The only claim about theism I think is worthy of sustained, principled challenge is to the demonstrably untrue claim that 'theism is true'. — 180 Proof

I agree the claim that theism is true should be challenged, even dismissed, but not on the grounds that it is demonstrably untrue, but that it is demonstrably not demonstrably true or false, which means it is demonstrably unjustified. On the other hand if someone says that theism seems true to them, then I would leave that alone.

It was Socrates who posed, “Is it good cause the gods like it or do the gods like it because it is good?” A world where suffering and hardship is supposed to be part of the cosmic game but is beyond the understanding of its participants, is not beautiful, perfect, or good. — schopenhauer1

That was a dilemma in the context of the Greek gods, because they might disagree with one another about what is good. It is a false dilemma in the monotheistic context, because the theists can always say that it is good because God loves it and God loves it because it is good.

Suffering and hardship are not merely supposed to be part of the cosmic game they are part of it, as are joy and ease. Whether the world is thought to be beautiful, perfect or good is a matter of perspective, disposition, opinion.

Actually they do. Well they did in my world - Melbourne arts scene. There were fights and feuds so bitter over issues like abstract versus figurative, — Tom Storm

The same kind of thing happened in the Sydney art scene in the late sixties and early seventies. But I see that as tribal politics being enacted by interested parties (the artists themselves who were vying for exposure and recognition) rather than purely fighting over aesthetics for aesthetics sake.

No. They are saying you don't need pain killers or treatment if you have faith. They are cunts. — Tom Storm

Okay, that is an extreme cuntish position. Anyway, she should be left to make up her own mind in my view.

It is, but 'taste' is also where the passion is. I'm fascinated by passion and commitment and why some ideas and not others. — Tom Storm

Right, but people don't fight egregiously over whether Rembrandt was a greater artist than Leonardo or Jackson Pollock is better than Andy Warhol, or T S Eliot better than Wallace Stevens. So, I think it is political ideology which causes much of the conflict between science and religion, even though it's not always, or even often, framed that way. People believe society would be better off if one or other of theism or atheism was predominant. And this brings in the idea of human flourishing, of which kind of life overall is more beautiful: the religious or the secular. Ideologues do not find it enough to merely make the choice for themselves and leave others to their own devices.

I think lots would agree. I have a sister in-law with terminal cancer. There are some friends of hers who have said - don't get treatment, all you need is prayer. This for me is when the supernatural becomes problematic. When it exceeds its speculative limitations and becomes a course of potentially harmful action. — Tom Storm

On the other hand the suffering that can be involved with chemo and radiotherapy may not be worth the trade-off in terms of the little extra life they are capable of offering. If a person is an ardent beleiver they may find great comfort in prayer and be able to come to terms with their impending death in a way that may be impossible while undergoing the rigors of modern oncological therapy.

Again it must be a personal choice, and there are no guarantees either way.

I think this is true but so hard when identity is often based on a community of shared values which often feels or is marginalized. — Tom Storm

I agree; when marginalized communities have little or no voice the problem is compounded. But I would argue that the marginalization often results from those in power having little or no respect for the sovereignty of the individual. Of course the sovereignty of the individual must be balanced against the social responsibility that comes with that sovereignty, which is of course the respect for the sovereignty of other individuals.

Theists often claim a calling which is 'higher than any other calling,' including any call to human science, and I think we should NEVER forget to totally challenge that arrogant, unjustified claim. — universeness

Conversely atheists may claim that a calling to science is higher than a calling to religion, which would be an equally arrogant claim. The world would be a far better place if people learned to speak only for themselves, and fully realize that they speak only for themselves. That said the voice of organized religion can often be one of the worst offenders, but it is still far from being the only offender.

Can those immersed in the philosophical tradition tell me if aesthetic reasoning is used to justify positions on morality and meaning? — Tom Storm

Excellent OP, Tom!

The way I see it there is beauty in courage and cowardice is ugly. Greed, jealousy, hatred, exploitation and cruelty are ugly. Generosity, admiration, love, nurturance and kindness are beautiful.

Over the years, I have often heard people debating god versus no god - and the argument I seem to hear from many theists is that the world is uglier and less enchanted without a god and/or without contemplative practice. The person expressing such a view appears to regard atheism and humanism and the privileging of science over the 'supernatural' as unattractive, mean and an example of bad taste. — Tom Storm

I think the debate over God being understood in aesthetic terms is like debating the aesthetic worth of art works, poetry or music. Taste is individual, so such debates are ultimately pointless. That said the aesthetic value of something that has been around for a long time may be argued on the basis of its having become canonized, thus showing it to have some universal appeal.

Contemplative practice is also, I think, a matter for the individual; it seems to work for some and not for others. I don't think science should be privileged over the supernatural or vice versa per se; people are drawn to the ideas that resonate with how things seem to them and what inspires them personally and argument is pointless because the presuppositions that are foundational to each side of the divide are radically different even though those on both sides may have what they take to be the best interests of humanity at heart.

They seem to be saying that their experience of the world, transfigured through the veneration of the divine is deeper, richer and more beautiful than yours (atheist). They see, or hope for, transcendent beauty. You see, or live in, ghastly nihilism. — Tom Storm

Again I think that is an absurd argument. It might seem to someone that veneration of the divine is deeper, richer and more beautiful than nihilism, but that is merely a personal preference. Others may see it the other way around.

I remember once talking to an emeritus professor of religion and Nietzsche came up. He shuddered. "An abominable man!' he spat out. I asked why. 'He couldn't fully experience the Creation with such vulgar sensibilities.' — Tom Storm

Some religious thinkers understand and appreciate Nietzsche. Others have a powerful hatred of what they take him to represent. Personally I have great admiration for Nietzsche and respect for his ideas even though I also think he profoundly misunderstands religion in some ways and gets it profoundly right in others. Nietzsche and Kierkegaard are a good pair to compare and contrast in this context. Both were sons of pastors and both reacted against the comfortable "lip service" forms of religion they found around them.

In politics also, there have been conservatives who cling to tradition: ceremony, hierarchy and religion, while also embracing the principles of those traditions, rather than just gleaning the benefits: bread as well as circuses. That whole concept appears to have become obsolete.... hijacked by shills who replace patriotism with jingoist xenophobia; christian forbearance with militant religiosity; family and community cohesion with the vilification of minorities - tawdry imitations of conservative values.
Or so it seems to me. — Vera Mont

Very well described! I agree wholeheartedly.

A definition is a statement that specifies the correct use of a term. — Jamal

I disagree with this definition of definition, or at least I don't agree that it is the one correct definition or that there are correct definitions at all. I would say instead that a definition is a statement that specifies an interpretation of the meaning of a term. And that is why definitions are needed in philosophy, because otherwise interlocutors will waste time and energy talking past one another.

I see the basic driving idea in conservatism to be the preservation of the existing power and class structures, with which the economic status quo goes hand in hand. If conservatives will support any new legislation it will be one designed to siphon even more wealth and power to the elites.

Of course this agenda, in practice, will be, unless it is a totalitarian regime, balanced somewhat by the necessity to maintain the illusion of being populist just enough to try to ensure being re-elected.

experiences being characterised as beliefs. My beliefs are justified by my experiences but my experiences just are — Andrew4Handel

I agree with this. At a basic level experiences are not mediated by beliefs. But there are plenty toady who disagree and claim that perceptions themselves are inferential and further claim that neuroscience confirms this,

Leaving that aside, I would say the most important thing about human life is how it seems to us; this is the living reality. A so-called objective purported refutation of that based on what is interpreted to be delivered to us by science is secondary to and derivative of how things seem to us. Even in regard to what science shows there are multiple interpretations, so we are again back to seeming.

The only way to judge the value of contradictory seemings is to assess what affect they have on the quality of our lives. As Nietzsche said, the importance of the truth of ideas (which is mostly not demonstrable anyway) is secondary to how those ideas contribute to or detract from human flourishing.

In this arena of undecidable values why should we give a fuck about trying, per impossibile, to be correct, anyway? That is the question the analytic dogmatists of normativity who see the substance of human life, of being a self, as consisting in making claims, and philosophy as contest, cannot answer. The reality is that we each choose the ideas we want to live with, and by. Fuck the mind police I say!

As you can see I'm passionately opposed to the impossible dream of normative correctness and the machineman ethic.

I think I'd have to remain agnostic there. I can't know if it's misapplied because it's not known. And I'm not sure how I get to that, now that I think on it -- I was clarifying and answering, not arguing. — Moliere

Yes, it's an odd situation. If we want to say there is something unknowable we seem to be commit to saying it is real, and yet the term 'real' finds its genesis in the empirical context, where it is (at least in part) inter-subjective agreement that establishes what falls into the category 'real' and what into the category 'imaginary'. Numbers seem to be an edge case insofar as they cannot (cannot all at least) be classed as imaginary, and even the ones that are so classed have real applications.

Additionally there would seem to be no way to decide if the term real is misapplied if understood to be extended beyond the ambit of human experience. Of course there are those who, in a positivistic spirit, will dogmatically claim that the term is certainly misapplied in that extra-empirical scenario, asserting without substantive argument that we don't know what we are talking about when we apply it this way.

In a way it would have to be a feeling that it's settled, but I'm not sure if that would be discursive or non-discursive. Gets back to the first question -- "the whole" is what I'm thinking, but I'm not sure how to get there since it wasn't in the categories posited so far. — Moliere

We have an idea of the whole, but it cannot be an item of perceptual experience (and this goes for all wholes including whole objects) which begs the question as to whether the idea is a kind of mirage or whether the human intelligence is capable of intuitions which are not founded on the senses. But then how could we ever decide about that?

You misunderstood...I was going away and I wasn't trying to start a fight...just needling you a little...but thanks for the somewhat disturbing snapshot of your personality anyways...

I had just grown tired of the regurgitated faux-poetic and normative machine-man cliches and wanted to get off the merry-go-round as I was becoming bored, so I thought I'd inject a little rhetorical counterpoint that was not meant to be taken seriously as a way of easing out of the 'engagement' with a bit of a laugh.

I likewise don't take you to be an intimidating intellectual adversary, but then I don't think of myself as being above you either; I just think our basic presuppositions and approaches are so far apart that we will never manage to do anything but talk past one another, and that quickly becomes tiresome.

It does puzzle me that you are worried about my age...I just can't see how that is relevant. Probably best we ignore one another from now on.

Put like that -- I believe it to be the case, but I do not know it to be the case. And I suspect the whole is not knowable, so knowledge cannot settle whether there is more to the real than what is real to us.

So what does? That's something I still ask and wonder about. — Moliere

Saying the whole is not knowable seems to imply that there is that which is unknowable. If there were that which is unknowable, would it follow that it is real, or would you say the word "real" here would be misapplied?

I take it that when you you say "knowable" you mean 'discursively knowable' and then you go on to wonder if there could be another way to "settle it". Would settling it, for you, imply some kind of non-discursive knowing or just arriving at a feeling of its being settled?

I'm getting stuck on the parenthetical comment since you're wanting clarity -- can you put the question without parentheses? — Moliere

Do you think what is real to us is the whole of what is real?

Sounds about right to me. "Mystery" invokes more than I like, so I like to say "absurd", but I admit functional equivalence. — Moliere

Invokes or evokes? I'm guessing you think counting life as a mystery, as opposed to merely thinking it absurd, opens the door to mysticism and/or religion, and for that reason you don't favour the framing?

Do you doubt that what appears real to us, what can appear real to us, is not (or at least not necessarily or not the whole of) what is real per se? — Janus

Yes! — Moliere

So just to be clear you think that what appears real to us is (necessarily the whole of) what is real per se?

I'm not sure I agree that life is fundamentally a mystery. . . . mostly I'd prefer to say "absurd", but that's pretty close in functional terms, too. — Moliere

Yes, the idea that life is absurd, at least as Camus framed it, is that it cannot answer the questions most important to us, and I think in that sense it follows that life is a mystery.

Grow up or go away. — plaque flag

:rofl: Now that's funny...or at least a little funnier than "Run along. You are boring"...! It seems you are starting to develop a sense of humour...

Sorry, officer, that I assumed we were concerned with logic. Carry on my playword fun. — plaque flag

:up: No worries cuntstable; it's all just language games, after all...until it isn't...

I don't mind if you disagree with me, but it's only polite to agree with yourself. — plaque flag

I'm not disagreeing with myself. The only rational norm worth holding to is consistency and then only when the concern is with logic.

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”

Sure. But I also think people are different. I can't pretend to think all interpretations are equally good or that communication is impossible or offer some other easy target. Semantic finitude is not semantic nihilism. I can't get it all but I'll always want more. Will to power, will to clarity, will to beauty. — plaque flag

I don't think what I think you are looking for will be found via any discursive investigation. It is obvious there is no perfect communication and that language is an inherently fuzzy medium, so it is not a suitable tool for drilling down to utter clarity. You might be able to formalize language to get unequivocal statements, but they will be unbearably dry and empty. It will be like eating perfectly washed sand.

You leap from stone to stone, as we all must when we clarify. Pile signs on signs. But not all piling is equal. What is it to communicate adequately ? We both already know 'well enough' in the fog of average intelligibility. In this context the point is to notice the leaping from stone to stone. Meaning is being is seeing is meaning is being. Forms and information and sensations. We dance around in a ring and suppose. — plaque flag

We communicate adequately when we feel we understand each other. Do we really understand each other? Did your wife really have an orgasm? Does she really love you? We can torment ourselves because we can never be logically certain of anything, because it's always logically possible that we are mistaken. Can we live with uncertainty then? Is it okay to allow ourselves to dream a little, or must we aim, per impossibile, to be absolutely explicit and correct about absolutely everything?

The idea of semantic finitude seems mistaken to me; meaning is not finite it is in-finite; there is no way to corral it satisfactorily, and it would be unsatisfactory if we could corral it. The deluded endeavour to corral meaning is the reason AP is such a terrible 'medicine'; it produces legions of one-dimensional semantically correct wankers who are in mortal danger of disappearing up their own arses. They are flies in a dreadful normative bottle of their own devising who deludedly think they have escaped another bottle of their own imagining.

That doesn't make sense, unless you want to reduce rational norms to 'habitually instilled associations.'

What is being associated with what ? It can't be hidden mind stuff, so ? — plaque flag

Rational norms are the delusions of semantic policemen. The habitually instilled associations of shared meaning are merely organic outgrowths of the lifeworld. Association is a living ever-changing process; don't ask what is being associated with what; the attempt to isolate the elements will always fail and after the futile process of eliminating error, you'll end up with sand instead of water.

We live our lives in an ocean of seeming; that is the "being of meaning". If you try to get out of the ocean of seeming onto dry land, onto terra firma, you'll end up trying to eke out a bare existence on an uninhabitable speck. There's my bit of wisdom for the day for what it's worth; take it or leave it, I don't mind.

What does it mean to feel ?

If answering this is no more than a matter of whether typical public criteria are satisfied, then I expect that we will indeed attribute feeling to such bodies as the technology gets better. — plaque flag

Most of us, by all reports, feel, so those of us who do all know firsthand what it means to feel, even if it might be hard to define.

It's also true that people don't only indicate by direct statement, but also by their actions, actions that we have learned to associate with feelings, that they feel. Bots don't do that...maybe they will someday...who knows.

Do you imagine 'mind' being summoned into existence 'within' 'matter' as this happens? Will something that can already talk better than most humans begin to 'overhear' itself ? What would convince you from the outside ? What level of performance ? — plaque flag

If a bot had something equivalent to a CNS, the I might be convinced that it feels things, just as I am convinced that animals feel things, even though I obviously cannot know for sure. If a bot started initiating conversation and asking novel and pertinent questions, or produced fine artworks, literature or music that might make me rethink the issue. I haven't encountered anything like that, so....

I tend to think most of us know, even though we cannot precisely define, what consciousness is. We can't precisely define what anything is, if you start to dig into our definitions.

No, they absorb structure (norms) and generate novel sentences.. That's also what we do. — plaque flag

I don't think that's all there is to what we do. I think we care to explain ourselves, and we like to evoke feelings and associations which seem rich to us with language. I haven't seen bots doing that...all they produce, just like everyday bodily bots, is shit.

I don't understand what you're trying to say there.

I don't think so, however admittedly tempting this sounds. If 'true orangeness' is hidden, we have no data whatsoever for supporting such a hypothesis. I don't see logic but only a comfortable and familiar prejudice. — plaque flag

The idea that our perceptions of the any colour are likely similar (leaving aside that some people are colour-blind) is based not only on questions we might ask each other about whether the colour seems closer to one or other of the colours on either side of it on the colour spectrum, but also on the well-observed structural commonalities of the human visual system.

But 'pure' qualia are problematic — plaque flag

I haven't mentioned qualia except to say I don't favour the idea.

People want to say what they also say can't be said. — plaque flag

What cannot be said cannot be said, obviously. However that there is that which cannot be said can be said without contradiction or inconsistency. I also happen to think that the fact that there is that which cannot be said is perhaps the most important fact about being human.

We might ask what 'experience' is supposed to mean. — plaque flag

You might...but why would you when you know what it means as well as you know what any word means?

We need not introduce internal images, though this is tempting in ordinary contexts, given popular metaphors like the mind is a container. — plaque flag

I think most of us have experienced internal images and internal dialogue judging from what others have said to me, I don't think of the mind as a container; it doesn't contain sensations, feelings, thoughts and images, it is sensations, feelings, thoughts and images.

It's 'obvious' once one grasps it (switches metaphors?). — plaque flag

I hope you are not falling into the dogmatic illusion that those who don't agree with you have failed to understand. There are already a few here afflicted with that particular prejudice.

This may be a parody, but how wide of the mark is it ? — plaque flag

Very wide, I'd say. Again all I've said is that our perceptions are not accessible to others other than by means of what we tell them. Perception is private, but it is talked about in a public language; a fact which would only be possible if there were a good degree of commonality. So, most of us feel pain, see colour, taste food, visualize, and so on. These are all experiences, and the only way others can know about them is if we tell them.

To me this also points toward that lack in our lifeworld of 'pure' mentality and its shadow 'pure' materiality. — plaque flag

Right, but I haven't anywhere claimed, or even suggested that, there is any such thing as "pure mentality" or "pure materiality".

'See' does not have this dual meaning where it's also describing a self-report about mental states. — Isaac

Yes it does: introspection is understood to be 'seeing into' the body/mind in order to notice what bodily feelings or thoughts seem to be present. It's commonplace and most everyone knows how to do it.

Only the little story about the Real being beneath the real-- that's what's being doubted. — Moliere

Do you doubt that what appears real to us, what can appear real to us, is not (or at least not necessarily or not the whole of) what is real per se? Of course the latter is not something we could ever discover, but is just a logical distinction between what appears to us and what is independently of us. I'd say it is of importance, because it reminds us that life is, fundamentally, a mystery. So I don't count it as a "little story" but as a realization that is central to human life.

The empirical world is a Cartesian framework, if by that you mean dualistic through and through. On the other hand the immediacy of experience is not dualistic, and nor is what gives rise to experience and the shared idea of an empirical world.

What exactly is this ghost intention ? — plaque flag

When I say something is intentional I mean it is deliberate, consciously chosen or created; the usual implication being it is something we care about; nothing to do with ghosts, which I don't care about.

Wrap up a clever bot in a soft warm android body that purrs and see what happens. — plaque flag

Is the bot going to feel what happens to that body?

We can't find the souls of our cats in this or that location. Where is this divine spark ? Imagine a young man falling in love with woman who treats him wonderfully who then discovers she's an android, a fact which she's concealed for fear of losing him. How does he determine whether she is 'in' there and worth of love ? — plaque flag

I think the question about the location of souls, or experience, or consciousness is generated by categorical confusion. Are synthetic organisms that feel things like we do,, and care about what happens to them like we do, possible? Maybe, but we are a long way from that right now.

If your hypothetical android fears the loss of her lover then she is like a human. Do you think chat-gpt feels lonely when no one is conversing with it?

I don't believe consciousness is to be "found" anywhere but via introspection; we might find physiological signs that are taken to indicate its presence but that's about it I think.

It's true that I don't currently project feelings on or having feelings toward machines. I just don't see why I couldn't in principle --- if those machines were more like my cat or wife with respect to my sense organs. It's not logically impossible that my cat is already a machine made by crafty aliens. — plaque flag

Is it merely a matter of your sense organs? Many weird things are not logically impossible, like God, it doesn't follow that we ought to believe in them. I think we need something more convincing. We can talk about, try to explain in various ways, how we feel with a lover, and we might even spin up some doubts about whether they are really feeling beings like us; it's logically possible they might be robots, but there is no sense of this possibility in our living interactions with them. What to trust...lived experience or conceptually generated doubts that only have their mere logical possibility to sustain them?

You claim that meaning can't be observed. I don't see how that claim is justified. Bots have learned to talk with us. I agree that it's difficult to talk about, but how is 'affect' to be understood ? But what is special about the human brain ? Is it the meat ? Or is it just a structure of a function ? And how does 'affect' get a meaning at all if affects aren't essentially public ? — plaque flag

I don't see how the claim that meaning can be observed can be justified. Whatever meaning bots produce is just regurgitation of what we have programmed them with.

Who knows what is special about the human brain? Is it fundamentally meat? Does it produce consciousness or is it a kind of transceiver? How could we tell the difference?

I don't know about you, but 'affect' gets its meaning for me because I experience myself as affected and affecting. I know how I feel, and sometimes in the right kinds of situations seem to be pretty good at discerning what others feel, if I pay attention.

This is from another thread, and it makes the same point I did to you earlier about semantic reference being entirely dependent on our understanding that words do refer:

I once heard John Searle say something which I believe prevents one moving down the road to confusion.

Words do not refer, but human being use words to refer.

I think sometimes folk forget this which causes folk to think a word is magically "connected" to some object. — Richard B

Flowers wilt, life declines. A day in the sun is the joy, no? Memento mori et memento vivere. :fire: — 180 Proof

:up: A whole day under the sun includes the brightest and the darkest hours.

they don't really understand what words mean, they are just programmed to be able to put coherent sentences together, a facility which relies on their being able to mimic grammatical structure based on statistical data showing how certain questions elicit certain kinds of responses. — Janus

But what if we are hardware 'designed' by evolution to do roughly the same thing ? These things can reason. They can outperform humans on important tests. It's starting to look like humans are superstitious about their own nature. As far as I can tell, it boils down to the problem of the meaning of being, the problem of the being of meaning, the problem of the thereness of 'qualia'. And I claim we don't have a grip on it. — plaque flag

Programming or designing is an intentional act, so I don't think the analogy holds. I'll beleive an AI is conscious when I see it write poetry that is not doggerel, but nuanced, musical and rich in allusions.

You can claim we are just being "superstitious" about our natures, and there may be cases of that, but I don't find it convincing as a general explanation for being reluctant to impute consciousness to AIs.

I don't think there is any one meaning of being; to claim there is would be to claim that the word refers to just one idea, reality or whatever. I don't know what "the being of meaning" refers to; but I know what the feeling or sense of meaning is. I don't favour the reificatory term "qualia", and I have no idea what the "thereness of qualia" could be referring to. Perhaps you mean something like the immediacy of experience?

We don't need to have a grip on experience, it being better to let go, although we do try to get a grip with language so that we can generate the illusion of an actual publicly shared world. Of course I'm not saying that illusion is not, in its own way real and important. There may be altered or higher conscious states where there really is sharing, but we would need to let go of the linguistically actuated "monkey mind" in order to know that.

If we are confident, is such confidence logically justified or just mere meatbias ? For most of our history, we have done what we like with machines, without worrying about their feelings, excepting of course some of the the 'machines' provided by biological evolution.

If 'sense of meaning' is understood to be immaterial and invisible to scientific and perhaps even conceptual approach, it's hard to see how such an assumption can be justified. — plaque flag

I doubt you really believe that machines feel or care about anything. Animals are not merely machines in my view, any more than humans are. The two concepts 'machine' and 'animal' are distinct enough. Machines are not self-regulating metabolic organisms, for a start.

Sense of meaning is an affect, and machines are not sentiently affected. Sense of meaning is an experience, and we have no reason to think that machines experience anything. I think 'immaterial" is a loaded term and so not helpful here. That said sense of meaning is not a physical object that can be publicly observed. We can talk about it; but only imprecisely.

Do the flowers I find in decline come before or after the death? Or both maybe, although I won't be there to find the latter.

If 'orange' is understood to refer to a quale, then to whose quale is it supposed to refer ? — plaque flag

In my view 'orange' doesn't refer to a quale, but to a kind of experience or perception. It's not a precise term, which is obvious if you look at a colour wheel that shows colour gradations. I'd say there is nothing precise about language, but its binaries foster the illusion of precision.

I don't think reference is dependent on precision, but on our understanding; words refer to things because we understand them to refer, that's all and there's no more to it than that.

A person might then say that 'orange' refers to my quale. And then you get it and link it to yours. So it has two references that might be the same, one can never tell. — plaque flag

If I have seen something orange, say an orange, and I say "That orange is a very intense orange" the sentence refers to an orange I have seen, and the second time the word 'orange' is used in that sentence it refers to the colour of that orange.

Say the orange is in front of us and you then say "I agree the orange of that orange is very intense" then you are also referring to a quality of the colour of the orange. Our actual perceptions are private and can never be compared except via talk, which means they can only vaguely or imprecisely be compared.

I have no reason to think that your perception of the orange is very much different from mine, and I have only your similar description as reason to think that your experience was like mine. I might ask whether you see the colour of the orange as tending towards yellow or red, and if I see it as tending towards yellow and you say you see it tending towards yellow, then we have more reason to think our perceptions of the orange are similar.

One can interpret things that way. I don't think it's obvious. — plaque flag

So the sentence " I saw an orange afterimage", just taken as a bare sentence, isn't abstractly referring to a certain kind of experience? What do you take the sentence to mean?

Yes. And we can just watch interactions. On this forum, I can tell (I am convinced) that other people grasp Wittgenstein's later work the way I do. And we read one philosopher about another too, which possibly changes, all at the same time, what we think about the author, the philosopher being commented upon, and ourselves. — plaque flag

If you can tell something as complex as how others grasp Wittgenstein's later work the "way you do", should it not be much easier to tell if someone's perception of a colour is the way you perceive it?

I don't even want THC these days. It'd probably be fine, maybe fun, but I don't bother to seek it out. — plaque flag

All drugs including caffeine, alcohol THC and psychedelics, etc., alter how we see things. I still find that interesting, although I don't explore these kinds of experiences at the expense of my health.

I can understand seeing it that way. Wittgenstein is better at keeping open the question of why skepticism continues to appear. And, yes, Austin can seem like he is just cataloguing how language works. What he is doing though is looking at: what we say when we.... (know, think, etc.) because the way we talk about those activities shows us what matters to us about the activities. The criteria for having apologized are what count towards being forgiven. So the workings of how we discuss the activity show us what we are interested in about it. The language shows us the world. — Antony Nickles

I agree that language shows us the world; since the world is a linguistically generated collective representation in my view. This is not to say that whatever gives rise to the phenomenal world is linguistically generated, nor that our perceptions of things are (entirely) linguistically generated.

Naming things, positing them as entities, brings the world into being for us. We never actually perceive the world, we just perceive those things which enter our visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, etc., fields. Nor do we ever actually perceive whole things.

:up: I agree.

"[T]ranslational or philosophical efforts to favor or purge a particular signification of pharmakon [and to identify it as either "cure" or "poison"] actually do interpretive violence to what would otherwise remain undecidable." — plaque flag

Ah, "pharmakon" is close to my heart, since I love psychedelics. (although they are mostly not poisonous except perhaps in massive doses). I seemed to remember it was Paracelsus who said "The dose makes the poison"? I looked it up and he also said: "All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison."

I was trying to, but how can I know ? What was I referring to ? Is my orange your orange ? If this stuff is private and immaterial and transconceptual, all I have is my hunch that I referred to it and your agreement. But is that evidence or just us both being trained by the same circus? — plaque flag

What could it mean to say that the word 'orange' in this sentence "I saw an orange after-image" didn't refer to the orange after-image I saw? What would the lack of reference there look like?

This is actually quite relevant. A certain kind of philosopher might anchor the author's meaning to some immaterial intention present as they were written. Then hopefully the same immaterial intention is recovered by the reader. No one could ever check. But I think there's an ordinary sense of idea transmission that's fine, like passing along a tool (something like an equivalence class of utterances with roughly the same fitness for the same tasks.) — plaque flag

Yes, no one could ever check; only the author would know whether the intention to refer gad been there. But even in the case above, just taking the sentence alone without specifying that it was uttered, so that it wasn't in a context where the utterance is intended to refer to a particular experience of the utterer's, the word "orange" still logically refers to the colour of some fictional orange afterimage.

How does one end up feeling understood ? Deciding someone else 'gets' an idea ? — plaque flag

We take them at their word that they have understood. We might ask them to explain the idea to us and if their explanation matches our understanding, then it should seem obvious they have most likely understood.

We can study words and other gestures, as if we were aliens, and learn to predict actions that follow such words, and so on. — plaque flag

True, we can do that. If we didn't know a language and found ourselves stuck among its speakers with no one to teach us, we might have to learn that way. But if they had some words which signified certain
emotions that we didn't ever experience then we could never learn the meanings of those words until we were fluent enough to ask for explanations of them, in which case we might gain some sense of their meaning.

In my view, the coming triumph of these bots (their eerie facility with language) will force us to question what meaning is in a way that only a few weird philosophers have managed to do so far. — plaque flag

Perhaps, but I don't think it likely since we can be fairly confident that bots don't have any sense of meaning, which would mean they don't really understand what words mean, they are just programmed to be able to put coherent sentences together, a facility which relies on their being able to mimic grammatical structure based on statistical data showing how ceartin questions elicit certain kinds of responses. Or something like that, I imagine ("I imagine" since I know next to nothing about programming).

Ah. I might call that abstraction or the methodical ignoring of differences that make no difference. — plaque flag

Yes we call it abstraction or generalization. If we are counting trees the differences between them don't matter, they just have to be similar enough to be counted as trees. It seems plausible to me to think this was done long before any conception of methodology had arrived on the scene.

You may be right that I'm not getting what's there. But then given the idea that there are no priveleged interpretations, it's possible that you are creatively misreading Wittgenstein. We won't be able to decide which is the case. The best we can say is that there has seemed to be something cogent there to you, but not to me.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I hate the idea of teams or tribes in our modern context.

Did I refer to it ? Who can say ? — plaque flag

I took you to be referring to it. If you didn't take yourself to be referring to it then you could say I was mistaken. But then this gets back to the argument against the author and the fixing of the meaning of texts according to the intentions of the author.

If we lose that idea then the fact that you could be taken to have referred to it is sufficient, since any absolute determination is impossible. The question about absolute reference, just like the question about absolute reality might just be an incoherent line of enquiry.

BTW your new name evokes some associations which you may or may not have meant to invoke. 'Tartar pennant' springs to mind in the dental context. Or you could mean to highlight an ambiguity: is it a flag or a plaque? I guess it depends on whether it flaps in the breeze. Both can serve as bearers of messages: does 'poison' refer to toxins or to danger or both?

any point of view is not no point of view. — Wayfarer

The view from everywhere is not the same as the view from nowhere, but is the view from nowhere in particular. The view from everywhere is achievable in principle, but not in practice because it would involve infinitely many views. Another limitation on us sentient beings is that we may not have the perceptual apparatus, or be able to simulate it, to see the world as a fly does.

If there were a God that inhabits all creatures and all things and can see what they see, and could even see things from the POV of any and all fundamental particles, then It could achieve a view from everywhere but even such a god could not have a view from nowhere as opposed to the synthesis of views from everywhere, which would be from nowhere in particular.

I think I get what you're saying. What I was alluding to was something a little different: that we encounter number on account of pattern, difference, similarity and repetition, all of which are inherent in perception.

I'm not arguing that meaning cannot be divorced from use. Or for it. I'm saying that the meanings of words aren't 'anchored' in or founded upon immaterial private experience. I'm saying (roughly) that meaning is established 'between' cooperative and competitive animals. Surely a language is marked on our brain in some sense. We have evolved the hardware for just this kind of tribal software. — plaque flag

Right, I'd say the meanings of words are not "anchored" in anything other than the fact that individuals associate them (as sounds or marks) with items they have experienced. It is arbitrary, the sound or mark can take other forms; obviously so. since there are many languages.

This association, I would say, is established by habit, which means by the usages one has grown familiar with. But a word can be made to mean anything that a logic of association, itself established by experience and by perceptual correspondences in a sense similar to Magick theory, allows.

I agree with Lakoff that we are metaphorical creatures. Math is understood metaphorically, even if proofs are theoretically computercheckable. — plaque flag

I agree that we are metaphorical creatures and that is precisely why I would say meaning can indeed be divorced from use.

Numbers as metaphors for objects?

I agree, which is why I'm glad I don't tend to do that. I'm a torrent of phine frases friend. — plaque flag

Your word-craft is not in question, but if you want to make claims fine phrases don't make the cut, you need fine arguments. However, if you don't want to claim that meaning cannot be divorced from use then it's all good...

Oh yes we go way back actually. I will try to dance a merry jig. — plaque flag

That's okay provided it's not virtual jig-a-jig. :wink:

you haven't even offered any argument for why you think meaning cannot be divorced from use, but just repeated claims that it's wrong, whatever that might mean. — Janus


I believe I have offered various arguments, and I constantly allude to philosophers who are famous for making just that kind of case. — plaque flag

Allusions to famous philosopher's arguments in lieu of laying them out in your own words (which I haven't seen but if there are such layings-out, then all you have to do is point out where they are) doesn't cut it for me; it reads like an appeal to authority.

It was a good analogy. — plaque flag

Neither it nor the flat earth analogy are good in my view. The first can be empirically tested and the second is a matter of mathematical logic. Neither mathematical logic nor empirical testability are applicable in the case of the idea that meaning can be divorced from use.

Note that I never offered the thesis 'meaning cannot be divorced from use.' I'm not saying it's a bad thesis. — plaque flag

OK, that's a turnaround. Banno said this: "That is, one cannot divorce the meaning from the use" and you responded with "Right".

Still no argument; just another bad analogy.

This is flat earth semantics, in that makes sense at first but turns out to be more wrong than right. — plaque flag

It is empirically demonstrable that the Earth is not flat. You keep saying that the idea that meaning can be divorced from use is like believing in a flat Earth. But the latter is not empirically demonstrable, so it's a weak analogy and you haven't even offered any argument for why you think meaning cannot be divorced from use, but just repeated claims that it's wrong, whatever that might mean.