Over here, there's a Hulu TV show that's caught a lot of attention. It's an episodic production of Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. It's about a future where all those changes have been washed away by a biological disaster. Somebody was saying that the show is hitting a nerve because of Trump. — Mongrel

Yes the Attwood thing is big over here too. The mores of Silicon Valley seem oddly 'frat-boy' too, as I've seen them called lately: that makes me suddenly feel with a lurch, that maybe this whole shift over several decades towards kindness - and that is part of what I feel it to have been - could all be rolled back.

David Smail, he da man. And he's got my essay on counselling on his website, so a man of taste too. — unenlightened

Good for you, un. I heartily agree that Smail was a fine man, and his website is still alive and kicking, but alas he isn't.

Could somebody explain why asking if all women are submissive is not demeaning but asking if a particular woman is...is?

Could I get one of our women-folk to explain this? The male-folk insist on it but won't explain it. — Mongrel

I went to my old gits' (people of 60+) philosophy group today, a dozen of us, we were discussing Simone de Beauvoir and how you acquire your gender. Of course it's an atypically gentle group, perhaps, but there was a widespread feeling among all of us of this generation that some remarkable changes happened in this period. Our fathers wouldn't touch a nappy, were proud their womenfolk didn't have to work, were uneasy talking about emotion and expected women to accept second place in decision-making. We knew the expectations but thanks to peace, prosperity and the education of women equally, a great many things have been transformed.

Pardon me if this is just Old McDoodle spouting feminism-lite. But a great sea-change occurred to people I know in our lifetimes. This idea of something essential in woman-ness that might be about submissive-ness - it seems like a question asked in some distant planet that only faintly resembles mine.

Submission en masse is about power, on this view, so our discussion did also go on to talk about British Asian women: second- and third-generation Asian women seem to be part-running the world round here, in fashionable hijabs (but they're still hijabs) and forthright manners, but they still go home to a conservative patriarchal outlook, and sometimes they're still married off to men from the old country who come from deep patriarchy; while a minority of their brothers in a second-generation way become more loyal to a lost set of values than their parents who tried to fit in.

If meaning were use, then ancient man could have used the word, "computer" — Harry Hindu

People did actually use the word 'computer' hundreds of years before there were machines that we now call 'computers'. From around the 1640's people who counted stuff, especially clerks, were called 'computers' because they were 'computing'. At the end of the 19th century when the first calculators appeared they began to be called 'computers' too. To distinguish, people began sometimes to say 'human computer' to mean the person and 'mechanical computer' to mean the machine. In the 1940's Turing's gang made their advances and made things called 'digital computers'. In the 1950's the digital meaning began to swamp the rest, and only complex digital counting-machines were called 'computers' from then on.

This looks to me like 'meaning is use' in action, but I have an awful feeling you won't agree.

OK, cool. I found him on Academia. He's very prolific. (and does work on a lot of things I'm interested in)

I understand your explanation, but if I wanted more, is there a good starting point? — Moliere

I@d just start randomly with one of his essays. One reason I picked 'moods' to write about for school earlier in the year is that there isn't a good starting-point, there isn't much clear thinking. There's an essay by Lauren Freeman 'Towards a phenomenology of mood' which surveys the ground. The paths she and Ratcliffe are on lead back to Heidegger and Husserl. Via college I also had access to the Oxford handbook of the philosophy of emotion, edited by Goldie, if you haven't already consulted that it's a good source for brief essays about various topics in 'emotion'.

Haha, so why then did you recommend Sextus as the place to start the journey towards being Epicurean? Why not Lucretius? — Agustino

Yes, I meant to say Lucretius.

So by "language game" he meant a method of representation? — Mongrel

Just to interpolate, para 7 of the PI in part reads:

We can also think of the whole process of using words in (2) [ a four-word language] as one of those games by means of which children learn their native language. I will call these games 'language-games' and will sometimes speak of a primitive language as a language-game.

And the processes of naming the stones and of repeating words after someone might also be called language-games. Think of certain uses that are made of words in games like ring-a-ring-roses.

I shall also call the whole, consisting of language and the activities into which it is woven, a 'language-game'. — Witt

Sextus isn't an Epicurean though? — Agustino

Yes, I beg his pardon.

Now if all Witty was arguing is that we assign meaning by how we use words in certain contexts, then no problem. But if he's saying that meaning IS behavior, then that's a problem. — Marchesk

Here, though, you're surely at a crux where Fafner is right: you are conjuring up an imaginary Wittgenstein in order to make a point of your own. 'Philosophical Investigations' is a complex book and nowhere in it do I remember these 'arguments' that you mention. One thing I'm confident he's saying is that it's difficult to have a clear overview of language, since we only have language to do it with. What you are calling 'meaning' will involve comparing one word with another, or with a group of other words, and asserting that some greater clarity results.

I felt your original question boiled down instead to 'What is a concept?' - but like others I struggle to grasp how that becomes an argument with or about Wittgenstein or meaning-is-use.

So, who's in charge? — Noble Dust

I like to think the work speaks for itself. But of course that's always in a context, a work doesn't speak in a void: Euripides and Sophocles still mean something profound to us, but we won't keep performing their work unless we renew it in the (re-)making.

But then...I do bend in galleries to read the little descriptions beside each painting, I read up on musical works in advance. There's aesthetic gain in understanding the background to a work.

I would mention that there is a third layer of people: the commentariat, who are also often the funders of public work, (or the same sort of people) and the advisers to private funders, as well as the teachers of the arts. They speak a certain language, on the whole, and influence how 'we' see art, both we-as-artists and we-as-audience. When I was a writer the reviews mattered, as did the sponsoring organisation's internal comments. As a freelance you're only as good as your next commission. If you can't speak the lingo of the commentariat you'd better have friends in high places, or be damn good :)

What would you say is this distinction between mood and deep mood? — Moliere

This comes from a man called Matthew Ratcliffe, whose papers are free to read on academia. It's the notion that 'deep mood' is the way we are in the world, the profound, all-permeating, hard-to-shift mood that features in clinical diagnosis, for instance. By contrast 'mood' can be short-term, is amenable to mild drugs or even reasoning, can be measured on scales often purporting to relate to 'energy' and 'attitude'.

Is he the one who invented the pyrrhic victory? — Bitter Crank

Sadly, a different Pyrrhus, although roughly a contemporary, won a battle against the Romans but couldn't afford the casualties.

I slightly mis-spoke, the sceptic is known as Pyrrho.

Ataraxia is the ancient Greek word for the kind of equanimity you're seeking. The fact that it was first brought to prominence by the arch-sceptic Pyrrhus encourages me. It was central to both the Epicureans and the Stoics. You might like to google for modern Stoicism, as the founders of cbt were influenced by it. I believe I'm more of an Epicurean, and the place to start that journey is an edition of Sextus Empiricus.

I asked a reasonable question. I await a reasonable response. I don't answer surveys out of nowhere.

Did it occur to you that posting this might affect the credibility of anything else you wrote?

Just depends on how loosely we're willing to define "language," doesn't it? — Terrapin Station

No. Have you another word for the medium of such adult-infant communication? Or would you just say it's 'gesture' which is not 'language'?

Here are the provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, edited by me to be shorter. — T Clark

Did anyone yet explain how their objections amounted to a shortening of this list?

Meaning is indeed prior to language as it must be — creativesoul

I'm late to this party, I was out enjoying myself. One thing that happened earlier today was, I was watching a bunch of children and their carers play in a pavement set of fountains, soaking in the heat. One infant in a push chair, aged about 1, was eating an ice cream. I smiled, she smiled back. I mimed munching, a couple of times. She pushed forward in her seat and offered me the ice-cream. I held my hands up in genial refusal.

Now, I think we spoke in the language of gesture to each other. But do you think that this sort of gesture is 'prior to language'?

The evidence is ambiguous and causal claims are unprovable. Still, History is largely a discipline. There are many facts, some interpretations. It turns out, after hard work, there are competing narratives. Is there something wrong with that? (Accepting that there are some cranks we rule out because they don't accept rigourous practice)

Argument and emotional appeal are, together, rhetoric. The judicious combination of each element is what's required. You will need to understand both the logic of any argument, and what emotionally underlies any given position. Political campaigning is a good education. If salutary!

Is there any reason why actual leftists and liberals can't be as comfortable loving and serving their personal nation-state as the typical conservative? — Bitter Crank

I agree with andrewk, that the modern nation-state is half the child of Weberism, of a 'centrist' or 'liberal' belief in benevolent management by the state and its officials, so there's every reason for state-loving among some leftists and liberals. Perhaps one reason the nation-state seems so stable is that as an institution it can express this social democratic urge, and also be what we fight for, believe in, regard as a quasi-mystical source of values.

There is a difference here between north America and Europe/Australasia. The first world war cast a long shadow over appeals to patriotism for those whose young men died or were scarred for life by the ordeals of the trenches. Quite apart, that is, from the culture of the USA. When I first met young Americans in the 1960's, and I mean those who were against the Vietnam war and facing the possibility of the draft, I was startled by their patriotism compared to how I and my British contemporaries felt. I cheered when England won the World Cup, but I had no notion of my country representing my values in the way that many people from the USA did and do.

Magnets create much more orderly order than conscious beings, who in my experience are always leaving random stuff in the sink and putting unflushable things in the loo. How everything lines up neatly when a magnet comes round for tea. So I would find magnets easier to swallow than conscious beings. Yum.

Ample make this bed.
Make this bed with awe;
In it wait till judgment break
Excellent and fair...

how would you explain the term "modes of being"? — Moliere

I agree with John that it's a pervasive orientation. One has to go to Heidegger or social psychology because analytic philosophy mostly assumes we are one way rather than another.

I've been reading up about perception, familiarity and anticipation. One hidden assumption in a lot of cogsci - but this goes back centuries, millennia - is that there is a sort of equilibrium we as human beings revert to, want to get back to. Our mode of being is not so much to make the world as to perceive it then act upon it.

An interactive and anticipatory way of understanding would on the contrary be that our mode of being is world-making, future- and other-oriented. As an example in language (the example I'm most interested in) the 'meaning' of anything one says or hears would then never be restricted by a compositional account, because part of the meaning would reside in what I am about to say, and what you think I am about to say, and what you are about to say, and what I think you are about to say...

So I think of 'mode of being' as indeed akin to Witt's 'form of life', and part of the fun of philosophy might then lie in trying to tease out assumptions hidden in our ways of thinking about how we are.

The relation of emotion to anticipation and memory is a related area (and I have some memory you're interested in emotion). A guy called Tronick studied infant moods and proposed that moods embodied a 'Janus principle' facing both past and present - that they are a non-cognitive way in which the past enters the present, or the present inhabits the future. That would help explain why athletes for instance focus on mood: mood changes anticipation and both in turn influence how the world is to us, and how we are in the world. Deep mood might then be how we are in the world, which would be why we call bipolarity or depression 'mood disorders'.

The only way in which a judgement on my part of his actions makes sense is:

(1) if I am on a jury and am called upon to judge whether he has committed a crime. In this case all that matters is what the law says; and
(2) if I want to use his case as an example to encourage or discourage certain types of behaviour to others. In this case all that matters is my assessment of his behaviour according to my values, not those of anybody else. — andrewk

We do however make judgments of others in formulating policies, for instance. An industry should not imply child labour except under certain stringent conditions, say. In such cases we seek common ground with others about what we think would be wrong, surely?

Cool. I think your position is probably around 90% hope. You aren't proposing long term solutions, but rather you stand for thinking about and investing in solutions. — Mongrel

Yes, the thing with feathers :)

Why dangerous? — Agustino

Just being wry.

Here we have a dangerous consensus emerging. Writing a novel, for instance, which I've done in a few times in my life: it's like climbing an awesomely high mountain, sometimes for several years, doggedly returning to the task each day, step by step the longest march can be won (a song), being kind to one's own superstitions about how to get started, finding the little habits that will get you through the hard parts, renewing one's efforts even when the damned thing looks unfinishable, the mountain a cloud that you deluded yourself was reachable...

HI Fafner, nice to see you here.

But large is also beautiful. And sometimes it's not only the best way, it's the only way to get the job done. I'm not knockin' small stuff. It definitely has its place. Agree? — Mongrel

I love big bold concrete buildings that insist on their concreteness, which I suppose is some sort of modernism in me! Big Green Things I would like to happen are experiments with tidal power, which need large investment but should have large returns if they work, and investment in storage of renewable power, which is technically quite easy but needs money put into it - people are always wittering about what to do when the wind isn't blowing, when I'm a David Archer about that, there's a technical solution waiting if we just put some faith and resources into it.

The folly of Big Green Things begins for me as I've said with nuclear power. But there has also been some folly in failing to develop networks to link up existing investment - many wind turbines were built before the grid was ready for them. Electricity grids are one of the great modern miracles, aren't they? Leading the way to all sorts of other networks, where small, modest or mediumn-sized investment can be made large by judicious combination.

I really think we can identify a common moral framework. For example, what's costly and unproductive is definitely immoral, I don't see how that can be argued against. — Noblosh

Being costly and unproductive is definitely a utilitarian perspective, so I don't see how you claim it's a meta-ethical one.

I like Hamlet and his father, the Ghost who I think represents Hamlet's intentionality — Cavacava

I think I have to grant you that. There would be a question to me about whether Hamlet deliberates or prevaricates. He comes to know what act he would at least half-like to perform: its justification holds him back. But he is all the same a counter-example to my prejudice, I concede.

No one actually uses, or ever learns, more than a proper subset of a given natural language. — Srap Tasmaner

Here I think you're going back on your own original impulse about 'use', though, and I admire the original impulse more. We find ourselves saying words, or writing words, or understanding words heard or read. To call this finding-ourselves-doing-something 'use' is not quite right, though sometimes near enough for jazz. Our language and our selves intertwine in expression and understanding.

What after all is 'a given natural language'? It feels to me that there is some residual myth of the given lurking in this. There is no monolithic English, for example, portions of which we gradually acquire. This imagined abstraction is sometimes conjured into life by grammarians and pedagogues, but lived languages are a plurality, being renewed all the time, with enough in common between us that we understand each other and can make ourselves understood.

In Sartre's philosophy, this would be inauthentic — schopenhauer1

I'm 68 and my life hasn't been the way you're talking about I am deeply pessimisitic about all sorts of things but I've lived a fairly adventurous life. I read Sartre as a young man and that influenced me, but that doesn't especially matter. Except that to me, in Sartreian terms, if you recognise what you're doing as inauthentic then to carry on drudgedly doing it, you are anti-Sartreian: you accept inauthenticity. I don't. I refuse it. I'm very different from Agustino for instance but I admire his adventurousness too, I feel that spark which I think I still have. I'm in love with a fine woman, as I have been at several moments in my life, I'm fending off ill-health touch wood (speaking as a non-superstitious atheist, thank God), I have enough money to get by on, I'm studying philosophy, and hey - last night I was a bass in a pop choir of 70 singers, mostly women, we sang six old pop songs in beautiful a capella harmony after several months of tough rehearsals and it was marvellous! Sometimes you take existential leaps and that happens: but you work at it after the leap, because joy and even simple pleasures don't just turn up at the door. Sometimes of course you take existential leaps and you wind up drunk with the equipment for suicide all prepared in a dark place. So I've been to rehab too, in my time, but what the fuck. No-one with a good mind is pre-programmed to a dreary predictable life. Me I need to go to the same supermarket every week and to have old friends to whom I don't have to make complex explanations, safe habits so that I can safely take the occasional leap when an abyss of possibility beckons.

I fail to see how reason gets off the ground without brute beliefs. — Moliere

I agree. Analytic philosophy tends to argue that one can somehow choose one's brute beliefs, or they're random. But they are historically-situated, and if we talk about beliefs in any time but our own, we tend to place them in a socio-historical context. Brute beliefs somehow rub off on you in your formative times without you realising until it's too late and, darn it, here they are, in your very sinews.

It is dissatisfying, but sometimes some old bugger says 'I refute it thus!' and then you're stuck for an answer, and have to wander off to find questions which seem to have replies :).

We have two languages - natural language and mathematics. You travel to a distant galaxy and find an alien civilization. Which language do you think would be shared by you and aliens? — TheMadFool

That's an interesting question in itself though not the one you're initially posing. To my mind our likely shared language would be gesture. On this reading, language is the making and attempted communication of signs. Enter apo.

That's a different issue from what the core explanations of different civilizations might be built from. I can imagine a Pythagorean civilisation, for instance, where music is the core explanation. But I've been doing a lot of singing and harmonising lately so maybe my mind is leaning that way. :)

Bruteness seems profound, but then you realize you can arbitrarily make anything lacking agreed upon explanation brute. Why is it that anything exists? Because something (some things) just happen(s) to exist. And why is that something and not something else? Just because? — Marchesk

Aren't you being circular though? Brute facts don't have explanations. But you want there to be an explanation for what makes a brute fact.

I don't think bruteness seems profound. To a rational fellow like Spinoza, say, it is on the contrary intellectually annoying, so he finds various cunning ways of saying there is no such thing. Surely bruteness says, even to the rationalist: Sorry, mate, this is as far as your fancy-shmancy reason will go. From hereon in it's metaphysics or blind bloody prejudice.

I find *some* people are [insert critical word] here *some* of the time, and that's all right if it stays civilised and sometimes it sharpens one's thinking process. If it was what you call it, 'most' people 'most' of the time, I wouldn't come.

Remembering stuff is bad for you. — Wosret

Your body and your habits implicitly remember, they embody memories, or you wouldn't have learnt to do stuff, surely? Then the question is, should I just place some checks on what I do out of habit or bodily urge and if so why?