Briefly and dogmatically, we can be pretty sure about our deductions; induction is deductively invalid; calling induction "abduction" doesn't make it valid. — Banno

Agreed on both counts.

I'm prone to thinking of induction as a kind of myth. Not the bad kind, but the good kind -- that is still a myth.

But Ramsey's solution gives us something to work with. Instead of seeking justification for induction, he explains how we act as if inductive reasoning were valid. Wanna bet? If you say you believe the sun will rise tomorrow, wanna bet? How much? At what odds? Your willingness to stake something reveals your degree of belief, not some abstract epistemic warrant. Rationality, for Ramsey, isn’t about justifying beliefs from first principles, but about maintaining consistency between your beliefs and actions.

Davidson makes use of this in his latter work. — Banno

Let's take this model up with the idea Williamson seems to be presenting here -- suppose philosophers formed a sort of betting ring on their particular philosophical ideas.

Does this make for a rational activity? Or is it not the betting, but the conclusion that's important? I.e. no the story you started with, but rather the "Rationality...[is] about maintaining consistency between your beliefs and actions"

My thought is that rationality is a collective practice whereby we check one another's beliefs through some agreed upon rough notions. Would that even be contrary to Ramsey, or could it be framed in terms of maintaining consistency between beliefs and actions?

:D

You're not wrong.

But, descriptively, don't people sometimes reason in this manner? Or is it a philosopher's fiction?

For my part, I just don't much like Kant's transcendental arguments. Fraught.

Genreral structure:
The only way we can have A is if B
We have A
Therefore, B
And that first premise is very hard to substantiate, very easy to break. — Banno

I think if we weaken their universality it's something of a common theme amongst philosophers: instead of the form we often say things more loosely like "This presupposes that" -- it may not be the case, but insofar that we agree upon the presupposition then the argument tracks well enough. Rather than structuring thought I'd say this structures dialogue: Less ostentatiously we could say that the first premise, if agreed upon, is to acknowledge the importance of the priority between two concepts.

I've seen it cast as a kind of "inference to the best explanation" as well -- where the transcendental part is the tentative "Well... this is the best guess I can think of for now, so until you have a better one..."


Though, really, it is just my idiosyncratic way of thinking through a philosopher -- I look for relations and analogies and such. It may not be relevant after all. It's something of a stretch, except for when I was reading Adorno talking about Kant as a kind of philosophical positivist, and that gave me some food for thought. (not in the analytic/continental sense, but the older sense of philosophy being able to establish positive knowledge -- at the very least of the sort that can state "and this is where you can go no further")

You probably know that Danto, in addition to promulgating his theories about the artworld, offered a frankly Hegelian picture of what art is. — J

Actually, nope! I know precious little of him, and it's third-hand hearsay through George Dickie, basically. Ad it's not like I read everything of his, he just had some really cool ideas that I found useful in thinking through art.

It involves a move which is philosophical -- a process by which art comes to understand itself, to eliminate all the things that art is not. He showed, I think convincingly, that we can no longer equate art with any physical substrate, any thing which art must be in order to qualify. Art is a way of seeing; we declare what is art, we don't discover it. The "we" here is the subject of much debate, naturally. — J

I agree that we declare what is art, in a sense -- though the "we" is pretty dang communal from my perspective, involving audiences, critics, artists, historians, and even casual appreciators of some art.

(This applies to all the arts, not just visual arts, so substitute "way of hearing" for music.)

I should hope so!


I'm not sure I understand the showing you describe, though: That we can no longer equate art with any physical substrate, any thing which art must be in order to qualify. The latter part makes sense to me, it's the "any physical substrate" that has me wondering what that means, or if it's not that special and just a turn of phrase.

Don't you find that quite distasteful?

Davidson undermines this again, by denying one leg of the transcendental argument that leads to it. In this case, he'd say that it's not categories that are held constant, but truths. We interpret the utterances of others so as to maximise their truth. We don't need shared categories.

So it's not that we must think alike, but that we can try to understand others as if they were saying the same things we would. That’s a much more humane model of reason. — Banno

I hadn't thought about it like that until now. I was mostly looking for points of comparison.

The "must" in think alike is descriptive, I believe, rather than proscriptive though. The categories organized experience -- truths organize the world maybe? And given Kant's whole shtick about freedom and creativity I'd be hesitant to say his isn't humane: from a secular point of view Kant's is something of a humanistic rationalism.

But, then, I'm inclined to agree with you about how there's no need for shared categories, and even if Kant thought there was this one structure that structures all minds I'd be more inclined to ground these things in social practices that are shared with others -- a sort of intersubjectivity of practice.

What do you think about calling or treating or striving towards philosophy as a science, if we take Davidson's stance? At least, in the manner that Williamson seems to be indicating to go towards or achieve.

On Danto -- yes! That's a sort of "beginning" for my thinking on the categorical question of art. But my exposure to that idea is from George Dickie, and not reading Danto -- though Dickie nods to Danto approvingly.

I think I'd say, using that notion, there's more than one artworld by which things are included or judged by. Popular music is an artworld unto itself where sales are a dominant metric of worth. Not usually for "the best" stuff, but it's an undeniable standard in the sense that it's sought after approvingly.

But then there's this notion of having a refined taste which is practiced by exposure towards the finer objects of aesthetic appreciation that seems to make sense to me. And, given our post modern world, it's fairly easy to see how there could be different sorts of tastes that apply different sorts of standards of inclusion and evaluation -- i.e. different artworlds.

I'll try and give more detail, then.

There's at least two ways I can think of making a standard. One is some formal prescription which holds for all practitioners of some craft. So something like the 7 principles of art.

The other is ostensively -- to use Shakespeare as the standard of greatness in English poetry, for instance.

What makes it a standard is intersubjective agreement. Insofar that you and I agree that such and such holds for all practitioners -- in this case, judgers of visual art and poetry, respective to the examples of standards -- we'll be bound by the standard.

It's just a temporal agreement, but in order for a standard to function we'd both have to understand and agree to it.

Also, interesting thought with respect to standards in art -- the standards are sort of the "starting place" for what counts as "good art". Sometimes, though, breaking the standards is what produces the best art.

Because any standard will do as far as I'm concerned. I did use "lively" as a possible standard for concluding a composer is "good", but there's surely more to it than that for a person who is seriously pursuing the aesthetics of music, or even for a person who's seriously invested in how we judge music, like a musician or composer. I expect their conversations to be much more rich and complicated than my toy example of a standard.

There is no standard by which the judge these things. — Patterner

Sure there is. Let's say that a composer which is lively is a composer which is good. We'll have some identifying criteria for what we mean by "lively", and thereby come to judge a composer as good.

One way to think on this with your examples -- perhaps there's a way of understanding why someone would say "Vivaldi wrote the most beautiful Baroque music" and why someone would say "Bach wrote the most beautiful Baroque music". I may have a preference for one or the other, but there's an attitude I can adopt to both in seeing why they're the ones we are considering in the first place: they're both good! And what is this goodness? Why these people, and not the butchers of the same time period?

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. It is not an end in itself at the latter’s expense, but carries it
off out of the thingly bad state of affairs, for its part an object of
philosophical critique

I'm wondering if anyone has thoughts on what "thingly bad state of affairs" means. I was wondering if it's supposed to say "thinly" just as a first guess?

Yup, that's how I read it.

But with what came before I'd say a couple more things for a summation, I think. I think he's addressing the positivists skepticism, and it seems he even includes Kant in that family when he speaks of the resistance of Kant. That makes sense to me since he was exploring the scientific basis of philosophy, and much of philosophy after Kant is a reaction to attempt to somehow "overcome" his system, or demonstrate that it's not the architectonic which it purports to be.

Though Adorno notes that the responses have been obscure, he wants to speak up in favor of this speculative thinking, or a moment within thinking, whereby the facts, on their face or as read, do not determine thought, but rather produce a facade through his through which thought must push towards and outward from in order to get closer to the things themselves.

Only, without a category that determines the thing -- it's non-conceptual. In a way I think I can see the fantasm as the appearance, whereas negative dialectics wishes to get beyond the appearance of facts (themselves conceptual) to the thing.

Rather than "I Think..." as the only option in the transcendental argument, Davidson would reject a transcendental subject, having instead a triangulation between belief, world and meaning. — Banno

Excellent comparisons, all around.

A question popped to my mind on this just now: How would Davidson distinguish "belief" from "I think..." ?

Something that comes to mind for me is that we could reconcile their epistemologies, at least, by noting how language and world are always-already interpreted, much like the categories shape our experiences. Furthermore for Kant these are supposed to be universally applicable "rules" such that all thinkers will share the categories. That'd be meaning. "The world" would just be what we refer to in speaking to one another, or the intuition for Kant.

But I gather there really is supposed to be one world, at the end of the day. "The noumenal" could just as well be read as the "nonsensical", perhaps.


Also @Srap Tasmaner -- Kant might be more of an ally to Williamson than I had first thought. His whole thing is trying to discover the scientific basis of metaphysics, but only to conclude agnostically on the subject. It seems Williamson is open to the possibility of a science of philosophy, at least, if not metaphysics so the idea which Kant presents -- that a philosopher can state the boundaries of reason in a clear enough manner so as to be able to distinguish when reason has gone too far, and it's only a matter of doing philosophy to state these limits -- that seems to get along with the idea of trying to do better.

The difference would be in style -- rather than the Magnum Opus from a genius it seems like Williamson would adopt the more modern scientific approach of distributed cognition through shared practices.

Does the aesthetic transcend reason? Well, perhaps, though I am trying to keep within the bounds of reason. So there may be this transcendent beauty, but here I am strictly concerned with rational judgments.

Which isn't to say that our beginnings have to make sense -- they often don't. We generally don't reason about our actions in a deductive manner, and doing philosophy is an activity.

But there is still this area of reason which does not deal with logic or the relations between things. I'd say that this way of thinking is rightly classed as epistemology. Or, as @Fire Ologist put it, those who ask how it is we know. Closely related is metaphysics, of course. Those who like to first ask "What is it?".

I think the notion of ways of thinking works particularly well there because there are a lot of philosophers that try to start on one side to answer the other due to the relationship between metaphysics and epistemology.

But then I wouldn't think that these ways are exactly ways of aesthetic judgment -- rather they are dealing with the usual problems of knowledge: What do we know, and how do we know it, and is there something we cannot know, and if so how do we know that?

For Kant the beautiful is closely linked to nature's purposiveness. He gives what he thinks the criterion for judgments of the beautiful are through this concept of purposiveness (as he does for sublimity through the mathematical and dynamical sublime). What's fascinating to me here is Kant is the sort of philosopher you'd think wouldn't put much stock into aesthetics. My understanding is that the CoJ wasn't pre-planned, whereas the CPR and the CPrR were -- Kant wanted, up front, to separate theoretical from practical reason so that we could pursue science without worrying about it undermining our faith.

Then comes along the CoJ that serves either as a contradiction to the original project, or the unifier of the original project such that there's a sort of foundation between three powers of reason: The theoretical, the practical, and the aesthetic.

I've pretty much lifted what I understand of his theory of the aesthetic to point out the category, but rephrased it without the jargon. This third "power", I think we'd prefer to say "capacity" today, is the universal appeal of things due to the structure of our mind.

Though today I'd prefer to not use "structure of our mind" and say something like "due to the tradition we were brought up within" -- thereby opening the door to more aesthetic categories than the traditional Beautiful or Sublime, insofar that we can proffer a sort of theory as to why something which is "subjective" holds for all subjectivities in the same manner (in a tradition this will the various reasons given for why such and such is being pursued or is attractive or interesting).

Such as the elegant, the rational, the clear, and other such adjectives often applied to philosophical arguments and thoughts.

Is it really similar to how science does this? If it's not, does it still make sense? — Srap Tasmaner

It definitely makes sense and I think it's close enough to say yes, that's how science does it -- but I must note the caveat that "science" is a huge category. So saying "yes, that's science" might not imply enough.


I like the idea of an experimental philosophy, though.


And your seperation, though I'm still untangling it, I feel kinship there. Somehow there's the thing we're questioning, the thing we're measuring, and the way we judge these things, or something along those lines. And one part of the science determines the other -- in a way this is Popper's division between observation statements and theoretical statements (as I remember it at least)

That consensus might be all we have. — Banno

Hey, at least it's something. Solipsism is avoided.

What have you found helpful? Has contact with others and activity helped or deepened the experince? — Tom Storm

Accepting my feelings was the most helpful thing for me. To give credence to @unenlightened -- if the 20 hour work week is established then I'm pretty sure I could cope with my disabilities without anyone knowing.

After that I'd say balancing alone-time with family-time with work, and medications, has brought me to a place where I can see myself well enough and be comfortable with myself well enough that I don't mind sharing with people who are going through the same thing.

I very much doubt there's a fixall. If I get to be scientistic, that's mostly because I think "depression" likely covers a lot of possible causes.

But even so -- it's a useful term for talking about how you feel.

I don't want to know why we experience depression in our lives. I already accepted that this comes and goes sooner or later. I believe it is key to try to live with this mental condition. — javi2541997

Furthermore, I don't care about the why as much as I care about the "How do I deal with it?"

There are cases where people report no longer feeling that way, but there are also cases that are chronic.

Coming to accept that mine was a chronic condition helped me deal with it. I adopted the attitude of "Well... if it can be cured, then I have to do this or that, and if it cannot be cured, then at least this and that will help me deal with the feelings"

I don't think so. A better mental state is the state of peace. — MoK

Oh, sure. No one which suffers with mental issues would disagree with that, I think. That's rather the point of talking about it.

New idea: Perhaps there's the highly theorized and the un-theorized as a sort of spectrum of aesthetic judgment: They're both judgments that are meant to apply more widely than just what I think, though they sit on a spectrum of some kind. (I had some ideas for that spectrum, but decided to leave it undefined to see if others have thoughts)

?

You're certainly heading in the right direction @Tom Storm -- insofar that I persuade some people that aesthetics is a philosophical endeavor, and perhaps that that endeavor is the judgment of non-moral norms which apply to more than myself I'd be content.

Have you considered the possibility that you are not depressed, but that rather it is that the world is a bit shit? I have to say you don't come over as depressed, but as quite lively and animated. Is it all an act? — unenlightened

I've considered this many times before. There are times I don't show depression. There are even times I don't feel depression.

But the world remains the same either way.

What I've noticed is that though I see the bad things in the world and they weigh me down -- it's not those bad things which weigh me down. They are merely obvious because I'm prone to see bad things.

Bad things looked at too often weigh me down, of course.But even trying to not notice the various things going on the smallest thing will set me off on a misadventure that I can now identify, and through that identification, stop.

EDIT: Also, I've noticed that people who have depression often emote in a lively and animated way. But then, after having done the performance necessary for them, they return to a place where they can charge up to do it again.

Well then -- there it is.

Perhaps what's most contentious in my claim here is that aesthetics are more than either a whim or a brain-event.

Why doesn't it resonate in everyone else? Lots of people don't want to hear Bach.

Does it have to do with how my neurons are set up? — Patterner

It could.

But that would not be the sort of "why?" I'm asking for. I'm asking for an aesthetic justification -- which would basically be a way of answering your question "Why doesn't it resonate in everyone else?" -- or at least a way to answer it.

Rather than saying "My mother played Bach and so I like Bach", in the causal sense this is a question asking after a rational reason for the preference.

Some sort of "This is what art ought be and so I like this" or something else -- something other than a causal explanation ,or whim.

Perhaps for the same reason I love Bach, but Mozart doesn't do much for me. Or why I love chocolate, but don't bother with strawberry. There is no "why". I just do. I assume it's the same for philosophers. What one talks about fascinates, and what another talks about is meh. — Patterner

If so then I'd say it's the same as random creative impulse, whim, and "I like vanilla, but you don't need to"

I.e. not subject to philosophical thought at all.

I tend to believe it's possible to reason about these matters of taste, rather than say "Well, I like Mozart, and you like Beethoven, and that's all there is to it"

That is -- there is a "why"; or if you just do, then you don't bother to say "just do" -- just go ahead and do.

Does that work? — Tom Storm

Sure.

So if you had to summarise what disinterest is in relation to art, can you do it in two simple sentences? — Tom Storm

Disinterested-interest (I feel the need to combine the terms for emphasis) is the attitude one takes towards a particular work of art such as the Mona Lisa. The judgment is meant to apply to more than your individual reaction to the Mona Lisa.

Yeh, basically speaking that's right.

The critic isn't just saying "My name is Moliere, and thereby this statue is beautiful!"

They have reasons and such they're referring to.

Oh man, then I'm in trouble. My thought is it's highly theorized interest, in the sense that I know what I'm interested in and I know what other people are interested in and I can separate the two.

Though.... I can see a place for untheorized interest using the same locution, now that I think of it. The first time I watch a movie because a friend recommended it is untheorized interest: let's see what this is about, then.

The notion I have in mind, in order to keep with the idea that professions do in fact learn something, is the interest a person learns over time in order to help others' problems. I know this, that, and the other thing about (whatever), and so can say "if you want this then you might want to..." with reasonable confidence.

Disinterested interest is the sort of thing where I'm interested in the outcome, but I've learned a thing or two about how others judge and can see what they're getting at. Or something like that in trying to make a distinction.

Interesting Kant developed this a bit. He wasn’t much of a mystic or an artist. Was this where he talked about beauty and the sublime? — Fire Ologist

This is what I have in mind: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aesthetic-judgment/#Disi

The "interest" is "beautiful" or "sublime" -- but the judgment is somehow disinterested, which as I understand it means we hold the judgment to hold for others.

In that spirit -- as I understand Disinterested Interest it's obviously paradoxical on its face.

Another way to put it might be a trained interest. So dis-interested in the sense of "I hopped off the left side of the bed today rather than the right side" as not being relevant at all, amongst other more controversial claims, and interested in the sense of "I know this or that is what they are looking for and in that interest I shall apply my talents in this or that way"


"Applying my talents" it's a bit of a stretch with respect to aesthetic attitudes, but I just mean that the judger of art applies their knowledge in judging the art-work. So it goes with any profession -- you wouldn't believe how much shit I've heard talked by one tradesman on another, whereas most of the world wouldn't care at all if the blahpideebip was bent krongy or left-Burly.

Could be. I'm invoking Kant's use, as I understand it at least.

Ultimately it wouldn't matter who where what when as long as we understand one another.

Your process of looking at pleasure as repulsive is a good exercise in thinking through aesthetics, I think.

It'd take the attitude of disinterested interest to be able to judge that way, I think?

But I'm specifically asking after if you or everyone else reading along have heard that term in the philosophical sense. By "that term" I mean "Disinterested Interest"

It has a specific meaning in aesthetics due to -- you may be shocked here ;) -- Immanuel Kant.

It may help here to steal an idea from the study of the arts. There, you don't get an answer to the question what makes some novels or pictures, etc. better than others. What you do get is a collection of examples which have been widely accepted as good examples. The expectation is that you will not be limited to imitating them (although that might be a useful exercise). The expectation is that students will be enabled to create new work by developing a critical judgement from those examples. The examples are collectively known as the canon.
True, there are various theories about what makes one work better than another, and students are taught these, or some of them. But they are taught as theories, subject to criticism. Again, the expectation is not that those theories will dictate what students will do. It is that those theories will be the basis of developing new ones. — Ludwig V

This is very much how I look at training in philosophy.

I think people misunderstand how much training and discipline goes into the arts when they react against this comparison.

Hey fellow traveler.

I can certainly see why I'm attracted to the existentialists -- Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus has provided comfort in many circumstances for me when dealing with my feelings of depression in particularly harsh times.

I think most philosophers would prefer not to deal with such topics -- they'd push it towards the psychologists or therapists and such.

Now, if someone is asking for help, I think that's the right thing to do. I'm not prepared to help someone on that level.

But I actually find it therapeutic to reflect on my experiences with depression, or at least what has been diagnosed as such.

For instance, Matthew Ratcliffe has written extensively about depression from a vantage that draws from Sartre, Husserl and Heidegger as well as embodied cognitive theory. Ratcliffe discusses the personal accounts of depression of such writers as Sylvia Plath and William Styron. What he concluded from these accounts is that depression is not just about feelings of despair but the loss of the ability ton discern salience and relevance in the world. — Joshs

I'd be interested in reading those writings of his, if you'd spare a reference for the best place to start.

I think it's clear this is not Williamson's view at all. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, I agree.

The part that makes me wonder is -- while "knowledge" might mean different things to different philosophers, I'm not sure there's a philosophy which aims at understanding as opposed to knowledge. But then I'd accept 's example if it's important down the line.

Though something to add to that -- I'm wondering if people are familiar with the idea of a disinterested interest?

I think it could do work with respect to distinguishing between when a layperson does philosophy and when a trained philosopher does philosophy -- i.e. @Srap Tasmaner what you call the real work of philosophy.

This is a great reflection. So, yes, this is the sort of thing I'm thinking through. What I'd call your two different thinkers are two different aesthetic attitudes -- that is, the sort of attitude one adopts in coming to judge what is to be judged. I'd been avoiding the term up until now because I wanted to make sure we were all on board with the notion that "aesthetics" is a legitimate philosophical domain in this more general sense than the classical sense.

At least, legitimate enough to think through.


Upon doing so my thought was to try and introduce aesthetic attitudes as a means for distinguishing ways of doing philosophy.

And you went right out and gave a full fledged theory with that thought all on your own, saving me all the work. Thanks! I enjoyed reading through your reflection!

Now you're just tempting me to point out we have a choice :D

I'll follow along with the not-family-resemblance interpretation.

It's not that these boundaries are all that important, but if what we're doing at the moment is trying to understand what Williamson is up to, we want to know what analytic philosophy is, rather than what it looks like. — Srap Tasmaner

I have no problem with that. I'd hand it to the analytic philosopher to provide this knowledge, too. And I'd accept their rejection of odd counter-examples to take care of the worry. (I tend to think that all research programmes end up finding odd counter-examples that are besides the point -- we're just overgeneralizing)

It's important enough to know for understanding what he's doing and what we're up to.

Heh, fair.

And so that'd be another case I'd have to make.

Yes and no. An analytic philosopher can talk *about* values, the roles they play in discourse, all that sort of thing, but by and large is determined not to offer a "wisdom literature." So it might be able to "clarify" (hey Banno) that it's the values at stake in a dispute, rather than something else, but it's not, as a rule, espousing a set of values — Srap Tasmaner

True, it's not as wide as what "wisdom literature" captures -- especially with respect to the axiological.

In a way I can't help but see that commitment to clarity as something cared about, though. It's something I care about too. And I think that the value of clarity operates at a different "level" than the values under discussion so that it's not necessarily in question when employing non-moral values.

But, then, for myself it's not such a big deal to acknowledge "in this conversation I shall adhere to the rules of analytic philosophy where this, that, and the other "move" are unpersuasive for x y z reason" -- it's almost like saying the obvious to me to the point that I begin to wonder why it was ever controversial to say.

It's like asking "Which language game are we playing then?"

Yes. And that might be down to your values. You might hope (as Tarski did, on the eve of World War II) that promoting logic and clarity would help people talk out their differences rather than kill each other. But the norm itself is just fit to purpose, like showing your work, making your arguments. It's what the community needs to do what they've set out to do, even if that thing turns out to be a huge mistake. — Srap Tasmaner

Right. I think that these are two different values -- there's what's fit to purpose (Clarity is fit to the purpose of logic), and then there's a reason beyond this purpose which justifies the selection of the purpose, or at least explains (since I don't think we need some overall Reason to justify any particular investigation -- investigations into clarity and logic for their own sake are perfectly acceptable)

Somehow that collective norm doesn't cease to be a value just because we call it "function" to my mind -- but then I ought say I'm not a professional, again, and I could easily accept that I'm simply wrong about what Williamson is getting at and it's my own little itch that's not going away, but it's not relevant.

I think it's a distinction worth calling attention to because this is exactly what people hate about analytic philosophy, and why they'd rather read Nietzsche or the Stoics or Camus. — Srap Tasmaner

So naturally what I'd say is "within the tradition of analytic philosophy values are quarantined. In its place is some non-value term called "function" "

But this is seen as a good thing so that people with different values can communicate. That's perfectly acceptable when it's not the values which are the reason people are miscommunicating, though. :D

Though I also don't think it's as much of a hellscape as perhaps the analytic philosophers imagine.

Still, I say this from outside the tower. How the professionals conduct their business is certainly less of my affair than Williamsons. If anything I'd have to be consistent in saying "the professionals say it is such and such, and so...."

But then it seems we have to agree, ahead of time, to this analytic norm in order for it to function -- we'd either have to want to escape the hellscape, or at least acknowledge that there are other ways to make appeals within analytic philosophy which more or less attempts to circumnavigate the norms of reason such that there's no choice, there's just what a professional would do.

↪Moliere

I'll try too:

We decide to build a bridge because we believe it would make our lives better, and the sense of "better" there is colorably an aesthetic judgement. Life with the bridge would be preferable, simply in terms of what we want our lives to be like.

That's persuasive, but we still have the problem that the bridge's capacity to improve our lives is instrumental; it has to succeed as a bridge, and can be judged to succeed or fail as a bridge, without any consideration of our motive for building it, and without considering whether we were right that the bridge would improve our lives in the way we wanted.

(Oh! Spectacular movie reference for this: Stanley Tucci's speech about his bridge in Margin Call, 2011.)

You can always take a step up like this, and examine anything by placing it in a wider context, but while you will gain new terms for evaluating the thing, you'll lose the ones you had before. — Srap Tasmaner

So the part I'd focus in on is "...can be judged to succeed or fail as a bridge", because this utility is what I'd say are the sorts of we'll call them interests that the engineer and builder have to keep in mind. It can be judged to succeed or fail insofar that we have some standards of utility to judge it as successful or a failure.

But since we can't see the bridge as true we have to have some standards of judgment by which it is successful. One of those standards will include things like "the builder used the best knowledge we have today in justifying the techniques employed in the building of the bridge", and that in turn is where truth comes in, I think. That is, it sort of takes care of itself in a manner of speaking about judgment. We all want truth, but we have to make inferences to get there -- and when participating on a collective project like building a bridge those standards of inference will change not just between bridge builders and philosophers, where we'd expect a difference, but between bridge builders -- or even between sites of the same bridge builder.

This will be due to various details thus far seen as worthy of consideration when building a bridge.

Important to my mind, at least, is that this will hold for any profession. Though scientists are participating in a collective project, there are also specific standards of any given lab or study or what-have-you. Much effort has been put into making these uniform, and there's just a point where choices have to be made (the standards of medicinal research are different between the United States and Europe, though there's a good deal of crossover in purpose and resemblance of the kinds of rules). These can be at random, or they can be by a trained sort of judgment -- and generally insofar that we're not dealing with some new creative effort it seems to me that it's this trained judgment of a given profession which fits within this kind of non-moral, value-based judgment.

Here for instance you didn't have to take the word "good" to have an exclusively moral sense, and I feel quite certain than Count Timothy von Icarus would not. I think your use of "aesthetic" (or maybe "beautiful" in the mooted non-traditional sense) has noticeable overlap with his use of "good". — Srap Tasmaner

True. Though that's because I am trying to figure out a way to explain this other "kind" of judgment, or capacity of thought. There's the concept of truth and knowledge and being, and there's the concept of ethical goodness (today generally thought to apply to rules-following, consequences, or character) -- and somehow these judgments differ from both of those.

So, sure, "good" does not need to be so strictly defined -- it's only because I'm trying to highlight non-moral judgment as something more than particular whim, and that this is how the practical affair of making knowledge gets done. Truth doesn't get defined by aesthetics, but truth sort of takes care of itself in the process of judgment.

I think Williamson is only demanding that philosophical theories succeed as theories, to some recognizable degree. Whether they make our lives better or worse or give us a warm fuzzy, he's presumably going to consider a separate question.

OK, I think that's a fair ask. I'd go further and note how "succeed as theories" requires specification, though, and continue the same line of thought as above -- but then I may not be countering Williamson at all. I like standards, I just think they change, and so need specification and agreement and collective understanding and such.


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So how does that sit? Do I manage to capture truth in the process sufficiently well to your satisfaction, or does it still seem like a stretch not worth making?

Sometimes the standards purport to be more than, or different from, aesthetics, no? Plain old pragmatics, for instance. To say that all standards come down to aesthetics requires some justification. — J

They do, and mayhaps my recent reply to Srap in the Williamson thread goes some way to bridge a gap here.

Yes, classically aesthetics is about the beautiful and the sublime, works of art and their judgment and so forth. But in the broader sense aesethetics is about value judgments which are non-moral, and yet still binding on others in some sense -- i.e. not strictly personal preference in the manner we say "I like vanilla ice cream, but you don't have to"

Basically,yes it's an extension of the category -- but it's reasonable on the basis that we make value judgments which, while there's no fact to the matter, and it's not really something that reflects on one's character or actions, we still hold it to be valuable for others in some sense, or choose to be binding to it.