If we are good regulators then thats trivially what they are.

The point being conveyed was that a good model can be entailed by any fashion in which an organism can couple to its environment.

I dont like the metaphor of lens as a depiction of the relation between mind and world. It implies a detached, subjectivist view of how we make sense of the world, as though the information contained in reality is already sitting out there and all we have to do is notice and process it internally. — Joshs

Maybe. What I was thinking about was the idea of attention - selecting parts of the outside world as more relevant than other parts. For me, this idea of attention conveys a lack of one privileged structure from the perspective of an organism - instead, organisms can interact with the world in different ways, to different parts, for different reasons.

We don’t pick out factual aspects of the world based on relevance for our purposes, we actively do things with the inanimate and social world, and the patterns of our doings forms normative structures of intelligibility and purpose which determine HOW the world appears meaningfully to us — Joshs

Not sure I see a fundamental difference.

IF that concept gets its sense from a discursive system of practices that is only peripherally shared by you. — Joshs

But there is nothing inherently stopping anyone from becoming becoming more familiar with that.

In particular, it is not clear that conceptual schemes correspond in any helpful way with "models" in cybernetics, whatever they are. — Banno

If concepts are just the coupling of word-use to the states of the world then that is fundamentally what they are. Words are proxies which convey the sense in which we - and how we - perceive, predict, attend or engage with our environments. If different people seemingly have different concepts then it is because they are interacting with the world in different ways or interacting with different parts of the world.

I like what @Janus says:

It seems to me that it is the various explanations for how and why the world we perceive is as it is that involve various conceptual lenses (conceptual schemes), and that is not that what we perceive is determined by conceptual lenses, but rather by what is noticed, what is selected, which in turn is determined by what is of interest or use.

We can attend to the world in different ways, paying more attention to certain aspects, configurations, things that seem relevant to us for various reasons and are maximally informative in regard to affording the behavior required to live or do what we want to do. I think all our perception trivially is picking out structures in the world even if it requires some processing to do so (e.g. our ability to sense and engage with 3-dimensional depth in visual space can only be inferred indirectly from 2D visual cues and also information from our bodies). Different brains may inclined to attend to some structures more than other, some brains may not even be able to pick out some structures (e.g. color blindness), and brains can often be wrong in some sense (e.g. illusions).

As @Ludwig V suggests, we may have local disagreements in the sense that we make (or think we make) meaningfully different predictions about how the world works. The fact that different cultures or even different people may attend to the world in different ways or use words in different ways then doesn't necesarily preclude some in principle mutual intelligibility in how these people use words, and people generally have access to the same information from the perceived world due to our shared biology and intelligence. This point can be somewhat separated from the idea that people can have different beliefs with different predictions or counterfactuals about how the way the world works - the belief in the existence or absence of God in different cultures is about disagreements of beliefs. Obviously these beliefs may involve novel concepts, but then Davidson's point is that the idea of conceptual schemes becomes vacuous once mutual intelligibility is allowed - it is not so troublesome to incorporate a concept you have never heard of before into your own conceptual repertoire. I think Kuhn's notion of paradigms was never about some notion of global unintelligibility but about general underdetermination of the kinds of hypothetical metaphysics that can account for empirical evidence, and local misunderstandings that cause scientists to sometimes talk past each other.

On the idea of interpreted experiences, I like a kind of middle ground in the sense that I think we just see what we see in terms of direct experiences. However maybe those experiences just change given the context for various reasons in your brain; for instance, color inversion / afterimage illusions is just a very extreme example of the fact that we can plausible have different experiences to the same stimuli given some different context. You might then think of having different experiences to the same stimuli in the sense of the kind of structure that is, so to speak, being inferred by the brain from its sensory inputs - the brain can react to the same sensory inputs in different ways to extract the most information in some context.

There is though, I think, also an interpretation aspect in the sense that we can plausibly act or re-act in response to the same experiences in different ways - that is a sense of interpretation purely in the sense of acts, behavior, changes of attention, vocalization, prompted thought or even mental imagery, prediction, memory, etc ...

Aside:
(Imo, its not necessarily very easy to disentangle experiences and interpretations introspectively because the nature of our experiencrs tends to be in flux - in a William James sense of the metaphor of continual flights and perchings and flights again of a bird. From my introspections, meaningfully making sense of a perch involves a flight which obviously takes you away from that perch - my own experienced cannot be made sense of in an intelligible, noticeable way outside of the fact that those experiences are a continual stream. There is no sense in which I recognize a dog without the reactive changes in attention and behavior that it entails, or the later ability to report and re-affirm that experience. In those attention-blindness tasks with the dancing gorilla, my cortical system may have registeted information on the retina which is related to the gorilla, but without attention and the ability for this information to affect other parts of the brain that react to the gorilla; then for all intents and purposes, nothing was registered, nothing was noticed, nothing was seen, because registering something is an act).

Continued:
... This all in the same sense that different people may attend or have tendencies to make different predictions or construct relationships about what they see in the world. We could then be "wrong" in some sense - the kind of structure inferred may have a different relationship to the world that contradicts counterfactuals related to the particular relevant scenario - a brain can be wrong in some sense when its predictions about its own experiences do not cohere. We use words like 'dog' in relation to a coherent structure of experiences that map to an outside world insofar as our biological machinery is coupled to an outside world. And biological structures can couple to the world in different ways (whether at the level of different species, cultures, individuals, etc), coupling to different facets, in a way that carries some kind of veridicality insofar that they organisms are predictive machines that react appropriately or at least consistently to the environment as a "good regulator": e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_regulator.

I think part of the motivation for deflation arises from the position that truth applies only to sentences — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think its more the fact that we cannot talk about truth without using sentences and words. The deflationary account then becomes a sufficient way of talking about truth. Sure , you can say organisms without words have an understanding of the world and 'what is the case' in some sense - which arguably is nothing more than our fallible ability to predict things and have those predictions fulfilled in our experience. But you obviously still cannot talk about that without words - the intellectual activity of truthing is then asserting 'what is the case' with words.

But if you can imagine a dog does not need to think to yelp and leap from being burnt, why can't we imagine the dog is behaving according to the exact same impulses in everything the dog does? Like a plant cell photosynthesizing - wherefore belief as a component of these motions? — Fire Ologist

Why does it have to be so black and white? If you look at brains of animals you will see a continuum of complexity from insects up to humans, and the core structure of the brain in these cases (at least down to fish) is largely preserved. Dogs will be somewhere in the middle - comparing it to photosynthesis given this then just seems hugely exaggerated.

What wouls you call it if you thought only one type of thing existed but there were innumerable number of them?

Organisms are quintessentially beings instead of mere heaps (existing according to a nature, not solely as a bundle of external causes) because they are self-organizing, self-governing, and most of all, goal-directed. The parts of an organism are proper parts of a proper whole because they are unified in terms of a goal that is intrinsic to the organism. This is the idea of "function" and teleonomy in biology. The parts of a flout or rock are not organized in this way.

And perhaps, ↪Arcane Sandwich, this is also a way of finding a via media between permissivism and eliminativism.
— Count Timothy von Icarus

Conservatives would reject the first premise: there is indeed an ontologically significant difference between bikinis and fouts. But that difference can't have anything to do with the question about scattered objects — Arcane Sandwich

Some of this reminds me of the interesting view of Bayesian mechanics / Free energy principle. A framework for exploring thingness in a statistical sense. Whats interesting is it was originally a framework for describing how the brain works... then all life... then eventually people looked at it as vacuously applying to any thing with different grades of complexity.

The idea of an ontological potential endows even simple physical systems, such as rocks, with a kind of weak coherence and ‘monitoring’ of internal states...

Namely, the FEP covers a broad class of objects as cases of particular systems, including adaptive complex systems like human beings, simpler but still complex systems like morphogenetic structures and Turing patterns, and even utterly simple, inert structures at equilibrium, like Objects that have no structure or no environment, either of which fail the FEP for obvious reasons, exist at one extreme...

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=7909771384315425233&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5 (Elan Vital section)

I don't think a flout would "fail the FEP" if a rock does, but it would be interesting whether a kind of statistical approach could be used to analyse how or why we might have different intuitions for something having thingness. As noted earlier, the Bikini case is also a scattered object - why do we tend to endow it with more thingness than a flout (while at the same time lacking the kind of "autonomy" of a more complex or living thing)? And there maybe some kind of analysis for this regarding how systems or things nest within each other in a statistically meaningful way, like the human use of bikinis as opposed to sme other properties / lack of properties in a flout. Ofcourse this is all just complete speculation whether this kind of analysis can even coherently be done in this kind of framework at all. I also suspect you could probably get some unintuitive results, but I guess it just reflects how my attitudes and inclinations would want to approach this kind of issue ideally.

Rather than asking "what makes this a a thing", it makes more sense from my own outlook to ask why we have certain intuitions about thingness, since all my perceptions about things in the world come through my brain which is processing all the statistics of perception and leading me to say "that ia obviously a fish", even in different contexts where I refer to say a living animal or just a slab of meat in the fridge.

I guess this attitude is also analogous to the kind of research programme some have proposed regarding the meta-problem of consciousness - "what causes our intuitions and understandings of our own consciousness and experiences?". But I don't think you necessarily have to do this kind of research programme and go so far as the statement: "consciousness doesn't exist!". I would rather just clarify the limits on what I can and cannot coherently say, the caveats, about what I am identifying as consciousness rather than completely eliminating the intuitively useful uses of words or perhaps being too permissive and pushing some kind of panpsychism or idealism. I think thats preferable to trying to resolve the hars problem - I do not think it is resolvable and I think metaphysics always has to be from the purview of what we perceive, so notions independent of that don't mean much. I think the most generic, fundamental way we can talk about the universe is that it has structure - we just want tomake our organization if these structures coherent from our perspectives in a way that is informative to us, while acknowledging all the caveats.

@Banno

Well said :up:

Although it does not seem that evolution is always very gradual (e.g. proposed cases of observed speciation). There is evidence for rapid evolution due to bottlenecks, fertile hybrid offspring reproducing in the wild, etc., and the whole EES controversy. It's an open question how larger shifts in anatomy (e.g. hands to wings, hands to fins, fins to hands, etc.) — Count Timothy von Icarus

I mean, any of the timescales regarding these kinds of debates are still going to be very long in general / will be long enough.

Yet neither is the argument: "Either species are defined rigidly in this way, or they don't exist," a good one. It's a false dichotomy. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't think anyones saying animals don't exist, but the intractable complexity, variety makes various different classifcatory schemes or ways of talking about animals or referring to groups or population plausible. All there really is are individuals that reproduce other individuals. They are all different but there are also similarities, but this is all graded.

Processes can be more or less stable. We can think of an entire ancestral line as a process. For some species, such as the cockroach, the process has been in a fairly stable equilibrium for an extremely long time, perhaps 100-300 million years. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, sure but I don't think that changes what I say. Those cockroaches still got there from the original ancestor and that still took a long gradual change. At the same time, its not entirely clear what it means when biologists say that cockroaches have stayed stable for millions of years. It might be in a different sense to some other kind of population genetics. Similar to how someone might get confused if they take one of those genetic tests that tell you you're 60% German and then compare it to how biologiata also say you share 60% of your DNA with a banana. Clearly what they mean by these percentages is different, referring to different things.

Yet if two species are indistinguishable, even upon close inspection with instruments, then in virtue of what could they even be said to be "two species?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes but distinguishability can become apparent over longer and longer times. Like how pople visibly age rather slowly.

I think at the end of the day we all agree animals exist and we try to classify them non-arbitrarily in ways that are most informative regarding the world and other facts we interact with.

But it's the thing signified by the scientific term that existed before man existed, not "whatever the term can apply to." I hope you can see the problem here. Insects can't have existed before man and be defined by however "insect" is used in normal language, because the term is used in various ways in different contexts in normal language. This would mean that some things would be both insect and not-insect. Nor can they be defined by "however science currently defines 'insect,'" since this would imply that whenever a scientific term is refined the being of past entities is also thereby changed. — Count Timothy von Icarus

So how is it defined?

This seems like an argument from ignorance. I know of no reputable biologist who claims that there have actually been very many hominid-like families throughout the history of Earth, just "lost to time." There are just the fairly recent hominids. And the same are true for many families.

What's the idea here. "A man like species could have walked the Earth with the dinosaurs, or any time since, but we just don't know about it." But not only this, but it's "very likely." I don't think so.

The idea that very many families of hominid-like animals have evolved many times is highly unlikely for a number of reasons. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Take yourself and look at the genetic differences between you and your parents. Then their parents, then their parents, then their parents. Miniscule genetic change. Then see what happens when you just trace this lineage back in time. You will get very gradual genetic change and very gradual phenotype change between yourself going back to some other kind of ape in the past to some mammal before that to some reptile and eventually some fish and something before that. All life on earth shares a common ancestor. So what I am saying is a fact. And therefore it is a fact that there is a gradual and continuous change between all of the individuals that ever existed, not just in your lineage but any lineage. The boundaries between your reptiluan ancestors and your mammalian ancestors and your primate ancestors will be continuous, ambiguous, graded, fuzzy.

Nothing to do with the fossil record and fossil record only sees a miniscule of these individuals in various separate branches and times.

And "fish" was used to describe whales for a long time. But clearly, while whales were whales before man, whales were not both fish and not-fish during this period. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Ironically, there are actually some fish that are more closely related to whales than they are to any other fish, genetically speaking.

I'm not necessarily trying to promote some kind of metaphysical permissivism (first time I have heard this phrase today actually) or any particular metaphysics about objects, I just think its plausible that people could have found bizarre combinations of things in the world commensensical as things to pick out if the statistical structure of the world afforded them some particular relevance. It just doesn't, so why pick them out. But then that means what we find intuitive as objects probably depends on the context. I mean some flint tools you see just look like literal rocks to my eyes but clearly the subtlety of what makes them not just rocks is not about them as objects in themselves.

The name? Just nonsense.

Anti-essentialism can only get one up to a certain point. "Essence" might be an ugly word for an analytic ear, yet Kripke argued that the essence of a gold atom is the property of having an atomic number of 79, which is the number of protons in the nucleus of a gold atom. Kinda hard to argue with that, even if one isn't an essentialist. — Arcane Sandwich

Its a thought provoking example but it hasn't compelled me to essentialism yet, at least not in a way that doesn't seem trivial.

even ambiguous — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think it is ambiguous if you're willing to consider all animals that have ever existed.

But that is not what the fossil record suggests for man, for just one example. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Fossil record doesn't say much. Whatever fossils we have of anything are a miniscule fraction of individuals that have existed.

There have not been "very many species indistinguishable from man" existing throughout the Earth's history. There have been, on contemporary accounts, just the one. And this certainly wouldn't be true for domestic animals either. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Again, you just have to think about yourself or chickens tracing their lineage back generation-by-generation - perhaps to the same common ancestor of yourself and that chicken, maybe some kind of fish - and ask if there are sudden jumps between one kind and another. There cannot be, it would be absurd. The changes are gradual and slow.

Unless you are merely speaking of the transition from wolf to dog, in which case what of it? Yes, domestication is not a binary. Yet the aurochs is extinct, the cow is not. More to the point, a stegosaurus is not a dog, an oak is not a dog, a rock is not a dog. These are quite discrete distinctions between dog and not-dog. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sure, there are objective distinctions between animals, but the kind of criteria that we use to concretely identify dogs as a species start to become fuzzy if you consider all individuals that ever existence and the graded differences in genetic make-up. That allows scope for disagreement or ambiguity about where exactly mammals start and stop being dogs. Even if you use criteria like reproducibility there will be gradation since plausibly there may be two dogs from different times that cannot breed with each other but plausibly there may be an intermediate dig that can breed with both. You then end up with this kind of moving window of different dog species, possibly many many many which are all legitimate and overlapping.

If we cannot find it, shall we conclude that either no dogs ever die, or that none have ever lived? Or perhaps that "life" and "being a dog" are mere cultural or mental constructs, ens rationis and not ens reale? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Not necessarily, but classifying species is not a trivial endeavour just because the average person can idenitify a dog on the street and everyone else agrees with them. The mass of all individuals who have ever existed whos genetics have drifted and changed slowly and gradually over time is kind of independent of the ways we choose to classify them, which we do in a way that that our current context allows. Clearly dog genes are some kind of objective marker that separates them from other species, but this objective marker would become less informative were we to consider all the biological animals that ever existed. Thats not to say that it isnt an objective marker shared by those individuals - but it becomes less salient compared to a world where the overwhelming majority of organisms lineages die out or change leaving pockets that are easy for us to discriminate. I think reality is generally more complicated than the everyday way we make classifications.

For example, there are curlterpillars: caterpillar-like objects that begin to exist when a caterpillar rolls up into a ball. There are incars: vehicles that look like ordinary cars, but that can only exist when they're inside a garage. — Arcane Sandwich

Who knows, there maybe some possible scenario where the structure of the world renders these distinctions useful to us.

I think ultimately we have to consider that the world is intractibly more complicated than we actually immediately perceive and it is part of the brains imperative to simplify the structure of what we see so it is most informative. But clearly, what exactly is informative depends on the context. Seemingly arbitrary combinations like "fouts" are not interesting and don't connect to the world in interesting, regular ways. Like how if we consider all organisms that ever existed, the dogs on earth now as a species would seem less interesting and stand out less. Certain kinds of sticks on trees bent at specific angles may be completely arbotrary and mean nothing, but imagine if it was the sign that a certain animal had been in the area doing something. It gains information and you end up giving this arbitrary bent stick a name because it helps you find and eat this animal. Classification is holistic. Statistical structures only mean something when they stand out from or relate to a background, and exactly how that statistical structuring is being achieved. Things then can look different in various contexts and different scales even though the information is coming from the same objective world. There is nothing wrong with a plurality in the use of concepts in this respect I think and I think in actuality hardly any of the things or concepts we talk about are strictly independent and mutually exclusive. I think the concepts we tend to use are probably not arbitrary in relation to the world because they reflect the most efficient, informative way of making or pointing out distinctions in our perceptions. But then I think what is most efficient and informative may still depend on the context somewhat, and obviously we only ever get a limited purview of the world. If the context had been different, different structures in the world may become more salient - and thats not to say some things magically disappear or come into existence. We just change the way we attend to what is in perception.

However, words generally try to focus on the actual, not the potential. The act of being a dog is what stays the same in all dogs. We could well imagine some sort of dog, bee, elephant fusion (horrific) and ask: "when does it stop being a dog and become a monster?" Yet no such animal actually exists, it is ens rationis, a being of thought. Language evolves through our interactions with actual beings, so we should only expect that our words will tend to indicate the beings we actually find around us. Language evolution isn't arbitrary after all. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't think you have quite got my example.

If you consider every single mammalian individual that ever existed, you will not be able to identify discrete boundaries between the concept of dog and not-dog. You may not even be able to agree on the criteria. Again, I am not considering potential, possible, counterfactual examples. I am considering all individuals that have ever existed in earth. I can't refer to most of these specific individuals, but I know for a fact that they existed. Sure, they don't exist now... and that is like a frame of reference on which the statistical structure of what is being talked about is different o if we change the reference frame, change the scale, change the inclusion of individuals, genetic structures that have actually existed.

All organisms on earth share a common ancestor; it is surely the case that if you trace the changes of all of your ancestors, generation by generation, the changes in genetics will be tiny every time in the context of all of the genetic variation that has ever existed. If, from your earliest ancestor to you now, your lineage has gone through all of the different stereotypical biological kinds - we at least know apes, mammal, reptile, fis, I believe - there is absolutely going to be no dicrete boundaries along the way. Its more-or-less a continuous path of infinitesimal change.

Your ability to identify dogs as a kind of concretization depends on the context of what kind of biological structures just happen to exist right now and happen to be rasily distinguishable. But importantly, the bits inbetween have existed.

But you don't tend to get the same sort of disagreements re lions, oaks, or carbon. — Count Timothy von Icarus

will probably come pretty easily, because, while a cultural role, it can be represented with clear, concrete characteristics. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I would also argue the possibility though that "concrete characteristics" are contingent on how the world happens to be, but if you look at how the world could be otherwise, then it doesn't seem so clear. And it seems to me that the way we extract structure from the world depends on a kind of reference frame to which that structure is optimal, but may not be so in another (similar to how different descriptions become inappropriate when we move to different scales of observation). I think its very difficult to do anything with the carbon example without kind of going into silly speculative metaphysics and notions of unconceived alternatives, which may be meaninglessly intangible. But with regard to things like lions and oaks, when you just e pand the temporal horizons of the world we consider, the concrete characterization may no longer exists as you have to consider the gradual changes populations due to evolution over a long period. And here, the biological ambiguities of defining things like species may become more relevant. I think animals is a very good example since it clearly shows our ability to recognize different animals in an easy fashion is contingent on the fact that a lot of the diversity, variety, continuity between different animals is not observable to us, even though it clearly did exist if we consider out entire evolutionary history. Someone more radical might then want to argue that this kind of example should be seen as a general thing that applies to all things that exist when you consider the great diversity, variety, continuity in possible worlds. Things always could have been otherwise so that the boundaries or transition structures we tend to use to identify, distinguish or label things no longer seem to be as optimal or informative.

The dog doesn't know that the blue ball has anything in common with their blue collar or with the blue cabinet in the living room, for instance, unless its being trained and rewarded with food when it point to blue objects — Pierre-Normand

But whatever cognitive or perceptual abilities an animal has is regardless of whether it has been trained to do something or not. The use of rewsrd is just motivation to get an animal to overtly display capabilities that it always had. It just comes to the simple notion that an animal nor a human is going to arbitrarily do things or display certain kinds of behavior unless it has a motivation to do so. If you observe people just going about their business in a public place, you probably won't be able to tell if someone is color blind; you need to engineer the scenario to make their lack of capability visible, which must involve some motivation or requirement to act in a certain way.

And this is the task I was talking about just if anyone's interested:

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_vis=1&q=intradimensional+extradimensional+shift+task+rat+mice&btnG=

You can try a human version here:

https://www.labvanced.com/content/research/en/blog/2023-07-wisconsin-card-sorting-test/

Depends what you mean I think. There are animal experiments that require them to learn rules where they have to attend to some perceptual dimensions (e.g. colors) and ignore others (e.g. shape) for sets of stimuli (where they will be shown all possible object/color combinations). Specific colors or shapes will lead to rewards when performing the task. If, say, red gives the reward you have say possible colors and two possible shapes for the animal to choose from, you can change the reward structure by just swapping which color gives the reward and the animal has to change their behavior. You could also swap all old stimuli out for new stimuli; say, changing red & blue for green & yellow, and circles & squares for triangles & vertical lines, so the animal has to learn a new reward structure. It always takes longer for animals to learn the new reward structure when it has been changed from a color to a shape than if the reward structure had stayed with colors. This kind of thing suggests that the animals are attending specifically to colors (or shapes) as an abstract dimension when looking for the reward, and can change so that they are attending to some dimensions while ignoring others. If they were just responding to the stimulus as an object in and of itself there should be no differences when changing reward. I'm pretty sure all mammals are able to do this kind of task, probably others too, I wouldn't be surprised.

I think dogs probably are smart enough to learn tasks which require them to abstract out something like color to perform it.

[reply="Banno;964071"

I think I will have to look at that paper again, On the idea of conceptual schemes, but I believe I more-or-less agree on things in there iirc.

Indeed, it is problematic to attribute beliefs to the spider at all, since beliefs sit within the broader framework of of triangulation, interpretation, and hence occur at a level that it utterly foreign to the spider. — Banno

instead, mental descriptions are interpreted within the broader context of social practices and linguistic frameworks. — Banno

Yes, I think these are some good points.

I will say that Moliere and I are referring to the same thing with 'chair' or 'rabbit'. — Leontiskos

Yes, you could say that, but I think upon deeper examination it is more complicated. Its your perogative I guess to just say that we don't need to worry about messy details - we both know that we will know it when we see it.

Someone else will come along and tell me that there is a 0.1% chance that we might disagree on what is a chair or a rabbit. And then we can argue about whether that 0.1% chance secures some particular thesis of "inscrutability of reference." — Leontiskos

I think this misses the point partially though in the sense that under the thought experiment there may never be a [dis]agreement, but plausibly one could interpret how words map to each other in different ways whilst preserving the same verbal behavior. The consequence of the indeterminacy I think is not that we may sometimes disagree but that there is nothing intrinsic to words. We just use them in certain ways as allowed by our brains. Those are the physical facts. We use words, and interpreting words or debating about reference is also just word-use, albeit in a more meta-cognitive manner. I don't think you need to do away with reference. But all we are are physical beings that say stuff because neurons do stuff because physics allows us to. Thats obviously very blunt and simplified but I think its fine. We believe in an objective world, right?

Edit: [ ] mistype

Our disagreements about the world don't stem from an inability to agree on what it is "in itself" but rather are manifestations of our willingness to negotiate how it is that we can most perspicuously define it in relation to us and us in relation with it. — Pierre-Normand

Hmm, thought provoking statement, very interesting.

"Moliere understands 'chair' to signify <chair-concept>."
"Leontiskos understands 'chair' to signify <chair-concept>."
"Therefore, Moliere and Leontiskos understand 'chair' to refer to the same kind of object." — Leontiskos

But I would say that the chair concept is in itself fuzzy, vague, indeterminate. If I bring a specific chair to mind then that is only an exemplar. There is no fixed definition of what a chair is. It seems to be a kind of know it when you see it kind of thing.

Sure, I can bring up specific words to say a what a chair is but usually you can probably define a chair in many different ways and the words you use are probably as fuzzy and vague and indeterminate as the original concept you wanted to define. When you bring up a definition it usually helps you in your kind of know it when I see it cognition by prompting things in your brain. But imo, I don't know if it ever specifies something.

When I say a chair refers to something it is almost better said that it refers to a shared ability to make certain kinds of distinctions in the world, and we don't necessarily need to specify this uniquely because we all know that everyone in the room is going to be equally good at agreeing on the distinctions from the same kind of stimuli and predicting the kinds of things they do, using them appropriately, etc.

And its in this sense that the need to give strict definitions or translations of words becomes redundant - learning how to translate words in a foreign language isn't the aim; the aim is learning how to use words in another language. This is why I have thought recently that the translation example can be misleading in appearing to say that "well gavagai could plausible really mean undetatched rabbit appendage", but really I would like to view these kinds of examples (like the kripke one as well) as a kind of reductio in which to say - what is fundamental is the underlying use.

If we want to use the concept of reference it is going to be filtered through how we use words and how we recognize things which can seem indeterminate, fuzzy and vague. Sometimes you can even recognize objects and you aren't even sure how you did it. Sometimes there is something inarticulable about our ability to pick out certain patterns and use words in complicated ways. And in that I would hope we can still use the concept of reference but in this context of fuzzyness, indeterminacy, vagueness. Reference isn't about look-up table or translation manual in your head. And maybe this is obvious to some people who want to talk about reference in a strongly realistic sense.

In some ways, I think the difference between people on different poles of this debate are about whether you are sensitive to the details and in doing so possibly kind of de-emphasize the coarser picture. Or on the other hand, think the details don't really matter because our ability to talk about and engage with things like chairs is so damn good, why worry about them!

For instance, I agree with anthropologists that agriculture brought about changes in human life that would represent a shift in conceptual schemes related to the passage of time and the idea of home. — frank

Would these meet the criteria for conceptual scheme under Davidson though? I believe Davidson's main target is some kind of claim that there are different conceptual schemes, ways (forms) of living (life) that are inherently unintelligible from some other perspectives. So the question is whether changes of norms about home life or concepts of time are unintelligible? I believe if anthropologists can talk about them, then probably not, at least to some degree. I'm sure a spider could never understand the majority of human existence though.

It might be worth adding "... and get the same result". The same behaviours might be seen with very different interpretations - we get a rabbit stew even if "gavagai" means undetached rabbit leg. — Banno

Yes, this would be the case in that Quine 'two men' passage I think.

For what could be more obvious then that we do refer to things with our words and mean things by them? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sure, but I am not sure I need an account of this which appeals above and beyond what I find a plausible view of how the objective world works. Nor, from my own introspective experience, can I seem to point to some kind of specific, definitive sense of what it means to "refer"; nonetheless, I can use the word reasonably well. I don't see an issue with embracing vagueness, fuzzyness, indeterminacy in regards to how we engage with the world. If one believes in an objective world then the men in the Quine quote are a part of that, behaving in an objective way where they tend to say and use words in certain kinds of contexts in reaction to certain stimuli. But, if an observer were to describe what those men were doing, they may plausibly be able to do it in different ways.

Except Quine literally says, "the meanings or ideas expressed in their identically triggered and identically sounded utterances could diverge radically." If the meanings and ideas expressed by our identical utterances diverge radically, then I would say we are talking past each other by definition. — Leontiskos

I would say that these meanings and ideas are imposed on the patterns of verbal behavior by an observer. You don't need these extraneous interpretations for people to communicate or use words, and the idea that you can coherently assign divergent meanings is something like a reductio to the thought that verbal behavior, language and understanding is anything above the physical events responsible for word-use. The idea of the two men in this idealized example talking past each other then would not really make much sense if their communication is perfectly fine. And if you think about it, each man's meanings would be indeterminate too, so what exactly are they talking past each other about in that regard? Rather, the fact that they can communicate fine is indicative that they are not talking past each other. If what you say in the following quote happens:

But that becomes more implausible the longer we draw out their conversation (say, from 15 seconds to 2 minutes to 5 minutes to 30 minutes...). The longer we talk the more likely we will realize that we are using words in radically different ways. — Leontiskos

Then it is because their verbal dispositions are clearly not the same as had been thought. But Quine is saying that you can conceive of different meanings for the same verbal dispositions - that is the example.

Doesn't the quote you provide imply that, if they started talking to each other, they may talk past each other entirely? — Leontiskos

Well I guess if they have the same verbal dispositions then there would be no possibility of some event which would lead them to think they are talking past each other. There would be no reason to say they are talking past each other in any radical sense because their verbal dispositions are the same so they communicate perfectly.

Ah, but therein lies the counterintuitive part. If one takes themselves to be making definitive references, or, through one's understanding of one's own sense of making definitive references, takes others to be doing the same, one is mistaken about what is truly going on. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well, all this means is being able to anticipate the correct and incorrect times to use certain words.

and one takes another's "that rake right there," to be definitive, one has misunderstood, no? — Count Timothy von Icarus

What definition of "inscrutable" would you offer, such that inscrutable reference poses no barrier to communication? — Leontiskos

Well I think them misunderstanding each other depends on if the other person agrees and corroborates or rejects their sentences when they have a conversation about it, after which they find out they have misunderstood and have the experience of having misunderstood.

I think you can talk about the idea of an objective world that exists out there that you can engage with, without requiring a single determinate way to parcel [or carve] that world up. I think the same equally applies to parceling up or interpret[ing] how people use words.

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That just seems to be implied when you read him or about him. We generally don't have huge problems communicating either, so it would be strange for him to uphold this inscrutability if he thought it affected our abilities to communicate.

From Word and Object, page 26, he says:

Two men could be just alike in all their dispositions to verbal behavior under all possible sensory stimulations, and yet the meanings or ideas expressed in their identically triggered and identically sounded utterances could diverge radically, for the two men, in a wide range of classes

If all of their dispositions to verbal behavior under all possible sensory stimulations were the same, then what would happen if they started talking to each other? If you looked at their behavior, surely it would just look like they understood each other perfectly well despite the possibility of different meanings. Because, if they have identical dispositions, then the behaviors each one expects of the other based on their own dispositions would be fulfilled in general. It would be quite difficult for them to misunderstand each other since I think misunderstanding generally happens when people use words in ways you don't expect, or you have no experience (and therefore [no] expectations [or ability to predict]) of how certain words should be used. Its hard to envision that in the example passage assuming that each man is cognizant of their own dispositions for using words.

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Quine clearly thinks that inscrutability of reference is not a barrier to communication, so I am just curious as to what you think Quine was saying in his ideas, considering that he believes communication is possible in spite of indeterminacy. Or do you think Quine was just completely obtuse or in denial regarding this very simple argument you give?

1. If reference is inscrutable, then we cannot communicate (or learn new languages).
2. But we can communicate (and learn new languages).
3. Therefore, Reference is not inscrutable. — Leontiskos

So where is Quine going wrong?

Not that there has been none, but there was plainly a massive sea change in the conception of man's place in the universe — Wayfarer

Like democracy, ending of slavery, workers rights, womens rights, the condemnation of racism and xenophobia, the welfare state, animal rights, positive attitudes to the environment, list probably goes on and on.

'Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving;...his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms.' — Wayfarer

I think skepticism about religion or the belief in God is a good thing. Neither does the absence of such things mean one cannot draw meaning out of life in whatever way they see fit.

that those who are transfixed by technological and scientific progress fail to grasp the shadow side of modern civilization which manifests as the meaning crisis. — Wayfarer

Baseless, empty rhetoric.

But I also agree on the shortcomings of ‘scientism’ and the evils of what has been described as the ‘reign of quantity’. (I sometimes wonder if from the Renaissance forwards, the West has taken all those elements of Platonic and Aristotelian thought useful for engineering and science, while abandoning the ethical dimension which went along with it, in their eyes.) — Wayfarer

So are you saying that there has been no kind of ethical or socio-political thought or advancement since the renaisance? Seems to me this is almost akin to missing the wood for the trees. People who throw about the word scientism are so focused on what they dislike about science that they fail to see the rest of western thought and philosophy outside of that. Neither is there a mutual exclusivity in entertaining these things.

Because we lack a compelling "top-down" explanation for consciousness and intentional aims, fields such as neuroscience tend to default to "bottom-up" explanations. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't think this is strictly true. The brain works on various different scales so you have to study it on various different scales, whilst bottom up explanations in terms of biology must coexist with more top-down explanations in terms of things like computation and information. Neither do embodied, enactive, extended, ecologocal perspectives neatly fit into a bottom-up view. One of the most in-vogue ideas in neuroscience, the free energy principle, is unambiguously a top-down, unifying principle akin to "top-down" explanations in physics. I have even heard the author of the theory use the phrase "downward causation" in an interview.

and I find it so odd to see people hell-bent on impugning it. — Leontiskos

What kind of benefit do you think they would get from not impugning it? If it is just saying that there are statistical structures and regularities in reality, then fine. But why do I need to use the word "essence"? Seems to connote something more than is required so I don't need to use the word.

I'm not sure I see where you're going with this.

One of the side issues with seeing entities as aggregates is the way we pick out what it is that "contains' the parts. It could be: — frank

But are "parts" really any different from the "part" that contains those "parts"? Does this question really need an answer? Is there even any definitive sense into how "parts" are divided or aggregate into more "parts" that we uphold all the time or even any of the time? I am not sure I think so. We notice distinctions and similarities in our sensory landscape which are multiplicitious, overlapping, redundant.

No doubt, the claim that "you need language to do any philosophy," is true. However, the person who champions a reduction of philosophy to neuroscience will be on similarly strong ground: "no one ever does philosophy without their head." The advocate of phenomenology will likewise argue that no one ever did philosophy without first having experiences and perceptions. — Count Timothy von Icarus

All these things are equally valid; but replace philosophy with knowledge. It applies to all knowledge whether science, philosophy, folk psychology, sports. Difference between different areas of knowledge are what you are talking about and your means of engaging with it. In that sense there are no essential features to any given parts of our knowledge and methods can vary. You don't need some specific foundation to philosophy; you just engage with things your're interested in, usually appealing to methods and insights that have accumulated over the years in those particular areas. The things stated in the quote are a field of interest in and of themselves, one I find interesting, and - from my perspective - in the kind of vein of naturalized epistemology or even Dennett's Heterophenomenology - which are kind of just particular uses of cognitive and brain science. But obviously there are many other fields not related to this. I don't have to view the things in the quote as some kind of foundation for a philosophy. They are just a particular area of philosophy I am interested in as opposed to certain other areas. I am not sure one needs some foundation - but then again, everyone settles into particular ways or habits or inclinations of belief in how they do philosophy. But this is no different to how different scientists or historians have certain inclinations or attractions to certain methods, opinions, ideas - and they don't need to be particularly philosophical about it. I have always been interested in things in the most general sense, in any field - history, nature, music, whatever. Philosophy is naturally interesting so it Was always hanging around. What became my first or top intellectual love though would be in the sciences. I would be dipping into areas of philosophy from random books I came across, random classes I chose to take. Things pop out like say philosophy of science. But then I think the real snowballing came when I start to notice parallels between narratives about how brains work (from neuroscience and cognitive science) and discussions in philosophy - people like Berkeley, Popper, Wittgenstein, others. (Philosophy of mind also obviously takes an interest for similar reasons, or because cogmitive/neural science fails to answer all questions). And I cultivate an interest in how those problems are related or diffused, deflated in a certain way. And thats just an interest, not a concerted attempt at making some foundation - albeit, obviously everything we do (and all knowledge) is actually "founded" in the brain, language and experience inextricably connected. But at the end of the day I am just doing the knowledge I find interesting along my inclinations. And in talking about this in a long paragraph all I am doing is questioning this idea of philosophical foundations as some need.

'Something it is like to be...' is actually an awkward way of referring to 'being' as such. — Wayfarer

Hmm, interesting observation possibly.

that there may be other ways of doing philosophy that, to the deflationist, are not even wrong, not just invisible, but plain unimaginable. — Srap Tasmaner

Many people here have views here that directly contest mine which may be what you call "deflationary style" (but tell you the truth I read this and "deflationary style" and "model-building style" look exactly the same to me - so I would identify as both unless I have probably misread something).

I am so in at the deep end with my views about how I think brains work though that I think that all of these different philosophical views are implicitly a kind of behavioral-style because in my views, that is the only way that brains do understanding. All views are compatible with a "deflationary-style" on the meta-level insofar that all views are "deflationary-style" models from a brain perspective. I have a kind of view that brains, minds are actually kind of like scientific instrumentalists at the deepest level but this is not immediately obvious to us because of the richness and automaticity by which beliefs and thoughts and behaviors work. We take everything we do and say for granted without thinking about it. Again, this is the meta-level, and so to it applies to debates about realism and anti-realism - a dichotomy far too coarse and flimsy to say anything interesting without serious caveats.

On the floor-level what differentiates "deflationary-style" from "essentialists" and others? Perhaps we all have a choice of at what level to deflate or decompose explanations - some prefer deeper levels than others. On shallower levels, you can hold up concepts without trying to give deconstructing analysis of what it actually means to use the idea. You just assert it and say it is right and know that it is meaningful to you in a commonsense way. Like many people do with God and say they just believe in God and don't want to deconstruct what that actually means - often science would bring up difficult questions too - rather, they just settle that they don't need to go deeper, it doesn't need to be explained: it just is. The "deflationary-stylist" will go deeper and deeper deconstructing everything: it just isn't and there is no essential nature to anything. But whats the difference between shunning further deconstruction versus deconstructing and concluding on a deflation of the essential being? Not much difference to me. Sure, you may be able to create new empirical questions and testable parameters for God. But the meaning of the thing within our perspectives has no foundation beyond what - in my opinion - the instrumentalist mind or brain, and instrumentalist networks of interacting instrumentalist minds or brains. You can conceivably be right or wrong (approximately) in some sense about hypotheses concerning empirical structures under some very strict caveats. Is there a meaningful distinction between the "deflationary-stylist" and the "essentialist" beyond this? I guess not so much from my perspective. You just end up discussing the compatibility of your concepts and what you consider good standards for acceptance or rejection - which is the same story for all knowledge for instrumentalist brains.

Hmm, but what about discussing the compatibility of "deflation" and "essentialism"? What does one bring to the table that the other doesn't? This must be a genuine question. Perhaps at a guess it is a matter of something like accuracy vs. complexity trade-offs. Do you embrace the details (that would deflate the more abstract level of analysis [by effectively prioritizing the bottom level?]) or coarse over them (and effectively ignore them)? Insofar that truth is about accuracy in some sense then where you stand on these trade-offs affect what you say is "true" or "real" or "deflated" or "idealized" - but we can choose different levels for different things. Does that mean then that "true" and "real" is just a kind of abstract label in enacted, instrumentalist models? Yes, maybe. It becomes more tangible when there is an easy answer to whether your predictions are correct or not - but the more abstract you go, the more murky this gets and the less is resolved. And obviously another issue is that, you can change assumptions on the more abstract levels to change what the easy answer is on a more concrete level. Some people reject chairs exist. But again, changes on the abstract level are so murky - mereology doesn't really change our experiences of "chairs" because we all experience similar regularities about them, presumably due to the fact that there is an outside world beyond our perspectives or experiential purviews.

That's not what non locality here means and Many Worlds is tenuous at best. — Darkneos

I'm not so sure what I think about Many Worlds here actually. But - where in the Bohmian interpretation are particles in many states at the same time? I don't think they are.