So knowing it is N. lies in my capacity, among other things, to show you the difference between Jim and N. — Banno

This makes the ability to identify someone or something, or diagnose the presence of some phenomena, an inter-relation between an agent and a social store of knowledge. This allows the continual vouchsafing of reference without collapsing all such behaviour into historical precedent or a dispositional state. Proper names can thus be rigid, but their connection to their referent is socially mediated through knowledge banks and, above all, (possibly deferred) interpretive competence towards the referent.

Let's say I showed you two pictures, one of your friend Jim, one of your friend Sally. I asked you which one was Jim and which one was Sally and why.

Then let's say you were looking through your album later, and you saw the picture of Jim and later the one of Sally.

In the first case, a question is present, so is the request for a justification. In the second case, no question is present, so there is no need for a justified answer.

Is the state of apprehension of each picture the same in both cases? Probably in all relevant respects, it is the same picture. In the first case, one can summarise one's perception and compare it to facts about Jim or Sally to provide a justification - what can be seen and is relevant for justification can be said.

Does this mean the scenario with the question and the scenario without it have the same structure? No. The first allows an answer to be given, in the second no answer would be. One scenario requires modification to turn into the other, and there is no guarantee that what can be presumed about the relationship between all involved parties and objects stays the same over transposing scenario.

If you can quote from the whole passage, there will probably be a contextualising example somewhere before or after it.

when it comes to rendering explicit our understanding of being-in-the-world. — Arne

It seems to play a pivotal role in reflection though. Thematisation without writing is empty, indication without words is blind.

There is nothing wrong with complaining about reductive materialism, or about any other metaphysical belief. There is everything wrong with claiming that it is an integral part of science. That sort of nonsense leads to the cancerous anti-science mantra that has taken over politics in the USA and is gradually destroying it. — andrewk

The nonsense is particularly easy to see when you look at the social sciences. They're certainly not in the habit of believing what they study doesn't exist at all!

new love

An indifferent canvas
Scored with the charcoal
Of old flames

baby (in a pram)

back is on what was close mother
no smell licked for arm body a sound of me
face two; sky-ed nice lip clicks
him arm grasp where head meets from mother
same skin as sounds stop
sounds stop a touch of me

I don't think it dominates the thoughts of practicing scientists. Ideal theories produce new predictions which can be checked, though demonstrable consistency with previously made observations obviously serves to support a theory.

What counts as an observation depends on the field of study; historical or anthropological data often require different interpretive techniques than the analysis of quantitative measurements. And some fields, like network analysis in sociology, have quantitative, interpretive/anthropological and historical methodologies which are of simultaneous relevance.

Ok. But what is the relation between the stream of photons whose frequencies are in the 'visible' spectrum of light versus those in the infra and ultra scales of the spectrum? — BrianW

Photons don't care about the existence of our eyes.

But of course I may have missed your intention here. — Baden

It definitely needs some redrafting. I'll probably steal your suggestion here. The second line was supposed to sound somewhat awkward and artificial; but I think you're right. That device wasn't worth the cost in flow.

I’m so sick of conceptualisation
The insertion of imagery to express imagination
The anxiety of each poetic device
Summarises each lie
I know I could not find the words
To express my appreciation of each part
I throw ropes to ensnare
The myriad pieces
In hope that the totality
Does you justice

But you escape the net
I hope the margins
Find you well
The empty space between
Your otherness and silence
Inspires another line

The hunger of words
Devours the incalculable
Depths of my admiration
I wish this
Just this
Sufficed
But it never could
Thank you

Not really sure what you're going on about. The energy of a photon is linearly related to its frequency always:

$E=hf$

If you have a cluster of photons of different frequencies, the energy is:

$E=h \sum_{i=1}^{N} f_i$

afaik the energy of a photon is always 'linearly organised' with respect to their frequency.

The division of one dimensional quantity by another with a different dimension produces a new dimensional quantity which is interpretable as a rate of the first by the second.

It is no coincidence that dividing the voltage difference in a circuit over the resistance of a resistor in that circuit produces a unit of current - this is because the resistor impedes the flow of current across it relative to the voltage which facilitates the flow of current. So you can think of V = IR as R = V/I; the scaling of a potential difference to the current flow.

The numerical equality of R and V/I is less important than the concepts which are represented by it; upon understanding why V=IR holds one will see that current can be measured in voltage difference over resistance felt.

You can use symbolic units, equivalence classes of dimensions, which show the relationships between the variables. For example, 'length', 'speed', 'time' are inter-definable, speed always has dimensions 'length per time'. Particularly common combinations of dimensional units are given names, like the ampere (which is charge flow per time), and there are often equivalent dimensions (like potential difference over resistance) which express the same unit in different contexts.

One can multiply and divide units of inequivalent dimensions, linking to rates through proportionality, but one cannot add inequivalent dimensions together. This is literally adding apples and oranges.

One must also be careful with functions, for example if $f(t) = a + bt$ is a length, $a$ must be a length and $b$ must be a speed. Different sides of equalities and inequalities must always have the same dimension, for 'how many apples are in an orange?' is a senseless question, whereas 'how many apples per orange are there on the table?' is not.

Hope that helps. You might enjoy reading about 'dimensional analysis', which is a label given to modelling techniques and mathematical tricks based on considerations of unit dimension alone.

Stop reposting this.

The Sauron thing is something that amused drake so he went on and on about it instead of allowing me to get the topic back on track. — frank

It was absolutely on topic. You even introduced it!

Not at all. It's going on all around you all the time. It's nature. — frank

One wonders why regulatory capture and bribes for favours are necessary if the strong must survive unaided.

Again: your position is all emotion, which is fine. If you have an argument that has something logical or empirical to say about the matter, I'd be interested. — frank

Your position is literally just a myth divorced from material circumstances. A myth that serves very few people, and is perpetuated to make us venerate unholy saints. This is why the Lord of the Rings was so appropriate an analogy for you - you were already dealing with mythical rather than political structures.

This is why it is so easy for you to bracket all of political reality and reduce everything to a symbolic opposition between good and evil, or between poor and rich. You've discovered that tyrants are made by the people they control, resistance movements are defined by the forces they oppose, policies are motivated along lines of ideological distinction. You have mistaken a conceptual dependence for a political one, but of course you won't notice this because all politics is reduced to myth anyway.

When Sauron comes and burns your lands I hope you still love him after.

So you can't accept Sauron even though you know the position he holds in the world that you love. Therefore, your argument comes down to a giant wad of emotion, and my point stands: there is no coherent logical argument against the proposition (in or around the OP.) — frank

People didn't fight Sauron because of some symbolic opposition between good and evil. People fought Sauron because he was a tyrant ruining their lives. You've got a really warped perspective here - it's as if you're not living in Middle Earth.

What are you drinking? — frank

I'd be drinking wine from Southfarthing if it wasn't for all these genocidal skeletons on dead horses.

Middle Earth is an expression of a primal conflict between good and evil. It only exists because of Sauron's superior, Morgoth. — frank

I know this. That doesn't mean support Sauron if you have to deal with all his shit you dolt.

If you love life, you love Sauron. — frank

Sauron was become now a sorcerer of dreadful power, master of shadows and of phantoms, foul in wisdom, cruel in strength, misshaping what he touched, twisting what he ruled, lord of werewolves; his dominion was torment.

But the Elves were not so lightly to be caught. As soon as Sauron set the One Ring upon his finger they were aware of him; and they knew him, and perceived that he would be master of them, and of an that they wrought. Then in anger and fear they took off their rings. But he, finding that he was betrayed and that the Elves were not deceived, was filled with wrath; and he came against them with open war, demanding that all the rings should be delivered to him, since the Elven-smiths could not have attained to their making without his lore and counsel. But the Elves fled from him; and three of their rings they saved, and bore them away, and hid them.

“Come not between the Nazgûl and his prey! Or he will not slay thee in thy turn. He will bear thee away to the houses of lamentation, beyond all darkness, where thy flesh shall be devoured, and thy shriveled mind be left naked to the Lidless Eye”

Whatever fake sophistication is making you defend a literal avatar of evil, stop it. If you love the free people of Middle Earth, you fucking hate Sauron. The people of Middle Earth will never be free until Sauron is strangled with the entrails of the last Wraith.

They love him too. He's badass. — frank

Ahistorical nonsense.

"Ere (Sauron's) spirit left its dark house, Luthien came to him and that he should be stripped of his raiment of flesh, and his ghost sent quaking back to Morgoth; and she said 'There everlastingly thy naked self shall endure the torment of his scorn, pierced by his eyes, unless thou yield to me the mastery of thy tower.' — The Threat of Luthien

The Free People of Middle Earth united against him. They hated him. What fucking book did you read?

If you love the LOTR then you love Sauron. Is this point really too obscure for you? Really? — frank

Tell that to the rest of Middle Earth man. Even the rest of the Gods hate Sauron.

I could pick on some of your examples, but that would be a side track. — frank

You realise I just replaced contrasting terms in your post with other contrasting terms right? The burden of irrelevance is yours here. Anyway, what were we talking about?

But wait, what was your point? — frank

You are a sickening apologist for Sauron, or a useful idiot for him. The orcs are hard working test tube babies born into war and selectively bred for barbarity. If given the opportunity for their successes to accumulate, maybe they would develop a culture of peace and prosperity. But as it stands Sauron enforces his will on the hard working orcs by making it their will.

I want to live in a Middle Earth where the guttural battle cries of the Black Speech (as called by the forced enemies of the orcs) are replaced by the beautiful harmonies of the Nazgul. Dethrone the Wraiths who built nothing of the present world, only acted as the willing hands of a tyrant against his people.

What does that look like for you? Also realize, unfortunately, I have a lot of other stuff I have to do to not go homeless, so though I'd love to delve many hours into the minutia mongering of every math problem that ever existed, every proof, every speculative realist argument, every Wittgenstein quote, I have to do this cursory, more playful approach. I know.. shitty of me. — schopenhauer1

Pick up the thread. Play about with it for a bit, see what strands come undone. Weave them back together into something coherent.

This is such a Steven Pinker-esque argument. The discussion is around the increase in right wing terrorism, and the charts provided clearly show this to be the case. This is an important societal problem to concern ourselves with, and not something to shrug at simply because there are less overall terrorist attacks compared to 40+ years ago. — Maw

I for one support ethnic diversity among terrorists. We're so used to them being just Muslims, and it's about time we had some proper integrated white nationalists reclaiming what's our own. The fall of Isis signalled the need for a renovation in terrorism, and only the white neckbeard can provide.

Edit: (yes, this is a joke. Yes. The majority of domestic terrorists come from working class disgruntled white right wingers.)

Edit2: (yes, far right terror is also a thinkpiece distraction, state terror is the major problem)

The Frodos of the world are truly amazing, but they apparently need a Lord of the Rings to provide them with something to overcome. So does this argue for or against the lords? — frank

The anti-biotics of the world are truly amazing. But apparently they need bacteria to provide them with something to overcome. So does this argue for or against streptococcus?

Me? I'm not going to side with fucking Sauron.

If you want to rather arbitrarily attach ambition, striving, resilience and opportunity taking to anyone; give it to the poor saps who should flourish under this ideal of resilience and adaptation but do not.

A single dad sleeping 3 hours a night with 2 jobs for 3 children.

A nurse who can't afford healthcare and has no plan through the privatisation of the healthcare system she is underpaid to serve in.

The craftspeople who had their skillset invalidated by their employers coopting technologies made through public funding and outsourcing all labour to violently oppressed workforces.

A social care worker who comes home every day covered in bruises due to the closures of specialist facilities, their body separating a violent 16 year old child sex offender from the 7 year old girl in the other room. They keep at the job because they know it's needed.

These are the people that should be rewarded for their contributions to society, they are resilient, skilled, hard working and adaptable. They are the value added to our common good, not the whims of shareholders and speculators.

Also, fdrake I know you have mentioned speculative realism. Can you elucidate on this view, and how it matches up with Witty's critique, or vice versa? — schopenhauer1

Not without you doing more work, no I can't.

I don't like the 'is' either. I think it's misleading. It should be "if an object is bound in a formula on some domain of discourse then we are committed to that entity's existence'. It's less about ontology/metaphysics in the continental sense of studying how or why things are the way they are and just about what there 'is' in the first place.

Edit: to see how little this helps you decide, consider the difference between "The present king of France is bald" now (with the implicit domain of currently living people) and in 1774 (when the domain includes a king of France). In the first case it's false because there is no present king of France, in the second case it depends on whether he has hair or not. This maxim just spits out whatever you've put into the domain already.

Set { {A} ,{B} } has cardinality 2. {A} and {B} are parts of it. Each have cardinality 1, so they don't have cardinality 2. Wholes can have properties the parts lack, parts can have properties the wholes lack.

I wonder why there was all that universe just hanging around waiting to exist for billions of years.

Would you be ok calling that potential a fundamentally biological thing? Or is there something extra-biological about it? — frank

Eh, we've evolved as social animals; our biology and development are radically social, so're all the (probably) unique higher order mental functions we have. I'm happy saying it's rooted our body, so long as our body is understood to already be a social organism.

Would it be appropriate to start another thread then? — schopenhauer1

It'd probably be for the best. It's not exegetical or easily related to the exegesis here. I'm fairly sure that a general thread won't get the kind of responses you want, though. You'll have to do most of the work in the OP.

That is not so. It's the same stinking distinctions that are being made, just in different terms. It's all the same at the end of the day, whether you analyze every word of Philosophical Investigations or not. The implications and conclusions will lead to these distinctions. I'm more interested in what PI implies and how it fits with other views in the philosophy world here. — schopenhauer1

While I'm not as dismissive of your concerns as @StreetlightX was here, you need to do a lot more work to link the concepts given exegesis in the thread to the much more general philosophical viewpoint you're trying to take. Precisely when one of the major thrusts of the currently discussed part is that finding seeds of universal generality in contextually dependent notions of sense ('philosophical grammars' to link it to previous discussion here) is a fool's errand!

I'd like to try, anyway. I gave a link in the op to the Open Learning site. It is a source I trust, both academically and politically. I trust them, not to be perfect, but to be careful; to be concerned to be accurate and unbiased in their material. Likewise, I generally trust the ingredients list on food packaging to be accurate. And as Wallows points out, money is entirely made of trust - well trust and rather thin paper. It's not a matter of left or right particularly - social life, economic life, law and order, governance, academia, science, every good thing depends on trust. — unenlightened

I think it's relevant to distinguish socially necessary trust, which is in some sense inviolable for the current functioning of things, and personal trust, which is based on an individual's relationship with whatever is trusted to some degree. People could stop trusting in money personally, and when that happens there are economic effects, but people can't stop treating it as a social necessity so long as the present order of things, or something close to it, holds.

Personal trust, moreover, is quite tied to socially necessary trust. One amazing revelation, though it is actually quite old really, which the success of anti-politics confronts us with acutely is that the powers which keep things running are not vouchsafed by personal trust in the aggregate; we know most government institutions cannot be trusted in all the senses we'd need to trust them to say we trust them, but nevertheless society keeps moving along since the relevant powers reproducing socially necessary trusts are doing so.

Socially necessary trust can perhaps be called an operative belief seen in our actions, even if the emotional valences of trust are not there.

It is always relevant to ask 'who do we trust?' 'for whom do we trust?' 'on what basis do we trust?' and 'does our trust matter?' - things are currently organised where personal trust in the system in the aggregate matters little for its ongoing function. I don't want to 'psychologise' trust here for the same reason that I don't want to 'psychologise' logic in other places; trust is always a worldly social relation with material consequences and grounding, mediated by the conditions of social-economic-political-cultural life which are situationally relevant to the target of the emotional valences of personal trust.

You guys know this is at least a three year necro right?

A rejoinder to my previous post is that a totalising conception of corporate power is not instrumentally useful in resisting its deleterious effects on public trust, so more than ever we need careful sociology and political analysis to track the limit points, fault-lines and interfaces between the ruled public, the ruling classes, and our glorified HR-for-capital governments.

I don't think we can talk about the decline of trust in public without talking about the political use of fear and the political strategy of anti-politics. We know that we can't trust politicians now, but we need reasons to stay mostly complacent or afraid to act, and we need useless channels to funnel dissent down to maintain (undemocratic) stability.

The alienation of people from their government representatives mirrors the alienation of the political class from international vectors of power. One way to address this issue is to replace non-compliance with structurally conditioned indifference; the 'non-linear' part of Russian propagandist Surkov's non-linear warfare:

In his enforcement of Putin’s will — or his own interpretation of it — Surkov carefully constructed and presided over a system in which Russians could play-act an intricate imitation of democracy. Every persuasion on the political spectrum was given a Kremlin-backed voice within the system as Surkov ensured that the Kremlin organized and funded a wide range of political groups and movements, from liberal to Communist to conservative, sowing confusion and cynicism in the public while at the same time co-opting any genuine opposition. The messengers differed, but the message was the same — the Kremlin was always in control. Under Surkov’s simulation of politics, dissent wasn’t crushed: it was managed.

The key part of this management strategy is the creation of supported avenues for dissent which stymie the formation of effective popular movements.These are gatekeepers for political action, moving the goalposts or hiding them.

Selectively inefficient legislative apparatuses play a role here: the legal system covering criminal negligents in Grenfell in the UK is a good example, so was the lack of jail time for our criminally negligent speculators in 2008. Sometimes this can be interpreted in terms of regulatory capture, sometimes it's (also) a systemic blindspot (see inequality + overproduction and climate change). A diffuse and inefficient (or intentionally badly enforced in the case of our tax laws) gatekeeper-administrative apparatus has the dual purpose of blocking internal political intervention and discouraging grass roots activism by rendering it internationally collaborative by necessity. It has the perhaps intentional side effect of alienating honest citizens from politics by denying the efficacy or applicability of their votes and petitions.

The media management of outrage interacts with our modern day equation of politics=political discourse to play a role here, the contours of acceptable opinion are rarely perturbed, and the well known alliance between powerful corporations and media outlets (cough Murdoch and Koch cough) project the voice of the ruling class from the institutions which help shape the terms of debate in which popular opinion is formed. Politics on social media is typically sound and fury organising nothing except the convenience of our ruling class.

An emerging role for 'influencers' is taking place, acting as pseudo-servants of the ruling classes by embodying acceptable opinions which are near the contours of acceptable opinion. The communities which support influencers also necessarily become associated with a consumer identity through the algorithms which shape the medium they are in: these algorithms also watch their every move, and our governments have almost unrestricted access. Here we can see the role of ideological echo-chambers, discretising identity into a panopticon of conflicting units that in reality have far more shared political interest than their antipodal role in discourse suggests.

This promotes a second level of apathy and indifference, there are people who can 'see through' this shit, which includes many liberal commentators, but this is still within the narrows of acceptable opinion; it is fashionable to bemoan the degradation of discourse, and this too is organised over influencer communities.

Then, unfortunately, we have anti-politics; which is a populist political rhetorical strategy that demeans official political opponents as part of the ineffective system (which everyone recognises), and thereby they provide false hope of revolution in rhetoric but their policies are more of the same. We have luminaries here from the milquetoast left and right, Tony Blair, Barack Obama, Nigel Farage and Trump.

The political situation surrounding anti-politics must be seen on the level of social structure which produces these effective demagogues rather than blamed on the examples. Their popularity only makes sense under the public acknowledgement of the degraded power of democracy in the West. Of course, Western democracies have rarely had this power, the interwoven threads of capital and government were created along with the working class and colonial expansion, exporting the hatred and indifference of the ruling class for their workers and citizens abroad, which was immediately re-internalised through the politics of fear-mongering racism.

The politics of fear in general also plays a privileged part here, as trust in our nation is better fuelled by xenophobia defining an empty, other-less Us through blind prejudice against the other; better fuel than a sincere commitment to a democracy of trusted institutions, which requires a lot of fire and sackings and arrests to achieve at this point. This politics of fear resonates with the anti-political and discursive elements of the non-linear war we face on all fronts; systematic trust is dead, we need to recreate it politically on our own terms.

For talk about the resurgence of right nationalism across Europe and America, the politics of fear, the anti-political element, and the reactionary disgust against feminism and post-colonial studies interact to make an actionable space of belief to propagandise. One way out of this trilemma of fear, undermined democracy and corporate power is fascism; which has the problems it always has, the other is to organise left; which requires us to repurpose the media which fail us every day.

I get what you mean but I suppose it's just a case of trying to justify ones behaviour by the behaviour of animals.. why don't we sniff each other's bums like dogs do when we meet each other or eat our own babies like hippopotamuses do.. there are lots of examples of this, it's called the nature fallacy and is used regularly to justify things, well in this case eating meat. — Kaz1983

I think you misinterpreted the question. It's actually designed to be in favour of animal rights arguments. The idea behind it is to burden a meat eater with a task to find something true of animals that's not true for humans that makes the distinction between killable/non-killable make sense.

It rules out things like pain, suffering, rudimentary self awareness, tool use etc. when applied to all animals. So the meat eater has to go on a case by case basis, which already plays into the animal rights activist's hands.

I can never think of a good answer to this question:

What is true of animals but not true of humans that allows us to kill and eat one but not the other?

But I still eat meat and buy unethical products like caged hen eggs. I guess if I'm happy with animal genocide I can be happy with causing them more suffering before they die.