By starting a discussion this way, we show others that we respect them as a person that is also trying to figure out what's true and what's not and thus can connect on this basic level. — Hirnstoff

Absolutely. Carl Sagan talks about this in Demon-Haunted World -- there are people out there who are curious and inquisitive and the scientific community has failed them by not getting out into the world enough, with the result that his cab driver doesn't know the difference between astronomy and astrology.

If no evidence is provided, we can emphasize that the opponent shouldn't build their beliefs on such a weak or even non-existent foundation. — Hirnstoff

But this looks like a non-starter in half a dozen ways. How quickly do you think, in such a conversation, you'll find yourself wanting to say, "But that's not evidence"?

It is entirely possible that the evident success of science, broadly if quietly acknowledged in modern society, is part of the problem. Maybe you're not the only one to whom it has occurred to model their approach to knowledge acquisition on science. Consider that what distinguishes science from ordinary informal reasoning is the positing of invisible entities and hidden forces; what we see in the world is the effect of these invisible armies at work. That suggests two solutions: yours, get people to do their science better; mine, get them to stop doing science at all. In favor of my approach, they're already demonstrably competent at doing jobs and planning birthday parties and judging produce, but real science is actually pretty hard.

the aforementioned problem (and other ordinary talk) posable as a finite one, and would it help? — bongo fury

If the plan is just to cash out talk that relies on "universals", broadly construed, into talk that doesn't, because it just uses names to refer to individuals, then my mistake of thinking it's dogs howling and not coyotes seems to just drop out. If that's not a big enough problem -- I have clearly made a mistake we want to be able to point at -- how am I supposed to name the individuals in order to make this translation? If not in practice, then in principle I should be able to do so. If I were to try -- "let's go see!" -- I can land right in a de dicto/de re swamp, of a sort Quine talks about somewhere with propositional attitudes: I am looking for a dog that is howling.

(( Right now reading Sellars's "Grammar and Existence: A Preface to Ontology" -- if I understand it, I may report back. ))

Are you asking me? — Dfpolis

No.

↪flaco — Srap Tasmaner

I heard an interview many years ago on NPR with a former FBI sniper, and he tells a story about a sting they had set up to arrest some militia-type dude (they pretended they were going to sell him weapons or explosives or something).

They make the arrest and the guy is talking his head off about The Government and Tyranny and all this, and our guy says, "Look, buddy. I had your head in my sights for the last two hours. You may be at war with your government, but your government is not at war with you."

This is what we want our law enforcement to be, isn't it?

Can you blame Black Americans for concluding that police departments are at war with them?

Interesting and persuasive stuff. Recommended reading for this approach?

But monkeys have also been shown not to make the "it's a frickin' big snake" call if there are no monkeys near them to hear it. (Don't have a citation handy, sorry.)

We need to relativise our tools and learn to figure out what tools other people use and see if there are tools we both can use. — Dawnstorm

This is the right thought. It's a truism that you have to find common ground to convince someone, a shared starting point, something. It's no use proving to your own satisfaction that 9/11 was not an inside job, if your goal is to convince someone else.

There was a sort of experiment on BBC3 many years ago called Conspiracy Road Trip, which famously convinced Charlie Veitch, a minor youtube celebrity and prominent 9/11 truther, to change his mind. (That episode.) At great time and expense, they convinced I think only 2 1/2 out of 5 participants. But Charlie was a big win, because pushing conspiracy theories was essentially his day job.

I think of there being a certain class of beliefs -- let's call it "ideology" -- which can have outsize impacts (social, cultural, political, economic) when people act on them, even just by voting, but which have very shallow epistemic roots. If you believe the moon landing was a hoax, how much does that really change how you go about your daily life?

So I also like to think that we all already use tools, share tools, that are up to the task -- everyday language and ordinary informal reasoning. The QAnon folks who almost certainly live near me all do the same sorts of things I do every day, take out the trash, go to work, buy groceries, check the weather. The problem is getting to talk to them about The Crazy in an ordinary way. Conspiracy Road Trip came close.

For instance, if you believe the moon landing was a hoax, would you still believe it if you spent an afternoon at the home of some old folks who worked on the project? Really sat and talked with them a while, asked questions, listened to their stories. Do that with a bunch of people who participated. There would have to been like a 100,000 people keeping this secret for 50 years. If you sat and talked and ate a chicken dinner with them, I doubt you could come away believing they were reciting the script they were given by the Deep State or whatever.

So my question for @Hirnstoff is how you can you do something like that on youtube? Or on reddit? So much of what we use to judge trustworthiness will be missing. But we need something that approximates it. I'm also partial to the view that science is just systematic common sense, so rather than "this is how Science does it" I'd lean on a folksier "that makes sense doesn't it?" approach. The main thing would be to approach ideological beliefs the same way people approach decisions about whether to take an umbrella, or whether their team has a shot at the playoffs this year, or which brand of peanut butter to buy. All these folks reason just like us outside the ideological zone, so start there.

It sounds really hard.

I'm out of my depth here, but I think the real target is Hobbes (who holds the honorary title of Founder of Game Theory). No coincidence that, in modern times, social contract theory is a branch of game theory (Skyrms, Binmore, et al).

What @unenlightened wants to deny is that the state of nature is a war of all against all.

But that's how it works in the real world — Banno

Ever seen the Dilbert strips with the guy who repeats what you said, but makes it sound like it was his idea?

If you do it means you're getting credit for someone else's discovery, so ... Congratulations?!

the founding principle of game theory — unenlightened

Say what?

It's just math. It's not like nobody was exploited until von Neumann and Nash and the others hatched their evil scheme.

A horizon is a real feature of vision on a round world, not a real feature of a round world.
A self is a real feature of awareness in a human body, not a real feature of a human body. — unenlightened

And ... therefore we are one? I cannot bring the argument here into focus.

I see such public posts as little evidence of abuse by the mods. — Philosophim

I certainly wasn't suggesting that it was.

The horizon is not an illusion, it's how far one can see. And the self is how far one can feel and remember. But that's all it is. — unenlightened

I thought the point was that an horizon looks like a boundary but isn't, that we imagine there is a self on this side and a world on the other side, but for there to be two genuinely separate things there would have to be an actual, not an apparent, boundary.

Instead you're saying there's a sort of functional boundary, that we have a self insofar as we are limited. If the horizon of our experience were expanded to, I don't know, infinite, maximal, something, then we would find either that our self is everything or that we have no self, take your pick.

I'm not sure I follow from there though. Recognizing how we might be but aren't, and that it's not a difference in kind, but "only" in degree --- I'm lost now.

I thought it was lovely.

Your focus on tools sounds somewhat like . I find a lot to like there, but no one not already committed to science and rationality does.

In my home state of Georgia, in the southern United States, we will soon be sending to Congress a woman who supports QAnon. The gulf between our tribes is as a great as that between a Star Trek future and a Mad Max one.

Personally, I think we should ignore such things. It shouldn't be the number of posts, it should be the quality of posts. It shouldn't be the number of mentions, it should be the quality of mentions. We are discussing philosophy where shows of status or symbols of superiority should be discouraged. — Philosophim

On the other hand, a couple of recent threads raise issues about the forum's culture that in my mind do relate to questions of privilege.

There is the longstanding issue of the mods and admins preferring and even enforcing certain styles and points of view. That's a real thing. Posting here is, as the saying goes, not a right but a privilege.

But also: the behavior and worldview gestured at these days with the word "privilege" is in part a case of Burns's Doctrine: none of us know how others see us. We don't know even know what Banno's Ratio means: is a high number good because you're engendering conversation or bad because the conversation you're engendering is likely filling up the cry? Is a low number good because people generally agree with you and have nothing to add, or bad because no one finds what you post worth responding to?

(There's a book called Another Bullshit Night in Suck City where an old drunk explains that getting beat up was good -- at least someone noticed him and took enough interest to bother beating the shit out of him.)

You suggest we're not the separate things we think we are, but all parts of a whole. There is no genuine separation, but only a perspectival illusion like a horizon. Some of the parts of that whole, us, maybe other organisms, see themselves as separate things.

Since I don't have your memories and you don't feel my aches, I suggest that even if we are parts of a whole, we are very separate parts, and that separation is no illusion at all, perspectival or otherwise.

If communication were perfect (and complete and instantaneous) we would indeed be a hive mind.

But it's not and we're not. I'm not sure the currently available hardware even supports that upgrade.

Is the dualism of self and world we do each genuinely experience then entirely due to there being more than one of us? If you were the only mind in the world, would your self then be illusory?

If so, the more or less Cartesian view I suppose you're combating does fall, but in a way I find surprising and extremely interesting.

How much does one person's voice/actions/vote count in the course of this flow. — Nils Loc

Despite the fact that game theory has been rendered mathematically and logically systematic only since 1944, game-theoretic insights can be found among commentators going back to ancient times. For example, in two of Plato’s texts, the Laches and the Symposium, Socrates recalls an episode from the Battle of Delium that some commentators have interpreted (probably anachronistically) as involving the following situation. Consider a soldier at the front, waiting with his comrades to repulse an enemy attack. It may occur to him that if the defense is likely to be successful, then it isn’t very probable that his own personal contribution will be essential. But if he stays, he runs the risk of being killed or wounded—apparently for no point. On the other hand, if the enemy is going to win the battle, then his chances of death or injury are higher still, and now quite clearly to no point, since the line will be overwhelmed anyway. Based on this reasoning, it would appear that the soldier is better off running away regardless of who is going to win the battle. Of course, if all of the soldiers reason this way—as they all apparently should, since they’re all in identical situations—then this will certainly bring about the outcome in which the battle is lost. Of course, this point, since it has occurred to us as analysts, can occur to the soldiers too. Does this give them a reason for staying at their posts? Just the contrary: the greater the soldiers’ fear that the battle will be lost, the greater their incentive to get themselves out of harm’s way. And the greater the soldiers’ belief that the battle will be won, without the need of any particular individual’s contributions, the less reason they have to stay and fight. If each soldier anticipates this sort of reasoning on the part of the others, all will quickly reason themselves into a panic, and their horrified commander will have a rout on his hands before the enemy has even engaged. — SEP

Cool.

(I looked around to see if I had unchecked a box somewhere, and then decided I must be remembering a feature from the old forum! No idea how long that eye has been blackened.)

@unenlightened's thread.

So finally, what I experience as the boundary of my self is simply the horizon of my sensitivity, or of my understanding, or of my memory. So to condense this to a one line meme:

Your skin doesn't separate you from the world, it joins you to it. You are the world. — unenlightened

I'm not quite following this. If the distinction between me and the world is on the order of an optical illusion, and the world is definitely a thing, then I'm at best part of it, not a different thing.

So what makes that sensitivity, understanding and memory mine? It's also an illusion that they belong to a thing separate from the world; those things just belong to the world, right?

In fact, all the sensitivities, understandings and memories are all the world's. But it compartmentalizes them -- because I don't have your memories, and you don't have my aches.

Is that an illusion too, or does the world really keep them separate?

0.77

I'm honestly surprised it's even that high. It feels like about half that.

@bongo fury @Pfhorrest

Last post resorted to heavy use of tenses, and maybe it turns out this is the most obvious difficulty in "applying" classical logic to everyday speech, a difficulty not faced in mathematics.

Goodman famously connects natural kinds to tense through projectibility, but I haven't looked at that in a long time.

I'm torn now between wanting to find a way to distinguish two types of "predicates", say by sortals being tenseless (the difference between being a coyote and howling); or just distinguishing the role in a sentence or an assertion. Maybe I get what I want just by saying this part of the sentence determines the subject -- these predicates constitute a sortal, what we're talking about -- and this other part is what we say about the subject.

And hurray for the guy who invited him up. That was a pretty ballsy move.

"if Newton was wrong and now Einstein is wrong, what is the likelihood that the newest theory is right?" — Gregory

Recommended: The Half-life of Facts, by Samuel Arbesman. Less philosophically sophisticated than I was hoping but interesting material.

Addresses exactly the issue raised, and attempts to do so scientifically!

Yeah that's worth considering, but it looks like a category mistake to me.

I clicked on another version of the video that shows more crowd response, and it was pretty predictable. Presumably clearer to Newsome's ears and he showed considerable restraint.

I think I've been running together a few different sorts of concerns.

I want to say that what we predicate of is not a generic unknown object but a more or less specific sort of object, an object taken as some kind of thing, or taken to be some kind of thing. In a sense, I am taking back the incredibly useful step of abstracting; that is, when we say that x*x = -1 has no real solution, but does have a complex solution, there is a step of generalizing what numbers are, abstracting away certain properties and leaving a smaller defining set, thus enlarging the set of potential solutions. (Probably not how complex numbers come about, but how they are eventually understood algebraically, I think.)

I've been thinking there are modal claims that we might want to make about sortals and predicates that are obscured by this phantom abstraction, i.e., the presumption that we predicate of a generic object. But I think that turns out to be at least a little wrong, and it shows in my posts. Yes, to be a coyote is necessarily not to be a dog. But also to be over there is necessarily not to be over here, and to be howling is necessarily not to be silent. On the other hand, none exclude the others: you can be a silent coyote over here, or a howling dog over there, and all the other variations.

But there is still a difference right? If you're a coyote, you're always a coyote, wherever you go and whatever you do. If you're howling, that's a temporary state. When a coyote dies, there is one less coyote in the world, though others are probably added. When something stops howling, does a howling thing blink out of existence? There is one less howling thing in the world, okay, but wouldn't we rather just say that fewer of the things in the world are howling? And same for the converse: it's not that a thing that is howling springs into existence; one of the things already here begins howling. If that thing is a coyote, it was already a coyote, and doesn't begin being a coyote at the same time it begins howling.

I also want to say that by avoiding premature abstraction, we get to save it for when we need it, as a step we take to solve a problem. Once there's doubt about the source of the howling, we might find it useful to speak in more abstract terms like "the source of the howling".

Thanks for posting the video. (As it turns out, BLM officially disavows this guy, Hawk Newsome, but I don't know the whole history there.)

What fascinated me is the range of crowd reactions, sometimes a mix of boos and cheers. I wish there had been more crowd footage -- you see just a little nodding and headshaking. When Newsome says, 'When I say I'm African-American, I mean both,' there's a guy who shakes his head for a while. That is not disagreement -- what could he be disagreeing with? It's disbelief. He doesn't believe Newsome believes what he's saying. But clearly some people do find him sincere, and maybe were surprised that he is not what Fox News and talk radio told them he would be. But chances are they would conclude that he was "one of the good ones", and BLM is still a bunch of radical leftists or crypto-jihadists or whatever.

I was thinking more of dropping correct/incorrect in favour of successful/unsuccessful or even useful/useless. — Banno

I'm just not signing up for "dropping" words that non-philosophers use successfully all the time. (See what I did there?)

I could see bringing "correct" back to its original home, having a close look at what circumstances give rise to talk of correct and incorrect usage, etc. etc. (I always have that in the back of my mind in talk about definitions -- giving a definition is a specific practice with pretty narrow and comparatively rare occasions.)

Oh sure throw that back at me!

Anyway, now that I'm home from work I can sniff around Kripkenstein and see what sorts of things they reach for.

I'm going to stand by that quote there because science. I'm just kind of exploring now exactly how the "language game" concept works. (Last week I read Sellars's "Some Reflections on Language Games" but I cannot say I've really absorbed it all.)

Also this

Noticing the fraught nature of the notion of correct and incorrect use, he might have simply stoped making that distinction — Banno

is not something I can imagine saying. I hate talking this generally, or jumping to the end, but I guess what you're headed for here is roughly

"incorrect" = "not how we use that word around here" or "not how we use that word around here"

Which is just orthodox linguistics, and I get that you want to undercut there being some, I don't know, Platonic Standard of the meaning of a word, fine, but I don't see any value in suggesting that we should give up the distinction between correct and incorrect. I like the linguistics version, and I think it matches people's behavior, so you could say this is the content of "correct" -- but I'm not sure about that either, because it feels awfully far from how people conceive their own practice of judging usage.

Sorry to ramble so -- in a bit of a rush.

you want to separate the process of identifying and setting up a target (which is to be the subject for a forthcoming predication) from the actual predication, the 'firing' of the predicate at that target. Anything like that? — bongo fury

Exactly like that!

Actually I think I'm probably just recreating work Strawson did years ago ...

I'm not sure I can think of a game without rules, not off the top of my head, or of a game with implicit rules. What are the canonical examples?

As you like, it's just that math never uses quantifiers that range over even all mathematical objects, much less everything in this and all possible worlds.

And just as a side effect, it's clearer that what you're asserting is that one of the reals is such that f(x)=0; you're certainly not asserting that the set of reals is non-empty -- you know it is, or you wouldn't be saying things like f(x)=0 anyway.

I'm not all that concerned about the metaphysics, but I am interested in finding the least misleading way to analyse ordinary language. "There is something that is a dog and is barking " is not it.

Shrug. The ad-hoc sortal thing is appealing, but we lose some of the other stuff we might want to say, even though the analysis of the sentence feels rightish. For instance, if something is a dog, it's necessarily a dog, but if it's over there it's only per accidens over there. So natural kinds.

What things, or what kinds of thing? — bongo fury

I'm honestly not sure how to answer. I leaned on the word "about" there but I often find analysis of "about" kinda slippery.

What I have in mind is pretty minimal, just approaching quantification in the restricted way math does.

So the analysis of

Some of those dogs over there are barking.

would not be

There is something such that: it is a dog, it is over there, and it is barking.

but

There is some member of "dogs" such that: it is over there and it is barking.

How do I describe that? If I want to say I'm talking only "about" the dogs that are over there and barking -- there's nothing left to say about them! Yuck.

Honestly it feels like I want to push "over there" back into the subject, that what I'm talking about is all those dogs over there and what I'm saying is that some of them are barking.

That might work, and in a sense it's okay if our sortal isn't a natural kind, but just an ad hoc count noun.

I've been called a cheat for moving en passent or castling; and indeed at some stage in the development of the game, this would have been true. — Banno

Does this show that chess does not have rules? No.
Does it show that at some points in history chess did not have rules? No.
Does it show that the rules of chess are not explicit? No.

I don't remember much of the history, but I believe what you would find is that there is a period when there are regional variants of chess, that in India, say, during this period, they play a version of chess that includes castling, but elsewhere do not.

Can you castle through check? No you may not, but I'll bet dimes to donuts that this was not part of the original rule allowing castling. It looks like a refinement for a situation not foreseen by the original rule.

Both have correlates in the evolution of natural languages, and both imply periods or regions in which what is correct play may be open to dispute, or to simple disagreement. But at no point and in no place do we have anyone playing chess with no rules whatsoever.

There is no teaching tic-tac-toe without rules; my attempt just results in a version with a much larger but equivalent set of ad-hoc rules pretending not to be rules. There still has to be some sense of "may go here; may not go there". I don't see any way around that. And you're not playing tic-tac-toe until you understand it as a rule-governed game. That there can be different but equivalent rulesets is interesting, and I suspect pretty important.

(Want to talk a lot more about rules and normative language, but I've got nothing worth saying yet.)

overly concrete thinkers — apokrisis

Band name!

Here's a thought: maybe the normative language is (just??) how we mark something as purpose-relative. Thus

You can't put your X on my O. I mean, you can, but then you're not playing tic-tac-toe. If you want to play the game, you have to put your X in an empty space.

But doesn't that sentence cry out for "if you want to play the game right"?

Is there a difference between playing tic-tac-toe and playing it the right way? Is the latter playing it by the rules? (Knowing that the game has rules, what they are, and how to follow them.)

Try it for yourself. — Banno

Yeah I've done that one.

If we end up saying normative instruction is (just??) for giving instructions, that looks, well, obvious, but why is it necessary for giving instructions? Is it?

We often do stuff without explicitly following rules. — Banno

You're always slipping in "explicitly" and "explicit". Are you arguing that we do stuff implicitly following rules, or just priming the intuition pump?

Did you ever decide at what point the kid taught tic-tac-toe without rules is playing tic-tac-toe? Is that even a question that makes sense to you? Or is there "no fact of the matter" about whether the kid is, you know, really playing tic-tac-toe? Does their ability to teach another kid to play come into it?