But Malinowski still makes a lot of sense :)

The meaning of meaning. — unenlightened

There came a point in my present studies where I genuinely needed to take out of the library the 1923 book of this title by Ogden and Richards. I felt I'd arrived in Philosophy proper. Of course, I actually wanted the appendix by Malinowski about language, but there you go :)

Similar to the Mary's Room thought experiment. Mary can learn all about the color red while in her white room, but until she gets out in real world an experiences the color red, she can't be said to know the color red. — Cavacava

Many decades ago I was between homes and only had an old black-and-white tv set on which to watch snooker which has multi-coloured balls. I came to learn which was a red ball (there are a lot of them in snooker) but I didn't through the telly experience redness. I am never quite sure I accept Jackson's notion that you can 'learn all about the colour red' without experiencing redness. But I quite take your comparison.

All this being said, though, we return to your original question:

How do appeals to practical reason work? — Moliere

It feels as if the premisses count a lot, but only given that we have some kind of mutual agreement that syllogism-style steps are reasonable.

If the steps are accepted, what *matters* to the person appealed to has to be found and invoked, otherwise the superficially rational argument falls on stony ground. (As someone who has spent many hours as a Green candidate or advocate failing to persuade voters of the merits of my case, I believe I have some experience of this stony ground) We have to find at least a mutually-common premiss to get anywhere. This zone is where many rational-seeming people trying to appeal to what they regard as practical reason get stuck. They get frustrated or angry that others don't get their argument. They are apt to think others are being 'irrational' when it may be that they are coming at it from different presuppositions.

Phronetic explanations seem to need to satisfy both explainer and the explained-to. I'm interested in medical diagnosis in this context. Doctors/nurses need a conclusion as much as a patient does. Sometimes then a the invocation of a so-called 'syndrome', or some other way of just summarising symptoms, masquerades as a diagnosis when in honesty it falls short. To name symptoms well is an important step, but it isn't a diagnosis that can lead to a prognosis. It is however somehow satisfying in lieu of the meaningful.

There's an odd bunch of academics who've formed the Serendipity Society and they're particularly interested in exaptation. You might like this quote from their website (https://theserendipitysociety.wordpress.com):

...many fundamental breakthroughs in science and technology followed what Wiener called the inverse question. These are cases in which the solution precedes the identification of the question. As Meyer writes: “Many of the essential medical discoveries in history came about not because someone came up with a hypothesis, tested it, and discovered that it was correct, but more typically because someone stumbled upon an answer, after some creative thought, figured out what problem had been inadvertently solved” (2007: p.300). Often, problems solved through the inverse question approach revealed new areas of the adjacent possible, which were not even supposed to exist. An essential, but under-appreciated, mechanism of the inverse question is exaptation, which is the co-option of artifacts (or biological traits) for functions different from the ones they were designed (or selected) for. The microwave oven, the bow and arrow, the first antibiotic, antiseptic, and antidepressant are all cases of exaptation. — Serendipity Society

Count me in, I have a relaxing summer ahead of me I hope.

To me life is not fulfilling. It is bleak and pointless. People who make suggestions to try and cheer you up usually mean well. They are not doing a bad thing. They may feel life is as bleak and pointless as you do. I don't despise good intentions that miss the mark. And I find mutual kindness gives pleasure both to giver and receiver. I do feel an encounter with the Other at the heart of things, which is probably why I get on with Levinas. There is no avoiding the Other. Why be prickly with them when they're being transparently kind?

I'd be interested in hearing more about this series of steps. I can kind of see it with respect to the syllogism, and it certainly fits Aristotle's patterns of thought, but I'm wondering how you relate that back to habituation and rule-following. Like, there's a series of habits which build good character and develops phronesis? — Moliere

I only meant the steps in some sort of process of inference.

I do think that in say bike-riding we learn a series of steps, until by repetition we don't even think about the steps, we 'just do it'. So knowing-how is built up from knowing-why. Our reasoning is built into things we have learnt to do automatically, like making tea or feeding the cat. It's hidden in familiar acts.

Sometimes I think the rule-following bit is a bit more a convenience of the world we live in and a product of our educational systems. It's easier to govern large swathes of people who are accustomed to hierarchy and authority. — Moliere

Just to use language, though, as an example, is an example of rule-following. Our carers teach us over and over again until we get it. Then we become so habituated to it that we forget we once learnt to follow rules to do all this saying and hearing. We are rule-following animals. The authoritarians use this fact about us to inculcate their ways into us. But left to myself I learn, say, a route to a place, and then I take that same route over and over, sometimes in defiance of people who tell me about rationally better routes: I know my route, I trust it, I'm safe along it.

In this case, deference to authority wasn't inappropriate. Sometimes, even when you do things correctly, bad things happen — T Clark

The tragedy of the case is though that many of the tenants fleeing had more knowledge about the fire than the fire officers who advised them. But they valued their knowledge less than they valued the rightness of authority. I'm not offering an ethical judgment. It's tragic. No-one is to blame, as between tenant and fire-officer.

As bc implies, the prior assumption of a single capitalizable (g)od is quite a leap. I love to talk about gods but God is a rather more specific phenomenon.

How do appeals to practical reason work?

Practical reason, roughly, is the concept of reason playing a role in action. It is thought to be quite different from theoretical reason because its aim is not truth, but proper conduct. This need not be moral conduct -- it can be prudence or self-interest. But in some way reason is still appealed to in deliberating on a proper course of action. — Moliere

I am interested in this question. One interesting factor to me is the relation between ancient and modern. Aristotle considers an ethical education to involve inculcating the right 'habits'. Wittgenstein worries and worries over what it is to 'follow a rule'. It feels to me that 'habits' and 'rule-following' are similar if not identical phenomena. We arrive at rules/habits - we reflect on them, reason about them, perhaps try to change them - we have a new set of rules/habits. (Ari considers this ethical, though in a broader sense than the modern; Witt is unclear)

This is one approach towards practical reason or phronesis. It seems there is some process behind such analysis as encapsulated in the Aristotelian syllogism: there will be a series of steps from an initial set of presuppositions that make sense to us. We will have reasons-for. (Looked at in two ways: the post hoc reasoning, and the actual why-one-did-it)

The next and wierdest question is: How does a being make a decision? How is all this reasoning related to decision-making? Much writing on the subject just assumes some sort of relation. Yet much of the time it's like riding a bike: we practice over and over until we do an action without having to analyse how we're doing it. Even with intellectually complex decisions, how we act can boil down to such shortcuts, rules.

I've been reading about the tragic fire in a high-rise block, Grenfell Tower in London. Quite apart from the longer-term issues of how the building was refurbished, the decision-making on the night of the fire is a lesson in how we employ practical reasoning. Many people died by obeying fire officers' advice to stay in their flats, even turning back when they were escaping when so advised, turning back against their own self-wisdom to their deaths. The fire officers themselves were following their superiors' orders and their training. Deference to authority, and fidelity to rules for which the particular situation was inappropriate, got in the way of practical reasoning from first principles. We are highly intelligent animals but we are rule-followers, and the rule-following is part of what we think of as our intelligence.

Do you disagree with Dreyfus' view? — frank

I'm sorry I'm very busy at the moment so am posting erratically, especially as I am interested in this subject.

I am with Dreyfus's Heidegger that there isn't always an implicit belief or theory involved in action, as Dreyfus's Plato would purportedly maintain. What McDowell wants to say in the Dr/McD debate is that the most intuitive-seeming human action can as it were be retrospectively unwound into reasons; Dreyfus wants to say that there is a residual 'mindless' area. That's my summary of my own memory of the debate anyway, I hope anyone will feel free to correct me!

For me I then go a certain distance with Dreyfus and his embrace of J J Gibson's ecological psychology. There are affordances to action in the world that are available to sentient creatures, who perceive such affordances as they move and act. But I think built into this, 'the mind' - some thinking process - is always ready to kick in. A highly-trained athlete runs largely on habit, but part of their training is what to do when habit fails you. This is the exceptional case: act on it.

Dreyfus makes a great deal of chess-masters and pushes the notion that at the highest level, grandmasters are not 'thinking'. There's some good empirical work to suggest that he's mistaken in this by a woman called Barbara Montero, which is then a philosophical challenge to Dreyfus's whole position.

My feeling is these categories like 'thinking/not thinking' still have some residual problem in them because they relate to cognitivism, and neither Dreyfus nor McDowell is a cognitivist. But they and we cannot help having breathed in the cognitivist air which makes words like 'mind' and 'thinking' hard to render anew.

Sorry if this has waffled off into incoherence.

...a mindless state of established practices... — frank

I don't agree they're mindless. We talk about know-how and 'knowing how' because we move about the world with embodied knowledge, inculcated in us by ourselves or our carers/teachers, through logical rule-making, rule-explanation, reflection and repetition. A lot of mind is embedded in bikes, and embodied in bike-riding. To me the match to Heidegger then is in his idea that we are 'thrown into the world' - Dasein finds itself flung into in a sea of established practices before it has even learnt to think, to grasp or have revealed to it what thinking might be.

This relates then, if we want, to ethics, or so I see it: to the Aristotelian model of virtues that we learn by habit, in pursuit of a notion of eudaimonia or well-being that already is present in our polis/society, and which we then contribute to in our virtuous action and our thoughtful reflection. Of course it's not clear in the modern world what binds us together, so angst becomes a typical and certainly Heidegerrian description of our fundamental (individualised) state, whereas Aristotle founds his ethics on the inevitability of the wonderful Athenian state, and on the deep philia that we feel for a few others.

What we might gain is a structure from which to build an understanding. — Banno

I completely agree. But that might be Chomsky-as-scientist type understanding: logical form might somehow underlie how our minds work.It might however be the wrong sort of clue as to how things are between us as creatures. Maybe philosophically 'belief' is just a silly bit of linguistic bollox ('belief' doesn't always translate well, interestingly, into other languages).

I'm not meaning I have an answer here.

I wondered about the idea 'alief' as proposed by Gendler: a normative contrasting feeling-in-the-head. But I don't know if that contributes towards the structure we both want, or if, conversely, it's just inventing some more linguistic bollox :)

And so monism yields back to a very real dualism — Jonathan AB

I wonder where the binary thing about dualism comes from though. For me worlds are plural not dual. Nelson Goodman proposed what to me is a plausible way of accepting this while being analytical. Each world you propose needs to hold together on its own terms, or at least that is my version of Goodman. 'Imagine a world where...' So for instance, a scientised world holds together holistically; a Wittgensteinian world where we're only engaged in language-games holds together; a world confected by Rauschenberg Picasso and Cindy Sherman could hold together, if you entered into their visions sufficiently...and so on.

I don't get the 'two'-ness and indeed I'm Wittgensteinian on that. We're just being bewitched by language there. We speak, say, of 'sharp-tongued' people, and we don't mean they have sharp physical tongues. So how does one know that any given 'physical' description is 'really physical'. If only that one example holds up, how are we distinguishing this supposed binary difference between 'mental' and 'physical'?

Banno, I keep thinking about examples like this. I wrote dialogue all my working life as a scriptwriter so I have a certain take on it. I won't be offended if you just rule it out straight away but it is a serious question.

So - my view - or at least the case I propose - is that 'John believes that the sky is blue' is always something about the speaker or writer of these words in their relation to their addressee(s) and can never be meaningfully removed from them into a pseudo-logical 'rendering'. You are assuming 'use', I am alleging language is always hovering between 'use' and 'mention'.

We are on Mars where the sky is actually purple.

We are in a retirement home where John stares out through a bleak window.

We are in a painting class which is supposed to be portraying the dark grey scene outside.

What sense does any translation or rendering like 'Believes(John, "The sky is blue")' make in these situations, as instances? How does such a rendering communicate to anyone else what is going on in such scenes? Isn't it just lexical rather than having any wider 'meaning'?

It's interesting to me, and I keep puzzling over it, how we completely
disagree, you and I, and yet utterly agree, at the same time. That's philosophy :) Thanks for carrying on such debates!

Any teleological approach to evolution ought be discarded as a mater of course. The point of evolution is its lack of purpose. — Banno

I hope you won't mind my drawing attention to this inadvertent pun. I've just been reading Victoria Welby, a neglected philosopher of the turn of the 19th/20th century, who had a notion of 'mother sense' which is a kind of version of 'intuition'. A mater of course seems to fit perfectly.

The very nature of motherhood - which is at the core of evolution though neglected - always seems a primal problem for philosophies of purposelessness, to me. It's hard to understand the act of giving birth unless...well, motherhood embodies purpose. It just is purpose.

Or maybe it's just that...

I'm with BC, but this may be because I'm almost as old a git as him/

I'm from Leeds where Louis le Prince shot this little bit of film, the second oldest in the world from 1888: a scene I still know well, though they've jut decided to shut the bridge for improvements.

A human is as they are with other humans. The Crusoe myth is as wrong as the early Wittgenstein solipsist myth. When I wake I find my mother is there. There are always others. The Other is always there. How else would I be I?

However, there is no necessity that the coin will NOT show heads throughout a series of a million flips. The only thing is such events are highly improbable.

But improbable is NOT impossible.

That means all our inferences of causality (not a coincidence) are actually cases that are highly improbable. We can't say for sure that a causal event is NOT a coincidence. A series of a million heads in a row is improbable, yes, but could be a coincidence. — TheMadFool

You move here from a million heads being 'highly improbable', to 'not impossible', to 'all' inferences being 'highly improbable'. That's a magic trick.

Did you ever see or read 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead'? Stoppard's play, revived at the moment in London in the UK, riffs for some time on an amazing sequence of calls of heads being right. They debate what you're debating as a consequence, besides doubting their own identities (since part of the point is that in 'Hamlet' the two characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are interchangeable)

The aspect of existentialism that I think is positive, is the emphasis on 'self-creating' and not living out of a rule-book. But the sense of generating 'out of oneself' a sense of meaning or purpose - I am dubious about that. What I have learned/am learning from my study of spiritual traditions and meditation, is the importance of having a sense of relatedness. I think it is one aspect of what is called in Buddhism bodhicitta and that it's the same quality as the Christian 'agápē'. I don't associate it with formal religion, but it is a spiritual quality, and I think it's lacking in existentialism generally. (Although there are some spiritually-inclined existentialists.) — Wayfarer

Well my understanding of the debate is pretty limited, but I think it was a major point of difference between Sartre and Levinas. They are both students of Heidegger in one way or another but Levinas goes in a different spiritual direction in the existential affirmation. As you can tell I'm pretty impressed by him, when I have more space in my reading schedule (i'm in college again at the mo) I'm going to get back to 'Otherwise than being'.

"Find" doesn't make sense in the world you posit. Meaning must rather be created. But the meaning we can create isn't proportional to, and doesn't fit, what the desires of the heart demand. — Thorongil

In 'Totality and Infinity' Levinas eloquently argues that the first-person encounter with the Other, the subjective experience, always exceeds mere (scientific) description from the 'totalising' system of explanations. There's always a remainder, excess, more, an overflowing.

This leads him personally to an immanent god in a practice of Judaism, but that's not the claim the book is making.

I agree with Streetlight about your 'grammar': as soon as you speak of 'data' you seem not to be in the same part of discourse as the 'metaphysical'. Berkeleyans and physicalists can talk the same sort of methodological talk about objects, but that doesn't mean the ways they underpin their talk of objects in the metaphysics bear any mutual resemblance.

Do you think existentialist classics, like Nausea, are persuasive? I can't find anything persuasive about them. I kind of admire Sartre for his honesty and for being utterly true to himself, but I can't help but feel he was, so to speak, pretty tone deaf when it comes to questions of meaning. 'Hell is other people'? — Wayfarer

I do think this is a bit 'apples and oranges' - if Sartre's fictions don't persuade you of something, I'm not clear that that diminishes Moliere's claims about the philosophical approach of existentialism and 'finding' (or whatever the right word is) meaning in the face of the absurd.

Of course, I quite see that the notion involved, of existence preceding essence (to sloganise it) is not how you see things, but that's a different matter.

I think the main thing I'm afraid of is if I saw a doctor, I'd get medicated, and it would kill my creativity. — Alurayne

Sorry to hear about the accident - and quite appreciate this point above. I hope it doesn't sound trivialising to cite the example of John Cleese, who to my mind ceased to be funny once he'd had 'treatment'. It's a balancing act: maybe the one-time Minister of Funny Walks doesn't regret a thing because he loves being an unfunny curmudgeon who's lived to a ripe old age. All the best.

a panic disorder — Alurayne

Well, it sounds like a panic disorder. If I were you I'd see a doctor.

Personally I think Beckett is a good read too in such circumstances. But maybe this is just me, in extremis the darkest fictions feel funny to me, and that helps me. :)

So I just keep posting for those who are reading the thread and are not necessarily responding. — Sam26

:) Good man. But do get some rest! Sorry I'm busy so am having to dip in and out of paying attention.

I don't think nihilism is the end result of having no reason why objects are. I find existential philosophers arguments to be compelling -- even in a nihilistic universe, an absurd world, we still can find meaning in life. Even if some objective purpose is not knowable, we still can live a life of joy. Even if it were knowable, and there was a purpose, but we were to find it reprehensible we can live well. — Moliere

I agree :)

we are born alone — Agustino

Dammit, I knew my mother didn't belong there. Always poking her nose in where she's best forgotten.

That is the best materialist argument that I know. Do you have or know a better argument than that? Any reference? — bahman

Jaegwon Kim is the man. 'Philosophy of Mind'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaegwon_Kim

Under materialism, consciousness cannot have any causal effect on the state of affair since the state of affair is defined in term of physical process. This leads to epiphenomena. What I am arguing is that consciousness has a causal effect on state of affair therefore materialism, given the definition in OP, is not correct. — bahman

I'm just saying that the present-day 'materialist' or physicalist argument is more sophisticated than this. Their argument is that there is a set of explanations that use 'mental' language, as yours does, and that this is a rational set of explanations, but that nevertheless there is ultimately an underlying physical explanation, but without a one-to-one correspondence between the 'mental' event and the 'physical' event. Instead the one supervenes on the other. That's their argument. As I say, I don't agree with it, but in my view you need a better argument than the one you've come up with so far to deny supervenience.

We however know that consciousness is necessary for learning (please read the following article). This means that consciousness is causally efficacious. Therefore materialism is not correct. — bahman

Personally I'm not a 'materialist'. But the article you quote can be easily accommodated within a materialist/physicalist account. Either 'conscious awareness' is itself physiologically based, or it supervenes on the physical here.

I can imagine that a person is unsure whether someone is dead or alive but I haven't met a person who believed that someone is both dead and alive. — litewave

My proposal is just an emotional equivalent to the logical argument: that there are many situations in life where one holds two possibilities to have equal weight, and must live with that fact, which to a logician is 'contradictory'.

To me the issue also happens in some supposedly binary choices in ethical dilemmas, where there is no right answer: there the important thing is to commit, one way or the other, and live with the consequences. I think many consequentialist thought-games are like that, where one is supposed to add up likely deaths from this action and compare with likely deaths from an alternative: that isn't how ethical choices happen, it's just a logician's game empty of serious human meaning.

Is this the answer?

I've never heard of this guy before... Did this article only appear because I went 'looking' for it? This seems to point to Question 1 & Option 1 plus Question 2 & Option 3 - where I am the only truly self-aware entity in my version of reality, and I'm slowly figuring out what I really am.. — CasKev

If that's the answer, then the question is the wrong question. Sadly brilliant scientists like Robert Lanza often go off the deep end and believe they can pronounce on Great Matters.

Except I'm not religious at all. — Sam26

OK, no fancy schmancy tea then. Just regular tea.

contradictory sentences don't correspond to any object in reality. — litewave

I went to a play last week about a long-missing man and the family's reactions. The programme featured an interesting article about how people cope with a loved one who has gone missing. Some say he has been seen here and there; some say the evidence all points to death. The phenomenon is known as 'ambiguous loss': it seems that the most balanced human reaction is to embrace the contradiction, i.e. to accept that the missing person is both alive and dead, like Schrodinger's cat. It seems to me much human reality is like that: we embrace opposite possibilities and live with them. How else can we go on? Everything's gonna be all right, isn't it? What do you mean, I won't live forever?

In this sense human understanding is more complex and difficult than this binary 'reality' people speak of.

Come on Mcdoodle, let's have that cup of tea. — Sam26

I know, I know, you can feel me wavering can't you? I must stop agreeing with Wayfarer about things :)

Well, if Harry Potter were written well...

My taste leans towards Tolkien — Banno

Ah, well I'm not much of a one for either of them as stylists.

I'm about to study a module which begins at the Tractatus and logical atomism and so I'm thinking about how much of the world of the imagination, emotion and ethics 'The world is everything that is the case' leaves out, from Rilke to Rowling or TSEliot to Tolkien. What a strange idea positivism is.

I'm a logical pluralist of some sort — MindForged

Me too. Nelson Goodman's 'Ways of world-making' might appeal to you as it does to me. He argues (as I remember it) against a univocal this-is-how-reality-is logic, but also against wiffly waffly woo. Any world we imagine needs intellectually to fit together by, as Banno puts it, choosing the grammar for the job in hand. (It seems to me this applies to the Harry Potter universe as much as to our variants on relativity or how participatory research can happen in social science)

Any logic one applies leaves great remainders of the ambiguous, contradictory, unknown, unknowable and misunderstood, for a pluralist. But of course there's still room in there for mystical Oneness underlying everything, although that's not my cup of tea.

One of the most beautiful things that I hold dear is Kubrick films. — Posty McPostface

I think my present-day favourites in the movie genre are Haneke films. I recently saw 'Happy End' which naturally doesn't have such an eponymous finale. His movies do not follow the structure most Hollywood movies have, they unfold elegantly and at their own pace. Happy End closes on Jean-Louis Trintignant as a senile old man, which makes a rather beautiful arc in my mind, since the first French movie I remember loving was Un homme et une femme, starring Trintignant as a widowed young man. I saw it at the Academy 1 on Oxford Street in London in the mid-60's. (Both Happy End and Homme/Femme are unafraid of dealing with death, which is much on my mind lately owing to recent bereavements)

Perhaps this post is an oblique way of saying - sometimes life seems to show you, well me anyway, a beautiful shape all of its own, just for you/me - I hope this isn't cognitive distortion but an aesthetic sense :)