Comments

  • Problem with the view that language is use
    ↪Fafner
    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.
  • Problem with the view that language is use
    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.
  • Problem with the view that language is use
    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.
  • Problem with the view that language is use
    ↪Fafner
    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.
  • Problem with the view that language is use
    ↪Michael
    "Imbue."

    Here's the link for benighted souls that don't get the reference.
  • Problem with the view that language is use
    ↪Fafner
    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?
  • Problem with the view that language is use
    ↪Fafner
    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.
  • Problem with the view that language is use
    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.
  • Problem with the view that language is use
    ↪Fafner
    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.
  • Problem with the view that language is use
    ↪Marchesk
    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.)
  • Problem with the view that language is use
    ↪Fafner
    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.
  • Problem with the view that language is use
    ↪Fafner
    Because my version defines its length as an actual value, not just where we get "meter".
  • Problem with the view that language is use
    ↪Fafner
    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.)
  • Problem with the view that language is use
    ↪Fafner
    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?
  • Problem with the view that language is use
    @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.
  • Problem with the view that language is use
    Aha! — Piglet
  • God and the tidy room
    sometimes I cannot make out what I am looking at. How about you? — Thinker

    Now that you mention it...
  • Problem with the view that language is use
    ↪Mongrel
    "Truth by Convention" is pretty early though, so maybe the behaviorism isn't fully formed yet. Been a while since I read it.
  • Problem with the view that language is use
    ↪Mongrel
    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.
  • Problem with the view that language is use
    ↪Fafner
    Sure, but that makes his fierce commitment to classical logic likewise a little uncomfortable for him.
  • Problem with the view that language is use
    ↪Fafner

    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.
  • Problem with the view that language is use
    ↪Michael

    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.
  • Problem with the view that language is use
    ↪Marchesk

    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.)
  • Problem with the view that language is use
    Hrmmm. I have asserted that the standard meter is nether. My diabolism is showing.
  • Problem with the view that language is use
    ↪Michael

    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.
  • Problem with the view that language is use
    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.
  • Problem with the view that language is use
    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.
  • God and the tidy room
    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.
  • Problem with the view that language is use
    If meaning is use, then I can use the word "meaning" in a particular way, and that is what it means. — Harry Hindu

    It's a curious thing. People not intimately familiar with Wittgenstein almost always interpret the slogan "meaning is use" as an endorsement of Humpty Dumpty:

    ‘And only one for birthday presents, you know. There’s glory for you!’
    ‘I don’t know what you mean by “glory,”’ Alice said.
    Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. ‘Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant “there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!”’
    ‘But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knock-down argument,”’ Alice objected.
    ‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’
    ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
    ‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master—that’s all.’

    But on the other hand, there's something a bit claustrophobic sometimes about LW's language-games. (2) is a dreary affair, isn't it? And Wittgensteinians (present company excluded, of course) have this way of calling people out for violating the rules of the language-game, or illicitly taking a word from the language-game it belongs to and passing it off as something else, etc. In short, treating the rules of the various language-games as prescriptive. Exactly the opposite of the casual anti-Wittgensteinian who dreads the chaos of Humpty-Dumptyism.

    And then I think of a marvelous passage from Ryle about "The Bogy of Mechanism," where he describes a scientist unfamiliar with chess studying a game being played (with the players hidden from him) and figuring out the rules. When the players are revealed, "He commiserates with them upon their bondage. 'Every move that you make,' he says, 'is governed by unbreakable rules..." He explains that when he has figured out the rest of the rules, he will be able to predict their moves even better than he can now. Ryle then distinguishes, as is his wont, from a move being governed by the rules and being ordained by them.

    Which brings us back to animal signaling, I should think.
  • God and the tidy room
    ↪Thinker

    My question really is whether you think someone's motivation determines the truth of what they say. Mathematicians enjoy mathematics, and of course that's why they do it. Finding an especially good result may make you especially happy, but the converse obviously does not hold.

    There has been some controversy within philosophy in recent years about whether alternative points of view are suppressed by charging them with committing the genetic (and related) fallacies. I was wondering if you were taking a side here.
  • God and the tidy room
    However, for us mortals we are bound to our motivation – even in our quest for pure mathematics. We are caged, like rats, with our motivations and emotions. We cannot escape the gravity of our emotions. — Thinker

    Do you actually believe this, or were you just having a go at @Sapientia?
  • God and the tidy room
    They surely can't be saying god is simply implausible because if they are then they'd need to have access to a vast amount of knowledge - extending from the subatomic to the intergalactic - and that I'm confident they don't. — TheMadFool

    Btw, I'm almost certain Hume had a related argument that the order you perceive in the universe could be the order only of the little bit you have knowledge of, and that for all you know the far greater portion of it is a seething chaotic hellscape, or words to that effect.
  • God and the tidy room
    If it looks like I'm making up stuff ''to hold it together'' I probably am but...are there any logical errors? That's the question that I care about. — TheMadFool

    I think, as I tried to show in my little dialogue, and in the post before that, the argument from design undercuts itself. Remember, conscious agency only gets in at all by noticing there is a difference between things attributable to it and things not. Once you say those things are all the same, you've lost the ground for attributing anything to conscious agency.

    Besides, contra my dialogue, there are tidy rooms in nature. The first time you find an intricately woven bird's nest can be a puzzling experience. Did this grow this way? Incredible! But do birds serve a long apprenticeship learning how to make these things, study the nests of other birds, make smaller, simpler practice nests before they attempt the real thing? No. There's agency at work here, and birds do have some consciousness obviously, but even though a bird's nest obviously has a design with a definite purpose, it's hard to say whether its production was conscious. What about anthills? Which ant is the architect?

    There are extraordinary structures, crystals for instance, created by natural processes of nonliving matter. There are extraordinary structures, which seem different, roses for instance, attributable to living matter, but maybe not to consciousness. The chambered nautilus. Life shows different patterns of sensitivity and reaction to its environment, and we can see that. Then there are extraordinary structures attributable only to conscious agency.

    You'll think the preceding paragraph is making your point for you, because, even though we agree that the universe is a quite astonishing place, you're looking at it through the wrong end of the telescope.
  • Problem with the view that language is use
    ↪Marchesk

    Okay, that is not what I expected. Well done?
  • God and the tidy room
    My reply to that is there's a difference of degrees between man-made order and god-made order (laws of nature). Humans can't break the laws of nature. The most they can do is pit one law against another e.g. a plane flies by a play between fluid dynamics and gravity. In a sense humans are restricted by the laws of nature and are therefore man-made order is inferior (a subset) of natural laws. — TheMadFool

    Yeah, by "you're making stuff up," I didn't mean that you hadn't actually said this, but that what you say here again you're just making up. This has nothing to do with the original argument. There's no plausible analogy between the two things you describe here. People move around bits of already existing stuff in accordance with rules they can't break; God makes all the stuff out of nothing and creates all the rules. I'm sure you can find some way to make these analogous, but no one would ever think to start the argument from design here-- it's just something you make up later to hold it together.
  • Problem with the view that language is use
    ↪Marchesk

    Your concern is that, under a certain doctrine, all there is to using language is emitting appropriate sounds at appropriate times, mechanically, as if there were no difference between human language and the sort of signaling other animals do, and that meaning here is not so much explained as explained away. The popular alternative, around here at least, seems to be that meaning is what's going on in the minds of speaker and hearer. I guess people call this "externalism vs. internalism."

    Because I find this sort of debate intensely boring, I propose instead we try together to analyse an example, leaving our pet theories aside, and see if we can discover something about meaning.

    Suppose I go hiking with a friend in an area he knows but I don't. We come to a fork in the trail, and I start to go right, but he says, "This way," starting left, "That way's kinda dangerous." Also consider a version of this story where my companion is Lassie, who sits and whimpers when I start to go the wrong way. Or a Neanderthal who grunts and shakes his head, and gestures to the left.

    What does it mean to understand each of these? What do we expect if something is to be called "understanding"?
  • God and the tidy room
    The situation is tricky because man-made order is a subset of the laws of nature. — TheMadFool

    Dude, you're just making stuff up now.
  • Problem with the view that language is use
    ↪Marchesk

    I'll try to get to your critique of "meaning is use" sometimes tomorrow when I have time, but in the meantime, you should note that linguists already have pretty good criteria for distinguishing human language from animal signaling. One place to start is Hockett's design features.
  • God and the tidy room
    ↪TheMadFool

    Q: Why do we not find tidy rooms in nature?
    A: A tidy room is the work of a conscious agent, acting with purpose and intelligence.
    Q: So we see two different sorts of phenomena in the world: those that show the hallmarks of conscious agency, such as design and purpose, and those that don't. The latter are the results of nature blindly following natural law, so to speak.
    A: Yes, that's right.
    Q: But isn't the entire natural world something like a machine, following rules laid down by its creator?
    A: But to what purpose?
    Q: I know not. But if I see a great factory, I may not know what is made there, but still recognize the hallmarks of conscious agency in its design. Is that not so?
    A: It is.
    Q: Then is not the entire universe like a great tidy room, governed by the laws laid down by its creator?
    A: Perhaps. But we began by noting the difference between tidy rooms and nature, and we saw in the distinctiveness of the tidy room evidence of design and purpose. If there is also tidiness in nature, what is it about the room that leads us to infer a conscious agent acting with purpose? If tidiness is everywhere, it is not the distinguishing feature we thought it was.
    Q: There are degrees of tidiness.
    A: Are they all signs of conscious agency?
    Q: They are.
    A: Degrees of conscious agency?
    Q: Exactly.
    A: So the tidy room is distinguished from nature, not by being the work of conscious agency, acting with intelligence and purpose, for so is nature.
    Q: Correct, although you should put in the bit about degrees.
    A: Then the distinction left for us is that there are tidy rooms on the one side, and there's nature on the other. We no longer deduce from this difference anything, but we happen to know they're both the results of conscious agency.
    Q: Of different degrees.
    A: How do we know there are these different degrees? How can we tell which is at work in a given instance?
    Q: It's as plain as the difference between a tidy room and nature.
    A: Then aren't you saying the same thing I was saying before?
    Q: You had conscious agency on one side, and nature on the other; I have both on both sides, but with the different degrees.
    A: Right.
  • God and the tidy room
    (5) Why are there three physical dimensions rather then some other number?
    (6) Why is there an arrow of time?
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