Comments

  • A Wittgenstein Commentary
    Cryptic. Can you elaborate?Fooloso4

    Guilty as charged.

    I will try to put forward a more cogent version next week.
  • Bravery and Fearlessness.
    Going into conflict, knowing full well it could end badly, is courage. Being certain that you will survive, no matter what, is fearlessness. So, you may have it precisely backwards:

    A fearless person has no ego, which means, no threat to the self-image, hence there is no need to fight with fear for no fear arises in the first place.TheMadMan

    Responses to fear is a close portion of anybody's life. I am not proud of all of mine. But I did stand up sometimes.
  • A Wittgenstein Commentary

    I figure that saying: "When we do philosophy" includes all the efforts Wittgenstein is making as much as it includes views he is resisting. Stating: "so it is not an empirical fact that this possibility is the possibility of precisely this movement" is a philosophical remark.

    The aspect of the engineering language is prominent in the paragraph. Does that supply what Wittgenstein is claiming to be missing in some accounts? Does it get closer to the "civilized men" being imagined here?

    It seems like the wide variance of interpretations are a function of how that gets answered.
  • Meaning, Happiness and Pleasure: How Do These Ideas Differ As Philosophical Ends?

    I think Aristotle was on to something when putting the pleasure of perception and knowledge above others.

    And how will that be measured against another thought?
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    The efforts to remove T from the ballot in a number of States is an interesting expression of Federalism, where the rights of States can cancel national criteria.
  • A Wittgenstein Commentary
    Despite what Wittgenstein says about the ordinary it is often an overlooked aspect of his philosophy. All the focus remains on the same few linguistic tangles.Fooloso4

    I would go further and say that the 'ordinary' is precisely what is not given. This is expressed in terms of distance from understanding. From paragraph 194:

    Though we may doubt whether such-and-such physical conditions make this
    movement possible, we never discuss whether this is the possibility of this or of that movement: 'so the possibility of the movement stands in a unique relation to the movement itself; closer than that of a picture to its subject'; for it can be doubted whether a picture is the picture of this thing or that. We say "Experience will shew whether this gives the pin this possibility of movement", but we do not say "Experience will shew whether this is the possibility of this movement": 'so it is not an empirical fact that this possibility is the possibility of precisely this movement'. We mind about the kind of expressions we use concerning these things; we do not understand them, however, but misinterpret them.
    When we do philosophy we are like savages, primitive people, who hear the expressions of civilized men, put a false interpretation on them, and then draw the queerest conclusions from it.
    — PI, 194

    This is not the sound of knowing language as a set of facts. The statement: "closer than that of a picture to its subject'; for it can be doubted whether a picture is the picture of this thing or that" suggests that the role of 'representation' is being presented against the background of other activities we do not understand.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    With Powell and Chesebro in the bag, the T team loses the chance to have a trial before their trial. The sled is beginning to pick up speed down the hill.
  • Reading "Mind and Nature: a Necessary Unity", by Gregory Bateson
    I figure Bateson is a paradigm change that has not happened yet.

    Noticing the repetition of iterations is not the same as saying what they are.
  • A Wittgenstein Commentary
    As regards the Investigations, I read it more as an attack on "bad" philosophy than scientism.RussellA

    I did not intend to argue otherwise. The questions I am asking concern where philosophy ends and science begins. That is where I objected to this statement you quoted from wikipedia:

    Wittgenstein viewed the tools of language as being fundamentally simple, and he believed that philosophers had obscured this simplicity by misusing language and by asking meaningless questions.RussellA

    I don't think this view is supported by the text. The complaints coming from Wittgenstein regarding the excesses of science as culture is expressed as an overindulgence in generalizations. No limits upon what science could actually produce were promulgated therein.
  • A Wittgenstein Commentary

    What the Wikipedia article writer fails to understand is that 'ordinary' uses of language do not become 'simple' elements from which models may be built upon. Such a presupposition ignores paragraphs like the following:


    663. If I say "I meant him" very likely a picture comes to my mind, perhaps of how I looked at him, etc.; but the picture is only like an illustration to a story. From it alone it would mostly be impossible to conclude anything at all; only when one knows the story does one know the significance of the picture.

    664. In the use of words one might distinguish 'surface grammar' from 'depth grammar'. What immediately impresses itself upon us about the use of a word is the way it is used in the construction of the sentence, the part of its use—one might say—that can be taken in by the ear.——And now compare the depth grammar, say of the word "to mean", with what its surface grammar would lead us to suspect. No wonder we find it difficult to know our way about
    — Philosophical Investigations

    The complexity of 'philosophical' questions, that perhaps could be "shooed out of the bottle" is not the same as recognizing the complexity of the 'ordinary.'

    This element involves the question about science that prompted my initial remarks. I don't think the effort to compare reports about 'physics' and 'psychology' were made to make science easier.
  • A Wittgenstein Commentary
    Wittgenstein is confident in the Investigations, in the way of Aristotle, that the role of the philosopher is to bring clarity to the ordinary use of language, rather than investigating the nature of reality.RussellA

    This is a reading of Aristotle I am not familiar with. From what I have gathered, not only was Aristotle an advocate for using "theory" in way that Wittgenstein questioned but Aristotle considered himself able to distinguish the inquiries by kind. That endeavor is far removed from the criticism of 'scientism' put forward by Wittgenstein. And it is the matter of 'science' distinguished from philosophy that I directed my comments toward .
  • A Wittgenstein Commentary
    However, Tomasello's empirical approach to understanding how humans are evolutionarily grounded in their cognitive abilities holds more value.schopenhauer1

    It seems to me that you are putting the two views into competition with one another in a way that was not intended by Wittgenstein. When I asked whether: "there is no such thing as a "non-theoretical" approach?", I was also asking if only the scientific method has value for you and whether the attempt, by various philosophers to place such efforts into a larger context was a mistake.

    As a point of reference, consider Bridgman's call for 'operational' definitions where the possible meanings of terms in models should be delimited at the outset of an investigation in order to avoid being sabotaged by meanings outside of the project. That approach has had a problem from the model building side as well as claiming we could proceed with certain kinds of explanation without comparing them to each other. Trying to find a way to talk about it is as much the beginning of 'metaphysics' as the speculation it encouraged.

    Few question or critique his ideas here, and I find this lack of critical examination reminiscent of disciples following a prophet.schopenhauer1

    After several years participating in this forum, I have observed countless challenges and critical examination of the writings. To ascribe all the challenges to those challenges as hewing to settled doctrine runs afoul of your complaint that no firm general proposition has been provided.

    It does seem likely that some have joined together in camps. It would be very campy to insist everyone has done so. There is a half-playful interview with Deleuze that illustrates both sides of the dynamic:

    “W as in Wittgenstein”

    Parnet: Let’s move on to “W”.

    Deleuze: There’s nothing in “W”.

    Parnet: Yes, there’s Wittgenstein. I know he’s nothing for you, but it’s only a word.

    Deleuze: I don’t like to talk about that… For me, it’s a philosophical catastrophe. It’s the very example of a “school”, it’s a regression of all philosophy, a massive regression. The Wittgenstein matter is quite sad. They imposed (ils ont foutu) a system of terror in which, under the pretext of doing something new, it’s poverty instituted in all grandeur (c’est la pauvreté instaurée en grandeur)… There isn’t a word to describe this danger, but this danger is one that recurs, it’s not the first time that it has happened. It’s serious, especially since the Wittgensteinians are mean (méchants) and destructive (ils cassent tout). So in this, there could be an assassination of philosophy. They are assassins of philosophy.

    Parnet: It’s serious, then.

    Deleuze: Yes… One must remain very vigilant. [Deleuze laughs]
    Interview with Deleuze

    I came upon all this sort of thing later in my life and am better read in the Ancients than the new-fangled stuff. I am torn between the optimism of Aristotle that we can get a handle on our existence through careful methods and the skepticism of Plato that focuses upon what is difficult to begin. I read Wittgenstein as being troubled in the vernacular of Plato more than confident in the way of Aristotle. Does that put me in a camp?

    In any case, Deleuze's complaint is not the same as yours. What is "over-explained" compared to "underexplained?"

    Also, Wittgenstein's approach, characterized by presenting language errors and usage cases without explicit theory, can be seen as overly simplistic and aligned with common sense.schopenhauer1

    I don't understand how "common sense" is a given in the text. Many of the examples treat what is given as commonly understood as odd when looked at as general reference. That is the opposite approach of establishing there is a baseline of assured propositions.
  • A Wittgenstein Commentary

    I think Tomasello is developing important models and is rigorous in his methods. You turned me on to him last year (or so).

    You acknowledge that such work is theoretical in a way that Wittgenstein's is not. Tomasello's work does not seem to cancel Wittgenstein's observations as other views might. Is your objection to Wittgenstein to say there is no such thing as a "non-theoretical" approach?

    Would you accept that such a question is, at least, "meta-theoretical?"
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)

    The criminal cases are more substantial. Personal liberty is never something you want to lose. Losing all your money is pretty big too.

    I hope mostly that our institutions persist. Trump will be on the wrong side of the sod soon enough. I worry more about the virgins, treasure, and electoral maps that will be buried with him.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    Could easily get tossed on appeal, and it's not as if the DoJ can afford misfires.Wayfarer

    As a civil case, where the purported fraud points to getting an unfair advantage within a set of legislated conditions designed to deny that to business owners, an appeal reversal based upon a faulty declaration of facts would be much different than the limits of standard practices. The Trump defense, so far, seems to be angling for the latter. For James to lose on that basis is more of a reflection of New York City and State law than upon the prosecutors. Shysters ride free.
  • A Wittgenstein Commentary

    I was thinking that Wittgenstein, as a survivor of the calamity of Nazi Germany, was proposing a measure of fragility not commonly observed. A way of thinking about what one could reasonably expect that was not all that it seemed.
  • A Wittgenstein Commentary
    The skeptic imagines the other's body blocks us from knowing their pain, but it is our unwillingness (to accept anything but pure knowledge) that shields their humanity from us;Antony Nickles

    I don't understand this quest for "pure knowledge" angle. What I took from the passage is that means of discrimination have consequences far beyond the subjects they entertain.
  • A Wittgenstein Commentary

    So, what about this paragraph? It does not fit into your 'reduction of skepticism' model:

    420. But can't I imagine that the people around me are automata, lack consciousness, even though they behave in the same way as usual?—If I imagine it now—alone in my room—I see people with fixed looks (as in a trance) going about their business—the idea is perhaps a little uncanny. But just try to keep hold of this idea in the midst of your ordinary intercourse with others, in the street, say! Say to yourself, for example: "The children over there are mere automata; all their liveliness is mere automatism." And you will either find these words becoming quite meaningless; or you will produce in yourself some kind of uncanny feeling, or something of the sort. Seeing a living human being as an automaton is analogous to seeing one figure as a limiting case or variant of another; the cross-pieces of a window as a swastika, for example.
  • A Wittgenstein Commentary

    That is a generous invitation.
    I will think about it.
  • A Wittgenstein Commentary

    Worthy of actually being quoted:

    Whereas we are tempted to say that our way of speaking does not describe the facts as they really are. As if, for example the proposition "he has pains" could be false in some other way than by that man's not having pains. As if the form of expression were saying something false even when the proposition faute de mieux asserted something true. For this is what disputes between Idealists, Solipsists and Realists look like. The one party attack the normal form of expression as if they were attacking a statement; the others defend it, as if they were stating facts recognized by every reasonable human being. — ibid. 402

    I have questioned a lot of your interpretations regarding these topics but I have to agree with this observation.
  • A Wittgenstein Commentary

    I brought up behaviorism as an example of a kind of theory making that Wittgenstein is not doing. The skepticism applied to the use of universals is not to reduce them to a set of inputs which are sufficient for establishing causes.

    Neither is W making an argument against behaviorism that Chomsky, for example, puts forth in his models.

    There is a ventriloquism underway in the insistence that a model must be the goal of the enterprise. If only a 'family resemblance' can be discovered amongst different games, the arbitrary nature of chess can be contrasted with how language-games work within certain constraints. To insist that there must be a way they are equally arbitrary is to insist upon the universal set aside at the beginning.
  • A Wittgenstein Commentary
    There is nothing outside the individual instantiations.schopenhauer1
    There is no way to confirm this to be the case. There are models of why it seems to happen in the way you describe. It does not introduce a "Platonic thing" to observe that we can observe many things about our use of language without presupposing a model. I can imagine solipsism but doing that does not make it a fact. It cancels itself as something to be verified.

    One thing the present discussion of what is "real" versus "ideal" poorly reflects is the extent Wittgenstein challenged the 'theoretical'. He questioned the way we seek universals but did not deliver an alternative model that explains what should happen instead. That would place him in the Behaviorist camp where language is a part of an organic system.

    And further, if we were to ever say that something can exist without a mental states, that is not meaning, but some sort of function. It's no more meaningful than some process in nature is meaningful.schopenhauer1

    Is this not the kind of theory that Wittgenstein expressed skepticism about?
  • A Wittgenstein Commentary
    Public is a shared internal understanding of use, which is internalschopenhauer1

    Is that to say language gives the appearance of us sharing a world but we are actually stuck in an isolated theater of the individual mind?

    And if that is the case, what is this "sharing" you speak of? It seems a lot more possible as something we can observe ourselves doing than to propose an unknown process designed to make us feel like it is happening.
  • What are you listening to right now?

    A lot of fun. Tight playing. Love whacking the anvil.
  • What is freedom?

    I provided the argument. I accept your surrender.
  • What is freedom?

    You don't get other people's problems. And yet you want them to help you argue against them in other places.

    The perfection of your form makes me wonder if you are an algorithm.
  • What is freedom?
    So I view that experience as highly overrated, even inconsequential.NOS4A2
  • What is freedom?

    You just dismissed the discussion of what "freedom" is about upon the basis of the conditions of our existence as an organism. Your beliefs are whatever they are.
  • What is freedom?

    You have located many of the problems of human experience within grounds presuming a determinism of conditions related to the possibility of our existence so far flung from why people talk about freedom that only a very fertile imagination could recognize it as an idea.
  • What is freedom?

    An interesting counterpoint to the libertarian ethos you proclaim in other places.
  • What is freedom?

    Your depiction of a "divided person" as literally cut into pieces makes me curious how you view the experience of desiring incompatible things, weighing competing loyalties, dilemmas of conscience versus self-interest, and times when you knowingly choose what is bad for yourself.
  • Essay on Absolute Truth and Christianity
    One bit of the argument.

    I am not convinced this is a testimony of faith.

    Whatever one may think of Scripture or how it got written, this idea of separating its use from "unbelievers" as a matter of dialogue reduces everything to whether one is convinced of one set of propositions or by another. And if it is the "one" set that has your vote, you suddenly possess the decoder ring needed to hear the Gospel.
  • Ukraine Crisis
    The rebellion of the USA against the UK was a taxation or public administration problem rather than a cultural war.javi2541997

    As the expression goes: "Taxation without Representation."
    It was also a about "lawyers, guns, and money." Also known as the British Mercantile economy:

    Britain’s desire to maintain their mercantile economic system also encouraged the creation of the Proclamation Line. Within the British mercantile world, colonies were to produce raw materials for export to the mother country, where they would be produced into manufactured goods and sold to consumers within the empire. To keep her wealth internalized, Great Britain enacted a number of regulations throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as the Navigation Acts, prohibiting her colonies from trading with foreign markets. Following the French and Indian War, Britain feared that westward expansion would lead to a growth in commercial agriculture, allowing farmers to profit by smuggling excess crops to external Atlantic markets. Instead, the government sought to protect mercantilism by encouraging colonial growth to the north and south in an effort to populate the newly acquired provinces of Quebec, East Florida, and West Florida. This would not only limit the establishment of commercially profitable farms on newly acquired western lands, but would also keep settlers within close range of Britain’s economic and political influence. Consequently, many colonials of varying socioeconomic backgrounds viewed the Proclamation Line and its restrictions as repressive measures put in place by the Crown to secure increased control over affairs in their North American colonies.Jennifer Monroe McCutchen
  • Feature requests
    It is interesting that my remark was removed without comment.

    So, it is like that.
  • What is freedom?
    The master is addicted to power and luxury, and his fear is that the slaves will revolt and enslave him in turn and beat him. This is the story of unfreedom, of being a slave to desire and fear. This is the life of a well trained dog; this is not freedom for slave or for master. So it seems that no one can be free, while another is a slave - maybe one day...unenlightened

    Through Hegel, this dynamic is expressed as a doubling of consciousness, where the conditions forced upon the slave are replicated in their treatment to themselves and fellow slaves. This points to a crossroads where the possible, as established by the power of the master, has a second life in the individuals framed by those conditions. There are some, like Georg Lukács, who saw the public and the individual bounded in the same topos or means of each side reflecting the other. There are views like that presented in the Invisible Man where the alienating dynamic is front and center but the 'personal' is decidedly not a reflection of those imposed conditions. And then there are the starting points for Freud and Jung who formulated these elements into conditions undergone by individual psyches.

    Kierkegaard takes a different approach by acknowledging that a person is limited by possibilities of the world one must live in but that the personal is not reflected in it as a possibility. Freedom is the capability to do things. That requires a movement from oneself and an education through the school of possibilities. This is noted in one of Kierkegaard's notes:

    In every concrete expression of freedom, all or a part of existence [Tiveroerelsen] collaborates. — Kierkegaard, Papers, V B 53:21, 1844, given as a reference in The Concept of Anxiety.

    Kierkegaard argues that the personal is fundamentally different from other categories to the point where psychology, as the attempt to generally understand the human condition, must give way to the theological. But his view is sharply at odds with a Stoicism that carefully marks out the borders between the regions. He clearly expects to change what is possible in the world.
  • Ukraine Crisis

    Who is the "us" in this statement?
  • Heidegger’s Downfall

    Yes, I would like to see more of that inherent contradiction.
  • Heidegger’s Downfall

    I agree Being and Time should be studied as an ontology thesis To what extent that thesis is inherently apolitical is a reasonable inquiry that doesn't make the text equivalent to Mein Kampf by default.

    After reviewing the range of literature concerned with the political, the interpretations range from seeing his work as a culmination of Heidegger's rejection of 'modern society' developed over a long time or as a conflict in his own thinking. The latter consideration is more interesting as a problem for philosophy. But that does not make it apolitical.