Oh all right.

First, it's not clear to me what your argument is.

‛The grass is green’ displays the assertion, and at the same time, under the right circumstances, makes it. — J

That doesn't sound like an argument; it sounds like you (ahem) asserting your proposed conclusion. Even so, the natural rejoinder is that the circumstances in question involve someone, you know, asserting it.

Surely we can look at a statement like ‛The grass is green’ as occurring in other contexts besides logical arguments, and when we do, we discover that assertoric force is by no means absent. — J

And again, the natural rejoinder is that the context of which you speak includes someone asserting this. You haven't actually shown why we ought to think force is part of logical form. Have you?

Second, it's a particular kind of argument you want to make: not so much that Frege is wrong or something, but that some other framework might prove more useful, or more perspicacious, might make easier to see something that Frege's framework makes hard to see, that sort of thing.

For what is worth, I agree with pretty much all of this.

Instincts are obviously prior to all of that, and instincts are to some extend already reasonable. Instincts are the original 'reasons' — ChatteringMonkey

One way to clarify all this is to distinguish clearly between rationality in the instrumental sense, meaning something like "goal advancing," and rationality in the sense of something like "meeting the standards of argument and evidence in your speech community."

In the first sense, animals are prima facie rational, if anything mostly more rational than human beings, less subject to ridiculous maladaptive beliefs or habits of thought that might lead to behavior harmful to self or group. There are limits of course.

The second sense appears to be the sole province of language-users and therefore us, for better or worse.

Two tricky points: (1) the extent to which and the ways in which the two related; and, perhaps as a particular case of (1) but perhaps not, (2) whether internalizing the patterns of reason as justification and argumentation (i.e., sense 2) genuinely contributes to belief formation at all, and perhaps to adaptive belief formation, or simply makes us more facile at producing justifications for beliefs arrived at we know not how.

Legend has it, that if you say it just like I did, he will appear. — wonderer1

I was lounging comfortably in my bottle, thank you very much, but I honor the code of my own free will.

(NB: Given the way that common speech differs from material implication, in common speech the two speakers would generally be contradicting one another.) — Leontiskos

I don't think that's quite right, depending on what you meant by "generally".

Let's continue to ignore the OP's use of "implies" and consider what's going on when someone says this sort of thing.

(1) If Smith wins the election, there will be a recession.

That claims some kind of link between one event and another. To contradict this claim, you deny that the link holds:

(2) If Smith wins the election, there may or may not be a recession.

That's the straightforward denial of (1).

But now consider

(3) If Smith wins the election, there will not be a recession.

That proposes another link, and I would suggest that in everyday reasoning the truth of (3) requires the falsity of (1), even though P→~Q does not entail ~(P→Q), which indeed does seem to be a problem for material implication.

After all, if P requires that ~Q, it can hardly require that Q.

I think people do recognize the difference even in everyday reasoning, and would accept that (2) is the simple contradiction of (1), and that (3), while also denying (1) a fortiori, is a much stronger claim.

It's clear with quantifiers too:

(4) All Englishmen are honorable.
(5) Not all Englishmen are honorable -- some are, some aren't.
(6) No Englishmen are honorable.

If no Englishmen are honorable, then it stands to reason that not all of them are, but that's a much stronger claim than simply denying that being English entails being honorable.

(Apologies if this was already covered.)

There are a few points I'd like to address further.

One is this business of psychoanalyzing. Of course in debate one philosopher not uncommonly accuses another of relying on a suppressed premise, of being in thrall to a myth (Sellars), or of consciously adopting an assumption they needn't, and also not uncommonly with the suggestion that this move is not made entirely knowingly.

That bears a vague resemblance to psychoanalysis and I think it's apt in one sense but not in another: the sense in which it fits -- and which philosophers are very likely to bristle at -- is the idea of speaking for the person you're having a discussion with; the sense in which it differs is that in popular usage "psychoanalyzing" specifically connotes delving into a person's motives, and that's not really what's going on in the standard philosophical exchange. Around here, we have a norm -- not always observed -- against that sort of questioning.

And that's the thing -- no matter how you do it, it comes off as questioning someone's motives. Just so, @Leontiskos gradually transitioned from a point about framing, to psychoanalyzing, to criticism (meant I think in the everyday negative sense), to skepticism, to undermining. Next would be "attacking" I suppose.

Which brings me to my second point.

The point that I have been making over and over again is that the one making the criticism of philosophy is intending to step outside philosophy. This seems obvious, unless someone wishes to claim that when Wittgenstein criticizes philosophy he is at the same time criticizing himself? — Leontiskos

Oddly, I had raised exactly this possibility earlier:

I think he's very interested in the sorts of things we do willy-nilly, oversimplifying, overgeneralizing, and not just to say "don't do that". It's here I think there is something deep about Wittgenstein, this feeling that there are things we might legitimately call "mistakes" we cannot really avoid. — Srap Tasmaner

If that were true, then indeed Wittgenstein would also be criticizing himself. There is a certain amount of "we" and "us" in the Investigations, even some famous ones:

115. A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.

(On the facing page, by the way, is this:

121. One might think: if philosophy speaks of the use of the word "philosophy" there must be a second-order philosophy. But it is not so: it is, rather, like the case of orthography, which deals with the word "orthography" among others without then being second-order.

for what that's worth.)

I don't think Wittgenstein holds himself apart from philosophy, above it, immune to the errors of those benighted souls who came before him. He no more stands outside philosophy than he stands outside language when he talks about that.

(Now maybe there is something going on here, underground, as it were. Maybe this is all a bit like his own Confessions: he too once lived in error as we do, but he's here to tell you salvation is possible -- and he was the worst of all, more committed to logical purity than any man who ever lived -- why, if he can be saved, then so can you -- just pass the hat along there, and give whatever you can.

I don't think so, but it's not crazy. I think he's more like a man talking about the human condition; that man is talking about himself and his own life too. That's the spirit of the philosophy/orthography remark anyway.)

Which leads to my final point, which is that I'm still inclined to treat the question "What does philosophy want?" differently from the question "What do philosophers want?" and so also the questions about why that's wanted.

We sometimes, on this forum, talk about science a little like this, as an institution or worldview with a sort of mind of its own. Right there, in the two remarks I quoted, Wittgenstein reaches for just this sort of personification: language does this, philosophy speaks of that.

I can't, off the top of my head, call to mind Wittgenstein attributing a motive to one of these personified entities, but it's not unheard of. The ersatz motives of science, of business, of government, of academia, all have been called into question on this forum, more or less daily. Maybe all that is evidence that this is not a great idea, I can't say.

(Questioning motives was more or less central to Nietzsche's genealogical critique and to Marx's materialist critique. Together with Freud, already alluded to, Ricoeur's fathers of the hermeneutics of suspicion. Does Wittgenstein belong in their company? Not to my mind, but I'm sure some would think so. @Antony Nickles speaks of Wittgenstein reforming philosophy by putting humanity back in it, and some would say either Marx or Nietzsche got there first.)

With all that out of the way, I still like the question "What does philosophy want?" It doesn't really matter to me that it arose in the context of Antony's interpretation of Wittgenstein; I intended to strip that context away entirely, but I was unsuccessful.

I think it's a good question, but maybe it isn't, I don't know. Does philosophy want something? Does it want something it can get? If it gets it, what then? Would philosophy be over, or would it carry on, protecting its prize? And of course the point of it all is that if philosophy does want something, how does that affect it? How does that color the practice of philosophy? How does philosophy deal with not having what it wants?

One could raise the question without leaving the philosophical frame, but it seems clear that that is not what is happening here. This would be the difference between the question, "What is it that we are doing as philosophers?" and the question, "What is it that those philosophers are doing?" (And the reification of "philosophy" does not change this point.) — Leontiskos

Well, the form in which the question is posed, "What does philosophy want?", has neither a first nor a third person pronoun, so it is a matter of interpretation, of context, of intention.

--- Perhaps here it's worth mentioning that @Antony Nickles offered a statement; I take responsibility for the question his statement would serve as an answer to. ---

Why do you think it was clear the question was not asked within the "philosophical frame"?

What would persuade you it was a philosophical question? Can you clarify what does and what does not belong within the philosophical frame?

Because it's a question about philosophy?

But the question isn't why you or I do, or don't do, what philosophy does, but why does philosophy do what it does? According to @Antony Nickles, philosophy does what it does because it wants certainty. If you then ask, "Why does philosophy want certainty?" that's still not a question about what you or I or Antony want. You can, of course, just deny that it makes sense to talk about "what philosophy wants" or even "what philosophy does." Would like to do that?

As you like.

I think the question is interesting: what does philosophy want? Not: what do philosophers want? Not: what do people hope to achieve by doing philosophy? But what does philosophy "itself", as we might say, want? And should we understand "philosophy" here to mean a particular tradition? A practice? A discipline?

@Antony Nickles says philosophy wants certainly, which he glosses (or does he?) as "purity". Is that a good answer? Is it the right kind of answer? What does it mean to say that philosophy wants certainly?

Do you have an answer straight off to what philosophy wants? I have a feeling you do, but are you sure it's the answer to this question?

I have claimed the primary focus in the PI is to examine why philosophy wants certainty (“purity”), and, even more, to learn something about ourselves in the process. — Antony Nickles


That is a predominantly psychological observation. — Paine

Is it?

All men by nature desire to know

Is that also predominantly psychological? No philosophy?

The sciences too. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sure. I've said as much myself.

There's a couple things going on here.

On the one hand, all models are wrong, but the process of modeling is iterative. You account for some factors, see what's left over, and then you can start looking where there's less light.

On the other hand, we want to be open to switching from Ptolemy to Copernicus.

The choice between complicating an existing model and replacing it with another isn't always simple. The new model will also be wrong, maybe at first more than the one you've got. Even figuring out whether you should refine an existing model is tricky: as you get closer, the signal to noise ratio is falling, by definition, so you have to beware of over-fitting.

I think all of this applies not just to institutional knowledge production but to us in general and to each of us as individuals.

Two points now about Wittgenstein.

First, since all models are wrong, often what's at stake when he says something like "A picture holds us captive" is not whether the model is right or wrong, but whether it applies to all cases or only some, whether it's mostly right about those cases, or only a little. It might not be a matter of abandoning a model, so much as there being other models that are more useful for some of the cases your existing model doesn't handle very well.

And in general, I think he's very interested in the sorts of things we do willy-nilly, oversimplifying, overgeneralizing, and not just to say "don't do that". It's here I think there is something deep about Wittgenstein, this feeling that there are things we might legitimately call "mistakes" we cannot really avoid. You could say we'll dialectic or iterate our way out of that, but I'm not so sure, and I'm not sure he was.

Ha! I almost did "Did anyone check to see if it's unlocked?" (Culture & Value contains many gems.)

(I have actually had such a comical experience. I once found several other managers standing around a dead terminal, trying the power buttons and talking about who to call, etc. I looked under the counter and plugged it back in. For real.)

As a further side note, there's a lovely little self-published book called "Are Your Lights On?" The title comes from a story about a highway tunnel through a mountain, in Canada I think. There's sign as you enter that says "Turn on lights" so the highway department people helpfully put a sign at the other end that says "Turn off lights." But that's obviously terrible, because it might be night-time, so round 2 of the sign was more complicated. But then what if it's raining? Whoops. Finally someone said you only need a sign that says "Are Your Lights On?" and people will do the right thing. --- The book was written by an IT guy who got tired of people coming to him wanting a particular solution (more bandwidth, more storage, whatever) to a problem they had not actually identified clearly. (Maybe we're copying too much data around. Maybe we're saving stuff we could dump.)

Lots of philosophy involves this "looking where the light is best" (or "hammer entails nail") sort of behavior, or solutions in search of problems.

It took me years of struggling to interpret him to change my mind. — Fooloso4

I was hooked immediately, from the moment I opened the Blue and Brown Books:

What is the meaning of a word?

Let us attack this question by asking, first, what is an explanation of the meaning of a word; what does the explanation of a word look like?

The way this question helps us is analogous to the way the question "how do we measure a length?" helps us to understand the problem "what is length?"

It's tempting just to quote the whole first page.

I thought then and still think now that this is brilliant. Here is someone I could learn something about thinking from.

I did not read this passage and think, "Ah. Wittgenstein is grounding the meaning of concepts in our customary practices." I've never gone to him for "doctrines".

There's so much to like here, but the main thing is to give your mind a little shake, get out of the sort of rut that we tend to get in thinking not just about philosophical problems but about anything. When the front door is shut tight, do you just look for bigger and bigger things to hit it with? That might work eventually or it might not. But why not have a look around? Maybe there's back door or a window open.

Anscombe somewhere links LW to Plato (rather than Aristotle).

You know both much better than I do, but I just want to record my sympathy with this view.

In particular, I want to say that there is something about the experience of reading Wittgenstein, and thinking along with him, that is reminiscent of how it feels to read Plato. The excitement of exploration. It's quite rare.

I was speaking in terms of any model you can write down — fdrake

Yeah, just wanted the distinction in print. "Model" is a pretty tricky thing that covers a lot of ground.

the role of the social environment in infants’ acquiring patterns of permanence — Number2018

I don't actually know what to say about that with object permanence, but a big yes yes yes to social context. Tomasello has this beautiful stuff about triangulating, how the infant doesn't just look at the toy but makes eye contact with the caregiver, apparently in reference to the toy. You can see this in real life any time you like. Very cool stuff.

The questions you raise about introspection being derivative of communication, kinda, that was all pretty hand-wavey for sure. It's the hunch that I quickly had as I found myself addressing how to interpret experiments with infants, which is a little controversial.

Have to think about that a lot more, and you might be right to bring in Searle.

Whatever model you have needs individuated states in it though — fdrake

For what we do, sure, but I keep thinking the brain is so much messier. The individuated steps there are each neurotransmitter binding to a site or not, an individual ion passing through a pump or not, all subject to randomness, with overall effects that are more naturally described in analog rather than digital terms. (Slightly more or less this or that.)

I think we tend to talk about talk as if we talk digital. But I remain unconvinced that language is principally made of chunks, or properties/predicates/relations which induce chunks. — fdrake

Yeah that's better. I was simplifying and exaggerating. I do believe that our misunderstandings about language are not fortuitous, even this one, but almost required. Language is a system that misrepresents itself to us, encourage us to misunderstand it. (One of LW's motivating interests.)

I'm gratified you found so much to agree with.

I was very impressed by the idea (in Mercier and Sperber) that participants in a discussion systematically simplify and exaggerate their positions, in both the definiteness of their view and their confidence in it, and that this is strategic: you're responsible for bringing a view to the table, others bring others, and you argue to some kind of consensus that would enable group action. (Reasons are in part excuses you offer others to make going along with you palatable.) We're crap at judging our own views but pretty good at criticizing others.

It reminds me of the way apo talks about "sharpness". It also explains, for me, why I found so attractive Dummett's occasional comparison of assertion to wagering: you can calculate the odds to a fare-thee-well and make your model as complicated as you like, but then you have to bet, which is sharp, rounding all probabilities to 1 or 0, and that's the nature of decisions.

And it's pretty obvious that something like this is right at the root of language use. We talk digital even if we mostly live analog.

I am never disappointed when I return to Hume. As a young man I foolishly preferred the Enquiries, so I am eternally grateful to you for getting me to engage more deeply with the Treatise.

Well, here's an absurdly long post I didn't mean to write. @fdrake I don't think you're quoted in here but now you've been mentioned, in case you want to slog through this. It's probably not worth it, but I've written it now, so what the hell.

reduction — Count Timothy von Icarus

I was referring to the reduction of one science to another, and all of them eventually to physics.

Wouldn't discussions of God fall into this category? That seems like a question of existence — Count Timothy von Icarus

Now and then. I think it usually presents somewhat differently than a philosopher's question like "Do sets exist?" When a believer asks "Do you believe in God?" or "Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?" they're not talking about whether God exists -- that goes without saying; they're talking about you, the state of your soul, your openness to receiving His grace, and so on. We could talk about that more, especially since the non-believer's side is a bit different.

But what's the idea here? I made an observation about how prevalent certain sorts of discussions are among ordinary people, with the suggestion that particular branches of philosophy represent a more systematic treatment of issues people find of concern in their daily lives, and which they often discuss, sometimes with considerable subtlety. And I suggested that the sort of discussions philosophers have about ontology are rarely about the sorts of questions ordinary people have and already discuss.

Is that sort of thing open to a counterexample? Not unless that counterexample is extremely widespread. You noted that belief in God is quite widespread; but that's not quite the same as saying lots of people on a daily basis discuss and disagree about His existence. If I had made a similar suggestion about ethics, for instance, I'd obviously be wrong; people talk about right and wrong all the time. The drunken rednecks across the street are arguing about it right now.

Now let's take a step back. Why did it occur to you to raise a counterexample to my observation? There wasn't much riding on my being right. I hadn't used the claim as a lemma in an argument. If you show that I was wrong, how do you expect that to affect whatever position you think I hold?

There were other arguments offered, which follow a different pattern, but also, I believe, in furtherance of the same goal you had:

On many forms of realism predication is an attribution of existence, and if this is right then all discussions involve existence claims — Leontiskos

Sartre asserts that our everyday decisions sustain a two-level ontology. — Number2018

The argument form here is "There's another way to look at this that I like better."

And I think that other way is captured, in part, in your usual suggestion that everything we do and say involves a metaphysics, generally unacknowledged and unexamined, and thus properly called our "metaphysical assumptions."

And basically I think that's false, but it's understandable that philosophers are inclined to think so. This is not the same thing as saying that metaphysics is nonsense, or impossible, or any such thing. Different issue.

Here's a sketch of an argument, with a short preamble.

A couple years ago @Manuel started a thread on Hume. I'm grateful to him for getting me to go back to Hume because I've been referring to that discussion ever since.

Hume tried to find some rational justification for our quite evident belief in object permanence, but could find none, and so concluded that Nature deems some matters too important to be left to our fallible reason.

And he's right. Infants acquire the idea of object permanence even before the idea of object identity. They're not born with it, so far as we can tell, but it develops predictably, and so that pattern of development is more or less "built in." And it comes before language, and evidently would have to come before anything like rational thought, so it's not like you could reason your way there anyway.

Permanent objects, in other words, are not a conclusion of ours. From just a few months old, we seem to experience the world as full of distinct and permanent objects. It is something a bit like an assumption, from then on, but an assumption, as Hume notes, we cannot choose to drop.

You could here point to Kant, Peter Strawson, Collingwood, and many others as engaging in a "desriptive metaphysics" (Strawson's phrase) that would catalog these sorts of basic assumptions. (Space and time, for a couple of gigantic examples.)

But I don't look at it quite that way, and that's why I don't buy the "implicit metaphysics" approach.

What we might be inclined to call "assumptions" like this are, I would suggest, our attempts to understand the structure of our brain's modeling of the world -- really of our experience, since our brains could give a shit about the world, and really just of that experience as it affects our bodies and their functioning. There might be something like "permanent objects" in those predictive models, or there might not be, even if it seems that way to us upon introspection; there are some things we can learn about those models, but there's probably a limit. Doesn't matter. Our awareness, much less our understanding, isn't necessary for some basic parts of the model to work. (Why we have any kind of awareness is a very interesting question, but to one side of my "argument" here.)

Now, how does all of this predictive modeling the brain does show up in how we talk about things? I think it mostly doesn't: the two are largely unrelated, and that's why I don't think it's helpful to talk about metaphysical assumptions in our discussions, even if by that you mean beliefs acquired from the models our brains build, below the level of our awareness.

I can be clearer, I hope, about what I mean by "largely unrelated". Of course, the systems that produce and consume communicative speech are dependent on the systems that model your physical environment and your body, and what you say is ultimately dependent on the state of those systems, what you experience more or less as "beliefs" about yourself and the world, although "beliefs" is a pretty clumsy description of what your brain is up to.

And speech is behavior, of course, so your brain is busy predicting the effect of your speech, just as it does for the rest of your behavior -- and those predictions guide the behavior you engage in. But speech in particular involves predicting the behavior of other minded beings like yourself. --- This is another capacity humans develop pretty early, perhaps even as early as six months!

These interactions -- with other minded beings -- have a different character from our interactions with much of our environment. We've built up enormously complex forms of interaction, especially with language, and that requires a very different sort of management than, say, walking about, picking berries, steering clear of snakes, etc.

And it's around here that I would place reason. I don't believe the modeling our brain spends most of its time doing looks much like a logical system, but when we communicate with each other, particularly when using language, there are standards of consistency, and expectations that we can, upon demand, support many of the things we say with reasons. The reasons we offer for our beliefs probably bear little resemblance much less connection to how our brains settle on their current favored predictions; reasons are rationalizations, but they meet the standards of discussion, not of "belief formation." which is a completely different thing.

So that's what I mean by "largely unrelated". Our brains, like the brains of many other animals, are busy keeping us alive by running predictive models of the state of our body and our environment as it might impact that. But we're not privy to much of any of that, and what we are aware of is something cast in a form usable for communication with other minded beings like ourselves. Made to order reasons designed to convince others our beliefs are reasonable for us and for them to hold together, as members of a social group. And so far as that goes, it's clear there's a different system at work here, because if you convince someone to hold a similar belief, they'll get there not by somehow (psychically?) sharing in whatever experience you had, but just by listening to you talk. That's pretty weird, but the main thing is that it suggests there's an entirely separate route to belief available: you saw the car accident happen, I only heard you talk about seeing it, and we both hold beliefs that it happened.

Another way I could put it is this: if there are invariants in the models our brains use, something we might call artifacts of those models, then those would in some sense be our "metaphysical assumptions." But I think there's a whole separate set of invariants at work in our linguistic communication with one another, and they need not be based on how our brains are modeling our bodies and environments; they are what we've landed on as the structure of our communication, and I think by and large the structure of our introspective thought reflects that structure, not the modeling our brains are doing below the level of our awareness. Our metaphysical assumptions, if there are such things, are probably no more accessible to us than they are to non-linguistic beings. There do seem to be a whole host of assumptions underlying our speech and our conscious thought, but no reason to think they are the "assumptions" of our unconscious modeling.

There may be a giant hole in this argument. I gestured at the evidence that infants have a concept of object permanence, later acquire object identity, later still recognize other minds, and so on. That's all infra-linguistic, so aren't these very studies evidence that we have such concepts and that they are among the metaphysical assumptions I would place in our unconscious brains?

Maybe, but the tricky part here is that we're interpreting the (mostly attentive) behavior of infants, and then talking about it, so what can we do? We're going to describe it in the terms we have, even though the infants in question don't. So I think here we're seeing something very similar to introspection. We know that infants behave in certain ways, and it's consistent so there's something going on; to describe what's going on we reach for the concepts we relied upon when setting up the experiments, and describe the behavior of the infants in those terms. Doesn't mean the infant's brain is actually modeling "object permanence," but it's doing something we all talk about that way.

I suppose I'm suggesting that thinking a concept like "object permanence" is actually instantiated in the infant brain might be a sort of category mistake. The whole system will behave in a way that we recognize or categorize as embodying such a conception, but that doesn't mean it's "in there" somewhere.

Sigh. Look at what you quoted:

But there is quite definitely no great body of everyday discussion of whether certain kinds of things exist — Srap Tasmaner

People might talk about whether there's money in the bank or beer in the fridge, but they don't talk about whether money or banks or beer or refrigerators exist.

And even for particular cases, you're far more likely to find someone saying "It hasn't rained for a while" than someone who says "There is a lack of rain." What's a lack when it's at home? Always something going on out in the fields -- sometimes it's rain and sometimes it's lacks.

there exists no fire in the furnace — Leontiskos

Uh huh. What if there does but it's out?

I would say that the commitment to truth is behind us, not in front of us. We can churn up the water and get it as muddy as we like, but we have presupposed truth the whole while. And if there is a question that is too complex to answer, then it is to that extent not truth-apt. But other questions surely are. — Leontiskos

I'm more inclined -- you'll be shocked to hear -- to say the opposite.

There is behavior, such as De León's, that we can recognize as "truth seeking". This project started, he relates, by accident. He had finished a project on migration and intended to move on to something else, but he took one last trip down to Mexico, where he spent some time talking to a bunch of young men hanging around the railroad tracks. He told them about his work, and they said, "Why didn't you talk to us?" They were all smugglers. So he took Herodotus's advice, and rather than just talk to them, which we can all see would be a useful step, he went to see for himself.

There is, I submit, no correlate to this, behavior we can recognize as "truth getting".

You're inclined to say there has to be a truth out there to seek, like it's just sitting there, to be found or overlooked or deliberately hidden. Unfortunately for you, "seeking" is an intensional verb, so as Quine patiently explained, just because you're looking for a spy, that doesn't mean there's a spy for you to find.

Of course, if I wanted to make that argument, it would only get me that maybe there's a spy and maybe there isn't, maybe truth exists and maybe it doesn't. I could say that, but what would I have achieved? And, more importantly, what would I say next? Shall we talk some more about the thing that maybe exists and maybe doesn't, which by definition we have no way to determine?

Instead, the behavior, where we started, is a rich territory, with lots to learn, and lots to say. There may or may not be a truth out there, but how people comport themselves toward it is endlessly fascinating.

(I was just yesterday going to look at Hobbes, but I got distracted by the introduction by "the late W. G. Pogson Smith", who must have been an old Oxford don. A couple choice moments:

He offers us a theory of man's nature that is at once consistent, fascinating, and outrageously false.

Ah, they don't write like that anymore. And this:

Truth is a necessity; but necessary truth is a will-o'-the-wisp. Seekers after truth --- how Hobbes despised them, all that deluded race who dreamt of a law whose seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world: all things in heaven and earth doing her homage! Rather, boldly conclude that truth is not to be sought, but made. Let men agree what is to be truth, and truth it shall be.

Marvelous. No wonder, as the other introduction notes, the English Parliament "even claimed that the theories found in Leviathan were a likely cause of the Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666."

There's your enemy, the damnable atheist Hobbes. It's all his fault.)

do you enjoy its applications in other disciplines? I'm reading a Deleuze inspired social science book on addiction at the minute. — fdrake

Desiring-machines run amok?

What I most enjoy, honestly, is everyday reasoning. I eavesdrop a lot -- the rednecks across the street talking about Vietnam, the guy lecturing his buddy on the phone about friendship, etc. One of my first posts at the new site was about my youngest son and I playing catch and, when I sailed one over his head, by way of excusing me, he said, "If I were taller I could have caught it." That strikes as obviously true, but I immediately thought, "But if you were taller, you wouldn't be Michael." What to do, what to do.

My indolent studies over the years (philosophy, cognitive science, evolutionary biology, statistics, linguistics, economics, anthropology, sociology, blah blah blah) have all been guided by trying to understand how people make sense of things, and in particular how they share the sense they've made with each other. Why do you believe what you do? Do you know? Can you know? When people demand or give reasons for beliefs, how does that work, and why do they do it the way they do?

So rather than applied philosophy, I'm interested in what you might call philosophy found in the wild.

Vaguely on topic, I argued somewhere a long time ago, that ontology is peculiar in this respect. People -- by which I mean, you know, people -- talk and argue about how to live, about how government should work, about how they know what they claim to know, about what makes a book or a movie or a piece of music good or bad, about what the right thing to do is in all kinds of situations. You can see the sort of raw material for whole branches of philosophy just laying around in the street. Except for ontology. The only everyday arguments about ontology I could come up with are things like Bigfoot and other cryptids, the Bermuda Triangle, today I might add the secret adrenochrome-sipping cabal of satanist liberals, and usual troubles over Sherlock Holmes and the sense in which Santa Claus and unicorns "aren't real." Philosophers argue about whether there are chairs or numbers or natural kinds, but people don't. (Scientists are likely to say, there are, kinda, for some of those, but not in the way you think, and then we all just need to deal with that.) But there is quite definitely no great body of everyday discussion of whether certain kinds of things exist, nothing anywhere approaching the discussions of right & wrong, of politics, of aesthetics, even of whether you have enough evidence to conclude that your boyfriend is cheating on you. (Austin was fond of reading legal opinions, and thought philosophers were ignoring a great body of practical reasoning.) Ontology, as we here think of it, is a game that only philosophers play. I've seen it argued that physicists, some of them, are now doing metaphysics, and if so, good for them.

you've already argued against contextless truth — Leontiskos

Did I? Are you sure?

I would make the point with Aristotle that what you have said already commits you to contextless truth. — Leontiskos

There's no need to be insulting.

There is nothing less programmatic than the simple idea that truth exists and can be known. — Leontiskos

I mean, it's tempting just to let that stand without commentary.

Are you standing up for common sense here, Leontiskos? Against what? Against me? Against a damnable relativism? Has common sense ever needed defending against philosophers?

What common sense usually needs defending against is science. I just heard on the radio an interview with a UCLA anthropoligist who's spent time along the migration trails from Central America to the US. He said his new book was intended just to add some nuance to the public conversation about migration, because nothing in life is black and white, and smugglers aren't just good or bad.

Which way do you want to go here? If this guy is good at his job, and it sounded to me like he is, then we might agree to say he is pursuing the truth, and is in a position to tell us truths we were unaware of. Fine.

But does that mean the statement "Smugglers are bad" must be true or false? Why would it? And what do we say about Jason De León's book? That it's the truth? The whole truth and nothing but the truth? A version of the truth? A part of the truth? But a partial truth can be misleading, so the understanding of truth is not monotonic even if the acquisition of truth is. How do we judge his work? None of us saw what he saw; we can't go back in time and skulk behind a tree to see if his reporting is accurate. We could interview his informants, if we could find them, but even the people that were there might not have noticed something that he did, and anyway some of them are dead now.

What does common sense say here? What does the political or moral philosopher say about human smuggling? What is the truth and how do you propose to get it?

This can happen to any thinker, but it seems viciously pernicious in Wittgenstein's case, being the style, the ambiguity of the text, and the demand to believe that this is a sui generis type of philosophical discourse that cannot be dealt with in the same manner as other philosophers... — schopenhauer1

While framed as a denunciation, this amounts to an endorsement of the resounding success of a man who said

I should not wish to have spared anyone the trouble of thinking.

truth is always truth in a language, under a particular interpretation. It doesn't even make sense -- heh, in this theoretical context -- to say otherwise, to say "just plain true, dammit!" — Srap Tasmaner

It seems to me that this is already duplex veritas; it is already a premise of quantifier variance. Hence it is part of the controversy, and someone like Sider (and me!) would already disagree with you here. Sider's (really Aristotle's) notion of "carving reality at the joints" is presupposing contextless truth, as does the idea of "ontological structure." — Leontiskos

I guess I had that coming, but it puts me in an awkward position.

I'm already on record, in this very thread, dismissing much of contemporary mainstream Anglo-American philosophy. Easy enough for me, dilettante that I am, but I've given my reasons: science stumbles merrily ahead, leaving the philosophers to argue amongst themselves. If there is something left for philosophy to do, I haven't been able to figure out what that is, and god knows I've tried. (There are people here, @Joshs and @180 Proof and god help me @apokrisis come to mind, who have a program philosophy plays a vital part in. I envy them their conviction, but I'm just a guy who thinks about stuff.)

But I can still play at philosophy, and it's an old habit. Even though the content of philosophy mostly leaves me cold now, I still enjoy the practice of philosophy, the challenge of understanding and evaluating arguments, all that.

So I could do that here, and we could play at arguing about the nature of truth, but my heart's not in it. I don't have a horse in this race; I'm just a guy who's spent an unhealthy amount of time around the track.

I could argue against "contextless truth" and "carving nature at the joints" but I wouldn't be arguing for an alternative philosophical position. And I'd spend a lot of time arguing against misunderstanding positions I don't even hold, just out of scrupulousness I guess. Trying to think well is about as much of a program as I have.

TL;DR. Bait not taken. If you want to opine on Absolute Truth, I won't get in your way.

I had a similar discussion with Joshs re truth being true withing a given metaphysics versus being true universally. It seems to me that if you tell a lot of people, "yes, what you're saying is true...but only in your context," you're actually telling them that what they think is false, because they don't think the truth is context dependent in this way. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well. Several things going on here.

It's an interesting point, but how broadly it applies isn't clear.

I'm desperately trying not to become an expert on QV, but I want to start by pointing out something a little odd about Hirsch's formulation of charity that I posted before:

A charity-based metasemantics assigns L the interpretation that, when all is said-and-done, when every disposition to correct and revise is accounted for, makes the best sense of the linguistic behavior of L-speakers by making their considered utterances come out true in actual and possible circumstances, ceteris paribus. — Hirsch & Warren

Surely "true" here is short for "true in L, under I", but I find it odd they didn't just say that, since all the model-theoretic machinery seems ready to hand.

So that's caveat number 1 to your point: truth is always truth in a language, under a particular interpretation. It doesn't even make sense -- heh, in this theoretical context -- to say otherwise, to say "just plain true, dammit!"

Caveat number 2: it's widely understood that even statements of fact -- observations and such -- in the context of science are relative to a given theoretical framework. There's no pure non-theory-laden observation to be had, and no one pretends otherwise; rather, it's the theory that enables the observations to be made at all. (More Kant, etc. And absolutely every philosopher of science.)

Caveat number 3: Goodman, in Ways of Worldmaking, makes the point that reduction is essentially a myth in science, and if that's so, he can claim for his relativism that rather than it being anti-science, it empowers him to take each science at "full force", to endorse the work of biologists and chemists, for instance, without treating them as second-class citizens whose science isn't quite as true as physics. That's appealing.

Caveat number 4: one of your interlocutors is claiming to have the regular old absolute truth, not truth relative to anything, and it's only because of that claim that contextualizing their substantive claim is either necessary (for the listening relativist) or offensive (to them making the claim).

Well, what do you intend to do about that? Goodman's line is to say that their being right -- assuming they are right -- doesn't preclude there being other perspectives that are also right. (A picture doesn't invalidate a verbal description of the same scene -- just different versions, doing different things.)

I think you want to give them the respect of telling them they're wrong when you think they are, and that's fine. Pluralism doesn't have to mean everyone's always right. It just means understanding something about how you're right, and that there may be other ways to be right. (Note that I am not here addressing charity and Hirsch's use of it.)

In short, you can separate their claim into two: the substantive claim, and an additional claim that all other versions are wrong. You can take both claims quite seriously, accepting one and denying the other. If they want to fight about it, you're not fighting about the substantive claim, but about their claimed monopoly on the truth, which you have taken just as seriously and denied.

That's enough "How To Be a Relativist."

I am reluctantly going to take a stab at a real paper by Hirsch. I'll get back to y'all on his particular take on charity.

The aversion to disagreement is a child of the aversion to wars, and "charity" is just a mask for "peace." — Leontiskos

I wouldn't say that logic is the last line of defense, but if we can't even avoid relativism when it comes to logic then we're probably too far gone. — Leontiskos

I've posted this before but here it is again:

There's a touching passage in Tarski's little Introduction to Logic that I'll quote in full here:

I shall be very happy if this book contributes to the wider diffusion of logical knowledge. The course of historical events has assembled in this country the most eminent representatives of contemporary logic, and has thus created here especially favorable conditions for the development of logical thought. These favorable conditions can, of course, be easily overbalanced by other and more powerful factors. It is obvious that the future of logic, as well as of all theoretical science, depends essentially upon normalizing the political and social relations of mankind, and thus upon a factor which is beyond the control of professional scholars. I have no illusions that the development of logical thought, in particular, will have a very essential effect upon the process of the normalization of human relationships; but I do believe that the wider diffusion of the knowledge of logic may contribute positively to the acceleration of this process. For, on the one hand, by making the meaning of concepts precise and uniform in its own field and by stressing the necessity of such a precision and uniformization in any other domain, logic leads to the possibility of better understanding between those who have the will to do so. And, on the other hand, by perfecting and sharpening the tools of thought, it makes men more critical--and thus makes less likely their being misled by all the pseudo-reasonings to which they are in various parts of the world incessantly exposed today.

That's Tarski writing from Harvard in 1940, having fled Poland before the German invasion.

A priest and a vicar, old friends, were having yet another argument about theology. Finally, the priest said, "Why do we argue like this?" "When you think about it," replied the vicar, "We're both working for the same guy." "Exactly my point," said the priest, "So how about this: you go forth, and you teach His teachings in your way, and I'll go forth, and I'll teach His teachings in His."

intelligible — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'm not one of the people making these analogies, but I don't see any harm in distinguishing "how to play chess" from "why to play chess" or even from "why to play this game of chess this way." I can belabor the point if you'd like.

In fact, here's a little belaboring: consider Grice's distinction between what a sentence (literally) means and what someone means by uttering that sentence on a particular occasion. Now consider a question like "Why did you move the bishop to b5?" Would you answer "Because bishops move diagonally"? No you would not; you'd explain something about the position and why you thought Bb5 was a good move. (Ryle talks about this, the difference between your moves being in accord with the rules and your moves being determined by the rules.) ---- But also, a beginner might ask, "Why didn't you take his knight with your rook?" And you might point out that a pawn is in the way, and rooks can't jump.

Now consider the different sorts of questions you might ask about what someone said, or the different sorts of explanations you might have to give in different circumstances. Some of them, particularly with children, are very much on the "how to play" level, some on the "how to play well" level, and others are past that, and amount to actually playing -- but again, only in accord with the sort of rules you yourself were taught as a child. (Or not. Rules change. And sometimes you help change them.)

Your move.

what do you believe our heroes are promoting? — fdrake

Conceptual relativism on stilts. Which honestly I'm not absolutely against (unlike both @Banno and @Leontiskos) but I'm unsympathetic with the whole approach and nothing I've read was at all persuasive.

At least in other games, in order to avoiding even implicit metagaming in group play, there can sometimes be requirements for draws too so that players don't accept draws easily due to both being sure to advance on a draw. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well, sure, and chess is notorious for this. But there is no game the rules of which can compel players to try to win.

Chess competitions also produce the opposite problem: it is an established fact that white begins the game with a slight advantage, but because of tournament or match standing a player with the black pieces might "have to" play for a win, and so take risks he or she generally wouldn't.

Even the existence of the rating system forces higher-rated players to take risks against lower-rated players, because a draw will cost them points.

All of that is external to chess itself, the play of which is perfectly settled, and has been for a long time.

I think this it he first time that paper has been quoted in this thread. — Leontiskos

FWIW, here first, which happens to be a post of mine you responded to, but I quoted it in the section responding to Banno, so understandable that you missed it.

The SEP article deals at length with Hirsch and Sider, but I won't be reading it.

just as we can only understand chess by watching it being played rather than staring at the queen under a microscope

I see what you did there.

Sorry. Eli Hirsch and Jared Warren, Quantifier Variance.

namely by way of differing introduction and elimination rules — Leontiskos

Their treatment of quantifiers is straightforwardly functionalist and unobjectionable: they note that if you can derive phi(x)Fx from Fa, then phi() is the existential quantifier in the language you're dealing with. So they rely on at least one standard introduction rule, and I'd assume all the rest.

Is that bafflement gesturing toward incommensurability? — fdrake

Not by me. Incommensurability is not a useful or interesting idea.

I'm of the opinion that there is something substantive here to talk about. — fdrake

I seriously doubt it. QV seems to be the love-child of incommensurability and a bizarre over-promotion of the principle of charity. I don't know why I'm even posting, it's so stupid.

Here's another sort of variance with its feet on the ground (since you mentioned OLP a while back): in everyday speech "all" carries existential import, but not in Frege's logic; in everyday speech "some" implicates "not all" but not in Frege's logic. (I did not say "entails"; the implication is cancelable, but using "some" this way is patently uncooperative.)

It is a fact that not everyone in every context means the same thing by "all" or by "some". But this is nowhere near the sort of variance our heroes are promoting, in my limited understanding.

Eh. It might be a crap example, and maybe there only are crap examples.

What interested me was two things:

(1) This shouldn't be the usual one side saying "There are more things in heaven and earth..." and the other saying "No there aren't."

(2) I like the idea of this exchange:
"You left out some values."
"No I didn't."
"But I can see that you did. That's why we got different results. You left out these two."
"But you don't count those."
"But they're in the data set."
"But they don't count."
I like the idea of each side being baffled by what the other could possibly be thinking.

Here's an example of quantifier variance from the wild, from the spreadsheet open in front of me: you have a set of data points; you can (a) average them (or whatever) talking all the values, or you can (b) average them (or whatever) after throwing out the highest and lowest. That's a difference in *how* you range over the given values.

It's still in some sense a change of domain, but it's change you sort of delegate to the quantifier itself, treating it as a filter. In one case "all" means all, but in the other "all" means all but the usual exclusions.

You could absolutely see analysts at loggerheads if one of them filtered, and assumed everyone did, and the other didn't, with a similar assumption.

Nothing to do with *kinds* of objects here, but to do with *how* we range over a collection of values.

Chess is interesting because it involves decision making under uncertainty, and it is moderately surprising that its complexity is just great enough to provide scope for style and creativity. Computers have kinda ruined it for me though.

Funny enough, international bodies tried, and then gave up on developing a single canonical set of rules for chess, finding it too difficult. Differences in rules—variants aside—will tend to only affect high level play (e.g. how a draw is forced, etc.), but they are real differences that have not been settled. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Do you mean this?

The Laws of Chess cannot cover all possible situations that may arise during a game, nor can they regulate all administrative questions. — FIDE Handbook

This is a catch-all for weird practical issues, a lot of which are covered, but shit happens.

I assume the reference to draws concerns this:

9.2 The game is drawn, upon a correct claim by a player having the move, when the same position for at least the third time (not necessarily by a repetition of moves): — Ibid

It goes on at some length, but kids in particular pick up on this idea of repetition of moves, which the rule immediately addresses.

What "real differences" did you have in mind?

It is night-time here. What is your point?

The way we use the word "berries" is what changes. Not the way we use "is". — Banno

Maybe, but it's not really "A is B" that's at issue here, but "Something is B".

Now how exactly do we manage that? Attributing a predicate to an identified individual looks straightforward, but in ordinary life we only reach for the existential quantifier in the absence of such an individual. (One of you drank the last beer. Someone left these footprints. There's something really heavy in this box.)

Is predication still the same thing here? Is this even predication?

I'm always inclined to translate these things in my head to a sort of "second order" predication -- that is, to a claim that some class (last-beer-drinkers, footprint-leavers, heavy-things-in-this-box) is non-empty. Not a claim about a thing -- as yet unidentified -- but a claim about a class. I think it's a habit I picked up in case the class does turn out to be empty -- I'm not left apparently talking about something that doesn't, ahem, exist. The class is usable either way, with or without members.

If you're looking for something you can pry open a drawer with, there's deliberate, strategic vagueness in the class -- now we're almost "third order": we want something we can use to do something that will count as getting the damn drawer open, and what that will turn out to be depends a bit on what we find. "I'll know it when I see it" means I'll define the class I'm identifying when I find a member of it. That's a neat trick.

I still don't see anything hereabouts to do with existence. Classes turned up, and they're supposed to be an ontological conundrum, but they're just a way of talking about my behavior, my predictions about what will work, what I decide and then actually try to do. They're handy for the mental work we do, as you suggest, whatever purpose we're pursuing at the moment.