making it clear that you mean "internal", or "qualitative" properties. — SophistiCat

Natural language draws no such distinction, AFAIK. So you're already inventing technical language precisely suited to denying the identity of indiscernibles.

Ah, but unless you point at one or the other sphere as you say "one" and "the other," this will not get you out of the bind. Because without ostention, the sentence "the property of being the one as opposed to the other" is equally applicable to both spheres; the "property" therefore is exactly the same. — SophistiCat

Sure, but you can just say 'call one A, the other B.' Problem solved.

I want to home in on the problem here: if you have no way to refer to them separately, you can't even coherently frame the scenario. If you do, then you have a way to distinguish their properties. You cannot have it both ways, where you have the vocab to frame the scenario, but not to distinguish between the two.

Informal language is richer than simple logics in that you can block moves like counting haecceity as a property, without violating any rules. — SophistiCat

I actually don't think this is right. You can't block haecceity in natural language, either, which is why you need to come up with an artificial language that blocks it.

In English, for example, you'd have to say: "suppose there are two distinct spheres, but they're the same in every way."

The response is: what do you mean? You just said they're distinct. Surely the one is not the other, then – but I've just predicated, in the natural language, a property of one that the other doesn't have, viz. the property of being the one as opposed to the other.

Pick any formalism you like. Let's say we have a first-order logic with identity. Now let's assume a non-identity relation between a and b:

~[a = b]

Now suppose I define by a meaning postulate a predicate F as follows:

Ax[Fx <-> x = a]

It follows that Fa, but ~Fb.

Now, the only way to stop the conclusion is to prevent me from defining such a property. But then, it's just a matter of stipulations on the language. But in the typical first-order logic, you can't do that, for any predicate symbol is definable, so long as it's well-formed, by showing to which individuals it is true of and which it is false of. Well, we let F be true of a and false of b. It is not possible for you to prevent this move, since you have admitted that a and b are distinct individuals in the domain. Et viola.

If you want to block this move, you must invent a logic in which a predicate like F is not expressible. The first order logic is not such a logic.

Australian philosophers always struck me as caricatures of their English counterparts. I've never really liked the style – whereas the Englishmen always seemed to feign ignorance in order to subtly assert the fact that they don't need to think, because they rule the world (and so they can insist anyone different from them is crazy, because they can always take for granted their superior position, knowing full well what they're doing), Australians just seem to not even know that anyone else exists, so when they call other people crazy it's not an ironic game of gentleman, they've actually just never met anyone unlike them.

Are you talking about the concept of "thisness" or haecceity? I actually don't accept that as a defense of PII. Maybe it again boils down to what properties are and that I think about them in terms of relations rather than take them as fundamental. — QuixoticAgnostic

It's not a matter of accepting or not.

If you say:

a =/= b

Then I can write you a property that a has but b doesn't, namely:

LAMBDA x[x = a]

The only way to deny the conclusion is to stop me, somehow, from being able to express this property. But you have to do it using a language that admits there is something about a that b doesn't have, viz. being a. Admit it, and then I can isolate the property a has but b doesn't – refuse to admit it, and you can't claim to have a counterexample.

"But that's not a property!" etc. Sure it is. I just wrote it. It's well defined, and meets any reasonable formal definition of a property you'd care to list. OK, so maybe you want to arbitrarily rewrite the rules so that this one doesn't count. Alright, but now you're just playing with words, so what's the point? We can gerrymander our definitions so that anything doesn't 'count' as a property anyway, so who cares? It's just a word game, then.

The problem with denying the identity of indiscernibles is that any language rich enough to express that two entities are non-identical is rich enough to require, by virtue of that admission, that they have distinct properties: each has the property of being identical to itself, and not to the other.

So it's not clear how to make a functioning language that doesn't allow it as a principle. You'd need a primitive way to express identity that somehow couldn't be reformulated into the expression of a property.

If you can't hear it, I can't tell you. But that's OK.

I think there is – and if we don't recognize it, thats our fault, not the question's (there are non-questions, but we shouldn't use that fact as a polemic to decide complacently that we know everything, and no unusual questions can touch us).

And no, I think the child wonders about these things often in language, often not – and being able to ask de se questions shows an ordinary mastery of language, not a confusion about it.

And so you can say 'if I were you...' But this does not mean 'if Snakes Alive were Banno....' nor does it mean 'If Snakes alive had the qualities of Banno, or were in the position of Banno...'

No, rather, it's I conditionally talk about what I would do it I were you. But it's puzzling, then, that it is coherent to reason in this way on most accounts. But I think that's so much the worse for them. Not that I think these questions can bolster an argument for solipsism.

Yes, but language clearly allows this kind of reasoning, and I think the question the child asks during its first existential crisis, 'Why am I this one, and not that one?' Not, 'Why is John John, but why am I John?' Something about the way we conceive of ourselves and personhood is not quite captured without understanding how this reasoning works. But logics have traditionally not taken de se reasoning all that seriously...though there was a boom with David Lewis' stuff.

Logicians have to proscribe because there are no natural logics, in the logician's sense – they are artificial, so at some point have ot be laid down.

But once you lay them down, you can describe. It's just that natural languages already have a layer that has been 'laid down' in a less conscious way, so the move to description is more obvious.

One thing I love about the fusion of ideal-language and ordinary-language philosophy surrounding Wittgenstein's time and others' is this realization that one can speak many languages, and that one can even make new languages to speak. It is very freeing.

While I don't think the argument works, there is something funny about de se reasoning that I think we haven't understood, and which allows us to ask such questions or make such speculations. It's the sort of reasoning employed in the old 'If I were you...' where what is imagined is that the 'center' or viewpoint on the very same world somehow shifts.

The reason is because, to paraphrase Rorty, philosophers have no rules – they can say whatever they want.

The reason for this, though, is hard to say. My guess is that philosophy and its techniques developed out of sophisms developed in the courtroom, and so are designed to trade on verbal confusions. Roughly, we call questions that make use of verbal confusion that is deep enough to go unnoticed 'philosophical.' That is their hallmark. The point of philosophy is just to push these contentions around, adopting rather than examining the confusions, so that philosophy is a kind of professional metasemantic blindness. Knowledge of language in some second-order sense wouldn't allow it to survive as a discipline, as the cognitive loop would snap.

Watching philosophers talk is sort of like watching a bird with a broken wing keep flapping it, and trying to readjust, not understanding what's wrong. We as humans talk and think in such a way that we fall systematically into certain verbal dead ends and thought traps. When we are deep into them, we call ourselves philosophical.

She's arguing, in her 2006 paper, (very convincingly from an evidential point of view) that there is no such state as 'anger'. If you looked for evidence of such a state in the brain you will fail to find any such thing. — Isaac

Philosophy strikes again!

Nausea is really good. I'd take it over most philosophy.

But I'm still not going to read Being and Nothingness. Eh.

I did read Transcendence of the Ego. I remember it was OK, but left no real impression on me, and I can't recall its specific contents well.

God, this sucks.

Book 3 of Locke's Essay would be a start.

I don't know, these verbal games just strike me as boring. Maybe it's an avenue for creativity, but sometimes I feel like I would rather learn something in the banal sense, not 'learn' something with quotes (shuffle concepts).

The misprison is where you misinterpret your forebearers, right?

Once you see through it, there's no going back...

It took the OLP's to make me see it, I'm ashamed to admit.

Then, a bold new theory of how affects are constructed...

Another true believer has entered the room, I see...

The bottom part isn't right – one of the main points of the Tractatus is that logical truths don't tell us about the world, but 'show' its transcendental structure. 'All that is the case' is one way the world can be among others, but logical truths including mathematical ones don't distinguish one way the world can be among others (I'm speaking in Tractatus W's voice here).

I don't have any dislike of Wittgenstein at all. I actually like what he did, and am in broad sympathy with the Oxford / 'ordinary language' philosophy.

I'm just suggesting that you have an inflated view of his importance, because you're reading too narrowly. He does not 'give us anything,' he is not Jesus Christ. He was just one out of very many philosophers, in a very long tradition, many of whom long before and after him said similar things.

What about? I'm not interested in banging my head against the wall of disciples of a philosopher. The true believers believe, I leave them to it.

Sartre was popular, but among professional philosophers he was never well-respected. There are videos of Derrida just saying he was a bad philosopher, and Heidegger apparently thought he was an idiot.

And it's often what goes in professional philosophy that trickles down to discussion elsewhere.

You don't have to read a philosopher to have your work be descended from them. Their thoughts permeate your culture and your professional milieu; most of what you think, in fact, is just because someone you don't even know about said it before.

How much do you know about the Christian Fathers, for example? Yet if you were to read them, you'd find half of what your civilization thinks there, in those books.

Wittgenstein was famously ignorant of the history of philosophy – but this is part of the reason that he did recapitulate so much of it thoughtlessly, not part of the reason he couldn't.

And you just recapitulated that Wittgenstein was prejudiced. So? Where does this leave us? — Pussycat

You'd probably have to read the empiricists on language.

I agree he probably didn't know much of anything about Hume.

The Humean nature of the facts has to do with their lack of dependence on each other, not with their observational nature. People in England have seen things that way for a long time – arguably, they still do.

The PI as opposed to the Tractatus might be a rejection of many things. I don't know if it has to do with Hume's fork, because Wittgenstein didn't know much about the history of phil., so probably didn't know where he got his original ideas from coherently enough to 'reject' them.

The PI is mostly a rejection of the idea that you can derive how language is by seeing how it would have to be given your philosophical prejudices. Instead, you can look at how people talk. The fact that philosophy is a confusion of language seems to just follow from that, since you can just look and see that phil's are confused and don't know what they're talking about. Phil's assume they make sense in virtue of philosophical prejudices too: we have to be making sense, because...

Well, I didn't say anything about relations of ideas.

My point was that Wittgenstein saw the world of facts as Hume did: that's the point of his analogy with the paper with black and white dots, or a net cast over the world with each hole being an individual 'unit' (I forget what the proposition numbers are).

I honestly think the Tractatus takes on the Humean assumptions uncritically, so it is not a challenge to them, unless by accident.

No – Im not really sure what you're talking about, sorry. There must be some fundamental miscommunication between us.

Hume tried to make metaphysics NOT make sense, instead of working around doubts and reduction. That's like Wittgenstein. I don't see what lock has to do with this. — Gregory

Locke (along with Hobbes) postulated that philosophers were prone to talking nonsense, due to not understanding the functions of their language, and in particular due to not associating their words with perceptually-rooted ideas.

I never said anything about 'Kantian facts.' I'll leave it to anyone who wants to try to exposit Kant. I'm not sure if that's even a term people use.

That's not what I said! Please read the post again!

And of course, we have to remember that when we say 'Hume speaking,' this is an abbreviation for Berkeley speaking, who is Locke speaking...and all the way down (read Epicurus, for example!).

A Humean fact is one that is totally causally and logically disconnected from every other. Its holding or not holding in principle has no effect on whether any other such fact holds or doesn't hold.

So you imagine the world, like Wittgenstein's picture of the paper divided into pixels, like a mosaic of black-or-white dots, each of which have only two possible values, and the value of each of which is utterly and completely distinct from the values of the others (any combination is possible). Recall that from this, W. concludes in the Tractatus that causality is superstition (Hume speaking).

I have no idea of what you mean by 'humean mosaic of atomic facts', — Pussycat

Then read more! Consider: the reason you don't know what I mean is the same reason you take the Tractatus to be so original: ignorance of the history of philosophy. If you knew what the empiricists had said for example, you'd never think that the tactic of treating philosophers' statements as meaningless rather than wrong, due to them misunderstanding how language works, was original to Wittgenstein.

In general, we tend to think great figures are more original than they are, because we read them in isolation. Once we read more widely, this illusion disappears.

The Tractatus, in my eyes, is just saying that language mirrors facts in the world, that it is/was designed to do this, and nothing more. I don't think that W. says what language is supposed to be, he just makes this observation, whether he is right or wrong. And, based on this, he goes on to talk about the abuse of language when people, philosophers mainly, use it wrongfully. But then again, we can discuss. — Pussycat

The point is that Wittgenstein's early view of language is not based on observation of how language actually works, but on how it must work if the presuppositions he has hold. You basically just recapitulated that very thought process to me in your post.

I'm not saying it's not innovative in its own right, but the line of attack you just outlined had been part of English philosophy at least since Hume, and arguably since Locke. The idea that philosophers' projects are doomed because they don't understand the logic of the language they used to make their claims is quite old, and the empiricists spent a huge amount of time talking about it.

Their solutions were slightly different, in that they had to do with words untraceable to perceptual sources, but even that reappeared in the positivists. Wittgenstein's entire conception of science, what a fact is, etc., are Humean.

And yeah, I think you're right, Rorty is not going to be a lasting influence on analytics. I see him as the culmination and also last gasp of the Moore – positivist – ordinary language – pragmatist line, which is now out of fashion in favor of a return to naïve and fairly professionalized / scholastic logic-chopping.

It hasn't evaporated, but my sense is that Wittgensteinians are seen now more as a particular in-group, or as a cult by those who don't like them. The dominant forces in analytic philosophy are mainstream ethics, metaphysics, and phil. language – Williamson, Sider, Lewis, and whoever the ethicists are these days. That sort of thing. The big Wittgensteinians are around, like Horwich, but they're sort of considered weirdos now, and a lot of people casually talk about how they hate the late Wittgenstein.

The Wittgensteinian notion of how language works comes from the idea of the world being composed of a Humean mosaic of atomic facts, and the idea that the purpose of language is to say true or false things under certain conditions. It follows from this that for a sentene to have sense is just to carve exactly the set of atomic facts to which it corresponds against those to which it doesn't. The rest of the Tractatus, past the mystical and transcendental stuff, just falls out of that. You can see it as not an account of what language is, but what it would have to be if this picture were right. So Witt. has comments about how everything in natural language must be in order in this way, even though we can't tell how it is and empirically it doesn't look that way. The prejudices are guiding the account of language, not vice-versa.

So Witt's idea of when to be silent is just whenever this mosaic isn't being carved up into 'yes' and 'no.' But then, this isn't how science, language, etc. work. So it's not quite so clear when to be silent or not.