What happened to your claim that words don't have essential meaning Banno? — Philosophim

That meanings need not be essential does not imply that words do not have any meaning.

He can't possibly be conflating anything then. — Philosophim

He said:

The majority of trans people are not victims of anything but the unfortunate situation of having a mental illness. — AmadeusD

Looks pretty clear. Most trans people have a mental illness.

You might consider what it is you are defending.

Amadeus is like a magic eight ball. When he gets shook up he will just say shit. Most of it doesn't stick. I don't waste my time on them anymore. — I like sushi

:smile:

You might say that. I couldn't possibly comment...

, , you both presume an adversarial model of discourse. Now fun as that is, it might be interesting to explore other possibilities...

Fine. I can see a benefit in making the AI's input explicit rather than covert. Lets's see what Jamal's thoughts are.

So you are happy to conflate transgender with gender dysphoria.

And to support that with pop scientism.

Ok. Thanks for your reply.

Am I way off track? — frank

Perhaps not.

I keep coming back to language being inherently social. It follows that an explanation solely in terms of an individual's brain or cognition or whatever must be insufficient.

So that part of what you suggest must be correct.

:rofl:

:up:


Exactly.

Discourse announces an AI Assistant for using their software

@Jamal, any plans for the use of AI in our new home?

Here's an answer to the conundrum - integrate the AI into the chat. — Banno

Rather than worrying about how much of a post is generated by AI, it might be useful to have the AI as a participant in the forum, so that the sort of questions at which it excels can be asked and answered quite openly.

Cool.

Now, what does it have to do with first and third person? And can we do it without qualia?

I suppose we might agree that there are real abstractions... as well as false, misleading and contradictory abstractions... :wink:

Sorry - not sure I follow your direction here. Yes, there are various cogent arguments that meaning is not rule-based, and I accept that. Language is not algorithmic. If mentalese is computational, it is thereby algorithmic. Do you agree?

Yep.

Yes, I asked it for a summary of Pinker. It remains pertinent. Don't tell Baden.

What I don't get is why the internal meaning must be attached to a symbol. — Hanover

Yep. That's a typical semiotic move. I might be tempted to counter it with "the internal meaning must be attached to a use", but that's not quite right - the use replaces the meaning.

I would suggest Pinker abandon his ideosyncratic mentalese position — Hanover

Yep.


Socrates was fond of places in which he didn't belong... :wink:

Cheers.

What does a possible world consist ofthen? — Metaphysician Undercover

Have a look at the definition and use in the Open Logic text already mentioned.

It'd do you good.

A smell is a quale. — hypericin

'qualia' are defined as subjective and first-person in nature. — Wayfarer

You two need to talk.

I'm suggesting that in the context of philosophy, 'qualia' are defined as subjective first-person in nature. Look it up. — Wayfarer

Would that the advocates of qualia would reach some sort of agreement.

SO you are at odds with those who have said elsewhere that qualia are just colours and so on. Because colours are not restricted to the first person...


But this is one of the issues; there is no clearly and generally agreed notions of what qualia are. See the SEP article for an exposition of this problem. And it seems to me that one simple explanation of this is that the notion is incoherent.

It is really a very simple story. In your life you encounter aromatic things. In their presence, you experience a kind of qualia: a smell. In your mind, you form an association: smell <--> aromatic thing. In this case, coffee smell <--> coffee. Then later on, when you encounter coffee smell, your training tells you it's significance: coffee.

You cannot omit qualia from this story. — hypericin

You have omitted qualia already. The word does no work in your explanation. The explanation is as effective without mention of qualia.

Being transgender and gender dysphoria are not the same. "Transgender" is an umbrella term for people whose gender identity differs from the sex assigned at birth, while gender dysphoria is the distress or unease caused by that difference.

So we agree that is in error.

I don't see that I owe a reply to Amadeus, given his blatant hostility. It's a shame that you think his quite offensive post "minor" - especially given the pleading you put in to being treated respectfully.

You have not been discussing that topic in a good faith or honest manner from my viewpoint. — Philosophim

Rubbish. That looks to be a merely rhetorical move on your part, an attempt to excuse yourself from the discussion.

I'm here. If you have substantive points to make, or if there is something I have not addressed, set it out.

But are qualia real without consciousness? — Wayfarer

Can you set out how this might work? What are you suggesting?

Perhaps it is not something that can be, or must be, explained. That's what makes it a hard problem! — Wayfarer

If it can't be explained, it's not a problem but a brute fact. I could go along with that.

, @Hanover

How's this:

• Pinker’s Mentalese requires meaningful symbols whose content is fixed internally and whose correctness is internally determined.
• Wittgenstein’s private-language argument shows that such a system cannot constitute meaning.
• Therefore: Pinker’s framework and the private-language argument are fundamentally incompatible.

Add to this that neural nets do not function symbolically. Current physiology is somewhat contrary to Pinker's account. But neural networks must implement symbolic structures at some level. At some stage Pinker must drop the "mentalese" metaphor.

Perhaps this is not quite the direction in which you would have this thread head, Hanover?

I noted that you wished to differentiate mentalese from private language. I am not sure that you can.

I have been explicitly saying qualia are colors and smells this whole time. — Patterner

Then it seems we are in agreement, at least on this. Except that I would drop talk of qualia as unneeded and potentially misleading.

Let's go over the other argument again. It's that qualia - such things as seeing colours - are essential to consciousness. But the very example you give shows that someone who cannot see colours - someone without qualia - would nevertheless be conscious.

What follows is that seeing colours - having qualia - is not constitutive of consciousness.

Consciousness it's not a thing. It is subjective experience. — Patterner

Those two words: Experience and subjective.

What we might say is that "I experience being conscious!". But how is that saying anything more than "I am conscious!" What work is done by "experience"?

And what does that weasel word, "subjective", add here?

So we agree consciousness is not a thing. But I don't see how calling it a "subjective experience" is at all helpful in explaining what it is.

@Frank,

What is a true statement that's beyond our knowledge? — Metaphysician Undercover

As Fitch showed, antirealists know everything that is to be known. There are no true statements outside of what an antirealist knows. Unless they reject classical logic.

A possible world consists of statements setting out what is the case and what isn't.
The actual world consists of statements setting out what is the case and what isn't.
Every possible world is the actual world. — Metaphysician Undercover

Again, a world does not consist of a set of statements.

But in addition, this argument is an obvious undistributed middle. B is A, C is A, therefore B is C.

Poor stuff.

I'm sorry, I found that post too long and meandering to follow. If there was a core point, it escaped me.

We are addressing concerns about language use and societal integration. We are clarifying the phrase “trans men are men”. We are engaged, I hope, in something approaching a rational discourse.

If a trans woman uses their standing in order to coerce others, the key problem is the coercion. If someone uses deception to invade a space they are not entitled to enter, then exposing the deception is entirely appropriate. But this does not justify treating all trans women as deceptive or illegitimate. The existence of bad actors never licenses the rejection of the genuine.

My overall point is the language as it is today in historical, linguistic rules, and even normative use imply that woman/man unmodified by adjectives means a sex reference. — Philosophim

Have another look at this. You had previously agreed that language is no algorithmic.

If you need to, go back to A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs and reconsider the place of going against the rule in language.

Then consider why I might think that you have "slipped back" to a previous way of thinking.

Banno started to play dumb. It was because we got to a point in the discussion where I believe he was afraid of continuing, likely because he knew that rationally he might be forced to say something he personally didn't agree with. — Philosophim

If there is something that you think I've yet to respond to, set it out.

I've pointed out that even if most people would understand "woman in the woods" as referring to a female, doing so is not a necessary consequence of either logic or grammar. This is shown by the fact that "the woman in the woods" might be a trans.

"The woman in the woods" is not a rigid designator.

The majority of trans people are not victims of anything but the unfortunate situation of having a mental illness. — AmadeusD

I'd like to see a direct response to this from @Philosophim, @I like sushi, @Outlander, @ProtagoranSocratist, and @Jamal as well as @Janus.

For my part, I see Amadeus as hiding his prejudices in medical language.

A good point, so I'll address it first.

I waved a hand in the direction of Charlotte Witt earlier. Here's a ChatGPT response to "Summarise Charlotte Witt in a hundred words":

Charlotte Witt argues that woman and man are fundamentally social roles rather than biological kinds. What unifies women as a category is not shared anatomy but their socially enforced position within a gendered system that organises agency, norms, and expectations. She calls this the “unified social individual”: among our many social roles, gender has a practical primacy, structuring how one is recognised and what one can do. Thus, woman is a role constituted by social norms and practices, not chromosomes or identities alone. Gender categories are relational, normative, and institutional, grounded in lived social positioning rather than biology. — Chat

Witt is challenging to the anti-essentialist motive I've expressed here, because she uses a form of essentialism in a defence of feminism.

Gender is important to trans folk, as you say, Jamal, since they go to so much trouble to display their preference.

What isn't "fussed about" is who gets to decide. The expectation that gender follows necessarily from the contents of one's underpants is absent. There is a recognition of the separation of sex and gender.

This is found as much in Witt as elsewhere.

"Flying over the categories" is yet another option among many.

I sense a category error in throwing a cognitive scientist into the ring with a philosopher. — Hanover

I suppose it might be seen as pretty unfair on Pinker. :wink:

Yes, there is a significant difference in the tasks each has at hand, and you summarise that well, with Wittgenstein doing conceptual clarification while Pinker is seeking explanatory hypotheses. Wittgenstein is not, like Pinker, offering an alternative scientific hypothesis about the nature of language, but working through how we might coherently talk about language.

But these two are not mutually exclusive. In so far as Wittgenstein has a cogent description of what language is, Pinker's explanation of how language functions shouldn't gainsay it.

But as I understand Fodor and Pinker, symbolic manipulation goes all the way down. Mentalese is the real deal, and public language a pale shadow, forced to conform to the vagaries of public usage. So it appears to rely on private language from the get go.

I'm fairly confident about Fodor here, bit less so about Pinker. I'd need to do some reading.

:smile:

Fine. I imagine in your circles people make a clearer distinction in speech between female and woman. — I like sushi

I'll stop there and re-introduce Zaachariaha Fielding. I don't know Zaachariaha personally, but I'd be very pleased if I could call him a friend. Zaachariaha uses both he/him and she/her pronouns.

“With my family, I didn’t even come out … There was no reason for it. My brother reminded me of it a few years ago – he said, ‘You know, you didn’t really come out to us.’ I didn’t really verbalise it, I was just more being it.” — Guardian, as quoted

Zaachariaha is just being Zaachariaha . He transcends the silly stuff we have been discussing here.

There’s room for everybody but the modern world loves building walls and categorizing everything. Am I a man, a woman, are we an Indigenous band, a queer band? All these boxes feel like barriers and we just fly right over the top on them… sorry suckers! — Zaachariaha

No, in my circles people generally don't make a fuss about such things.

Enjoy this:

Tell me you would not object to living with no color. — Patterner

That presumed equivalence between qualia and colour is... unjustified.

Those things are qualia. — Patterner

Then qualia do not act as advertised; they are not private and ineffable. You have defended qualia to such an extent that they are no longer qualia. They are just colours and smells.

But your parable is cute. What it shows is that what matters for colour-talk is functional discrimination, not a private qualitative feel. You preserve the entire public language-game of colour, nothing is lost except the internal “what it’s like.” And crucially: nothing about the language-game depends on the missing qualia. You've shown that qualia do not do explanatory work. Cheers. "Colour experience” is a role in a language game, not some private essence. What we call “seeing blue” is just discriminating this from that, and responding appropriately in action and speech.

Notice that in loosing all my qualia, I did not loose consciousness. You should find that odd, if being conscious is having qualia.

You want the message to be “Ah! so there is something missing, something ineffable and private…”. But what is missing is the illusion that there needs must be a private feel doing causal or explanatory work - you've inadvertently shown that the private feel does no work at all.

If I can lose all the qualia and still use colour words perfectly, then what’s ‘missing’ never did any work and isn't needed. The something something over and above behaviour drops away. Presumably the "feel" bit is important here; that all Chalmers would now be saying is that the emotional reactions of the organism are the marker for consciousness. but importantly, when you actually examine what that “something” amounts to, it collapses into an impression, a way of talking, or an attitude toward the experience—not a metaphysical ingredient. The “feel” isn’t an extra entity; it’s just how we react, respond, or are disposed to speak in certain situations.

Being conscious is not possessing a certain metaphysical item, a quale. Being consciousness is being a creature that lives, reacts, expresses, interacts, and speaks in certain ways.

And that embeddedness is what is in danger of being lost by the simplistic expedient of treating consciousness as a thing.



But it's a good parable.

Women almost always refers to females. — I like sushi

Sure. But not always. Which is enough to allow "A trans woman is a woman" in just the same way as "An ice chair is a chair".

If I asked what is it like outside and you say 'it is raining outside' I imagine water is fallign from the sky. If I then go outside and find it is raining blood or orange juice I would feel that you neglected to make it clear what was going on. — I like sushi

But I would not have lied. What I said was true. The conventions of language were discussed . broadly agreed that conventions are insufficient to explain language use

I have no issue with saying 'trans gender women are women' in the context of gender. — I like sushi

Cool. So what's the issue here? That was the bone of contention, wasn't it?

I am starting to understand the OPs frustration here now. It is far more complicated than it first appears. — I like sushi

Philosophy proper is.

I am very much saying we ought (normatively) assume a woman is female in the sentence 'woman in the woods' because that is how language functions. — I like sushi

I don't see any reason to do so, and indeed given that doing so would offend many of my friends, I won't be joining you. I suppose it depends on the company one keeps. (I wonder who Jesus would've spent his time with? :chin: )

Cheers. Thanks.

(Actually, let me add an example. Suppose, instead of imagining a wood, you are responsible for hospital admissions, and a woman presents themself for admission. Is it morally correct to assume that they are female? Or should you just ask?)

Possible worlds consist of stipulations.
The actual world does not consist of stipulations.
Therefore the actual world is not a possible world. — Metaphysician Undercover

I did this the other day, but it's easy enough to do it again. A possible world does not consist of stipulations, so much as a complete description of a state of affairs - which statements are true and which are false. In an informal sense it is convenient to think of possible worlds as stipulated, by setting out how, if at all, a possible world differs form the actual world.

The actual world can for logical purposes be set out in the same way, as statements setting out what is the case and what isn't. But of course the actual world doesn't consist of such statements, nor of stipulations.

So both premises are muddled, and so is the conclusion.

we can make the actual world one of the possible worlds — Metaphysician Undercover

I will count that as progress. But your views on realism appear similarly confused. But by all means, set out the account clearly and I might address it.

Here's an AI generated summary:

Banno argues that Metaphysician Undercover fundamentally misunderstands modal logic and conflates distinct concepts. The core errors are:

**1. Conflating Truth with Necessity**
Meta treats "p is true" as meaning "p cannot be false," but this confuses truth with necessity. Something can be actually true without being necessarily true. For example, it's true you read a post, but it's also possible you might not have read it.

**2. Mixing Metaphysical and Epistemic Modality**
Meta fails to distinguish epistemic possibility (what we know) from metaphysical possibility (what could have been). Using the Jindabyne snow example, after checking weather reports we know epistemically that it didn't snow, but we can still consider metaphysically what would have happened if it had snowed.

**3. Reversing the Actuality-Possibility Relationship**
Meta claims knowing something is actual excludes it being possible, violating 2300 years of logical tradition from Aristotle onward that "what is actual must be possible". If you know something, it's trivially possible to know it—the alternative would mean Meta "knows only things that are impossible to know."

**4. Confusing Semantics with Metaphysics**
Meta conflates semantic stipulations (how we talk about worlds in models) with metaphysical claims (what world we're actually in). Possible worlds are semantic devices for evaluating formulas, not claims about multiple concrete universes.

**5. Misunderstanding Modal Operators**
Meta treats "◊Kp" (it's possible to know p) as meaning "we don't know p," when it simply means "Kp is not impossible"—an error that would render all knowledge impossible. — Claude

Point me to one place where you showed error in my reasoning please. — Metaphysician Undercover

Here.

I wasn't able to follow most of that. I don't see why you think it not a fair analogy, unless you presuppose some form of essentialism. A chair must be wooden, plastic or made from a non-precious metal; a woman may be female or male or transexual or asexual. The material doesn't determine the classification, "chair"; and the biology doesn't determine the gender.

For the reasons I explained in prior posts, this is contradictory. — Metaphysician Undercover

And your reasoning has been repeatedly shown to be in error.

You can't reduce modality to classical non-modal logic. — SophistiCat

Yep. It's a curio.

p→◇p is invalid without reflexivity.