Well, consensus amongst dissenting parties doesn't guarantee anything and some of the most well known philsophers are renowned for changing their minds after many years. In any case you seem to allow that analysis of language use can be a useful tool at least at the beginning of a debate. But if a tool can be used, it can be used well or badly. I'm not saying this is the case, but perhaps Chalmers and Dennett did not use those tools effectively at the outset. The only way we could ascertain that they did or did not, would be to go back to what they say and apply those tools once again.

The philosophy of mind and for that matter psychology is riddled with technical terms and terms used in special technical senses, "qualia", "visual experience", "percept" , "mental state", "representation" etc etc. I know from bitter experience that not all philosophers using the same terms use them to mean the same things, even if they think they are doing so.

Well, I would start by asking both Chalmers and Dennett what they mean by "qualia", after all, clever as they undoubtedly are, they are not immune to conceptual confusion and this might be revealed when we push them to express what they mean.

Well, your position is not too far away from Wittgenstein's then. He was pretty clear that once you make the questions you are asking clear, either they will turn out to be addressable by science, or they will rest philosophical ones. But the questions being asked need to be made clear, and it is there that the analysis of language use has its role to play, at least on the Wittgensteinian approach.
Addendum, of course for W, the analysis of language will also have a role to play, but a different one, with the residual purely philosophical questions.

Not all philosophers engage in the kind of language analysis that Wittgenstein engaged in. Some I know to be overtly hostile to that kind of approach. As far as I am aware, there is as little consensus amongst nonWittgensteinian philosophers as there is amongst Wittgensteinian ones. But pehaps your point is that philosophy itself is futile.

OK, then, with 1 and 2 nailed down, let me try to get clearer on 3. Is this a fair summary of your position:
1: For the person feeling a pain, the pain sensations they have represent some other thing or process.
2: For that person to really be in pain, the pain sensation must correctly represent the presence or occurrence of that other thing.
3: Where there is representation there is the possibility of misrepresentation.
4: So a person could be having pain sensations, but not actually be in pain because those sensations are incorrectly representing the presence of that other thing.

Let me just make sure I understand your position. You believe that pain involves three things:
1. Pain behaviour, including talk, which is entirely public.
2. A sensation of pain, private to the person feeling pain that nobody else but that person can get access to.
3. Something, that the above mentioned sensation represents, and that nobody has any understanding of, including the person feeling the sensation.

I'm not asking for your arguments or your reasons for thinking this for the moment, I just want to make sure I've been able to extract the basis of your position from everything you have been saying.

I had considered this sort of thing, but I wonder if it isn't more of a comparison - a simile or metaphor - rather than a direct description.

Point taken, descriptions of pains often resort to metaphor. But how about descriptions of afterimages? It doesn't seem to be a metaphorical or non literal use of colour and shape vocabularly when we describe them.

What is hidden, if anything, is what pain feels like for me, compared to what it feels like for you. Is it the same? We can't talk about it, so who knows?

I'm not convinced about this, although perhaps it doesn't matter to the point you are making. I remember having sciatic pain described to me, before I ever had sciatica, as like having streaks of burning electricity pulsing down the leg. Then, one day, I felt something those words described well and it occurred to me that I was sufferring from sciatica, and my self diagnosis turned out to be spot on. So, whilst I certainly cannot feel another person's pain for them, just as I cannot doff their cap for them, I can feel same pain another person feels, I can take the cap from their head and doff with it myself, and we can, it seems, usefully describe to each other exactly what it is we are feeling. But perhaps there is a way of interpreting that story as well such that the inner drops out of the picture.

I haven't seen that it's been very successful in resolving philosophical issues.

I suppose that would depend on what you mean by the phrase "resolving a philosophical issue". I certainly know from experience that some people will stubbornly maintain an incoherent position even when it is pointed out to them that they are using words inappropriately when they try to express what they mean. Often such people resort to the Humpty Dumpty position that they can define the words the way they like. Finally, when that point is reached there is nothing to do but walk away from the discussion. So, if by successfully resolving philosophical issues, you mean convincing other people to change their minds, examining word use is not always effective. That I grant you. Sometimes, however, it is effective, and I have certainly had the wool pulled from my eyes by a person pointing out to me a subtle distinction in the use of words. However, you might have a more restrictive notion of what it would take to resolve a philosophical issue than I do. You may even have a more restrictive notion of what counts as a philosophical issue in the first place.

Not sure what I wrote to prompt it, but compliments are always welcome :wink:

It matters for how we say things and what we mean. It doesn't matter a lick for what is the case.

Whether you are a realist or an idealist, certainly it, i.e. word usage, matters a lick for our capacity to find out, understand and express what is the case. That alone makes examining how words are used a useful activity for philosophers to engage in.

the aspect of language which no one has the capacity to understand,that part of language which refers to the private.

This seems really odd. It sounds like you are suggesting there could be words and phrases in a language that cannot be understood by anyone. Perhaps I am biased, but wouldn't a word or phrase at least have to be understandable by someone to count as part of a language? I am unsure that I am right about W, but I am even less sure that you are.

Could you explain how the beetle can be shown?

There lies the rub. To be honest, I am not certain that this interpretation of W is correct, nor that the ideas I am trying to force on him do so either. I am trying to see if there is room for both the general Wittgensteinian position that "nothing is hidden, everything is on the surface" on the one had, and the idea that pain behaviour and mock pain behaviour are distinct things. If they are distinct, then it is fairly natural to think that the difference lies in what the actors are feeling, but if everything is on the surface, then so is what they are feeling. In the end, it may not be a tenable position, but I have yet to see an out and out contradiction in it.

The intermediary, which allows for the existence of deception is an activity which lies unobservable between the observable behaviour and the internal intention, veiling the intention.

I might have misunderstood you then. I was under the impression that your view was that pain behaviour is the intermediary in cases of both genuine and fake pain. Now though you seem to be suggesting that the intermediary is also hidden. I'm not sure I understand that, but it might just be lack of imagination on my part.

Sorry, to be clear, how I would like to interpret W is that "the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant" is true for him precisely and only if the object is considered to be necessarily private, so as per his analogy in the case where the beetle cannot be shown. Where the beetle can be shown, is a case he says nothing about, because it is not, as you point out, his target at all.

Well, I guess I have to construe it as the first premise in a modus tollens argument, the second premise being that the object is not irrelevant.

If I understand Wittgenstein correctly (and I might not), then it is not the subjective experience of dreaming that determines the meaning of the word.

To be cautious as W exegesis, I think you would need to add the qualifier "just" between the "not" and "the subjective experience". Some people read W as denying outright that the inner has any role to play at all in determining the meaning of words, which I do not think he does. What I think he does is challenge the idea that "inner" here means "necessarily private and unknowable to others". Anyway, that's my interpretation, which might be wrong of course.

But, since there is a real, known difference between honestly expressing one's feelings, and deceptively expressing one's feelings, your conclusion has already been refuted. If there was no intermediary between one's pain, and one's expression of pain (pain behaviour) such deception would be impossible. If the intermediary was only added in the cases of deception, for the purpose of deceiving, it would be evident, the person would not be showing the beetle, creating a veil in between, when other times the person would be showing the beetle and there would be no veil. Therefore deception would be impossible.

I still do not see the impossibility you are talking about, although it might be there somewhere. Let's change the example. A fake Picasso and a genuine Picasso can both have exactly the same appearance. Nevertheless, a fake Picasso and a genuine Picasso are distinct things. Sure, both Picasso and the faker need the same materials in order to accomplish their goals. However, Picasso's goal is not to produce a genuine Picasso, he could hardly fail to do that after all. He is also not attempting to produce a representation of a genuine Picasso. The faker's goal, however, is precisely to do the latter. With genuine Picasso everything is there on the surface, so to speak. With a fake Picasso the story is much more complicated. In many cases, deception requires a lot more work than sincerity, although of course it can sometimes be hard to be honest as well.

The fact is that we might, anyone of us, at any time, be deceived by mock pain-behaviour.

This is compatible with the idea that we can nevertheless in some circumstances recognise genuine pain behaviour for what it is, i.e. the manifestation of pain. At least, you would need more argument to show that the mere fact that we can go wrong means that we can never get it right. What it is to get it right, of course, remains open for discussion, but the idea that getting it right means, at least sometimes, being directly confronted with someone's pain and not simply a representative intermediary of it, has still yet to be refuted as far as I can tell.

That we can recognise pain behaviour when we see it is not the issue, of course we can. That Wittgenstein acknowledged this is not an insight of his. The issue that concerns metaphysics and on which Wittgenstein seems silent is embedded in Metaphysician Undercover's question: what makes the difference between mock pain behavoiur and real pain behaviour.

Pronouncements, no matter who makes them, are not arguments.

Almost, if not always, Wittgenstein's concern is with language

Well if it were only language Wittgenstein was concerned with, then fine, nothing more need be said. However, I have met so called Wittgensteinians that feel that in being concerned with language Wittgenstein somehow managed to solve metaphysical problems along the way, rather than just avoiding them or, perhaps more charitably, expressing them in a different way.

Admit it? What greater difference could there be? — — Wittgenstein

I can think of many greater differences than the difference between mock and sincere pain behavoiur, the difference between pain behaviour and smoking calmly in an armchair, for instance. Pain behaviour and mock pain behaviour might be different, but there is also the apparent similarity to account for. If one suggests, quite naturally, that there is a common denominator between mock and genuine pain behaviour, e.g. the bodily movements, including the movements of the larynx and lips, then the question arises, "so what is added in the genuine case to distinguish it from the mock case?" The response, "it is not nothing but it is not something either " or "you are being lead astray by language" then just rings to some like a hollow refusal to engage with the issue.

That is the key point, deception is unidentifiable, because if it is identified it is not deception, only an attempt to deceive. And the other point is that deception occurs.

I'm not sure about "unidentifiable" here, why isn't a case of deception just a successful attempt to deceive? After all, if each instance of deception were of necessity unidentifiable, no deception would ever be discovered, and so how would the notion of deception ever get a hold? The opposite take from yours would be that deception must be discoverable, and so identifiable, but to be deception it must of course allow for being, as a matter of fact, unidentified. Here we do not need a paradigm of deception in your sense, just the paradigm of sincere behaviour and the idea of an attempt to emulate that behaviour for, at least in some cases, deceitful purposes. So, if all deceptive behaviour must be identifiable as deception, that might entail, with some additional premises of course, that deceptive behaviour does not share a common denominator with sincere behaviour, and so sincere behaviour in the case of pain can really be a case of showing the world what is your box. This still leaves the tricky business of explaining how actual cases of deception work, but perhaps Wittgenstein would just say that it will vary from case to case and that no matter how many examples we produce we will not obtain a general principle that will apply to all cases.
.

Furthermore, if any instance of what appears to you as me showing you my beetle might actually be an instance of deception, then I can never actually be showing you my beetle.

This is precisely what Wittgenstein has to deny, and it is indeed difficult, but I think he does deny it.

Accepting the antecedent of the inference you make above involves accepting the concealed premise that could be expressed in the first instance as: if there is no difference between the appearance of two things, in this case types of behaviour, there is no real difference in what they are. In itself, of course, that can be denied, since it is just a version of the unwarranted inference from appearance to reality. Nevertheless, if one does deny that inference, i.e. if one does accept that pain behaviour and fake pain behaviour can have the exactly the same appearance but may yet nevertheless be metaphysically entirely distinct phenomena, then the difficult question is to try to explain how we can be fooled into thinking someone is in pain: it seems that there just must be some common denominator between fake pain behaviour and pain behaviour, but if we accept that, then falling back into skepticism about us ever being able to show each other our pain seems inevitable.

This reminds me a little of the difficulties with the disjunctivist repsonses to the argument from halluncination in perception, which I suppose is no accident given that this started out as a thread on idealism.

Incidently, anyone who thinks idealism is dead could do worse than ressurect an old article by Mary Calkins, called "The idealist to the realist" : it is short and freely available on jstor. It dates from the 1920's, but most of the points it makes remain salient.

So the analogy really tells us nothing about the relationship between language and what's inside, pain, or other feelings whatsoever, "what's in the box". — Metaphysician undercover

Exactly, we are agreed:

The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all;

Wittgenstien

Yes, showing, for me, that the language game itself is incoherent : the meaning of "beetle" cannot be entirely determined by necessarily private objects.

Wittgenstein is not saying that where everyone could look into each others boxes, that the things inside the box would nevertheless still have no place in a coherent language game with the word "beetle". As you say, the analogy itself is entirely silent on that.

For me we are being invited to conclude that people must be able to show each other their beetles, otherwise "beetle" never gets to really mean anything at all.

More tentatively, I think we are also being invited to reach for a conclusion that where we can all show each other what is inside our boxes, what is inside our boxes cannot vary too much without "beetle" losing its usefulness entirely. But there I meander a long way away from the text.

I think we might be largely agreed on how to interpret Wittgenstein, and we are certainly in line that the groundwork laid out for the example to make sense requires there to be something inside all the boxes. I agree that we can show each other our pain through our words and actions, and I believe that is what Wittgenstein himself believed, and as I read Wittgenstien he allows that to be a manifestation of what is inner, although of course what is inner in this sense is definitely not private. The example of the beetle in the box is supposed to show the logical incompatibility of three things, as I see it anyway: i. there is something inside each persons box; ii nobody can show any body else what is inside their box iii the meaning of beetle is determined fully and only by whatever is in the box. You can have i and iii, but have to drop ii. You can have i and ii but cannot have iii. As for deception, in the case of the beetle and the box it only makes sense by somebody coming along and pretending that they even have their box: it might look like their box, but things that look like boxes are not always boxes, and if it were genuinely their box, it would have something inside it.

Quick addendum: re. the football player faking pain: I take Wittgenstein as promoting the idea that fake pain behaviour is not pain behaviour, even if it looks like it.

I always presumed that Wittgenstein's example of the beetle and the box was just to show that it is a necessary condition for "pain" to have a meaning that it refers to something inner, but that "inner" here cannot mean private and undisplayable to others. I.e. it is necessary for "beetle" to have a meaning that people have things inside their boxes, but ii. they must be able to show others what is in the box. It must be necessary, since if it were not, then it would make sense for everyone's box to be empty, nobody to have the slightest reason for thinking that anyone else's box was not empty, and yet "beetle" still have a use in the language. But what use? It just becomes exactly synonymous with "box" in that case. On the other hand in order to communicate effectively, the meaning of "beetle" must also be shareable, and by hypothesis we cannot share what is private and undisplayable. Is that a misinterpretation of Wittgenstein?

First, there isn't a debate. 'Opening for business' before the spread is contained will kill the economy..

What is the argument here? I'm not saying there isn't one, I'd just like to see its premises laid out.

I'm wondering if there may be a contradiction buried in the simulation proposal, on the other hand it may be that I am not grasping what is at stake. So, here's a rough outline of the objection for you all to shoot down or elaborate on:
The general proposal of simulation theory can be captured in the following statement:
P: The perceived world is a simulation caused by some process or thing in an independently existing real world.
If we understand that statement, we understand the subordinator clause "the real world". Where do we obtain our understanding of that phrase? Knowledge of linguistic structure might be innate, but the substance of language, the meanings of words, is something we develop as we are guided through and interact with the world around us. The world we are guided through and interact with is the perceived world. So, if we understand "the real world" it's meaning must be entwined with the meaning of "the percieved world" such that, although in some cases the connection between them may seem loosened, for example with optical illusions etc, "the real world" means at least "the perceived world".
So what? Well on the one hand statement P requires that the process or thing doing the simulating exists independently of the perceived world, in order to bring that world into existence, and on the other it requires that process or thing to exist IN the perceived world, through the conceptual connection between the perceived and the real world, and so cannot be independent of it. The contradiction then is that the simulator both is and is not independent of the perceived world. We have plenty of good reasons for thinking that contradictions are not true, therefore P is not true.

One way of getting around this would require that simulation theorists be able to construct a meaning for "the real world" that divorced it from even the slightest conceptual tie to the perceived world. I noticed in a number of commentaries above the term "real" was scarequoted, so perhaps this is the way to go. However, if that is the chosen resolution of the issue, the question then becomes what possible evidence do we have that there is any such thing as a real world at all, over and above the perceived world? All the empirical evidence, by definition, is bound down to the perceived world. Someone above made a similar point I think that it could make no difference to us whether there is or is not such a "real" world, although I'm trying to get to a stronger claim that if that is the case then the proposal is either contradictory nonsense or totally vacuous nonsense.

That Hume made a distinction does not mean he was entitled to. That was Kant's point really. Leading on from @Wayfarer's remark, what are Hume's famous "matters of fact" after all? His "system" had three fundamental types of things: sensations, ideas and relations we make between them. The difference between induction and deduction dissipates if that is all there is.

Kant got there before you, but made the same point. Take Hume's starting point that everything is, fundamentally, sensations and ideas, and then mathematics and logic rest on the same basis as chemistry and physics and whatever other special science you care to mention. Kant thought that this refuted Hume's position, since mathematics and logic are clearly not open to the same sceptical challenges as the inductive procedures that underpin those sciences. At least, that's what Kant thought. He was probably wrong, and there is a whole tradition of philosophy, pragmatism included in it, that really does see no difference in kind between logic and biology, just degrees.

b) no idea, that part has become unconcious, my fingers know more about how to play it than my head.

If you have no idea, then how do you know that it has become something unconscious, rather than just something that is entirely there for everyone to see when you play the guitar? It's you that know how to play the guitar, not your fingers nor your head.

i don't see how the distinqtion between knowing and ascertaining is relevant here.

Then I can only advise you to read over the thread more carefully.

I've not read Rand, but if this quotation is a representative example of the kind of thing she takes as given:

An organisms life depends on two factors: The material or fuel which it needs from the outside,and the action of it's own body, the action of using that fuel properly

then she is no philosopher. A philosopher would examine the assumptions that lie behind this kind of remark, including, but not limited to, what "life" and specifically "human life" actually is. A philosopher would not just assume that it is true. Perhaps in the work you quoted she goes on to unpack the premise (rather than its consequences)? If not, she appears to have in mind a definition of life as "automotive energy consumption with self-replication" but even if that is a definition it's the kind of limited definition that makes sense only when you are trying to research into the strictly biochemical/biophysical (i.e. not philosophical) question "How might life on Earth have begun?" not when you are trying to answer the question "How should a human being live?"

Since when I play the guitar I can unconciously ascertain where my finger needs to press the string to get the right sound out of my guitar when I stroke the string with my other hand.

You are riding rough shod over numerous subtle distinctions and probably also misusing the word "ascertain". To ascertain means, in the most general sense, to find something out. How do you unconsciously find out where your fingers need to press the string? Does it involve looking at the score, does it involve looking at where your fingers are actually placed? If so, looking here is intentional, conscious activity. A master of the guitar may indeed know exactly where his fingers need to be on the fingerboard, and may know without having to engage in any reflection or looking at all, but that is precisely the kind of case where there is no finding out going on at all, even if there is knowledge. It's not the case that every display of knowledge or know how is the immediate outcome of actually ascertaining anything, although certainly gaining that knowledge or know how may have involved ascertaining things at some stage. I know that I am going to enjoy the cup of coffee steaming beside me. I certainly at some point in my life found out (ascertained) that I like coffee, but that's not what I am doing now: I'm just looking forward to drinking the coffee.

Consider this question:
How did you ascertain where your fingers needed to be on the fingerboard?
And consider in what circumstances that question would actually make sense when:
a) Asked of someone who is learning to play the guitar.
b) Asked of someone who has mastered the guitar.

Now think about the following question:
How did you know where your fingers needed to be on the fingerboard?
And consider in what circumstances that question would make sense when:
a) Asked of somseone who is learning to play the guitar
b) Asked of someone who has masterd the guitar.

There will be differences and similarities between all the circumstances that you can imagine, and its the differences that tell as much as the similarities.

You see, the blatant ignorance here is had by assuming that there is no way to possibly measure intelligence. And yet who would argue that a slug is as intelligent as a cat, or that there's no way to effectively determine any difference, and more importantly on precisely what basis would one argue such things? — creativesoul

Certainly people who are sceptical about IQ tests will not want to say that a slug is as intelligent as a cat. Neither would they want to say that a cat is more intelligent than a slug. What kind of circumstance would elicit that kind of comparison between cats and slugs in the first place? I cannot think of any (beyond a desperate and question begging attempt to show that cats and slugs share something in common called intelligence that comes in amounts and can be measured).

There was a prior and more sophisticated exchange earlier in this thread on the idea of oneperson being more or less intelligent than anotherperson, but as far as I recall, that certainly did not end in it being agreed that to talk in this way committed one to a metaphysically dubious position that intelligence is a thing that comes in amounts and can be measured

Sorry, but you are fudging the issue.

The claim being made (by a number of people, not just you) is that recognizing intelligent behaviour always involves measuring intelligent behaviour. You were asked for a definition of measurement according to which this is true, since recognizing something and measuring something are prima facie distinct activities (otherwise why would we have two words)? You then give us this definition (copy-pasted from your original post) that measurement is
"the act or process of ascertaining the extent, dimensions, or quantity of something;"
So, for you to recognize something always involves an activity of ascertaining the extent, dimensions or quantity of something.
Metaphysicsnow and then I point out that ascertaining something is an intentional and conscious activity, and so we ask you what intentional and conscious activity we engage in whenever we recoqnize an occurence of intelligent behaviour. You then tell me that this question is invalid. Why is it an invalid question? Is it because for you recognition can be unconcious, that seems to be what you are getting at above? But that is irrelevant since it is ascertaining which you are now being asked about, and ascertaining is very definitely an intentional and therefore conscious activity. Nobody unconsciously ascertains anything. Furthermore, if for you to recognize is to measure, and to measure is always to ascertain, then to recognize is itself to engage in an intentional and conscious activity, which undermines your claim that recognition can be unconscious.

What might get you out of the hole you have dug for yourself is if you could present us with some cogent non-question begging examples of somebody unconsciously ascertatining something. I wish you luck with that.

Just like how driver tests provide excellent meant of ascertaining how good people are at taking driver tests. That we can say for sure.

Not a particularly good analogy - driving tests are also a measure of your ability to manipulate a car - if you can do that in the context of a test you are likely to perform well with a car in other contexts (although not necessarily, bad drivers pass their driving tests). This is a key disanalogy with the IQ test: there is no device/tool being used to take an IQ test, except perhaps a pen (but then there are better ways to test penmanship than an IQ test).
Also, as @MetaphysicsNow pointed out, let us not forget that you still have not answered my question:
when I recognise intelligent behaviour, what are the intentional conscious activities I engage in to determine the extent, dimensions or quantity of intelligence?

Your argument appears to be:
1: Self-deception only makes sense if it makes sense for one person A to act deceitfully towards a person B, where A and B are the same person.
2: It does not make sense for one person A to act deceitfully towards person B, where A and B are the same person.
3: Therefore, modus tollens, self-deception does not make sense.

To support (2), the model of A being deceitful towards B regarding some proposition P, goes along the following lines
a) A knowingly believes that not-P.
b) B's own interests are best served by knowingly believing that not-P.
c) A knowingly believes that his (A's) intentions/wishes are best served by having B knowingly believe that P.
c) A acts intentionally in order that B should knowingly believe that P.

So we end up, if the deceitful behaviour is successful, with A knowingly believing that not-P and B knowingly believing that P at one and the same time. This is not possible where A and B are one and the same person.
(Note that we are talking about A being deceitful to B, not A merely deceiving B.)

That seems right, and so (2) is a true premise.
But this leaves conditional (1) undefended and @Srap Tasmaner and I have been suggesting that self-deception should not be modelled on one person being deceitful to another. That part of the argument you have not yet established. As far as I recall, it came down to intuitions about what you/I/Srap would or would not call cases of self-deception.