what we call "philosophy".

So I'll give a simple definition of what they were trying to do, which I hope is not controversial: philosophy is thinking well about what it is important to think about.

There are two elements or moments there, and maybe they can't be fully disentangled, but they can be thought about distinctly, within limits that might themselves be interesting.

Socrates spends more time on moral and political matters than someone like Williamson, but his mission is not just to think and talk about these important issues, but to think well about them, and to lead others to think well about them.

The work of philosophers lands somewhere in a space measured by these two axes. Those most concerned with the "thinking well" part tend to focus on logic and language, moving a bit along the other axis into metaphysics and epistemology. All of this together is the territory most strongly associated with academic analytic philosophy. If it's technology, it's the technology of philosophy.

Does it leave untouched important areas? Morality, politics, spirituality, art, culture? Of course. But thinking poorly about those important areas of human experience doesn't deserve the name "philosophy".

Better still, we would want figuring out what's important to think about to be part of the practice of philosophy, and not something we can assume we already know. (I'm reminded of a certain German philosopher who suggested that no one devoted any time to the single most important question there is.)

If we're going to begin the task of figuring out what's important to think about, I think we would want to do a good job of it, so we would begin by thinking about how we could figure out something like that. Right from the start you have to face the challenge of thinking well, and reflecting on how that can be done.

Maybe too many philosophers never quite get past that. They become absorbed entirely in the matter of thinking itself. But philosophy is a communal project, so the fruits of their labor are available to others ready to get to issues of more "relevance," as kids in the sixties are supposed to have said.

We should know better than to exalt the theoretical physicist while denigrating the experimenters, the engineers, and the technologists without whom their work would be just a peculiar way of decorating a whiteboard.

If we're going to begin the task of figuring out what's important to think about, I think we would want to do a good job of it, so we would begin by thinking about how we could figure out something like that. Right from the start you have to face the challenge of thinking well, and reflecting on how that can be done.

Maybe too many philosophers never quite get past that. They become absorbed entirely in the matter of thinking itself. But philosophy is a communal project, so the fruits of their labor are available to others ready to get to issues of more "relevance," as kids in the sixties are supposed to have said. — Srap Tasmaner

How well is a philosophy thinking if its results are of immediate practical relevance to a wider community?
As a certain German philosopher wrote:

“…a philosophy is creatively grasped at the earliest 100 years after it arises. We Germans are now precisely beginning to prepare ourselves to grasp Leibniz… But why could I never have felt this process to be “painful”? Because I knew obscurely, what I now know more clearly, that indeed precisely this misinterpretation of all my work (e.g., as a “philosophy of existence”) is the best and most lasting protection against the premature using up of what is essential. And it must be so, since immediate effectiveness must remain foreign to all essential thinking, and because such thinking, in its truth, must be prevented from becoming “familiar” and “understandable” to contemporaries. For that would mean what is to be disclosively questioned in thinking had been degraded to something Already commonplace. So then everything is in the best possible order—i.e., everything is well hidden and misinterpreted and withdrawn from rough fingers and from being rubbed away by the common understanding.

I don't know what I was expecting, but that sure wasn't it.

I'm just going to congratulate myself for being directly on-topic and move along.

I'm just going to congratulate myself for being directly on-topic and move along. — Srap Tasmaner

Thank you.

philosophy is thinking well about what it is important to think about.

There are two elements or moments there, and maybe they can't be fully disentangled, — Srap Tasmaner

Beautiful. Shining.

Previously, the two moments seem to have been tagged thinking well, and making shite up.

Ignores the simple fact that Plato and Socrates belong to a very different time.
On a different note...the burgeoning partisanship on this site is becoming nauseating.

immediate effectiveness must remain foreign to all essential thinking,

It's an . . . unusual claim. Does anyone know whether another philosopher besides Heidegger ever said something similar? Reminds me of Beethoven saying that his final music was "for a later age."

Edgar Allan Poe famously said there is no such thing as a long poem.

I would say there are people who are naturally suspicious that the grander the edifice you've built, the less we should trust that you put equal care and effort into each part.

The systematic philosophers people continue to read generations after their passing are the ones that stand up to such scrutiny, if not quite entirely then more than enough to credit their discipline.

On the other hand, even the less gifted, or less stubborn, might manage to make at least some small thing well. Such contributions are the meat and potatoes of science.