It doesn't do anything so useful and worthy when it entails questioning the existence of the "external world" — Ciceronianus

I tend to agree - to an extent. Debates on abortion, outside academic philosophy, quickly go to topics such as personal identity, the nature of consciousness, the possibility of knowing other people's perceptions, free will and responsibility. On the one hand, Wittgenstein talking about beetles in boxes and G E Moore speculating that he might not have eaten an egg for breakfast. On the other, demonstrations outside clinics. There is a connection - I submit.

Metaphor goes deep.. — Amity

My own understanding is a bit shallow but I'll just go with the flow.

Perhaps it's unfair to characterize the discussion of some traditional philosophical discussions as mere "play." Perhaps it's kinder and more accurate to consider it to be a mental exercise. — Ciceronianus

Philosophy is very broad. Laws and constitutions are built on philosophical foundations. Philosophy includes questions of moral responsibility, human rights, the scope of state powers. The answers to the questions can affect lives and deaths. So this is not just play. Whether philosophy helps or not is another question. I suspect that when tyranny is being planned then philosophy is ineffective. But that's different from being unserious.

"I saw Donald Trump in studio the other day."

"Sure..."

"It's true, he was eating a taco bowl with the production crew."

But otherwise, don't know what truth means — h060tu

I think you're implying that if Trump was eating taco with the crew then the statement that Trump was eating taco with the crew is true. Truth is to say of what is the case that it is the case; or of what is not the case, that it is not the case. That was Aristotle's theory and I'm guessing from your example that it's yours too?

Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hour's amusement, I wou'd return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain'd, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther. — Hume

(THN 1.4.7.9 ; SBN 269)

Hume wrote something along the lines of thinking about scepticism all day and then going out to play billiards without the least doubt about the existence of the external world. I can't find the quote but it's in the spirit of the thread I think.

"Is there a way to describe various finite quantities without going right to numbers?" - answer, yes there is: we can talk about 'lots', 'few', 'big', 'small' etc. It's the same with infinities. We can talk about 'endless', 'unbounded', for example. Is there anything that is endless or unbounded? I think so. E.g. a race round a standard athletic track that ends only when there is no more track ahead of us. But is that what you are thinking about?

...rarely.... — Tom Storm

It will become an everyday experience before very long. Then you will start to enjoy it. Then you will come to expect it. Then you will be a grumpy old bloke. Just sketching out the map of the road ahead...

.......but women then brand the man as ignoble — Agent Smith

To the puzzlement of many men, women want fairness and justice and they also appreciate it when others are kind and considerate. They like to have equal pay for equal work and somewhere to sit when they are especially tired. In return, many are prepared not to have special advantages and to take care of others' needs whenever they reasonably can. That deals with the 'equality' vs 'seats on the bus' puzzle, which should be no puzzle at all. We all want fairness. We all need the kindness of strangers occasionally.

The thing is, who would front the money? — Manuel

Whenever someone talks cheerfully about colonising Mars, they are usually thinking about somebody else living there and not thinking what it would be like for them to live there. When Life on Mars becomes possible, Life on Earth will become more prized and only for the rich. The planet with no atmosphere will become the destination for people on the public housing waiting list.

....intrinsic properties of experiences that are also ineffable, nonphysical, and ‘given’ to their subjects incorrigibly (without the possibility of error)

"I had an ineffable experience."
"Wow, me too! I wonder if we both had the same experience."
"I would think so. One ineffable experience is much like another. Once you've identified an experience as ineffable there's not much more you can say about it. In fact, there's absolutely nothing more you can say about it. That's what 'ineffable' means."
"Was it like a sound or a sight or a scent or something?"
"I couldn't say. If I could say, then of course it wouldn't be ineffable. And ineffable is just what it was."
"Hmm. Well, maybe I was mistaken about mine. Not sure it was truly ineffable."
"Well, you can't mistake an ineffable experience, mate. No possibility of error there!"
"Oh, ok, then it definitely wasn't ineffable."

That's all I have to say about ineffable experiences.

Amalac

Very interesting lecture. "There are no essences: things are just what they are." The knock-down slogan against essentialism.

An essentialist might reply: "There are essences: because things are just what they are."

Just as you noted, Russell and Wittgenstein seem to come to opposite conclusions about the essences of words from much the same premisses.

Depends on what we want to achieve. — Amalac

One thing we want to achieve is preservation of the phenomena. Is the sentence "Socrates wrote The Republic" using the name "Socrates" correctly to refer to Socrates and saying something false about him; or using the name incorrectly by introducing a false description and therefore referring to Plato? Kripke (in those lectures) would say we would tend to say the former.

The "essence" of Socrates thus consists of those properties in the absence of which we should not use the name "Socrates." The question is purely linguistic: a word may have an essence, but a thing cannot. — Russell

It's curious that although what Russell says about the use of words seems quite in line with Wittgenstein, and yet he concludes that words do have an essence, unlike Wittgenstein. — Alamac

I have to admit I do not really know what it means for words to have an essence and yet things not to have an essence. If the essence of "Socrates" is every property in the absence of which something encountered in the universe is not Socrates, then the same criterion can be used to determine correct and incorrect use of the name "Socrates" - and vice-versa - perhaps?

An interesting note on this argument Kripke on Naming and Necessity. Socrates might have died aged 2 and it would still have been Socrates the very same person, as Kripke said. He was challenging Russell's view of names as 'disguised descriptions' and pointed out that almost all the descriptions we might use to pin down a reference to Socrates could have been false and yet we would still successfully refer to Socrates. I think Kripke came close to essentialism in that argument.

If there are no essences, then it's not essential for a chair to be made of a physical substance or to have more than two dimensions. This is one of the criteria of essence. It's the properties without which a thing could not be the thing that it is. If a thing is not physical (like triangles and constitutions) or it has at most two dimensions (like a circle or a geometrical point), then we can't say much specific about it but we can say at least and for sure that it is not a chair. That's not a huge philosophical triumph but it's a start.

The scout master is a character in Catch 22. Anyone who works for long enough to become an Eagle will have grown too old to become an Eagle.

You can only get out of flying missions if you're crazy. But if you want to get out of flying missions then you are clearly sane. So whether you're crazy enough to fly or sane enough to refuse, you have to fly. Joseph Heller, for anyone who hasn't come across it yet.

I only dropped in because I thought we'd done with Goebbels and had gone on to the general question. I've tried Moore. I've tried Swift. I've tried Plato. And old Goebbels keeps coming back. I wish he'd go away. He's not helping.

Why would someone want to convince someone else of something that they themselves think is false? — clemogo

That is a beautiful question. It is the one asked by Swift:

For he [Gulliver's 'master'] argued thus: “that the use of speech was to make us understand one another, and to receive information of facts; now, if any one said the thing which was not, these ends were defeated, because I cannot properly be said to understand him; and I am so far from receiving information, that he leaves me worse than in ignorance; for I am led to believe a thing black, when it is white, and short, when it is long.” And these were all the notions he had concerning that faculty of lying, so perfectly well understood, and so universally practised, among human creatures. — Swift, Gulliver's Travels

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/829/829-h/829-h.htm

Contrast Plato:

“It is appropriate for the guardians to lie to the citizens for the benefit of the polis, but it is subversive and destructive for anyone else in the polis to lie.”

I'm on slightly surer ground with the sources now I think.

You are right to object. I was quoting from wikipedia as an authority. That should have made me at least pause. On the general question, whether you can believe something and also disbelieve it, I'm not sure. I think the point of Moore's example is that when you say 'I believe p and not-p' you seem to be contradicting yourself; but it's quite possible to believe p when p is not the case and so there is no strict logical contradiction in the statement. So it's a paradox.

Goebbels probably never said that. But you have read in so many places that he said it that you now believe he did say it. Constant repetition will make us compliant in belief as in behaviour.

The [..] supposed quotation of Joseph Goebbels has been repeated in numerous books and articles and on thousands of web pages, yet none of them has cited a primary source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie#Goebbels's_description

Since we and our acquaintances and credit companies know exactly who we are outside the philosophy lab, why do we struggle with the question when we step inside?

I can't tell the difference between mass delusions/hallucinations and objectivity. — TheMadFool

Mass delusion is when all your followers kill themselves, expecting the world to end as you told them. Objectivity is when you find out who your cell-mate is.

I tend to see the funny side of real things rather than contrived things. — Tom Storm

I'm sorry to break this news, Tom Storm, but that may be the first step on a road to becoming a stand-up comedian. The second step is wanting to share it with everyone. You're almost there - despite yourself... :wink:

That would explain why I didn't get the body I wanted. Too slow of brain to get the good one. Only myself to blame. :cry:

You are, because you chose to be. — Book273

There was a really nice body I was going to choose to be in but someone else got it first and I had to settle for this second-rate body. If that sounds absurd, it's because the idea of choosing to be in the body you are in *is* absurd. Let's think about what's involved in choosing.

Other related puzzles. Why is the time now? Why is my brother always in a place he can call 'here' and I am also in a place I can call 'here' and yet they are different places? Why must the volume of my body always be the same as the amount of water it displaces when submerged? Why must a fair coin have an equal chance of landing heads and tails? I put these questions to raise the possibility that your questions are not so much about personal identity as about how particular concepts work: "I", "anybody else", "this", for example; and how statements that seem to give information may be about concepts rather than particular facts or states of affairs.

Oh gosh, I've never seen that. I laughed from start to finish. Thank you. I guess you know Jonathan Miller as Bertrand Russell?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSifxC_L9F0

Maybe. I personally dislike most stand up comedy, so I'm out. — Tom Storm

My feelings exactly until a new breed of stand-up appeared which consists of very witty treatment of serious subjects - basically, excellent lectures. I mentioned maths, Classics and geography, there are probably more. If 'stand-up' calls to mind some guy wittering on about his flatmate's bathroom habits then I agree, but there's more to it than that, I promise.

Ok, I think I get it. I shouldn't be looking for philosophers doing stand-up. I should be looking for stand-ups doing philosophy. That's a great idea!

There's a sound in my head? Are sights and smells in there as well? — Ciceronianus

By the locked-in-the-library theory we can never know whether what's in each others' heads are sights and smells and sounds or something else or nothing. And we can't know about anything outside our heads, either. I can't see how I would ever get to know what's even in my own head or what a head is.

The naive realist believes perception reveals the world as it is. — hypericin

That doesn't sound like naivety to me. I think the naive realist believes that, when she sees a chair, then, absent any good reason for thinking she's the victim of trick, it's a chair she's looking at. She thinks that if she has four guests and three chairs then she's one chair short, just because there are three chairs to be seen and three chairs that she sees. If you ask a naive realist whether she thinks her perception reveals the world as it is, she will likely look at you blankly as if it's a question without much clear meaning - and I'm with her on that one.

Voting, not so much. — Book273

Two sayings from the 1970's - are they still current? "If voting changed anything, it would be illegal," and "Whoever you vote for, the government always gets in". The first is anarchist, the second is grumbling at the bus stop, but similar sentiment.

If we express an opinion surely we are looking for conflict? — I like sushi

...except when two people agree, I guess. I mean, two people saying "Hey, I love avocados too just like you!" are not necessarily trying to have a fight about avocadoes.

Surely we express opinions for all sorts of reasons. — StreetlightX

I wondered about that as well. I think the charitable reading is that the OP's question is limited to those opinions that make us angry or upset.

Anger is vulnerability, and when opinions of others make one angry, perhaps it is out of fear they may be right? — Tzeentch

I think that's a very good point For example, people get furious at anti-vax (or pro-vax) opinions, aware as we all are of uncertainties that could affect life and death. They don't generally pay much attention to the idea that the government is run by alien lizards, being fairly secure in the knowledge that it isn't.

People protested against it all over the world, not just on US soil. — god must be atheist

True. And other people voted for it, organised it and went to fight in it. Other people thought that John Lennon and Bob Dylan were useless hippies or dangerous communists. The rightness or wrongness of the war was debated then as it is now. There is no agreed history, just as there is no agreed account of current affairs. This is not a matter of ignorance or knowledge but of political judgement.

Another threat to democracy I hear about is people lumping together opinions they disagree with as conspiracy theories held by gullible, ill-informed and ignorant people. I'm not sure that contempt for opposing views is a threat to democracy from either direction but it's possibly not helping.

I think it's a question which shouldn't arise, frankly, and I assume it does only if one takes faux doubt of the kind which so famously was indulged in by Descartes seriously. — Ciceronianus

Ok, but it keeps coming back. Descartes has been dead a long time and we still worry about brains in vats. The flies get out of the bottle and then a whole new generation of flies gets in.

they (or any other parts of my body) exist "independently of my experience" if that's what he's saying — Ciceronianus

He is addressing the question whether all his experience might be a mere figment of his imagination, including his own hands. Well, here's one hand. Is anybody putting their own hand up to say 'No, it isn't' or 'No, it might not be'? You mean no, what isn't? You mean this hand I'm producing? It's a while since I read it but from memory he does not claim to refute universal scepticism but to advance an argument that, if all 'this' is hallucination, then I'm not producing a hand here in this lecture theatre - the very hand whose existence we may proceed to discuss, apparently assuming that it's here because, well, here it is. I would love to have been there.

I'm speculating, but I think the use of a body part as an example is a nod to Descartes - we might not doubt our own existence but we can doubt the existence of bodies including our own. A wilder speculation is that he was thinking in 1939 of recent brutalities which young men were thankful to survive still in possession of their hands or other limbs.

I'm not certain what you mean by this, — Ciceronianus

I mean the famous 'proof' of an external world.

"Much of the lecture is devoted to working out what counts as an ‘external object’, and Moore claims that these are things whose existence is not dependent upon our experience. So, he argues, if he can prove the existence of any such things, then he will have proved the existence of an ‘External World’. Moore then maintains that he can do this —

How? By holding up my two hands, and saying, as I make a certain gesture with the right hand, ‘Here is one hand’, and adding, as I make a certain gesture with the left, ‘and here is another’ (‘Proof of an External World’ 166)" https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moore/

Moore was not claiming that he had a justified belief that he has hands. He was actually producing his hands. To deny the external world would be to deny that what he was producing were his hands. In the same way, if there is no external world, then I am not producing this post on PF. It's performance philosophy.

The spirit of G E Moore is upon my shoulder. If there is no external world, then I'm not posting these words on PF.