It seems that Bob paid for the statue rather than the clay, though. Did Bob pay for something that isn't physical?

That was fascinating. The answer was that Quine would say I have a unique connection to the world, but I also mind-meld with my community so that my language isn't private.

If I can mind-meld with my community, why can't I mind-meld with individual people? Or maybe it's that there is an innate primal language from which all languages emerge?

Food for thought. Thanks!

makes sense :up:

@Banno

Imagine someone saying something like this about numbers:

"What numbers never do is just hang out quantifying trees."

How would you respond to that?

Quine believed in semantic holism, right?

We want to say that this is "innocent" at the level of p, but does Frege's own understanding of what a proposition is, allow us to do so? — J

Right. That's the first thing that occurred to me about it. Frege's propositions must reflect context of utterance. I was thinking there might be some sort of phantom assertion to it, something generally understood as with the textbook. "One observes...". instead of "she observed.."

When was the force stroke supposed to be used?

Part of our unearned insouciance is this story we tell ourselves about how p can, of course, "stand on its own" in some obvious way. — J

Isn't it because the world is supposed to stand on it's own, and true propositions are states of the world?

If you read a textbook on anatomy, you aren't supposed to think of it as being asserted by someone in particular. It's like das Man, except with the textbook it's the scientific establishment.

Cool. Logo / psychism is basically stoicism.

It's easier to get forgiveness than it is to get permission. Especially if it's the Netherlands.

The idea of logic as normative crops up more in everyday speech, I would say. "You're not being logical!" is a normative reprimand; the idea is that a good arguer ought to use correct logic. More generally, we seem to believe that in most cases, logic represents a template or set of guidelines for good reasoning, and it's all too easy not to use them. We aren't forced to think logically, in the way that, say, we're forced to digest food using [whatever the heck we digest food with]. — J

I see what you're saying. I just don't think anyone other than a few stray mystics is ever truly illogical.
The person who is being admonished to be more logical is being asked to think it through again. Statements of logic, like the LONC, are indubitable. You don't really have any choice in that. If you speak in contradictions (outside of mysticism), you're spouting nonsense, right? You're asserting p's that can't be true. The fault is in failing to take note of what you're bound to think.

As for an ontological LONC, how would we establish that? To nudge Hume, even if it's been true up to now that contradictions don't happen, that doesn't mean it won't start happening tomorrow. The ontological LONC is really an expectation rooted in logic. Double slit experiments cause stress for decades. No one ever makes a credible case for dispensing with the LONC. We're stuck with it.

Am I missing the point here? 

Maybe form and formlessness are dependent on one another for meaning. It's one concept.

St. Gregory of Nyssa takes this up in "On the Making of Man." Apparently, a common argument at the time was to say that matter must be coeternal with God (a view based on the Timaeus) because God, as pure act, would lack the properties of matter (which must come from somewhere). But as St. Gregory points out, having removed all form, all whatness, from matter, one is left with nothing, no attributes at all—so there is nothing to "lack" in a "lack of potency." (This is also how Aristotle's Prime Mover(s) or Plotinus' One cannot be said to suffer from any privation through being pure act). — Count Timothy von Icarus

That's interesting. One of the books I read about Plotinus suggested that he was an eliminative idealist (like a reflection of an eliminative materialist). Though we talk about the privation of the good (or mind), it's not really an independent thing. It's also part of the One, though apparently the part where Plotinus explains this is squirrelly.

Now, if form is rather something created by/imposed by the mind, it almost seems to counterintuitively dislodge the phenomenological side of the understanding of eidos, since now the whatness of things is no longer essential to what they are but is rather something produced in one corner of the world, for some perceiving subject. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I suppose that goes well with panpsychism. I've leaned pretty far into the skepticism about metaphysics these days. Don't have much to say about it, but I could go on and on forever about the dramas that Form and Formlessness play out in the psyche. Cool stuff.

I've never thought of logic as normative. Have you? I've always thought of it as if the mind is a landscape that's just there, that we're inside. Logic is part of the boundaries of it. What do you think logic is?

I love most of Koons' stuff. But yea, investment is like accounting: it's a bizarre other world. S&P500 futures make about as much sense as a giant balloon dog.

Matter ‘comes to matter’ within intra-actively changing agential configurations. — Joshs

What now?

Both points are intended to cast a bit of doubt on the presumption that our propositions are always referentially determinate, and thus their truth conditions too, at the time of our choosing, — Srap Tasmaner

If you express a proposition you just need to be pointing to some state of affairs. Precision isn't really the issue.

Cosmology shows there are enormous amounts of formless matter scattered throughout the Universe. And that's only the matter that can be seen! — Wayfarer

But we imagine that if we had eyes small enough, we would see particles down there. It's not really formless, is it?

But you just did. — Banno

You misunderstood. I have never said that.

If you are incapable of entertaining a statement without deciding if it is true or if it is false — Banno

You keep saying this in spite of protests from both me and Leontiskos that no one has claimed this.

...given the right circumstances — Banno

Exactly. The only way I can make sense of Frege's idea of a proposition (a thought) that is disconnected from assertion is to imagine that we're looking at humans as if they're robots and we're examining the programming to see where the meaning is coming from. That's wild.

They are not the sort of sentences that ordinarily might be considered true or false. But "The cat is on the mat" is. — Banno

Sentences aren't usually considered to be truth-apt. There's a good SEP article that explains why.

What do you think "apt" means? — Banno

It means it can be either true or false.

"The cat is on the mat" can be given a truth value, and hence counts as a proposition. — Banno

How can it be truth-apt if we don't even know which cat it is?

Isn't it apt to be true, or perhaps false? Couldn't it be true, or perhaps false, in suitable circumstances? — Banno

Exactly. You need context to turn a sentence into a proposition.

The blob is still a form and generates content for Bob. — Nils Loc

Yep. There really isn't any such thing as the Formless. It's just that once you start talking about forms, you have to have something that received the form. It's more about the way we divide up the world. It's something built in to the way we think.

How could "the cat is on the mat" be truth-apt? We don't even know which cat it is.

The old war still rages, — Srap Tasmaner

Are you like, presently in a dungeon on trial for heresy?

Through the form. — MoK

:up:

In The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger critiques the idea that form and content can be treated separately, as though form were something imposed on a thing, or content were ‘beyond’ form and style. — Joshs

I first encountered Heidegger in a book about the philosophy of beauty. Some secondary source told me that Heidegger thought that we experience form and matter in a relationship of dynamic tension. We broadcast the form outward onto the world, and pull sensations in (as in listening more closely, squinting to see). That broadcasting versus drawing in (which is also yin and yang, btw), is what a thing is. Supposedly he said that the original greek word for subjectivity meant core, as in the unchanging idea of a thing, like the center of a solar system. Cool, huh?

I can only say that form is mind-dependent, and I agree with you. — javi2541997

So when you look out at the world, are we seeing mind-dependent forms all over the place?

Why is this a curious question for you? — I like sushi

This was in John Perry's book about personal identity, as I recall. It's about the relationship between form and matter (matter being defined as something formless.) It's just examining the way we think.

The idea that thought is inherently forceful can only become an insight if it is concretely shown how that idea is compatible with the fact that embedded thoughts and dependent acts of thinking must do without a force of their own. If thoughts as such are tied to some force or other, while embedded thoughts (e. g. p qua part of not-p) do not directly come along with a force of their own, it must be clarified how the indirect connection to force, which embedded thoughts must indeed come along with, is to be understood. That is, it must be clarified how dependent logical acts that have an embedded thought as their content, and the overarching logical act that does indeed bear a force of its own interlock with each other such as to provide for the unity of a propositionally complex thought." — Pierre-Normand

Couldn't it just be that the force of an embedded thought is a phantom context from which meaning can be drawn? It's not that we're imagining an actual assertion. It's that our worldview grew out of one in which the world is alive. There's some sort of divine narrator.

If I judge P true, and so do you, aren't we making something we'd want to call "the same judgment"? — Srap Tasmaner

If we make the same judgment, we agree on the same proposition. We aren't agreeing on a sentence or an utterance. Would you like to work through the argument that establishes that?

My premise lies rooted in the encounter between agent intellect (subjectivity) and intelligibility (objectivity). This encounter plays in real space as the form/substance interweave. — ucarr

This sounds like a ghost in the machine. Is that what you mean?

:grin:

Bob received a blob of clay. What he ordered but didn't receive was the work required to turn that clay into a statue as well as the artists skill and vision. — T Clark

So you're saying it's not the form Bob paid for, but labor costs?

I don't think the statue is really attached to the clay in terms of form and content. Although it is true that Bob went to a potter, a statue can be made of different material, such as marble or gold. — javi2541997

You're saying Bob paid for the form, not the clay. It sounds like you're saying we can separate the two. As you say, the same form can appear with different materials. But where is the form if it's separate? In a special realm? In people's minds?

That makes sense. I read this in the SEP article on Lotze (he lived from 1817 to 1881):

"The new model of the academic researcher demands the replacement of prominent personalities—i.e., romantic ‘geniuses’—by the new exemplar of the sober scientist."

Lotze navigated a transition from German idealism to a philosophy that focuses on values and analysis. Maybe we could say the whole western culture was shifting toward an emphasis on quiet objectivity rather than an emotional idealistic view. Frege was a part of that?

We live on the other side of the 20th Century, so we know what kind of terrain that shift was headed toward: eliminative materialism, functionalism, inscrutability of reference. Complaining about the view from nowhere seems to target something that's foundational for us: scientific objectivity.

I wonder if the impetus for separating content from assertoric force is related to the 'view from nowhere.'

It's language that's detached from any particular human. It's like the narrator of the novel we inhabit.

Sorry, wasn't trying to be dense. You mean the marbles are identified separately, but the colors, being universals, can merge?

What is wanted? — Srap Tasmaner

I don't it's a case of ambiguity. You just don't have enough information to know what's being asked. You'd have to go back and get the request clarified, right?

I agree. I think Frege would too.