Much as I agree with you, you're never going to win this argument. For the idealist, to be is to be an object of experience. Arguing about the nature of oranges won't get you anywhere, because the sophisticated idealist is happy to grant that oranges are physical objects. It's just that all physical objects also happen to be objects of experience!

There's no way to refute this, not empirically, not philosophically, not logically. It might be fun to discuss at first, but once the novelty wears off it's better to just shake your head and ignore it. — Theorem

So, to be is be an object of experience. Except that this falls flat on it's face when it comes to rocks on distant galaxies that no one has ever experienced. They either have to implausibly deny that they exist, or twist the meaning of what's being said beyond good sense.

This is far from being irrefutable. This is lose-lose.

I mean - they would mean what they say. I don't know how else to meet a 'nuh uh' but with a 'yes huh'. — csalisbury

Then how are they idealists and not realists? An object, at least in the context of things such as oranges, doesn't ordinarily mean an appearance or an idea or an experience. That's like defining black as white, and then when someone clocks on and says something like that's not what black is, but you just insist that it is, knowing full well that you mean something else and that you're going by an usual definition. In this situation, you would basically be a sophist. How can they be saying the same thing as me, and mean the same thing as me, yet I'm a realist and they're an idealist? You have some serious explaining to do.

I'm guessing you actually knew what I meant when I said that they don't mean what they say. You're just point scoring again.

Alright, but if that's what it comes down to, why bother with the 'olp' stuff? The irony here is that this 'olp' routine- 'what would people at work say' etc - is being used in order to defend...well, I invite you to explain the OP to people at work:

'What are you talking about, man? Potatoes? Orange juice? Rules are just the things written down in, like, the employee handbook or, like, the rulebook in monopoly. There's no mystery. ' — csalisbury

It's not very difficult to explain what an analogy is, and what language rules are, even to a layperson. I guarantee you, they would get what I mean, and they would see where I'm coming from, and they would agree.

Now try that with idealist nonsense and see where it gets you!

The modern idealist will say this is backwards. That which is named is always first an undefined appearance susceptible to naming. — Mww

How can it be an appearance if it isn't appearing to anyone, like the orange in my cupboard?

This is how that same modern idealist thinks. An orange, as any real physical object, just *is* the experience *because* it has already been named, or which is the same thing, cognized as meeting the criteria for “orange”. Experience is just another word for empirical knowledge. — Mww

The modern idealist makes very little sense, and if they put what you say into practice, then they would have trouble understanding people all the time, since people mean two different things when they talk about the orange and the experience of it. There's a reason why we use different words to describe the one and the other. The modern idealist would have to ignore or disregard this. The modern idealist is a naive idealist.

It may make sense but many idealists will claim it to be false. There isn't an orange and then also its experience, just as there isn't fear and then also its experience. Fear just is the experience and an orange just is the experience. — Michael

They may claim it to be false, but if my account makes sense and their's doesn't, then they haven't got a leg to stand on.

Fear isn't much like an orange.

It's not that you eat the experience of an orange but that you experience eating an orange. — Michael

Experience eating a what, though? What's an orange to them? An experience? If so, then I'm eating an experience.

Your account of idealism tries to combine the idealist's account of an orange with the materialist's account of eating, which isn't a view that anybody I know of supports. — Michael

How do they explain what it is that I'm eating then?

What's the ontology of unexpressed meaning? — Michael

Good question. Maybe it's a goat like everything else.

At least in the case of potatoes and oranges we can say that they exist as physical objects even when not being mashed or juiced, but in what sense does meaning exist when words aren't being spoken? — Michael

But do you not think before you speak? And are your thoughts not meaningful? If meaning did not exist prior to being spoken, then how would you plausibly explain what goes on prior to the act of speaking? It doesn't make sense to me that meaning would just blurt out with our speech simultaneously, and then disappear along with it the very second that we'd stopped talking. That sucks as an explanation.

So it makes sense to think that it exists prior to speech, and independently of it, but I'm not sure what it exists as. I'm not sure what kind of thing it is. That was the whole point of my other discussion.

It is what it is, I guess. :grin:

Linguistic meaning is a redundant term. "il n'y a pas de hors-texte". — emancipate

Nonsense.

An idealist could also say that in eating an apple, they're eating a particular object. — csalisbury

Sure, but they wouldn't mean what they say, and what they really mean doesn't make sense.

Thanks. I really don’t know why S hates me so much. I thought for a minute a few weeks back that we bonded over “Rick and Mortie”, but that didn’t last. I know he despises people who believe in God, but I’m not judgmental about his atheism, so I don’t know what his problem is. — Noah Te Stroete

Ah jeez, Rick. I thought that you understood that this was just a bit of fun. Chin up, wipe those tears from your vagina. @Hanover would have known. Why can't you be more like Hanover?

As I understand it, the common thread linking the examples in the OP is a particular tripartite structure.

For example, with expression, you have

(1) the thing expressed (say, a meaning)
(2) the expressing (say, the writing down of the word)
(3) the expression itself (say, a word)

Expression is taken as a particular example of a more general structure:

(1) something
(2) Something that happens to that something
(3)something else. — csalisbury

Bingo!

And yet @Banno had the nerve to say that my analogies here lead to misunderstanding. Well, no, not if you are bright enough to get what I'm doing. What he did was a bit like a bad workman blaming his tools. "I've messed up" becomes "These tools are rubbish!", and "I've got the wrong end of the stick" becomes "He's leading people to misunderstanding!". (And if you want to comment on this, Banno, then feel free to do so through private message. Although I'm not in the least bit interested in what you have to say).

How's that for a taste of your own medicine? :grin:

But, being charitable, it seems to me that if people have been talking about rules in the way you describe, what they mean is that a rule simply is an statement about what's allowed, what's prohibited etc etc. They are denying that there is an antecedent (1) that undergoes a (2) to become a (3). (I'm not saying I agree - I don't - but I think this is what they must mean.) — csalisbury

Yes, I agree that that's what they're doing. I'm showing how this clashes with ordinary language use and common sense.

Likewise, the idealist (or one type of idealist) is saying the apple is its appearance. There is not some antecedent thing, which then appears. The idealist probaly wouldn't say 'you're not eating an apple, you're eating its appearance' in the same way a nonidealist wouldn't say 'you're not eating an apple, you're eating its being'. They'd say 'you're eating an apple.' (Again, I'm not taking a stance here.) — csalisbury

As a non-idealist, I'm happy to clarify that by eating an apple, you're eating a particular object. That doesn't seem absurd to me at all. It seems true. That's not the case with eating an appearance.

Any talk of expression butts up, ultimately, against some kind of bedrock - otherwise you have a situation where everything is an expression of something else. Some things must be primitive - they may or may not be expressed, but they are not themselves expressions. — csalisbury

Agreed.

Another way to say this would be that they only express themselves. It seems like these people talking about rules consider rules to be things of this sort. Idealists consider appearance to be something of this sort. (I was talking about pain in this way, as well). — csalisbury

And I disagree with all of you.

I agree, but I understand the Kantian distinction as saying exactly that; the only thing that can be known (said) about noumena is that you cannot know (say) anything about them. They are even "them" only insofar as they logically correspond to phenomena. — Janus

I get the similarities between what early Wittgenstein was doing with his Tractatus and what Kant was doing with his Critique. Both are about limits. The limits of language, the limits of reason. The book I have on Wittgenstein's Tractatus makes comparisons.

What you call "noumena", I call nonsense.

Really. (And people expect me to remember something like a Schopenhauer book I read 40 years ago., haha.)

Sometimes I can't even remember what movie I watched yesterday (I'll remember it when I look it up, but offhand, sometimes it's a challenge to remember what it was without looking it up). I would blame it on age, but I've always been like that. — Terrapin Station

I remember the word "sphygmomanometer", how to pronounce it, and what it means. I likewise remember "lysergic acid diethylamide". I remember the year of the Glorious Revolution: 1688. I remember other historical names and dates. I remember that Brain Hugh Warner, better known as Marilyn Manson, was born in Canton, Ohio, 1969. And I didn't even have to look any of that up. I know it off by heart.

I more or less remember the order of Kings and Queens from William the Conquerer right up to our present Queen.

But I forget what day it is, and when I'm asked by my boss whether I'm working tomorrow, or what time, I never know the answer. And I can forget things I was only told a matter of minutes ago.

Of course, we could never know, so, for us, only the logically impossible can be definitely impossible. But it is logically possible that there are absolute limits inherent in the nature of any possible physical thing as to what is physically possible. It is also logically possible that there may not be any such limits. — Janus

:up:

Yes, from a commonsense perspective that is true. — Janus

I'm not just speaking common sense. I'm rejecting the Kantian distinction, shocking as that might be for some. There are things. And things are just things. And then there is language, and facts and the like. And on the other side of that boundary, there is nonsense. Anything that can be said at all can be said clearly, and whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

I tend to think of the Kantian insight as being not merely a language game, but as stemming from the realization that, although we can think of the independent existence of things, the actual existence of things that we can speak in positively meaningful terms about is always the existence of things for us. — Janus

I would say that there are just things. And I can talk about them.

Of course it is logically possible that the water may flow upwards, and it may even be physically possible; but it may also not be physically possible; the latter possibility is what I was getting at. — Janus

Okay, well, if it is physically possible, then that would just make my tap water example a bad example. I realised what you were getting at, and that's what I tried to get at in my reply. What I'm saying is that physical impossibilities aren't really impossible, but only conditionally so. They're really just extremely improbable. This is because, as I said, logical possibility reigns supreme. It overrides physical impossibility.

It is verging on introducing the idea of the impossibility of saying anything about the noumenal. And that is to 'step up' to another level of discourse about what can meaningfully be said about 'things in themselves' in general. — Janus

My current thinking is that even playing along with that Kantian language game is part of the problem.

That's an interesting question. I guess it depends on what is physically possible. Is it physically possible for any vessel to travel at light-speed? At greater than light-speed? We just don't know, so I guess all we can say is that there seems to be "an extremely low probability". — Janus

I'm a bit of a Humean on "laws" of physics. It's possible that tomorrow I'll turn on the tap and the water will flow upwards. This logic ultimately reigns over whatever physics has to say, although this can be trivial in the sense that I would assign something like that a probability of, like, 0.00000000000(...) 1. But possible nevertheless.

With things like this, it's always ultimately just an extremely low probability.

But in any case, it seems absurd to think that whether or not the tablet is meaningful is dependent upon whether or not anyone could get to see it, regardless of whether anyone actually does get to see it. — Janus

If in principle they could understand what the text says, then it's meaningful. If in practice they can't, because, say, they can't even get there, no matter how hard they try, then that says nothing at all.

Again, I mean in principle, not necessarily in practice. There doesn't have to be a decision on meaning only the theoretical possibility of one to allow for a world where the presence of meaning makes sense. — Baden

But "decision" is the wrong word. It's not a matter of decision. It's a matter of figuring out. The meaning has already been made.

I would say you get into murky territory when you posit a scenario that brackets out all meaning-makers to the extent that the question becomes somewhat incoherent. Is something still meaningful? There's no-meaning-maker, even in principle, to decide unless, again, they get snuck in by the back door. — Baden

Oh no. Now you've gone and done it. We were doing so well until you suggested that there needs to be a "meaning-maker" to "decide" whether or not there is meaning.

The meaning-maker could have died hundreds of thousands of years ago. No one else "decides" the meaning. He decided it hundreds of thousands of years ago. Everyone else is redundant in that very specific sense. The either decipher or they don't. They either get it right or wrong.

I don't have a huge problem with your straightforward view (less so than the opposition's alternatives). It mostly works, but I'm going for some extra nuance that deals with the sneaking-in-the-meaning-maker-by-the-back-door thing. Where do you see my view being more problematic? — Baden

Your use of terminology seems more open to problems of interpretation. Logic is good for cutting out ambiguity.

I suppose a succinct way to put it would be: If there is to be a question of meaning, there must, in principle, be a question poser (meaning-maker). And where there is a question poser, there must, in principle, be an answer to the question. — Baden

There must be a question poser (meaning-maker), or there must have been one? It seems the latter to me.

I have been trying to address the question just from the 'commonsense' perspective of ordinary language use where 'meaning' indicates that something that has been encoded is either deciphered or at least decipherable. — Janus

I like that way of putting it.

So, if there is, for example, an ancient tablet inscribed a million years ago by a now extinct literate species on a planet 200.000.000 light years from any other sentient beings, that is potentially decipherable then we would ordinarily say that it is meaningful, even though there may be zero possibility of its ever actually being deciphered. — Janus

Zero possibility? Wouldn't there just be an extremely low probability - next to nothing, but not zero?

However, in any scenario where there are no meaning makers at all left and no potential, even in theory, for decipherability, the connection is short-circuited, and I don't think it then makes sense to identify meaning (or non-meaning). So, the most sensible way of talking about this from my point of view is to admit meaning does not have to be in the here and now (it's not tied to some active brain state etc) but there must be potentializability for it to make sense to talk about it being instantiated in any given text. — Baden

Okay, you get a gold star too. Although if you close this discussion I'm taking it back. I don't quite agree, but I like it, and it's a lot better than what some others have come out with.

I don't see a need for your terminology of theory and potentiality. My solution seems simpler, and makes use of logic. If the following conditional is true:

If there was a being capable of understanding the text, then the text could be understood.

Then the text has meaning.

(This is not to get at the "truth" of the matter, but to try to offer the least problematic solution.) — Baden

Mine seems less problematic.

And you have some kind of information transfer/encoding approach to the meaning of the words on the Rosetta stone. We could work out what they meant because there was a meaning to be worked out; rooted in the information content of causal chains of language use connecting their ancient word use with our modern translation? — fdrake

You have a way with words. I doubt I could've put it like that.

I like it. You and Janus each get a gold star for your contributions.

And Terrapin too, since bouncing back and forth off of each other has been productive to some extent, and I wouldn't have even created this discussion if it wasn't for his line of enquiry which really got me thinking. Although I'm still peeved about his "dodge" and "dodecaphony" shenanigans!

Yeah of course that scrap of paper, with those blotchy squiggles, have meaning after all humans are dead. Say a bird grabs the paper and utilises the paper for nest padding. Voilà, now its meaning is warmth and insulation or some shit like that. — emancipate

You're late to the discussion, so perhaps you missed me say about a trillion times that I'm only talking about linguistic meaning. What you're describing is a different kind of meaning: meaning as a tool, or some shit like that.

The real question is: is there meaning when no life at all exists? — emancipate

Yes. Linguistic meaning.

When is meaning?
— Mww

But... but why is dog? — fdrake

Exactly. Ask @Terrapin Station. He has the answers to these kind of questions. :lol:

Where is Tuesday?

What about the Rosetta stone? Big fucking thing with scribblings on it dug out of the earth. — fdrake

It's awesome. Such a treasure.

Did the words have meaning before they were discovered again? Have they had meaning since they were written in the same way? What about when it was unknown and forgotten in the earth? — fdrake

Yes, yes, and yes.

I've been trying to follow the discussion but I lost the thread. Will someone help me get back on track? — fdrake

There's a whole bunch of different aspects to this discussion. What was intended as my main focus pretty much went out the window, and now it's a rehash of realists vs. idealists on linguistic meaning, which was Part 2 of my previous discussion.

Ancient texts were introduced to show the faults of idealism with regards to linguistic meaning. The idealists have predictably failed to come up with a reasonable response to this.

Anyone who is willing to assert that a correlation between different things does not always require, include, and depend upon a creature capable of drawing it...

Raise your hand...

Like we're in grade school. Love it. — creativesoul

See me after class.

I don't remember what your hypothetical scenario is (I'm guessing that it's just something about meaning when no people exist). — Terrapin Station

You really don't remember?

That there is meaning when no people exist is my conclusion, utilising the thought experiment. That conclusion leads to the conclusion that meaning, once set, is objective.

You could put it in your neutral way of talking about ink marks on a piece of paper if you want to. It's a scenario where everyone is dead. An hour previously, when everyone was still alive, these ink marks had meaning. On that we presumably agree. But, of course, I would say that, afterwards, as before, they're not just ink marks: they have a meaning.

The problem with this for S's view is that S claims that meaning would exist if no people existed. — Terrapin Station

It's only a problem if what you two agree on is true. Obviously I reject what you two agree on and put my own philosophy in its place. My philosophy logically results in that conclusion.

Some things are their expression. Pain is the canonical example. — csalisbury

:brow:

The expression of pain is not pain. I cry out or grimace - the expression - because I am in pain. I can make that same expression even when I'm not in pain.

That seems to make as little sense as all of the other examples when conflated.

Even Wittgenstein claimed that the word "pain" does make reference to a sensation (not an expression). But he didn't think that it described it.

I don't know where you're getting this from or why you think it.

And a mashed potato isn't an expression of a potato in the way a rule made explict expressed the rule. — csalisbury

What? You're changing the terminology. That's going to make a difference. You're no longer addressing my point by doing that. I didn't say that a mashed potato is an expression of a potato. The latter makes no sense for a start.

The move from potato to orange juice to rules seems to rely on the linguistic quirk that one meaning of 'expression' is squeezing out. — csalisbury

I did that on purpose. It's a good analogy. They both use the same word for a reason. I could think up others. For example, this also has some key things in common with putting a piece of paper through a shredder. The paper would be the meaning, the person would be the shredder, the shredding would be the expressing, and the shredded paper would be the expressed meaning. It's like a process of conversion or transformation. You input your raw material, and then it gets processed through the machinery, and gets converted into the end product.

I don't know about the English etymology, but I know from my book on Wittgenstein's Tractatus that in ordinary contexts, the German "aussprechen" concerns our ability to clearly speak, pronounce, or articulate words. And as such, the German word is a hybrid of sorts between "ausdrücken (to express, quite literally in the sense of squeezing out)" and "sprechen (to speak)".

"Ausprechen" is a special case of "ausdrücken" or expression: it concerns what we put into words or language.

This is from Wittgenstein's Tractatus: An Introduction by Alfred Norman, a professor of philosophy at Technische Universität Darmstadt in Germany, published by Cambridge University Press.

Wittgenstein was Austrian, next door to Germany, and where they speak a variation of the German language; and he taught at the University of Cambridge from 1929 to 1947. Interesting link.

You could even think of the squeezing out in terms of how our throat muscles squeeze together in order produce vocalisations. Vocalising is another kind of expression: the expression of noise.

There are other analogies too. That book I referenced, for example, draws on the early Wittgenstein and makes links with language and music. It's a good book.

In the cases like you're describing, I'd just say that the person is confused. Knowing something and how we know it is often not the same thing as what we know about. (They're only the same when the topic is knowledge itself.) — Terrapin Station

People too quickly jump into thinking, "But how can that be so without me knowing about it?", as if our knowing about it determines the metaphysics. As if the world won't just carry on as before, only without us and our knowledge.

I suspect that this is where people are going wrong with both metaphysical idealism and linguistic idealism. It's a bad way of thinking.

I'm a metaphysical realist in general, but I believe that some things, like emotions, desires, thoughts, etc. are only mental phenomena. That's not giving them any different status aside from placing that phenomena in a particular location--brain activity. — Terrapin Station

Okay...

So, do you agree with my point there being cases where the role of knowledge in relation to metaphysics is being overestimated?

For me, it's difficult to separate epistemology from ontology. — Terrapin Station

Yeah, and I think that that can lead to some of the biggest problems in metaphysics. It leads to what raises big red flags for me.

If I'm going to ask myself, "How do we know that 'dog' still means something if no people exist," I don't know how I could answer that without exploring just what meaning is ontologically in the first place. At it seems to me like once we know that, it's easy to answer the epistemological question. — Terrapin Station

Sure, in that sense it seems alright. I do the same thing. But the sort of thing I meant by that - and if you're a metaphysical realist then you should agree with me here - is the kind of thinking that goes, "But how do we know that the cup is still there?", which is fine in a sense, but not in the sense where it is being asked because in their head they're imagining a link between knowledge and existence, such that the cup can't exist at the time without us knowing that it does at the time. That's a gross overestimation of the role that our knowledge plays, in my assessment. It's anthropocentric.

I'm trying to imagine anything that could persuade me to believe that notions of objective, persistent, abstract existents aren't simply examples of a type of projection. — Terrapin Station

Well, straightaway, for me, it's counterintuitive to apply the categories you do for stuff like this. Stuff about the necessity of a physical location, stuff about a subject being required. And then I think about why that is. And I consider your explanation, and it just doesn't work out. It just doesn't seem right. And then, of course, that fits my view about the persistence of post-human stuff such as rules and meaning, which I believed separately anyway, and which wouldn't fit with your view. So the explanation comes together for me. I'm going with what I find works best, and although my account might not be complete, it is working for me better than yours.

I think the subjective approach can explain a whole bunch of stuff. Stuff related to understanding, as I've acknowledged throughout. But it shouldn't try to transcend where it works. It shouldn't try to be more than an epistemology, and venture into the world of logic or metaphysics. When it does that, it becomes anthropocentric, and we should all know that anthropocentric models can fail spectacularly, as history has shown.

As I explained above, S apparently believes that a "christening of meaning" (at least per communal usage) makes some sort of objective, persistent abstract existent obtain, an abstract existent for which it's a category error to contemplate location, concrete properties, etc. — Terrapin Station

I would advise against trying to engage with him productively. He seems like a dead end. He won't really listen, he'll just keep pushing his view, asserting this and that, and so on. He has shown little interest in engaging my position on its own terms or working out the problems with his own position which I identify.

In order to 'set the meaning', you already have to be able to say what something means. And that is something Rover cannot do, beyond 'sick 'em, Rover', or 'over there!' — Wayfarer

What? That needs an explanation, because at first blush it simply seems false. Why couldn't I just coin a name at the time? I don't have to say anything. I can just look at something and coin a name for it, then that's what it means in my language.

I like the way you're actually battling with an idea that being on this forum has made you consider, which you don't actually want to consider. — Wayfarer

Considered and rejected.

What problems do you think crop up if "dog" doesn't mean something objectively? — Terrapin Station

If it logically implies a subject where there are none, as in the hypothetical scenario, then that's a contradiction, which is a problem. Of course, that's only if my interlocutor accepts the hypothetical post-human scenario. If they don't, then we go no further in a sense, but I find them disingenuous if they do that, since we're all capable of imagining the hypothetical scenario. It seems more like a post hoc rationalisation to deny that it's possible.

Do you think that 'subject' is a necessary property (Deixis) of language? — emancipate

As in a subject, like a person, a who? Or as in subject-predicate? (Which would include a what).

I read the articulate you linked to. What I referred to as a subjective context earlier is what the article calls personal deixis. These statements wouldn't make sense without a subject, without a me, I, them, you, etc., in a hypothetical scenario where there is none.

But, in my view, and so far as I'm aware, these statements with a subjective context are the only kind of statements which play out differently in the hypothetical scenario.

The other statements I take to be objective. It would be true that the word "dog" means what it does in the language. My logic can deal with that without a problem. It is only the logic of others, where they read a subject or subjectivity into it, where problems are encountered. They've incessantly tried to make their problems my problems, without success.

I understand what you are saying. But you're begging the question. How is it embodied? How does it travel from the marks to the reader? Absent humans or any similar intelligence, what constitutes the difference between meaningful marks and any other configuration of reality? — Echarmion

In my view, it seems to be a nonphysical realm. Or rather, a realm for which it is not appropriate to think of in terms of the physical. It's a subset of what's the case. It's the case that the text is meaningful. But there are lines of enquiry here which seem inappropriate, and which seem to be based on pre-held assumptions - minimally, that it even makes sense or is appropriate to ask such questions in this context to begin with. You know, category errors, like asking where is Tuesday, or what are its physical attributes, or something like that.