:wink:

Part of Wittgenstein's response might have been an admonition to look - that despite the apparent problem, "and yet language works!"


Like my answer to implies, there is a way of understanding a rule that is shown in following or going against it, in specific cases. It's what we do.

More likely he would have reached for that poker...

It's all going to hell, man. — frank

Well, the USA is fucked. The rest of us will have to learn to accomodate that fact. We'll get by without them. The details will need to be worked out. That's part of what this election is now about.

The Orthodox domination of the secondary literature on private language was largely ended by Saul Kripke’s account of Wittgenstein’s treatment of rules and private language, in which Wittgenstein appears as a sceptic concerning meaning... Kripke’s Wittgenstein, real or fictional, has become a philosopher in his own right, and for many people, it is not an issue whether the historical Wittgenstein’s original ideas about private language are faithfully captured in this version. — SEP

FIne. Perhaps he did not do violence, so much as changed the subject.

do you assent that the imagined red and green are different experiences? — J

No. Red and green may be experienced, but they are not experiences - not qualia, because nothing is.

It's not just that the red in my imagining might be the green in yours, but that the comparison cannot be made. Red and green, like all words, are inherently communal, not private.

I agree about not prolonging this with color phenomenology — J

Too late.

I disagree that Kripke does violence to Witt. — frank

Yeah, I understand that, from previous conversations. Kripke has fun with a misdiagnosis of PI. I maintain that PI§201 and thereabouts answer Kripke. And I think mine the more standard response.

Where is the demonstration? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Demonstration? Were is the "demonstration" that this text is in English? Where is the "demonstration" that this is a hand?

That last paragraph in the article. Quine advertises it as "a final sweeping observation", but it seems to be claiming littler more than that truth functionality requires substitutional transparency.

Hence over to Davidson, and interpreting natural languages in formal first order terms, as truth functional. And we arrive at the nineteen eighties.

Meh. Moyal-Sharrock tries something like this, taking "belief" to mean "trust" alone. The trouble is that this is not how it is more widely understood. Hence things such as

Anglophone philosophers of mind generally use the term “belief” to refer to the attitude we have, roughly, whenever we take something to be the case or regard it as true. — Belief

and

Most contemporary philosophers characterize belief as a “propositional attitude”.

Few beliefs are openly the result of "judgement", if by that is meant explicit ratiocination. That some belief is indubitable does not imply that it is unstatable. If a belief is not true, it cannot be used to justify another belief.

That beliefs can be put into the form "I believe that p" where p is some proposition is pretty much constitutive of the philosophical conversation about belief.

Moyal-Sharrock presents a divergence from, rather than an elucidation of, On Certainty. Not unlike Kripkenstein.

Does Wittgenstein demonstrate things like... — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well, yes. Pretty much from the get go of the Tractatus, truth belongs to propositions, what is the case can be said to be the case, and the limits of our language are the limits of our world. Hinge propositions are not tautologies, not mere axioms or truisms.

Good grief.

I'm somewhat surprised that you attempted to answer 's question, at your accepting the presumption that being red is an "experience".

Ah well. Yet anther discussion of the phenomenology of colour will only help the length of my thread.

Given recent indiscretions, to what extent can we rely on the US as a member of the Five Eyes?

Looks like NZ is no longer the weak link...

No - you are leading me astray here. A fundamental tension in my own account is between language as use, after Wittgenstein, and the truth-functional approach of Davidson, after Quine. I've been allowed to mix the two up over the last page or so, and so have not had to face the strain between these two approaches.

That is, in using Wittgenstein against Quine I've neglected the problems that might cause for Davidson.

So this hasn't finished.

And I still need to sort that last argument, from the final paragraph of the article.

Sure.

Pretty much.

Cheers! I guess I am a bit like Charlie Brown to Meta's Lucy...

Not at all. And I don't try, I do...

"Knowing that" is dependent on "knowing how", in that one can only present a true sentence if one knows how to present a sentence. This is an outcome of looking towards use rather than meaning, since the use to which a piece of language is put is as much a doing as a saying.

Yes, that is what I am disagreeing with.

I do agree with your rejection of 's attempt to limit the applicability of these ideas.

If, as Wittgenstein says, Moore's propositions are not known, then they are not epistemological, i.e., not justified or true. — Sam26

Not known as propositions. They are known as in knowing how to ride a bike. "Here is a hand" is a recipe for how to play the game of dealing and speaking about physical objects. Not a knowing that, but a knowing how.

↪Banno My point is trying to clarify different uses of truth in our language. And the difference in the roles of truth in our systems of belief. — Sam26

They are not different uses of "truth". They are different uses to which the proposition is put by the language game. Some propositions stand within the game, others set the game up. Those that set the game up cannot generally be doubted within the game. Hence the game hinges on them.

Two different sorts of hinges: the constitutive rules such as "the bishop moves diagonally", that set out how one thing counts as another... and the basic statements such as "here is a hand"... unless "here is a hand" is understood as a constitutive rules, "This counts as a hand..."

Show me how time is a physical quantity. — Metaphysician Undercover

I can't. All I can do is lead the donkey to the water. I can't make him drink.

Can you show me a physics text that does not use time?

'cause, you see, as has been mentioned before, your grasp of physics is, shall we say, eccentric?

So better to pay it no attention.

...but I want to say that Zeno's paradoxes are not problems of measurement at all. — Moliere

Yep.

I think this lays out a good difference between truth and measurement — Moliere

No. The measurement is true. Specifying the degree of error does not render the measurement untrue. The tank really does contain 25±1 litres.

341. That is to say, the questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn.
342. That is to say, it belongs to the logic of our scientific investigations that certain things are in deed not doubted.
343. But it isn't that the situation is like this: We just can't investigate everything, and for that reason we are forced to rest content with assumption. If I want the door to turn, the hinges must stay put.

Hinge propositions are foundational— truth is not a property they possess but a role in epistemological language games. — Sam26

And yet they are true. If they were not, then the door could not move, the investigation could not take place.

I can't say I agree with your first statement — Moliere

Good, becasue it is nonsense. A "non- physical" measurement of a physical quantity... what would be your non-physical units for the fuel left in the tank - not litres, since they are physical.

Physical measurements are not infinitely precise, nor is such precision needed.

Yes to accuracy agains precession.

But it's not a "fib" at all; the tank really is a quarter full, ±5%. It's a truth.

One thing that is very clear here is that some folk do not understand errors. Error is fundamental to physics.

See, for more, Introduction to Error and Uncertainty.

There's that, and then there's the philosophically more interesting view expressed here:

Each measurement has a certain amount of uncertainty, or wiggle room. Basically, there’s an interval surrounding your measurement where the true value is expected to lie.

...the presumption that there is a true value; that given infinite precision we could set out the actual value as a real number. There is no reason to supose this to be true.

Literalism again. — Hanover

Any declaration can be made compatible with any theory with the addition of suitable ad hoc hypotheses.

I do much prefer literalism. Especially over sophistry.

"Genocide" is not so easy to pin down as head-stomping. What says the "moral force"? Do we need "Moral Jedi" to do the interpretation?

like an explanation for why boys face longer exclusions in schools for equivalent transgressions — fdrake

...and why more men are in gaol. It's very easy to point the finger at schools becasue they are examined in microscopic detail, and the data is ready at hand, but the ailments need not be peculiar to school communities so much as more easily identifiable in school communities. You can see the misbehaviour more easily in school statistics than in the broader community.

And then go watch a movie where the solution is more often than not found in being more violent than your opponent.

There's a lot of hocuspocus in schools, a lot of political interference and, at least in English speaking countries, a failure to acknowledge the expertise of teachers.

How did we get on to this sidequest?

Yes. — fdrake

I urge caution. Start with two cohorts, one lower than the other, and then reduce that inequality, and it can be said that the other cohort is "falling behind". Especially when the two cohorts exhaust the population.

For Gregory I feel pity actually. — Tobias

Me, not so much. A recent discussion on Mathematics showed that he had a very poor grasp of some basic concepts, together with an unwillingness to learn. That attitude was apparent here, as well. And the selfie taken from the vicinity of his groin was just weird.

Sure, all that, more or less.

Boys outperformed girls in mathematics by 11 score points; girls outperformed boys in reading by 22 score points in Australia. Globally, in mathematics, boys outperformed girls in 40 countries and economies, girls outperformed boys in another 17 countries or economies, and no significant difference was found in the remaining 24. In reading, girls, on average, scored above boys in all but two countries and economies that participated in PISA 2022 (79 out of 81). — Gender differences in performance

Mixed results. But...

In Australia socio-economically advantaged students (the top 25% in terms of socio-economic status) outperformed disadvantaged students (the bottom 25%) by 101 score points in mathematics. — PIZA results

11 points, 22 points... and 101 points. Which should be our primary concern?

My critique of Reeves is the common one that he is blaming schools for general societal problems. It's a strategy adopted by folk - politicians - so they can ignore the actual issue by blaming the teaching profession.

Shouldn't this be in the Lounge?

If you need folk to genuflect, then I do agree that the US was a great civilisation.

The issue in this particular thread is, what next? Especially for us, in our parochial Dow Nunder considerations.

Tim Tams aren't American — frank

Indeed, famously Australian, but Arnott's were purchased by the US corporate Campbell's Soup in 1997. There followed an explosion of varieties in the crass US tradition, including of all things a cheese variety for the Indonesian market.

Divided loyalties.

responsibilities? :chin: — frank

Yes, responsibilities - things the US undertook to do, then backed out of.

China can't be trusted. — frank

Nor can the USA, as it turns out.

Do you think you might be a little bemused? — frank

I hope I would be aghast.

I would limit purchases from the US — frank

Such purchases are very few.

...you didn't read my post — frank

I think I did, but you didn't like the response.

Do you know the expression "Cutting off your nose to spite your face"? — Banno

But thanks for boosting this thread.

US postal rates are so much higher than other regions - Canada, for example - that again, we don't make such purchases.

Again, the point MAGA misses is that the US has no monopoly on production. If you make it harder to buy or sell into the USA, we will buy or sell elsewhere.

Do you know the expression "Cutting off your nose to spite your face"?

The USA can do as it pleases. But having said that it would provide aid, defence materials and so on, and then having rapidly and unilateral backed out out of those undertakings, others will respond appropriately. Again, since the USA has shown itself to be unreliable, why should we do business?

There are other places to buy things.

(Indeed, I contemplated a personal ban on buying US produce, only to realise that extended as far as the occasional TimTam.)

...the US never had any responsibilities — frank

One example: the US said it would provide aid, then reneged. Hence, it is unreliable. See What Trump's USAID freeze means for the rest of the world

The Washington-based Malaria No More says new modeling shows that just a year of disruption in the malaria-control supply chain would lead to nearly 15 million additional cases and 107,000 additional deaths globally. It has urged the Trump administration to “restart these life-saving programs before outbreaks get out of hand.” — The Independent

A "hinge proposition", if ever there was one.