Ok. And how is this relevant? — Echarmion

I think you are looking for something that doesn't really exist. I don't think the mind consists of like substantive thoughts as objects which can be converted into words and back again.

I find it funny some people are obsessed with some standard upon which people *should* agree on things (i.e. truth, realism). Yet, in practise, they know this is never the case or else they would never be having these debates about truth or realism. The motivation for realism is almost more like an insecurity or nagging anxiety. Perhaps stranger realists (including, perhaps most notable, karl popper) are those that accept many of the arguments for anti-realist views yet seem to find themselves unable to get over their intuition for realism and enforce it no matter the cost, essentially question begging. Given that anti-realism or realism doesn't really matter, I guess the whole debate about whether science yields truth is essentially a personality contest between different people who's different personality traits and intuitions draw them to different dpgmatic assumptions and question begging foundations.



If truth is a language tool then I think mental concept is equally a language tool. Science is just a biological activity, a special case of the same biological activity that allows the use of words like "truth" and "mental concept".

It's when the government monopolizes the right to weapons or otherwise regulates and restricts it that a characteristic sense of oppression and inequality emerges. — baker

I will never understand this obsession which only seems to exist in America.

Nothing at work is going to fulfill you like your family will — ButyDude

I don't think this is true for everyone.

So, I believe that a good change could be more support for mothers to have children, maybe paid maternal leave or something like that. — ButyDude

I mean, it should be regardless of sex I think.

I am kind of skeptical of the difference that a nuclear family makes here. Kids can thrive I think with any person as caregiver and it is possible yo be be supported with 4 caregivers or even only 1 if that caregiver can handle it. They can equally be supported with caregivers whp are not together and co-parent. The personal and economic hardships of people will endure whether people stay in a nuclear family or they are not; these issues are much deeper.

There are far more pressing and less banal issues in this world than resurrecting the nuclear family. For me, moving the world back toward that kind of conservativism is not the right step.

Thanks for the reply, and some nice insights! To be honest I deeply respect the idea of someone who is uncompromising to put their stamp on a goal or vision they want to communicate and explore. Those kind of things really are what stick with me in stories or films. Even if a film or story isn't particularly exciting or enjoyable, if I perceive of it as projecting some kind of well-built underlying concept or vision, I often find myelf returning to it again and again, at least in thought, over more enjoyable alternatives. Sometimes though it takes time for those things to click. There have definitely been examples, in particular of films, where my first viewings I didn't find good at all, but once I can construct a picture I find interesting, whatever I found boring or uninteresting or disagreeable with it doesn't really matter anymore, or even accentuates the new way I am viewing it.

endless description of the mergings and juxtapositions of mutilated bodies and broken car parts in purely aesthetic terms, repeating ad nauseum words like “stylized,” “formalized,” “junction,” and of course, “engine coolant.” — Jamal

Reminds me of the Atrocity Exhibition. I think these two works are probably deeply related on a conceptual level. Might have to take a lok again.

The collection I have is just like his whole collection of short stories I believe so I don't know really know which stories group together in original books. I don't think they are ordered that way, if I am not mistaken.

The wikipedia synopsis of Unlimited Dream Company sounds quite interesting actually.

I have question, apologies if already has been answered somewhere, but:

Do you think it needed to be unenjoyable to be the art it is, in your view?

I haven't read any of it; I only watched the film a long time ago which left very little impression on me - all I remember is a scene I found very dirty.

I do, however, own a collection of Ballard's short stories and find that he is a great short story writer, both very enjoyable as well as insightful and intelligent. So I wonder if you think Crash needs to be unenjoyable to be its art.

Just as an aside, I haven't really read any other of his works, with the exception of an attempt at Atrocity Exhibition which doesn't really seem like something you would read in a traditional way. Some of the imagery in that book has stayed with me though it hasn't really evoked enough of exploration and thought about the book for me to have an opinion on its merit.

My response would be that then, the person not being able to self-correct their private language would be no worse (or better) off. — schopenhauer1

This is precisely to point of the private language argument.

Any term can only be defined in other terms, so how does any term help? :roll: You know as well as I do what 'forever' in the context of 'addition can go on in principle forever'. You also know what 'no limit' means in the context of 'there is no reason to think there is, in principle, any limit to addition'. — Janus

Well this is the point, nothing helps. You may say that "you know as well as I do" but if I interpret "forever" in a non-standard way that is consistent with your past usage of the word forever then whats not to say that you mean something else other than "forever".

Kripke says -

"Here of course I am expounding Wittgenstein's wellknown remarks about "a rule for interpreting a rule". It is tempting to answer the sceptic by appealing from one rule to another more 'basic' rule. But the sceptical move can be repeated at the more 'basic' level also. Eventually the process
must stop - "justifications come to an end somewhere" - and I am left with a rule which is completely unreduced to any other. How can I justify my present application ofsuch a rule,
when a sceptic could easily interpret it so as to yield any of an indefinite number of other results? It seems that my application of it is an unjustified stab in the dark. I apply the rule blindly."

No, the point is the rule can never be determined, If he says 5, someone will just ask him to show he was using phlog-ddition!

Forever means there is no limit in priniciple. What does "qu-orever" mean — Janus

You've just repeated a synonym for "forever" so how does that help? What does "no limit" mean and does any of this really help without specifying what exactly has "no limit"? That would be "adding" presumably so you're back to where you started and probably should characterize that to me first.

"Quo-rever" is just an analogous concept for forever, exactly like quus where all your uses of forever so far are consistent with it but it differs in some way. But tbh, forever or infinite seems so abstract it seems difficult to point to what you mean anyway: how exactly can someone show they are referring to the infinite? hence why when I asked what forever meant, you just replied with a synonym effectively. But again, the target here isn't really forever but addition. This explanation youve given is essentially "I am adding forever" but "adding" was what was in question in the first place so how is saying " I am adding forever" resolving the issue?

You could have meant " I am quusing forever"

Tell me that and I'll tell you whether I meant that. — Janus

Well I already told you that is irrelevant. This is just like the Newtonian vs Special relativity example I already gave. Its not about what you think you mean, its whether you can prove a fact of the matter about what you think you mean.

I don't even know what you want me to give, since you apparently are unable to articulate it clearly. — Janus

Whats so hard? Prove that when you use "addition" at any given time you don't mean quus or some other quus-like word. A fact that unambiguously shows that every time you say "addition" you cannot be meaning any of these other alternative phrases.

C'mon man, this is total bullshit. I know what adding consists in, and if you could tell me precisely what quadding consists in then I could point to how it is different than adding. — Janus

I think I will jist have to leave a quotation from Kripke:

"Let us return to the example of 'plus' and 'quus'. We have just summarized the problem in terms of the basis of my present particular response: what tells me that I should say '125' and not '5'? Of course the problem can be put equivalently in terms of the sceptical query regardIng my
present intent: nothing in my mental hIstory establishes whether I meant plus or quus. So formulated, the problem may appear to be epistemological - how can anyone know which of these I meant? Given, however, that everythIng In
my mental history is compatible both with the conclusion that I meant plus and with the conclusion that I meant quus, It is clear that the sceptical challenge is not really an epIstemological one. It purports to show that nothing in the mental history of past behavior - not even what an omniscient God would know - could establish whether I meant plus or quus.
But then it appears to follow that there was no fact about me that constituted my having meant plus rather than quus. How could there be, if nothing in my internal mental history or external behavior will answer the sceptic who supposes that in fact I meant quus? If there was no such thing as my meaning plus rather than quus in the past, neither can there be any such a thing in the present. When we initially presented the paradox,
we perforce used language, taking present meanings for granted. Now we see, as we expected, that this provisional concession was indeed fictive. There can be no fact as to what I
mean by 'plus', or any other word at any time. The ladder must finally be kicked away.

This, then, is the sceptical paradox. When I respond in one way rather than another to such a problem as '68+57', I can have no justification for one response rather than another. Since the sceptic who supposes that I meant quus cannot be answered, there is no fact about me that distinguishes between my meaning plus and my meaning quus. Indeed, there is no
fact about me that distinguishes between my meaning a definite function by 'plus' (which determines my responses in new cases) and my meaning nothing at all.

Sometimes when I have contemplated the situation, I have had something of an eerie feeling. Even now as I write, I feel confident that there is something in my mind - the meaning I attach to the 'plus' sign - that instructs me what I ought to do in all future cases. I do not predict what I will do - see the discussion immediately below - but instruct myself what I ought to do to conform to the meaning. (Were I now to make a prediction of my future behavior, it would have substantive content only because it already makes sense, in terms of the instructions I give myself, to ask whether my intentions will be conformed to or not.) But when I concentrate on what is now in my mind, what instructions can be found there? How can I be said to be acting on the basis of these instructions when I act in the future? The infinitely many cases of the table are not in my mind for my future self to consult. To say that there is a general rule in my mind that tells me how to add in the future is only to throw the problem back on to other rules that also seem to be given only in terms of finitely many cases. What can there be in my mind that I make use of when I act in the future? It seems that the entire idea of meaning vanishes into thin air."

I have already said that the logic of addition is unlimited iteration; in principle we can keep adding forever. — Janus

But what do you mean when you say "adding" or "forever". How am I sure you don't actually mean "qu-orever" instead of "forever"?

The logic of quaddition like rules diverges from this when it stipulates some hiatus or terminus at whatever arbitrary point. — Janus

So what, this doesn't stop anyone using quaddition. It is both logically and literally possible to use the rule quaddition.

As long as such a quaddition-like rule does not diverge from the normal logic of addition, then there is no discernible difference and hence no need to use a different name to signify that procedure. — Janus

Yes, but equally someone could use that logic to say that quus should be preferred and there is no reason to use a different name of "addition" to signify it.

Two is always two regardless of what word you use to signify the concept. — Janus

How is this any different from saying that the image of the world I see is the same regardless of the boundaries I wish to draw on it and the way I wish to partition my concepts that describe it?

In contrast the concepts /tree/ or /animal/ are not so determinate. — Janus

But the image of a tree or an animal you see is determinate. Is the way you group different things as "trees" or "animals" much different from say describing things as prime numbers or odd and even or any other kind of mathematical concept? Can't addition, multiplication and subtraction all be grouped as operators?

So, introducing questions about ordinary language into a discussion of counting and addition is only going to confuse the issue. — Janus

No, because this whole issue is meant to be a generic property of all language. Quus was only given as a single example.

I don't need to do that; I don't need to define some essence in order to know that I am counting or adding — Janus

Okay, you know you're adding. But how do you know that what you are adding is not infact quadding, and how can you demonstrate that?

I don't even need to define the rule because the logic of counting and adding accords with the logic inherent in the cognition of mutlitudinous things. — Janus

How can you say it accords with anything if you can't define it, meaning how do you know that other rules don't also accord with the logic inherent with cognition.

Nothing new regarding this is emerging from you, so I think we are done. — Janus

I wouldn't be still saying anything if you would just give me what I want, but you can't. If you could, you would have done it literally days ago. You cannot actually resolve the underdetermination inherent in the problem. There is no way you can rule out using various different rules instead of addition without being dogmatic i.e. declaring that it is addition for no evidence or reason other than "you feel it", and because you can't even demonstrate you're actually adding, you cannot even demonstrate that what you feel is actually truly addition and not quaddition. And with your choice of dogmatism, equally someone else could be equally dogmatic and just declaring that they are using quus just because thats what "feels right". You can say they're wrong. But they could say you're just wrong, and there's no way to resolve it... which is I guess where we are at!

I have addressed the thing you asked me to demonstrate, now I think you should try and address what I asked you to demonstrate.

You say you unddrstand the logic of addition; lay out for me that logic then and give me the facts that rule out that you will give a quus-type answer in future uses of addition.

all I've been saying is that addition seems to me to be a natural development of cognition-based counting — Janus

And why can't I just question whether you have been quonting all along instead of counting?

There is no cognition-based logic to justify such an arbitrary stipulation — Janus

There is nothing that logically forbids someone from just using quaddition either.

There is no cognition-based logic to justify such an arbitrary stipulation

You don't have a cognition based logic to justify it other than you are used to addition. Not really a justification imo... "it just is because it is and anything I am not familiar with is wrong"... That's how it sounds.

At the end of the day, in the thought experiment, the data so far is just as consistent with the use of quus as plus.

I deem the whole thing a lame non-issue; I see no significance in it. — Janus

Well the significance is that you can't seem to refute it. Its very simple to refute Newtonian mechanics - for instance: under such and such conditions, time dilation occur; time dilation is impossible in Newtonian mechanics; Newtonian mechanics refuted. You don't seem to be able to use logic to justify addition at all.

This whole thing deep down is about the relationship between words and the world. The question is something like: do words have a fixed one-to-one relationship with the things that exist in the world in a way that they are intrinsically related? Does our behavior and thoughts prescribed in a rigidly defined, top-down manner by words and definitions, as if meaning has some kind of essence to it?

The alternative is: no, there is not a one-to-one fixed relationship between words and the world. Instead, we make labels and place them where we please and there are no fixed boundaries that force us to label things one way or another. We can, in principle, place the boundaries any way we like. Meaning is not essential in definitions but inferred from our behavior and how we use words in a bottom up manner. Our intractably, complicated behavior comes first.

If you think about it in this sense, what is in question is not whether we use quus or plus... we have a certain kind of mathematical behavior that we use very well for our own ends, but there is no single way to characterize it or label it or put boundaries around it. This underdeterminism has no consequence for our behavior because as I said just now, the behavior comes first, directly caused by the intractably complicated mechanistic behavior of our brains. And as our brains are just neurons communicating, there is nothing inherently semantically characterizable in what the brain is doing because its just mechanistic physics and there is probably not even a single way for brains to do any given task it is capable of.

Personally, I believe associative learning is at the foundation of language. In other words, Hume's theory of constant conjunction. This is the relationship between two events, where one event is invariably followed by the other: if the occurrence of A is always followed by B, A and B are said to be constantly conjoined. — RussellA

What is also interesting i find, is that the kind of very very very basic description of hebbian learning / spike timing dependent plasticity in the brain actually mirrors Hume's talk about causality quite well in terms of learning due to conjunctions and one event having to precede the other, things like that.

The connection is that: it is only in the context of public language as we use everyday, in a way that must be consistent with other people's language usage, that we find notions of rules and definitions determined - because we are checked by public consensus.

The point of the private language argument is that: without these checks, language seems redundant and there does not seem to be an inherent need for people to characterize the things they see in the world, or rules they apply, in one specific way or another (as illustrated by Kripke's quus rule-following paradox). Wittgenstein seems to suggest that giving things determinate labels via a private language seems to have no contribution on people's behavior and cognizance of the world.

it would be of no use. — Janus

It has been of use though because all of the examples of addition you have used so far in your life have been consistent with some quus-like rule. If you could have used that rule so far, then clearly it could have been of use.

It isn't really about intentional use anyway. The premise is that you have been using the addition rule for the whole of your life and you know it intimately. Then someone comes a long and questions: "How do you know you are not actually using quadditon? give me a justification of this."

Use is not so much relevant in that you would have to demonstrate that you are in fact using the "useful" rule, and that somewhere a long the line the future you are not going to give an answer that other people might find totally inconsistent with addition (but consistent with the "useless" rule). How can you demonstrate that you are not going to do that and you are in fact using the "useful" rule?

It's not dogmatism: I'll change my mind — Janus

I don't mean dogmatism in the sense of you not changing your mind, I mean dogmatism more in how it is used here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnchhausen_trilemma

You are defending the use of addition over other rules without demonstrating it. Your main justification so far seems to be that anything other than addition is arbitrary, but that in itself seems dogmatic. What do you mean by arbitrary other than that is just what you are used to, what seems natural... just what feels right? That seems to be dogmatism in the sense of the above wikipedia article.

If you can demonstrate that some rule could always yield the same result as addition and yet differs from it in the very part of it that does so. So, for example quaddition is exactly the same as addition up to any sum that does not exceed 57. — Janus

Again, its not about the difference between the two rules - we know they are different. It is about whether you can justify that a single rule you have been using is addition and not quaddition.

It may be easier to think about it analogous to how theories compete in science. For instance, Special relativity and Newtonian mechanics are very obviously different. But from our perspective on earth right now it may not be apparent which one is correct because they yield more or less the same results in our everyday context. We need an experiment to demonstrate one is the case and not the other.

I am therefore asking for your experiment about this. Asking me to demonstrate that quus always yields the same result as plus yet is also somehow different is an impossible contradition. They are just different. Yet, in our difficulty in figuring out whether the laws of nature are obeying Special relativity or Newtonian mechanics, would you also ask me to demonstrate that Newtonian mechanics gives different results yet is also the same as Special relativity? No, because that isn't relevant. We know they are different models; the question is which one is being instantiated right now on earth, which has to be demonstrated by experiment.

For the quus example, where is the experimental demonstration that you have been using addition and not quus (and then not any other type of quus-like overlapping rule)?

Edit: I hope this last part has addressed your arguments in the sense of saying that your arguments are erroneous and not relevant to the problem just like how trying to demonstrate that Special relativity is both somehow the same and different to Newtonian mechanics is not relevant to the question of whether Newtonian or Special relativity is actually the case on earth. Only an experiment can differentiate the two, which is also what you have to analogously/metaphorically provide to differentiate quus and plus.

So, if I add two numbers and the sum is more than 57, I am not doing quaddition, but ordinary addition. — Janus

Not necessarily because there are other rules other than plus which are consistent with that sum also. There are no specific instances which where alternative rules cannot be applied.

And as I said before if I am working out how many guests will be at my daughter's wedding and there are 35 from one side and 75 from the other, quaddition will be of no use, because it will tell me that I only need five places at the dinner table and five meals. — Janus

Its not about picking which rule to use. I am going to assume you have been using addition putatively as plus only for your entire life; its about whether you can demonstrate that this rule you have been using and are still using is in fact plus and not quus.

and wherever they are the same then there is no point using another name for what amounts to being just ordinary addition. — Janus

Well thats dogmatism like I said because wherever they are the same you can easily use quus.

The point is that wherever quaddition or any other arbitrary set of rules differs from addition then it is obvious which one I'm doing — Janus

Demonstrate it, give a definition that tells me you will always give the correct answers for plus and not quus.

This whole subject is a non-subject as far as I can tell, and no one has been able to come up with anything to convince me otherwise, so I think the time has come to drop it unless you have something new and substantive to say about it. — Janus

Well fair enough, I just don't think you have demonstrated a distinguishing fact yet and in view of that, I think my view about dogmatism is valid.

Why are you asking me how they differ when I know you know how they differ. quus operations are the same as plus except for numbers over 57 where it equals 5.

But again, this has nothing to do with the s
differentiating rules, its demonstrating one is using one rule and not the other.

I don't see human behavior as being relevant to the logic of counting or addition except insofar as it follows it. It's true that for finite addition (which all addition actually is) the logical possibility of endless iteration does not have to be kept in mind. — Janus

The point here is that in order to show you are following a specific rule, you need to give me a reason to believe that it is one rule or the other. The rules are obviously different; you just need to give me something that distinguishes whether you are using one rule or the other. Your past behavior is possibly part of the evidence in terms of what answers you gave to previous addition problems. The issue is that they are identical to answers for quaddition so they fail to be useful evidence.

Maybe instead you can give me some kind of definition which tells me what you are going to answer next or in the future. But then again, if I can pose alternative rules that fit the data so far for your usage of plus, can I also not pose the same kinds of alternatives for the components of your definitions? To be honest, I am not sure you can give a definition of addition which can actually explicate what you are going to do next because it is one of those concepts that are so primitive, if you ask someone what it means, they tend to just give you another synonym.. but then what does that synonym mean? It goes on forever. Similar might be said for a concept like infinite or something like that. If you cannot give me an intelligible explanation then how are you going to differentiate whether you are using plus and quus?

If quaddition is the same as addition then it's not a different procedure but just a different name. — Janus

So what? If it differs, then how could it do so without arbitrarily stipulating that iteration must cease at some point? — Janus

Its about the fact that everything you have done so far is consistent with multiple different rules. The rules can then be different but your behavior so far has been indistinguishable.

I can just keep adding forever in principle. — Janus

You can keep adding forever but you then need to give me a definition of that which then naturally entails the results of addition and not quaddition, otherwise how would I know that you go on using your rule and then you just end up quadditing or any other rule?

Dogmatism has nothing to do with it; there is simply no reason that addition should terminate anywhere. — Janus

It has everything to do with it because you're adamant that even when the situation is underdetermined, you dogmatically lean on plus even though you have no further means that can disambiguate the actual rule was plus.

This is nonsense: I haven't claimed that one could not use quaddition or any other arbitrary rule. — Janus

You are because from all our conversations so far, the final bastion you've decided to support yourself on is that quus is arbitrary and thats how you can somehow distinguish that you are using plus and not quus. Now if that is your only means of distinction then it follows that under the situation of the thought experiment, no one ever could be using quus because it is the arbitrary rule.

But then it is simply addition up that point, and so what? — Janus

But the question is whether it is also quaddition?

He is pointing to a way of meaning but not really giving it an explanation except, "Don't you see!". You are explicitly saying, "Brain discovers X.. " He is just saying what he thinks we do. — schopenhauer1

Maybe the point to take away then is that we don't need an overarching theory of meaning. If you want to know how language and words work and how information is communicated between brains.. we have psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, anthropology etc.

It only dispells it if you think dogmatism is a valid way to objective truth.

In addition, your point of view comes to the bizarre conclusion that under the conditions of underdetermination of the thought experiment where there is no fact of the matter that distinguishes someone's past usage of quus vs. plus, someone has to be using plus and not quus. Its impossible for someone to be using the rule quus because it would be too arbitrary.

If you mean a fact that justifies the rule and/or justifies how the rule is applied. I sometimes think that the quickest way to state the problem is to point out that the rule cannot be a fact, because the rule has imperative force and no fact can do that - a version of the fact/value distinction. For the same reason, no fact can, of itself, justify the rule. — Ludwig V

I think this misses out the point that this problem is supposed to only be an illustrative example of a generic problem that applies to all uses of language which would naturally include facts. And that's not even taking into account that I disagree that this cannot be looked at as a fact issue.

If you believe this is due to the fact-value distinction, then I think this kind of thought experiment would imply it applies to facts to: learning and inferring facts from evidence kind of implies an ought or imperative in the act of ascenting to some belief based on some evidence. No fact can then justify the belief. And I think yes, thats exactly what is being implied by the thought experiment; yes, I think the fact-value distinction is illusory or at the very least blurred since belief has what seems like a normative component (I am not a normative realist though). However, we can still distinguish facts and beliefs from normative concepts generally; the thought experiment I think must be about both, not just one or the other.

I am probably not understanding this at all correctly because its too technical for me but it sounds like its bolstering the Kripke's skepticism rather than really solving anything.

Let me know if you want me to help you put the toys back in the pram.

What I am getting from this post mainly is that things like "forms of life" lack some kind of inflated metaphysical underpinning or something, but concepts like this and games more or less just refer to our behavior in which we use words. There doesn't need to be anything else unless you want to really get into the neurobiological causes of that. I mean, I think Wittgenstein is much closer to jettisoning the idea of reified meaning rather than trying to establish some rigorous explanatory theory.

I'm presenting this hypothetical scenario to critique Wittgenstein's idea that language use is sufficient as a foundation. The main point is to stress the necessity of a robust foundation for language, especially if we claim it's rooted in community or "Form of Life." — schopenhauer1

I believe brains are the foundation, if I am understanding you correctly. Brains are complicated dynamical systems with self-organizing behaviour. Networks of brains (i.e. social systems) that communicate are also complicated dynamical systems with self-organizing behaviour. You're not going to get some form of justification because its just how Brains happen to behave determined by the physical context in which they exist; being "correct" is irrelevant and it is trivially the case that people are wrong about things all the time. Nonetheless, this is an objective explanation for how language is learned, used, "corrected". You being not "correct" isn't enough to stop the wheels of the universe turning and neuronal messaging being transmitted and societies going on their daily business.

Yes, that's true. I'm a bit inclined to say the W sees that "fuzzy non-linearity" as inherent in all concepts. — Ludwig V

Yes, I would agree with this and agree with it myself. I don't know of there is anything particularly special about logic and am drawn in the direction of logical nihilism or pluralism.

I'm sure there's a lot of quick and dirty solutions and heuristic dodges involved. — Ludwig V

I am not sure I would characterize them all as heuristics or "quick and dirty" solutions since they are just the same processes that underlie everything we do. Its just that the actual statistical structure of much of the world is much more complicated and non-linear than the simpler idealized concepts we like to dealing with in academics.

I think the problem with the answers that brains give though is they are finely contextualized by different personal histories, individual differences in brain structure, noise etc. What people learn and the information they store is probably different for everyone, but in places like academia we want to remove all ambiguity. The side effect of neat clean concepts is they lose all the fuzzy non-linearity which makes them exceptionally good at being used in real life.

Yes. There isn't a way of resolving that without going beyond that way of thinking. W's does that. His appeal to games, practices, forms of life etc. is an attempt to explain it. As a general thesis, it is quite unsatisfactory, (cf. God of the gaps) — Ludwig V

That works in some ways. But the picture of the world out there, waiting to be "carved at the joints", is partial. The world reaches in and prods us, tickles us, attracts us and repels us. We do not start out as passive observers but as engaged actors in the world - which does not always behave in the way that we expect. — Ludwig V

For me, what the point of the impoverishment of language shows is that the way we use words and concepts does not trickle down prescriptively from definitions and meanings that possess some invariant, essential nature. Rather, definitions are idealizations that are constructed or inferred in a bottom up manner from the statistics and dynamics of experience. The kinds of fuzziness, ambiguities, context-dependence, indeterminacy that characterizes Wittgenstein's analyses can be explained by appealing to the nature of how brain processes perform inference, effectively extracting lower-dimensional, more coarse-grained, more generalized underlying patterns (concepts) from complicated observations. These are extremely complicated machines processing an extremely complicated world and so the processing they do does not necessarily reflect very simple, linear, straightforward transformations between observations and the resultant inferred concepts.

Essentially the missing link in Wittgenstein's observations is the fact that we have a brain, one whose processing is extremely complicated yet also totally hidden from us, generating our complicated thoughts and behavior from below on the fly, making it look like we are acting in these kinds of mysterious ways that seem somewhat messy and underdetermined by our concepts and so can only be described as "games, practises, forms of life".

"The world reaches in and prods us, tickles us, attracts us and repels us" as a product of the mechanistic message passing and hebbian timing-dependent learning between neurons that are physical enslaved by the patterns of activation at our sensory boundaries (e.g. retina, inner ear, receptors under the skin), impelling the perceptions forced upon us, complicated behavior we are capable of, the higher-order concepts that we construct, but also the metacognitive insight that such concepts could have been otherwise. The brain completes the picture.

I think the intention is to distinguish between a heuristic which may be useful in some circumstances, but not in all, and how we would settle the question whether the output of the heuristic is correct or not. — Ludwig V

I dunno; I think looking at this way, as I seem to understand what you have said, plays down everything else that Wittgenstein seems t be getting at in philosophical investigations.

Some focus would help — Ludwig V

Well you just put forward your four points without any reference to what you mean by those points. Basically, all these points are lacking a "how".

Well though the math thing you get at is related, its not exactly the same. The rule thing is about definition and description and is just meant to be a single example of a type of issue that is generic to everything. I guess the point is that semantic definitions and descriptions are not intrinsically embedded in the world; instead, we impose labels on the world at out own discretion and there are no fixed set of boundaries for those concepts or force us to impose concepts in a particular way.

A computer with the most advanced algorithms and computations, and even "error checking" mechanisms that are a kind of "self-check", gets nowhere closer to that thing having "meaning" (to itself), because nothing internal made it "meaning-ful". — schopenhauer1

But a brain is just a type of computer working using algorithms in a way that is not qualitatively different to what goes on in machine learning.

I don't even know what "nothing internal made it "meaning-ful"" means when if these machine learning models had the architecture and inputs of a human brain, then they would trivially be capable of doing everything a human brain like you and I could do. They could have this conversation right now like we are about their own concepts of meaning and understanding.

I agree with that. Though Wittgenstein would ask what makes the sign-post point? Again, there's a practice of reading sign-posts, which we all somehow pick up/learn. Perhaps by recognizing a similarity between a pointing finger and the sign-post. — Ludwig V

Yup, and then the issue regresses as to what makes someone recognize a similarity between pointing a finger and sign-posts. This is all what I meant when I said that meanings and definitions are so impoverished that language should not be usable, yet it is.

I like Hume's response - essentially that it is not possible to refute the argument but it has no power to persuade me to believe the conclusion. — Ludwig V

I think for me, its about how such insights might reveal something about how brains and minds work.

There's a nest of complications buried in that. — Ludwig V

Well I am just saying that it is a factual statement regardless of whether there turns out to be or not be a fact of the matter. It straightforwardly makes sense as a factual statement.

In one way, it depends on whether I had that rule in mind when I gave the answer. — Ludwig V

Or perhaps even what it means to have a rule in mind.

But I am learning from this. One result is that I now know how to defuse Goodman's "grue". Another is that it seems that Kripke has made the private language argument superfluous. I need to think about that. A third - minimal - result is that Kripke has added to the stock of examples that pose Wittgenstein's problem. The fourth is that I notice that we have all appealed to the wider context, both of mathematics and of practical life to resolve it. Kripke's case is effective only if we adopt his very narrow view, The wider context makes nonsense of it. (I'm not saying that a narrow focus is always a bad thing, only that it sometimes gets us into unnecessary trouble.) — Ludwig V

Can you elaborate?

I only really see your conceptualization here being tenable in a very sollipsistic way because everyone might have their own different personal meaning. I don't think thats necessarily wrong but maybe describing everything in such a sollipsistic manner seems a bit stunted.

Behaviorist camp where language is a part of an organic system. — Paine

I think behaviorist is quite a bad term imo. What causes behavior? Neurobiology. What are its consequences? On other parts of the physical world. Really, behaviorism is just physicsalism or natural-sciencesism, since an account if behavior and what it is doing is just woefully incomplete without the rest.

My point being is that anyone who is a behaviorist should be incorporating more into their analysis to make it complete (while still consistent with their attitude). If they do thid then they become no different from anyone who advocates for the utility of the natural sciences in explaining the world. Its certainly much easier to do this now when we know much more about neuroscience and related fieldd compared to the early twentieth century.

I think we can agree here. I am not saying we have some a priori definitional understanding per se, just that we need some sort of mental experience for meaning to obtain, period. — schopenhauer1

Well, I wasn't agreeing that experience is required, just that we agree on the mental being experiences.

Before I said that there isn't really anything special about meaning or understanding since it is about "use" and "meaning" is just a specific case of "use" that we have singled out; for instance, saying "the word fish is spelled f-i-s-h" is arguably a use of the word fish which isn't really connected to what we would call the meaning of the word fish. But then the dividing line imo is blurry, constructed, weak. Meaning isn't special, and insofar that it is functional I don't see a reason why experience is required for those things.

When I interact with people, I don't need to know if they have experience or not to attribute to them understanding and things like meaning. Experience is redundant here, since a person with a functioning brain but hypothetically no experience (i.e. zombie, and i am not saying that this is necessarily possible) would behave in exactly the same way. The properties of their understanding comes from the functional neuronal interactions.

I think ultimately this is a difficult issue where someone like myself would more or less end up having to commit to the additional idea that a putative zombie should be attributed as having experiences / it is impossible for them not to have experiences / they are the same as us. But at face value, just by thinking about my characterization of what meaning and understanding is, experience does not seem necessary, purely because the hypothetical absence of experience has no effect.

Again though, I don't think there is anything special about meaning or understanding beyond "use". In this way, the difference in meaning and understanding between, say, me and one of those large language models is not some special, qualitative difference but rather just the extent of the functional capabilities. Im sure some A.I have better functional capabilities in some areas than us (e.g. how you can train A.I. to be exceptionally good at chess or go), but none of them have the functional capacities for the kinds of capabilities we think of as having true understanding of certain things, certainly not sentience. Obviously though this is a kind of continuous scale and as they get better, the divide between what we might call understanding and non-understanding becomes blurred, which is probably why there have been discussions recently about whether large language models have understanding - they are just getting better and better.

Public is a shared internal understanding of use, which is internal — schopenhauer1

Again, I think this is a bit tenuous if the internal drivers of public behavior are redundant. People can have different internal experiences driving the same public behaviour, which they have obviously partly learned publically.

I think there is different layers to "use" - there is the internal state transitions of experiences accessible to me where there is the meaning of pain to me in terms of how my internal experience of how pain experience relates to my own experiences of other behaviors, contexts, consequences, and is meaningless without them. That might include my personal meaning of the word pain. These have external consequences which are perceived through other persons experiences.

Because the word "pain" is learned and used socially and I cannot experience other people's experiences of pain; they could plausibly be different while generating the same behaviors which I perceive in other people and react to - I might even describe my pain to someone and they imagine it differently because of the unique nature of their own experiences (i guess their conceptualizations and assumptions that they learned aocially may even be different if they learn in a slightly different social context to me, though with some overlap).

The observable aspects then contain the bulk of the meaning in the public sphere and how we as communities or societies use this concept of pain. If its possible people have different experiences of pain then how can the word pain be pointing out or singling out some specific pain experience? Even in a single person this might be fuzzier than it seems since I am sure that different pain experiences induce similar reactions in particular contexts and perhaps similar pain experiences may induce different reactions depending on the context. I don't know if there is a one-to-one mapping between particular contexts and pain experiences; and at some point, there must be some generalization involved since we don't differentiate every slightly different pain experience.

It can be really difficult to read to be fair. Its one of those books where possibly what the book says has not been as influential as what othwrs have said about the book.

Eh, this gets awfully close to the problem of a hidden dualism. The mental quickly gets covered up with behavior or process, trying to hide evidence of the mental — schopenhauer1

I am not denying the mental in the sense I am not denying my own experiences. But I side with Wittgenstein and Thelen in saying that I think the evidence for more than that is tenuous and this way seems a better fit with how I view neuroscience.

Reading more, I guess we agree with the mental in terms of experience. But I am saying that I don't think there is more above that and that the meaning embedded in our experiences is still totally functional... transitions in experience... i experience some context and i experience myself saying a word and then some further experiences follow that etc.

A program that requests and retrieves data. Is that meaning? It makes requests, the requests are used for various outputs. Are these requests actually "meaning-ful? — schopenhauer1

Well what do you mean by meaningful here?

I genuinely don't think I know what meaning can mean outside of the context of use. Even my internal experience of pain has meaning only in a functional sense. If pain was just a sensation that did not elicit any kind of responses in me, not even my attention, then it would be meaningless. I wouldnt even be aware of the pain sensation that I was having. Pain is only meaningful to me in how it elicits my reactions, changes in my attention, changes in thoughts, arousal etc. Obviously I am having a distinct sensation and I can identify that but even idenitification only is meaningful in the context of responses I am making internally in the act of identification; changes to thought, attention, whatever. Sensation is necessary but functional responses are equally necessary. Only through them does the sensation mean something.