I was under the impression that Wittgenstein was advocating an intuitionalist conception of language in the Investigations. You can see it in his famous example of a lion who could speak but we would never understand it. — Wallows

Wittgenstein draws a sharp distinction between understanding how to use a word according to public convention, versus the personal attribution of meaning to a word by private acts of the imagination as part of self-expression or sense-making. And he denied the existence of a necessary relationship between these two sorts of meaning. So he wasn't a "psychologismist" in the sense of believing that the meaning of theoretical terms of public discourse could be semantically reduced to private experiences via a private application of translation rules that map theoretical terms into observation terms - as was briefly considered by the logical positivists during their foray into phenomenalism and verificationism.

Wittgenstein's arguments against private language therefore present a paradox. For he presented thought experiments that supposedly delineate public linguistic semantics from 'a priori' private intuition, yet these arguments only appeal to private intuition... His arguments are like arguing with oneself that one's mental image of Elvis Presley isn't the real Elvis Presley because one can imagine the "real" Elvis entering the room.

Hence in my opinion, Wittgenstein's private language arguments cannot be consistently interpreted as being a proof of ontological claims. Rather, they should be construed more weakly as being a therapeutic construction with only medicinal value - arguments that judging by the confusion of the public, appear to have failed in their intended therapeutic purpose.

Consider the sentence "Animals eat in order to survive". How is this different from saying "survival tends to follow eating"?

In a given situation, to predict a person's motives is to predict their behaviour. And to predict their behaviour involves interpolating memories of that person and the world in general. Teleology should therefore be considered true, or at least meaningless.

Realism is a type of constructivism. For otherwise the statements of realists would not exist. The difference between realists and idealists is in what statements they construct and for what purposes.

The two words are different. Phenomenon implies an experienced thing, whereas change does not imply experience. So two concepts, since it makes sense to speak of non-phenomenal change. — noAxioms

sorry, perhaps i should have been clearer. I'm referring to change within the context of 'phenomenal change' and it's relationship to the A series, as opposed to mathematical representations of change, and arguing that the A series deflates away.

When people say things like "time flows by" they appear to imply that the phenomena of a river is different to the passage of time, something that comes about by first distinguishing phenomena from the A series and then equivocating the A series with the B series to give time an illusion of hidden dimensionality above and beyond what is observed. A flowing river isn't merely a metaphor for time passing, for they are the same thing. "time flows by" just means "the river flows" here. This is entirely consistent with any mathematical description of physical change.

I think those arguments are inane. I don't understand the "if y cannot fail to have x" part of your comment, though.

We're also probably not going to agree on what meaning is. — Terrapin Station

My original point was that I cannot make sense of the notion of unchanging phenomena, so "phenomena changes" is a tautology that says nothing. One might as well have said "phenomena is phenomena" or "change is change".

So to my mind, there isn't room for two concepts, namely that of phenomena and that of temporal change. Furthermore, when we learned the meaning of the words "changing" and "unchanging" we learned it with reference to public semantic conventions, and not directly in relation to immediate experience.

One of those "you can't have x if there is none of x's opposite" arguments? — Terrapin Station

Yes, because if y cannot fail to have x, then x is part of what y means .

"Phenomena is always changing" is analogous to "Every rod has a length"

So just has we can eliminate the concept of length by only referring to rods, we can eliminate the concept of change by only referring to phenomena - where "phenomena" means to refer to the world in general.

Isn't the idea of essential phenomenal change nonsense rather than true of false?

To say "phenomena is always changing" is to assume the meaning of "phenomena could be still". But what exactly is a still experience? For i've never had an intrinsically still experience. Whenever I have ordinarily declared that everything is still, is in relation to performing a task during which I observed things were changing, but not in a way considered important to the task.

So if 'still phenomena' is logically impossible, then to assert the opposite that phenomena is changing is meaningless if interpreted to be an essential statement of experience.

There isn't such a thing as 'physical phenomena', for no physical concept can be given a persistent interpretation in terms of experiential phenomena, as the logical positivists soon realised.

Take for instance Red. It's physical meaning is defined in terms of optical wavelength, not in terms of a sensory impression, and we cannot give an exhaustive description of the context that is necessary such that an application of optical red always produces a "red" sensory impression. Furthermore, the theoretical meaning of "optical wavelength" is holistic, given that it is a property whose meaning and experimental determination rests upon the understanding and application of the rest of physics. Physical red therefore cannot be given a phenomenal definition.

We use our sensory impressions as estimators of our use of physical terms, but they aren't the definitions of our physical terms. On the other hand, we shouldn't forget that our use of physical terms is ultimately determined by the totality of our sensory impressions. So we aren't justified in jumping from semantic holism to physical realism.

(t) transitivity: aRb & bRc => aRc
(s) symmetry: aRb <=> bRa
(r) reflexivity: aRa

(s) & (t) => (r) via substitution of (s) into (t)

Therefore:

(s) => { (t) => (r) } (giving up irreflexivity if transitivity is true)
(s) & Not (r) => Not (t) (giving up transitivity if irreflexivity is true)

He probably wants to argue that a 'worldly referent' is not what adherents have in mind, so your interpretation is sort of cheating, a diversion. — Joshs

But how do we know what adherents have in mind? Isn't the only way to determine this to establish the environmental conditions under which they make their "transcendental" assertions?

Suppose that a christian evangelist insists "God isn't part of the world". If we could determine the environmental and neurological conditions under which he asserts this sentence, then shouldn't we interpret his utterance of "God isn't part of the world" as referring to these conditions?

Their claims do not transcend experience and are, therefore, meaningless! — charles ferraro

Not necessarily. For if transcendent referents are ruled out of semantics, this does not preclude the word "transcendent" being used to refer to things which are not transcendent.

Unless speech is the ultimate cause of itself, all speech must ultimately refer to an external cause, so even "transcendentally referring" speech has worldly referents, even we do not know them.

All utterances have been used at least once, and hence all utterances have meaning, even if that meaning is indecipherable.

It doesn't make sense for the presentist to think of the past as being immutable, for the presentist does not interpret his memories as referring to anything transcendent of his volatile world of experience, and he surely appreciates that his memories change over time.

And if the presentist also denies the second law of thermodynamics as constituting a direction or orientation of the present, then time-travel into the past or future could be seen as being nonsensical in virtue of experience not being linearly ordered.

I'm not sure how you get the impression that the later Wittgenstein believed in psychologism. For he rejected the "picture theory" of meaning, arguing against the reduction of linguistic understanding to mental states or immanent experience.

But since his methodology was solipsistic, one shouldn't to go so far as to say that he believed linguistic meaning transcended experience, only that semantics cannot be given a constructive universal definition in terms of immanent experience.

Lets think of a specific example, for example let's imagine a god who created the universe and who exists outside of space and time.

Now in one sense this is a meaningless and impossible thing to do, but in another sense this is perfectly possible. After all, we can imagine anything and associate it with a sentence.

Also consider the fact that religious people who purportedly make transcendent claims teach the meaning of their claims and think about them. But this would not make sense or be possible unless their claims were in fact not transcendent of experience.

So my way of thinking is this: propositions concerning the supposedly transcendent are in fact ordinary propositions concerning the world, but in disguise. The only difference between a transcendental proposition and an ordinary proposition, is that the former is irreducible to a particular public worldly referent.

linguistic reference is only demonstrable within a language-game.

Wittgenstein made the therapeutic suggestion to include percepts and actions in the definition of "language", because concepts such as linguistic reference can only be made sense of within the broader concept of a language-game. Whereas if "Language" is used to only refer to the verbal part of the language-game, your philosophical puzzlement arises.

Yes memories have content, in the same way that a digital image has pixel values, but it is a vacuous tautology to say that information is intrinsically past-referring. unless that content is related to other content in a particular way.

Consider false memories and deep-fake photographs. What does it mean to say that they are false, in the sense of having no referent in the past? In a causal sense all phenomena could be said to represent the past, whether the phenomena is considered to be genuine or fake, and whether the phenomena is recalled into mind or externally perceived in the world.

In practice, we verify the truth of memories and photographs and it is our process of verification that decides whether the memory is "true" or "false". Orthodox opinion interprets past-contingent propositions as being intrinsically past-referring and purely by the force of their expressed content and independently of the process of their verification. In contrast, I'm saying it is the process by which a proposition is verified that determines whether the content of the proposition is past, present or future referring.

I cannot fathom a hard distinction between memories and present experience, for i cannot see much of a distinction between memories and photographs. And in the case of a photograph, in order for it to 'refer' to the past, it must be used in a certain way.

For example the photograph must be compared to another photograph, or inspire a personal recollection from a person and so on. As with photographs, it doesn't make sense to say that the content of individual memories are past-referring in and of themselves . Rather the concept of the past is actively constructed out of memories , together with reason, current observations and experimentation, without being reducible to memories themselves. But this implies that the past is also uncertain and changing, and not merely in a dead epistemological sense but in a living sense. Therefore the psychological past and the psychological future appear to be heavily overlapping concepts that cannot be ordered using cartesian coordinates.

In my opinion, the objective of science is the simulation of behaviour, with the aim of inventing efficient and understandable languages with which to communicate the body of results of simulation experiments, for purposes of engineering.

By the most pragmatic interpretation of that aim, any invented language and method of simulation suffices as a scientific method provided it achieves its goals of behavioural replication to the level of precision deemed necessary for a given engineering application.

Aren't tastes and personal preferences also truth-apt?

For isn't it possible to doubt our own tastes and preferences?

Don't we often say that we want something, but regret having done it? Don't we often say we prefer something but regularly do the opposite? And aren't we sometimes glad to have been forced to do something that we wouldn't have done voluntarily?

I've noticed for instance, that when I am depressed I will insist that I don't want to do something, say go for a walk, but when forced to do it I actually enjoy the walk.

So if a person's verbally expressed tastes and preferences are understood to convey information about their future behaviour, then they are falsifiable and hence truth apt. Perhaps society does know what is best for each of us.

Namely, as mentioned in the OP, if we reduce matters of what gives one meaning in life or purpose to a matter of taste or personal whim, then haven't we idiotized the issue of what gives one meaning in life to a simple matter of what I like best or dislike most? — Wallows

Only if epistemology is premised upon a hard object-subject distinction. Or put equivalently, that one's epistemology is based upon the correspondence theory of truth, or alternatively, that pre-existing truth is interpreted as being discovered rather than presently constructed by the observer, whereby their preferences and decision-making are considered irrelevant to the truth they obtained.

Once the correspondence theory of truth is rejected, epistemological scepticism is transformed into ethical and aesthetic preferences.

For example, consider the so called epistemological problem of other minds. According to the correspondence theory of truth, either other minds exist or other minds do not exist and their ontological status is independent of the way human behaviour is judged by an observer. This leads to sceptical doubt , the problem of individuality, the hard-problem of consciousness etc.

On the other hand, suppose the "truth maker" concerning the existence of other minds, is viewed more holistically as being as much a function of an observer's perceptual relationship to the entity he is observing. According to this anti-realist account, an observer's conception of other minds is as much an account of his personal preferences that guide his perceptual and cognitive actions than it is the behavioural data he is viewing.

So in short, if correspondence theory is rejected, then preferences are epistemologically relevant.

Necessary statements are commands or policies, i.e. speech acts, whose origin of force is the intentions of the speaker or institution who asserted them. This includes metaphysical assertions, ethical assertions and all universally quantified 'propositions' over infinite domains in science and mathematics.

So "Bachelors are unmarried men", when interpreted as expressing a necessary truth, is to declare a policy allowing the substitution of the former as a synonym for the latter without exception. Hence the image of it holding in "all possible worlds".

However, when interpreted as expressing a publicly verifiable proposition "Bachelors are unmarried men" is both contingent and under-determined.

Anyway, doesn't the semantic under-determination of the word "determinism" render the question meaningless?

Consider the following circular definition, which nevertheless has intuitive meaning.

Determinism is the thesis that the state of the universe at any given time, together with the laws of nature, fixes (determines) the states of the universe at all other times. — SophistiCat

But this definition is also fulfilled by taking determinism to refer only to the fixing of an arbitrary finite number of states. And no amount of protest against this non-standard interpretation of "determinism" is able to eliminate it.

So it isn't clear in my mind, as to how the original question can be sufficiently represented.

I don't think that Quantum mechanics is helpful or useful in this sort of discussion, because of it's many conflicting interpretations that parallel the philosophical disputes that already existed in classical mechanics in relation to probability, time and counterfactual reasoning.

In my constructivist opinion, what is impossible cannot even be thought. Impossibility refers to the sentences of a language that have no application in a given language-game.

So, i interpret special relativity as saying that an object of positive mass accelerating to c isn't a meaningful proposition of relativity, i.e. that it isn't even wrong, because it cannot be constructed from the application of the postulates of special relativity.

Recall Wittgenstein's analogy for verbal definitions in terms of occasional sign-posts that are placed to guide walkers along a route. The sign-posts tend to be laid down only at the points where they are useful, namely at the places where walkers frequently become lost or confused.

The route is analogous to the implicit conventional use of a word, whereas the sign-posts are analogous to the explicit conventional definition of the word. Needless to say, individual walkers will walk idiosyncratically , regardless of whatever the sign posts say.

And is it necessarily the case that a walker who frequently follows the route could give an accurate verbal account of it without him actually following it?

Interestingly Lewis Carroll's paradox concerning the meaning of logical deduction in "What the Tortoise said to Achilles" came 50 years earlier than Wittgenstein's remarks concerning the relationship between rule-based definitions and language use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Tortoise_Said_to_Achilles

Whilst this is slightly jumping the gun, later on in PI Wittgenstein expresses a similar logical refutation of the idea that the use of language can be grounded in rule-based definitions or explicitly expressed conventions, because in a nutshell the very meaning of rules and conventions is grounded in their use! - For otherwise our definitions lead to infinite regress.
As an example, just try to define the logical operators non circularly.

Also, regarding the question of 'exactness' with respect to the specification of rules, Wittgenstein had questioned earlier in his career (i think during his middle period in Philosophical Grammar), whether the notions of exactness, identicalness etc were a priori in the sense of being phenomenological aspects of experience. The significance being whether or not exactness is empirically reducible. For if it isn't, then the notion of exactness is well, inexact, it's meaning only being demonstrable as a family resemblance of uses across different language-games.

Yes, the concept of intelligence is anthropomorphic, for we understand intelligence to be the capacity to solve problems of relevance to ourselves.

This then leads to the consequence of believing that intelligence is definable in terms of a particular class of algorithm, say deep neural networks with the capacity to react to stimulus the way we do. But this is an illusion, because as far as making predictions is concerned, it is easy to show that on average, no machine learning algorithm can solve a randomly created problem better than any other algorithm. See Wolpert's No Free lunch theorem for a modern reboot of Hume's problem of induction.

So the very definition of intelligence is inductive bias. To say that a process is "intelligent" is merely to say that it is similar to another process, and hence is useful for modelling the other process. So it is perfectly reasonable to call Alpha-Go intelligent - relative to the problem of go, since AlphaGo was designed to learn and represent maximum utility go sequences, at the cost of AlphaGo having relatively lower performance if trained to solve problems dissimilar to go.

i am unable to visualise or demonstrate a semantic notion of logical inconsistency.

I can demonstrate what might be called psychological inconsistency, for example by holding a self-negating belief, such as "This sentence is false. Therefore it is true. Therefore it is false... etc", but this isn't any different from writing {-1, 1, -1, 1,...} as a consequence of iterating the equation x(t+1)=-x(t) starting from x(0) = -1.

This is hardly what one might call the semantics of logical inconsistency, which requires two incompatible statements to be held simultaneously. But this isn't imaginable by definition. At most, I can imagine a driver encountering two signposts for a town which point in opposite directions, and him being unable to make a decision. Or two people disagreeing as to which word applies in a situation. Or a computer program failing a software test.

So logical inconsistency at most refers to a syntactical convention of communication of which nothing else needs to be said. It has no significant implications.

Leave the future alone if you're looking for certainty because certainty isn't possible for even the present or the past. As Bertrand Russell once said the universe could've sprung into existence 5 minutes ago with false memories of the past. Certainty isn't possible. — TheMadFool

It is inferences that are uncertain, whereas a report can only be considered to be false in the sense of violating our conventions for communicating reports.

But is there a clear distinction between inferences and reports? For example, is the sentence "It appears that the dark clouds are about to rain" a necessarily uncertain inference or a necessarily true report?

I understood Wittgenstein as insinuating that one's private experience of red, i.e. phenomenal red, is neither a necessary nor sufficient estimation of the public use of optical red. The purpose of ostensive definition is to 'set up' the estimation of optical red in terms of phenomenal red, and vice versa, without either being semantically reducible to the other, since while they conceptually overlap they are not conceptually equivalent.

Yet at the same time Wittgenstein pointed out that the meaning of physical concepts such as optical red cannot be meaningfully said to transcend the holistic totality of one's experiences, due to the meaning of utterances resting upon use and demonstration.

So I understood Witty as rejecting the epistemologies of both phenomenalism and physicalism, whilst being close in spirit to metaphysical pluralism - not in the sense of substance pluralism but in the sense of use pluralism and family resemblance.

The obvious yet strange thing about predictions is that they cannot be future-referring in any physical sense since they are only expressed in immediate response to present stimuli.

Hence predictions could be interpreted as being reports of the immediate present, thus they could be considered to be necessarily true, regardless of whatever happens in the future.

To the best of my amateur knowledge, there isn't general agreement as to whether Kant meant to posit anything literal that was a-phenomenal. After all, why would he posit the literal existence of something beyond the bounds of sense that his synthetic theory of cognitive judgement denies as having empirical meaning?

It seems to me that Kant could only have been self-consistent if noumena in the literal sense was meant as an empty figure of speech, but with which Kant conveyed metaphorically the notion of there being bounds of meaningful discourse in terms of the ordinary empirical notion of a visual boundary.

Is hearing voices qualitatively different from hearing your own thoughts?
Or are there intermediate cases, where the voices are semi-controllable and semi-self identifiable?

You are free to call a hypertask the motion of an arrow by saying "this moving arrow is a hypertask", which says nothing other than "this is a moving arrow", but you cannot derive the conclusion that motion is a hypertask through summation of individual terms of a series. For there is no notion of "infinite summation" in standard calculus except as a figure speech referring to a bound of the sum of finitely extended finite series that is defined via the principle of induction. You are possibly mistaking the principle of mathematical induction for a proof that a hypertask summation can terminate at a finite value, when mathematical induction is merely a definition for what "infinite series" means in the sense of a bound with respect to finite series.

Zeno's paradox even applies to each of the infinitesimally small elements of a supposed hyper-task. Suppose we use a non-standard calculus that defines a "hyper-real" number 'epsilon' that is both positive and yet infinitely smaller than every positive real number such that it's value when multiplied by the 'number' of natural numbers equals 1.

If you are prepared to swallow arguments of classical logic that permit such a thing , then as I recall, it can also be shown that the logic permits models of "hyper-hyper-real" numbers that are infinitesimally smaller than epsilon, and so on, without bottom. So one cannot appeal to the notion of infinitesimals and hyper-tasks without running into "higher-order" zeno's paradoxes.

Sadly one cannot appeal to mathematics without begging the question. Sure, a normalised infinite geometric series equals 1, which is to say that it is the upper and lower bound of any finitely extended geometric series. But the only way of assigning time intervals to each term of the associated geometric sequence, say {0.5,0.25,0.125...} is to ignore the application of zeno's argument to each and every term.

And the only way to reach the value of the bound is to literally sum an infinite number of terms, which assumes the existence of a hyper-task that mathematicians do not possess -unless , say, motion is considered to represent such a hyper-task, which is precisely what Zeno's argument calls into question.

Well, delusions are rather not beliefs; but, convictions that are justified and maintained through erroneous reasoning like cognitive distortions. — Wallows

But aren't depression and anxiety treated as beliefs produced by cognitive distortions in CBT? And what is the definition of a cognitive-distortion?

Couldn't the falling success rate of talk therapy for treating neurosis possibly be an indication that the placebo effect and behavioural conditioning are the main causal agents responsible for talk therapy's success in treating neurosis, as opposed to talk therapy working due to reasoned argument?

In many cases, the depressive's beliefs about himself and the world are probably more rational than his therapist's in the sense of being evidence based. Perhaps CBT works mostly as a rhetorical device whose success has more in common with religious propaganda than with rational and honest epistemology of the self.

In my own case I frequently have bouts of depression in which I will give lengthy evidence based justifications for my negative life expectations, yet my expectations often change instantly positive the moment the sun comes out... This seems to suggest that negative rationalisation is an epiphenomenal symptom of depression rather than a cause of it.

And knowing all of this doesn't help me avoid negative beliefs during a future depressive episode...

So while there are clearly phenomenological and neurological differences between psychosis and neurosis, I am tempted to think that they should be pushed closer together.

As a non-schizophrenic I have some difficulty understanding delusions, but as an occasional depressive i am familiar with reality contradicting my negative expectations.

Are schizophrenic delusions categorically different from neurotic beliefs? For example, is psychotic paranoia qualitatively different from social-anxiety paranoia? Is the introspective rationalization of those states similar or different?

Thought experiments are nothing but a form of empirical simulation. For any thought experiment can be substituted for a publicly demonstrable virtual reality simulation. But a simulation isn't a simulation of anything until it is actively compared against some other empirical process by using some measure of similarity.

Once this is grasped it is trivial to understand, for instance, how Zeno's paradoxes fail as thought experiments concerning motion. The lunacy becomes clear when a proponent of the argument is forced to demonstrate the paradox with an actual arrow.

Zeno's arguments are better understood to be a thought experiments for Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. You can analyse the arrow's exact position at any given time, but in order to do so you first have to stop the arrow and thereby destroy it's actual motion. But these argument's are still not a priori or "non-empirical" whatever that means, rather they are phenomenological and involve memories and imagined possibilities.

Drawing upon Wittgenstein, one might say that the meaning of a thought experiment is how it is used. Hence thoughts 'in themselves' do not express impossibility.

Impossibility refers to the expression of a thought that isn't usable within in the context of a given language-game. For example, if somebody claims to imagine a heavy object travelling at or beyond the speed of light, they aren't wrong in terms of *what* they imagine, rather the contents of their imagination isn't a model of relativity; but their imagination will be a model of some other theory.