It isn't that 'I' or 'you' don't exist; rather, the identity that I have doesn't occupy a specific region of the brain called "the self" -- at least they haven't been able to find it, and they've been looking, — BC

I think that you and they badly need a deeper understanding of the concepts of identity and the self. Then they wouldn't waste their time on obviously futile searches.
The classic place for this is the paradox of Theseus' ship. Have you encountered it? It demonstrates quite clearly that the identity of anything is not a constituent element of any part of that thing. There are difficult cases, but that much is clear.

What seems to be the case is that various facilities in the brain maintain our identity as a seemingly solid self. — BC

I don't know what that means.

So, once the sentence is ready, the motor centers are in charge of the typing. — BC

Yes. This is a version of Chomsky's theory. But it doesn't fit with what happens. Sometimes, typing out text is like unspooling a sentence. But not always. Sometimes one pauses in the middle of a sentence to work out how to end it. Sometimes one types out a sentence as a trial or draft, not because it is finished. Or consider what is going on when I work out a calculation with pencil and paper.

Obviously Broca's area, (language production) is involved; thought creation areas are involved; memory, etc. None of these areas control motor functions (like typing). — BC

Yes, yes, you know all those areas are "involved". But you don't know what they are doing beyond the roughest outline. But they must control motor functions - through the relevant department. If they did not they could not send their completed sentences to be typed.

Brain injuries and brain manipulation (during surgery) reveal that different areas of the brain control different aspects of our whole behavior. — BC

Yes. That is well known.

No matter what you say, what you think, what you do, it issues from the brain labeled "Ludwig V". — BC

But you do admit that I do say things and think things and do things. "Issues" is pretty vague, so I don't have to take issue with that. No, the brain does not make me do anything, unless you can describe it as making me do what I have decided to do - which is a very peculiar notion.

What the neurological researcher is saying is that the "representation called the self of Ludwig V" is not doing the thinking, — BC

There is no self apart from me, Ludwig V. A representation of me would be a picture or model of me. Why would it do any thinking? It doesn't even have a brain.

It feels like "we" are doing the thinking, but that's part of the fiction of the self. — BC

But you just said that we do think. I think it would be better to talk of constructions rather than fictions. I can recognize that in some sense, I am a construction - there are lots of bits and pieces working (mostly) together.

it's just that "your thinking" happens in your brain below your radar. — BC

I do realize that there's a lot going on in my brain when I think &c. We do know a bit about what is going on. But you could only describe it as thinking if you are prepared to say that a computer thinks. The brain is, after all, a machine.

Why don't you claim the task of keeping yourself upright when walking; blinking regularly to keep your eyeballs moist; keeping track of your temperature, blood pressure, heart beat, and breathing; waking up every morning (rather than not waking up); registering a patch of itchy skin; and hundreds of other services going on all the time? — BC

How do you know what I claim and what I don't claim? If you had asked me, I would have told you. But I think you are going off the rails in this and the next paragraph.

Thinking is just one of many things that we are not 'personally' responsible for. — BC

It is true that consciousness is the tip of an iceberg, and there is indeed a lot going on in our bodies that we are not aware of. We know a bit about the brain, but not very much. It is always tempting to get ahead of oneself and posit things because they "must" be so. That has led us into many blind alleys and idiocies, so it is best to be cautious.
Thinking does seem to go on automatically. But I find that I do have some control over it. I guess it is a bit like breathing.
You are aware that anyone who is convicted for many crimes is found guilty because they intended to do what they did?

— Vera Mont

Probably the reverse. I didn't say better, just more. (Yes, I realize that many humans consider more/bigger/faster the ultimate in good.) But that doesn't come under a comparison with the rational thought of other species. — Vera Mont

I think I agree with you.

Many of the intelligence tests are really about "How much like us are they?" That business with the yellow dot, for example. Dogs don't identify individuals by sight but by smell and don't seem at all interested in their own appearance. I'm not surprised if they show no interest in their reflection in a mirror, which smells of nothing but glass, metal and the handler who put it there. — Vera Mont

Yes. I would value them more if they weren't called "intelligence tests". The very idea of intelligence makes not sense to me. It seems to comprise a wide variety of skills, some of which are highly transferable. We all possess many of them, some more and to a higher degree than others. It's about as sensible as trying to develop a single test for the nutritional value of food.

OTOH, tests of spatial orientation (mazes) do mimic the actual life experience of mice and challenging rats to obtain food in a human-made environment is certainly realistic. The experiments with plastic boxes, sticks and stones don't seem to give crows any trouble, though the props might be too foreign for most birds. It's hard for humans to devise tests that objectively measure the performance of species with very different interests and attitudes and perception from ourselves. — Vera Mont

Yes, but complaint is that behaviour in a mimicry is not necessarily the same as behaviour in their real life. Being caged in the lab at all is what disrupts everything - even if they are enjoying the holiday from real life.

The least obtrusive and most reliable way to discover how other animals think is to observe them in their natural habitat, solving the problems nature throws at them. We have an increasing ability to do that now. Without special equipment, though, we can observe domestic animals as they go about the business of living, overcoming obstacles and devising means to obtain what they desire. It's not The Scientific Method; it's common sense. — Vera Mont

Quite so. But "true" scientists are obsessed with controlling all the variables. Experiments are thought to be better science than observations, (and, in inanimate matter, they are). Interpreting observations in their natural habitat is very tricky and there's always the issue that the observer might affect the behaviour - even the presence of a camera/microphone can do that. It's not "just" common sense. Better to think of it as organized and disciplined common sense.

Reflection (mind that is minding, or “I” that is “I-ing”), is the interruption. Reflection has its own motion, but it is an interruption of the motion of that which it is reflecting on. So the movement of reflection creates a stillness in the thing someone is reflecting on. — Fire Ologist

I don't understand that.

My sense is that animals don’t waste any of this time - they don’t interrupt the motion by creating a still reflection (of a moving thing) that they can reflect upon. — Fire Ologist

Sometimes cats and dogs sit and stare into space, quite still. One wonders what they are thinking about and whether they are thinking at all but, perhaps, meditating, or maybe just sitting without anything going on in their heads at all (but perhaps that is meditation - I don't know about that). If not for that, I would agree with you.

Perhaps the two are always paired. That would mean matter is always consciousness-bearing, and consciousness is always matter- bearing. The relationship is a biconditional. — ucarr

No, I don't buy that. We know that consciousness evolved long after the inanimate formed. We know that causation was working perfectly well during all that time, even though consciousness did not yet exist.

But I have to concede that we only know that because we've been able to assemble the evidence and formulate hypotheses and theories.

If you adopt a strong definition of existence, such as "to be is to be perceived" or, more gently "to be is to conceived", then your thesis would follow. But you have a big problem explained where we came from. Berkeley supplied that by positing God. How would you do it?

I do accept that anything that exists can be known, conceived, perceived and that there will always be more to know, conceive, perceive than we have discovered, conceived, perceived. (I think).

The pair are indeed closely linked. Consciousness or awareness is always consciousness or awareness of something - subject and object. The object can (usually) exist without a subject. I don't think that consciousness can exist without an object, but I'm not dogmatic about it.

No, because you can have observations at multiple different scales and independently apply the abstract concept of design to each scale. It has nothing necessarily to do with the relationship between different scales in a way that is different from how the observations at different scales relate to each other. — Apustimelogist

OK. I'll accept that you are right about that. But you are OK with the relationship between part and whole, I think. So do you say that relationship is hierarchical up to down or down to up or just mutual. I can make sense of any of those.

So can I try a last example on you?

A rainbow is a very different from a sandy beach. It has parts, but not separable parts. There is the shape, the bands of colour, but that’s more or less it. So is it a physical object? In a sense, yes, but it would be less misleading to describe it as a physical phenomenon.

To see a rainbow, your back must be to the sun as you look at an approximately 40 degree angle above the ground into a region of the atmosphere with suspended droplets of water or a light mist. Each individual droplet of water acts as a tiny prism that both disperses the light and reflects it back to your eye. As you look into the sky, wavelengths of light associated with a specific color arrive at your eye from the collection of droplets.

I’m sure you know the story. I looked this up to make sure I got it right and discovered, what should have been obvious that there is a very complex step about the explanation why we see a single large arc instead of multiple small ones. I've gathered that it involves fractals, so it is likely beyond me, though I would love to understand it. But it is very relevant because it is a holistic effect, not a compound of the individual reflections from the individual rain-drops.

One might say that this is an explanation of the cause of the rainbow, but that generates a huge metaphysical issue about what the rainbow is, and a distinct temptation to say that it is not a physical object, but a mental one. Unless one wishes to embrace dualism, we need to say that the explanation in physics is an analysis of the rainbow, not a cause.

The molecules of the grain of sand, suitably arranged, constitute the grain. The grains, suitably arranged, constitute the beach. It is the water next to the beach that make it a beach, but that's a question of context, not constitution of anything. Does our picture of pictures/maps at large and small scales - and there's nothing wrong with it - or a piece of furniture with parts that constitute the whole, make sense of the rainbow? I think they are all different from each other. That's all I'm saying. — Ludwig V

The Arts vs The Humanities.

Why” is basic to both modes, and this conversation is about their differences, so I haven’t dwelt on it. — ucarr

That explains it.

The two great modes have an important difference WRT focal range: “understanding “ has a well-defined focal range coupled with a well-defined goal, where as experience, potentially drawing from all of existence, has a focal range and pallet of goals unspecifiable. — ucarr

I'm taking you to mean by "focal range" because there is always an object of understanding - the "what" that I'm seeking to understand. Sometimes, I agree, there is a well-defined goal (answer). But is that true of understanding of Heidegger or Wittgenstein or even my dog? I don't think so.
Experience, on the other hand also has an object, which can be quite narrow or very wide-ranging. Experience of life is the latter, experience of frying an egg is the former. So I agree that it's focal range is unspecified. But that's because sometimes it is wide and sometimes it is narrow. So I see no difference here. I'm not at all sure that there is a goal at stake here. What would it mean to say, "I reached my goal in that experience". (Unless just having the experience is the goal, which, I think, is not what you mean).

Experience always holds the potential to explode understanding. The two modes, being in creative conflict, animate each other. New experience drives understanding forward and new understanding drives new experience forward. — ucarr

I can agree with that, at least as a generalization. But I would want to add that sometimes understanding drives itself forward, by asking questions. Is that wrong?

“What it’s like to be a bat.” What it’s like to be something is the great question that links consciousness with matter. — ucarr

Well, I've told you what I think about the question. To be honest, I couldn't give you a straight answer right now. One day I need to write something about it. Still, I don't think you need that question, because matter is inherently defined as "not mind" and "mind" is inherently defined as "not matter". There's no need for any other link, is there?

As we answer the question “What is matter?” do we discover that our deeper questions on the subject require that we answer the question what is consciousness, thereby suggesting all material road maps lead to consciousness? — ucarr

It would be very satisfying if it did. "Return of the Repressed" springs to mind. The talk of the observer as a necessary part of theories in physics promises much.

Can there be an existence not known to be existence? — ucarr

Well, there are certainly many things that exist even though they are not known to exist. So I would have though that the answer to your question is clearly Yes. Or have I misunderstood?

Does causality persist in a world without consciousness? If consciousness must filter reality to a small sample of what’s there, then an unfiltered reality might have an unparsed version of relativity that features unlimited temporal differentials super-animated beyond cause and effect into simultaneous everything. That might play as a beyond-sequencing explosion of uncontainable potential. An unspeakable fullness of possibilities. — ucarr

Off hand, I would have thought that it must. We would not exist if it didn't. But I don't know if that's relevant because I don't understand the rest.

We can’t answer this question, but it lends a hand with answering the question: Why is there not nothing? — ucarr

Do you mean "Does causality persist in a world without consciousness?" I wouldn't have thought so. How do you think it lends a hand?
BTW I don't think "Why is there not nothing?" is answerable, because there insufficient implied context to indicate what might count as an answer.

It’s because you ask the question.
You can’t ask “Why existence?” if existence isn’t known. — ucarr

Your answer is a good one, because it appears to be an answer, but isn't one.
I don't think the reason why one cannot answer either version of the question is that "existence isn't known". After all the existence very many things is known, yet the question is still unanswerable.

Perhaps the greatest dialog between the “What” and the “How” is the “What” of the “How” and the “How” of the “What”? — ucarr

Which nicely illustrates why I can't understand your enthusiasm for "What?" and "How?"

The first question in our jingling duet is What is the good life? The second question is “What is the status of narrative? — ucarr

The first question is certainly a good candidate for its place. I don't see why the second is there. It has its place, but surely not this high up the ranking. Perhaps it's because you think the personal history is so important - which it is, in a way.

There’s experience, but what experience is worthy, and how do you make it your own? — ucarr

Worthy of what, by what criteria? You make experiences your own by being there, awake and attentive. Or have I missed the point?

Is narrative merely descriptive, or is it also generative? — ucarr

I can't answer that because I don't know what you mean by "generative". Narrative, on the face of it, always includes description, but no description is "merely" descriptive. For example, what's left out just as significant as what's included. How things are described are just as important as what is described. "Spade", "Bloody shovel", "Agricultural implement",

I did happen to run across something yesterday. The British government put out a big report on the Grenfell disaster. — fishfry

Yes. There's been a lot about it in the media in advance.

The Spectator put out a summary blaming the incident on "complacency." — fishfry

H'm. The author says that's his view, that's true. But if only it was just complacency. There was a lot worse than that. Gaming the already lax building regulations - next door to fraud. Ignoring tenants complaints. And on and on. But thanks for the link.

Spiked-Online noted that the reason the tower burned was that it was wrapped in flammable cladding that had been installed for environmental reasons. In other words the building itself would not have burned but for the cladding that had been wrapped around it as insulation. — fishfry

If you look a bit closer, it was partly for environmental reasons and partly for economic reasons. Insulation saves money. When they talk about sustainability in these contexts, they often don't distinguish between something that pays back in the long term and something that is needed for climate control. Insulation ticks both boxes, so it can be hard to discern which they mean. But I would bet it was not climate control what was uppermost in their minds.

And now the government is busy removing the flammable cladding from other buildings. — fishfry

If only it was. Progress is glacially slow because everybody is arguing about who should pay. The Government thinks that the industry should pay; the industry thinks the Government should pay. Meanwhile, the companies that designed and manufactured the cladding and sold it on the basis that it wasn't flammable are in deep trouble, but paying to put right what they've done would almost certainly bankrupt them - i.e. they can't pay. Some landlords of long-lease flats (their tenants are responsible for maintenance) are trying to make their lease-holders pay.
The police will take until the end of next year to decide whether there will be any criminal prosecutions and nobody will accept liability until that's settled. Then there may be civil suits for damages, which will take more years. Don't hold your breath. (Yes, some building have been done, but very few compared to the number affected.) Government (both parties - the seeds of this were sown in the 1980's under Thatcher and subsequent governments never put it right), the Local Council, the building industry generally, the companies that manufactured, sold, and installed the stuff, and even the fire brigade are all blamed in the report.
The fire itself was spectacularly awful. 72 people died, which is surprisingly low - thanks to the fire service. But the aftermath - if you don't laugh, you'll have to cry. No-one seems to have a shred of decency - always excepting the tenants.

So the loss of life was attributable to liberal do-gooding. Needless to say the official report did not make this point. Thought I'd pass this on. — fishfry

Oh, please! If there had been any do-gooding at all involved, it wouldn't have happened. It was greed and laziness. Complacency, if you like, in that Government trusted the builders to do the right thing.

Thanks for the opportunity for a good rant. I hope I haven't bored you.

And who are you? Where did you come from? Who do you think you are? — BC

I realize that you are asking those questions to get me puzzled, not because you think they don't have answers. But perhaps we should start from the fact that those questions have perfectly good answers and frame what neurologists are doing in more sensible ways.

So, some neurological researchers and thinkers propose that the 'self' -- you, I -- is a convenient fiction. — BC

That has some plausibility if you mean "fiction" in the sense that mathematics is (maybe) a fiction, and physical objects and everything else. But the suggestion that I and you don't exist is absurd. It would be much better to say that the self is a holistic phenomenon. The brain process that you say cause my action are an analysis of the action, not a cause of it. Compare the analysis of a rainbow in terms of physics. People used to complain that physics abolishes the rainbow, but of course it doesn't; physics analyzes the rainbow, and it is normal for a holistic phenomenon to apparently disappear under analysis.

The composer is a mental facility composed of various brain circuits. This facility outputs the text to the motor facility which causes my fingers to move in just the right way to produce this text. — BC

Why do you separate composing from typing? The idea that saying something is somehow unspooling what the brain has already done just pushes the issue back a stage into an infinite regress. That representation of what is going on is an analysis. (The clue is in the term "analysis".)

But again, Neurological research shows that the decision to act is made BEFORE we are aware that we want to act. The "I" editor operates a couple of beats behind the brain circuits that actually made the decision. — BC

No, my fingers operate a couple of beats behind the brain circuits. What you call the decision is simply the initiation and control of my typing. To put it in a misleading way, "I" is the entire process. We are misled into thinking that decision is separate from action is just a result of the fact that we can interrupt the process of action part way through - aborting a process, not completing one process and starting the next. If you think of decision as an action distinct from execution, you end up with an infinite regress.

And then eventually, socrates put forwards the notion that we should have conscious rational deliberation prior to the act as the golden standard.... rational thinking instead of instinct. — ChatteringMonkey

Yes, and one can see why. There's reason to think that planning ahead pays off. But the model always suffered from not recognizing that planning isn't doing and being unable to understand the difference. Hence, for example, the puzzle of weakness of will. It turns out that non-reflective action is always crucial. One just cannot plan every action.

No, but what I'm saying is that "reasons" are not necessarily the result of conscious rational deliberation either. Instincts are obviously prior to all of that, and instincts are to some extend already reasonable. — ChatteringMonkey

I have some reservations about instinct. It's supposed to be used for unlearned behaviour. But instincts get modified, because, paradoxically, we have an instinct to learn. So actual behaviour is, paradoxically, learned. Birds seem to have an instinct to build nests in specific ways. Yet this cannot be a simple response, since they have to adapt to the circumstances they are actually in. What I'm getting at here is the we need a concept of non-reflective behaviour to explain, for example, how people manage to fight without the articulate deliberation in advance and why they do not need to deliberate about deliberating, though they can. The idea that they do something like articulate deliberation but at lightening speed is pure hand-waving.

Two tricky points: (1) the extent to which and the ways in which the two related; and, perhaps as a particular case of (1) but perhaps not, (2) whether internalizing the patterns of reason as justification and argumentation (i.e., sense 2) genuinely contributes to belief formation at all, and perhaps to adaptive belief formation, or simply makes us more facile at producing justifications for beliefs arrived at we know not how. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, they are indeed tricky. Sadly, I have nothing useful to contribute. I do have faith one day someone will come up with something.

It's pretty deeply engrained into my way of thinking, to see causality as a lot more complex than that. — wonderer1

I know there's a lot going on around causality, because there are so many anomalous phenomena that seem to escape it. Just as the pre-scientific (Aristotelian) concept of causation had to go to enable the new science to develop. What I'm trying to suggest is that some phenomena that appear to be "secret" are just the result of asking the wrong (because unanswerable) question.

I don't say humans are not the smartest and most linguistic; only that they are not unique in the ability to solve problems, and that setting problems to solve is the only way that I know of to test this ability. — Vera Mont

I dunno. There's evidence around that being smart and linguistic may turn out not to be entirely beneficial. In this context "better together" means together with the entire planet.
Setting problems is probably the only way. But I worry that all we are testing is whether they are as smart as we are by our standards. Which are not necessarily the best standards. Lab work has to be a bit suspect.

What I object to is starting from a conclusion that should have been put to rest decades ago. — Vera Mont

I don't disagree. But there has been a lot of progress in the last few hundred years. We are no longer the centre of the entire universe, a special species chosen by God. We've recognized equality in a way that never even crossed Aristotle's mind. It's no wonder that some people are anxious and defensive.

When it comes to our power of thought, it's still hidden. We don't know at this point how the brain thinks BECAUSE we do not have access to enough of the brain's processing to figure it out. — BC

Yes, it's fascinating to watch people wrestling with it. BTW, I don't think the brain thinks. I'm the one who does the thinking. In other words, thinking is a holistic phenomenon, like a rainbow.
A big problem is that "thinking" along with "understanding" are probably the two most protean concepts we have. I'm pretty sure that we'll have to modify those concepts to fit with the science we come up with, rather than the other way round.
People think that there's a way of sorting the problem out according to the model of information processing that we already have in our thinking machines. So it's worth noting that not everyone thinks that they are thinking machines. Then there is the fact that the brain is not just an information processing machine. It also controls action and reaction, and it may not need anything we could recognize as language to do that.

Will it be solved? I don't know. Depends on the stability of civilization over the next century or two. — BC

It will be solved. But I'm pretty sure it will take conceptual change, perhaps as big as the change that solved the solar system.
What's a century or two? There was nearly two thousand years between Ptolemy and Copernicus. There's no rush.

I just finished reading it, so I have a better understanding of the context in which he was using "powers". — wonderer1

So you should also have a better understanding of what empiricism was/is all about. The debate between empiricists and rationalists (the orthodox background for empiricism in philosophy to-day) is a whole other issue. That debate was about innate ideas - a quite different problem.
You may find it interesting to read Section V and VII for more about causation and Section XII for more about scepticism.

It's interesting to consider how much less secret and hidden these days, is the power of bread to nourish. These days if I go buy a loaf of bread many of the bread's nutritive 'secrets' are likely to be listed on the packaging. :smile: — wonderer1

Yes. One could argue that the powers are less secret than they seemed to be back then. We describe what happens in terms of a condition - if and when the first billiard ball hits the second, the second will move. It makes no difference if you know the molecular analysis of the balls - the causal relation has no more to it than "if and when p, then q will follow".

I guess you'll have better things to do that hang around here!

I want to add that I do not at all deny that animals (including humans) do have purely mechanical responses. Examples in humans are the reflex breath as you come back to the top of the water, which is clearly evolved and rational, as contrasted with the jerk of your lower leg as your old-fashioned doctor tap just below your knee, which (so far as I know) has no evolutionary purpose. You may know that if you scratch a dog at just the right place, their back leg comes up as if to scratch themselves; they can also do the same thing when they want to scratch themselves; that response can be mechanical and irrational and can be voluntary and rational.

Often, this involves altering the meaning of words and twisting familiar concepts, and may include denial of the audience's practical experience. — Vera Mont

You're not wrong. But, along with all the similarities, there must be differences. The same applies to chimps and horses and whales. So there is legitimate enquiry to be had here, surely?

However, based on my considerations of neuroscience, calling our subconscious recognition of patterns "a power" doesn't seem inappropriate. — wonderer1

That's a different case. Our recognition is revealed when we recognize it. These powers, as Hume keeps emphasizing, are "secret", "hidden".

I'd be interested in hearing more about Hume's disagreement with Aristotle, if it isn't too much trouble. — wonderer1

I recommend reading what he actually says, and only reading secondary sources with that in mind. The argument against induction is routinely misunderstood, and so they cannot be altogether trusted.

Bear in mind also that when I say "Aristotelian" I mean it. Hume might have been arguing with Aristotle, but he doesn't say that who he's disagreeing. It's "the schools" that he is targeting.

His discussion is in the "Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding" Section IV, Part II. It begins on page 33 in my edition. It begins:-

I shall content myself, in this section, with an easy task, and shall pretend only to give a negative answer to the question here proposed. I say then, that, even after we have experience of the operations of cause and effect, our conclusions from that experience are not founded on reasoning, or any process of the understanding. This answer we must endeavour both to explain and to defend.

If you have an electronic text, search for "power". It'll come back with over 100 entries, but you can click through them quite quickly. In my search, it was number 15 of 129. It comes quite early, in the first page or two.

quote]He (sc. Hume) presents an argument in the form of a dilemma which appears to rule out the possibility of any reasoning from the premises to the conclusion of an inductive inference.[/quote]
People often forget that he also says that, in spite of the fact that inductive reasoning is deductively invalid, we will continue to act on that basis, but not from reason, from custom or habit. He also says that inductive reasoning is all the proof you will ever get and provides a basis that is "as good as a proof". (In the context of his discussion of miracles, he slips up, or gets over-enthusiastic, and says that induction reasoning (against miracles) is a proof. He excoriates radical scepticism, which he calls "Pyrrhonism" even though he acknowledges that he cannot refute it. He recommends a month in the country as a cure. All he wanted to disprove was the Aristotelian idea of a "power" hidden behind the phenomena.

There are two ideas that may help with the issue of animal ratonal thinking.
One is the idea of "embedded" beliefs. These are believes which it is necessary to posit to make sense of the action. You walk towards your car, reach in to your pocket for the key to open it, and fail to find it. You believed that you had the key even though you didn't. You just didn't think. So there was no reasoning process behind your walk to the car and yet you believed it. The same is clearly true of animals. They do not have language, so they cannot go through what we call a reasoning process, though they can clearly learn from experience and remember what they learn and so act rationally.

The other idea is the distinction between knowing how to do something and being able to articulate that knowledge, or between tacit and articulate knowledge. (Even philosophers have to acknowledge that it is perfectly possible to use a word correctly without being able to define it. They quarrel about whether that means that you know what the word means only because (unsurprisingly) they are fixated on articulate knowledge and don't take knowing how seriously. Given that knowing-how and knowing-that are two distinct abilities, it should be no surprise that animals know how to do things without knowing how to articulate them.

Please let's try to get over the idea that only humans have language. There are many language-like communication systems, of varying degrees of sophistication. It's a matter of degree, not of kind.

The reaction happened before the thinking could begin. — Athena

That doesn't mean that it wasn't rational. He thought that his son was an intruder. An embedded belief.

This is the stimulus, this is the reaction. Not rational thinking. — Athena

But you are leaving out all the interesting bits. Stimulus/response is Pavlov's idea. The stimulus, for him, is something external and the response is the animal's. It's the feedback that does the work. In the case of his dogs, the bell announces the food and the animal salivating is the response, because the dog has learnt that the bell is followed by food. It's perfectly rational. Skinner introduced what he called "operant conditioning", where the stimulus is something the animal does and the response is what the environment does. If the response is a reward, the animal's action is reinforced; if the response is unpleasant, the animal's action is inhibited. It's called trial and error and it's perfectly rational.

I agree that the baby waving its arms and legs about is. let's say, purely mechanical. Evolution sees to it that we are born with a basis for learning what we need to know. Whether it is mechanical or not, it will be rational. But the baby quickly finds out that some movements are rewarded and some are not - and off we go. They have a mechanical seeking movement - probably based on pheremones - that is rewarded when the milk is found - and off we go. Horses and cows and others have a more complicated problem - they have to learn to stand up and walk before they feed - but they manage it. I'm not clear whether the squirming caterpillar is yelling in pain or trying to escape, by the way - possibly both. They could be blind, mechanical movements, but I doubt it. Evolution would favour squirming caterpillars because they are more likely to escape.

True, though this could apply to any scale of description I think. — Apustimelogist

Yes, it could. But that's what links the different scales together, as different representations of the same thing.

We can also extend the format from things that have a purpose and are created by human beings, by saying that the design gives the (internal) structure of the object - relationships between the components at a lower (smaller) level.

Does a pile of sand have an internal structure? In one sense, no. But in another sense, yes. Each grain of sand has a relationship to each other grain of sand in the pile, and that's what makes it a pile.

So now we can see that the "bottom up" relationship between levels that you identified is matched by a "top down" relationship. So the hierarchy goes in both directions. You can call it a hierarchy from both perspectives, but "objectively" it is not two hierarchies, but one structure of a collection of pictures/maps...

Yes?

You asked about slaves without masters and masters without slaves. If a master is not isolated from slaves then he is not without slaves, and vice versa. — Leontiskos

That's true, but doesn't answer my question. What if a (natural) master is isolated from slaves and vice versa?

Isn't it just that "slave" and "servant" have become dirty words? But they were not dirty for Aristotle ("doúlos"). — Leontiskos

But he does think that slaves are vicious and bestial and should be treated as animals. I think that's a pretty dirty, don't you?
The issues get very complicated. Simpson has made me realize that Aristotle's argument is not nearly as simple as I thought. But at the heart of this one is the question when it is moral to deprive another human being of liberty and to compel them to obey your wishes - for life? Closely related is the question is when we can morally treat another human being as (just) an animal?

Aristotle thinks (I think) that there is a fact of the matter that justifies that. In fact, as I showed last time, it is not altogether clear exactly what his argument proves, because he distinguishes between natural and legal slavery without explaining what the difference amounts to. So it isn't clear what the argument is about. It's certainly not about the actual practice of slavery. So we are left with a fog, only slightly illuminated by his comparison of slaves with tame animals.

Does not the substantive question come down to whether a distinction is relevant or real? — Leontiskos

Yes, that's exactly what I think. Though I've qualified that below.

When someone opposes him they are arguing that such a distinction is either not real or not relevant. — Leontiskos

Yes. As it happens, I think that his distinction is neither real nor relevant. But I've shelved the question whether it is real for the sake of the argument.

We could say that those who favor "universal equality" are those who see fewer real and relevant distinctions between humans. — Leontiskos

Well, I don't know how we would count them. But certainly the argument is about which distinctions are real and relevant.
But there are two different issues going on here. (This is slightly different from what I said in my last post). One issue is about the common elements that all human beings share - and there must be some if the classification as human or not is to work - and the rights that "follow" from those common elements. The other is about what differences among human beings allow or require different treatments of them in various situations.

Thank you very much. I can get my teeth into this. I won't complain that you've sent me too much. I just hope that my reply isn't too much and that we don't lose too much in the course of discussion.

The present state of my general descriptions of the two great modes: science/humanities goes as follows: science asks: what is existence? Humanities asks: how is human? — ucarr

So that's why you posited "What" and "How" at the beginning! (I'm still wondering where "Why?" fits in).

For science the focal point is on measurement. For humanities the focal point is on consciousness. — ucarr

I like the first sentence, because it explains why mathematics is so necessary to science. It is the methodological decision at the start of what we now call science.
I'm less happy with the second sentence, for reasons that may appear later.

When you measure something you contain it. Containment of existing things drives toward understanding. — ucarr

H'm.

When you experience something you assemble a continuity of knowing-what-it’s-like into a narrative of an enduring point of view, your personal history. — ucarr

That's true. But is it relevant? I suppose we'll see.
I may be naive, but I thought the whole point of "knowing-what-it's-like" is that it can't be turned into propositional knowledge and hence not into a narrative.
I would have thought that if you were going to ask this kind of question, you would have looked at the existentialists. That's exactly their point - that the start of understanding is the lived world into which we are thrown. But I hope you are not going to turn the Humanities into a matter of personal history.

Every human individual is both scientist and artist. The human individual needs both the understanding of measurement and the knowing-what-it’s-like of a personal history in order to live. No understanding? No personal history? No life. — ucarr

In a sense, that's true. As a matter of history, it can't be. Or are you saying that no-one before the Egyptians invented arithmetic had a personal history? I don't think so. So it needs a bit more explanation.

The scientist measures, i.e., she sounds the dimensions of a thing, thereby revealing the what of a mysterious thing that mystifies her own knowledge of the what of her being until she finally surrenders her understanding to a radically new picture of the what of the state of being of herself. — ucarr

So if you assemble enough measurements, you'll develop a new understanding of yourself? I would have thought you need more than that.
Why and how did you start measuring in the first place?
Where did your pre-measurement picture of the what of the state of your own being come from?

The artist assembles a continuity of knowing-what-it’s-like into an arc of change and discovery that is a personal history through the start of adventures, the middle section assessing battles won/lost and finally reaching the summit/plateau of a new state of the how of her being. — ucarr

I can see how you are developing your starting-point. But this is perilously close to a stipulated definition. I have a feeling that it would not correspond to the actual life and practice of actual artists, never mind what they might say if you ask them.

Logic and math cover the two great modes thus: scientifically they mark and track the what of the position of the state of being; artistically they narrate a continuity of the direction of the how of being towards a conclusion of the what-it’s-like to reside in validity-as-truth, or not. — ucarr

I'm glad you are locating logic and math as an exception in the what/how dualism and sad that you're just combining the two. I think that what you say boils down to the idea that logic and math underpin both "what" and "how", defining the permanent framework of possibility for both. Is that what you are saying?

In each mode, one of the greatest mysteries is the location of the inflection point linking the immaterial and the material. This linkage and its circumambient mystery establish the wholely picture of life: substance grounding immanent form endlessly variable, albeit grounded within the ambiguity that animates the what and the how. — ucarr

Not quite the hard problem, but close.
The urgent questions here are:-
Are these mysteries soluble or not?
If not, how are we to live with them? (There's no question of understanding them, is there?)
If they are, is it the artist or the scientist or both who will "solve" them? Or do we each solve them for ourselves when we construct our personal histories?

The idea that science and art are both necessary for what Aristotle would call a good human life is fine by me. ("No life" is a bit extreme, don't you think?)

My big trouble with this is that you seem to be pursuing a quite different project from the one in the title. The Humanities are not pursuing a personal project. They don't have and they don't pursue what you might call scientific objectivity. How could they? Why should they? But they do have their methods and their standards. You don't recognize that and so confuse the Humanities disciplines with the practices of the arts, which the Humanities study, but do not perform.

The idea that each of constructs a personal history based on our experience has a lot to be said for it.
But it doesn't touch any of the Humanities disciplines.
Historians would likely not call that history, but memoir - because it does not even try to be objective; nor should it. It's fine as it is. An objective personal history would be a biography, and that's a different enterprise. Memoir is a literary form and so is open to study by Literature, but it isn't the study of Literature. You seem to have forgotten that philosophy belongs here, and I'm sure you don't think that is a matter of constructing a memoir.

To be sure, the Sciences start from measurement, but measurement on its own is just data. The sciences develop theories to enable us to understand the data and it is no more than stamp-collecting without it. (Stamp-collecting isn't just gathering stamps into albums either - or at least it can become more, but that's another story).

I think you are being misled by the binary distinction between objective (science) and subjective (everything else) and by the rhetorical effect of ("What is it like to be a bat?"). That question is genius. It manages to persuade us that it can be answered yet cannot be at the same time.

Speaking of looking through lenses, someone who studies humanities would likely disagree with the idea that science deals with "what" and humanities deal with "how". From a certain perspective, if humanities is the focal point, then it is the what, and science is just about understanding the universe in which events happen. — Igitur

I do like the lens metaphor - it seems to me to be very useful and I shall use it at every opportunity.

There are clearly hidden depths to the definition that @ucarr gave. Whether it is somehow about self-reference or formalisms, there are interesting and important issues at play. But I have a sense that this is a definition from the perspective of science. So here is a perspective from someone who studies humanities (if the term can be applied to at least some of philosophy).

Our sense that science and the humanities are different arises from the fact that there are different ontologies (which are defined by their practices and languages) in play. However, ontologies and practices don't necessarily line up neatly with the standard catalogue of subjects - or even with each other. Academic departments are, presumably, formed on the assumption that each subject/discipline is an interest group and/or a collegial group. That is not false, but it is well to remember that each subject/discipline/academic group is itself riven with battles of all sorts, in which the definition of the group itself may be at stake.
It's an intellectual mess - but then, that's a field of special interest to philosophy. From my point of view, we do well to ask, before getting embroiled in this marsh, what, in Wittgenstein's terms, our real needs are. To understand that, we need to go back to the historical (and legendary) time when the distinction was formulated, when the intellectual and framework and space for what we now call "science" was developed. This was also, at the same time, an intellectual and social battle.
Since then science has become dominant in our lives, and it is the intellectual and social space for the humanities that is at stake. (I won't mention cuckoos and eggs). The issue has not changed much. But I wonder if we would find it easier to make progress if we stopped amalgamating a complicated and multi-dimensional issue into one, and treated the various sub-issues piecemeal, leaving the grand distinction to fall into place (or to fall into disuse) as it may. That may seem boringly familiar, but I would have thought that analytic philosophers would find it of interest.

Science is about understanding the universe, humanities are about understanding our past (generally) and philosophy is about understanding where we, either as individuals or as a larger group, fit into that universe. — Igitur

It would, surely, be more accurate to say the science is about understanding the universe conceived of as a machine, or the universe insofar as mathematics can be applied to it. Philosophy certainly includes how we fit in, but also includes the question how far the scientific project fits in to the universe. Are you assuming that the study of literature and history are essentially philosophical? That's an interesting thought. I think there's a case to be made.

There are discussions that don't aim to answer that question, but I feel as though that particular "Why" is the main reason people try to create or improve philosophies, or feel drawn to it. — Igitur

You may be right. But, surely, in the end, the question why people are drawn to philosophy is empirical.

Formalisms measure regularities of nature. You say (above) regularities of nature are concrete matters of fact. Since formalisms measure regularities of nature, and regularities of nature are concrete matters of fact, formalisms measure concrete matters of fact. — ucarr

No they don't. As I wrote: formalisms ARE USED to measure or describe the regularities of nature (e.g. arithmetic IS USED to count apples in a barrel). — 180 Proof

Are you both sure that the difference between you is not just a question of language. I can't see what is at stake here.

Yes, true; though they still have a correspondence to the same area of reality, which injects redundancy. — Apustimelogist

Well, yes. It is redundancy in one sense, but it has a point, which makes it not entirely redundant. There has to be something that the picture/map have in common, to establish that they are different pictures/maps/models of the same thing. So we seem to be agreed.

If I may, I would like to try another example. When your flat-pack arrives, it is not a bookcase, but a set of parts for a bookcase. We can lay them all out on the floor, count them, check them. Now, what needs to happen to make it a bookcase? All the parts are there. Nothing needs to be added. What’s the problem? Easy, the parts need to be put together as designed.

So the list of parts of the bookcase is complete, but leaves out something. But it doesn't leave out another part. It leaves out the design. The design is not a physical object; it is an abstract object - it belongs in a different category from the parts. Yet it is not less basic or more fundamental than the parts.

Well I don't want to take this example too seriously but surely these distinctions are more or less at the same scale or granularity? At the same time, the mapping of a whole grain is mapping to the same part of reality as mappings to different parts of the grain so there is a redundancy. The parts mapping is mapping to the same part only it makes more distinctions, more information. The coarser grain mapping ignores distinctions that exist. — Apustimelogist

Yes, but the coarser grain mapping enables you to supply what the fine grain mapping leaves out - the whole that the fine grain mapping can't present. Think seeing the wood (coarse grain) and seeing the trees (fine grain). The two mappings are interdependent and both necessary for a comprehensive understanding.

You're trolling me now. — fishfry

Not intentionally. If I've upset you, I apologize.

You could post something on the public area, at least that way we'd get some fresh meat once in a while. — fishfry

Yes, that would be good. But maybe other people prefer something noisier - more exciting.

I used to be a liberal too. Something happened over the years. — fishfry

That's what happened to me.

My vote literally doesn't count. — fishfry

True. I still vote, but my expectations are low. It's more of a ritual than anything real. And yet...

Now we're into building regulations? — fishfry

It's just that I'm so angry about the total mess and the expectation it won't be solved.

I can sum it up in a cartoon I saw the other day. — fishfry

Here's my most depressing thought. Tyranny and freedom are not opposites. What's tyranny to you is freedom to someone else. What's freedom to you is tyranny to someone else. Oversimplified, I know - there's always compromise. Which is not a solution, just a way of making do.

You are justifying evil by saying there's always been evil. Fine. — fishfry

NOT justifying, I'm trying to work out how to live with omnipresent evil, without indulging in cop-out evasions - blaming Government or Capital or Original Sin. I think I'm closest to Voltaire's "Candide"? Or Kurt Vonnegut's "so it goes" - or perhaps Hamlet's "The rest is silence". Yet obstinately and stupidly, life goes on. It's better than the alternative, I suppose.

I haven't anything better to do!! LOL. Am I leaving too soon for your taste? I don't mean to be short. I just haven't got anything else to say. — fishfry

You've been saying that for a while now. I'm in the same boat. So now we're talking about the fact that neither of us has anything else to say. Absurd, and yet, here we are.

Recent developments in the West are very concerning. Robert Reich, Clinton's Secretary of Labor, just called for "reining in" Elon Musk. — fishfry

Why does that concern you? Everybody who has power has an opposition. The opposition always thinks that those with power should be "reined in" or crushed. (Actually, if you think about it, that's really a very mild comment compared with what some people say). Most people with power are either "reined in" by the opposition or their own failures. I've no idea whether Musk will be reined or crash and burn. At the moment, it's impossible to tell which it is to be. The sooner the better, as far as I'm concerned. There'll only be another like him afterwards.

There are many other examples. You talk about Putin and Xi but you don't seem concerned about the creeping -- actually now galloping -- authoritarianism and censorship in the west. I'm very concerned; you much less so. So I don't think my point was unfair. For a Brit to ignore these issues lately I find very strange. They're putting people in jail in your country for very anodyne online comments. — fishfry

It depends what you think is anodyne. Compared to the way that some people carry on (without being thrown in jail), it probably is anodyne. But most people's comments are just hot air - unpleasant, but not harmful. Look at the consequences.
There was a famous speech in the 60's by a Conservative politician named Enoch Powell, in which he drew everyone's attention to the flood of immigration into Britain, painted a terrible picture of the abolition of the "British way of life" and announced that there would be "rivers of blood" in the end. Was he reporting? Or was he inciting? I don't know what his motivation was, but I know what happened as a result. It wasn't rivers of blood, but it did involve bloodshed and it was very ugly.
You may have seen the reports of the report released about the fire in Grenfell Tower. Everybody is very shocked and horrified. In a way, so am I. But I have known it was coming ever since the then Government relaxed the building regulations. It was only ever a matter of when and where. It was obvious. It was also always obvious that when it happened most people involved would say it was not their fault, even though it is obvious that they all contributed. No clean hands.
There has never been a golden age when there was no censorship, no authoritarian squelching of opposition. It was ever so, it will always be so.
I'm a somewhat old-fashioned middle-of-the-road liberal and I felt more comfortable 20 or 30 years ago. I grew up in the post-WW2 consensus/settlement. It was never what it seemed to be and it fell apart anyway. (If you want a date, it was the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 that did it.) Once that has happened to you, you never, ever buy in to anything else with the same innocent, deluded conviction.

I'm kind of running out of steam on this site. Might need to wrap this up soon. — fishfry

If you do decide not to continue, that's fair enough. I wouldn't want to (couldn't) detain you if you have better things to do. So long as you aren't leaving for the same reason that you left the Lounge. Better to let me know when you make your decision, so's I know what's going on. If and when I make the same decision, I will let you know. OK?

A master or slave in isolation would be like a part disconnected from the whole, and in both cases the lack of cooperation or communion will make their lives worse than what they otherwise would be. — Leontiskos

Why do you assume that a natural leader with no people to lead and a slave without a master to serve will inevitably live in isolation. Why cannot they live in society?
Come to think of it, he divides Greek society into two groups "the many" and "the few", natural slave and natural leaders. Natural slavery is not necessarily legal slavery and vice versa, it would seem. So maybe that is what he is thinking. I'm finding this very confusing. I think this would all have been a lot clearer if we could just drop the bit about slavery and talk about leaders and followers. It is at least plausible that anyone who is not a leader is a follower. Then we could say, with a clear conscience that natural leaders with natural followers makes for a peaceful society and the people who are not natural leaders may become leaders, but they will be poor leaders, and vice versa for followers. There would still be arguments about it, but at least what is at stake would be clear and make sense.

Yes, I agree. — Leontiskos

I'm glad about that.

It seems to me that universal equality means that the same things are appropriate to each. Or at least it often means this, or leans in this direction. A kind of classlessness. — Leontiskos

But now I'm a bit confused. It is just obvious that there are some things that are in common between all human beings (whether by essence (definition) or by accident (empirically)) and other things that are not. So yes, everyone is equally entitled to vote and equally entitled to a fair trial.
So perhaps I should reformulate a principle of non-discrimination, which requires that people are not discriminated either in favour or against on irrelevant grounds. Aristotle specifically picks out the case of Helen of Troy claiming that the fact that her parents were divine meant that she had special privileges. Aristotle rejects that. So it looks as if he believed in that principle. Does that help?
I'm all for classlessness. But there's nothing wrong with distinguishing between classes of people when the criterion of membership is relevant. (People who are sick and people who are well).

What I mean by information here is purely about distinctions one can signal that map to distinctions in reality. — Apustimelogist

So a map of a single grain of sand cannot signal distinctions between grains, and a map of the inside of a grain cannot signal the whole grain, and a map of part of the beach cannot signal the dune at the back of the beach.

What I am saying isn't to do with the pragmatics of navigating one's picture of the universe. It is not really about strong reductions as in the wikipedia descriptions I gave. — Apustimelogist

Well, I'm picking up what you said about large-scale and small-scale models/maps/descriptions/theories.
Now, I don't understant what your doctrines are to do with. They are not to do with navigating the scale of them or about strong reductions. Yet you keep saying things that look like strong reductions and then denying that they are. What is what you are saying to do with? I'm at a loss to understand.

I'm not sure whether you are saying that the analysis of water as H2O captures all the information about it.
— Ludwig V
I'm just saying when you make observations at finer, smaller scale, you get more information. — Apustimelogist

You really hate an example, don't you? Nothing but large-scale generalizations. So you miss the detail.

In the sense of distinctions. Finer-grained observations make distinctions that do not exist for coarse-grained observations even though they may be mapping to the same sets of events. — Apustimelogist

Yes, they certainly do. But then you don't get the bigger (larger-scale) picture. Then you can't see the wood for the trees. You may know the wood is there, but that's only because you've looked at a larger scale picture. The larger-scale picture doesn't tells you about the wood, but not the trees. The smaller-scale picture tells you about the trees, but not the wood.

Its not about information in the picture but information about the unobservable reality beyond. — Apustimelogist

You don't get information about the unobservable reality beyond the picture. It's unobservable in the picture. So it is observable, but only in a different picture.

Methodological reductionism: the scientific attempt to provide an explanation in terms of ever-smaller entities. — Apustimelogist

That seems to fit what you are saying pretty well.
But I do accept that you are not claiming that because a glass of water consists of H2O, the water doesn't really exist.
I'm not sure whether you are saying that the analysis of water as H2O captures all the information about it. But I do think you might be.

On the other hand, it seems almost tautologically the case that if you examine reality at the finest details, you will have more information about it in the sense of being able to make distinctions - specifically in the sense of correspondence ideas about truth. — Apustimelogist

What do you mean "more information"?

Larger scale maps have less detail than smaller scale maps, but wider scope. I wouldn't know how to answer which has more information. Ditto pictures.
A picture of something close up which is 5" x 7" or 100,000 pixels has the same amount of information whether it is a picture of a landscape or a picture of a molecule.

An X-ray gives us information that we cannot get without it. But it loses information that an ordinary camera does capture. A camera cannot capture smells and sounds. A microphone cannot capture the weather (or not all of the weather. Different kinds of information are relevant.

When you think of a bishop threatening a king, your are thinking of the bishop in a wider context than if you are thinking of the bishop as an aesthetic or historic object. When you are thinking of a bishop as a physical object, you lose the context of the actual game and the aesthetic and historical context, but gain the physical properties of the bishop - down to its molecular constitution.

With that said, Aristotle is great once you get the hang of him. — Leontiskos

I agree. He is not easy, however. It is a mistake to think that you can read him once and get your head around. Everything is interconnected. Very little is easy to grasp from a contemporary view-point. The contrast is very instructive.

Maybe. Impatience is a big driver of the way that debates go. The media (or their readers) do not have the patience for going slowly and paying attention to detail. Everything has to be a slogan - three words - preferably monosyllables and no more than two syllables.

My theory is that the people who might make a fist of the job are reluctant to take it one. One of the things that has changed in the last 3 or 4 decades is that the media scrutiny is much more effective and much, much noisier.

To clarify and or get rid of certain words or tendencies that prevent discussion from advancing.
This applies to a lot of metaphysics and a part of epistemology.
But as for ethics or aesthetics, I don't think ordinary language helps much, because we are dealing with facets of life which we have less depth of insight. And when there is depth of insight, what we can say about it amounts to very little: — Manuel

I'm inclined to agree with you.

Why should we be just?
Why should we not do evil?
Why is this beautiful?
These questions have answers which don't give much depth of insight. They tend to be rather trivial but are nonetheless crucial issues for life. — Manuel

Yes. I'm inclined to think that the problem is that they are too general. People do manage to have better discussions about specific issues within (and sometimes between) those categories.

My first example was 'we only ever see indirectly' – a claim that 'seeing' is always, with no exception, indirect. And my second example was the one you raised: 'all bachelors are unmarried'. These are both claims that admit of no exception. But to me, one of them seems like nonsense and the other one seems meaningful (in a limited way). I'm trying to work out why that is. — cherryorchard

At first, I thought that I would say that your second example is grammatical - a la Wittgenstein - and the second is not. But a second thought gives me pause. Remember, we have that argument that there is a contrast - seeing a sense-datum/experience/impression is seeing directly. So your first example becomes "Seeing an object is always, with no exception, indirect". But then experiences (etc.) are objects ("I see a red patch"), so it becomes "Seeing a physical object is always, without exception, indirect." So it looks empirical, until we realize that there is nothing that would count as seeing a physical object directly, and then it becomes grammatical. There are complications with the first that we do not find with the second. (Though I could invent some, if you want to explore an entirely trivial rabbit-hole.) The reason the first is nonsense to you is that you have a philosophical position (a grammar) and so interpret the first in a certain way. This reflects back on the contrast theory and explains why the philosophers who are accused of holding it by Gellner never articulated it.

Seeing something in a mirror is another example – e.g., 'From where I was sitting, I couldn't see the door directly, but I could see it in the mirror.' That sounds like ordinary language to me. — cherryorchard

I'll buy that.

ysyti'I couldn't see the airplane directly but I could see it with my binoculars' does not strike me as a familiar use of the word 'directly'. If you wanted to explain that you could only see the plane with binoculars, you might say something like: 'it wasn't visible with the naked eye'. The word 'directly' wouldn't ordinarily be used like that. But I suppose if someone was just chatting and not being mindful of how they expressed themselves, they might say 'I couldn't see it directly'. — cherryorchard

Good point.

I suppose elucidating the specific usage suggests that 'directly' and 'indirectly' only work in contrast to one another. But it doesn't prove as much. Or does it? — cherryorchard

What it suggests is that when we look at examples carefully, we find that a yes/no answer is difficult to impossible to sustain. That is a position that Gellner does not seem to recognize.

My point in offering the example is not to prove a point, but to help articulate what we are talking about. You suggest seeing with the naked eye - i.e. without equipment. Which makes perfect sense. Except that it hands an opening to the sense-datum theories to ask whether my eye is not the equipment by means of which I see. So it needs to be formulated more carefully. I think that dualism is the philosophical doctrine (actually assumption) behind the entire argument.

Oops!. Perhaps the example we are looking for is the philosophical doctrine of monism. Not necessarily, provided we don't deny dualism. That's why these philosophers tend not to actually deny dualism.

Can anyone think of any word that is meaningful without a contrast? I haven't seen an example yet. — cherryorchard

No-one seems to have come up with one yet. And yet I don't think anyone has decisively endorsed or rejected Gellner's theory.

It does not pay to assume that a word must have an opposite, or one opposite, — Austin,

I think that Austin has it exactly right. Notice that he does give examples - and there are plenty more - "grumpy", "uncouth". It's a question of what you do next. He doesn't jump to a theory but considers what questions to explore. Very different from Gellner.

That is, it appears that in thinking of Wittgenstein or Austin as advocating any theory of meaning, Gellner shows he has not understood what they are up to. — Banno

Absolutely.

If so, then it is a sensible approach. It would be hard to believe that ethical or aesthetic considerations could be eliminated. — Manuel

I/m sorry. What's a sensible approach? What cannot ethical or aesthetic considerations be eliminated from?

Sometimes, universal statements about a particular term are meaningful. But why is that so? — cherryorchard

I'm sorry. I can't work out exactly what you mean. Can you give an example - or two?

And while the word 'indirectly' does have a hypothetical antithesis ('directly'), it's very hard to see how that might apply to anything in this specific case. Someone who wasn't sure what the word 'see' meant would not be helped along if we told them 'we only ever see things indirectly'. — cherryorchard

Austin gives an example I think is helpful. But I can't remember the details, so I'll adapt it. Air traffic control radar shows a blip on the screen, with the flight number attached on a little label. The controller says "I can see flight 417", and so he does, but the visitor who peers anxiously out of the window is puzzled. The controller can see flight 417 indirectly. The visitor thinks the controller meant directly. Clearly, seeing flight 417 through the window is seeing it directly (despite the fact that it is through the window). Suppose the visitor gets out a pair of binoculars, sweeps them round a bit and says "Aha! There it is!". Does the visitor see flight 417 directly?
The last point - the unanswerable, doubtful case is quite important to me. There's no point in pretending that this stuff is cut and dried.
Now think about why you gave the answer you did give to each case. I think you'll find you understand how directly and indirectly could be applied in this case. I agree I don't think it would help anyone who doesn't already know what "see" means, but it does help us, in our situation, so that's all right.
Austin does raise the question why anyone would worry about the difference in normal life - did you feel the same when you read the example? He's sort of saying that, despite the example, he's not at all sure that "direct" and "indirect" to "see".

I'm not sure this deals conclusively with the problem, though... — cherryorchard

Neither am I. Philosophers always pretend they are sure of their answers. I don't see any harm in tagging something "not sure". Something may happen later that will help.

Maybe it's because the sentence 'all bachelors are unmarried' is a way of defining the term 'bachelor'. — cherryorchard

Yes, that's what I meant about paying attention to the kind of statement it is - its purpose and context. That's always part of the meaning, isn't it?

In any case, thank you for the quotation from Ryle! I will look up that book. — cherryorchard

It's good philosophy and a good read. You're welcome.

Right, and when I tried to bridge your thread with the thread discussing whether we see colors or only our perceptions of colors I ran into this same problem — Leontiskos

There's a quick put-down available, I think. Our perception of colours is our seeing of the colours. Your "opponent" is being misled by the common philosophical tendency to assume that every noun denotes an object.

that is what driving a car consists of. 'Indirect' (or indeed 'direct') doesn't enter into it, unless there are two varieties of driving (real or imagined) that can actually be classified using those words. — cherryorchard

See
One possibility is to challenge your opponent to explain what "direct" means, if not using the steering wheel and pedals. Remote control of the car would be indirect, I think.

There are direct experiences (mental and physical sensations, feelings, thoughts) and indirect experiences of the outer world (sights, smells) — cherryorchard

This is one of those very difficult muddles that are very hard to articulate. "Indirect experiences" is a rather peculiar phrase. In the cases of sight and smell (and hearing), what is seen etc. is at a distance, but the sense-datum is experienced directly; what is experienced indirectly is the object of the experience, not the experience itself (the sense-datum). Mind you, if that is what he meant, I would say that this is another example of assuming that a noun always denotes an object. But "sense-datum" or "experience" is not an object, it is an event. A common mistake in philosophy.

I'm interested that you call Gellner's 'paradox' argument a 'slam-dunk'. I confess I can't make sense of what he means at all. — cherryorchard

i call it a slam-dunk, because some people try to apply the format to all sorts of statements. It's formulaic and refutes without attempting to understand, which, for me, is debating, not philosophy. "We can never be certain of anything" is an example, but the reply "Are you certain of that?" suppresses the argument rather than exposing where it has gone wrong. (Mind you, in that case, the argument is sound.)

whether we can meaningfully make such statements as 'we only ever see things indirectly' or 'we can never be certain of anything'. — cherryorchard

You have to consider that Gellner might believe one or both of those propositions. You don't. So Gellner would think that these are examples of contrast-free statements. If he did so, he would, of course, be begging the question, which is whether those claims are meaningful.

My point about logic was not clear enough. Take any analytic statement, "All bachelors are unmarried" is a nice stock example. It is not possible for any bachelor to be married. It is contrast free. Ryle's examples below don't apply and Gellner has a case for saying that this is an example of a contrast-free statement, and, in a sense, it is. But that isn't paying attention to the kind of statement it is, and to the point that of course there are some people who are not bachelors. It's just that there are no married bachelors.

This is interesting, thank you. I haven't read Ryle – do you remember where this idea comes up in his work? It strikes me as reminiscent of passage 345 in Wittgenstein's 'Philosophical Investigations': — cherryorchard

I agree with you about that passage.

A country which had no coinage· would offer no scope to counterfeiters. There would be nothing for them to manufacture or pass counterfeits of. They could, if they wished, manufacture and give away decorated discs of brass or lead, which the public might be pleased to get. But these would not be false coins. There can be false coins only where there are coins made of the proper materials by the proper authorities.
In a country where there is a coinage, false coins can be manufactured and passed; and the counterfeiting might be so efficient that an ordinary citizen, unable to tell which were false and which were genuine coins, might become suspicious of the genuineness of any particular coin that he received. But however general his suspicions might be, there remains one proposition which he cannot entertain, the proposition, namely, that it is possible that all coins are counterfeits. For there must be an answer to the question 'Counterfeits of what?' Or a judge, who has found all too many witnesses in the past inaccurate and dishonest, may be right to expect today's testimonies to break down under examination; but he cannot declare that there are no such things as accuracy and sincerity in testifying. Even to consider whether this witness has been insincere or inaccurate involves considering what would be the honest or precise thing to say. Ice could not be thin if ice could not be thick. — Ryle, Dilemmas, pp. 94, 95

This would be something that Gellner might elevate to a theory. But Ryle does not present the claim that all concepts must be like this.

Sure - words can be problematic in philosophy. People get stuck discussing words rather than ideas all the time, so there is room for "ordinary language philosophy". — Manuel

Actually, Austin is quite modest about ordinary language philosophy, only claiming that it is an important preparation. He does not explicitly rule out the possibility that some philosophy may survive the fire and need further consideration. But he does not explore what that further consideration might consist of, so perhaps he thought it was a purely theoretical possibility.

That's a very good post. Gellner made a great splash with "Words and Things". I think it was rather a marmite book. You either loved it or hated it. Personally, I hated it.

(The Contrast Theory when made explicit leads to a neat paradox; on its own grounds, a language should sometimes be usable without contrast, so that "contrast" may have a contrast.)

That's a kind of argument that's very popular with philosophers, because it is a slam-dunk. Unfortunately, such arguments are usually mistake, because they have over-simplified the issue.

In this case, there is a slam-dunk reply. You can obtain a contrast to any assertion by inserting "not". So the contrast to the contrast theory:-

a term and its denial between them do not exhaust the universe, or at least a universe of discourse.

Here, I'm following Gellner's argumentative tactic. It doesn't help much, does it?

Actually, I'm more than a bit puzzled about his claim that ordinary language philosophers, who rejected the idea that philosophy was about theories or doctrines, had any theory of meaning, as such. I don't recall this theory from my (admittedly not exhaustive) reading of them. If this is Gellner's summary, the possibility that there is distortion here cannot be ruled out. Where is the quotation that would back his claim up?

So where did he get the idea that ordinary language philosophers did have this theory of meaning?

One possibility is that he is distorting something that they do say - that a given concept will always be part of a structure, or family and so not comprehensible outside that structure. So you cannot understand what "north" means unless you understand what "south" means (what often gets left out is the you also need to understand what "east" and "west" and how the other main points like "south-west" are constructed from the basic framework). Understanding the use of the word means understanding the use of it in the context of its family.

Another possibility is that he is picking up on an argument of, I think, Ryle, that it is not possible for all coins to be fake. If there is no such thing as a real coin, there is nothing to fake and so "fake" has no meaning. As I remember it, this was intended to apply to sense-datum theory, because that theory essentially claims that my belief that everything that I see is a three-dimensional object located in space-time is an illusion. In this case, at least, "fake" or "unreal" are defined in relation to "genuine" or "real", so there is a contrast here.

A third possibility is that he is picking up on an argument that was popular with analytic philosophers, but not necessarily with ordinary language philosophers. This is about logic. In truth-functional calculus, an analytic statement turns out to be true in all possible circumstances. This was described as not asserting anything and hence not denying anything. (Empirical, contingent statements do, of course, deny something in asserting something.) So analytic (logically true) statements were labelled "trivial". That was the basis for Logical Positivism. Traditional philosophy expected philosophically true statements to be logically true (or necessarily) true, so all traditional philosophy could be labelled trivial - unless they were false in which case they were meaningless or nonsense.

BTW Any ordinary language philosopher worth his salt would ask "Does Gellner ever give an example of a term that does not have a contrast?". That's the basis of a good counter-argument, because just one example would refute the theory. So, does he?

In my view, both philosophy and the sciences describe reality. — Joshs

Well, yes, in a sense that's true. But, in that context, I thought that further explanation of what was intended would help to clarify.
PS I meant to say that I wanted to know what Apustimelogist would say.

It's time to be a bit more helpful, but I'm going to take a break here and post that later. — Ludwig V

Here's the promised continuation from my last post. I hope it is somewhat helpful.

I’m not a fan of hasty generalization, or of generalization without examples. Generalization is all very well, in its place. But I’m just going to discuss three examples, with the aim of showing the variety of relationships that there are between levels of description or scales of models. One size definitely does not fit all.

A (sandy) beach. Lots of sand accumulated along the edge of the sea or a river. One might think that nothing changes as one zooms in, until one can discern the individual grains. But it’s not as simple as that.
Zoom in so as to cut out the sea. You have a sandbank – sand banked up over and against the underlying geology. Not much has changed, in a way, but it clearly is not a beach any more. Descriptions are often a question of wider and narrower contexts, or of focus, if you like.
Zoom in closer. In a way, there’s no obvious level between the bank and the grains, but we can identify a heap of sand and a volume of sand as segments of a bank or beach – I call them segments because they can be cut out and removed from the bank. But the sand that we remove does not constitute a bank or a beach. So, in a sense, nothing has changed.
Yet closer, and finally we arrive at the grains of sands, which are independently existing components in the sense that they can be individually separated from the beach or bank.
The game changes at this point, so I’ll move on.

A flat-pack bookcase When it arrives, it is not a bookcase, but a set of parts for a bookcase. We can lay them all out on the floor, count them, check them. Now, what needs to happen to make it a bookcase? All the parts are there. Nothing needs to be added. What’s the problem? Easy, the parts needs to be put together as designed. But the design specifies the structure of the finished article; it is not a missing element that needs to be added to the parts.
But the bookcase has a top and bottom, a left side and right side, a front and a back. These are all parts of the bookcase. Where did they come from? They were not laid out on the bench, although the part that was to become the top was there, and it is called the top because when it is where it is supposed to be. Its top will be the top of the bookcase. Each shelf – and the part that will form the bottom - also has its own top, but the bottom of this part will also be the bottom of the bookcase. But the point here is that these parts are not components that can be separated from the bookcase and laid out on the floor or work-bench.
Holism. Levels of description are interdependent. One cannot understand what the parts are without understanding the role they play in the whole, which conditions their physical properties like shape, size, composition, etc.
I’ll leave out all the other dimensions (descriptive systems) that the beach is part of. Aesthetics, politics, economics. Zooming in and out won’t ever capture them. But that's not a problem - it's a feature.

A rainbow A bookcase is special because it is a human artifact, with a purpose. A rainbow does not, it is a very different from a sandy beach. It has parts, but not separable parts. There is the shape, the bands of colour, but that’s more or less it. So is it a physical object? In a sense, yes, but it would be less misleading to describe it as a physical phenomenon.
To understand what a rainbow is, we look to physics. To view a rainbow, your back must be to the sun as you look at an approximately 40 degree angle above the ground into a region of the atmosphere with suspended droplets of water or even a light mist. Each individual droplet of water acts as a tiny prism that both disperses the light and reflects it back to your eye. As you sight into the sky, wavelengths of light associated with a specific color arrive at your eye from the collection of droplets.
I’m sure you know the rest of the story. But there is a very complex step about the explanation why we see a single large arc instead of multiple small ones. I've gathered that it involves fractals, so it is likely beyond me, though I would love to understand it. But it is very relevant because it is a holistic effect, not a compound of the individual reflections from the individual rain-drops.
One might say that this is an explanation of the cause of the rainbow, but that generates a huge metaphysical issue about what the rainbow is, and a distinct temptation to say that it is not a physical object, but a mental one. Unless one wishes to embrace dualism, we need to say that the explanation in physics is an analysis of the rainbow, not a cause. (In the same way that we would say that the physics of a single grain of sand is an analysis, not a cause – thought it does of course cause the behaviour of the grain.)

I’m not arguing that we have to abandon the large-scale, small-scale model or the idea that physics explains everything, just that we recognize there are several ways that levels of description (scale) and categories of objects map on to each other and that the domain of physics is, well, the physical. So other forms of explanation also have their non-hierachical place.

I mean redundant more in the informational sense wherein it just means that these descriptions are already repeating information about reality (in a correspondence theory of truth sense) that is already in the smaller scale descriptions. — Apustimelogist

How is that not reduction? All the information is given the smallest scale description.

all the different descriptive perspectives that are available to us dovetail neatly into a single hierarchy. — Ludwig V

It is intended to re-describe your large-scale, small scale image.

Well I am just implying that her work isn't actual physics, its philosophy and what she is saying is not a description of reality with scientific consensus which is relevant because it means that introducing her into a comparison with newtoenian physics is more or less just postulation. — Apustimelogist

We all agree on that this work of hers is not physics, I think. But then, I thought that describing reality was essentially a job for physics. Philosophy might ask what reality is, but it wouldn't necessarily be particularly interested in describing it. I didn't read that part of the discussion about Newtonian science. I thought it was probably beyond my competence. I wonder if maybe you are applying the criteria for science to philosophy?

I've only got 10 minutes, which is a shame. So, initial comments.

Philosopher of science Joseph Rouse is one of Barad’s biggest champions. He considers her notion of materialism to be a version of naturalism that avoids the pitfallls of other naturalistic conceptions of nature. — Joshs

I like naturalism. But I've regarded it as materialism without the ontological and conceptual dogma. So there's room in my head for something more accurate.

I take Barad to claim instead that nature as revealed by the sciences is itself normatively constituted.

Well, the concept of nature is obviously normatively constituted. So far it's just a beginning of an analysis. Not a criticism - just a reservation.

First, she argues for the ontological priority of “phenomena” over objects.

That's an ancient piece of philosophy. Here, there's some need for discussion to sort out just what phenomena are. Data?

She then argues that phenomena in this sense must incorporate conceptual-discursive normativity. Conceptual-discursive norms are not something imposed upon phenomena “by” us, however. On the contrary, we ourselves only become agents/knowers as material components of the larger patterns of natural phenomena.

This bothers me. Phenomenologists have this habit of saying something and taking it back. I realize that description is a bit crude. But it expresses my feeling that I'm being offered dogmatic assertion rather than argumentation. I think the idea is that what she writes should be seen as so obvious that it needs no argument. (as in both Wittgenstein and Heidegger. I'm not claiming such writing is impossible, but, for me, this isn't it. More needs to be said.

Thus, Barad neither reduces conceptual-discursive normativity to anormative causal relations, nor imposes already-articulated conceptual norms upon the material world. Instead, she is arguing that the natural world only acquires definite boundaries, and concepts only acquire definite content, together.

I think I can agree that the discourse of the sciences is the product of interaction with the phenomena, if that's what she's getting at. But I don't see the necessary explanation that the concept of science is like the lens through which we encounter the world. One requirement of that lens is that what we encounter and the way we encounter it must be norm-free. I've just been tangling with Aristotle's metaphysics, which is a splendid example of what I hope we have left behind. It isn't science or at least, not what we require of science.

Once that conception is in place, Barad goes on to argue that our participation in the phenomena we understand scientifically makes ethical and political responsibility integral to conceptual-discursive normativity as well.

Well, it could only need saying to an audience of scientists, but for normal people that's just obvious. But, I repeat, the practice and theory of science must be as norm-free as we can make it. Otherwise, there's no point.