The modern philosophers gave themselves a task not entertained by the ancients, to master nature. Philosophy was no longer about the problem of how to live but to solve problems by changing the conditions of life. — Fooloso4

Perhaps true, but it's not like no one built houses or roads or engaged in agriculture until Bacon. Man had been changing the conditions of life for millennia by the 16th century.

Thanks. It's nice to get a report from the field.

Interesting that you highlight the idea of introducing a bit more organization or discipline into people's thoughts and discussions. Obviously value in that, and it's value people associate with philosophy, so that's something.

I think there's something there. Much of scientific practice is analytic, in the sense that the aim is to find a way to isolate one factor from among the great many that go into producing any phenomenon we might be interested in. This is very difficult. I was surprised to find, when watching an episode of Nova, that once you've carefully gathered your samples it can be like another year before you get the results of carbon-dating. Every step is work.

So that's one thing. The enormous time and energy put into getting answers to questions made as specific as they can be, or as they need to be, whichever is achievable.

I think the main features of science as an enterprise are that it is communal and self-correcting. I don't know if that fits exactly in the traditional "method" box, but it's the crucial add-on to the carefulness above: for all the work dozens of people put in, they might miss something, so no one believes that there is any process available that marks your results as The Truth. They're just results, and the better the process the more weight they'll carry, but mistakes at either the level of practice or of theory are just expected.

Thus passeth away the relevance of philosophy.

if the becoming has no end then there can be no ultimate convergence — Leontiskos

How did the word "ultimate" get in there? There are obviously infinite sequences and series that converge without ever reaching what they converge on.

Some envision progress as the movement toward universal agreement. — Fooloso4

It's hard not to think of Peirce, asymptotic approach to 'truth' and all that, but even if you do conceive a project as aiming for universal agreement, that doesn't mean you expect to get there.

We're talking about the thesis that philosophy has a determinate pull (link). Saying, "There will always be points of divergence and points of convergence [among philosophers]" doesn't seem to help us in addressing that thesis. — Leontiskos

Sure it does. If the direction is determined statistically, we're just talking about evolution, which may not have a telos but does have at least local directionality.

the input of a professional ethicist I found to be valuable — LuckyR

This was, relatively speaking, an outsider to your field?

I'd heard that "ethicist" is a profession now. Was their expertise helpful? Can you describe that for us a little?

We haven't outgrown yet religion, politics or science, all of which require critical analyses and reflective interpretations. — 180 Proof

I think there's maybe a default tech-worshipping pragmatism where a philosophy 'should' be but never actually was. — plaque flag

I thought about this idea of philosophy as critique, but why should practices be incapable of self-critique. After all, that's what we would require of philosophy. I'm not saying it would be the norm. I understand something of institutional dynamics. But I think there's something presumptuous about philosophers, who lack the expertise and knowledge, however flawed and limited, of a field's practitioners, swooping in to pass judgment on their work. Better to cultivate the practice of critique among the producers of knowledge.

I think for a lot of people encountering philosophy might be transformative, might spur a sort of reflection they had never engaged in before, but I don't think philosophy has a monopoly on that. It wasn't transformative for me, but more like finding my tribe, where my peculiar bent was more or less normal.

I think science is most of what philosophy was trying to be for most of its history, so the emergence of modern science is almost like the maturation of philosophy, its fulfillment. In a world with actual physics and cosmology, psychology and neuroscience, sociology and anthropology and linguistics, what philosophy has to offer on the nature of reality or thought or human social life is, shall we say, quaint.

The bits of philosophy likely really to engage people still, I'd guess, are ethics and political philosophy, but that's because people already love arguing about what's right and wrong, and philosophy just provides opportunities to do that. We have a great body of writing about ethics and politics, but whether there's any knowledge there is hard to say.

For all that, there is something a bit magical about Plato, something that isn't trying to become science. I don't quite know what it is, and I don't think the history of philosophy since Plato gives much of a clue either, but maybe there was something worthwhile besides embryonic science in there all along.

If it's not empirical, and it's not mathematics, it's irrelevant.

Maybe that leaves room for something we could still call philosophy, I don't know.

If there is, at least in principle, a way to tie values back to something outside the individual, — Count Timothy von Icarus

That might be reinventing the wheel, if language is outside the individual in some sense, even if it's not outside all individuals in the aggregate, outside at least in the sense of being explicitly a technology of cooperation. And then there's @Isaac's narratives, which serve multiple purposes as language does.

then that provides a framework — Count Timothy von Icarus

This might be a mistake, looking for a framework. It could be we have many sorts of conversations and they have different sources and structures. I care about my kids and I care about democracy -- is that the same thing just because "care" is in both descriptions? Do we talk about these the same way?

understanding how value claims gets communicated without an infinite loop of translating mental state to mental state — Count Timothy von Icarus

Same problem we have everywhere, and I don't know how to solve it. is a persuasive statement of the view, and much as I'd like to, I don't know how to get around it, and I'm not willing just to reject it by fiat.

When I come up with a solution, the forum will be the first to know.

Our sense of values did have to emerge out of something after all. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, and I don't see a better candidate for rock bottom than biology. I think everything goes back to being a living organism, first of all, and being whatever sorts of living organisms we are, which is to start with whatever we were crafted to be by evolution.

I've had some sympathy for the sort of emotive account you can get from Hume and Smith. (The moral sentiments.) I see all sorts of material to work with in the theory of cooperation, from Axelrod to Grice, which I think we can also assume has a biological basis.

My gut instinct (heh) is that we are not that different from the first Homo sapiens, and that our biology is much closer to the surface than we realize.

I don't think social norms work for this because they are too malleable, we need a more general principle that stands behind social norms, hence looking to how animals view fairness. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Obviously I think this is exactly the right approach.

I would put forward that the problem is not a misunderstanding of the word, rather that the word is being used as a short form for more than just itself. Simple elaboration clarifies the misunderstanding. — PhilosophyRunner

Is this assuming nominalism? That there is no "justice," or "good," that people can point to that extends outside the frame of "my desires and preferences?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't think that's what he meant. I think @PhilosophyRunner meant that often when people talk they assume that their words will be interpreted as they interpret them, from their point of view, with all of their assumptions. Sometimes people recognize the need to spell out those assumptions, but often they don't. Philosophy is obsessive about spelling out assumptions -- witness you here bringing up nominalism -- but ordinarily people aren't, hence @PhilosophyRunner's suggestion that understanding can be improved by what he calls "elaboration," which I take to mean people spelling out their assumptions, their point-of-view. That's all.

Of course, your examples suggest, @PhilosophyRunner, that people agree less than they appear to, that for instance people who all say they want "justice" might have in mind very different things, but there may be examples that go the other way, where people don't realize they want the same thing because they use different words for it.

No matter how much a community of agents might appear to agree (or disagree) that "such and such is true of "the" real world", as far as linguistic designation is concerned they are merely talking past one another and gesticulating towards different and unsharable private worlds corresponding to their individuated mental processes. — sime

You said, "in AI", but this is supposed to apply to the psychology of animals as well, right?

You talk about your model and I talk about my model, but we're never actually talking about the same things.

as far as linguistic designation is concerned — sime

Can you explain why this qualifier? Is there some other way in which agents do share a world?

?

I know this is a thread about the war in Ukraine, but I was addressing the general question about how countries in the US sphere of influence develop.

You're suggesting that the US's net influence is to make other countries better than it can even manage of itself? Is the theory that it nobly sacrifices it's own people's freedoms to help improve those under it's sheltering wing? — Isaac

Well no, but something like what's in the first sentence wouldn't surprise me honestly. The US has a lot of problems but a biggie is the legacy of chattel slavery. If we provide aid and support to country not burdened by such a history, they might very well do better than we do.

Plus, there's that whole "do as I say not as I do" effect. I'm just saying a result like this might not be that ludicrous.

I wondered how we would be able to talk about the 'behavior' of things like signposts, and I'm sure we could come up with something, but it could also be that we inevitably face problems with artifacts like this.

I'm reminded of a very clever check fraud scheme I heard about once. Guy had gotten hold of the magnetic ink that's used to print routing and account numbers on checks so they can be read by a machine. He made some fake checks that had one bank's routing number encoded but another bank's name actually printed in English on the checks. When these checks went to the merchant's bank, they would sort them first through the machine and the ones that kicked out would then be sorted by the bank they went to. Then a loop would start, where one bank's machine would reject an account number and it would land on the trouble desk, someone would glance at the bank name on the check and say, oh that's not us, then send it to the other bank, whose machine would say, wrong bank, and then it would go right back. These checks would loop back and forth for months until some human finally noticed.

It is a terrible mistake to think that every trait possessed by all individuals in a population must be there because it is or was beneficial. — GrahamJ

Oh absolutely! Sexual selection is certainly real, generic drift, isolation, lots of factors I don't know about, all of which is why I always try to keep the focus on reproduction rather than adaptation.

There is in principle no difficulty answering Srap Tasmaner's argument in relation to 'procreative genes'. If cultural transmission made them only mildly advantageous, they could go the same way as the vitamin C enzyme.

I do not think this has happened. I do not think cultural transmission is reliable or powerful enough to explain what we see — GrahamJ

This is very much what I was trying to argue, that genes that drove procreative behavior would be very unlikely to get replaced by culture alone, and that natural selection would unquestionably have favored such genes in our ancestors. The evidence for their existence is only the ubiquity of reproduce behavior, I guess, since I just don't know if there's research.

So I'm not seeing how honesty is serving the purpose you've assigned it (making communication functional). If I ask you where the train station is, I'm far less interested in your honesty than I am in where the actual train station actually is. I want you to be right, not honest. — Isaac

(Btw, there's a game-theory based argument for truthfulness and trust in David Lewis's Convention, the details of which are not leaping to mind.)

It's an interesting question. Obviously in the short term sense, misinformation and disinformation will have the same effect, and the cause of the inaccuracy is irrelevant, assuming you rely on the 'information' to the same extent.

Over the longer term, you're of course also assessing the quality and reliability of the source. I think we do distinguish between sources that are untrustworthy because they're regularly mistaken and sources that are regularly deceitful. The question would be, how do we that and why is it worth the trouble?

One thing that comes to mind is that you get very different results for predicting the source's behavior: mistaken guy can be expected to act on his mistaken belief, but deceitful guy we would expect to act on his genuine belief. Hence "actions speak louder than words" is the corrective heuristic for "talk is cheap."

Cool.

I'd responded to the "creek" vs "crick" for small stream as a functional difference analogy you made — fdrake

Right, "stream" and "creek" are different words that denote the same things, meaning -- at least in this case, maybe not in all cases -- they also have the same function within people's regional dialects. That function relates regularities in the physical environment to regularities in speech behavior. It's not that functionalism ends up having no role here, because it's functionalism that identifies the equivalence of "stream" and "creek," so functionalism can answer the question "Why do say 'creek'?" but it can't answer the question "Why do you say 'creek' instead of 'stream'?"

Your first point was that gender might not be an observable regularity like a creek, so an object like 'man' might be in part determined by whether people say 'man' of it, and so on, practices, comportment towards, blah blah blah. This would speak to @Isaac's constructivist tendencies, 'man' as off the shelf narrative for making sense of things.

I have deep reservations about that account because there are extremely salient observable differences between people because humans reproduce sexually and always have, just like our ancestors who lacked speech and culture. I think it likely we make almost exactly the same sort of intuitive inferences about the sex of members of our species as other mammals do. The question would be whether those intuitive inferences play a major role in our speech and culture or have they long since been swamped by other factors. Unclear to me, but even infants seem to distinguish male and female early, so I'd count that as evidence the machinery I'd expect to be there is there.

But we're not nearly done with functionalism, because one key question is whether everyone saying "I'm a boy" is even doing the same kind of thing. Such a claim could be overwhelmingly down to the sex-determining mechanism evolution bequeathed you, or it could serve a psychological or a social role. Or all of the above. But even before trying to figure that out -- which looks daunting -- we have to think carefully about where the functional account takes hold and where it doesn't. That is -- and now we're coming back to creeks and streams -- there might be a nice functional account of why you say "I'm a boy" but not of why you say "I'm a boy" instead of "I'm a girl," because that might be just a matter of personal history, like saying "girl" instead of "femme" or "Fraulein", or like saying "creek" instead of "stream".

Sorry that's a lot of words that don't advance any particular claim or the discussion. Just really clarifying for myself as much as anything where I think the discussion stands.

But I do point out that that option that we do have, that you outline, is a moral imperative arising from the social nature of language, that it is shared. — unenlightened

We're on the same page here. Humans have always lived in cooperative groups, and language is a cooperative enterprise in furtherance of other sorts of cooperation. Dishonesty violates the social contract, more or less -- except when being a little dishonest upholds it. Someone like Trump thumbs his nose at the idea he is under any sort of social obligation, and that extends to his use of language. But that potential is built in: one of the selling points of language is that utterance is, for the individual, inexpensive, but that also means that talk is cheap.

Upholding the cooperative use of language is upholding the cooperative basis for society per se. If you want to describe that as an obligation to mostly "tell the truth," I won't complain. The way we talk about truth serves our social needs, but I think it's a mistake to construct a theory out of that talk.

Cultural change couldn't stop Tinky Winky from being purple, but they could turn Tinky Qinky into a queer symbol. — fdrake

I don't actually get the point here. Tinky Winky wearing a frilly tutu can arbitrarily be a queer symbol, or can be one by aligning with our hyper-local conditions, but there's no reason to think this symbolism has any essential connection to queerness beyond that, is there? So in time pointing to Tinky Winky as a queer symbol will seem distinctly peculiar. You'll have to explain when and where and why they were taken as such.

Are you making a comparison between this sort of opportunistic symbolism and a person's gender identity? I don't want to guess.

What type of intuitions are you talking about Srap Tasmaner? — fdrake

Let's say, the conscious output of unconscious processes of inference (often performed by mental modules that are domain specific). Meant really as a replacement for "belief" which has all the wrong connotations.

And you can test for them. You can do research. The part I'm iffiest on is whether they must be conscious, because I don't see why, but that's just the problem of consciousness, and it seems like they often are. Maybe that's just because in doing research you elicit self reports.

That's a great example, thanks — fdrake

Thank goodness. I wasn't sure at first why that occurred to me.

The act of treating something as manly, womanly etc informs what it means to be a man or a woman. — fdrake

Does it? I mean, you say this, and it fits the usual way we talk about socially constructed whatever, but it's exactly what people are fighting over. The claim is exactly that your treating me as a woman or as a man doesn't make me one, anymore than treating slaves inhumanly made them inhuman. (How's that for a pointed comparison?)

This is exactly the sort of thing that made me wary of picking a level or a style and then crafting an explanation for that framework. You will always be able to do that, but the evidence that doesn't fit might be on another level. I think.

I thought you were addressing an arbitrary functionalist, rather than specifically Isaac. — fdrake

You might be right. (I wanted to make sure you didn't think it was you, and that it was clear I wasn't saying it but mentioning it.)

My reference point here is the manifest and scientific image concept in Sellars. — fdrake

Yeah I noticed you'd been in that recently.

If we end up saying the social categories don't mean anything, what question are we asking again? — fdrake

There's still behavior to be accounted for, including verbal behavior. One of the key linguistic markers for what region of the US you grew up in is whether you say "stream" or "creek" or "crick" (possibly also "kill" though I think that's preserved more in names than speech). There might be others I'm forgetting. Point being, there's no distinction at all among these, each is a Nash equilibrium, but they do indicate something about your personal history (statistically). On one level, they're equivalent; on another, a key distinction. Denying that they denote distinct types of small river doesn't change the differences in usage patterns.

I'll try to give another answer to this later.

Your sense of your gender, or your identity more broadly, comes to you as an intuition. Seems obvious to me.
— Srap Tasmaner

I think as a "manifest imagey" conception this makes a lot of sense. — fdrake

Dang. It was meant to be scientific.

we could all agree that the sole criterion for being a man, in this sense, is an honest report that one is — fdrake

Ah, now that's a whole different thing. I'm not sure the sort of intuitions I'm talking about could bear that kind of weight, and I wasn't anywhere near proposing that they should.

What's the difference between psychological, physical and social explanatory styles? — fdrake

Hmmm. You left out philosophical. Maybe I'm just excessively interested in psychology at the moment but I don't really want to make this kind of distinction. I think talking about behavior, human or otherwise, requires moving relatively freely up and down these levels. Maybe it's just that I've also recently sworn off boundary policing. Maybe it's that I think finding the right explanation means finding the right level at which to give an explanation.

If we go the other way and climb from "bottom up", all of the social categories we were trying to "climb toward" would dissolve since they're not derivable from, or identical with, their neural-dynamical conditions of actuation. — fdrake

I get that. It's like Fodor's argument for the ineliminability of the 'special sciences'. (You can't just absorb meteorology into physics.)

On the other hand, my first commitment for 'what we're climbing toward' is "saving the appearances," so I want the bottom-up theory to explain why we hold the usual view, but I don't know that we need to preserve its categories and explanations. It's crucial to Fodor's argument that meteorology is an actual science. That it can't be reduced to physics is not at all the same as saying that pre-scientific ideas about weather and climate would need to be reconstructed for physics to be a threat to them. If those categories are inadequate, we can pass right by.

I'm okay saying that because my interest is almost entirely 'scientific' rather than political, so that's a limitation to my approach.

Your functionalism is just unwelcome.
— Srap Tasmaner

Yeah! — fdrake

Was it clear that the "you" there is @Isaac? (And also that I was again speaking in another voice.) Just checking.

gender is a performance — fdrake

I do still think we end up there, and maybe I like the word "performance" here because once we're this far along even I will have given up disentangling the cultural and the biological.

On the other hand, I'm pretty strongly committed to what I came up with after this, which is that identity, and so gender identity, seems obviously about intuitions. It has all the earmarks. You just know the answer when asked, even if you have trouble explaining it, you might not think about it much otherwise, sometimes the words for expressing it strike you as inadequate, there's confusion about whether you should even have to defend it with reasons, on and on. It's textbook. Your sense of your gender, or your identity more broadly, comes to you as an intuition. Seems obvious to me.

But that doesn't tell you much about where that intuition comes from. Your intuitions about how language works might be innate, but your intuitions about your native language are learned through socialization. We can have socially formed intuitions, and those will be realized in biology, but that doesn't make them biological meaning "innate". So the source and purpose of identity intuitions -- open question for me. @Moliere tells me the self is entirely social (I think), and for the record that strikes me as nuts. As nuts as thinking our ideas about sexuality are entirely cultural. But I don't have a theory to offer about our identity intuitions, and if I did have one it wouldn't be worth much. That's a research program, far as I'm concerned.

@fdrake

One thing on my mind is that both the hypothetical explanatory accusations I was considering are functionalist: one points to sociological function, one to psychological.

Functionalist explanations of speech behavior are going to be inherently unsatisfying to some people because they appear to ignore the content, or at the very least to ignore the truth-value of the content. (We had that discussion a long time ago too.)

The other thing is that functionalist explanations are most convincing when there's no competition (why on earth do they do that?) or when existing explanations have a serious flaw. (My example for the latter is Mercier and Sperber's explanation for why reason appears to have defects, the answer being that it doesn't if you recognize what it's actually for.)

And I think some of us see a prima facie case against the currently offered explanations for why someone with the anatomy of one sex would claim to be of the other sex. Some might see no need of an explanation at all, but it needn't be a political issue just, you know, the spirit of inquiry. The explanations on offer seem to depend on (a) ideas about identity or (b) ideas about language. Your objections to (a) and (b) are what provide the opening for a functionalist explanation. But not everyone accepts those objections, so to them you're just offering a competing theory, but on ground functionalism does not find congenial. Your functionalism is just unwelcome.

snarled sentence — BC

It's a lovely sentence.

"I'm not here because I'm awaiting a sentence, I'm here because (something to the effect that I'm minimising some neurological loss function defined over my body states)" - and it would be true. — fdrake

Right, right. I used to have this argument with @Isaac, the space of reasons vs the space of causes, that sort of thing. Driving a car isn't just moving your arms and legs in a certain way. Been there done that.

I do tend to stop at some level above surprise minimization, although I think it's fair to keep that in mind. Damasio gets a lot of mileage out of homeostasis. You can use that lowest level as a constraint: if your theory requires something where the cost would outweigh the biological value, it's a non-starter. (Okay, at species level. Individuals get up to all kinds of shit.)

I suppose I assume that to get anything that will look like an explanation to me -- of identity, for instance -- you have to move at least in the direction of biology, so down to the level of mental mechanisms that would produce intuitions about identity, say. But it also makes sense to move up, to take essentially a functionalist stance -- what social purpose could this behavior serve?

Best to do both, right? I worry that there's a little more room for bullshit moving up rather than down. But either way you almost immediately run into these unresolvable differences -- "You're only saying that because you're a lackey of Capital," "But you're only saying that because it makes you feel special and in-the-know." The first is probably an abuse of "because" and what it really means is that by saying that you *become* a lackey of Capital. The latter is too general and would account for any heterodox view I might hold, and so doesn't account for my Marxism.

I think there is a consistent pattern here. Cultural explanations tend to overdetermine individuals, biological to underdetermine them. It's another way to put the point you were making: the farther down you go, the greater the range of behavior accounted for, which is fine, unless you wanted an explanation of *this* behavior. If apo is right, I stop at this specific store, for milk, after work, in order to accelerate the heat death of the universe. That is not an answer to any of the everyday questions I might be asked. (Why *this* store? Why milk? Why after work?) But it is an answer to some question.

I need to work and think some more about the kind of explanations I want, but am I in the neighborhood of your concern here?

I think we're thinking along the same lines except you remembered to mention filtering and I forgot again.

absolutely nothing of social life, no "mental furniture", ideology or even motivational state, survives the parsing — fdrake

This is too meta for me to understand. :(

I think by and large you're taking stories as cultural moves we can make in defense or explanation of our opinions and behavior, and I keep trying to find a role for them in production.

Fox News, for example, is like an experiment in how many different ways you can say "Shut up you fucking hippy!" They're still fighting retrograde actions against the sixties, and experience an intuitive revulsion toward the counterculture. (The eloquent version of this can be found elsewhere, Saul Bellow or Allan Bloom, etc.)

One way or another the label "hippy" gets attached to the object of revulsion. But are you a hippy because I find you revolting? Or do I find you revolting because you are a hippy? Most people will tend to go for the latter because it sounds more like a bit of reasoning, even if they think it's based on faulty premises. Your version is the former, in which "hippy" is available as a story that makes sense of the feeling of revulsion, and is more radical.

I want to go with your version, because the usual version just feels more computational and I no longer trust that model. On the other hand, I want an explanation for the initial feeling of revulsion and people keep telling me that culture can reach right down to your feelings and shape your responses; if culture can be effective in this way, it has to get into the game earlier than our post-facto stories and justifications and rationalizations.

On the third hand (the gripping hand), we needn't pretend this is all linear; you could have the revulsion, reach for an explanation, and also react to the explanation, almost as if it were being presented to you with the expectation that you will react.

The other role of stories, on this view, would be as feeling management strategies. Depending on the story the feedback might be positive or negative: this is a big deal, dial up your response; or, this isn't that important, dial it down.

This I like. I'm not clear on why this has to be conscious, but this seems to be where consciousness comes in, these very high-level sorts of management.

And it jibes with experience, I think. We've probably all had the experience of working ourselves up to a level of anger we didn't have at the beginning of a disagreement, or building up a simple infatuation into our One True Love, or literally telling ourselves that something isn't worth getting worked up over.

I've left the initial feeling of revulsion toward hippies unexplained, but I'm not sure it matters. (To young progressive this is everything!) The narrative feedback loop gets started somehow and it might have close to nothing to do with whatever got it started. (The genealogical analysis believes that uncovering the real source of that initial reaction reveals the real meaning of the narrative, and that's tempting but I suspect deeply mistaken. We can talk more about that.)

And basically that's true for all of us, so far as I can tell. — Srap Tasmaner

"Just not clear to me what the word "true" is doing in this story. " — unenlightened

It's doing what the word "true" is actually useful for, which is allowing me to endorse by reference the account denoted by "that".

There's a very good reason "It's true that Billy ate all the cupcakes" is equivalent to "Billy ate all the cupcakes" and to "'Billy ate all the cupcakes' is true": it's because we want to be able to express agreement without repeating everything, so we have "That's true" (and "That's not true" and so on) as a construction where "that" refers to something someone has already said.

There are some complication but I think such a prosentential theory of truth is fundamentally on the right track.

I think when you say, "Just not clear to me what the word "true" is doing in this story. ", you are deceiving yourself, and saying something that is not true. I believe it is true that my key will open the front door, and if it should turn out not to be true because the lock is broken, or my wife has changed the lock or someone has blown the bloody door off, or the god of locks is angry with me, then I will have to admit I was wrong. — unenlightened

There's the past tense again, just like with Painter and the chromosomes.

Let's go with that. The examples we come up with always have to do with someone turning out to have been wrong in the past. That suggests that there is an "accounting" use for words like "true" and "false" in judging past performance. If we want to make good predictions, we need some way of judging the past performance of an inference engine, so we regularly look back and tally up the successful and the unsuccessful predictions. We do the same thing at the macro scale when we have a new theory or forecasting model: we try retrodicting the events already in the books and see how well we do.

It would be nice if we really could "check" a previous prediction against "what actually happened", but I just don't see how we would do that. All we have is our current understanding based on the evidence we have, and we can say the prediction squares with the evidence or doesn't, but all of this is (a) a lot squishier than it sounds, because we mostly deal in probabilities and (b) all of the accounting we're talking about is handled by inferential mechanisms in our minds the workings of which we are not aware of and do not control. We're accustomed to giving reconstructions of the reasoning process we "must have gone through" to reach conclusions, but the truth (!) is that our beliefs arrive in our awareness as finished products. You don't consciously "work out" your beliefs as the rational consequences of your other beliefs much at all, if at all.

None of which is to say that some beliefs aren't more defensible than others, of course they are. I don't doubt that the very stable genius you mentioned has defective belief formation equipment, but the real problem is that his behavior is dishonest. We expect people to aim at saying things that square with the evidence and are defensible, but he aims at saying things that will materially benefit him. We don't have the option of only speaking the truth; if we had some way of just knowing how things really stand, it wouldn't take so much work to find out. But we do have the option of only saying what we do in fact believe, and what we believe aligns with the available evidence, and what we believe we can give good reasons for that others should find convincing.

it might be better to finish with some other kind of identity -- like identity in general — Moliere

Forgot you said this, and it's kind of what I ended up writing about above.

A heterosexual child doesn't have to wait long for his or her culture to supply the "guide book" for what "heterosexual" means. On the other hand, a rural homosexual child may recognize that he likes other boys, and understands that this is an outlier desire, best not discussed. He may not have a "homosexual identity" until he comes into regular contact with urban homosexuals who can supply the gay "guide book". — BC

This is an excellent point, but, as you note in the next paragraph, it's not the gay guide book, but a gay guide book. Which is interesting.

Having these broad stories for ourselves helps us make sense of our own actions and thoughts, put them into context, give them a purpose and a coherence (that they might otherwise lack). — Isaac

All of which is fine, but one of the things that's troubling about your "off the shelf" metaphor is that it suggests mass production, that more or less identical narratives are available to everyone (or maybe people within a given culture or speech community, whatever), and I'm not sure that's quite right.

It seems to me that in taking up a narrative, you don't so much buy a copy as make a copy, so even though there's going to be some, maybe considerable, family resemblance among the copies of a story each member of a community are carrying around, they are still going to be idiosyncratic. And if you consider how we get access to these stories, we're making copies of copies of copies of copies ... The archetype may still show through, but quite a few of the details might have changed. In fact, over time one narrative might split into two, if there are populations that started with different versions of the original. And by now it should be really, really obvious that what we're looking at here is evolution.

Which is no surprise, but what I'm really curious about is the copying process itself. What I don't want to slot in here is that bullshit sort of "recipe" account you always get of musicians. (Grew up listening to country on the radio, got into funk in high school, and then I discovered Ella Fitzgerald --- and out of all that came "Walking on Sunshine.") But I think we have to say something about how whatever you've got before you acquire the new story (to use on yourself or others) is going to color your version of the story. At the very least, what else is already in your repertoire is going to shape your use of the new script -- some people will use it more and some less, depending on what else they've acquired and how they use them. (You can know a hundred stories and always reach for the same two or three.)

It's not that I want to push back against psychology's legitimate pursuit of generality; it's just that I'm interested in the mechanisms of acquiring and using these stories. The individual's narrative repertoire will be idiosyncratic in exactly the way their genes and their idiolect are, but we can say general things about how people are individuated in these ways.

Which might get us some ways toward @Moliere's sense of individuality.

Idiosyncrasy might also explain some of the strange bedfellows politics makes, and the failure of people to recognize their allies.

Have a nice day.

The part I think is noteworthy is that when you claim that P, my reasons for believing you -- your trustworthiness, reliability, honesty, likelihood of having first-hand knowledge in this case, etc -- those now count as reasons for believing that P. That's an incredibly useful inference pattern, so useful that it runs on automatic most of the time: if I'm accustomed to getting the truth from you and you tell me you bought milk, I assume (that is, infer) that you did. Reasons only come into it if your claim has to be defended -- maybe against someone who doesn't know your many fine qualities as an evidentiary source.

And around we go. Suppose now I vouch for you. Our skeptic might have reason to trust what I tell him, but what does he know about my reliability as a judge of other people's trustworthiness? Might never have come up for him, so he'll believe you only to a degree because he doesn't know yet whether I've made the smart move believing you, whether that's something else about me he can rely on.

And at no time has what is true changed, but only what we believe to be true. Although it could also happen that the number of chromosomes might change.

By all means let us be open to revision and reversal of what we believe according to what we later learn to be true, but not according to what we later find to be convenient — unenlightened

Just not clear to me what the word "true" is doing in this story.

If a belief is true, there can be no evidence that it's false, so you'll never need to revise your belief. If such evidence does turn up, in addition to revising your belief, you also remove the "true" sticker from it. So what? What was the sticker doing anyway?

Now when we accuse someone of holding a belief because it's convenient for them, I think often we're talking about something they're not aware they're doing. What we perceive is that holding such a belief serves some need of theirs, again probably something they're not aware of.

And basically that's true for all of us, so far as I can tell.

Ask 'em to get you a pair of your socks; if they succeed, then that'll do, won't it? — Banno

It'll mostly do, sure, but the question isn't whether the way we talk is fine, of course it is.

I think we ought to have a theory about how we do things like keep track of socks and find them on demand. (Or acorns. Squirrels do more caching than recovering, sometimes much more, but it's not entirely clear yet whether the unrecovered acorns are actually lost.)

And we also talk a lot, so that's more behavior we want a theory for.

The question is whether the sorts of stuff we usually say about the sorts of stuff we usually do is a good start on a real theory of what we do, and there I think it's a pretty mixed bag.

We do tend to treat what we say as a kind of theory, so we say things like "He can get the socks because he knows where they are," or "He can't get the socks because he doesn't know where they are." And that's theory-ish, because it looks like you could make a prediction, right? People who know where the socks are will be more successful and more efficient at retrieving them than people who don't, than people who are just guessing or searching.

But of course you just said that your test for knowing where the socks are is fetching them. That's a no good. We want to be able to sort people first by what knowledge they have and then test the theory that knowledge is predictive of performance.

You can keep your performance criterion like this: sort people first by whether they have successfully performed the task in the past -- pause for a moment and say this is a strong indicator of knowledge -- and then test whether those we've attributed knowledge to out-perform those we haven't.

But that's just induction. There's a flourish in the middle involving the word "knowledge" but you're really just testing whether past performance predicts future performance. Now it's starting to look like this is not a theory of behavior at all, but about how we use the word "knowledge." That is, we're not so much leaning on knowledge as an explanation of behavior, since we've given no independent criterion for its presence or absence, as noting that we make inductive inferences about behavior straight up and then label some behavior "knowing" and some not.

But even as a theory about how we use the word "know" this is pretty weak, because we allow all sorts of exceptions. I might not usually know whether the trash has been picked up but this time I do because I happened to see them stop this morning and take the trash.

Squirrels don't talk about where they've cached acorns; we (at least when doing philosophy or laundry) do talk about where we've put our socks. The fact that we talk about it doesn't change the fact that our sock caching probably relies on abilities we share with squirrels. (They sort and organize acorns, for example.) And that's why a theory of how we talk, though intensely interesting in its own right, is not the same as a theory of how we find our socks.

The final word on this whole socks business:

There are a few ways to not know where your socks are kept. One is pragmatism, in which the location of your sock draw can never be known, but only approximated asymptotically. Such brilliance derives not only from Charles Sander Peirce. — Banno

Why is it so hard to tell the difference between someone who knows where your socks are and someone who thinks they know? Why is it so hard to tell the difference even about yourself?

I think there are two issues here, and they are separable: (1) Is the idea of knowledge helpful for modeling our mental lives? (2) What's going on when someone says "I know"?

For the first, no, it's probably not. Even Hume knew that reasoning concerning matters of fact is probabilistic, but we didn't listen. We have probabilistic expectations about our environment and our own state, these eventuate in dispositions to act, and everything is subject to revision as we go.

For the second, I think it turns out Sellars was right, that "I know" puts your claim in "the space of reasons," meaning you commit to the claim and indicate a willingness to attempt to defend it with reasons. If you assure me that you know something, I might take your confidence into account, or I might not, but that depends on a lot of other factors. I won't, as a rule, take it as a fact about you from which I can infer the truth of your claim. Why would I? If you're wrong about one, you're wrong about the other. What does hold, for me, is that reasons to believe you count as reasons to believe what you claim, and that might be very helpful. (For you, this is useless, since you already believe both you and what you claim.)

"I know" is a sort of exaggeration of the reliability of our cognitive state, which makes it suitable for the back and forth of argument, but not as a description of how we navigate the world and keep tabs on our own thoughts. Or maybe it does have some introspective use, as a sort of marker for what is not at the moment being questioned, even if it isn't altogether unquestionable. Some of our ideas, habits of inference, are so close to wired in (I'm thinking of things like the physics we already 'know' as infants) that it takes a lot of work to question them at all.

if the truth becomes a matter of choice, or convenience, then language itself loses its value — unenlightened

The trouble is this:

The number of human chromosomes was published in 1923 by Theophilus Painter. By inspection through the microscope, he counted 24 pairs, which would mean 48 chromosomes. His error was copied by others and it was not until 1956 that the true number, 46, was determined by Indonesia-born cytogeneticist Joe Hin Tjio. — Wiki

Wiki says now we know "the true number", simple as that. But of course that's not exactly true, because there are variations in the number, types, and arrangement of chromosomes listed on that very page. More importantly, for more than 30 years every biologist and every doctor believed it was a fact that humans have 48 chromosomes. Of course, we now believe they were all wrong, but it ought to give one pause.

None of this is a question of choice or convenience. This chaos magic business would be a non-starter even if beliefs created reality as imagined, because you can't choose your beliefs. Painter didn't choose his incorrect belief and Tjio didn't choose his improvement on Painter; he certainly didn't prefer 46 to 48 because it had the virtue of being true, as if he had some other way of determining that besides looking through a microscope. He looked and found 46. Others looked and also found 46 and said he was right.

If there's virtue here, it's not in eschewing choice or convenience, but in (a) looking and (b) holding your beliefs as open to revision. That's what pragmatism was aiming at, even if the talk of utility obscures that now and then.