All of these but the last seem to have aged pretty well.

The world is all that is the case.

The world is the totality of facts, not of things.

The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts.

For the totality of facts determines what is the case, and also whatever is not the case.

The facts in logical space are the world.
— Wittgenstein

This is green, but let's try.

Beliefs articulate the world's possibilities.

True beliefs are the world's actuality.

Much of our language has developed so that we can talk about things like beliefs and logic and truth.

That various beliefs exist in the world is a fact, without of course (all of) those beliefs being facts themselves.

Possibility is greater than actuality in the sense that, for us, we exist primarily in the first...in what might happen, in ways the past might be interpreted. 'Truth' seems useful like North on a compass. If P, then Q seems to aim at the truth of P, not just our belief in it.

Is there a ‘same’ empirical world that different languages link up to, placing a barrier to conceptual relativism by assuring translatability?( Davidson’s argument as I understand it). — Joshs

Good question, intricate issue. Disclaimers: I haven't studied Davidson directly (just mostly read Rorty's use him, and I'm not eager to add the adjective 'empirical.'

Assume there is no such 'same' empirical world. What are you imaging this assertion to be 'about' ? (To be part of...) Your world or ours ? Do you imagine this hypothetical truth applying to aliens too?

I claimed in another thread that the minimum rational epistemic commitment is a plurality of persons subject to the same logic/concepts/language and together in a world that they can be right or wrong about (equiprimoridal trinity). The argument for this trifold 'given' is that its negation, if binding, depends on what it would deny. I understand 'world' here as maximally unspecified, synonymous our situation, the one we talk about with one another...as whatever happens to be true.

Is it safe to assume that Davidson is right or wrong about our world ? (I'd include ambiguous and incoherent as two more categories for statements. With irony, we could get all sorts of complicated blends, suggestive and possibility undecidable.

Are you tempted to say that we all live in different worlds ? But, if you were to say that, wouldn't you somehow talking about my world, while claiming to be stuck in your own ?

One issue to consider here is what we could mean by an alien conceptual scheme without having already made sense of it to some degree in terms of our own. We don't want to write checks we can't cash, like a pure fetishized otherness which is semantically nothing but a negation of everything intelligible.

I don't see a good reason for dropping an analysis of 'truth' founded on a study of the ways it is used. — Isaac

:up:

Indeed. I'd just include it among other worthwhile inquiries.

I don't see how it can be true that snow is white if "snow" does not refer to the worldly soft white bits of frozen water that fall from the sky in cold weather. — Luke

Why wouldn't 'snow' refer that way ? Isn't what you say about snow true ?

Didn't notice that, but clearly it is wrong. If an entire island decides that the way to survive a famine is to erect giant statues... — Banno

Hold on, sir. You misleadingly quote me, removing a vital conditional phrase. I'm not saying it was intentional or nefarious, just setting the record straight.

Redundancy suggests this: If an entire community passionate believes P, then P functions as a truth for them, as an automatically allowed premise, so long as that shared, strong belief persists. — Pie

From the 'inside,' a strong belief functions as a truth...until, perhaps, disaster strikes. That's why they are dangerous.

I'm not sure I'm versed well enough to speak on these conceptual schemes of Davidson. I'm not sure what Banno means here by: — Jerry

In case it's helpful or just a fun thing to talk about, we can switch to a related theme. How does the acolyte understand the guru ? Or a mediocrity a genius ? How does an inferior mind conceptualize a superior mind ? To believe that the guru or genius possessed something hidden from me in the first place, I'd have to recognize at least the usual sapience. But how can I recognize sapience except in terms of my own conceptual scheme ? Presumably I need to project goals and clever solutions, ones that I could understand as such, in order to see intelligible life as such.

For me, philosophy is not concerned with establishing a meta-narrative, nor with establishing normatively correct rationality, but with getting the life back into life. — Janus

I can't really object. Getting the life back into life sounds good. It is still a project, an individual vision anyway of the Better Thing to do, something of a metanarrative maybe (which is fine.)

So, for example, if "snow is white" is true, then the linguistic proposition somehow becomes the worldly fact that snow is white. — Luke

As I see it, 'snow is white' expresses a belief. If true, that belief is a fact.

If possible, it'd be great to make due with just the string of words and the meaning of the string of words. The meaning of the string of words is the world (or part of it rather.)

The meanings of true assertions just are the world.

To imagine a true statement becoming false is to imagine a different world.

The alien conceptual scheme can only be recognised as a conceptual scheme if there is an interpretation for in in our conceptual scheme. — Banno

:up:

That seems right. If I am extremely vague about the alien conceptual scheme, it's only a negation of my own and basically ineffable. The more I sketch it out, the more I see that it's part of my own already.

So you want to make the questions unanswerable, to make them no longer questions, and yet to still ask them. — Banno

No. I don't think they are really questions. I think these pseudo-questions are fascinating and perhaps where philosophy bumps into its repressed past.

I gave you reasonable answers, but what you want is unreasonable ones. — Banno

This is where we diverge, I suppose. The 'dark side' of the analytic leaning is a streak of Officer Barbrady. "Nothing to see here." It's not a rule that we have to avoid anything muddy or awkward. As I keep being told, 'reasonable' makes a normative claim here, implicitly excluding whatever its user would like excluded. I think you realize this, so I'm just pushing back. Philosophy that is only fussy language policing is seriously diminished and is even a parasite on that which it rejects (creative risk). I came to this analytic side late because of a mistaken perception that it purchased respectability at the cost of relevance. The cartoon version is a person afraid to talk about anything that matters, but not afraid to try and shame anyone brave or foolish enough to do so. I do not deny that plenty of earnest nonsense gets spewed on the other side. Complementary.

I think it's wrong to take Nausea (title suggested by the crafty publisher, by the way) as a 'wallowing' book, as if Sartre wasn't having fun with us. It'd be like thinking Bleach or In Utero weren't expressions of ecstasy, just because they played with the ugly.

https://vimeo.com/384672843

To wonder at a tautology...

All at once the veil is torn away, I have understood, I have seen.... The roots of the chestnut tree sank into the ground just beneath my bench. I couldn't remember it was a root anymore. Words had vanished and with them the meaning of things, the ways things are to be used, the feeble points of reference which men have traced on their surface...

It took my breath away. Never, up until these last few days, had I suspected the meaning of "existence." I was like the others, like the ones walking along the seashore, wearing their spring clothes. I said, like them, "The sea is green; that white speck up there is a seagull," but I didn't feel that it existed or that the seagull was an "existing seagull"; usually existence conceals itself. It is there, around us, in us, it is us, you can't say two words without mentioning it, but you can never touch it. When I believed I was thinking about it, I was thinking nothing, my head was empty, or there was just one word in my head, the word "being." Or else I was thinking — how can I put it? I was thinking of properties. I was telling myself that the sea belonged to the class of green objects, or that green was one of the qualities of the sea. Even when I looked at things, I was miles from dreaming that they existed: they looked like scenery to me. I picked them up in my hands, they served me as tools, I foresaw their resistance. But that all happened on the surface. If anyone had asked me what existence was, I would have answered in good faith, that it was nothing, simply an empty form added to things from the outside, without changing any thing in their nature. And then all at once, there it was, clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost harmless look of an abstract category: it was the dough out of which things were made, this root was kneaded into existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the patches of grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous lumps, in disorder — naked, with a frightful and obscene nakedness.
...
Absurdity: another word. I struggle against words; beneath me there I touched the thing. But I wanted to fix the absolute character of this absurdity. A movement, an event in the tiny colored world of men is only relatively absurd — in relation to the accompanying circumstances. A madman's ravings, for example, are absurd in relation to the situation in which he is, but not in relation to his own delirium. But a little while ago I made an experiment with the absolute or the absurd. This root — there was nothing in relation to which it was absurd. How can I pin it down with words? Absurd: in relation to the stones, the tufts of yellow grass, the dry mud, the tree, the sky, the green benches. Absurd, irreducible; nothing — not even a profound, secret delirium of nature could explain it. Obviously I did not know everything, I had not seen the seeds sprout, or the tree grow. But faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence. A circle is not absurd, it is clearly explained by the rotation of the segment of a straight line around one of its extremities. But neither does a circle exist. This root, in contrast, existed in such a way that I could not explain it. Knotty, inert, nameless, it fascinated me, filled my eyes, brought me back unceasingly to its own existence. In vain I repeated, "This is a root" — it didn't take hold any more. I saw clearly that you could not pass from its function as a root, as a suction pump, to that, to that hard and thick skin of a sea lion, to this oily, callous; stubborn look. The function explained nothing: it allowed you to understand in general what a root was, but not at all that one there. That root with its color, shape, its congealed movement, was beneath all explanation.
...
But at the heart of this ecstasy, something new had just appeared; I understood the nausea, I possessed it. To tell the truth, I did not formulate my discoveries to myself. But I think it would be easy for me to put them in words now. The essential point is contingency. I mean that by definition existence is not necessity. To exist is simply ... to be there; existences appear, let themselves be encountered, but you can never deduce them. Some people, I think, have understood this. Only they tried to overcome this contingency by inventing a being that was necessary and self-caused. But no necessary being can explain existence: contingency is not a delusion, an appearance which can be dissipated; it is the absolute, and, therefore, perfectly gratuitous. Everything is gratuitous, this park, this city, and myself. When you realize this, your heart turns over and everything begins to float...
— Sartre

https://twren.sites.luc.edu/phil120/ch10/nausea.htm

how a world without observers is different from just an "ineffable clump" — Jerry

:up:

Truth isn't what is real, but rather, what observers can construct from what is real. — Jerry

This makes truth (the real) a nonlinguistic and ineffable clump, which I think is subject the Hegelian critique above.

It's correct to say that there are no falsehoods without conscious entities, but that also holds for truths. "Truth", as I argue, is completely observer-dependent. It's incorrect to say "truth is the default state of the universe" because without observers, there is no truth. — Jerry

:up:

The problem here is that this buys into the romantic myth that we are all essentially solitary "self-actualising" agents in life. The truth is that humans are socially constructed. The idea that we are individual "egos" with the private drama of moral choice is itself a social script. — apokrisis

:up:

Those are reasonable answers, but they don't scratch the itch. I'm sure you've seen this, but ...

The experience that we need in order to understand logic is not that something or other is the state of things, but that something is: that, however, is not experience.

It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.

When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words.
The riddle does not exist.

If a question can be framed at all, it is also possible to answer it.

To say 'I wonder at such and such being the case' has only sense if I can imagine it not to be the case. In this sense one can wonder at the existence of, say, a house when one sees it and has not visited it for a long time and has imagined that it had been pulled down in the meantime. But it is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing. I could of course wonder at the world round me being as it is. If for instance I had this experience while looking into the blue sky, I could wonder at the sky being blue as opposed to the case when it's clouded. But that's not what I mean. I am wondering at the sky being whatever it is. One might be tempted to say that what I am wondering at is a tautology, namely at the sky being blue or not blue. But then it's just nonsense to say that one is wondering at a tautology.

Seems like Witt and Heidi both stumbled upon something irreducible.

You raise some classic points. I take you to be discussing what Davidson calls conceptual schemes. I also connect this to the position I'm abbreviating as 'Kant.'

I think the rhetorical effect, which is substantial, depends on us pretending to be able to jump in and out of our actual 'carving' (as you would call it.) We write a check that we don't know how to cash. The idea of an alien conceptual scheme is baked it seems from only negation. 'Like ours, but not like ours.' Any actual exploration or description of this scheme would only manifest its inclusion in our scheme.

The other idea (the 'Kantian' idea) is that there is some stuff 'behind' all possible conceptual schemes, which functions as there input. Let's say human cognition is $f$ and alien cognition is $g$, then humans have the world as $f(X)$ and aliens as $g(X)$. So $X$ is the hidden input or deep Reality. Personally I think the idea of a conceptual scheme is powerful and justly central. We model other human beings this way, I think, taking many of our beliefs as ground truths and imagining these as the inputs of their models. Note though that we are using already-been-chewed input here. Is this not true on a tribal level too ? So that the $X$ is questionable ?

I hold that no answer in that space will make any difference to how I live my quotidian life. I think these sorts of yearning questions are an inevitable by-product of human beings as meaning making creatures. — Tom Storm

:up:

Most questions of metaphysics are just people telling stories to each other to try to ground the 'mystery' of life in some kind of foundational meta-narrative. — Tom Storm

This seems to apply to what many want from philosophy. Other issues seem drier to me, more like a mathematics with concepts which is aesthetically driven. What's the slickest take on issue X ? Or...what's the least 'sentimental' or 'spiritual' take ?

Precisely, it is suspect and it should remain suspect because of the tendency humans fall victim to with sharp unjustified beliefs (centuries of war waged in their god/s name/s). Philosophy first, always. — intrapersona

:up:

I think that those who share our attitude want to come together as patricidal siblings, which is to say as equals, meeting in the middle. The 'father' symbolizes 'magical' access to an authority that is either explicitly unintelligible or available only to an official representative. The ideal of science, it seems to me, is that it's equally true and equally checkable by everyone. For practical reasons, this is often no longer the case, albeit ameliorated by transparency with respect to data and the code used to process it. As I see it, there are two complementary temptations or motives working against this ideal fraternity/sorority. One is the desire to play the parent, stealing the autonomy of others, and the other is something like Sartre's bad faith, which is to say evading one's own responsibility, embracing the status of a child.

That's a big part of the problem. We got guys ready to kill for hearsay, for a fucking rumor... — Olivier5

:up:

Do you now acknowledge that our statements have truthmakers? — Luke

Assume 'statements have truthmakers.' What would a truthmaker for that statement look like ?

Nor do I. It's not ineffable; the T-sentence sets it out exactly.... — Banno

What might tempt us toward the ineffable is some darker issue. What is it to assert ? What does it mean for something to be ? This feels Heideggarian, and perhaps there's no light at the end of this tunnel.

Where do we need a concept of truth in there? The entire concept seems, dare I say, redundant. — Isaac

Inspired by some of your other posts, I say it can play a useful expressive role. It's the North on our map. Assume P. Now we can conveniently ignore warrant and take P as a premise recklessly yet safely.

Redundancy suggests this: If an entire community passionate believes P, then P functions as a truth for them, as an automatically allowed premise, so long as that shared, strong belief persists.

Gore Vidal, although not a philosopher, springs to mind. — Tom Storm

:up:

I wonder what a Foucauldian riposte to this would be. Often felt that the postmodern challenge to rationalism and science and progress and its constant urge for reinvention is like a form of Romanticism, but with cynicism and disenchantment where hope and love used to sit. — Tom Storm

I can't ignore the anxiety of influence here. If the trend is anti-systematic, then one might try to be more and/or differently anti-systematic. Yet I can't see any escape from a game that is essentially normative. A philosopher projects/offers/markets a [better] way, even if only implicitly through criticism the [opposite of that better] way. If it's not 'just my opinion,' then it binds 'in the name of' some X. From a structuralist perspective, the names don't matter but only the roles. (In short, 'pomo' types are still in the same game, while pretending, sometimes incoherently, to have escaped it by merely renaming things.)

I'm going to justify this detour in terms of the jesting Pilate.
@Tom Storm got me thinking about Rorty and irony and Romanticism, inspiring me to dust off a few quotes.

Can we imagine an ironist or jester, who plays at being earnestly systematic ? The passage below has always moved me. In it, Hegel credits the gang of literary Romantics with a high but not the highest level of spirituality or consciousness or transcendence. He swallows them.

Now if we stop at these absolutely empty forms which originate from the absoluteness of the abstract ego, nothing is treated in and for itself and as valuable in itself, but only as produced by the subjectivity of the ego. But in that case the ego can remain lord and master of everything, and in no sphere of morals, law, things human and divine, profane and sacred, is there anything that would not first have to be laid down by the ego, and that therefore could not equally well be destroyed by it. Consequently everything genuinely and independently real becomes only a show, not true and genuine on its own account or through itself, but a mere appearance due to the ego in whose power and caprice and at whose free disposal it remains. To admit or cancel it depends wholly on the pleasure of the ego, already absolute in itself simply as ego. Now thirdly, the ego is a living, active individual, and its life consists in making its individuality real in its own eyes and in those of others, in expressing itself, and bringing itself into appearance. For every man, by living, tries to realize himself and does realize himself.

Now in relation to beauty and art, this acquires the meaning of living as an artist and forming one’s life artistically. But on this principle, I live as an artist when all my action and my expression in general, in connection with any content whatever, remains for me a mere show and assumes a shape which is wholly in my power. In that case I am not really in earnest either with this content or, generally, with its expression and actualization. For genuine earnestness enters only by means of a substantial interest, something of intrinsic worth like truth, ethical life, etc., – by means of a content which counts as such for me as essential, so that I only become essential myself in my own eyes in so far as I have immersed myself in such a content and have brought myself into conformity with it in all my knowing and acting. When the ego that sets up and dissolves everything out of its own caprice is the artist, to whom no content of consciousness appears as absolute and independently real but only as a self-made and destructible show, such earnestness can find no place, since validity is ascribed only to the formalism of the ego.

True, in the eyes of others the appearance which I present to them may be regarded seriously, in that they take me to be really concerned with the matter in hand, but in that case they are simply deceived, poor limited creatures, without the faculty and ability to apprehend and reach the loftiness of my standpoint. Therefore this shows me that not everyone is so free (i.e. formally free)[52] as to see in everything which otherwise has value, dignity, and sanctity for mankind just a product of his own power of caprice, whereby he is at liberty either to grant validity to such things, to determine himself and fill his life by means of them, or the reverse. Moreover this virtuosity of an ironical artistic life apprehends itself as a divine creative genius for which anything and everything is only an unsubstantial creature, to which the creator, knowing himself to be disengaged and free from everything, is not bound, because he is just as able to destroy it as to create it. In that case, he who has reached this standpoint of divine genius looks down from his high rank on all other men, for they are pronounced dull and limited, inasmuch as law, morals, etc., still count for them as fixed, essential, and obligatory. So then the individual, who lives in this way as an artist, does give himself relations to others: he lives with friends, mistresses, etc; but, by his being a genius, this relation to his own specific reality, his particular actions, as well as to what is absolute and universal, is at the same time null; his attitude to it all is ironical.
— Hegel

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ae/introduction.htm#s7-3

He claims to include and digest The Irony, making this plausible by stressing what's shallow in it (ignoring its mystical depths.) But is this possible ? The 'Irony' is like Chaos or the womb of the gods itself. Hegel solidifies on its surface. Hegel, who knocked up his landlord's wife.

It's fun to imagine Hegel as an Ironist who merely pretended be the greatest of earnest systematizers. Or maybe he did swallow Irony, along with its mystical depths.

For at the stage of romantic art the spirit knows that its truth does not consist in its immersion in corporeality; on the contrary, it only becomes sure of its truth by withdrawing from the external into its own intimacy with itself and positing external reality as an existence inadequate to itself. Even if, therefore this new content too comprises in itself the task of making itself beautiful, still beauty in the sense hitherto expounded remains for it something subordinate, and beauty becomes the spiritual beauty of the absolute inner life as inherently infinite spiritual subjectivity.

But therefore to attain its infinity the spirit must all the same lift itself out of purely formal and finite personality into the Absolute; i.e. the spiritual must bring itself into representation as the subject filled with what is purely substantial and, therein, as the willing and self-knowing subject. Conversely, the substantial and the true must not be apprehended as a mere ‘beyond’ of humanity, and the anthropomorphism of the Greek outlook must not be stripped away; but the human being, as actual subjectivity, must be made the principle, and thereby alone, as we already saw earlier does the anthropomorphic reach its consummation.

The true content of romantic art is absolute inwardness, and its corresponding form is spiritual subjectivity with its grasp of its independence and freedom. This inherently infinite and absolutely universal content is the absolute negation of everything particular, the simple unity with itself which has dissipated all external relations, all processes of nature and their periodicity of birth, passing away, and rebirth, all the restrictedness in spiritual existence, and dissolved all particular gods into a pure and infinite self-identity. In this Pantheon all the gods are dethroned, the flame of subjectivity has destroyed them, and instead of plastic polytheism art knows now only one God, one spirit, one absolute independence which, as the absolute knowing and willing of itself, remains in free unity with itself and no longer falls apart into those particular characters and functions whose one and only cohesion was due to the compulsion of a dark necessity.
...
But the determinate being of God is not the natural and sensuous as such but the sensuous elevated to non-sensuousness, to spiritual subjectivity which instead of losing in its external appearance the certainty of itself as the Absolute, only acquires precisely through its embodiment a present actual certainty of itself. God in his truth is therefore no bare ideal generated by imagination; on the contrary, he puts himself into the very heart of the finitude and external contingency of existence, and yet knows himself there as a divine subject who remains infinite in himself and makes this infinity explicit to himself.

Just so you can see what Rorty's systematic 'son' is up to,...

One might ask whether the inferentialist approach does not require overestimating the extent to which we are rational. Are we really very good at telling what is a reason for what? How often do we act for reasons—and in particular, for good reasons? The question betrays a misunderstanding. We are rational creatures in the sense that our claims and aims are always liable to assessment as to our reasons for them. How good we are at satisfying those demands doesn’t change our status as rational. And it must be kept in mind that on this way of thinking about the nature of semantic content, it makes no sense to think of us first having a bunch of sentences expressing definite propositions, which accordingly stand in inferential relations to one another, and only then having there be a question about how many of those inferences we get right. For it is our practices of treating what is expressed by some noises as reasons for what is expressed by other noises that makes those noises express conceptual contents in the first place. Once the enterprise is up and running, we can certainly make mistakes about what follows from the commitments we have undertaken, and what would justify them. But there is no possibility of us massively or globally getting the inferences wrong (for very much the same Quinean reasons that Davidson has emphasized).

I have been arguing that it is better to think in terms of understanding than knowledge, and better to think of meaning-and-understanding (which on this approach are two sides of one coin) in terms of inference than in terms of truth. So far, I have approached this issue largely from the point of view of semantics and the philosophy of language. But there is more at stake here. For this way of thinking about semantic content goes to the heart of the question of what it is to be sapient—to be the kind of creature we most fundamentally are. It says that we are beings that live, and move, and have our being in the space of reasons. We are, at base, creatures who give and ask for reasons—who are sensitive to that “force of the better reason”, persuasive rather than coercive, which so mystified and fascinated the ancient Greek philosophers. Crossing that all-important line from mere sentience to sapience is participating in practices of giving and asking for reasons: practices in which some performances have the pragmatic significance of claims or assertions, which accordingly, as both standing in need of reasons and capable of serving as reasons (that is, of playing the role both of conclusion and as premise in inference) count as expressing propositional semantic content.

This semantic rationalism—which goes with thinking of content in the first instance in terms of inference rather than reference, reason rather than truth—flies in the face of many famous movements in 20th century philosophical thought. The American pragmatists, above all, John Dewey, used the possibility of explaining knowing that in terms of knowing how not only to assimilate our sapient intellectual activity to the skillful doings of merely sapient animals, but at the same time to blur the sharp, bright line I am trying to draw between sapience and sentience. Wittgenstein famously said that language does not have a ‘downtown’: a core set of practices on which the rest depend, and around which they are arrayed, like suburbs. But inferentialism says that practices of giving and asking for reasons are the ‘downtown’ of language. For it is only by incorporating such practices that practices put in play propositional and other conceptual contents at all—and hence count as discursive practices, practices in which it is possible to say anything. The first ‘Sprachspiel’, language game, Wittgenstein introduces in the Philosophical Investigations has a builder issuing sorderss to an assistant. When he says ‘Slab!’ the assistant has been trained to respond by bringing a slab. When he says ‘Block!’ the assistant has been trained to respond by bringing a block. From the inferentialist point of view, this does not qualify as a Sprachspiel at all; it is a vocal, but not a verbal game. For the assistant is just a practical version of the parrot I considered earlier: he has been trained reliably to respond differentially to stimuli. But he grasps no concepts, and if this is the whole game, the builder expresses none. An order or command is not just any signal that is appropriately responded to in one way rather than another. It is something that determines what is an appropriate response by saying what one is to do, by describing it, specifying what concepts are to apply to a doing in order for it to count as obeying the order. Derrida’s crusade against what he calls the ‘logocentrism’ of the Western philosophical tradition has brilliantly and inventively emphasized all the other things one can do with language, besides arguing, inferring, explaining, theorizing, and asserting. Thus we get the playful essays in which the key to his reading of Hegel is that his name in French rhymes with ‘eagle’, his reading of Nietzsche that turns on what Derrida claims is the most important of his philosophical writings (a slip of paper that turned up in his belongings after his death, reading only “I have forgotten my umbrella,”), and the unforgettable meditation on the significance of the width of the margins of the page for the meaning of the text printed there. But if inferentialism is the right way to think about contentfulness, then the game of giving and asking for reasons is privileged among the games we play with words. For it is the one in virtue of which they mean anything at all—the one presupposed and built upon by all the other uses we can then put those meanings to, once they are available. Again, the master-idea of Foucault’s critique of modernity is that reason is just one more historically conditioned form of power, in principle no better (and in its pervasive institutionalization, in many ways worse) than any other form of oppression. But if giving and asking for reasons is the practice that institutes meanings in the first place, then it is does not belong in a box with violence and intimidation, which show up rather in the contrast class precisely insofar as they constrain what we do by something other than reasons.
— Brandom

Not so much. The notion of meaning can be dropped. We use the words to make true statements. — Banno

I think that's fair. I was criticized for waxing Heidegger earlier (gently), but one might mention the 'significance' of a familiar and articulated world. Language and world and we ourselves are equiprimordial, even if we can talk about the time of the dinosaurs or the big bang.

Pinker defines reason as the use of logic to attain a goal. Which, if you accept this, supports Nazism as nicely as it does Liberalism. — Tom Storm

We might say that Hitler applied something like instrumental reason. Sure.

My concern is not the privileging reason per say but the fact that reason can underpin mutually exclusive belief systems. — Tom Storm

If understood in a 'thin' way, then I agree that the same reason/logic applied to different premises should lead to different conclusions.

I probably side with Rorty here but largely because I eschew system building and he (though dead) remains smarter than I am, so there's that... — Tom Storm

Rorty is deep. Some of his comments on the depths of the soul are probably often overlooked. I'm excited about the work of one of his academic sons. He advised Robert Brandom, who does take the risk of a theory making explicit of human nature, updating Hegel.

Would it be fair to say you are a romantic of a kind? — Tom Storm

Tricky question ! Hegel is called a Romantic Rationalist, and the gist and feel of his project appeals to me, though I feel no attachment to or mastery of many of the details, having come at it initially through the mad atheistic Kojève. The story of a process becoming aware of itself, making its own nature progressively explicit as a telling of stories, is just beautiful. It's echoed by an amoeba transforming itself into a Darwin who only then grasps what has happened.

Maybe I'm just an ironist, thought, who also loves Sartre's Nausea. I take Shakespeare as a hero, following Harold Bloom, thinking that maybe he's the hero of an expansion that never recaptures itself, doesn't know its own depths. Public decency and private irony, something like that. As Elvis or Rorty said, don't be cruel. But in the same book (CIS), Rorty was frank about the desire to humiliate. He understood the 'festival of cruelty,' just as the program Smith seemed to.

Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery.

My philosophical position was initially 'pomo' and relativistic, probably because I was an alienated, artistic young adult who wanted to start rather than follow trends. But, as my biased current self might put it, I grew up, saw the logical incoherence in the presentation, developed what I now see as a better spiel (product, costume), without however (I hope) losing some perversely mystical gallows humor that takes it all as a game or a joke.

This talk of norms, is it an advance on Plato, or is it sophistry in modern, perhaps even scientific garb? — Srap Tasmaner

One ought not discuss norms ? Or one ought not bother with glib incoherence, from an officer of the local thought police ?

We use the word. — Banno

So we use the word to mean the world ?

And it seems to me that this is what Davidson is saying in suggesting we give up our dependence on the concept of an uninterpreted reality: that there is no such separation between our true statements and the way things are. We "reestablish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false". — Banno

:up:

It can come to look obvious even. Of course!

but it is not redundant to distinguish between P and “P”. — Luke

I agree with that of course.

'P' is letters or sounds. P, as I intend it, is the meaning of 'P.' We mean the world.

Nor I - hence my disclaimer: — Banno

:up:

Fair questions indeed! I'm self-consciously just a dude, a non-parent even, who likes to talk about ideas...and I feel my smallness. With that disclaimer, I open my big mouth and try again.

To me this position - which I generally share - seems to originate from a value system which already holds that reason and progressive politics are synonymous, or flip sides of the same coin. — Tom Storm

How does one make this case in philosophic terms? — Tom Storm

Maybe 'progressive' is a little too loaded here in our polarized times, though it's typically been on the side of enfranchisement. I'd stress freedom/autonomy. Freedom/automony means being bound by norms that one understands and embraces, establishing one's own laws. If we think in terms of justification...of the right to and the habit of asking why we should obey or believe, plausibly implicit in freedom/autonomy, then we see that reason is 'given' or basic.

'Why should I be reasonable ?' asks for a reason. Brandom might stress that we just are inferential animals. That's what 'rational' means.

It is requisite to reason’s lawgiving that it should need to presuppose only itself, because a rule is objectively and universally valid only when it holds without the contingent, subjective conditions that distinguish one rational being from another.
...
...
Reason must subject itself to critique in all its undertakings, and cannot restrict the freedom of critique through any prohibition without damaging itself and drawing upon itself a disadvantageous suspicion. For there is nothing so important because of its utility, nothing so holy, that it may be exempted from this searching review and inspection, which knows no respect for persons [i.e. does not recognize any person as bearing more authority than any other—GW]. On this freedom rests the very existence of reason, which has no dictatorial authority, but whose claim is never anything more than the agreement of free citizens, each of whom must be able to express his reservations, indeed even his veto, without holding back. (A738f/B766f, translation slightly modified) — Kant

The second part is trickier, because dominant humans (with worldly power anyway) have withheld adult status (freedom and autonomy) from other human beings for various reasons. I take Hegel's work to be largely about the expansion of this rational tribe toward the realization that all humans are free. Is this expansion implicit in reason ? I think it basically is, though not obviously so. The big thing I learned from philosophy was the primacy of the social. I am a 'we' before I am an 'I.' To speak a language is to run an inherited operating system, to share an always already significant lifeworld. This 'softwhere' doesn't need or care about this or that skin color or sex organ (which doesn't mean it can't be initially confused about this independence.) The developing individual primarily assimilates ideas and skills that he himself did not create. Robust and glorious individuality abases itself to be exalted, empowers itself by surrendering itself to others, listening to and learning from everyone else, submitting to the better reason, thereby transforming humiliation and error into strength. I think it was Bacon who insisted that we are the ancients, because we inherit more than all who came before us. It's as if human knowledge, call it Shakespeare, is a baby god getting fat on centuries of experience, surviving the death of his cells, we the thinkers and tinkers and stinkers who come and go, picking up tricks upon entrance and sometimes leaving behind a few before exiting. The gut level version of this is described by Ma Joad. There's just one momma's love that all us mammals share in...and maybe there's just one 'intellectual love of God' which I can celebrate as a Spinoza-adjacent atheist with you and everyone else. Is it our nature to expand and transcend ourselves ? Unless something jams us up?

Rorty didn't trust theories of human nature, but I'm not afraid to keep trying to make explicit what we are, wary of course of abuses of the phrases 'human nature' and 'rationality.' Yet I'm not optimistic. We might indeed destroy ourselves, descend into another holocaust or worse. I can even feel my way into the antinatalist who is terrified of life's shameful vulnerability and would like us all safely extinct. I was moved by David Pearce's ideas. How glorious for a product of the nightmare of Darwinian evolution to correct that nightmare, if such a project is not insane. I'll settle for Denmark at the moment. In fact, I'm seem to be fairly happy with my own life in the insane US.

I don't think we need a truthmaker, just to be clear.

I've been speculating about what others, who disagree, might have in mind.

The issue is...what's the truthmaker of 'there are plums in the icebox' ?

This Is Just To Say
By William Carlos Williams


I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

It seems obvious that for every true contingent proposition there must be something in the world (in the largest sense of “something”) which makes the proposition true. For consider any true contingent proposition and imagine that it is false. We must automatically imagine some difference in the world.

I think folks are falling prey to their visual imagination somehow. If the contingently true proposition is the color of Sally's dog, they visually imagine the color being changed, digging beneath propositions to 'sense-data.' This is the ice box temptation too. They 'see' the plums. They are trying to methodically ignore the conceptual aspect of experience, as if pre-conceptual visual memory were the truly real...and articulation was a secondary layer.

Cartesian baggage. As if epistemology makes sense as a merely private matter.

Or that's my hypothesis.

That sounds right, depending on how CT is understood.

Is truth something like North on a compass ?

The grammatical role it play is so simple that it confuses.

'Assume P.'

Now P plays the role of the given, that which we stand on fearlessly.

Oh Sorry ! I meant CT for correspondence theory. (Fixed).

Truthbearers look like an attempt to resuscitate substantive theories of truth by reintroducing some sort of ontological implication for true statements. It looks wrong. — Banno

Yeah. Still seems like unnecessary machinery to me.

It's as if assertion is brutally irreducible, which I'd connect to the primacy of the social and the publicity of meaning.