Of course not! The two are not one in the same. The ancient text no longer has users. Current texts do. Current texts are still used, and that is precisely what grounds the certainty of answering in the affirmative when asked "Can the meaning of any text persist through time?" The use throughout time of current langauges is precisely the ground upon which we can certainly conclude that the meaning of a text can persist through time. — creativesoul

So, despite all of that text in the opening post, it all boils down to that one assertion which I've bolded above. You may as well cross out or delete everything else you typed up. And it is merely an assertion.

But... regarding the OP, all we can conclude is that the meaning of the ancient text persisted throughout the time period during it's use. — creativesoul

No, that's simply not true. We do not have to accept your assertion, and if we do not, then we can easily reach a different conclusion. And we are all well within our rights to simply dismiss your assertion, as well as everything else that relies on it.

You haven't done anything remarkable here. It's just the same old problem. You merely take for granted the very thing which the debate hinges on.

It comes pretty naturally out of what follows, I think. You treat meaning rather like a thing or a property, whereupon it seems mysterious that it could survive without a context, and how does it survive, in what form etc. I'm saying that if we just look at what we mean by meaning and especially mean, these concerns seem to miss the point. — jamalrob

I'll be honest and admit that I haven't read the opening post, at least yet.

But if that's what he's doing, then I made the point multiple times that some people were treating or talking about meaning in the wrong way, in a way which suggested category errors. For example, thinking that it has a location or that it literally resides in something, like a physical object. My point about there being meaning was in a factual or logical sense. The factual sense can be expressed by saying that it would be the case that there is meaning. And the logical sense can be expressed by saying that if it's true that, if there was a being there capable in principle of correctly deciphering the text, then the text has meaning, then the text has meaning.

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

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

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

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

Agreed. This became a problem in my discussions. I think that some people either missed or (for some reason unclear to me) rejected my point that the first meaning can be more useful than the second meaning, yet (again, for some reason unclear to me) a bunch of people rigidly stick to the second meaning, even when it becomes a problem.

You seem to be doing it again where you’re interpreting the act of eating under a materialist ontology, and so I assume accusing idealism of entailing that we swallow and digest experiences with our mind-independent physical bodies.

Of course the problem here is you trying to mix materialism and idealism together. So stop doing that as it’s ridiculous. There’s just the experience of eating an orange, and like with a painting or a dream we can separate it out and say “this part is the orange and that part is my mouth”. — Michael

What's funny is that you think that I'm doing this, and you're coming up with an elaborate explanation, overthinking it as philosophy-types are wont to do, when in reality, all I'm doing is speaking like an ordinary person, and using logic. People ordinarily talk in this way, and you seem to be having problems with that and blaming it on what you take to be my realist assumptions. It is perfectly normal to eat an orange, and to say that a minute ago, I ate an orange. It is perfectly normal to ask you what an orange is. And that will have logical implications, whether you like it or not. If an orange is a fruit, then I ate a fruit. If an orange is an object, then I ate an object. And if an orange is a part of my experience, then I ate a part of my experience.

What's ridiculous is your tacit suggestion that I accept the illogic you're responding with, and that I stop speaking like a normal person. These are faults with idealism. I'm not just going to lap it up.

Look for definitions of the words before you answer? — ssu

No, no, no. I shouldn't really have to provide a definition for the word "horse". Assume that words are being used in the ordinary way, or examine and consider the context or usage, or, if you're still not sure, then ask for clarification. Assume that I'm talking about horses, as in actual horses. We all know what they are! Don't bring your horses as cats nonsense into the discussion without being very explicit about it, and without it being accompanied by a very good explanation.

Delete the posts in question. It's inevitable you'll get posters talking past each other especially as a lot of posts here are likely written while multi-tasking or in haste. Ideally, we should just all slow down. But, realistically, that's not going to happen. — Baden

But it can be way more subtle than the example I gave in my opening post. It can, in some cases, look a lot like an intelligent and meaningful philosophical discussion, when in reality it could be a pointless dead end. If we're using the same terminology, then initially it might go on undetected. I might not realise that the other person is actually talking about cats, not horses. But of course, they could simply insist that they are talking about horses - horses are those fluffy things that sit on your lap, and I'm an idiot for not realising this, and I need it repeated to me ad nauseam, or I need you to point out to me the logical consequences of what I'm saying if misinterpreted in accordance with your own meaning: horses can't be ridden, stupid! They're too small!

A real example would be that an hour is a measurement, and a measurement is a human activity, or that meaning is a mental activity. That wasn't what I was saying at all, and bringing these interpretations into the discussion without proper justification caused big problems.

No, but neither does the hammer. All use is contingent on a user. If you prefer we could refer to the hammer's potential use. It's still a property of the hammer (that it is potentially used to drive nails) and we still derive what that use is from its history (even if only a minute ago), not its current state. — Isaac

The only part I disagree with is where you say that this is a property of the hammer. That seems to take our way of talking about the hammer far too literally. To say that the hammer has a use, or a potential use, is not to say that the hammer has this as a property, it would just be to say that the hammer is used in this way, or that it could be, given its properties, e.g. a rubber grip with an ergonomic design, a metal head with a broad, flat end, etc. And more specific meanings can be further qualified or clarified, so that, for example, when someone says that you don't use a hammer to saw a piece of plywood, they're talking about what it was designed to be used for.

Are you getting this stuff from Heidegger, by the way?

Do you think the fact that a hammer is used to drive nails is a property of the hammer?
— Isaac

No, that wouldn't just be a property of the hammer. It would be a property of the hammer, the nails, the air between the hammer and the nails, the person or machine swinging the hammer, etc. — Terrapin Station

This is very, very peculiar. The fact is a property of the air between the hammer and the nails, amongst other things?

No. Properties of the air between the hammer and the nails would be nitrogen, oxygen, argon and carbon dioxide. You won't find a fact in the air. That's crazy talk.

What you're saying here is just as absurd as those moral objectivists who suggest that wrong is an objective property of kicking puppies.

In both cases, you won't find what is said to be there through an examination the things themselves: of air or hammers or swinging, or of kicking or puppies.

The inconsistencies among your various positions are becoming more apparent over time. Your own reasoning can be used against you.

I assert that meaning is use and thus the word has a meaning (its use, or history of use) independent of humans currently using it. — Isaac

:up:

The orange is part of the experience, just as a dent is part of the car door. Your mistake, again, is in trying to understand idealism from the perspective of materialism, where experience is one thing and the object of experience is some separate thing, but that's not how it is for idealism. There's just the experience of eating an orange and we pick out parts of the experience and name them ("orange", "man", "mouth", etc.). — Michael

I see. The orange is part of the experience. So when I eat the orange, I'm eating a part of the experience.

Now it all makes perfect sense. I think you've made me a convert.

S, I did a breakdown of your OP, charitably steelmanning it, to show how it didn't work. I engaged with the form and substance of your argument, thoughtfully.

You did not respond in the same way. The biggest part of your response to my post was, bizarrely, to Banno, directing to him this steelmanned version in retaliation for what you perceived as a previous slight. There wasn't much to the rest of the post, but it ended with you more or less ignoring my criticism in order to say that, in any case, you disagree with the people who disagree with you.

You've since added the point that if you explained your post to other people, they'd probably agree with you.

You've accused me of point-scoring, but your approach through the majority of this thread has been to quote others who agree with you with a '100' or other variations on 'nailed it,' while fisking other posts in a patently point-scoring way. (this is a tu quoque, by the way.)

You've glowingly approved theorem's caricature of idealists as self-important, while saying things like 'It's time for a new breed of philosophers to throw off the chains, escape the scourge' etc. With a characteristic note of martyrdom, you compared your approach to that of a historical figure executed for spreading information to the masses.

You can understand my frustration. I remain suspicious that you don't quite understand the difference between OLP therapeutics (which I am a fan of ) and appeals to incredulity + pose-striking. — csalisbury

:100:

(Alright, alright! Maybe I'll take another look and start over. Just hold your horses! But I do think that you're giving yourself a bit too much credit there.)

Meaning doesn't require a subject due to a definition. The realization that it requires a subject is the result of an ontological investigation/analysis. — Terrapin Station

Sure... if you say so...

Smartass — Noah Te Stroete

Thank you.

I have more than one, but at least mine aren’t up my ass! :lol: — Noah Te Stroete

It's quality, not quantity. You could have a hundred, but you'll never be as smart as me.

I was being charitable. — Noah Te Stroete

Ergh! How revolting. Kill it with fire.

(My left brain is yelling at my right brain right now.) — Noah Te Stroete

Come now, we all know you don't have a brain.

You’re still a dick. :kiss: — Noah Te Stroete

That's more like it. You had me worried for a second there.

S may be a dick sometimes, but at least I have respect for him. Others, not so much. — Noah Te Stroete

Sometimes? :brow:

I am done. — Amity

Sweet! Alrighty then, let's continue. :party:

Now, where were we...? I think when we left off, @Noah Te Stroete was wiping the tears from his vagina. Are you done crying, yet?

You are right. I was referring to the thread but you know how shit spreads...or how one rotten apple spoils the whole barrel... — Amity

Or one rotten killjoy ruins the fun. Yep, certainly wouldn't want that to spread.

Fair enough. Do other moderators hold the same view about this kind of 'discussion'? It is not about being upset, it is about challenging online behaviour. — Amity

Ladies and gentleman, I believe we have ourselves a white knight.

The title itself I simply rolled my eyes at and felt utter contempt at such expression. — Amity

:snicker:

It's one discussion out of hundreds in the Lounge. Just ignore it like most of the rest of us do. — Baden

Not you though. Admit it, you love rolling around in the muck with the bad kids, so long as you can maintain some semblance of being above the fray. :grin:

What could possibly suggest I’m confused? Because I don’t agree with you? Because I don’t stick to your usage? Because the authority I’m using is confusing to you?

You can’t even know for sure I don’t completely agree with every thing you say, but took the antagonist approach just for the fun of it. — Mww

You don't think that if we all use the same terms but mean different things, that'll increase the risk getting our wires crossed?

Oh but I don’t, in principle. Only difference is yours is necessary but insufficient, whereas mine is both because a form of idealism is attached as its complement. — Mww

Empty words.

Ahhhh. So “you’re sooooo stupid!!!” is a successful refutation in your world? — Mww

I haven't said that. I don't need to.

No, rocks are not always just rocks. And I'll thank you not to try that one on again. — Baden

Right. Sometimes they're cats.

The disagreement with S isn't at all about "The word 'dog' WAS used to refer to dogs." It's not about something historical.

The disagreement with S is that in S's view, the word dog has a meaning--not past tense, but present tense--at time T2, even if no persons exist at time T2. He's not saying something about how the word was used there. He's saying that the word has a meaning at T2, which is a correct meaning at T2 (not a correct meaning about or in the context of T1, where we're simply reporting usage at a past time). — Terrapin Station

It's partly about something historical, and that part is important. If it weren't for that, then it wouldn't have meaning.

The big difference between us, which you've made more explicit in your last few posts, is that I don't just trivially define meaning in a way which necessitates a subject, whereas you do.

Meaning isn't a property of objects like hammers. Meaning is a mental activity that we engage in.
— Terrapin Station

Unless I've missed something, I thought that was the topic of this thread, merely asserting it does nothing to progress the discussion. — Isaac

Indeed!

I know that you were directing these questions at Terrapin and his crazy views, but I'll give you the right answers.

So where is the fact that the hammer was used to hit nails? — Isaac

The question doesn't make sense.

If humans capable of recollecting the fact ceased to exist would it cease to be the case that the hammer was used to hit nails? — Isaac

No.

...meaning is a mental activity... — Terrapin Station

And if you cling to that and don't step outside of it, even for just a second, then we won't get anywhere. It's a dead end.

But it isn’t. Lots have done what you are doing, mocking it without refuting it.

Go figure. — Mww

I'm doing both, as ever. All the best criticism weaponises humour. Voltaire was famous for it.

Along with Einstein, Newton, Galileo, Hawking, just to name a few.

Good company. — Mww

But their contributions are still very useful in a very important respect, not just interesting for historical value or as an exercise in critical thinking.

And they were all scientists, by the way. Although apparently Kant did make some contributions to science, but unlike the others you mention, he's not famous for that, he's famous for his philosophy.

Of course I’m a realist. How foolish to suppose there aren’t real things in the real world. Besides, I couldn’t explain my very own self if I denied objective reality. And if I acknowledge objective reality as not only reasonable, but absolutely necessary, I cannot then deny that same objective reality, and by association its contents, as present when I am not.

I call anyone an idealist if they are rational thinkers. Whether or not those anyone’s agree is nothing to me; it’s just what the name implies. — Mww

That's a pretty rubbish way of defining your terms. Realist idealists? Atheist theists? Anyway, at the very least, you're not a realist in the relevant sense, given the context of this discussion, because you keep disagreeing with me over my realism. It would be more helpful if you just stuck with my usage to avoid confusion.

It's also an argument I didn't make. In fact I brought up the argument you're imputing to me, later on in the same post, in order to say that it doesn't work. — csalisbury

I disagree. It think that it's your argument when exposed for what it really is, without the manipulation of language to make it seem like something more serious and defensible.

What part of that post are you referring to? I didn't respond to the parts that seems unworthy of much of a response because they just seemed kind of empty, like an assertion or an opinion. Where was the substance? Where was the proper argument?

Exactly. The bottom line is that "plausibility" and "good sense" are all you have to fall back on in your war against the idealists. But that won't bother the idealist one bit because they know that sometimes what seems plausible or sensible to the majority is nothing more than ignorance. You see, the idealist is one of an enlightened few and has seen through the smokescreen of naive realism and has grasped the Truth!

Besides, there's all sorts of ways to get around these kinds of objections. We could posit God, the World Spirit, the Absolute, the Will or anything else we can dream up to account for the fact that things continue to exist even when you and I are not experiencing them. — Theorem

Idealism: isn't it just great? I must be a blind fool for caring about things such as plausibility and good sense! :lol:

There’s a painting of a man eating an orange. What is the nature of the orange? It’s paint. But the painting isn’t a painting of a man eating paint; it’s a painting of a man eating an orange. — Michael

A painted orange is a painted orange, and an experience of orange is an experience of an orange.

But I'm asking what an orange is. What is it that's being painted? What is it that's being experienced? And you've yet to give a sensible answer.

I dream of eating an orange. What is the nature of the orange? It’s a dream. But I’m not dreaming of eating a dream; I’m dreaming of eating an orange. — Michael

A dreamed orange is a dreamed orange. This is just yet more equivocation. What is it that you're dreaming of?

Your description of idealism still seems to mix ontologies by assuming a materialist understanding of eating. — Michael

I'm simply testing whether it can make sense without twisting everything out of all proportion. Your reply still doesn't pass the test. It just kicks the can down the road, leading to the same kind of questions that I originally asked, only now there are more of them, and there's still no real answer. It has exacerbated the problem, not drawn closer to a resolution.

So there’s meaning when there’s thinking. Is there meaning when there isn’t thinking (or speaking)? — Michael

There is by my account, which works to actually resolve the problems found through philosophy, instead of exacerbating them and getting off on it.

I have no experience of oranges in cupboards. — Mww

That doesn't mean jack outside of a sort of empiricism which is extremely unreasonable.

If you tell me there is an orange behind the cupboard door, I’ll say....ok, take you’re word for it. But no such knowledge of fact is available to me. Still, because I know “orange” and I know “cupboard”, I know a priori the possibility of oranges in cupboards is not self contradictory and is at the same time quite possible. Just like those stupid f’ing rocks. — Mww

If your epistemology only let's you say, "There might be an orange, but then there might not be. It's a big mystery and I'm clueless either way", then your epistemology should be the laughing stock of philosophy.

No, actually, they do not. — Mww

Yes, actually, they do.

The orange *talked about* IS the orange of experience... — Mww

You've moved the goalposts. The claim is regarding the orange and the experience of it, not the orange and the orange of experience. Try again, but this time with the correct wording.

The orange you ate is certainly an orange, the orange in the cupboard is possibly an orange. — Mww

Lol! Are you being serious? The orange in the cupboard is only possibly an orange? :rofl:

I feel like we're having the same conversation in two different places.

I'm not talking here about the meaning of blue. I'm talking about blue, the wavelength. In order to say the cup is blue (blueness is a property of the cup) it is sufficient in your view, that it emits a wavelength which any intercepting object capable of recognising it would register as blue. An incorrectly tuned spectrometer may register it as red, but it would be wrong.

The word "dog" (as a collection of sound waves) emits these sound waves which, upon being intercepted by anything correctly calibrated to recognise them, would produce the image of a dog.

Yet the cup's ability to make capable recipients register 'blue' is a property of he cup, yet the word "dog"'s ability to make capable recipients conjure the image of a dog is not a property of the word, but of the capable recipient. — Isaac

Nice. I'm glad that someone is honing in on what seems to be an inconsistency in the reasoning between the two positions I call metaphysical realism and linguistic idealism. I'm a realist on both.

Even paradigm-shifting thinkers aren’t right all the time. — Mww

Kant, for example. :grin:

They went too far down the rabbit hole. — ZhouBoTong

:100:

Someone needs to break the spell that they're under.

Are we really to understand that this is the epitome of modern wisdom? — Theorem

No, it's a deception.

Sure, transcendental idealists are ostensibly more sophisticated than that, but are they really? — Theorem

No.

If we try to imagine an apple, but leave out perspective and a subjective sense of time, we cannot do so. — csalisbury

Oh god, not this again. Just because I can't imagine something, like an apple, without imagining it, that doesn't mean that it can't exist without my imagination. That's a really bad argument.

The only thing left is to accept that there is a mystery at the heart of it, something that we cannot understand through philosophy or thinking alone, maybe cannot understand at all. — csalisbury

No, no, no. Thinking that it's a mystery is precisely the problem. There is no big mystery to the fact that stars were there before us and our experience, and stars will be there afterwards. What do you think we're made of? This anthropocentrism is sheer folly in the guise of wise and insightful philosophy.

But the proper use of the gem, imo, is to show us that whatever there is, beyond our thought and experience, it is confused to think of it as something that's basically like how we experience the apple, only unexperienced. That in itself is a kind of idealism, only one that isn't self-aware. — csalisbury

It's not a "whatever it is", it's an apple. If it was an apple before, then it's an apple after. Things don't change their nature in line with our perception of them. That's anthropocentricism again. That wouldn't make you Copernicus, it would make you Ptolemy.

Ignoring it then leaves one with rationality in general and humanity in particular irreducible to a non-contradictory fundamental condition, because the only other possible methodology, empirical science, cannot provide one. Yet. So far. — Mww

Saying this is one thing. Demonstrating it with a sound argument is another.

All physical objects also happen to be objects of experience OR POSSIBLE experience. — Mww

That's compatible with realism. The irony is that you kept calling me an idealist. No, you're a realist.

Even those rocks on distant galaxies are possible, in principle, to experience. Even if in practice, we never end up doing so, no matter how hard we try. But accepting that they exist is to accept realism. Realism is just that they don't actually need anyone there experiencing them at the time in order for them to exist. You don't actually seem to understand realism.

It could also be re-written as, all KNOWN physical objects also happen to be objects of experience. Not even science can deny that. — Mww

Ambiguous and misleading. The rocks on distant galaxies aren't objects of experience in my sense, yet I know that they exist, and I know things about them; and my sense makes sense. It makes sense, if that's denied, to then ask, "Well who's experiencing them, then?".

But it appears that you mean something else entirely, and you're just not being as clear as you should be about it.