Comments

  • Wittgenstein's Chair
    How do you check that someone knows how to play?

    Do you have them explicitly list the rules?

    Or do you watch them play?
    Banno

    Imagine I taught one my kids to play tic-tac-toe without rules, and then they try to teach another kid. You don't command the same kind of deference with your peers. "You have to put your X in an empty spot, not on top of my O" (note the "have to"), and then what's the answer to "Why? Why can't I put an X over your O?" It's going to be "That's just how you play." And maybe "Your way is wrong." (And maybe "This is how my dad taught me, do you want to learn how to play or not?")

    Or maybe my kid comes back to me and says, "Dad, me and Griselda made up a different way to play tic-tac-toe, and it's better than your way."

    Alright so back to my kid explaining the game -- not playing but explaining. Maybe she can get by with "You just don't" instead of "You can't go there", much less, "It's against the rules." So why do people end up saying, you can't go there, you have to go here or here. What does the normative language get you?

    (Yes I'm ignoring your questions, and I'm ignoring the invisible answers you printed next to them, unless you really want me to be bored.)
  • Wittgenstein's Chair
    When it's your turn, you ask me where you're supposed to put your "X" or your "O", whichever you're playing.Srap Tasmaner

    That "supposed to" in there looks interesting. We could get around it I guess, and in early days we do. I could just say, "Okay, it's your turn now, try to make an X in this box."

    How far can we get before we really really need "should" and friends?
  • Wittgenstein's Chair
    For me to go through this rather tedious charade, i would first need to figure out that you are trying to teach me some new game, which I don’t know how to play yet.Olivier5

    Why did you remove the reference to rules? I mean, do as you like. I silently edit posts to fix grammar and punctuation. Whatever.

    I'm just wondering if you decided the discussion of rules is a mistake? out of place?
  • Wittgenstein's Chair


    It is how Capablanca learned how to play chess, and it is said, in tones of deepest wonder, that when Capablanca played chess it was like he was speaking his native language.
  • Wittgenstein's Chair
    Everytime @Banno and I play tic-tac-toe, I wipe the floor with him, but when we play noughts and crosses it's just the opposite.
  • Wittgenstein's Chair


    I wasn't setting you up for a "gotcha". Kids play games that only kinda have rules, rules that can change all the time, which is to us an unusual kind of rule, but worth remembering. (Always wanted to teach philosophy taking Calvin & Hobbes as the text.)

    So we have a new question: when I tell you where to put your X or your O, I'm telling you in part that doing that is allowed by the rules. Does that mean that you know games have rules? I mean, I could do this with a three year-old and they would be totally stoked and squealing each time they suddenly won! I'm not sure they know games have rules. They know that winning, especially against dad, sounds fun. (At least a couple of my kids say to this day that one of their ambitions is to beat me someday at chess.)

    But somehow I've gotten us to talking about this backwards: I started out asking whether you have to know that you don't know how to play tic-tac-toe to learn to play tic-tac-toe, but now I can't figure out how to decide when to say you know how to play tic-tac-toe. How did that happen?
  • Wittgenstein's Chair
    For me to go through this rather tedious charade, i would first need to figure out that you are trying to teach me some new game, but are unwilling or unable to teach me the rules in plain English so you’re just showing to me how it’s played.Olivier5

    But I didn't say anything about rules.
  • Wittgenstein's Chair
    You can teach something to a kid, a dog or anyone else without being explicit about it. But you can’t do that with tic tac toe. Too complex.Olivier5

    Okay suppose I taught you tic-tac-toe in the following way. When it's your turn, you ask me where you're supposed to put your "X" or your "O", whichever you're playing. I have a couple options for how to answer this -- I could explain what is equivalent play under a transformation of the board or I could just skip it. Let's say I skip it and I just pick one. I always tell you a move chosen from the set of best moves. I deliberately don't always make the best move myself, so that I sometimes have the opportunity to say, "And when you go here you win." We could change it up. I could feed you a less than optimal move by saying "Try going here," and then I might end up saying, "And when I go here I win."

    The main thing I'm trying to leave out is that the way to win is to get three in-a-row. You have to know what games are, that there are turns, that sometimes one of the exactly two of us wins, and sometimes it's a cat, and you get to practice making Xs and Os and maybe lines. If, with repetition, you begin to recognize individual positions and remember which move led to a win, which a loss, and which a cat, do you know how to play tic-tac-toe? If you figure out the three-in-a-row thing, do you now know?

    Added: forgot to mention you figuring out the transformations on your own, but you get the idea.
  • Privilege
    If their participation contributes to that institution, does it necessarily follow that it contributes to the racism?Pro Hominem

    No that it is not the tree I'm barking up at all. If, say, a bank lends money to qualified Black applicants at a lower rate than it lends to qualified white applicants, that bank is in effect racist. It gets to be that way because some loan officers made some racist decisions. If you worked at the bank for thirty years and only made one such decision, you contributed some tiny amount to the bank being racist, not just because you worked there, but because of something you did. Maybe once or twice you wondered why someone was being turned down by another loan officer, but didn't raise the issue. More, but still smallish, responsibility, and so on.

    Maybe I could be convinced by some argument about enabling __, or supporting __, or contributing to __, or participating in __, or whatever, but I'm certainly not making any such claim now. I'm just talking about what people actually do that's actually in itself not okay. And making one indefensible decision also doesn't make you responsible for the decisions of the virulent racist in the next office, or for the whole bank, just your part.

    We could keep messing with this, but I'm not sure it's much help. What suspicions did you have? Did you act on them in any way? Was there an incident which, if you reflected on it, might have led you to check that guy next-door's numbers to see if there's a pattern? I don't need all this for the tiny point I'm making.

    And you know I've posted a lot of this stuff and been pretty clear throughout, I thought, that I'm not saying every white person had their knee on George Floyd's neck. The other cops there, who failed to do what I didn't even have the option of doing, none of them actually had their knee on his neck either. I don't see that I'm even committed to saying that anyone benefited from George Floyd's murder, though I hold out some hope that we all do, in a very different way. (I almost posted something on an objection to the concept of white privilege which I was going to describe as "The murder of George Floyd didn't help me pay my mortgage." I decided against it. @StreetlightX would have posted it -- love ya, Street.)

    So I'm just going to say: if you're tempted to think I've said that all the racist things are done by all the white people and they're all responsible for all of them and all the white people benefit from all the racist things all the white people do -- that's not me. I can't imagine why I would ever say that.
  • Wittgenstein's Chair
    if you already know that 2+2=4, it’s impossible for you to learn it again, unless you forgot itOlivier5

    (Pointless aside: this thread begins with a video about the Socratic Method, whose namesake seems to have held that learning, even of things like 2 + 2 = 4, is precisely being reminded of something you already know.)

    Okay so first time in. We're not developmental psychologists here -- well, I'm not -- but what role do we think is played, in learning that 2 + 2 = 4, by not knowing that, and by knowing that you don't know that. You mentioned motivation, and that makes sense.

    I'm not now going to spring "the answer" on everyone -- I don't have one -- but one of the things I was thinking about is the way you can teach someone something without telling them what you're teaching them, which might always or sometimes (not obvious to me) involve not telling them you're teaching them something at all.

    For small children and animals, the line between "teaching" and "training" gets blurry. Should we reserve the word "teaching" for when someone can know they're being taught? Does that mean in every instance when they're being taught, they must know that?

    You can clearly teach someone how to add without ever telling them it's called "addition", and you could afterward tell them that now they know how to add. Where did we rely on them knowing that they don't know how to add? In one sense, everywhere: they don't know what to do next. In another sense, nowhere: they don't even know there is a procedure that they don't know how to follow.
  • Wittgenstein's Chair


    Oh but you don't have to make them admit it. You can even play along.

    There's a certain kind of inartful info-dump that occurs in science fiction which I (and I think others, but who knows) call the "As you know, Bob, ..." I can be more subtle than that.

    ("Inartful info-dump" is not redundant; vide almost anything by Neal Stephenson.)
  • Privilege
    We'll just have to agree on your terms.Srap Tasmaner

    Oh -- that's not what I meant to type at all! I just mean whatever terms, however used, so long as we understand each other, and I'll keep making whatever distinctions I want.
  • Privilege
    Are you referring to affirmative action?Pro Hominem

    No no, the differential minimum sentences for crack vs powdered cocaine, famous example of a law that is in effect racist.

    There is a legal issue -- since we're here -- about whether a policy (or law or regulation) is known by those enacting it to be in-effect racist, in which case that's a no-no, and counts as discrimination.

    I'm allowing for the possibility that a lot of people contribute to a given institution being in-effect racist, while themselves only occasionally and perhaps quite rarely racist, and perhaps not even knowing it.
    (As Michel Foucault said, people know what they do, mostly know why they do what they do, rarely know what what-they-do does.)
  • Wittgenstein's Chair


    Good! I hadn't even been thinking about incentive.

    Any other thoughts?
  • Wittgenstein's Chair


    Babies and pigeons both lack language, so you're definitely in the neighborhood I was thinking about.
  • Wittgenstein's Chair


    If you're willing to elaborate I'm genuinely interested.
  • Privilege
    When was the last time someone said anything to you about your whiteness?Pro Hominem

    The rarity of this is part of the point.
  • Privilege


    We'll just have to agree on your terms. I make some distinctions I like and find useful but not everyone does.

    Some of what you're describing I would call "institutional racism" and it bugs me that Wikipedia redirects "systemic racism" there. I think of institutional racism as the codifying of racist choices within an institutional structure; it allows members of that institution to avoid responsibility. "Look, if it were up to me, I'd hire you. But we just don't hire colored people, company policy. I'm not saying it's right, or that I wouldn't change it if I could, but I just work here."

    Some things like mandatory minimums are kind of a grey area for me because they're certainly "in effect racist" but they are not explicitly racist.
  • Privilege
    white people experience the absence of the oppression non-white people experience. This is no straw man - scroll through the posts, that is what is asserted time and again.Pro Hominem

    I agree with your claim that this is how white privilege is often described and how many have described it in this thread, but it's not quite how I see it, and I don't think it's quite what Peggy McIntosh had in mind.

    But before dealing with your specific points, let's talk about negation.

    Americans, to pick an example, have rights; the rights of Black Americans are frequently violated with impunity; the rights of white Americans aren't. I'll admit, there's something a little underwhelming about saying one group experiences the absence of a denial of something; that's just to say they're treated normal, right? Because I find that at least a little persuasive, I've been more interested in other ways of looking at it, and you won't find me pushing the "absence of denial" approach much.

    But think of it this way: system says, this is for everybody; then system pretty consistently grants to one group and very, very inconsistently grants to another. What is that? That looks a lot to me like the system straight up giving more to one group than to another, and it's the "absence of denial" formulation that looks like a ridiculously roundabout way of describing it.

    It's not what the system says it's doing -- no question. And by its terms, you'd have to resort to this "absence of denial" thing. But the system is lying.

    Let's just call a spade a spade. White Americans have more rights than Black Americans, and they do because the system gives them more rights.
  • Privilege


    Street and I don't often get along (maybe he's forgotten since I haven't been around for a while), but this is the key post in the thread:

    By racially marked I simply mean that one's race is, as it were, re-marked upon, whether in word or deed. A kind of racial intentionality as it were - to experience race as race; as distinct from those experiences of race which are not experienced in racial terms - as with your hypothetical police interaction.StreetlightX

    You don't see anything here or in the last handful of posts he and I have exchanged? Nothing that rings true?
  • Privilege
    What's actually bad is ascribing qualities to an individual based on their skin tone. That is what systemic racism fosters.Pro Hominem

    Hoping this doesn't derail what is finally the discussion of white privilege we should have, but --

    That's not systemic racism -- at least not as I use the term. Systemic racism is differences in experiences and outcomes that correlate to an improbable degree with which race your society, at large, assigns you. It is evidence of the holding, at least now and then, of racist attitudes because, being improbable, it must consist of racist behavior. As I say, "in effect racist".

    But when you put the word "systemic" in front of the word "racism", do you mean something else? Something like "racism without gaps"? I truly don't know. Attributing qualities besides skin tone based on skin tone, I would just call "racist". Do you just mean "lots of people having racist ideas"? If so, I suppose I agree after all, I just make allowances for people not to be all-day-everyday racist, in this sense. You only need to be racist once in a while to do your part. (Like maybe you want your dog to have a fun day and that bird-watcher is just so annoying.)
  • Privilege
    By racially marked I simply mean that one's race is, as it were, re-marked upon, whether in word or deed.StreetlightX

    Oh, you know, that does actually help a lot. It's not just about categorizing.

    Okay, this gives me something to think about some more.

    Rest of the post good too. You have actually helped me here! Thank you.
  • Privilege
    It has far fewer consequences than if they identified me as black.Pro Hominem

    I think the consequences are really different, largely invisible, but no fewer.

    But as I'm arguing with @StreetlightX, I find I'm not really sure, again.

    In a sense, I'm not racially marked; in a sense, I'm racially marked as white; in a sense, I'm marked as raceless by being marked as white; in a sense I'm marked as white but take that as not being marked. I honestly can't figure out right this second what the "right" thing to say is, if there is one, if it even matters, given that the result of all three is the same. Maybe Street will come up with something.
  • Privilege
    When one doesn't experience racial marking in one's day-to-dayStreetlightX

    Okay, again, this is what I don't get, and don't get in particular in a discussion of white privilege. Everyone is racially marked.

    An attempt at an example. Suppose I'm in a situation, an officer-involved situation, and I demand that my rights be respected. I think I'm acting only as a person, because I universalize my experience. Now let's suppose the cop acquiesces to my demands because he marks me as white. (It could be otherwise, and I'm stipulating that it isn't.) Whether he knows this is why he's doing it or not, same result for me. I have an experience that reinforces my view of myself as a raceless person, by having an experience as a white person, an experience that, with this cop in this moment, only a white person can have. I go on my oblivious way, not recognizing the role my race plays in my experience.

    Note that the cop needn't be racist. He could be black.

    My experience of (a) being white and treated white but (b) thinking I'm raceless and treated raceless is what I think of as white privilege.

    I'm just confused by you saying I'm not racially marked, that I don't experience the society I live in as racist. White people do get the message that race is something other people have, but that message itself is a lie.

    The white experience of race is largely one of having experiences which are not racially marked at allStreetlightX

    Maybe this is the better way to put it, and I'm making a lot of nothing. We're probably saying the same thing, but keep swapping who's pointing at the underlying context.
  • Wittgenstein's Chair


    Here's a hard question: to learn how to play tic-tac-toe, do you have to know that you don't know how to play tic-tac-toe?

    Don't feel like you have to answer immediately. I'm not waiting to find out the answer so I can decide what stock to buy today before close.

    It is shocking how relevant this is to the thread, and that's my excuse for some pretty odd posts.
  • Privilege
    Their experience of race - or lack thereof - is so far removed from any realityStreetlightX

    This is the part I don't get. I agree completely that a white guy like me grows up thinking his experience is universal in way that is certainly illusory, divorced from reality; but I am connected to reality, to the only one there is. I move through the world thinking of myself as only a person, and that "only" is a delusion; the whole time I am moving through the world also as a white guy, and to this I am simply oblivious, as Peggy McIntosh aptly puts it. I want people like me to see that they do indeed have an experience of race and of sex and of gender and of class and the rest of it.

    Are you sure that your rejection of their rejection of race isn't too focused on what they're thinking and too little on how they experience the world? It's probably just a matter of emphasis. I'm not sure we disagree at all.
  • Wittgenstein's Chair
    I was just trying to milk it for the obvious truth.Pro Hominem

    I was trying to discourage you from doing that.

    You have to know what game you're playing to make a move or take a turn. Is everyone in this thread playing the same game? Is anyone?

    My kids have seen me play chess, and when little would sometimes want to "play chess like dad" by moving pieces around on the board. They're playing something, but it's not chess. They don't know how to play chess. Even when I played this game with them, my ability to play chess didn't turn what I was doing into playing chess. We were still only playing whatever that game was.
  • Privilege
    Thus, you may ascribe "white membership" to me, but I do not accept it, nor do I wish to define myself or anyone else this way.Pro Hominem

    But you're not going to deny that a whole lot of people count you as white and that this has consequences, are you?
  • Wittgenstein's Chair


    What if the clocks are all labeled "Here"?

    What if they're labeled as you say but their times are only a few minutes apart?

    What if speaking a natural language isn't like looking at a shelf full of clocks?
  • Wittgenstein's Chair


    That's kinda brilliant.
  • Privilege


    Are you and I just focusing on different ends of a spectrum?

    I'm supposing that everyone moves through the world to some degree unaware of the way they affect those around them; all the usual suspects have a part here (race, sex, class, appearance, etc. etc. etc.) but it is also, I firmly agree with Burns, just the human condition.

    I'll give you an example. As a young intellectual, I was, as I see it now, kind of an arrogant prick. I didn't see it that way at the time, and I like to think I've mellowed somewhat with age, so when a coworker told me, referring to some other employees in the building, "They're all scared of you," I was genuinely taken aback. I don't even interact with these people much, and I have no idea what I did to make them feel intimidated. But it's a fact. Have I been up to my old tricks without realizing it? Would make sense, but I don't know that; they might find me intimidating for some reason completely unrelated to the swagger I used to affect in my twenties.

    All I can say is that something has put me in a position of dominance or privilege that I was unaware of and that I have been acting as the dominant without having any such intention. Sometimes when you learn something like that, it can be eye-opening. (I'm a sucker for epiphanies. One of my favorite moments in film history is when Alec Guinness says, 'My God, what have I done?')

    You're focusing on people who refuse to have that eye-opening experience despite being given the opportunity; they engage in denial, in willful ignorance. This happens, no question, and it's pretty clear that two of the big reasons are (a) a sort of contra-Burns desire to maintain the image of yourself you've grown accustomed to and like, and (b) the simplicity of not dealing with decidedly unpleasant issues like sexism, racism, oppression, and your role in them (and so back to (a)).

    Maybe the difference is something like this: we all lack some awareness of how we affect others -- and you can't quite call this a lack of self awareness because others are involved from the start (this is why I had so much trouble formulating my last post) -- but this is your immediate environment we're talking about; but then there's lack of awareness of the society you're a part of, what goes on in it, what the experiences of others, especially others unlike you, are like, and, to get to the point, the experiences of others unlike you interacting with people quite a bit like you. Burns doesn't say anything stops us from seeing and understanding that stuff; if we don't, that's a failing beyond what he talks about, a failure to see or a failure to draw connections between what you see "out there" and your own life.
  • Coherentism
    I'm not familiar with "scare quotes"Metaphysician Undercover

    Please don't take offense, but this is too beautiful not to rip ungraciously from its context.
  • Wittgenstein's Chair
    Srap points out, with excruciating politeness, that you have misunderstood some of what was said in the video.Banno

    Did I? I didn't mean to. I had watched exactly none of the video last time I posted in this thread.

    I did eventually watch the first several minutes, but I flinched every time he said "educating our children to be virtuous" and gave up.
  • Privilege
    Even if it means blinding oneself to reality because it's more comfortable that way.StreetlightX

    O wad some Power the giftie gie us
    To see oursels as ithers see us!
    It wad frae monie a blunder free us
    An foolish notion:
    What airs in dress an gait wad lea'es us,
    An ev'n devotion!

    The question that interests me is, what part of the way others see me that differs from the way I see myself -- a difference I'm not even aware of -- is down to my race? What part of my behavior is enabled and encouraged (note) by awareness, on the part of others, of my race, when my race is the furthest thing from my mind?

    Added: "or resented"? This paragraph is missing some stuff. It should also have a point about the way I see myself, my expectation about how the world will receive me, and that those expectations can be both due to my race and oblivious that I even have a race. Some of the world encourages this part of me; some of the world has just been putting up with it.

    I think there's a strongish sense in which this is simply unknowable for an individual; people don't go around as a collection of parts but as wholes. Do you defer to that guy because he's your boss, because he's tall, fit, and well-dressed, because he's white, because he's well-spoken, because he makes more money than you, because he's a cis-gender male, because he's kind and reasonable, because he makes a point of being considerate of others and listening to other points of view, because he's unfailingly respectful?

    What we can do is look for patterns in society at large and assume they apply to us just as much as they do to anyone else. And then try to act accordingly, despite never receiving the "giftie".
  • Bordieu/Foucault: post-structuralism


    That's the book with "reading as poaching" isn't it! I could never remember where I read that, which, there you go.
  • Wittgenstein's Chair
    If you haven't noticedTheMadFool

    You know that I've noticed. I flat out refused.

    What do you make of that refusal and the reasons I've given for it?
  • Wittgenstein's Chair
    There is a world of difference between "explain it to me like I'm five", which is good, healthy for all involved, an excellent check on obscurantism, etc., and "argue with me like I'm five."

    As we say in Georgia, "That dog won't hunt."
  • Wittgenstein's Chair
    I also see you haven't answered any of my questions on Wittgenstein's philosphy.TheMadFool

    And I'm not going to. And anyone who does would be wasting their time.

    There is nothing I could say about Wittgenstein or any other philosopher or any philosophical theory, and nothing anyone else could say about any of those things, that could or should carry more weight than the facts that words in natural languages mostly don't have clear definitions but can be used correctly or incorrectly.

    This you are prepared to deny, but you might change your mind based on, of all things, my presentation of Wittgenstein?
  • Wittgenstein's Chair


    "I" there isn't me.
  • Wittgenstein's Chair
    Responses from the Community headed your way:

    1. You don't understand Wittgenstein, like, at all.
    2. "In my view, words are just ..." and then some completely different theory that has nothing to do with what you said or with what Bonevac said or with what Wittgenstein said.
    3. Go ahead then, define "chair" for us. (Probably, but not necessarily, a variant of 1.)
    4. And where do words get these essences?
    5. Well, Bonevac supports Trump, whadja expect? <emoji>
    6. Give us an example of a word being misused. (Related to 3; less likely to be related to 1 but likely based on at least some minimal knowledge of linguistics.)
    7. What makes the use of a word a misuse? (Asked with the expectation that you won't be able to define it; this will in itself prove that you're wrong; could be 1 or, again, just some minimal acquaintance with linguistics.)
    8. Patient explanations of some basic linguistics, which you in turn will argue against.
    9. Patient explanations of some basic Wittgenstein, which you in turn will argue against.

    I'm just going to point out two things:

    1. Bonevac is a teacher. This video (which I haven't watched) was probably made with his own students in mind, if not expressly for them. He bothered to make this video to explain something he has found his students (a) mostly don't know, (b) have trouble understanding, (c) are sometimes resistant to.

    In other words, you are the target audience for this video, but instead of taking in the material Bonevac offers you at no charge and reflecting on it, perhaps learning a little more about how language works, you are digging in and explaining your "position". Well, he knows your position. It's why he made the video. (Again, assuming, since I didn't watch it.)

    So think about that: teacher explains "I'll bet a lot you are unaware that A, and when I tell you A, you'll find it hard to accept at first (as most of my past students have), or even understand" and then you declare for ~A almost immediately.

    I'm thinking if you asked the internet whether words really have definitions, someone might answer by posting this exact video. Do you see how odd that is?

    2. On a related note, is it really your position that Daniel Bonevac has never heard of the idea that a word can be misused? Your presentation suggests that you figured out he's wrong because you know that words can be misused -- he must not know that, or he would have realized he's wrong.

    You could actually take this as a kind of argument: if just knowing that a word could be misused would prevent Bonevac from being so obviously wrong, and since presumably like everyone he does know this, maybe he's not obviously wrong, and whatever point he's making is not refuted just by knowing that a word can be misused; maybe I should think about this some more.

    This is something like the principle of charity. (You can google that.)

    Bonus point:

    3. I'm not trying to discourage you from saying what you really think, or suggesting you pretend to accept things you don't. There's nothing wrong with expecting something to make sense to you before you accept it. Ask for reasons. Ask for arguments and evidence.

    But whatever you happen to think about something at any given moment isn't by definition (see what I did there?) a position the rest of the world is required to accept or refute. It's just a starting point. The goal is greater understanding, not being right or wrong immediately. It might seem hard to square this kind of humility with standards that aspire to objectivity, but it can be done.