The modeler causes the model, therefore cannot be a quantity in it. — Mww

Okay, in my simplistic way, this is what I'm thinking. Suppose I'm sitting at the kitchen table with my son, and I say, "Draw us." He draws a couple stick figures sitting at a table, one bigger one smaller, and the smaller one bent over drawing. That's a model of us, and he's included, right? He could even draw a tiny version of the in-progress drawing, but there's no way to have it stay up to date, and he can't keep drawing smaller and smaller versions, because that goes on forever. But that's just granularity, isn't it? At some point he can just stop, and the model itself -- the drawing -- is just symbolized, in the same way he and I are just symbolized.

But to do that is to model himself (along with me) as part of the world, not himself as modeler -- rather the way Frege points out that talking about a concept is talking about it as an object, rather than as a concept. Maybe, except he has symbolized himself making the model, represented here just as a symbol.

But I also want to say that recognizing yourself as part of the world is not such a bad thing to do. To see yourself as both concept and object, not just one. And to see your model too as part of the world, not just an odd pair of glasses you look out at the world through.

the impossibility of the model containing that which models — Mww

Why is it impossible?

I mean, there are obvious ways in which we do model ourselves, as I'm sure @apokrisis would be happy to explain.

Is it just the regress that worries you? (Can't model myself modeling myself...)

Being confused can be a good sign. It show you understand enough to see that there is something problematic being discussed.

Try to be flexible in your thinking. Do not make the mistake of agreeing or disagreeing too quickly. It may be that what you are agreeing or disagreeing with is your own misunderstand of what is being said. — Fooloso4

This.

Something else I always used to do is make my own "index" inside the back cover of a book. Like if there's a good example -- something that helped you -- involving a bird house, put an entry for "bird house p. 53" The book's index is not going to have an entry for "bird house". (Works for all classes.)

Also practice really listening to others when you discuss things in class. Most people don't listen so much as wait for their turn to talk.

Don't think about it much but I guess I lean deflationary (maybe why I don't think about it), and I've always been intrigued by the prosentential theory. It has a linguistic feel to it I like -- how does this construction work, why would people use it, that sort of thing.

I would like to be more inclined to a pragmatic theory than I actually am.

to model a "world" in which we are there as the "other" of the world — apokrisis

Sorry, I can't resist: is this the transcendental unity of apperception?

(@Mww?)

Is there a revised T-sentence to go along with -- what? Are you pointing at it?

If you find a discussion interesting but don't understand how a word is being used, I say first stop is just Wikipedia. Asking is actually even safer, because people use technical terms, um, creatively.

If there's an argument or a point you don't understand, absolutely ask, if you're interested.

I'm probably the sole vote here against SEP, so I'll say avoid it like the plague. Really. Don't read SEP. Maybe read a little of the IEP, if you must, but not much of that either.

That's interesting. It wasn't obvious to me that the Nature paper they cite says what they say it does, but I can't read the whole thing right now. And I'm not an epidemiologist.

I really wouldn't have expected that how much virus you're exposed to has some effect on how sick you get, but I suppose it makes sense, if your immune system has some time to respond without being overwhelmed. Again, not an epidemiologist.

That might change my thinking a bit. It's still a good reason to get vaccinated, but where I live has about half the vaccination rate of Sweden and people still refusing to wear masks...

Oh but look at them! As if the rubble isn't even there. You can bomb our bookshops, but we'll just watch our step as we browse.

.

The transmission of more severe cases is troubling, but how many people are inclined to go clubbing when they have, say, the flu? How likely is it that a mild case will transmit and become a severe case in a vaccinated person? — AJJ

I'm a little confused. My understanding is that you transmit the virus. Severe illness might mean you're shedding more virus, more likely to infect others, but also likely to stay home, not infecting anyone; but the asymptomatic can also transmit the virus. You don't transmit your illness and how sick you are has nothing to do with how sick someone you infect gets. Is that your understanding as well?

How much risk should we be eliminating from our society? — AJJ

Sure, it's always a question of costs and benefits. Cars are a lot safer than they were fifty years ago, or even twenty, and we still drive.

I'm not on board with any delusional plan to eliminate risk from life.

Regarding transmission, I think people can take care of themselves — AJJ

I'm not quite sure what you mean here.

See, this is why we can't have nice things.

Agreed.

I do wonder how the trade-off is made though, as children in school together represent an excellent way for diseases to spread from household to household, even colds, flu, and the like.

For adults, as @Isaac has argued at length, the baseline risk for a healthy middle-aged person might be low enough that the vaccine offers little additional protection, some but not much. (Though possibly still a good decision given the extremely low cost to an individual.)

That still leaves questions about whether the vaccine helps reduce transmission.

I agree with your read of our little population, for the most part. I was mostly talking about the world "out there".

Maybe it wasn’t intended that way but it is tendentious — AJJ

Then we don't use that word there same way. I wasn't trying to make a broader point with the thing about kids, just the exact point I made, as I've explained. I may be arguing incompetently, but I'm doing so in good faith. I assume you are too.

Questions such as this are a slippery way of defaming someone. — AJJ

And I wasn't trying to defame you; I was asking why you brought up case-fatality rates. How should people use those statistics to inform the choices they must make? (Is that less offensive?)

What is the risk of a young, healthy person dying from Covid-19? According to research such as Ioannidis’s, tiny. What is the risk of a person being injured by one of the vaccines? We don’t really know, but it exists. So where does this dramatic reduction in risk you claim actually come from? — AJJ

I'm not advocating vaccination for children. If people who know more than I do have made the trade-off, I trust that decision.

Given that, I take your point about not lumping in unvaccinated children with adults who cannot get vaccinated. If the risk for children is already extremely low, we should talk about them separately. You are right.

There are pretty deep divisions now, yes. — frank

I think about waking-up-from-a-coma-on-January-6 scenarios. Fifty years ago, pre-Watergate, the scene itself might not be surprising -- students had been occupying university administration buildings and stuff like that -- but this was a large and violent group of people who believed the election had been stolen. (Not protesting but attacking, and not a policy, but questioning the legitimacy of the government.) Nixon won the election he was so worried about in a landslide.

Post-Watergate, the idea that some group might conspire to rig a national election is more plausible, but still fringy. Today, there have been all sorts of polls showing a majority of Republicans think the election was stolen. What was the last day, between Watergate and January 6, that you could have gone into a coma and then wake up to find what was happening surprising? Twenty years earlier? Ten? Five? One? How did we even get from A to B?

The American system can handle that kind of conflict up to a point. The Civil War shows how the whole thing can break down. If things head in that direction, history shows that compromise only makes things worse. — frank

Civil war feels decidedly less hypothetical than it did when I was a kid. We're basically living through a cold civil war right now (with occasional open fighting, January 6 did actually happen).

To speak of young children being hospitalised with Covid-19 has the the same fearful effect as speaking of all the anecdotal reports of horrific vaccine injuries. Do you dismiss the latter as being unverified and unrepresentative? If so it seems worth considering that you may be employing the same trick. — AJJ

Ah. Well it was not intended as a trick, but only to demonstrate that children are not immune. The only reason to demonstrate that children are not immune is because exactly that claim had some traction earlier in the year in some media circles, and maybe still does though I doubt it.

Here’s John Ioannidis, a highly respected researcher in epidemiology, saying that according to his research (in places such as Germany) the absolute risk of an under-65 dying from Covid-19 is about the same as driving your car to work — AJJ

Ioannidis is a pretty smart guy, and I would trust his statistics. But that video is from over a year ago, and we should have a better idea by now what the actual mortality rate is, and how it compares to, say, seasonal flu. Here's something from Johns Hopkins. I didn't realize the rates were so variable, which I suppose is down to quality of care. Seasonal flu is usually around 0.2% or 0.3% right? So a lot of countries are less than one order of magnitude bigger than that, and a lot of countries are much higher (but may also have much higher rates of death from seasonal flu). Higher than he thought a year ago, but within an order of magnitude, so not bad at all for an estimate. (Is there an easy-to-find breakdown of case-fatality rates broken down by vaccination status? That would be worth seeing.)

What I don't understand is what use you're making of case-fatality rate. Are you telling parents they shouldn't care if their kids get sick because they're less than ten times as likely to die from covid than they are from the flu? I mean, yeah, it's not Ebola, but you and your family ought to get vaccinated. Right? It's a risk that can be dramatically reduced.

I'm not sure what you're asking. — frank

Sorry. What concerns me is navigating the differing perspectives of our fellow citizens. It's all very well to choose not to consider those who differ with us enemies, but in some cases they will consider us enemies. I worry about that.

It isn’t correct to lump teenagers and the very young in with people with medical conditions when you say this. — AJJ

I'm sorry, I don't understand your point. Here in the US we're not vaccinating children under 12. Vaccinating those between 12 and 18 is I guess becoming pretty common, but certainly wasn't earlier in the year.

Young children, and teenagers, may indeed be at lower risk of becoming infected, and at lower risk of becoming seriously ill, but they're certainly not immune. I have a friend who teaches in a public high school that, within the first month of the new school year, had three children sick enough to be hospitalized and many more sick enough to miss school.

It seems there’s a lot of fear within this debate, on both sides, that gets masqueraded as reason. — AJJ

Is this obiter dicta, or was there something in my post that struck you as fear masquerading as reason?

Unvaccinated people aren't my enemies. They're fellow citizens. — frank

I agree, very strongly. But there is a clear problem. What if they consider me their enemy? (For "they", feel free to substitute climate-change deniers, flat-earthers, Nazis, racists, theocrats.)

In this case, it's very direct: if I were in a position to use state power to forcibly vaccinate someone against their will, I might regret resorting to force and even apologize for doing so, but protest that what I'm doing is for their own good, and for the good of others. They won't agree. What do we do?

If the vaccine works, then the unvaccinated pose no threat to the vaccinated. — Bartricks

It's complicated.

There is, as I understand it, very strong evidence that the vaccinated are less likely to become infected on exposure, to develop Covid, but it's certainly not 100%. We do not have a vaccine that literally immunizes you against SARS-CoV-2. If we did have an immunizing vaccine, your argument would be strengthened.

Of course, just being unvaccinated is not threatening, in itself, to anyone. What we're interested in is whether someone who is infected can infect someone else. There is also evidence, though it is not as strong, that being vaccinated reduces the likelihood you will transmit it to others. Reduces, but not all the way to zero. Since there is also strong evidence that being vaccinated when you get infected reduces the severity and duration of the ensuing illness, we could conclude that the vaccinated potentially present a greater risk to the unvaccinated than the unvaccinated do to the vaccinated. (The transmission reduction effect is smaller and perhaps less well-supported -- I'm still not clear on this -- than either of the other effects, the reduction of the chance of being infected, and the reduction of the severity of the illness if infected.)

If you are not vaccinated, you are more at risk of getting sick when exposed to the virus, and the illness you develop is likely to be more severe and last longer, no matter whether you caught the virus from someone who was vaccinated or someone who wasn't. Since there are people who cannot get vaccinated, people with certain allergies and medical conditions, the very young, and for now teenagers (though that may be changing), everyone is a potential threat to them, and it seems the unvaccinated are probably a somewhat bigger potential threat. (Again, "potential" because not unless you're infected.)

In the broadest strokes, you are right, that the unvaccinated take the biggest risks with their own health and the health of those who are also not vaccinated, but not everyone who is unvaccinated is unvaccinated by choice. There is at least some reason to think they also present a risk to the vaccinated as well -- smaller, though, because being vaccinated reduces both the chances of getting sick and the severity of the illness when you do, but of course those are only likelihoods. It is even possible for a vaccinated (but carrying or even infected) person to infect a vaccinated person and for the latter to become severely ill, but that is less likely than an unvaccinated (but carrying or infected) person infecting a vaccinated person who becomes very ill.

Since none of the effects are 100%, I feel I should add that the mandate case would be strengthened if vaccines actually blocked transmission. They do not.

"the cat is in a hat" is true iff the cat is in a hat. — Banno

Which cat?

I think the "principle" is, though agreeable, only a truism which cannot survive contact with any enemy who's declared war (on reason? on science? on evidence? on public health? on democracy? on the rule of law? on "those people"?) — 180 Proof

But it's not what they say.

You might be right. I tend to agree with your diagnosis. I tend to think you and I are on the side of reason and democracy and all that's good. I tend to think some of the loudest voices on the other side are just plain lying when they say they're standing up for what we are actually standing up for.

But I don't believe that the entire audience for those folks knows they're lying. I think a lot of them believe it. There's some bad faith there, no doubt; some of that audience eagerly laps up the rationalizations offered for their prejudices. It's a fact. But it's not all of them.

And it's not what any of them say. Both sides in our culture war claim to be the good guys. I think when it comes to the exemplars on this forum, both sides actually believe it. Both sides think the other side is the enemy of everything good in the world. (Okay, obviously there we have to make an exception for evangelicals because they wouldn't piss on the world if it was on fire. And it is.)

Do we just try to bully them into a Are we are the baddies? epiphany?

Yeah I just noticed that.

So, hey, @180 Proof, wtf?

Andrew Yang? — Cheshire

He only counts as "left wing" if that means "not a Republican".

Sanders supporters were convinced Yang was a libertarian trojan horse. Nobody on the left, or that thinks of themselves as on the left, ever had time for him. He likes capitalism.

Cheshire baker @Srap Tasmaner ...

If we disagree and you are wrong –> demonstrably wrong –> demonstrably dangerously wrong, then is it "fascist" to defend myself, with violence if needs be, against being subjected to the imminent danger/s which you (e.g. anti-vaxxers) advocate or present? — 180 Proof

Not sure what's going on here. I'm actually in favor of vaccine mandates.

I'd be really curious to know why you think I'm an anti-vaxxer -- if you do, the grammar here's a little unclear to me.

What was a “fact” before is merely the limitation of the utterer to achieve their purpose, not some feature of metaphysics. — Ennui Elucidator

Fact as the limit of my will is very good. But we need to aggregate, and there are patterns.

If you have a set of organisms, each is part of the other's environment, but there are also non-organisms, or organisms not considered in the original set, that are part of every organism's environment (every organism in the set, that is). That's a simple starting point for something -- the limit of all of them aggregated by just taking the intersection (a set that's invariant across environments), and I think it's a version of that simple starting point people imagine as "reality", or "nature", or what's "out there". One sort of thing there are facts about.

But there are also patterns in the way we are each other's limits, and it's hard (okay, hard for me) not to reach immediately for game theory there. There is some predictability in the ways we compete with and cooperate with each other, patterns that inevitably arise within sets of organisms like this, and they have that weird double-status of being both something that feels sort of external to us, but that we are also part of and contribute to shaping. So there are things here that look a little like facts, but not the other kind of facts that are the limit of aggregate will, but facts that are aggregates of wills.

That's all terribly abstract, but I hope the point comes through that the limit of your will can be a thing, another person like you with their own will, or the way your will combines with the wills of others in a way you partially control, as everyone does, and partially don't, because no one does.

But the observations that were done, remain done, factum, unless they were poorly done of course. Any new theory would have to contend with past observations. So observations (and only they) are facts.

So, if you never saw a black swan, that is a fact that you never observed a black swan. The theory that no black swan exists is a different thing, not a fact. — Olivier5

On the one hand, I see no reason to think we can separate observation and theory like this. Facts are theory-laden. That's the lesson of mid-century philosophy of science and that's the lesson of neuroscience today.

On the other hand, I do believe reality pushes back, and we need to capture that somehow. It's tempting to think we could take "what is invariant across all theories" as the observation, but I suspect that turns out to be nothing at all. It might turn out to be plenty if we could narrow the field of theories, and I think something like that is roughly what happens in practice. Competing theories are often very close kin, differing in some important local respect, but with an enormous amount in common.

But I don't know how to proceed from there. The only natural way I can think of to classify theories is backwards -- to just sort them by invariance, in essence to sort them by what counts as an observation for them. But that looks like a roundabout way of getting to your position: within a theory family, something will count as a "pure" observation, but only because that's how we defined the family!

I just don't know how to make these two ideas -- both of which I find compelling -- play nice together.

One last thought, then I'm calling it a night.

A tempting next step would be to suggest (?) that definiteness isn't definite -- that the boundary between concepts we expect to support judgments of fact and those we don't is itself blurry.

I don't want to say that. I want to say that these are different kinds of concepts; that the difference is grammatical not one of degree. It's not that funny is just "less definite" than height -- definite doesn't fit here at all.

But I'm troubled because another way to do this would be to imagine surveying a population. Given the same instruments and the same training, we'd expect an awfully tight clustering of the measurements each of them gave for the height of some object. A really steep and skinny bell curve. We could do the same for a joke by asking how funny it was. Who knows what we'll get -- maybe a normal distribution, maybe random, maybe a distribution with two humps is common. Who knows? But it looks like we can get away with treating them similarly and concluding that height measurements are not qualitatively different, just more predictable, more stable.

But what does that really show? If they are qualitatively different, then the statistical approach doesn't explain that, it reflects it, albeit imperfectly, because there's always noise. In fact, I'll bet we could amplify that noise. The whole height-measuring story sounds a little too good to be true. People have a wide range of aptitudes for dealing with even moderately technical equipment, and if using it properly also required a particular level of comfort with math, we could see even more variation. It's not hard to imagine a population that would produce a disheartening range of results for some measurement task, maybe with spikes in the distribution representing common mistakes. But none of this would show that our expectation of a definite answer was misplaced. (I suppose you could argue that even the held-it-upside-down sort of mistakes still yielded a definite result, just not the answer to the question asked.)

So maybe we can make the original idea work, that some concepts are fact-friendly and some aren't. (There may still be some trouble about determining whether a certain sort of thing falls within the domain of application of a given concept -- but I don't want to recreate the Wittgenstein thread over here with a lot of talk about rules and how we extend them and all that.)

I suppose we ought to have a word for the opposite of reification, something like "nebulation", @Banno's foe in this thread: the blurring of edges and misting over of shape to reduce definiteness so there aren't any facts anymore to worry about. If that produces knock-on confusion because it's the sort of thing you expect there to be facts about, maybe that confusion will only thicken the mist.

(I confess to being enough of an analytic that I never met a distinction I wanted to elide.)

Truth will out. — Banno

I like "Reality bites back." (No doubt because it doesn't care about your feelings...)

There's also the version in Chernobyl: "Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later that debt must be paid."

I suppose we could also throw in that one of the effects of reification (or, conversely, one of its motivations) is the bestowal of definiteness on something, creating an expectation of there being facts. (A "fallacy of misplaced definiteness" people around here might say.) Dummett spotted something like this in the debates between realists and anti-realists across a number of issues. Quine, for example, was an anti-realist about propositions and pretty close to being an anti-realist about meaning to boot, and he was wont to say that "there is no fact of the matter" about, say, whether a translation is correct. If you reify meaning -- if you are a meaning-realist -- you'll need meaning-facts. (Or maybe you reify meaning because you want there to be meaning-facts.) But if the rest of your language doesn't expect meanings to have this kind of definiteness, for there to be facts about meaning, you're in for a lot of weird.

I reject the notion that the height of the mount came into existence only when the observation was made. — Banno

If we didn't have the concept of height, there'd be no way for us to say anything about the height of Everest -- what that height is, that it has one, or doesn't, nothing. That is a tiny, tiny sliver of what the other side in this wants.

But we can also say this: given our concept of height, it makes no sense to talk about Everest not having one. Everest having a height -- as you say, @Banno, a single specific height -- is built into our concept of height. There's enough Dummett still rattling around in my brain that I'd go further and say that measuring heights is built-in too, and that includes an idea about measuring the height of Everest, even if that idea is purely imaginary and wildly impractical. (I have in mind even something like those drawings to scale you see in textbooks, man standing next to Everest and a y-axis, with numbers and dotted lines.)

Not every concept works the way height does, requiring an exact value like that. Funny can't, because to start with it seems like it's not a 1-place predicate at all, but more like 3-place. (Something was funny to someone on a certain occasion.) But even allowing for that, it just doesn't seem to require definiteness. Asked "Did you think what he said was funny?", it's okay to answer, "Kinda but kinda not." A demand for a yes or no answer to "Is that funny?" comes off as confused or abusive.

The definiteness bit also implies that there can be a fact about the height of Everest -- and must be! -- but there can't be a fact about whether something is funny. (For other quite different cultures there might be facts about humor, but it will be obvious that their concept of funny works differently from ours.) And that's not only a matter of our concepts -- not just, we might say, a "fact about us" -- because not just anything gets a height, only Everest sorts of things. So there's that too.

As I think about it, I think the language bit is mainstream pragmatism.

It does still feel a little funny having words like "truth" and "fact" around we've given definitions we can only aspire to use and never reach. I used to think a lot about the role of the ideal, as something that does have practical use. I'll have more time later tonight.

Perhaps it has something to do with animals being forced to move, forced to act. 'Reality' is something like the model an animal is most likely to act on. — Zugzwang

That's very close to how I look at it. Forced to choose, to act, to place our bets, to say one thing rather than another and then be accountable for what we say. All that.

I do still find it slightly curious that this shows up at the language level, but I probably just haven't thought about it hard enough.

Nevertheless we can maintain a distinction between what is the case, and what is believed to be the case; and mark this distinction with care by distinguishing fact from belief. — Banno

What I find curious is that not only can we make the distinction, we can't avoid it. No matter how convinced we might be about reality eluding our beliefs about it, we have no choice but to talk in terms of facts and truth and what is the case. Apo would give us the metaphysical explanation about "sharp cuts" and whatnot. I tend to think in terms of commitment, wagers, that sort of thing.

Yeah that is what I'm saying, but only in the damnably long term.

It's not a left/right thing and it hasn't been good for anyone.

I don't have a solution for the "tolerating intolerance" conundrum, but I'm confident everyone being intolerant about everything isn't it.

But the pro-vaccers are trying to present their contempt as justified, — baker

I agree at least that contempt is not helpful.

I was reminded, entering this little subtopic, of an interview I heard once with John Gottman, the University of Washington marriage expert: his number one sign that a relationship is going to fail is not arguing, but contempt.

In this context, I find that thought a bit chilling.

contempt — baker

This is true, but in the American culture war, if that's part of the topic here, it goes both ways. We're practically famous for deep currents of anti-intellectualism, occasionally politicized, religious suspicion of education, rural suspicion of cities, and so on. Broad strokes, I know, but hard to miss.

It's all too easy to be arguing about appropriate usage as if some profound investigation of hidden things is involved. — Zugzwang

I remember some philosopher being described as "asking ordinary questions about peculiar things and peculiar questions about ordinary things." I aspire to be so described.