It occurred to me after I wrote this, that a bit of Rödl might have seeped in. — Wayfarer

Definitely! For me, that's one of the marks of an interesting philosopher -- their insights hang around, and show up in other contexts, and you realize your thinking has been expanded. (Note to those who think philosophy has to be either right or wrong: This phenomenon I'm describing can happen regardless of whether you agree with the philosopher's solutions. What you get is insight into the questions.)

Yes we are essentially agreeing that there is no objective reality that makes any sense with regard to human consciousness. — philosch

Yikes, no! I'm speaking about a particularly troublesome term -- "existence" or "being" -- that has no clearly correct usage. But the vast majority of our terms do, and it is objective reality that makes this so. For that matter, there is probably something objectively real about whatever it is that philosophers want to call "existence," it's just that the language we use is so imprecise and contentious that it would be better to describe it another way -- structurally or mathematically, perhaps.

If I understand what you are asking my answer would be no, there is no "correct" way, there is no truth of the matter, there would be different ways, each with more or less utility depending on the context of each. — philosch

That's about how I see it. The term "existence" simply doesn't lend itself to being identified with some particular thing/event/item, which could be checked in the case of disagreement, in the way that, say, "table" does.

Any of the above, really. And, clearly, I'm doubtful if my wish can be granted.

Joe offers a particular doctrine about existence, Mary offers a different one. Is there anything either can appeal to, in order to determine whether one is correct? Let's just pick "conceptual definition" from your list. Would Joe and Mary be able to consult such a definition in order to resolve a disagreement between them?

As you're demonstrating, it's possible to make a sensible recommendation about how to talk about existence, and make some further distinctions based upon it, concerning e.g. the kinds of existence and how they might connect, structurally.

But the question is, Is there anything further to be said in favor of some particular recommendation? That is, apart from usefulness in laying out a metaphysics, is there a truth of the matter? If there was -- if there was a correct way to conceive of existence, and/or talk about it -- how would we show this?

The thesis is summed up in the last sentence:
What is important is to appreciate that the contexts ‘Necessarily . . .’ and ‘Possibly . . .’ are, like quotation and ‘is unaware that . . .’ and ‘believes that . . . referentially opaque. — Banno

Yes. And this is amplified as follows:

If to [any] referentially opaque context of a variable we apply a quantifier, with the intention that it govern that variable from outside the referentially opaque context, then what we commonly end up with is unintended sense or nonsense . . . — Quine, 148

I added "any" to Quine's statement because we can now appreciate that referential opacity characterizes (at least) three different situations: quotation, "belief"-type statements, and modality; as you say, they are three distinct issues.

Staying with modality for the moment, I'm curious how we should handle this idea from Kripke concerning what he calls "strongly rigid designators":

A rigid designator of a necessary existent can be called strongly rigid. — Naming & Necessity, 48

We know that a rigid designator has to designate the same object in every possible world. Thus, no one other than Nixon can be "Nixon". But Kripke is clear that Nixon, as such, did not have to exist. "Nixon" is not a strongly rigid designator.

Is a number strongly rigid? Kripke uses Quine's example from "Reference and Modality":

What's the difference between asking whether it's necessary that 9 is greater than 7 or whether it's necessary that the number of planets is greater than 7? — N&N, 48

Kripke suggests that the answer, "intuitively," would be:

Well, look, the number of planets might have been different from what it in fact is. It doesn't make any sense, though, to say that nine might have been different from what it in fact is. — N&N, 48

So, does "9" rigidly and strongly designate nine? That is, is there something about the number nine which makes us want to say that it must necessarily exist? We could do without Nixon, but not nine. This type of necessity seems problematic. Can it ever be anything other than stipulative? If there are insights from modal logic that would help here, please share.

To a large extent this is a modern version of the de re/de dicto distinction — Banno

Can you say more about this?

Lots to ponder in this essay. Just as a place to start:

Quine contrasts two statements (pp. 147-8):

(1) (∃x)(x is necessarily greater than 7)

and

(2) Necessarily (∃x)(x is greater than 7)

(1) is an existential generalization of a modal statement, and is either incoherent or false. (2) is unproblematic. To explain the difference, Quine makes the analogy with a game that must have a winner and a loser: “It is necessary that some one of the players will win, but there is no one player of whom it may be said to be necessary that he win.” Likewise, there must certainly be a number greater than 7, but we cannot say that any given number is necessarily that number. As Quine puts it,

Necessary greaterness than 7 makes no sense as applied to a number x; necessity attaches only to the connection between ‛x > 7’ and the particular method . . . of specifying x. — Quine, 148

Let’s rephrase (2) in ordinary English: “It has to be the case that some number is greater than 7” or perhaps “It has to be the case that 7 is not the highest number”. Why is it true? In what does the necessity lie? As Quine points out, the necessity here does not concern any attribute of the number 7. It is nothing like “A bachelor is an unmarried male”, where synonymy is supposed to result in analyticity or tautology. Synonymy is not the issue here. But we want to say that (2) is analytically true – that is, true by virtue of its logical form – since it doesn’t matter what number we plug in; it has to come out true. If Quine allows (2) to be an example of a logical principle, then he would agree.

But have we really freed ourselves from any (questionable) definitional analyticity? Don’t we need the concept/definition of “number” in order to know that there is no greatest number?

I believe we ought to say that Quine’s (2) is really shorthand for:

(3) Necessarily (∃x)(x is a number) & (x is greater than 7)

Or does this commit us to the existence of some number? We could rephrase it, then (and I’ll use English for simplicity):

(4) Necessarily, if some number exists, there’s another one that is greater.

This preserves the analyticity we desire: Granted a number – and what “number” means – we know it can’t be the greatest number.

But coming back now to tautology, if I write “x is a number” and then write “There is a number greater than x”, have I written a tautology? Are the logical constants alone what make the statements tautologous, regardless of what we plug in? I don’t think so. We need “number” to have attributes, one of which is “always exceeded” or “cannot be highest” or some such. The logical form alone can’t give us this. So “greaterness” is not about “7”, as Quine says, but it is about “number”. You can’t understand “number” without knowing what to do with “greaterness”. Is this analytic/definitional necessity?

Notice that this is not at all the same thing as saying, "You can't understand 'water' without knowing that water is composed of H20". Necessity, as Kripke shows us, may be a feature of either analytic or synthetic statements. So what gives "number" its peculiar type of analyticity? If statements like (3) are not true by tautology, but nor is math empirical . . . what's the best account? Would we be better off, for instance, with an argument that shows that any number x can't be the greatest number because there is no such thing?

Best wishes to you, @fdrake! Your support and interest meant a lot to me.

Relating this to the OP, accepting (3) rather than (4) seems to be claiming that Pat is mistaken as to her account of her own mental life. I doubt such a move can be justified. — Banno

I don't want to keep this going unnecessarily, but it's worth pointing out that, in other contexts, it's perfectly ordinary to question someone's account of their mental life. We question motivations, refer to unconscious processes, interrogate "forgotten" memories, etc., all in the belief that we are frequently mistaken in our account of our mental life.

Good thoughts from all, thanks.

I guess he thinks <p>. — Wayfarer

:lol: And I do it self-consciously!

What have you decided concerning the OP? — Banno

Looking back at the OP, I'm struck by how modest its scope was intended to be. I was, and am, quite unequipped to teach anything about Rodl, and am still working my way through his remarkable book. My interest in the OP was about the "I think" in general, and whether a "common sense" report such as Pat's has to be accepted at face value. My responses 1 - 3 were intended to be possible disagreements with an empirical or experience-based understanding of what the "I think" is supposed to represent.

So on reflection, I have two main conclusions. First, that the time spent on the thread in attempts to clarify terminology were essential, and barely touched some of what is needed when we use words like "think" or "accompany" or "self-conscious". (Does the "I think" accompany thought the way a nanny accompanies a pram?). Second, that response #3 comes closest to my own view. Speaking to Pat, I would agree with her about her experience, and say something like, "So we see that either the 'I think' is a conspiracy of Kantians and phenomenologists, or it has to be an unexperienced condition of thought. You may well decide that the former is true, and there is no purpose to positing an 'I think'. But if you're willing to entertain the idea that there's something to it, then it must function for us similarly to space and time in other types of cognition."

OK, and one further semi-conclusion. Rodl wants to argue for some significant aspects of self-consciousness that he believes are built in to the "I think". I'm not (yet) convinced this is necessary. I believe thought is necessarily first-personal, but to say, as in response #2, that "the 'I think' is an experience of self-consciousness" seems wrong on two counts: the "I think" is not an experience at all (Rodl would agree), and self-consciousness is being asked to stretch itself into something constitutive of objectivity. Let me quote @Wayfarer's astute summary on this:

To make a judgement is implicitly to state 'I think that <p>' or 'I believe that <p>' In this sense, judgement is itself not one perspective among many but the condition for the possibility of any perspective.

To deny that judgment is self-conscious would involve making a judgment—and thus reaffirming what you are trying to deny. This makes the self-consciousness of judgment something that cannot be opposed or rejected. — Wayfarer

This seems to me a bridge too far. I can accept the first paragraph: In an important sense, judgment is not like other "possible perspectives." But the second paragraph is question-begging: It only describes a contradiction if you already posit that a judgment must be self-conscious. Perhaps more importantly, we want self-consciousness to be interesting, to be about something that is worth pondering and exploring. This isn't it. But again, the debates re Rodl can go on and on, while the OP was aiming at much smaller fry.

Do you have the actual hard copy? — Banno

Well, a paperback reprint. But it is signed by WV Quine as well.

This not by way of an argument but an outline. — Banno

Understood. It'll be fun to look it over and then read some Kripke, as you suggest. I never took Kripke to be talking about essences per se; if I use the rigid designator 'that apple' I am certainly not claiming to reveal anything ontologically important about it. But it does get complicated with names, and it's fair to ask whether Kripke isn't backing into a doctrine about essences when it comes to possible-world semantics. Anyway, I'll review.

OK. (My copy has an inscription from WVQ's son to his teacher which reads, "Miss Ellis -- These essays are of a kind I never had to write for you and in fact they are by a different Quine. The author is my father. Douglas B. Quine, '64". Wonder what Miss Ellis made of it . . . )

It might be worth taking a close look at Reference and Modality — Banno

Do you mean the essay in From a Logical Point of View?

Sorry, just catching up with this. Re Quine: That suggests a possible difference between the structure of definitional and logical truths. For as we know, Quine's issue about synonymy doesn't apply to logical truths. People tend to forget this and think that Quine denied any analyticity at all, but he explicitly makes this distinction.

I think it's both interesting and significant that there are things we can know a priori. Obviously not so much in such jejune cases as John's marital status. — Wayfarer

What is it exactly that we are supposed to know a priori, in this case? That “bachelor” means “unmarried male”? But that is not a priori at all – it’s a fact about language and the world that we have to learn. In John’s case, we’re using “a priori” as a rather confusing substitute for “known ahead of time” or “known as a background belief” or something similar. Perhaps that’s why it looks jejune: It doesn’t really touch the issue of what genuine a priori knowledge might consist of.

Is it a tautology, though? If Wittgenstein (via @Banno) is right, then no, it’s not even a tautology. It doesn’t follow the form of “Either p or ~p”. It isn’t “self-evident.” It does “tell us something about the world,” both the world of language and the world of logic, of what can now be extensionally substituted.

An interesting question is, what makes logical truths (appear to be) self-evident, whereas definitional truths must be learned? And the perennial favorite: Self-evident to whom?

The notion that there are final answers to some central issues is in and of itself a central issue. — Arne

This is very well put, and a good response to some of your thoughts, @LaymanThinker. Note that @Arne isn't scoffing at the idea of "final answers," but nor is he/she claiming to know any. Whether they exist, and how we might know them, is one of the very questions to which we don't have a final answer. Welcome to philosophy as self-reflexivity!

Good, and let's remind ourselves what Rodl means by "validity": He's not saying that "I judge p to be true" means that it must be true. We can certainly be mistaken in our judgments. He means, "If it is true, then it is valid to so judge."

"Judgment is self-consciously and objectively valid." [This] locution is not meant to convey -- absurdly -- that judgment as such is valid. It describes the form of validity that belongs to a judgment. . . . And its validity is objective: the measure of its validity does not involve the subject of the judgment. — Rodl, 5

Now take it a step further and substitute "Pat" for "Quentin" in "Quentin judges that 'Pat thinks the oak is shedding its leaves.'" This would give us "Pat judges that he himself thinks the oak is shedding its leaves." So, is it still the case that the truth or falsity of the content ("the oak is shedding its leaves") is immaterial to the form of judgment? I believe so. It's a sort of ugly recursion, but the form does seem the same. Pat could in theory keep himself neutral on the accuracy of his own thought about the tree.

That is, putting "I think..." in front of each proposition buggers extensionality. — Banno

Yes! And well explained. I think I understand the Fregean fix as well -- "the scope of the "⊢" is the whole argument." If you don't mind, could you fit the terms "I think 'grass is green'" into the Fregean a/b/a schematic you gave us? I want to be sure.

We can entertain a proposition without thereby accepting, believing, or assenting to it. — banno

OK, don't hate me, but Rodl would ask, "What is this activity you are calling 'to entertain'? Is it the same thing as 'to think'? Not 'to think' in the sense of 'judge', presumably; that's the very point you want to deny. So it must be 'to think' in the sense of 'to have a thought' -- but what is that? Everyone believes it must be obvious what 'to have a thought' means, but I find myself perplexed when I try to say more about it."

Both the "I" and the "it" do not refer to anything in particular. — Janus

Could you say more? The "I" refers to the thinker/speaker, and I'm not sure which "it" you mean. Sorry, I'm probably missing your point.

q = "Grass is green"
p = "I think q" = "I think 'grass is green'"

This is the problematic structure I was referring to. How should we talk about the force and the content of p? Is "I" the subject (or "argument," in Frege's terms) of p? We need a workaround, and (at least) one is available, but before we consider how this problem is usually resolved, I was trying to get clear about what's wrong.

@Banno @Janus Have to leave now -- rats. I'll look forward to seeing where y'all take this.

What is the logical status of a judgement or proposition apart from its being made or beleived by anyone? If anything, it would be merely content, no? — Janus

That's a great way of putting one of Rodl's puzzles. He challenges us, "What is 'merely content'? What can that mean?"

I would have thought that the force/ content distinction reinforces the role of the "first person" — Janus

Yes, in the way you describe, but look what happens when the proposition itself -- p is "I think q". How do we accommodate this?

Well, I was trying to go a little slower. Ignore Rodl's possible solution. Is there something that needs solving about the 1st person in order to keep propositional logic workable?

I am missing something here, but what? — Banno

I'm not sure, but following along in this thread, I believe what separates the Rodl-deniers from the Rodl-curious (I don't think we have any committed Rodelians, certainly not me) is whether or not they can see a problem about p. I do see the problem Rodl (and Kimhi) see. How can there be objective content that is also thought? This is not a problem in logic, it's an ancient epistemological puzzle. It's the "view from nowhere" problem, which is why Rodl spends so much time on Nagel. Rodl's concerns about p are a relatively new and often infuriating way of going at this, but I don't think we can just say he's confused.

Can I ask, if a bright child asked you, "What do philosophers mean when they talk about p?" how you would answer? In the simplest terms, what do you think p is meant to signify?

Sorry, which bit? There are so many "I thinks" here!

Let me ask you both, then, what you make of this:

The [force-content] distinction is introduced as a matter of course; the student is trained not to be tricked by the act-object ambiguity. But there is an awareness that the force-content distinction and the doctrine of propositions have difficulty accommodating 1st-person thought: I ____. — Rodl, 22

Rodl goes on to argue that the 1st person must be understood as self-conscious, but let's not worry about that right now. @Banno, I think you've noted before that we need to do some tinkering within Fregean logic to accommodate the 1st person. Would you agree with Rodl that, without such tinkering, there is indeed a difficulty presented for the "doctrine of propositions"?

What I said should be read as a general critique of some forms of phenomenological method. — Banno

OK.

In so far as Rödl is dependent on such a method his argument doesn't hold unless one is willing to insist that Pat is wrong in her account of her own mental life. Which is what Rödl appears to be insisting on in the section referred to by ↪Wayfarer. — Banno

I'd need to see what @Wayfarer comes up with here. I don't recall Rodl saying this. But way back in the OP, that was my possible response #2 to Pat:

"The “I think” is an experience of self-consciousness, and requires self-consciousness. When you say you are “not aware of it,” you are mistaken. But you can learn to identify the experience, and thus understand that you have been aware of it all along."

I don't think it's a good response, but not because it would be impossible for a person to be wrong about their mental life. I think it's misguided because Rodl's thesis about the "I think" doesn't describe a mental event at all. Thus, response #3:

"The “I think” is not experienced. It is a condition of thought, a form of thought, in the same way that space and time are conditions of cognition. Self-consciousness, in Rödl’s sense, is built in to every thought, but not as a content that must be experienced."

This is correct according to Rodl, I believe. What we've been chasing up and down the yard these 20-odd pages is whether this is a coherent thing to say.

An ingenious idea for "translating away" the 1st person. I think I know what Rodl might say, though: Pat is still performing an act of judging, regardless of whether the object-language sentence concerns herself or a sentence-token. "A declarative sentence" can't refer to anything at all, or judge anything; only a person (or thought) can do that, he would maintain. It's a variation on his skepticism about p -- "It stands ready quietly, unobtrusively, to assure us that we know what we are talking about. . . . If only we understood the letter p, the whole world would open up to us." (55)

But I disagree about redundancy. — bongo fury

Me too.

If someone disagrees with this, if they perhaps insist that their thought of judging that things are so just is judging that things are so...

What are we to do? How are we to settle such an issue? Are we to say they are mistaken? Wrong? Misunderstanding the issue? — Banno

Why presume there is even some fact of the matter? — Banno

First, note that Rodl does disagree with this. The quote is his version of what an opponent of his views might say. His own view is much closer to your "judging that things are so just is judging that things are so."

But your question about how to settle a disagreement here is one of my favorite meta-philosophical problems. Philosophy always seeks to understand itself, to know its own nature, to comprehend what it is capable of. The question of resolving a philosophical issue is central to one's conception of how philosophy can proceed. What sorts of resolutions can philosophy accomplish, in a case like this? Is somebody right? If we trace the disagreement back to a divergence in some fundamental premises, what do we do next?

Sorry for the mini-essay, but it's a prologue to replying that it's a lot easier to say what wouldn't settle the issue. I don't think an appeal to differing personal experiences will do it; Rodl wants to say something about all thought. More broadly, I don't think there's any empirical resolution; the issue is metaphysical. Whether there is, then, no "fact of the matter" will depend on how you feel about metaphysics.

To conclude with something optimistic: You know how, when something goes wrong with some electrical or digital set-up, 9 times out of 10 the problem is something silly and hardware-related, like forgetting to attach a cable? And you've been sitting there trying to understand the software and figure out what you're doing wrong? Similarly, I find that more often than not a philosophical disagreement can be, if not resolved, at least better understood by assuming the problem is a terminological dispute. That's part of why I've been going at this thought1/thought2 business so heavily.

The problem of one thought and then another is a product of the view of propositions Rödl is militating against. — Paine

Yes. For Pat to think, "Hey, I'm thinking about a tree" would be an example of a second thought being simultaneous (or nearly so) to a first thought. Rodl, as I read him, is fine with this; it's of no interest to him. What he denies is that the "I think" works like this.

So when I followed his lead in making the distinction between "my thought of judging p" and "judging p", I was well aware that this is a terminology he's putting in the mouth of his opponent. But we can still ask, If the "I think" is not "my thought of judging p", what is it? And what I'm suggesting is that we have a problem no matter which horn of the dilemma we choose -- see my response to @Wayfarer

I think the problem of talking about what is a new 'thought' has to first pass through the issue of the first person being the one making the judgement. — Paine

Yes. One of the central issues of S-C&O is whether 1st-person thought is "a thorn in the flesh of the friends of propositions," or merely "a local problem" concerning a type of reference. What I've read so far, in terms of argument for this, seems equivocal, but there is much more I haven't yet gotten to.

rejection of the "affirming subject" — Paine

. . . understood as a subject who is always affirming in a context. So any other subject could theoretically be plugged into that context, leading to "objectivity." Being true for one means being true for all. Rodl rightly calls this trivial:

First-person thought, insofar as it is first-personal, is not objective. — Rodl, 27

. . . but so what? The problem is not rooted in this obvious fact. This is not the "thorn in the flesh."

The force-content distinction is a close parallel to the distinction you're trying to draw between thought1 (the act) and thought2 (the content). — Wayfarer

It is, with a key difference which is obscured by Rodl's insistence on using "think that" as synonymous (or at least interchangeable) with "judge that".

The idea of "content" is more or less the same, but my "thought1" is not the same as Frege's "force" or Rodl's "judgment". I intend thought1 to be much more neutral, a simple label we can apply to any mental event. Such a thought doesn't assert anything, nor judge anything to be the case.

Now, do you read Rodl as denying that there can be any such thought? I don't. I read him as denying that we can think, in the sense of "judge", any proposition without an accompanying "I think".

Is this "I think" a thought2? -- that is, some piece of propositional content? Clearly not. But nor is it a thought1, a new mental event; Rodl rejects this. I hate to multiply entities, but it seems as if the "I think", as an act of self-consciousness, must be yet a third term we require in order to understand what it means to think. It is not, properly speaking, a thought at all, but rather constitutive of a certain kind of thinking, much as space and time function in Kantian metaphysics. "The very framework within which all thinking and evaluation occur," in your words, though I'm not yet ready to say "all thinking."

For Rödl, these are not separable aspects of judgment. — Wayfarer

Yes. But to say they cannot be separated at all, or do not successfully refer, is a further step. If Rodl is indeed trying to take that step, then I'm tentatively saying he's wrong to do so.

I think the error lies in the attempt to objectify thought (although that is not Rödl's terminology or method.) But it relates to his later point from Thomas Nagel about 'thoughts we can't get outside of'. — Wayfarer

I'll wait till you get to the Nagel/Moore material before offering any responses about that. As to objectifying thought in general, I believe Rodl is saying that there is no such thing as a thought which hasn't been thought. The whole idea of a "p" which resides somewhere in the ether, waiting to be thought, makes no sense to him. And we know that he affirms objectivity, in his own way: thought can be objective precisely because it is self-conscious, and vice versa. It knows itself to be judging what is the case. What I'm still working to understand, as you can tell from my other comments, is whether this way of seeing objectivity forces us back into some version of the force/content distinction -- which was the point you began your post with, and it's a good one.

Very good! I can't give this the response it deserves right now, but I will, next time I'm online here.

Thanks for the excellent synopsis. Here's what I've realized about Rodl's claims here:

On p. 38, in laying out the objection of his critic, he says (speaking for the critic):

My thought of judging that things are so is a different act of the mind from my judging that they are so. The former is about my judgment, a psychic act, a mental state; the latter, in the usual case, is not; it is about something that does not involve my judgment, my mind, my psyche. It is about a mind-independent reality. — Rodl, 38, my emphases

Now combine this with what Rodl tells us about his terminology:

I use "judgment" and "thought" interchangeably, following ordinary usage: "He thinks that things are so" represents him as judging, as holding true, that things are so. — Rodl, 4

(Whether this is the only ordinary usage is debatable, but let that go. We're trying to understand Rodl's scheme.)

So Rodl believes that the force/content distinction is a discrimination between a "psychic act" or "mental event" and a "mind-independent reality" that does not involve "my mind, my psyche." It is this that he denies.

Earlier, I suggested distinguishing two uses of "thought". Thought1 is meant to refer to what Rodl is calling a mental event. Thought2 refers to the (somewhat mysterious) propositional content that is the subject of a thought1, and, as Rodl says, is understood to be independent in some important sense from any particular mental event.

What Rodl is claiming, using the synonymy of "thought" and "judgment," is that thinking that things are so is not different from being conscious or aware of so thinking. So the million-dollar question is, When I think about my judgment, which we know is a thought1 (a mental event), is my new thought about that judgment also a thought1? I think much of Rodl's thesis rests on denying this. Self-consciousness has got to be a thought2 item, something "accompanying" any thought1, not an additional simultaneous thought1 (mental event).

One important qualification: As Pat noted in the original OP, one can "think about one's thought" in a perfectly ordinary reflective way, pondering its occurrence, wondering if it's true, etc. Sometimes we do that, sometimes we don't. In doing this, we are engaging in a mental event, a new thought1. That is not the kind of "thinking about thought" that Rodl means, and I certainly wish he had made this clearer from the outset. Or maybe he thought he did, simply by asserting that the "I think" is not a new thought. In any case, we mustn't get confused and say either that we never have a separate, self-reflective thought about thought, or that the ubiquitous "I think" is that kind of thought.

The question might be asked, what of incorrect judgement? — Wayfarer

Your explication here is clear, and we ought to agree with Rodl, regardless of whether we endorse all of his views. Incorrect judgments are not made so by virtue of anything within the act of judging itself, but rather because of the facts on the ground. As you put it,

When a judgment is incorrect, it does not negate the self-conscious aspect of judgment; rather, it indicates that the grounds or reasons upon which the judgment was based were flawed or incomplete. — Wayfarer

Is all this consistent with your understanding of Rodl so far?

Again, thanks for the interesting response.

This sounds like the anti-metaphysical movement redux. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think I understand exactly what you mean here. If we link the word "existence" with some particular feature of metaphysics, and then deny that this feature has an application, we would indeed be banishing a central point of metaphysics, at least of the traditional variety. But that's not what I'm suggesting. Again, it comes down to the difficulty I think you're having with severing the link between word and concept.

Try to imagine your metaphysics, whatever they may be, laid out as a series of groundings. Some level grounds another, is thus more essential than another; there may be a level that can be shown by transcendental argument to be necessary for human cognition; etc. etc. Now -- and this is the hard part -- go ahead and put words to it, but don't use the terms "existence" or "being". It can be done, and the doing is quite revealing, I believe. What it shows is that structure -- which is what we care about, you and me*, what we want to understand about the world -- remains intact no matter what words we use for our labels. And that is all I'm saying. It's not the least bit anti-metaphysical. In fact, the whole reason I urge this way of looking at it is to help metaphysics, to get us free from a terminology that, however time-honored, hinders us talking about the important things.

Unless the notion is that existence/being should just mean "every possible thing that has or can ever be quantified, for all philosophers, everywhere, — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes and no. What I would rather is that "existence/being" should be declared meaningless, dead by the thousand cuts of equivocation and ambiguity. (And remember, I'm talking about the word, not any of the various metaphysical carvings of the world that have been given the name "existence.") But if we must use the term, it has a pretty good use within quantificational logic. You're wanting to say that this reduces the idea of existence to something trivial. It would if I were linking word and concept. But I'm not. It's the word "existence" which is trivial in this context, though important for doing logic. This is what I meant when I wrote:

"Now I completely agree that this [Quine's motto] tells us next to nothing. [i.e. it is trivial.] (In particular, it is neutral about some of the uses of "exist" that traditional metaphysics wants to privilege as "real existence" or "what being means" or some such.). But nor should it be controversial."

"all thinkers should be uncontroversially committed to the idea that 'existence' is just 'whatever anyone can or does quantify over.'" — Count Timothy von Icarus

So, just to say it one more time, my idea is most decidedly not this. Maybe by using scare-quotes for "existence" you're leaving it open whether you're referring to the word, or to one of the many concepts of what it means to exist that metaphysicians have proposed. But I think you're saying -- and tell me if I've got this wrong -- that the problem for you here is that existence itself is being reduced to something about quantification, and that doesn't remotely do it justice. And thus would begin the endless wrangles about existence itself. It's those wrangles that I'm proposing (vainly, I know; it's too entrenched) that we stop.

*Reading this over, I see I've assumed that structure is indeed central to your concerns as a metaphysician. But even if you want to understand the world in some other way -- perhaps more phenomenologically, by focusing on individual items of experience rather than the way they relate together -- I think the "existence" terminology is a hindrance. We can find a paraphrase for all questions about being, from Aristotle to Husserl. Same point here: What counts is the thing itself, not how we label it.

1975 (when the liberals and pacifists took over the western world) — Eros1982

I missed that! Dang, and I would have enjoyed it too.

Gadamer says this, in Truth and Method:

That which can be understood is language. — Truth & Method, 442

This is a little cryptic, taken out of context, but what he means is that there are many things we experience that aren't candidates for understanding -- not everything conveys truth or meaning or even comprehension. But what can be understood is language. Nor does this mean that there's nothing but language, or that in understanding language we are only understanding words and symbols. He means, I believe, that we "do understanding" using language, it is our human mode of interpreting the world.

Quite similar, really, to the end of the Tractatus. I know opinions differ about this but I always took Witt to be saying only what is obvious: There are plenty of things we can't talk about -- entire worlds -- but therefore we have to hold our peace and not try to force what can't be articulated into words that we've stipulated can't express it.

(this is only half facetious) — Banno

Aargh! Let's keep it completely facetious! No psychologism :razz:



These are good descriptions of how background beliefs might function, and indeed, I don't think there's a problem with understanding what we mean by them, and how they show up in ordinary life. My worries begin when we try to put them under the same umbrella as "belief" understood as a propositional attitude. Maybe I should just stop there and ask, If I say of Joe, 'He believes that water is H20', when "believes" is understood to refer to background belief of Joe's that he is not currently entertaining, am I ascribing a propositional attitude to him?

Incidentally, I think switching to 3rd person makes the issue clearer, because when we say "I believe such and such .... " it's tempting to say that I couldn't both make the statement and be unaware of the belief. In 3rd person, the believer is not the one doing the stating.

I appreciate your thoughtful response to this.

But there does seem to be an issue in kicking existence out to predication in that a diverse group of thinkers from Kant to St. Thomas have rejected being as a predicate. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The point I'm making about the word "existence" necessitates a kind of viewpoint shift that may not come easily. Let me rephrase it a little: The only thing that all the various uses of "existence" have in common is that they introduce the term as referring to something we can talk about, something we can quantify over. So if we insist on using "existence" and asking what it means for something to exhibit this feature, all we can do is point to the one characteristic they have in common, "being the value of a bound variable." Now I completely agree that this tells us next to nothing. (In particular, it is neutral about some of the uses of "exist" that traditional metaphysics wants to privilege as "real existence" or "what being means" or some such.). But nor should it be controversial. As some like to say on TPF, it's just common sense.

When you say that my modest proposal entails "kicking existence out to predication," that doesn't capture the emphasis I'm placing on language. I'm not saying that the word "existence" be used to cover one sense of existence but not another; I'm recommending we drop the word entirely. (And as I've probably said before, I know this will never happen; but a fellow can dream!). The various grounding and entailment relations that legitimately exist among the various types of being will remain unchanged. A traditional, metaphysically conservative philosopher has nothing to fear here.

The question of existence as a predicate, and Kant's opposition to it, has, I believe, been settled, or at least stabilized, in modern logic. See @Banno's response, above, for a short version. Quantification and predication are two different things. The hot issue here is quantifier variance, but that is (and was) another thread.

Should predicates not include an ontological commitment? — Count Timothy von Icarus

The terminological problem raises its head again, in different guise. Let's say we answer, Yes, they should include such a commitment. What, then, are we committed to? How are we using "being" in a way that clarifies, rather than merely reveals our preferred usage?

does Brutus have a right to be miffed over what seems to be sophistic equivocation here? — Count Timothy von Icarus

No. If Brutus insists on misunderstanding what Cassius is saying, we can't help him, but he doesn't have to. And in fairness, Cassius is obviously trying to get Brutus' goat. He ought to be clearer, and explain that the word "exists" can be used in several different ways . . . which is why I dislike it so much as a keystone philosophical term. But I guess you think it should only be used one way?

At the risk of being repetitive, my complaint is with the term "existence", not the various concepts associated with its use.

My preferred solution, as many of you know. I've seen you refer to this as Quine's "joke" about being, but it's about time we took him seriously. And to the question of "vindicating ordinary speakers," I find it's relatively easy to explain what this means to an intelligent non-philosopher, especially once they understand that it's a wrangle about terminology. It leaves the obvious difference between Pegasus and a table unaltered.