Still has a causal link tied with it. — schopenhauer1

Yes, I already said. It is interesting though to think though what if you could replace it with something else functionally identical? Would that interrupt the identity?

The start of an object isn’t just the substance so it was more nuanced. Also isn’t there volumes of philosophical literature on identity, essence, and similar issues?

Seems rather dismissive, so I wonder if it’s just you don’t like when I argue it rather than X “legitimate” philosopher in SEP. — schopenhauer1

Not sure what you're getting at.

Thanks, I will take a look!

How would you characterize what happens in your head when you think? Like whenn trying to solve a problen?

Some random shower thoughts on the issue

I think really in physical systems of many components the whole notion of objective identity might be moot because we can draw the boundaries where we like on same/different.

Often we can pre-stipulate identity on counterfactuals though. What if I were born in Rome in 1823?

One question is if counterfactual causal chains leading to the development of gametes would mean different gametes (even if same genetic components), meaning different people? Is the counterfactual of "What if I was born in Rome in 1823" make it trivially that I am not that person since the causal chains leading to the gametes would be different necessarily?

What if I was synthesized of artificial components and artificial genetics but the same biological development and identical history of events?

I guess that certainly wouldn't be me (or would it?) but then can't I just imagine myself if that was the case? Whose to say that isn't me if I am imagining it (it isn't real anyway). If thats what counterfactuals are... just postulating what if... and postulate changes to relevant part.

What then exactly does it mean to say that different gamete wouldn't be me other than pre-stipulating the gamete is me? Must have another consequence other than just labelling it as me or not me. If we use the distinction of causal chains to say something is me or not, there must be some substance to what that me is other than just pragmatic bookkeeping? But again, that seems moot on the physical components case.

I think it must have something to do with experience. The other gamete would not be having my experiences that I am having. I would never have been born, no lights would have been turned on (a common phrase I have heard to describe phenomenal experience) in the same way that I know someone else right now is having experiences I am not having and don't have access to.

Other than that, its hard for me to envision what it actually means for the other gamete to not be me. But then again, I think this is getting into a awkward metaphysical territory surrounding identity in experiences and also things like the hard problem of consciousness. It might even be presupposing a kind of dualism I don't agree with. What does it mean to be having my own experiences as opposed to someone else's (in the sense of previous paragraph)? Doesn't seem well defined to me.

My intuition is that if experience has is its basis in the degrees if freedom found in biology and physics, it will have similar moot problems of identity as with physical component systems.

If we have the momentary unfolding of biophysical processes or functions in flux then is the continuity of consciousness illusory?

If knowledge and memory is also embedded in this momentarily unfolding flux then is there a fact of the matter about being the same as I was 5 minutes ago? After all, to generate the right expressions of memory or knowledge only requires the right momentary states in terms of physical states of my neuronal membranes. Continuity is not necessary and it is questionable whether my brain is ever in the same two states even for similar experiences at different times.

Yup, I was just saying that when I think about it more deeply, I just discard identity or self from an objective standpoint entirely.

The genes obviously contribute but seems intuitive one might change genetic information or phenotypic traits of a person and retain the identity. Its not clear where the dividing line is. I can even conceive of changing lots of genetic information which otherwise has little effect on the parts of the person crucial for its identity.

Yes, I get the intuition. It seems to make sense, more from the causal link standpoint than the blueprint one because I am not sure that DNA can be identified with us as opposed to picking out us in a way that is somewhat incidental.

But then again when I think about identity or what it means for a counterfactual person to be you, I don't really find sound criteria or meaning anyway.

I am claiming that it is necessary not sufficient, which is harder to say about almost any of the other subsequent things in the causal history. If we took those away, they might or might not contribute to identity, but what is absolutely needed is that initial gamete combination and blueprint. — schopenhauer1

So what is it about the gametes here is the important thing?

Edit: I may as well ask to clarify specifically about why exactly the timing bit is important since that comes under the original question too.

I think I need more information before I decide whether to agree with you.

Very interesting thread with some good posts. Don't think I have any interesting insights beyond what others have already mentioned. I think without a well-defined, self-consistent, non-trivial notion of identity for a person, it *(the gamete thing)* might just be moot. I personally don't subscribe to such a thing. I do get the intuition about the gamete thing though, but maybe the intuition gets a bit hazy when we start talking about very precise timing effects and things like that. At the same time, I think arguments similar to the gamete point could possibly be applied to points all along the causal history in different ways but where the consequence for identity would plausibly be different.

But how about a more radical position? Avoid speaking about "reality", just as one avoids speaking about "existence". (I don't remember whether you ever looked in on the thread about Austin's "Sense and Sensibilia", but the argument is in there.) Suppose we treat concepts as instruments (cf. telescope, microscope, galvanometer, etc.). Instruments do not make claims about particular empirical truths (or the generalizations we derive from particular truths). They enable us to establish empirical truths. You would be a realist and an anti-realist at the same time. — Ludwig V

Yes, this seema actually quite similar to what I mean by being instrumentalist. I will have to take a look at the Austin thread; maybe you have a particular post in mind, or page in the thread?

Yes, that sounds sensible. But that's an ideal and there may never be answers that are more than provision (see philosophy of science). Can you suspend all judgement while people work out all those answers? And can people work out all those answers without negotiating the issues we are bothered by - just without us? What do we do with our confusions while we are waiting? — Ludwig V

Yes, thats definitely a good point. We don't know nearly enough about the brain, cognition, etc. But I do think we know enough about the world to make some general arguments about the kind of manner in which these things should work, maybe some of this being in the field of philosophy of mind, for instance, maybe other areas too. Following from this there's also room for making arguments about why I think its good to let those explanations speak for themselves, why I might want to deflate certain things which I do not think can add anything else substantial or veridical. And obviously philosophers have been making arguments of that kind of nature for a while.

Well, I would go further than that. — Ludwig V

Aha, yes I think I would too. Its one of those things where I am aware that the initial motivation was to make notions of "realness" redundant in this area but also feels like just another form of anti-realism. I think its not that inaccurate to say that I think of myself as a kind of instrumentalist about everything which most would say is just anti-realism. I guess it has just got to the point where the anti-realist becomes anti-realist about anti-realism.

The meaning of a word is its use in an utterance. — Banno

Well I think that implies a very deflated notion of truth which basically aligns with what I just said there.

The closest anyone has got is Banno's weirdo move of just claiming 'brute fact' without anything whatsoever to establish that claim — AmadeusD

If Banno's view is realism, it is an extremely thin, watered down realism where "truth" is nothing more than how we use the word, regardless of what "truth" actually means. Neither does it rule out moral truth relativism. Its therefore probably not a kind of realism that is problematic for an anti-realist.

The referee is not a player, but is just as much on the field as any player. They are not somehow separate and above the game, but immersed in it. Ditto judges.
A dictionary uses the same language that it describes, but is just as much a book as any other.

My line would be that the debate doesn't pay attention to the actual use of "real" vs its many opposites and the muddled idea that "real" is somehow equivalent to ontology. — Ludwig V

Yes, I think this kind of thing is very much in my preferred domain. My inclination right now I think is to just not try to shoehorn my understanding of science into the "real" or "not real", at least not use words like that as the focal point. Rather, I would want explanations of how science works, how people's cognition works, how brains work, how language works and let those things speak for themselves.

My inclination is that how these things all work are in the same way that the scientific instrumentalist does science. Its just about predictions (parallel to predictive processing in neuroscience) or use like tools. For me, words are no deeper representation-wise than how they fit in the dynamics of our experiences. Uses of words like "truth" and "real" are no different. So because they are no more than where they fit as part of our experiences, their ontological significance is kind of deflated somewhat... just in the sense that they are nothing more than how they might fit in the dynamics of experience... because that is exactly what happens, I say words, hear words, read words in the context of other experiences... and thats all there is to it (a lot of help from neuroscience would be required). Obviously knowledge and science are trying to explain our experiences but then, the words / concepts we use as part of "explanations" and "knowledge" are effectively just moving parts embedded in the stream of the very thing trying be explained (experience... as a whole).

Well I wasn't making an argument for or against the merits of some view or claim, I was just saying what I think would happen. I was just thinking it would be ironic that a viewpoint attempting to resolve the realism/anti-realism debate might lead to a meta-realism debate. I wonder if there could be a similar middle ground position to that debate as well (maybe not; hard to visualize).

Well, that's because nobody gets out of bed "because I ought to fulfill my goals." — Leontiskos

Well they evidently do because you go on to list all the sorts of goals or reasons why people get out of bed, and the other goals and reasons these are related to. Whether explicitly or implicitly, people seem to do things in order to avoid or attain future states of the world. Its very difficult to give a reason why people shpuld get out of bed that does not satisfy something like that, and ultimately it will be trivially related to the person's unique life situation.

and here we arrive at a more basic moral judgment: "I ought to feed my children." This is one example of a personal goal that is widely accepted to be "moral," and so your "personal goal" distinction turns out to be no more relevant than the pragmatic or psychological distinctions that others have given. There is no mutual exclusion, here. — Leontiskos

I am not making a mutually exclusive distinction. Feeding your children is yet another goal or desire or want or [equivalent pragmatic phrase] that people may have. It may happen to be widely agreed moral statement but that is irrelevant. On one hand, there is no requirement that the reasons for getting out of bed need to be moral. On the other, moral statements fall to the exact same line of reasoning I gave in that post: I cannot find objective reasons why I ought to feed my children. I may come upon a very good reason about not inflicting suffering on people but then you can ask if that is an objective reason. Is there an objective reason to not inflict suffering? What in the world would make it so?

So if, "I ought to get out of bed," is grounded in the belief that one ought to feed their children, and the actor takes this belief to be objectively true (and moral), then, "I ought to get out of bed," is also objectively true and moral. — Leontiskos

That someone takes a belief to be objectively true is not an argument that it is objectively true. Unless you can provide an objective argument why they are correct, then the only argument being given is someone's subjective inclination that they think something is true. Is there a reason to think those inclinations are accurate? How do you refute other people who just happen to have different inclinations? It is not a sound argument for something being objectively true. And this comes back to a point I made before: you and Banno seem to be primarily arguing for being able to use the world "true". But this is almost trivial and not the real meat of issues in regard to moral realism. As some other posters have said, moral realism doesn't follow from truth aptness. What you need to do is resolve the indeterminacy problem and show why some moral statements are objectively true, as opposed to just saying that is reasonable to use the word "true".

The basis belief is, "I ought to feed my children," or, "It is better that I feed my children than that I not feed my children." I take it that this is an objective moral truth, but more importantly, it is affirmed to be an objective moral truth by the hundreds of millions of parents who got out of bed this morning. — Leontiskos

Well, I don't think we can necessarily make the claim that it is affirmed as an objective moral truth by millions of people without some kind of rigorous empirical survey.

More importantly, I don't think the fact that people agree on things make them true. Often people agree on things by consensus which we later change our agreement to be false or which another completely different community think are false. It is plausible there are other reasons people agree which are not to do with objective truth.

As an example, it is trivial that the reasons people get out of bed are related to their unique personal situations, not some context-invariant reason. It just so happens that many people have similar reasons for getting out of the bed because we live in similar worlds culturally and we have similar desires, partly due to culture, partly due to biology (e.g. the only reason I want to eat is because I am biologically wired and structured to so so).

Whilst many people share similarities in why they get out of bed, many people have completely different reasons (e.g. not all have children to feed) and changing the proportions of people that have particular reasons is something that can conceivably occur by changing the social or even biological context. At the same timev someone having a goal that they may want to attain by getting out of bed doesn't seem to connect to some objective reason that they ought to get out of bed.

I can reiterate this line of thought in a similar way but concerning morality and agreement. People may agree on different moral things depending on the social context. Perhaps societies which are more harsh may have more permissive moral norms, societies which are more co-operative may have more stringent ones. Changing the context may lead to changes in moral norms due to the changes in the practicalities of living and changes in the way people interact or communicates with each other.

Our biological similarities obviously also have a big factor in morality - we are essentially wired to be averse to pain and we have sophisticated abilitied to empathize and read people's intentions. I don't need to refer to objective moral facts to explain that those kinds of things may lead to certain agreements on moral statements. In fact, if moral statements are about how people should behave and society relies on co-ordinated behavior to function, then it is almost impossible for society to function without wide ranging agreements on many things, whether legally or morally or otherwise.

Furthermore, I think that appealing to agreement among people suggests that they have some kind of inherent ability to sense moral truths. I just cannot envision this as some kind of likely ability for people to have, based on what we know about neuroscience and things like that. The way I conceive of neuroscience just doesn't look like we have some access to moral truths in some fashion. I cannot envision how that would look scientifically. We don't have some kind of sensory apparatus for moral truth and the idea of physically sensing an ought makes no sense to me.

To me, from a neuroscientific perspective, *I would say that* morals arise as abstractions which are related to things like desires and the kinds of affective and interoceptive states that underlie emotion. It doesn't seem to me that these have anything to do with some kind of moral objective state of affairs as opposed to our inherent biological tendencies and how they interact and manifest within a social context that can vary. Neither do I see any inherent reason why acting in accordance to those kinds of things is something we objectively ought to do, and I think that trying to charactetize moral truth that way is ultimately intractable, indeterminate and trivial.

I would reply that the claim needs to be backed up by a demonstration of the difference. Mere assertion won't cut any ice. — Ludwig V

Well sure, I'm just saying that I think if that discussion were opened there would be disagreements, just like with the realism debate. I guess this would be the meta-realism debate.

I saw a suggestion somewhere that a third possibility that one adjusts one or other concept (or network of concepts) so that there is sufficient overlap to enable the theories to be compared. That would sometimes be helpful because it would enable people to conduct experiments that will support one theory or the other. — Ludwig V

Yes, Kuhn mentions this. The relation between all these issues are quite subtle I think. Matching concepts is about how similar theories' ontologies are. This doesn't mean they are not mutually intelligible and scientists may become "bilingual"; however, at the beginning, the differences between theories may make it difficult to compare where scientists talk past each other because they aren't aware (or sometimes just don't agree) of the underlying assumptions and meanings of each other's theories. At the same time, when there is some overlap, especially toward the more empirical parts of the theoretical networks, it makes it easier to immediately compare predictions in experiment in ways where scientists aren't immediately and totally met with disagreements about whether particular methods or interpretations of observations, etc. are valid, which would *otherwise* block scientists seeing the validity of opposing theories.

I think possibly one issue in this whole discussion is that both you and Banno want to argue for being able to say "x is true" or "x is false", yet neither of you are willing or able to give arguments that refute the kinds of indeterminacy as in these examples with chess pieces.

Moral statements being truth apt doesn't entail moral realism. If I hold that the truth predicate merely serves a social function, I can accept the truth aptness of moral oughts without any metaphysical implications. I may also reject scrutability of reference, so I don't think "ought" refers any more than any other word. This doesn't interfere with truth aptness. — frank

:up: :ok: :cheer: :up:

Rightly or wrongly we mean to assert an objective moral fact, and as such it must be that either moral realism or error theory is correct. — Michael

I think I personally lean towards views where there is skepticism about this. It may at least be indeterminate or context dependent.

Well, it was good enough for Tarski, Davidson and one or two others. — Banno

Well every single opinion is good enough for someone even if has valid criticisns so I don't really see what this statement contributes any defence.

Nothing - any more than something stops someone from starting with g as 10m/s/s. Either way, they may find it difficult to maintain consistency. What makes it true that "g is 9.8m/s/s" is exactly that g is 9.8m/s/s. — Banno

Well then you have not given an argument. Giving an argument would be giving me some evidence that "g is 9.8m/s/s" or the equivalent for some moral statement.

How do you set out the "ends they want to realize " without an evaluation? — Banno

I assume by this you mean that statements like "Banno likes Vanilla" supposedly cannot be true.

"Banno likes vanilla" is very different from "Banno ought to eat vanilla" though. "Banno likes vanilla" is not a normative statement, it is a fact about states of the world insofar as you are a component of the world and "liking" is a state of your being. There is nothing wrong with that.

At the same time, I don't see why people can't reason using normative statements even if those statements don't necessarily have objective truth values. I don't see why the fact that I can reason with them implies objective truth, similarly to rules in chess.

For example, you got out of bed this morning because you believed that the proposition, "I ought to get out of bed," was true. On my reckoning that is a moral judgment, pertaining to your own behavior. — Leontiskos

Well, I would call it a normative judgement rather than moral judgement, but maybe thats a tangential point.

Is the reasoning that grounds that moral judgment purely hypothetical, with no reference to, or support from, objective values or 'oughts'? I really, really doubt it. — Leontiskos

I don't agree. "I ought to get out of bed" is not independent of the context. Sure, you can incorporate the context and say "I ought to get out of bed in x context" but then that leads me to ask why I ought to get out of bed in x context. I don't see how such a reason cannot depend on my personal desires and personal goals.

I will then end up asking the question: "why ought I perform behaviors that fulfil my goals?". I see no putatively objective statement about the world that makes it true that "I ought to fulfil my goals". I may want to fulfil my goals but I don't see why that means I ought to behave in accordance to what I want. Yes, it may seem a little strange or irrational (to most people) if I don't act in accordance to my own goals but I don't see why those consequences mean I ought to fulfil my goals. So what if it is strange or seems to be irrational to others? Attempts to establish why I shouldn't behave irrationally just seem to appeal to the same kinds of normative statement at the beginning of this paragraph: " I ought to fulfil my goals" or "I ought to do what I want".

Just giving such normative statements as a brute fact doesn't seem good enough justificafion for me because there is nothing stopping someone from starting from different assumptions and believing a different kind of contradictory normative fact. Neither is there any fact of the world that will distinguisg which of the contradictory normative facts are actually true. It seems to come down to subjective intution and my views of neuroscience and cognition do not give me any reason to believe that such subjective intuitions have any link to some objective reality in regard to normative oughts.

When people make decisions they do so on the basis of the belief that some choices are truly better than others, in a way that goes beyond hypothetical imperatives. — Leontiskos

I don't doubt this since there are many examples of these people in these threads but I think thats beside the point. Someone believing that one is performing choices that are objectively good or bad doesn't give necessarily give me reason to think those beliefs are in some sense veridical, especially when some people might not share those beliefs. When I try to directly examine reasons for there to ve objective oughts as I have just done in the last section, I do not come up with any reason that they actually exist.

After all, in real life a hypothetical imperative needs to be grounded in a non-hypothetical decision or imperative in order to take flesh — Leontiskos

I am not totally sure what you mean here but I am guessing you mean that these imperatives need to be grounded in the kinds of prior assumptions like "I ought to fulfil my goals" which I could not find any objective basis for in a previous section of this post.

Probably far too liberal useage of italics in this post, unfortunately.

This kind of stuff is difficult without being very precise but I think there is a good point in the idea of chess not being true or false due to how it is a construction. Its truth totally depends on people to the extent that it seems difficult for there to be truths that are not about things like people playing chess or their intentions regarding chess and things like that. Its difficult to say the rules of chess pick out anything independently of such things which makes it similar to morality in that regard. And there comes a triviality to it too because if you can talk about the rules of chess being true then it is trivial to talk about any game being true. Talking about this is interesting because it unveils that a lot of our truth talk is actually idealizations and when you try to specify what you mean, the original sentences seem at best vague, usually faulty and can arguably even not be true under the standards you would have wanted for them.

Well, "one ought not kick puppies for fun" will be true if and only if one ought not kick puppies for fun. — Banno

Again, that describes how people talk about truth but it doesn't in and of itself tell you if something is true or truthapt.

it's a consequence of the hinge proposition that one ought so far as one can avoid causing suffering. — Banno

So what stops someone from starting from a different assumption about whether one ought to cause suffering? Presumably there is nothing that makes this true either if you have to add in that its a hinge proposition.

Can you show how one does that if normative statements have no truth value? — Banno

Its very easy, you can talk about it in terms of things like goals, actions, their consequences and reason using them instead. People do it every day concerning the things they want to do and the ends they want to realize to decide what behaviors they want to do.

So "one ought not kick puppies for fun" is a valuation. And it gives every appearance of being true. — Banno

What makes it true?

Second, if valuations are not the sort of thing that can be true, then they cannot be used in deductions or explanation — Banno

Its very easy to reason about normativity in terms of some kind of means-ends analysis.

As far as I know, I think she just gives the best kind of modern account of emotions in psychology and neuroscience. Its probably better I just link examples of papers, where you can see the abstracts / introductions, to get a feel of what kind of things she says:

https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=WF5c0_8AAAAJ&citation_for_view=WF5c0_8AAAAJ:HoB7MX3m0LUC

https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=WF5c0_8AAAAJ&citation_for_view=WF5c0_8AAAAJ:ZHo1McVdvXMC

https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=WF5c0_8AAAAJ&citation_for_view=WF5c0_8AAAAJ:fPk4N6BV_jEC

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1934613/

But the emphasis is about moving away from having some fixed repertoire of emotions that have a self-contained existence. Seeing them thid way, emotions seem kind of mysterious ontologically. She's morr about breaking them down into more primitive and tangible components and interactions.

Actually, I wish to get hold of a copy of Damasio's 'Looking for Spinoza'. — Jack Cummins

I recommend you might want to look at books by Lisa Feldman Barrett. She has a good modern take on emotions.

Well maybe "should" was too strong a word but I think similar kinds of skepticism as with moral realism can lead you to drop other realisms. Where to draw the line? Depends who you are I guess. It doesn't seem to me a big leap from dropping moral facts to modal facts which do not seem to be anymore facts about actual events as morality is. Dropping normativity in the context of morality does not seem such a stretch either from dropping normativity about beliefs all together which I am sure a lot of moral anti-realists would not find easy. I think the idea that there is no objective fact about what someone ought to do would also cover beliefs if it covers moral facts, ceteris paribus. I think there's probably other parallels too where some argument against moral facts might apply to other facts.

I guess there is no good well-defined place for deciding where you should stop in terms of skepticism though. Even the most stringent anti-realist I am sure will not give up everything.

Yes, this is a very good point. I think it would have to be something like you go under a medical procedure and wake up afterwards having gained a doppelganger. Then I imagine your memories would be lined up.

I am not sure I understand what you mean here??

Had some thoughts about Doppelgangers inspired by Karl Pilkington and then a film I saw recently called Infinity Pool:

Imagine there is a world where doppelgangers can be created identical to other people in terms of biological structure, genes, memories, abilities, absolutely everything.

Some questions:

1. If a doppelganger was created of you, how do you know you are not the doppelganger? Could you convincingly win an argument with your doppelganger about who was the real doppelganger?

2. What if you were met with this same doppelganger scenario but from another family member or friends. You could only pick one to bring back to your life with you and you would never see the other again.

That is a brilliant account of the debates. It makes it look as if it just a question of different ways of saying the same thing. The catch is that it's hard to see why it matters which way one jumps — Ludwig V

Aha I think this would create a regress of the same problem as someone else would come along and say that it isn't just different ways of the same thing.

But yes, I have thought about ways of kind of possibly ignoring labels of "real" or "non-real". Ironically, I feel like its very difficult to do this in a way that doesn't just look like normal anti-reaalism.

That may well be true. But that makes his use of "translation" very different from what translation between languages involves. — Ludwig V

Yes, and I suspect maybe this has contributed to misunderstandings when people conflate his translatability of theories with translatability of languages. Languages are so flexible, and the experiences that we are talking about are so rich, that even if a word doesnt have a direct word equivalent in another language, it might be possible to still reconstruct it or make a new correspondence using other words.

For instance:

Gökotta (Swedish) - To rise at dawn in order to go out and listen to the birds sing.

As far as I know this word has absolutely no equivalent in English but its very easy for us to reconstruct the meaning of the word that is more or less the same by using other words. A Swedish person would also be able to do the same in the Swedish because words are rich and redundant *(i.e. I am sure there is a direct translation of "To rise at dawn in order to go out and listen to the birds sing" in Swedish that doesn't use the word Gökotta")*. There's a hundred *(redundant)* ways to describe a table which roughly preserves what I am talking about *when I talk about tables*.

You can't really do that nearly as well in science taxonomy. You cannot use words from Newtonian Mechanics as surrogates for Quantum Wave function in the same way you can for the Swedish word. As far as I know, particles-type things aren't in Aristotelian theory (only *using particles as* a demonstration anyway) and so you cannot reconstruct modern particles either using Aristotelian ontology. Maybe Aristotle could describe them as "points" or something, but he is not using taxonomy from his theory, he is just using other words that he can use everyday to describe what a particle in the other theory is, in an intelligible way. That wouldn't count as a correspondence between the two scientific theories. *(At the same time, I realis, maybe there isn't a sharp line between terminology that is part of theory or not part of the theory, since I imagine all theories must make use of words or concepts or math, etc., that is not unique to the theory.)*.

Kuhn also I think specifies a little more about translation with things like the "No-overlap" principle (kind of similar to the partial matching thing I mentioned in a previous post) to try and specify his criteria for translatability. That obviously has nothing to do with ordinary language translation.
Kuhn's notion of translation (which he explicitly uses to characterize incommensurability) clearly is not supposed to be generally applied to language. He designed it to track when ontologies in different scientific theories don't correspond to each other.

So this is partly why I have tried to be explicit where I am talking about Kuhn specifically in this thread since I think his view is quite different to the idea of generic conceptual schemes in languages. Nonetheless, Kuhn still seems to be a main target of Davidson in his "Very Idea" paper. But I think insofar as Davidson mentions Kuhn as an originator of the idea he is attacking, he has constructed a strawman since Kuhn isn't representative of the idea he attacks

but then the concepts of a theory are inter-related, not defined one by one. — Ludwig V

Yes, I believe establishing that they correspond more or less equates to how a term is interrelated with other terms in the same theory. You can then match the networks of concepts together. I believe it would be something like: some places concepts match because their relation to neighbouring concepts also match. But then in other parts of the networks, these things break down.

Edit: some clarifying *...*

Yes, I think all kinds of different fields with different methods, focusing on different topics sould be crucial for understanding. In terms of the ways you talk about, its probably useful for there to be specialists on both the formal and positivist end and simultaneously people who try to mix between. People that will mix it up will depend on the extreme ends where people have created specialized, deep knowledge for those specific topics (e.g. formal or empirical) from which the middle people can make use of to integrate.

I think personally, in this kind of topic of investigation, I am most interested in computational approaches using things like neural networks and dynamic systems which can then be used to explain how we use language in a symbolic way without being explicitly symbolic. Approaches that are broadly enactive/embodied which I think resonate well with Wittgenstein's view of meaning as use. So in my opinion, there are ways you can kind of validate the views late Wittgenstein came on to... at least under my interpretation of Wittgenstein.

I actually think Large language models are kind of Wittgensteinian; these models are working basically through just learning to predict and choose what comes next based on previous context which is kind of similar to how I see Wittgenstein's meaning-as-use. Predictive computational models like these seem to be good at explaining brain responses:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2105646118
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-022-03036-1
https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.01930

Which is interesting because you can then speculate that brains don't need much more than prediction for complex cognitive functions like language (and predictive processing is already very popular in neuroscience). Such a view of language seems very thin though for people used to a view which is strongly symbolic and thickly representational. At the same time, its quite consistent with enactive/embodied views of cognition.

So I think to some extent there are ways to link new empirical findings back to some things philosophers might have said back in the day, caveat being that my interpretation of Wittgenstein is probably unique to me given how difficult he can be to understand.

Obviously, what I find most interesting is just one small area in all the kinds of fields and areas of investigation in language.

They may be different but I don't think that difference entails anything to do with truth. Nothing has been presented to suggest that imo.

My personal opinions:

1. For what evidence is there empirically for "conceptual schema" to be a "thing" as applied to language use itself (not necessarily as a meta-theory of differences in scientific frameworks aka "incommensurability"). — schopenhauer1

I don't think these schemes are necessarily a "thing" in the language sense you talk about. All that there is, in a physical sense, is our use of language. Different people will use language differently in different contexts which you could categorize in different ways. What is the consequence though? We more or less live in the same experiential worlds and the richness and flexibility of how we both use and learn languages make the obstacles of different language schemes like this temporary or trivial. No one is obliged to choose between different ways of using language. People regularly assimilate.

2. What role does Philosophy of Language play in understanding language as opposed to linguistic anthropology, linguistic cognitive neuroscience, psycho-linguistics, and related empirical, or scientific-naturalistic adjacent fields?

For example, when we talk about "forms of life" and "language games", yes that is indeed a neologism created in the Philosophy of Language, but have "forms of life" and "language games" and related neologisms (like "conceptual schema") just become runaway theoretical constructs? — schopenhauer1

I think philosophy always has a role in clarifying concepts but I do suspect that at some points in time natural philosophy formed the main basis for understanding certain topics. Over time, as empirical knowledge improved, natural philosophy would be overtaken by scientific areas like physics etc. I think that something similar could be the case with language where in the early 20th century, there was a heavy emphasis on forming theories of language, meaning, epistemology. With Later Wittgenstein, we hit the limits of these approaches. I agree "forms of life" and "language games" are vague and not that informative as terms, but they are enlightening in terms of the limits of philosophy in this area. I think they should be taken as stop-gaps not ends in themselves. They were introduced in the context of the inability to logically prescribe meanings to language and reference. Nonetheless, language and knowledge carry on and are used regardless in complicated ways which we give those labels of "language games" and "forms of life".

Why? Clearly, its the brain. The brain is mechanistic so it doesn't have to be driven by logic and rationality, just physics. "Forms of life" and "language games" are then stop-gaps for scientific, empirical theories of how people actually use language and why they behave (ultimately caused by the brain). That's not to say that science replaces philosophy here, just that a limit has been reached when Wittgenstein came upon these concepts. Similarly, I believe Quine talks about language being about people's practices which we would investigate scientifically.

That doesn't mean that philosophy still won't be important in other ways for clarifying concepts concerning language, just not necessarily in terms of grand theories trying to describe how language actually works. Perhaps more in helping to clarify concepts that scientists and other professions come up with, and their consequences.

Yes, I would agree with that. But one needs to tease out what counts as access. — Ludwig V

This is a very good point and one I have thought about a fair amount recently. From my intuition this may be a substantial reason for gulfs between realists and anti-realists - realists are much more permissive when it comes to access than anti-realists.

I don't think there is necessarily a rigid, neat, well defined line on what counts as access. It may be fuzzy and people think different things depending on assumptions, inclinations, topic under question. A realist may think the different perspectives we have on the world are different ways of viewing the same thing, an anti-realist may say those same perspectives block knowledge of the thing in and of itself. A realist may say theories are approximately true, an anti-realist may say the notion of "approximately true" is arbitrary and just highlights that the theory does not explain all of the data.

My intuition is that this threatens to make the division between realist and anti-realist something that is in some sense subjective and I am not sure how substantive concepts like "real" or "not real" really are if such dividing lines cannot be established.

Yes. There's an ambiguity about language. Most people seem to equate "language" with "conceptual scheme" or "paradigm". But I can't see that natural languages can be equated to a single conceptual scheme or paradigm, so I prefer to regard them as distinct. — Ludwig V

Yes, I think when it comes to Kuhn at least, his mention of translation is not talking about languages generically but about words thats constitute specific scientific theories.

But the point applies to conceptual schemes or paradigms as well as languages. — Ludwig V

Which point are you referring to?

Yes, that's clearly true. He's a bit like Hume, who demolishes the claim that logic or reason establishes causal powers or causal laws, and then turns to psychology to fill the gap. I'm doubtful about this, because it seems to reduce the issues to causality or subjectivity. Which misrepresents what's going on, I think. — Ludwig V

Obviously, Kuhn has no idea what is going on inside the head but I don't think this Humean line of thought misrepresents, because what is going on when scientists form beliefs and create theories is going to be directly related to whatever is going on in a mechanistic brain (and therefore psychology). And whatever a brain does is going to be complicated and difficult to scrutinise. Certainly belief formation does not have to be constrained by strict notions of logic or entailment and I think people's thoughts are definitely not constrained this way in everyday life. Such logical entailments are impossible if data is inherently underdetermined by different possible explanations, people emphasize different arguments / evidence, and people have different starting assumptions on how they view the world. Logical entailment then becomes intractable.

It is very rare I think that people totally follow some prescribed, unwaivering set of extremely detailed logical steps when coming to beliefs. And I think people can often have intuitive impressions of what they think is correct without coming to it by some transparent logical process. For instance, I reckon most people that are unconvinced by the many world interpretation did not need some logical steps to come to their impression that it is intuitively, unrealistically strange. People don't need to follow some set of logical steps to come to the conclusion that there are true moral facts - often people just have a blunt intuition that some things are objectively wrong. I'm sure such kinds of intuitive thought apply to various kinds of theoretical thinking in science. The existence of these kinds of phenomena are not to say that what the brain is doing is random, however. If you think of artificial neuronal networks as having an inherent ability to optimize their learning due to their design then its pretty realistic to say that similar things apply to the brain. Just because people have intuitive impressions doesn't mean that they are totally random or not driven by some process which has efficacy in learning. But as with artifical networks, more complicated, open ended problems gives bigger scope for error, ambiguity and coming up with different solutions (or theories) that may not even be compatible.

One couldn't seriously argue that Newton's theory was not better (more comprehensive, more accurate, more coherent (?), simpler (?)) than Aristotle's. I hesitate about "more useful" because it isn't particularly obvious at the moment that Einstein is more useful that Newton. — Ludwig V

What Kuhn described in his "Structure of Revolutions" just tries to describe what scientists do I think, not justify them. From what he observes, it seems that different perspectives can arise in different people who then evaluate theories differently. What is the objective standard? This doesn't seem to fall out from anywhere. All there are are different people and their different perspectives which are not all the same, for various reasons.

I think you could very well say Newton's theory is better and most people would agree; but obviously this is still arguing from within your own perspective and assumptions. It may just happen to be that lots of people share many of those same assumptions, and probably for good reason; for instance, its difficult for people generally to motivate scientific theories without those theories explaining evidence. But then again, the more detailed you look at it, the more disagreement you might find e.g. about what simplicity is or what comprehensive means, what kinds of explanations are preferable, etc. It seems more trivial comparing Newton and Aristotle from today, but I am sure at the time it would have been not as clear cut when people did not know what a success Newtonian theory would become.

Well, yes. The new science (Newton, LaPlace) abandoned the Aristotelian idea of "matter" in favour of a different conception of what physical objects consist of. But it was pretty clear that both concepts were "about" at least some of the same thing(s). Is that what you had in mind? — Ludwig V

Sure, Newton and Aristotle both describe motion but Aristotle's worlds of four elements or whatever it was seems radically different to what we understand today. I don't think they can be construed as the same world. In terms of Kuhn's translatability one would not be able to give one-to-one correspondences between the elements in Aristotle and their supposed equivalents in modern science. Modern science paints a far richer picture of the world with relations which do not exist in the Aristotelian picture and making it impossible for those Aristotelian elements to be equivalent or matched to the modern ones in an interchangeable way - they play very different roles in the new scientific picture where they are not even fundamental anymore. There is no more one-to-one correspondence between the modern and Aristotelian notions of air, or the respective notions for fire. They exist in completely different networks of constructs. I assume you might be able to match parts of these notions but it will be a mismatch as a whole. I am sure Aristotelian fire occurs in the world in places where it doesn't occur in the Newtonian world while there are blatant phenomena in the Newtonian world which don't occur at all in the Aristotelian one even though they are related to Newtonian fire. The ontologies are fundamentally mismatched in an incompatible way, though I get that there generically may be no well-defined fine line between compatible and incompatible.

I think perhaps from Kuhn's perspective the real significance is simply that scientists have different incompatible claims about the world which are not easily settled by available evidence. From his point of view, the narrative that textbooks seemed to paint was a picture where instead, all that scientists did was just passively discover new things about the world that piled up. For him, these textbooks missed the combative clash of incompatible beliefs between different scientists.

Well I think its less about saying "we might as well kust give away the whole thing" and more that some people just genuinely don't believe in the "whole thing" in the firsr place.

It remains that we can and do commonly assign truth values to normative statements. We also use these truth values to perform deductions. The oddity here is the denial of all this because of philosophical ideology. — Banno

Well I would say that just because people seem to assign truth values doesn't mean that that is necessarily what they mean; I don't think there is even necessarily determinate what people mean when they use the word "true" in everyday scenarios. It may not even be determinate in philosophical conversations and people clearly have different explicit philosophical notions of what truth means.

I think maybe the central issue is that regardless of whether one has the prior belief that there is such a thing as moral facts or not, I don't see how the use of T-sentences can be a strong argument since people can just deny they use language in a certain way. Its difficult to see how what people say about their own language use can be rebutted just through this existence of this scheme. If people use language one way, and others use it another way, then how can language use in itself tell you anything about whether something is actually truth-apt in an objective sense? I think it's a framework for how people talk about truth but I fail to see how it can be an argument for truth.

I mean't stance-independent moral fact. If moral statements aren't about facts in the first place then they may not be amenable to the T-sentence thing. If they then think that "you ought to do this" it may not be obliged that they are saying that "you ought to do this is true". They may even find perhaps that "it is a stance independent fact that you ought to do this" is false of they want to.

I would say that if both theories are explaining the same data, reference has been maintained... Just enough to establish that they are both theories of the same things, or at least the same world. — Ludwig V

I just don't see why reference has to be maintained. Not saying that constructs from successive theories cannot be deemed the same or used in virtually the same way. I just don't see this as necessary.

To be honest, I am not entirely comfortable with the idea of referencing something in the world that one cannot access. To me, what seems to be a maintaining of reference is driven by the continuities in the empirical structure that successive theories predict or explain. I don't feel like there is an obligation to think of reference as always continued.

"Correspond" is a strong word. I would compare different languages (I'm not saying that "theory" and "language" mean the same thing). We can recognize that two languages are about the same world and even about the same things, so long as some (most?) references correspond; it helps if some (most?) concepts overlap, at least roughly. But we can recognize at the same time that that is not true of all references or all concepts.
It seems to me that incommensurability is really quite vague. — Ludwig V

Well, I think with different languages, people usually are not only literally in the same world, but living lives in similar ways with similar objects.

I think the closest thing to incommensurability when it comes to normal language would be describing things in peoples lives whether objects, customs or whatever that simply do not exist in another person's culture. But then again, languages are also flexible enough to describe the same object in many different ways by referring to different properties - and those novel customs and *objects of other cultures* can usually be described in corresponding words in that way. For instance, some tool that doesn't exist in your culture can be described in terms of materials and ways people behave using it that you are familiar with.

I don't know if scientific taxonomies are so much like this though. They don't have this kind flexibility and the worlds are not as rich as the ones we describe with language. If you come across a new concept like a wave function in quantum mechanics, you cannot simply re-describe that in terms from the taxonomy of Newtonian mechanics in the same way one might by re-describing a tool in terms of materials. Its a totally new object which means it is a world incompatible with the old Newtonian one with a different ontology and different possibilities, even if they also share many of the same things. I think, however, maybe there is no fixed, neat dividing line between what you would call two different worlds. But I also think in something like physics, they are usually talking on such a fundamental level of description that in well known examples like relativity, quantum mechanics, its not really ambiguous at all. If you think quantum mechanics is literally getting rid of classical particle trajectories then I think its very difficult to say that this is the same world as classical mechanics.

I think incommensurability, at least Kuhn's, is less vague than people think; it is just misunderstood. I *think* it is just about different scientific theories having different ontologies. Sometimes scientists talk past each other if they are not aware of their different assumptions but Kuhn isn't saying that different theories are inherently unintelligible from different perspectives.

My personal opinion is that Kuhn got misunderstood because in describing how scientists do things, he was essentially also trying to give descriptions of the psychological nature of how they come to their beliefs. Now, central to Kuhn's revolutions is that there is no logical entailment between evidence and the correct theories. There is then this kind of arbitrary nature in which scientists come to hold beliefs, going by intuition, going through "conversion" processes, having a stubbornness and talking past each other because they may work from different assumptions or reject each other's standards of evidence, etc. His account of theory change isn't about *logical entailment* like Popper, but psychological change in people's minds which is not constrained in a determinate, algorithmic way by evidence.

I think people have confused these very visceral descriptions of psychology with the idea that scientists live in different conceptual schemes which are inherently unintelligible. But I think Kuhn's idea is much closer to common scientific underdetermination than people think. He talks about translation I think initially in the sense of how scientists may initially misinterpret each other's theories purely out of naivety, and later he uses this as a kind of criteria for how different theories are incommensurable. But this notion of translatability Kuhn uses isn't about intelligibility, *intelligibility* incidentally very close to Davidson's notion which he comes to use in the "Very Idea Of" paper. Kuhn's translatability is instead just about if the structure of lexical networks match up and terms in one theory have a direct correspondence or interchangeability to constructs in the other so that they can be thought of the same thing. This has no bearing on whether someone can *or cannot* come to understand that theory.

But obviously all this is just my view of Kuhn, no one else.

Edit: clearing up for clarity, hopefully: marked by *...*

I confess, I think you've lost me here.

There are "non-stance-independent facts"? And these are not true? — Banno

Not necessarily. I am just implying that people may be able to use such sentences such as "you ought to do this" without necessarily meaning it in a way of expressing beliefs about stance independent *facts*.

Expressions such as *you ought to do this* may have other meanings or uses that do not have to be related to stance independent facts. I am skeptical that there are always determinate meanings behind the way that people use certain words in everyday life, let alone meanings that coincide with how philosophers might interpret those words in an academic setting. After all, people can use *words like truth* and concepts of right and wrong without any kind of formal training or education. I think people can plausibly use sentences like "you ought to do this" or even use the word "true" in ways that are not as strict as what is being talked about with more rigorous philosophical frameworks.

I therefore don't think that just because someone can say "you ought to do this" or "it's true that you ought to do this" has to imply the kind of T-sentence framework you are using *because people are not necessarily expressing a fact*.

Edit: some mistakes and added clarity **

But for some reason, folk refuse to apply this to statements counting "ought". Special pleading. — Banno

If saying that *a moral statement* is true means that they are saying *that such a statement* is a stance-independent fact then why should they *apply T-sentences* if they don't think *that the moral statement* is a stance-independent fact? Doesn't seem to follow. To apply the T-sentence is to assume the phrases make sense in the first place, which some might *not* believe *to be the case for moral statements*, if they have a reason to.

Those who deny this usually claim either that moral statements are not truth-apt; or that they are, but are all false. Which path will you choose? — Banno

I don't think I really have a strong opinion on that particularly right now.


Edit: Some housekeeping on comment just for better clarity (hopefully); additions marked within * ... *.