Reification of meaning.

I take you to mean an ancient text in an unknown language that is as yet undeciphered.

In one sense it is meaningful: we know it means something, but we don't know what. We recognize it as language, that it had a role in a culture, and so on.

In another sense it is not meaningful: it's meaningless to us, it carries no meaning in practice to any language-using meaning-making creatures.

So asking if the meaning was lost when its culture disappeared or is somehow still contained in the stone tablet, waiting to be released again, is ambiguous. It's either, depending on how you're using the word "meaning".

What is the philosophical issue beyond this? Well, even with this ambiguity we can still say that meaning is always at least originally bound up in a context of social practices, or, if you prefer, is always at least originally located in individual minds. Which means that the question isn't an enlightening one, in that it doesn't do much to resolve that debate.

Or am I missing the issue?

No, not that doctor. — S

Maybe more like Dr Nick Riviera?

I supported the closure. The philosophical content had shrunk to almost nothing and letting it continue would have resulted in more childish bickering. And as I see it the decision was about quality more than it was about being illiberal and controlling.

Yeah, it's good to know about those fallacies, but I don't think it's a case for pinning.

I agree with @TheWillowOfDarkness and @Hanover and @StreetlightX.

Among the bad posts and obnoxious posters, I suspect that fallacies and biases are far from being the biggest problems. In fact, the identification of fallacies can be part of a bad argumentative style, and a preoccupation with fallacies seems sometimes to indicate an interest in critical thinking at the expense of philosophy.

And there's just something so middlebrow about it, like a preoccupation with "correct" grammar.

So I say no way.

Unfortunately there is no such feature in the software we're using, but SophistiCat created browser plugins that do the job: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/28211

So it Isn't that people don't see it. What other reasons could there be for lack of an article submission ?

Perhaps:

1.Those that have the ability to write such simply weigh up the pros and cons and don't think It's worth it. Wouldn't they be looking at publishing in a physical, established magazine like Philosophy Now.
I am not sure about the monetary reward. I think someone once told me that they receive a free annual subscription. Are there copyright issues ?
2. Some might be put off by the wording and don't feel ready to Submit. Encouragement and feedback throughout the writing process might produce more results.
3. An initial stimulus or prod suggesting a theme that members could compete in writing about. — Amity

Yeah, I had an article published in Philosophy Now a long long time ago, and I received a year's subscription.

Otherwise I'm not sure. It could simply be that while that discussion was pinned, we didn't have many members. The forum's grown a lot since then.

I did find it difficult to find information about articles. It comes under 'article submissions' stuck between 'Feedback' and 'About TPF'. The headline 'ARTICLES' at top of page only takes you to the one and only article ever published ( as far as I can remember ). — Amity

If my memory serves me right, I had the Submit an article for publication discussion pinned at the top of the forum for a year or more, and we got almost nothing.

Sorry Jake, I don't know. I only found out because there's very little documentation for PlushForums, so when I was Googling for information about some admin functionality, it came up on Vanilla. I haven't looked into it any further.

Yep, that's how I understand it.

In this form and hosted as it is, yes it's just a service from PlushForums. But I believe it's based on a fork of VanillaForums, which is open source and available to run yourself.

Another question. Could you move this forum to another host if that was for some reason desired? I'm not suggesting this is necessary or desired, I'm just wondering if moving would be possible. — Jake

We could move if necessary, say if it became too expensive, but it would mean starting from scratch unless we had control over the source code and database of the new forum. So if I hosted the new forum and could change the code, access the database directly, and so on, then I could conceivably run a script to import the data from the PlushForums JSON export.

I'm interested in hearing jamalrob's opinion on proceedings. — Evil

Hi Evil. I don't think I have the heart for this debate any more. Who knows, maybe I'll muster the energy to gather up my tatty old opinions for another try, but maybe not.

Right now The Lounge doubles as a place for relaxed and off-topic discussion, as well as a dump for threads that don't fit moderators' standards in other forums, which makes for a weird mix. I would rather see a dedicated "dump" subsection (you could give it a more polite name, like "Not quite philosophy" or something). — SophistiCat

This could be a good idea.

Thanks for the comments. As I'm in a minority, I don't feel justified in making any substantial changes. I agree with the several comments about the specific problem of "intra-religious" discussions, and I'm inclined to be stricter with that stuff, but otherwise I'm going to leave things as they are, and leave it to the mods to use their own judgement.

I just told you: the site is categorized. It always has been.

Still don't know what you mean. There are many categories and every discussion is in one of them. All discussions are categorised.

It's unfortunate, that the categories cannot be implemented in practice due to the workings of the forum. Otherwise, we could have sticky and guidelines for each sub-forum, where the inhabitants of this forum might flourish. — Wallows

What do you mean? Specifically, what is "implementing the categories in practice"? And what is "sticky and guidelines"?

Fascinating.

Unless you go with the Bitter Crank-Terrapin view that "it" refers to the conditions (which is the view of at least one linguist, so Google tells me), it's just a dummy subject, stuck in there to satisfy the syntactical rules of English. In Spanish you'd say "llueve". There's no subject, because of the way Spanish works.

So along with some others here I suspect it's not a philosophical issue.

EDIT: Just noticed that Dawnstorm made the same point.

A question with a view to showing that ethics is about the things we value and not merely about moral comprehension: if I destroy the Mona Lisa for no reason other than wanton destructiveness, is it a simple category mistake to call the action immoral?

I'm sure you can imagine examples. The point is to show that our actions in respect of people or babies or animals or dead bodies or psychopaths do in fact take place in a moral sphere independently of any assessment of individual criteria such as future moral comprehension. The concepts of right and wrong do in fact, in real-world communities, apply to those actions. I take you to be arguing either (1) that they should not apply, that perhaps people all over the world have made a mistake, or (2) for a meta-ethical position whereby you think that the only reason we apply the concepts of good and bad to our treatment of others is that we recognize that they are, or will be, moral agents--that they have individually satisfied some criteria (and hence that principled veganism is based on a mistaken assessment). If your position is the latter, then it seems to me that our moral concern for people with severe cognitive impairment, for the dead bodies of our loved ones, and for pet animals stand as counterexamples.

You do not treat a person well because you've established that they have the mental capacities that you deem to be requirements for morality. And if you treat a person well on that presumption, you do not suddenly treat them as morally insignificant if you later find out that they lack those capacities.

But my wider point was that ethics just is about human actions concerning the things we value. We value pet dogs and most non-psychopaths would not wish to see them tortured. This is an ethical matter despite a dog's possible lack of moral comprehension. Do you disagree?

EDIT: The even wider point is that I think you are appealing to an intuition that is close to my own view, which is about species membership and the moral sphere of human society (which includes animals, though not as moral agents). I.e., I think that individual capacities are a red herring.

The case with infants is different, the infant will grow up and gain moral comprehension — DingoJones

But take the generalized AMC. Some infants may not ever gain moral comprehension--it could be some kind of severe mental disability--and yet they would, obviously I think, remain morally significant.

This probably doesn't go any way towards answering you, but note that I should have said something like: "That is, you could argue that species membership justifies the exploitation (the use) of animals". I didn't mean to suggest an argument in which species membership justifies any treatment that is currently practised, like cruelty.

By the way, @Sir2u amd @DingoJones: the omnivore argument is pretty lame. Surely people here should agree for the sake of argument with the very reasonable proposition that all people could conceivably live healthy lives without animal products? Principle of charity and all that.

Our interaction with animals is not an ethical matter. Ethics are a social contract which animals cannot agree too. What animals DO abide by is nature, survival. That is something humans are capable of understanding, and Id go further and say that humans are already doing that. We are a part of the food chain after all. Its just incoherent, to me at least, to include them in ethics. Even if we ignore that and we focus only on what humans can do to measure animals according to our rules, wouldnt we be obligated to do everything we can to reduce the suffering of animals inflicted by other animals? It doesnt make sense. — DingoJones

I can go along with your position that interactions between non-human animals are not governed by morality, and that animals are not moral agents. The trouble is that the human treatment of animals is part of the moral sphere, simply owing to their involvement in our practices. In doing things with animals we involve them in our relations with each other, and the "ethicality" of those intrahuman relations is thereby in a manner of speaking transferred on to the direct relations between humans and animals.

I think just about anything can be "included in ethics" that concerns human actions, so the human treatment of animals is or can be an ethical matter. Let's agree that animals are not moral agents. Does it follow that human actions involving them are not a matter for ethics? I don't think so. Some version of the argument from marginal cases (AMC) can be used to show this. E.g., the treatment of infants is a matter for ethics even though they might have no concept of right and wrong.

Notice that the AMC is not here being used to argue for anything so strong as animal rights, and in my opinion it doesn't even show that the exploitation of animals is wrong. What it shows is that human actions that involve beings--human, non-human, and maybe even non-living (dead bodies)--without the mental abilities we consider as normal for humans--such as the concept of self, right and wrong, and temporal self-awareness--are ethically significant, or can be.

One intuitive way to see how this is so is to observe that the cruel treatment of animals may do harm to humans. The knowledge of cruel practices, and certainly the witnessing of or taking part in those practices, may have a brutalizing effect on people. I don't want to make any argument depend on this, but it's one way to look at it.

And it seems to me quite difficult to claim that the treatment of pets is not an ethical matter, which your position implies.

Now if I'm right and it is an ethical matter, you could still argue that it is not wrong to exploit animals, perhaps by invoking the significance of species membership (which includes the so-called "marginal cases"). That is, you could argue that species membership justifies our treatment of animals, even though it doesn't justify the claim that the treatment of animals is not ethically significant at all. This would probably be something like my own position, e.g., we can eat meat without doing wrong, so long as we don't treat the animals cruelly.

As BC says, hover over the discussion title to see the category. Also, when you're in a discussion the category in the left menu is emphasized in bold (though not on mobile).

The effects: conscious experiences, will never be the things they are experiencing. It is nonsensical to even think that could be the case, and to even ask the question: "How can we see things as they really are?" — Harry Hindu

Yes indeed.

215. Here we see that the idea of 'agreement with reality' does not have any clear application. — Wittgenstein, On Certainty

Darwin explicitly uses it as a metaphor. I can't see in what way he treats it as a deity. On the contrary.

Otherwise, you seem to be railing against the popular conception of evolution. I agree that people get it wrong, but in my experience they don't seem to misunderstand it in the way you describe, and in any case I don't see how such misunderstandings are caused by a metaphor.

EDIT: By far the worst popular misunderstandings of evolution are: evolution as a ladder leading to humans (which predates Darwin), and the related idea that e.g., humans evolved from chimpanzees

what the metaphor is for — Wayfarer

To help people understand natural selection: it is as if there were a breeder selecting suitable variations.

Because it is assumed in all naturalistic accounts that there is no agency at work, and yet in the above, the metaphor is precisely one of agency, something that acts. This is the subtle duplicity at the heart of evolutionary biology qua philosophy. — Wayfarer

How is it duplicity if it's explicitly metaphorical?

EDIT: sorry @Marchesk, this is off-topic

Just use a single thread for all of them please.

Yes, in fact I agree. But given Marchesk's definition of indirect perception as the perception of mental objects (as intermediaries between things "out there" and consciousness), one could say that an awareness of one's own perception is an example of indirect perception, in a manner of speaking. However, I'm not sure that this kind of awareness is what he means by "conscious perception".

when I'm conscious of driving, the content of my perception is a conscious experience, which is mental. I'm no longer directly perceiving the car on the road. Instead, I'm perceiving a world of feels, sounds, colors, smells, and so on. — Marchesk

There's a missing premise here. You assume the equivalence of the content of perception and the objects of perception.

But the content of perception--if it means anything at all--is the way things look, sound, taste, and yet it is the things that look, sound, and taste that way. To say that you are perceiving the way things look, sound, taste, is tantamount to saying you are perceiving your perception (one can attend to one's own perception, but this is not what you are talking about (or is it?)).

Also, in an ecological direct perception account, the "non-conscious" absorption in an activity in an environment is paradigmatic of perception. To be conscious of one's experience sounds to me like those cases where one attends so much to one's own experience that successful absorption breaks down--as when you focus so much on what your hands and feet are doing that you momentarily lose the ability to drive.

EDIT: maybe that means that I kind of agree with you, or at least with this: perception is sometimes direct and sometimes indirect

The feeling is a property of a system involving the perceiver in an environment, so no, I wouldn't accept your formulation.

No, it's the water that is the object of perception in cases both of feeling that's it's cold and feeling that it's warm.

EDIT: in fact, the framework of direct vs indirect takes us down the wrong path here, I think. So yeah, temperature perception is a good example.

Therefore, our perception has a component that isn't in the water itself, since water can't feel cold or hot. — Marchesk

Well yes, perception is relational, depending on both perceiver and perceived (I'd also want to add the environment and the actions of the perceiver, but we can leave it aside for now).

Temperature perception is variable in a way that colour perception is not, and this is expressed in the way we talk and think about hot/cold vs green/blue/red etc.

The reason for supposing the green is mental is because it's being generated in the brain — Marchesk

Our bodies (eyes, brain, etc) respond in specific ways to our environment. To me that doesn't make colour merely of the body. It is how we see things, and the way we see things is owing to the way our brains and eyes are (and how we behave). But still, it is the things that are green.

NOTE: Haven't we been here before March, many many years ago? :rofl:

The relational account holds that the leaves themselves are green (under certain conditions etc). This entails that it is not something mental that is perceived, which is your definition of indirect perception.

Thus direct perception on this account depends on both perceiver and perceived. As seems kind of obvious when you think about it.

And if the fact that different perceivers perceive in different ways were enough to kill off direct perception as a philosophical position, then the fact that dogs can't see green would have resolved this issue a while ago.

I can't think of a way of saying it more clearly.

I think you're missing the point.