has an idealist bent, and so is perhaps suggesting that any language game will do.

There's a pinch of truth in saying language games do not reflect the facts, since the facts, being truths, are a part of the language games around truth. Better perhaps to say that the games are embedded in the world – so the builder's game inherently involves slabs and blocks and cannot be played without them.

There's also the ill-informed supposition that language games only ever involve language, which even a cursory reading will evict.

While he shows that Moore's use of "know" in "I know this is my hand" is problematic, I suspect Wittgenstein pretty much agreed with the argument Moore presents against idealism. "Here is a hand" shows that there is stuff around us to be dealt with, providing a foundation, a certainty. Again, there have to be slabs in order to engage in the builder's game

A couple of things.

In PI§66 Wittgenstein, in considering the nature of games, asks us not to theorise but instead to look at how the word "game" is actually being used. We're in a not dissimilar place here, thinking "there must be something that serves to pick out the individual in question..."

But an individual can be "pick out" even in cases where the description is wrong - consider another example from Donnellan, someone at a party asking "Who is the man with the martini?" and receiving the correct reply, despite the drink not being a martini. The description may be wrong and yet still serve to elicit the correct response.

SEP lists three possible ways of fixing a referent, in addition to descriptions, and points out that they are not mutually exclusive. Some combination might well give the best account.

What is clear is that rejecting the idea that all references are fixed by descriptions does not tie one to the view that no references are fixed by description, nor to causal theories of reference.

In fending off the arguments, is obliged to take extreme measures. Hence "If the definition of Thales is stipulated to be "the man who fell into the well," then Fred is Thales". His approach cannot envision, let alone articulate, the possibility that Thales did not fall into the well, because for him "Thales" is exactly "He who fell into the well". I hope others will accept that "Thales might not have fallen into the well" is a clear enough English sentence that might even have been true.

Aristotle was a fine philosopher, "conceptually rich" as says, and well worth reading, especially on topics such as ethics. But his logic has been superseded. Leontiskos has attached himself to the descriptivist view, and thus to the supposed utility of Aristotelian logic he holds dear. He has taken the next, predictable step, when Kripke shows your argument to problematic, attack the character and authority of Kripke ().

Notice that the Kit Fine article (this is a thread about an article by Kit Fine...) does not reject Kripke's account; Fine is too good a logician to engage in anything so perilous. Instead he accepts the modal approach but tries to defend essences by accounting for them using definitions instead of necessity.

Anyway, given that the discussion has moved away from the Fine article I might leave this topic where it is.

So what?

Well, it comes from Kripke because he is the bloke who developed a working semantics for modality.

Modality is the part of logic that deals with "what if..." and the like. Kripke's solution is Possible World Semantics. Part of that semantics is that proper names refer to the very same individual in each possible world in which it exists. A consequence of this is that one might specify a possible world in which the characteristics that supposedly set out the essence of that individual do not apply. Nevertheless, what they do not apply to is that same individual.

The argument from error being used here is a plain English account of that sort of argument.

Possible World Semantics gives a way of dealing with modalities that enables us to clarify quite a bit of what was obscure in earlier types of modal logic, especially that which did not progress far beyond De re and De dicto.

Not unlike the clarity that Frege and Russell brought to the ambiguity of "is" by separating out quantification, identity and predication - ∃(x), x=x and f(x). There are folk not so far from this thread who have not been able to follow this, with dire consequences.

An alternative version. Suppose that the only thing we know about Thales is that he fell into a well. On the descriptivist account, "Thales" and "The fellow who fell into a well" are synonymous, then on your view "The fellow who fell into a well" is what we mean by "Thales"

Now suppose that it wasn't Thales, but his friend Fred who fell into the well. So "The fellow who fell into the well" actually refers to "Fred".

It follows that all this time, while you thought you were talking about Thales, you were actually talking about Fred.

The alternative, which is now a commonplace, is that names do not refer in virtue of some associated description.

Edit: I hope it clear that in this case Thales certainly exists, but we do not have to hand a description that sets him apart, he has no "essence", so it seems, and yet we can still talk about him.

I don't see that you have understood the argument. Your supposed reply begs the question by supposing that "Thales" sans description does not refer to Thales. And yet, "What if every description we have of Thales were wrong?" is clearly a question about Thales. You are apparently willing to deny this, in order to preserve your view.

Obvious question begging on your part. You claim the name cannot work without a description, so you say that the name hasn't worked; but it has. Meh.

~~

In fact, he seems proud that he makes no attempt at theorising. — RussellA

Wittgenstein's work shows the poverty of what is here being called "theorising". There's something oddly obtuse in denouncing him for not doing something that he has shown to be an error.

Wittgenstein deals with the first part, but ignores the second. — RussellA

What twaddle. Wittgenstein explicitly asks his readers to look at how words are actually used. Suggesting he does not look at how "the language game has a use in the world" is the most extreme example of your misreading so far. That follows you here shows how little he has understood. As happens so often, the fly is so happy in the bottle it will go out of its way to remain there.

But this is a confusion of a name with an individual, — Leontiskos

Really? If Thales did not fall down the well, that is a truth about Thales, not about his name.

You'd have to fill this out somewhat.

And it's not that Thales doesn't exist - but that he exists, and yet none of the things we understood to be true of him are actually true. Suppose it is true that nothing we thought we know about Thales were actually true of him. That would be a fact about Thales. And this despite the unavailability of a description that is true of him.

Laws ought to apply to each and every particular individual, not a set of individuals. — NOS4A2

yet

I do not count companies or any other association as individuals. — NOS4A2

No corporate law then. That's a rather extreme form of laissez-faire!

Honestly, what you are setting out here is too incomprehensible, too incoherent, to be addressable.

Might leave you to it.

It isn’t a voluntary association like people getting together to form a club or company. — NOS4A2

Worker cooperatives need not be imposed. Your' engaging in the fallacy of composition. You've also moved from the claimt hat there isno society to a claim something like that social norms ought not be imposed.

Laws ought to apply to each and every particular individual, not a set of individuals. — NOS4A2

Presumably you would count incorporated companies as individuals?

Or are you against incorporation?

Isn't what? your point remains obscure.

Incorporation in the general sense is voluntary... Socialism isn’t. — NOS4A2

So if you inherit your shares, having them forced on you involuntarily, then... what?

Again, you appear to argue that there is no such thing as society, while making use of the very thing you deny.

There's nowt queer as folk.

Well, if you want to continue discussing Searle, I suggest starting a new thread.

But it would be clear only if you knew which investors owned how many shares. — NOS4A2

Meh. Of course anyone can purchase shares, and even if the numbers are not public, the process is.

What you call "collectivist politics" is a commonplace. Socialism could be as simple as having those who work for the corporate body, own the body corporate.

All that stands out here is your ongoing inability to see more than individuals in the social interactions around you, and the contradiction in rejecting socialism while accepting incorporation.

"Well institutional facts work this way" — schopenhauer1

Yep. What's salient here is the communal nature of certain intentions.

This relates to 's recent thread.

I won't go into Searle here, too much of a digression, except to say that he is a hard realist.

Searle posited something quite similar, which I had a go at expounding.

But the political subject is without a particular referent. — NOS4A2

So you claim, yet "Common ownership" and "public control" are clear enough in the associations listed on the ASX.

Then it's hard to see what the complaint in your OP is.

So we agree that people can get together and form social organisations?

Extraordinary, that there are folk who believe in incorporation but not in society.

...the meaning of a particular word is determined by its relationship with the other words within a holistic whole. — RussellA

No. Forget about "the meaning of a particular word" and instead look to how it is used. There is a way of understanding a word that is not found in setting out synonyms, but which is seen in it's being used.

Perhaps I am missing what you are saying — RussellA

Indeed, you are. One can't explain aspect perception to someone who only sees the duck.

Austin, especially in Other Minds, addresses "real".

Consider the question: Is it a real one? When you ask if it is real, what are you sugesting? No, it's a fake; it's an illusion; it's a forgery; it's a phoney, a counterfeit, a mirage... What is real and what isn't is decided in each case by contrast; there is no single criteria.

The wile of the metaphysician consists in asking 'Is it a real table?' (a kind of object which has no obvious way of being phoney) and not specifying or limiting what may be wrong with it, so that I feel at a loss 'how to prove' it is a real one.' It is the use of the word 'real' in this manner that leads us on to the supposition that 'real' has a single meaning ('the real world' 'material objects'), and that a highly profound and puzzling one. Instead, we should insist always on specifying with what 'real' is being contrasted - not what I shall have to show it is, in order to show it is 'real': and then usually we shall find some specific, less fatal, word, appropriate to the particular case, to substitute for 'real' — Austin

Austin shows that it has different meanings (uses) depending on context - it's not a real dollar note, it's a forgery; it's not a real tree, it's an illusion; and so on. The pattern is "it's not a real X, its a Y". Austin goes on to add a tool for analysing metaphysical notions of "real", by finding a more appropriate word, or dismissing the argument if one be not apparent.

What is offered by Austin is not a definition, but a method to test proposed uses. What we have is an antidote to the philosopher's tendency to push words beyond their applicability.

Perhaps seeing this requires a particular conception of philosophical problems as knots in our understanding, to be untied, explained, or showing how to leave the flytrap. but the fly has to want to leave....

There may perhaps be a sense not covered by this, a sense that is "absolute" in some way; but Austins method sets the challenge of setting out clearly what such a sense would be.

Austin's Paper is here.

It's eleven months since I wrote the above. The topic comes around every few months. It's a prime candidate for a fixed thread. And for Einstein's apocryphal definition of insanity. @Jamal?

Hey, folks, DNA evolved on Earth. What would be extraordinary is if ET had any DNA.

The story is a crock. If you can't see that your critical skills are inadequate.

To be clear, what I'm suggesting is that the issue at hand – the identity of indiscernibles – is not an empirical question. Rather we might see it as a choice between two ways of setting out how things are. In the one, we accept that if things are of indiscernible, then they are the very same thing; in the other, we instead accept that different things might be identical. Both views lead to coherent accounts, just with different numbers of things in the world.

Unless someone can show how either view leads to contradiction, then the choice is arbitrary, not empirical.

Also, consider the one electron universe.

sure. Just to reiterate, I have not come across a version of essence that is of much use, but I’m happy to gives consideration to any that’s proffered. I’m hoping for something a bit more useful than “what makes a thing what it is“

A name is always attached to some thing.
In order to use a name the thing to which it is attached must be identifiable.
The identification of things occurs via description.*
Therefore, names presuppose description. — Leontiskos

I think all three assumptions problematic. For the sake of simplicity, I've been focusing on the third, using Donnellan's argument. I thought that clear.

We could address the others, but I'm not intent on writing a thesis here.

Well, we might have to leave this as moot, since what you see as advantageous is what I see as deleterious.

But to the topic of this thread, what sort of place do you see here for essence?

If your point is that Russell's descriptive account is problematic, then we agree.

The converse of the issue you describe is presumably that folk such as Kant and Schopenhauer are perhaps too quick to develop a "full-fledged construction of metaphysical theory" without due attention consistency.

...If everything that is true has to exist... — schopenhauer1

Analytic thinking is not monolithic. The detail here is considerable, and the gloss you give above is far from accurate.

I'm pleased you are enjoying Anscombe. She is a favourite of mine. She is writing at a time and with a background that pretty much took the descriptivist theory as granted. That changed considerably with Donnellan and Kripke. For all the logic that sits behind her view, and that of others such as Searle, the argument given above and others offered by Donnellan and Kripke have been for a while considered pretty conclusive.

I am not aware of anything in which Anscombe directly addresses Donnellan and Kripke. IF you come across something, I'd be most interested.

The argument is pretty straight forward. Suppose that it turned out that nothing we thought we knew about Thales were true; that he did not think all was water, did not fall into a well and did not say "know thyself". Who is it that the previous sentence is about? Well, it is about Thales. But if, "in order to use a name the thing to which it is attached must be identifiable", we now have no way of identifying Thales, which would imply that the sentence is not about Thales.

Edit: A quote substantiating this dropped off the post. Here it is again.

The role of this history leading up to a present use of a name has almost always been neglected by those who accept the principle of identifying descriptions. The sort of description generally mentioned as helping to pick out, say, Thales, is such as 'the Greek philosopher who held that all is water'. Nothing is made of the fact that such descriptions are given by us derivatively. We might be pardoned if we supposed that the referent of 'Thales' is whatever ancient Greek happens to fit such descriptions uniquely, even if he should turn out to have been a hermit living so re- motely that he and hisdoctrines have no historical connection with us at all.

But this seems clearly wrong. Suppose that Aristotle and Herodotus were either making up the story or were referring to someone who neither did the things they said he did nor held the doctrines they attributed to him. Suppose further, however, that fortuitously their descriptions fitted uniquely someone they had never heard about and who was not referred to by any authors known to us. Such a person, even if he was the only ancient to hold that all is water, to fall in a well while contemplating the stars, etc., is not 'our' Thales. — pp. 352-3

I'm sorry that you haver been unable to identify the argument. It is quite well-known and you should have little difficulty in finding it in secondary or tertiary sources.

. How do the balls get there? You need stars to go supernova to create glass (or iron), right? — Count Timothy von Icarus

You are stuck in empiricism, it seems. Sure, the universe does not consist of two identical iron balls. At issue is not a situation in the world, but how we can describe a situation in different ways, to different ends.

The identity of indiscernibles is not a puzzle so much as a fence between differing ways of setting things out. Decide whether you will treat the indiscernible as seperate or identical, and proceed as you will. Just be consistent and you'll probably be fine.

why not go all in and just assume "absolute space and time," to simplify things? — Count Timothy von Icarus

What about redescrbing the situation as one ball in two locations?

Hmm. Seems @Leontiskos has yet to reveal the essence of the issue.

I don’t get why Russell structured his logic such that a non existent referent makes the statement false and not vacuously true. — schopenhauer1

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descriptions/#MotForRusTheDes

To a large extent it was to sort out ambiguities of scope. If anything, the situation is more complex than Russell supposed, but we've benefited from his drawing attention to it.

you can break up and build up the world in any symbolic way you want! — schopenhauer1

Well, one ought be willing to accept the consequences of the structure you propose. So accepting a contradiction leads to explosion, which is not very helpful.

...the Cavell essay... — Antony Nickles

Yep. Something for @Sam26 to consider later.

Words which have a use in the language game don't name the thing in the box.
PI 293 - But suppose the word "beetle" had a use in these people's language?—If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all. — RussellA

Your conclusion does not quite follow. "it would not be used as the name of a thing" – you conclude that the thing in the box doesn't have a name, when the conclusion ought be that there is no thing in the box to be named.

Again, pain is not a thing! You repeatedly read the text as if it were.

The idea is apparently that description is insufficient to account for naming because names are capable of picking out a unique referent whereas descriptions are not. — Leontiskos

Well, no. Of course descriptions can pick out unique individuals, and names can be ambiguous. At issue is whether a given name is shorthand for some description, such that the description sets out the referent of the name. Presumably the description somehow is seen to set out the essence, but that's me guessing. I remain unsure of what sort of thing you think an essence is.

The Donnellan arguments show that a name may work even when the associated description fails.

And that it follows that the name's referring is not dependent on the description.

...rule following is something we sort of stamp onto certain kinds of events? — frank

Well, something along those lines happens when we say that little Jenny can count.