Yep. Convergence is not itself normative, so this idea is problematic.

Perhaps his point can be seen as pragmatic, that convergence, many folk working together on an issue, indicates a problem worthy of consideration.

Added:

It doesn't seem to indicate a problem for biological evolution. — GrahamJ

Yep. Convergence might indicate utility, if nothing else.

My question is simply what is the aim of the translation project now? Is it the same, or something different? — Ludwig V

Excellent question. Long answer, again.

The original aim was to provide a foundation for maths in logic. This was not entirely dropped as a result of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. While it's right that the whole of mathematics cannot be deduced from a single logical foundation, it's not quite right to suppose that mathematics cannot be given a basis.

Gödel didn’t show that mathematics is not logical, but that not all mathematical truths are derivable from within one particular formal system. It didn’t show that reduction to logic is impossible, but that no axiomatic system will do everything originally hoped. ZFC set theory and type theory are alternative logical foundational systems.

Philosophers came to see that formalisation often misrepresents the richness, context-sensitivity, and performative dimensions of ordinary language. But to walk away from formalism was to give up a valuable philosophical tool. Better to see if and how that richness can be treated formally, to see what can be done.

While other logicians provided formalisations of various aspects of language, Davidson provided a methodological basis for such an approach using Tarski's work of truth. Oversimplifying, Davidson suggested using a truth conditional semantics to develop an interpretation of aspects of natural languages in an extensional first order logic. With Russell and the Tractarian Wittgenstein the aim was to replace natural language. With Davidson, it was to understand it.

Davidson deliberately moved from talking of "translation" to talk of "interpretation" in order to make clear this methodological difference. So Davidson accepted that meaning cannot be separated from use, while still looking for ways to understand language in more formal terms.

Logicians and philosophers now look to see both where formal systems can display the structure of natural languages, and were aspects of natural languages can suggest ways to develop new approaches within logic.

Yep. Thanks.

The next few pages - from the bottom of page twelve - become more explicit about methodology. There's a suggestion from Grice that good philosophers are not just self-conscious about the methods they use, but seek to develop those methods. There's an acknowledgement of confirmation bias, with the suggestion that the way to counter this is by reducing obscurity. "Where the level of obscurity is
high, as it often is in current debates about realism and truth, wishful thinking may be more powerful than the ability to distinguish good arguments from bad, to the point that convergence in the evaluation of arguments never occurs."

There's the inevitable example of science. It'd be difficult to deny that scientific approaches do not lead to progress, but far more difficult to set out explicitly what those processes are and why they lead to progress. And this: "A small difference in how carefully standards are applied can make the large difference between eventual convergence and ultimate divergence."

Williamson apparently sees convergence as an indicator of progress. An interesting thought. While we might properly question if the methods of science are suitable for philosophical enquiry, we might admit that what is a problem for scientific method at least overlaps what is a problem for philosophical method, and we might further agree that convergence might indicate a good direction for further study.

The size of one's brush is not a bad way in to the next part of Williamson's essay.

Much even of analytic philosophy moves too fast in its haste to reach the sexy bits. — p. 14

Quite so, and not just with analytic philosophy. The temptation to jump ahead, to overgeneralise, to use the big brush, is great.

The fear of boring oneself or one’s readers is a great enemy of truth. — p. 15

Precise errors over vague truths. It would be a mistake to characterise this as marking some considerations as irresolvable, rather we should be open and explicit about our inability to formulate some issues clearly enough for due consideration, to put the effort into those areas that show the most promise.

See the edit.

Thanks for pointing out the lack of clarity.

That's not what is suggested. Even if there were a platonic form, deciding to conform to the form is making a normative choice.

To be sure, progress is a normative notion. So modal logic is an improvement on predicate logic, despite modal logic being in a formal sense reducible to predicate logic.

So nothing need "guarantee the fixity" apart from our own preferences. If we agree that modal logic represents an improvement on predicate logic, what more is needed?

You (or Tim) may argue that we need something external or absolute or a platonic form or some such to fix the judgement. But that there is such choosing to abide by such a thing is itself a normative judgement. And yet we judge.

could explain why it will not be answered... — Fire Ologist

You are basically painting with a roller rather than a brush.

I
I'll have to leave you to it.

Thank you for the example.

If you think they're legitimate in any given case, I'll take that to mean that you agree with Williamson to some extent. — J

Oh, yes. I think this the topic of the next few pages.

All brute facts about things in the world are subjective, relative and contingent. — Joshs

Is this to be read as a stipulation? It doesn't correspond to, say, Searle's use of 'brute fact" as mind-independent, non-institutional and (at least usually) physical.

Even so, they rely on idealizations. — Joshs

Arguably, they are interpreted so as to be stated... We'd have to look in to what is involved in "idealisation" to see how that fits.

And so on, by way of sense-making - my putting in my terms what I think youa re saying, you putting in your terms what you think I am saying, such that we seek some common ground from which to see what is at issue. I'm sure you will agree that there is much more to be said here, and we could go on in kind for quite a bit. I think we'd be matching your more phenomenological approach to Davidson's triangulation, itself a huge topic, but one that might well be worth pursuing.

All somewhat tangential to the topic here, which is analytic method.

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.