So whether we make use of formal logic or natural
language in service of philosophy, if our focus is on reducing our experience of the world to fit the idealizations of logic or the categorical universalities of language we are failing to address the most fundamental philosophical question; what is the nature of our subjective comportment toward the world such that it makes possible the invention of abstractions which leave out the relevant and purposeful way in which we encounter the meaningful world? — Joshs

Seems to me as examining "the nature of our subjective comportment toward the world such that it makes possible the invention of abstractions which leave out the relevant and purposeful way in which we encounter the meaningful world?" just is examining concepts and categories - language.

The mistake here would be restricting such contemplations to "subjective".

And that's why I'm sceptical about phenomenology.

There is, for example, no actual philosophical work by anyone anywhere in this thread. At least on this view. Strictly speaking. — Srap Tasmaner

Did I misunderstand you here? I had understood that this was becasue of the topic, not the degree of formality...

I think I'm having trouble with the apparent juxtaposition of formal and natural languages. I understand formal language as a subclass of natural language, not as its antithesis. "A = apples" is as much a part of English as "May I introduce you to George?" The difference is in the rules around "=" that permit substitution extensionally...

Formal language is just natural language with more explicit restrictions and explanations.

So what is philosophy? The demarcation criteria I've suggested a few times, to little effect, is that doing philosophy involves going back and looking again at what we have said, and checking how it hangs together.

So 's nephew is applying and doing a bit of nomenclature, but not philosophy. If he had been challenged to count the legs on a spider - an activity that might have involved some discussion of the difference between pedipalps and legs, and quite a bit of fun - and then challenged to decide whether a spider is an insect, or whether insects have six legs - then he might be doing philosophy, by giving due consideration to the way he was using "insect", "Spider", "octopus" and so on. The key shift is from naming to examining concepts and categories.

In this account, any formalisation is a tool for doing philosophy well.

@Ludwig V, this also is a part-answer to our PM chat about the place of logic in the analysis of language.

So, in a way, I do think that the idea of formal logic as regularization of natural language is simplistic, though not wrong. — Ludwig V

I like simple.

Banno's position here is interesting because he is strongly committed both to the primacy of natural language and the usefulness of classical logic. The argument he often makes is that classical logic is not something you find implicit in ordinary language, as its hidden structure, say, but you can choose to conform your language use to it. — Srap Tasmaner

Yep. I'm pleased and flattered to see this clear reflection on my view. Thanks.

I think that view actually rhymes quite well with the description I've been trying to develop of how formal, technical language can be embedded in natural language, much as mathematical language is and must be embedded in natural language. — Srap Tasmaner

And again, very much Yep!

We end up using multiple disciplines because experience warns us that we ought to. — frank

I think this is pretty much it.

Ok, and that, in so far as it goes, is not a poor position to adopt?

So regardless of Williamson's odd metaphysical notions, we might have some agreement?

The whole point of the lecture is that you should make sure you are properly disciplined, so this must be something you can do, and you must be able to know whether you are doing it or not. Otherwise, it's just "try to", which he's clearly not going to countenance. — Srap Tasmaner

Perhaps it will suffice to be disciplined enough.

If you and I agree, will that suffice?

Thanks for that. Interesting.

I think part of the problem here is that "disciplined" is being used in two different ways ― not quite two different senses. It's rather like the way we use the word "hot" in two ways: you can ask if something is hot or cold, and you can ask how hot something is (or similarly, how cold). Similarly, discipline seems to be, on the one hand, a matter of how firmly your inquiries are guided by other disciplines, and by how many; but on the other seems to be something that can be achieved, and that stands as the contrary of "undisciplined". — Srap Tasmaner

Relative and absolute senses. She will be huddled under blankets while I am comfortable in my tee shirt. But we at least agree that she is cold while I am hot; that this is the fact of the matter. And this will be so regardless of what the thermometer shows, it would be impertinent for me to say she was mistaken here. So let's not suppose our differences to be merely subjective.

Perhaps Williamson needs a thermometer and thinks it will solve his problem. But we don't, since we can easily see what is the fact of the matter. It doesn't stop us from adjusting the thermometer.

So the issues is, can we find a setting that is comfortable for us both?

*"The phenomenologically reduced perceptual experience is not just a method but an *existential shift*—what he elsewhere calls "the philosopher’s genuine rebirth" . — Joshs

thought Williamson didn't go far enough in naming names.

Excellent post. Yes, one cannot write without writing rhetorically. It's no depreciation of the paper to point out that it is rhetorical or aesthetic.

Acknowledge that there are different styles of philosophy with very different aims — Janus

...discourse and dissection. So I'll go back to the suggested demarcation criteria, that we stop just making shit up when we start dissecting, and that this is what marks the move form myth making to doing philosophy.

Is Williamson "blind to his philosophy's historical situatedness? — Janus

He explicitly situates himself within realism within the realism/antirealism debate within analytic philosophy. But the expectation is that he explicitly situate himself in Heidegger's history.

"What I'm saying is true, but don't you dare claim that it is 'understandable.' That would be to turn it into a technology."

What I really think: This is all rhetoric of a bygone moment in philosophy. We can find plenty to think about in Being and Time without worrying about whether H was often defensive and hyperbolic. — J

The work done on Heidegger that made progress was that which interprets it in analytic terms, and dissects it accordingly - Dreyfus, Brandom, Carman...

All somewhat tangential.

So from Williamson's standpoint, @Joshs is doing bad philosophy—obscure, unstructured, and unconcerned with convergence or clarity.

But from a Heideggerian or Derridean standpoint, Williamson is doing bad philosophy—blind to its own historical situatedness, epistemologically naive, and overly committed to scientistic ideals.

How do we move past this?

~~

But different discursive communities can’t rely on good will to overcome incoherence in interpretation between groups — Joshs

Sure. But absent good will, and there is no hope at all.

Williamson finishes by explicitly acknowledging that his own essay does not meet the criteria it advocates.

He couldn't, becasue the essay is not an argument as such, so much as an aesthetic critique. He is showing us again what is beautiful in philosophy, and what isn't.

Despite all the talk of rigour, logic, clarity, and convergence, Williamson’s piece is fundamentally rhetorical: it persuades not by example, but by tone, stance, and value judgment.

Is transparency and clarity enough? We might add a need for responsiveness, a desire to be both understood and to understand. That, too, is a constraint.

But that is an attitude, and so depends on what one wants, on what one is doing here.

What is philosophy for?

That's the question that will decide what you think philosophy is, and how you will do philosophy.

Nietzsche consistently positioned his philosophy as being ahead of his time, written for future generations who would be capable of understanding and implementing his ideas about value creation, self-overcoming, and the rejection of traditional moral systems. He saw himself as preparing the ground for future philosophers and cultural creators who would build new foundations for human flourishing. — Joshs

But is that admirable? It could also be seen as a mere dog-whistle to those who would think of themselves as part of an intellectual elite, pretending to understand words that were hollow.

Is he a radical voice ahead of his time, misunderstood because of the profundity of his insight? Or is he a clever ironist, whose appeal to future generations flatters the vanity of self-anointed "deep thinkers," regardless of the actual content?

All this assumes procedural constraints and shared norms can be willed into existence on the basis of some imagined neutral playing ground. — Joshs

Willed into existence, yes, but not on some "imagined neutral playing ground", so much as by the hard graft of making oneself clear and explicit.

And a certain amount of good will.

This is @J's particular genius.

When law and order break down, the result is not freedom or anarchy but the capricious tyranny of petty feuding warlords — p. 17

Without agreed-upon constraints, philosophical debates become dominated by style, authority, and local jargon—each little sub-school operating as a fiefdom, each debate carried out on terms untranslatable to others. Sound familiar? has a point. It was rather neatly described elsewhere as

...people building drone view pyramids of arguments... — Ansiktsburk

It captures a recurring phenomenon in both contemporary philosophy and in this forum: the appearance of rigour—complicated argument-mapping, textual scaffolding, with little real pressure placed on foundational assumptions or cross-framework intelligibility.

Williamson's suggestion:

We can reduce it by articulating and clarifying the constraints. — p.17

Indeed, and this requiers agreement, convergence. This is Williamson’s minimalist prescription: no methodological revolution, just a re-commitment to being explicit. What logic are you using? What counts as evidence? What assumptions are you allowed to make? These are, in a sense, procedural constraints, shared norms that allow for adversarial argument without descending into chaos.
Williamson isn’t pushing a single method (e.g., scientific naturalism or conceptual analysis), but calling for transparency: if you’re doing verificationist semantics or paraconsistent logic or metaphysical grounding, say so. And make it intelligible.

It went down hill from soon after the opening post, a result of the contributions of those who could not abide what that post said.

I'm just going to congratulate myself for being directly on-topic and move along. — Srap Tasmaner

Thank you.

The paragraph, at the top of page sixteen, on the aesthetics of definitions is harder to follow. An example might have helped.

The criticism of Dummett in the next paragraph is clear enough. ‘Either a mammoth stood on this spot a hundred thousand years ago or no mammoth stood on this spot a hundred thousand years ago’ is either true or it is false; false for my case since there were no mammoths in Australia. Clumsy stuff, on Dummett's part? Or mischaracterisation?

As I recall, Dummett moved from a classical logic to an intuitionist logic, since the absences of warrant for the conclusion, in an intuitionist logic, permits the rejection of the law of excluded middle - we just don't know for sure whether there was a mammoth were Dummett stood, a hundred thousand years ago - and saying "I don't know" is commonsensical.

But we can still take on board Williamson's point: it is important that we are clear what logic - what "constraints" - we are using. It's just that Dummett may be using intuitionistic logic rather than just relying on Williamson's common sense.

Onward. The thoughts at the bottom of page fifteen parallel those I have expressed elsewhere in terms of completeness and coherence. It is easy to construct a complete theory, since any contradiction will, by the principle of explosion, result in an explanation for anything. Harder, though, to construct a coherent theory, one that does not involve contradiction.

And yes, that's a trite argument. Yet

...it is rigour, not its absence, that prevents one from sliding over the deepest difficulties, in an agonized rhetoric of profundity. — p.15

Consistency is a necessary precondition for explanatory adequacy. While the point is logically elementary, it bears repeating: in philosophy, the real danger isn't just explicit contradiction, but the glossing over of inconsistencies in the name of elegance or rhetorical flourish. That’s where Williamson’s critique really bites.

It's worth noting that this paper was delivered at a conference on realism and truth. That likely accounts for why Williamson spends so much time on the realism-irrealism debate. — J

Cheers. Worth noting. Here I am reading the text as a more general critique and defence of analytic method - I think that's how @Srap Tasmaner intended me to see it when he suggested the paper.

You there, Srap? Have we lost you?

We don’t need anything external to our preferences to fix them. — Joshs

I agree.

...the analytic methods Williamson chooses to apply to world are considered as external to that world... — Joshs

How do you ground that? It seems a hollow accusation, given the ambiguity of "world".

What, exactly, is "being concealed, forgotten , ignored and flattened over"?

...what philosophy should genuinely be concerned with... — Joshs

What's that, then, and why should we take your word for it?

All this by way of showing that you are doing the sort of thing that Williamson complains about.

Now I'll give my own summation and evaluation when we have finished working through the paper, and I suspect that at that point we will find ourselves not so far apart. But let's not jump to the conclusion quite yet.

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.