I'm confused. You keep talking about poetic meaning, but I said poems, art in general, don't mean anything. How can we be agreeing — T Clark

Well, that's entirely my fault, looking back. Let me try again, straight faced --

I think when you say:

I've come to see that art, including poetry, doesn't mean anything beyond the audience's experience in seeing, reading, or hearing it. Art is an artists way of expressing an experience which makes it possible for them to share it with others. — T Clark

I took that to mean "a poems meaning is an audience's experience in perceiving the poem",

rather than

"poetry has no meaning. what poetry is is an audience's experience in perceiving the poem"

So I was reading you as restricting poetic meaning to the experience, rather than making a distinction between meaning and experience.

To continue in the Kantian line of thinking, truth would be noumenal, so it would be unknowable. — Hanover

Only if we wanted it to be noumenal, though. If we wanted it to be phenomenal, then as the Gods of the meaning-verse we could make it phenomenal, and then truth would just be about empirical reality as opposed to the questions which reason posits and wants answers to but would require a different sort of mind to be able to answer in the mode of scientific knowledge.

Applying this to statements, the best we can say of statements is the best we can say of perceptions, and that is that they belong to us, are our interpretations, and are influenced by who we are. We see the cat, but whether it is as it appears to us is the unknowable. When we speak of the cat, we speak in terms of our other phenomena and compare, analogize, and use as metaphor what we interpret. It's all a matter of interpretation, which is consistent with an indirect realist view of the world.

The direct realist states the cat is just what the cat appears to be. I find that equivalent to the literalist who says the sentence says just what the words say it says.

The indirect realist states the cat is whatever it is, mediated by the person's perceptions and sensory faculties. I find that equivalent to the non-literalist who says the sentence is an interpretative description influenced by worldview and comparative analysis to other perceptions. — Hanover

Here I think we're diving too deep into literal meaning rather than poetic meaning -- the idea here being possibly shaking up the conversation on the usual delineations, since there's no reasonable way to determine which is better or worse. So I think I'd prefer to say, for an anti-realist, what you say is about right, but a realist would take this line of thinking and still commit to there being a cat on the mat, it being real, and all that.

On either way, though, we can make a distinction between the poetic and the literal, right? Here we are, right now, where meaning has already been bootstrapped to our capacities -- and so with our ability to make the intelligible ex nihilo, we make a distinction between different uses of language, one of which is in the modality of truth-telling, and one of which is in the modality of metaphor.

I'm thinking, given the notion of metaphor as a relationship between named entities, that this actually has something to do with substitution. The phonetic "Chair" stands for a chair I'm sitting on. In a way it is the most basic metaphor -- to treat a sound as a differentiated object of meaning.

This "switching out" between metaphorical pairs sounds a lot like correspondence, at least.

But this is hand-wavey. I think there's more to say about how poetry works before being able to tie metaphor to truth-conditions. Probably won't get that far in this thread, because making a reduction of truth to metaphor sounds like a titanic project :D -- but it is the kind of notion that I'm playing with in the background of my thoughts, at least.

Oh... I thought we were disagreeing. — T Clark

Well, we're not!

So there!

:D

I did focus on the relationship angle of your post. It's in the relationship that I think meaning comes about, from the call-and-response of a speaker and an audience which flips back and forth.

Here I think you're right we disagree:

I agree with this. There are worthwhile things to say about poetry, but I don't think meaning is one of them except in the fairly trivial sense of knowing what the poet is referring to. Example - In "Wild Grapes" by Robert Frost, it's good to know that "Leif the Lucky's German" refers to Leif Erickson's German foster father.

I like to talk about what I experience when I read a poem. As I see it, that's different from it's meaning. From my point of view, most of the poem interpretations I've read are baloney. I do also like to talk about technical aspects of the poem - meter, rhyme, metaphor - and how they help me share the poet's experience. I don't think that's the same thing as meaning either. — T Clark

So you would claim that "poetic meaning" in reference to "meaning" is more or less an equivocation, that these are actually separate things. Do I have you right?

That is fine by me, because I'm also actually interested in the aesthetics of poetry unto itself -- and actually put this in aesthetics with the idea of exploring that more than the usual reductions, with the idea of it generating more shared thoughts to build from.

And, even more than that, while I have this odd suspicion, it is just an odd suspicion. And it's a lot easier to talk about how poems work and how it is they mean or what it is they mean.

Thanks for the introduction. Most enjoyable :up: — Amity

Of course! He's tons of fun.

The rhythm of the first two lines in each verse reminds me of something heard before.
Possibly a pop song or an advert...
Something along the lines of 'This is not just food. This is M&S food'.
No, it's a jingly kind of pop.
Ah, got it!
The Bangles... — Amity

Hah! I didn't pick up on that, but I see it!

I am against all of those who are rigid towards interpreting a poem. There isn’t anyone clever than other in terms of experiencing poetry. — javi2541997

I agree. I will note that I actually aesthetically enjoy rigid readings of poems, in the sense of applying some kind of aesthetic criterion(s) to interpretation -- but not when they're dogmatic. That seems anti-poetic, to me.

I want share another poem with you:

[He] said:
“the sea used to come here”
And and [he] put more wood on the fire. Ozaki Hōsai.

This haiku poem gives me nostalgia because the author is missing something that is no longer with him: the sea. — javi2541997

I love haiku. I read a small book that introduced me to how to read haiku and two of the features of haiku that I remember are there were fixed symbols with meanings (I forget which symbols were what, but I remember the kingfisher was one symbol with a few meanings that were fixed to it), but for the whole genre rather than by author. This allowed people to play with those as a kind of agreed upon beginning to make their own variations. So while poetry doesn't have to have conventions, it does have conventional meanings too.

The other thing I remember from that book was that haiku was meant more for friends, rather than high art. So you wrote haiku to share among family or in letters and such, to express feelings in the moment. This is how I relate to poetry, so I thought that was neat. (It's also how I get along with philosophy, for the most part: it's a social activity more than an institutional one, for me)

It brings it, but where was it, what did we put it in, and how was it transported? How can something be "in" the poem when the poem is sounds? How do we "make" sense? Do we build it?

You seem to be speaking in metaphor, comparing abstract thoughts to physical objects and the movement of tangible things.

I see what you're saying, but not really visually as seeing would entail.

My point is that all is metaphor and poetry. — Hanover

This is good.

I want to begin with this notion that all is metaphor and poetry -- itself a metaphor! :D

Now, in reference to truth-conditions, I think that metaphor would be seen as parasitic upon the world, as you read me in the above -- "in" meaning a cabinet rather than a sentence. And metaphoric meaning does exactly this! It's poly-amorous.

I wonder, though, to take a line from Kant, just because we begin with truth-conditions in our thinking about meaning doesn't mean that meaning starts with truth-conditions. I think it could at least be made coherent that we begin with, as you say, metaphor and poetry and, from that, craft truth-conditions.

(Side note: I don't think that either case would count for/against anti/realism -- i.e., as usual, I'm putting that to the side, insofar that we can believe that's an innocent maneuver, at least)

**

I was tempted, though, to also directly answer your question with Shakespeare -- famous wordsmith. My guess is he was actually listening to the vernacular at the time and recording it, with a few poetic flares thrown in for art. But those poetic flares are, I'd say, one source of how we craft meaning. We have a poem with a rhythm-rhyme scheme, and we need it to rhyme -- so we craft a new word that fits phonetically, but has a new meaning.

Now, that's one way we do this. And I'd posit that the process is, from "our side" of phenomonology, more or less ex nihilo -- we are the Gods of the meaning-verse, creating its meaning as an intellectual intuition would a world. (But, being a good naturalist, I do suspect there's an underlying explanation, if we wish to look)

Would it not also follow that different types of poems work differently? — Tom Storm

Absolutely! In fact, that's part of what's interesting to me about poetry -- something as simple as a rhythm-rhyme scheme can evoke emotion, thought, and action all at once.

An aspect of poetry is the concentrated, careful word selection to intensify meaning. They also have to sound good when read aloud. I think it was jounro-poet Clive James who said if a poem doesn't captivate when heard, it will collapse and not be remembered. Or something like that.

I agree with this aesthetic direction, on the whole. I love poems written in the phonic script, and usually write my own that way. But sometimes I've come across poems that manage to establish another aesthetic. The Psalms is a good example of this kind of poetry -- it's considered to be written in ideas which are either repeated, contrasted, or act as a kind of resolution. The poems are separate and yet not separate too, and can be grouped by genre even within the Psalms to give an added dimension of interpretation.

I've come to see that art, including poetry, doesn't mean anything beyond the audience's experience in seeing, reading, or hearing it. Art is an artists way of expressing an experience which makes it possible for them to share it with others. — T Clark

I agree with this, too. This whole approach is why both poetry and theatre are of philosophic interest to me (they also happen to be interesting unto themselves to me, too :D -- else I wouldn't have the sustained interest to continue gathering examples) -- they necessitate dialogue, an other, a community, a group. The poem comes alive in the collective witnessing of the poem -- before that, it's just a script.

To the extent that awareness can be aware of itself, it seems (to me) to manifest as a silence, and an emptiness. I don't know if anyone else has another experience? — unenlightened

Makes sense to me.

Get's along with how I understand the notion of "listening" too. Listening well requires me to have that silence.

While I feel more confused than when I began, I'll say one positive thing I learned is I'm not really sure what I want from a theory of truth -- and now I can explicitly recognize that and begin to try and make a list. Also, I'd say it's opened my mind even further on how truth itself is an open question, still -- and that one of the inferences we can make from this belief is that we don't need to know what truth is, explicitly, to know how to use truth. Else, we wouldn't be able to say things like "Well, math should count in addition to pictures"

I think, most of the time, I've just been asking of a theory of truth that it be true of truth (self consistent), without begging the question. Further, that it not depend upon metaphysics, since as I understand metaphysics at least the theory would then beg the question on truth: we might be able to say, after having settled what is the case "oh, and here's the truth" after the fact, but that's not satisfactory -- we might as well just say the forms are behind the veil of appearances and be done with it if we're going to assume what is the case in order to understand truth.

Not sure what else to add to the list.

Well, that's no fun :D. And I don't think it'd help much: if politics isn't in the business of talking, it's in the business of shooting -- so silence isn't right. But we can't go about acting like we're saint-like in this matter, either. History is bloody and amoral. Very few people are actually "in the right" -- if they are, they didn't survive the game: they were exterminated by the people who wanted to build nations.

Kind of. And kind of not.

I only mean to highlight that the problems of Marxism are problems of human organization on the international scale -- that they trade on the use of violence, and the usual way of going about making a nation will make it such that any nation that survives the nation-building game will have a dark history which can be used to make propaganda with.

But since we, ourselves, also live in a nation that survived the nation-building game, we lack the ethos to make such pronouncements -- it's like Ted Bundy calling Jack the Ripper a murderer.

How else does one win the nation-building game?

I think that dictatorship, at least on the economic level, is exactly what's in place -- it's either the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie or the proletariat, but a dictatorship all the same. That's how we relate to property: by adjudicating who gets to dictate what happens to a thing. This is common between socialisms and capitalisms: they are dictatorships over property. When the investment banker decides you don't own a home, you're forced out on the street. When the boss decides you're not contributing enough, you're forced out of work. When the money-man says you're not worthy, then you die in a capitalist economy. The dictators just set it up in a way that they can alleviate their guilty conscience, saying that those who suffer deserve their suffering, for their imprudent individual actions.

But it's a dictatorship all the same, if you're born on the wrong side of the property line.

Is Marxism hijackable? That, my friend, is the right question. — Agent Smith

I agree!

And I'd say that it is not.

All the concerns about the one true Marx are understandable -- due to the anti-communist propaganda machine that has been and continues to operate on the popular USian conscience -- and I've shared the sentiment in a previous life. I get the feeling, but I'd say it's wrong.

There's a funny line with Marx going on -- there are those who want to say he is pure, but the real applications are somehow wrong, and there are those who want to say the real applications are the heart of the matter.

On the interpretive angle both agree that the real instances of Marx's work are undeniably wrong, tyrannical, and so forth. Lenin as misguided zealot, more or less re-iterated over the course of every socialist country.

But there are people who benefited from the efforts of socialism. Socialism is not the paradise people imagine. The warts are on the level of systematic violence against innocent groups. However, in comparison to any modern nation.... well, that's just the recipe for making a nation: genocide, repression, appropriation, and exploitation are the name of the game. That's how you win the nation-building game (and it's a pyrrhic victory).

***

That nation-building ends in a pyrrhic victory, most of the time, is the fact upon which any propaganda machine can be built from. If you want your people to avoid notions that might make them like those people, then you utilize the dark facts of any nations history to paint that nation as bad while using the positive facts about your own nation to paint it as a good one, so people are attached to your nation and fear the other nation.

I think that's where a lot of attitudes towards Marxism and socialism are from. Marxism is a full on tradition with political actors that continue to influence the international world, though. Like any tradition it comprises of many, but what it is not is a foregone conclusion of obvious evil and wrong.

To spell out my position in the most literal manner for your convenience: there are people who get paid less than they should be paid, and what I'd change in your formula -- in answer to "what more do you want?" -- is that if you work you can make a decent living, regardless of what you do.

If you work, and have a decent job, you can make decent living. What more can a human want — god must be atheist

I'd cut out "and have a decent job" -- that's clearly saying there are jobs for people who count, and jobs for people who don't count. So if you don't have a decent job, you work hard, and yet don't see anything from your work.

How do you form a government without a market? — Yohan

Through collective action. It's not necessarily but is usually violent collective action.

Whatever a state's genesis, though, in maintaining a modern state we usually engage in violent collective action or the threat of said violent collective action in our negotiations with other states (and in the policing of our own citizens) The old economic definition of a state being the firm which has a monopoly on the use of violence.

All these different terms get confusing, but the basic idea is free trade vs forced community sharing. When government interferes with free trade, then the problems of capitalism emerge.
Communities sharing is good. Thats the positive value communism is based on. But when its FORCED it leads to unintended consequences.
Trying to control nature always leads to unintended consequences. We have to work WITH nature, not against it. — Yohan

Well, this isn't doing a lot to dissuade me from Marxism's work on capitalism.

My belief is that markets cannot exist without a government -- they are as artificial or natural as any other social arrangement. That's because property rights are not naturally endowed upon us -- naturally speaking, we can take whatever we're strong enough to take (and in terms of a social species, that usually translates into numbers of people more than raw individual strength). It's only by creating an artificial market that people begin to trade things, since taking them directly has a punishment associated with it.

Sounds like classical liberalism. In which case, Marxism's description of capitalism is apt.

From here:

Capitalism

The socio-economic system where social relations are based on commodities for exchange, in particular private ownership of the means of production and on the exploitation of wage labour.

Wage labour is the labour process in capitalist society: the owners of the means of production (the bourgeoisie) buy the labour power of those who do not own the means of production (the proletariat), and use it to increase the value of their property (capital). In pre-capitalist societies, the labour of the producers was rendered to the ruling class by traditional obligations or sheer force, rather than as a “free” act of purchase and sale as in capitalist society.

Value is increased through the appropriation of surplus value from wage labour. In societies which produce beyond the necessary level of subsistence, there is a social surplus, i.e. people produce more than they need for immediate reproduction. In capitalism, surplus value is appropriated by the capitalist class by extending the working day beyond necessary labour time. That extra labour is used by the capitalist for profit; used in whatever ways they choose.

The main classes under capitalism are the proletariat (the sellers of labour power) and the bourgeoisie (the buyers of labour power). The value of every product is divided between wages and profit, and there is an irreconcilable class struggle over the division of this product.

Capitalism is one of a series of socio-economics systems, each of which are characterised by quite different class relations: tribal society, also referred to as “primitive communism” and feudalism. It is the breakdown of all traditional relationships, and the subordination of relations to the “cash nexus” which characterises capitalism. The transcendence of the class antgonisms of capitalism, replacing the domination of the market by planned, cooperative labour, leads to socialism and communism. — marxists.org

Proof is in the pudding. There are lots of linguists doing lots of fieldwork. Maybe they'll find something, maybe they won't. Arguments that they must, or that they cannot, hang in the air exactly the way a brick doesn't. — Srap Tasmaner

Yeah, that makes sense to me. I certainly don't want to be read as saying either that they cannot or must -- if anything I've been pushing against notions like that. I certainly don't expect the meandering thoughts I have to in some way impinge on a project people have dedicated their lives to. I'm sure these thoughts have been thought by people better educated on the matter than I :D

I guess, for us -- .or really, for me, since I think you're still pretty much on board with correspondence theory -- I have to think on your question and get at another approach that does utilize something that I'm more confident in.

(EDIT: "Homebase" for me is Kant, but I'm also confident that he's wrong :D -- so who knows)

Which is a perfectly good prior. What do you do next? — Srap Tasmaner

My first response was "No idea" :D -- but that's no fun:

To get back at truth, it seems to me that if there's no ur-Language, or at least rules for all languages which count as Language in general, then we'd have to put aside any semantic theory of truth (if we hoped that theory was universal, at least). There'd be nothing of truth as much as we're talking about the English predicate "...is true", which does have a history and all, but clearly we'd be picking out the "good cases" in that history and so we rely upon -- even if indistinct -- some notion of truth that is bigger than the English predicate "...is true"

But then you say here:

Linguistics is littered with failed theories, even failed research programs, like any other science, but not all of them. — Srap Tasmaner

And I have a great respect for the sciences (as well as philosophy, for that matter).

So I'll lay out my suspicions --

It seems to me that in order to generalize about language you'd have to have a representative sample. But no one person knows enough languages to even come close to that (think about how many languages have already perished up to now, and how the kinds of societies which don't prioritize capital and conquest might have very different dialects than us), so you kind of just have to assume that the languages you do know are at least related to this general picture of language -- that real language use instantiates the general features of language, and it does so so strongly that the specifics of any one language don't obscure it.

And when it comes to even the small number of languages I'm familiar with I'm having a hard time picking out much similarity when it comes to meaning such that we'd have a rule which translates the meaning of one language to another. Really you just have to know both languages in order to perform a translation. Knowledge of a particular language is about as "deep" as knowledge of language goes -- and translation is an art of understanding two languages, rather than a rule.

But that's all just based on my mere experience with language learning and such. I have a hard time conceptualizing what Language, in general, could possibly mean other than "whatever it is we mean when meaning with means" -- so my suspicions are likely just based on my small impression of things, and there's much more to the story that I'm unaware of.

Finished A Nice Derangment of Epitaphs today. I think I get along with its conclusion rather well -- I really do suspect there is no such thing as a language, in these terms of rules and such, and especially when spoken of in the abstract (rather than, say, English). I suppose I'm not as disturbed by that notion as others might be. Maybe I'm just ignorant of its implications. It sounds like one would conclude that we are simply animals barking, that language is meaningless, and we're all just acting out of the drives we happened to be driven by due to our evolutionary heritage.

But that would run counter to things like understanding the meaning of a poem, wouldn't it? Perhaps the whole approach of specifying rules of interpretation is what's wrongheaded? We get by without explicit reference to rules quite frequently. It's just not some kind of universal rule or something.

Logic can be mapped onto probability somewhat naturally...Formally, though, it does make some sense to think of logic as a special case of a more general calculus of probabilities. — Srap Tasmaner

That's interesting. New for me, at least ! :D --

Not sure what vocabulary we should use for this sort of thing, but “validity” feels really out of place. Once you’re doing probabilities, that’s what you’re doing. — Srap Tasmaner

This makes sense to me. The only conclusion that doesn't really make sense to me is that probability undermines validity -- how to work that out, I'm not sure, but that's really the only belief I'm holding onto here.

I was attempting to "make sense" of probability in some way with my knowledge of baby-logic -- I thought maybe if you separated out the steps, basically, you'd have something that works. But you're saying it can be mapped, but in so doing you're not really testing validity anymore. It's wholly different.

although the material is difficult and I was unable to garner much interest from anyone else. — Banno

It looked to me like it fell to the same problem as any other theory of truth, but with more interesting results. The "interesting results" were definitely beyond me, so no noise from me. But that you landed on "false" just meant it had the same problem as any theory of truth, as I understand the liars.

We had a probability for the whole conditional, plus a second premise giving a probability for its antecedent, but no probability for the consequent. If we already knew that pr(G) = 0.65, why we would we bother trying to calculate it? — Srap Tasmaner

As I read the OP, the scenario specified that premise 1 and premise 2 each have a 65% chance of being true, rather than the implication having a probability -- so my thought was to simply separate out probability from the truth-table to make the deduction work. For the argument to work we'd probably want to use "and" rather than material implication though, right?

P
Q
Therefore,
P ^ Q


Works out better for the OP's point, that the conclusion is less likely than each initial premise, due to two events being a part of it rather than 1 event, and the conjunct only holding true when both are true.

That is, I took the scenario to be demonstrating how validity becomes invalid when possibility probability is a part of a given proposition.

These issues and many others are too big for any one person to decide, do you not agree? — Judaka

Sure.

Can you clarify, could you be describing something more like doing someone a courtesy or giving the benefit of the doubt as I have here, as opposed to believing whatever you're told regardless of your own personal views? Because surely you do have your own personal views about how gender is determined and expressed and yada yada... right? — Judaka

I do, and I've been laying them out -- I haven't been saying "do not discuss" or "have no opinion" or something along those lines. Here we are discussing! :D And I'm not trying to say "Do not post again!" or something along those lines. We cannot help but to have an opinion, a lot of the times.

My belief is that these things aren't very clear cut, that there is no one definition for identifying as such-and-such, there are multiple ways to be a man or a woman or neither, and so the type of philosophy which lays out definitions and counter-examples in a dialectic simply will not come to an understanding of gender, at least as I understand these things. Who we are is softer than the tools of analysis which are meant for reaping and harvesting of intellectual products.

Metaphorically, we are flowers and turtles -- and the harvest kills both while it pursues maximizing wheat germ.

Does that make any kind of sense?

When I say prove, I don't mean by providing a logical argument and laying out the evidence. We do it without words, we demonstrate it. Gender identity is communicated in less than a second, and only in exceptional or rare circumstances will there ever be a conversation about it. — Judaka

Focusing here, because this is something I agree with.

I invoked the notion of asking because it's basically the golden standard for determining some one person's identity, in my view -- and talk of wanting standards for categories to determine identity runs counter to the notion of simply listening to a person talk about themself. I agree that we don't go about using the golden standard, however. We just glide along, barely without even a belief formed, accepting people's identity before it's even face-value, before its even named.

My thought is that who we are isn't really chosen by us. So "girding" that conversation isn't important. It's not something which needs to have intersubjective agreement, nor does it need to be an object of knowledge. The very reality of our identity takes care of itself, and so self-identification doesn't undermine identity. That is -- I take statements of one's identity to be truth-apt, I just think that the person whose best situated to make judgments about their truth is the person making the statement (EDIT: about themself, that is).

But then there's the other side of identity, how you interpret others. But this doesn't have to do with features or aspects of others, in my opinion. As you noted, we don't ask people for their identity. It happens before we're even really cognitively engaged. We glide along, accepting the identity we see and interacting with it before really judging whether the identity we perceive is right or wrong or whatever.

So given these two features -- that a person is better situated to judge whether something is true of themselves, and the lack of cognitive engagement in ascertaining others identities on a regular basis -- I'd say that a general conversation is exactly wrong headed. We don't need sets with specified traits to make judgments of others with. We just need to listen to what others have to say about themselves.

Yes, I read us as saying similar enough things too.

Isn't it clear why would be a problem? — Judaka

I don't think so. But, then, I don't think of personal identity like you do. I'm not looking to define these things in order to pass judgment on who counts as who. That's exactly what I'm advising against. So where you say

You're really vastly underestimating how many different kinds of identities there are, not all of them are clear cut and some are quite contentious or hotly debated. — Judaka

I'm saying we ought not debate personal identity. It's not up for debate because to debate someone's identity is dehumanizing. It puts someone in the position of proving their own existence. How could someone possibly do that?

So where you say:

There needs to be a general discussion to understand this so that we can decide how someone who isn't biologically male could assume a "male" identity, — Judaka

I'm saying that's exactly what doesn't need to happen. For the most part, we treat others with enough respect that they know things about themselves a little better than I know about them -- this is especially the case with sensitive things, like religion, political affiliation, or sexual orientation. That's respectful of the person as a person. And that's what is important.

what the rules are for that and how it might work etc — Judaka

The rules for determining someone's personal identity, usually, is to just ask them, and believe that they're in a better position than myself to ascertain such things. Further, even if I happen to believe otherwise, it's not my place to go about proving it -- After all, they're in a better position than myself to ascertain such things about themself, given they've always been around and I've only been around for however long but much less than always.

The rules, I suggest, is to treat others with enough respect that they need not prove themselves. Asking for proof of someone else's personal identity is belittling -- it says to someone they are so ignorant that you know them better than they know themselves.

Note that this doesn't mean that someone cannot be wrong about themself. It means that the rules we should concern ourselves with is how we actually treat people, and the best way to treat others, when it comes to them speaking on their personal identity, is to respect them. For a discussion to take place, respect first has to be in place. And if we're asking people to prove who they are, then respect isn't really in play. Then we're trying to prove things, or show how I was right or wrong when this is wholly other to how we actually build relationships.

But it'd be absurd for you to completely hand over the reins to me to allow me to dictate to you how you should view me. — Judaka

Why's that?

For gender identity, it's not about whether someone getting to decide what your "true" gender is, it's about the practical implications of being recognised and acknowledged as belonging to a particular gender. — Judaka

For practical purposes, I'd say that for almost every part of one's personal identity we don't have to go about proving it to others. Notice your list:

disabled status, class, appearance, ethnicity, language, hobbies, skills, occupations, culture, place of living, and way of living, — Judaka

These are aspects of one's social identity. I'd say that "identity" is not singular. When it comes to one's social designation, of course it matters what others say. When it comes to one's personal identity, no one owns that but the person whose identity it is. Necessarily, by the usage of language, our social nature is already imprinted upon our identifying ourself. But these social identities come from our personal identities. After all, disabled status wasn't a thing in the United States until the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed in 1990. It's not like everyone who was disabled suddenly became disabled after having the social recognition. It's just that people in the world "caught up" to the real facts of disability (itself a social designation only necessary due to our economic model being privitized, and some people not counting as "good enough" for the machine of capital to use, but they certainly would still like to live).

There needs to be a general discussion to understand this so that we can decide how someone who isn't a male could assume a "male" identity, what the rules are for that and how it might work. — Judaka

Eh, I'd just say that you're the one whose mistaken on how these things work. After all, you say:

I have an expectation that others are going to treat me as a male because I identify as a male and look like a male, I've never encountered any situation where it's been an issue for me. — Judaka

Might it be the case that people who have had to deal with being accepted might know a little more than someone whose always been accepted for exactly who they are and who never has to worry about proving who they are to others?

If I identify as disabled but I'm not disabled in any way, you'll just accept that as part of my identity? If I tell you I identify as upper-class but I'm completely broke, you'll go forward thinking I'm part of the upper-class? — Judaka

A thing about hypotheticals -- they aren't real. And when discussing the reality of personal identity I think that hypotheticals of the form which compares facts with judgments are wholly inappropriate. We don't go down to the identity-clinic where the trained psychologist runs a brain scan and hands us a paper which tells us who we are. Identity is not an object of scientific knowledge.


A thing about identity -- even if I don't accept your identity, you can continue to identify in that manner. What I think is irrelevant to your personal identity because I don't "negotiate" your identity. Personal identity isn't some object of knowledge which a community of knowers debate which propositions are appropriate. Personal identity morphs and changes over time, and we frequently are saddled with parts of ourselves which other parts of ourselves would rather not were there.

I may have a hard time believing such and such about a person (for whatever reason), but that doesn't mean that my beliefs are determinant of their identity.

The way I'd put it is that the thing-in-itself is a noumenon, i.e. something that can be thought but cannot be empirically encountered, but noumena is the general category while thing-in-itself is one particular noumenon.

I believe it was mostly invented to make a distinction between transcendental idealism and the pure idealism that Kant is concerned with criticizing -- it's absurd to think that the moon stops existing when no one looks at it, but we'll never encounter the moon-in-itself either. So thing-in-itself is more like a place-holder concept to guard against treating metaphysical (non-empirical, and unbounded by the categories) judgments about objects as knowledge -- such as objects are material/ideal, which cannot be determined through collective empirical judgment.

This isn't to disagree with anything you've written, which I've agreed with, but to complement it.

Are you saying that identity is entirely free choice? — Judaka

No.

I'm saying that no one owns a person's identity other than the person whose identity it is. You nor I get to say who Susan or Ryan are. They get to say who they are. And they are the ones who get to say whether they were right, wrong, or somewhere in-between when it comes to their own identity.

The issue is whether others accept the identity you choose, and the question here is the legitimacy of a choice to determine one's own gende — Judaka

"Choice" isn't the right language, as I say in the above. Identity, including gender-identity, is not about epistemic access or moral choices. You simply are not the one I'll consult when it comes to someone else's identity, and I wouldn't consult myself to understand your identity -- I'd ask and listen to you.

And that is as it should be, whatever the point is.

Is it ever reasonable to concede the truth of each of the premises of a deductive argument and yet deny the conclusion — MichaelJYoo

If F(65%) then G(65%)
F(65%)
Therefore, G(65%)

So the unweighted possibility space would look like:

F| G| F->G
T| T| T
T| F| F
F| T| T
F| F| T

For any particular instance you'd have to input a randomized number, or perhaps this is a model of a real process (like flipping an unfair coin) and you'd just have to flip the coin to determine the truth value of each proposition.

That is, it seems that you'd just have to determine the individual truth-value of each proposition, then you could determine whether some connective holds or not in the old-fashioned truth-table way.


I wouldn't want to refuse the possibility a priori, but I do think that denying the conclusion of a deductive argument where its premises are true would depend upon the content of the example -- and probability doesn't seem to undermine validity because its at a different "level" of determination than what truth-tables are at: probability determines if such-and-such a proposition is true in a given instance, and then based upon the value of that event you can apply the normal calculus.

However, what does it mean to be a man or a woman? — Susu

I think that this is intentionally left up to whomever is identifying themself -- there is no one way to be a man or a woman, up to and including the body one is born with, and up to and including identifying as neither a man nor a woman. Our identities are ours, not based on conventional nomenclature or essential properties or duties.

You're going to have to spell out what you're thinking, because to me these just look like a handful of unrelated questions.

I took it as a symbol for the dawn of whatever it is that allows us to create and invent tools -- hence the shot shortly thereafter where the ape throws a bone in the sky, a clear indication of a tool separate from the ape, which cuts to a spaceship in the same position -- nothing has changed for the species since that moment of realization, the only difference between using the bone as a tool to accomplish things we want and a spaceship in the same manner is having enough generations to figure out the details of that same way of grasping the world (totally unlike prior to their cognizance of themselves and tools and desires -- sort of like a dawn of consciousness thing, but with a symbol that symbolizes the advent of technology)

I don't feel qualified to comment on the potential differences because I wouldn't claim to know very much about Kant's noumena. From a complete layman perspective though, Kant's noumena are often referred to as the thing-in-itself, yes? Taking that literally (perhaps erroneously, though) I think the difference would be in that hidden states do not posit any 'thing' at all, they are an informational construct, about data, not material composition. As such they can be an implication of a data model, whereas any thing-in-itself would be ontological? But as I say, I'm not sure as I don't have a deep understanding of noumena. — Isaac

Perhaps, with our powers combined, we could come up with something that works for us. Obviously to make these comparisons one has to have an interpretation of Kant, so there's going to be some controversy with respect to which interpretation we're favoring. But if we don't mind stirring that pot and wanting to have some kind of rough idea, I'd claim I have some knowledge of the noumena. (EDIT: heh, well... as a philosophical concept, at least! :D I'd be contradicting myself the other way...)


In my understanding of the distinction we have to step back and look at the philosophical landscape of the time to see what sorts of debates were being taken seriously by philosophers: Is space relative, or absolute? Are we free, or are we determined by the laws of physics? Does God exist? Is the soul immortal?

From the particular examples that Kant works through we can see that his target is metaphysical theories. Further, these metaphysical theories are demonstrated to be undecidable since the only way we settle whether some statement is true is by referring to what we collectively experience, and these particular theories and judgments attempt to get "outside" of our experience and assert the truth of things we have no connection to.

By "no connection", I always harp on the fact that one of the categories is "causation", and the noumena is outside of the categories, and so no we cannot make sense of the noumena by applying the category of causation to it -- it does not cause phenomena. With respect to our scientific knowledge, at least, it's a purely negative category (with respect to the other two powers of the mind, practical reason and aesthetic/teleological judgment, the noumena plays a different role -- but with respect to scientific knowledge, it's purely negative)

So given that, from your description of "hidden states" -- I'd say these things are absolutely not connected. First we don't even have concepts with your neural model, that's sort of just "assumed" to ride along with the firing of neurons. And then with all the causal language being used "noumena" seems wholly innappropriate as a boundary condition for this discussion. I'd say this falls under "empirical psychology", so the transcendental conditions of knowledge won't effect what we have to say here even if we are Kantians.

is that they're purposeful fictions. — Isaac

I like this notion of purposeful fictions.

I suppose the error theorist's task, then, is to lay out what discriminates a fantasy from a purposeful story -- "story" in the sense of our ability to parse the world into story form, ala "purposeful fiction". That might go some way to making this notion more appealing.

By "scientific", I meant according to the way biologists use the word. — Tate

I pulled a definition from this pdf claiming to be a post-secondary biology textbook: "mating system whereby one male and one female remain coupled for at least one mating season"

Given that human beings don't have a mating season, I'd say it's a hard sell on being useful to describe humans.

Nevertheless, it's held up as an ideal on a large portion of the earth. The question was: why? — Tate

I've supplied an answer, and answered your rebuttal: polygamy is an extension of monogamy, not a strike against monogamy as an ideal. The ideal is there because penis-havers make economic decisions over the household, and they don't want to be saddled with someone else's child.

If by scientific you just mean descriptive of human behavior, then human beings are simply not monogamous. There's nothing to explain because this is a false statement.

Historically patriarchs had multiple wives — Tate

I think you're starting from a false notion of patriarch here -- it's a picture of a man with his harem. While that is an example of patriarchy, it's not a definition. Patriarchy as I set it out: the social rule where the penis-haver of a household makes economic decisions for said household. So, "historically speaking", monogomous relationships count insofar that the penis-haver is the one who holds the power of the wallet within the household.

Some patriarchs have multiple wives -- but I'd say that even most do not. Polygamy is just an extension of the logic taken to an extreme: if I can own one wife, then if I'm rich enough I should be able to own multiple wives. While we of modern, sensible tastes don't put it in terms of ownership, it wasn't so long ago that a man could have his wife put away for being "hysterical" in our purportedly modern world.

I don't think patriarchy answers the question, though. Patriarchy doesn't entail monogamy — Tate

Patriarchy is the enforced social rule of men as the head of the household who makes decisions with respect to household economic arrangements, at least with respect to this topic (it's much more than just this rule, but this is a simple enough beginning).

This balance of power has changed in parts of the world, but that tradition is still alive and well -- and I'd say that even if we choose to re-interpret monogamy in some other way, that this is where the ideal "comes from", so to speak -- its cultural genealogy comes from the fact that children are expensive, that it's harder to track who the father is, and monogamy makes tracking that economic responsibility much easier.



Oh, yes -- we're recently enlightened, you see. ;)

But, yeah, I believe human beings are creatures, more or less. Flesh, blood, bone, and brain, and related to all the life that we see before us through the evolutionary story.

I hear you. The fact is, I care about all those questions but they still 'don't matter' in practical terms, as far as I can tell. I'm not saying I want to change anything but I find it interesting that a transformative idea - like truth or the nature of reality - may not actually transform how I conduct myself. — Tom Storm

Yeah, true. There's something queer about philosophical theories -- they seem as if they should have transformative implications, but also that people can change their beliefs on these matters and go on about their day like nothing changed.

Two ways to tackle this: 1) a given philosophy is deemed useless, or 2) a given philosophy is deemed bad.

1) Whatever philosophy happens to be, we regularly see examples of people changing philosophical positions -- so it is reasonable to conclude that, insofar as our day-to-day is concerned, philosophy is useless because we are free to change beliefs without changing anything else.

2) Whatever philosophy happens to be, these philosophies on offer are bad because they do not address the concerns of human beings -- if they did, then changing a belief would have consequences for our activities.

Why not just have harems like gorillas? — Tate

In societies that don't have harems, at least (since some societies do have harems, hence the word harem) -- the women will have to agree to patriarchy as well as the men, but when you frame it like that it's a lot harder to catch on. So, monogamy.