Is belief, or the linguistic expression thereof, the sort of thing that can be moral or immoral, or would that be a category error? — Sapientia

Sorry I've been away on holiday, I hope I may interject this late on. I'm coming from an Aristotelian angle, where belief in itself doesn't count as moral or immoral because it isn't choice.

...[choice] cannot be opinion; for opinion is thought to relate to all kinds of things, no less to eternal things and impossible things than to things in our own power; and it is distinguished by its falsity or truth, not by its badness or goodness, while choice is distinguished rather by these. — Aristotle

Virtue or vice or (lack of) self-control each can only show itself through action, including a speech-act. Our fantasies aren't moral or immoral in themselves. I can't help the thoughts that fly into the windows of my soul, only what my soul gets the body to do once those thoughts have had their sway in deliberation.

Nevertheless once an action is undertaken or under way, our judgment of the state of mind of the perpetrator then matters to us, counts as 'moral', otherwise an unintentional killing with an accidental knife would count the same as murder aforethought. So the inferred belief with which an act is committed counts as moral or immoral, even though belief qua belief does not.

Are other folk OK with choosing one or the other for sure? — Moliere

I'm going with Lawlor's 'Voice and...' and I chose that thinking that that was the recommended version.

He came to see the Tractatus writer as playing one among many possible language games. That's the simplified version of how I read it. That doesn't stop the Tractatus being a kind of summation of a certain point of view, a pov which can still feel relevant and useful. He discussed with Nicholas Bachtin publishing the two books together; I think this shows he still valued the earlier work. Still, the P I for me has great depths including challenges to critique most propositions like yours or mine.

I've written a lot of radio plays. You write the 'Sound Effects'. Even a mysterious noise has a way of being described, being describable. Or does it? I tried similes, being poetic, describing the action to imply the noise. Sometimes all you can do is present a recording: 'This is the noise I mean.' Sometimes there is only the experience of the noise. Electronic analysis wouldn't clarify it. But it must mean something to the author mustn't it? It may only mean artistically that that sound belongs there, at that place in a sequence.

Broadly speaking, one can speak of two types of systems in nature: analog and digital — StreetlightX

I am snagged on the basics. 'Analogue' began as a mathematical term itself, about sameness of ratio or proportion. It's become a loose term, particularly handy as contrastive with 'digital'. It seems to me that one's beginning should be that there are a number of ways of speaking about systems in nature, one digital, one based on analogy, others descriptive in other ways.

I was reading about how songbirds probably originated in Australia, from the evolutionary point of view. For songbirds, I guess that meaning began with the first Australian song, though them rob-rob-robins don't call it meaning, I gather. They think a trill around middle C does the trick.

Yes, I think that's right, that "so-called 'laws' are useful descriptions of what is in play under certain conditions"-the "certain conditions" being something like 'the totality of what has been recorded of human experience' — John

Well, the Cartwright view is more limited. She takes 'capacities' as real, as inhering in nature, but laws as how we describe the enactments of such capacities within certain conditions, and the conditions are very much narrower than yours. But it would take us off into a quite different debate about the philosophy of science to debate that. Most of our scientific results are inductive, not deductive, and the practice of science (as she sees it) is not to declare that natural laws hold sway everywhere, but to investigate whether and if so how the laws work within certain defined and repeatable conditions. She does this via what she refers to as a 'nomological machine', a concept to describe just such a set of defined and repeatable conditions - which might be a lab in Stanford (with the observer's presence accounted for) or the solar system (with the disturbances from the rest of the cosmos accounted for) - or wherever. (There are always conditions in brackets, it seems to me) Her example in 'The Dappled World' is to drop a feather from the second floor of a villa into a windy piazza: it is more difficult, in fact probably impossible, even to know which 'natural laws' to use to predict its movement - even when we're capable of getting little Juno to Jupiter with such amazing precision.

We came up with this word 'meaning' so I'm sure we can still find something useful to do with it, inherent or not.

I'm just looking at Monte Faito which a friend recommended to me as an alternative hill walk. In fact I tried to copy a link to a Google map in here but for some reason couldn't make it work. Anyway I'll wave, wherever I am :)

There's something in a box but I don't know what that thing is. I want to know what's in the box. Would you say that I know what I'm looking for or that I don't know what I'm looking for? — Michael

I'm amazed you already know what a box is, and that it's the sort of thing something would be in. How did you come to know that? :)

I'll be in Sorrento on Friday, so I'll let you desk-bound folk savour the virtuality :)

My feeling is that language is something that happens between people in many different language-communities (including soliloquy). We bring various capacities to bear - our vocal arrangements, our brains, our gestures - to express, try to understand or communicate with each other. These may well all be activities for which we can formulate both (a) rules we find we enact by whether we like it or not, and (b) human-imposed rules, or modifications of a-rules, that make the process work more to our satisfaction.

Then grammarians' rules, dictionaries, meta-languages, T-sentence concepts are all type (b) rules. But Chomskyan generative grammar and certain rules of dialogue would be (a) type rules.

To me exchange of 'truths' is just one of the things such language-communities might regard as what they're doing through language.

And in all this we are then, as you say, largely improvising most of the time.

This could all be bosh, of course, I'm just thinking about how I see it.

I can see how mathematical language could fit my schema. We find we just do count, subtract, divide, multiply. Elaborations make this work better. But I may be on the wrong tack for math. Witt for instance thinks that regarding sets as fundamental is just silly, whereas that's so much part of my psyche now I can't dislodge it to look at it afresh. (I wanted to refer to 'truth-telling' as a subset of language a little earlier!)

I hope this clarifies it. — John

Thank you, it does. I tried hard to see what Meillassoux was getting at, but my resistance to the 'absolute' is such that I never managed it.

Laws of nature are not conceived to act in the world, either; instead they are thought as what governs any acting in the world — John

Nancy Cartwright's take on this is that so-called 'laws' are useful descriptions of what is in play under certain conditions. I always think 'laws' is an odd analogy/metaphor, since human laws are after all made to be broken, or I'd never have smoked dope or parked on the pavement.

One way a placebo effect might help a mental distress problem would be self-organisation. If one can follow a regime of timed pill-taking, one can recognise in oneself powers of self-control. I'm inclined to feel that looking at quantum mechanics is to keep looking in the wrong sort of place, but that's my bias.

I've always loved Wittgenstein, so I've naturally wrestled with his philosophy of math. Recently I bumped into this piece by Ray Monk, which really moved me. I find it plausible as an interpretation. — Hoo

I'm not a mathematician, but I've been doing some re-reading/study of P.I. over the summer and thinking a lot about Wittgenstein. My interest is in philosophy of language. Witt is of course a challenge to any philosophy project - one of my current tutors gets fierce at the mention of his supposed 'anti-philosophy'. It does feels as if the 'game' notion is at the heart of both how Witt looks at natural language and at mathematics. What game are we in? What use is it? How is it used? Whenever the game is in play, rules emerge. Where do these rules come from? Do they matter?

I am at the point in philosophy of language in thinking that much of the talk about truth or 'truth conditions' that is at the heart of the traditional enterprise is 'bosh', as Witt might have put it. If it means something, it means something about the desire of the secondary workers at this coalface - the philosophers of linguistics in my case, the philosophers of mathematics in yours - to find a primary justification for why they do things the way they do.

I don't know exactly what to do with this feeling. I think I am an 'engineer' as Monk puts it of language, and there are quite different engineering ways of writing about language that I might know about, because I've written and thought about writing and worked in language.

But it means starting from a different place from where the traditional analytic approach to phil of language starts. Maybe you're in the same boat.

Yes it gave me a good smile :)

I presume you know these articles by Marcia Angell from a few years ago:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/06/23/epidemic-mental-illness-why/

The old question is, what was the right diagnosis in the first place, what were the people involved trying to diagnose, and what does 'getting better' involve? My ex-partner, who suffered a terrible mental breakdown from which, in her and my view, she only recovered with the help of anti-psychotic drugs, now carries on a happy life with a regular dose of anti-depressant which probably has no pharmacological effect. This is the sort of creature we are.

These are the sorts of area where I wonder whether 'the intelligibility of the world' addressed in another thread is being properly defined by us on the forum. That discussion very much focussed on scientific intelligibility of a particular way of looking at 'the world'. But how do we make jealousy, or grief or madness or the finitude of life intelligible? My view is that we do so by intelligent conversation, discursive essay, art, spirituality and, for those who are so inclined, religion, and that 'science' has little help to offer in making such fundamental problems 'intelligible' to us. But I hope I'm not hijacking this thread by mentioning something that's been on my mind.

I'm the universe
& I'm ok
I'm me all night
& I'm I all day...

The news has opinion all mashed into it. I don't remember it being like that in the old days. — Mongrel

I agree. It even spreads into sports reporting, which is ruined by continual opinionating :) How can I work out how the game really went?

With a caveat, though, that in my youth the news was more controlled by different vested interests, yet had a cleverly-maintained appearance of impartiality. In the UK, looking back, that's clear for instance in old reporting on stuff from the royal family to misbehaviour by public figures.

War reporting was very circumscribed - the Vietnam war then erupted with a much greater openness of reporting - the last war to be so well-reported at the time, for the military worked out how to control it.

Interesting thread: in Britain and especially England there's been some debate about people who voted to leave the EU - the Brexiters - and whether they partly represent this 'white working-class' group who aren't allowed to have an identity of their own. I think it's overdone in relation to the referendum - the political classes lost control of the terms of the debate - but there's definitely an element of it there.

If radical contingency were the case you could have no warrant at all for thinking that you could even know what "passing historically-situated notions" either are or have been. — John

You're going to have to be a bit less pithy for me to understand you. What Bernard Williams meant by 'radical contingency' in (the history of) ethics, for instance, was just the sort of idea I was trying to represent as 'passing historically-situated notions'. Why would radical contingency forbid me to speak in such terms? Is there some current specialised use of the term that I'm ignorant of?

I think the first scientist I saw on tv was Fred Hoyle, arguing against the Big Bang, when I was a child. The Big Bang is a theory that has risen to prominence in my lifetime, and certainly looks convincing to me. But for people who are babies now, and their babies, a quite different theory may well stand in its place. So to me the 'radical contingency' extends to whether one can build a metaphysics from the intellectual foundations of such theories. Others are welcome, but for me it will be the expenditure of fine-sounding rhetoric on passing historically-situated notions.

I think good knowledge and understanding of major works of art makes the world more intelligible and this has nothing to do with science.

Pardon me if I missed this point earlier, I'm traveling around and on my phone.

There does seem to me a clear difference between ethical and artistic judgement. If you don't like music I like - if you don't even call it music - what's it to me? I just won't invite you to my atonal abstract mashups.

But ethical judgments matter even if only one of you thinks it's ethical. Something will happen, or not happen, and it will count. I remember when I was 16 years old being told by an ardent Communist that some deaths of bourgeois lackeys were a practical necessity. That's not what I call music.

Of course, here we may just be prattling about art and ethics, signifying nothing. But judgments that lead to decisions do matter.

To interject...there is a paper by Michael Weisberg called Water is not H20. I liked it. Distilled water, maybe, although I gather chemists would prefer greater precision even then. But this topic gets me into hot, erm water. Someone turned me down for a Master's course over a paper i wrote about it. Water just is H20, she exclaimed. How then can heavy water be a form of water? How can the polluted water in my local canal be water?

'Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.'

'The world' is intelligible enough for me. I must say, Picasso and Graham Greene made it so for me, initially, rather than scientists. They remain a good guide to what matters to me, as compared, say, to neuroscience.

Napoleon seriously considered Lyon as his capital. Merde.

I imagine my ancestors a good deal lately. I imagine the mothers singing to their babies as my mother sang to me. Thus she passed on to me our history, our way of saying, our recurrent affection. I feel recurrence as an immanent feminist phenomenon. Mother to child, mother to child.

This notion that bachelors being unmarried is analytic - it drives me crazy. These are just words that pass. It tests nothing.

I believe the art of orca and clever songbirds would be more interesting. They are fellow beings. Emily is a machine-phenomenon who has experienced only what her creator opens up to her.

Goverments make rules and some people will use the word 'moral' about most if not all of these rules. You have to wear a seatbelt and it's for your own good. Me, I don't like that: I'd rather we all went to hell in our own way. But i comply, because I'm a compliant sort of a fellow. We would save more lives by making the speed limit 10 mph, but for some reason that's unimaginable, neither moral nor immoral.

There are more and less rational ways of building concentration camps, executing people and selling insurance. Reason and morality are not good bedfellows. That's how I take Hume's meaning. Reason is a method to apply to premisses, deriving from 'passions'.

'I am lying' is something I've heard someone say. They smiled wryly. How can we deal with people who utter paradoxes yet succceed in making sense? It's so annnoying of them, as if there were something about language beyond logic.

No, I don't think Thompson argues explicitly from the inside out. I said the opposite. My suggestion is that he's trying to find an analytic-style answer to a question that isn't susceptible to such answers. Perhaps you could quote where he's arguing that 'we can discover moral truths through self-examination alone', or explain the steps from his words to your summary.

If a lost group of neanderthals emerged from the forests of Siberia, how would we react? Are they Homo sapiens neanderthalensis or homo neanderthalensis? Apparently some of 'our' ancestors and some of 'their' ancestors fucked, so are 'they' 'us'? Or am I misunderstanding the boundary of a form of life?

I've reread the article a few times now, and I keep thinking: I wouldn't start from here. Maybe it's because for fun I'm reading Levinas for the first time, but I'm feeling that Thompson is reading something from the outside in, which one of those darned Continentals would read from the inside out. Dasein begins with Dasein's being-in-the-world, and this may be non-analysable. Even to edge towards the notion that the form of life is a priori seems more of a nod to Plato than to Aristotle - to what Levinas calls the Eleatic, i.e. the universalising, the univocal, against the pluralist.

But perhaps this just demonstrates I'm committed to a pluralist empiricism and that I accordingly agree, I can't see what's wrong with a meta-ethic built from its foundations :)

I sense a triad. Enter a Piercian, for all I know a familiar under a pseudonym?

I think the only things to do are to fund the Red Cross/Crescent and Medecins sans Frontieres, and to accept that intervention in a faraway conflict that you have little understanding of would be worse than inaction. Doing good by killing people is rarely right.

And I like those old Magee things too. R M Hare. A J Ayer.

Good idea. But there is already Philosophy Tube in this niche, and he's drawn subs of $1400 a month. Maybe we could link up. Anyone know him?

I deem compassion, not happiness, as the basis of morality, and compassion can sometimes only occur when someone is suffering. Perhaps this makes me a suffering focused ethicist (though I am no utilitarian). More specifically, fellow-feeling is the condition for compassion, and the latter does not always result unless one feels another's suffering as they do. This finally breaks through the I-thou relation which otherwise prevents compassion. Happiness is quite irrelevant in this situation — Thorongil

I wholeheartedly agree. There is though certainly a place for compassion in the op's Aristotelian-sounding ethics. Both Aristotle and Epicurus emphasise 'philia', comradeship or fellow-feeling, and the placing of oneself as it were in the imagined situation of the person one has this feeling for. I think this is quite different from modern 'altruism'. But then, I think neo-Aristotelian 'eudaimonia' is expressly not just about hedonistic pleasures, and that indeed the greater virtues in the system are intellectual ones - justice, contemplation, practical wisdom - rather than the appetitive - good food and sex.

The August reading is relevant to all this, as Thompson seems to try to provide a basis for the 'human life-form' as the subject of a virtue ethics.