Wittgenstein's written philosophy is imitative of dialogue — Fooloso4

That underscores for me the stated goal of Wittgenstein to distance himself from the generality of the Tractatus.

That is, understanding is not the name of an inner item whose occurrence constitutes correctness. It's a word whose use is anchored in criteria in our practices, in being able to go on correctly. — Sam26

From the quote from the Blue Book I gave above, the difference between science and the investigation Wittgenstein is doing involves the use of models. To see the contrast, we can look at those who study linguistics as a science. Consider a remark by Noam Chomsky on behaviorism:

Many people tend to think of psychology in terms of its tests and experimental methods. But one should not define a discipline by its procedures. It should be defined, in the first place, by the object of its investigation. Experimental or analytic procedures must be devised in order to shed light on this object. Behaviorist psychology, for example, excels in its experimental techniques, but it has not properly defined its object of inquiry, in my opinion. Thus it has excellent tools, very good tools . . . but nothing very much to study with them. — Chomsky, Noam. On Language: Chomsky's Classic Works: Language and Responsibility and Reflections on Language (p. 53).

The matter of causes is directly addressed by Wittgenstein:

Now if it is not the causal connections which we are concerned with, then the activities of the mind lie open before us. And when we are worried about the nature of thinking, the puzzlement which we wrongly interpret to be one about the nature of a medium is a puzzlement caused by the mystifying use of our language. — ibid. page 10

This why the comparison of language games is not an explanation to replace another explanation.

Maybe now is a good time too look at how Wittgenstein separates his enterprise from Psychology in the Blue Book:

Frege ridiculed the formalist conception of mathematics by saying that the formalists confused the unimportant thing, the sign, with the important, the meaning. Surely, one wishes to say, mathematics does not treat of dashes on a bit of paper. Frege’s idea could be expressed thus: the propositions of mathematics, if they were just complexes of dashes, would be dead and utterly uninteresting, whereas they obviously have a kind of life. And the same, of course, could be said of any proposition: Without a sense, or without the thought, a proposition would be an utterly dead and trivial thing. And further it seems clear that no adding of inorganic signs can make the proposition live. And the conclusion which one draws from this is that what must be added to the dead signs in order to make a live proposition is something immaterial with properties different from all mere signs.

But if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we should have to say that it was its use. — Wittgenstein, Blue Book, page 8 (in the linked edition)

Supposing we tried to construct a mind-model as a result of psychological investigations, a model which, as we should say, would explain the action of the mind. This model would be part of a psychological theory in the way in which a mechanical model of the ether can be part of a theory of electricity. (Such a model, by the way, is always part of the symbolism of a theory. Its advantage may be that it is seen at a glance and easily held in the mind. It has been said that a model, in a sense, dresses up the pure theory; that the naked theory is sentences or equations. This must be examined more closely later on.)

We may find that such a mind-model would have to be very complicated and intricate in order to explain the observed mental activities; and on this ground we might call the mind a queer kind of medium. But this aspect of the mind does not interest us. The problems which it may set are psychological problems, and the method of their solution is that of natural science.

Now if it is not the causal connections which we are concerned with, then the activities of the mind lie open before us. And when we are worried about the nature of thinking, the puzzlement which we wrongly interpret to be one about the nature of a medium is a puzzlement caused by the mystifying use of our language. This kind of mistake recurs again and again in philosophy, e.g. when we are puzzled about the nature of time; when time seems to us a queer thing. We are most strongly tempted to think that here are things hidden, something we can see from the outside but which we can’t look into. And yet nothing of the sort is the case. It is not new facts about time which we want to know. All the facts that concern us lie open before us. But it is the use of the substantive “time” which mystifies us. If we look into the grammar of that word, we shall feel that it is no less astounding that man should have conceived of a deity of time than it would be to conceive of a deity of negation or disjunction — ibid. page 10

My reply was a strict focus on the AI report you supplied.

Of course, there are and have been many other forms of slavery. You mentioned the Greeks before. The Spartans were cruel overlords over their neighbors in ways that was not the practice in Athens.

As for the Americas, see Enslavement by the Spaniards

Slavery is complex.

Your quote from AI is profoundly misleading. To understand the condition of slaves from Africa, I suggest reading The Chattel Principle by Walter Johnson.

When considering the U.S. representation structure at its beginning, consider the 3/5 ratio to establish population in slave states. Those people were easy to count because they were black.

Consider the Fugitive Slave Laws of 1850. That permitted slave catchers to work in non-slave states to return property to southern owners. What made the slave catchers job easier than it might have been is because the slaves were black.

I disagree with other parts of your statements but don't want to detract from the importance of what I have argued so far.

The bunker view is that none of the reactions to the Administration are about what they do or do not do. There is no loop.

Welcome back to the Forum.

Your comment puts the one I just made in Sam's thread in a larger context. I will try to come back to your points after pulling together some other thoughts I have about responses to the Tractatus.

When the assistant hears “bring me a slab”, he thinks about the expression “bring me a slab” and thinks about the physical consequences if he does not take the builder a slab. The assistant knows what “bring me a slab” means because he can think about the physical consequences of not taking a slab to the builder. — RussellA

Wittgenstein is asking how all this "thinking" got started:

32. Someone coming into a strange country will sometimes learn the language of the inhabitants from ostensive definitions that they give him; and he will often have to guess the meaning of these definitions; and will guess sometimes right, sometimes wrong.
And now, I think, we can say: Augustine describes the learning of human language as if the child came into a strange country and did not understand the language of the country; that is, as if it already had a language, only not this one. Or again: as if the child could already think only not yet speak. And "think" would here mean something like "talk to itself". — PI, 32, translated by Anscombe

Philosophical Investigations explores what "talking to oneself" involves (and not) during the discussion of the possibility of private language but it does not bring the "privacy" into question. The following is an example:

The essential thing about private experience is really not that each person possesses his own exemplar, but that nobody knows whether other people also have this or something else. The assumption would thus be possible—though unverifiable—that one section of mankind had one sensation of red and another section another. — PI, 272

With the different goals and challenges he gives to himself and the reader, I don't think the dimension of the personal gets easier. In the Preface to the PI, he speaks of the work as a response to what he questions in his Tractatus. A few sentences later:

For more than one reason what I publish here will have points of contact with what other people are writing to-day.—If my remarks do not bear a stamp which marks them as mine,—I do not wish to lay any further claim to them as my property.
I make them public with doubtful feelings. It is not impossible that it should fall to the lot of this work, in its poverty and in the darkness of this time, to bring light into one brain or another—but, of course, it is not likely. — ibid. viii

The comparisons to the Tractatus give a starting place for the method to be used There is the multiplicity of language games versus pure logic in Section 23. And this returned to again later:

114. (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 4.5): "The general form of propositions is: This is how things are."——That is the kind of proposition that one repeats to oneself countless times. One thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing's nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it. — ibid. 114

What does not seem to be abandoned from the Tractatus is the solitary element:

Here we see that solipsism, taken to its conclusion, coincides with pure realism. The solipsistic self shrinks down to an extensionless point and the reality coordinated with it remains. — Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 5.64

The move from "general explanations" in PI does not seem to have weakened Wittgenstein's view of the limited role of the "psychological" or "scientism" while looking at thought and language.

Comparisons between feudal serfdom and other forms of slavery are interesting but require a search for historical contexts that is not evenly reported by the people involved. This is a broad topic that involves the different way humans developed social organization in our "prehistory."

Something that makes the American experience worth considering upon its own terms is the degree to which a slave was seen as not being fully human. That degradation may be justified or not by different people. The evaluation is more important than the logic formed to support arguments, theological or otherwise.

It is, at least, verification that Trump is racist.

Trump has survived so many revelations of his character that he figures himself to be invulnerable.

This instance feels different. Maybe Macbeth is calling for his own destruction through complaining about the boredom with his charmed life.

I don't know what the real story is but am curious why it is patently implausible from what you have learned.

As a problem for philosophy, the role of "identity" is the loose ball in the Rugby scrum of the dialectic. I don't think there is a "self" that can be regarded as an object before different thinkers have their way with it.

I do think we have very private experiences that can be properly recognized as self-consciousness. How we think about that with just ourselves and with others is not a given shared experience. If that diremption is talked about as being unnecessary, the story cannot be translated into a place where it is necessary.

That circumstance suggests there is a limit to comparisons in our experiences.

I had no inkling of those reciprocal voting treaties!

I want it here.

Anything in this universe is natural. It can't be otherwise. If there is something non-physical in this universe, then it is natural, and can be part of the explanation of some things. — Patterner

That, for me, is the critical issue. If one does not accept the Cartesian view of creation constantly being refreshed by God, thinking must find itself in the stuff made without being called just stuff.

The use of "ego" seems to always require an arrangement of associations that set the scene for its appearance. Narcissus falls in love with his reflection. The image is not the lover. The myth captures a moment without movement.

In various developmental models, the goal has been to find what happens to everybody. In Lacan, the "specular self" trying to find itself in space and time starts working on a "social self" when it can't. Lacan says one can become less frantic about the gap but never suggests it could be closed.

Jung thinks that the desperate life of the isolated self is in a dialectic with a larger version. There is movement in that model but it is based upon an unmoving underlayment as firm underfoot as the Narcissus myth.

Models of the self by Vygotsky involve learning in the context of other people where the individual and the society are involved with each other from the beginning. Can that approach be set side by side with the Lacanian view? I don't think so. There is not a ring to rule them all.

In considerations of the value of the "self-less" as an aspiration, that has been the hockey putt of thinkers on morality since we learned to disagree with each other. While that thinking may invoke primary human conditions, that should be viewed in a different light from those who can tell you exactly what those are.

Agreed. The Bannonite effort was aspirational rather than effective. We can freak when Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen gets a helicopter ride to a waiting carrier.

I was referring to an argument made in a particular book. Phillips would be the last to dismiss slavery as not being critical to the moment he reports upon. He does not argue that the generational elements he is interested in are the last word on what happened.

I started my comments on this thread pointing out how religious thinking can sharply oppose what others adopt. I will leave it there.

It is a difficult balance. To accept intolerance as what is tolerated is the hairshirt of freedom.

In terms of where people came from within Britan, Albion's Seed by David Fischer gives a brilliant report on differences in how they lived and why they left. The subtitle is Four British Folkways in America.

In regard to the Puritans, their role in the English Civil Wars found them siding mostly with the Parliamentarians against the Royalists. When considering the aristocratic bent of the ante-bellum South, Kevin Phillips' The Cousins' Wars makes a strong argument that the dividing lines of previous generations re-emerged in the American Civil War. It is interesting but does not really engage the problem of slavery and how people responded to it. This place is a hot mess.

Your point is amplified when considering the efforts at the inception of the U.S. alt-right movement to align with nationalistic parties in Europe. The efforts begun by Bannon and Breitbart back then are followed by J.D. Vance and Hegseth continuing the work today.

I suppose the most common ground for those desiring separation is a version of Hank William's "If you mind your own business then you won't be minding mine."

But that personal sense of liberty does not represent many communities that were established to preserve a separate space that excludes outsiders on various levels.

While you have the "worldly" churches BC is referring to, there are groups like the Branch Davidians who came into armed conflict with Federal agencies. The Unification Church has split into those seeking acceptance by a larger public and those who reject such as heresy. There are many other agendas to consider with their own divisions.

What the First Amendment permits is the freedom to teach your children what you wish. There are extreme examples where Common Law restricts that freedom. But those peculiar instances should not obscure the fact that the U.S.is built with such a permission accepted into the structure of governance by default.

Perhaps the version by Hillel is more universal: "Do not do to others what you would not have done to yourself."

I suppose it does not rule out forms of self-destruction but that sort of thing is covered in the first Psalm by "the way of the wicked peters out."

When one searches Google Scholar for "denominations that split during the civil war", the results show how divisive the presence of slavery had become.

This happened in the context of the Establishment of Religion clause of the First Amendment. It is this inclusion that has been the most important separation of church and state. It was adopted to avoid the religious dynamic that drove the English Civil Wars.

WCN would like to bring that dynamic back

Yours is a helpful consideration. The abolitionists of ante bellum U.S. were an important force against slavery, even though most other opponents to the institution at the time were more self-interested. Lincoln started in the latter camp but ended up in the "justice of history" group by the time of his second inauguration.

That was also a prominent feature of Orban's election victory in Hungary.

A lot of the other moves used by Orban would not work in the U.S. system because of the Constitutional boundaries in place (so far).

In terms of a national law usurping local authority, perhaps a closer parallel would be the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The slave catchers, however, were private agents of slave owners, not a federal agency.

In the latter sense, a parallel can be seen as an inversion of desegregation laws of civil rights era opposed by state and local governance, especially with the focus of ICE upon schools and public services.

Let's say the cops came and cleared out a storage locker I rented by the month.
But they made no effort to account for what was removed while it was happening.
While that process is by no means a guarantee of perfect diligence, consider how less perfect it would be if the discovery started in a different storage locker altogether.

The claim is essential to his brand. He got people to talk about it again.


It is like the Durham investigation in that respect. But the idea of independent investigation is difficult in a land where special counsels are not permitted unless agreed to by the aggrieved party.

The FBI just raided the Fulton County storage of election results for the 2020 election in Georgia. Nothing much is known yet about the "probable cause" behind the criminal search warrant. One of the problems out of the gate is chain of custody:

Fulton County officials expressed concern over the seizure of the ballots.

"These are the original voting records, original absentee ballots," Fulton County Commissioner Marvin Arrington, a Democrat, told ABC News regarding the materials seized by the FBI. "Once that stuff leaves our custody, where is the chain of custody? How can we know if we're going to get everything back? How can we know if they might do something mischievous?" — ABC news

Not a propitious beginning for any future litigation.

I understand what you are saying about political messaging. What is most important to me is the scale of the present effort. The recognition deserves its own moment.

While you are making a list, a few more bullet points:

• The targeting of specific states based upon partisan metrics.

• The breakdown of established protocols of cooperation between federal, state, and local law enforcement.

• The effort to establish ICE prisons in all states through private contracts.

• The incredible amount of money legislated for the operations.

That is enough bullets for one day.

Looking at the videos, it is interesting how the other shooters followed the first, a spasm of fear notable in other killings by groups.

I think the distance between Hegel's and Kant's use of terms does not permit a simple comparison of what they argue is the case in some language outside of what they used. When Hegel gives a term a menial job in his system, it does not mean the element of what Kant said is entirely beyond our experience is now available to us. Hegel acknowledges the merit of Kant's Paralogisms in his Logic (with significant qualifications).

For myself, the interesting matter of their differences concerns the work of "rational" versus "cosmological" psychology. How we talk about experience is a child or stepchild of the dispute.

Not usually what people complain about when they complain about me.

Your statement sounds like a particular reading of Kant, I suppose.

Do you see "what you have read" in the portions I have quoted from Hegel?

I don't understand

which cannot be subjectively imposed on them — Corvus

Does Hegel say time is just subjective perception? Or does he talk about time as some external entity in the material world? — Corvus

In Hegel, the life of an individual human being happens in the context of an unfolding over time of the potential for freedom to actually come into concrete existence:

Spirit, on the contrary, may be defined as that which has its centre in itself. It has not a unity outside itself, but has already found it; it exists in and with itself. Matter has its essence out of itself ; Spirit is self-contained existence (Bei-sich-selbst-seyn). Now this is Freedom, exactly. For if I am dependent, my being is referred to something else which I am not; I cannot exist independently of something external. I am free, on the contrary, when my existence depends upon myself. This self-contained existence of Spirit is none other than self-consciousness — consciousness of one's own being. Two things must be distinguished in consciousness; first, the fact that I know; secondly, what I know. In self consciousness these are merged in one; for Spirit knows itself. It involves an appreciation of its own nature, as also an energy enabling it to realize itself; to make itself actually that which it is potentially. According to this abstract definition it may be said of Universal History, that it is the exhibition of Spirit in the process of working out the knowledge of hat which it is potentially. And as the germ bears in itself the whole nature of the tree, and the taste and form of its fruits, so do the first traces of Spirit virtually contain the whole of that History. — Hegel, Philosophy of History, translated by J. Sibree, page 27

Hegel's Phenomenology of Geist details how this happened through stages of human history. Hegel recognized the harsh aspect of this process on the lives of particular individuals.

The notion, too, is extremely hard, because it is itself just this very identity. But the actual substance as such, the cause, which in its exclusiveness resists all invasion, is ipso facto subjected to necessity or the destiny of passing into dependency: and it is this subjection rather where the chief hardness lies. To think necessity, on the contrary, rather tends to melt that hardness. For thinking means that, in the other, one meets with one's self.—It means a liberation, which is not the flight of abstraction, but consists in that which is actual having itself not as something else, but as its own being and creation, in the other actuality with which it is bound up by the force of necessity. As existing in an individual form, this liberation is called I: as developed to its totality, it is free Spirit; as feeling, it is Love; and as enjoyment, it is Blessedness.—The great vision of substance in Spinoza is only a potential liberation from finite exclusiveness and egoism: but the notion itself realises for its own both the power of necessity and actual freedom. — Hegel's Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (pp. 309-310

As you can see, this is pretty far away from the question of mind-independence from the workings of a single tiny skull.

Thank you for all of the debate.

Fare forward.

I wonder if the experience with beauty competitions plays a part in the reactions.

My push back on Reitan's comments is not an endorsement of what Westacott objects to. I am not defending Kant or Hegel.

I think all readers can agree that Hegel does not put forward the humility of Kant. That means we should be extra careful about how to compare their language.

There is a significant element in Hegel regarding time and history. Can that be approached through an enlargement of the general ideas or does the new philosophy introduce incompatible ideas?

Judging from my own study of Hegel (admittedly many a year ago now) he rejects the idea of noumena and the "in itself" altogether. "The Rational is the Real" — Janus

He certainly does not treat the things in themselves as a mysterious region behind the veil of appearance:

44.] It follows that the categories are no fit terms to express the Absolute—the Absolute not being given in perception;—and Understanding, or knowledge by means of the categories, is consequently incapable of knowing the Things-in-themselves. The Thing-in-itself (and under 'thing' is embraced even Mind and God) expresses the object when we leave out of sight all that consciousness makes of it, all its emotional aspects, and all specific thoughts of it. It is easy to see what is left,—utter abstraction, total emptiness, only described still as an 'other-world'—the negative of every image, feeling, and definite thought. Nor does it require much penetration to see that this caput mortuum is still only a product of thought, such as accrues when thought is carried on to abstraction unalloyed: that it is the work of the empty 'Ego,' which makes an object out of this empty self-identity of its own. The negative characteristic which this abstract identity receives as an object, is also enumerated among the categories of Kant, and is no less familiar than the empty identity aforesaid. Hence one can only read with surprise the perpetual remark that we do not know the Thing-in-itself. On the contrary there is nothing we can know so easily. — Hegel's Logic, being part one of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences translated by William Wallace

I did a word search for noumena in the book and came up empty. I don't read it as a rejection of the ideas but a part of Hegel opposing how objectivity is contrasted with subjectivity in our thinking. Here is a sample from Logic:

Thought in such a case is, on one hand, the synonym for a subjective conception, plan, intention or the like, just as actuality, on the other, is made synonymous with external and sensible existence. This is all very well in common life, where great laxity is allowed in the categories and the names given to them: and it may of course happen that e.g. the plan, or so-called idea, say of a certain method of taxation, is good and advisable in the abstract, but that nothing of the sort is found in so-called actuality, or could possibly be carried out under the given conditions. But when the abstract understanding gets hold of these categories and exaggerates the distinction they imply into a hard and fast line of contrast, when it tells us that in this actual world we must knock ideas out of our heads, it is necessary energetically to protest against these doctrines, alike in the name of science and of sound reason................................

In that vulgar conception of actuality which mistakes for it what is palpable and directly obvious to the senses, we must seek the ground of a wide-spread prejudice about the relation of the philosophy of Aristotle to that of Plato. Popular opinion makes the difference to be as follows. While Plato recognises the idea and only the idea as the truth, Aristotle, rejecting the idea, keeps to what is actual, and is on that account to be considered the founder and chief of empiricism. On this it may be remarked: that although actuality certainly is the principle of the Aristotelian philosophy, it is not the vulgar actuality of what is immediately at hand, but the idea as actuality. Where then lies the controversy of Aristotle against Plato? It lies in this. Aristotle calls the Platonic idea a mere δύναμις, and establishes in opposition to Plato that the idea, which both equally recognise to be the only truth, is essentially to be viewed as an ἐνέργεια, in other words, as the inward which is quite to the fore, or as the unity of inner and outer, or as actuality, in the emphatic sense here given to the word. — ibid. section 142