I fall back on my experience here on the forum as the basis for my response - many discussions quickly descend into confusion and lack of direction caused by lack of agreement on what words mean. Prime examples are "consciousness," "metaphysics," "truth," and "reality," but there are plenty more. — T Clark

Working out what these things mean is the stuff of philosophy. To restrict the use of a term at the beginning is to shut down the philosophy. I understand your position. My last post was a response to the post of yours in which you appeared to conflate definitions at the beginning of a discussion with definitions as an aim. This is the crucial point.

This isn't the place to take up the subject, but I don't understand your objection to "personalizing" philosophical issues. As I've noted before, one of the goals of philosophy is self-awareness. For me it is the primary goal. This is certainly true of eastern philosophies, but also western ones. After all, some guy supposedly said "The unexamined life is not worth living." The point, at least the only point, isn't to discuss ideas and reason, we're also here to examine our lives. — T Clark

I have explained as clearly as I can what I think is wrong with personalizing everything, so I don’t think I’ll say any more on it. Feel free to continue.

Please believe that not all new users are here to spam your forum. I'm a long time reader and enjoy reading the posts here. I finally had something interesting to share because it reminded me of something that I had a personal connection with. — VanessaD

:up:

Exactly. That would have been impossible had I asked everyone to adhere strictly to a definition given at the beginning. The process of conceptual exploration and clarification is part of what philosophy is, rather than a necessary unquestionable first step.

The OP title is an exaggerated provocation, and the less radical thesis is…

A definition of a philosophical concept might be required at the beginning of a discussion only in the case that the term is equivocal.

I’m not committed to this, because I don’t trust my own taxonomy of definitions, but I hope there’s a good kernel of truth in it.



Good stuff. I’m currently unsure how best to judge the relevance of each of those approaches or where to go with them, or where to go with this discussion.

It’s possible that @T Clark’s approach is more relevant than I thought, although it’s an approach to analyzing TPF discussions in terms of psychology rather than analyzing definition itself. What I mean is, I’ve noticed that people are disagreeing in what seems a temperamental or polarized way rather than substantively. It’s not clear that, for example, @Janus and @Isaac, or @T Clark and I, would really differ much given an actual discussion to look at, and what differences there would be might be to do with temperamental levels of tolerance for troublemaking.

Whether that is interesting or philosophical, I don’t know.

Rather than just posting a link, maybe you could present his arguments or ideas if you think they’re interesting. Note that the guidelines say, under the heading “Types of posters who are not welcome here”: “Advertisers, spammers, self-promoters: No links to personal websites.”

But welcome to the forum.

With you so far. What’s next?

Looks interesting :up:

Why bother with Kant. It's confused waffle. Quine and Kripke provide firmer and more fertile ground. — Banno

I’m far more interested in Kant (it's not waffle and to the extent that it's confused it’s in the most interesting ways), but I see what you mean: just on definitions they’re more useful. I like Naming and Necessity; haven’t read Quine.

But to go there, we need to differentiate various sorts of definition, and differing ways to refer. That'd get you past page eight. — Banno

I guess that’s what I was asking for before, since I recognized that my own taxonomy of definitions was creaking under pressure.

Thank you for your efforts in getting us to page eight. :grin:

I meant read the exchange again. We weren’t talking past each other.

Read again. Think again.

No.

Maybe it does not matter, but we may disagree because I would say that we can define our concepts, after investigation, and it’s just that Kant’s understanding of, and requirement for, a “definition” is wrong. — Antony Nickles

Yes, I understand. But since Kant does say that in philosophy we can arrive at a good definition, even though we shouldn’t begin with one, he would appear to be not far from you on this.

Ok cool. I still disagree with your angle on Kant but otherwise (I’ve read your first post in this thread) I think we’re in agreement.

For some reason, it seems that some (Western) communists and socialists have become apologists for Russia.
Doesn't make sense. — jorndoe

In the left-wing community these people are referred to as “tankies”. It is indeed quite perverse. There are a few things that feed into it. The main, obvious thing is that Western leftists may tend to be sympathetic to whoever is opposed to their own governments and opposed to Western foreign policy. This means that Russian anti-western talking points coincide with their own.

Another factor is the flipside of the popular Western misconception that Russia is still in some sense socialist or represents a continuation of the Soviet Union. There is a small kernel of truth here, in that Putin’s priority is always the strength of the centralized state and the extension of its power, and if he ever expresses admiration or approval for the Soviet Union it is just for the strength of its government and its success in securing its borders. There are probably other aspects to it as well, like the Stalinist-lite cult of Putin’s personality.

Again, digressing, but Kant takes this as a failure and a tragedy for philosophy, rather than a fact that nevertheless doesn’t make philosophy less rigorous than science, less methodical, practical, relevant. — Antony Nickles

He regards speculative metaphysics as a failure, of course, as I suppose Wittgenstein and Austin do too, but the fact that what works for mathematics doesn’t work for philosophy is part of what he sets out as the bounds of good philosophy. It is part of his assessment of the failure of philosophy hitherto, a fact to be observed rather than a “failure and a tragedy” itself. The section is in the Transcendental Doctrine of Method, the purpose of which is precisely to set out the limits of the rigorous and methodical use of reason, limits that enable this methodical use.

In other words, that we cannot reason mathematically in philosophy is not a “failure and a tragedy”; it is what must be payed attention to if we want to philosophize.

Well, this is the realm of science, not philosophy — Antony Nickles

I was responding to your claim that his notion of the unknowable thing-in-itself implied a “lack of faith in our ordinary understandings.” I was trying to point out that this is not at all the thrust of the idea. Rather, it is part of a critique of metaphysics, which attempts to know things beyond the conditions under which we can know things.

And you’ll notice that Kant did not stop philosophizing when he realized that speculative metaphysics was barking up the wrong tree. This is because philosophy still has a place, in examining our concepts, concepts that apply meaningfully to experience. That’s what transcendental philosophy is. The upshot is, it’s not just science.

we also fail to define the empirical, to Kant’s satisfaction — Antony Nickles

I’m really not sure where you’re getting this “to Kant’s satisfaction”, as if he has a demand and expectation that we should be able do this. The point is that we should not even try, because we can philosophize without definition, and indeed must. The point is critical—of those who carry on defining regardless.

In creating “objectivity”, Kant cordoned us off from the world “directly”, unfiltered by us, though that was his ideal. — Antony Nickles

This is a respectable interpretation of Kant, though I don’t share it. At the very least, it is not what he was trying to do. Reality for Kant is the world of experience, and we are not cordoned off from it.

I don’t really want to do more of this exegesis, but I suppose it’s fair if what you’re saying is that I was mistaken in using Kant to back up my point.

Thank you for your interesting posts Antony.

But in this latest one you've managed the remarkable feat of agreeing with Kant in substance while appearing to believe you disagree with him. So I think you're reading him wrong. You, I, Austin, Wittgenstein, and Kant are similarly sceptical about definitions in philosophy, claiming that we can use these concepts without such "mathematical certainty". Indeed the whole point of that section of the CPR is to say that what works for mathematics is not appropriate for philosophy.

Of course elsewhere he puts this "thing-in-itself" outside the reach of our knowledge, thus the lack of faith in our ordinary understandings — Antony Nickles

In fact, in the realm of empirical reality—that which we can know—Kant is very much on the side of our ability to know, to directly perceive and to judge objectively.

I'm on my phone so I don't know if I want to get into CPR exegesis right now, but I thought I'd give you an initial response. Let me know if I've misunderstood you.

I’d heard this song a few times over the decades but never took any notice. Then on Sunday night I was walking down the street and there was a guy singing it accompanied by electric guitar and a backing track. It was weirdly, deeply affecting, not because it was an overly-emoting slow version—it wasn’t—but maybe because the strength of the song came out better when sung in a lower register.

The trouble is, neither the original nor any covers I’ve found online come close. Still, it’s a very good song in itself, despite its cheesy eightiesness.

@javi2541997 There’s a Japanese novella called 道化の華, translated as The Flowers of Buffoonery. The key word here seems to have the alternative translation of clown, so it looks like it has a very similar meaning.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flowers_of_Buffoonery

I'm done here!

I feel there's something important to say about it though I don't know what it is yet. — Baden

I thought I'd done that already :cry:

Nice link to: — Baden

Yes, that was totally intentional. :smirk:

Interestingly, being a buffoon is acting the buffoon. Being a fool is, sometimes, acting the fool. Jesters were not always or often mere idiots, but had an act.

So these words are quite complex. They mean either the real person or their act, or both. Being and acting.

:lol:

But seriously that is how I sometimes behave, heroically bringing light where there is darkness.

"Buffoon" is in fact used in the sense of "clown", referring to someone who is "being silly" or "acting the fool". In those cases it makes sense to pull my trick. Not so much when my wife calls me a buffoon for making a mistake, causing an accident, etc.

And the key thing here is that this cannot be done if the words simply switched to positives like “nerd” or whatever.

EDIT: sorry about the multiple posts folks, I’m thinking on the fly again and I’m on a phone.

And if I manage to pull the same thing off with buffoon—I’m working on it—then I can say, you’re right, I am a buffoon, because I don’t accept this society’s attitude to frivolity, joy, silliness, and in refusing to accept it I am being a rebel and speaking truth to power, as the original buffoons did.

All good stuff, but. I meant something a bit different. Maybe amateur, which I was talking about in my last post, is a better example. To use it to mean someone who does it for the love, not the money, is not only to bring the etymology to the fore and thereby introduce a more subtle distinction; it’s also to embrace the negative connotations to some degree: you’re right, I don’t make a living from it, and I’m fine with that.

Yep, as a practical matter all of that’s no doubt accurate. I just find the exceptions more interesting, like amateur and (I want to say) buffoon. It looks like the difference between negative to positive and positive to negative is…

I’ll use an example:

If one wants to emphasize that an amateur does something for the love, not the money, and need not be less good at it (photography is a good example because probably most professional photographers spend their working lives doing weddings and don’t have time for anything artistic or challenging)—then one is going to call oneself an amateur, and would be more careful about using it to describe someone else. You’d have to qualify it: “you’re an amateur, and that’s something to be proud of, because it means you do it for the love of it”.

Ok I have more to say. It seems like some words, such as “nerd”, “queer”, and the N-word (not against the rules to mention this word explicitly in quotes but I find myself unable to do it)—these have switched sides, sometimes within a group and sometimes in the wider society. But it seems to me that “buffoon” has an essential double character and that we’d lose something if it became entirely positive.

Of course, I don’t really believe it has an essential character or even that we wouldn’t replace it with similarly double-sided words if it did go mainstream, but I think this may indeed identify different classes of words.

@Janus I want to say that the most interesting and famous philosophers have radically undermined or rejected the premises of their predecessors. If this is an exaggeration, it’s not much of one.

EDIT: should we, along the lines of Kuhn, distinguish normal and revolutionary philosophy? Maybe the analytic logic-choppers and the continental disciples of whichever big postmodern philosopher you care to mention are doing the former.

That's a great example. In these cases it’s not always just a “switch”; it’s because the word is negative, signifying for example an outsider status, that it becomes positive.

It’s debatable if this is what happened with “nerd” or if this is all that happened with it—what’s good about being a nerd is not only some minority outsider subversive thing but actual knowledge, and dedication to something valuable—but I think some words are like that. Maybe the reclamation of racist and homophobic slurs, e.g., queer, is similar.

But as I later said to Javi, we wouldn't want buffoonery to be entirely socially acceptable anyway, because it would then lose it's potential subversiveness. The buffoon undermines serious pretensions. — Jamal

@javi2541997

So, the interesting question for me is: can a word find positive connotations through its negative connotations?

Nonetheless, you are right in the fact that modern use has negative connotations — javi2541997

I didn't really make that claim and it's not something I would make a point of in this case. I think we all know that it's usually derogatory.

I would definitely say "buffoon" is purely negative, I don't think I've ever heard it used in any other way, — Judaka

I think this is because in our significantly Protestant Anglo culture*, being silly is frowned upon, regarded as frivolous and trivial. I believe the role of the jester, clown, fool, or buffoon is embraced by some entertainers though, and these words still retain some of their positive connotations as a kind of background significance.

But as I later said to Javi, we wouldn't want buffoonery to be entirely socially acceptable anyway, because it would then lose it's potential subversiveness. The buffoon undermines serious pretensions.

*To label as “Protestant” or “Anglo” the culture I’m talking about, the industrious culture of seriousness and the refusal of fun, is probably totally wrong, but it doesn’t matter.

Nonetheless, it seems that this word contains negative connotations because Jamal didn't like how I considered myself as a buffoon. — javi2541997

Here is the original exchange:

I would like to wish a good morning to everyone. You all already know that I am the buffoon of The Shoutbox — javi2541997

I wish you good morning but I resent your claim to be the preeminent Shoutbox buffoon. — Jamal

I was playing with the ambiguous character of the word. I was pretending to be affronted that Javi was claiming the coveted title of Shoutbox buffoon, thereby embracing the positive use of the term. At the same time this is also self-mockery, implying that I and others are fools, and in our foolishness we want to be known as buffoons. It’s dialectical.

I'm with Jamal that the word "buffoon" has negative connotations — Judaka

I would like to add a general principle for Jamal, myself, and numerous others: Exercise at least a little generosity in interpreting the words that other people write (or say). — BC

I’d like to point out that I’m being taken here to have some kind of position on this issue, but I don’t recognize it as alluded to in these comments; my main point both in the Shoutbox and in this discussion is that the word “buffoon” has an indispensably double-sided character.

Mostly I like silence, natural sounds, and the occasional human utterance. I prefer—it feels like I absolutely need—silence when I’m reading. I get stressed by constant traffic noise. I get angry at people who use car horns needlessly. I love music but I hate the ubiquity of background music.

But sometimes I love being in amongst the noise of the city and talking and laughing noisily all night.

But what does this have to do with philosophy? We have a social science section and I think noise and ambient sound could be explored in terms of psychology and sociology, and from there it could get philosophical, but the way the OP frames the topic it just seems to be about personal preference. Discussing how silence might help you feel more philosophical is not itself philosophical.

I’m not moving it to the Lounge as yet. Let’s see what happens.

But just because “buffoon” is often now derogatory doesn’t mean we can’t use it differently to make a point, as I’ve seen people do with the word “amateur,” which can be quite derogatory but comes from the word meaning “lover,” so an amateur is someone who does something for love, not money, and this needn’t imply a lack of skill.

So this is a kind of reclaiming. One could contrarily celebrate the role of the jester in society by proudly calling oneself a buffoon or a fool. It works for “buffoon” better than for “fool” because it retains a bit more of its less derogatory meaning.

I think perhaps a philosophical discussion needs a linguistic hierarchy of three classes of words. Most words being working class, taken for granted, over-worked and underpaid attention to; then some middle-class words, pedantically defined, and always following the rules of logic; and finally some few aristocratic words that are what the discussion is all about.

Which might suggest that one's philosophical instincts in this discussion are somewhat indicative of ones' class loyalties. Or it might just be a big tease. — unenlightened

I’m not sure what to say about this but I like it.

Your comments had me puzzling over the difference between an artist and an artisan. I had thought of this previously as a difference in the narrative, but if one takes your definition, there is something of ritual involved as well - magic involving ritual. — Banno

Oddly though, the common distinction between artisans and artists is that the things the artisan makes are functional. But art in magic ritual is functional too.

Fair question. I'm a fan of Austin, who's method involves the close and detailed analysis of the terms of our language, the "tools of trade"; I use that sort of analysis in my own considerations, having the OED and various etymological dictionaries at hand. This is quite a different process to mere stipulation, seeking an understanding of the historical development of terms and their interrelationship. Rather than closing the conversation off, this approach invites further commentary and comparison. — Banno

:up:

But it doesn't go down well in a forum. such as this, where if any attention is paid at all it's in order to point out how irrelevant it is. — Banno

I don't know. Sometimes it works.

A term such as Dasein is stipulated. It's what folk now call a term of art, a neologism, having no history, or rather not relating to any etymology, imported into English with a vast baggage. It's no good to reject the use of Dasein, so one might look to the use; but notice that the place the word is mostly used is in discussions of what it means... These are grounds for suspicion. — Banno

A couple of things. One is just that you can probably imagine a better example (unless you mean that this sort of issue is common to all such exegesis). Second point is that you're just calling into question the very project of trying to understand Being and Time. That's all very well but it wouldn't be a very philosophical engagement in this case.

I gave the example above of using a definition at the commencement of an argument. That's not problematic, indeed it is setting up the furthering of the discussion by admitting the limitations of context, and so inviting critique — Banno

Not sure I understand this. Isn't this the kind of definition we've been talking about?

Yes, the failed definition is also a success. It's a metaphor. As a matter of style, it's offered exclusively. But perhaps the speech act should be interpreted as a gift, as a good place from which to peep at a complex phenomenon for a moment. — plaque flag

Interesting to look at these together:

Only exaggeration is true. — Adorno

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth — Adorno, Minima Moralia

I think the latter is not a metaphor so much as, like the former itself (as you pointed out), an exaggeration. There may be exceptions, it may not stand up to scrutiny, but it shows something about art nonetheless, and not really or entirely by analogy. My thread title is a bit like that, though obviously not as subtle. It might not be mere clickbait, but an exaggeration to make the point that often, definitions should not be used in philosophy.