Interesting thoughts, everyone. But before I get to anything in depth, I wanted to respond to this:

Taxation is not coercion in that one accepts taxation as part of citizenship. — Bitter Crank

This would seem to imply that citizenship is voluntary. That's not necessarily the case. It's the same problem as with Hobbes' social contract; when the hell did I get the choice to sign that contract?

Late reply to you, but I do want to mention that this:

Haugeland offers a account of experience as the exercise of recognitional abilities that are constituted as such inseparably from the (understanding of) the constitutive standards that govern the objets thus recognized and that make them intelligible.

This smells very strongly of John McDowell, whom I understand to be wearing a fine misting of eau de Kant.

Right on the button. Just what I needed.

From Section 7:

Obviously, what keeps recognition from being thus vacuous is its being beholden somehow to what is ostensibly being recognized, yet in such a way that the criteria of correctness are induced from above. — Haugeland

So I can't plan out a chess match in my head, and then say that, every time my phone rings, another move in that match has taken place, and then say that my phone is playing chess against itself, because my supposed pattern recognition here is not at all beholden to the phone; the game would proceed the same way if I applied this method to anything else that happens repeatedly. A little further on in the same section, we have this:

[actual cases of pattern recognition are] the concrete way in which recognition holds itself to its object.

Anyone else smell Wittgenstein here?

...there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call "obeying the rule" and "going against it" in actual cases." — Wittgenstein

Haugeland is saying, I think, that a pattern exists when there is a set of rules that govern what something should do, and how we're supposed to respond when it does (or doesn't) do what it's supposed to do. We follow these rules by responding the way we're supposed to.

The whole thing is a bit fishy, though. I get the same vague sense from this paper as I do from Dennett, Heidegger, and, to a lesser extent, Wittgenstein - namely, the sense that I've been hoodwinked somehow. It's very subtle, but there's a gap in it somewhere.

I think that the sleight-of-hand here is in the whole assumption of pragmatism - namely, the idea that the ultimate test of something's validity is whether or not it's useful. It seems to underlie everything in this paper (and most of Dennett's work), but I never see it satisfactorily defended. I can't point exactly to where the chink in the armor is here, not yet anyway - I will have to study this some more.

Much thanks. Works of the second kind are quite interesting to me, because I'm interested in how philosophy of time "hooks up" with logic and cognition.

I think that there's truth in what Becker has to say (I have "The Birth And Death of Meaning," but haven't read "The Denial of Death"). Heroism really is linked to eternal life through remembrance.

However, I wonder how well Becker's ideas cash out in practice. The general impression I get is that he has a lot of valuable things to say about what humans think is important and why, but I think that you can only take that so far in terms of explaining the behavior of individual humans.

Also, am I identical to my ego? It sounds like a tautology, but there are lots of niggling philosophical doubts there. "Not that which says I, but that which is I." Or perhaps, "You are not what you think you are." Is your ego just a (faulty?) mental representation of yourself to yourself? Suddenly, Kierkegaard is knocking at the door.

Ooh! Ooh! The Haugueland paper looks extremely interesting! The relation between patterns and the things that realize those patterns is something I've been fascinated by since I began reading philosophy.

I, for one, can safely say that I don't know if I'm omniscient or not, as a matter of certainty I mean.
So, I guess I'm not, I can't be, as per above.
But then I actually know that I'm not, with certainty, since I just found that out deductively. — jorndoe

Why aren't you certain that you're not omniscient? You could claim that this is because you, as a human, can't be certain of anything... But where do you derive that? Because, if you derive the premise that you can't be certain of anything from your own non-omniscience, then the argument is circular.

Additionally, I think there may be a problem with the certitude of the conclusion. The fact that something was arrived at deductively isn't a guarantor of certainty. The conclusion of a deductive argument is only as certain as the premise. If my car is red, then "My car is in the parking lot outside" implies "There is a red car in the parking lot outside," and this is deductively valid. But my premise - that my car is in the parking lot outside - is not certain, since someone may have stolen my car before I wrote that sentence. Thus, my conclusion is not certain either, even though the argument is deductively valid, because deductive validity is a necessary but not sufficient condition for certainty of a conclusion. The other necessary condition is the certainty of the premise.

Outside of metaphysics, we have fields such as epistemology, philosophy of mind (which has metaphysical connections), political philosophy, etc. Now these fields don't appear to be dead ends as metaphysics does, but they still are fields that will likely never reach a full philosophical consensus and an objective certainty. Instead, it's just a game. It's nihilistic. — darthbarracuda

I don't think they need to reach a consensus to be productive.

The people who founded the government of the USA were deeply influenced by John Locke, for example, and his political philosophy seems to have had at least partial responsibility for the political and economic superpower that resulted. Even if political philosophy never reaches a consensus, it still changes things in the real world.

An ideology is a pervasive mindset that determines what you think even when you don’t know you’re thinking. It defines what is “normal”, what constitutes conventional wisdom and what is, literally, unthinkable.

If ideology is as powerful as positions like this say, then whence all of the opposition to the "dominant paradigm" coming from liberal arts departments? Do academics have think-outside-the-box superpowers or something?

If a 'universal' physical property exists, where does it exist? — mcdoodle

It doesn't exist anywhere, it just exists. There's no reason to assume that everything has a location. Spacetime exists; where is it?

Whatcha gonna do? He knows how to be convincing.

The positions he disposes of so neatly seem so silly it's difficult to believe they were, well, believed. — Ciceronianus the White

Chalk it up to Quine's rhetorical skill, which is formidable.

Consider that if pleasure is the only intrinsic good, as the hedonist claims, and one does not feel pleasure in the desire for the good, as the article claims is possible, then the hedonist is contradictorily obliged to abandon his desire and pursuit of the good. — Thorongil

I think the only way around it would be if desire were malleable, in which case the hedonist would be obliged to re-shape his desires so that he does feel pleasure in desiring the good. But perhaps I have misunderstood you, or not thought it through. Just throwing some mud here and seeing if it sticks.

This paragraph puzzles me:

Moreover, the doctrine of meaninglessness of contradictions has the severe methodological drawback that it makes it impossible, in principle, ever to devise an effective test of what is meaningful and what is not. It would be forever impossible for us to devise systematic ways of deciding whether a string of signs made sense—even to us individually, let alone other people—or not. For it follows from a discovery in mathematical logic, due to Church [2], that there can be no generally applicable test of contradictoriness.

He seems to be saying that, since there's no general test for contradictoriness, and all contradictions are meaningless, then a test for meaninglessness is a test for contradictoriness; it follows that there's no general test for meaningfulness (or lack thereof). Quine regards the lack of a meaning test as a "severe methodological drawback." But I don't understand why this follows. Here's why: if "x is a contradiction" implies "x is meaningless," then any test that tells us that x is meaningful also tells us that x is not a contradiction. But that just shows that meaningfulness implies consistency. None of this, however, shows that the meaning test amounts to a generalized contradiction test, since a statement can be meaningless without being contradictory ("I have a kraffenbargle" is meaningless because "kraffenbargle" doesn't mean anything, but there's no contradiction in there).

I haven't read the paper by Church that Quine references, but does Church's result about the impossibility of a contradiction test also rule out a consistency test? If so, then Quine is right, but he doesn't seem to put it clearly.

Any help here? I'm assuming that I'm just not understanding Quine properly, because his argument as I've summarized it seems to commit a basic logical error (the kind where you confuse antecedent with consequent), and I would think that Quine of all people would not make such an error, so obviously, I haven't summarized him correctly. I know I'm wrong, I just don't know why.

Under what definitions, though? There are definitions of the word "mental" that basically mean "thought," so that one isn't going to work. Perhaps you mean "having to do with the mind?" That's a more common definition, but then I have to ask you what makes a mind different from a perspective. If the answer is "nothing," then we're back to square one, because you've made made minds identical to perspectives. If the answer is anything besides "nothing," then there's a difference between minds and perspectives, and the argument falls apart again.

Well, yes. You said that "All and only things you think are from your perspective." Then you offered to replace "think" with "mental." This would then be equivalent to "All and only mental things are perspectival," which is to say that "perspectival" and "mental" mean the same thing.

Well, you replaced "think" with "mental." But perspectival != mental, unless you're redefining those two terms, in which case, whichever one is redefined drops out, and you're left with nothing.

Hope I'm not coming across as rude.

An observation, rather.

My problem here is that either the argument is invalid, or the terms are being re-defined so as to have the implications you want. In either case, nothing is really demonstrated.

So "think" and "perspective" drop out, and you're left with the premise, "Everything that is mental is mental." From this, you derive that everything is mental simpliciter.

So a room can't be from your perspective. But, vis a vis your earlier argument, everything is from your perspective. Ergo, rooms don't exist.

Things from my perspective can be thoughts, sensations, or the room I'm sitting in. The latter two are not things that I think. Of course, I'm guessing you'd get around this by saying that you're using a different definition of "things that you think" or "from your perspective." But if you're just changing the definitions of "thought" and/or "perspective" in order to make them equivalent, then you haven't demonstrated anything.

An argument that does not have at least one non-tautological premise fails to yield a non-trivial conclusion.

From a computational perspective, humans are just like computers. — darthbarracuda

Take some random object in your hand, throw it up in the air, and then catch it. A computer, I understand, has to do some pretty fancy math to get a robotic arm to do that. But you didn't do any math when you caught it. We may do the same things that computers do, but the stuff going on in our brains is not like the stuff going on in the computer in some important ways.

And your perspective is all there is. But now I foresee a retreat to "But my perspective is all there is from my perspective!" which is just a tautology.

You can't make a claim from my perspective, only from your own. Therefore, anything in my perspective that isn't in yours (including my sensations and such) don't exist. Thus, I don't have a mind. Only you do.

In that case, my perspective doesn't exist. Only yours does.

Because we are interested in what exists FOR YOU. From your perspective everything is from your perspective! — invizzy

That would seem to imply solipsism, not idealism.

Additionally, I don't think we ought to give ultimate primacy to individual perspective.

Why is "what exists from my perspective" equated with "what exists?"

I'm sorry to shit up your thread, dude. I like to irritate people 'cause I'm kinda ornery. A character fault. ;)

<3

I love talking to you. It's like schadenfreude on tap.

What is it that's so amusing about watching you nail yourself to a cross?

Keep suffering. It's amusing as hell.

Your anguish is adorable. :)

Baleeted.

To be honest, I am really confused when people complain that philosophy is too abstract and needs to get back to "concrete lived experience" (whatever that is). I want to talk about the problem of universals. If you want "concrete lived experience," go look at a wall or something.

On a less catty note, I guess it just annoys me when philosophers use "real world" rhetoric, because I feel that they are dishonestly trying to co-opt philosophy for whatever faddish political movement they're a part of.

Sorry, Pneu, but credibility is an archaic term in the world of modern politics in the digital age. — Landru Guide Us

I'm just doing my little part to delegitimize the conservative freakazoids who have used their usual memes on this thread and elsewhere. — Landru Guide Us

This is where the error is. Credibility may be archaic in the world of modern politics, but I'm talking about your audience on this board.

I really don't think propaganda works that way, and I would invoke George Lakoff in that regard, and the fact that conservatives continue to win elections and policy decision saying absolutely crazy things. Gun policy is a case in point. — Landru Guide Us

There is a question of tone. I can say something batshit insane and, if I say it the right way, it will sound reasonable. Conversely, one can say reasonable things and sound like a lunatic if one uses the wrong wording.

Since the archaic rational debate method doesn't work, and since we even know why it doesn't work, to continue to engage in it seems almost cowardly to me, or even worse, unimaginative. — Landru Guide Us

Do you think that this statement is going to help or hurt your credibility (and, by extension, that of your movement) with people here?

Give me an example of what isn't true here — Landru Guide Us

I can say something true in a manner, or use a conversational tone, that makes me sound hysterical. You can fight memes with memes, sure, and propaganda with propaganda - but if you sound like you're using propaganda, then you're not an effective propagandist.