If they were truly indistinguishable, though, they'd just be other humans (not "machines," if by that is meant something non-human). So that amounts to not much.

I watched the whole movie, yeah. I think it failed as a sci-fi scenario and as a drama personally, the former for the reasons I mentioned. The ending was just sort of, "alright, then." The whole Alan Watts thing was pretty vomit-inducing, too.

I just don't buy it. She's literally just Scarlett Johansen. No one is wondering whether Scarlett Johansen is human. Even something schlocky like Data from Star Trek is more interesting.

Yes, but we still can distinguish between fiction and history; there is some ingredient that is present in one and missing in the other (and, or, vice versa). — Mariner

If you're interested, Sartre's Nausea is essentially an attempted refutation of this claim in fictional form.

One of the reasons that Her is not compelling as a movie, though, is that the OS is effectively no different from a woman. They literally just cast a woman for the role, and she does everything a human being does. And nobody even seems to care that the guy is dating her anyway. It's not very thought provoking when you just take a woman (and it was, we all know, actually just Scarlett Johansen), and then *say* she's a computer, to somehow demonstrate that the line can be effectively blurred. Traditional sci-fi scenarios like this usually have some sort of framing device to show that the two are literally distinguishable, and then ask the further question of which qualities are important to personhood. That disappears when you start right off the bat with no difference whatsoever.

But disquotationalism doesn't say that if chairs exist in that world then "chairs exist" is true in that world; it says that if chairs exist in that world then "chairs exist in that world" is true. — Yahadreas

To say that "S" is true iff S, or to say that they mean "the same thing," is to say that in any case in which one holds, so does the other. That is, they have the same truth conditions. So if I say that "A is to the left of B" means the same thing as "B is to the right of A," that means there is no situation in which one could hold but the other not.

Now, if I say, "Chairs exist iff 'Chairs exist' is true," and by this I mean that these two mean the same thing, then I am speaking a falsehood. Why? Because there are situations in which chairs exist, but "chairs exist" is not true, viz. situations in which the linguistic conventions are different or absent.

Put another way:

(1) Whether "chairs exist" is true depends on certain linguistic conventions are in place.
(2) It is possible that chairs exist, yet no such linguistic conventions are in place.
(3) Therefore, it is possible that chairs exist, yet it is not that case that "chairs exist" is true.

It is not the same. We can say "chairs exist" to describe that situation. Therefore, we can also say that "chairs exist" is true, in the current situation, when that sentence is evaluated relative to the hypothetical world. Notice that this is not the same as to say that "chairs exist" is true in that hypothetical situational. It is merely still true here, when talking about that hypothetical situation.

Now, we cannot say that "chairs exist" is true in that world -- in that world, there may even be no such sentence. This is different from saying that chairs exist in that hypothetical situation. Again, one is a claim about chairs, which do exist, and another claim is about a certain linguistic object, which in that situation, does not exist, and so cannot be true or false.

Put another way, the only way a sentence can be true is if certain linguistic conventions are set up. In the imagined situation, no such conventions are set up, and therefore the statement is not true.

The alternative would be to claim (1) that in any situation in which anything describable now by language occurs, language must also exist in that situation (language, even English is necessary, and it is impossible for it not to exist as it does now, with all of its conventions for assigning truth conditions -- an absurdity), or (2) that the truth of sentences is independent of any convention, either that no language need to exist for its sentences to be true (?!) or that language (all possible languages?) exist Platonically whether they are actually instantiated or not.

When we say that "the chair exists" is true we are saying that the chair exists and when we say that the chair exists we are saying that "the chair exists" is true. — Yahadreas

This is false. For example, chairs can exist even if there is no English at all.

In order for "the chair exists" to be such that it can be true or false, there have to be elaborate linguistic conventions set up such that some truth value can be assigned to it. It's true that, with English as it now stands, this trivially coincides with cases in which chairs exist. But in a situation where English was different, or there was no English, this would not be so.

To see this, just reflect on the fact that your position results in the absurd conclusion that in any case in which someone makes a chair, this ipso facto means that English as it is now spoken suddenly must exist. But it's just not true that whether there are chairs or not controls whether language works in a certain way.

But they do not mean the same thing. One is a claim about chairs; the other, about a linguistic object.

It is not a contradiction. If there is no English, then "chairs exist" is not true; yet in such a situation there can still be chairs. Whether there are chairs or not is not dependent on certain linguistic conventions being set up.

It is true that "chairs exist" is true, when evaluated relative to that situation via our current use of the sentence, as English is actually set up. But this is not what your disquotationalist premise wants to say; it wants to say that the two conditions, a sentence's being true on the one hand and chairs existing on the other, are equivalent, that is, that in any situation in which one holds, the other does as well.

This has the false consequence that any time a chair exists, English must exist as it does now as well.

I've said this before, but it bears repeating: disquotationalism as presented here is not even true. On the left side of the biconditional you have some fact about language, which requires certain conventions to be set up, and on the right side you have a fact about chairs.

Now in a situation where English never arose as one of the many human languages, but chairs still existed, then chairs would exist but "chairs exist" would not be true.

So you don't need to worry about the implications of disquotationalism in the sense that it's false to begin with.

""Things are not illusory because they fail to match up with our own transcendental standards of truth, things are illusory because they are at odds with themselves;"

While I agree with this, the upshot is that, as all things are at odds with themselves, all things are illusory (depending on your standards and how hard you're willing to force things to be rigorous or not be at odds with themselves). That is, nothing about the world 'makes sense' on its own terms any more than the gestaltist illusions do.

History is always made up, and there are no limits to what you can make up, and so no limits as to what can have a history. But then there's a sense in which nothing actually has a history, we just pretend it does (make up stories).

No, the claim itself doesn't take itself to be privileged in the way metaphysical or ontological discourse does. It only shows that the attempt at such a privileging yields a sort of practical contradiction.

It doesn't fail in what it sets out to do, except in cases where a discourse tries to set itself aside as asking privileged questions about 'what there is' or how things 'really are.' There is no contradiction in discussing these things in the normal sense: for example, we might argue over whether it is raining, which is a question of the way things really are, or about whether there are knives in the drawer, which is a question about what there is. But metaphysical and ontological discussions do not take themselves to be asking questions of this ordinary sort, but scaffolding questions about the way things are, or the sorts of things that there are in a fundamental sense.

Propositional logic has no mechanisms for tense. Of course it would be possible to translate the antecedent and consequent with the tense already folded into them. Thus if A = "McDoodle will work hard" and B = "McDoodle will get Distinction on his exam," then A--> B would mean that there is no possible situation in which you will work hard, but that you won't pass the exam. On some readings of the sentence, that is more or less an adequate translation. There is no 'time' at which one validates truth of propositions in propositional logic -- there is simply an interpretation function that brutely assigns true or false to every letter. If you wanted, you could assume that that function is in effect representing evaluation from a single point in time.

I agree with Yahadreas that reference is metaphysically or ontologically non-committal. This is obvious form the fact that we have (1) actual linguistic markers for talking about non-actual situations even when we're anchored to actual discourse -- linguists call this modality -- and (2) methods of shifting the basis for discourse altogether away from actuality -- fictional discourse. The point is not simply that we can talk about things we would independently consider to have no status as 'real' in the sense the realist is interested in it, but that, in such cases, language seems not to change in its behaviors at all. To put it simply, language works exactly the same way whether you're in the Matrix or not. It seems completely blind to such questions.

Insofar as linguistic 'anti-realism' is a merely negative thesis, then, that the behavior of language provides support against the realist's claims about how language somehow secures or props up reality, I would say that these facts are good grounds for linguistic anti-realism. Certainly, one is not committed to anything like SX's claim, whatever it might mean: the question of whether language itself treats linguistic structures on a par with non-linguistic ones is an interesting one. In some ways, I think it does: all languages have mention mechanisms, for example, that effectively give speakers the ability to form quasi-proper names out of words just by the fact of those words' existence (what we in philosophical discourse use quotations marks to mark), and so do take words to be 'things' as much as they take anything else to be 'things.' But in other ways, language seems curiously blind to itself: it lacks mechanisms for describing its own mechanisms, outside of formal linguistics, where we must use the medium of models. For example, we seem to be unable in natural language to self-reference our own speech acts except in certain 'performative' constructions, which in English often license the adverb 'hereby.' Thus you can say, 'I [hereby] challenge you,' but you can't answer a question like, 'What are you doing?' with 'I'm answering your question.' That is, the descriptive assertion is incapable of itself describing what it is doing; it is forcibly interpreted as a description of something else.

I'm not quite sure on this subject, but my inclination now is to think that because ontology or metaphysics are themselves discursive practices, and the medium they're forced to employ itself refuses to validate the very theses that are made in that medium, there is a sort of incoherence to questions of ontology and metaphysics. Or, at the very least, to the extent one has an ontology or metaphysics, it must be non-linguistic (and I do not rule out that possibility) and the best language could do to illustrate it would be to 'lead people' to that non-linguistic understanding rather than straightforwardly describing 'the way things really are.'