- I would suggest going back to this post and working out why you felt the need to effectively say, "Well, it's more complicated than my first post allowed..." The contradiction in your thought lies in the tension between down-regulation and play, which are two distinct things. You could try to square your circle by claiming that not all play need be down-regulation, but that we must accept the dogma that whatever Baggs is doing can be nothing other than down-regulation, and that therefore any play that Baggs is engaged in must be located in the context of down-regulation. That seems to be your current approach.

(A key here is to understand that stimulation and down-regulation are not at all identical. Stimulation will also involve, for example, up-regulation. In fact that is probably the more basic orientation of stimulation.)

Nor do I. What about stimming? — fdrake

You are the one who has assumed that all that is occurring in the video is "stimming," and that stimming is always connected with down-regulation. So you exclude the possibility of true play; of non-utilitarian or non-down-regulating play.

- So then play is merely down-regulating? That strikes me as patently false.

I have been around autistic people. I don't interpret everything they do as mere down-regulation.

The intentionality associated with stimming is not toward the stim source, it's a means of the body coordinating to produce a regulated and focussed state. — fdrake

I think you overestimate your comprehension of Baggs. Perhaps their intention is not as simplistic as you assume. Perhaps they are acting with an intention towards the "stim source." There is no reason at all to rule out such a possibility. My guess is that this reductive analysis of the intention as merely down-regulating is almost certainly wrong.

- Is Baggs playing or merely down-regulating?

Good posts. I would still say that until someone proffers logical pluralism, it will just be a moving target. When we talk about "logical pluralism" we are apparently talking about something that no one on TPF holds. And if someone on TPF wants to say that they hold and defend "logical pluralism," then they are the one who needs to tell us what the hell they mean by it, lol. Until that happens the wheels will continue to spin without any traction.

I suppose where the above gets complicated is that being able to stim like that allows a form of stimming play, which is what Baggs is doing. — fdrake

Which is to say that your explanation of "stimming" is self-admittedly not an explanation of what Baggs is doing, which is interesting given that you are the one who introduced this word "stimming."

This is the common conflation of an act with an intention. "They are pitch-matching, therefore they are 'stimming'." Except that pitch-matching is not always "stimming" (in that sense of down-regulation), as you yourself recognize with respect to Baggs' play.

The structuralist approach is to see the signifiers as forming a system, the whole group of them, and what's important is just that they can be and are distinguished from each other, a "system of differences" . — Srap Tasmaner

Okay, understood. I suppose I am seeing the essence of language as bound up with communication, not distinct signifiers. Distinct signifiers obviously aid communication, but a single signifier can still do the job, and is the basis of a multiplicity of signifiers. (Though I realize there will be disagreements about the primacy of multiplicity.)

On the typical road maps I look at, towns and cities are indicated by circles, filled circles of different sizes and stars (for capitals). — Srap Tasmaner

Sure - I thought that by "cartographic" you were referring back to your symbols of Mt. Rushmore and the Eiffel Tower.

If you look at formal approaches to language -- Frege, Tarski, Montague, that sort of thing -- language is a system for representing your environment. That could, conceivably, be just for you. A language of thought.

And it is only because you can put the world, or some part of it, into language, that it is useful for communication. When you communicate, you put part of the world into words (or claim to) and pass those words to someone else. Language as descriptor of the world underlies language as means of communication. — Srap Tasmaner

I think there is a third option, where language is bound up with thought. On this view one could develop a private language and, say, keep a diary in that language and thus in some sense "communicate" with their future self. "Representing your environment" is not quite the same as thinking. Or as Williams says:

One way of telling the story of Western philosophy over the last few centuries is to present it as the rise and fall of a particular view of language. Gradually, piecemeal, the idea of language as primarily a matter of accurate naming and information-sharing has yielded to a recognition of language as what we could call a matter of orienting ourselves in our world—developing a range of diverse strategies for collaboration in finding our way around. The more complex the world we encounter (in introspection as well as observation), the more diverse and sophisticated will be those strategies, and the less they will have to do with carving up our environment into bite-sized pieces with definitive labels. Whatever a still over-con dent popular scientism claims, coping adequately and sustainably with our environment requires more than a catalog of isolated substances with fixed attributes. — Rowan Williams, Romantic Agenda

Reality is what's interesting here -- what I don't want to do is define reality within my logic, though. And I don't think that logic needs to restrict itself to objects since reality is not composed of objects and objects only -- it also contains sentences. — Moliere

Well you can't say what it means, you can't say what a sentence is, you can't say why it would count as a sentence, you can't say how it would ever have any purchase on reality, and you don't seem to think it would ever be utterable in real life. That's a pretty problematic place to be. Again, it looks to me that you are playing a game that has nothing to do with reality.

As I see it right now the objection is — Moliere

The objection was given <here>. You tried to answer it by redefining "false" as "fake," and I think we both agreed that that answer failed. That's where things stand, as you never made another attempt.

I've asked you if you'd accept a defense of dialetheism, the belief that there are true contradictions, as a basis for making the inferences that there is more than one logic. — Moliere

Sure: if dialetheism is true, then strong logical pluralism is true.

Marx and Hegel are philosophers which, like the liar's, utilizes contradiction in their reasoning. — Moliere

No, they don't. This is equivocation. Neither one has anything like the standing contradictions of dialetheism. Tensions which go on to get resolved are nothing like the stable contradictions of dialetheism.

Which was a counterpoint to the idea that one cannot hope to recognise whether something is a language unless one already speaks it. — fdrake

Okay, but in that case it seems like your argument only reaches the weaker conclusion, <Sometimes we can recognize a language we do not speak>.

Calling it a language with a spoken component (the humming) when it's produced by someone who as a premise of the video cannot communicate in spoken language is hopelessly reductive and easily refutable. And for the purpose of normalising autism no less. — fdrake

I agree. Again, I see no reason to believe that Baggs is engaged in a linguistic activity.

Is it not language unless the meaning relation is conventional rather than natural? The traditional answer is obviously "yes" but I'm not so sure. Especially if you wonder how language could get started in the first place. — Srap Tasmaner

Right, I agree.

If it's not absolutely essential, then what's the relation here? Is it the other way? That is, conventional meanings as a subset of linguistic meaning? That looks to be the story with writing. (Or with the use of natural gestures, like folding your arms, to indicate an attitude.) Are there counterexamples? Any cases of conventional but non-linguistic meaning? — Srap Tasmaner

The obvious example was right in front of me: cartographic symbols. While there is obviously structure in the way these are placed on the map, that structure is not grammatical. — Srap Tasmaner

Here "conventional" does come apart from "arbitrary." The cartographic symbol is conventional but not arbitrary. Is it natural?

In any case, I think we are in agreement that a sign need not be arbitrary or purely stipulative.

-

One way of "problematizing" the concept of language would be to step back and ask, "What am I/we trying to do by offering the Wikipedia page definition of language?" — J

Right.

-

I understand why you might think that, but sign language just is language. Children who are deaf will, if put together in groups, develop sign language just as they would regular language, in the same way, along the same developmental axis, and with the same resulting richness of potential expression. Body language is nothing like sign language or spoken language. It doesn't fulfil the basic criteria I provided earlier, but sign language does (including e.g. distinct linguistic units that can be recombined to produce new meanings, and indicate grammatical categories, such as case, tense, voice, mood etc). — Baden

First it is worth noting that intentionally folding one's arms to convey some meaning is not "body language" in the normal sense, and therefore dismissing such intentional gesturing as mere "body language" is not really accurate.

But it seems that your argument is as follows: <Language has grammar; folding one's arms to convey meaning has no grammar; therefore folding one's arms in that way is not linguistic>.*

My first objection to this idea is that it requires that atomic linguistic units are not language. For example, something like, "Stop!," or, "Yes," or, "Why?," or, "Platypus," are not linguistic given that they lack grammar. Similarly, the arm-folding could be represented as, "I am nervous," or, "I am reticent," and yet the arm-folding sign itself represents this same reality in a grammarless way. How is it that, given two intentional signs which mean the same thing, one can be linguistic and one not? And is the heart of language communication or grammar?

Second and relatedly, wielding a natural sign as an intentional sign is not metaphorically linguistic in the the sense that a claim like, "emotions are a language," is metaphorically linguistic. As indicated, robust language may never have developed at all without the intentional appropriation of natural signs. And grammar itself may not be as straightforward or stipulative as one supposes. For example, if the person intentionally signaling their reticence by crossing their arms moves one hand to their chin, has a grammar developed? In that case we have a sign-juxtaposition which could be translated as something like, "I am reticent but also willing to hear more of what you have to say."


* And the question here related to @Srap Tasmaner's post asks whether grammar is arbitrary or merely conventional.

Is that the kind of answer you were looking for? — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, thanks.

Whether the picture is being used as a picture or a sign. — Srap Tasmaner

Okay, but there is an underlying idea in this thread that if a sign does not signify arbitrarily then it is not a real sign. This is captured by 's claim that, "Folding one's arms could conceivably be linguistic as part of a system of sign language, but in that case it could mean anything." This is similar to your premise that if a picture is being used as a picture then it must not be being used as a sign. That is the premise I am picking at.

Is a picture already a sign, albeit a non-arbitrary sign? Does intentionally recording a dance add a sign-layer to the dance? The point here is that we think we know what a sign or a piece of language signifies, but upon closer inspection we may be much less sure. In the first place I would want to say that "leaf" and a picture of a leaf are both signs of a leaf; one arbitrary and one non-arbitrary.

-

Edit:

Further reply with example.

Sometimes maps for children will have little pictures. At Paris, a little Eiffel Tower; at South Dakota, a little Mount Rushmore. Here the picture is a straightforward representation of a thing, but used by a sort of metonymy to mean the whole place where that thing is. So in such a case, both. — Srap Tasmaner

Okay good, so you anticipated my objection to some extent. Metonymy is an interesting deviation from a simple picture or image.

I mean, it depends, right? — Srap Tasmaner

What specifically do you think it depends on?

For instance, semiotics has been brought up here. But on the wider Augustinian/Peircrean view of semiotics, all sorts of things are semiotic, so that isn't all that informative on as to language. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I still think I identified the crux here. It is intentional sign use (language) vs mere sign use. The trick is that a mere sign ("folding your arms") can be always be coopted as an intentional sign.

For example, is the person in the OP praying?* Then it could be language. I don't think they are, but the distinction is subtle. If I groan only as a response to pain then I am not linguistically engaged. If I groan to tell someone else that I am in pain, then I am linguistically engaged, even if that aspect of the groan is not a necessary condition for this act of groaning.

To say that the person in the OP is not linguistically engaged requires a number of assumptions, but I think all of those assumptions are plausible.

* Or what if they are a pantheist or a panpsychist?


Edit: Further, is Tallis' Lamentations of Jeremiah or Górecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs language, even for the non-Latin or non-Polish speaker? Is the music itself an intentional sign communicating sorrow?

I think it is right to say that the OP is not language, but I think @fdrake, @Baden, and perhaps @Srap Tasmaner are working with mistaken premises in drawing that conclusion.

It's the same type of mistake that would claim body language is language by the way. It's not. It's just communication. — Baden

Suppose, I am in an interview and I fold my arms to communicate my nervousness. That is an expression that communicates something, "discomfort", which is publicly interpretable and which is often described as "body language". But it is not language. Folding one's arms could conceivably be linguistic as part of a system of sign language, but in that case it could mean anything. — Baden

Why isn't it language? You used a sign intentionally to communicate something to others. You folded your arms "to communicate." This looks like a form of sign language or body language, in a non-metaphorical sense. The only quirk is that the interpreters may interpret the sign non-intentionally, in which case it would be more manipulation than language. But they may interpret the sign intentionally. They may know what it means and cognize its meaning, and they may even recognize that you are intending to communicate nervousness (or something else like reticence). If someone with a great deal of self knowledge folds their arms I am given to know that it is not unintentional.

Same question. Why not just say not all communication is linguistic? — Srap Tasmaner

If someone thinks in pictures is their thought process therefore non-linguistic? Part of this is definitions, but some definitions will fare better than others.

@fdrake seems stuck on non-necessary norms of interpretation, such as spacing and punctuation. I would suggest that he think about coded language, such as encryption or the hidden signs involved in a football game or military strategy, where the linguistic matter is supposed to be unrecognizable according to standard norms.

You really don't need fluency, or even much understanding. to detect the presence of units of meaning. — fdrake

"Салам, куыдтæ дæ?"

What are the distinct symbol groups in that? Clearly, "Салам", "куыдтæ" and "дæ". It has a question mark at the end, so presumably it is a question. — fdrake

Did you know that spaces and punctuation were a later addition to written language? Kinda blows up your whole theory about "units of meaning."

Even if we make mistakes, it's still clear what trying to split this stuff up would mean in terms of a language. I doubt you can say the same form Baggs' stimming. — fdrake

What's to prevent her actions from forming the material for a language? I don't think that's what she is doing, but there is no in-principle barrier to her actions being linguistic. It is not the material object that is non-linguistic. Anything can become linguistic, including running your hand under water. It is the non-linguistic intention behind her actions that is non-linguistic.

I wanted to avoid semiotic language since, taking Baggs at her word, her language is nonsignyfing. — fdrake

Is there a different definition of language other than the semiotic one which is underlying such critiques? Or is that the basis of the critiques even if it is unspoken?

Autism is a disability because the person has no choice in the matter. There is the opposite malady of being unable to "stim" and being limited to discursive reasoning. But a good example of someone who consciously undertakes such a practice is the monk who meditates. Is that language? Is it dialogue? Is it linguistic? Is it sub-linguistic? Super-linguistic? I think that presents a clearer case, which could then be extended to the autistic (or not).

They might be. I inferred that Baggs' were since she spoke of a dialogue with her environment. — fdrake

This seems like a matter of basic semiotics. There is sign use and then there is intentional sign use. Language is the latter, and it is uniquely human. A dog licking its paw is the former, and humans are of course immersed in this sort of unintentional sign use as well, but it is not language. It is Helen Keller's transition from water-as-stimulus to water-as-sign.

Perhaps interaction with environment can become dialogue if the environment is addressed as Buber's "Thou," but usually this is not happening, and it doesn't seem to be occurring in the OP. At best what we have here is a metaphorical sense of dialogue.

I think the person wants their actions to be seen as meaningful and valuable. They can be that, but I don't think they constitute the intentional sign use which is language. It is a kind of cathartic manifestation of potency, which is different from language.

(Site was hanging and somehow double-posted)

They might be. I inferred that Baggs' were since she spoke of a dialogue with her environment. — fdrake

This seems like a matter of basic semiotics. There is sign use and then there is intentional sign use. Language is the latter, and it is uniquely human. A dog licking its paw is the former, and humans are of course immersed in this sort of unintentional sign use as well, but it is not language. It is Helen Keller's transition from water-as-stimulus to water-as-sign.

Perhaps interaction with environment can become dialogue if the environment is addressed as Buber's "Thou," but usually this is not happening, and it doesn't seem to be occurring in the OP. At best what we have here is a metaphorical sense of dialogue.

I think the person wants their actions to be seen as meaningful and valuable. They can be that, but I don't think they constitute the intentional sign use which is language. It is a kind of cathartic manifestation of potency, which is different from language.

Perhaps a better way of resituating language and communication is represented by Rowan Williams' recent review of Charles Taylor's new book, Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment, "Romantic Agenda." Williams' understanding of language is more robust in the way you might desire, and is more fully explicated in his Gifford Lectures, coalesced into his book, The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language. The lectures are available online.

(CC: @Srap Tasmaner)

- Good post. :up:

Common solutions: we introduce other toys so that everyone gets something (not an option in our example); no one gets it (not allowed in our example); they each get the whole thing because they will play with it together (not helpful for consumables, as in our example, which is why we split them); we divvy up not the toy but the time playing with it, take turns, and we can even measure the duration of those and make them equal-ish. — Srap Tasmaner

And are those constraints, empowerments, or both?

If physicalism is a metaphysical position, as you (and most everyone else) characterize it, then its only obligation to science is to be consistent with it and to not give it a priori constraints. — SophistiCat

I don't think the OP is ultimately about physicalism's obligation to science. I think it is about physicalism's claim to be a better (metaphysical) explanation, or at least a better scientific metaphysics.

But the strengthened liar's sentence persuaded me that there is at least an interesting formal concern. — Moliere

That's an interesting background explanation for why the "Liar's paradox" tempts you, but what I am hearing is that you are interested in playing a game that has nothing to do with reality. You have not answered the objections, and I don't see that Marx and Hegel have much at all to do with this issue. When you talk about "truth" and "falsity" you are not talking about truth and falsity; you are equivocating. We could play an arbitrary game and call the Liar's paradox "false," but we cannot call it false, and I have explained why.

I think this is all symptomatic of the decadence of contemporary philosophy, which is more a matter of novelties and entertaining oneself than actual philosophical engagement. On this point, there was a recent article about the filmmaker Terrence Malick and his encounter with droll contemporary philosophy, "Malick the Philosopher." This form of philosophy will be made to reckon with its own vacuity.

An afterthought -- in a way the pluralist is actually more anti-nihilist than the monist. The monist has to hold that contradictory statements cannot be logically comprehended which is, in a way, a baby nihilism: Here is the field of inquiry where no logical rules hold. — Moliere

Something like that. I would say that the so-called "monist" accepts that people can be wrong about things, and that that is probably at the pragmatic core of this thread. Truly, there is a mystery about how error can occur. But this was never a real thread. The people behind it were never interested in giving real arguments for their position, or even attempting to distinguish "monism" from "pluralism."

Edit: I realize this was curt, but I don't see the conversation going anywhere and so I am just setting out my view. I take it that Epictetus is much more interesting, substantial, and philosophical than the "Liar's paradox."

Coming back after being away for a few days… I think @Count Timothy von Icarus has successfully highlighted the fundamental problems in this thread and in Banno’s polemical approach. That aside, there are a few posts that deserve a response:

I disagree that that is what is going on. — fdrake

Whether or not it is what is going on, it is what is at stake, and that’s the point. Your construals avoid the problem of intent, and intent is the crucial aspect (e.g. when you talk about “verbatim” or “taking someone ‘exactly’ at their word”).

When someone stipulates a definition, they are committed to that definition insofar as it relates to the intended concept. — fdrake

I agree, but I really don’t think your approach in the discussion of square circles manifested anything like an attempt at close reading or an investigation of intended concepts. It was more an exercise in interpreting utterances as they suited your purpose (of arguing for square circles). Granted, it is no wonder that a polemical and insubstantial thread continued in polemics and lack of substance. You and I were just following Banno's lead in this, and it is why Banno should not be allowed to set the pace.

Which could equally mean "mind", "minds", "people"... — fdrake

And that was quite intentional on my part. When dealing with people prone to misrepresentation it is best to give a starting point which either makes them think or ask a question. If they do neither one then they show themselves to be uninterested in philosophical discussion. It is in no way surprising that Banno managed to do neither, and after dealing with this for long enough I’ve just put him on ignore. Indeed, my earlier definitions were more specific, and the later ones became more general in proportion to my realization that the instigators were not willing to look outside their paradigm.

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Yes. I thought it went without saying. Some things people think of are more appropriate than others in some contexts, and strictly better by some metrics. Some fiction is more valuable than others. If a thingy works better than another thingy on every relevant facet, the first thingy is better than the second thingy.

How would you judge that for a given context? Well I suppose you'd look for examples, see what pans out, provide definitions of things to see if they capture the relevant phenomena... Maybe you'd refine your criteria for what counts as a good thing in a given context based on the what you've seen and what's been created, too. — fdrake

I’m still not seeing a straight answer. Why? Because you claim to be talking about metaphysics but then you qualify everything by words like “context,” “value,” and notions of artifice. Earlier when I asked if there is better and worse “fan-fiction” you again cleaved to the metaphor and gave examples of literal fan fiction.

I still have the impression that you think of this is as an Objectively Correct vs Subjective-Relativist sense, and I don't want to accept the Subjective-Relativist role in the discussion since the proofs and refutations inspired epistemology of mathematics isn't relativist in the slightest, because its emphasis is on communities of people agreeing on what follows from what by following coordinating norms and demarcating those norms' contexts of application. Minimally then, it's intersubjective, and communities create knowledge about collectively understood subject matters. — fdrake

So then do you think intersubjective agreement is metaphysics? Is that the goal? To try to garner agreement? The democratization of science?

I’m perplexed at how impossibly difficult it is for folks on this forum to think about metaphysics and to escape modern immanentism. Truth has been so thoroughly deflated that folks around here can’t even recognize the notion of truth when it shows up at the party. “Communities of people agreeing on what follows,” is a very common substitute, but also a very bad substitute! When peer review and intersubjective consensus shifts from a helpful aid to truth, to truth itself, something very problematic and bizarre has occurred. What began as, “A number of instruments agree, therefore they are probably telling us the truth,” shifted to, “A number of instruments agree, and we’ll just define that as truth qua truth.” This is substituting truth with agreement; metaphysics with intersubjectivity. This is a significant misstep. Einstein’s physics is not superior to Newton’s physics because more people agree with Einstein. It is superior because it has more purchase on what is actually occurring in reality; because it is truer. Agreement is an epistemic criterion, not a metaphysical criterion.

The modern world is merely anthropocentric. We have made everything about ourselves, our desires, and our values, so that this is all that even exists. To talk about something beyond that is not allowed. Science, metaphysics, and truth are barred at the gate, even to the point that we cannot say what a woman is.

In an artificially bounded task like this — Srap Tasmaner

Hmm? I find your lack of bounds more artificial than the OP. It is not artificial to say that there are unbroken wholes, such as chickens. The notion that everything is infinitely divisible is much more contrived than the alternative.

Life is not like that. — Srap Tasmaner

Sure it is. That's the point of the OP: life is exactly like that. I go to my sister's house and there are three kids who want to play with the same toys. Toys are unbroken wholes. The OP is immediately relevant. I go to the car dealership and I am offered whole cars. They don't let me buy a half car for half the money. Life is exactly like this.

Either we find a creative way to complete this subtask (making do with rough equality ― 7 or 8 each, cutting the strawberries, if that's an option, or switching measures, say from units to weight, and so on) or we mark this path off in the search and backtrack until we find a path. — Srap Tasmaner

If the OP were saying that it is a great tragedy that we can't divide the 23 chickens equally then it would be a dumb OP, but I don't see it saying that. What the OP is illustrating is equally present in all of the cases you are presenting. The curious relation between mathematics and reality is equally present with strawberries, and weight, and measurements of time, etc.

Reality, sure, but mathematics is how we conceptualize our situation and can inform both our choice of action and our method. Mathematics is adverbial. — Srap Tasmaner

But to a large extent it's not. If you think the indivisibility of the 23 chickens is merely a conceptual problem, then provide a different conceptualization in which the chickens can be equally divided. Can you do that?

You want to talk about choosing a different course, but the mathematics precedes that pivot. We choose to weigh the chickens instead of count them because we can't divide them in a numerically equal way. This decision doesn't moot the point of the OP, it presupposes it. We decide to weigh them because mathematics is not merely "how we conceptualize our situation." When my low fuel light comes on I will be able to drive for about 70 miles without fueling, regardless of how I conceptualize my situation.

Anywhere you want to look, it is plain as can be that thinking and acting mathematically is empowering for humans, not some implacable constraint. — Srap Tasmaner

It seems to be both, no? "Empowering, not constraining," is a story you're telling, but mathematics constrains and empowers. Limiting it to either side is an ideological move.

But for the general distinction in approaches, which this little problem illustrates, the entire business world disagrees with you, the natural sciences disagree with you, the various branches of engineering disagree with you. — Srap Tasmaner

These are bold claims given how little I've said. You seem crabby and contentious. Are you whipping up bogies to fight against? The OP is about whether mathematical explanations are causal explanations. That shouldn't be a contentious topic.

Well, I know it's all off-topic for this thread, but that passage you quoted resonated with me. — Wayfarer

Great. And thinking about it again, "indivisible" is probably not a great way to describe it. But it is somewhat different from advaita, at least in the sense that the undividedness is applied to being itself, which includes beings (plural). I.e. beings are also unified in their separateness. But I have not studied this question in any great detail.

-

I think @J's OP is interesting. It is something like: if mathematical necessity is not self-supporting, then whence is the necessity derived? There is an understandable temptation among some in the thread to grow impatient and fast-forward to the end instead of watching the whole movie. And that further question is a difficult one, having to do with such things as the transcendental of unum.

But the very idea that mathematical necessity is not self-supporting is important, even before we get to the further question. Mathematics seems to dominate logic, thinking, and philosophy in every age. We have a very strong intuition that mathematical necessity is necessity par excellence, and that it should be the model for thinking and reasoning. It is not obvious, historically or culturally, that mathematical necessity is not self-supporting or self-sufficient, and much could be gained by recognizing this.

I think what's strange about this problem is that the setup makes human beings helpless before the implacable necessity of mathematics, and that's the wrong story to tell. — Srap Tasmaner

That seems a rather strange way to express it, but what is your alternative? "If we are smart we will foresee that the chickens cannot be evenly divided, and therefore we will not try and will not be thwarted?" Either way the math/reality constrains our options.

In real life, a case like this is more likely to play out this way: you've got these 23 thingamabobs, and there's talk of splitting them three ways. You say, "Won't work," and someone less numerate than you says, "Well, let's just try." As they fail, with a puzzled look, they say, "Wait, I messed up somewhere. Let me start over." You will want to explain to them that it's impossible, because 23 is not only not a multiple of 3, it's a frickin' prime.

What's of primary interest here is that you, because of your relative expertise in mathematics, understand the situation better than the person who, even after trying and failing several times, still believes it might be possible. — Srap Tasmaner

I think that is a large part of the point, yes. Mathematics provides us with a grasp of reality even though it is not necessary in the strict way that we tend to conceive of it. But looked at from a different angle, there is very little difference between the less numerate and the more numerate. The less numerate just takes a few more minutes to recognize that something cannot be done. And it's not as if the more numerate recognizes this a priori, in no time at all.

But I am not sure it is a useful standard in this context since it seems to allow for refuting the dominant position(s) in terms in which its advocates wouldn't recognize it. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sider calls this "hostile translation." From the QV/Sider thread:

This is what Sider refers to as a "hostile translation" on page 14. It is interpreting or translating someone's utterance in a way that they themselves reject. — Leontiskos

@fdrake wants to talk about "good counterexamples," and he relies on notions of "verbatim" or "taking someone exactly at their word" (even in a way that they themselves reject). The problem is that if these are still hostile translations then they haven't managed to do what they are supposed to be doing: they haven't managed to produce good counterexamples.

I have to say, I love the cheekiness of the cover. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Medhurst's Moses

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Phillip_Medhurst_Picture_Torah_457._Moses_breaks_the_tables_of_the_Law._Exodus_cap_32_v_19._after_Parmagiano.jpg

This is the principle that animates all living beings, from the most simple up to and including humans. it is why, for instance, all of the cells in a living body develop so as to serve the overall purpose of the organism. So the 'one-ness' of individual beings is like a microcosmic instantiation of 'the One'. — Wayfarer

Yes, and it's hard to say exactly how the animate and the inanimate relate on this score, but the convertibility of being and unum goes beyond animate realities. A rock, a molecule of H2O, a drop of water, a road, a river, a country, etc., are all one. They all possess a unitariness, so to speak, both as concept and reality.

Trying to get out of this thread, but...

a stipulated logical monist of a certain sort, that there is only one entailment relation which all of these logics ape. — fdrake

I called the pluralism/monism debate an internecine debate between Analytics because they are all univocalists. Your word "ape" here is doing a lot of work, but it seems that for both pluralists and monists such an entailment relation will be purely univocally predicable. This is why the whole game is so boring. The interesting question is an adjudication between two different paradigms, and folks like Banno and probably G. Russell are eternally stuck in a single paradigm, interpreting the other paradigm in their own terms.

My definition of logic via the Meno is something like, "That which creates discursive knowledge" (or perhaps just knowledge). Now is knowledge or discursive knowledge a univocal concept? I don't think so, and therefore there can be no univocal "entailment" relation that holds for all knowledge. For the univocalist this means that each kind of knowledge and each accompanying entailment relation are hermetically separate from every other kind, and that is precisely what analogical predication denies. This is probably something like Wittgenstein's "family resemblances," although I am not overly familiar with Wittgenstein. (And note again how drastically this univocal analysis deviates from natural language use.)

In the realm of circles we are asking about the relation between the pretheoretical grasp or notion of a circle and the formalization. We could say that the formalizations "ape" that pretheoretical notion, but the scrutiny here is entirely on the manner of aping. Yet in the case of knowledge there is something more concrete and even practical at stake in the question.

No True Scotsman doesn't admit of an easy formalisation in terms of predicate logic — fdrake

Yep.

I imagine monists are generally going to just deny this, because monism is about logical consequence relative to some non-arbitrary context — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think this is part of it too.

I'd also want to liken the relationship of formalisms to their intended objects, or intended conceptual content — fdrake

That is the big equivocation for me. Is it a relation to a non-mental reality or merely a conceptual content? Timothy's point about non-arbitrary contexts hinges on the answer.

My intuition is also that there are other principles that set up relations between the practice of mathematics and logic and how stuff (including mathematics) works, which is where the metaphysics and epistemology comes in. But I would be very suspicious if someone started from a basis of metaphysics in order to inform the conceptual content of their formalisms, and then started deciding which logics are good or bad on that basis. That seems like losing your keys in a dark street and only looking for them under street lamps. — fdrake

Sure, and I don't think this is controversial. But I don't think you've given a straight answer to the other side of the coin: are some formalisms truer than others? Is there better and worse metaphysical fan fiction? That's the nub. (And some grandchild of logical positivism is operative here, because the formalists are liable to say, "This question is not formally adjudicable, therefore there is no better or worse metaphysical fan fiction.")

(This central topic has been sidestepped in all sorts of ways. Wanting to talk about modeling or "correctly assertible" rather than truth is one of those ways. If some metaphysical fan fiction is better than others, then it is truer than others, and there is (non-deflationary) truth to be had.)

Unum in the same sense as in non-dualism, advaita, non divided. — Wayfarer

Or perhaps indivisible, and that seems to be a bit different. A chicken is indivisible. To divide it is to lose your chicken.

In your other thread we touched on the Scholastic transcendentals or convertibles. Another transcendental besides being and truth is oneness (unum). — Leontiskos

In this vein, this paper looks interesting, "being without one: deleuze and the medievals on transcendental unum."

There was consensus among the scholastics on both the convertibility of being and unity, and on the meaning of this ‘unity’—in all cases, it was taken to mean an entity’s intrinsic indivision or undividedness. [19] In this, the tradition was continuing and affirming a definition first proposed by Aristotle in the Metaphysics. [20] This undividedness, in the words of Aquinas in his Commentary on the Sentences, is said to lie “closest to being.”[21] For the most part, ens and unum were distinguished by these thinkers only logically or conceptually—unum adding nothing real to being, or more properly, adding only negation, only a privation of actual division.[22] It was common practice in medieval philosophy to distinguish the transcendental sense of unum, running through all of the categories, from the mathematical sense of unum, restricted to the category of quantity. These two ‘ones’ are each in their own way opposed to ‘multiplicity.’[23] Aquinas offers a succinct account of this in his Summa Theologiae (Ia. q. 11, art. 2).[24] The ‘one’ of quantity is the principle of number; it is that which, by being repeated, comprises the sum (the multiple).[25] Aquinas says that there is a direct opposition between ‘one’ and ‘many’ arithmetically, because they stand as measure to thing measured, as just-one to many-ones. Likewise, transcendental unity is opposed to multiplicity, but in this case not directly. Its opposition is not to the many-ones per se, but rather to the division essentially presupposed in and formal with respect to the multiplication of actual multiplicity. This tracks with a consistent distinction in Aquinas between division and plurality in which division is seen as ontologically and logically prior.[26] Transcendental unity then, has a certain priority to its predicamental counterpart.

We will return below to the consequences for contemporary ontology that follow upon this fact that, in its developed form, it was division, not plurality, that was taken by the classical tradition to be the precise contrary to transcendental unity. . . — Being without One, by Lucas Carroll, 121-2

If your prayers are answered you assume it was God who did the answering. — Metaphysician Undercover

And you think that one should still pray even if God doesn't exist?

Your understanding of each of the positions seems to make them trivial rather than controversial. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Great posts. :up:

There are two questions with this pluralism/monism debate: What the heck is the thesis supposed to be, and Who has the burden of proof in addressing it? The answers seem to be, respectively, "Who knows?" and "The other guy!" :lol: — Leontiskos

I would agree that every quantification is into a domain, and I don't think there are context independent utterances. I do not think it follows that there is no metaphysics. I'm rather fond of it in fact, but the perspective I take on it is more like modelling than spelling out the Truth of Being. I think of metaphysics as, roughly, a manner of producing narratives that has the same relation to nonfiction that writing fanfiction has to fiction. You say stuff to get a better understanding of how things work in the abstract. That might be by clarifying how mental states work, how social structures work, or doing weird concept engineering like Deleuze does. It could even include coming up with systems that relate lots of ideas together into coherent wholes! Which it does in practice obv. — fdrake

And this sounds a lot like Srap's approach. I was encouraging him to write a new thread on the topic.

Plato's phrase, "carving nature at it's joints," seems appropriate here. I would say more but in this I would prefer a new or different thread (in the Kimhi thread I proposed resuscitating the QV/Sider thread if we didn't make a new one). I don't find the OP of this thread helpful as a context for these discussions touching on metaphysics. — Leontiskos

It seems to me that Sider's thread is the better place for this, but what you describe here doesn't really sound like metaphysics at all. The only point that sounds like metaphysics is the fanfiction metaphor, but if the fanfiction cannot be good or bad then one cannot be doing metaphysics, and are you willing to say that the fanfiction can be good or bad?

- Good to know.

- Good points.

One of the great things about producing formalisms is that they're coordinative. — fdrake

Coordination, cooperation, intersubjective agreement, etc., really tends to be the goal and limit of contemporary thinking. I think such things are useful, but I also think that at some point we have to venture out beyond the bay and into the open sea.

Seems right.

There is also a really odd thing that happens constantly on TPF (and it usually happens with SEP). Someone will champion a position like logical pluralism or dialetheism or something like that, but when it comes down to the question of what exactly they are promoting they are at a loss for words. They don't have any clear definition of, say, logical pluralism.

So we go to a secondary source like SEP or Griffiths and Paseau. But as soon as the content of the position is being taken from SEP and not from the TPFer we are no longer engaging/arguing with that TPFer. The TPFer had superficially identified with logical pluralism without being able to say what logical pluralism is, or what they mean by it, and when one flies over to SEP they have overlooked the crucial nature of this conundrum. SEP is not going to tell us what the TPFer thinks; it is only going to tell us what the author of SEP thinks. The thread becomes the discussion of a position that no one in particular holds, and that no one in particular has a stake in. In my opinion this outlines one of many misuses of SEP on TPF. Yet there is a fascination in our contemporary culture with labeling and labels!

...And to be specific, after this thread was necro-bumped Banno did the thing, "Yay for logical pluralism! Boo for Leontiskos and his logical monism!" What did Banno mean by logical pluralism? He had no real idea. Why did he think I was committed to logical monism? Again, probably no idea, although everyone took him at his word (!). It was a half-baked thought meant to stir up controversy, and that is the heart of the problem. Bringing in something like SEP is not going to make that initial move impressive or substantive.

- So apparently if you didn't get a good look at the guy who hit you, you would just assume it was Tyson. I still don't see how you would write him a letter if you don't believe he exists.