It's not that what is being said doesn't apply to scientific investigation, but that it doesn't apply only to scientific investigation. We have to hold some things as indubitable in order to consult a train timetable, or to find our way home, or to recognise a friend, and so on. And this is also so in the laboratory.

Excellent.

He is not talking about knowledge of train schedules or dreams or calling for blocks. — Fooloso4

Yes, he is. Look and see.

The emergence of Intelligence and life in the world — kindred

Misquoting Gandhi and Grinspoon, I think it would be a good idea.

The remarks in On Certainty look at the grammatical structures that give us confidence in our models. — Paine

Sure. And...?

OC is perhaps more like a ball game:

83. Doesn’t the analogy between language and games throw light here? We can easily imagine people amusing themselves in a field by playing with a ball like this: starting various existing games, but playing several without finishing them, and in between throwing the ball aimlessly into the air, chasing one another with the ball, throwing it at one another for a joke, and so on. And now someone says: The whole time they are playing a ball-game and therefore are following definite rules at every throw.

And is there not also the case where we play, and make up the rules as we go along? And even where we alter them a as we go along.

Perhaps in the OC L.W. is making up the rules as he goes along... And isn't this sometimes worth doing?

What he says is that I am called L.W is not a hinge. — Fooloso4

You left out the italicises "I", and ignore that he immediately qualifies that comment.

657. The propositions of mathematics might be said to be fossilized. - The proposition "I am called...." is not. But it too is regarded as incontrovertible by those who, like myself, have overwhelming evidence for it. And this not out of thoughtlessness. For, the evidence's being overwhelming consists precisely in the fact that we do not need to give way before any contrary evidence. And so we have here a buttress similar to the one that makes the propositions of mathematics incontrovertible.

I have been getting pushback on he claim that hinges have their place in our scientific investigations. — Fooloso4

No you haven't. You have been getting pushback for claiming that hinges are only about scientific investigations. For thinking the forest is only oaks. has explained this.

The "system" includes all language, the many games we play and things we do with it; from reading a train timetable to traveling to the moon in a dream, from calling for a block to multiplying 12 by 12.

On Certainty grants the opportunity to see some of how Wittgenstein works. It is unpolished, and certainly not a coherent, complete argument for a particular view. It is instead a record of the application of the various tools you have listed, of his struggle to identify exactly why, and even whether, "This is a hand" is not certain. He is playing with various formulations, looking for what works and what doesn't, "that which stands fast", "river beds", "mythology" “hinges”, and “animal certainty” all taking a part, are examined and critiqued and then he passes on. And it woudl be a mistake to presume that he reaches a conclusion.

It's not a treatise, it's a workshop.

It's clear from and that you are misunderstanding both what Wittgenstein is writing and Sam's responses to those misunderstandings, and now my own small contribution.

It's as if we wandered into a mixed forest and you, finding an Oak, concluded that the whole forest consists of oaks; And when Sam points out an elm, you say "but look, that one over there is an oak". Yes, it is, but that does not make the forrest a forrest of only oaks.

Look and see.

See §657, in which he says, of "I am called L.W", "And so we have here a buttress similar to the one that makes the propositions of mathematics incontrovertible".

An excellent appraisal, . Yep, I thought the bit might fit.

Pearls...

How is look and see a hinge? — Fooloso4

What?

Seems to be a comprehension problem here. On several levels.

That's an excellent diagnosis.

Seems your thread must deal with both hinges and the unhinged. :wink:

Have another look at OC §470 through §475. In part, his puzzlement here is addressed by later work on constitutive utterances. "L.W." counts as a reference to Wittgenstein, and that it does so does not "emerge from some kind of ratiocination", it's in the doing...

What other classes of investigation is he considering with regard to hinges? — Fooloso4

:meh:

Most of the text is to do with other examples, as per Sam's Tool 1. Look and see.

He explicitly denies that this is a hinge. See my response to Sam. — Fooloso4

655. The mathematical proposition has, as it were officially, been given the stamp of incontestability. I.e.: "Dispute about other things; this is immovable - it is a hinge on which your dispute can turn."
656. And one can not say that of the propositions that I am called L.W. Nor of the proposition that such-and-such people have calculated such-and-such a problem correctly.
657. The propositions of mathematics might be said to be fossilized. - The proposition "I am called...." is not. But it too is regarded as incontrovertible by those who, like myself, have overwhelming evidence for it. And this not out of thoughtlessness. For, the evidence's being overwhelming consists precisely in the fact that we do not need to give way before any contrary evidence. And so we have here a buttress similar to the one that makes the propositions of mathematics incontrovertible.

Notice the italic I and the bit after the "but..." where he says that it can be regarded as incontrovertible. What's a hinge and what isn't, isn't fixed, but is an aspect of the game being played.

If you are not careful I'll use a Chess analogy on you... :wink:

"And so we have here a buttress similar to the one that makes the propositions of mathematics incontrovertible."

There's a difference between considering scientific statements amongst those of mathematics, trips to China, the shape of trees, pictures and railway timetables; and restricting one's proposals only to scientific investigations. He is clearly considering scientific investigations as one class amongst many. As for textual support, you are simply selecting only those parts that suit your odd perspective. I'll invite folk to read the document for themselves.

They are propositions that belong to our scientific investigations. — Fooloso4

Not what I understood from my reading. He mentions method, sure, but his examples are quite varied and not all of them mere science. Many are from mathematics, but also included are things as prosaic as "So-and-so was with me this morning and told me such-and-such" and "I am called....".

There is not textual support or evidence that Wittgenstein uses the term 'hinge' to mean anything other than these incontrovertible propositions that belong to scientific investigations. — Fooloso4

I call bullshit.

Indeed. When your words do not square with your actions, something has gone astray.

I'd lay the blame at the many misconceptions in "...the mind-independent nature of distal objects".

...my intellect cannot reach out beyond my body to grasp the mind-independent nature of distal objects. — Michael

:meh:

Any chance of Sussan Ley still being Liberal leader in a week? — Banno

Took longer than expected.

Yep.

A tool you might consider, @Sam26, is an admonition not to think in terms of meaning, but to instead look at what the words are being used to do. It's not that the meaning is given by the use, but that thinking in terms of an utterance having a meaning is a mistake.

That appears to be the mistake made by Frank and Russell, and others. They are still working with meaning.

Group consensus can take us a long way, — Joshs

How far?

Then you reject the limitations imposed by our shared reality?

Can someone be mistaken in your view? Even wrong?

know it's an unfair accusation, but I cannot understand your position as being anything other than indirect realism rebranded to sound like direct realism. — Michael

is that Michael's insistence on the mooted "apple-as-present", the view that there are two things here, the apple and the apple-as-presented? That instead we have one thing, the apple, and seeing the apple.

N-gram

On my view, in the first interval, the redness and roundness I'm aware of are properties of the apple as it shows up for me from this vantage point. — Esse Quam Videri

It might be clearer to talk of properties about which we agree. Extensionally, what counts is that agreement - that you and I and Michael all agree that the apple is one of the things that is red.

In that sense, it is a just a further step along the path Aristotle discovered when he noted the structural similarity of classes of arguments, setting aside the specific contents of the premises and conclusions. — Srap Tasmaner

Perhaps the difficulty is to do with how a model-theoretical account relaters to intuitionist mathematics. On the on hand we have a clear idea of truth as satisfaction, and considerable progress in math. On the other, we have truth as relative to proof. It'd make for a good topic. But not here, with so many clowns.

(among people who know what they're talking about) — frank

We did this already.

https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/5030?aos=47

That's the data from philosophers of mathematics. 43 respondents. Structuralism was ahead, with 18 agreeing. Platonism is in the alternatives, with 15 respondents.

Not perfect data, but far from a consensus for platonism.




What's the supposed contradiction?

Sounds accurate. If the observer is aware of the delay, then they are aware that they see the apple as is was ten seconds previously. They are under no compulsion to conclude that they only ever see a mental reconstruction of the apple, and never the apple.

So metaphysician undercover is now saying numbers are not ordinal, only cardinal.

While Frank continues to say very little.

I agree that during the second interval I will judge that the apple is still there, and that this judgment will be false. — Esse Quam Videri

Oh, so the observer is unaware of the ten-second delay?

Then that's the problem. The causal and epistemic stories differ.

:meh:

The pain and c- fibres firing stuff needs a detailed look. Pain has a different grammar to colour, despite what Michael seems to suppose. So it's tempting to say Kripke's argument assumes we have direct or immediate access to our own mental states; but take care - do we "access" our mental states, as if they were somehow seperate from us? Or is it more that we are our mental states - they are constitutive of us? And that's not so far from the distinction between only ever seeing a mental model of an apple, the indirect realist error, and seeing as constructing a model of an apple, the alternative.

Intersting offshoot.

For a start, Kripke's causal theory of reference plays against indirect realism in much the same way it plays against descriptivist theories of reference. A rigid designator picks out the extension, not some mental image or sense-data or whatever. That collapses much of the fussing between semantics and a supposed ontology. "Nixon" refers to Nixon, not to some intermediary.

Not a refutation, so much as a rejection of any advantage.

yes indeed. Existential qualification functions within a domain. So if it’s univocal then it’s univocal only within that domain...

So we might think that it moves the “question of existence” back a step, back to asking what it is to be part of the domain. And the domain is a construct; this or that counts as an item within the domain.

:meh:

What are your thoughts?

:meh:

I'd reject the term "mental image of an apple". It's already floating free of application, already private.

I do occasionally see apples. When I do so, there is invariably an apple. I can also imagine an apple, or perhaps I might hallucinate an apple, and such cases would be noteworthy, given a different grammar, precisely because there is no apple.

Once we treat “phenomenal character” as a constituent or item in an inner realm, we’ve already built the indirect realist ontology into the starting point. The grammar invites reification. — Esse Quam Videri

So the point becomes one of pedagogy - how to have Michael or Amadeus understand their mistake. But his involves a change away from thinking of private mental states, a habit ingrained since before Descartes. Our comments get interpreted through that window.

There might be a place here for a discussion of pedagogic method.

You've claimed I don't, but haven't set out anything to support such a view. I have asked. What, for you , is realism? Technically, it's the commitment to statements being either true or false, with antirealism the view that some statements are neither true nor false. Meta, and perhaps you, suppose a slightly different realism in which truths are made true by a mind-independent domain of entities, whose existence and nature do not depend on our practices, languages, or activities.

But you are fishing again. What happened to indispensability?

Whatever it take for you to commit.