But it does.

P1. All and only (things that you think) are (from your perspective.)

together with the new tautological premise:

P2. All (from you perspective) is (from your perspective)

C. All (from your perspective) are (things are things you think.)


It is just

P1. All and only As are Bs.
P2. All Bs are Bs.
C. All Bs are As.

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

No, that'd only follow if all is from my perspective, but that isn't the case, and you haven't provided an argument for that claim in this thread. — Sapientia

Sorry because it WAS a tautology I thought it trivially true and didn't include it in the premises. But surely it is true:

P. Everything from your perspective is from your perspective.

Tautological, yes. True? Of course.

And it is not self-defeating. We still have absolute truth, there IS absolute truth from your perspective. We can still be objectively wrong for instance.

Yes that's true. From my perspective.

How so?

But all my claims are going to be from my perspective. Indeed it is impossible to make claims any other way.

If
All (from your perspective) are (things you think.)
then I should be able to truthfully utter

"All are things you think."

Which is indeed my claim.

Isn't it just a logical argument though?

1. All and only (things that you think) are (from your perspective.)

therefore

2. All (from your perspective) are (things are things you think.)

It is just

1. All and only As are Bs.
2. All Bs are As.

That's valid isn't it?

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

Yeah but access to that body and outside things are going to be through thoughts. For us they're the only tthings that exist. And that's important, for US. I'm not saying bodies don't exist, they do but for us they only exist though mental activity.

1. Everything you can think is necessarily from your point of view.
2. It follows that everything (from your point of view) is what you are thinking at this point in time.
3. What you are thinking at this point in time is a thought.
4. It follows that everything is thought.

Yeah I would agree that brains and photons are thoughts too. Everything is -from your own point of view. You can't think of anything that is not a thought.
We must be talking past each other a bit.
Do you agree that everything you can think of is mediated by a thought? That is not 'real' access, surely?

But it could be a demon. And that is an important point.

Good question, could be a demon putting the thought in our head, we simply don't know. There is no access to the real world, you see. But presumably there is a cause; perhaps light reflecting, cones firing, the lack of tinted spectacles or water in the way, just the fact that there is anything there in the first place. Most likely a combination of these.

Yeah but I'm saying a and b are called red because they are THOUGHT of as red. That's how conceptualism works. And if c is not thought of as red it won't be described as such. It is not about redness from a third person's view at all, that is totally irrelevant - from their point of view it could be green!

“What makes it the case that the concept red is rightly applied to both a and b, but not of some third individual, c?”

I don't see a problem here, surely red is applied if something is thought of as red.

Awesome, thanks. Might be useful to have titles as well as just links though :)

How about "The Intentionality of Intention and Action" by John Searle?
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1207/s15516709cog0401_3/pdf

Oh I see. Well an Idealist would say EVERYTHING is thought (or at least all that is known is thought) which would solve that problem, wouldn't it?

Right but I'm saying universals don't exist. We just have a THOUGHT of redness.

Why do we need to account for the concepts? Can't we dismiss them as false if we reject platonism? We can have false concepts right?

I don't think there is much of a problem with universals if we accept a version of 'conceptualism':

Conceptualism (also called psychologism and mentalism, depending on the sorts of objects under discussion): This is the view that there do exist numbers — or properties, or propositions, or whatever — but that they do not exist independently of us; instead, they are mental objects; in particular, the claim is usually that they are something like ideas in our heads. — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Platonism in Metaphysics)

If everything is a thought I'm not sure you run into the same problems. There is no platonic realm needed to explain where redness etc. is, it is just a mental realm.

Not relevant you think?

I don't see why it matters at all whether we say that "all humans have the following similarities" as opposed to our saying "all uses of the term 'human" have the following similarities." — Hanover

Ah this is a common misconception. There are n + s conditions for both, and they are different. We need to analyse both conditions of description as well as ontology to get the proper picture.

Say, as I will now claim, the necessary and sufficient conditions for being a screwdriver (i.e. ontology) are ‘created to drive screws’. If so, the screwdriver itself needs to fit entirely within the conditions ‘created to drive screws’. As a result screwdrivers must be created to drive screws only. A multifunction tool that is created to drive screws as well as say, cut rope, pick food from your teeth and file your nails would not fit in the conditions ‘created to drive screws’ and thus not fit the definition of ‘screwdriver’ even though such multifunction tools are created to drive screws! This counter-intuitive result is important so I will attempt to set it out below in a different iteration.

As mentioned there are different conditions between correctly describing things as x, as to whether something is x. Of course the two are related, we often describe things as x if they are x.
The necessary and sufficiently conditions of correctly describing x as:

1) “A screwdriver”

are if and only if:

1a) x is a screwdriver

however the conditions of being

1b) A screwdriver

as I claim, has one necessary and sufficient condition - if and only if:

1c) created to drive screws

That condition 1c) is obviously met if and only if x is created to drive screws. A multifunction tool then that is created to do things over and above drive screws (like our aforementioned example that is also created to pick from food from your teeth) and would thus not be a screwdriver.
But confusingly there are also conditions that need to be met in order to be described as:

2) “created to drive screws”

Note that 2) is different from the conditions that are 1c) created to drive screws. 2) and 1c) differ in that 2) is a description while 1c) are a set of conditions (for ontology).
To be 2) described as “created to drive screws” there is only one necessary and sufficient condition, if and only if:

2a) x is created to drive screws.

Notice however that 1c) uses the description 2)!

Multifunction tools, and screwdrivers, then that both meet 2a) and can be described as being 2) created to drive screws. Things that meet 2a) however do not necessarily meet 1c). Indeed our multifunction tools that meets 2a) by being created to drive screws because they are not created to drive screws exclusively, do not meet 1c (and therefore not 1b), 1a) or 1)) and cannot then be screwdrivers, nor can correctly be described as such.

Note there is no infinite regression here. 2a) uses 2) and 2) uses 2a), not a further description which would be a problem if that description needed a description that needed a description and so on.

Using this method of understanding necessary and sufficient conditions, let us re-examine one of the few uncontroversial essentialist definitions - the example of ‘bachelor’- and examine why it is so uncontroversial.
The conditions of being correctly described as

3) “a bachelor”

(as opposed to being a bachelor) are if and only if:

3a) x is a bachelor

the conditions of being a bachelor however are if and only if x is:

3b) an unmarried man

uncontroversially, the conditions of being correctly described as ‘unmarried’ are:

3c) unmarried

and the conditions of being correctly described as a man are:

3d) a man

The reason that the conditions for ontology (3b) are uncontroversial is because unlike ‘screwdriver’ not only is every unmarried man necessarily 3c) unmarried and 3d) a man, but that all things 3c) unmarried and 3d) a man can be correctly described as ‘unmarried’ and ‘a man’. This follows, as people are described as ‘unmarried’, for example, only need to be unmarried. Although this would theoretically include anyone over and above ‘married’, married people can’t be over and above married (as opposed to over and above ‘created to drive screws’). This is due to marriage being a binary - it being absurd to be married and unmarried, say, unlike the way that multifunction tools that can be created to drive screws and created to pick food from teeth. This binary effect, also present in the quantifier ‘a’, the sex ‘male’, and species ‘human’ result in it being, in some sense, an accident of circumstance that the conditions of ‘bachelor’ works both as a description and also ontology.

The distinction between description and ontology is vital to defining things but can be hard to accept at an intuitive level. Under the distinction that I’ve made here, a vegan diet can be defined as having necessary and sufficient conditions (i.e. of ontology) of:

4a) eating non-animal products

It would be a mistake though, to suggest that an omnivore - say chewing on a cheeseburger with a piece of lettuce in - is following a vegan diet just because she iseating non-animal products. Why is this? Intuitively it seems as though our cheeseburger fan is eating non-animal products and should therefore meets the diet of 4a). The answer though, is that a sentence that includes ‘eating non-animal products’ (as per the italicised portion of the first sentence in this paragraph) itself is a description, rather than what I am calling conditions of ontology. It is the fact that a vegan diet is exclusively eating non-animal product that makes it vegan, and it is exclusively the diet that is exclusively eating non-animal product that can correctly be described as vegan. We should be able to see here that the idea that ‘eating non-animal products’ has its own necessary and sufficient conditions is just another way of phrasing the fact of distinction between description and ontology. To ignore this distinction however would be a serious mistake when defining concepts and thinking about essentialism.

Excellent point, well written.

So a theory of evolutionary biology is actually pretty complete when it comes to astronomical bodies. I assume that a necessary condition for biological evolution would be that the entity is biological, that is part of the theory. Planets are not and the theory thus explains why they don't biologically evolve. A theory of meaning then needs to explain meaning fully, but it is no problem if some things don't HAVE meaning, just like it is no problem if some things don't evolve. But we need a rule for why.
A partial theory of why tigers evolve would also need to explain why the theory was specific to tigers or else it would be just rubbish.

It is about meaning isn't it?

Mmm, I don't think it is ABOUT astronomical bodies though.

All complete theories have partial theories embedded in them. It has to be that way if you think the phenomena are at all diverse. — The Great Whatever

I'm not sure this is true. To be honest I'm not sure we can even make sense of a 'partial theory'. Theories that don't explain things (and obviously 'partial' ones don't) are plainly dreadful theories. Can you give me an example of a successful partial theory?

Clearly they aren't going to be subject to the same sort of analysis. — The Great Whatever

Why not though? That's my point. A theory of gravity attempts to explain gravity for all things, for example. Partial theories are dubious theories if not outright bad ones.

But that's the goal, isn't? A full account of meaning. I can't conceive of how how a theory of meaning for truth-conditionals can fit into such an account either. Indeed I'm certain it can't.
A theory of meaning that seems applicable for all meaningful expressions is much more desirable, and I think accounts of small portions of meaningful expressions do a disservice, and further most likely wrong. We're looking for necessary connections between all meaning and expressions not just some.

Yeah you're right @mcdoodle the theory is VERY wanting. Minimal explanatory power. Does it have many adherents? Seems hugely problematic.

I recommend reading the SEP entry on Davidson in conjunction with this paper, otherwise it can be a bit tricky to understand what's going on.

Well. I struggled with this, just disagreeing with everything from go to whoa. I've got my own ideas on a theory of meaning (don't stress I'll try not to push that barrow too much here) and this was hard for me.

I disagreed/disliked:

- His characterisation of reference (for me reference is mental)
- What seemed a circular theory (Tarski says truth is what is meant by this, Davidson says meaning is what is true by that)
- His writing style, assuming specialised knowledge
- That for Davidson meaning appears not to be an entity (echoing Wittgenstein, Chomsky et al.) seemingly flying in the face of the way we speak
- Apparent lack of explanation for meaning of expressions such as 'hello!' or for fiction and lies.
- Apparent lack of explanation for a link between meaning and natural meaning i.e. a low pressure system in the east means three days rain at least.

Simply put this just didn't seem to have much explanatory power. Dislike. 1 star.

Perhaps you are technically correct. Is there another word for learning meanings in the way I suggest?

By listening to examples of things that speakers say we 'ought not' do (like stabbing people with knives) and inferring based on knowledge of speakers values, and facts about stabbing people, and the situation at hand, the sort of things the speaker would be saying.

How does one ostensively learn the meaning of "obligation"? — Michael

By listening to how people use the word obligation, determining the similarities in the things called obligations and using that rule when we ourselves use the world.

Ideational theories use an incoherent relationship between ideas and meaning. They make a distinction which is not there. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I don't think I am making a distinction in my theory though. Can you see that?

The distinctions used under ideational theories are more akin to distinction of states of the world related to thinking and communicating. I might, for example, have the thought I need to explain something (initial thought), think and work what meaning I need to say to communicate it to others (idea/meaning/mental grouping which, critically, does not convey my initial thought; I am not telling people I need to tell them something when I explain the issue), then move on to speaking the words which represent the idea/meaning/mental grouping I had. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Can you elaborate on this? What are you saying here? You seem to be agreeing with a version of an ideational theory, right? But then why doesn't the idea convey the original thought, as with my theory?

Yeah the guy on the floor is a great one.

We can absolutely theorise about a Mona Lisa of another kind. I think Goodman proposed this thought experiment (and Danto wrote about this too I think) but imagine a Mona Lisa that is a molecule for molecule copy (perhaps an advanced 3D print or some infinitely accurate forger). Is it art? Most would think not, it would be a copy.
Doesn't that tell us something deeply important about art? It suggests to me that art has something to do with intentions of the creator. Why? Well that is about the only variable we have changed.

OK, like I say, meaning is an idea. What is an idea though? Simply a mental grouping, a type of thought articulated by a rule/necessary and sufficient conditions.

So the speaker has a specific thought, then an idea/meaning/mental grouping is chosen which conveys that thought (i.e. the thought fits the conditions), then the associated word or expression for that meaning is uttered, then the hearer receives the meaning (i.e. the mental grouping), and you've just had successful communication.

For the life of me and I can't see the flaws of this, it is just a simple elegant theory.

So, if you have a thought that you want to greet someone you can choose the word 'hello' which has an appropriate meaning/grouping for that thought.

Isn't this a lot simpler than Propositional Theories of Meaning?

No worries, they're nice. How long have you been doing photography? How old are these ones?

Can you tell us more about these Baden? Is your creation the photographs or are these installations/other works?

I'm also unsure whether I want to, or should, overcome my prejudices. The world of philosophy is a big place and with some reliability can say the vast amount of writing I would dismiss as continental I would find less pleasurable, less easy to understand, and less relevant to my academic studies than the huge amount of stuff I want to read that I consider smack bang in my wheelhouse.