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  • A Newbie Questions about Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
    Insofar as some true relation aRb pictures the world, — Banno

    Do you mean

    Insofar as some true proposition "aRb" (and/or some spatial relation within its sign) pictures a fact,

    ?

    Just trying to follow.

    Sure, the relation shows the state of affairs, — Banno

    Yes. Fact = state of affairs = relation.

    A proposition, for W, is any such entity (by whatever of those names) which is used in a language to (if true) show (be a diagram of) another.
  • Phenomenalism
    the visual and auditory imagery is causally covariant with
    — Michael

    Yes that's much better than

    the thing that we hear is causally covariant with
    — Michael

    But then what's indirect about it?     — bongo fury

    Maybe I chose the wrong bit to make the point about indirectness.

    Not that "the visual and auditory imagery is causally covariant with" isn't much better than "the thing that we hear is causally covariant with". It's a lot better, at least when comparing with hallucination, for the same reason that referring to Frodo-discourse is better than referring to Frodo, in literal-minded analysis.

    But causation is one of many varieties of (roughly speaking) binary relation that appear to warrant inference of indirectness, willy-nilly. Any cause and effect step is plausibly a causal chain or story. We need merely zoom in, to see more steps.

    The other varieties sharing this apparent warrant include acquaintance, information, access, trace, [etc, suggestions welcome].

    (I do think it's weird that making the theatre Cartesian by having an audience appears to satisfy a (vain?) urge to insert a properly direct step; but that may be beside the point.)

    So, I shouldn't have to ask what's potentially indirect about "causally covariant with". Every step of causation might be a chain.

    Whereas,

    this visual and auditory imagery is isomorphic with — Michael

    Yes that's much better than

    the thing that we hear is isomorphic with — Michael

    ... for the same reason that it avoids equivocating between real and imagined. But it's also a better example of directness, in the relation between image and (if there is one) object. The isomorphism is perfectly direct. So are: conventional (i.e. an agreed pretence of) reference between word and object, and derivative notions of about-ness, such as Putnam's or Goodman's.

    So, one reason to question the doctrine of indirect realism is to resist the one-way or "bottom-up" notion of learning, as a transmission of knowledge along a chain or channel or conveyer belt.

    Admittedly, dispensing with causation, acquaintance, information, access, trace etc., might leave the success or truth of the imagery (and hence learning) unexplained. If reference (including pictorial reference, according to Goodman) is conventional and pretended, it can't convey anything intrinsic about objects. If perceptual imagery is the directly-about-history book re-writing itself, how does it get to be true, as well as direct?

    Ok. But the notion of a causal or other chain-like process might still be wrong.

    Someone contesting indirect realism doesn't necessarily want to claim that knowledge about the rock flows specifically from the rock to the person. It might result rather from the vast network of interactions and interpretations in the background.

    Someone contesting direct realism doesn't necessarily want to claim that knowledge about the rock flows specifically from rock to TV screen to person. It might result rather from the vast network of interactions and interpretations in the background.     — bongo fury

    Advocates of causation, acquaintance, information, access, trace etc., may find the caricature in terms of chain and channel to be libelous. The author takes full responsibility.
  • Phenomenalism
    Why? — Isaac

    "Why is it the words and not the events that inform us?" ?

    Or "why are the words still about the events?" ?
  • Phenomenalism
    ↪Michael


    No worries.
  • Phenomenalism
    ↪Michael


    He's straw but intellectual?

    Why the denial about the Cartesian theatre?

    Or, better denial, please.
  • Phenomenalism
    Ah good, you added more.

    the visual and auditory imagery is causally covariant with — Michael

    Yes that's much better than

    the thing that we hear is causally covariant with — Michael

    But then what's indirect about it? You say the homunculus is straw, but don't you need him, for indirectness?
  • Phenomenalism
    That's just playing word games. — Michael

    Logic, hopefully.

    They don't see a picture. They see an apple. — Michael

    Do you mean, they notice an apple (shape) in their mental picture?

    It's like saying that Frodo carried the One Ring to Mordor, that the One Ring is a fiction, and so that Frodo carried a fiction to Mordor. — Michael

    You're not being serious. Ok.
  • Phenomenalism
    I didn’t say it’s not a mental image. — Michael

    Oh, so it's a picture, after all?



    it’s bad grammar to then describe this as “hearing mental imagery.” — Michael

    But you just did:

    When a schizophrenic hears voices those voices [that you just said this person hears] are just “mental imagery” — Michael



    do you accept that schizophrenics see and hear things that aren’t there? — Michael

    Literally, they obviously don't. They 'see and hear things'.
  • Phenomenalism
    Does the schizophrenic who sees people who aren’t there see a picture of people? — Michael

    That's my question. Prompted by,

    the kind of thing that we hear in the case of a veridical perception is the same kind of thing that we hear in the case of an hallucinatory perception (e.g. the schizophrenic who hears voices). — Michael

    What kind of thing is it, if not an actual voice, and now apparently not a mental image either?
  • Phenomenalism
    Obviously the point for me is the usual one, of whether or not seeing an apple is a case of seeing a picture of the apple.
  • Phenomenalism
    Reading a history textbox doesn't give us direct access to history. — Michael

    But the book itself: is it directly about the historical events, or only indirectly?
  • Phenomenalism
    Yes. — Michael

    So the true factual literature "my dog has fleas" isn't about an actual dog?

    Or is it that actual things are the same kind of things as made-up things?
  • Phenomenalism
    the kind of thing that we hear in the case of a veridical perception is the same kind of thing that we hear in the case of an hallucinatory perception (e.g. the schizophrenic who hears voices). — Michael

    And, I suppose: the kind of thing that we read about in true factual literature is the same kind of thing that we read about in fiction?
  • A Newbie Questions about Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
    Entities are patterns of properties. — Harry Hindu

    At a stretch. Ok. If mental entities include linguistic conventions, then no one counseled dispensing with them.
  • Is there an external material world ?
    we renounce dualism (Dennett, 1991). We
    put in its place a dual aspect monism     — Hobson and Friston's Choice
  • A Newbie Questions about Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
    ...a mental entity — Harry Hindu

    Not an entity, that's the thing. A linguistic regularity. A pattern.
  • A Newbie Questions about Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
    For instance, how do we non-korean-speaking people know that Korean is a language? It just looks like scribbles and strange sounds being made by some people to us. How can you explain the difference in how different people interpret different scribbles and utterances if not by referring to mental entities? — Harry Hindu

    Convention?
  • A Newbie Questions about Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
    The Eiffel tower is in Paris, is 330m in height and is made of wrought iron. I can replace "I saw the 330m tall wrought-iron structure in Paris" by "I saw the Eiffel Tower". Is this what Wittgenstein is referring to ? — RussellA

    The structure facts, definitely. The top being 330m from the bottom. The iron molecules being roughly 40 times as numerous as the carbon, thank you Wikipedia. These are like the spatial arrangement of the "tables, chairs and books" (3.1431) or of the "a" and the "b" in "aRb" (3.1432).

    The tower's being in Paris: not sure, good question. Or two questions: if its being in Paris is its relation to a different structure (Paris), then may a proposition analogously derive its sense (it's potential interpretation as a diagram) from its relations to other propositions? I'm guessing no, because atomism. Or, if its being in Paris is a unary relation, i.e. a property, then how might an isomorphism (between this tower fact and some other fact) obtain? (Does W somewhere discuss the redness of the rose in something like this respect?)

    The definite description aspect, I doubt the relevance. Or rather, I've no idea.




    An aesthetic is a unity between its parts, rather than just being an aggregation of parts loosely related. — RussellA

    Ok, but then, still curious that you would downplay the very relations, tight as you like, by which unity of your required sort is achieved.




    but did he say that music uses propositions, that propositions are used in music as well as language ? — RussellA

    The gramophone record, the musical idea, the written notes, and the sound-waves, all stand to one another in the same internal relation of depicting that holds between language and the world. — 4.014
  • A Newbie Questions about Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
    If we dispense with mental entities then what is left? — Harry Hindu

    Language, art, music, etc.

    https://monoskop.org/images/1/1b/Goodman_Nelson_Languages_of_Art.pdf
  • A Newbie Questions about Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
    In great music, as with great painting, the notes, or brush marks, combine into a single aesthetic experience, — RussellA

    That depends on how you look at it, as W points out in the case of sentence tokens:

    For in a printed proposition, for example, no essential difference is apparent between a propositional sign and a word.
    (That is what made it possible for Frege to call a
    proposition a composite name.)     — 3.143

    Curious that you want to downplay the relational/factual/structural aspect of the artwork and stress the whole, er, feeling, while W is keen to use musical and pictorial structure to explain propositional structure.
  • A Newbie Questions about Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
    ↪Tate


    Never mind then. Back to words and music.
  • A Newbie Questions about Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
    (that's the overall message of the TLP, anyway). — Tate

    What is?
  • A Newbie Questions about Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
    ↪Harry Hindu


    That's the kind of reason I (and I claimed also W) counseled dispensing with mental entities.

    I was going along with it (entities included) out of interest, while I thought I could follow. Awareness too, and I'm out of here.
  • A Newbie Questions about Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
    So yes, as far as I know. — RussellA

    Well I did specify:

    (For you?) — bongo fury

    So, yes.

    Good. I didn't misunderstand.

    But that line of thinking was leading me to expect,

    the individual notes and combinations of notes in music express feelings not [while combinations of notes express] thoughts. — RussellA
  • A Newbie Questions about Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
    ↪RussellA


    So, yes?
  • A Newbie Questions about Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
    Feelings are different to thoughts. Feelings are not propositional, thoughts are propositional. — RussellA

    Are feelings to thoughts as words are to propositions (and things are to facts)?

    (For you?)

    Just trying to square this with,

    the individual notes and combinations of notes in music express feelings not thoughts. — RussellA
  • A Newbie Questions about Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
    There would be no public language if there were no private thoughts. — RussellA

    Interesting theory.
  • A Newbie Questions about Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
    But as Wittgenstein is identifying thought as proposition, in talking about propositions, he is also talking about thoughts. — RussellA

    Loosely (indirectly, residually) of course, but he (like the grade school teacher) isn't heading towards your kind of diagram, in which thoughts or any other mental units combine or map as discrete units (in the manner of word or picture tokens). Is my point.

    He's getting out of the head, into the language.
  • A Newbie Questions about Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
    ↪RussellA


    My comment was very broad brush, so I wouldn't be surprised to have chapter and verse thrown against it. But the only line there that I can see addressing my comment is

    4 The thought is the significant proposition — RussellA

    But I'm suggesting that, like the grade school teacher, W wants to talk in technical terms (worthy of a diagram) about the propositions and their reference, not so much about thoughts as such: as items in their own right.
  • A Newbie Questions about Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
    "...the actual colour that I experience in my mind, which could be green for me and yellow for you" is incoherent. — Banno

    How do you mean incoherent? Because of a homunculean regress? Or because inescapably private? Or somehow else?

    Or is "incoherent" not the criticism? "Fantastical", maybe?



    It might be helpful at this point to again look at one of the great themes, perhaps the main theme, running through all Wittgenstein's work. It's the distinction between what can be said and what can be shown. The notion permeates his work. — Banno

    But does it distinguish, simply, between literal, declarative statements and other kinds of symbol use (words, music or pictures), as it does for Goodman?

    Or does it, for W or you, have to do with the isomorphism business? (I often wonder.)



    In the Tractatus, a name is the thing it denotes. — Banno

    Is this a typo? If not, then oh dear.
  • A Newbie Questions about Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
    One respect in which I think it fair to say that the Tractatus anticipates the PI is in arguing in terms of "thought" in such a way as to facilitate behaviourism, as opposed to the kind of psychology indulged here -
    ↪RussellA


    W's use of "thought" reminds me of how teachers in the UK tell 3rd-graders to recognise a complete sentence: as one that expresses "a complete thought". I.e. what it reminds me of is how to use but immediately get past the psychology, and to work with language and logic instead.

    Like the teacher, he probably didn't mean "thoughts" to refer to identifiable brain events that correspond or fail to correspond to propositions. It was more a matter of putting the reference of symbols in the perfectly realistic context of our deliberate efforts to make sense of them.




    The proposition "Rembrandt is a painter" is a description of Rembrandt as a painter. By seeing a picture of a Rembrandt painting, which is isomorphic with the person Rembrandt, we gain an acquaintance with Rembrandt. — RussellA

    Does W say "acquaintance"? Or is this you critiquing him?

    And do you not think that W claims that the proposition "Rembrandt is a painter" is isomorphic to the fact of Rembrandt being a painter?
  • Is there an external material world ?
    No, classifying is descriptive. It's part of the language game. — Marchesk

    So is seeing-as. It's reaching for suitable words and pictures.

    Part of the confusion over the hard problem is failing to understand the difference between describing the world and experiencing it. — Marchesk

    Well put. The difference is artificial, like the problem.
  • Is there an external material world ?
    What does it mean to see differently other than to see different things? — Michael

    It means to classify the same things differently.

    To see different things is to carve it all differently.
  • Is there an external material world ?
    Because it seems to me that when we say that one person sees something as red and another as blue that the words "red" and "blue" are referring to the particular qualities of their individual experiences. That's colour as everyone ordinarily understands it. — Michael

    How isn't it a Cartesian theatre understanding?
  • Is there an external material world ?
    I saw this image recently: — Michael

    In a Cartesian theatre?
  • A Newbie Questions about Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
    ↪Fooloso4

    I wish... I had a pair of bongos.


    As I understand it, as they are used here those symbols denote any two elemental objects. — Fooloso4

    Any two, or any two that are related in the fashion specified (by "R")?
  • A Newbie Questions about Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
    Single quote marks are also sometimes used in academic writing, though this isn’t considered a rule. — Fooloso4

    Sure, but also they can be 'scare' quotes:

    Specialist terms that are unique to a subject are often enclosed in single quotation marks in both U.S. and British English. — Fooloso4

    So in a thread about distinguishing word from object, requests for clarification might be expected.

    Square brackets [ ] should be used. — Fooloso4

    Haha, fair do's.

    There are no "sign objects" — Fooloso4

    But there are sign-objects by other names, e.g. "the picture's elements", "a propositional sign [...] composed of spatial objects", "elements of the propositional sign", "simple signs", etc.

    'a' and 'b' are variables. — Fooloso4

    I expect this could be a right reading. But I'd like to know whether this means, for you or for W, that

    "a" and "b" are two particular symbols with no fixed denotation?

    Or something else?     — bongo fury
  • A Newbie Questions about Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
    He used the term 'name' in a way that is different from the way we ordinarily use it. — Fooloso4

    Ok. And you prefer single inverted commas, but the reader infers, from your use of the word "term", that you use these single marks as quote marks. We aren't sure why you decline to clarify with doubles, when invited, but never mind.

    Names referred to the simple or elementary objects. — Fooloso4

    If you mean, names were for W those symbols that referred to simple or elementary objects, that doesn't sound any different to ordinary usage of "name" in logic.

    What they are, he never said. — Fooloso4

    Also standard. Interesting, of course, if W is keen to be asked the further question.

    The relation between these objects is not another object and so a relation is not a name. — Fooloso4

    Do you mean,

    The relation between these objects is not another object and so a relation cannot be named (referred to by a name). — Fooloso4

    ? Or,

    The relation between these sign-objects is not another sign-object and so such a relation cannot be a name? — Fooloso4

    ? Or both?

    'a' and 'b' are not names either but refer to any simple object. — Fooloso4

    Do you mean,

    "a" and "b" are not names either but refer to — Fooloso4

    ... any two particular names, according to context?

    Or do you mean, "a" and "b" are two particular symbols with no fixed denotation?

    Or something else?
  • A Newbie Questions about Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
    'R' is not the name of the relation between 'a' and 'b'. What that relation is is determined by 'a' and 'b'. — Fooloso4

    Do you (agreeing with W) mean,

    "R" is not the name of the relation between a and b. — Fooloso4

    ?

    And then do you (agreeing with W) mean,

    What that relation is is pictured by the relation between "a" and "b". — Fooloso4

    ? Although that doesn't fit with the following sentence, so do you (agreeing with W if you say so, not sure I follow) mean,

    What that relation (between a and b) is is determined by a and b. Simple objects contain within themselves the possibilities of their combinations. — Fooloso4

    ?
  • A Newbie Questions about Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
    an abstract counterpart to the whole truth-bearer. Not just a dog that has fleas, but an abstract referent of "that the dog has fleas". Not just a thing, but a fact. — bongo fury

    W's picture theory of meaning is that a particular one of the facts or structural features of a truth-bearer is isomorphic to (is a diagram of) its truth-making counterpart.

    This means that the truth-bearer is of interest as, or as the location of, a fact, not just as a thing. E.g. as the fact that its "a" character is in a certain spatial relation on the page to a "b" character. (3.1432.) Not just as the individual thing, the written or printed sentence token, in which that fact occurs.

    (Or, in this case, the relevant syntactic fact might be a certain spatial relation between the "dog" and "fleas" tokens.)

    The subtlety of the distinction leads W to declare, with some emphasis,

    3.14 The propositional sign is a fact.

    Notice though that this is very far from equating a truth-bearing proposition (or even the propositional sign the fact of whose structure is crucial for the picturing relationship) with the truth-making fact that it thus pictures.
    ...
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