I agree with all of that. From an inferentialist perspective, pain as a concept gets its meaning from the network of inferences which we allow and disallow. For instance: 'I flushed all my aspirin, because I was in terrible pain' does not make sense for us. Unless we are missing context, the person does not speak our language correctly. "The trip was pleasant and ever so painful!"

In giving up dependence on the concept of an uninterpreted reality, something outside all schemes and science, we do not relinquish the notion of objective truth -quite the contrary. Given the dogma of a dualism of scheme and reality, we get conceptual relativity, and truth relative to a scheme. Without the dogma, this kind of relativity goes by the board. — Banno

This sounds like Hegel, big time.

e all feel pain, or at least most of us do if our neurological machinery is "normal", and we all behave similarly and say similar things when in pain, so it seems reasonable to think that the experience of pain is not so different for different people. — Janus

I given this one some thought, and discussed it with others. The following may or may not be helpful or persuasive.

When fitting a linear model to a scatterplot, we assign one measurement to the independent variable and another to the dependent. We then plot the best least squares line and check R^2 for how well the model fits. In this case, we are simply missing either the dependent or independent variable. Because pain (itself) is (grammatically) ineffable and 'invisible' to scientific instruments, we have no data whatsoever to test the thesis you suggest, which indeed seems reasonable. More broadly, we have and can have no data that will support that the same neurological machinery will result in the same ineffable 'output.' I agree with Ryle that most of our everyday talk of mind (when we aren't being metaphysical) does indeed draw the mind into the inferential nexus, in terms, however, of a state's constituents (not its indicators.) (My love for my wife is not hidden somewhere within in me but is out there in the way I treat her, though I don't deny a feeling component that we can't do much with on its own. ) As long as we have an operational definition of pain or sorrow, we can measure the postulated entity that way. In other words, we can look at the relationship of reports of pain and brain scans, etc. But the ineffable thing itself is like a black hole which is only visible through its effect of everything public around it. Pain itself is the hole in a doughnut, and the hole depends on the dough for its meaning.

I'm not even sure what Davidson is saying, it seems a bit confusing to me. — Sam26

I think the point is that reality, the one we (can) talk about, is 'already' linguistic...and not something 'subintelligble' that words can somehow picture, as if holding up concepts to judge against something real-but-non-conceptual. The 'picture,' if true, is the world.

In giving up dependence on the concept of an uninterpreted reality, something outside all schemes and science, we do not relinquish the notion of objective truth -quite the contrary. Given the dogma of a dualism of scheme and reality, we get con- ceptual relativity, and truth relative to a scheme. Without the dogma, this kind of relativity goes by the board. Of course truth ot sentences remains relative to language, but that is as objective as can be. In giving up the dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the world, but reestablish unmediated touch with the tfamiliarobjects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false. — On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme


That the cat is on the mat is a fact, not a sentence. — Banno

Excellent quote ! I think our views are pretty damned close on this issue. A rare pleasure.

Well said. I'm not surprised that it's bongo fury who has you pointing this out. I've tried to make the same point to Bongo a few times. — Banno

It's good to hear I'm not crazy. I thought that was how others were taking Wittgenstein in that context (who seems to echo Hegel.)

The word "pain" would mean nothing to someone incapable of feeling pain. — Janus

With respect, I think that this intuitively plausible view is just what is being challenged. What you say seems to 'anchor' meaning in something private. The background theory seems to be that we act the same because something on the inside is the same. Wittgenstein, in my view, is flipping this scheme over, inverting it.

It seems that we are so convinced we feel the 'same' pain (while insisting that pain is private?) because of the routine common machine-learnable use of 'pain' public life..and not the reverse. We don't want to explain outward synchronization (the place of 'pain' in our public grammar) in terms of a hypothetical inward synchronization (as beetle/beetles/no-beetle). We want instead to explain the popular concept of this 'inward' something in terms of a useful but misleading substantive.

I take this, correctly or not, to be a relatively standard interpretation.

I think the beetle implies that there are private meanings, nameless images and feelings, also, that cannot be made public. — Janus

‘Suppose everyone has a box that only they can see into, and no one can see into anyone else’s box: we call it a ‘beetle’. No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle.

Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in their box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing.

But suppose the idea ‘beetle’ had a use in these people’s language? If so it would not be used as the name of a thing’.

To me, private stuff (non-meaning) is certainly allowed or hinted at, but private meanings are exactly the rhetorical target. Because people might have all kinds of different things in their one box, because what's in an individual's box can even change continuously, and because such a box could even be empty, it makes no sense to think of a word as a name for 'the' beetle in the box. So 'pain' does not make sense as a name for something radically private. It's more like a can opener. The word has a public function. I explain why I called the dentist with it, why I don't feel like going out with friends, why I'm asking for an apisirin, why I don't believe in public meaning... Note that Google Translate can use the word, presumably without having even a box, let alone a beetle in it. Statistics ! There are strong patterns in our traces.

Even if one allows or postulates some ineffable painstuff (which I 'believe' in in the usual sense), it's misleading (so Wittgenstein seems to imply) to think of 'pain' having its meaning anchored in the ineffable. I connect this with Saussure's structuralism. Signs get their meaning positionally, contextually---from within a system of differences without positive elements. They aren't tags on pregiven intuited meanings (references to entities shown in a private theater.)

Now this is just my current take.

I don't think W denies it, but sees it, in its ineffability as dropping out of the conversation. — Janus

:up:

Agreed. No denial implied or necessary or sought.

Hence only

epistemological-semantic nullity. — Pie

which implies that meaning is [essentially ] public.

(I agree that no one possesses exactly the 'same' English as anyone else in a certain sense.)

This is just about it, the fusion of word and world, inasmuch as we can know it.

At the heart of the linguistic process lay an in-built mechanism, a feedback loop, that accounted for language’s ability to regenerate itself. This consisted in the continuous interplay between an external sound-form and an inner conceptual form, and their “mutual interpenetration constitute the individual form of language.” The dynamic and self-generating aspects of language are therefore inscribed in its very core...

In spite of Humboldt’s attempt to salvage universalism for knowledge, his view of language inevitably ushered in an epistemological relativism, with each language yielding a peculiar way of seeing the world. For “man [lives] with the objects… exclusively in the way that they are conveyed to him by language” with language “placing definite boundaries upon the spirits of those who speak it.” In this light, language was construed as a ‘contingent absolute’ as German philosopher Jürgen Habermas later put it. Crucially, this radical relativism seemed to blur the distinction between mere knowledge and reality itself. Indeed, within such relativism, language seemed to embody reality itself...

In keeping with his predecessors, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) starkly opposed any passive, instrumental understanding of language. ...Language could only be grasped on its own terms, as a force of its own, intimately bound to Being , whose voice it conveys to man. It was “neither expression nor a matter of human manipulation” but merely “spoke.” ...

According to this idea, human consciousness’s very access to entities was predicated on language. Simply put, there was no being, no prior distinct existence, from which any essence for anything could be understood, without a linguistic understanding of it. In the words of the German poet Stefan George, “there is no thing where the word is lacking” (from ‘The Word’, 1928). Heidegger expanded on this ‘ontological’ nature of language in his essay ‘On The Way To Language’: “The thing is a thing only where the word is found for the thing… The word alone supplies being to the thing, [for] something only is, where the appropriate word names something as existing and in this way institutes the particular entity as such… The being of that which is resides in the word. For this reason, the following phrase holds good: language is the house of being” (On the Way to Language, 1959). Within this framework, language is world-instituting, since it brings about a ‘happening of being’ in which man is thrown and through which a world appears.

https://philosophynow.org/issues/108/Herder_Humboldt_Heidegger_Language_As_World-Disclosure

Anyway, thanks for questions that have led to further clarification of my thoughts on these issues — Janus

Thanks for the kind words. It's great to talk about this stuff.

I don't see a viable alternative to the correspondance theory of truth, and never managed to understand any of its critiques. — Olivier5

:up:

Sorry to offend. I guess we just understand Heidegger differently.

I agree that is a kind of caricature; but it's not how I think I, and I imagine we, experience the world. — Janus

:up:
The way I understand Heidegger is that, indeed, we don't experience the world as Descartes might tempt us to think. We are in the world in language with others. There is no boundary, not really. I take Wittgenstein to make the same kind of point in a very different style. The beetlebox is his own little joke on the ghost, on its epistemological-semantic nullity.

For that matter I think the idea of the physical as a "res", a 'brute' material substance, is also misguided if taken to be more than just a perspective within its proper limits. — Janus

:up:

We only know those objects as images and sensations. The objects are present "in" the sensations and images. — Janus

That's precisely the view I was describing as 'Cartesian' (or 'Lockean' or 'Kantian'). It takes the subject as more real or present or certain than its objects. This is the 'veil-of-ideas.' It's precisely what I take the early Heidegger to be attacking. So it's hard to make sense of your invocation of his phenomenology, which obviously informs Derrida's complementary attack.

In case it's not clear, I assert that the we and the world are prior to the 'I' who gazes on the spectacle. I take this subject-centered view to be a late development. As a child, I lived in a world of objects. I was later convinced that it was sophisticated to reframe all of this as spectacle, not noticing the holes in the plot. This 'official story' features the sense organs as their own product or creation, an absurd infinite loop. In short, the sensation theory is fine, is reasonable, only in a context that takes the (social) world as just as equally given. Sensations make sense only as part of a causal-explanatory nexus that includes genuine worldly objects (red balloons and mouse turds) affecting worldly sense organs which then are understood to involve 'sensations.' 'The doctor dilated my eyes and the world was painfully bright.'

Heidegger is clearly not constructing the world from the 'I' below. I don't use him as an authority. I just think he's relevant to the minimum epistemic situation..and our tangential conversation.

By 'others' we do not mean everyone else but me -- those over against whom the 'I' stands out. They are rather those from whom, for the most part, one does not distinguish oneself -- those among whom one is too. This being-there-too with them does not have the ontological character of a being-occurent-along-'with' them...This 'with' is something of the character of Dasein; the 'too' means a sameness of being as circumspectly concernful being-in-the-world. 'With' and 'too' are to be understood 'existentially', categorically. By reason of this with-like being-in-the-world, the world is always the one I share with others. The world of Dasein is a with-world. Being-in is being-with others.
...

The one as that which forms everyday being-with-one-another...constitutes what we call the public in the strict sense of the word. It implies that the world is always already primarily given as the common world. It is not the case on the one hand there are first individual subjects which at any given time have their own world; and that the task would then arise of putting together, by virtue of some sort of arrangement, the various particular worlds of individuals and of agreeing how one would have a common world. This is how philosophers imagine these things when they ask about the constitution of the inter-subjective world. We say instead that the first thing that is given is the common world -- the one.

A little more on the proposed us-language-world fusion (which maybe only I care about...we shall see.) We see and touch objects of course without talking about them. Our lives are not just language. You tell me you have not eaten all the plums in the icebox, but I go to get one and there are none. What you said does not correspond to what I see. But this seeing and feeling the empty ice box can play no role in reasoning. Sensations are not the inputs (or outputs) of inferences. It's the desire to drag in the ineffable or not-yet-effed ghost that causes us so much trouble.

You imply there are plums in the icebox.
I report that there are not.
I conclude and claim that something is rotten in Denmark, that you probably lied.

I don't suggest we deny the realm of the ghost. There's just not much to do with it. It reminds me of Popper. Where scientific hypotheses come from doesn't matter, doesn't give them their status or lack thereof as scientific hypotheses.

If I may wax phenomenological again, here's a different approach to the same insight into the centrality of language for us as our rational selves, not only sentient but sapient. I take the following to gesture toward the 'field of meaning' which we share as our essentially familiar and intelligible world, that thing that we can be right or wrong about, because it transcends each of us individually, encompassing us, our source and our future grave. (Ha ha !)

Language is not merely a tool which man possesses alongside many others; language first grants the possibility of standing in the midst of the openness of beings. Only where there is language, is there world, that is, the constantly changing cycle of decision and work, of action and responsibility, but also of arbitrariness and turmoil, decay and confusion.
...
The one as that which forms everyday being-with-one-another...constitutes what we call the public in the strict sense of the word. It implies that the world is always already primarily given as the common world. It is not the case on the one hand there are first individual subjects which at any given time have their own world; and that the task would then arise of putting together, by virtue of some sort of arrangement, the various particular worlds of individuals and of agreeing how one would have a common world. This is how philosophers imagine these things when they ask about the constitution of the inter-subjective world. We say instead that the first thing that is given is the common world -- the one.
...
Being-there as being-in-the-world is primarily governed by logos…Coming into the world, one grows into a determinate tradition of speaking, seeing, interpreting. Being-in-the-world is an already-having-the-world-thus-and-so. This peculiar fact, that the world into which I enter, in which I awaken, is there for me in a determinate interpretedness, I designate terminologically as fore-having.

Dasein is history.
...
Dasein, whiling away its own time in each case, is at the same time always a generation. So a specific interpretedness precedes every Dasein in the shape of the generation itself. What is preserved in the generation is itself the outcome of earlier views and disputes, earlier interpretations and past concerns.
...
The wellspring of such persistent elements lies in the past, but they continue to have such an impact in the present that their dominance is taken for granted and their development forgotten. Such a forgotten past is inherent in the prevailing interpretedness of being-together-with-one-another. To the extent that Dasein lives from (cares about) this past, it is this past itself.
...
The world with which we are concerned and being-in itself are both interpreted within the parameters of a particular framework of intelligibility.
...
One has a timeworn conceptuality at one's disposal. It provides the fore-concept for the interpretation. The interpretedness of a 'time' is strictly determined by these structural factors and the variable forms of their realization. And it is precisely the unobtrusiveness of these factors --the fact that one is not aware of them -- which gives public interpretedness its taken-for-granted character. However, the 'fore'-character in the structure of interpretedness shows us that it is none other than what has already been that jumps ahead, as it were, of a present time pervaded by interpretedness. Guided by its interpretedness, expectant concern lives its own past. — Heidegger

I think this was Hegel's point.

...a correspondence theory of truth must inevitably lead into skepticism about the external world, because the required correspondence between our thoughts and reality is not ascertainable. Ever since Berkeley’s attack on the representational theory of the mind, objections of this sort have enjoyed considerable popularity. It is typically pointed out that we cannot step outside our own minds to compare our thoughts with mind-independent reality. Yet—so the objection continues—on the correspondence theory of truth, this is precisely what we would have to do to gain knowledge. We would have to access reality as it is in itself, independently of our cognition, and determine whether our thoughts correspond to it. Since this is impossible, since all our access to the world is mediated by our cognition, the correspondence theory makes knowledge impossible (cf. Kant 1800, intro vii). Assuming that the resulting skepticism is unacceptable, the correspondence theory has to be rejected, and some other account of truth, an epistemic (anti-realist) account of some sort, has to be put in its place (cf., e.g., Blanshard 1941.)

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-correspondence/

The idea of unmediated reality..of some external 'nonlinguistic' world behind any claims we can make about the world we live in...is itself the problem.

More especially it takes for granted that the Absolute stands on one side, and that knowledge on the other side, by itself and cut off from the Absolute, is still something real; in other words, that knowledge, which, by being outside the Absolute, is certainly also outside truth, is nevertheless true — a position which, while calling itself fear of error, makes itself known rather as fear of the truth.

This conclusion comes from the fact that the Absolute alone is true or that the True is alone absolute, It may be set aside by making the distinction that a know ledge which does not indeed know the Absolute as science wants to do, is none the less true too; and that knowledge in general, though it may possibly be incapable of grasping the Absolute, can still be capable of truth of another kind. But we shall see as we proceed that random talk like this leads in the long run to a confused distinction between the absolute truth and a truth of some other sort, and that “absolute”, “knowledge”, and so on, are words which presuppose a meaning that has first to be got at.

With suchlike useless ideas and expressions about knowledge, as an instrument to take hold of the Absolute, or as a medium through which we have a glimpse of truth, and so on (relations to which all these ideas of a knowledge which is divided from the Absolute and an Absolute divided from knowledge in the last resort lead), we need not concern ourselves. Nor need we trouble about the evasive pretexts which create the incapacity of science out of the presupposition of such relations, in order at once to be rid of the toil of science, and to assume the air of serious and zealous effort about it. Instead of being troubled with giving answers to all these, they may be straightway rejected as adventitious and arbitrary ideas; and the use which is here made of words like “absolute”,"knowledge”, as also “objective” and “subjective”, and innumerable others, whose meaning is assumed to be familiar to everyone, might well be regarded as so much deception. For to give out that their significance is universally familiar and that everyone indeed possesses their notion, rather looks like an attempt to dispense with the only important matter, which is just to give this notion. With better right, on the contrary, we might spare ourselves the trouble of talking any notice at all of such ideas and ways of talking which would have the effect of warding off science altogether; for they make a mere empty show of knowledge which at once vanishes when science comes on the scene. — Hegel

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phintro.htm

I said that my thoughts ,feelings and bodily sensations are what is most immediately present to me, and I should have made explicit that I think this includes the experience of being in the world. For me subjectivity just is being in the world, but being in the world is a bodily sensation. — Janus

Sure, but that's still an 'internal perspective' on the issue (your prerogative, obviously), talking of the sensations as more present than the objects associated with those sensations.

I never accused you of being a solipsist, just on the build-from-the-inside ('Cartesian') side of the continuum.

If I close my eyes, I don't see the world, If I am deaf I don't hear the world, if I has no sensation in, or proprioception of, my body I would not know how my body was disposed in the world. If I die my world disappears with me. — Janus

:up:
I think we agree that your 'opening' on the world closes upon death, while the mighty world rolls one.

I agree with Heidegger's idea of the "mineness" of being in the world, of being with others. This "mineness" is what I have in mind when I speak of subjectivity, not some attenuated, ghostly "I". — Janus

The ghost I joke about is mostly just the guy behind all the sensory monitors, alone in the skull's control room, who grasps the world primarily as spectacle. I see it as a powerful part of the tradition. The other part of the ghost is the elusive X featured in the hard problem.

I've tended to read the analytical blokes who've integrated the continentals. To me it's mostly different styles, different background lingo...but similar points.

Sure. But I'm a golden dye-job with dirty continental roots.

Waxing phenomenological, I'd say that we, our world, and our language are fused.

We are being-in-the-world-with-others-in-language.

It doesn't seem to make any sense. Are you joking? — bongo fury

Joking and not joking. If the world is all that is the case, a truth is a piece of the world.

I'm questioning the supposed gap between the meaning of a true assertion and the world it is true of.

It's not just me who thinks the correspondence theory is pretty close to being deflationary.

The correspondence theory is often traced back to Aristotle’s well-known definition of truth (Metaphysics 1011b25): “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true”—but virtually identical formulations can be found in Plato (Cratylus 385b2, Sophist 263b). It is noteworthy that this definition does not highlight the basic correspondence intuition. Although it does allude to a relation (saying something of something) to reality (what is), the relation is not made very explicit, and there is no specification of what on the part of reality is responsible for the truth of a saying. As such, the definition offers a muted, relatively minimal version of a correspondence theory. (For this reason it has also been claimed as a precursor of deflationary theories of truth.)

The disaster kicks in here ?

The metaphysical version presented by Thomas Aquinas is the best known: “Veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus” (Truth is the equation of thing and intellect), which he restates as: “A judgment is said to be true when it conforms to the external reality”

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-correspondence/

you might wish to read about basic linguistics, eg Saussure, — Olivier5

Saussure is one of my favorite thinkers. Good recommendation ! But bad social gesture.

As I've said, you can do whatever you want. — Tate

Isn't the point discussion ?

How's this ? The meaning of the assertion, the sentence in use, seems to simply be the world(-as-understood). If we jettison apparent nonsense like the world-in-itself...the world is just that which is the case. To me this is not correspondence. There's just use/mention. 'P' is a string of letters. P is piece of a world, a truth (or an attempted truthery.)

I think his joke is that the correspondence theory doesn't make sense, so it's like answering 'the' question to present it so that it does.


What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48410/days-56d229a0c0c33

“Dasein "occurs out of its future"."Da-sein, as existing, always already comes toward itself, that is, is futural in its being in general." Having-been arises from the future in such a way that the future that has-been (or better, is in the process of having-been) releases the present from itself. We call the unified phenomenon of the future that makes present in the process of having been temporality.”(Heidegger 2010) — Joshs

:up:

Beautiful.

The essence of something is not at all to be discovered simply like a fact; on the contrary, it must be brought forth. To bring forth is a kind of making, and so there resides in all grasping and positing of the essence something creative…. To bring forth means to bring out into the light, to bring something in sight which was up to then not seen at all, and specifically such that the seeing of it is not simply a gaping at something already lying there but a seeing which, in seeing, first brings forth what is to be seen, i.e., a productive seeing. — Joshs

In other words, phenomenology is making it explicit, foregrounding the otherwise inconspicuous. We should also make a space for stronger forms of invention, genuine additions to the space of reasons (new abstract objects, new distinctions.) This is expressive rather than inferential. One expects new metaphors and new styles to be part of this.

What Heidegger is pointing to here is not the fundamental nature of time for Dasein but ways of thinking about time that we fall into. We convince ourselves that the future that arrives is a duplicate of our past. — Joshs

I get that, and I plucked some of the quotes you used from The Concept of Time. A vulgar way of thinking about time hides our profound historicity from us. The past leaps ahead.

A present time pervaded by interpretedness is the vulgar time of public interpretedness, otherwise known as the average everydayness of Das Man. — Joshs

A present time pervaded by interpretedness [just] is ... the average everydayness of Das Man.

I see (hope you'll agree) us, the world, and language as a unity. The background or given is the one, what one can assume of one, what everyone 'knows.' The philosopher is a little freakier than others, a little more able to recognize pseudo-necessity (encrusted interpretedness) as historical contingency, the way we happened to end up doing things, the stuff we happened to end up taking for granted...as bedrock reality.

The dialectic begins the moment I interact with others, as a dialogic back and forth that reshapes the sense of both of our conceptions in subtle fashion in continually. — Joshs

:up:

You introduced me to this passage from Heidegger’s early work, for which I am grateful. I went on to incorporate it in a paper that makes the opposite argument from the one you think Heidegger is making concerning time. — Joshs

Glad I could help ! But how do you know what point I'm making. Aren't we still on the way toward making it together ?

Love that poem.

I know how to write. I'm not just making weird stuff up, friend. I'm far the first to gripe about the mysteries of the correspondence theory of truth. I'm just asking how you navigate or tolerate them (the traditional criticisms, and the one in particular that I tried to articulate.)

Correlations drawn between different things. <------that's what all human thought and belief amounts to. — creativesoul

In statistics, correlation or dependence is any statistical relationship, whether causal or not, between two random variables or bivariate data. Although in the broadest sense, "correlation" may indicate any type of association, in statistics it normally refers to the degree to which a pair of variables are linearly related. Familiar examples of dependent phenomena include the correlation between the height of parents and their offspring, and the correlation between the price of a good and the quantity the consumers are willing to purchase, as it is depicted in the so-called demand curve.

Correlations are useful because they can indicate a predictive relationship that can be exploited in practice.

I find the correlation theory initially plausible, but isn't some kind of mathematical/functional already mainstream? I did some digging.

Here's a non-journal but seemingly reputable popularization.

The brain is an energy-expensive organ, so it had to evolve energy-conserving efficiencies. As a prediction machine, it must take shortcuts for pattern recognition as it processes the vast amounts of information received from the environment by its sense organ outgrowths. Beliefs allow the brain to distill complex information, enabling it to quickly categorize and evaluate information and to jump to conclusions. For example, beliefs are often concerned with understanding the causes of things: If ‘b’ closely followed ‘a’, then ‘a’ might be assumed to have been the cause of ‘b’.

These shortcuts to interpreting and predicting our world often involve connecting dots and filling in gaps, making extrapolations and assumptions based on incomplete information and based on similarity to previously recognized patterns. In jumping to conclusions, our brains have a preference for familiar conclusions over unfamiliar ones. Thus, our brains are prone to error, sometimes seeing patterns where there are none. This may or may not be subsequently identified and corrected by error-detection mechanisms. It’s a trade-off between efficiency and accuracy. — Psychology Today

This seems relevant too:

Functionalism is the theory that mental states are more like mouse traps than they are like diamonds. That is, what makes something a mental state is more a matter of what it does, not what it is made of. This distinguishes functionalism from traditional mind-body dualism, such as that of René Descartes, according to which minds are made of a special kind of substance, the res cogitans (the thinking substance.) It also distinguishes functionalism from contemporary monisms such as J. J. C. Smart’s mind-brain identity theory. The identity theory says that mental states are particular kinds of biological states—namely, states of brains—and so presumably have to be made of certain kinds of stuff, namely, brain stuff. Mental states, according to the identity theory, are more like diamonds than like mouse traps. Functionalism is also distinguished from B. F. Skinner’s behaviorism because it accepts the reality of internal mental states, rather than simply attributing psychological states to the whole organism. According to behaviorism, which mental states a creature has depends just on how it behaves (or is disposed to behave) in response to stimuli. In contrast functionalists typically believe that internal and psychological states can be distinguished with a “finer grain” than behavior—that is, distinct internal or psychological states could result in the same behaviors. So functionalists think that it is what the internal states do that makes them mental states, not just what is done by the creature of which they are parts.

https://iep.utm.edu/functism/

I think we are both functionalists ?

A child that has just been burned as a result of touching fire forms the belief that touching fire caused the pain solely by virtue of drawing a correlation between what they did(touch the fire) and the pain that ensued. We can know this much as a result of their absolute refusal to touch it again. — creativesoul

What does this proposed drawing of a correlation add to the situation ? This sounds either mathematical (statistics) or thought-like or ?

A child is less likely to touch an object that burned him. This we can take as given.

This is one of my favorites:

Frege ridiculed the formalist conception of mathematics by saying that the formalists confused the unimportant thing, the sign, with the important, the meaning. Surely, one wishes to say, mathematics does not treat of dashes on a bit of paper. Frege's ideas could be expressed thus: the propositions of mathematics, if they were just complexes of dashes, would be dead and utterly uninteresting, whereas they obviously have a kind of life. And the same, of course, could be said of any propositions: Without a sense, or without the thought, a proposition would be an utterly dead and trivial thing. And further it seems clear that no adding of inorganic signs can make the proposition live. And the conclusion which one draws from this is that what must be added to the dead signs in order to make a live proposition is something immaterial, with properties different from all mere signs.

But if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we have to say that it is its use.
If the meaning of the sign (roughly, that which is of importance about the sign) is an image built up in our minds when we see or hear the sign, then first let us adopt the method we just described of replacing this mental image by some outward object seen, e.g. a painted or modelled image. Then why should the written sign plus this painted image be alive if the written sign alone was dead? -- In fact, as soon as you think of replacing the mental image by, say, a painted one, and as soon as the image thereby loses its occult character, it ceased to seem to impart any life to the sentence at all. (It was in fact just the occult character of the mental process which you needed for your purposes.)

The mistake we are liable to make could be expressed thus: We are looking for the use of a sign, but we look for it as though it were an object co-existing with the sign. (One of reasons for this mistake is again that we are looking for a "thing corresponding to a substantive.")

The sign (the sentence) gets its significance from the system of signs, from the language to which it belongs. Roughly: understanding a sentence means understanding a language.

As a part of the system of language, one may say, the sentence has life. But one is tempted to imagine that which gives the sentence life as something in an occult sphere, accompanying the sentence. But whatever accompanied it would for us just be another sign.

Does he mean reading the furniture in a room ?

I hope this is not too tangential. I think it applies to the implicit ocular metaphor in the correspondence theory (languagemeaning as picture to be held up and check for congruence with ...nonlanguage reality? 'The Absolute In Itself' ?

It is natural to suppose that, before philosophy enters upon its subject proper — namely, the actual knowledge of what truly is — it is necessary to come first to an understanding concerning knowledge, which is looked upon as the instrument by which to take possession of the Absolute, or as the means through which to get a sight of it. The apprehension seems legitimate, on the one hand that there may be various kinds of knowledge, among which one might be better adapted than another for the attainment of our purpose — and thus a wrong choice is possible: on the other hand again that, since knowing is a faculty of a definite kind and with a determinate range, without the more precise determination of its nature and limits we might take hold on clouds of error instead of the heaven of truth.

This apprehensiveness is sure to pass even into the conviction that the whole enterprise which sets out to secure for consciousness by means of knowledge what exists per se, is in its very nature absurd; and that between knowledge and the Absolute there lies a boundary which completely cuts off the one from the other. For if knowledge is the instrument by which to get possession of absolute Reality, the suggestion immediately occurs that the application of an instrument to anything does not leave it as it is for itself, but rather entails in the process, and has in view, a moulding and alteration of it. Or, again, if knowledge is not an instrument which we actively employ, but a kind of passive medium through which the light of the truth reaches us, then here, too, we do not receive it as it is in itself, but as it is through and in this medium. In either case we employ a means which immediately brings about the very opposite of its own end; or, rather, the absurdity lies in making use of any means at all. It seems indeed open to us to find in the knowledge of the way in which the instrument operates, a remedy for this parlous state; for thereby it becomes possible to remove from the result the part which, in our idea of the Absolute received through that instrument, belongs to the instrument, and thus to get the truth in its purity. But this improvement would, as a matter of fact, only bring us back to the point where we were before. If we take away again from a definitely formed thing that which the instrument has done in the shaping of it, then the thing (in this case the Absolute) stands before us once more just as it was previous to all this trouble, which, as we now see, was superfluous. ...
Meanwhile, if the fear of falling into error introduces an element of distrust into science, which without any scruples of that sort goes to work and actually does know, it is not easy to understand why, conversely, a distrust should not be placed in this very distrust, and why we should not take care lest the fear of error is not just the initial error. As a matter of fact, this fear presupposes something, indeed a great deal, as truth, and supports its scruples and consequences on what should itself be examined beforehand to see whether it is truth. It starts with ideas of knowledge as an instrument, and as a medium; and presupposes a distinction of ourselves from this knowledge. More especially it takes for granted that the Absolute stands on one side, and that knowledge on the other side, by itself and cut off from the Absolute, is still something real; in other words, that knowledge, which, by being outside the Absolute, is certainly also outside truth, is nevertheless true — a position which, while calling itself fear of error, makes itself known rather as fear of the truth. — Hegel, from Intro to Phen

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phintro.htm