Absolutely keep going. Don't be in too much of a hurry to get answers. Clarifying an issue is beyond valuation.

I'm for formalizing everything that can be. Maybe it's just a matter of temperament.

The place of informal reasoning in philosophy is -- Emperor? King? President for life? At least in certain areas, namely almost all of it. A few areas have been cleaned up a bit, but most of what gets really cleaned up is farmed out as a science. Philosophers are like mathematicians hanging out in the faculty lounge pre-1994 speculating about whether Fermat's last theorem is true, whether it can be proven, why it should be true, what approaches might lead to success, arguing about how much progress has been made, etc.

You know that's not going to work, don't you? Can Luna2 be the idea of Luna2? That way, infinite regress lies...

I'm not sure how well I can express this, but I think the problem is K itself. (I'd like to take a closer look at Dummett's response though.)

I think you cannot allow as a predicate anything that touches the logical constants or the syntax or semantics of your formal system. K has "true" in it, so you cannot let it run wild in a system that takes truth as a primitive. If you had a formal system that took colors as primitives, you could no doubt generate paradoxes by allowing "looks red" as a predicate.

Of course in ordinary English, there don't seem to be any restrictions on what you can say that might tame semantic (or logical or syntactic) predicates. I think there are two options for how to look at natural language paradoxes:
(1) It's down to the use you are making of the language whether something counts as a paradox. It's not a problem for the poet qua poet even to violate the law of contradiction.
(2) If a natural language is in fact an exceptionally complicated formal language, then the paradoxes tell you what the primitives of the language are, by showing you what leads to trouble.
(1) seems to undercut (2) but I'm not convinced it does. On the other hand, (1) still allows you to say that if your purpose in using language at the moment is reasoning, then certain predicates are off-limits.

Sure. I just remind myself every time I say something like that that Montague was a helluva lot smarter than I am and he thought it was bollocks. I'm not in a position to argue on behalf of his view, just suggesting that it might not be wise to rely too heavily on the distinction. That's all.

Added: I still do it -- I used the distinction in another thread earlier today. I just feel a little less certain about it than I used to.

Cool. It goes on the list.

I said that there's no such thing as a 'theory of types' because in natural languages 'type distinctions' are constantly violated without rendering the sentences meaningless, so it's not clear what work logical type distinctions are supposed to do (e.g. we sometimes use names predicatively as in "he thinks he's Einstein" etc.).

Yes you can have a theory of types in formal language (maybe), but what's its use for explaining phenomena in natural languages? — Fafner

We say things like this, I say things like this, but don't forget Richard Montague, who swore up and down there's no principled distinction between formalized and natural languages. (There's a part of me that hopes he's right, but I can't even read him, yet.)

No, I read him as saying, at least for the word "good", that you don't need a new meaning for each new use of good, so it's easy to specify the meaning in advance. Something else deals with the unanticipated usage.

It's reminiscent of Grice's response to Strawson. Strawson argued, roughly, that the logical constants have different meanings in different situations. Grice split meaning into, on the one hand, what you might call the "literal" meaning without going too far wrong, and implicature, and argued that the variation Peter saw, quite rightly, was explainable in terms of what is (either conventionally or conversationally) implicated by an utterance on a particular occasion, rather than by shifts in "literal" meaning.

How do you intelligibly talk about genetic material without allowing that there are molecules carrying information?

I don't see how what you say contradicts what I said about Fodor. — Fafner

You have the bigger picture in mind and I just have the quote you posted. In the quote he explains the applicability of "good" to any noun phrase as not being due to "good" having many meanings we could list, but something else. Your concern earlier seemed to be that there could be a sentence where the meaning of a word in that sentence could not possibly have been specified in advance. Fodor's thing about "good" insists that the one meaning specified in advance will, in this case, always be enough. I don't know what he says in general, though, and you do.

Hmm I don't remember ever seeing such a use of 'proposition', can you give an example? — Fafner

Well I just tried to use that way, but I didn't get away with it.

As for paraphrase, that's an interesting thing. But I was talking about a step before you really get to content. Something like this: Jones said, last Saturday, "I've got it," referring to the money he owed. You can normalize this to: On July 1, 2017, Jones says that Jones has the money Jones owes. That's a kind of paraphrase, but the goal is just to put the sentence into a particular timeless form and remove a certain amount of context dependence.

However, if you treat proposition as themselves having semantic content, then the question would arise, what is their semantic content? Another proposition? — Fafner

Yeah that has to be right. Sometimes "proposition" gets used to mean something like: the sentence under consideration, disambiguated, indexicals eliminated, ellipses eliminated, whatever is needed from context explicitly added in, and so on. A sentence "normalized" in whatever way is needed. That's a useful thing but I don't know a standard term for it.

unless you have an algorithm that tells you what "___ is a good X" means independently of what '___' and 'X' mean and the context of their use, then we could never understand new sentences of this form, which is exactly what Travis denies — Fafner

Now I'm confused because Fodor explicitly says in the passage you quoted that the meaning of "good" is fixed and its varying applicability is explained by something else besides its meaning, and he called that its "syncategorematcity."

I just made almost exactly the same suggestion (as Fodor does) elsewhere, but about assertion & truth rather than goodness.

I'm not sure such an approach requires every possible use to have been determined in advance -- some can kick out as not (yet) defined, and we probably actually want that to happen, I should think.

it is not uncommon to hear about people changing their attitude after a child, sibling, friend, etc. comes out. Their changed emotional stakes, not their changed cognitive beliefs, explains their stance, a case could be made. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

It just seems most natural to me to describe such cases as beliefs changing; what you described would be reasons for those new beliefs.

As an aside, by saying this I'm not really defending any particular view about human psychology-- and certainly not epistemology! This is just how belief talk works, and what we use it for. If I'm defending anything much, it's just the utility of folk psychology, not any theory.

Do we have to define computation as symbol manipulation? There are clearly phenomena in nature that are driven by information transfer rather than just energy transfer. It seems relatively natural to think of systems that rely on such mechanisms as also being computational, whatever else they may be. (Insert several pages of @apokrisis here.)

Thanks!

Never read him, but he sounds like a pretty smart guy.

So as I understand, you are saying that the act of inference from empirical evidence consists of two parts, one is the act of assertion, and the other is the inference from empirical evidence. — nishank gupta

I spoke hastily and conflated a couple things, but it might actually help.

We really don't want to say that that there's the inference, and the assertion of the inference. You don't assert modus ponens when you use it. You do assert the conditional, but that too could be an empirical claim.

The issue I was reaching for is this: outside of mathematics or some other formalized domain, it's not just the validity of the inference that's up for argument, but the presentation of the issue and the applicability of the inference schema. Suppose you do something that in mathematics would be informal but entirely benign, like this:
Let x = 2
Then x² = 2x
Now imagine that argument ensues not over the second line, but over the legitimacy of saying "Let x = 2". That's how things go when you're doing philosophy, because the distinction between language and metalanguage is, well, less clear than in a formalized domain. So there's a sense in which there is always a meta-asertion that how the inference is structured is appropriate and meaningful.

Look at what you're doing here. Is it even possible to formalize the issue you're trying to address?(Note the thread next door.) I'm not sure. And there's another point there: informal reasoning is generally not quite deductive. How do you formalize analogies? Can you formalize salience? There's no harm in trying, but things are just different out here than they are in mathematics.

Now back to the nature of truth ...

But we assume that they're similar enough that they might as well be the same until there's a good reason to believe otherwise. — Terrapin Station

That's not far from my earlier suggestion for how we can Grice's types rolling, but I still think that this similarity needs grounding, and we probably want a little more than an assumption to do it. And we need to explain how similarity does us any good.

Here's how I see the dilemma.

Option 1 (Frege's): propositions, meaning and truth are not subjective mental states or events.
Pros: meaning and truth are public and shareable; communication works as advertised -- understanding is grasping the same meaning as the utterer; logic works as advertised -- if A asserts P and B asserts ¬P, they're talking about the same thing.
Cons: entails a third (platonic) realm of entities (?) that are neither physical objects or subjective mental states or events.

Option 2 (psychologism): meaning, truth, etc. are subjective mental states or events.
Pros: does not entail the third realm.
Cons: communication and logic do not "literally" work as they do in Option 1: A and B cannot be in the same subjective mental state, thus A and B cannot "literally" understand each other's utterances, cannot both assert or deny the same proposition, etc.

You can of course just plump for option 1 or 2 and accept the consequences: accepting option 1 entails accepting a third realm many find implausible; option 2 leaves you hanging out with the freshmen asking, "How do I know your blue is the same as my blue?"

If that's not enough, there is further motivation for crafting a third option: there is a sense in which Option 1 explains nothing, but simply redescribes what we want to explain, with the needed theoretical entities (meanings, propositions, etc.) and a framework showing how they are related; Option 2 goes wrong not by relying on mental states and events, but by not engaging the theoretical framework of Option 1 at all.

We could modify, or clarify, Option 1 somewhat: it's platonic entities people are hesitant about, and it's not really clear what Option 1 is committed to in the way of entities. (Elsewhere, Frege is committed to numbers as objects, etc.) Propositions and concepts are not treated by Frege entities at all. But is the sense of a proposition? We talk about it as if it were, but perhaps there is a way of refining our presentation of Option 1 so that the population of theoretical entities is smaller and more acceptable.

We could modify Option 3 along the lines contemplated earlier in this thread, by gathering utterances and mental states into types or equivalence classes, with the intention of plugging this into the framework of Option 1 in place of the theoretical entities there. We somehow already do something like this with phonemes (or cheremes), for instance.

One way to approach the issues you raise (which I think are serious issues, very much worth thinking about) is to step back and look at assertion first. What does it mean to make an assertion? Of any kind, mathematical, empirical, metaphysical, whatever.

One idea is that the very act of assertion carries with it an idea of how the truth of the assertion could be verified or determined or established, whatever, and that's necessarily domain-dependent. An assertion is an assertion about a particular domain. So a mathematical assertion carries with it the idea of verifying the assertion by means of an effective procedure such as calculation or proof. An empirical assertion carries with it an idea about what would count as evidence for it, how that evidence could be acquired, in principle at least, etc.

Your question about inference is interesting because if you make an inference from a set of empirical premises, the result should be an empirical proposition, but when you assert the inference, you indicate that it is the validity of the inference that must be verified (conformity to inference rules, proper form of the premises, etc.). Because the result is empirical, it may be possible to disprove the result by empirical means, and then your inference becomes a reductio of one or more of the empirical premises.

Any of that make sense?

Propositions, as the meanings of the sorts of sentences that can be true or false are not objective on my view, because meaning isn't objective. Of course Frege posited that they were objective, because Frege was anti-psychologism . . . which in my opinion was one of the dumbest moves that philosophy ever made. Not that that was only Frege's fault. I just mean the move away from psychologism in general. — Terrapin Station

I'm just still trying to figure out what all this means. Maybe if you clarified what you mean by "objective" and "subjective" -- I may have guessed wrong -- that might help.

I believe I understand how Frege's view works; I don't understand how your view works. If you want to just explain it, that would be fine.

We want to be able to make inferences that rely on mathematical and empirical truth being the same, one and only, kind of truth:

If I bought 6 apples, and if I ate 1, and if you ate 1, and if 6 - 4 = 2, then there are 4 apples.

The truth of "I bought six apples" is established in one way and the truth of "6 - 4 = 2" is established in another, but a true proposition is a true proposition.

I can imagine a theory that would structure this inference completely differently, but I think we would want such a theory to generate this version of the inference as a consequence. It's just too natural and convenient to give up easily.

There's the sentence I actually utter: "My apple is red."
There's the sentence you imagine uttering: "Your apple is red."
Do they have the same meaning? Express the same proposition? Are they equivalent in some other way?

Sometimes you're stuck with your theoretical entities. — Srap Tasmaner

Should also have said something here about category mistakes.

E: all of the above.

I really cannot imagine doing philosophy by deciding ahead of time what I'll quantify over, if it comes to that. I have the same physicalist or naturalist prejudice most philosophers do, but that only decides all questions if you also believe in a form of reductionism that looks pretty suspect. Sometimes you're stuck with your theoretical entities.

Other commitments are certainly a factor in choosing one theory over another, but I'd say the main thing is always explanatory power: does the theory make sense of our collective intuitions? does it clarify murky cases? does it include what it should and exclude what it should? The opposites of those (and whatever else goes in there) are bad.

Among a particular community, we could identify the sense agreed upon. Yet that sense is a sense among many that are out there (and over time.) — Mongrel

This is absolutely true of course, and you may have to narrow the context all the way down to the occasion of utterance, and even then you may have to appeal to the intention of the speaker to disambiguate an expression.

There is something mechanical about this process though, which may be why it's of slightly more interest to linguists than philosophers. (Perhaps wrongly.)

1. Does communication presuppose complete disambiguation?

2. The real trouble seems to come once disambiguation is done, assuming it can be: when I understand something you say, have I acquired the content of your utterance, as a sort of payload?

people are coerced into doing a lot of things that are not in their own interests based some screwed up ideologies. That is the norm. — Andrew4Handel

This is the part I really don't get. Why aren't you crusading for responsible parenting, the alleviation of suffering, the end of war, more nurturing forms of education, more meaningful and rewarding employment? Do you believe there's nothing we can do about unnecessary suffering, and that's why we should just pack it in?

Could I make a suggestion here, which is that the term 'objective' is somewhat misleading in this context. — Wayfarer

This had not occurred to me. I think overwhelmingly I use objective/subjective to mean something like public/private, just because of the contexts in which I'm making the distinction. For instance, here the idea is that when you understand a sentence you have grasped something that anyone can, thus something public, as opposed to whatever images and so forth the sentence might call to your mind and your mind alone, which would be private.

I should have added: do you expect that for all I can tell at least initially, when you say "Your apple is purple," you mean what I would have meant if I had said "My apple is purple"?

It's like you saying your apple is red and me saying, no, you're apple is purple, where for all we can tell at least initially, we're both using the sound "apple" to "point at" the same objective thing, we're both using "red" and "purple" to "point at" the same objective things, etc. — Terrapin Station

Do you say "No, your apple is purple" because for all you can tell at least initially, when I said "My apple is red," I meant what you would have meant if you had said, "Your apple is red"?

Propositions, as the meanings of the sorts of sentences that can be true or false are not objective on my view, because meaning isn't objective. — Terrapin Station

So how do people compare judgments? I judge P_me true, you judge P_you true. We're not even talking about the same proposition. (In fact Frege argues that would actually be me judging P_me true_me and you judging P_you true_you.)

As I said, if you can establish that P_me and P_you, if not instances of P simpliciter, are members of some equivalence class (which we could then define to be P if we wanted), then you would have a meaningful way of comparing my judgment of P_me and your judgment of P_you.

Until you do that, it's just me saying my apple's red and you saying your banana's yellow.

Also Soames presents an awesome argument for why we can't dispense with propositions (a sort of netherworld object) without denying that there is such a thing as agreement. — Mongrel

I think I've been pushing a Frege-inspired version of this in chatting here with Terrapin. Certainly positing propositions do give you a way to agree and disagree, etc. So they're certainly sufficient, but I want to see more clearly whether they're necessary, which is what I'm working at above. I do wonder whether starting from the conditions of communication could eventually get you a version of Frege's machinery.

I think it's a genuine question how much of especially pre-high-school teaching can be done without saying "we". I don't think of spelling as repressive, teaching it as indoctrination. Fact is, though, we have teachers tell students, this is how we spell "apple", this is how we add numbers, this is what we mean by a fact or an opinion. If "we" suddenly disappears when you get to religion, what does its absence convey?

I don't know if you know the paper where David Chalmers argues for a contemporary Fregeanism where 'sense' pretty much becomes 'intension'. — mcdoodle

I do not, and thanks for the tip!

"Mental object" is what math people call the "idea" Frege speaks of. That's as opposed to "abstract object" which I suppose is his "sense." — Mongrel

I think that's right, bearing in mind that he's going to take mathematical objects as, well, objects, just like physical objects. Sometimes he describes the sense of a complete (i.e., referring) expression as the way the object referred to is presented. Example: "2 + ..." is an incomplete expression, a function. Put an object in the blank, and you get a complete expression like "2 + 3". "2 + 3" refers to 5, but not the same way that "5" refers to 5, or "7 - 2" refers to 5. This is supposed to explain why equations can be informative. "2 + 3 = 5" tells you that the references of the two expressions are the same, but it remains that "2 + 3 = 5" expresses a different thought from "5 = 5" or "7 - 2 = 5". The thought expressed is the sense.

But the question is, what are A and B making judgments about?

Frege has a clear answer to that: the proposition, the thought, which is objective. I'll grant that this is basically a posit, but like any posit it serves a purpose. If A and B disagree about whether a proposition is true, they have to assign different truth-values to one and the same thing. That thing cannot be any particular inscription of the proposition, but the proposition itself.

The thought expressed by a sentence is also what Frege says you get when you understand the sentence, and you get it without remainder. It is what is communicated, what is transferred from A to B, what A and B can have different opinions about. This is the idea behind scenario (1) in which there is a single, shared, publicly available box of propositions for A and B. It's what you said it would be easy to deny. (Starting to feel a little icky about talking about propositions as if they're objects.)

So the question is whether scenario (3) can be made to work.

As is, it's just an intuition pump, right? I mean, baseball cards are manufactured; they are by design identical. The analogy is going to fail almost immediately. The questions that replace the built-in identity are a little problematic: what would make two utterances instances of the same utterance-type, two beliefs instances of that same belief-type? What's a type? It feels like you need something from scenario (1) (or nearby) to get this going.

Here's what I'm tempted to do: agree with Grice that this is what happens-- to talk about the tree, we need each to have a belief that the object we're looking at is a tree, not the belief. Don't posit, not yet anyway. (The idea is to avoid using Frege's machinery at all.) Accept that what we have here is all we need to talk about the tree. Then look for an explanation for how two numerically distinct beliefs can count as beliefs of the same type right here, in the transaction between two members of a linguistic community. We honestly don't need them to be instances of the same type, not for this part, although it's pretty obvious why that would be helpful. Right now all we need is for A and B to agree to treat their numerically distinct beliefs as instances of a belief-type.

Grice is almost certainly going to get here with a (probably infinite) chain of intentions, so that can get a little weird.

I'd like to come at it sideways, by the comparison with phonemes. How does someone "decide" that the allophone you actually utter will count as a /d/? This is already a little wrong, because the range of allophones is itself already determined by the speech community. It still looks like we're trying to figure out how conventions work.

One shot at this might be this: when you utter a sound, I have to take it as an allophone of some phoneme we use in our speech community or not. If possible, I'll take it as one of ours, because (a) intentions, and (b) why not? You can provisionally, experimentally take the sound as a phoneme. Which one? Again, you have to decide whether that phoneme with the others around it make a morpheme, and again if possible you will, because (a) intentions, and (b) why not? You do that provisionally and experimentally, all the way up to the complete utterance, and see if it seems to work. I'd say there's a tiny bit of evidence we do this in the way we read over typos, mentally substituting the right letter because we're pushing toward taking the utterance as valid. You could think of this as the principle of charity, but you might also wonder what choice we have but to proceed this way.

Does this actually work? Has any of Frege's machinery been smuggled in here anywhere?

"Mind-independent" is not a phrase I have any use for, I think.

Re: compositionality, I don't see how you recursively generate expressions without it.

Re: my ontology, I don't have one.

In a way, "no man's land" is exactly the right phrase, because nothing here is the sole and unshareable property of any man. I can understand why people think stuff out here "dodgy," but just look at what's here: meaning, information, patterns, mathematical objects, transitions, tendencies, dispositions, institutions, -- I could go on and on and on. We may nurse a view that we are particulars and all we ever really, in whatever sense you think you can make that work, talk about are other particulars, but I think every time you open your mouth you make use of stuff in no man's land. I think it's rather the point of language.

It's not the object referred to but still objective.
— Srap Tasmaner

Objective? Third-person data as opposed to first-person data? — Mongrel

If by "third-person" you mean public, then I think yes.

That would be a version of Frege's context principle. It can get a little weird.
— Srap Tasmaner
Weird how?

There are various ways of formulating contextualism and some of them conflict with compositionality. I can't imagine giving up compositionality. I don't even know what the alternative would be.

but there's something there that has to be taken seriously.
— Srap Tasmaner

I don't know if you've really taken it seriously unless you've pondered how it fits into the bigger picture.

I'm not sure what this means.