Yes, I agree with this description!

If we had no basic intuitions, then each rule would require further rules setting out how it is to be followed—infinite regress follows. — Janus

Yes, we can say the same for all word meaning, I mean!

This is a general point about meaning and classification so it doesn't really matter where plus-ing came from.

What I’m referring to is the distinction between physical causation and logical necessity, so there’s not much point addressing that issue if you don’t understand it. — Wayfarer

Are you implying that a brain cannot invent or learn to use logic?

…using reason to try to ascertain a reasonable position. — Wayfarer

Surely a position doesn't have to be true to considered a reasonable inference given available information?

Plantinga's argument contends that if our cognitive faculties are the result of evolutionary processes driven purely by survival, then there is no reason to accept that that they produce true beliefs, only that they produce beliefs that are advantageous for survival — Wayfarer

I think perhaps one point is that an organism that survives is an organism that is navigating an actual structure to the world, it must act sensitively to that structure and anticipate that structure in order to make sure it's paths keep within the kinds of bounds for it to survive. Surely, fitness payoffs will have objective places within that objective structure, with objective paths between any part of the world and some payoff or reward. Seems to me that even if there may be no kind of access to a single perspective-independent view of the world, an organism benefiting from fitness payoffs will need perceptual faculties that are synchronized to and can differentiate the actual structure of the world.

There maybe gulfs in terms of sophistication and access to structural information when you compare a whelk to a human to something with access to information about even more detailed, perhaps even microscopic, information; but this doesn't seem so radical to most people. Maybe there is a kind of compromise here; fitness payoffs probably are related to the actual structure of the world, but I question whether it even makes sense to say there is only one "veridical" way for an organism to be perceptually coupled to the environment. The questions is then whether there is a fact of the matter about the veridicality of different kinds of perceptuo-motor couplings that are equally effective? At the same time, even though our perceptual systems may be strongly limited, clearly science and technology has allowed us to probe much hidden structure we are not usually privy to.

What do you think 'natural causation' comprises, and how might it be related to reason? It's actually quite a deep question, explored in part in this earlier thread. The gist is that causation of the kind that characterises physical and chemical reactions, is of a different order to logical necessity, which is the relationship between ideas. — Wayfarer

I don't really know what you mean by different order but seems to me from neuroscience and machine learning that any kind of intelligence can be scaled up from very simple prediction algorithms. For instance, it is proven I believe that recurrent artificial neural networks (and no doubt biological neurons) are Turing complete. They can compute anything. Sure, there may not be great pressure for many organisms like bacteria or whelk to be great reasoners but once you have the first step of neurons which can learn then you have the fundamental basic ingredient that allows for reasoning. In any case, I am not entirely sure what we mean when we say that our reasoning is reliable. Is it actually reliable? Problem of induction might say no. Sure, deduction doesn't rely on that but maybe the assumptions used in deduction do. How reliable would a person's reasoning be if they had never had access to learning things as a basis for reasoning? I don't know if there is anything inherently reliable about reasoning. Not because brains aren't good at what they do but because problems like induction transcend that. Maybe it depends on semantics of reliable - pretty vague word.

If natural causation didn't come up with our reasoning abilities then who ever did did a pretty bad job considering all the people who's reasoning erroneously led them to naturalism.

Doesn't seem incompatible with anything I said

The only form of justification that can be used legitimately involves determining assertability conditions in the public realm . — Joshs

I wouldn't say its a justification as opposed to an explanation for how people use words without being paralyzed by indeterminacy.

There is no fact of the matter that can determine whether the meaning for me of a rule like the plus sign is the same as I apply it now as when I applied it last year — Joshs

I would only add that I think this kripkean idea applies as much to your own meaning as anyone elses. But this is no impediment to your use of these words or behave correctly.

Kripke doesn’t deny that we form meanings of words that bring with them determinate (by determinate I mean that they are unchanging in their sense for as long as they are in effect) instructions , rules and criteria on how to apply them. — Joshs

I am not sure I agree because there can be indeterminacy when you define a rule. There may be indeterminacy about whether your past behavior is consistent with 'plus' or 'quus'; and if this is the case, then surely the fact you are using the word 'plus' or refer to 'plus' cannot rule out that you actually mean 'quus' when you were saying 'plus'. I agree though that also it is implied there is no fact of matter whether you would be using same rule now as before or future.

Kripke thinks of a word meaning as an interpretation, a picture that determines how it is used, and we swap out pictures all the time. — Joshs

Disagree. He is suggesting there is never a picture for determining anything because, it is always underdetermined. We act blindly according to Kripke(nstein); community members hence also agree and disagree blindly, but it is within a community of people agreeing and disagreeing, that some people are viewed as wrong and others right about things (by the community). For a person on their own, anything may go without backlash, as they assert and do what just seems right to them. Agreement and disagreement about use then help build language-games within a community.

we cannot appeal to social regularities or collectively presupposed norms within a practice

Any regularities in what practitioners have previously done does not thereby have any authority to bind subsequent performances to the same regularities.

I think Kripke would actually agree with this given his arguments against dispositionalism.

“It is felt to be a difficulty that a rule should be given in signs which do not themselves contain their use [that is, which are not meaning-objects], so that a gap exists between a rule and its application. But this is not a problem but a mental cramp

To me, this is just what Kripke's sceptical solution is describing.

So from your post, I don't agree with your and I guess some of the cited writer's characterizations of Kripkenstein. Kripkenstein's views don't seem necessarily incompatible with much of the other stuff that has been said imo.

CTM involves mental representations which would determine the connection between a rule and an act, and would prescribe how to act directly from the determinate rule representation. This kind of view is rejected. The point is not to define what a rule is, but that we can act coherently while there is inherent indeterminacy in characterizing what kind of rule is being acted in accordance to.

models do not learn simple, human-interpretable rules or representations of the world; rather, they use local computations to interpolate over task-relevant manifolds in a high-dimensional parameter space. — Apustimelogist

This would be how a brain learns to do a tasks or acts or behaviors like addition.

Imo, actually categorizing some behavior as addition or being aware of it, having knowledge about it... or whatever... would itself be nothing more than acts or behaviors (e.g. saying "I am adding", pointing out a mistake someone has made when adding).

We then make choices about these categorization acts or distinctions or knowledge acts despite inherent underdetermination. And we continue to use these categorizations until we perceive they are no longer fit for purpose, like a scientist (perhaps an instrumentalist scientist specifically) might continue to use theories until a better one comes along - criteria for better just being how well it works, how adequate it is at accounting for observations, agnostic to any notion of realism for these theories (Edit: maybe this last analogy needs some work I think; it was inspired by the Kripke Humean analogy I quoted here:

Note again the analogy with the Humean case. — Apustimelogist

).

The quote from above (about models not learning human-interpretable rules) imo also applies to the categorization act behaviors:

models do not learn simple, human-interpretable rules or representations of [categorizations]; rather, they use local computations to interpolate over [categorization]-relevant manifolds in a high-dimensional parameter space. — Apustimelogist

And again, the categorization itself is just a behavior or act, like saying "I am adding"; not necessarily assuming that there is any representational content to this phrase. It is just a phrase - phonemes, letters. They don't have any inherent significance in terms of some symbolic representation with semantics attached. Their significance is that if you plug these inputs back into some neural machine, the neural machine [whether your own or another person] will be able to return appropriate acts (to be extremely simplistic about all it). (I feel like the PI sections on reading particularly are good examples for the kind of thing - reading in terms of surface perceptions and acts and nothing more).

Alot of this is being filtered through through additional neuroscientific ideas that obviously were not around at the time, but that's how I flesh out these ideas to give them more tangibility. I still feel like they reflect the same kind of anti-essentialist leanings in PI.

This sounds a little reductionist. Sure, I am all for this kind of predictive/enactive/semiotic understanding of the neurobiology involved. The brain and nervous system are the basis of the modelling relation we call "consciousness". But then on top of neuro-semiosis is stacked socio-semiosis – humans learning how to think and behave at the level of "parts of a larger sociocultural organism".

Socio-semiosis shares all the same general processing principles. The same Darwinian and thermodynamic logic. Yet it is still a further level of "embodied intelligence". — apokrisis

I don't see what any of this has to do with what was in my quote. I'm talking about people experiencing and justifying beliefs about their own behaviors, not social dynamics. I don't think two areas do not share competing explanations.. from what I can tell.

I would put it the other way around. The requirement for becoming the higher level thing of a social organism is to have a culture that can shape all its individuals into precisely the kind of self-regulating and socially-cooperating agents that would allow such a social organism to exist. — apokrisis

I was alluding to Wittgenstein's arguments about the impossibility of private language argument as connected to why Wittge-kripke-nstein evokes social agreement regarding rule-following paradoxes. I just used the word 'sociality', perhaps rather idiosyncratically, to refer to that social agreement thing. I wasn't really making any general statements about social behavior in the way you are talking about now. But sure, culture is central to social behavior like you said.

So that's a critical difference. — apokrisis

Difference between what?

Never rated Hoffman. I remember thinking when I read one of the original "fitness beats truth" papers that the model he made was too rudimentary to really support his conclusions. Overextends albeit things felt in reasonable territory still.

However, saw Phillip Goff's and Keith Frankish's Mindchat episode with him and was just basically spewing unintelligible garbage.

Where is the social component in the operation of this prediction machine? — Joshs

It's a special case. Changes in brain parameters (e.g. changes in membrane ion channels, synaptic receptor growth / recession, plasticity generally) occur due to external input changing the cascades of firing reverberating through the brain. Social inputs are just a special case of that input. My description you were replying cggo can be contextualized from my earlier comment that the brain is a deeper explanation than sociality. You can view sociality as a mechanism of how language works but it doesn't actually explain why we agree, why we come up with new words, how thinking and underlying processes work that are ultimately responsible for how we can use language. So sociality is a more superficial explanation than brains imo and probably does not cover many cases of relevant learning.

To put the question in enactivist terms, does it make sense to analyze behavior in terms of subpersonal mechanisms solipsistically ensconced within a brain? This is the critique often leveled against active inference predictive processing approaches. In recent years P.P. models have moved closer to fully embodied 4EA approaches in recognizing the inseparable reciprocity of interaction between brain, body and environment. — Joshs

No, it doesn't make sense to analyze this way since neuronal behavior will appear meaningless to a scientist without knowing things about the world outside an organisms brain and what an organism does, how it lives.

But when we talk about the question of 'how a brain does what it does?', then it is just a fact that the only thing a brain has access to is its external inputs. A brain does what it does and achieves all of these incredible things without access to the outside world.

Personally, I think active inference and predictive processing can only make complete sense in an enactive characterization so I am with you there: (e.g. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1059712319862774)

What’s missing here is the crucial normative character of perception and cognition. Perception is not not a one-way fitting process between organism and world in which the organism must adapt its perception to the facts of an environment external to its functioning. It is instead a reciprocal process where the nature of the ‘external ‘facts’ confronting the organism arrive already pre-interpreted in accordance with the organism’s normative purposes and goals. — Joshs

I disagree about pre-interpreted (Darwinian natural selection is blind) but I know what you mean. I think the article I linked earlier is very amenable to this kind of stuff and mentions both evolution and ecological psychology:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089662731931044X

It makes explicit parallels between the blind-fitting of neural processes and the blind-fitting of natural selection. Therefore, while genes will lead to constraints on our biological phenotypes and how the brain works, there is no reason to think such constraints should be viewed teleologically or "pre-interpreted" or normatively except for as a kind of useful fiction when talking about evolution. The evolutionary blind-fitting has as little interpretable "comprehension" to the problems it is solving as the brain has access to what is going on past its sensory boundaries.

Some quotes from paper:

"Our affordances are constrained by our bodies and brains, and there is an intimate relationship between how our bodies and neural networks are wired and what we can learn."

"Direct fit, as an algorithmic procedure to minimize an objective function, allows neural networks to learn the transformation between external input to meaningful actions, without the need to explicitly represent underlying rules and principles in a human-interpretable way.

A major task taken up by the school of ecological psychology was to characterize each animal’s objective functions, conceptualized as affordances, based on the information the animal needs to behave adaptively and survive in the world (Gibson, 1979, Michaels and Carello, 1981). For cats, a chair may afford an intermediate surface for jumping onto the kitchen counter, whereas for humans, it may afford a surface on which to sit while eating. Like in evolution, there is no one correct way to fit the world, and different direct-fit networks, guided by different objective functions, can be used in the same ecological niche to improve fit to different aspects of the environment. Furthermore, as argued by the school of ecological psychology, information is defined as the affordances that emerge in interactions between the organism and its ecological niche. As opposed to strongly representational approaches common in computational neuroscience, the direct-fit approach learns arbitrary functions for facilitating behavior and is capable of mapping sensory input to motor actions without ever explicitly reconstructing the world or learning explicit rules about the latent structure of the outside world. Marr (1982), for example, speaks favorably of Gibson’s theory of vision but, unsatisfied with the theory’s vague treatment of information processing, instead suggests that the goal of vision is to recover a geometrical representation of the world. In contrast to the representational stance, the direct-fit framework is aligned with Gibson’s treatment of the goal of vision: to recover information in the world that affords the organism its adaptive behaviors.

Gibson believed that animals are entangled with their environment in a closed perception-action feedback loop: they perceive to act and act to perceive. Furthermore, actions and affordances are shaped and constrained by the structure of the environment and the organism’s physiology. Similarly, from the direct-fit perspective, neural networks implicitly learn the structure of the environment as a means to an end, but this learning is ultimately driven by internal objectives aligning perception to action with an eye toward adaptive fitness (see Box 3)."

So, yes for sure; for an indepth understanding of how an organism works, you will always want to look at what the brain is doing in the context of its environment and its evolved phenotypes. But when talking about how the brain actually achieves what it does, the brain is essentially insulated. The constraints from an organism's evolutionary history and body are filtered through the sensory inputs it receives (e.g. from its own body, partly in reaction to motor signals it sends out), and the actual internal structure of the brain.

Put differently, Kripke comes up with rules describing the behavior of an autonomous subject which are not indeterminate, and then attempts to use them to explain the indeterminate use of rules in social situations. — Joshs

I think this is ass-backward. He starts with indeterminacy of rules and then uses sociality to explain why we seem to pick out specific concepts for our experiences when they are in principle indeterminable. I find Kripke's interpretation of Wittgenstein very agreeable; it makes sense to me and I have never been tempted to look at Wittgenstein in a way incompatible with the Kripkean view of rules.

Quote from Kripkenstein:

We cannot say that we all respond as we do to '68+ 57' because we all grasp the concept of addition in the same way, that we share common responses to particular addition problems because we share a common concept of addition. (Frege, for example, would have endorsed such an explanation, but one hardly needs to be a philosopher to find it obvious and natural.) For Wittgenstein, an 'explanation' of this kind ignores his treatment of the sceptical paradox and its solution. There is no objective fact - that we all mean addition by '+', or even that a given individual does - that explains our agreement in particular cases. Rather our license to say of each other that we mean addition by '+' is part of a 'language game' that sustains itself only because of the brute fact that we generally agree. (Nothing about 'grasping concepts' guarantees that it will not break down tomorrow.) The rough uniformities in our arithmetical behavior may or may not some day be given an explanation on the neurophysiological level, but such an explanation is not here in question. 77

Note again the analogy with the Humean case. Naively, we may wish to explain the observed concomitance of fire and heat by a causal, heat-producing, 'power' in the fire. The Humean alleges that any such use of causal powers to explain the regularity is meaningless. Rather we play a language game that allows us to attribute such a causal power to the fire as long as the regularity holds up. The regularity must be taken as a brute fact. So too for Wittgenstein.

This leaves us in the thrall of a Cartesian skepticism, a gap between the subject and a social world outside of the subject (parallel to neural models positing an internal prediction machine adapting itself to an impervious external world). — Joshs

I think I see this point but I don't see it as a problem. It is not just parallel to a brain processing information from the external world but a special case. We have no access to what is going on in other things and people apart from externally observable regularities - what suffices for our intelligible models and concepts then is empirical adequacy:

How does agreement emerge in the case of a term for a sensation, say 'pain'? It is not as simple as the case of 'table'. When will adults attribute to a child mastery ofthe avowal "I
am in pain"?80 The child, if he learns the avowal correctly, will utter it when he feels pain and not otherwise. By analogy with the case of 'table', it would appear that the adult should endorse this utterance if he, the adult, feels (his own? the child's?) pain. Of course we know that this is not the case. Rather the adult will endorse the child's avowal if the child's behavior (crying, agitated motion, etc.) and, perhaps, the external circumstances surrounding the child, indicate that he is in pain. If a child generally avows pain under such appropriate behavioral and external circumstances and generally does not do so otherwise, the adult will say of him that he has mastered the avowal, "I am in pain."

Since, in the case of discourse on pain and other sensations, the adult's confirmation whether he agrees with the child's avowal is based on the adult's observation of the child's behavior and circumstances, the fact that such behavior and circumstances characteristic of pain exist is essential in this case to the working of Wittgenstein's sceptical solution. This, then, is what is meant by the remark, "An 'inner process'
stands in need of outward criteria." Roughly speaking, outward criteria for an inner process are circumstances, observable in the behavior of an individual, which, when present, would lead others to agree with his avowals. If the individual generally makes his avowals under the right such circumstances, others will say of him that he has mastered the appropriate expression ("I am in pain," "I feel itchy," etc.).

I feel like the emphasis on sociality comes from the feeling that language for insular, private individuals is redundant and unnecessary; and so regardless of the possibility alluded earlier that "The rough uniformities in our arithmetical behavior may or may not some day be given an explanation on the neurophysiological level", sociality is deemed by Wittge/Kripke-nstein as integral to the heavy lifting of constraining word use (including that describes the applications of rules) because word use wouldn't even arise for an insular, private individual.

Originally an edit to my post

blindly — Apustimelogist

that was replying to . But became too long I thought just make new self-contained post.

-

By blindly, I mean that if rules are underdetermined then there is clearly no observable foundation for the way we act; we just act confidently with intuition. There are no floating internal symbolic representations of rules that prescribe our acts perfectly, there is only a flow of unfolding acts over time within one's experience; we infer rules from this flow after the fact (not infallibly) and all there is to the demonstration of understanding rules is more acts embedded in the aforementioned flow (e.g. stating a definition is an act; expressing disagreement is an act). Understanding a rule does not require a symbolic representation of a rule.

If you trawl through all the ways of trying to determinatrly characterize an act as a case of a rule, we end up with no foundation other than "it just feels that way, strongly; this is the use of plus" even if it is actually difficult to define what 'plus' even means without circularity and more indeterminacy.

But we can continue to use concepts like plus ... invoking the word so long as the concept ... to borrow a phrase, is empirically adequate ... but again, there is a sense in which what is "empirically adequate" is just what seems to be the case -

If it is the case that: "it just feels that way, strongly; this is the use of plus", then surely it is also the case that "it just feels that way, strongly; this is empirically adequate".

I like this paper for articulating the blind nature of cognition:

Direct Fit to Nature: An Evolutionary Perspective on Biological and Artificial Neural Networks

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089662731931044X

Summary / Abstract
Evolution is a blind fitting process by which organisms become adapted to their environment. Does the brain use similar brute-force fitting processes to learn how to perceive and act upon the world? Recent advances in artificial neural networks have exposed the power of optimizing millions of synaptic weights over millions of observations to operate robustly in real-world contexts. These models do not learn simple, human-interpretable rules or representations of the world; rather, they use local computations to interpolate over task-relevant manifolds in a high-dimensional parameter space. Counterintuitively, similar to evolutionary processes, over-parameterized models can be simple and parsimonious, as they provide a versatile, robust solution for learning a diverse set of functions. This new family of direct-fit models present a radical challenge to many of the theoretical assumptions in psychology and neuroscience. At the same time, this shift in perspective establishes unexpected links with developmental and ecological psychology.

"On a moment-to-moment basis, the brain is assimilating dynamic, multidimensional information about the world in order to produce rich, context-dependent behaviors. Confronted with such complexity, experimental neuroscientists traditionally design controlled experiments to reduce the dimensionality of the problem to a few factors conceived by the experimenter (Fisher, 1935). This reductionist program relies on a core commitment to the assumption that the neural computations supporting many of our cognitive functions can be decontextualized and decomposed into a handful of latent features, that these features are human interpretable and can be manipulated in isolation, and that the piecemeal recomposition of these features will yield a satisfying understanding of brain and behavior.

In parallel to the research in neuroscience and psychology laboratories, artificial neural networks (ANNs; see Box 1) are attaining human-level behavioral performance across many tasks ... This research program effectively abandoned traditional experimental design and simple interpretable models ... Such models learn how to recognize faces or respond to natural-language inquiries directly from the structure of the real world by optimizing millions of parameters (“big” models) over millions of examples (“big” data;
LeCun et al., 2015)."

"Although the human mind inspires us to touch the stars, it is grounded in the mindless billions of direct-fit parameters of System 1. Therefore, direct-fit interpolation is not the end goal but rather the starting point for understanding the architecture of higher-order cognition. There is no other substrate from which System 2 could arise. Many of the processes in System 1 are shared with other animals (as in perceptual systems), and some are unique to humans (as in grammar learning), but all are executed in an automatic, fast, and often unconscious way. The brute-force direct-fit interpolation that guides learning in these systems, similar to evolution, can go further than we previously thought in explaining many cognitive functions in humans (e.g., learning syntax in natural text without imposing rule-based reasoning; see Box 2)."

"It can be tempting to impose our own intuitive or folk-psychological interpretations onto the fitted model, but this is misguided. If a generic network learns such a rule, this rule is likely inherent in the training set and is thus not so much a meaningful property of the network as it is a property of the data (see Figure 2). These interpretable rules arise incidentally, as an emergent byproduct of the fitting procedure. The incidental emergence of such rules is not a “goal” of the network, and the network does not “use” the rules to extrapolate. This mindset, in fact, resembles pre-Darwinian teleological thinking and “just-so stories” in biology [as opposed to blind Darwinian natural selection] (Gould and Lewontin, 1979, Mayr, 1992). Evolution provides perhaps the most ubiquitous and well-known example of a biological fitting process that learns to act in the world while being blind to the underlying structure of the problems and their optimal solutions."

I might say that our direct aquaintance with our own intelligence is accompanied by an ineffability because it is automatic, unconscious, "brute-fitting".

Which is why Kripke confessess this undeniable pull and intuition and confidence at his following of a rule despite his inability to justify it. We are directly aquainted with our ability to act coherently and this ability transcends determinate, human-interpretable foundations precisely because our brain doesn't require them to do what it does.

Edit: The phrase "directly aquainted" I used here may be a bit too strong but just trying to convey that it is some strong aquaintance that just comes from a direct feeling rather than looking at some other justification. This is not to say that it is necessarily infallible even if it is a product of an extremely sophisticated machine.

Without further elaboration/clarification, I am not sure what I see written here is much different from Kripke's sceptical solution. Rules are indeterminate but we act coherently anyway blindly.

Isn’t the naturalized, empirical concept of brain an attempt to rescue a picture theory of meaning by recourse to a causal physiology as a ground for the seeming ungrounded indeterminacy of symbolic interaction? — Joshs

I don't really understand what's been asked here. The brain can provide an explanation for blind intelligible behavior without symbolic interpretation. The brain as a prediction machine that can correct or update the parameters (from "error") responsible for its behavior, and underlies our ability to act coherently.

But it is appropriate for the linguist, philosopher of language, or semiotican? Don't grunts and screams share a family resemblance with speech? The issue is that you still need the "right sort of family resemblance," since all things resemble each other in at least some ways. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Its appropriate where the description fits; you have agreed with the concept yourself when you said "There is no "One True Feature," to point to for defining life". Speech, grunts whatever may also be another example. If it is a valid concept then it is a valid concept.

The salience of the concept is that Wittgenstein was using it specifically as counter to philosophical positions that are directly the opposite to it, trying to create rigorous theories of meaning. That is where the significance of this concept is intended, not for creating linguistic or biological theories. It is not intended for linguists and biologists to say "life is a family resemblance and that's it, that's my theory of language"; nevertheless, does that stop someone saying that the concept of life is an example of family resemblances? Ofcourse not.

If someone's behavior is expanded to include their thoughts, experiencing, etc — Count Timothy von Icarus

I am not expanding behavior to include everything. Behavior is a special case of acts we do.

isn't saying much of anything. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I would say the intention is to dissociate the idea of categorizing actions, based on some rule which is inherently indeterminate, from the actions themselves. We act regardless of the indeterminacy. I would also say such a view is in direct contrast to views where thinking is something more than sequences of our surface experiences, e.g. computational theories of mind, "language of thought hypothesis" and views that there is some intelligible, determinate semantic representations / symbols / modules underpinning those sequences.

Ok, but wouldn't this hold for all activities, not just social ones. And wouldn't this be true or animals as well? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes.

I do think Wittgenstein brings in social interaction to fix the underdetermination problem. That part seems fairly straightforward. I think I might disagree that it actually addressed the problem though. The argument from underdetermination is too strong, it proves too much. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It demonstrably doesn't fix the problem because the indeterminacy is being described in terms of words we have learned socially. If social interactions fixed the problem then surely there would be no longer any indeterminacy for Wittgenstein to write about.

For me, the idea is that symbols cannot do work by themselves because of chronic indeterminacy so you cannot have a theory of meaning that pulls itself up on its own bootstraps. You need some additional "causal" mechanisms to explain why we can act appropriately in terms of the words that we use without the presence of apriori determined boundaries or taxonomies.

Sociality then becomes this invoked as this "causal" mechanism. Obviously though this is not much of an explanation by itself and I think probably much too restrictive. The deeper answer IMO is brains, which cannot be inherently be interpreted representationally (human-interpretably symbolic to be more specific [since the word representation can be plausibly used in an extremely vague sense]), interacting with the environment, and sometimes other brains.

It would be vacuous for a biologist to say "all life shares a family resemblance," and to stop there. Whatever "all life," is it must surely have some sort of resemblance to be deemed "all life" in the first place. What biologists do in reality is posit a constellation of features that make up this "family resemblance," e.g. having a metabolism, undergoing selection, etc. If one stops at the metaphor and introduces nothing else one hasn't said anything. All of being can be said to resemble all that is in some way or another. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I feel like this response is suspect to the same criticism I have already brought up:

I suspect you conflate Wittgenstein's philosophical arguments and rhetoric against the logical positivism at the time for a full-blown scientific theory of language which it clearly is not. — Apustimelogist

I feel like you are attributing more to this concept than required and criticizing it for things not intended. — Apustimelogist

Family resemblance isn't intended as a basis for biological theorizing. The notion of family resemblances is not intended to do any intellectual work for a biologist.

I would say no, understanding has a phenomenological element. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Not sure I would say that a lack of phenomenology is the reason why people say that chat-gp or a LLM does not have true understanding. Conversely i'm sure phenomenology can be devoid of understanding.

Neither was I ignoring phenomenology; in fact, I was always implying it. When I am thinking about my understanding, I am typically thinking about it through the lense of my own experiences when I understand something. I am thinking about understamding in terms of sequences of experiences which include my own behaviors and thoughts.

The "oh, now I get it, moment" you mention is definitely included as part of enacting or demonstrating understanding, and I have many times had that kind of thing in mind when thinking about it.

As a previous poster already pointed out, all empirical science is undetermined. The problem of underdetermination is about as broad as the Problem of Induction or the Scandal of Deduction. It would seem to make most knowledge impossible if one demands "absolute certainty." That's why I never found the arguments about rule following from underdetermination particularly convincing. You could make the same sort of argument about Newton's Laws, quantum mechanics—essentially all empirical claims, or about all induction. That the future is like the past is "undetermined," as is memory being reliable. Thus, the issue of under determination is as much a factor for any sort of social rule following as it is for some person designing their own board game and play testing it by themselves; democratization doesn't eliminate the issue. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The idea is not to resolve indeterminacy. The idea is that we enact appropriate behaviors even when a characterization of them is simultaneously indeterminate in principle. Social interaction doesn't make rules less indeterminate. We learn how to act appropriately by interacting with our environment, including the appropriate use of words when we interact socially, para-socially or whatever.

But I don't think this warrants nescience vis-á-vis phenomena like "understanding a rule," that we are well acquainted with either. The demand for "absolute certainty" is the result of a good deal of ridiculousness in philosophy — Count Timothy von Icarus

Not sure what you are saying here.

The "elements" of Shannon information are typically limited to 1s & 0s — Gnomon

I'm just saying any number of elements are valid since its the logarithmic base and you can choose any base you want without affecting the properties of bits(or trits or nats).

There is no "One True Feature," to point to for defining life, but we generally don't have much disagreement over whether prions or self-replicating silicon crystals are alive. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, this is pretty much the point of family resemblances so I just don't really understand what you are criticizing about it when you agree with it. I feel like you are attributing more to this concept than required and criticizing it for things not intended.

Right, learning the rules is a prerequisite to playing the game. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But what is learning the rule? When they learn people are making observations, whether of behavior or via something like reading, and then subsequently there is the acting out of behavior and cognition. Thats all there is to it.

understanding — Count Timothy von Icarus

And what is understanding over and above the ability to enact or demonstrate understanding? I don't see problems here. You can say that you know that someone understands how a game works without having them doing anything at that moment. But what does that actually mean other than that you know that they will be able to enact an understanding when required to do so? Enacting may be playing the actual game correctly. Enacting may be verbally describing the rules. Enacting may be the ability to attend to an ongoing game in sequence and anticipate what will happen or be surprised when something unexpected happens. There are many ways one can enact an understanding but to me that seems to be nothing above how we behave and think in real time.

Attributing rules to the behavior is chronically underdetermined / indeterminate on some level, and this issue regresses chronically. You can observe some behavior whose description by a rule is completely indeterminate; nonetheless, a person attributes a rule anyway. But then the attribution of the rule itself corresponds to bundles of behaviors / thoughts / words which themselves can be described indeterminately... and the regression goes on. Social interaction imo doesn't necessarily validate, as such, that we indeed are following the these rules we attribute to ourselves; but it does constrain or regulate our behavior through things like agreement, disagreement, instruction, etc. Since rule attribution corresponds to behavior, then social interaction obviously also constrains or regulates our rule attributions.

(But it is not the only thing - we can obviously learn many things without social interaction, though we are still interacting with a world and trying to learn the behaviors that elicit the kind of perception / experiences / outcomes / events we want to see in the external world or even just our own internal thoughts when we are working through a problem in our own heads.)

Rule attributions never truly escape the indeterminacy and regresses, but nonetheless we learn to act anyway in appropriate ways depending on the context. For example we learn to act appropriately in regard to the context of a particular game, or some routine, or in the context of particular instructions, agreements and disagreements, etc. It doesn't matter if the rules are always in principle indeterminate, because we learn to act appropriately anyway in ways that avoid outcomes / events / experiences / perceptions we do not want to see.

I guess, from my personal perspective, the crux is that determinate rules from unshakeable foundations are not required for rule-following behavior - it does not matter if the determinacy of the word "gavagai" can always be questioned by the radical skeptic. What matters is that the word can be evoked appropriately in response or anticipation to particular events in the world. What is deemed appropriate depends on what kind of events we want to see, and attaining what we want to see will usually depend on our behavior and thought being sensitive to the actual structures of the world as accessible through our perceptions (e.g. view from anywhere to some extent). Insofar that a word like gavagai is usually used in a social context, what is appropriate for the word use then also depends on how other people use that word, and whether they agree with your use.

:up: :up: :clap: Pretty nice description, I thought.

they are composed of two elements — Gnomon

You can use as many "elements" as you want!

I have no idea why you thought I was referring to the vague concept of "family resemblance" in the first place and not PI65's far more provocative claim that there is no way to define what is common to all languages. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That passage is clearly talking about family resemblances imo.

What I was objecting to is the idea that such vagueness has to be how we speak of language because it isn't possible to do better. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But surely "doing better" is just specifying the multifarious different ways language is used, which would only further validate rather than invalidate the idea.

My comments were specifically in the context of that section being supplied in defense of the cognitive relativism thesis — Count Timothy von Icarus

Fair enough. I don't view Wittgenstein in terms of relativism.

Hence the reference to information theory. It turns out there do seems to be things all physical systems of communication must share if they are to communicate at all. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think think bringing information theory or any other framework into it only emphasizes the validity of family resemblances. Information theory is highly idealized and isn't specifically about language. Neither does information theory by itself does not deal with all the things language can do. It can only describe aspects of what characterizes language and I am sure in many areas of the study of language it is useless. Its more a tool someone can use for study rather than a way of defining what languages are.

I think Wittgenstein's initial disappointment may have swung him a bit too far over towards seeing difficulties vis-á-vis language as insoluble — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't see the issue this way, similar to how the difficulties of defining life has nothing to do with the difficulties in studying the details of what living things do. They are not really related.

For example, the biological definition of life lists certain characteristics which are important to consider, without committing all of them being instantiated in any particular case. Or again, lists of symptoms in medicine are not always offered on the basis that all of them will be instantiated in every case. — Ludwig V

Very good point.

"Family resemblances" is not an "idea" or "theory" that can be proved wrong. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I mean, it would be shown wrong if all concepts had precise, singular definitions that strictly characterized all their exemplars in the same way.

And I'm sure many concepts actually do have sufficiently precise definitions, maybe most saliently in scientific contexts. So I am not sure I would conflate "triviality" with generality.

I think you are confusing some type of pathological vagueness that exists in a theory with what is simply a statement about how we use language in vague and fuzzy ways.

My point is that given advances in the study of language it is certainly now too trivial to warrant much attention. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't really understand what you mean here by warrant attention. You either agree with the claim or you don't. People can do advanced, even rigorous, linguistics study about the structure of language and still agree with the notion of family resemblance. So unless you are suggesting that modern linguistic contradicts it, I don't understand the consequence of what you are saying. It's like saying that someone who studied the mating behavior of a certain kind of insect is not interested in questions about the definition of life - so what? People interested in specialist linguistic fields are not necessarily going to be interested in a more general concept from the philosophy of language. I suspect you conflate Wittgenstein's philosophical arguments and rhetoric against the logical positivism at the time for a full-blown scientific theory of language which it clearly is not.

We might make a similar move in getting rid of the concept of "game" and moving to the broader concept of "system," (which seems to be far more common in linguistics). — Count Timothy von Icarus

I mean, system is just as vague as "game". When you try to characterize concepts like "systems" or maybe something like "information" and then do a survey of all the kinds of concepts of something like "information" in various fields / perspectives / contexts and how they differ but may also have commonalities which do not have a single, rigorous definition - well then family resemblances speak for themselves.

Re PI 65, I think this has simply been proven wrong by advances in linguistics and information theory. We can identify similarities. I find it hard to even imagine Wittgenstein wanting to argue this point in the modern context given his respect for the sciences. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What have these advances found to contradict the idea of family resemblance?

I meant demonstration of your claims about is/ought. I am not sure what you mean to convey from that teleology link as it's conclusions seem weak and non-committal to me. Points it mentions about equivalences of least action to dynamical laws seem notable in this respect.

I generally don't like the idea of teleology in terms of purpose. I will comment on how they define in the article:

"Teleology involves the invocation of final causes, or ends, in the explanation of some
target explanandum."

I am not sure what "final cause or ends" here means but I am not directly opposed to explanations that in some sense zoom out or appeal to higher order or more global or more abstract patterns and regularities or to longer time-scales, etc, etc, etc. However, I am inclined to think that these explanations are emergent from blind, dynamical behavior at the local level and zooming out as opposed to something else (i.e. more top-down, however you would want to think of that).

That said, I don't see how talking about patterns of phenomena with more abstract, global descriptions implies anything about oughts. The fact that a system tends to behave in a certain way doesn't imply that the system ought to behave in a certain way.

You mean experimentally? - https://www.nature.com/articles/nphys3343 — apokrisis

I have no issue with delayed-choice or any other kind of entanglement scheme. I advocate an interpretation of quantum mechanics which has formulations fully capable of producing these behaviors. What makes delayed-choice paradigms seem metaphysically strange or problematic is the collapse postulate; but in a stochastic interpretation, particles (the hidden variables) are already in definite states and there is no physical collapse. No physical collapse? No problem.

We must remember that collapse was added to quantum mechanics in a completely ad hoc fashion because physicists wanted definite measurement outcomes in the theory; but it was never a necessary part of the development of an empirically adequate quantum theory.

From the stochastic perspective, this ad hoc addition happened because physicists conflated the quantum state with a physical object when it is should be seen as a piece of machinery that is really talking about probabilistic behavior and nothing more. The Schrodinger equation evolves the quantum state like a diffusion equation evolves a probability density function for some Brownian particle's diffusion behavior, the kind of probability distribution that can be realized empirically by repeating an experiment ad infinitum. Anyone can see that a diffusion equation and probability density function is not in conflict with Brownian particles occupying definite positions.

For me, as I've said, the real question is whether there is something to the claim that people become separated from their bodies and whether they're having a third-person experience. The evidence, as my argument concludes, is that there is enough consistency and corroboration of the reports to conclude reasonably that consciousness is not dependent on the brain. There can be significant damage to the brain (e.g. Dr. Eban Alexander's brain damage is significant) and still, people give very lucid descriptions of what's happening around their body and what's happening many miles from their body.

Many people describe their experiences as being hyper-real. One would expect a damaged brain to produce something less than what we normally experience, not more than what's experienced by a normal functioning brain. — Sam26

To me this is just conjecture. We don't know or have models anywhere near detailed enough about the brain to make rigorous claims about what we should and should not expect in these kinds of scenarios. These things you are saying are just based on intuition, not on detailed models. NDEs may be different to other kinds of hallucinations but that doesn't rule out a naturalistic cause. The review you posted even cited data on neural activity during death. There is not enough good evidence to rule out a naturalistic explanation.

So you can't demonstrate it?
What has that got to do with 'temporal entanglement'? When did I say when I apparently rejected it?

The very idea that is and ought could be connected in this finalistic fashion! — apokrisis

Well I don't see any connection whatsoever. Can you demonstrate this?

The first paragraph in your post, sir, is riddled with special pleading, appeal to incredulity & appeal to popularity, and also jejune folk psychology. C'mon, how about some philosophizing sans the fallacies & pseudo-science. — 180 Proof

:100: :up:

So, you were underwhelmed by this revelation of Causal Information as the key to universal progressive & creative Evolution from almost nothing to everything? — Gnomon

I would be less underwhelmed if you had a substantive counter to my claim that nothing novel is being said. The definition I quoted before is virtually tautology. What you have been saying about it looks like exaggeration to me.

Good lecture on how quantum systems are formally equivalent to stochastic processes (link to papers at start of video though I have linked the previous in this thread):

https://youtu.be/IBP1oxHxnpk?si=zXwj-n56sdUpBUHo

Shown in the video how the weird quantum phenomena like non-commutativity (and heisenberg uncertainty, measurement dependence), interference (thus coherence/superposition), decoherence, entanglement are all behaviors that occur in a certain (and only recently described i.e within the last 20 years) family of [stochastic processes, i.e. sequences of random variables that will always realize definite outcomes at any point in time]. Collapse appears purely as statistical conditionalization. The author goes through how you can bi-directionally translate between quantum and stochastic formalisms - the quantum representation is just a useful tool. Note, the author also says this is extremely generic and can be applied to any kind of quantum system whether particles or any ontology you like.

No many worlds.
No measurement problem.
No cat dead and alive at same time.
No Heisenberg cut.
No shoehorning deterministic trajectories and pilot waves.
No need to wonder if the moon is really there when no one looks.
No observer woo.

Parsimony demands one ignores these distractions because they are not required to produce quantum behaviors.

Quantum theory is precisely orthogonal to Kantianism or Berkelianism or Schopenhauerism or Dennettianism.



"The functional information of a system will increase (i.e., the system will evolve) if many different configurations of the system undergo selection for one or more functions."

... functional information increases if functions undergo selection"

... increases in functional information characterizes evolution"

This doesn't seem like some profound new law about the world to me; they just seem to be proposing another way of describing evolution as always been understood, just in a different and I guess more general way.

But, having thought about it, I want to emphasize the multifarious uses of language, many, but not all, of which involve communication in one form or another. — Ludwig V

Yes, true.

Could you break it down for me? — Ludwig V

I'm just stating that how an animal's communication isn't thought.

But you could also say that you don't need language to communicate — Ludwig V

True. I would say that communication just generalizes language. Similarly, what an animal communicates about is different to their actual perceptual/cognitive/physica engagement with what they are communicating about.

Yes, I would probably say so.

inaccessible — Ludwig V

Well I just mean in the sense like what is happening somewhere out of your direct perception is not accessible. You cannot know what is going on in that case.

I wouldn't fight over the question of priority. That it has multiple uses is not in question, I think. — Ludwig V

I think that quote is a bad phrasing. Its about the idea that language is not identical to thought. We don't need language to think about things. When we don't need language to think about things or engage with the world, I think this is how language becomes redundant in the private language scenarios.

Yes I thimk we agree. To me I don't see the inherent distinction between a public language and a private one other than only one person uses it. So to me it is a counterexample to the private language used by only one person. But it is not counterexample to the deeper intended point imo. So for me, maybe a more general view of the private language argument is the point that language is meaningless without the need for the communication of inaccessible information, whether that communication being with other people or yourself.

Interesting paper perhaps relevant:

Language is primarily a tool for
communication rather than thought

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=language+primarily+communication&btnG=

(top link pdf)

Abstract/Intro:

"Language is a defning characteristic of our species, but the function, or functions, that it serves has been debated for centuries. Here we bring recent evidence from neuroscience and allied disciplines to argue that in modern humans, language is a tool for communication, contrary to a prominent view that we use language for thinking. We begin by introducing the brain network that supports linguistic ability in humans. We then review evidence for a double dissociation between language and thought, and discuss several properties of language that suggest that it is optimized for communication. We conclude that although the emergence of language has unquestionably transformed human culture, language does not appear to be a prerequisite for complex thought, including symbolic thought. Instead, language is a powerful tool for the transmission of cultural knowledge; it plausibly co-evolved with our thinking and reasoning capacities, and only refects, rather than gives rise to, the signature sophistication of human cognition."

Someone else can read the note, so it doesn't count as private language — Ludwig V

I don't think it matters if someone can read the note, it matters if the criteria for the correctness of words is socially enforced or not.

But the fact this counterexample exists doesn't change the point of the private language argument imo. Imo the private language argument is about showing that when you have no external enforcement of these criteria, any kind of stable foundation for word meaning evaporatrs because we simply don't need words to engage with the world. The counterexample introduces the same kind of practical enforcement as the social case and so it doesn't contradict the point being made imo.

How does any individual ever know that they are properly chastising someone for following a rule wrong? Per Wittgenstein, they can't be sure that they ever understand a rule — Count Timothy von Icarus

The point is that it doesn't matter. People do whatever they are going to do anyway. They aren't even thinking about these skeptical possibilities. I think what Wittgenstein is making a point about time and time again in PI is that the relations between words or rules or whatever... and what we mean by them is chronically indeterminate or underdetermined. But people can behave coherently anyway. Wittgenstein wasn't trying to pin down rules or fix a problem.

What is happening is inverting the idea that there is some realm of fixed kind of platonic abstract meanings that determine our behavior. No, it is the opposite. Meanings and rules are metacognitive idealizations of an organism that is intelligent enough to make inferences about its own cognizing, its own behaviors, its own perceptual processes. We don't need a strict way to agree rules because all the heavy lifting regarding rules is done by the underlying cognizing and complicated percetual and behavioral abilities latent in us and that we have in common with other people.

In artificial intelligence, a common complaint is that much of what these things do are not human-interpretable in the sense that even tough these machines are very good at what they do, its hard to work out exactly why they do certain things, describable in a way that makes sense to people. And in many ways, why should it? Our abilities to do things like object recognition or motor control or mental calculations far outstrips our ability to talk about these things semantically. Our own abilities are not necessarily easily human interpretable which might make sense given that how neurons compute things shouldn't be a universe away from A.I.

Words meanings and rules are more like signposts pointing in the right direction for the rest of our highly complicated cognitive, motor, perceptual faculties to do the job. In the same way that looking at the dictionary definition of a word is just a signpost where the rest of your brain already has inside of it much of the information from our developmental histories required to generalize from the definition to using the word.

The point is that our faculties do not come from platonic abstractions of words. They are extremely messy and build skills from a long history of observations, using billions of parameters capable of extremely complex non-linear abilities.

Meanings and rules emerge from these things and just are a way of efficient communication to help people's behaviors synchronize in some sense. They are pragmatic. The behaviors they signify don't need to be rigorously determined because biological self-organization does not require it. In the same way that Darwinian evolution isn't based on perfect forms, it is based on blind, messy selection.

Its about what works, not directly tapping into some inherent kind of truth well or something. Sure you might think of "plus" as a pretty perfect concept that everyone obviously follows doing math. But if we do do this, this doesn't get prescribed from up-high by some well, determined, platonic realm of abstract rules. It comes bottom up from an extremely complicated brain which is exactly why brains have no problem acting coherently even when our metacognitive interpretations of what we are doing are chronically underdetermined. When you think about it, you won't even be able to give a nice non-circular foundational definition for what plus is that isn't underdetermined. Yet we just have a kind of meta-cognitive, intuitive confidence in out ability to distinguish and perform some kind of act. Doesn't matter how we do it. We apply the labels after the fact and insofar as there are multiple ways to draw boundaries, we can apply labels in many different chronically indeterminate ways. But that doesn't matter because our intuitive abilities do the heavy lifting. What is the criterion for "coherence" then? Just whatever people agree with, and the reason for such agreement is then open to the same skeptical games regressing ad infinitum. But again, this doesn't really matter because that is like a meta-cognitive inferential labelling process that is not necessarily identical to the development of those actual behaviors (I guess similar to how everyone has the perceptual ability to see the same colours but cultures may draw boundaries differently - there is a distinction between the seeing of the color and the metacognitive act of labelling). You don't need a theory of 'plussing' to do addition. Just like most people have no idea from a theoretical linguistic perspective what is happening in their mouths or the sounds they make when they talk coherently.

I remember hearing somewhere a view that philosophy often had a pre-scientific role in fields before those fields like physics or biology become more mature. And I think you could argue much of this analytic philosophy regards to characterizing meaning and language takes a similar pre-scientific rule with regard to things like psychology, neuroscience, machine learning etc etc. That is what this kind of philosophy will give way to if you want to know why and how people do things. Its a scientific question. Hence Quine's idea for naturalized epistemology. There is no rigorous foundation for knowledge, how we know things, what meanings are. All you can do is study how the behavior and cognition that people do works. What people do doesn't trickle down from rigorous formal constraints. It emerges and self-organizes from blind physical interactions.

In the case of my talking to my self, my present and past selves affect each other to produce new senses of meaning of the words and the criteria of rules I invoke. — Joshs

Yes, I have thought before that a.nice counterexample to Wittgenstein's private language argument is someone writing a note to themself to remind them to do something in the future, a scenario that requires someone to enforce some relationship between words and things in the world for the sake of reminding themselves.

‘internal’ cognitive system receiving inputs from, computationally representing and spitting out outputs to an ‘external’ world. — Joshs

Yes, I just mean chains of causal interactions. There is no explicit objective notion of representation, just cascades of neural impulses which then can generate outputs. My use of internal was just alluding to the fact we cannot observe most of what is going on. At the same time I think internal is justified in the sense that a brain can be separated from the external world in some sense with its sensory inputs and motor outputs as intermediaries. And that brain is the seat of our experiences. I have to say I am definitely not as much of an extended cognition person as you are though I don't necessarily disagree with it per se. I am just lezs inclined to view things that way.



Sorry, I don't think I am following any of this but to me what makes something a sign is depend on its reception by something that can use it as a sign.

My take on Wittgenstein and his "forms of life" is that absolutely everything bottoms out in behavior. Any interpretation of behavior is inherently indeterminate and interpretations we give rely on arbitrary, inscrutable foundations characterized by circular regresses in definition and ostensive pointing. From my view the point is that this indeterminacy and underdetermination has no consequence for people's behavior which can still seem totally coherent. It comes from latent, hidden kinds of blind processes; i.e. in the modern perspective, from the physical dynamics of neuronal behavior. Knowing some kind of determinate rules and forms of life people use is beside the point because people don't need that to interact. People interact successfully despite inherent underdetermination and indeterminacy.

I don't believe that saying "meaning is use" is intended to determine what meaning is. But in lieu of determinate objective meaning structure, all there is to what we call "meaning" is use. And obviously not all meaning is use since something like "History is spelled H-I-S-T-O-R-Y" is a use of "History" that isn't necessarily related to its meaning. Obviously our use of "meaning" and similar synonyms as well as our own reflections on it don't have more to them than behavior that bottom out in neural processes. But the trying to characterize that behavior just brings us back to the issues of indeterminacy. I don't believe "meaning as use" or "forms of life" are meant to be rigorous, comprehensive theories of meaning. They just point to the fact that seemingly coherent behavior co-exists with inherent indeterminacy. The idea of nested forms of life I think is quite appropriate in the sense that behavior has regularities on various different scales, and this is a general feature of complex systems in biology and physics.

I can't use the word 'to' properly if I don't know it brings about a directional relationship between two objects. — Lionino

The problem is, as they don't know what the word actually means, and only learn how to use it from examples/contexts — Lionino

As soon as we know the German word is a "perfect" translation of the English word, we are able to use productively. — Lionino

I think the answer to these issues is that there is nothing more to knowledge than use either. It is driven by underlying neural processes we are not privy to and cannot be interpeted semantically but physically.

I like this quote from developmental paychologists Esther Thelen and Linda Smith:

"We believe this answer is wrong. Knowing is the process of dynamic assembly across multileveled systems in the service of a task. We do not need to invoke represented constructs such as “object” or “extended in space and time” outside the moment of knowing. Knowing, just like action, is the momentary product of a dynamic system, not a dissociable cause of action."

"We think to act. Thus, knowing may begin as and always be an inherently sensorimotor act."

(Paper: Dynamic Systems Theories; direct pdf download when clicking link https://cogdev.sitehost.iu.edu/labwork/handbook.pdf )

We then have dynamic neural systems that can observe their environment, causing complex physical interactions in the system which we think of as learning and encompass all our complicated intellectual abilities. But we cannot cash out this stuff as "knowledge" until we see it's behavior in real time which even then is indeterminate in interpretatio . This is how we would think of "meaning as use" too so "knowledge as use" is basically a generalization.

We then have to account for the fact that we can make an observation and somehow miraculously aquire the ability to coherently use a word in a certain way that we could not before (e.g. learning what the german word for village means and miraculously being able to use it) because we have a complicated internal neural system. But that doesn't contradict the idea that there can be nothing more to what that word means than how we use it. Sure you could point to the internal neural system but we cannot interpret that semantically and we can only cash that out once we observe the behavior even if that behavior is kind of meta- such as when you just define a word... metacognitively stating the definition of a word is behavior, or saying that you could state the definition if you wanted to (without actually stating it) is also behavior, generated by internal neural processes which are capably of generating all of our behaviors. At the same time being able to use a word does not always mean we are using it in a way which seems coherent with the consensus use or that we won't "get it wrong" simply because our understanding isn't deep enough. Nonetheless when we do get it "right", there is nothing more to it than use, generated by the underlying neural systems (at the same time there is no fixed, rigid criterion of "getting it right". Again, all behavior or "use" has indeterminate interpretation; nonetheless our behavior can be coherent.

signifier to the English speaker but devoid of its meaning and use. But it is precisely to the extent that "hola" has become unrooted from its context that it is possible for its context to be learned: the English speaker learns the use and meaning of "hola" from its own context. Only then is communication possible: To the extent that the sign refers beyond the given context and usage. Significance, the most proper of language, exceeds use but does not exclude it. — JuanZu

Signifiers and significance is also nothing more than use as knowledge is - we observe symbols and physical interactions from the outside world causally affect our internal neural systems. They then can spit out future behaviour that reflects the causal interaction with the symbol in the context of the outside world... a symbol is nothing more than the associations we observe it connected to. And out understanding of the symbol is nothing more than the behaviors our internal neural systems spit out, effectively the use of the symbol, the predictions or anticipations and reactions of symbol associations which itself is cashed out in behavior, whether verbal, attentional or otherwise. Those abilities may rely on how our internal neural systems are parameterized but you cannot interpret that semantically. You can only interpret mechanistically. One physical event causes another and then another which results in eventual states and outcomes. You can also formulate this kind of thing in terms of experiences too imo... what we know, how we think is nothing more than sequences of experiences. And I think that is actually a central part of the sections in Wittgenstein's PI when he is talking about mental acts like reading, the point being that just as with language, all our capabilities are characterized by indeterminacy and that ultimately none of these things are more than the sequences of experiences when we perform mental acts like reading... analogous to meaning as use... language is nothing more than the placement of words in the context of other words and other events in our experiences and out in the world. Characterizing that is inherently indeterminate, yet the behavior occurs seemingly coherently anyway.

So on the contrary, I think nothing we do exceeds use. My interpretation is Wittgenstein I don't thing was creating a theory of meaning. But saying that what we think of as meaning is nothing above use and behavior.

Interpreted in modern terms, I believe Wittgenstein is just perhaps an early pioneer of enactive cognition:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enactivism

And so meaning, knowledge, language is enactivism. Most acutely perhaps, situated cognition as alluded in the Thelen quote earlier:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situated_cognition

I don’t see how this works for quantum field theory. — apokrisis

It has been applied to field theory! References for such application to field theory are given in (e.g. you'll find them if you search the phrase "field theory" and look through:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.05467

Mentioned in the formulation below too that it is general enough to be applicable to fields:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.10778

but quantum properties like contextuality, entanglement, non-locality — apokrisis

All occur in stochastic mechanics from assumptions of particles, always in definite locations, moving randomly. You can see that explicitly in the paper linked earlier which recreates Bell violations and perfect correlations exactly as regular quantum mechanics.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10701-024-00752-y

These weird quantum effects can be seen as very intuitive consequences of unusual statistical properties in quantum mechanics related to failures of certain assumptions concerning joint probability distributions / "global sections":

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/13/11/113036/meta

Interestingly, these assumptions also fail in areas of social science because things like human decision-making often have a context-dependent nature to them. Somewhat appropriately, quantum theory has become a valid tool in social sciences and you can find phenomena like quantum-like interference effects and Bell-like violations in human behavior and even online data: e.g.

https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-psych-033020-123501
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10699-018-9570-2
https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/24/9/1207
https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10146180/

Also classical computer science as well as logical paradoxes too strongly related to contextuality:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.7386
https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03097

And classical light entanglement too:

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=classical+entanglement+optics&btnG=

And classical Brownian particle analog of entanglement:

https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0412132
https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/25/11/1565 (just revisits above arxiv paper)

All because they have unusual statistical properties of joint probability distributions as implied by commutation and uncertainty relations.

The point is that these unusual statistical properties are far more "normal" than we are led to believe and seem to naturally emerge under certain assumptions when talking about particles in definite locations but whose motions are random.

A nice summary of the kind of nature of this unusual statistical property (quote from: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.13326):

For certain families of events the theory stipulates that they are commeasurable. This means that, in every state, the relative frequencies of all these events can be measured on one single sample. For such families of events, the rules of classical probability — Boole’s conditions in particular — are valid. Other families of events are not commeasurable, so their frequencies must be measured in more than one sample. The events in such families nevertheless exhibit logical relations (given, usually, in terms of algebraic relations among observables). But for some states, the probabilities assigned to the events violate one or more of Boole’s conditions associated with those logical relations.

This alludes to the fact that Bell violations are actually just a special case of inequalities discovered by Boole in the 1800s which decine conditions for a joint probability distribution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fr%C3%A9chet_inequalities). The fact that a unique joint distribution doesn't exist doesn't mean the underlying statistics don't exist, just that they must be defined on separate probability spaces.

In the stochastic particle case this condition seems strongly linked to the uncertainty relations for position-momentum distributions - they cannot simultaneously be both concentrated. Naturally then sharp position and momentum measurement distributions cannot co-exist.