The Gombe Chimpanzee War lasted nearly four years.

People and other animals aren't just selfish or just cooperative and nobody worth listening to was ever saying they are, not even Dawkins. The question is how to knit together the blind, mechanical reproduction of genetic material with the layered, complex behavior of the creatures carrying that material.

the dignity of the person — schopenhauer1

The dignity of a person who doesn't exist and cannot give or withhold consent?

in the procreational decision, one can prevent all future harm from befalling a future individual, without any negative consequences to that future individual — schopenhauer1

By making sure that individual doesn't exist, what a court might call an "overly broad remedy".

the moral choice is to always prevent creating conditions/capacities of suffering when one is able. — schopenhauer1

I'm sure you don't consider the argument against procreating to be an argument for murder, but you must rely on some other principle right? Without something else you have an argument for mercy killing on a global scale.

It's attributing to life at it's elemental level some "will", and vice versa, denying this will (and it's selfishness) to human beings, where it belongs. — Olivier5

Eh. I read a bunch of his books years ago and was never tempted to reach this conclusion. YMMV.

Above my paygrade, but it looks to me like you're opposing a caricature of bad science with a caricature of good science. That said, I personally wouldn't encourage biologists to do an end-run around anthropology.

Absolutely. And that's why DNA takes center stage in the modern synthesis, not any of the other candidates. Darwin couldn't have known this, so that left some work to do getting natural selection to play nice with genetics. I always thought of Dawkins as part of that tradition starting, I guess, with Fisher.

Exactly my point, and well put. It might be possible to tell a "selfish protein" story in which DNA is how proteins reproduce themselves, or move up to cellular machinery, or up to cells, or organisms, our species. That's a healthy debate about the concept of natural selection, and the modern synthesis settled on DNA, which Darwin didn't even know about.

the assumption that elements of human society must necessarily have explanations in the context of adaptation. — frank

Then your beef is with really simplistic sociobiology, right? Humans respond to the Beatles as they do because 200,000 years ago...

Eh. Everyone knows that stuff is tricky and people aren't always all that circumspect about it. As near as I can tell, Midgley is somewhat skeptical of sociobiology (incl. E. O. Wilson) but believes we ought generally to begin the analysis of human behavior by remembering that humans are after all animals, and what we learn about "them" helps us understand ourselves. To some, that would make her a sociobiologist. Big shrug.

For instance, there is probably some genetic basis for character traits, but there's no one-to-one relationship between genes and character traits. — Olivier5

My understanding as well. It's been my impression that there is a long-running debate about what exactly is selected in natural selection, a healthy debate, and I thought Dawkins made a solid contribution to that debate, whether he's right or not, by starting at the ground floor with replication. There's a interesting puzzle there about traits, which environmental pressures can reward or punish, and the genes and alleles of genes that underlie them, which the environment can't get at directly. But then you can look at the allele itself and think of it having an environment, blah blah blah. I always took "selfish" here as a reference to blind, mechanical replication, and that's all.

Adaptation is not the dominant force in human (natural :lol: ) evolution — frank

Are you talking about change within our species, rather than its emergence?

I'm reserving judgment.

"Gene-juggling" doesn't look all that good to me -- but I've not finished reading it. It's early, for all involved. For instance when a couple pages in I got to the business of Suckers, Cheats and Grudgers, I immediately thought of Axelrod, but his book hadn't been published yet and I'm not sure how widely the work was known. (My copy of The Evolution of Cooperation has a foreword by Dawkins.) I don't know if Jane Goodall had yet told the world about the Gombe Chimpanzee War when this article was written. Anyway, I think it's entirely possible she's getting Dawkins wrong, but I don't particularly care.

What does interest me is her approach. As I understand it, from sniffing around her work on Google Books a bit yesterday, she's interested in what lies behind research programs in the sciences, motivating and guiding them, and she thinks that stuff is fair game for philosophy. Done well (Nietzsche maybe, Wittgenstein, Dewey I think, Sellars) that can lead to interesting insights about the overall shape of disputes in philosophy, the argument behind the argument, as it were. Done poorly, well, you get deconstruction, and I'm a little uncertain here because much of her work seems to focus on the little philosophical asides and obiter dicta of scientists. If she's going to build her case on that sort of thing alone, it's just Derrida all over again; if she uses those remarks as clues to investigate the hidden structure of ideas, you could get something as interesting as Sellars. I don't know yet.

We can start anywhere and work in any direction. We can work on disjointed parts, perhaps bringing them together, perhaps not. — Banno

The appeal of edges and corners is that some of the directions you might go in are not available, so your search space is reduced -- or, rather, is reduced if you've sorted the remaining pieces in some way, but even if you haven't the number of criteria a piece could meet and be usable is reduced, so identifying add-onable pieces is simpler either way.

But you always have the option of not thinking of the pieces as fitting together at all, and the puzzle is just putting each piece in the right place, as if in a grid, which is curious. People do exactly that with corners and edges, but trying to do that with every piece would surely lead to a sort of combinatorial explosion, so instead we allow the work or works in progress to constrain our search.

Whether you think of next piece as add-onable or just as placeable, the whole process is inherently concurrent, which is also curious, and why puzzles can readily be worked on in multiple chunks and in parallel by multiple people. This would remain true even for a simplified form of puzzle that was a just a line or a snake, connecting pieces as in a chain.

(I'm not actually disputing your no-edges, making-new-pieces take, but you know I'm going to be fascinated by the nitty-gritty of how the problem is structured and how people actually solve these things, lots of which still applies to your open-ended construction.

You might be interested to know there was -- still is? -- a line of puzzles that billed themselves as the "world's hardest jigsaw puzzle": no picture of what you were making, no edge pieces, and a handful of extra pieces to throw you off.)

Avoid those "jigsaw puzzles" that go round and round in philosophical arguments conducted thousands of times already. — jgill

I think I fundamentally agree here. On the other hand, as you can see above, I can't help but find jigsaw puzzles and how people solve them interesting even if the particular puzzles themselves are old hat. Of course I've been known to find how people put on their socks interesting, so...

She looks terribly interesting, so thanks.

Let's say you decided you made a decision that was much more detrimental. It can go on and on. — schopenhauer1

There's a lot going on between most decisions and the consequences of those decisions.

I think we all shoot ourselves in the foot, but some of us are given a BB gun when we're born and some of us are given a shotgun. I've made a lot of mistakes in my life, none of which led to prison or homelessness.

I think your observation that everyone makes mistakes is a reasonable founding principle for a society that is more supportive and even forgiving. We could live in a world more obsessed with human flourishing than justice.

Isn’t all pain and distress a result of being born? Because it seems to me like you’re saying all pain and distress is unjustified. — khaled

No. But "result" is a weasel-word, isn't it?

Being born is a necessary condition of being alive; being alive is a necessary condition of suffering; therefore being born is a necessary condition of suffering.

Does that make being born the sole sufficient condition of suffering? Obviously not.

Certainly being alive is also a necessary condition for making poor decisions. Is it a sufficient condition?

What exactly would that mean? Even granting, and I see no reason not to, that everyone makes poor decisions, does it make any sense to say that being alive caused those decisions?

They are claiming that if you just made better decisions you wouldnt be so bad. — schopenhauer1

Okay. In one sense, that's just obvious, and in another it's ridiculous. If I don't deliberately crush my hand with a 2-pound sledgehammer, then my hand is fine, or it ends up getting crushed some other way, or something worse happens to me because I didn't crush my hand, or something amazing and wonderful happens to me because I did crush my hand, or happens because I didn't, or ..., or ..., or ...

Counterfactuals are tricky enough without trying to do some kind of double-entry happiness bookkeeping on top.

If I freely choose to crush my hand with a sledgehammer, we can at least say that the pain I suffer is my own fault, and if I never regain the use of that hand, that's mostly my fault too, though I suppose we could discount a little for medical science not being more advanced than it is.

I'm still not sure I understand what you're arguing for or against.

Then why bring it up? Is someone claiming that the pain and distress of being born is justified because the fetus chose to be born?

"same" is ambiguous in meaning. IE, is "same" meant as a type (the same type of idea) or a token (the same instance of an idea). — RussellA

My argument was precisely that I can happily say "Joe is thinking the same thing as Allison" if Joe is thinking it's going to rain and so is Allison, and that I can do so without committing to the independent existence of The Thought That It's Going To Rain.

I like the type-token thing, but not if it allows Platonism in through the backdoor after barring it from the front.

I guess the price of being a human born in existence right? — schopenhauer1

Did I freely choose to be born?

Suffering can be brought about from contingent external forces or our own detrimental decisions. The origin of the suffering doesn't negate the suffering and certainly doesn't make one more justified — schopenhauer1

I took the "common sense" understanding of whether some particular suffering is justified to be the difference between "I brought this on myself (it's my own fault)" and "I don't deserve this".

In order to challenge that distinction, what else is there to talk about besides responsibility?

It's like if I threw you in a game and you didn't ask to play it, can't escape — schopenhauer1

Then no one would say you are playing the game voluntarily, and consequences of you playing at all can't reasonably be laid at your door.

But what about things you do in the course of playing? If someone forces me to play hockey, do they also force me to knock someone's teeth out? We tend to assess responsibility more finely than that.

If I chose freely to play hockey, am I freely choosing to have my teeth knocked out? I'm choosing to risk it, certainly, but I'm not choosing for it to happen in the same way that I'm choosing to skate, since that's an unavoidable part of playing hockey.

I agree, of course, that suffering is suffering, no matter the origin; I'm just not convinced there's a common sense view that it's different if you brought it on yourself. That looks to me like assessing responsibility, nothing more. It's even perfectly consistent to say, "It's a damn shame what he's going through, but he brought it on himself."

poor decisions are part of the process of being human, and that people will make them is part of the inevitable suffering of existence — schopenhauer1

But why should I not feel responsible for this poor decision just because it's a certainty that some of the decisions I make in my life will be poor ones? If, in this specific case, I could have acted otherwise, I'm responsible, whether it goes in the good-decision bucket or the poor-decision bucket.

If, up to this point in my life, I have only made good decisions, whether I now make a good decision or a poor decision will determine whether I have made only good decisions or not, but that is not the choice I face. Responsibility doesn't simply attach to the conjunction of all my decisions, but to each according to the circumstances and my capacity to act freely in each case.

Understanding an utterance in a language you know is not a voluntary action. You don't get the meaning through a conscious and laborious process something like decoding an encrypted message. If there's good reason to think you are doing something like this, you do it out of habit and a facility developed through countless hours of practice, quickly and without attention. You have to pay attention to the speaker, but not to the process of decoding. Or you're not doing anything like that. I would hope this is an empirical question. Either way, understanding is not something you usually should be described as "doing". It's more like something that happens to you.

There is something similar with speaking. Not just with respect to phonetics, not even just with all the mechanical bits of language production, but even in what you say. Think back over the last few days of verbal exchanges you had at work or in a social setting: in how many of those did you have to, or choose to, consciously and with effort decide what to say? Most of the time we effortlessly select the words to use, assemble them into a sentence and utter that sentence, but more than that, very often we don't even have to think about what to say; it just comes to us, which is to say, it just comes out.

Again, there are questions about how to describe what's going on here, but candid speech is, at least very often, habitual, requiring no more conscious effort than understanding the speech of others.

There are always bits that are outside any frame we might set up. — Banno

Or pieces we don't yet know how to connect, that have no affordance in the work in progress. You can set those aside until their place is revealed, or you can set aside the work in progress for a while and take the orphan as a separate starting point, and then hope to join the two (or many) works together later. Not coincidentally, people doing a jigsaw together do both. Just noticing that two loose pieces go together, even if you don't know where the two of them together will end up, is progress.

It seems to me that we start off, as children learning a language, taking others at their word — Harry Hindu

I think rather that how a language is learned, and that it may be learned, is the source of the habit of taking people at their word, but itself is not an example of taking people at their word.

I don't think a child learning the names of the colors is called on to believe that we are telling them the truth, neither in the sense that we are not lying about what we believe the names to be, nor in the sense that these are indeed the real names of the colors. I want to say that the question of truth just does not arise here at all.

This leaves me feeling that the analysis of language only or primarily in terms of truth conditions is fundamentally wrongheaded. And in this, I think I agree with @unenlightened: the practice comes first and theory after. In this case, when called upon reflectively to analyze a bit of language, the method of truth conditions can be a handy tool to be familiar with, but it does not underlie our ordinary use of words. But what does? How does that work?

I only want to say that you don't need a reason to take someone at their word. This is some kind of default, and all the theorists I mentioned, Davidson, Grice, and Lewis, recognize this.

So what happens when you realize there is a problem taking someone at their word? Not because you suspect deception, not because you suspect factual error, not because you suspect somewhat figurative use of language such as irony, but because you suspect a deviant or novel use of some word.

In daily life people make mistakes and use words in novel ways and we seem to manage. Do we need a special explanation for that?

Can you offer an example of "language processing"? Understanding language seems to be more ad hoc and associative than algorithmic. Sure language has it's conventions but they are more like habits, well-beaten paths, than they are like well-defined procedures. — Janus

You don't see anything systematic in English phonology, morphology or syntax?

Also: might want to rethink your concept of "habit". Putting on your slippers when you get up in the morning is a habit, but so is getting 17 when you add 12 and 5.

Anyway, how can you use a word which refers to something which isn’t there? — Tristan L

Because a referring expression doesn't always refer. Displacement is a core feature of language, but if you have the tools to create an expression that can be understood by others to refer to something not in your immediate environment, you also have the tools to fail to refer to anything at all.

Suppose you ask me to grab three reams of paper from the supply room, and I come back with two. You put one in one printer, one in another, and then say, "Where's the third?" "There were only two there." No one thinks that just because you can say "the third ream of paper" that there were three.

Or, let's say, considering the purpose of this thread: I don't think that, and you have given me no reason to do so. I'm not actually here to refute your position: you can believe whatever quantum Platonism you find entertaining. The point of this thread is to see if you can give me, a non-Platonist, any reason to take your position seriously.

The connection between storm clouds and rain is not mental.

"Algorithm" is a malapropism :wink: as has already been suggested — Janus

Not by me. I only said we need to be careful, because there are problems in this domain distinguishing algorithm from implementation.

But clearly a whole lot of language processing is algorithmic, just as a lot of other biological processes are.

Something in this neighborhood happens, however we characterize it. There are differences among Davidson's account (charity) and Grice's (cooperation) and Lewis's (truthfulness & trust), but for the moment we can agree that we all recognize this. Even LW says stuff in this ballpark.

My first thought is that this is not something we choose to do; it is not voluntary, anymore than understanding an utterance in a language you know is voluntary. You need not choose to understand it; you simply do.

Except when you don't, and then you must analyze or ask questions or decide to put off, perhaps forever, understanding the troublesome utterance.

Do we agree up to here?

Another example, slightly different, is the "falling beams story" from The Maltese Falcon:



John Huston's film is almost a word-for-word adaptation of the novel, but they had to cut this because it doesn't advance the plot appreciably.

Always loved that bit! (And his many appearances on QI.)

For each of the believers in the two stories, there seems to have been a prior state in which there was an inferential structure:

The pictures on a tv screen move and change because there are little men in there.

We could add a bunch of steps (something needs to move them; little men could move them) and make it a modus ponens and so on, but that's the start and finish.

Similarly:

If I'm a space ranger, then I spent years at the Space Ranger Academy training to be one.

It looks to me like the consequent in each of these cases gets detached -- in one case because there's an alternative explanation that doesn't need little men, so the necessity of the inference is denied, and in the other because the premise is denied.

That leaves each of these conclusions not falsified but floating free, unsupported. There are little men in there, but not for any particular reason (and then you could rationalize that -- they make sure everything works smoothly); I went to Space Ranger Academy but for no reason, or only to become a toy not a Space Ranger.

This is a funny thing, because it's not exactly illogical not to deny the conclusion of an inference, just because the inference or premises were defective. It could still be true, and in neither case was the particular conclusion that is still affirmed challenged.

The engineer could have just opened up a tv and said, "See, no little men," but you might have to do that with a bunch of tvs, and even then maybe our guy would think, surely some tvs have little men in them. How would you convince Buzz that he never went to Space Ranger Academy? Maybe showing him the Space Ranger Academy playset at the toy store (Buzz Lightyear figure sold separately).

All that to one side -- consequent cut free, still possibly true, never specifically challenged -- we might want to say there is a standard of evidential support that these beliefs no longer meet. We still have grounds to criticize, if we want, but these grounds are a little shakier. "Don't believe anything you don't have strong evidence for" is a rule begging to be selectively enforced.

But what do we say about the persistent or vestigial credence accorded these free-floating beliefs? Is that just habit, doxastic inertia? Will these beliefs maybe just fade away over time now that there's no obvious way to continually reinforce them?

Or do we think that we can see here that belief is not really a product of inference at all? Maybe it's more like Hume might describe it, just a sort of emotional accompaniment to a thought, because you can undercut the inference and leave the feeling of belief intact.

Btw, can anyone provide a case from real life instead of these stories? Or if not from real life then from philosophy?

There are no even odd numbers, and since one cannot talk about what doesn’t exist (Parmenides already realized that), what we talk about must be the real and existing property of being an even odd number, musn’t it? — Tristan L

Let's suppose you're right, and there are Properties and concrete particulars are instances of them. There is Wrenchhood, and there is the concrete particular, 'that wrench there', which is an instance of Wrenchhood.

When I ask you to hand me that instance of Wrenchhood, am I asking you to hand me Wrenchhod? No. Am I "talking about" Wrenchhood? I am using the concept of Wrenchhood, and relying on you to understand it, but talking about Wrenchhood is when you analyze the necessary and sufficient conditions of being an instance of Wrenchhood. Asking for 'that wrench there' is not that.

When we talk, hypothetically, about an instance of a concept that has no instances, what is the thing we are talking about? There is no such thing, so we are talking about nothing. But you would have it that if there are no instances of Wubblehood, then when we talk about wubbles we're actually talking about Wubblehood. But the absence of wubbles doesn't change talk about wubbles into talk about Wubblehood the concept.

This argument for Platonism, from vacuous predicates and vacuous singular terms, is widely accepted, I'll grant you, but not by anyone who has learned the difference between use and mention.

You might find this article interesting.

No, I mean is there a procedure to maximize agreement -- as an abstract goal, sure, whatever -- but is it conceivable that an interpreter has at his disposal a procedure whereby he could maximize agreement between his model and the speaker's?

Think about the trouble in economics with rational agents maximizing their utility. It's an interesting idea, and something you might try when working through a problem, but it turns out (a) this is really hard, and (b) there's no evidence people do anything like this habitually, so this particular kind of careful working through, even if we do it once in a while, is not the foundation of people's decision-making habits.

Similar questions then for Davidson: can it actually be done? and do we do it so much and so well that it becomes habit? I don't know what Davidson says, or whether there's any evidence.

Here's another attempt.

If we're going to do truth conditional semantics, we recognize we're talking about reasoning. Davidson's principle of charity, for instance, has one of those classic hallmarks of idealized reasoning in it: we strive to maximize agreement.

The question is whether this is how people reason about the utterances of others, or should, and there's a little there, sure, and whether this reasoning becomes habitual so that it's a good description of language perception and comprehension. There doesn't seem to be any evidence for that, but it might be what Davidson thinks.

Davidson's approach? — creativesoul

And related. Basically all the approaches inspired by Carnap and Tarski.

I don't know if there is any experimental evidence at all for the whole model theoretic approach to the semantics of natural languages. There is considerable experimental evidence for lots of stuff in linguistics, but not so much this, so far as I can tell.

For an example of something right next door with experimental support, there's Eleanor Rosch's prototype theory. That's not the same kind of semantics, but does actually tell you something about the semantic connections between words as people actually use them, or at least tries to.

I'm still sniffing around the landscape of semantics a little to see who's actually doing research.

I'll throw in one more point: the AI world has a broader view of logic and logical systems, with the goal of getting machines to do stuff. By contrast, you read Davidson or Lewis and it seems like research into logic and logic-driven systems ended in the thirties or forties. It looks kind of quaint, or at least provincial.

Davidson in skirting around the psychological issues. But he doesn't talk about Dalmatians either; is that a criticism? — Banno

Sure, and I'd grant him that by the Treaty on Abstraction, except he's not content to dump the behaviour of people in as data and churn out a theory (of the sort deplored above), but he then wants to attribute such theories to linguistic agents.

We don't even have to invoke mental concepts here (which might trigger you), but can just talk about behavior, and so far as that goes an agent's theory of meaning should be predictive of their behavior. So Davidson is doing psychology after all.

(I recently watched a lecture by Richard Thaler and he quoted some economist from the turn of the previous century warning that economists who try to ignore psychology end up inventing their own, badly.)

earlier you expressed a resistance to such a framework — creativesoul

That's possible. In a little while I might not endorse what I just wrote.

I'm uncomfortable with this whole approach to semantics, so I keep finding new ways to reject it.

I think there's something to my last couple posts but it's still not quite satisfactory.

Aren't we saying much the same thing? — creativesoul

I'm saying Davidson chooses, as is his right under the Treaty of Abstraction, to ignore the processes that solve the problem of defective utterance, whether they are to be found in System 1 or in
System 2, but then treats the results of that problem solving as if it were a formal semantics for a language. What's more, because the problem solving is done by or within an interpreter, he believes he is entitled to attribute to them his formalization of their results. I don't think he is, and I think his thinking he is is practically a category mistake.

Is that what you're saying?