I would say one difference between my hypothesis and yours is that mine is motivated. I don't have a definition of "motivated" handy, but at least the conditional I've tacked on repeats a claim I've established by induction.

My conditional has a contrapositive, the conclusion of which I believe has been shown to be false: if it matters whether a human makes the observation, then it matters which human. Now that could still be false, if its antecedent is true. I can't test that. But at least I'm still talking about the same thing as when I was showing inductively that for some things, it doesn't matter who makes the observation.

And I think we want to keep the distinction between observations that depend on the observer in a way we can understand (can find mechanisms to explain) and observations that don't seem to be observer-sensitive.

Suppose you did an experiment in which people answered questions about the colors they see. You'll probably find there are differences among your subjects, and you could say color is observer-dependent in that sense.

Now do an experiment where you put some keys in a box and ask your subjects if the keys are in the box. Let's imagine they all assent. Then we describe keys being in boxes as not observer-dependent.

But wait -- what about non-human observers? Don't know how to test them, so we'll be content to say the result only applies to human observers -- if you're human, we predict you'll agree the keys are in the box.

What about when there's no observer at all? Tricky to test, but maybe we can at least form an hypothesis: if it doesn't matter which human makes the observation, then it doesn't matter whether any human actually does. We might feel bad about forming an hypothesis that's unfalsifiable, but then all hypotheses that exclude observation probably are. At least this one feels like a natural inductive step from our observations.

Just thinking out loud. We entertained the possibility that there was a general pattern of forced theory refinement, and that there's a kind of refinement congenial to a theory and a kind not -- the kind that might make you start looking for a new theory -- so it seemed natural to wonder if the uncongenial kind could be reliably forced.

I'm wondering now if every theory can be forced into an ad hoc refinement.

And I'm wrong to say it's always the amount. A piece of the true cross counts no matter how small.

Actually that last bit -- it's still a bag of flour -- is curious because it's literally true but cancels the implicature that it's a full bag of flour, or the usual bag of flour, etc.

On issue with blobs, heaps and chunks is that they are modifiers that turn mass nouns into count nouns. A bag of flour isn't quite the same as the flour that's in the bag. — Pierre-Normand

But my suspicion is that this is just not true, that it's always the amount of flour we're interested in and the bag is just the obvious way of referring to how much. If bags of flour did not have weights printed on them, a grocer who emptied some of the flour from each bag would still be a cheat. "It's still a bag of flour" wouldn't be much of a defense.

I had this same thought because our example is a statue and one of the most famous statues of all time is missing her arms. (Great song by Television.)

I suppose there's sorites on the one hand, and the ship of Theseus on the other; you can ask if you still have a heap after taking away a grain, and if you still have the same heap. (People's intuition about the latter might very dramatically.) An external constraint -- this blob is the bronze, meaning all of it, that used to be the statue -- blocks the latter but not the former. If you've lost any, you have to say this is some of the bronze.

(I feel like I'm making less sense with each post -- maybe because I'm at work now.)

Are you asking under what conditions some bit of material becomes an independent object? — Fafner

The sorites arises when you try to treat a mass noun collection as an object in its own right. You can say that makes it a vaguely defined object or you could just not think of it as an object at all.

I'm thinking that for a given theory, some ways of refining or extending it will be natural and some will be ad hoc. So naturalness is also theory-relative.

I guess there's a difference between talking about the bronze a statue is made of and the particular collection of bronze bits it's made of. The first is just the mass noun "bronze" and it's the status of the latter that's confusing. (Mass nouns just don't always come to you in discrete hunks. Air doesn't, for instance.)

So the question really is how do mass nouns behave when you qualify them in some way -- the bronze this statue is made of, the snow in the mountains, the water in that glass. Does such a qualifier make an object?

So we're abolishing any distinction between natural and ad hoc sortals. — Srap Tasmaner

Actually I think that would be a measure of how the theory refinement is done, not that it has been refined.

I guess I'm just still unclear what we're supposed to have learned about "meaning."

So we're abolishing any distinction between natural and ad hoc sortals.

I'm not getting this.

If I refer to some stuff by referring to its current configuration as an object, I'm still referring to the stuff.

I guess we're thinking of stuff as a bunch of objects, water molecules, say. I could, in principle, name each water molecule, couldn't I? Even though I don't and it's impractical. In fact, not naming those bits is what makes water, for my present purposes, stuff rather than an object. Stuff is a collection of unnamed and interchangeable objects.

the particles must form some sort of unity — Fafner

Why isn't set membership enough?

Yes, I think that's the sort of thing I'm saying. We could say that dummyness is theory-relative, and that Travis's argument is that there is no final theory possible, in which all dummyness has been eliminated. But there is the built-in corollary that we can always eliminate dummyness by a refinement of our theory, so I'm still unclear on what conclusion is to be drawn.

So the point is that I have to define my set by reference to the statue? Must I have an independent way of referring to it? What about before it was a statue, when it was a pallet of bronze?

Btw, I liked snow because it's more comical, but the point I was reaching for -- that it's generally clear whether we're referring to an object or some stuff -- is more clearly made with water: moving the water from a glass to a bowl means destroying the object that is a cylinder of water.

To complement Pierre-Normand's answer: if you take a slightly different example, that of a clay sculpture, I think it becomes more intuitive to think that if you crush the sculpture then what reminds is a lump of clay that was identical (in some sense) to the original sculpture that has been destroyed. — Fafner

I think the sense of identity here is more or less just set membership though: all the bits of stuff that the statue was made of are still here.

With some materials, we imagine the material itself by imagining objects (blocks, lumps, piles, slabs, hunks) made out of that stuff, but that could be a hindrance not a help.

I went for snow to fight the intuition of cohesion: imagine taking the instruction to clear the walk as meaning I should recreate the configuration of the stuff that was on the walk somewhere else.

According to Simons, ship is something of a dummy sortal since some people may be interested in Theseus' ship qua historical artifact, or buy it in order to make use of it as a fishing boat. — Pierre-Normand

Yet again it is a question of interest and purpose. Are we sure there will turn out to be sortals that are never dummy sortals?

(I'm reminded of the exchange from Local Hero: "You wish to buy my church?" "Well, not as a going concern.")

It's not perfectly clear that what you call here the "lump of bronze" that constitutes the statue is an object at all. It feels more like a mereological sum of bronze bits. Your question might still be ambiguous, but not between two further determinations of a generic sortal, but between the object and the stuff it's made of (which is not an object).

If I tell you to move the statue, I'll expect you to keep it in intact. If I tell to clear the snow from the front walk of our museum, it's okay for you to change the configurations of the bits of snow, let some of them melt, etc. Swapping object and stuff in those examples would have dramatic and peculiar consequences.

If you find logic interesting, you should really take some time and study it.

This convention* is not of the nature of a promise: For even promises themselves, as we shall see afterwards, arise from human conventions. It is only a general sense of
common interest; which sense all the members of the society express to one another, and which induces them to regulate their conduct by certain rules. I observe, that it will be for my interest to leave another in the possession of his goods, provided he will act in the same manner with regard to me. He is sensible of a like interest in the regulation of his conduct. When this common sense of interest is mutually express’d, and is known to both, it produces a suitable resolution and behaviour. And this may properly enough be call’d a convention or agreement betwixt us, tho’ without the interposition of a promise; since the actions of each of us have a reference to those of the other, and are perform’d upon the supposition, that something is to be perform’d on the other part. Two men, who pull the oars of a boat, do it by an agreement or convention, tho’ they have never given promises to each other. Nor is the rule concerning the stability of possession the less deriv’d from human conventions, that it arises gradually, and acquires force by a slow progression, and by our repeated experience of the inconveniences of transgressing it. On the contrary, this experience assures us still more, that the sense of interest has become common to all our fellows, and gives us a confidence of the future regularity of their conduct: And ’tis only on the expectation of this, that our moderation and abstinence are founded. In like manner are languages gradually establish’d by human conventions without any promise. In like manner do gold and silver become the common measures of exchange, and are esteem’d sufficient payment for what is of a hundred times their value. — Hume, Treatise 3.2.2

* He's been talking about property.

Understanding a sentence in which a novel use of a word is made is just a special case of understanding a sentence in which use is made of a word you don't know.

Making a novel use of word in a sentence may or may not increase the risk that your sentence will not be understood -- contextual definitions aren't all that risky -- but there can be good reasons for taking that risk.

Why yes, in a thread discussing Wittgenstein's conception of meaning, I am speaking about conventional meanings. I hope the shock of this revelation doesn't incapacitate you. — StreetlightX

Was the rewrite intended to be more snippy or less?

Wittgenstein is here by implication, but his name appears not in the thread title, and the thread itself has ranged over far more topics than just Wittgenstein's views.

Neither does the word "word" or "meaning" appear in the title of the thread but "language."

Neither does the phrase "meaning of a word" occur here:

I'm not sure how I gave the impression I wasn't. What else would already-established uses/conventional uses of language refer to? — StreetlightX

Now, for my part, I consider the tantrum exchange complete, and I'm good with moving on.

You're talking about the conventional meaning of a word, how a word is generally used within a speech community, how a word is most often used within a language, that sort of thing.

That's important, of course, but the meanings of words are far from being the only conventions of a language or of its use, or, I would like to say, of language as such or the use of language as such.

• There are vague, abstract conventions about communicating in certain ways (rhetoric, Grice's maxims).
• (There's probably a truth-telling convention, but that one's hard to formulate well.)
• There are conventional things to say in particular situations in each language (manners).
• There are conventional ways of talking that are context-dependent (formal and informal, preaching and sportscasting, political speeches and domestic disturbances).
• There are performative conventions like the words spoken in wedding ceremonies.
• There are conventions of grammar ranging from abstract classifications (pre- and post-position for adjectives modifying nouns) and more specifics within each language.
• There are conventions of what Fowler would have called English usage.
• There are conventions of word-formation.
• There are conventions of spelling.
• There are conventions of pronunciation that vary by region and dialect.
• There are conventions for what phonemes we use, with some variation, and conventions for how we use them (some sequences of sounds that English-speakers do make are not English).
• My use of English rather than some other language is down to English being the language conventionally spoken within the speech community I was born into.
• My use of spoken language rather than gestural or something else, likewise.
• My use of language at all, I think likewise.
  
  (And what goes for me, goes for everyone in the appropriate way.)

That's off the top of my head. It's turtles all the way down.

When we assume that facts exist, we are implicitly committing ourselves to a form of nominalism as opposed to viewing things as mutually dependent and holistic. When we assert the ontology of the universe as facts and not things, we seem to be saying that objects are nominalist, but, as opposed to what? — Question

?

You should take another shot at that paragraph.

I had begun to wonder if you were just talking about words and dictionary-meanings. Bleh.

Where occasion sensitivity might play a role, among other places, is where determination of some determinable has established membership in an equivalence class that is thereby fine-grained just enough to satisfy some practical purpose (including the founding of a meaning convention for effective communication, in some cases." — Pierre-Normand

That makes perfect sense to me. Equivalence is variable.

Maybe this idea provides the sought after stopping points for Strap Tasmaner's "cofinal tails". Determinable properties and dummy sortals don't determine such tails, but substance-sortals and event-types possibly do since they determine as fully as one might want *what* something is. Further, specifications (or further determinations of determinables) beyond such a natural stopping point only achieves the specification of merely accidental properties (including such things as the accidental microphysical realization or material constitution of events or substances. — Pierre-Normand

So the idea would be that this is how you know you only have the tail of an entailment-poset -- maybe you're starting around "Something happened to him" and "Something" couldn't generate such a set, so you know there's there's something more determinate further up.

Here, we've been talking at length about a particular event and its accidental properties. If we want to know whether it was a killing, we might stop at one point in the determination process; if we want to know whether it was manslaughter or homicide, we would have to go further; if we only care that there was a death, we can stop before getting to "killing." And if we just want to know as much as possible about an event, as an historian might, we might determine everything we possibly can. If you're doing research on violent death in America, then you might employ pretty unusual sortals, such as "Death by stabbing, assailant known to victim but not immediate family."

If stopping points are all occasional, we don't need a way to tell we've only got the tail of the entailment-poset, we already know we do. We always do. The point of calling one "just a tail" is to highlight that it is insufficient for our current purpose, and that we need to further determine it.

What the ontological import of all that is, I couldn't say.

ADDED: What I haven't addressed here is how you match sortal to purpose.

If you want to say that convention of use exists at the moment of it's birth — StreetlightX

No I absolutely don't. I'm just trying to follow your thinking here, badly it seems. I'll take one last shot at it.

by convention I mean already-established use (of language), and not grammatical regularity — StreetlightX

Maybe if you could give me an example of each, that would be clearer: an example of an already-established use in English that is not what you would call a grammatical regularity (I assume you mean this in a wide sense); and an example of a grammatical regularity in English that is not an already-established use. (Since you use "regularity" in one and "use" in the other, I did too, but that's not an endorsement.)

It's a measure of my confusion that I have absolutely no idea what your examples will be. I hope it's plain as day to you.

Suppose you do attempt to teach John Cakese. Let's suppose also that none of the words of Cakese exist yet; you intend to make them up as you go, and then use them consistently, and you may also distinguish different sorts of words and consistently use those different sorts of words in different ways. Is that the idea? And to you, there is no convention here because you're making it all up.

(I take it we are not to imagine Cakese as your native language.)

Isn't Cakese experienced by John as something that already exists by the time he hears it? And if regular, etc., etc., then as conventional?

Let's call it "Cakese". You said I could call it what I like, and I've decided.

As it turns out, you never meant to imply that Cakese actually exists. Fine. It was, let's say, an imagined language, like Builders(2). Your post included no actual use of Cakese -- you were just explaining what it would be if it were a language and how it might be used. Fine.

On this reading, John's request for "a 'new usage' that bears absolutely no association or link whatsoever to the conventional usages of the time in which it arose" could be satisfied simply by imagining a new language and imagining using it. Since Cakese has just been (imagined to be) invented, it is, by definition, not conventional, not as you use the word "conventional," i.e., it wasn't a language that already existed. Huzzah!

You may be satisfied, but I seriously doubt John will be. I think he would expect to see something that counts as a use of Cakese, while having no link to the conventions of Cakese.

Is there something peculiar about English that makes it impossible to produce the sort of unconventional usage John requested in English?

these criteria must be 'lived', and the only thing that that guarantees their uptake (or not) is the 'form-of-life', the 'whirl of organism' in which they operate. Meaning is use means: look at the practices in which language is embedded in ("the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life"), and language or meaning cannot be grasped apart from that activity — StreetlightX

Incidentally, it is just this rarefied, intellectualist, and 'thin' approach to language - in which meaning can only ever find its ground in more language ("meaningless... unless they are given meaning as being equivalents to words..."), shorn of any reference to human practice, lived context, and worldly action - in short, the entire order of the performative — StreetlightX

The only ground for the supposed meaning of your supposed use of language that you indicated was more language, that is, the translations you provided. We have been given no reason to believe there are practices in which your supposed language is embedded. You didn't even bother to fake it: you could have made up scenarios where you say "koijnufbab" to the postman each day, etc.

You might have said, here are some arbitrary strings of letters and some gestures that could conceivably be part of a language. Fine. You might have noted that the lived context of those strings and gestures includes the use of English, and that it is possible to treat those strings and gestures as loanwords from a language that happens not to exist. But by claiming there is such an unnamed language, that a few strings and gestures and their translated meanings is all it takes to have a language, it is you who have failed to take Wittgenstein seriously.

In fact, it's clear that what undergirds your claim that those strings and gestures were a use of language is something you will not say: that they were meant as language.

If I had some cake, and you were in the same room as me, and neither of us could speak to each other in terms other than in my made-up-on-the-spot language (assuming I was consistent with grammar), I wager you'd 'get' my invitation to eat cake eventually (this would be the 'rough ground' of language - life and it's being lived, language bound up with action - that secures meaning). This is how we teach children, no? Does it matter if we teach them with an already-established - i.e. conventional - language, or not? — StreetlightX

This is a tough sell because it's extremely difficult to imagine the "no other terms" part. I think we all reach in our minds for some foundational gestures we pretend are transparent and self-grounding. (If the goal is to share the cake, the thing to do is cut each of you a piece. That's what Wittgenstein would say.)

But the most important word in here is "consistent." What you teach someone when you teach them a language, the practice you invite them to join, is precisely the consistent and regular actions (not only the utterances, but the matching of utterance to occasion, and so on) that constitute its use, in short, its conventions. No regularity, no convention, and no language.

Supposing, just for the sake of argument, you have a provided a criterion for what could or should count as a use of language, what would lead me to think the criterion had been met in this case?

At a minimum one would have to grant that the phrases and gestures have a grammar particular to them (such that there would be different kinds of lexemes employed), and that this grammar would be transposable to other words or gestures that could belong to that same language — StreetlightX

I'm sorry, are you saying I have to grant this, in the present case? Or are you saying that if this were an instance of language use, this is what I would be granting?

without interpretation there is no difference between meaningful and meaningless — Metaphysician Undercover

I'm a little puzzled by this.

If I speak to you in a language you do not know, it would make sense for you to say, "That's meaningless to me." "Meaningless to me" would mean "I can't understand this." But even if it were meaningless to you, it could be and is meaningful to me and to anyone else who knows that language.

But you seem to have something very different in mind. If I say something to you in a language you know, must you interpret what I said for it to be meaningful to you? I'll grant that conversation usually involves some ambiguity, some ellipsis, and so on, and sometimes those have to be cleared up to understand what someone is saying. I suppose you could call that interpretation.

But that's by and large a matter of clarifying which of several meanings the speaker meant. You could say that until one meaning is settled on, what was said does not have a meaning. But it doesn't look much at all like the case of speech in a language you don't know. If there's an interpreter on hand, she could transform the meaningless into the meaningful for you, but that's not much at all like the problem of selecting one among several meanings.

What the two cases do share is an asymmetry: there is no reason to think I do not understand what I say to you, whether I speak in a language you don't know, or speak ambiguously in a language you do know, or speak with the exemplary clarity of a post such as this one. I have no need of an interpreter to understand what I say; nor do I need to disambiguate it or fill in whatever was elliptical in it. So I cannot see that my own speech was ever meaningless to me in any sense, even without either of the two sorts of interpretation.

Fair enough. What I'm wondering though is in what sense your typing was a use of language.

My uses may be idiosyncratic, but they are not private, by dint of their being uses of language at all. — StreetlightX

What language would that be?

The issue is ontological and not directly tied with issues of knowledge or reference. — Pierre-Normand

If by this you mean, can we imagine a theory in which the distinction you are contemplating is deployed to pick out different entities, I suppose that would be fine, but you're not suggesting there is something like a "bare" ontological question here, outside the context of any particular theory, are you? That would seem very strange to me indeed. What's more, it seems to me the motivation for preferring either a theory that distinguishes actions from, say, occurrences, or one that doesn't, would be precisely its utility in dealing with issues of knowledge and reference. And of course the issue arose in this thread precisely as a question of reference.

At any rate, I'm not sure we are compelled to reach the ontological issue at all: clearly one could be in a position to assert that there was a death and not in a position to assert there was a murder; one could dissemble; one could be interested in the event only qua death and indifferent otherwise (the lawyer executing Caesars will). I suppose some of this is the sort of thing you would count as occasion-sensitivity.

And the unavoidable fact is that if Caesar does not die, there is no murder. Do we have a problem with theories where the existence of one entity (a murder) requires the existence of another (a death)? What about when the required entity is of a different type?