. I'm inclined to say that a sewing machine or a pumpkin patch is not a social construct as I mean it, precisely because it is a physical presence. Whereas the notion of property 'that it is my sewing machine or my pumpkin patch' very much is. — unenlightened

Yes that's helpful.

But it seems clear to me that the institution of property could conceivably wither away or be abolished or dramatically changed, not by an individual of course, but collectively.

And what if we stop using the term "gravity" in our theories?

I would add: there's a difference between, say, fiction and human institutions. Telling a story doesn't make the story true. What is made, and what has effect in the world, is not the content of the story, but the story itself and the telling of it. With institutions, the content becomes real. If you christen a ship, it now has the name you gave it.

If you want, you could say everyone behaves "as if" this is the ship's name, but that just kicks the can down the road. You'll still have to explain the difference between one kind of fiction and the other by explaining what "acting as if" is.

Gravity is found; human rights are fabricated. Both are quite real. When you make something, it's real, isn't it? The difference between gravity and human rights isn't that one is real; it's that we don't have the ability to change or abolish gravity, which we do with human rights.

People don't consent to the social contract; it's an "as if" thing.

On the other hand, I used to be fascinated how in old movies like The Postman Always Rings Twice, John Garfield can just come walking up dusty from the road and get a job and a place to stay and there are no forms, no cards, no papers, no nothing. That kind of anonymity has mostly disappeared. Presumably it lives on in the underground and illegal economies, and can reappear sporadically in carnival circumstances, but not for us normies.

(1) subjective pleasure, physical or emotional, (2) ethics or duty, and (3) necessity, like health and safety. — Samuel Lacrampe

It's really not obvious these three stand on their own. Plenty of people will reduce (2) to (1). You could reduce (3) to (2) or (1). Some might claim that (1) and (2) are actually in the service of (3).

Plus foundationalism here has an odd result: the only things that will count as ends in themselves are things that serve no other purpose, that is to say, things that are, in some sense, pointless. People are inclined to reduce everything to pleasure-seeking because pleasure seems pointless to them, that is, something that is not desirable for some reason but just desirable as such. Avoidance of pain might have an even stronger claim than pleasure here.

For instance, I'm betting that you'll pick (1) from your list to explain this:

I am sure that I could find a coin or a paper currency that is no longer legal tender but some collector would love to keep. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Collectors derive pleasure from their collections. I'm not sure that's wrong exactly, but I'm also not sure it illuminates or explains the collector's behaviour more than just letting him say he sees these things as having value in themselves. "We love the things we love for what they are."

Sure. I should've been clearer. I wasn't talking about including "whatever talk creates" in the social. I was thinking more of the role of engaged civic discussion. I honestly believe that informed citizens sharing their views with each other is crucial to change. Changed minds is a necessary if not a sufficient condition for social change, and talking is how you get there.

It's not what we think and believe as much as what we do and produce through collective activity that's important to making social products. — Moliere

That's persuasive, but would you include talking among what we do?

I think you're on the right track.

I haven't read Frankfurt's book, but my sense of the bullshitter is that he is not just a subjectivist but indifferent to questions of truth and falsity. You say what you say just for the effect, for instance as a move in a negotiation. Might be true, might be false, who cares? I think there is a concern that the bullshitter can naturally morph into a confabulist who isn't even sure when he's telling the truth.

I'm pretty sure LW thought all he had to do was show us how foolish we were being and we would quit it of our own accord. There would be no need for him to tell us what to do (prescribing) so long as he could show us what we were doing (describing).

Finally, by 'felt reality', I simply mean that if you're about to be lynched by mob because you're black, it will do little good to plead that 'race is a social construct'. — StreetlightX

That's really nice. Well said.

Happily we also have this point:

I think the primary motivation for understanding something as socially constructed is that it is, by the same methods of being built, capable of being re/un-built. — Moliere

So if we believed race and the inherent inferiority of one race to another were part of the natural order, there wouldn't be much room for the idea that lynchings should stop; or, having had such a heterodox idea, it would surely be more difficult to convince people to change their behavior.

I've been looking for a way to build a sort of "economic" model of truth within a population and I think I've gotten something I can use from the test-taking scenario, namely how one's certainty can affect another.

I'm thinking of building on how Grice talks about meaning (simplifying a bit):
A tells B that p,
(1) intending B to believe that p,
(2) intending B to recognize that A intends B to believe that p,
(3) intending B to fulfill (1) on the basis of (2).
(The levels can be multiplied here without end ...)

We could do something like this with certainty: surely A is also expressing to B some degree of certainty that p, and intends B to recognize this, and intends B to embrace p in part on the basis of recognizing A's degree of certainty, and intends that B's degree of certainty that p be reflective of A's degree of certainty.

That's the ideal case, but in real life we often form a judgment about a speaker's entitlement to the degree of certainty he has expressed. So we would have to add that A intends B to recognize A's degree of certainty to be justified.

***
Before trying to flesh all that out, there's another candidate (i.e., another factor we might be able to analyze without talking about comparing statements to reality and such).

Truth is normative. I don't just mean in the sense that one should tell the truth. Generally speaking, one should believe what is true and one should not believe what is false.

So we could do this:
A asserts that p to B,
(1) implying B should believe that p,
(2) intending B to recognize that A believes B should believe that p,
(3) intending B to believe that p on the basis of (2).

(It's tempting to rewrite this using "expect," but unfortunately "expect" is ambiguous between merely predicting and demanding conformance to a norm. One reason for a parent to tell a child, "I expect you to behave," is, oddly, that they don't expect them to behave.)

There is a natural linkage between this normative sense of truth and the certainty calculus I've been playing with. You ask me where your keys are; if I tell you I think they're on the kitchen table but I'm not sure, I do not also think you should believe they're on the kitchen table. I might even think you should not believe this on the flimsy basis I've provided, but you shouldn't rule it out. But if I tell you I saw your keys next to the computer, I think you should believe that's where they are.

Anyway this looks promising.

Should also have mentioned Donald Barthelme. Maybe Robert Coover. I never read Gaddis. John Hawkes is the same era but it always seemed to me he had his own fish to fry. The Blood Oranges and Second Skin were two real favorites of mine, beautiful novels. It's too bad nobody reads him anymore.

And Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, and Byron have a lot in common since they all focus on Poetry of the self, hence they are Romantic — Thanatos Sand

See, this is the sort of thing that makes sense if you want to do literary history or cultural history as a science. From my point of view, reading Don Juan is about as different an experience as you could hope to have from the experience of reading The Prelude. From that point of view, lumping together Wordsworth and Byron is bizarre. That's not a critique of your approach; it is a statement that my purposes in reading and discussing poetry are different.

For your purposes, everything you said may make sense. I have no doubt that it makes sense to someone like Jameson. But I am not interested in doing literary history or criticism as a science. That's why I'm not rebutting each and every one of your points. I'm not doing science. I explained my historically based usage of the term "postmodernist" and it is avowedly unscientific, but it provides, I think, a complete explanation of why I don't apply the term the way you do. My usage has a certain provenance. Pre-Jameson & friends it was the standard way to use the word. It may not work in your circles, but you're not claiming some sort of "ownership" of the word, are you?

Btw, do you really think Barthes couldn't have given Hawthorne a postmodernist reading if he had wanted to? I'm betting he could have. Guy was a magician.

P.S.: It is not a good habit to assume that the people disagreeing with you just don't know what they're talking about, haven't heard of or haven't read certain authors, etc. Sometimes people might just disagree with you.

Btw, have you read D. H. Lawrence's book about American literature? He describes Poe in terms that would strike the contemporary ear as "deconstruction." Might be up your street.

You seem to have taken what I said as a claim to know for a fact that, for instance, Phil Dick is not a postmodernist writer, rather than an expression of my opinion that he is not. Perhaps instead of saying your list was "strange" I should have said it was "surprising," to me at least.

Given a precise definition of "postmodernist," I suppose it could be a fact that Dick either is or isn't a postmodernist. By and large literary criticism does not achieve this level of precision. For example, it has never seemed to me that Blake and Wordsworth and Keats and Byron have all that much in common. I don't particularly care if someone wants to call them all "Romantics," but I remain largely skeptical of "schools" of art except where a group of artists are demonstrably self-conscious about it (as with the Surrealists, say). Even then, differences regularly overwhelm similarities.

So you are working with a definition of "postmodernist" broad enough to encompass these diverse writers, and given this definition and your method of applying it, it is a fact that the authors you mention are postmodernists. If I could be compelled to embrace this definition and the method of applying it, then I would be compelled to accept it as a fact that Phil Dick was a postmodernist. We would be doing literary history as science.

But part of the point of any science is what it cares about and what it doesn't. If you're doing orbital mechanics, the color of the bodies involved is irrelevant. If you want to select particular features and ignore others, you can of course classify authors however you like, and those classifications are objectively right or wrong, relative to the criteria of classification. What do you choose to ignore about a writer's work? Not only is there room for debate on what to count and what to ignore in a given artist's work, it is clearly acceptable to ignore nothing at all, and forego doing science here at all.

I don't have any such science. I think of certain authors as postmodernists, and have some rough and ready reasons for doing so: there was a cohort of authors coming up in the late fifties and sixties who began taking the conventions of fiction as something they could play with within their works of fiction. They produced fiction that was noticeably odd by the usual standards. I call those guys "postmodernists," not least because John Barth did, and because some of them were self-conscious about it. It's also the point in history when most writers become academics. Since then, this reflexivity has itself become a sort of convention. I don't see Phil Dick doing anything remotely like that, despite being a contemporary, so I don't think of him as a postmodernist. That's about the depth of my interest. I don't claim there's a fact of the matter here.

I know I'm going to regret this, but ...

That's a really strange list. DeLillo and Pynchon, sure. But not Dick, Faulkner, Gibson, McCarthy, or O'Connor. (Roth and Morrison I haven't read.)

Calvino's the other obvious choice. Maybe Vonnegut? Maybe John Barth. Maybe DFW?

Not poking fun at you. (That is a strange idiom.)

Here's how this happened: to me, the schoolboy examples make it obvious that truth is not the same thing as knowledge or certainty; but the response I got was disheartening. So I wanted to do something with testing where you take away the "objective" part -- the answers -- and the only thing I could see to put in its place was consensus.

As it has happens, there are people around here who hold exactly this view: that truth is just what people individually or collectively say it is. So now I have a model where the truth is literally determined by vote. As I said before, I didn't foresee the cheating issue, but I agree with you it has some obvious real world analogies.

The smilie means you don't actually think I am, right? I never know what those things are supposed to mean.

Contribution: something given freely without recompense.

I appreciate your contributions here, Srap... — creativesoul

I don't want to seem stupid but it looks to me as though I'm a pound down on the whole deal.

In the case at hand, if reality meets expectation, then the students have gotten it right. That is, they've hedged their bets correctly as a means of getting what they want. — creativesoul

I think we can use concepts of correctness or success without being forced to treat their appearance as an instance of truth, if that's what you were suggesting.

Obviously we can make it that, but I don't think we have to. If we absolutely have to then there's just no way to do this sort of analysis at all. Which might be true. It might be true that truth can't be analysed or explained at all. But I'm trying.

Here's another wrinkle.

How do the conspirators choose which answer they will give? A randomly chosen answer will pick up some support, but if it's quite unpopular, though the needle will move they risk still coming out in the minority. They're better off doing some pre-test research to find out what the popular answers are and then going all in on those to make sure they win and our conspirators get the reward.

That raises two issues: the reward will be shared with a lot more people, and that's bad; interestingly, if two answers are roughly equal in popularity, our conspirators get to pick the winner. (The best scenario is to be in the minority who get the answer right, but still better right than wrong.)

So there's some push here toward the consensus representing what most people actually believe, but where there's controversy we're right back to manipulation.

What would count as looking like truth, if not looking like some pre-conceived notion of "truth"? — creativesoul

In this case, it's having the answers you give on the test marked as correct.

In our world, what's on the test is also submitted to scrutiny; there's such a thing as complaining that the answer in the back of the textbook is wrong and getting it changed.

So the question will be whether the way test grades are handed out in my made-up world is similar to the way grades are handed out in this one, whether what "counts as true" for them is similar to what "counts as true" for us. I'm not sure yet.

It's also not a bad idea when trying to explain X to avoid using X in the explanation, so I'm trying to avoid even covert uses of standard ideas of "truth," so no comparing the answers to reality.

On my view, thought/belief always uses correspondence with/to fact/reality, including situations when that presupposition goes unnoticed and/or unmentioned. — creativesoul

Sure, that's a point of view. I want to see what I can do without appealing to that at all, since people are always saying this view is fundamentally "mistaken." Okay, let's not use it -- or any other idea of truth --
and see if we can still get something that looks like truth.

I think most students are asserting their actual beliefs with their actual level of certainty, but some definitely aren't. But then instead of measuring their answers against an "objective" standard like a test key, we are measuring them against the consensus of their community. — Srap Tasmaner

Here, I can make this easier. Assume the great majority of students believe the test is being graded with a key, but a small number find out it isn't, and some of those collude to manipulate the results.

(I don't care whether the key is "objectively correct" because the key is the stand-in for "objective reality" here. Comparing it to something else isn't necessary for the scenario to work.)

Perhaps you could penalize a student for claiming high confidence and getting the question wrong, but that would be very complicated. — Metaphysician Undercover

That was part of the model but I left it out by mistake. It's no more complicated than the rest of this. And it naturally equates your level of certainty with the risk you accept and the potential reward you can receive.

Do you agree that you have made a distinction here between what the student believes is right, and what the student believes will be marked as right? — Metaphysician Undercover

Right. We start with the usual "objectively correct," then shift to "what test-giver wants," and then shift to "consensus." I'm not conflating these; I'm seeing what we can get out of the model by subsituting one for another and avoiding talking about being "objectively right."

The correct answer must be the one believed by the oneself, not by anyone else. So when I am confident that I have the correct answer, I am confident that the answer I have is the correct answer, regardless of how the teacher will mark it. — Metaphysician Undercover

I think most students are asserting their actual beliefs with their actual level of certainty, but some definitely aren't. But then instead of measuring their answers against an "objective" standard like a test key, we are measuring them against the consensus of their community.

You want to use the word "correct" for whatever a student sincerely believes. What about the test-givers? Do they just give everyone a "100"?

I agree with the thesis of Fight Club. The test is whether the subject ever really gave up... abandoned all hope. — Mongrel

I like the big showdown in Matrix 3, when That works for me.

The question is whether the Nietzschean creating his own values or the Sartrean choosing his own life project are recycling a model that needs something in the slot marked "God".

---- Michael beat me again.---

The hope was that something we'd be willing to call "truth" would show up.

I think the hinge of the analysis I have so far is this: if your degree of certainty or confidence in asserting something is like a wager, then you can deliberately manipulate the betting market by expressing certainty; on the other hand, your degree of certainty or confidence is the only thing we have to to differentiate your views from another's, so socially it becomes your reputation. Given a choice, it makes sense to cheat off the more confident student. And that will continue to work if the people you are imitating are colluding to manipulate the consensus.

We're avoiding using any sort of "objective" standard of correctness for now.

EDIT: 'cause phone.

Have you already read Eric Wolf's Europe and the people without history?

Here's what I've been working on...

Imagine students taking a standardized test. Their goal is to select answers that will be marked correct. In selecting what they believe is the right answer, they must also have confidence that this is the answer the test-preparer will consider the right answer, that the test has no misprints, that it will be graded correctly, etc. In short, that if they do their part in selecting the right answer, the test-givers will do their part in marking it correct. On the test-giver's side, they have to believe they have made the test properly and that the answers they will mark as correct are the ones well-prepared students will select.

Now suppose you want to cheat. You don't know the others, so you don't know who's worth copying off of. If you could compare their answers to the key, you'd know who to copy off of, but if you could do that you wouldn't need to. No joy there.

Now suppose that in addition to selecting an answer, you rate your confidence in selecting that answer, say on a scale from 1 to 5. You could imagine the test-givers using this as a sort of wager, and giving students more points for confidently selected right answers than for guesses, but otherwise it wouldn't change much for them.

But it would change a lot for the students. Now you have an obvious way of deciding who to copy off of.

Now suppose the test is actually not being graded against a key, that instead the answers selected by the students are being tallied as votes and the biggest vote-getter is treated as the right answer. Without the confidence mechanic, and assuming the students are relatively well-prepared, this makes surprisingly little difference. (I've been running some little "simulations" in Excel. If students mostly choose the right answer and wrong answers are randomly distributed, the right answer still usually wins.)

But with the confidence mechanic, things can get weird, because students can collude to move the answer. As I tried testing this, it looked like it only took two students out of ten so colluding to make a noticeable difference, and three was overkill. (The idea is for the conspirators all to confidently select the same answer; they'll pick up some help from whoever believed this answer actually to be right, and often enough swamp other answers, including the right one, selected with only random confidence. Thus their choice tends to win more than it should.)

What's the point of all this?

I wanted to see if we could build up a community's idea of truth from scratch. Test-taking makes a good stand-in for truth because there is a mechanical sense of correctness here, which we can exchange via voting for something like consensus, and we have a way of adding in confidence or certainty as a factor -- socially this would be something like reputation. The goal is to model a speech community without using the concept of truth, but rather explaining their concept of truth.

But the test-taking example leads naturally to the idea of cheating. In broader social terms, you can imagine cheaters as people who value prestige and standing above truth, and it turns out even a smallish group can collude to manipulate the community's consensus. And by manipulating the consensus they can reinforce their reputation as the people who know and speak the truth, despite having other goals entirely.

So I'm a little stuck. I hadn't foreseen the cheating issue, and I'm not sure where to go with this next.

Here's some more chess analogizing...

There's an idea known as "the move the position demands." Among more accomplished players, this is the maxim that the move you want to play, even and perhaps especially if it seems impossible, is the move to look at. It may not be playable immediately, but maybe it can be prepared, and the threat of it can force your opponent into something undesirable. But sometimes it is playable immediately -- you just have to look pretty deeply to see why. You have to calculate.

Calculating variations is the sense-making part. The idea of the move is important, but the variations give it substance. The best ideas are grounded in the concrete position on the board, rather than in your preconceived ideas or your preferences. If you can look at the position on the board with an open mind, it will tell you what to do. Sadly, you have to be a damn good player for the board to talk to you.

So there are two steps: begin by letting the data lead the way -- a candidate move is much like an hypothesis and the best ones practically hold up a neon sign, IF you are tuned into the data (the board) the right way. But then there's the analysis, which is first of all a check on your intuition. But it can be more: your first idea might fail, but if it had something to it, it should provide an entry point to understanding the position better, and the right move will show up in your calculation. (Bad candidate moves don't touch the essence of the position on the board, so the variations you get for them can go right by the best move without so much as a hello.)

Continuing my metaphor, one sense of "doing the work" would be to say you have to go all the way down the alley to find out if it's a dead end, but on the other hand, I think what I was reaching for with the idea of "failure-sensitivity" was that it would surely be nice to be able to recognize that an alley will turn out to be dead end before going all the way down it.

If the character of philosophical problems is "I don't know my way around here," the question is how best to learn your way around.

None of this has the constructive flavour you had in mind though. When doing mathematics, it's as if you build a special flashlight for each problem that will allow you to see what you need to see. You make your tools. So that's one way.

I've been wondering if maybe instead of talking as if you choose from preexisting domains, the domain is something you construct with the question. Theoretical entities are in an obvious sense constructed, and maybe these are the members of the domain you construct. Asking a question would be the first step in building, rather than finding, an answer.

I can see how you might take what I wrote that way, as if the goal were just to avoid mistakes and avoid failure. I don't think I really brought out how much can be learned from finding yourself in a blind alley.

But I don't want to be stuck in one. ("But the answer must be here.") I'm talking about recognizing when you were wrong and getting out to see some more of the world instead of staying in your alley because it's the right alley.

Something else I remember Ryle saying, though I can never remember where, might be relevant here; it was something like this: there's an idea that philosophy deals with perfectly ordinary questions about really peculiar stuff (minds and such), but actually it deals with really peculiar questions about perfectly ordinary stuff.

A few more examples would be good, to put that hypothesis to the test. Unfortunately my mind is a blank right now as I search for examples of category errors. — andrewk

I am happy to provide a supporting reference, the first example Ryle gives in The Concept of Mind to explain his newly coined term "category-mistake": a visitor being shown around Oxford and told about all the buildings, finally asks his guide, "But where is the University?"

His mistake lay in his innocent assumption that it was correct to speak of Christ Church, the Bodleian Library, the Ashmolean Museum and the University, to speak, that is, as if 'the University' stood for an extra member of the class of which these other units are members. He was mistakenly allocating the University to the same category as that to which the other institutions belong.

I don't think you'll find category mistakes limited to definite descriptions though.

Perhaps one of the confusions underlying this area is the 'domain of discourse' within which such discussions take place. — Wayfarer

On the one hand, I think there is never not a 'universe-of-discourse', as you put it - and this is the case irrespective of the times or the medium or what-have-you. On the other hand, I think this has become more obvious in recent times, where one can no longer take for granted that someone else shares the same universe of discourse as you — StreetlightX

And I think this is directly relevant to Ryle's original point: that people sometimes ask a question with a mistaken idea about which box they should look in for the answer. (So for Ryle, there's the Cartesian myth that human behaviour is explained by special stuff found in the special box.) But I recently claimed elsewhere that you have to specify a domain -- what else can you do? Look everywhere? At everything?

But it is nevertheless possible to make a mistake in specifying the domain where your question's answer will come from, or to formulate the question in such a way that the answer must come from someplace that it cannot possibly come from. We want some failure-sensitivity, to know when we've gone up a blind alley.

But you have options then: even if you determine there is no answer to your question in this alley, what does that tell you? That the question has no answer? If the question forced you into that alley, you know at least that this formulation of the question yields no answer. But maybe there's a better question to ask, a way to reframe the issue that led to the question. If the question didn't force you into the blind alley, maybe you just made a wrong turn and can take your question elsewhere. I wouldn't expect a sharp distinction there, but they feel different. Failure can instruct in different ways.

For instance, in those two paragraphs I said "the answer" several times and this suddenly looks prejudicial to me. Do you know setting out that your question has only one answer, rather than various answers? Even if you find an answer in Box A, how do you know there's not another, different answer in Box B, and maybe even in Box C?

In the OP @StreetlightX, you talk about running out of sense-making resources, which is nice, and is the kind of failure-sensitivity I had in mind. I think your sense-making is much broader than what I've got here (question reformulation and domain redefinition) but this is just the bits I get from Ryle's original idea.

But all of this discussion of the truth values of statements about fictional entities, are red herrings (IMO) in the discussion of whether existence is a predicate. — fishfry

Every discussion about existence ends up being a discussion about negative existentials!

But I agree. And I stand by what I said earlier:

Existence is not a predicate because it is something else, namely a quantifier. It's just a matter of getting it in the right logical bucket. — Srap Tasmaner

Frege makes the point that "The king's coach was pulled by four horses" has a very different logical structure from "The king's coach was pulled by black horses." That's the right place to start, in my opinion.

Wouldn't the (2) style claim be "All sports kill for humans"? — Sapientia

No, the pair of conditionals was (1) sufficient condition and (2) necessary condition, so the other way to say that is "All x are y" and "Only x are y."

Oh wait, you were kidding.

I largely agree, but only that (1) is probably more of an insult. If "All men are fools" is on the table, why not "All women are fools" too? Subtlety has already been tossed aside.

The thing is, we all know that generalizations like (1) are usually, well, stupid. It's more damming of the person saying it. But (2) style claims sometimes fare better. Compare:
1. All humans kill for sport.
2. Only humans kill for sport.
(1) is dumb, but (2) is disturbing if true.

it does not logically follow that women can't be fools. — Sapientia

But it does follow from (2) that no women are:

1. If a man then a fool.
2. If a fool then a man.

I still say the implied comparison in (1) doesn't have much bite if all or nearly all women are also fools; same for (2) if no or nearly no men are fools.

You could argue that being called a fool is bad whether anyone else is or not, but since the insult is targeted at whole classes (men, Americans, whatever), it's hard for me not to see an implied comparison between members and nonmembers of the class.

Have I failed the test?