Have you read "Thinking and Being" by Irad Kimhi? Or "Self-Consciousness and Objectivity" by Sebastain Rodl? — J

I haven't. They look very much like my cup of tea, though. :up:

"Better" in virtue of what? — Count Timothy von Icarus

If you have trouble deciding, I'll do it for you.

But I can't see that "The speaker holds true..." is at all helpful. What's unclear about "X believes that the cat is on the mat"? — Ludwig V

Well, there's the issues of substitution. If the cat's name is "Jack", does the speaker also believe that Jack is on the mat? It seems not. And yet Jack = the cat.

Hence the analysis "The cat is on the mat" and "The speaker holds that true", where that indicates the previous sentence. This has the benefit of separating the belief from the fact.

Davidson was not able to give up the search. — Ludwig V

I missed something.

But nowhere here are we talking about arguments showing that people actually agree, or argument as a means of clarifying, or any of the things you said and that I was asking about. Are we just moving on? — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, the argument did indeed move on. Disenchantment with the global framing of the debate led to the rise of localism, Phil os science moved away from examination of method and towards examining scientific language and culture, and modal theories of causation. Philosophers moved to metemetaphysics, after the book by that title, a sideline of neo-Aristotelian approaches as a reaction against Quine, another sideline on the construction of social reality, and so on. Pholsophers got board with the lack of progress and moved on.

...do you think that clarity tends to dissolve disagreements because it shows most disagreements to have been merely verbal? — Srap Tasmaner

Sometimes, not always. It also can bring out differences in aesthetic, in what the proponents are seeking.

I think Williamson considers the end goal knowledge. — Srap Tasmaner

Ok, lets' settle on clear knowledge... :wink:

I'm trying to bring in the 1st person judgment. We can stipulate that we will use "assert" so as to mean that "The cat is on the mat" and "It is true that the cat is on the mat" assert the same thing. Indeed, this is very often how we use "assert." But does this get us to "I judge that the cat is on the mat" or "I judge that it is true that the cat is on the mat"? Are these formulations also meant to say the same thing? How? — J

I'm lost here. We have it that "the cat is on the mat" can have a particular interpretation, understood whether it is true or not; and we have it that "I judge that sentence to be true" is a distinct, albeit not seperate, item.

Is that not so?

Ok, lets' settle on clear knowledge... — Banno

Why do I feel like I just walked into the Meno?

Do you think that "learning" in philosophy amounts to becoming clear about what you already know? Or can philosophy provide us with knowledge we did not have before?

Inter-disciplinary work has developed well in recent decades... — Ludwig V

A result of philosophers being forced to pay their way, perhaps - of economics, rather than largess on the part of philosophers.

And you do all this so that the choice between theories or approaches is not "merely aesthetic". (@Moliere) — Srap Tasmaner

What about "aesthetic" as opposed to "merely aesthetic"? -- the desire for results, success, knew knowledge -- how is that not aesthetic?

Isn't the attraction to results, success, and so forth very much an itch of the modern scholar?

Yep. Chalmers et al took themselves to be working on the same problem, as can bee seen in his Ontological Anti-Realism - he's explicitly re-casting the problem as about metametaphysics, and arguing an antirealist case from there. But the upshot appears to have been a move past the realism/antirealism dichotomy, a re-framing of the activity.

Yep!

- You've been asking a lot of good questions, even if no answers are forthcoming. :up:

I'd suggest some sort of shared intentionality, social intent, along the lines proffered by Searle. Shared intent as opposed to individual intent. That for a non-extensional account.

Alternately, after Davidson: aren't "the cat is on the mat" spoken by J and "the cat is on the mat" spoken by @frank both true under the very same circumstances? That is, they are extensional equivalent - so what's the issue?

But "What is a proposition?" would make an excellent thread...

Why do I feel like I just walked into the Meno? — Srap Tasmaner

:razz:

Do you think that "learning" in philosophy amounts to becoming clear about what you already know? Or can philosophy provide us with knowledge we did not have before? — Srap Tasmaner

Isn't becoming clearer about what you already know a way to improve your knowledge? At the least, I'm not convinced that they are mutually exclusive...

I've in mind Midgley's plumbing model of philosophy. We get the plumbing right, and then are we still doing philosophy? I'm suspicious about that. I do think philosophy can to some extent provide a service to other disciplines, fixing the leaks and bad smells.

Back to the demarcation criteria I suggested: philosophy happens when we stop doing things with words and start looking instead at how we do things with words; how those words work. Doing philosophy involves going back and looking again at what we have said, and checking how it hangs together. Dissection.

Now, a corollary of that: it remains undecided if what is left over when we get the plumbing right is still philosophy, or has become something else.

So "learning" in philosophy is at least becoming clear about what you already know, but maybe philosophy might provide us with knowledge we did not have before, after it gets through fixing the pipes. I remain unconvinced.

It might be worth pointing out that intuitionistic logic is a proper subset of classical propositional logic: everything provable in intuitionistic logic is provable classically, but not the other way around. It’s consistent, and it has a semantics—Kripke models, for example—that is both sound and complete.

What it doesn’t assume is the law of excluded middle or double negation elimination. That’s the point.

Dummett made use of it in his work—especially in his arguments against classical realism about meaning.

If we are tempted to agree with Dummett might give consideration to what it is we are agreeing.

If we are tempted to disagree with Dummett we might do well to understand the solidity of the foundation on which he stands.

I'd suggest some sort of shared intentionality, social intent, along the lines proffered by Searle. Shared intent as opposed to individual intent. That for a non-extensional account. — Banno

I don't think there's any fact of the matter regarding shared nor individual intentionality. It's all Wittgenstein's Group Dynamics.

I don't think there's any fact of the matter regarding shared nor individual intentionality — frank

Then how do you explain a football game?

Then how do you explain a football game? — Banno

I don't.

Is that not so? — Banno

Yes. My question is whether "I judge that sentence to be true" ever follows from "That sentence is true"? If I assert the latter, have I also committed myself to asserting the former?

Alternately, after Davidson: aren't "the cat is on the mat" spoken by J and "the cat is on the mat" spoken by frank both true under the very same circumstances? That is, they are extensional equivalent - so what's the issue? — Banno

Right, this is tricky. The question is about "I judge that the cat is on the mat," spoken by each of us in turn. These are different assertions, you'll agree? The "I" in each case is different -- the person who is judging. They aren't extensionally equivalent, despite being phrased identically.

I don's see that this is not captured.

• The cat is on the mat.
• J judges that to be true
• Banno judges that to be true.

I do think philosophy can to some extent provide a service to other disciplines, fixing the leaks and bad smells. — Banno

I don't think any other discipline has asked for philosophy's help or wants it.

That's not to say that some kind of interdisciplinary business isn't possible and sometimes interesting, but no astronomer (or even social psychologist) has ever said, "Whoa, have you seen the new data? We're gonna need a philosopher."

Doing philosophy involves going back and looking again at what we have said — Banno

This is the same issue that bedeviled the other thread, that you need something to dissect. There are a lot of candidates for that; is one of them the kind of theory that Williamson thinks it is the business of philosophy to produce?

"Why not?" you'll say. "Have scalpel; will travel."

But there's a genuine question of intention here: Williamson would absolutely agree to carefully examining theories, with the goal of improving them or producing better ones, not with the expectation they'll all be left dead on the dissecting table.

I don't think any other discipline has asked for philosophy's help or wants it. — Srap Tasmaner

Philosophers don't wait to be asked...

This is the same issue that bedeviled the other thread, that you need something to dissect. — Srap Tasmaner

There's no shortage, is there? starting with how many legs does a spider have, and working on from there...

Williamson would absolutely agree to carefully examining theories, with the goal of improving them or producing better ones, not with the expectation they'll all be left dead on the dissecting table. — Srap Tasmaner

I suspect that the philosophers now working on metametaphyscis and so on see themselves as working on the same issue, but re-cast as a result of the considerations from, amongst others, Williamson, Chalmers, Dummett and so on.

It's not an autopsy.

the desire for results, success, knew knowledge -- how is that not aesthetic? — Moliere

Because it isn't?

I'm genuinely puzzled why you'd stretch the word "aesthetics" to cover, well, everything. Now if you wanted to talk about value or utility or something, you'd have an argument. But an engineer who designs a beautiful bridge has to make sure, first and separately, that what he designs will function as a bridge and it'll probably have to meet a host of other requirements before considerations of beauty come into it.

My question is whether "I judge that sentence to be true" ever follows from "That sentence is true"? If I assert the latter, have I also committed myself to asserting the former? — J

The answer is straightforward. From "That sentence is true" it does not follow that "I judge that sentence to be true". Neither does it follow from "I judge that sentence to be true" that "That sentence is true. The context is not extensional.

If you assert "That sentence is true" you have also committed to "I judge that sentence to be true" on the grounds that to assert a sentence counts as to judge it to be true. This is not an entailment but a performance.

Because it isn't?

I'm genuinely puzzled why you'd stretch the word "aesthetics" to cover, well, everything. — Srap Tasmaner

I'll give it a shot to make a case of some kind here.

Now if you wanted to talk about value or utility or something, you'd have an argument. — Srap Tasmaner

How is that different, exactly?

Utility -- it's not something we ought pursue in a ethical sense. It's not strictly true, either, because it's relative to one's desire. We have to want to build a bridge for some reason or other, and it's not an ethical value, at least not on its face. I wouldn't say someone is morally good for building a useful tool. I'd say it's useful.

Since it's not true, and it's not good -- well, maybe it's not beautiful in the old sense of the aesthetic, but there is this broader sense of "beautiful" which is that which is judged worthy, but not on moral grounds.

Basically the judgment of values which are not-moral falls into the aesthetic. Sometimes we like to say these are "epistemic values", or some such, but even there there are are choices between which epistemic values one makes appeals to.

At least, insofar that these judgments are held for more than one person. We say we like vanilla ice cream, but we don't hold that others should like that -- it's something I like.

But these other value judgments tend to be binding for practitioners -- the elegance of a mathematical theory persuades, and so forth.

EDIT: Perhaps another way: I think it makes sense to try and make appeals to what is attractive to a body of people. So here, with Williamson, in order to respond I'd have to do better than I really can, at the moment -- but the way I'll figure it out along the way is to see what it is Williamson cares about, what he finds persuasive, what arguments he allows, and so forth. I'll be looking for his taste in judgment: which arguments does he deploy? Surely they're all valid, but there's many arguments one can make. What topics are worthy? That sort of thing.

I'll try too:

We decide to build a bridge because we believe it would make our lives better, and the sense of "better" there is colorably an aesthetic judgement. Life with the bridge would be preferable, simply in terms of what we want our lives to be like.

That's persuasive, but we still have the problem that the bridge's capacity to improve our lives is instrumental; it has to succeed as a bridge, and can be judged to succeed or fail as a bridge, without any consideration of our motive for building it, and without considering whether we were right that the bridge would improve our lives in the way we wanted.

(Oh! Spectacular movie reference for this: Stanley Tucci's speech about his bridge in Margin Call, 2011.)

You can always take a step up like this, and examine anything by placing it in a wider context, but while you will gain new terms for evaluating the thing, you'll lose the ones you had before.

Since it's not true, and it's not good -- well, maybe it's not beautiful in the old sense of the aesthetic, but there is this broader sense of "beautiful" which is that which is judged worthy, but not on moral grounds.

Basically the judgment of values which are not-moral falls into the aesthetic. Sometimes we like to say these are "epistemic values", or some such, but even there there are are choices between which epistemic values one makes appeals to. — Moliere

Here for instance you didn't have to take the word "good" to have an exclusively moral sense, and I feel quite certain than @Count Timothy von Icarus would not. I think your use of "aesthetic" (or maybe "beautiful" in the mooted non-traditional sense) has noticeable overlap with his use of "good".

I think Williamson is only demanding that philosophical theories succeed as theories, to some recognizable degree. Whether they make our lives better or worse or give us a warm fuzzy, he's presumably going to consider a separate question.

Well, there's the issues of substitution. If the cat's name is "Jack", does the speaker also believe that Jack is on the mat? It seems not. And yet Jack = the cat. — Banno

Well, I do see this as a puzzle. I'm inclined to say that if the speaker knows that the cat's name is Jack, then they do also believe that Jack is on the mat; if they do not know, they do not also believe that Jack is on the mat. Implicit in this is the question of the identity of individual propositions. Are "the cat is on the mat" and "Jack is on the mat" two propositions or one? If the former, they do also believe .... However, if the latter, they do not also believe.

The classical definition of intentionality, in my view, is not incorrect, but could, and should go further. If we consider the speech-situation, we find that these contexts are not rigidly separate, but are often mixed. Suppose I'm telling a story about my cat. Yesterday, I was with a group of people who do not know that my cat is called Jack. Last week, Jack, who is fond of chasing his tail, accidentally caught it, and bit it. You should have seen his reaction; he was furious with the tail, but couldn't work out what to do about it. Obviously, I will tell the story, not about "Jack", but about "my cat". This morning, I was with a group of people who know my cat's name. I told the same story, but not about "my cat", but about "Jack". Choosing the appropriate one of inter-substitutable references depends on one's audience. This works for "believes" and a number of other concepts classified as intentional.

Davidson was not able to give up the search.
— Ludwig V
I missed something. — Banno

You didn't miss anything. The problem is that I failed to delete that sentence from a draft.

Pholsophers got board with the lack of progress and moved on. — Banno

Quite likely. It's quite a common phenomenon - and not irrational. Perhaps people concerned with lack of progress should take not.

But does this get us to "I judge that the cat is on the mat" or "I judge that it is true that the cat is on the mat"? Are these formulations also meant to say the same thing? How? — J

Those two statements do not assert the same thing, in my book. The link between them only holds in a very special situation.

Do you think that "learning" in philosophy amounts to becoming clear about what you already know? Or can philosophy provide us with knowledge we did not have before? — Srap Tasmaner

I think Wittgenstein, for one, would say that philosophy amounts to becoming clear about what you already know, or perhaps learning to find one's way about in circumstances that are confusing. But perhaps becoming clear about what you already know (or don't know) is, in a sense, acquiring new knowledge.

Yes. My question is whether "I judge that sentence to be true" ever follows from "That sentence is true"? If I assert the latter, have I also committed myself to asserting the former?
I say not. However, one could say that when I assert that the cat is on the mat, I'm expressing my belief or judgement that the cat is on the mat. — J

no astronomer (or even social psychologist) has ever said, "Whoa, have you seen the new data? We're gonna need a philosopher. — Srap Tasmaner

To be fair, I don't think that scientists ever say "hold on, this is a philosophical issue. We need to call an expert."

"the cat is on the mat" and "Jack is on the mat" two propositions or one? — Ludwig V

I should have been clearer - my apologies. It's if the speaker does not know that jack is the cat's name. So we have

The cat is on the mat
The speaker believes that the cat is on the mat

The cat=jack

And by substitution,

the speaker believes that Jack is on the mat

Which is not the case. I'm just pointing to the opacity of propositional attitudes.

All language games involve ends, but of course which ends aren't always obvious. I've had many a person tell me that "good arguments" are just those arguments that lead to people seeing things your way, or which convince them to do what you want. I find it curious when people who embrace such a view fault arguments for being merely rhetorical or aesthetic. Presumably, arguments can be as vacuous or invalid as we please, so long as they work, so long as they are "useful" (to us).



You're welcome to advance your own at least. If metaphysics is not a science of being qua being, or any of its other various definitions, but instead a debate about language—about "proposing better ways to conceptualize and systematize our thought and language," surely there has to be some notion of the end this language is "better for." It certainly cannot be "better" at doing metaphysics in its traditional sense, and it hardly seems that it can be based on a "metaphysics of goodness," because switching the terms of the debate to philosophy of language (itself a move supported by metaphysical presuppositions no doubt) seems to have put that out of reach.

However, if the very issues at hand are various forms of anti-realism, e.g. anti-realism re values (i.e. the very idea of anything being better or worse at all), anti-realism re truth (i.e. the very idea of anything ever being truly better or worse), anti-realism re linguistic meaning, etc. it seems to me that it will be impossible to appeal to "better or worse language," without begging the question re anti-realism. That is, anti-realism is itself not unrelated to the ends of philosophy, e.g., the post-modern "ontologies of violence," grow out of a certain sort of anti-realism and philosophy of language.

But we keep discussing:
- our language, as it
- comes from a speaker, and as it
- references a thing in the world.

I mean every word in that last sentence.

Many OP’s start from “laws in the universe” or “ways to philosophize” or “what is belief” or so many others, and we are back to grappling over language, speakers, and the world.

I'm not sure this monomania is necessary. It takes a particular sort of philosophy of language to make all philosophy into philosophy of language. Such a philosophy is not without its own assumptions about ends and metaphysics either.

I think Williamson is only demanding that philosophical theories succeed as theories, to some recognizable degree. Whether they make our lives better or worse or give us a warm fuzzy, he's presumably going to consider a separate question.

I think that's right. "Succeed" how though? I'm not sure how one smuggles in ends by which to measure success without foreclosing on at least some claims of anti-realism (e.g. re the desirability of any ends). If one claims that success leads to knowledge and truth, and the point in question is anti-realism re knowledge and truth (either tout court, or within "science" or "metaphysics"), this just seems to beg the question (see my response to @Banno above).

My point would be that some forms of anti-realism remove any grounds for considering their own position choiceworthy. Of course, some are forthright about this. Philosophy is ultimately sophistry, a contest of power, the will placed above the intellect. And the charge here is that, aside from begging the question, Williamson is simply engaged in the same dynamics, his standards a power play, although he lacks full self-awareness of this fact.

I don't think the purveyors of the metaphysics are violence are wrong here, given some of their assumptions, and the tricky thing for contemporary philosophy, including in the analytic space, particularly within the linguistic turn, is that it has already given them those assumptions.

Edit: if you want a concrete example, just consider deflationary theories of truth, where truth is just the use of that token ("true") within a system/game. Williamson's claim that advances in formalism represent "knowledge of truth" might point in that direction, maybe not. I think full deflationism is far more popular here than in mainstream analytic thought. But if one accepts deflationism, particularly when paired with logical nihilism or a liberal logical pluralism (something some analytics are led towards, particularly through the elevation of philosophy of language), I think one will find the more "post-modern" theorists who descend from Nietzsche to be quite irrefutable, which will then cast doubt on the whole project.

However, if the very issues at hand are various forms of anti-realism, e.g. anti-realism re values (i.e. the very idea of anything being better or worse at all), anti-realism re truth (i.e. the very idea of anything ever being truly better or worse), anti-realism re linguistic meaning, etc. it seems to me that it will be impossible to appeal to "better or worse language," without begging the question re anti-realism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is true. A behaviorist, for instance, can't complain much about wording, because no language use is supposed to actually refer, or convey meaning, do ontology, etc.

Just be aware that some anti-realisms exist because of apparently insurmountable problems with the corresponding realism (no pun intended.) If one persists in being a hard ontological realist, for instance, it appears the basis is pure whim... or a kind of faith. There's no power to persuade.