The default assumption is that what goes for one, goes for all, if the property in question is putatively essential (as "identity" would be). If I am a mind, why would any other person be anything else? If tiger A is a mammal, why would tiger B be a bird? etc. I'm calling this an assumption, because there's nothing that immediately shows it must be true, but it would take some powerful reasons to unseat it, I think. Remember, we're talking about our world, not just a possible, "idiolecty" world. In our world, we don't declare one person to be a mind, another a body, except maybe in some unusual cases of brain death or similar perplexities. At any rate, we don't do it when there is no other difference between the two. — J

I see what you're saying. There are definitely situations where concise, unambiguous language is required, like in the repair instructions for a spaceship. Otherwise, language is pretty metaphoric, poetic, unconsciously Shakespearean. I guess it depends on the situation.

Maybe there aren't any other minds! — J

For thousands of years there have been people who believed the universe is one giant mind. Some physicists think it's actually a black hole inside a bigger universe, which might also be a black hole. Craziness all around.

What does Adorno say about this? And can you say more about how we might understand persons, if they can be categorized as either minds or bodies, depending? — J

Negative Dialectics circles around the idea of the unification of subject and object, sometimes known as mind and body. A dialectical approach says they have to be mutually dependent, and this leads to the idea that the separation is an illusion, if one truly had their shit together, one would see that the two are one. Heidegger could be interpreted as seeing it that way. Adorno disagreed with the rush to some sort of mystical marriage of the opposites because one is apt to become blind and numb that way. Leave the mind and body, soul and Christ, self and world, however you put it, alone. They're separate in our consciousness for a reason. There are necessary dramas playing out, much of which really hurts. Stop trying to bypass it and let that pain transform us.

I actually agree with you. It's pretty strained to say that I could be Obama. It probably just means I'm giving advice, "if I were you..." :grin:

I'm suggesting that it's a genuine, if trivial, reason, but defers the interesting question of why you'd want to talk that way. — J

Science fiction is fraught with disembodied minds being transferred around, like an uploaded version of a person subsequently downloaded to a clone and whatnot. In fact one of the first books I read as a child was by Jack Vance and had the plot of a guy who wakes up in a body and can't remember what happened in his last iteration. A murder mystery ensues. If you recall, in the Matrix movies an AI manages to download himself into a human. I'm just used to that kind of thing.

Were you suggesting the "frank=mind / Obama=body" structure as something that might reflect how things stand in our world? — J

I guess it could be. I don't know. Heidegger would say no, I think Adorno would say yes, the issue being whether the self and the environment it evolved in are inextricable. What do you think?

Because it only defers the real question, "Yes, of course, but why do you want to say that?" — J

Why do you say that's the real question? When Kripke says Nixon could have lost the election, would you say we need to know why he would say that?

Were you additionally suggesting it as a real possibility? — J

What do you mean by "real" possibility?

I see a non-serious and a serious answer to this. The non-serious answer is, "Well, it's an ad hoc way of allowing us to speak about the possibility that frank could have been Obama." A reason, admittedly, but not a very good one, since nothing of philosophical interest follows from such ad-hocness. — J

It wasn't ad hoc. It's what I was thinking about from the beginning of our discussion. I really don't know how the world works. I normally think about it as a tree of possibilities.

This example isn't so much a matter of being stripped of properties as it is of being saddled with absurd ones. — J

It's just straight Descartes. That we can't say the mind is necessarily identical to the body was mentioned by Kripke in N&N. I'm guessing his restraint about metaphysical pronouncements is due in part to Wittgenstein's influence.

Cool, so I'll give an explanation for why Kripke might be ok with the proposition that I could have been Obama. There are a couple of options for how we interpret the word "I" in that statement.

1. I am defined as the frank who was born at a certain place and time of certain parents.

2. I am defined as a mind that can occupy any living body. Here think of Charlie Kaufman's Being John Malkovich, in which the image of the mind as a puppet master recurs, and the main character travels through a tunnel that leads to John Malkovich.

So if the reference of my proposition is 1, then the proposition is false, because we would have a contradiction. If the reference of my proposition is 2, does that work? The problem is that I'm defining myself as my mind, but I'm defining Obama as his body. This is the conundrum of Kaufman's movie.

But since the references of the objects in the proposition are set by intention (whose intention is another cool question), we could have it that the proposition does refer to me as my mind, and Obama as his body, so it works. I think my argument might be a little flimsy. What do you think?

Yes, one way, and on one understanding of necessity (a priori). And notice how we're forced to phrase it: the object obtains the properties. Is this magic? :smile: Can this be what Kripke literally means? — J

This isn't about necessity in general. It's that when I pick an object, like the pillow with the red button, I'm only looking at possible worlds where that object exists. There are possible worlds where the pillow doesn't have a red button, but I don't care about those. For the purposes of my communication, the red button is necessary because it's in all the possible worlds I'm paying attention to. I magically made the red button necessary by fiat.

BTW, do you take "in the idiolect of the speaker" to be Kripke just being careful (like "in language L"), or is he making some additional point? — J

He's saying that when I rigidly designate an object, like the pillow with the red button, you're supposed to pick up on what I mean by it. It's all about me and my intentions as a speaker. I think we recently had a thread where we were talking about Quine's inscrutability of reference and someone kept saying, "but doesn't intention pick out the thing?" Naming and Necessity is an effort to flesh out that idea, among other things. The distinction between rigid and non-rigid designators becomes valuable when he starts talking about the mind-body problem. It cuts through some fog.

The reference is entirely subjective.
A human is saying your words and it will obviously fall to that persons view — Red Sky

That's what Kripke is describing here in lecture 2:

1, To every name or designating expression 'X', there corresponds a cluster of properties, namely the family of those properties q> such that A believes 'q>X'.

2. One of the properties, or some conjointly, are believed by A to pick out some individual uniquely.

3. If most, or a weighted most, of the q> 's are satisfied by one unique object y, then y is the referent of 'x'.

4. If the vote yields no unique object, 'x' does not refer. •

5. The statement, 'If X exists, then X has most of the q>' s' is known a priori by the speaker.

6. The statement, 'If X exists, then X has most of the q>' s' expresses a necessary truth (in the idiolect of the speaker).

For any successful theory, the account must not be circular. The properties which are used in the vote must not themselves involve the notion of reference in such a way that it is ultimately impossible to eliminate. — Naming and Necessity, Lecture 2 p.71

What picture of naming do these Theses ((1)-(5)) give you? The picture is this. I want to name an object. I think of some way of describing it uniquely and then I go through, so to speak, a sort of mental ceremony: By 'Cicero' I shall mean the man who denounced Catiline; and that's what the reference of 'Cicero' will be. I will use 'Cicero' to designate rigidly the man who (in fact) denounced Catiline, so I can speak of possible worlds in which he did not. But still my intentions are given by first, giving some condition which uniquely determines an object, then using a certain word as a name for the object determined by this condition — ibid p.79

@J Would you agree that #6 of the theses explains how an object obtains necessary properties? It's a matter of the speaker's intentions. That's at least one way..

I don't understand why you are putting extra emphasis on this. — Red Sky

It's just because the issue of reference became a hot topic in analytical philosophy, starting with Russell and Frege, who advocated that names are symbols for a collection of descrtiptions, through Quine who claimed reference can't really be fixed. It's just part of this ongoing philosophical debate about how speech works.

Not surprisingly for a thread called "What is real?" this one has taken a lot of detours. How about a new thread? — J

While looking for an online copy of N&N I can copy from, I came across this paragraph from lecture 3. It touches on the question of whether Kripke was doing analysis or building a metaphysical picture:

Descartes, and others following him, argued that a person or mind is distinct from his
body, since the mind could exist without the body. He might equally well have argued the
same conclusion from the premise that the body could have existed without the mind.
Now the one response which I regard as plainly inadmissible is the response which
cheerfully accepts the Cartesian premise while denying the Cartesian conclusion. Let
'Descartes' be a name, or rigid designator, of a certain person, and let 'B' be a rigid
designator of his body. Then if Descartes were indeed identical to B, the supposed
identity, being an identity between two rigid designators, would be necessary, and
Descartes could not exist without B and B could not exist without Descartes. The case is
not at all comparable to the alleged analogue, the identity of the first Postmaster General
with the inventor of bifocals. True, this identity obtains despite the fact that there could
have been a first Postmaster General even though bifocals had never been invented. The
reason is that 'the inventor of bifocals' is not a rigid designator; a world in which no one
invented bifocals is not ipso facto a world in which Franklin did not exist. The alleged
analogy therefore collapses; a philosopher who wishes to refute the Cartesian conclusion
must refute the Cartesian premise, and the latter task is not trivial — Naming and Necessity, Lecture 3

Notice that Kripke isn't here worried about whether Descartes was right or wrong. He's exploring what happens from various starting points. If we start with accepting that the mind could be distinct from the body, we can't subsequently assert that there's a necessary connection between the two. We can gather evidence of that in some way, but that's it.

But you're wondering whether he means, more precisely, to be asking: "Would we refer to this woman as the Queen if she came from different parents?" Possibly. "Necessity in the realm of selfhood" would be something about this woman that must pick her out from all others, in all possible worlds. So we're asking, Can such a property exist, or inhere, within the woman herself, as opposed to within the process of picking-out? One is tempted to reply, "Yes indeed. The genes, the DNA. They are there regardless of whether we use them for any reference-fixing." — J

I guess the wildcard is how you pick yourself out in (or at) possible worlds. If you identify yourself as the person with particular parents, then you can't be Obama. If you get existentialist about it and you're 'that quality of being that comes to rest in the sanctuary of the form' as Kierkegaard put it, then the door would be open to a plot like Being John Malkovich. I think the point I'm making is pretty obscure and wouldn't come up very often.

Well, yes, in the sense that he's availing himself of terminology that has a long fraught history. — J

Sometimes you need a little fraught in your life. Do you want to examine the lectern example in this thread? Or a different one?

And at several other places he's clear that what makes a person that person is being born of certain parents. — J

I take him to be assessing the way a person normally comes up in conversation. He's analyzing the way we think and speak, not revealing necessity in the realm of selfhood.

Whether this equates to an essence is a fraught subject, of course. — J

I was referring to the way Kripke uses the concept of essence in N&N. Is that use fraught in your view?

Can you say more about the context question? I read Kripke as saying, not that one could refer to an Obama who has certain parents, but that we must -- that's where the "baptism" starts. — J

Yes. I'll get some cool quotes together. Maybe we could go over the lectern example.

That's fair. I was agreeing with Kripke's view here. — J

I don't think I'm contradicting Kripke. He would agree that essential properties are chosen in context, right? One could refer to an Obama who has certain parents.

Yes. See the exchange above about "If I were Barack Obama . . . " Taken literally, it can only mean "If I were not I . . . " which can't get off the ground. When we say things like "If I were you . . . " we mean either "Here's what I think you should do/think etc." or "If I (still being me!) were in your situation, here's what I would do; perhaps you should do the same." — J

I think you're insisting that a person who didn't have your history, parents, DNA, can't be you. That's a choice regarding essential properties. It's not a necessary stance, I don't think, by way of the Cogito.

That position doesn't make sense to me. If what we see is an hallucination or other phantasm, then our eyes must be, also — Patterner

If you're at the Overlook Hotel and you see people who shouldn't be there, you should question whether you're hallucinating.

It's not not about the body either. Your body wrote the reply, making use of what you knew about Tully, in a way not that dissimilar to how you ride a bike, making use of what you know about peddles and wheels.

The classical approach is to divide "know how" from "know that", and treat of each with an utterly different account. I want to consider an alternative: that knowing involves doing, including doing speaking and thinking — Banno

There's a passage somewhere in the Old Testament that says there's no knowledge in the grave. Knowledge is about living, it's part of living, and that's not something anyone does inside their skull. I understand.

These are the problems with the classical approach - might call it the cognitive theory of knowledge, that are addressed by treating knowledge as embodied, as an activity. — Banno

But riding a bike is partly a matter of muscle memory. I don't see how the knowledge that Tully wrote X is something about the body. It seems to be about thought.

But if you know that Cicero wrote De Officiis, it does not follow that you know that Tully wrote De Officiis, despite Tull=Cicero. — Banno

Knows is an intensional operator. That knowledge has this intensional aspect puts weight to the idea that knowledge is about a relationship between a knower and an object of thought.

How do we know what is real? It hurts! — karl stone

Aspirin makes the world disappear.

What's wrong with saying knowledge is a relationship between a knower and a proposition?

That basic illusion, the so-called "façade of life", is the fundamental claim to facticity itself, supported by that principal postulate, of a real distinction between appearance and essence, which justifies factuality at its base. Smashing that façade is what provides to the subject, freedom of thought, happiness of thought, and depth of speculation, to go beyond those conventional limits which formulate "what is the case", facticity. — Metaphysician Undercover

:up: Essence is the unchanging core of an object, the idea. Appearance is the transient expression of the core, alive in time, like music, unfolding out of itself. Any object is the dynamic tension between the two. We do move in a domain of ideas, but if we let those become concrete to us, it's like we're living in a dictionary. Life won't tolerate that for long.

I am not talking about the reality in China, I am talking about normative claims. The current reality in China is that the people cannot decide which public demands the government should achieve. China has had a period of time when economic development was at the center, and the future of local government officials was strongly correlated with economic data. I think it is right to use clear standards to guide government behavior. — panwei

Imagine a point when there is unrest among the people, perhaps people in Chinese cities who aren't receiving public support because they have left the countryside. The government will have to make them a priority eventually, or an event will take place that wounds the soul of China. That's often how governments respond, not through democracy, but because the cost of being unresponsive is greater than preserving the status quo. That's true in the USA as well. There are mechanisms of the US government that resist popular demand. There are many of them. The goal of those mechanisms is to make it so popular demand has to be very strong in order to make significant changes in direction. That's supposed to keep government priorities from flipping back and forth, but it's not working right now. Something has changed so that the US is like a loose cannon, swinging one way, then the other.

:grin:

Perhaps it's better explained if we consider the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Some might say that if the many-worlds interpretation is correct then there is a world in which I won the lottery. And I would counter by saying that none of the people who exist in these parallel universes are me. I just am the person who exists in this universe, and any person from a parallel universe who superficially resembles me – in appearance and name and background – only resembles me and shouldn't be thought of as being me. — Michael

This is the issue Kripke was addressing, yes.

Therefore, it is a reasonable arrangement to be eliminated if you fail, except that your current elimination criterion is votes, while the criterion I advocate is "the extent to which the people's public demands are realized." — panwei

You have candidates who were in charge of various provinces, and each is evaluated in terms of meeting public demands. The winner is chosen as the supreme leader. Is that right?

Didn’t Kamala Devi Harris get eliminated? — panwei

She lost the election, yes.

Wasn’t Biden eliminated after his election defeat? — panwei

He eliminated himself. He decided not to run.

Not so sure about this. First of all, I don't take "If I were Barack Obama . . . " as a genuine reference to a possible world. For me, this is loose talk for "Barack Obama should have. . . " — J

Could be.

If we insist on pressing this hypothetical, we run up against Kripke: "You can't be Obama; he was born of different parents." And I think this is right. "If I were Obama . . . " etc. reads like a meaningful sentence but that's an illusion. — J

I think I could define myself Cartesian style, so I'm just conscious of various things. Combine that with a very fluid sense of identity and strong sense of empathy, and I can honestly imagine being in your shoes to some extent. If you reject that line of thought, then yes, such talk couldn't reflect the way you actually think.

We've crossed over from loose talk into nonsense. — J

Again, I think this probably comes down to temperament. I can't tolerate being pigeon-holed. I need to see through other people's eyes, so I can imagine possible worlds where I'm somebody else, or a rock. I'd love being a rock.

Due to translation issues, a misunderstanding occurred earlier. What I mean is, 'If the competition fails, you will be eliminated. This is a reasonable arrangement, not a weakness, and there is no need to explain it further.'. — panwei

Ok. I was trying to explain that we don't eliminate people just because they fail. Failing is a valuable source of knowledge. A leader could become smarter and stronger through experiencing failure, so it's potentially beneficial in the long run. When there's an election, we don't just think about achieving a particular goal, although that's important. We also think about the character of the person we're electing. Is it a person who represents the way I see the world? I can't predict the circumstances this leader will have to face, so I try to pick someone who is resilient.

On rigid designators, what does it mean for an object in one possible world to be the same object as an object in a different possible world? Is it simply a stipulation? — Michael

Rigid designation is just about capturing the way that we think, especially about alternate histories. Imagine I tell you that if Hitler had been accepted to art school, he wouldn't have become a dictator. If you insist that anyone who didn't become a dictator couldn't be Hitler, then you're going to be missing the point of my assertion. If you agree that there are all kinds of things Hitler could have become, then you're using rigid designation, which means you're using the name Hitler as a sort of nexus of possibility. The name picks out a certain person, but does not specify a complete set of properties.

You can, on the other hand, pick out a thing and identify it by a certain property or history. I'll discern your intention by the context, or if I'm uncertain, I'll ask you.

The question is especially relevant if we claim that the same object can have different properties in different possible worlds. Does it make sense to say that there's a possible world where I'm a black man named "Barack Obama" and who served as the 44th President of the United States? What does it mean for this person to be a possible version of me rather than a possible version of you or a possible version of the actual Barack Obama? — Michael

All of that is sorted out by a specific statement. For instance, if you say, "If I were Barack Obama, I would have told the Syrian rebels to calm down."

The study of political philosophy does not inherently require similarities to the current electoral system in your country. — panwei

Nevertheless, the problem you found is only associated with your own contrived system. The problem does not arise in electoral systems in general.

So, the question isn’t meaningful, it’s misguided. It treats certainty as something that needs to be justified, when in truth, certainty is what makes justification possible in the first place. — Sam26

I disagree that it's misguided. It's true that one tends to live with unquestioning certainty, but doubt about foundations also arises spontaneously at times, although perhaps not for everyone.

What you can say is the question has no point for you personally.

If you fail, you are eliminated. There is nothing to say. — panwei

What you're describing is not similar in fundamental ways to the electoral system in my country, so you've succeeded in showing the weakness of an artificial system of your own devising.

And that is very easy to understand, because "society" is an extremely difficult and vague concept, generally shaped and adapted toward the purpose of the discussion, in general usage — Metaphysician Undercover

One way to think of it in terms of needs. Think about the way we limit the freedom of individuals to protect society, as when we sanction theft. The needs of the individual thief threaten the well-being of society. On the other hand, if the well-being of society always trumps individual well-being, what's lost is creativity and innovation, which come from the dreams of individuals.

That's a way of seeing a spectrum with individuality as one pole and society as the other. Capitalism is heavily focused on the well-being of individuals, especially wrt freedom of the spirit. Capitalism says do whatever you want, there's no limit. There's theory that says no harm can come to society from individual greed, but though that theory is perennial, it's been shown over and over to be false.

We might imagine that collectivism would be the cure for all of mankind's ailments, but remembering that the spectrum is indivisible should be a warning about that.

:up:

To grasp a concept is being able to act in certain ways. — Banno

Suppose I know P, but I never act on it. How am I different from a person who knows P, but can't act on it?

This is an old philosophical problem with the concept of potential energy.

Understanding occurs. It's within the mystical parameters of consciousness which AI lacks yet seems to outperform us on.

I don't demand language for conceptual grasp. That strikes me as contrived to eliminate metaphysical messiness. — Hanover

Good answer.

Equating cognitive grasp of propositions to an experiential event necessarily eliminates any non-empirically based propositions — Hanover

I don't think we can say cognition and behavior are identical. That makes no sense.

What do you think is happening when a person grasps a concept?

Do you take the assessment of the truth value of a proposition as knowing-how knowledge, equivalent to juggling balls? Seems evaluating statements requires cognitive grasp of concepts. — Hanover

But aren't concepts an aspect of engaging the world? Even if I was beheaded and one last concept passed through my noggin, the meaning of that thought is inextricable from my better days of seeking and finding, trying and failing, etc.

When the people authorize the government by setting indicator weights, they are telling the government what to do and what requirements to meet. — panwei

But a strategy may succeed or fail for all sorts of reasons beyond the control of the government. A healthy government is flexible enough to deal with changing circumstances. A rigid government will crash against the rocks of fate.

Would you rather make mistakes and learn? Or be told what to do and learn nothing?

It’s interesting to consider how and why the social and cultural differences between men and women have developed over time. I suspect things were very different in the Paleolithic. — Michael

:up: