Comments

  • Coronavirus
    The growth of coronavirus isn't exponential in Italy. The acceleration of the number of new positive cases has steadily been declining since the quarantines were imposed in Italy, and has now levelled off to around 0. China reported no new cases 2 days ago too (but I haven't found their raw data in a neat form yet). If it were exponential in actuality, you'd expect the opposite trend; it would be accelerating more and more as time goes on.

    All of this drop in rate of new cases can't be attributed to the quarantine measures; people would have probably isolated themselves regardless. But the effect of cutting off as many transmission vectors as possible should not be underestimated.
  • The Diagonal or Staircase Paradox
    Still, it just looks... wrong — SophistiCat

    Looked at this some more. A general explanation seems to be "the arc length functional is not a continuous functional in the infinite norm (uniform convergence norm) on the space of continuous functions". We can treat the staircase as an example of this fact (after rotating it to make it continuous).
  • Coronavirus
    For those of you that don't give a crap about the epidemiology, the FTSE100 has plunged down more than it did when the 2008 recession hit, and more quickly.
  • The Diagonal or Staircase Paradox
    Interesting question, but beyond my modest pay grade, I am afraid :) — SophistiCat

    Me too, I do not have the analysis fu for that.
  • Ancient Greek, Logic and Reason
    ↪Antidote


    Seems mostly fine to me.
  • Ancient Greek, Logic and Reason
    Reasoning was, before logic was? — Antidote

    Insofar as logic is understood as the study of methods of reasoning, yes. Humans have been able to reason long before we could write.
  • Ancient Greek, Logic and Reason
    Logic studies methods of reasoning. Logic is to reasoning as culinary science is to cooking.
  • Metaphilosophy: Historic Phases
    In the Socratic / Western tradition, the basic practice of philosophy is to do something like say 'Imagine scenario X. Is X a case of Y?' That's what most philosophy boils down to. — Snakes Alive

    Let's grant that this is the core principle of philosophy. Is it connected to philosophy's manner of becoming disconnected from how things are?

    I can see some argument for it.

    (1) Philosophical arguments consist of addressing questions of the form "Is X a case of Y?".
    (2) X and Y are explanatory categories philosophy has not created.
    (3) In order to be connected to how things are, X and Y would need to be created by philosophical practice.
    (4) No philosophical argument is connected to how things are.

    Do you think this is close to your position?
  • The Diagonal or Staircase Paradox
    By the way, ↪fdrake and ↪boethius seemed to suggest that the key to the staircase "paradox" is in some pathology of the shape, namely its corners, where the curve is not differentiable. But this is not so — SophistiCat

    You are right, it's a sufficient condition for the failure of the arc-length functional to respect the limiting procedure, not a necessary one. I believe the staircase could be approximated by some differentiable curve (replace the discontinuities with regions of sufficiently high growth, I believe polynomials would work) and cause the same issues.

    Do you know a sufficient and necessary condition that characterises this sort of pathology? Other than stating "the arc-length map of the limit of the approximating series of functions is not necessarily the limit of the arc-length map of the approximating series of functions".
  • Corona and Stockmarkets...
    (1) People sell a thing at a price, people are aware of the price it was sold at (this is a stock market mechanism), this establishes a standard that it sells at that price.

    Asset prices are decreasing on average because of (1) in a feedback loop. It's not just that though. (1) happens even in times of market stability, it's just how they work. What makes this different is that a lot of people are selling, and (1) ensures this drives down the price (and people know it will). To answer that you've got to ask why they're selling.

    (2) Some people will be selling simply because they can see the price is going down on average.
    (3) Some people will be selling because there are mounting economic risks regarding the coronavirus in general; it's a (borderline) pandemic, everything conceivable will be disrupted in some way to some degree, all along production chains, in travel and logistics etc.
    (4) Some people will be selling because they know (2) and (3) are happening and will turn a profit by selling now for (comparatively) lots and then buying stuff for cheaper in the case of an even more major economic disruption (if this starts looking too likely, governments will try to respond in some way, like they're doing now in the US with another "fiscal stimulus" package in congress).

    The whole thing's just a movement of hot air, which may or may not currently be percolating around the insides of an overfilled financial balloon. The political north's largely been stagnant or declining in productivity since 2008, AFAIK the relative price of goods to median income's typically been increasing since then (this is the opposite trend expected from when there's growth rather than a bubble). Let's hope that all this is wrong, and that continued disruption won't lead to another 2008 wealth/power transfer.
  • Justin's Insight
    humans don't do mathematical calculations when we play throw and catch, at least not consciously. — TheMadFool

    Not doing one type of calculation consciously does not imply much about doing other calculations. Not being aware of doing one type of calculation implies even less. The mental model of calculations being done in the brain, then passing through consciousness, then the body reacting isn't particularly apt. It's more like perception data in our neural nets feeds forward to motor control functions and our internal models at the same time but in different ways. It feeds forward with most of the focus payed to immediate environmental differences, like changes in the visual field corresponding to the ball moving, and changes in the ball's relative trajectory relative to promoted motor functions.

    There's no guarantee that even if a calculation of type X was somehow used by the body to interface the perceptual inputs with the motor outputs that it would feed forward in precisely the same way to our internal models, so we wouldn't necessarily become aware of its character even if it was happening as described.

    There is also no guarantee that Justin uses the same interfacing strategy between its perceptual data and its motor functions that we do just because they have the same outputs; we'd be better off comparing Justin's behaviour in catching the ball to human behaviour catching the ball (say, with eye tracking goggles and a body sensor) to see if they do strategies with similar outputs (behavioural incentives and catching strategies).

    I see that @StreetlightX made much the same point with a quote.
  • Metaphilosophy: Historic Phases
    I don't see all that much difference. What the professionals do today is not much different from what's in the Platonic dialogues. Philosophy has never been something 'people in general do.' It's a folk practice in the sense that it belongs to a parochial cultural tradition and is explicable in terms of that (and not explicable in terms of its efficacy, or something else), not in the sense that random people on the street do it. — Snakes Alive

    What are the historical invariants of philosophy as a folk practice then?
  • Metaphilosophy: Historic Phases
    ↪Snakes Alive


    So the reason I brought up the manifest image and philosophy's role in negotiating and modifying it is as follows. Say that you want to distinguish the folk practice of philosophy from how it's been professionalized over the years; seeing it as something people in general do rather than something that philosophers as a job description do. Then people outside of the academy predominantly do philosophy in response to events which happen and cultural shifts.

    In a broad sense, people can respond to the open questions living raises, and other things we're confronted with, by reasoning philosophically; questions of supporting a law, a military intervention, equal rights; negotiating political terrain in the register of conception (what should we believe in response to event X?) and natural/metaphysical terrain in the register of their conception in relation to (at least) science and religion (should the laws for punishing drug addicts for their drug related conduct change given what we've learned about volition?) - these are both components of the manifest image that we play with in response to what happens.

    Philosophy as a folk practice, including the conduct of philosophy outside of universities, is impossible to sever from a reactive effort to update our conceptions in response to the shifting situations we're exposed to. Though, clearly, not everyone engages in the folk tradition like literal members on a philosophy forum will.

    If, and I agree that it does have, a tendency towards separation from how things are; it's a fine line to tread when the folk practice of philosophy in a large component just consists of discussions of how things are. And I find it hard to articulate the unique separation from how things are philosophical discourse has, from more general separations between concept and topic, words and what's talked about, and expression and what's expressed.
  • Does anybody actually agree here?
    ↪Pfhorrest


    None really. You don't fit well into any of them.
  • Metaphilosophy: Historic Phases
    I don't think you can in the way philosophy traditionally has thought. The Skeptics actually already understood this, that all valid deductive arguments just beg the question. — Snakes Alive

    Agrippa's trilemma is a classic philosophical move though, not something extra philosophical. It seems to me like you want to have your cake and eat it too; to see philosophy from the outside as a folk practice, but to be non-neutral about what its internal logic can demonstrate.

    I don't think the function of the discipline has changed at all. The 'posits' of the older and newer philosophers aren't real 'posits' in the way a physicist posits things, because they're not interested in asking about how things are, they're just ways of shuffling categories and verbal commitments about. — Snakes Alive

    That's extremely oversimplified though. What makes, say, people like the Churchlands or Metzinger cease to be talking about the brain, and what we know about it, and what consequences this has for how we think about the brain and our consciousness?

    In the same regard, "consciousness" is made up, as is the idea of a folk practice. We can gesture at them, or posit that we see things in those terms, but I don't see a way of allowing other disciplines to interface with how things are and to simultaneously deny that of philosophy. Probabalistically, or as a general tendency within philosophy, this disconnection from how things are is a valuable part of describing it as a folk practice. What about its internal logic makes it lose contact with how things are?
  • Metaphilosophy: Historic Phases
    But I don't think the way the discovery of the syllogism was interpreted (as involving a transcendental binding glue to the universe called 'logic') is at all correct. — Snakes Alive

    Seeing syllogisms as ways of deriving new behavioural commitments from old ones makes a lot of sense. The "binding glue" of a syllogism is ultimately normative/juridical from this perspective, you can be called to account for yourself through not adhering to the shared pattern.

    The idea isn't, of course, that folk traditions can't house real knowledge. But I don't think the way the discovery of the syllogism was interpreted (as involving a transcendental binding glue to the universe called 'logic') is at all correct. — Snakes Alive

    Interpreting syllogisms as a means of logos itself unfolding is definitely an enduring myth. Though it has some ring of truth, as if you do make correct assumptions, you can derive correct conclusions through reasoning well. Correct in the sense that if you're an architect, say, you can tell if a given structure will be able to support its own weight through general principles.

    Wilfred Sellars speaks about the "manifest image", which is roughly the landscape of conceptual and behavioural commitments that we have by virtue of being in (life situations like this one); it's perspectival and normative. He also spoke of the "scientific image", which is roughly the a-perspectival description of nature and ourselves, it uses patterns of reason in the manifest image, but updates and modifies them as well as being able to postulate new entities and see what these postulations do.

    Philosophy navigates both of them; it (used to) posit entities regularly (like atoms, and logos, and Geist, and the transcendental subject, and the cogito...), now it seems (post Kant?) to posit explanatory categories more than new entities; to rethink and reconceptualise what is given rather than innovating new parts of nature (though the two aren't mutually exclusive). Having a "scientific image" of philosophy as a practice is an interesting project.

    Though some philosophers have 'understood' – and what happens to these people (historically, empirically) is that they stop doing philosophy in the usual mode at all, not that they add another self-reflexive layer to it — Snakes Alive

    I think I disagree here? Maybe? People who've studied philosophy and find something deeply wrong with how it's done either stop, or try to effect a revolution in it; and in that manner define their own predecessors (as Zizek says about Borges). People who stop doing traditional philosophy can also start new stuff, like the origin of economics as a distinct discipline. They seem to emerge from a philosophical background and mutate it by fixing content somehow.

    Though this is biased for famous philosophers and academics generally, the intractable cases like us (presumably) who are suspicious of the enterprise but keep on going for reasons unknown, like finding some meaning in it, or practicing it like knitting but with words to make concepts and dis/connect others, seemingly do it because we find value in it rather than trying to shake the ground in accordance with our ideas.
  • Thoughts on power
    The "anarchist" stance is generally just a pretentious, antisocial attitude toward government as a "whole' (often ignoring that even in 'pre-literate' hunter gatherer societies with presumably no "formal" law or government, there still would have been some type of informal government or hierarchy, just as there is or would be within families or any other social institution, whether or whether not it is officially or legally recognized as a "state" to begin with). — IvoryBlackBishop

    Well, this is sort of off topic, but anarchists generally restrict themselves to disliking unjust hierarchies, rather than hierarchy in general. In some sense, it "just so happens" that anarchists dislike governments most of the time, because they're typically unjust by anarchist standards. One popular way of being unjust as a government is failing to live up to what are allegedly their democratic ideals.
  • Metaphilosophy: Historic Phases
    I would like a real history of philosophy to be written. Not a summary of what philosophers have thought, but an actual historical account of what the heck it is and how it came to be in Greece. I'm particularly fascinated by the relation between philosophy, sophistry (something that I think may not really be distinct from philosophy, and was only thought to be so as part of a propaganda campaign that was pretty uncritically swallowed), rhetoric, and the Greek legal tradition. Looking back on it from 'outside the fly bottle,' what Socrates does is so weird, and it's an interesting historical question how such a practice comes about. — Snakes Alive

    Out of interest, how would you view something like a syllogism from this anthropological perspective?

    All men are mortal.
    Socrates is a man,
    Socrates is mortal.

    Does it have anything to say about the widespread use of syllogism?
  • Does anybody actually agree here?
    I arrange the forum into a few tendencies.

    There's the Wittgenstein monster.
    There's the libertarian keyboard warriors.
    There's the leftist keyboard warriors.
    There's the mystics.
    There's the denizens of the shoutbox/Lounge.
    There's the weirdo continental metaphysics people.
    There's outright bongclouds.
    There's the "learn math better" machine.
    There's the first fumblings in philosophy group, who are mostly new posters.
    A related group to the above, the Personal Theory of Everything group.
    There's the Pierce advocacy group.

    We're missing a few we had at the old place. At least they're not represented much any more.

    There was the jaded academic tendency.
    There were the logic bots.
    There was the Heidegger/destruction of metaphysics fanboy club.

    And there are the ever present lurkers.

    Edit: I forgot the "Interminable discussion of god therapy group"
  • Metaphilosophy: Historic Phases
    The big question for me is : Laruelle sure reads a lot like a parisian Intellectual, so is this just a magisterial one-up in a known tradition of one-upping? I'm not sure - it seems likes something's there, I really think that. I just wish he didn't come out of Paris. But it's also something to while the time. — csalisbury

    I dunno. It probably fits into the grand tradition of overblowing the significance of one's own insights. Non-philosophy's probably destined to become one of those intellectual cul-de-sacs that houses a university based cult.
  • Metaphilosophy: Historic Phases
    Cool. I've never read Laurelle, but I've heard the name. I like the idea of 'non-philosophy,' but I'd rather not give it a pretentious name like that, and just do an ordinary anthropology (that happens to have Westerners as its object) — Snakes Alive

    I guess one difference with Laruelle (in this context) is that he's interested in neutering one specific dialectical move - or a class of them -, so that some interesting philosophy can be done without it. The "non" just means that Laruelle thinks this dialectical move (he calls it "decision") is part of the core practice of philosophy. In the way that "belief in the divine" is a core practice of religion; it doesn't refer to any specific god belief, but a general pattern he wants to suspend. There's no necessity in it, he just wants to see what happens by suspending it.

    Another difference is that he describes how concepts do stuff rather than how people do stuff; decision operates as a structure of thought rather than a practice of people. Though clearly the two are linked.

    @csalisbury was right I think, I'm not attacking viewing philosophy as a folk practice.

    Yeah, sure, so it's a folk art, but clearly a verbal / legalistic one. But my point is that it's as local as studying hadith. It's not a universal discipline, doesn't ask 'the biggest questions,' etc. It's a set of practices developed out of the Greek legal system, and outside of it, it can't really be taken seriously as what it claims to be (just like the hadith). — Snakes Alive

    Maybe the PR statement of philosophy is the biggest questions, what is blah, the nature of truth and consciousness. It's kinda funny really, maybe you start out looking to make sense of the world in general, and then after 40 years of studying and teaching you write things like "the homeostatic cluster property theory of meta-ethical naturalism". Dan Dennett famously called philosophy a practice of "discovering higher order truths about chmess", chmess being a variant of chess that no one actually plays. Considering that people in the discipline seem to know that something is deeply weird about lots of its practice, I don't think it makes a lot of sense to leave out this instance of reflexivity from seeing it as a folk tradition.

    Also, seeing it as a folk tradition sort of brackets it, like a phenomenologist doesn't care whether the "external world" really exists when analysing their experience. You don't have to care about the veracity of its claims or practices when you want to describe them like an anthropologist.

    What I'm critical of, and I dunno if you're actually doing this, when someone says it's "just a folk practice", exactly the same shit is said about medicine from a similar perspective (seeing it as an organon of power over people's bodies). Confusing becoming indifferent for the purposes of an investigation for whether the content of a discourse reflects anything real or not and hypostatising this bracketing into a global refutation or annihilation of its internal sense.

    As an example, "Allah exists" isn't false (or true) because of the folk status practice of the hadiths.
  • Metaphilosophy: Historic Phases
    Its core practices are unchanged since Plato, and so is its content. — Snakes Alive

    When you say core practices, what do you mean?

    As an example, you can point to a few things that are core practices/doctrines of Catholicism.
    (1) The Trinity
    (2) The Eucharist
    (3) Baptism
    ...

    I'm asking what things you'd throw in the list for philosophy.
  • Belief in nothing?
    No. Atheism isn't a "belief" any more than Off is television channel. We don't watch "nothing" when the tv is off, we're just not watching tv. — 180 Proof

    Outright rejection of specific theistic claims and simply-withholding belief in the divine in general aren't mutually exclusive. Believe (not (theistic claim X) ) vs not (Believe (theistic claims of class Y) ), why not both? EG: "There is no transcendent god" vs "I don't believe in any immanent god".

    I don't think they're exclusive when X and Y are the same either. One way of being absent belief in X is to believe in X's negation ("not believing in X" is true when it is not assented to, and assenting to its negation is a way of not assenting to it).
  • Mathematicist Genesis
    The same problem happens with multiplication.

    2 * x = 1

    Has no solutions when x is a natural number. That is, there are no multiplicative inverses in the natural numbers (or the integers). But there's more conceptual issues to work out here.

    For addition, it made a lot of sense to copy all the natural numbers, append - to them, then simply define -x as the additive inverse of x. Geometrically, this can be thought of as mirroring the positive number line into the negative one, inducing a copy.

    I'm going to call the natural numbers with additive inverses "the integers".

    Positive numbers
    0------->

    Negative numbers
    <------0

    Integers
    <-------0------>

    But division is a bit more tricky; we need to define a new structure to somehow "mix" natural numbers with each other to produce parts of natural numbers which are not natural numbers.

    As always, the use of fractions preceded their axiomatization. So we can go from the use and try to guess axioms.

    When we write a fraction, it's something like 1/2, or 22/7, or 22+3/5, or 1 - 1/2 (ignoring decimals because they mean the same thing). Cases like 22+3/5 reduce to cases like 1/2; 22+3/5 = 113/5.

    What we have to work with then are pairs of numbers. We could write 113/5 as (113,5) to signify this. So we will. So all fractions can be written as a pair of integers like that. Now we've got a way of writing all the fractions, we can define operations on them.

    Multiplication and division of fractions are actually easier to define in this way than addition and subtraction.

    We want 1/2 * 4/7 to be 2/7, so if we have two fractions (a,b) and (c,d), (a,b)*(c,d) = (ab,cd), where ab is a times b as natural numbers and cd is c times d as natural numbers.

    Division follows with a minor tweak. (a,b)/(c,d) = (ad,bc); dividing by a fraction is the same as multiplying by 1/ that fraction.

    Addition is a bit harder.

    (a,b)+(c,d) = ?

    Go by example.

    We have that 2/7 + 3/5, as in school the first thing to do is write them over a common denominator. One way of getting that is just to multiply the bottom numbers together, then times each top number by the top number in the other fraction. This gives us two fractions numerically equal to the starting ones, so the sum will be the same.

    In symbols:

    2/7 + 3/5 = (5*2)/(5*7) + (7*3)/(7*5) = 20/35 + 21/35

    Then the tops can be added together as they're over a common bottom.

    2/7 + 3/5 = (5*2)/(5*7) + (7*3)/(7*5) = 20/35 + 21/35 = (20+21)/35 = 41/35

    If we replace 2,7 by a,b and 3,5 by c,d:

    (a,b) + (c,d) = (d*a,d*b)+(b*c,b*d) = (ad+bc,bd)

    Careful reading shows that we've not introduced an axiom for combining the pairs through addition rigorously. Especially since it requires the common denominator trick.

    One way of making this rigorous is to make the axiom for all integer a, (a,a) = 1 (with the assumptions that 1 behaves like it should, 1 times anything is itself). Now with that, you can simply define addition as what would result only when the fractions are expressed in terms of a common denominator. Why does this work?

    (a,b) + (c,d) = by definition = (ad+cb,bd)

    Now imagine that we have two representations of the same thing - this is called a well definition proof.

    Let's set (e,f)=(a,b) and (g,h) = (c,d). The question is, if we compute (e,f)+(g,h), do we end up at the same result as computing (a,b) + (c,d) ? How can we turn e's into a's, as it were?

    Well, we could try and say that two fractions are equal; (a,b) = (c,d), then a=c and b=d... Again, there's a but:

    Note that 1 has lots of representations, (1,1), (2,2), (-2,-2), and so on. But they all equal 1 when written as fractions, but 1 isn't equal to 2. What gives? They're clearly "morally equal", but strict equality in the last paragraph is too restrictive to get the job done.

    We were in a similar situation before; with expressions like 1+3 and 2+2, we want them to be equal, but they contain different things. We want to take collections of representations of things and glue them together.

    We actually have enough here to do the work. If we define two fractions (a,b) and (c,d) as equivalent when (c,d) = (e*a,e*b) for some integer e... Does this do the job?

    Instead of stipulating:
    (a,b) = (c,d), then a=c and b=d
    we instead stipulate
    (a,b) = (c,d), then c=e*a and d=e*b for some integer e.

    Now we can try and complete the well definition proof; if we start off with two sums of fractions, will their results necessarily match? I'm just going to write = here to mean equivalent. Two fractions will be equal (equivalent) when one is a representation of 1 (like (2,2)) times the other.

    (a,b) = (e,f), (c,d) = (g,h)
    Question: (a,b)+(c,d) = (equivalent) = (e,f)+(g,h)?

    From the equivalences, we have:
    e=ka
    f=kb
    g=lc
    h=ld

    Then using these and the definition of addition above

    (e,f)+(g,h) = (eh+gf,fh) = ( [ka][ld] + [lc][kb], [kb][ld] )
    You can rearrange the square brackets inside using the rules of natural number (and integer) arithmetic:
    (e,f)+(g,h) = (eh+gf,fh) = ( [ka][ld] + [lc][kb], [kb][ld] ) = ( [kl]ad+[kl]cb, [kl]bd)

    That last one, there's a common factor on top and bottom:
    ( [kl]ad+[kl]cb, [kl]bd) = ( [kl](ad+cb), [kl]bd )

    The common factor is the same. So we can pull it out (by the definition of multiplication of factions) as

    ( [kl](ad+cb), [kl]bd )
    = (kl,kl)*(ad+cb,bd)

    So by: two fractions will be equal (equivalent) when one is a representation of 1 (like (2,2)) times the other, the two representations come out the same, completing the proof.
  • The Diagonal or Staircase Paradox
    What happens to all the corner points in the stairs as the number of steps increases without bound? :chin: — jgill

    Spoiler solution attempt
    Every point in the line becomes a "corner", so there are no corners. More precisely, , when conceived as a function of line position gets little indicator function atoms for any which correspond to the corner, which is just another representation of , with a in [0,1], the hypotenuse. (more precisely they get arbitrarily close to that representation)
  • The Diagonal or Staircase Paradox
    The key to dissolving the apparent paradox is to calculate the error in approximation for each tiny right triangle, then add them up. — jgill

    This is neat.

    I just wrote the staircase after n refinements as a sum of 2n scaled indicator functions.

    .

    Let the mapping of to its arclength be . Which is always 2 for any finite n.

    But is discontinuous.

    So the limiting procedure:



    doesn't let you take the limit inside the bracket (the limit of arclength is not necessarily the arclength of the limit).

    For those who don't speak math, the last bit: "letting the staircase get closer and closer to the line" doesn't entail "the length of the staircase gets closer and closer to the length of the line" since the staircase has discontinuous jumps in it.
  • Metaphilosophy: Historic Phases
    In general, only an outside view sees something as a 'folk tradition.' For the people in the tradition, it's just 'what's done,' or 'the tradition.' So if you ask a performer of the tradition, they'll say 'it's the most general form of inquiry' or 'it's the study of how things hang together in the broadest sense' or 'it's an inquiry into the deepest questions,' but these things aren't true. So what is it really...? Well that question hasn't been properly asked yet, because al the histories are written by natives, who give you the party line. — Snakes Alive

    It is a folk tradition, which while providing a necessary perspective, isn't sufficiently precise to demarcate it from any other folk tradition. That's the start of a story, not the end of one.

    Philosophy is 'self-reflexive,' OK, but so is Islamic hadith, and so on. Westerners have a blind spot for philosophy because it's their folk tradition, but an outsider is able to see that it isn't what it claims to be from the inside. — Snakes Alive

    Something that maybe distinguishes philosophy from religion and other folk traditions (when describing it from this exterior viewpoint) is that you can almost arbitrarily change the content of a philosophical work, and its form, and still be doing philosophy. Philosophy can be about anything, use anything, be done in any way. If you label something as philosophy correctly and say no more on the matter, it says nothing about what it's about or how it's done. Contrast "Catholicism".

    In this regard, it's actually very similar to broad terms like "folk tradition" or "art" which encompasses a plurality of styles and topics that can have mutually exclusive examples and overlapping examples at the same time. Contrast "Catholicism" and "religion". Philosophy's much more similar to the latter as an umbrella term.

    Philosophy is 'self-reflexive,' OK, but so is Islamic hadith, and so on. Westerners have a blind spot for philosophy because it's their folk tradition, but an outsider is able to see that it isn't what it claims to be from the inside. — Snakes Alive

    I suppose the effect of characterizing philosophy as a folk-tradition only works if philosophy thinks of itself as something different, so characterizing it that way says something new, reframes things. If it is the same as any other folk tradition, that characterization should have the same effect for any folk tradition (one says 'this is a folk tradition' and sees what the effect is) That may be the case. — csalisbury

    That reflexivity, the ability to take anything about itself or "outside of itself" as a topic of investigation or inspiration, can be (and has been) used to read this plurality of styles and contents back into philosophy on a conceptual level; as in, as a concept understood in the interior sense to philosophy rather than from the outside.

    Someone might take an imperialist view of that by itself'; it's a social practice that uses any other social practice and haughtily declares itself as more reasonable and rational than those bloody pagans and totemists. But it doesn't need to play that subjugating role, when it interfaces with politics it can be emancipatory, and it can attempt to highlight its own biases - like analysing philosophy in terms of ethnocentrism tries to do. (As Rick Roderick puts it "Rorty once called philosophy "the conversation of mankind", he didn't notice that some people aren't in it").

    Another interesting way of looking at that arbitrarity of content/form within philosophy and its infinite capacity for reflexivity together is provided by Francois Laruelle. who attempts to characterise how philosophy works on an abstract, schematic level articulated in terms of these two properties. Philosophy consists in a mode of interpretation that takes the infinite capacity for interpretation and distinction as a given. but (allegedly) when one practices philosophy one cannot help but produce work that posits, without articulation, the very groundlessness of infinite interpretation (no starting/stopping points when conceived as a historical system of concept articulation) arising from the ability to take anything as grist for the mill, in any way, and draw distinctions of any character.

    lengthy quote on Laruelle containing link to quoted essay
    Axiomatic Heresy, Ray Brassier on Laruelle[/url
    ]Decision minimally consists in an act of scission or separation dividing two terms: a conditioned (but not necessarily perceptual or empirical) datum and its condition as an a priori (but not necessarily rational) faktum, both of which are posited as given in and through a synthetic unity wherein condition and conditioned, datum and faktum, are conjoined. Thus the philosopher posits a structure of articulation which immediately binds and distinguishes the conditioned datum – that which is given – whether it be perceptual, phenomenological, linguistic, social or historical, and its condition – its givenness – as an a priori faktum through which that datum is given: for example, sensibility, subjectivity, language, society, history.

    What is crucial here is the way in which such a structure is immediately independent of, yet inseparable from, the two terms which it simultaneously connects and differentiates. It is a basically fractional structure comprising two differentiated terms and their difference as a third term that is simultaneously intrinsic and extrinsic, immanent and transcendent to those two terms. Thus, for any philosophical distinction or dyad, such as transcendental/empirical, subject/substance, being/beings, différance/presence, the distinction is simultaneously intrinsic and immanent to the distinguished terms and extrinsic and transcendent in so far as it is supposed to remain constitutive of the difference between the terms themselves. For the division is inseparable from a moment of immanent indivision guaranteeing the unity-in-differentiation of the dyadic coupling.

    The result is a structure wherein the coupling of related terms is also their disjoining – for example: pure synthesis as that which (dis)joins transcendental and empirical (Kant); self-relating negativity as that which (dis)joins subject and substance (Hegel); horizonal ekstasis as that which (dis)joins being and beings (Heidegger); différance as that which (dis)joins architext and signified presence (Derrida); ʻindi-different/ciationʼ as that which (dis)joins virtual and actual (Deleuze) – a (dis)joining that remains co-constituted by the two terms it is supposed to condition and so implicitly contained within both. Because it is posited as given in and through the immediate distinction between conditioned datum and conditioning faktum – the very distinction which it is supposed to constitute – this structure presupposes itself as given in and through the datum which it constitutes, and posits itself as a priori condition, or givenness, in and through the faktum which conditions that datum.

    Thus, because the disjoining of condition and conditioned is simultaneously extrinsic and intrinsic to their joining, all the moments of a philosophical decision are self-positing (or auto-positional) and self-presupposing (or auto-donational): a conditioned datum is given by being posited a priori through some conditioning faktum which is in turn only articulated as conditioning in so far as it has already been presupposed through that datum, and so on. There is a sense in which the structure of decision is circular in that it already presupposes itself in whatever phenomenon or set of phenomena it articulates. Hence the suspicion that philosophy manages to interpret everything while explaining nothing, because the structure of the explanans, decision, is already presupposed in the explanandum, the phenomenon or phenomena to be explained. Yet strictly speaking the structure of decision is not so much that of a circle as that of a Moebius strip – but one where the twist that joins the inner and outer faces of the strip and allows them to flow smoothly into one another is also a fracture, scission or split whose dimensionality is simultaneously more and less than, both in excess of and subtracted from, the immanent dimensions of the stripʼs opposing surfaces.

    This fractional loop, this auto-positional and auto-donational structure, constitutes philosophyʼs inherently reflexive or specular character. It guarantees that everything is potentially philosophizable, which is to say, possible grist for the decisional mill. Thus, if philosophizing (especially in the ʻcontinentalʼ manner) remains a loose-knit grouping of interpretative strategies rather than a rigorous theoretical praxis, it is because decisional specularity ensures the world remains philosophyʼs mirror. Philosophizing the world becomes a pretext for philosophyʼs own interminable self-interpretation. And since interpretation is a function of talent rather than rigour, the plurality of mutually incompatible yet unfalsifiable interpretations merely perpetuates the uncircumscribable ubiquity of philosophyʼs auto-encompassing specularity. Absolute specularity breeds infinite interpretation – such is the norm for the philosophical practice of thought.     — Axiomatic Heresy, Ray Brassier on Laruelle
  • Question thread?
    What's a lazy question since it got brought up? — Shawn
  • Question thread?
    ↪Shawn


    Lazy questions are bad posts. People can't engage with them, unless they manage to be stupid at the same time.
  • How to become an overman
    Step 1) Re-evaluate all values in the palatial capacity of your wisdom.
    Step 2) Live as a mild mannered office clerk.
  • Analysis of Language and Concepts
    Obviously, as we have already agreed, linguistic analysis in the tradition of Wittgenstein and Austin isn't the be-all and end-all of understanding, but it is an important study, helping us to understand many confusions that arise philosophically. — Sam26

    What happens after the confusions are dispelled? Does that speak to the veracity of the cleared ground, or is it simply a case of being better off to do whatever else is required than before? I'm always wary of leaving the implicit accounts our use of language has as the final word, when their analysis is intended only to be the first.
  • Analysis of Language and Concepts
    Times like these. — creativesoul

    How could a time be like anything else? :chin:
  • Analysis of Language and Concepts
    I don't think this is quite right, but I think this partly down to how to phrased things with the dichotomy language/world. I need to modify what I said above: it is in fact the case that language and world can 'come apart', but the key thing is to recognise instances when they do. 'Linguistic analysis' ('LA'), as I understand it, is the attempt to track when language and world depart from one another, despite the impression that they have not (what Witty calls 'being held captive by a picture' or somesuch). There's a passage from Cavell that I really like that brings out the critical import of LA here, where he uses a really interesting turn of phrase, on making words 'nothing but their meaning': — StreetlightX

    So I don't wanna shit on linguistic analysis totally, and it's an extremely important tool to check when "thought is not gaining traction on being" (paraphrasing Brassier) when reasoning. But I want to emphasize strongly that it's not the only thinking style which serves this negative role; especially when the flavour of intuitions and philosophical constructs that are wedded to the norms of language use should not be expected to gain traction in the right way.

    One example, that this forum readily serves up, is in qualia discussions. A folk psychological judgement of what feelings, perceptions and sensations are becomes embedded in the qualia notion by what counts as a qualia and what does not; it isn't a coincidence that qualia get associated with words for sensation types but /the quale/ is present in every token/instance. People doing phenomenology don't seem to need the concept at all, and the kind of descriptions they produce of experience - how you have to think to produce those descriptions - does not match the kind of descriptions that qualia engender of them (what always seems like a bundle theory). Phenomenology seems to pay much more attention to what makes the items of the bundle distinct.

    Reminds me of a discussion on the old forum about the distinction between naming and individuation, but I can't see a precise way of fleshing out the connection.

    Another example, taken from @Sam26 's video post about a section from Sense and Sensibilia. Austin gives a brief discussion about the phrase "material thing" and asks whether clouds count (arguably they do not). The ambiguities surrounding whether it's appropriate to consider a cloud a material thing marks site of torsion in how we think of objects and more hazy intuitions about processes. It is not so surprising that there will be internal torsion there in standard language use because norms of discourse have very little to say about how clouds work clouds. That isn't to say that clouds are philosophically uninteresting; linguistic analysis might show that the norms of discourse have a tension regarding them, but there's kind of metaphysics that takes something like a cloud as an exemplary entity rather than something like a table or an idea. There's still room for a positive account, and here it looks to require much different tools to build. Linguistic analysis can show us holes in intuition there, a different perspective is required to give anything like a positive account.
  • Analysis of Language and Concepts
    As I understand it, in this context, it would mean that a clarification of meaning is required that would help resolve an argument, or at least clarify a philosophical problem. These kinds of issues arise all the time, especially in a philosophical forum. Rarely are there threads where such clarifications would not benefit the discussion. — Sam26

    Insofar as linguistic analysis can be understood to be an autonomous practice, its remit is entirely negative: it acts like rails at the bowling alley, making sure that what counts as the object of analysis remains unequivocal. — StreetlightX

    If the remit of linguistic analysis is a critical imperative that intervenes upon already established philosophical questions, arguments and claims, it seems to me that the application of the imperative should have some conceptual structure. While it seems the case that linguistic analysis could be used irrespective of the topic of the discussion, the applicability of linguistic analysis as a critique may still place constraints upon what it may analyse. If you'll permit a clumsy form-content schema, linguistic analysis has universal applicability in terms of discussed content (we may always make the kind of errors and confusions it highlights), but perhaps its intervention is necessary only when the discussion takes a certain form.

    I have in mind an analogy between Kant's critique of metaphysics and the doctrine of transcendental illusion. Roughly, a transcendental illusion is an error of reasoning where a confusion occurs between necessary relations between concepts and necessary relations between things. What is particularly interesting here is that transcendental illusions are internal to the concept of reason; reasoning generates transcendental illusions through a tendency to take the objects as they are analysed as the objects themselves. The content of the transcendental illusion; what it concerns; is irrelevant to the character of the formal error of reasoning.

    Continuing the analogy, a linguistic analysis will often reveal (or purports to reveal) that the terms an argument is articulated in are subject to an internal tension; and it is the internal tension which ultimately gives the argument its force, rather than the structure of the argument and the truth of its premises.

    As an example, Austin's analysis of the argument from illusion (for perceptual anti-realism, specifically used to argue for sense-datum theories). The original argument goes like: we see a stick half submerged in water, it appears bent. The stick has not really bent as immersion in the water does not bend it. The bending of the stick in the water is equivalent, insofar as it generates a perception, to seeing a stick really bent in that manner. Since a perception of the stick appearing to bend in water is sensorially equivalent to a perception of the stick bending outside water in precisely the same way, we do not see reality as it is; we see appearances, construable as sense data.

    Austin intervenes in the argument by, among other things, pointing out that it is fully consistent to say "Yes, we see a stick which appears bent", undermining the equivocation of appearance and perception used to establish the equivalence of the "really bent stick" perception from the "bent stick in water" appearance (there's more to the argument of course).

    The internal tension highlighted is the elision of perception and appearance through a shifting of vocabulary, which when criticised dispels the force of the argument by revealing unstated, implausible premises.

    In terms of the analogy, the unstated conceptual connection (of equivalence) between appearance and perception motivates the object based equivalence between two hypothetical appearance-perceptions; the stick bent in water, and the stick bent out of water in precisely the same manner of bending. The (conceptual) equivalence between appearance and perception transforms into an (object based) equivalence between perceptions in the two considered cases.

    the exception being when we lose track of the motivations and purposes behind the uses of concepts and start reifying them (to take an example from the PI: when 'stand roughly here' becomes decoupled from the purpose of 'being able to find you again when I come back' and we engage in the fool's errand of trying to delimit the scope of 'here' in precise terms in order to understand what it means). — StreetlightX

    Can we doubt most of this information? No. Why? Because the very tools for understanding the world around us, our words and concepts, come from others. If we doubted most of it, we would be reduced to silence. Our culture and other cultures succeed because of the truthfulness of most of what is conveyed to us. This is not to say that we should trust everything we read or hear, because sometimes there are good reasons to doubt what is said or written. — Sam26

    At the same time as acting as a form of criticism, there appears to be content which is leveraged in those criticisms that is of a positive character. The critical imperatives allow us to disconnect ideas, but there are also ideas which become connected by applying the criticism. When Austin shows us the sentence "I see a stick which appears to be bent", as a valid and literal instance of "I see", it suggests that judgements can co-occur naturally within acts of perception; we see the stick as bent, but we also judge that the stick is bent during the act of seeing.

    Wittgenstein has commitments of a similar form, specifically, the claim that "if we can't speak of doubt, we can't speak of knowledge", or in another phrasing; if knowledge of X is part of a language game, then doubting claims regarding X must be too. In order to leverage this positive content methodologically, it must be stipulated to hold in the considered circumstances. Negation of an argument must be done using some premises or else it is baseless.

    This is interesting, as it makes a positive claim about the world shielded behind a critical intervention; whenever the critical intervention regarding knowledge and doubt is applied to a topic
    *
    (or more generally, any instance of the principle of bipolarity; if it can be true it must mean something for it to able to be false, "The Paris meter stick is 1 meter long" if false is meaningless, therefore...)
    , the topic is treated as equivalent to one in which the described connection between knowledge and doubt holds.

    If we abstract one level, to what the character of this intervention says, in the background it imagines an equivalence between what is being talked about and intervened on and the kind of construction (language games) in which it holds. Without explicating the character of the kind of language game in which the knowledge-doubt one holds (just all ones involving knowledge and doubt...). In what circumstances does such a connection hold? Perhaps it can only be seen through examples, perhaps as @Banno would usually say the circumstances can't be explicated, they can only be shown. These are both issues.

    as if language existed in pristine isolation as a system of meaning unto itself. — StreetlightX

    So relying upon such a connection by virtue of seeing it as relevant alone construes language and world as something which is given and self interpreting; it is some way or the other, and if this is not seen in the case being analysed, that is a problem of someone's understanding rather than a problem of the methodology. In broad terms, the applicability of connections like Wittgenstein's knowledge-doubt one rests upon a privileged domain in which terms are imbued their meaning, and a connection to this domain is only ensured if you follow the pattern of argument in the knowledge-doubt (or like) analysis. It stops being a methodology using language, and reifies a particular interpretation of language as language, without the mechanisms of contextualisation that it espouses. Linguistic analysis comes (or can come) to police sense rather than clarify it.
  • Analysis of Language and Concepts
    So it seems like we both reject

    (A1) The only methodology in philosophy that makes in all topics and subtopics is linguistic analysis.

    Because there are topics in which it is not necessary.

    There is much here to agree with, but on the other hand, there are philosophies that grow out of some of the analyses done that need (I believe), in order to be more precise, a Wittgensteinian analysis. — Sam26

    We've had a brief discussion about it being useful for clarity; and we've conducted the discussion in pragmatic terms in general. It's a truism that clarity is certainly desirable when writing on a topic, but it does not seem a sufficient reason to render linguistic analysis necessary for discussing that topic; even if such a topic would benefit from it, that does not establish that it is required to discuss the topic at all.

    Given that, what seems a more interesting discussion topic is are three related issues:

    (B1) What circumstances necessitate adopting linguistic analysis as a philosophical methodology?
    (B2) What does it mean that linguistic analysis is necessary for analysing a topic?
    (B3) Does the necessity of linguistic analysis for a topic say anything about the topic's nature?

    In the spirit of being clear, by linguistic analysis I mean a method of doing philosophy that focusses upon the its topic by analysing examples of word use surrounding the topic; including observed patterns of inference using the words; and from those examples and word use analysis makes speculative claims about the topic of study or critical remarks regarding previous work (or patterns of inference and claims).

    An example of a critical remark in Wittgenstein (from On Certainty) is undermining Moore's use of "Here is a hand" as an item of knowledge, because any statement which could count as knowledge must be able to be doubted, and in the circumstances of Moore's utterance it could not doubted that he had a hand, so he could not know that he had a hand.

    Or Austin on the argument from illusion (against an argument for perceptual anti-realism):

    That a round coin should 'look elliptical' (in one sense) from some points of view is exactly what we expect and what we normally find; indeed, we should be badly put out if we ever found this not to be so. Refraction again-the stick that looks bent in water-is far too familiar a case to be properly called a case of illusion. We may perhaps be prepared to agree that the stick looks bent; but then we can see that it's partly submerged in water, so that is exactly how we should expect it to look.

    Undermining the claim that the bent stick is illusionary.

    An example of a speculative claim in Wittgenstein (from Philosophical Investigations) is that discourse/language use consists of language games that have no necessary structural similarity in virtue of being uses of language; but language games (and classes of language games) may have structural similarities at any level of detail. Moreover, philosophy allegedly takes methods of explanation and description that work well in one language game and transfers them to others in which they do not apply.

    Speculative claim from Austin in Sense and Sensibilia (setting out interpretive guidelines for use of the word "real"):

    Next, 'real' is what we may call a trouser-word. It is usually thought, and I dare say usually rightly thought, that what one might call the affirmative use of a term is basic-that, to understand 'x', we need to know what it is to be x, or to be an x, and that knowing this apprises us of what it is not to be x, not to be an x. But with 'real' (as we briefly noted earlier) it is the negative use that wears the trousers. That is, a definite sense attaches to the assertion that something is real, a real such-and-such, only in the light of a specific way in which it might be, or might have been, not real.

    I hope that the characterisation of linguistic analysis (and examples) are agreeable. Given that:

    For instance, your example, "were the banker bailouts in 2008 (morally) right?" This, it seems, is a classic example of where a linguistic analysis might be needed. What does it mean to be morally right? What theories of moral right and wrong are we talking about (utilitarian, deontological, or relativistic theories, to name a few)? This would bring up the different uses we have for these words in our culture. That said, much of the time when using these words, we take it for granted that people are referring to the same things, until you press them on the specifics.

    Seeing as you reacted to the question "were the banker bailouts in 2008 (morally) right?" strongly, affirming that it is a classic example for linguistic analysis, what was it about the question that made you believe it was necessary (if you believed it was necessary) to approach it through that lens?

    And moreover, to what extent are these features generalisable? Can you use them more abstractly as indicators that linguistic analysis is necessary (or profitable) in a circumstance? And moreover, if that is true, how can you transfer those indicators to philosophical discussion more generally?
  • The Road to 2020 - American Elections
    ↪NOS4A2


    Why is Russia supporting Trump?
  • The Road to 2020 - American Elections
    ↪NOS4A2


    Why is Russia supporting Warren?
  • Plantinga: Is Belief in God Properly Basic?
    I agree with this, i.e., there is no neat way of mapping this. It's like trying to map out what pornography is, like the Supreme Court said, I know it when I see it (Justice Stewart). I know that seeing that tree in my back yard is about as basic as you can get. The problem is setting out some definition that will fit each case. I don't think that can be done. It's like trying to come up with a definition of game that will fit every use of the word. It can't be done. This is why I say that each use needs looked at on its own merits. Even the words direct and indirect have problems as you pointed out. — Sam26

    Something that makes me deeply suspicious of this whole endeavour of subordinating conceptual analysis to the analysis of word use is that an idea can be posited and motivated by use and insulated from its problems by claiming that the idea itself is sound, it's just the ambiguities of language that render definitions for concepts more like family resemblances ("X tends to go together with Y in these circumstances") than complete characterisations ("X holds if and only if Y"). This is not to say behavioural indicators regarding a concept are worthless for examining how it works, it's just to say that it's not the whole story - simply because the use of words does not exhaust the domain of analysable phenomena.

    Though I guess pursuing that connection would take the thread too far afield.
  • Plantinga: Is Belief in God Properly Basic?
    I would agree, but would compare direct with indirect experiences. The best way to examine these kinds of experiences is to examine context driven experiences, or how we use the words in specific cases. — Sam26

    I don't know that there is an everyday use of words that maps neatly onto the distinction between direct and indirect experiences. Whether perceptions of X are mediated through some Y or not is much less important than whether someone "was there to experience it" or not; what makes first hand testimony first hand testimony is that someone was there, not any epistemic account of direct (or indirect) perceptual events.

    It looks extremely convoluted to get a good distinction between the two experience types solely out of ordinary use of language. As in, if someone needs glasses to see more than 1 meter away clearly, but with glasses has 20/20 vision, their vision of these distant objects is mediated by the glasses. If no mediation between a perceiver and what they perceive is a pre-requisite for forming basic beliefs regarding what is perceived, then such glasses wearers cannot thereby form basic beliefs using their vision. If no mediation is sufficient, then whereas if they took their glasses off, and reverted to their poor eyesight for distance, they would be in a situation to form basic beliefs about distant objects based on their vision even though they may be unable to see clearly beyond 1 meter away!
  • Plantinga: Is Belief in God Properly Basic?
    The answer must be in there being two sorts of basic beliefs - those that are presumed in order for an activity to occur, like keeping the bishop on its own colour in order to play chess; and those that are somehow universally basic... and "here is a hand" is one of those. — Banno

    Maybe there are two senses of it.

    The particularised one:
    (1) A belief B of a person P in a context C is properly basic if and only if P cannot doubt B in C without a performative contradiction necessitated by the doubt.

    The universalised one:
    (2) A belief B is properly basic if and only if for all contexts C and all people involved in them P; P cannot doubt B in C without a performative contradiction necessitated by the doubt.

    The particularised one seems way too weak; basic beliefs look as fungible as normal ones depending on the context and the person; and the universalised one seems way too strong - I can't think of many beliefs that there aren't extenuating circumstances for that would make someone able to reasonably doubt them.
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