Its not even a question of whether one accepts that God exists or not; even supposing we do accept that God exists, if only purely for the sake of argument, theism is still not explanatory in at least one important sense i.e. analyzing something we don't understand in terms that we do understand. Which is a pretty important part of what explanations are supposed to do. — busycuttingcrap

By the same criterion, the Big Bang hypothesis is not explanatory either. Both it and the God hypothesis posit creation ex nihilo, and we cannot understand how something could come from nothing. It would seem that any explanation has to terminate in the unexplained, in something that is merely accepted as "brute" fact or presupposition.

So this would suggest our language isn't necessarily a brain thing. The brain is involved, of course, so that's not where I'm going here. — Moliere

Right, is it just differences in the human brain that enables the development of language, or is it vocal chords or the opposable thumb or a combination? I don't think it makes much sense to consider the brain apart from the whole body, anyway.

As you say , some animals can recognize and respond appropriately to words and phrases,but do they have any notion that the word or phrase represents or refers to anything, or do they merely associate certain sounds with certain activities?

I'm have no definite sense of what you mean by "an understanding of language would get closer to this notion of the virtual insofar that we are thinking of language as what's virtual". Maybe you have in mind an idea that I would agree with: that the world of objects, or as the Buddhists would say "namarupa" or "name and form" is a conceptual overlay to bare perception, where the latter is just sensation; visual, auditory, tactile or whatever. In Buddhist philosophy the state of conceptual-less perception is referred to as Nirvikalpa.

* "Of or pertaining to the absence of conceptual thinking or discursive thought"
* "the state of recognizing reality which is totally freed of the distortions of discursive thought, non-discrimination"

(This ties in with the issues around ineffability).

On this view, the empirical world is not something we directly perceive, but is a conceived abstraction; a world of different kinds of objects and "states of affairs", collectively derived from associating sensory experiences.

Do animals experience such a world? It seems doubtful, since they probably don't name things and conceive of them as kinds, and yet they can function very well, arguably better than we can, although they are not so adaptable to new environments.

To what extent do you believe brains are involved in the eons of judgments that've been passed down? — Moliere

I think @unenlightened has already answered this very well. A complex brain can re-call, re-member and re-imagine events, which better enables learning from past events and preparing for an anticipated future.

How much this is dependent on symbolic language is something to wonder about. Looking at human life in contrast to the lives of "higher" animals it seems undeniable that there is a vast difference in the form of a massively complex human culture, a documented past, and anticipatory enthusiasm-driven momentum for growth and development that we just don't find in other animals.

So, I'd say that it is predominantly symbolic language which is responsible for the greatest difference between us and the other animals. Just what qualities of the homo sapiens brain that make speech and symbolic language possible for humans , but not for other animals I can't say. I don't even know if there have been solid results from research on this, so that would be an area of further investigation.

What unenlightened touches on in his second paragraph I agree with. There are ways in which the discursive mind has diminished our lives, making us in some ways less than the animals. Animals do not suffer delusions, fixations on pet theories, "messianic" complexes and so on; it's a long list of afflictions that come thanks to the great "gift" of symbolic language, of speech and writing. It seems that every "high" has its commensurate "low".

I agree with that, I think. Not eons, though -- spoken language is much sooner than biological timescales. It seems like eons. — Moliere

eon
ē′ŏn″, ē′ən
noun

An indefinitely long period of time; an age.

The longest division of geologic time, containing two or more eras.

The largest divisionof geologic-time: used by J. D. Dana especially in dividing the archœan into astral and archæozoic eons.

I had in mind the first definition not the geological one.

How do you, how could you, know (The tree would still be a chestnut)? — Janus

works as well if you ask "How do you, how could you, know the tree is no longer a chestnut?" — Banno

A tree is an interactive reality; so it's not a matter of whether it would be a chestnut if there were no humans. :lol: Banno: the last of the naive realists.

Balls. You want to treat knowing and being true as the same. The are not. Knowing is a relation between an individual and a proposition. Being true is not a relation. — Banno

In your imagination. We know things via perception; how else? To say that something is true is to say that it has been determined to be true by observation: leaving tautologies and stipulative truths aside. That's not to say that within this human world of embodied perception there are not undiscovered truths, that you lack the imagination to able to see that is the source of your error.

and each time your account falls apart. As it does again, here. You can't recognise a decent argument. — Banno

My account only falls apart in your dualism afflicted imagination. I'll pay a decent argument from you if you finally get around to presenting one. I won't be holding my breath, because all you can seem to able to manage is repetitive assertion and aspersion.

I guess to bring this back to the original question -- to what extent is the brain involved in any of that? — Moliere


My apologies for indulging Janus' off-topic confusion. — Banno

It's not off-topic, either. I'm saying the body-mind interacting with the cosmos, constructs our common empirical reality; it's a collective representation. That empirical reality, which would not exist without us; that is what the notion 'reality' derives from and rightly only refers to.

Humans also imagine there is an absolute reality, independent of our empirical reality, but that is merely an imagining; we just don't know anything beyond the empirical.

We are born into a world already formed by the perceptions and judgements, evolved over eons in a community of embodied perceivers, and enacted within ever-changing culture and language.

Obviously. I'm using a bi-conditional logic. What logic, if any, are you using, and why? — Banno

You are committing the error of applying a dualistic, determinate body based logic beyond its ambit: as I said: "language on holiday".

...and we're off on Janus' preferred goose chase again. Around and around. — Banno

Nice: assertion, ad hominem and aspersion, but no argument. I'm not chasing anything because when it comes to questions about what would be real if there were no humans, there is nothing to chase. It is you imagining that there would be something there; chasing a phantasm of your own precious dualistic "logic".

Our elders were not embodied perceivers?

Without all of us this wouldn't be real in the same way. — Moliere

Sure, we can say all of this would be real in some way without us, but we have no idea what that could mean, since the notion real has its genesis in perception. To say all of this would be real without us is to project our perceptually embodied based notion of reality onto an imagined "situation" where there is no perception or embodiment: I think that qualifies well as "language on holiday".

The tree would still be a chestnut, the rose still a rose. — Banno

How do you, how could you, know that? It's nothing more than your preferred way of talking.

An obvious slide. — Banno

From what to what?

Yeah, they would. "The tree is a chestnut" and The flower is a rose" are true even when no one perceives it. — Banno

If there were no humans those sentences would not exist, let alone be true. If there were no bodies there would be no tree, no chestnut, no flower, no rose, for they too are bodies.

Self-deception. The flowers and the root are real - not hallucinations. The interpretation is what the body does. If anything the body is a reaction-generator. — Banno

They wouldn't be real without the perceiving body; at least not in the same way. No reality to speak of without bodies, and no speaking either. A different way of looking at things, but, hey, I forgot you don't like different ways; it's safer in the bottle, even when all the other flies have flown.

:up:

Sure, you can still ask why, but that would be to either fail to understand, or fail to accept, what is offered as an ultimate explanation. The very idea of an ultimate explanation necessarily precludes that it should require, or that it would even be possible, to itself be explained.

Is God something we know and understand, such that saying "God did X" adds to our understanding of how/why X occurs? Or is it simply kicking the explanatory can down the road? — busycuttingcrap

God is conceived as being that to which all roads lead, and at which all roads end, so unlike other.less absolute, explanations, such as aliens, or computer simulations, it is not "kicking the explanatory can further down the road".Of course if one doesn't accept such a God then it won't be seen as any kind of explanation.

The "Big Bang" hypothesis shares some characteristics with the theistic explanation for the existence of the Cosmos. It may not be that to which all roads lead, but is that in which they terminate, if looking backwards for explanation. It is certainly seen as being where all roads begin, and like God, is not in need of, nor does it lend itself to, further explanation.

Btw, I'm not actually interested in what Kant thought about reality (noumenon) because his phenomenon-noumemon distinction seems to me one of Kant's own "transcendental illusions" (re: an inconsistency of his schema). — 180 Proof

I can relate to that; there is a kind of tension in Kant, since he rejects the possibility of doing metaphysics (as traditionally conceived) via pure reason, while advocating practical reasons for believing in God, Freedom and Immortality. There may be inherent problems of inconsistency and incoherence in his philosophy which would explain why there is (apparently) controversy among Kant scholars as to just what he thought about some issues.

That aspirational assertion is merely my opinion, not attributed to Kant. Even though we cannot directly know the ding an sich, we can -- via the observational methods of Science, and the reasoning of Philosophy -- construct models of ultimate reality that "approximate" the true ding. On this forum we argue about whose model is Closer To Truth, which is the pragmatic goal of Philosophy. Even Kant seemed motivated to get as close as possible to Transcendental Idealism. :cool: — Gnomon

OK, but I don't believe we can construct models of ultimate reality, we can only construct models of how things appear to us, The very idea of ultimate reality is verging on being, if it is not actually, incoherent, in my view.

Even if our models were "approximating" to ultimate reality, how would we ever know, and how can we even know what it would mean for a perspectival model to approximate to a reality that is defined, as ultimate or absolute, as being beyond all perspective and context?

I don't agree with you that we are arguing, on this forum, about whose model is "Closer To Truth"; the way I see it we are arguing for how things seems to each of us, from our own perspectives. That is why so much talking past one another goes on. I don't purport to argue for transcendent truth, but aim to get a clear picture of just what our (human) situation consists in; and that is why I advocate phenomenology, because I think it's the closest we've come to a good methodology for that purpose.

Kant said that we cannot help trying to do metaphysics (do metaphysics in the sense of trying to get to empirically transcendent truth by means of reason), His project, as I understand it, was concerned with showing that to be impossible. So he acknowledges that we cannot help trying to do it, but wants us to realize it is impossible. This realization will not eradicate the urge to do it, but should help keep it in check.

Gautama Buddha realized the same things 2600 years ago.

The ability to distinguish colours is not dependent on what we do, some of what what we do is dependent on the ability to distinguish colours. The cart and horse are not the same; the horse pulls the cart, the cart does not pull the horse — Janus


Sensorimotor theories of perception indicate that action is essential to perception in general. — Joshs

I don't disagree with that, but I was referring specifically to what we do with our colour perceptions, to what the ability to perceive colour enables us to do. The point was that, however we might have gotten there, we can distinguish colours (as can some other animals), and we don't necessarily have to do anything, at any given time, with that, beyond just noticing different colours, This was contra Banno's assertion that distinguishing colour consists entirely in what we do with it. .

We distinguish colours only because it makes a difference to what we can do. — Banno

An over-generalization, I think: we may distinguish colours simply because we like the way they look. In any case distinguishing colours and being able to distinguish them are not the same thing.

Again, it's not arbitrary, because of what we do with the apples. The cart and the horse are the same thing - it's an automobile. — Banno

The ability to distinguish colours is not dependent on what we do, some of what what we do is dependent on the ability to distinguish colours. The cart and horse are not the same; the horse pulls the cart, the cart does not pull the horse

...and we know this not as a result of the quality of blue and yellow, but because of what dogs do. QED. — Banno

Of course, yet what they do, their observable actions, is not their ability to distinguish blue and yellow, but what that ability enables.

You get the red one and not the green because it's not arbitrary. You seem to be saying that it's not arbitrary because you get the red one not the green one; that would be to put the cart before the horse.

Dogs can see blue and yellow apparently; which means they can distinguish between those colours, but the rest appear yellow or blue or perhaps grey. They don't require language to do this.Our ability to distinguish colours, as opposed of course to naming them, does not rely on language.

Why shouldn't we just use a word for a variety of different things, without those things having something in common? — Banno

Because the uses of words that denote perceived qualities are not arbitrary; the perceptions are not without commonality. If they were we could agree on nothing. And the argument is not transcendental but immanent; immanent to what we can commonly recognize. Is the apple red or green?

The agreement does not come about because we consistently use the appropriate words in different cases, but we consistently use the appropriate words because we see perceive the same phenomena. It's not likely that we will disagree about whether an apple is red or green ( leaving aside cases where colour-blindness comes into it).

Isn't that the "reality beyond the 'for us'" – the limit or horizon of our reasoning, namely that reality necessarily encompasses its conception such that 'reality's conception encompasses reality' is a self-contradiction? In the Kantian sense, empirical knowledge (phenomenon) proximately approaches but asymptotically cannot reach the horizon/reality (i.e. noumenon). In other words, aren't we (embodied reasoners) just an aspect of the whole which cannot transcend – thereby 'totalize' – the whole (re: mereological self-consistency)? Inhabitants of the territory who cannot make a map (out of aspects of the territory) informationally identical to, let alone 'greater than', the territory itself? Well, isn't that a coherent "idea of reality in itself" (i.e. the territory > maps-of-the territory), of what makes "reality for us" (i.e. map-making/using) possible? I suppose I could be confusing myself with 'transcendental illusions' ... :chin: — 180 Proof

That all makes sense to me. I don't think Kant denied that there is a reality in itself (i.e. something that would be in the absence of human life). Kant interpretation among dedicated scholars is notoriously controversial, and I am no Kant scholar. so I could be off the mark. (It seems the closest we have to Kant scholar on this forum is @Mww).

In any case, according to my limited understanding I think Kant would not deny that we experience noumena, in the sense that we are affected by it/them, and are part of it/ them in that they give rise to our being and perceptions, which we in turn model as "things", "bodies", "objects" or sounds or smells and so on, And those empirical objects cannot be known exhaustively, but I think it is controversial as to whether Kant thought of those objects as things-in- themselves, but if he did it would make sense to me, and would ratify the distinction between things-in-themselves and noumena, the latter being what we can attain no conception of.

So, I agree with what you seem to be saying: that the "territory" is the unknowable (because it cannot be encompassed) reality in itself. This stuff is seemingly impossible to talk about without some incoherence pr aporia, so I think it's fair to say that we all "confuse ourselves (to varying degrees) with transcendental illusions". .

You introduce the word "quality" like it was clear what it means. What's a quality, then?

I submit that it's just a way of using a word. "Using" is the pertinent term. Red things need have nothing in common beyond our saying that they are red. — Banno

So, you are going to play that game? What's a quality? It's an attribute. What's an attribute? It's a trait. What's a trait?....

Why do we (mostly) agree that some things are red, as opposed to any other colour? It's because we perceive those things to be coloured such that they seem to qualify as being red. To qualify means "to have the appropriate quality".

Again, I've already replied to this. Given any rule for inclusion in a family, we can chose a new member which does not satisfy the rule. — Banno

Again you are presenting irrelevancies. I haven't said there needs to be a single rule for inclusion in a family. Given the whole set of characteristics, the possession of a sufficient number of which would qualify for inclusion in a family, can you find a new member who satisfies none of them? That is the salient point.

One of the points of this is methodological. It's It's contrary to the near ubiquitous supposition that "we call all these things red, therefore there is a thing, redness, that all these have in common" — Banno

There is no "thing" redness, if by that you mean an object. But there is a quality of redness that things that qualify as red things display. The quality of course is not some particular shade of red, but a general quality of redness.

But of course you can find something common between any two things. What this shows is that you've missed the point. Oh well. — Banno

It seems it is you, not I, who has missed the point. Of course you can find something in common between any two things, so what? I was asking for an example of two things which could be said to belong to the same family that do not resemble each other in any way that is criterial for counting as being included in the family.

This current series of exchanges between us came about on account of my response to this;

The point is that there need be no similarity for someone to be counted as part of a family. — Banno

Now if you say there is a set of things belonging to a family, then it seems to follow that all members of that family must possess some salient resemblance or similarity to the other members that justifies including it in that family.

Now, I ask you again if you can provide any examples of things which could be said to belong to the same family that possess nothing in common that would qualify them for being included in that family. Don't try to move the goalposts this time, but just attempt to give an honest answer. If you can give a satisfactory answer then I will concede the point, not otherwise, no matter how much you protest that I have missed the point.

I find Wittgenstein's idea of family resemblances not very coherent or useful and even potentially somewhat misleading. Members of a human family are considered to be such usually because of their genetic commonalities. That said, a person might be adopted into the family, and parents themselves usually don't have a genetic heritage in common, but they are thought of as family on account of being thought of as belonging and being loved like family and so on. Sometimes, perhaps rarely, human family members do not even resemble one another.

We find the idea of family in the larger taxonomic context in relation to plants and animals, and there are morphological criteria which serve as reasons for including particular kinds of plants or animals in a family.

I would still like to see an example of two things that are considered to belong to a family that yet have nothing in common. I can't think of any.

Yeah, me and my brother-in-law. He's a bloody insurance salesman. Parasite. — Banno

But you do have something in common; you are both in relationship with your sister..

Yes, vivid personal subjective realities. My experience is my reality. But, it's just one of many experienced "realities", because your experience may be different. — Gnomon

Our experiences may be different, but if they have nothing in common then they would not qualify as experiences of reality, even though they might qualify as real experiences. We actually don't perceive reality at all, we conceive it.

In order to approximate "true" reality (ding an sich), we would have to compare our varying worldviews, looking for areas of overlap. — Gnomon

This is not Kant, though; according to him we cannot approximate to the noumenal. We can only say how things seem in our experience, and if our experiences align, then we have empirical reality. Empirical reality is reality for us according to Kant. So, logically we can then ask "what about reality in itself or beyond the "for us"?", and Kant's answer is that we can have no idea of what that could be.

It's still essentialism. Is yellow a red or a green? What of orange? Brown? — Banno

Is essentialism some kind of bogeyman for you? Do you see that there might be differences kinds or degrees of essentialism? Yellow is not a red or a green, it is a yellow, or else we fall into incoherence. A yellow may be more reddish or more greenish. The colour wheel although divided into six colours is really a more or less infinite continuum. It is said by some that the human eye can distinguish around ten million different colours, so the division to 'red' 'green' 'yellow' etc., is really a gross generalization.

GO back to the point of talk of family resemblance again: there need not be something held in common for all the members of a family. Hence we cannot expect to proceed to examine classes or predicates by finding the feature that they supposedly have in common. There might be no such feature. — Banno

Can you give an example of two things that should be thought of as belonging to the same family, but which have nothing in common with each other?

Once one has accepted that the ways things seem to one is potentially flawed, one cannot rationally, at the same time, use "but that's the way it seems to me" as a counter to any alternative model put forward. we've just accepted that the whole reason we're undertaking an 'investigation' in the first place is because of a lack of certainty about the way things currently seem to us. — Isaac

The way things seem can only be "flawed" in relation to some other way things seem; with the presumption that the latter somehow gets us closer to "the way things really are", or is more serviceable or...

Can you give an example of an investigation that is based on "a lack of certainty about the way things currently seem to us"? Are you saying we are uncertain that things really seem that way, or that they "really are" that way?

There need be nothing in common between various cases for which we use the same word. Hence the discussion of family resemblance. And hence the rejection of the essentialism that requires some one thing to be the same in order to justify the use of that word.

It's just not what we do. — Banno

Of course there is something in common with experiences we could say are of red: they more closely resemble one another than they do experiences we could say are of green or any other colour. This is a similar counter-point to your argument I made earlier regarding the essential role of similarity (and difference), and which you did not address.

I continued to look at the flowers, and in their living light I seemed to detect the qualitative equivalent of breathing -but of a breathing without returns to a starting point, with no recurrent ebbs but only a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning. Words like "grace" and "transfiguration" came to my mind, and this, of course, was what, among other things, they stood for. My eyes traveled from the rose to the carnation, and from that feathery incandescence to the smooth scrolls of sentient amethyst which were the iris. The Beatific Vision, Sat Chit Ananda, Being-Awareness-Bliss-for the first time I understood, not on the verbal level, not by inchoate hints or at a distance, but precisely and completely what those prodigious syllables referred to.


Contrast this from Sartre:

The chestnut tree pressed itself against my eyes. Green blight covered it halfway up; the bark, black and swollen, looked like boiled leather. The sound of the water in the Masqueret Fountain trickled in my ears, made a nest there, filled them with sighs; my nostrils overflowed with a green, putrid odor. All things, gently, tenderly, were letting themselves exist like weary women giving way to laughter, saying, "It's good to laugh," in a damp voice; they were sprawling in front of each other, abjectly confessing their existence. I realized there was no mean between non-existence and this swooning abundance. If you existed, you had to exist to excess, to the point of moldiness, bloatedness, obscenity. — Nausea — Banno

Simple: good trip vs bad trip.

So i don't see it helping with the mind-body problem or the hard problem, except perhaps to show how what we deal with is always already filtered through our neural networks, even when they are behaving unconventionally. — Banno

Just another interpretation...

is the brain a virtual reality machine? — Moliere

To proffer what I think is a less loaded locution: I'd say the body is a reality-generator.

See also, The Bird of Paradise, by RD Laing. (Not seemingly available online for free). — unenlightened

Nice summary!

http://libgen.rs/search.php?req=r+d+laing+the+bird+of+paradise&open=0&res=25&view=simple&phrase=1&column=def

Kant seemed to be saying that, although we might infer an objective "mind-independent external world", our internal working model of that world is actually a subjective construct. Hence, we like to think we are seeing reality, when in fact we are imagining an artificial (man-made) model of reality. :cool: — Gnomon

I read Kant more as saying that what we experience is a human reality. I think he was aware that the notion of 'things as they are in themselves', although we are logically driven to think it, is really an impossible thought,

Our sensory experience is not imaginary, and since it shows us a comprehensive invariance and consistency between senses and between individual percipients, the inference to, and collective representation of, an external world of identifiable entities seems most natural and plausible.

The point to keep in mind, in my view, is that we don't actually experience, moment to moment, such a world, but it is rather "there" as a kind of constant and inescapable background presumption.

But on a philosophical forum we soon discover that my noumenal worldview (my map) may be rejected by others with different maps of true reality : e.g. Idealism vs Materialism. :nerd: — Gnomon

I don't see it that way; I think our "maps" of an external world are pretty much the same. The metaphysical debates reflect more attenuated concerns about what might underly, and be the "ultimate foundation" of our phenomenal experiences and common representation of an actual, external
in the sense of external to our bodies) world.

(

The Brain is a real tangible object, but the Mind is an ideal imaginary subject. We know the Mind by rational inference, not by sensory observation. Hence Functionalism treats the idea of Mind as-if a Real thing. — Gnomon

The idea of the mind as a subject can easily be, and naturally pre-reflectively commonly is, reified as a mental substance, something thought to be not merely imaginary, but real in some "other way" than physical objects are thought to be real. The problem is that we cannot adequately model such an "other way".

I don't see functionailsm as being "the idea of Mind as-if a Real thing" but the idea of mind(ing) as a real process, attribute or function of a real thing (the body). (Of course we can refer to a process, attribute or function as a "thing", but I am sticking here for the sake of clarity to the conception that treats "thing" as denoting a tangible object of the senses).

As I said above, apart from the experience of the "external, objective" world there is also the experience of freedom and moral responsibility, and although we don't directly experience what goes on in other minds, similarly we don't directly experience an external world either, although we do have plenty of experience that provides individual evidence that something exists outside of our skins, just as we have plenty of experience that provides evidence for the existence of other people.. — Janus

I assume you're referring to Kant's ding an sich noumenon*1, which presumably exists "independent of representation and observation". Yet "Universal Mind/Consciousness" as an abstract idea, lacks phenomenal experience. So Realists tend to dismiss such unverifiable ideas, asserting that their phenomenal existence (as brain states)*2 is the only reality. Anything else suffers from the major limitation of Idealism : subjectivity. Which can be dismissed as "imaginary", or "mere opinion", or even "woo-woo" -- if it clashes with the Realist's noumenal worldview. — Gnomon

I wasn't referring to Kantian ideas. I intended to point out that we don't experience an external world, meaning that we don't experience anything that we know to be a mind-independent external world, even if an inference to a mind-independent external world might seem most plausible.

I don't think realists generally think that our existence consists merely in brain states; that would be just one part of our existence. Brain states, insofar as they are observable, are phenomena just like anything else. Also, I don't know what you mean by "realist's noumenal worldview".

The hard distinction between Realism & Idealism seems to imply that "my sensory experience counts as real" but your subjective experience counts only as hearsay. — Gnomon

I don't see it that way; even though we don't experience others' sensory experience, emotions, somatic awareness and whatever else constitutes human experience, we have no reason to suppose that others' experiences are any less real than our own, since they report their experiences, or that they have experiences, just as we do.

Whereas Functionalism*5 seems to be a half-step toward Idealism. — Gnomon

I'm not sure what you mean here. To my way of thinking functionalism just says that mind is a real function of the brain, which is again a kind of realism, if not strict eliminative physicalism.

The bit that is missing is that a family resemblance can grow, so there can be no definite statement of what that similarity is. — Banno

Sure, something can change and become more like something else, but I don't see how that fact rules out stating what parts of the things have become more similar to each other. In any case "no definite statement of what that similarity is" sounds like ineffability.

phenomenology is supposed to provide a firm foundation for philosophical speculation but instead gets itself tied into a knot by presuming to talk about what it itself supposes to be ineffable. — Banno

Can you provide a quote from any phenomenologist to support your strange contention that they suppose what they are talking about to be ineffable.

Many of your posts do not show in the mentions alerts. Hence they get missed. — Banno

OK, that's weird; I don't know why that would be.

Hence the rope example. No single thread runs through the whole rope, and yet we treat it as one thing. — Banno

I don't see the relevance. If there is a family resemblance then there must be some resemblance, i.e. similarity, however small.

I'm not familiar with Austin's example of grey, you'll need to give some more detail.

Still hiding from my mentions alerts. — Banno

No idea what you are talking about.

The point is that there need be no similarity for someone to be counted as part of a family — Banno

"Family resemblances"—remember? There is no resemblance without similarity.

Such boundaries and exactness are the definitive traits of form—be it Platonic form, Aristotelian form, or the general form of a proposition adumbrated in the Tractatus. It is from such forms that applications of concepts can be deduced, but this is precisely what Wittgenstein now eschews in favour of appeal to similarity of a kind with family resemblance. — SEP


Notice the rejection of forms that goes along with this anti-essentialism. The concepts we use are constructed by us for our purposes, not found floating in some ideal void. They need have no centre. — Banno

What could similarities consist in if not similarity of form? Similarities of form are thus essential, if not, obviously, perfect. That is there are no perfect similarities in this world, because a perfect similarity is a sameness, and one thing cannot be the same as another except in a generic, "fuzzy" sense.

Right, if we make decisions or choices (which we obviously do) then it seems inevitable that we will feel those options to be selected freely. The notion that everything we do is predetermined (by prior chains or networks of causation) is difficult, if not impossible, to parse other than in an attenuated, abstract way.

So, there's a kind of irony in, as you say, the thought that we are "pre-determined" by the very existence of alternative courses of action, to believe we are free.

I haven't (and probably won't) read The Diceman, but it is based on an interesting premise; I have heard of it before, thanks for reminding me of it.

:lol: :up: