Comments

  • Analyticity and Chomskyan Linguistics
    ...no two people's understanding of "grass" will be the same, — RussellA
    This is to suppose that there is a thing, which is someone's understanding of grass; as if to understand "grass" were to have a certain box in one's mind; so that your box can be different to my box.

    That's the image that is to be rejected. Understanding grass is not having a thing in one's head, but being able to roll on it, pick it, plant it, mow it, set out it's parts in a botanical essay...

    ↪RussellA
    You give an oddly subservient view of the way we might use words. A triangular view, inflexible, fixed. Boxes in one's mind.
  • Modified Version of Anselm's Ontological Argument
    it requires 2nd order logic. So what? — hypericin
    So you can set it out in a second order formalism?

    Go on, then.
  • A Summary of the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus"
    ↪Wayfarer
    Yep. Not good. But it's raining, and cold.

    All this by way of getting myself arsed enough to make lunch.
  • A Summary of the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus"
    ↪Wayfarer
    Sure. Ethics isn't said, it's done.

    (It's the difference between praising National Socialism and working in a hospital ward.)

    Apophatic silence has a place but it’s not, pardon the irony, the last word. — Wayfarer
    Yeah, it is. Because we don't know. But then there is what we do.
  • Analyticity and Chomskyan Linguistics
    Woe, heavy. Might need a few cones to work on this.
    The hoped-for picture here is that there is something (thought, meaning, intention, etc.) that we convey or at least that goes into language (or in this instance is in language systematically). — Antony Nickles
    yeah, and that's not quite right, since there isn't always a "what goes in" prior to putting the words together. Tolkien said the story grew in the telling, Banno says the sentence grows in the saying. It's not always there beforehand.

    Which is what is wrong with the picture of language as externalising something that is already there on the inside... It sometimes isn't there until it is said.
  • Modified Version of Anselm's Ontological Argument
    Here are two puzzles, from Frege and Russell, that must be explained if one is to treating "exists" as a property.

    1. What is the difference between a sweet, juicy, red apple and a sweet, juicy red apple that exists? The difference between a red apple and a green apple, or a sweet apple and a sour apple, is pretty clear. But explaining clearly what is added to an apple by existing...?

    2. It's not difficult to understand an apple that is not sweet, or an apple that is not red - but an apple that does not exist? What is it?     — Banno
  • A Summary of the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus"
    I think much more could be said, but I won’t press the point, — Wayfarer

    Push all you wish, this is one of the common themes between Tractatus, Investigations and Certainty. And the source of my angst with your otherwise excellent posts - the tendency to tell us stuff that really can only be shown. That fuzz on the edge of language. Here be dragons is better than inventing new continents. Or is it?
  • Analyticity and Chomskyan Linguistics
    Each space is the result of a Performative Act, first by Euclid, then by Riemann and then by RussellA. — RussellA

    Sure. But the point remains the not all analytic statements are acts of naming.

    But further, when do you, or I, participate in such a formal act of naming? Apart from baptisms and boat launchings, it's not something we commonly do.

    Frankly I don't think you've quite got the depth and breadth of Quine's criticism of analyticity. But I do think what you have written here is very good material. Indeed, it is very similar to a short thesis I wrote long ago, mistakenly trying to protect Searle from Kripke.
  • Analyticity and Chomskyan Linguistics
    Hmm. I've been mixing my replies to
    ↪Manuel
    and
    ↪Moliere
    . My apologies. But why stop now?

    I'm wondering if analyticity is required for a generative grammer? — Moliere
    I'm not seeing it. Indeed, i find it hard to understand what an analytic statement would be like in an I-language... as
    if you introspect into what happening in your head right now, you don't get coherent sentences — Manuel
    ...then how could you get an analytic sentence...?

    I don't see how an I-language works.
  • Modified Version of Anselm's Ontological Argument
    Why can't existence be regarded as a first-order predicate? — Art48

    It can. It's called Free Logic. But one of the results of free logic is that the existence of something cannot be the result of a deduction.
  • Analyticity and Chomskyan Linguistics
    I don’t want to disagree... — Antony Nickles

    That's no fun.

    My ramblings yesterday were unclear. Perhaps I can tidy up a little bit.

    Folk tend to talk of names and statements on the one hand and of concepts on the other, as if they were seperate things. So one uses words to give expression to the concept, that concept being a something lurking in one's mind, names by the words one uses. I don't think concepts are like this; or at least, they are not as seperate form words as folk seem to think.

    So folk suppose something like that learning the number seven consists in "forming a concept" of seven in the mind of a child. It isn't. The process of learning seven takes place by interacting with things around them, by sharing seven lollies, by working out you will be ten in three more years, by seeing two bikes and five scooters as a group, and by learning all the other numbers as well. That is, it's not the development of a concept but the interaction with the world that counts.

    And notice that one checks for understanding of seven by checking these sort of interactions.

    "Seven" is not a thing inside a mind, but a capacity to perform certain actions.

    And so more generally for pother concepts. They are better thought of not as things but of acts.

    And I take it hat this is what underpins "Don't look to meaning, but to use". Hence,
    Understanding that concept is just being able to do that stuff. Including talking. — Banno
  • Analyticity and Chomskyan Linguistics
    Apologies if that goes off topic from the OP. — Manuel
    We're a fair way off it anyway. Think we might have to let it roll.

    Some thoughts on I and E language. I-language is indeed not a private language in Wittgenstein's sense, since it is not about sensations unavailable to others, but about the things around us. It is however perilously close, close enough that some of the arguments agains a private language may well apply to it.

    It is also very close to Fodor's mentalese; I hadn't appreciated the link between Fodor and Chomsky previously.

    It is also close to Evans' notion of "speakers'a denotation" as opposed to "name denotation"; The article on which the notes
    ↪RussellA
    cites is at http://www.jstor.org/stable/410691 . I'm not sure why we need Evans.

    We might more profitably add Davidson, who in A Nice Derangement..., first posits and then rejects something similar, his "first meaning"

    As
    ↪Antony Nickles
    so eloquently points out, all of these appear to be founded on a misdirected view of language.
    ↪schopenhauer1
    sets the problem out clearly, in agreeing with Chomsky that most of language is self-talk. Shop's, and perhaps Chomsky's, supposition seems to be that since most of our language use is the little voice in your head, then the source and prime example of language use must be that little voice. But isn't it entirely possible that the little voice is a sort of back-construction, the internalisation, as it were, of our external language?

    And there's this.

    Similarly mentalese is dependent on algorithmic approaches to language. Hence Fodor's idea that mentalese has the form of first-order logic. I see Davidson's argument in A Nice Derangement... as a sort of diagonal argument agains this; and against the lawful behaviour of language in general. When one sets up some nice set of rules to explain language and language use, someone comes along with a nice derangement of epitaphs to display their negation. Perhaps frustratingly for those who require order, language always transcends whatever bounds one might try to place on it.

    I'm going to work from the presumption that language is primarily a social activity, and secondarily "private".
  • Analyticity and Chomskyan Linguistics
    ↪Paine
    I have no idea what you are asking.
  • A Summary of the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus"
    ↪Wayfarer


    4.1212 What can be shown, cannot be said. 


    The tractatus is showing us how things are, not saying how things are.
  • Unjustified Skepticism
    ↪Andrew4Handel
    Hence the ineptitude of pragmatism. In making use of the certainty of language it undermines its own scepticism towards language.
  • Analyticity and Chomskyan Linguistics
    In a nutshell, I can't see why generative grammar requires analyticity.
  • Analyticity and Chomskyan Linguistics
    ↪Antony Nickles
    Yeah, the idea that language is built by an algorithmic process from this or that simple, eb it names or propositions or whatever, just can't get off the ground. Language has to be embedded far more widely in cognition - to the point where cognition and language use are much the same thing.

    Understanding that concept is just being able to do that stuff. Including talking.
  • Analyticity and Chomskyan Linguistics
    Enrico Cipriani provides some additional context and discussion, extending the argument to Kripke. If I have it right, Chomsky takes there to be an innate capacity to recognise analyticity in utterances in order to explain our intuitions.

    One example used is that from "John was killed" we can conclude solely on the basis of the meaning of the words, that John is dead. It's not obvious that the only explanation for such an inference is an inherent capacity for a universal grammar. The relation between something's being killed and it's being dead is the sort of thing that Quine's holism explains.

    My thinking at present is that the discomfiture between analyticity, necessity, a priority and certainty introduced by analytic philosophy over the last fifty years of last century considerably complicate attempts to provide a consistent and coherent account along the lines of generative grammar.

    This should not be surprising. Language grows as much by breaking the rules as by following them.
  • Analyticity and Chomskyan Linguistics
    Starting at p102, Paul Horwich's Chomsky versus Quine on the Analytic-Synthetic Distinction has a potted history of the issue from Frege through Russell. and Carnap to Quine and Chomsky. However i was unable to follow his account of the difference between P-analyticity and P-analyticity.
  • Analyticity and Chomskyan Linguistics
    Your example may be reworded as: "a triangle is a plane figure, a polygon, where the sum of the internal angles is 180 deg", thereby defining "a triangle". — RussellA
    That's not just a rewording. it's saying something completely different. The relevant equivalence is not between "triangle" and "three-sided shape", since we might have given some other name to three-sided shapes. The relevant equivalence is between polygons with three sides and polygons, the internal angles of which sum to 180º. This could not have been otherwise. It is not a result of a performative.

    A more complete consideration of "gavagai" will I think show that the performative utterances on which your account relies are not up to the task of fixing the referent of a name without ambiguity.
  • A Summary of the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus"
    ↪Fooloso4
    Ok. We agree.

    Then the salient stuff is that this is a large part of what is different about PI. The Tractatus is of interest in consideration of how it feeds into the Investigations.
  • A Summary of the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus"
    His a priori assumption is that there are elementary propositions. That in the final analysis we have a configuration of simple names of simple objects. — Fooloso4

    Where the logical atomism of the Tractatus differs from that of Russell is that Russell took individuals to be basic, while in the tractatus it is facts. The "final analysis", in the Tractatus is not the names of objects. "Only in the nexus of a proposition does a name have meaning." Names only have significance within propositions, not vice versa.



    And this is one of the the crucial differences between the Tractatus and the PI. The Tractatus sought to build a description of the world from atomic propositions, while the Investigations recognised that what counts as simple, atomic or axiomatic depends on what one is doing.
  • Definitions have no place in philosophy
    Some apocryphal...
    In my opinion, it’s a task in life to train oneself to speak as clearly as possible. This isn’t achieved by paying special attention to words, but by clearly formulating theses, so formulated as to be criticizable. People who speak too much about words or concepts or definitions don’t actually bring anything forward that makes a claim to truth. So you can’t do anything against it. A definition is a pure conventional matter.

    They only lead to a pretentious, false precision, to the impression that one is particularly precise. But it’s a sham precision, it isn’t genuine clarity. For that reason, I’m against the discussion of terms and definitions. I’m rather for plain, clear speaking.     — Karl Popper
  • A Summary of the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus"
    The problem is atomic propositions are an a priori assumption. — Fooloso4

    Not sure I have what you mean here. Atomic propositions are not each learned a priori. I hope youa re not saying that.

    But one might say that the category, "atomic propositions", is understood a priori.
  • Analyticity and Chomskyan Linguistics
    What is your interpretation as to what "empirical analysis" entails here for understanding analyticity? — schopenhauer1

    I suspect that Chomsky may well have had something not unlike the thought experiments used by Quine in Word and object. So the question arrises as to how Chomsky could avoid the inscrutability of reference and hence the indeterminacy of translation.

    ↪RussellA
    Interesting. Where do "Gavagai", the inscrutability of reference and the indeterminacy of translation fit in this account?
  • Analyticity and Chomskyan Linguistics
    ↪RussellA
    Your idea is that all analytic statements are the direct result of performative acts.

    For plane figures, if the sum of the internal angles of a polygon is 180º, then the polygon has three sides.

    This is true in virtue of the meanings of the terms involved. It appears to by analytic.

    Nothing in this argument has a form like "I name this a such-and-such"

    That is, this analytic statement does not seem to be the result of a performative act.

    I conclude that not all analytic statements are the result of performative acts of naming.

    My suspicion is that your account is based on considering only one type of analytic statement.
  • Analyticity and Chomskyan Linguistics
    ↪RussellA
    Can you explain Quine's objection to analyticity?
  • A Summary of the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus"
    ↪Fooloso4
    Ok, so let's reset.

    Now the next question is how one gets from a fact to a proposition - so to the elephant in the corner, proposition 6.

    This seems about right:
    What Wittgenstein is saying is that you can create any proposition you want by starting with the whole set of atomic propositions and negating a certain subset of those. — Reddit

    Science as removing the false propositions from logical space...?
  • Analyticity and Chomskyan Linguistics
    ↪schopenhauer1
    Thanks for the Scientific American link. Nice summation.

    The issue is if a statement can be true in virtue of the meaning of the words alone. But we do not have a consensus on what the meaning of the words means. Given that Georges Rey thought it necessary to add an entire supplement on Chomsky's view to the SEP article and that the editors accepted this, it seems it is quite involved. More than just an unconscious calculation. Rey quotes Chomsky as suggesting that it is an issue for empirical analysis. Rey is noncommittal, suggesting that Chomsky vacillates, but perhaps Chomsky is undecided because of the absence of empirical data.
  • A Summary of the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus"
    Here: — Fooloso4
    The proposition does not get hungry or need its diaper changed.
    — Fooloso4

    Hmm. Neither does the fact. You're thinking of the baby.     — Banno

    What I said was correct. Facts do not cry. Babies cry.

    This is silly.
  • Is truth always context independent ?
    Yes,
    ↪invicta
    , philosophy is quite difficult, isn't it.

    Kant went to all the trouble to develop these terms, only for others to show that they don't much work.

    Most folk hereabouts seem to stop at Kant, and apart from the fashionable Nazi, not bother with stuff from last century, let alone new stuff.

    Can I commend Two Dogmas of Empiricism to you.

    Analyticity is a central topic, in that one's approach towards it has import for one's approach to logic, and hence to what it means to do philosophy well.
  • A Summary of the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus"
    You are conflating the fact and a statement of fact. — Fooloso4

    Where did I do that?

    All I've done is point out that your:
    The fact: the baby is crying
    The proposition: the baby is crying     — Fooloso4
    does not set out a distinction. If anything, it says that facts and propositions are the same.
  • Modified Version of Anselm's Ontological Argument
    ↪Epicero
    ?

    You only do OP's?
  • Is truth always context independent ?
    So this thread is about @invicta discovering analyticity.

    Next step is to deal with Quine. Then Chomsky. Then Davidson.
  • A Summary of the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus"
    @Sam26, have you looked at Anscombe's An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus?
  • A Summary of the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus"
    The proposition does not get hungry or need its diaper changed. — Fooloso4

    Hmm. Neither does the fact. You're thinking of the baby.
  • A Summary of the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus"
    ↪Fooloso4
    SO
    The fact: the baby is crying
    The proposition: "The baby is crying"

    ?
  • A Summary of the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus"
    The fact: the baby is crying
    The proposition: the baby is crying     — Fooloso4

    That explanation does not make the difference at all clear.
  • A Summary of the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus"
    ↪Sam26
    But hence TLP 6.5... "to say nothing except what can be said".

    Oh, well.
  • A Summary of the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus"
    Where we disagree is that it has propositional form before being used as a proposition. — Sam26

    Not quite. At issue is realism against antirealism. Things can be true and yet unsaid; there are unstated facts.

    Facts and states of affairs are propositional. Hence the world is propositional It can be put into propositions, despite not having all been put into propositions. In this sense the cyr of the baby and the dog tipping its bowl are propositional. Perhaps as "The baby wants its mother" or "The dog wants its water".

    But leave this if you like, since it is pulling at the consequences of the Tractatus account, rather than part of what Wittgenstein was saying. My apologies for interrupting.
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