So at least according to the algorithmics of machine learning, beliefs and goals aren't foundational when it comes to explaining behavior, rather they are concepts concerning model-fitting strategies for determining behavioural causes and behavioural conditioning. — sime

Maybe belief is a psychological construct. It's something unobservable, but we use it to explain and predict behavior. I think the more complex the behavior is, the more likely it is that we'll explain it in terms of belief. Simple behavior could be instinct, but something like plotting revenge needs propositions for the explanation.

I don't read frank as suggesting that mass is not real. Quite the opposite. — Banno

Yes. Mass and energy are real. They're both scientific constructs.

Mass in modern physics has multiple definitions which are conceptually distinct, but physically equivalent. Mass can be experimentally defined as a measure of the body's inertia, meaning the resistance to acceleration (change of velocity) when a net force is applied.[1] The object's mass also determines the strength of its gravitational attraction to other bodies. — Wikipedia

In physics energy is not a substance, nor is it mystical. Energy is a number. A quantity. And the quantity itself isn’t even particularly fundamental. Instead, it’s a mathematical relationship between other, more fundamental quantities. It was 17th century polymath Gottfried Leibnitz who first figured out the mathematical form of what we call kinetic energy – the energy of motion. He realized that the sum of mass times velocity squared for a system of particles bouncing around on a flat surface is always conserved, assuming no friction and perfect bounciness. Leibnitz called this early incarnation of energy vis viva – the living force. — Matt O'Dowd

Figures.

The Earth doesn't orbit around the sun, nor the sun around the earth, but both orbit around a common centre of mass, under the influence of the other bodies in the solar system; and this will be so regardless of the frame of reference chosen. — Banno

There's a kind of absolutism that belongs to a theistic outlook. It's the kind of absolutism that would have a person deny something as simple as Galilean transformation. Meh.

I understand the inscrutability of reference, and more generally the indeterminancy of translation to be more or less equivalent to contextualism as opposed to relativism, because semantic indeterminancy is a theory (for want of a better word) of meta-semantics that in effect considers the meaning of a proposition to be relative to the context of the agent who asserts the proposition, and hence the public inability to know what the speaker is referring to - as opposed to relativism that is a theory of truth that considers truth to be relative to the speaker. — sime

You're absolutely right. Quine's insight was touched on earlier, but lately the thread has centered on global skepticism.

Hold up. Let's go over it a little more slowly. We just start with the realization that when we say the earth orbits the sun, we have chosen a frame of reference. Doing so requires that we choose a point and call it stationary relative to the rest of the points in the system. Are you with me so far?

Physics, not philosophy, suggests nothing is really true? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I gave you an example of a truth that's relative to the choices we make.

It's true that the earth orbits the sun if we say the sun is stationary relative to the earth. We could instead pick the earth as the stationary point and then it wouldn't be true that the earth orbits the sun. This is not rocket science guys.

Also energy and mass are constructs. They aren't observable. The list goes on.

Do you believe it's true that the earth orbits the sun? Did you know that this "truth" is relative to choices that we little people make? If there's no one to choose a frame of reference, there is no truth of the matter. This is not philosophy. It's physics.

Do you think I hold that view, Tim?

Edit: Or that such a view is implied by linguistic philosophy generally? — Banno

Everyone after Wittgenstein was deranged. Just a sad turn of events. :fear:

I very much doubt you'd find any of my thoughts about this interesting, but I'll say it anyway.

When we think about a world, the whole thing is supposed to hang together spatially and temporally. A single moment in a world implies the rest of it. So we always use the same epistemological principles for pre and post human sections of a world. It's just crazy nonsense to say that there were no divisions before humans, but divisions existed afterwards.

So in order to avoid turning the topic into something only a lobotomy patient would understand, we will jettison talk of how the world was before humans. Instead, we'll talk about what we know of the world beyond our own conceptions of it. And many a great mind has decided that the answer to that is: diddly.

:up:

People say all sorts of weird things. Which philosopher thinks that affirming language games means that nothing existed before humans?

. I don't think this implies that there is no fact about any distinct things existing in the world prior to the act of some language community. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't either. I don't think anyone thinks that.

The rules of chess are stipulated, not arbitrary. They did not pop out of the aether uncaused. How much fun is it going to be to play a game with totally arbitrary rules and victory conditions (or perhaps no victory conditions, you just move pieces around according to some random ruleset until you get bored or expire)?

Anyhow, chess comes after language. The question is how to make a language with nothing to refer to, not "if we start with a language already in hand can we make arbitrary stipulations?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

The idea is that we don't passively engage our world like blank slates upon which the world faithfully writes. It's more that we deal with one another in activities which feature linguistic rules we've agreed upon, much like we've agreed upon the rules of chess.

In other words, language doesn't come from isolated individuals treating the world out on the range like Teddy Roosevelt. Language arises from interaction with one another, much like a community of birds squawking at one another.

I guess my thoughts are: "if it was arbitrary, we wouldn't be able to agree." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Chess

fremen

:up:

But is it metaphysically possible for him to have been born of different parents? I don't think Kripke would agree (not that he's the boss). — J

I think Kripke's concern would be about someone asking about an alternative Socrates who had different parents. To my mind, whether that question would make any sense depends on the context. Since it is metaphysically possible for Socrates to have had different parents, I would say there are contexts where it would make sense. And of course others where it wouldn't.

@Banno do you disagree with that?

. I'll go with naturalism, like Quine. — Banno

Me too, but with a big dose of skepticism about metaphysics. That bias thing again. :grin:

The first two refutations are empirical, and defeasible. The third, of course, is not, should it be true. So, is that what Count T is saying, when he says that Socrates is a man, not a chimpanzee? The question you asked about essential properties vs. necessary properties is the same question, perhaps. — J

I can't really speak for Count. I don't quite understand what he means.

It's metaphysically possible for Socrates to have been a chimp. Where I think confusion might be arising is if we're limiting possibility to that possible world we call the actual world. This would be a type of actualism. If we embrace that, then Socrates would necessarily be a human. This view is also hard determinism.

Is believing in essences from Plato? Is that how we're supposed to be sorting out reference? We're contacting the ideal?
— frank
I don't see how that could be made to work. it would be up to others to present such an argument. — Banno

I was wrong about that. We all lean toward materialism, so I don't know what's meant by "essence.".

You and Count are both materialists.

Cheers! :nerd:

Ok. But how does this help you fix a reference? Or is this completely divorced from the OP?

Is it whether Socrates is necessarily a man, or whether, in referring to him, we are adopting a Kripkean understanding of proper names? — J

We hadn't brought up Kripke. It works like this:
I could make it clear that the Socrates I'm talking about is the human one. I'm only looking at possible worlds in which he is, so we have a necessary property known a posteriori. It's a case of this Socrates. This particular one.

That kind of essential property doesn't travel outside discussions where that Socrates was identified, though. Everywhere else, Socrates could be anything. He could have been a talking fish because there's a possible world where he was.

So you aren't saying essential properties are necessary properties. I don't know what you mean then.

Yes, but Kripke's essential properties are stipulated. Do you think that's what Count means?

No, this is profoundly misunderstanding what an essence is supposed to be, even vis-a-vis contemporary analytic essential properties. It's on a level with claiming that Quine is talking about how we can say "triangle" and "three-sided 2D shape." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Are you saying that it's necessarily true that Socrates is human?

He considered himself to have dispatched any notion of essence, still a quite active topic in contemporary philosophy, in a few sentences where he claimed he could imagine that Socrates was an alien. — Count Timothy von Icarus

@Banno is correct about that. Being human isn't essential to Socrates because he could have been an alien. He could have been an android who time travelled to ancient Athens.

If Quine is right, many others are wrong. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Who are you thinking of?

It's not very deep philosophically. :sad:

Is believing in essences from Plato? Is that how we're supposed to be sorting out reference? We're contacting the ideal?

It's interesting to think of op-amps as a perfect symbol of reductionist thinking; powerful, useful, but ultimately simplified models of broader, relational systems. — Mapping the Medium

Electro-philosophy. :grin:

the ADC breaks the analog continuum into discrete, digital data points. — Mapping the Medium

Doesn't the central nervous system also deal with converted information?

My work requires that I research the history of information technology. — Mapping the Medium

Cool. Do you know the story of the invention of the step-by-step switch? And do you know whether that was the kind of switch Turing used in his Enigma decoder?

It is my understanding that analog chips are only added to increase efficiency of digital processing, but the foundation remains nominalistically digital. With the addition of analog, it speeds up the original method and is intended to require less energy. — Mapping the Medium

I was just talking about AD converters that are used for interfacing with the world. Did you know one of the first ideas for a computer was analog? That's what the op-amp originally was.

Interesting post. Quine's insight only eliminates agreement among us if recognition of another's reference is entirely empirical. My interest in the topic isn't so much in defending or killing it. It's more like part of a flow diagram. If you don't allow any innate language capability, you need to jettison folk ideas about communication. Take your pick.

Unlike the other animals, human thinking is an artificial intelligence. — ENOAH

That's a fascinating thought. Sentience isn't equivalent to human intelligence. It's something other than that. I think human thought is driven by emotion, which as you say is tied up in interaction with other people primarily, but emotion is part of interacting with the world, and much of that is biological at its base.

But computers have analog to digital converters to "sense" the world. Is this a kind of feeling? I mean, we could engineer something like a sympathetic nervous response for an AI. Would it be sentient then? I think I might be on the verge of asking a question that can't be answered.

So presumably if Alex had possessed more empathy he would have understood what "gavagai" meant? — Leontiskos

Yes. He'd need to live with the natives for a while to build empathy.

Then you either failed to read or understand the post. Why don't you explain how empathy solves the problem of reference? — Leontiskos

Suppose that understanding you requires that I put myself in your shoes. I must look at the world through your eyes. When I do that, the million things your speech could mean narrows down. Now I can test the waters to narrow it down even further. This would mean I understand you to the extent that our experiences are similar.

What we let go of in this scenario is that notion that words and sentences are little trollies carrying meaning as a payload. We're saying communication works because we're siblings with the same cultural birthright.