A couple quick thoughts while I ponder this...

There's some slippage between whether we're talking about how we do, could, or should use the word "construction" or talking about the concept of construction. I don't know a simple way to deal with that.

(Part of the appeal of an extensional approach is that there's no issue there: talking about a class is the same as talking about applying a predicate.)

Now with words, something almost all of us do is the "in a sense" move. So you could say that "in a sense" rivers "construct" riverbeds, where "in a sense" might as well mean "metaphorically." Or it indicates there is a useful analogy here. But you could also say that "literally" rivers construct riverbeds, and that requires adjusting the received meaning of "construct."

In one sense, that just amounts to skipping a step -- metaphors are just not-yet-literal usages, not yet entrenched, and some metaphors never receive wide enough usage or acceptance to become entrenched as literal. On the other hand, a metaphor that is used widely enough to become literal doesn't usually displace existing usage; it gets added on. Displacing existing usage carries a heavier burden.

No point. You're on a logic kick, and I think it's cool that the sort of syllogisms you're messing with have recently been featured in a TV show (an excellent TV show). And one needs no reason to quote Lewis Carroll.

As for the OP, I thought that was settled. Were you expecting something else?

ADDD: You could conclude with Freud that all living things possess a death drive.

I think before answering, I'd better ask what you imagine these standards to be.

Elsewhere, you have argued at length that truth is just certainty, that it is at best intersubjective. Are you going to suggest here that there are objective standards for us to conform to?

Syllogisms from Orphan Black (you have to answer true or false):
Some bags are pockets, no pocket is a pouch.
Conclusion: All bags are not pouches.

Some pigs are predators, no predator is a pet.
Conclusion: Some pigs are not pets.

Some maggots are flies, no fly is welcome.
Conclusion: no maggots are welcome.

Some doctors are fools, all fools are rich.
Conclusion: Some doctors are rich.

All mangoes are golden, nothing golden is cheap.
Conclusion: All mangoes are cheap.

Then there's Dodgson/Carroll:

The only animals in this house are cats;
Every animal is suitable for a pet, that loves to gaze at the moon;
When I detest an animal, I avoid it;
No animals are carnivorous, unless they prowl at night;
No cat fails to kill mice;
No animals ever take to me, except what are in this house;
Kangaroos are not suitable for pets;
None but carnivora kill mice;
I detest animals that do not take to me;
Conclusion: Animals, that prowl at night, always love to gaze at the moon.

Here's another take: when the kids have to pick up, they pretty much always have to distinguish between stuff they want to keep and stuff to throw away. The latter category amounts to: stuff they do not value.

So how does that work? If you like a picture, you keep it; if you don't, you don't. But you can tell one picture from another without deciding whether you like them; and you can tell apart all the pictures you like. I still don't see values as the source of the distinctions we can or do make here. What am I missing?

I hope I don't seem pigheaded here, SX. I find some of what you're advocating here quite appealing. Sorry not to have gotten back to the issue of construction yet, too, but I want to get clearer about this business first.

You express no understanding of how such a convention could come into existence. — Metaphysician Undercover

It is the in the nature of conventions that it barely matters how it got started. Members of a population face recurrent coordination problems. If there is only a single course of action that is clearly best for each party, the solution will not be a convention -- that's just doing what's best.

What makes their solution a convention is that there are multiple acceptable solutions available. Traffic flows smoothly on two-lane roads whether everyone drives on the left or on the right. There may be various particular reasons for doing one or the other at a given time and place, but they pale in comparison to the utility of settling on one or the other.

The prescriptive rule has causal impetus which the descriptive rule does not. — Metaphysician Undercover

I'd talk of reasons rather than causes here, but at any rate conventions generally are normative. My reasons for following the convention will always be connected to others following suit. If for some reason people start driving on the other side of the road, I had better do that too.

You can find all the gory details in Lewis's Convention, if you like, but I'm happy to continue as his spokesman since it makes perfect sense to me.

I think that other drivers make this choice in the same way that I do, they are trained to do this, just like me. We are all trained to drive on the right. We all see it as the correct thing to do, and expect to get the privilege of being allowed to drive if we do it correctly, and so we do. — Metaphysician Undercover

Sure. The point you're missing here is that you're also taught "WE all drive on the right side of the road," you're taught that other people will do this, and that's why you need to do it too.

Do you think it's a coincidence that all these people individually being taught what the right thing to do is are all taught to drive on the right side of the road?

I don't think we learn to drive by observing others, and using the invalid deduction "if others are doing it this way, then I ought to do it this way too". — Metaphysician Undercover

Pretty sure I never said anything remotely like that, nor does my claim require it.

You're taught to drive on the right rather than the left just because that's how we drive around here. We all continue to drive on the right because we all continue to derive benefit from it, and pass it on to others, so we have no motivation for changing, but other conventions do change if a better alternative arises and is adopted.

Your argument here is that this must be either a prescriptive rule (your view) or a descriptive rule (what you wrongly take to be my view). I'm telling you it's both and has to be both. It only makes sense to tell people to do it if it's what everybody does. If you lived in the UK, you wouldn't teach your kid to drive on the right.

Now if you want to say, we teach people to drive on the correct side of the road, whatever that is, go ahead. Can you teach someone to drive on the correct side of the road without teaching them which side that is?

So I make the decision to drive on the right hand side, based on what I believe others expect of me. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah. What's more, you expect them to. If you expected everyone to drive on the left, driving on the right would be the wrong thing to do in whatever way you like.

My expectation is not that others will behave in the same way as me. — Metaphysician Undercover

Really? You don't think everyone drives on the right and expects you to?

We're not talking here about driving defensively. There is a general expectation that people in the USA drive on the right; that's not the same as an expectation of each driver that they always will.

Do you really think your choice of which side of the road to drive on has nothing at all to do with other drivers?

It's not inherently right to drive on the right or the left side of the road. In the USA we drive on the right and expect everyone else to drive on the right and do so because we have these mutual expectations of each other. What makes it a convention is that we could just as well drive on the left like they do in the UK with suitably translated expectations and intentions.

Suppose I tell my kids to pick up all the stuff on the floor. Within that directive, there is no distinction made, or made use of, between paper, pencils, and toys.

Now suppose, contrary to fact, that I'm the sort of person who has labeled boxes for putting things in. When the kids ask what to do with everything, I could say, "Put everything wherever it goes."

If they put away nothing, on the grounds that there was no box marked "Stuff," I think that's a candidate for a category mistake. The class "stuff" is just the ad hoc class, "things on the floor that could be in boxes." Everything in that class also belongs to a class with a box assigned to it, without me having mentioned these. There's a genuine issue, on the other hand, if something is left over for which there is no box.

We could say that the context of my command is a theory that does distinguish paper, pencils, and toys, even though the command doesn't make use of that distinction. It does make use of the distinction between things that are on the floor and things that are in the boxes.

Now if I value tidiness, I might form the intention to have the kids pick up, and in asking them to, I make use of the distinction between things on the floor and things in boxes, but my intention doesn't create that distinction and neither does my valorization of tidiness. The question is whether a distinction is relevant to my intentions, formed on the basis of my values.

I think you really believe there is some widespread breakdown in comprehension of the concept of truth.

Strange. I don't see that. Trump was a demagogue, taking advantage of a democracy the way his kind have been known to do for thousands of years. — Mongrel

I see a little of each side.

On the one hand, there is overwhelming evidence that institutions are less trusted now than they were several generations ago. A chunk of that is down to Vietnam. But then there's the stuff Chris Hayes writes about in Twilight of the Elites. (Essential reading!)

That doesn't mean people no longer believe in truth, but they're no longer sure where to find it.

Then there's Trump. I remember hearing a bit on NPR where a Trump supporter in coal country said he didn't think Trump would or could actually bring back coal jobs, but it was just nice that he was saying something. Showed that he cared.

Okay, so the "literal" truth of what he said was not even an issue. Trump was in essence "virtue signaling."

And there's similar behaviour around the numbering of floors in Trump Tower. People like the high floor numbers, even though they know they're not "literally" right. Everyone agrees to play along. It's all pretend.

Didn't NIetzsche say (maybe in Genealogy of Morals?), "What if truth is not a value? What then?"

And you can pile onto this the saturation of our culture with media, the loss of distinction between fiction and non-fiction in a gazillion ways, and I think, yeah, there's a real problem here.

practical, resolvable problems — WISDOMfromPO-MO

You're a traditional, mainstream liberal. Be proud!

Someone once described liberals as conservatives who can't resist tinkering. Another way to look at it would be that liberals focus on stuff that has practical solutions.

Remember Obama's bit about Hillary's campaign slogan: "Trudge on up that hill!" That's liberalism. You leave the revolution to someone else and just fix shit.

This condition, "the condition that everyone conforms" is artificial though, it's made up as a way to make sense of the problems created by the category error. There really is no such condition at play here. What is the case, is that we conform because we want to conform, we apprehend conformation as beneficial to ourselves. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah, that's the whole point of conventions. I prefer to conform on the condition that everyone else conforms. There's no particular benefit to me driving on the right side of the road unless everyone else does, and everyone else feels the same.

Nailed it.

You just have to get used to how quantifiers and negatives go together. "All" is the same as "There isn't one that isn't" and "There is" is the same as "Not all aren't".

¬∃¬ can be traded for ∀
¬∀¬ can be traded for ∃

The assumption that there is a correct definition of brick is the assumption that someone else has made a correct judgement, someone has correctly judged what it means to be a brick. The attitude of confidence is the assumption that I have made the true judgement. So this is where we find truth, in the assumption that I have made the true judgement, not the assumption that I am following the judgement of someone else, because it is correct. — Metaphysician Undercover

"Brick" is the English word for what Tim wants to buy.

Sorry for the confusion -- I was formulating the negative, "Nothing comes from nothing."

Yours is the negative of mine, so it's all good.

Suppose that everyone says "2+2=4", such that this forms the descriptive rule, "human beings say 2+2=4". There is nothing here to imply the prescriptive rule, "human beings ought to say 2+2=4". To produce that prescriptive rule we must refer to something further, and this something further, might be found in the meaning of "2+2=4". — Metaphysician Undercover

But the problem is precisely here: the people who all say "2+2=4" have access to its meaning, if you like, and they all do say it because they all ought to. And they all ought to because they all do -- that's what it means to be part of speech community. You're in a loop flipping between prescription and description.

The approach that makes the most sense to me at the moment is Lewis's: we each prefer to conform on the condition that everyone conforms, and it's easy to get from there to normative conventions.

Yeah, that's interesting. I think I was imagining something like crystals constantly forming and falling away, or a crystal that constantly morphs into new shapes.

It's tempting to think that repetition could lead to a shape locking in, or at least making it harder for it to change shape.

I don't understand.

That's really plausible, absolutely.

When I posted, I almost said "hundreds, or even thousands" but didn't, and then afterward it occurred to me I was really talking about something like attention. So now I'm tempted to say "millions".

I guess I'm just resisting the idea of cognitive habits hardening into worldviews because I'm feeling skeptical about conceptual schemes these days.

But I see a way of putting our ideas together: attention can flicker, different ways of looking at things are always offering themselves to you; some of that you filter out just to stay functional, or to carry through on your intentions.

But if you actively tamp down other ways of looking at things when you don't have to, that's what makes you dogmatic. It's not that your theory makes it impossible to see certain things; it's that you make an effort not to, that you insist on sticking to one way of looking.

What I'm talking about is something like this:

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny ...' — Asimov

I thing that even further than that, frames organize the very details of what we're seeing, making somethings stand out, and others remain in the background, and the same information doing different work in our frames. — Wosret

If I scan the room looking for my keys, I look at it one way; if I'm deciding where to set up Catan to play with my kids, I look at it another way. If those are frames, I create, I dunno, hundreds of them every day.

*Spencer-Brown: "There can be no distinction without motive, and there can be no motive unless contents are seen to differ in value." — StreetlightX

Hmmmmm.

Why can't I do all of that the other way round?

Here's a shelf of books; here's shelf of CDs. When I'm looking for something to listen to, I "valorize" the CDs over the books. If I just need an example of "human cultural artifact", either will do -- which is not the same as not distinguishing them, it's just including them both in a larger class.

Even here, it seems odd to say I "value" the CD when I want something to listen to, rather than just saying I recognize a functional difference between CDs and books. Only a philosopher would say you could also listen to the book but are unlikely to find the experience rewarding.

Better would be a two-place predicate, since "nothing" is an English quantifier, so the principle would be:
¬∃x¬∃y(x came from y)
which is the same as
∀x∃y(x came from y),
which is "Everything came from something" (and not to be confused with "There is something everything came from").

I don't remember who said it, but there's also this: facts may very well be theory-laden, but we also want our theories to be fact-laden.

(The sort of thing I was talking about here.)

One can, of course, make all sorts of distinctions for all kinds of purposes: — StreetlightX

In fact, it seems more and more of our discussions around here are ending with this point: that if you have such and such purpose, you distinguish A from B, but if you don't, then you don't. (@Fafner, @Pierre-Normand and I had longish discussion about sortals that ended this way.)

I'm feeling an overwhelming impulse to look at that more closely: what does it mean to say a distinction is "purpose-relative"? How does that work?

From the point of view of individuation, it is not at all clear that one can make an in-principle distinction between the kinds of processes involved in either the construction of mountains or molehills. For someone like Manuel Delanda, for example, the processes at work in the formation of both mountains and societies, are, at a certain level of abstraction, exactly the same: "Sedimentary rocks, species and social classes (and other institutionalized hierarchies) are all historical constructions, the product of definite structure-generating processes" ... which Delanda describes, but I'll omit for reasons of space. In any case, the conclusion being that "this conception of very specific abstract machines governing a variety of structure-generating processes not only blurs the distinction between the natural and the artificial, but also that between the living and the inert." — StreetlightX

I can see doing this "at a certain level of abstraction" with a particular explanatory purpose in mind, but I'm not convinced that being able to do this somehow proves there is no distinction to be made, or that no distinction can be made; for other purposes we won't lump together the processes that lead to mountains, to trees, to anthills, to the convention of private property. My ability to describe balls and shoes as "sports gear" at a highish level of abstraction, does not prove no distinction can be made between balls and shoes at lower or even at equal levels of abstraction.

My concern, expressed earlier, was the loss of agency. Discipline and Punish is interesting because Foucault shows us something that looks a lot like a purposive action, but no one did it. I'm just not convinced we have to take that as a general rule, rather than what we find (or don't) taking this approach. There are other approaches.

Which oddly echoes what we're talking about here. There's a distinction we can make between what our theory describes and explains and the theory. God knows, that distinction isn't perfectly straightforward, but there is a difference.

Time out to revisit Ryle:

The University is just the way in which all that he has already seen is organized. When they are seen and when their co-ordination is understood, the University has been seen.

For instance, one answer to "Where is the University?" might be, "Oh, the government abolished education years ago. The buildings remain, and are used for other purposes, but this is no longer a University." And that goes back to pumpkin patches and sewing machines, etc. The "organization" Ryle refers to is social, in at least one sense. You can tear down either one without destroying the other.

And there is agency at work there. We change what we use the buildings for, and thus whether there is or is not a University here.

Now when it comes to, say, physics, tearing down the buildings (i.e., physical reality) is not even an option. But we can designate some as this entity, some as that, propose relations that hold among them, etc. And we have some agency here, power over our own theory to change or abolish it. Seeing this, some people are inclined to treat physical reality itself as a construction we have made, to say, for instance, that particles exist only insofar as we call something in our theory "particle". There is an obvious sense in which that's right, but it's extremely misleading. Using a bunch of nearby buildings now as a university or now as a barracks, doesn't turn stairs into quads, or rooms into storm drains.

So it still seems to me that one of the natural ways to sort things is into what we can change and what we can't. On the the "what we can" side will be things we constructed and things we didn't. The method will be different for each, but just as we could abolish universities, we can blow up a mountain but we cannot abolish the natural forces that formed it. We can describe those forces variously in our theories, but they are what they are regardless of our descriptions.

That's basically it.

One conceptual step that might help:
If you have premises ¶ and want to derive the conclusion Q, then you want to show that the conditional ¶→Q is true. Assuming that conditional is false should lead to a contradiction. As it happens, ~(¶→Q) is ¶ & ~Q. So if you show that the conclusion Q being false leads to a contraction, then you've shown that the premises do imply the conclusion.

See I'm not even sure about this either: I think that if taken to the limit, deconstruction entails that there are, as it were, constructions other than those of the social. That is, the word 'social' in 'social construction' ought to be understood as something that qualifies scope. There are asocial constructions, constructions of biology, of geology, of celestial dynamics, and then there are constructions that pertain to 'the social', each of these with it's own specific mechanisms and modes of functioning. I understand 'social construction' in an entirely naturalist way, as it were. And I think, moreover, this is how it should be understood. — StreetlightX

Okay, I think I've got it. The "social" bit is easy, The hard bit is understanding what happens to agency, and to the distinction between organism and environment. You can keep that distinction by situating construction not at the level of organism, as something an organism might engage in (a bird building a nest), but a level up, so that construction can be a process that includes both organisms and their environment.

Even setting aside my qualms about this, I'm still going to want to distinguish between construction processes dependent upon organisms acting within an environment and constructions processes that require only natural forces. But if I'm allowed to pick out something and call it an agent, something that can bear responsibility, without denying that its actions are embedded in an environment, then I'm going to question the point of the ascension in the first place.

I hope I haven't misunderstood you, because it's starting to get interesting.

if the social is real, if it belongs on the side of the real, then the distinction to be made is no longer oppositional; one cannot neatly parse the social and the real not because of some limitation on our 'finite', human selves - the attempt to go beyond which would be "hubris" - but because the concepts themselves no longer lend themselves to any such neat parsing. — StreetlightX

But then we still have the question of how to distinguish what is (real and) constructed from what is (real and) not constructed. I can't tell whether you're suggesting that "neat parsing" is only available when there is an opposition of real and unreal, rather than just a distinction between

• one real thing and another real thing,
• one sort of real thing and another sort of real thing, or
• one way of being real and another way of being real,

whichever one of those you'll go for, or think we should all go for.

One issue as you noted is the problem of knowing what people really believe.

But I agree with just about everything you said. I'd be okay with describing my view as "Changed minds are necessary but very far from sufficient for social change."

I think there is a widespread feeling, or even "prejudice", that nominalism, if not simply true, is at least the default position, and that any theory that makes use of non-particular entities requires justification, and that this justification is likely to be vaguely pragmatic or instrumental. ("Natural kinds" is just an oxymoron, on this view.)

Concepts become something that is, by definition really, imposed on reality. I haven't quite figured out what image is driving this idea. It seems to have something to do with granularity: we imagine the conversion of our incomparably rich and detailed visual field into grainy pixels, or a paint by numbers, a process something like rotoscoping, boundaries separating one thing from another, foreground from background, drawn in an arbitrary and heavy-handed way, reflective of our needs, desires, preconceptions and preferences rather than reality.

That's not quite it, but it's close. I'm convinced there's an intuition pump at work here, but I can't quite nail it down.

Needless to say, something about this view feels off to me, but I haven't figured that out either.

I think we can do better, but let me think a bit. It goes everywhere.

But maybe not. When Hume, he of the "is/ought gap" says "the wise man proportions his belief to the evidence," maybe we just take that as a fact, no implication that people ought to do this. But isn't rationality something we aspire to?

Do have we made any progress on your question?

Sure, but I think rationality is normative in a non-moral sense. I don't think it's just a matter of expecting conformity, but there's "should" and "must" everywhere.

Sometimes you'll hear economists talk about credit, and the economy at large, this way: that it is sustained by faith or trust, and if something undermines that trust, the world could come tumbling down.

Oh yeah. In fact stealing and using or selling an identity is criminal as such, I assume.

That's really interesting, how the system creates the opportunity for violating some of its terms by following others.

Do we have a right not to identify ourselves? I don't remember anything about that. Even if we do, it may in a given case be outweighed by another social interest. (I'm just talking legally.)

What I'm wondering is this: if we analyze assertions to which we attach the additional normative claim -- "You should believe this" -- would that capture all the cases we usually describe as truth claims? Would it capture too much?

ADDED: Need to backtrack. This is all going to end up being about knowledge. What is claimed to be true is what you claim to know; it's the content.

What is 'generally accepted' imposes itself on me as real, as a physical constraint. I'd better not take pumpkins from someone else's pumpkin patch, or there will be consequences. — unenlightened

Maybe another way to say this is that the behavior of people is of course quite real, and some of their behavior can be described as participating in the convention of property, or maybe as "practices constitutive of" the convention of property.