I agree somewhat with the "required pace", but you and I know that in post-K12 math and related subjects it takes effort and time to accumulate a background necessary to advance or apply knowledge even a bit. In my years of teaching college math I have encountered only one such individual - an older student who dropped out to support himself as a poker player. He had taken my course in complex variables, and I recall speaking with him informally in the math office in which he brought up a really interesting and unusual notion on the subject, spur of the moment. Like a light bulb burning bright. I was unable to convince him to continue the curriculum. — jgill

I think our bar for profundity is different. Kids trip up on stuff like:

a ) x+1 = 2, solve
b ) x+1 = 3, solve

because they think that x in the context ( a ) is the same as x in the context of ( b ). Which is a very good reason to be stuck.

They also get tripped up on stuff like addition in the integers being commutative, but subtraction in the naturals not being.

Sometimes they even do things like 1-2 = 0, which isn't "wrong", per se, it's a sense of subtraction that removes instances from collections of stuff - like scoring off bags of pasta from a shopping list. You then have to tell them that it's "wrong", in some sense, to say 1-2=0 even when such subtraction is perfectly cromulent.

Yes and, to develop the idea, there’s a kind of bait and switch whereby what’s ostensibly offered, “knowledge” (of this and that) is offered as an implicit route to power, but functions to obscure the actual route to power (the meta knowledge of the system of power in which such “knowledge” is misleadingly elevated) both in terms of its content and mode, i.e. this “knowledge” tends towards a static “body of knowledge” that divides the individual against itself rather than an integrated praxis that would unify and dynamize it. And this exclusion of praxis, the inculcation, not just of disembodied “knowledge” but of the idea that knowledge (implicitly generalized as power) just is disembodied “knowledge” enables the gradual castration into the social that the social needs to inflict to reproduce its organs (institutions and those willing to be dispensable cells therein). — Baden

Absolutely!

You paint a picture of knowledge as a monolithic yet untethered abstraction.

Monolithic, in the sense that the static body of knowledge pervades society totally. It saturates us as both assumed common sense, and that sense's unfulfilled expectation. It determines those who know what we know. And those who do not. The enculturation of this knowledge must also remain relatively static in order to reproduce the social forms that that knowledge pervades and engenders. For such expectations, in order to function as an assumed body of knowledge, need a means of propagating the assumption as well as its content.

Also untethered, a subject which satisfies the demand of that knowledge, one who knows what we know, satisfies it in a normative sense rather than a semantical one. One does not need to be able to calculations with fractions to count as someone who knows how to do calculations with fractions - most jobs need a qualification that says you can do this, most people never learned to do fraction maths. There is a divergence between what is known and what is counted as known by whom. Whatever tethering mechanisms distribute satisfaction of these knowledges into bodies thus only reproduce this knowledge approximately, but also therefore are not required to reproduce this knowledge in toto. Thus we're left in a situation in that who counts as knowing what we know is distributed by the broader social form of education, rather than the content which it is designed to reproduce. The medium of education is to a large part also its message.

Every person is not, however, a coordinator of the medium of education. But they are a vehicle for its expectations - and thus its norms. Everyone who knows what we know expects others to know what we know, for that is what it means to know what we know. Those expectations however are stratified, as the broader social form of education distributes who counts as knowing differently from who knows. Whenever someone thus passes on what we know, they pass on the stratified means by which those expectations of knowledge are formed. Alienating us from our own capacity to reproduce a social form of knowledge, as its guide.

I believe you can feel this alienation when teaching students. There are daily moral dilemmas, some are related to the curriculum and some are not. Regarding those which are not related to the curricula - you know your students are doing things that are socially non-normative but are nevertheless morally permissible. You know they are thinking and acting in ways that are socially unacceptable in broader society but work in their community. You're thus confronted with the responsibility of raising concerns regarding deviations from what is normative and socially acceptable, regardless of its moral status. Because you know your students will be punished for deviations, and thus act as an organon of that punishment - reproducing the expectation by enacting it. There are even forms to fill in when something non-normative is disclosed. Not that they always are.

Regarding knowledge of the curriculum - the kind of student that satisfies all benchmarks in a subject has already been discouraged from pursuing their insights and skills due to herding them through the curriculum at a required pace. It is not uncommon to see an allegedly failing student have a profound insight, which you nevertheless cannot spend time developing with them since it is more important to their life to count as knowing what we know than teaching them how to learn, to grow their own capacities and insights.

Another way of saying this is it's not the knowledge that is primarily identify-forming in an educational context, it's the context itself as a way of framing knowledge as power that forms the social identity and the ground on which individuals' navigation of this embedded framework rests. You might call individual strategies for negotiating the framework individual identities. But the framework is what's primarily internalised and grounds them. — Baden

I want to "yes, and" this. Primary and secondary education is also an unholy union of parenthood and peer socialising. It is the "village which raises a child", if that village were administered entirely by beleaguered and hopelessly overworked academics, forced to play the roles of parent and prison warden. The social machine that reproduces knowledge is also the principal site that society collectively reproduces itself within.

(A key here is to understand that stimulation and down-regulation are not at all identical. Stimulation will also involve, for example, up-regulation — Leontiskos

Yes. It involves both. Stimming works like a stabilising perturbation to arousal. The overall effect is down regulatory. A bit like eye jitter is required to produce consistent visual perception.

So you exclude the possibility of true play; — Leontiskos

True play? Of course what's going on is play.

Aye. And that's about autistic cognition more generally, rather than the role stimming plays in it, or Baggs' stimming routine. There might be something specifically autistic about what Baggs is doing, but the phenomenology doesn't reduce to the autistic cognitive style which promotes stimming.

So then play is merely down-regulating? — Leontiskos

Remove "merely".

. I don't interpret everything they do as mere down-regulation. — Leontiskos

Nor do I. What about stimming?

There is no reason at all to rule out such a possibility. — Leontiskos

Indeed. They are playing. Having formed a routine out of stims.

Yes and. Both. Have you ever been about autistic people?

Indeed. — Joshs

That strikes me as incredibly reductive. The specificity of Baggs' conduct has been dissolved into a broader glut of sensorially infused and creative sociality.

Which is to say that your explanation of "stimming" is self-admittedly not an explanation of what Baggs is doing, which is interesting given that you are the one who introduced this word "stimming." — Leontiskos

Everything Baggs is doing is a stim. The stims seem to form routines. That's pretty normal autism stuff.

Infants do this to understand their environment. Infants are hypersensitive. — I like sushi

Yet you can distinguish an infant's behaviour from a neurodivergent person's stimming, like they do in the diagnostic protocols for it.

Reductively analyzing stimming behavior in terms of arousal mechanisms misses the creative sense-making motivation behind it. Stimming is not a thermostatic mechanism, its pleasure comes from learning to organize a chaotic hodgepodge of sensations into regular patterns. — Joshs

Didn't you say the same holds for everything we do though?

I suppose where the above gets complicated is that being able to stim like that allows a form of stimming play, which is what Baggs is doing. But it's not too much different, as stimming play, from arranging things on your desk or handling your collection of rocks.

I do think that the regulatory component of those activities is still well described by eliciting regular stimuli, but there's a bit more going on. It's a routine, in a place, and the acts are volitional. Generically stimming is less volitional and more autonomic, but Baggs' play is a stimming routine.

I don't particularly agree with this, in application to stimming anyway. To the extent I understand what you're saying.

The intentionality associated with stimming is not toward the stim source, it's a means of the body coordinating to produce a regulated and focussed state. The stimulus and conceptualisation of the stim is a down regulatory component of the overall state of the person stimming which is nevertheless otherwise directed. Someone stimming strokes their hair to listen, not to stroke their hair.

I think it's better to think of it as a means of enabling perception to function "as usual", by providing it regularizing grist. You get a steady stream of elicited, predictable sensations which are rapidly cognized. Which regulates arousal by reducing variation in perception in the stim relevant senses over time.

being mesmerized by the changing visual patterns of fireworks, ocean waves, a roaring fire. — Joshs

Those ones probably don't count as stimming. Since they're not repetitious in the context of the stimmer's life.

any people see it as a form of comforting oneself (and some evidence backs this up), but it is more or less about a need to process and interact with the environment I believe. — I like sushi

It's both, a self regulatory perceptual activity. Often, or perhaps usually, done involuntarily.

Primarily stemming from early childhood adaptation and learning regarding items like cause and effect, — I like sushi

I think whether you see it as an adaptation depends upon how you read adaptation. Whether a given person stims or does not stim seems relatively innate, as do the senses which the person stims with, but the specific stims used are unlikely to be predetermined. As an example, assume someone who stims is likely to be born with a hypersensitivity to some range of senses, and also born with a tendency to find tactile stims comforting, and thus picks up tactile stims to regulate the hypersensitivities. Like maybe they stroke their hair.

Someone could have the same hypersensitivities and find a different sense regulative. Like maybe they fidget - vestibular and proprioceptive stimming with tactile elements.

Just for clarity, by hypersensitivity I mean a much lower than average ability to down regulate arousal associated with that sensation. That is, a hypersensitivity to a sense engenders states of enduring and heightened arousal associated with that sense.

More broadly, stims are triggered in response to high arousal states. Hypersensitivity might bring that about, but so might the excitement of a friend's company or an interesting task at work. Or a social conflict. Someone will rely on the sensory modalities that aid them in regulating arousal for their stims, regardless of the state of arousal's source. People's stims often change over their lifetime, as do the scenarios and events which produce the heightened sense of arousal those stims regulate.

Not exactly. I don’t think they refer so much as enact. — Joshs

What do the sensations enact?

It s a language of thought using sensation rather than verbals symbols. — Joshs

Were you meaning to construe the sensations as symbols?

Also, for what it's worth, Baggs used to speak, went through something like normal language acquisition, got all the way to college before they started to lose their speech, I think. So we're not dealing with a "feral child" situation. And they continued to write even after they stopped speaking. It's complicated. — Srap Tasmaner

How complex.

Another reason it doesn't make sense to see their behaviour as language. You watch the video, it's a series of perceptual and sensory exercises. There are sounds made for their own purpose, for how they're heard and relate to background sounds. Objects are tasted, just for how they relate to the tongue and mouth. Objects are nuzzled, just for how they relate to the face and neck. It's at best a language metaphorically, and I think construing it as a language makes you lose so much specificity of description it's a damn shame.

There aren't any symbols, there aren't any words, there isn't an attempt to communicate, how they've expressed themself doesn't convey a content that's durable in time, no one could have a conversation with the series of actions unless it was already codified as a language through extant norms. Some of this even comes from the video - the "language" is nonsignifying , it cannot be representational or symbolic - and has no linguistic community associated with it.

There are so many interesting things you could describe about stimming routines. eg Baggs is pitch matching background noises with humming, but is a nonspeaking autist, why? What's the phenomenology there? What's the expressivity?

Calling it a language with a spoken component (the humming) when it's produced by someone who as a premise of the video cannot communicate in spoken language is hopelessly reductive and easily refutable. And for the purpose of normalising autism no less.

fdrake seems stuck on non-necessary norms of interpretation, such as spacing and punctuation. I would suggest that he think about coded language, such as encryption or the hidden signs involved in a football game or military strategy, where the linguistic matter is supposed to be unrecognizable according to standard norms. — Leontiskos

I never intended to say groups of symbols were necessary for something to count as language, I think it's essentially a sufficient condition to be able to recognise units of meaning. In the context of the discussion, I was showing a sufficient condition for recognising the presence of units of meaning without there being an understanding of the underlying language. Which was a counterpoint to the idea that one cannot hope to recognise whether something is a language unless one already speaks it.

;) I dare you to find the different particles in the word. And before you think of it: the ' symbol in the text is a normal letter in the Hebrew alphabet (Jod). You can find this and more examples on page 160 of the grammar I linked before. — KrisGl

All I meant was that there were recognisable units of meaning. The example you gave is a unit of meaning. I would have no idea wtf it means, there are still marks on the page. You even split it up into units of meaning for me.

There are plenty of examples like that, like making the sound iu-a'o in Lojban prior to saying an activity acts as an incredibly specific audible emoji. There isn't a translation of the attitude into English, or of the attitudinal indicator into English - it's still a unit of meaning!

You really don't need fluency, or even much understanding. to detect the presence of units of meaning. The fact that such a thing is so difficult for Baggs' stimming indicates that if it is a language, it is unlikely to be like any hitherto known one. It also will have only one "speaker".

Ok! And can you make the argument you intended to with the reference too?

I told you already that I don't think I can, because I do not speak that language. Take me by my word. I could make some elaborate counterargument now by introducing you to the nature of pre- and suffixes in the hebrew language and how you can cram a sentence into a whole word and how someone not familiar with that language would not be able to distinguish the different parts of one word that make up a whole sentence. I will not bore you with it. — KrisGl

You wouldn't bore me with it.

I don't speak this language. — KrisGl

You don't need to to try.

"Салам, куыдтæ дæ?"

What are the distinct symbol groups in that? Clearly, "Салам", "куыдтæ" and "дæ". It has a question mark at the end, so presumably it is a question.



What are the distinct gestures in this ASL poem?

Even if we make mistakes, it's still clear what trying to split this stuff up would mean in terms of a language. I doubt you can say the same form Baggs' stimming. Can you do it?

Sometimes ticks include cursing. Would you know from the outside if my cursing is me cursing or me having a tick? — KrisGl

You can tell that over time. People who curse as the result of a tic do so in wildly variable circumstances and seemingly independently from them. For a single instance of cursing, you might not be able to.

What units exactly would be fine enough for you to consider something a language? — KrisGl

I don't know. Try going through her tap water scene and dividing it up into distinct events of qualitatively different character that might be used for expressing something! I'll respond further when you've tried something like this.

This seems like a matter of basic semiotics. There is sign use and then there is intentional sign use. Language is the latter, and it is uniquely human. A dog licking its paw is the former, and humans are of course immersed in this sort of unintentional sign use as well, but it is not language. It is Helen Keller's transition from water-as-stimulus to water-as-sign. — Leontiskos

I wanted to avoid semiotic language since, taking Baggs at her word, her language is nonsignyfing. It doesn't have symbolic representation. You might think of that as a contradiction in terms, which would be another way to undermine its claim to be a language.

Why is that exactly? — KrisGl

Because AFAIK it's known that stimming is tightly linked with autistic people's emotional regulation. If you must suppress stimming, the self regulation goes out of whack. Another reason I want to think of it as autonomic is related to what you said here:

Whether or not there is intent or meaning(s) behind them ... we still don't know. — KrisGl

that likens her behaviour to stroking one's hair, scratching yourself, finger twiddling etc. None of which need be carried out with intent.

And how about the question if you would consider a sigh or a yawn part of language? — KrisGl

Someone can sigh in response to something, or at the end of a long day. A sigh in itself I wouldn't want to call an item of language in all circumstances, even though it is a sound that allows predictable expressions in some contexts. Like when it's a response to a request. But in others it isn't - like when you do it when frustrated. Compare the above to a word or a gesture in sign language. In contrast, "egg" is always "egg", an "a" sound is recognisably always an "a" sound. Can you say the same for Baggs' finger rubbing in the tap? Can you even say what this finger rub means vs that one? Can you even tell when one ends and one begins? There just aren't units of fine enough graduations to represent the continuum of behaviour she has.

A yawn is also something unintentional, but you "feel a yawn coming on", and can't suppress it. It's even unpleasant to try suppress. There's a sense of relief and normality afterwards. In that regard I think it's a better analogy for a stim than thinking of it as a language.

If you know an autistic person's stims, I think you can treat them as indicative of their mood sometimes. Some people have stims that only come out when very distressed, some people have stims that only come out when happy. If you knew what was what for a person, you can read it like a facial expression. Even though facial expressions aren't language either.

Okay. So language is something that can only happen when there are people agreeing on a standardized meaning of sentences, words, gestures? — KrisGl

Yes I think so. At the very least, something needs to be standardisable even if it isn't yet standardised. I don't believe Baggs' stimming is standardised, and I don't think it's standardisable in the same way as items of language are either. It's repetitive, there are patterns and types of things but... you can say the same of almost any process.

So "to individuate" stims means to be able to ascribe different meanings to each part of action within one stim (playing with the water)? — KrisGl

Yes. It is difficult to ascribe parts to the stimming. When her hand is moving back and forth in the water, should we just think that the first bit where she's relatively slow and the second bit where she's relatively fast count as distinct "units" which we could interpret as items of language? What about the variations in hand angle, which fingers feel the water etc within the units?

I mean ... we can certainly individuate the different stims (playing with water, moving hands in the air) and the different actions within one stim (moving slowly one second, then faster the next), right?'

Absolutely. It's just that you can't split the stims up from within them easily. Do all the bits of her humming have the same meaning? Does her humming change meaning when her hands flap? What about when she rocks? What about when she paces back and forth? Is she saying one thing or two things? Is her rocking and her humming one unit and her flapping another?

We just are not sure about the meanings these actions have or if they have meaning at all.

I think the situation is even more ambiguous. If we take her at her word, and that she's in a constant state of reciprocal connection with the environment, it would be really weird if we could only ascribe meaning so broadly. She spent a long time humming, and we'd have to reduce that to "her humming".

Whereas eg I've spent a long time typing this, and you can see where the letters are, where they end, which marks count as what words etc. You can tell that I'm doing certain things with the words - like elaborating, like answering questions, like making arguments, like analysing concepts etc. What I'm doing is language, and I'm also using language to do stuff.

If you were an anthropologist 6000 years from now and discovered this post, it would be recognisably language even if you didn't know what it meant at all - because you can see language's hallmarks.

I don't think you can say any of this about Baggs' stimming.

Frankly, though this is a bit off topic, I also think interpreting Baggs' stimming as language has the opposite of its intended life affirming/depathologising effect for autistic people. It's framed as a response to her being believed to be inferior because she has a speech disability. But it addresses this by framing her stimming as a language, thus undermining the speech disability claim. There doesn't have to be anything pathological about being disabled. Though I appreciate that calling her stimming a language can normalise that aspect of autism in some contexts.

I do wish that stimming was understood more like yawning than like language. Something autonomic.

What exactly distinguishes language-action from other forms of action? — KrisGl

I would say that an item of language needs to be standardised, or at the very least standardisable. Like words have wrong ways to pronounce them, sentences have grammatical errors, words can be misspelled, some gestures are seen as displaying an emotion in some contexts - like getting in someone's face, and it would not be seen as intimate. There needs to be something in the action that allows it to be standardised in order for it to count as an item of language in some context.

And I don't think her stims can be standardised in the above way. They probably can't even be individuated - can you tell the difference in significance of the water, or Beggs' relationship with her environment, when she changes the speed her fingers move against the water's current? When she's splashing or following the flow?

I assume you consider stims to be an action as a response to an emotion. — KrisGl

They might be. I inferred that Baggs' were since she spoke of a dialogue with her environment. Though some of them might not be about enacting some part of her mental state - eg when she seems to be pitch matching background noises with her humming.

Broadly speaking I thought that stimming was a response to an emotion - but in the sense that stimming is part of self regulation for autistic folks. Stims can be like sighs. They can also be like yawns.

I assume that, because you paralleled rubbing the face on a toy with someone going for a run when they are sad before. Is that correct?

In the context of what I wrote, I was trying to infer "her side" of the dialogue, the parts of her environment-person relationship that she was experiencing and what was structuring her intentions. And I found it difficult to imagine that such things make sense as items of language, they seemed much more like singular sensations and feelings, or like shifting on your feet to balance.

Do you believe what Baggs is doing counts as language?

And language is definitely not something like ... let's call it an "action" (going for a run when sad). — KrisGl

I think language is a subset of action. Just there are some actions which aren't instances of language.

Could you maybe explain what you mean with "phenomenology" of the two different rubbing stims here? — KrisGl

By phenomenology I mean the qualitative character of the experience and that experience's elements' significance in the life of the person who is having it. The felt stuff and its structure. As opposed to the performed stuff, the gestures and movements and sounds.

In the context of my post, I meant the reference to phenomenology in a certain conditional way. That if the states associated with her stimming were instances of communication, they would need to communicate some aspect of the state through gesture. Which would be difficult, if not impossible to do, if we take the Mel Baggs at her word that she is in a state of "dialogue" with the felt character of the environment.

For an example - what can you infer about Mel Baggs' state of mind from the section of the video in which she's stimming with the tap water? Is that state of mind what she's presenting?
Can you say that she's saying anything with it? Or does the motion have some intimate and singular significance to her? I think it's more accurate to think of Mel Baggs behaviour as a series of stims rather than as a language or as communication.

I don't think it makes sense to think of it as communication. Since there is no message, only receptivity and exploration. It also doesn't make sense to think of it as a language, since there's nothing like syntax arranging language items, there are only repetitious behaviours.

Consider the face rubbing stim. You can rub your face on two different soft toys in the same way, the phenomenology of those acts can differ radically even if the rubbing stim is the same. Thinking of the stim as a language item, it must have a reproducible content of some sort, and since the phenomenologies differ so much it would difficult to call the content of the stim state reproducible.

By reproducible X, I mean that something which counts as X could be done again. I think you only get her stims type identified - face rubbing soft toy stims are face rubbing soft toy stims, rather than "this state at this time type items", like you'd be able to get with "the dog I walked today".

There'll be some autobiographical detail which would allow an intent on her part to be inferred, which would form some reproducible context around the act - maybe she rubs her face on one toy in one circumstance, and one in another. But there's nothing to distinguish the latter from, say, someone going for a run when they feel sad - which isn't a language.

I thus thing it's a bad idea to call her stimming a language because it misses necessary properties of language - reproducible and structured presentation - and also that if it were language, it makes something like going for a run when sad language, which definitely is not language. I also don't think it's right to call it communication, since there's no reproducible message.

What is in the video? — I like sushi

It's only 8 minutes long.

Welcome to the forum!

Spitballing here.

Spite is an underrated motivator. But I don't think it's healthy to be the unique motivator in your life. If I'm motivated to do something, I think I'll experience that motivation as a result of one of the following drives or causes:

• A sense of need - this might be for food or social contact or routine tasks.
• A sensation of nervous energy - this might be for a deadline or deescalating a fight.
• A sense of duty - doing what I perceive is right regardless of any circumstance to the contrary.
• A sensation of pleasure - it just feels good to do the thing or to keep going.
• A sense of purpose - the task satisfies a deeply held belief or desire.
• A belief that it would be funny.
• A belief that the behaviour would be transgressive in a satisfying way.
• A feeling of anger - at injustice or a perceived wound/slight.

I'm sure there are many others.

Some of these states are sustainable, if often used, and some of them are not. The sense of need for food, social contact or routine tasks is something that can come and go without much effort, and can thus always serve its purpose. The sensation of nervous energy has contexts in which it is helpful and contexts in which it is unhelpful - the stress of nervous energy will impact you if it is sustained. Being bound by duty regardless of your other principles is taxing - often so taxing that a person's preferences will change to match their duties. The sensation of pleasure is sustainable, but the body quickly adapts to it and the sensation reduces. Humour and transgression are circumstantial, even if the attitude which sustains them is a facet of personality and thus always possible as motivations. Anger comes and goes quickly.

Of these drives, only duty, purpose, humour and transgression are things which can be cultivated through trying to improve one's resilience and insight. If a person can combine them, as you might with transgression through spite to act in accordance with a higher purpose, perhaps the motivation is heightened and easier to reinforce.

However, perhaps one needs to be careful that sustainable motivations are only mixed with sustainable motivations when trying to cultivate drive. Transgressive spite with a sense of purpose, that is a humorous lifestyle of a sort in which one's passions are exercised, transgressive spite with a sense of purpose and anger will make you persist in a state of stress if called on as one's principal drive.

Thus a person has to be careful how they mix their states and projects to cultivate their drive, else you end up poisoning yourself against your own nature over time.

↪fdrake Is that much different to ↪TonesInDeepFreeze or ↪Banno or to ↪Michael? Looks as if we have broad agreement. Always cause for concern. — Banno

It isn't much different no.

~G→~(P→A)
~P
G — Banno

Mostly spitballing.

The offending equivalence (this is logically valid).

(¬G→¬(P→A))↔((P→A)→G)

The latter: "If a prayer is answered by god, then that god exists"
The former: "If there is no god, then if something is a prayer then that prayer will be unanswered by that god."

Then you introduce ~P into the mix.

(((¬G→¬(P→A))∧(¬P))↔((P→A)→G)∧(¬P))

Those are still equivalent, you just conjoin ~P to both sides. If you encountered ((P→A)→G)∧(¬P)) out in the wild, you'd think "if something is a prayer, then it is an answered prayer, and that implication being true implied god existed" + "something isn't a prayer", you'd wonder why the hell anyone would be talking about something not being a prayer when it'd need to be an answered prayer to be relevant. It's a bit like trying to test a cat at the vet for a dog's illnesses.

Another thought regarding it is that the concept which makes the argument work is that if some prayers are answered by God, then God exists... Which looks a bit like (A→G). Rather than (P→A)→G. The equivalence between those two parsings isn't valid:

(((P→(A→G))∧(¬P))↔((P→A)→G)∧(¬P))

since its countermodels are P false, A false, G false - IE no prayers, no answered prayers, no gods. The fact that A false G false is part of a countermodel to the equivalence and are also the facts which made the OP's argument seem paradoxical makes me believe that translating the natural language into (((¬G→¬(P→A)) makes us think we've translated (((P→(A→G))∧(¬P)) into formal language, when we haven't. Which translation is of the two is not, in this instance, an innocuous choice.

The latter translation is also suspect - you can read it like "if I pray then all prayers answered are answered by god".

I prefer the latter analysis, an ambiguity between A->(B->C) and (A->B)->C that we don't notice much. But I get the impression that you could design other paradoxes to slip through this latter analysis.

Is there better and worse metaphysical fan fiction? That's the nub. — Leontiskos

Yes. I thought it went without saying. Some things people think of are more appropriate than others in some contexts, and strictly better by some metrics. Some fiction is more valuable than others. If a thingy works better than another thingy on every relevant facet, the first thingy is better than the second thingy.

How would you judge that for a given context? Well I suppose you'd look for examples, see what pans out, provide definitions of things to see if they capture the relevant phenomena... Maybe you'd refine your criteria for what counts as a good thing in a given context based on the what you've seen and what's been created, too.

I still have the impression that you think of this is as an Objectively Correct vs Subjective-Relativist sense, and I don't want to accept the Subjective-Relativist role in the discussion since the proofs and refutations inspired epistemology of mathematics isn't relativist in the slightest, because its emphasis is on communities of people agreeing on what follows from what by following coordinating norms and demarcating those norms' contexts of application. Minimally then, it's intersubjective, and communities create knowledge about collectively understood subject matters.

If you read through Proofs and Refutations, which is an amazing book, the most clear cut resolution and associated proof of the book's central topic is offered using an entirely separate formalism than what had been considered up until that point. It was a substantial theoretical innovation and reframing that cleared away the old problems, but was nascent within them. Lakatos' approach has a dialectical flavour in that regard.

It is interpreting or translating someone's utterance in a way that they themselves reject. — Leontiskos

I disagree that that is what is going on. When someone stipulates a definition, they are committed to that definition insofar as it relates to the intended concept. Rejecting a criticism of a definition on the grounds that the criticism doesn't portray your intents is a fine thing, so long as it isn't pointing out something which your stated commitments entail. Isn't this a basic idea in reasoning itself, playing out in how people codify ideas?

Indeed, you offered an alternative informal definition of logic:

"That which creates discursive knowledge" (or perhaps just knowledge) — Leontiskos

Which could equally mean "mind", "minds", "people", "institutions", "thought processes", "scientific experiments", "scientific theory", "perceptions", "deductive reasoning", "deductive reasoning using formalisms" and so on. Which are perhaps in the intended scope, and perhaps not.

But something like a research institution creates knowledge in a sense, and I doubt that is in the scope. And we could play the same game as we played with the formalisms out in natural language. What would make a research institution fail to be logic?

The book "Sophie's World" is a good starting place. I recently picked up "Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar...", which is a bunch of introductory snippets on various parts of philosophy but illustrated with jokes.

Both of these give you a taste of various topics without having to do too much work. I think it would be a good idea for you to find out something you're interested in in it so that you know what you read next. At least gives you some key terms to google.

I have to say, I love the cheekiness of the cover. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Thanks. It looks a little bit like a Chuck Tingle cover.

For instance, G&P frame the position they want to argue against as: "we define logical pluralism more precisely as the claim that at least two logics provide extensionally different but equally acceptable accounts of consequence between meaningful statements." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Can you link me this paper please? If it hasn't been done already.