Yes.

Is this all in the right neighborhood of what Banno is saying? — Fire Ologist

No.

My worry about both (some) analytic phil and (some) Witt-derived phil is that the thus-far unanswered questions are indeed ignored, or rather ruled out as nonsensical. "Solve or dissolve," in other words. Let me ask you directly: Do you think there is a warrant for that, or is Williamson correct here? This clearly goes to the heart of the meta-discussion about method. — J

Shouldn't we demand clarity as much from those asking questions as those seeking answers? So in Joshs' case, it is not just legitimate but incumbent to ask how we unpack "presupposing as its condition of possibility a general and primordial origin".

It's also legitimate, given our practical limitations, not to give full weight to every question, but to focus on those that appear most promising.

Analogously, not every reply in a thread deserves a response. It is at least to some extent incumbent on those posting to check their own work and see if they have erred, or could present a clearer case.

Why does the question remain unanswered? Why is it ignored?

Section four is about the problem of the priors. That's a genuine difficulty for Bayesian approaches. However it is clear that there are some interesting developments in the area. I encourage you to start a new thread, maybe taking some of the novel results mentioned in Section Seven, and start a discussion about how a Bayesian approach might be helpful. In the process you might be able to show how you think it might overcome the limitations given in the article.

Have fun.

I'm aware I didn't respond to your comment in the "Belief as emption" thread, where you drew attention to some similarities with Bayesian stats. I recall thinking I would come back to it, but don't think I did.

Again, with these comments, I don't see a clear way to respond. I don't see why, for instance, "a formal language in which only false statements will ever be made" could be a "better" (more foundtaional?) tool for understanding reasoning than lambda calculus. It's not clear that formal logic and probabilistic reasoning are opposed. In fact, there’s a rich space of logics — Bayesian logic, probabilistic lambda calculus, epistemic logics with uncertainty — that treat probabilistic inference as a continuation of formal logical methods, not a rejection of them. So I wonder whether your contrast isn’t overstated.

J is unsearchable — javi2541997

Our mystery man.

yep, "Sushi" works. thanks.

So, page eleven, and the core complaint:

Much contemporary analytic philosophy − not least on realism and truth − seems to be written in the tacit hope of discursively muddling through, uncontrolled by any clear methodological constraints. — p. 11

And then:

We who classify ourselves as ‘analytic philosophers’ tend to fall into the assumption that our allegiance automatically confers on us methodological virtue. According to the crude stereotypes, analytic philosophers use arguments while ‘continental’ philosophers do not. But within the analytic tradition many philosophers use arguments only to the extent that most ‘continental’ philosophers do: some kind of inferential movement is observable, but it lacks the clear articulation into premises and conclusion and the explicitness about the form of the inference that much good philosophy achieves. Again according to the stereotypes, analytic philosophers write clearly while ‘continental’ philosophers do not. But much work within the analytic tradition is obscure even when it is written in everyday words, short sentences and a relaxed, open-air spirit, because the structure of its claims is fudged where it really matters. — p.11

That "assumption that our allegiance automatically confers on us methodological virtue" is quite accurate. You can see it in the reply I made to @Joshs, a couple of posts up. I didn't spend much time on the reply at all, instead presuming that my lack of understanding was down to a lack of clarity on Joshs' part, and so I threw the post back at him, expecting him to do the work of clarification. Quite rude, by some standards.

Trouble is, I think that what I did is the right approach. It should be down to the poster to make their case. And I think Joshs would agree, but perhaps say that he had made his case sufficiently, and I should be able to follow it; that it is my lack of comprehension of certain philosophers from outside the analytic tradition that is at fault.

And it's not clear that we cannot both be right.

What is clear is that there is much more that needs to be said, were Joshs and I to pursue that discussion. And so to

...we should be open and explicit about the unclarity of the question and the inconclusiveness of our attempts to answer it, and our dissatisfaction with both should motivate attempts to improve our methods. — p. 12

but also

...it must be sensible for the bulk of our research effort to be concentrated in areas where our current methods make progress more likely. — p. 12

We ought pick our fights with care.

(, happy to come back to your point. I'm not saying that your point is not worthwhile - how could I, if I haven't grasped what it is?)

Also, some members do not come up in the search box.

Not sure why - "@I Like Sushi" and "@T Clark" do not come up, but "@Count Timothy" does.

There seems to be no problem with single-word names. "J" is unsearchable.

On a PM following on from a recent thread, a name is now struck through. Interesting.

So presumably if one deletes a conversation, it is deleted for oneself, and not for the other participants?

There's a lot to unpack in that, and the worst outcome here would be yet another realism/anti-realism thread. This would be a good topic for PM, if it involves just you and I, or a new thread if others are interested.

Whether we like it or not, and whether we intend to or not, we cannot will ourselves to confine our method to the study of bread rather than the world in general without already presupposing as its condition of possibility a general and primordial origin, — Joshs

I'm unconvinced. Mostly because I don't quite see what you mean. We might start with the brute fact of bread, presumably, and work from that. No need for Plato.

he clearly doesn't believe that an exclusively language-oriented method is enough. — J

I differ with him here - philosophical problems are overwhelmingly the result of poor choice of wording; to the point where that's an alternative definition of philosophical problem. Once the plumbing of language is done, what is left might be physics or politics but not philosophy.

So in this regard I am somewhat at odds with Williamson.




But we might agree on a methodology, such that working out a suitable language in which to state the problem comes first, then we see if there is anything left over that looks like philosophy.

A bit of history seems appropriate here, given the comments above. A potted history, leaving out whole continents of philosophical discourse in order to map a rough path.

End of the century before last (I have to get used to writing that), the dominant philosophical system was Hegelian, of a British persuasion. Moore and Russell reacted against it, Moore by showing how the way it was articulated was far removed from common sense, Russell by showing how it was far removed from the precision of the new logic developed by Frege.

I am very dubious about using natural language as a tool for reasoning or "using words to think with". — GrahamJ

Russell's student, Wittgenstein, adopted a similar line of thinking to yours, Graham, developing at least in outline a new language based on the new logic, that could set out all and only the true statements. Having solved philosophy, he went on to become a primary school teacher.

Meanwhile Tarski developed a description of Truth for formal languages that was correct - so far as it appleid to formal languages. Quine, over the puddle, took a different approach, examining how a natural language might be interpreted in a formal language, adopting a holistic approach.

Then Wittgenstein realised that being a primary school teacher was much harder than doing philosophy, and went back to Cambridge. Under the influence of a few very, very good thinkers, he realised that he hadn't actually been paying attention to the complexity and utility of languages. He did a re-think that radically changed the way that he approached the topic, by looking at how language is actually used.

(Meanwhile, a few of the chaps at Oxford did something similar, perhaps on hearing rumours of Wittgenstein's work.)

Nowadays few, if any, philosophers would consider replacing natural languages with a formal language. They don't need to.

Quine's student, Davidson, pulled much of Wittgenstein, Quine and Tarski together in a theory of translation that doubled as a theory of meaning, taking truth as a primitive, proposing that understanding a language involves grasping a theory that could generate all the true sentences in it. This is not a replacement for natural languages. It provides instead a translation of natural languages using formal tools.

It may be intuitive, , but it is also based on some very tight argument from Davidson and others, and formed the basis for much work at the end of last century.

Dummett famously argued that understanding a sentence should be tied not to its truth-conditions per se, but to a speaker’s ability to recognise or verify when the sentence is true. This position led him toward anti-realism: the idea that the truth of a statement is constrained by our capacity to know or verify it.

The realist/antirealist debate petered out in the first decade of this century. Part of the reason is Williamson's essay. The debate, as can be seen in the many threads on the topic in these fora, gets nowhere, does not progress.

The present state of play, so far as I can make out, has the philosophers working in these areas developing a variety of formal systems that are able to translate an ever-increasing range of the aspects of natural language. They pay for this by attaching themselves to the linguistics or computing department of universities, or to corporate entities such as NVIDEA.

Something like that.

At last the ALP understand the term “diplomacy.”

How can I achieve these 14 worldwide objectives? Not by yourself. That much is clear.

That's probably a bit too strong. I gather you want something in the mix about agency and instrument? Perhaps we might agree that under a certain description, it's the apprentice who moves the block, yet under another description, it's the master? Adopting the idea that an intention varies with a description, form Davison and Anscombe...

Moving blocks is not something we do with words — AmadeusD

Yeah. The master moves blocks by giving a command as much as by pushing them with their hand. I'm sorry you can't see that. It prevents you participating fully in this discussion.

Page ten concerns the nature of discipline in philosophy.

...when philosophy is not disciplined by semantics, it must be disciplined by something else: syntax, logic, common sense, imaginary examples, the findings of other disciplines (mathematics, physics, biology, psychology, history, …) or the aesthetic evaluation of theories (elegance, simplicity, …). — p.10

As I've said before, philosophy is more than just making shite up. It also has to fit in with what we know. "Tightly constrained work has the merit that even those who reject the constraints can agree that it demonstrates their consequences."

Is the upshot here that philosophy cannot be done well by an amateur? I don't think so. More that it can not be done well by a dilettante. But also, it is not served by elitism, but discipline.

And now the essay gets more interesting.

Onward.

Page nine is a defence of the use of philosophy of language.

Those metaphysicians who ignore language in order not to project it onto the world are the very ones most likely to fall into just that fallacy, because the validity of their reasoning depends on unexamined assumptions about the structure of the language in which they reason. — p.9

and

The attempt to provide a semantic theory that coheres with a given metaphysical claim can therefore constitute a searching test of the latter claim, even though semantics and metaphysics have different objects. — p.10

The "linguistic turn" brought with it various philosophical tools that have become quite ubiquitous. Philosophy of language wasn't rejected so much as centralised. Language is the philosopher's main tool, and it will serve them well to understand how it works.

A tangent:

So long as you remember that PMs do not contribute to public threads any more than a "private language" is generally accessible. — Leontiskos

That's a misunderstanding of "private language". A private language is one that cannot in principle be made public, such as the sensation "S" in PI. A conversation via PM can of course be made public, and so is not private in the requisite sense.

I remain open to any comments via PM.

Should we look more deeply at the examples?

Taking the example "...contingency is not equivalent to a posteriority, and that claims of contingent or temporary identity involve the rejection of standard logical laws..." There have been quite a few threads on these topics on the forums. I think Williamson is right here, that there would be few professional philosophers who would seriously question these results. Those who think necessity = a priori or contingency = a posteriori haven't understood the modal logic developed since the sixties.

The discussion of intuitionism might be both novel and more interesting.

Or do we take it as read that there has been progress in these areas? That would be my preference, allowing us to proceed further in to the essay.

but the actual moving of the object doesn't seem to me part of the game. — AmadeusD

I don't understand this. If "Block" did not result in the apprentice moving a block, then we have no game. Moving the blocks is constitutive of the block game.

If you have time, I'd be interested in your reaction to

My response: — Banno

How should we understand the self-reflexive nature of philosophical inquiry? — J

Isn't the present paper just that, an example of self-reflexive philosophy, in analytic terms?

I criticise the rigour and adherence to rigid principles that prevent the exploration of other possibilities, and you suggest my claims need to be presented with more rigour and adherence to these things. — Skalidris

I'll happily stand by my preference for rigour. The complaint that quality in philosophy is in decline remains unjustified.

Timothy Williamson is not one of them — Srap Tasmaner

I haven't yet read much of his beyond the present paper, but from tertiary sources he seem to have some odd approaches to modal logic and epistemology.

The distinction between analytic and continental philosophy has become somewhat anachronistic. There's been somewhat of a convergence, taking the best of both, especially in the recent past. It was never a clear juxtaposition, positing a method against a geographic area.

Progress may not be identical with closure on a given topic. I could lament that we haven't answered or achieved agreement on a host of questions, but still acknowledge we've made progress in understanding them. For that matter, rather than lamenting, I could postulate that a lack of closure is a hallmark of what constitutes philosophy. — J

I'd agree with that. It follows form treating philosophy as a method, as something done, rather than as a set of beliefs. This was one of the themes of my thread on two ways to philosophise.

I'll be interested to see, though, whether he's able to "bootstrap" analytical phil out of the charge that it has selected only those questions which suit its methods. — J

If asking only those questions which suit it's method is asking what bread is made of, rather then what everything is made of, then I think it an agreeable approach. There's a lot to be said for working on questions that are at least answerable.

There's a tension between complaining that philosophy no longer addresses the big issues and agreeing that philosophy must remain incomplete.

indeed, they are not searchable.

You are familiar with the example, from PI? There is presumably a difference between moving blocks and moving blocks following an instruction.

There's an updated copy of the essay included as a afterword Williamson's the 2007 book The Philosophy of Philosophy.

Available here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/9780470696675.after

Thanks to @Heracloitus for this info.

So to the next issue: how much progress had been made. Williamson is optimistic:

Although fundamental disagreement is conspicuous in most areas of philosophy, the best theories in a given area are in most cases far better developed in 2004 than the best theories in that area were in 1964, and so on. — pp3-4

He argues his point on a case basis - undeniable progress has been made in modal logic and in truth theory, and there has been at least movement in ontology, with the then-raging debate between realism and anti-realism and the semantics of natural languages. There are developments in paraconsistent and intuitionist logic that look promising.

That the progress here is formal, technical and complex does not detract from the fact of progress.

Within this progress Williams sees lost opportunity. Now at about page eight.

Imagine a philosophy conference in Presocratic Greece.

It's an excellent parody, sharp and well-aimed. We have the system-builders, the groupies, the mockers and doubters; where would you be? I'd be with the doubters, and I'll argue that they were right.

The issue is how we are to mark, as well as to make, progress in philosophy; how to avoid "a feeble
and unnecessary surrender to despair, philistinism, cowardice or indolence". The refinements that bring progress about " emerge in the process of attempting to answer the original rough question".

Williamson is right in rejecting the suggestion that the mere divorce of science from philosophy is sufficient to explain progress, and in identifying the problem here as "that one cannot always tell in advance which questions it will be fruitful to pursue." It is the process that brings about progress, not beliefs and not the doubt alone. This takes us to about p.3

My response: Those who jump too quickly to an answer to "what are things made of?" fall; not water, not fire. The doubters have it right: we can intelligibly ask what bread is made of, but not, at least amongst the presocratics, what everything is made of. It is a step too far to ask what things in general are made of. It was exactly by answering questions like "what is bread made of" that we were able to progress towards the broader question. The answerable questions have a large part in this progress. Understanding the nature of grain and water and heat, and how they interact, lead by degrees and indirectly to the questions of chemistry and physics that constitute our present start of play.

This response should not be seen as a rejection of the essays thesis: it is the process that is important. Speculative ambition is an important part of that process. Discourse, the sweeping, theoretical system building, needs dissection, careful analysis of small, concrete questions. Williamson wants both, but insists that discourse must be disciplined by standards akin to those in the sciences.

Yep.

358. Now I would like to regard this certainty, not as something akin to hastiness or superficiality, but as a form of life. (That is very badly expressed and probably badly thought as well.) — OC

This last parenthetical sentence ought give us pause when considering the usefulness of "form of life".

I can't follow your reasoning here, sorry. Was that your point?

The form of life is what we do. It's not here nor there. Consider:

355. A mad-doctor (perhaps) might ask me "Do you know what that is?" and I might reply "I know that it's a chair; I recognize it, it's always been in my room". He says this, possibly, to test not my eyes but my ability to recognize things, to know their names and their functions. What is in question here is a kind of knowing one's way about. Now it would be wrong for me to say "I believe that it's a chair" because that would express my readiness for my statement to be tested. While "I know that it..." implies bewilderment if what I said was not confirmed. — OC

The form of life as "a kind of knowing one's way about".

Are you after something about the supposed missing internal life of a community of AI's? Do you think I am suggesting that there is no "internal life" for the users of "gavagai"? I'm not; I'm just pointing out that you may get your rabbit stew regardless of that internal life. Or not.

, There was an opportunity to consider more of Midgley, which might have been quite helpful. @Hanover's move towards forms of life is interesting, and continues on Sam's thread.

The commensurability of conceptual schema remains one of my main philosophical puzzles.

I'd like to take the idea of treating dissection as a demarcation criterion a bit further - that the difference between, say, literature, myth, or religion on the one hand and philosophy on the other is the emphasis on dissection and critique; on iterative re-assessment of one's position.

To address the form of life in your Gavagai example would require a linguist who is attempting to interpret the language not of a foreign people but of a lion. The lion represents the being with a differing form of life, who, per Wittgenstein's clear statement, we would not understand. The Gavagai example is no different from French to English to German. That is, all those folks share a form of life. We're looking for those who don't. — Hanover

This supposes that the we and the French participate in the same Form of Life...

Are you confident in that? :wink:

Even less so with ChatGPT, since it participates in a form of life in the way of a block or an apple.

So my problem here is that if we're going to say that we're taking as a hinge belief the uniformity of thought processes among various people, why not just make it a hinge belief that we truly have the same beetle metaphysically. — Hanover

That's certainly not something I'm suggesting. "The unity of thought processes" cannot be confirmed in any other way than by what people say and do. It's not a "hinge belief" that brings about any unity. The unity is seen in what is said and done, and that alone.

Hence, we do not have to agree on a hinge belief about gavagai in order to go on the hunt. It;s the doing that counts.

Thanks.

The thread became a bit of a shit show. But overall I'm happy with the result. Indeed, the passion of the response overwhelmingly carries the case in the OP.

These two come off as contradictory:
1. There are only blocks within the game of building.
2. There is more than language; there certainly are blocks. — Fire Ologist

You have misunderstood.

The bit you miss is that language games and language are not the same.

A language game - moving blocks, counting apples - is not confined to language.

So, "There are only blocks within the game of building" is not confined to language. It directly invovles blocks.

And so a language game involves more than just language.

How will you respond?

Long ago, when I was philosophically active, there was a widespread opinion that scepticism was vanquished and could be put to bed (or its grave). It turns out that was not so. It seems to be still alive and kicking. — Ludwig V

I suspect this is only so amongst apprentices, and the occasional journeyman. I'll maintain that Austin and Wittgenstein put the sort of scepticism in the quite well written OP to bed.

The explanation for solidity is not the somewhat vague idea probably everyone has before learning what's really going on. — Patterner

Here's a funny thing: After learning that atoms are mostly space, one does not find oneself sinking into one's arm chair. Things remain solid.

Learning that atoms are mostly space does not change the fact that arm chairs are solid. Both are true.

If there is a problem of perception here, it is the misperception that things consisting mostly of space cannot also be solid.