You needn't let that rigor disappear. The American philosopher W. V. Quine famously said, "To be is to be the value of a bound variable." He took "there exists" to mean exactly what it seems to, and argued that if somewhere in, say, a theory of physics, you have an expression like "∃x F(x)" then your theory is committed to the existence, real-world actual existence, of something that is F.

(Apologies if you know all this. If not, the place to start is "On What There Is" collected in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays.)

Like when we define the truth of a formula of the form ∃n F(n) we say:
∃n F(n) is true iff there exists a natural number x such that F(x) is true
In that definition does the 'there exists' part mean the set theoretic provability of the existence or some kind of platonic metaphysical existence or some other kind of existence. — Meta

If the question is whether you are committed to interpreting ∃ metaphysically, maybe platonically, then the answer is no. "∃n F(n)" says only that F is true of something in the domain of discourse.

Of course you can go further and take a position on what the objects in the domain of discourse are, but just using quantifiers doesn't commit you to any particular view.

Are you saying the similarity is that there are principles at all, or that the principles themselves are similar? — Srap Tasmaner

there are principles at all
— Srap Tasmaner

That's it. — TheMadFool

Is the relation between my house and its principles the same as the relation between the universe and its principles? — Srap Tasmaner

To the extent that we can posit a creator of the principles. — TheMadFool

So we've agreed that the principles that somehow relate to the house or to my building the house are not similar to the principles that somehow relate to the universe or to God creating the universe.

If I understand your last post, the idea is that what matters is that the builder or creator is the source of the principles that relate to the project. My ideas about the house guide the building of the house and determine the result; God's ideas about the universe guide his creation of it and determine the result. To say something is designed is to say that it embodies some person's ideas. Is that it?

So, absent direct evidence like watching someone design and build something, we can tell something is designed if we can tell that the principles of its organization were someone's ideas. In the presence of something designed, we feel it was done deliberately, or intentionally, or on purpose, at any rate that it didn't just happen, that there was an agency at work in addition to natural processes.

We can be wrong about this. Sometimes trees just happen to grow in circles. But if they are very precisely spaced, or if they line up with constellations or something, we may suspect they were planted. An archaeologist can spot a broken arrowhead where laymen would only see one rock among others. Pattern is not everything though, because nature is full of patterns.

And now we're right back where we started, because the claim is that the existence of patterns in nature is indeed evidence that nature is the way it is deliberately. We clearly cannot reach this conclusion the same way we determine, say, that the shape of this rock must have been deliberately imparted to it by a skilled craftsman. That method is comparative. Natural processes are known to shape rocks in certain ways, and this isn't one of them.

Since we cannot evaluate the universe comparatively--we are not in a position to say something like, this neat, orderly universe appears to have been made deliberately, but those other messy universes seem to have just happened--we must hold that design, deliberate intent, etc. can be apparent in a thing without reference to anything else. The object must wear its designedness on its sleeve.

The problem we encounter immediately though is that concepts are comparative by nature. Even though it is conceivable that, having acquired, say, the concept [red], you could tell something is red without comparing it to anything not red, you could not possibly acquire such a concept in the first place.

In this case, if designedness is to play the role demanded, it must be an innate concept. We must be born with the ability to recognize what is the result of deliberate, intentional design and what is not. And note that it has to be this particular concept. It will not do to say we are born with the ability to recognize patterns or something. No one is disputing that there are patterns in nature. What's at issue is whether those patterns are designed, whether the universe itself is designed, and we must be able to recognize this without comparing the universe to anything else.

Note also that the issue here is not whether there are different sorts of design. We could, for the moment, allow that there might be human design, ant design, divine design, and so on, and that it may be possible to acquire those distinctions through experience. The issue is whether they are all types of one and the same thing and whether you can tell they are just by looking, from the moment you're born.

Is the relation between my house and its principles the same as the relation between the universe and its principles?

The similarity is the existence of principles that is common to both a house and the universe. — TheMadFool

Are you saying the similarity is that there are principles at all, or that the principles themselves are similar?

Of course, in ordinary usage, people sometimes treat "believe" and "know" as, well, not quite opposites, but they don't treat believing as an ingredient of knowing the way philosophers often do. There's nothing at all unusual about someone saying, "I don't believe we're going to win tonight, I know we are!"

So I wonder what Moore's paradox looks like with the factive verb: "It's raining but I don't know it's raining." As before we treated "It's raining" as implicating belief, do we also take "It's raining" to implicate a claim to know it's raining?

And then tell me how the things on your two lists are similar.

I think Moore's paradox shows that use is an element of meaning but not exhaustive.

If we consider the statement "It's raining but I believe that it is not raining" then we quite rightly take it to be an absurd thing to say, even though "it's raining" and "I believe that it is raining" do not mean the same thing. And that's because in saying "it's raining" one is (usually) indicating that one believes that it is raining, and so the statement "It's raining but I believe that it is not raining" is a performative contradiction even if not a logical contradiction (thanks to The Great Whatever for this insight). — Michael

If in saying "It's raining," one is saying he believes it's raining, then it is logically contradictory to say "it's raining but I don't believe it's raining."

The contradiction arises because it's implicit that the speaker who states it's raining is the same speaker who states his belief that it's raining and it's assumed that a speaker can only assert beliefs even should he proclaim his statement as truth.

Contextually and implicitely you're saying "I believe it is raining but I don't believe it's raining," so you have a direct logical contradiction.

A performative contradiction (e.g. " I am dead" or "I ate my mouth") states an impossible performance. I cannot tell you I'm dead because death eliminates speech. I can't eat my mouth because my mouth does the eating.

The raining example you gave is 2 seperate propositions, and of a different form than my examples above. — Hanover

Shouldn't you be claiming that "It's raining but I believe that it is not raining" is equivalent to ""I believe it's raining and I believe I believe that it is not raining"? Then where is the direct logical contradiction?

"It's raining" is not equivalent to "I believe it's raining," nor does the former imply the latter, but arguably the former conversationally implicates the latter. What's odd here is that the implicature is apparently not cancelable. I honestly don't know what conclusion to draw from that.

The organization/order is what's common. — TheMadFool

Perhaps you could be more specific.

Suppose I built a house and God created this universe.
Tell me exactly what those two acts have in common.

0! = 1, and most mathematicians most of the time would say 0⁰ = 1. This is not a profitable avenue for you to stroll down.

I could agree with that.

As I read the history, and I'm not quite an expert, one of the things that happens in the LW and immediately post-LW era is the rise of the Oxford school, "ordinary language" philosophy. Despite the considerable differences, there's some overlap to sort out. What I find really interesting is what happened to OLP. Austin, Strawson, and Grice--much as they fought among themselves--are all taken up by linguists building out the new sub-specialty of pragmatics. As a school of philosophy, OLP seems just to disappear, but what actually happened is that it decamped to another department. There's stuff in Wittgenstein that you can also see as reaching for a field of pragmatics that doesn't exist yet, so he has to work really hard to show what he's getting at. And this is still a kind of analysis, absolutely.

Well, Wittgenstein gave up on the idea of logical analysis but not everybody did, and I think the jury is still out. Logic and linguistics march on.

why shouldn't we say that the more sophisticated creatures do have concepts despite lacking language? — Fafner

I can't help feeling it's an empirical question, and that bothers me. I'd rather be clearer on what connection there is between language and concept. I can imagine arguing several different positions easily.

Of course the concept of 'length' is something the we have created. It really doesn't make sense to 'perceive' a length in an object as an empirical discovery, and for a simple reason: you must already have the concept of length in order to perceive something as having a length, otherwise how could you know that what you are perceiving is 'length' and not some other property? — Fafner

I don't think I disagree with anything here-- maybe-- but I think you mustn't take the further step of saying you can't perceive the length of an object without having the concept of length. You may not perceive it as a length, as something falling under a concept, but critters without concepts perceive things, know things, etc.

No no, of course not, but animals do stuff that looks like cognition, so I feel a little uncomfortable with theories (like Whorf-Sapir) that tie even stuff like perception to linguistic competence. Maybe it's something like this: dogs can (hypothetically) know which of two levers is longer, but they can't provide justification for their knowledge. There's a causal chain, but no logical one.

"Imbue."

Here's the link for benighted souls that don't get the reference.

Okay, I'll bet you could devise an experiment that would show that dogs can pick out the longest of a set of levers, or the shortest, or whatever. I don't see a concept here, but there's something. What is it?

I get that. And you could manage by training people to use the stick in a certain way and that's that. But it's far from uncommon to use definitions in a given domain and people are pretty adept at that. I would think for a lot of people, including every scientist who ever lived, just telling them "One meter is defined as the length of this stick" would be all the training they need.

the concept of length is not something created as part of a language game. It's something we cognate about objects. How we make use of length to measure things is part of language games. — Marchesk

That has an undeniable ring of plausibility to it, but I wonder whether it's an empirical claim or a logical one.

For comparison, I think the war over the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis and color words is still raging. See this wikipedia article. The nutshell would be something like this: many languages do not have separate words for what we call "blue" and "green" (just as an example); can native speakers of those languages distinguish blue from green? Common sense says so, and I tend to agree, but the research goes on.

Agreed. That's why it's not helpful for him to say, there's one thing that's neither a meter long or not a meter long. It is one meter long, not because we measured it, but because we say it is. It's one of those cases where saying it's so makes it so.

You have to keep in mind we're taking about a time when 1 meter was defined as the length of this stick.

(Answered before your edit. Yeah that's how we do it now, I think.)

The "one" is there even when LW talks about it. Its length is defined as 1 meter, but it could have been defined as anything. 2 meters. 1.003 meters. He needs to account for the "one" somehow if he can't say, it's 1 meter by definition, which he can't because he says it has no length.

Because my version defines its length as an actual value, not just where we get "meter".

I read and loved The Realistic Spirit many years ago. (Still have my copy somewhere-- you're welcome to it if you don't have one.)

So that's what I said at first. Since nothing here rules out doing a definition by cases, I wonder if there isn't some advantage to one approach or the other. It's not just the use of the word "meter" that's at stake here, but the number 1. If the standard was a stick 2 meters long, and a meter was defined as half the length of this stick, how would LW express that?

@Fafner, what does LW have to say about the standard meter being 1 meter long by definition? I don't remember and my copy's in another room.

sometimes I cannot make out what I am looking at. How about you? — Thinker

Now that you mention it...

"Truth by Convention" is pretty early though, so maybe the behaviorism isn't fully formed yet. Been a while since I read it.

Maybe, and that would be pretty interesting because people hate the sort of methodological behaviourism of LW but Quine is quite definitely an unabashed mid-century behaviorist.

Sure, but that makes his fierce commitment to classical logic likewise a little uncomfortable for him.

Yeah but that claim haunted him the rest of his career, and in later works he gets closer and closer to saying you just never revise the laws of thought.

Actually I changed my mind while I was cutting the grass. You were absolutely right.

It occurred to me that we could just define the length of the standard meter as 1, and make the definition of "length of an object" by cases (1 if you're the standard meter, otherwise the result you get when comparing to the standard meter). And I thought to myself, as long as you're okay saying there's this one object that has its length differently, then this is a pretty natural thing to do for standards like this ... because that's exactly what we already did. Duh.

The standard meter in Paris, when LW wrote, was one meter long by definition. You can't show that it's one meter by measuring, but you can show it by providing evidence that this particular object is the standard meter.

Yeah it's something else now. But if the standard's something else, the thing in Paris is just a stick. (A really nice stick.)

Hrmmm. I have asserted that the standard meter is nether. My diabolism is showing.

No, for it to be true you would have to have an effective procedure for determining it to be true (as in mathematics) or some idea what would count as evidence and how you could in theory at least acquire that evidence. Because there's no conceivable way to measure the standard, you're out of luck. The standard does not have a length.

Well we can't measure it without a second standard. Can you explain what he means when he says it is and is not a meter? — Mongrel

He's being cute. Obviously measuring the standard doesn't make sense. But people can still form the sentence, "The standard meter is one meter in length," so what do we say about that? Is it true or false? It's nether. The law of the excluded middle does not apply here.

Again we are talking about getting at the ideas in the users mind, not getting at the rules. — Harry Hindu

There's ideas and there's ideas. When you use the phrase "my grandmother," I can understand you without experiencing the memories you do when you say "my grandmother." And a good thing, because I cannot experience your memories. So there's something else that I can and do get, if I understand you, and that other something is the meaning of the words you speak.

I didn't say they're ''all the same''. — TheMadFool

You had better, or your analogy doesn't get off the ground. I'll try again:

Option 1:
Here's a house. Designed. Must've been a person.
The universe itself looks designed. Must've been a person.
Oh crap! I only recognized the house as designed because it's different from, say, trees and mountains. If everything looks designed, there's nothing about a house that suggests it's the work of a person.

Option 2:
There are two kinds of design or order.
One of them I know to be the work of a person.
Oh crap! There's nothing more to say, without heading back to Option 1.

You have to somehow get person into Option 2. You're trying, but it's just by postulating--the analogy from Option 1 is just gone. You tried the word "subset" first and now you're saying "degrees," but what's missing is any real argument that these things are similar enough to be considered different species of the same genus, and that whatever that genus turns out to be, it's something we'll recognize as the result of personal agency.

Rules won't do the trick. Everyone knows that physical law and regular old human law aren't the same sort of thing at all. They are not species of the genus Law. Just using the word "law" to describe how the universe works is probably a hangover from a more theist period of physics.

Yeah I know you didn't say anything about human law, but when you say "your rules must be sub-ordinate to your boss's rules," it's exactly the same equivocation. The rules of an employee should be subordinate to his boss's. It's normative. Physical law is a necessity. There's no choice about obeying. If I'm an employee of the universe, I'm a good employee whether I want to be or not.

Whichever word you choose--order or design or rules or laws--you have to argue that the high and the low are different types of the same thing. Option 1 was plausible in, say, the 17th and 18th centuries when you could compare an orrery to the actual solar system and say, "Hey, they're both machines. I made this one; He made that one."

The dilemma, once again, is this: sufficient similarity, the feature is no longer a sign of personal agency; insufficient similarity and you can only attribute to personal agency the one you already know.