So what did you think of all those books and papers? --- Or, wait, was your OP a summary of your position after reading all that stuff?

I'm not sure that was a critique of evolutionary psychology rather than of a critique of the idea of human nature, and maybe even of psychology tout court.

Actually I have some sympathy for John McWhorter's take, that wokism is a new religion. And that's not based on what young progressives advocate, but on the behavior.

We don't seem to share the same wants when it comes to philosophy. — javra

Indeed. I think reasoning serves a purpose.

Probably nothing more to be gained from further discussion, but it was fun. Appreciate you indulging my heterodoxy.

Have a great trip! We'll be here when you get back.

Which is to say, who the heck can conclusively answer this & by no means necessarily. It could be as much an uncreated "just is" aspect of reality as matter is to the materialist. — javra

Okay, but you can't possibly find that satisfactory. That is the weakest conceivable position it is possible to take and still call this 'philosophy'. I'll pass. -- But having passed, I have to wonder about a position that says "who the heck knows" and then makes a claim about the nature of reality. Doesn't inspire confidence. Are you even sure you know what you're claiming?

But no one actively holds two (or more) contradictory beliefs at the same instant. Instead, one flip-flops between them while upholding both as true. — javra

So when it comes to reasoning, what is it we're upholding again? What's the model of rationality we should aspire to? Flip-flopping and hypocrisy are fine so long as you don't contradict yourself? We're supposed not to contradict ourselves because it's a bad thing to do. (In some circles, the principle of explosion will be darkly alluded to.) But your position is that we don't just because we can't, and we do the next best thing, which is advocating contradictory positions seconds apart. If we want to say that's not okay either, evidently the "law" of non-contradiction won't be any help, and we'll need a whole 'nother principle to rule that out.

variation in the constellations of cognitive strengths and weaknesses people have — wonderer1

Perfect! For me. Just moments ago I realized I meant to say something about Whitman over in the thread where I'm pissing on the law of non-contradiction:

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

And what you posted is almost exactly what I wanted to say. Ask me a question and I'll be responsible for the answer I give, as a person, as a moral agent by society's reckoning, but that doesn't mean it was "I" who answered. Some cognitive lieutenant piped up and said, "I've got this one, boss." We have many many specialty departments, and one of them produces the answer I (the person) give.

This is perfectly clear in some linguistics research. You can identify a race between concurrent processes -- maybe one applying the "-ed" rule and one looking up the irregular preterite -- and whoever gets there first wins. Availability bias is obviously like this too, and suggests multiple sources of the answers we give, the things we say.

I've complained about it, recently, with respect to my own posting habits, when I notice that I'm giving a type of answer out of habit, even if it's no longer representative of my thinking. We say stuff, and sometimes the stuff we say strikes even us as someone else talking with our voice.

BTW, a belief that A which is held with a probability of .90 is not contradicted by a belief that ~A held with a probability of .10. Each proposition entails the other, for they address the same thing. The LNC however does affirm that it not possible to hold a belief that A with .90 probability while at the same time holding a belief that A with .10 probability. — javra

It depends.

I thought you were going to finish that paragraph with A at 0.7 and ~A at 0.7, which should also be impossible but is known to happen, at least when considering the implications of people's beliefs. Polls routinely show slightly (and sometimes not so slightly) inconsistent opinions, and are notoriously dependent on how the questions are worded. How the questions are worded suggests a certain framework, calls up particular associations, all that extra-logical stuff. I think the approach you take suggests it would be possible to word questions "perfectly" to account for all of this and only get consistent results. I not only doubt any such thing is possible, I'm not sure it's coherent to claim that it is. There's just too much language getting in the way when you put things into words, so your first step will have to be to make the questions non-linguistic.

And then what is it the LNC actually applies to? Is it the non-verbal intellections of God?

Joke I heard while I was there about the little bells people wear especially on particular trails: What's the difference between grizzly scat and, say, black bear scat? Well, they look almost identical, except the grizzly scat has these little bells in it.

the left wing has been effectively neutered by it's own internal divisions — Isaac

That's hardly news though. Been the case since the Judean People's Front split off from the People's Front of Judea.

Again, it's simply naive to think that this is coincidence. That the only campaigns which receive any air time (from the bought and paid for conglomerate media) are the ones which have zero impact on the ever greedy consumer machine. — Isaac

Capital's always going to be doing that thing where any identity division is exacerbated, monetised, coopted in an attempt to create and maintain markets. This ultimately isn't a good or a bad thing, it is just a thing that happens. — fdrake

Or there's overlap between emancipatory politics and capital here. I noted earlier that capitalism's tendency to eat through whatever institutions you've got has sometimes been a good thing, and that might be what's going on here. Just consider how focused on the workplace emancipatory issues are, equal pay, hiring and firing practices, workplace conditions. Some of that bears some resemblance to labor union struggles of old, but some of it is demanding that everyone have the same opportunity to be a wage slave, right? So that might be emancipatory but it's also capitalism eating through institutions like sexism, ableism, racism. Use those divisions, destroy them, rebuild them, whatever. Capital don't care.

The tendency of capital to dissolve social forms also tends to dissolve stultifying ones. Disruption isn't always bad. — fdrake

Ah, so you said the same thing. Hurray for us.

So it could be that there is no successful left-wing politics anywhere; all we really see is a kind of mirror-image of capitalism's opportunism. Where people can use the universal acid of capitalism on some injustice, there's some redress possible, but only there.

Because it might not be possible to stop capitalism. ("Internal contradictions" always sounded like wish fulfillment to me.)

Yellowstone — wonderer1

I've been there! Just in a touristy way, not camping. It is beautiful.

My favorite Yellowstone story. Driving along with the in-laws, and we see some cars pulled over, which is a sign there's something to see, so we pull over. There's a bunch of tourists standing around in a little picnic area and a couple of park rangers standing over by some trees talking to them, because behind the rangers out in the meadow is a grizzly bear. So this dude is standing with his back to a tree, and the meadow, answering questions about the bears and being educational. The other ranger is off to one side where he can see everyone and also glance over toward the bear. "Uh, Bill," and a nod toward the meadow, where it turns out the grizzly has covered some ground since the talker last looked. He turns to glance over his shoulder and visibly jumped! "Okay, everyone, you all need to move back now, that's it, move on back now, DON'T GO IN THE WOODS!" Just ever so slightly lost his cool as this grizzly ambled toward us, it was awesome.

in the name of philosophical accuracy, the law of non-contradiction states that A and ~A cannot both be at the same time and in the same respect — javra

Yes, yes, we all know you can make this sound more precise, but ceteris paribus conditions always grow toward infinity. How fully do you think you can specify "in the same respect"?

Hence the incomprehensibility of much of QM as its currently interpreted. — javra

I'm not going to wade into QM interpretation -- I wear water wings even in the shallow end of that pool -- but I think you needed something here besides "QM is incomprehensible" else you're undermining your own case.

And don't forget the other major paradigm shift in modern physics. You casually invoke simultaneity in your precise definition of the LNC. Feel on solid ground there? No qualms at all about specifying some universal time-stamp for phenomena? We just recently here on the forum had a discussion of an event that will appear to have occurred in one frame of reference but not in another, and there's a paradox if those frames of reference can communicate about it.

Let's put it this way: the law of non-contradiction appears to be a rule that would be suitable for an omniscient god. Down here in mortal land, we frequently have good reasons for both P and ~P. Some of this just goes away if instead of laying down rules for the universe to follow, we just note that all of our beliefs are held with some degree of confidence, so a belief that P with a confidence of 0.90 is the same as a belief that ~P with a confidence of 0.10. Every opinion we hold is a contradiction viewed this way, which is just to say that the contradiction framing is not particularly useful.

Not only easing the discomfort, but this is also the most profitable policy for reducing surprise. If actual agreement (top priority) doesn't reduce surprise, then we can at least fall back on predictable narratives about conflict. — Isaac

That's a piece I was missing.

I'm selling the whole package of support relations as a whole — Isaac

Interesting. One thing I forgot about is kettle logic.


There's still something a little off though.

If I make some claim, I might expect you to agree. (Remember our "same as me" discussion, my weird insistence that this would be the cheapest and fastest way to model you?) But suppose you don't. I said that presenting some reasons is an attempt to bring your views into alignment with mine, but that feels both obviously true and a little weak. If I now know that you disbelieve P, I should be able to model you just fine, so that's not the whole story. (Keep reading, progress below.)

When you disagree, there is also the surprise that I've been modeling you wrong, and it feels like one of our first responses is to get a quick sitrep on that failure -- to assess just how much damage this response does to my model of you, to figure out how wrong I was. This you can definitely see on the forum: people go from noting your disagreement right to "You mean you don't think you're conscious? You can't smell the sunrise and see the flowers??" That incredulity is a siren going off at the model-of-you desk. Oh, and we need to make sure the failure is confined to you, that I haven't been getting all kinds of stuff wrong.

But once things settle down again, likely through the emergency deployment of narrative, why do I try to change your views? That could actually be the same as what was going on above -- an attempt to determine whether I've gotten more than you wrong. Are you in fact right? Do I need to update to ~P? So I request a report from the modeling team -- why is P in the model anyway? (It's fun writing as the clueless executive. I literally don't know why P is in the model! There are some nerds somewhere who take care of that stuff...) The modeling team -- working on a deadline -- throws something together and sends it up and I show that to you. "This is what the boys down in modeling say about P, and it sounds pretty good to me." That will look like an argument, and if I didn't have you around, but were only entertaining a doubt of my own, that might be that. But now my trust in the modeling department has weakened, so by showing you their report, I'm also checking up on them, testing them. "Look, you seem to know something about this P business. Here's what my boys are telling me. Is this any good? Did they miss the boat here?"

Around here (TPF) it's almost a certainty that your answer will be "This report is crap. Your modeling team got this one wrong." But by saying this, you've now disagreed with more of my model, and even though my confidence may have been shaken, I don't just reset to impartial open-mindedness; I may have fallen from 95 to 93.8, that's all, so your responses are still being discounted by default as overwhelmingly likely to be wrong. By disagreeing with my Official Reasons, you're just pigeonholing yourself as an anomaly for me, making the case that my model only failed to recognize how perverse you are, while getting almost everything else right.

Through these first few exchanges, there's been no sign of the need to bring your views into alignment with mine, only a brief flirtation with bringing mine into alignment with yours. --- Actually some of the initial incredulity-driven tests might amount to "Surely you misspoke," so there's that.

There might be something else going on here though. When I recognize that you had a genuinely different view of what I assume is the same body of evidence, that piques the curiosity of the modeling team. "How did he come up with that?" There might be a bad algorithm there worth knowing about and avoiding, or there might be an interesting inference technique there we didn't know about, and even if it doesn't change our view in this case we're always on the lookout for new inference tech. So there's going to be a strong need to know why you had a thought that I didn't. Oh, and of course this plays directly into my need to model you better! My model of you was inaccurate; I need to update it with a model of the crappy inference algorithm you're using, in case I talk to you again.

Still no sign of needing to change your mind though, even though it looks like that's what arguments are for. The only thing I can think of is some hand-wavy thing about cooperation in the general project of all of us staying alive. I might (will! do!) prefer not to have to maintain a desk just to keep track of your screwy views and it would be easier and cheaper to bring you back into line with "practically everyone". --- Or, at least, assign you to one of the narrative departments. I just don't have the manpower to track every rando's views individually.

That's actually not bad, and less hand-wavy than I thought.

I don't know what you had in mind regarding a social explanation for reason — wonderer1

Roughly just an "arguing first" view -- that logic is not a handy tool waiting to be used, pre-existing our use of it when arguing, but that the rules of logic come out of what we do when we discuss and argue. That looks impossible because what other criteria could we have for whether I win the argument or you do, for whether my argument is better or yours? --- Still, I'm convinced (at the moment) it has to be done.

I speculate that logic becomes a matter of undeniable intuition as we are grasping the relationships between language about reality and reality itself. — wonderer1

I'd be hesitant to put it that way. I don't quite want to just block anything that smacks of a representational view of language -- at the very least I'd want to know why we are so strongly inclined to think of language as representational.

Also, if you think of logic as kind of a distillation of language, something implicit in it, I think that's going to turn out to be wrong. As above, I think there's a strong impulse to think of language this way, as carrying along logic inside it as its necessary skeletal structure, but natural language is much more subtle, much more flexible, and also much wilder than logic. But I also don't think it's simply a mistake; something about the way language works, or the place of it in our lives, almost demands that we misrepresent it, so to speak.

But now I'm speculating about your speculation...

Here's my favorite passage -- and for @Wayfarer the most beautiful description I know of the "subject of experience" -- and in this one there's a direct contradiction:

Trippers and askers surround me,
People I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and city I live in, or the nation,
The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new,
My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues,
The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love,
The sickness of one of my folks or of myself or ill-doing or loss or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations,
Battles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news, the fitful events;
These come to me days and nights and go from me again,
But they are not the Me myself.

Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,
Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,
Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,
Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next,
Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.

Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders,
I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait. — Leaves of Grass 4

"Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it." I feel that every hour of every day. But it's a contradiction.

Forgot that last pair of lines, which are weirdly on point.

To contradict oneself is to simultaneously claim two contradictory things. — Janus

Do you often say two things simultaneously?

would you say he does actually contradict himself there? — Janus

He's already gone, that's the point of the whole passage and why I posted it. Our mental lives are oriented toward the future. What does it matter if a moment ago I thought there's no way there's a tiger in those bushes? And so it goes, we continually leave thoughts behind, continually update our beliefs. Our beliefs one moment are never consistent with the last, by design and a good thing too, else how would we learn about the world.

But I've had a lot of time to think about this sort of stuff on my own. — wonderer1

Alas, so have I. I remember -- this may have been 25 years ago -- arguing on the defunct ANALYTIC-L mailing list that producing reasons for your beliefs is (just) a practice of ours. I was very Wittgensteinian back then.

I was much impressed with David Lewis's Convention some years ago, his attempt to ground language in game theory, and after that I began to think of Wittgenstein as a man trying and failing to invent game theory. I wanted to do something similar for logic and reason -- modus ponens would fall out as a pareto dominant strategy, that kind of thing.

I wanted to provide a social explanation for reason, but leaving it more or less intact -- and this is the aporia that Lewis ran into, that he couldn't directly link up the convention account of language to the model-theoretic account he was also committed to.

So recently I've decided that if I have to give up the the timeless truth of logic to get to a social grounding for reason, something consistent with psychology and naturalism, that I'll just have to give in to full-bore pragmatism, no more mysterious third realm for logic and good riddance.

Obligatory quote.

The past and present wilt—I have fill'd them, emptied them.
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.) — Walt Whitman

I don't think it is so much a matter of the principle of non-contradiction being true as it is a matter of it being necessary for sensible discussion to be achieved. — Janus

Is it?

Consider that if I assert A, and you convince me of ~A, then when I join you in proclaiming ~A, am I contradicting myself?

No, of course not, you'll say. But suppose I say A at one time and ~A at another, without anyone having argued for ~A, then I'm contradicting myself? Apparently my thinking has changed, as apparently it had when you convinced me. Is that contradiction? Does being convinced magically absolve me of inconsistency?

How close together must my saying A and saying ~A be before it counts as a contradiction? How far apart must they be before you call it "changing my mind"?

Now consider the other claim made routinely around here: you say A, but A entails B and you don't want to say B so you ought to give up A. Chances are that I'll dispute the entailment or add in some condition that blocks it, or I'll say B is fine after all, or - or - or -. You try to hang a charge of being inconsistent on me and I weasel out of it somehow -- mustn't contradict myself! -- and this is what we want to hold up as the paradigm of rationality?

On the other hand it is a known fact that people do not appreciate particularly the implications of their beliefs and that inconsistency lurks on the edges of everyone's thinking. Now and then it makes conversation frustrating but it doesn't seem to make it impossible.

the depth and importance of the principle of non-contradiction — Leontiskos

people who are involved in discussions don't usually contradict themselves (because if they did, they would be presenting no clear position) or speak incoherently (because if they did, they would not be saying anything) — Janus

I'm not convinced civilization would collapse if people were inconsistent and contradicted themselves, because I think they are and they do, consistently.

But that also means I'm inclined to throw out this framing of people as consistent or inconsistent. I'm not sure you can pull off partitioning people that way. Your ultimate backstop is going to be a single compound statement of the form P & ~P, with the usual caveats. If people don't ever say things like that -- leaving aside, though I'm loath to, rhetorical usages -- that's interesting, but it's not the same as only ever asserting P and never ~P, and it's not the same as having a set of beliefs that supports only one of the two.

Count me as the skeptic there is any such law.

Kahlil Gibran — wonderer1

Nice. There are times when the obvious truth of this really hits you, and it's just as true that we learn an enormous amount from other people. Somehow.

Also, I think it turns out I'm re-inventing the approach of Mercier and Sperber in The Enigma of Reason. Just read the introduction and there were lines that could have been in my post, which is odd. Now I don't know if I should wait to read the book until I've worked out some more of this on my own. (Call it Gibson's Dilemma: there's a story that William Gibson bolted from a screening of Bladerunner because he was in the middle of writing Neuromancer and it was too close.)

Very chancy business, this life of the mind.

a lack of a model for 'the generic person' — wonderer1

Very interesting!

One of things @Isaac and @Count Timothy von Icarus seem to have been arguing about for some reason circled around this "generic person" who is the target of the logically valid argument, the argument that any rational agent ought to accept.

One thing I was thinking about -- going back to that thread of yours -- was the difference between someone who shares your intuitions, so no argument is necessary, and someone who doesn't. My first thought was the thing about intuitions being tacit knowledge, and if that were the case, to explain something to someone who doesn't "get it" what you have to do is spell it out, you have to demonstrate some of the little steps you had skipped over. And that's very much the feel of doing things logically, clear little steps, everything implicit made explicit.

But of course that's wrong. Not everything is made explicit. Not everything can be made explicit. More importantly for this discussion, not everything needs to be made explicit; you only to need to spell out as much as the other person needs to "get it". How much is spelled out, how much made explicit is sort of negotiated.

At least that would be the plan, but when the plan fails, we point to the step-by-step-ness of our chitchat as if that's proof that we're right. And I'm saying the step-by-step-ness is an artifact of our negotiation process, not some standard of truth and justice. If I weren't talking to you, I'd hold the same beliefs without the step-by-step demonstration.

In short, yes, there's the generic person, the rational agent, like homo economicus, but we only pretend to craft our arguments to suit him, or we only invoke him when things go wrong. He represents an idea about what we do when we talk, but not even an ideal we try and fail to realize. --- I think this is one of those things everyone assumes is true (the way we use logic and respond to it) that if you could show them what that would really look like if we did it, they'd realize it's nothing like what we actually do.

Or I'm barking up the wrong tree. We'll see.

Like this.

But also, Srap Tasmaner has probably heard my 'insight' on these matters to the point of fatigue and I fear if I use the word 'narrative' one more time in any post I might well inspire physical damage. — Isaac

These days, I'm attempting to sing a different tune..

To wit, here's what I've been thinking about -- unfinished, but it's time to post something.

Being in the habit of telling each other what we know, I tell you something I think I know -- about the mind or reality or some philosophical thing -- but instead of thanking me, you disagree. This is shocking and bewildering behavior on your part. (Surprise.)

If I do not understand your position at all, that's the worst case for me, because what kind of action (i.e., talking) can I engage in in response? Anything is better than this, so my first step will be to substitute for your position a position I believe I understand and can respond to. (There's a cart before the horse here. Have to fix later.)

I want to bring your views into alignment with mine, and that's why I make arguments in favor of my belief. But I probably don't really know why I believe what I believe, so I'll have to come up with reasons, and I'll convince myself that if I heard these reasons I would be convinced. But really I have no idea, since I already believe what I'm trying to convince you of; it's almost impossible for me to judge how much support these reasons give my claim. Finding reasons for what I already believe presents almost no challenge at all.

This is all risky behavior though, because I've opened myself up to more disappointments: you might reject my reasons themselves, or you might reject that they provide support for my "conclusion" so styled, or deny that they provide "enough" support, whatever that is.

Denying the premises is really the least of my worries, because we're talking roughly about intuitions -- making this the fourth recent thread I've been in to use this word -- which I'm going to gloss here as beliefs I don't experience as needing justification. If you share my intuitions, we still have to fight about the support relation; if you don't, I can just keep daisy-chaining along until we find something we agree on. This is routine stuff, have to have common ground even to disagree let alone resolve such a disagreement.

But that still leaves the support relation. Not sure what to say about that. If you start from the idea that some people will just "get it", we're still talking intuitions; as you spell out more and more steps between what your audience accepts and what they don't, this is what logic looks like. The usual view, of course, is that "being logical" makes a connection a candidate for a step in the argument; the thing is, I think we spell things out only to the point where the audience agrees, which means something they accept without reasons -- and here we're talking precisely about the support relation that holds between one belief and another, and the sorts of things I come up with are just things that sound convincing to me as someone who already believes, which means my process for producing reasons is a kind of pretend.

It's entirely possible that logic is some kind of refinement of such behavior, a constraint placed on it, which is how we tend to think of logic, the guardrails of sound thinking. Dunno. One thing I think the description above gets wrong, now that I've written it out, is that the support relation really shouldn't be presented as another belief itself, but as a rule or habit for passing from one idea to the other. (I think empiricists and pragmatists would agree on that.) So the issue at each step I have to spell out is not whether you accept a proposed connection, but your behavior -- do you pass from antecedent to consequent as I predict or desire?

Very convincing though, you've clearly been practising. — Isaac

Now you can just get the app, LadGPT.

Did you see that ludicrous display last night?
— Srap Tasmaner

No, but my first-person-instatiated-point-of-view saw it. I was out. — Isaac

Try googling what you quoted there, and if you don't recognize it, you're welcome.

"Did your point of view see the match last yesterday?" — Isaac

Did you see that ludicrous display last night? What was Wenger thinking, sending Walcott in that early? The thing about Arsenal is, they always try to walk it in.

Apparently there's a difference! — Wayfarer

Yeah. One's from the protagonist's point-of-view, one's not. Or do you think it was impossible for Nolan to write or film the 'subjective' scenes?

Also, Nolan is famously red/green colorblind, which makes this all weird.

David Chalmer's doesn't say that consciousness is off-limits. He says it is intractable from the third-person perspective, due to its first-person character — Wayfarer

'Intractable' is all I meant there, but I was trying to resolve the ambiguity in "due to its first-person character."

If you're demanding the book be on the shelf when I hand it to you, that's just a double bind, and probably a misunderstanding on your part.

If you want to know why we only find books on shelves, you want to see what it is about shelves that make them uniquely capable of hosting books.

But that takes for granted that you and I are both subjects of experience, so that you can safely assume that I will understand what you mean. — Wayfarer

So is the argument that consciousness is off-limits because it's first-person, or that one of the things psychology needs to account for is that it is first-person?

The first is "Being me the book on the shelf"; the second is "Why are books on shelves?"

objective physical sciences exclude the first person as a matter of principle — Wayfarer

So what?

I think you're aware of this discussion in exactly the same sense that I'm aware of this discussion. Why should I define a special me-having-my-awareness instead of just saying I have awareness just like you.

Why should there be science conducted exclusively from my point-of-view? And if there can't be, why is that a shortcoming? Other people can study the same properties of me.

The grammatical differences among first, second and third person sentences present some interesting quirks, Moore sentences for instance.

But other than that, how exercised do we get about the difference between "He said he's going out" and "I said I'm going out"? We translate between them regularly.

(Obligatory anecdote: Kafka said, "I became a writer when I found I could say 'he' instead of 'I'.")

But if you define a phenomenon so that its first-person-ness is part of the phenomenon, we're in "Hand me the book on the shelf" territory.

Just don't do that. We use mentalistic vocabulary about others as readily as we do about ourselves, attribute knowledge and beliefs and awareness and forgetfulness and consciousness to other people all day long, and we mean the same thing as when we describe ourselves as being in these mental states. What matters is the book, not its being on the shelf. That's just a double bind.

That's perfect. Temperamentally I'm much closer to Graves, but, as he suggests, it's not always very satisfying.

And there's reason to doubt the capacity of analysis alone to get us to the understanding we want. Even though I don't think I can shake the habit of analysis, I'd like at least to supplement it with a thinking closer to image and myth. (Some of the philosophy that has left its mark on me is like this, Wittgenstein, Sellars, Heidegger, others.)

So while in one sense I started this thread as a protest against insufficiently analytical argumentation, my real motivation is more like overcoming analysis as a paradigm, or at least embedding it within something more varied and more flexible, but without giving up the rigor and precision of analysis, the things that make it useful and powerful.

Revising.

D. H. Lawrence's first book of poems was called "Look! We Have Come Through."

Robert Graves reviewed it, saying, "Perhaps you have, and a good thing too, but why should we look?"

That was roughly the mood in which I wrote the OP.

Sorry to clutter up your thread — unenlightened

Heh. This thread is about clutter.

I agree with your remarks in spirit, the charming and damnable heterogeneity of it all, but I still think there is a thread (heh number two) of persuasion running through all the sorts of things we say.

Quine reports that Burt Dreben once told him that great philosophers don't argue -- the idea being that it's all about competing frameworks. Give people an approach they like better and it doesn't really matter whether the old one is still more or less tenable, it just becomes irrelevant.



This thread is still very much on my mind, so I'll probably come roaring back in another day or two.

what was an interesting conversation we here having seems to have fizzled out and been replaced by yet another truly bizarre argument — Isaac

So still on topic.

My eyes glaze over when there's a lot of "That's not what I said," and "That's not what I meant."

To coin a phrase, Why should we talk about the history of this conversation?

What is the relevance here? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Maybe none. I only skimmed the exchange you were having with @Isaac, and don't want to take sides. It's just that this caught my eye:

This is a logically valid argument. — Count Timothy von Icarus

In other discussions, it wouldn't have bothered me, but since we're talking about what makes an argument acceptable, I thought it a somewhat misleading phrase.

Probably not important.

Any activity which loses sight of life as a whole becomes unmoored and I don't think that's terribly healthy. — Isaac

That's more or less the idea. If logic stands above and apart from our practices, it hangs in the air. More later.

>If it is Monday, then Grover Cleavland is the President
>It is Monday
>Thus, Gover Cleaveland is the President (proposed entailment/conclusion)

This is a logically valid argument. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Given modus ponens as an inference rule. (And thus not a theorem.)

Actually constructing arguments requires some system of deduction, not just the definitions of the logical constants.

But it is the entire nature of intuition that it extends if not transcends the current limits of what can be discursively extracted from the context. — Pantagruel

Not sure about "transcends". I talked about this in @wonderer1's thread, the difference between not reported and not reportable, and the difference between not reportable in principle and not reportable as a practical matter. I get the feeling you're alive to the issues here, hence the careful phrasing.

On the other hand, I'm a little puzzled by the hint that it must be intuition that extends. Is the idea that conscious processes can't extend because whatever hasn't been discursively extracted from a context can't be by conscious analysis? By definition? I almost see an argument there, but it's not clear, and that's probably on me.

The expert diagnosis of a very experienced MD versus an intern for example. — Pantagruel

Isn't there a study from years ago showing that AI is better at reading x-rays than most radiologists?

Herbert Simon concluded decades ago that intuition is kind of a myth, that it's overwhelmingly a matter of experience, and perhaps some habits that make knowledge more accessible. But there's no preternatural insight. Your comparison of the intern to the experienced MD makes sense with that understanding as well, without mythologizing intuition.

Been really enjoying reading your thoughts in this thread.

the 'argument from equals' in the Phaedo — Wayfarer

I've been mulling over your post and I don't have a simple response to it. I might spend some time actually looking at the Phaedo and then start a thread on it. In the meantime, I have some remarks.

1. I think it may not be possible to resolve our differences, because I am not sure they can be expressed cleanly, that there's some proposition or set of propositions you hold true and I false, for instance. Maybe, but I have my doubts.

2. There is a broad sense in which you seem to believe there is a world of concrete particularity, accessible to the senses, and a world of abstract generality, accessible to reason. It looks like there's little room for disagreement; I can't taste or see or touch the relation of equality, only things that are or are not equal.

3. That's not so far from Hume's observation about causality, but he didn't conclude that we can learn through rational insight what we cannot learn by looking; he concluded that the belief in causality is in some sense a fiction, a useful simplification.

4. If Plato's argument is right -- not clear to me yet -- if the concept of equality is unlearnable, then we might also conclude that we have no such concept, rather than concluding it must be innate.

5. "But of course we have the concept of equality!" --- We are adept at doing the things that having a concept of equality was supposed to explain, certainly. But if we cannot have such a concept, then the explanation must change.

6. It seems to us we see the entire environment before us, like a high-definition movie on a screen, our visual field. This is false. There is no such rendering of our environment present anywhere in our brains, and could not be. The truth is that we move our eyes frequently, much more than we are aware of, and we see a section of about a degree or two of our visual field clearly each time; the complete visual field is patched together without our awareness, giving the impression of a seamless whole.

That's an example of how an explanation can change to make something impossible possible.

7. The assumption that we must have the abstract concept of equality to judge whether two sticks are the same length suggests a computational model of the mind, with abstract rules being applied to concrete cases as they come up. I have my doubts.

8. Presumably the argument against materialism will continue before birth: if it's not a concept that could have been learned, it will also turn out to be a concept evolution could not have provided us with.

9. As you see it, Plato provides a dispositive argument that equality cannot be learned, but we have the concept, therefore ... If that argument is watertight, there's no need to consider empirical evidence, which could only mislead us.

10. On the contrary, I'm inclined to look at the research. Mathematical concepts have always been a central focus of developmental psychologists from Piaget on down to today. Parents and teachers spend time teaching children how to count, how to recognize shapes, similarity and difference, and so on, or at least providing them the appropriate setting for learning those concepts.

11. At what age do children actually acquire the concept of equality? What does the proto-concept look like, and how do they use it? Are there differences between cultures?

12. Mostly I think making claims about what can be learned and what cannot without looking at the development of children is worse than a waste of time.


As I said, I may post something about Plato, just because it might be interesting, though, not because it would lead to anything.