I think the significant philosophical question is, why the controversy? — Wayfarer

And your explanation is to look at what you take to be the motivations of the skeptics in your story.

Is that the discussion you want to have? Everyone chooses up sides and then questions the other side's motives while defending themselves as wholesome, open-minded truth-seekers? That's the philosophical approach, in your mind?

As for the postscript argument: "I've got a whole bunch of rocks here; surely a few of them contain mithril."

What other kinds of evidence could there be? — Wayfarer

Take a step back and consider what we're talking about here.

I don't keep up with this stuff, but Wikipedia seems to believe there is still no evidence for extra-sensory perception that is broadly accepted among scientists. So I haven't missed anything.

That's the state of research when you have a definitely living subject in the lab.

So now we're asked to accept that there have been thousands if not millions of cases of indisputable and objectively verified cases of extra-sensory perception, where the perceiver is dead. And on the basis of that evidence, we prove that the perceiver is non-physical.

If anything does, that qualifies as "huge, if true."

There are a great number of interesting issues raised by eyewitness testimony. We've talked about some of them in this thread on and off over the last eight years.

But let's put all that to the side. Why don't you tell me why it turned out to be so much easier to prove there is such a thing as extra-sensory perception when the subject of the perception is dead.

You're trying to make an apple pie with strawberries.

@Hanover gamely pointed out that people can't see without using their eyes, and all of the reports you rely on are of people seeing without their eyes and hearing without their ears. So are you using the words "see" and "hear" the way Hanover and I do, or in some other way?

I struggled with the Nancy Rynes video. Is she lying? Is she deluded? Is it all true? Listening to her story, these questions don't really find any purchase. I was reminded of how I feel when I listen to Christians talking about ― whatever they talk about, discerning the gifts of the Spirit and whatnot, or listening to MAGA people talk about the threat that monster Kilmar Abrego-Garcia poses to America or the theft of the 2020 presidential election. We are not in the realm of true-and-false here at all. I cannot enter sympathetically into this way of talking; I'm tempted to say it's like listening to people speaking a foreign language I don't understand, but they're using words I use, so it's more like listening to experts discuss something I don't have the background to understand. I recognize the words; I have no trouble putting the sentences together as they come; their apparent literal meaning is not difficult to work out, even if strange; but I have no feeling for the purpose of these sentences, why these were chosen and not others, why these words and not others, what a natural response to such a sentence would be. To my ear, it's just a sort of word music.

When outsiders like me listen to a MAGAist talk about January 6th, we tend to get stuck halfway between our world and his: the terms of the discussion, we think, come from our own world, the one governed by laws written in our world, with facts established in our way, and we hear the MAGA people take some of the words and ideas from our world and then use them wrong ― again, a little like someone learning a foreign language making mistakes, or a child. So we're inclined to correct them, point out their mistakes, explain the finer points of things like laws and facts, because it sounds to us like they are trying to speak our language and getting it wrong, or even like they are deliberately misusing our language and we ought to stop them. But generally this is all pointless because all of the words and ideas that seem derived from our words and ideas ― maybe they are, maybe they aren't, but they aren't ours anymore at all and there's no way to take them back. They have very different meanings now, among the MAGA, and if you think they're the same as your words and ideas, very little of what they say makes sense ― in the sense that they say things that, if we said them, would be obviously false or inconsistent or reprehensible, but in their world they seem to count as true and just and good.

Wittgenstein seems to offer us two options here: we can say that this is what language-games look like, and this sort of self-referential, untethered-to-reality effect we perceive in the way these other groups talk and think and behave, that's the way everyone is in their own speech community, and we're no different; or we can say that these are genuinely and definably deviant uses of language, language gone "on holiday," the engine no longer hooked up to anything and just spinning idly, that sort of thing.

The complete failure of your project in this thread, @Sam26, is in trying to force together the sort of talk people share at new age gatherings and other sorts of talk that, whatever they are, aren't that.

You're sympathetic to the sorts of things Nancy Rynes says. Many people are. I glanced at the comments on the video at YouTube, and people do find this sort of thing very meaningful. (Interestingly, a number of comments I saw were not related to NDEs as such but simply to the afterlife; people take Nancy to be describing what their departed loved ones are experiencing, for instance.) I can imagine being sympathetic, and I can even manage it for a few seconds at a time if I try, but I can't sustain it.

I don't think you've ever confronted just how different a story like hers is from what you want to present it to us as. She's walking along through her afterlife construct with her teacher, while laying on an operating table, and ― I forget how she puts this exactly ― she glances over her shoulder or turns around and notices that behind her is just a grey void, not the mountain meadows and forests she had just walked through, and this is when her teacher tells her it's not real. Now think about that. How did she notice the grey void? By looking behind her?

What does that even mean in this context? ― The metaphor she's using here is what we're familiar with from video games. When playing a screen based video game, there are two ways to turn around and look: you can physically turn around, away from the screen, and now you see your room and your stuff; you can turn around in game, and the engine will render new scenery for you in real time. If you're playing a VR game, that distinction is gone and physically turning is turning in game. There are cases when you can glitch into the landscape and get to see some void on your screen, but it's not by design.

The question here is, in what sense did Nancy look behind her? And why was this amazing construct she described so poorly coded that it didn't render when she turned too far?

The point of these questions is to be wrong. They don't matter. Looking behind her is a narrative device, to set up her teacher's explanation. She's telling a story, but it's not the same sort of thing as the story she tells about her accident, which could, up to a point, be verifiably true or false, and make normal sense or not. When she says part of her consciousness split off and was 50 to 75 feet away, it is not the case that we could establish exactly how far away it was, that it could turn out to be exactly 78 feet away and her estimate from memory wrong. ― Where each vehicle was and what happened could be established to a reasonable degree with enough witnesses, cameras, physical traces, all that. That's just not true of almost everything else she says.

Parts of her story could be shown to be true or false in the everyday sense. Parts of her story aren't like that at all, but you keep presenting them as if they are. The task of treating the one like the other is so obviously impossible that you have to cherry pick relentlessly, and just pass right over the 99% of these stories that is clearly not even a candidate for verification in any normal sense. Did Nancy speak with a single teacher or was it three that walked and spoke in unison? What color were the little energy sparkles that came out of the flowers when she touched them? Could she have misremembered? She says the sky was a sort of metallic blue; is that right? Did it have ultraviolet streaks in it? Has she gotten her teacher's exact words right? What if she got a crucial word wrong? Couldn't she have misunderstood the message she was to bring back to the world?

This whole project of treating these stories as testimonial evidence is doomed from the start. The people who find these stories meaningful don't need it. For the rest of us, it's a non-starter.

For me, these stories are a kind of oral wisdom tradition. Nancy's story is symbolically meaningful but not literally. I don't know if the same thing is true of how I usually talk and think, but I hope not. I don't know whether Wittgenstein entitles me to ignore Nancy as speaking "on holiday" or if I should recognize that I'm no different. William James was open to spiritual and religious experience in a way that his science-minded audience finds hard to accept, but for him it was perfectly consistent with his pragmatism. (Relevant here because of Ramsey's influence on Wittgenstein.) Maybe if this is the result, pragmatism and the later Wittgenstein are a disastrous wrong turn after all.

I can't answer any of those questions, but in trying to present these stories as testimonial evidence of anything, I think you're just barking up the wrong tree.

My core set is firsthand reports documented close to the event, anchored to the medical record, and checkable against named staff and physical particulars. — Sam26

Except the video you posted of Nancy Rynes a couple days ago, saying

The following NDE typifies what I've been saying in this thread. — Sam26

fits none of those criteria.

I watched it ― at the maximum allowable speed, but I watched the whole thing. It's a story that by then she had been telling for 8 years, and the bulk of it is about what she claims to remember having experienced during surgery. Not only is there nothing objectively verifiable in her story, if what she says is accurate it is inherently unverifiable and incomparable because she was told that everything she saw was a "construct" just for her. (A couple hundred years ago she wouldn't have had the word "construct" or "simulation" to use, and would have said "dream".)

So how does Nancy Rynes bolster your case? Why did you post her story?

it is the reduction of complexity that allows systems to complexify (and adapt), and in fact reach higher orders of self-referential complexity (self-managing of complexity). The more efficiently they simplify, the more efficiently they can complexify in a sense. — Baden

I'm so glad you came back to this, because that's an excellent point. (And, for what it's worth, close to my own thinking about the utility of simplifications like logic, mathematics, language, music theory, maps, all that jazz.)

they are operationally closed (operate only according to their own internal rules or code), but they are cognitively open in that they are affected by their environment and interact with it. — Baden

Right. One thing I didn't like about my earlier post was it ends up sounding too much like we're only talking about modeling, but we want to be able talk not just about "this is how I symbolically represent and predict the outcomes of horse races" but also "this is how I cut planks to the lengths I need," where this later phrase refers not to a verbal description of me doing it, but to me doing it. The system in operation, interacting with the environment, rubber meeting the road in a more than cognitive sense.

What's tricky is to find the natural correlate of simplification by abstraction in non-cognitive (or, at least, not only cognitive) interaction. There is an obvious path in modifying the environment to simplify it (planks as simplifications of trees, extracted from them, with the rest of the tree physically abstracted away), but otherwise I'm not sure, so maybe this is just a hard difference between mental and physical interaction, that there is this freedom in cognitive behavior that you can't quite manage when dealing with the world in the raw, however it comes. Not sure.

I always think of wisdom as keeping things in proportion, weighting all the relevant considerations correctly. That means reacting appropriately to what's in front of you, taking it as neither a bigger nor a smaller deal than it is, but also holding constant the issues that aren't in front you. So it's the wise person who remembers what the whole point of doing something is, instead of focusing only on the procedure; it's the wise person who points out the desirable and undesirable consequences of some undertaking, because they don't forget the broader context in which it will occur; it's the wise person who balances what they know and what they don't know, their relative confidence in an outcome and the potential consequences (which might be big or small) of it not going according to expectations.

I don't know if a complete picture is coming through there, but it's for reasons along these lines that I think wisdom tends to come with age. Having seen a number of successes and a number of failures, you can have some sense of the shapes they take, and you've had the experience of not foreseeing how either would play out. I think when you're younger it's natural to get caught up in the immediacy of the problem to be solved, but after you've been through that a number of times, you're maybe a little less impressed by that feat alone and tend to take the wider view. ("Yes, we can do this, but do we need to?" or "Yes, we can do this, but should we?" and so on.) And if everything depends on solving this problem, or completing this task, the wise person remembers that and keeps the focus where it needs to be.

So, for me, it's keeping things in perspective, in the proper proportion, and that often means not being misled by something looming large because it's immediately in front of you, but remembering that it's still small compared to other things that aren't currently taking up so much of your field of vision.

(I think Thoreau was my first philosopher, and I've been reading Walden again for the first time since I was a teenager. He's always talking like this. You've got a fine house and you've completely forgotten what the point of a house is. You're working night and day to meet your material needs and completely neglecting your soul. It's always like this with Thoreau: you've allowed yourself to be caught up in something and in the process you've forgotten what's really important.)

Burns's Theorem.

But if you zoom out and take a community as your system, instead of an individual, you would hope to see an increase in adaptability (and capacity for self-correction).

Except when you don't (because communities can be rigid and self-reinforcing too). So you need to zoom out more.

But at some point the zooming out needed exceeds the human perspective. The trick might be to avoid getting into situations like that. (Don't write a program so clever you can't debug it.)

a misunderstanding that arises if you view Nature as a piece of reductionist machinery — apokrisis

Which would itself be an example of rigidity, right? This style of thinking, I mean, not just the mechanical approach itself, but *sticking to it* when you ought not.

This is the sort of thing that starts to look irrational over the sort of time scales we deal with. "Drill, baby drill!" Sure, our global civilization will adapt eventually, but there's a lot of friction thrown up against adapting, which I would be inclined to describe as rigidity.

Rigidity is one of the hallmarks of neurosis, or what @180 Proof always calls "maladaptive" behavior. (Freud insisted that neurotic behavior has a purpose, it meets a need, just badly.) @Tom Storm, I would guess you have considerable experience with that sort of rigidity.

There's a kind of semantic bootstrapping here. — Baden

This is all very interesting, thanks.

There's an issue I don't think has been raised yet: "system" often carries a connotation of rigidity, though we can certainly point to systems that are flexible and adaptive. My point is, it's always a question with systems.

In your semantic terms, I was thinking about the use of the phrase "the System" (capital S) in the 60s and 70s counterculture. The imputation was of a particular kind of rigidity, a rigidity that extended to this semantic level. Thus the System was thought to see everything in terms of wealth and power and status, and to be blind to, say, art and feeling, on the one hand, or injustice and suffering, on the other. There were categories of no use to the System, and so it did not recognize them at all. You get the idea.

(( The classic Monty Python version of this is the banker who struggles to make sense of the concept of charity. ))

You'd find another popular usage in gambling: some guys go to the track and pick horses for dumb reasons, or whimsical reasons, or based on their "feeling" the horse will win; other guys are said to "have a system." The system guy may generally do better, but in trying to treat the problem of prediction rigidly, he will never get a big payout on a long shot.

And of course this is the thing about systems in interaction with their environments: they attempt to achieve predictability (and thus a kind of rigidity) not just by refusing to see what doesn't fit (as the counterculture would have it) but by making their environment more predictable, by eliminating what doesn't fit. Adaptation is required for the system to persist, but it can adapt itself to its environment or its environment to itself.

I guess I could also say, people do seem to nurse worries that the sort of rigidity some systems are prone to is perhaps even irrational, in addition to whatever other fault one might find.

I interpreted your quote as saying people who struggle with memory and communication issues are not desired members of the forum. Desired members have excellent communication skills and know enough about the subject to explain it to a child. I can't even explain things to adults. I seriously doubt I meet the high standards you all want to keep. — Athena

Here's an analogous case for you.

This is an English-language forum (almost but not quite entirely), but more than a few members are not native speakers of English. That means sometimes their grammar is a little off, or their diction is a bit surprising, and so on.

No one would ever suggest that if you are not a native speaker of English then you are not welcome here, and in fact most people are willing to overlook minor deviations from standard English, so long as the post is still intelligible. (Most people would be shocked to read a verbatim transcript of everyday speech. We're very good at ignoring deviation, and need only bring that skill to bear.)

More than that, I think most members here are keen to look past the surface of someone's writing and find the ideas being expressed, so if that surface is a bit rough, it's not really a big deal. The forum has rules about presentation that are intended (a) to keep us from looking like some lame social media site where ppl dont bother to spel n punctuate n stuff, and (b) so that posters make an effort not to place unnecessary interpretive burdens on their audience.

In short, mostly people here care what you think and cheerfully make allowances for less than sterling expression of those thoughts. Anyway, that's what I choose to believe this evening.

Which brings me to the main point about AI (or Wikipedia or SEP or IEP or what have you). The only important thing in anyone's post is their ideas, and that means their ideas. If all I post is information I get from elsewhere on the internet, I'm just a go-between; anyone could look up the same stuff I look up. so there's nothing about my post that's uniquely and irreplaceably me.

What people want from you here is what you think. If it's expressed at too great a length, with unnecessary detail, and much of that in parenthetical asides, as here, most readers are pretty forgiving, if annoyed. And if you use some bit of software to improve the presentation of your ideas a little, that's within bounds, so far as I can tell, because the important thing is that it is your ideas getting expressed.

I see.

@J

One other thing we might say is that the reason you know some of your work needn't concern itself with the effects of what you're observing and theorizing about, is if your theorizing is overwhelmingly dependent on something that is not part of the observed.

That's gonna end up a bit Kantian, but the point right here would be to claim that there is no mathematics involved in the bodies falling from the tower. They do not consult my equations to see how fast they need to accelerate. The mathematics is something I add to the total situation (object of study, my observation and theorizing, etc.) so I needn't worry about it being compromised in any way.

And so with philosophy, one might argue that reason ― or simply logic, whatever ― is something not found in what philosophy studies, but added by the philosopher. That looks a bit dodgy because often people want to say that reason is part of human nature, but I think anyone really committed to such a view could argue, with a clear conscience, that the reason found in the wild is quite imperfect, unlike the reason I am employing, blah blah blah.

Or you could claim some sort of structural insulation ― that in reasoning about a bit of reasoning, I am perforce reasoning on a different level or at least concerning a different object from whatever you were reasoning about. (This looks like it will be headed for problems about reflexivity reminiscent of issues in set theory, but who knows. I sometimes think that natural language is not as a matter of fact its own meta-language, but it supports the generation of temporary meta-languages on the fly, as needed. Maybe.)

Anyway, someone might be inclined to describe philosophy as special in a way similar to this, with the added benefit of a comparison to mathematics, which is the paradigmatic armchair science, for everyone from Plato to Williamson.

⊢⊢the cat is on the mat

is different to

⊢the cat is on the mat — Banno

Hmmm. My first thought was to wonder whether this is true, but on second thought the weirdness of this is that the LHS of the turnstile is empty. From what set of premises can you derive "the cat is on the mat"? My grasp of this is weak, but is the following sensical?

Γ ⊢ (Γ ⊢ "the cat is on the mat")

Is it conceivably false if sensical?

I think that when you have

A ⊢ (B → C)

then you can say

A ∪ {B} → C

And if that sort of thing holds for the turnstile, then you'd have Γ ∪ Γ on the LHS, which is just Γ, so they'd be the same.

I guess I could just look it up...

It would have to admit that "observing" and "theorizing" are subject to laws that are ultimately physical, just like anything else. So we're left with the familiar problem of how to give reason the last word — J

I think mostly science can and must say that their own practice is subject to natural law, but what you can deny is that it is theoretically relevant. (Except when it is.)

Now maybe totalizing critique is lurking here, as you suggest. Maybe we can sidestep that with a distinction like Ryle makes between being governed by laws and determined by them -- the rules of chess don't determine how a chess game goes, but they still constrain how it might. That's kind of a cultural argument. (Roughly it's "determinism was never a real threat, but a misunderstanding.")

What I want to say is something like this: we know perception is physical, in the sense that there is at least a transfer of energy and this facilitates a transfer of information, etc. But there is still a recognizable difference between physical interaction between an organism and an object that we would call "perceiving" and an interaction we would call "eating" or "breaking" or something else. And so with thinking. There may be a longish causal chain between the object of my thought (or its elements) and my thought of that object, and that chain is governed by physical law, as is the functioning of my brain, but my thought, like my perception, need have no physical impact on its object.

Science relies on this distinction, which it finds in nature, and then deliberately submits itself to being acted upon, either through the act of dropping weights from a tower, or by watching those weights fall. The scientist is not acted upon by the weights as they fall, and is acted upon by gravity but not in a way that matters. If he looks, then he is acted upon by the weights, but only as perception. If he then theorizes about gravity, there's no longer even that, even though he continues to be subject to gravity and would generally prefer being able to see the paper and ink he writes with.

None of this is news, but what interested me is that science doesn't really begin by saying subject over here, object over there; it begins by deliberately submitting to being acted upon, in a controlled way, and separating its work into being-acted-upon and not-being-acted-upon. That separation is just making more salient and more definite distinctions found in nature, although I think that to clearly define it you have to have theory as an element (to be able to identify when something is relevant).

I never actually provided an argument that this separation is the source of science's rigor. Maybe it's not, or maybe it's important because it enables something else that is.

I'm still not happy with any thoughts about philosophy on this score, so this whole post is just repetition. I could add that I am almost totally unconcerned about science undermining itself through totalizing, and I think the reason is somewhere in here, but untheorized.

while "knowledge" might mean different things to different philosophers, I'm not sure there's a philosophy which aims at understanding as opposed to knowledge. — Moliere

To make this more than a slogan, you'd need some sort of theory (hermeneutics would be an example), and I think what that theory would try to account for is, first of all, the "as opposed to science" part.

Williamson begins by claiming (uncontroversially) a shared lineage for science and philosophy, and he mentions the relation of science to philosophy at several points. (The other disciplines that can discipline philosophy; whether a theory can be used in empirical linguistics; etc.)

And this is as it should be, because Williamson wants to talk about rigor, and throughout the 20th century, at least, that discussion took this form: (1) Can philosophy be a science? (2) Should philosophy be a science?

(Williamson doesn't quite approach the issue this way, so his answer seems to be that philosophy can and should be science-ish.)

So we need to talk about science, and what the comparison to science might reveal about philosophy.

Here's where I thought to start, with the self-image of a toy version of science: in order to study and theorize the laws of nature, science breaks itself into one part that is by design subject to those laws, and another that is not. (There's a problem with this we'll get to, but it's not where you start.)

What I mean by that is simply that the data a scientist wants is generated by the operation of the laws of nature in action. You can observe events where those laws are operative; you can also conduct experiments to try to isolate specific effects, which you then observe. But the whole point of an experiment is to submit some apparatus or material to the forces of nature so that you can see what happens. This part of the work of science deliberately submits itself to nature at work.

But the two further steps, observing and theorizing, are intended to be separate, and not subject to the forces and constraints and whatnot under investigation. The weights fall from the tower and I observe the action of gravity upon them, but my watching them does not require that I too fall from the tower. I need not submit my process of observation to gravity to observe the effect of gravity on bodies.

Then I collect my observations and I work out a mathematical description. My mathematics describes the action of gravity, but is not subject to it, and need not be to describe it. My mathematics is not a theory of gravity, but provides constraints on the theories I produce. (By showing what it does to what, and how much it does it, and what it doesn't do because it's not part of that equation, and so on.) My theories of gravity are also not subjected to the work of gravity as the bodies I observed were.

Before getting to philosophy, I'll note that this self-division of science worked right up until it didn't, but also that when it stopped working, it didn't entirely stop working. It seems when you observe nature at very small scales the process of observation itself has effects on the observed big enough that they must be taken into account. We might wonder whether something similar happens in philosophy, but for now I'll just observe that we know more or less exactly why this happens at quantum scale, and could have predicted it would. (But we don't end up with the equations I write on a whiteboard changing the outcome of an experiment, for instance.)

The practice of science doesn't make a universal claim about not being subject to the laws it studies. The paper upon which my equations describing gravity are written is itself subject to the force of gravity, but not in a theoretically important way. The self-division of science is not absolute. (It is even plausible to claim that the division itself is not a posit of theory, but is itself found in nature -- right up until you hit the exception at quantum scale.)

Now what about philosophy?

Can it achieve this sort of self-division? Must it do so to achieve the same rigor as science? (Or can it be just as rigorous without doing so?)

--- I spent a few pages trying to answer these questions, but it was a mess, so here's just a couple obvious points:

1. If you think philosophy (or logic) studies the laws of thought or of reason, you're unlikely to think any of your work needs to separate itself from those laws

2. If you think philosophy studies norms of thought and behavior, neither making your work subject to the specific norms you're studying nor making it subject to different norms seems obviously satisfactory. Both present problems.

I think Williamson wishes to describe something like an experimental approach to philosophy, and that's what his whole competition between theories business is meant to be. Is it really similar to how science does this? If it's not, does it still make sense?

The advantage of the question What is bread made of?" is that there is a pathway to answering the question, that we might well answer the question. You have the answer when you can make bread.

Seems pretty direct. — Banno

So the moral of the story is: don't ask questions you don't already know how to answer, or don't just already have the answer to.

Exciting stuff.

My point right here will be that, once again, clarity is a means, not the goal. — Srap Tasmaner

For you, sure. But why shouldn't clarity also be a goal, if not for you, then perhaps for others? And so an aesthetic. — Banno

I mean, sure, it's an aesthetic value, of course.

And of course it can be a goal, alongside others, or sometimes the goal, in specific cases ― we're not making progress, so let's rethink this.

But see there again, I'm going to tend to think you need to clarify a problem to stand a better chance of solving it. And I think this is certainly Williamson's view.

This is where my view is at odds with that of Williamson. I am on the side of the doubters at the philosophy conference in Presocratic Greece, rejecting the discourse of Thales and Anaximander in favour of dissecting the bread. — Banno

Yeah, this is a funny thing, because the question "What is bread made of?" isn't obviously clearer than the question "What is everything made of?" They're both pretty simple questions, in form anyway, and pretty easy to understand.

What's quite different is how you'd go about answering them. For one thing, bread is artificial, so we already know what it's made of because we make it.

What isn't clear is (a) how you'd go about figuring out what everything is made of, and (b) that everything is made of the same "ingredients". The question might not have the same kind of answer that the bread question does, and it's very hard to see how you could figure out it has that type of answer.

What Williamson says, is that it's not clear what the various proposed answers even mean. Another way to put that might be to say that it's not clear in what sense they are answers to the question.

So there's all sorts of clarity we might want. First, we'll want to be able to tell when we have an answer, and it should be clear. Second, we want to know how to proceed toward finding an answer. For some sorts of problems, this is clear ― maybe you just need to do a calculation. But for a whole lot of questions, and I think the ones Williamson is valorizing here, we absolutely are not clear how to proceed, what procedure will, if carried out, produce an answer.

And here, not only must we begin without clarity, but we cannot really expect to have clarity about the effectiveness of our procedure until we see some positive or negative results. Even then, the results may not be enough to tell us whether we're on the right or the wrong track. Clarity will come only at the end, when you reach your destination or a dead end.

So what's the advantage with bread? That we already know? What about the ingredients of your bread? What's water made of? Or wheat? Is it clear how you'd answer those questions? Were the Greeks capable of answering them?


Bonus anecdote on one sort of clarity.

My father drew building plans for a living, for much of his career. I loved his drawings. They showed his experience, the way he would work in notes on exactly the tricky things the men at the job site might struggle with. (And I loved watching him work. He'd step back from the drafting table, still looking at the drawing in progress, pull a cigarette from his breast pocket without looking, light it, take just a few puffs while he was thinking, then rest it in an ashtray and back to it. I looked in his office once and there were three cigarettes still burning in three different ashtrays, and he was hard at work on the drawing.)

The thing that made his drawings beautiful to me was that he knew what would make them most useful, and you could see that he knew, and he made sure it was there, right where it needed to be.

There's also the Sellars line from PSIM:

The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term

where the verb is "understand" not "know".

There is a more definite take on all this available, but I can't name anyone who holds this position. (@J, @Moliere, @Count Timothy von Icarus, @Leontiskos, anyone come to mind?)

The claim would be that philosophy does not aim at knowledge, as science does, but at understanding. I don't know whether you would say this, @Banno, but some might describe Wittgenstein's famous "quietism" this way, and I suppose that's plausible.

I think it's clear this is not Williamson's view at all.

None of this business about absolute or relative clarity was at issue. — Srap Tasmaner

Odd. Seems to me the very point of contention. — Banno

I have no idea why you think that. @Moliere and I were talking about the norms of analytic philosophy, and I don't think either one of us ever mentioned it.

Given two proofs, the clearer is preferred. On that we agree? — Banno

I don't know where you're headed with any of this.

I don't think there's a standard measure of how clear a proof is.

If there were ― contrary to fact ― what would come next? That a clearer proof is more mathematical? Maybe "better mathematics" where "better" means more aesthetically pleasing, but that's not a measure of truth in mathematics, or a criterion of knowledge. It wouldn't make one proof truer than another.

A good proof aids in concept formation, as I've said more than once. An interesting proof might show connections between theorems, or even between branches of mathematics, that you didn't expect. Might be more worth knowing such a proof because it's an aid to your work, to understand that.

All of this is lovely.

But none of it amounts to the goal of mathematics being clarity of anything. I don't even understand what that would mean.

***

The trouble is, "What are all things made of?" is not as clear as "What is bread made of?". I'd suggest that progress came from iterating clear questions: "What is φ made of?" - "what is bread made of?"; "What is water made of?"; "what is Hydrogen made of?"; What are protons made of?" And that this has proved more agreeable than just-so-stories about water and fire. — Banno

I think Williamson is drawn to the ambition of the bigger question. It provides motivation for the smaller questions. (Much as he suggests a theory should be able to handle toy examples.) We can talk more about that.

My point right here will be that, once again, clarity is a means, not the goal. "What is everything made of?" unanswerable because it's not clear how to proceed? Fine, we'll do it by cases, and keep breaking bigger questions into smaller ones until we have one we can finally answer. (This used to be called "analysis".)

But the point is answering the questions. Gaining knowledge. Putting all the knowledge you acquire together into a theory.

As you say, clear enough to get on with it is clear enough. And what we want to get on with is acquiring knowledge, not making things clear. Means, not end.

A mathematical proof is never completely clear - there is always more to be said, more for the mathematician to clarify. — Banno

None of this business about absolute or relative clarity was at issue.

Here we are again, where the question is: Is making things clear, to whatever degree, the goal of mathematics? Your description here of what's always left for mathematicians to work on ― it sounds like that's what you want to say.

Now, I'm always talking about good proofs and bad proofs, but that's all about communication and especially pedagogy. The real work of mathematics is producing the proof in the first place, because that's how you produce mathematical knowledge.

There is still work being done on ZFC. But there is enough clarity for mathematicians to get on with other questions in the mean time. — Banno

Great. They have enough clarity to get on with what exactly? Making other parts of mathematics clear? And in the meantime of what? Of making set theory even clearer?

Seems to me that we can posit clarity as an aesthetic value. As something that we might preference not becasue of what it leads to, but for it's own sake.

Seems Moliere agrees, but perhaps you do not. — Banno

I think by and large I don't see clarity itself as a goal, as I believe you do.

I don't know whether Williamson is closer to my view or yours.

If you think about mathematics, there can be a sense in which a mathematical theorem or a construction or whatever can be clear, because nothing is hidden, the rules are known, everything can be made explicit on demand, and yet be complex enough or counter-intuitive enough that it remains difficult to understand, despite having industry-standard clarity.

The other natural point to make here is that what is clear to one mathematician may not be clear to another, so it's a little uncomfortable making the "psychological" clarity of the producer or consumer of the work a measure of anything.

Thinking about how various "analytic philosophy" is, I should also say that my last few posts might be very wrong-headed. Maybe it is a loose set of norms that binds it altogether. Maybe it's a "family resemblance" situation.

Sometimes I've been inclined to think that, and put a lot of emphasis on those norms (as @Banno does with "clarity"). But not at the moment.

Somehow that collective norm doesn't cease to be a value just because we call it "function" to my mind — Moliere

I get that, and maybe there's no harm in noting that there are these norms, and maybe they're in a special subcategory but maybe not, and you get the advantage of applying what you know about norms to them. Sure.

On the other hand -- and I'd have to take a few minutes to work out an example -- I worry slightly that you could choose to define analytic philosophy in terms of this set of norms it enforces, instead of the thing that required them. That could have odd results like classifying something as analytic philosophy because it follows all those norms, even though it's something quite different.

It's not that these boundaries are all that important, but if what we're doing at the moment is trying to understand what Williamson is up to, we want to know what analytic philosophy is, rather than what it looks like.

For the record

"Your analysis is correct (or incorrect) because you share (or don't share) my values." That's a hellscape analytic philosophers want no part of — Srap Tasmaner

Though I also don't think it's as much of a hellscape as perhaps the analytic philosophers imagine. — Moliere

I'm enough of an analytic that I do.

That's perfectly acceptable when it's not the values which are the reason people are miscommunicating, though. — Moliere

Yes and no. An analytic philosopher can talk *about* values, the roles they play in discourse, all that sort of thing, but by and large is determined not to offer a "wisdom literature." So it might be able to "clarify" (hey @Banno) that it's the values at stake in a dispute, rather than something else, but it's not, as a rule, espousing a set of values.

But then it seems we have to agree, ahead of time, to this analytic norm in order for it to function — Moliere

Yes. And that might be down to your values. You might hope (as Tarski did, on the eve of World War II) that promoting logic and clarity would help people talk out their differences rather than kill each other. But the norm itself is just fit to purpose, like showing your work, making your arguments. It's what the community needs to do what they've set out to do, even if that thing turns out to be a huge mistake.

this utility is what I'd say are the sorts of we'll call them interests that the engineer and builder have to keep in mind. It can be judged to succeed or fail insofar that we have some standards of utility to judge it as successful or a failure. — Moliere

I think there's room to distinguish function from utility (or interest or value or aesthetic or ...).

A bridge (I'm just going to make this up) is a structure that enables conveyance of people or goods or vehicles across an obstacle under their own power, whether that's something you value or not. A structure can fail to enable such conveyance, whether you want it to or not, and so is not (or is no longer) a bridge.

I think it's a distinction worth calling attention to because this is exactly what people hate about analytic philosophy, and why they'd rather read Nietzsche or the Stoics or Camus.

Analytic philosophy keeps values in quarantine. When we talk about "epistemic values," or some such, that's understood to be heuristic, just shorthand for "fit to purpose," more or less. We're still not taking about "why we value knowledge" or anything like that.

And this is seen as a good thing to do by the analytic community because you ward off this sort of thing: "Your analysis is correct (or incorrect) because you share (or don't share) my values." That's a hellscape analytic philosophers want no part of, but it is embraced elsewhere, with suitable obfuscations.

That's why there is a sort of "shut up and calculate" attitude in analytic philosophy, and why Williamson is demanding that people work harder. It's why his model for a successful theoretical discipline is mathematics, which he imagines sitting in the armchair next to philosophy's.

(I can put it even more colorfully. The analytic attitude is this: Philosophy doesn't need a hero; it needs a professional.)

I'll try too:

We decide to build a bridge because we believe it would make our lives better, and the sense of "better" there is colorably an aesthetic judgement. Life with the bridge would be preferable, simply in terms of what we want our lives to be like.

That's persuasive, but we still have the problem that the bridge's capacity to improve our lives is instrumental; it has to succeed as a bridge, and can be judged to succeed or fail as a bridge, without any consideration of our motive for building it, and without considering whether we were right that the bridge would improve our lives in the way we wanted.

(Oh! Spectacular movie reference for this: Stanley Tucci's speech about his bridge in Margin Call, 2011.)

You can always take a step up like this, and examine anything by placing it in a wider context, but while you will gain new terms for evaluating the thing, you'll lose the ones you had before.

Since it's not true, and it's not good -- well, maybe it's not beautiful in the old sense of the aesthetic, but there is this broader sense of "beautiful" which is that which is judged worthy, but not on moral grounds.

Basically the judgment of values which are not-moral falls into the aesthetic. Sometimes we like to say these are "epistemic values", or some such, but even there there are are choices between which epistemic values one makes appeals to. — Moliere

Here for instance you didn't have to take the word "good" to have an exclusively moral sense, and I feel quite certain than @Count Timothy von Icarus would not. I think your use of "aesthetic" (or maybe "beautiful" in the mooted non-traditional sense) has noticeable overlap with his use of "good".

I think Williamson is only demanding that philosophical theories succeed as theories, to some recognizable degree. Whether they make our lives better or worse or give us a warm fuzzy, he's presumably going to consider a separate question.

the desire for results, success, knew knowledge -- how is that not aesthetic? — Moliere

Because it isn't?

I'm genuinely puzzled why you'd stretch the word "aesthetics" to cover, well, everything. Now if you wanted to talk about value or utility or something, you'd have an argument. But an engineer who designs a beautiful bridge has to make sure, first and separately, that what he designs will function as a bridge and it'll probably have to meet a host of other requirements before considerations of beauty come into it.

I do think philosophy can to some extent provide a service to other disciplines, fixing the leaks and bad smells. — Banno

I don't think any other discipline has asked for philosophy's help or wants it.

That's not to say that some kind of interdisciplinary business isn't possible and sometimes interesting, but no astronomer (or even social psychologist) has ever said, "Whoa, have you seen the new data? We're gonna need a philosopher."

Doing philosophy involves going back and looking again at what we have said — Banno

This is the same issue that bedeviled the other thread, that you need something to dissect. There are a lot of candidates for that; is one of them the kind of theory that Williamson thinks it is the business of philosophy to produce?

"Why not?" you'll say. "Have scalpel; will travel."

But there's a genuine question of intention here: Williamson would absolutely agree to carefully examining theories, with the goal of improving them or producing better ones, not with the expectation they'll all be left dead on the dissecting table.

Ok, lets' settle on clear knowledge... — Banno

Why do I feel like I just walked into the Meno?

Do you think that "learning" in philosophy amounts to becoming clear about what you already know? Or can philosophy provide us with knowledge we did not have before?

Do you have any impression what's happened since 2004? — Ludwig V

I really don't. That's right in SEP's wheelhouse though. I think of it primarily as a "review of recent literature" for grad students.

Wonder if anyone's ever thought of that before! — J

The emoji indicates that you know the answer is "everyone", right?

In the context of the paper, where the principal example is semantics, we could note that Williamson is going to insist that people actually try doing this analysis formally, and he has very little patience for claiming, before the work begins, that it's unnecessary or impossible.

You and I seem to agree with large portions of Williamson. — Leontiskos

I would at least say, perhaps incorrectly, that I think I get where he's coming from, and I do have considerable sympathy with the view expressed, but I also have reservations.

There honestly isn't much point in "taking his side" here or not because the paper itself, as he acknowledges, is pretty handwavy. As philosophy, it's pretty weak tea, but it might be strong medicine for philosophers.

neither side — Ludwig V

Yeah that's fair. My memory of the paper is probably colored a bit by knowing which side Williamson is on.

Here's a quick example (from Wittgenstein) of everything, I hope.

Is the standard meter rod (or whatever it's called) itself 1 meter long?

The question assumes a bivalence that turns out to be troublesome. "Obviously" and "obviously not" both spring to mind and are both defensible.

Some will be inclined to shrug off the question and say it is "by convention". But Quine argued (repeatedly and at length) that "true by convention" is actually incoherent.

So then David Lewis comes along and writes a book (cleverly titled "Convention") that gives a rigorous definition of convention in terms of game theory (complete with lemmas and theorems), and applying it to semantics, and Quine writes a preface saying Lewis has done more than any other philosopher to mount a defense of "truth by convention".

I think Williamson here says, this is how it's done. You put in the work, develop the theory as far as you can, and you'll at least have some evidence for or against, insofar as some obstacles are overcome or roadblocks to progress appear.

lowest common denominator — Leontiskos

Sometimes a grandmaster discussing a game will say something like this: "I looked at sacrificing the pawn, but I didn't see anything concrete." "Concrete" here is a magic word; it means actual variations leading to a specific advantage, not just "I'll have more piece activity," or something vague like that.

A lot of discussion of chess in the pre-engine era turns out to have been mere handwaving if not outright bullshit. Once you have a machine that cares a lot more about the concrete than vague evaluations, chess starts to look different.

I think Williamson's minimum requirement is theories that produce something concrete. Rather than "I think white stands better" versus "I think black", show me some actual variations.

That sounds fine to me, though I don't see "undemonstrated" or "unjustified" as a truth value. — Leontiskos

Intuitionistic logic is a whole thing, which we probably don't want to get into here, and to which I would not count as a reliable guide. It's part of the gossipy backstory of this paper, is all.

this comes too close for my liking to "flaw-based" resolution of a difficult issue — J

One way to read the paper is that Williamson proposes an alternative to "my theory versus your theory", namely results, success, new knowledge. Proof is in the pudding.

(For instance, skeptics of intuitionistic logic have to admit it has proved very useful for proof theory, and thus for creating automated proof checkers. That's a success.)

Then he has to come up with a plausible story about a kind of result all parties of good faith could recognize.

And you do all this so that the choice between theories or approaches is not "merely aesthetic". (@Moliere)