I have trouble seeing a connection between dependency and modality. — Banno

Spinoza has modes, but they are conceptually different to modality in modern logic, as I understand it. The simple point is that Spinoza sees necessity in terms of dependence. A necessary being does not depend on anything for its existence, whereas contingent beings do. So, contingent temporal beings that come into and go out of existence depend on Nature or God (Deus siva Natura) for their existence, Nature or God is eternal, does not come into or go out of existence and depends on nothing.

Yes, it is. SO the question is clear, and the referent fixed - the question is about Socrates. It would be odd to answer "But since you don't know who Socrates is, I don't understand your question". — Banno

It's not a matter of not understanding the meaning of some reference to Socrates when one has no idea who the name 'Socrates' refers to, but of not knowing who or what is being referred to. Descriptions will be necessary to provide that information.

Well, in S5 that would lead to everything being necessary. Much as Spinoza concluded. But that's not a theistic god. It seems pantheism is more logical than theism... :wink: — Banno

Yes, Spinoza was a determinist so in one sense for him everything was necessary, but he also made a distinction between a being (God or Nature) that is necessary in the sense of depending on nothing else, for its existence and beings that are contingent in that they depend on other conditions and beings for their existence.

You'll be familiar with the examples. Who is the question "I've never heard of Socrates, when did he live and what did he do?" about? I suggest it is about Socrates, despite the speaker perhaps not having anything available with which to fix the referent. It's not that there are no definite descriptions, but that they are not needed in order for reference to work perfectly well. — Banno

Right, logically the question is about Socrates, but for someone who does not know who Socrates is said to have been, descriptions will be needed for reference to work.

For consistency god must have created the world of necessity. In modal logic (S5) if there is a necessary being then everything in every possible world is necessary. — Banno

Is there any logical reason why there could not be just one necessary being?

But now, given the ubiquity of the use of the name, there is a widespread agreement as to the referent of "Socrates" such that it is not dependent on that particular act. — Banno

But does the widespread agreement not come about due to many descriptions that form part of the causal chain? This would seem to be inevitable if there were more than oine Socrates and question like 'Which Socrates are you referring to?" or 'I've never heard of Socrates, when did he live and what did he do?'.

I agree that for those who already know who the name refers to descriptions need not be at hand. :cool:

Likewise, God recalling all of creation history from outside time does not affect the freedom of creatures in time. Boethius decisive innovation was to make it clear they being located at one moment in time is as limiting as being located in one space. To be at just one moment of time is to be separated from oneself, and not to fully possess all of oneself. God was already thought to be most truly One, so God's existence in time also runs into the problem of dividing God from Himself. — Count Timothy von Icarus

An interesting addition to the argument!

What do we make of this? If god sees what we have done, and so cannot change it, then there is something god cannot do. Or god does not know what we will choose, in which case there is stuff he doesn't know. — Banno

I think the eternalist view enables God to know what we have done. what we have chosen. On that view there is no past, present and future. Could God change the past? Would that not change all of reality?

In any case is God compelled to fix our mistakes? This comes back to the obvious fact that he has no created a perfect world, not if a world, to be perfect involves no suffering for any creature.

Also, there is the question as to whether God can do things that defy logic. Is God bound by logic? If so, then He cannot be omnipotent. So many questions about God!

Did you see the argument, from a recent Philosophy Now paper, proposing that this was the perfect world, but not for us?

The Best Possible World, But Not For Us — Banno

Doesn't sound too promising but I'll have a look.

Kripke’s entire argument in Naming and Necessity is that names refer via causal chains, not definite descriptions. — Banno

I never got this. Naming and Necessity was the text we studied in one of my undergraduate units at Sydney Uni. I could not then and still cannot see how the causal chains would not necessarily have involved description, and that because names may refer to more than one individual, and because pointing in the case of remote individuals would not be possible.

If I recall correctly Augustine dealt with that argument by pointing out that God who is not in time but in eternity sees all of the past present and future, so it is not a matter of him knowing what one will do, but what one has done.

For me a far more telling argument would be that God should be able to create a perfect world but hasn't. That throws in doubt either omnibenevolence, omniscience or omnipotence. On that point it seems that the latter two must go together, or at least if Gord were omnipotent he must be omniscient, but neither require omnibenevolence.

OK, I've probably misspoken in the sense of failing to flesh out what I meant and poorly expressing what I did say.

I said: "Yes, viewed through the lens of the human notion of goodness and justice an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent creator seems to be an oxymoron."

I should have written the last words of the sentnece differently and added something like the underlined: "Looking at the actual conditions in, and nature of, our world and viewed through the lens of the human notion of goodness and justice an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent creator seems to be untenable".

I don't agree that the notions of omniscience, omnipotence and omnibenevolence are logically incompatible per se.

:up:

The dog doesn't know that the blue ball has anything in common with their blue collar or with the blue cabinet in the living room, for instance, unless its being trained and rewarded with food when it point to blue objects, in which case the salient affordance isn't the blueness, but the promise of food. — Pierre-Normand

Of course all of that may well be true. But I see no reason to think the blueness of the ball is not perceptually present even if the dog has no conscious awareness of its presence, just as we most often aren't consciously aware of what we are perceiving. The ability to detect blue is simply a matter of physiology.

Anyway, the original point at issue was whether the world is always already interpreted for dogs (and other animals), and the idea of affordances seems to suggest that it is.

Yes, viewed through the lens of the human notion of goodness and justice an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent creator seems to be an oxymoron.

They don't see the ball as blue, since this abstract feature of the ball never is salient to them. — Pierre-Normand

I agree they probably don't see the ball as blue if that means they consciously conceive of it as such. Nonetheless I see no reason to think they don't see the blue ball, that it doesn't appear blue to them. Much of our own perceptual experience is like that—we don't see the red or green light as red or green we simply respond appropriately.

Do we think that a being which is omnipotent is greater than a being that is not? Because maybe someone would say, "If it is an evil being then the omnipotence would make it lesser, not greater." — Leontiskos

Yes, that's why I included "all other things being equal".

:ok:

I am not a mathematician, so no doubt there is something here I am not understanding. Apparently, Cantor has shown that infinities come in different sizes, and it seems logical to me that the set of whole numbers is greater than the set of even or odd numbers. Of course I could be mistaken. If you think I am, can you explain my mistake?

A misuse of the word "size". — jgill

So, you disagree with Cantor?

Just like Zeus, eh? Btw, do you stop to think about what omnipotent means and implies? Is omnipotence the greater thing?

Then there is the question of what, exactly, a thought object is, and if it is of a being than which & etc., then what do we know about the idea? And in particular how that idea, or any idea about the idea, becomes constitutive of anything "existing in reality"? — tim wood

Omnipotence is the greatest power. It doesn't follow it is the greatest good or knowledge. God is traditionally conceived as being the greatest everything, so all other things being equal and omnipotent God would be greater than a God whose powers were limited.

That said, I am an atheist, in the sense that I don't possess a belief in God and am only considering the logic of the ideas of degrees of goodness, power and knowledge.

I suppose there are those who think that because we can conceive of the ideas of God, eternity and infinity that they must actually exist. I think that is really the thrust of the Ontological Argument. I can't see how it could be a matter of logic—I think it must be counted as a matter of faith.

So, if a dog sees something as blue or yellow (apparently dogs lack red receptors) does that count as empirical content?

I'm pressed for time right now—I'll try to respond to your other posts when I have more time.

It's very simple to show that infinite sets are not atl the same size. The set of even numbers is infinite. The set of odd numbers is also infinite. The set of whole numbers contains both sets, so it must be larger. No counting is required.

And I think it's pretty clear that Anselm's God cannot meet these criteria. Nor, for that matter, do (I think) any of the original Christian thinkers think that He could or did. — tim wood

If God is "that than which nothing greater can be thought" then he is necessarily omnipotent, from which it would seem to follow that he can meet any criteria he likes.

But both stances seem to be consistent with the thesis apparently shared by Rouse and McDowell, that empirical content doesn't reside outside of the sphere of the conceptual. — Pierre-Normand

This leaves me wondering just what you mean by "empirical content"?

Since all imaginable characteristics of objects depend on the modes in which they are apprehended by perceiving subjects, then without at least tacitly assumed presuppositions relating to the former (subject) no sense can be given to terms purporting to denote the latter (object). In short, it is impossible to talk about material objects at all, and therefore even so much as to assert their existence, without the use of words the conditions of whose intelligibility derive from the experience of perceiving subjects. — Bryan Magee, Schopenhauer's Philosophy

This is a conflation between our ability to discern characteristics of things and the characteristics themselves.

I would not say that, when we like ice cream, we are free not to like it, anymore than, when we are sensitive to good reasons, we are free to disregard them. But in those cases, I follow Susan Wolf who, in Freedom Within Reason, argues that free will (or rational autonomy) doesn't consist in the ability to freely choose between a reasonable and an unreasonable option but rather in having acquired rational abilities through becoming (mainly by means of upbringing and acculturation) asymmetrically sensitive to good reasons. — Pierre-Normand

Since we don't create ourselves by fiat so to speak and given that we have no choice given who and what we are as to whether we are convinced by arguments or not. I'm not seeing much difference between the ideas of being convinced and being caused to be convinced.

I also want to reiterate that once we look at the world as always already interpreted, then I think the interpreted evidence of the senses, although obviously sometimes mistaken, does provide good evidence and hence rational justification for both animals and humans for at least the basic beliefs about what is observed. I think we've explicated our respective positions pretty thoroughly so I'm not sure there's much more to say at this point. Thanks for your efforts and polite participation, Pierre.

:up:

We give the name 'matter' to, and arguably derive the idea of matter from, that which we understand to constitute the things encountered by the senses. We also speak of "subject matter" and what "matters", and I think the underlying idea is one of substance and of what is substantive.

What you say raises an interesting issue. On the one hand it seems obvious that a rational argument can either convince or fail to convince. In the cases where it convinces, we might say the argument caused a conviction to be adopted. The question is then why does a rationally valid and sound argument not convince? It might be that, even if the argument is perfectly valid, the presuppositions it is based on are not accepted by the person who fails to be convinced. If we are being honest and unbiased, and we understand what counts as a valid argument we are not free to choose whether or not we accept it as valid, but we might reject it nonetheless because we fail to accept its grounding assumptions. Are we really free to accept or reject grounding assumptions? Of course we are in principle, just as in principle we might say we are free to like or dislike ice cream.

In any case, if we reject the idea that all causes, and in particular rational arguments, are nomological or strictly law governed then we might still maintain that integrating the space of reasons and the space of laws is impossible because we are incapable of understanding our actions in vivo in terms of causation. The example you give of the difference between raising the hand to vote as opposed to just raising it for no reason might be explained by saying that different brain regions or processes are involved in each case, but that both actions are strictly caused by the brain.

Marcus's central thesis is that reasons are causes, but they are not reducible to the kind of law-governed causes that operate in the physical world. They belong to a distinct category of 'rational causation' where causes are not related to effects in a nomological manner. Elizabeth Anscombe, Jennifer Hornsby and Michael Thompson also have helped me see how human actions and intentions are both causal and rational (and conceptual) but not thereby nomological. — Pierre-Normand

This also seems pertinent: the Merriam Webster Dictionary defines 'nomological' thus:

"relating to or expressing basic physical laws or rules of reasoning".

I would disagree. The way we talk about such things is not arbitrary. When we appeal to "our ways of talking about things," we just push the explanation back one step. The question then becomes: "why do we talk about things in this way?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think you have misunderstood me; I haven't said that the ways we talk about things are arbitrary. Of course they are constrained, if the talk be sensible, by the things talked about. My point was only that, in relation to the notion of identity we might say that a corpse is a dead person or that a corpse is no longer a person, and that would depend on whether we define "person" as exclusively a living entity or not.

Perhaps personal identity outlasts biological life? After terrorist attacks we still speak of dead Christians, dead communists, etc. One can still refer to "George Washington" or to "medieval Muslims," yet surely they are not still around. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Is this and identity in general not simply a matter of the way we speak about things. Take the 'Ship of Theseus' example. Replaced bit by bit, is it the same ship as it was when originally built? The question becomes 'What do we mean by "same ship?". There is a sense in which the ship is never the same from one moment to the next. And once parts that have worn out are replaced...how much less so? And then when all parts are replaced...?

Of course, ships are not alive, but I don't think the question regarding whether a corpse is the same person as the living being, only now dead, is any different. It would depend on what we mean by "person'. The point I want to make is that there is no fact of the matter in these kinds of questions, but rather merely different ways of thinking and talking.

So, my response will not satisfy Janus's worry that Davidson and McDowell's rejection of the duality of empirical content and conceptual scheme since it will appear to him that the world of the dog and the human world and incommensurable just in the way that Davidson purports to deny. But my rejoinder to this would be simply to assert that the dog, owing to it not being rational, is blind to the aspects of the world that our rational abilities disclose (including affordances for reasoning practically and theoretically)while, on the other hand, our different animal nature makes it simply hard to grasp affordances of the specifically canine form of life. — Pierre-Normand

When a dog sees a cat, they grasp affordances (e.g. something to cuddle with, to bark at, to keep a safe distance from, etc.). — Pierre-Normand

The underlined part seems to contradict what you say below it. Also I don't agree that dogs are not rational—I think they are capable of reasoning, although obviously not linguistically mediated reasoning.

When you say that Davidson and McDowell reject "the duality of empirical content and conceptual scheme" are you suggesting that they believe there is no difference between experience and what we judge to be the case on account of experience?

When Davidson understands experience to be always already interpreted I take him to mean that it is always to some degree conceptually mediated. Is the conceptual only possible in the context of symbolic language? Surely, we allow that gestalts are for animals as well as humans. Gestalts involve recognition, which arguably involves pattern recognition. Should we understand pattern recognition as well as the understanding of the significance for the animal of what is recognized as a kind of (proto in the case of non-linguistically mediated) process of conceptualization?

I never agreed with Wittgenstein's assertion that if a lion could speak we would not understand him. Why would we not be able to understand the lion if he spoke our language? The lion is not all that different from us. For me the idea that we could not understand the lion stinks of human exceptionalism. So contrary to what you say I do not see animal's experience as being radically incommensurable with human experience. They eat, drink, run, walk, swim or fly, smell, taste, hear, see, feel, mate and so on just as we do.

Your criticism worries me more than McDowell's.

...those affections feed into our thinking in ways we cannot hope to understand
— Janus
But we do increasingly understand how the stuff around us works on our neural system... so I'm not convinced of this. — Banno

I didn't mean to say that we could never develop a scientific understanding of what goes on with the pre-cognitive effects of the environment on the organism, but that they are not a part of our conscious experience in vivo and hence cannot play a part in or be used to justify our directly reasoned perceptually based judgements.

So, I don't see that McDowell has solved a puzzle that Davidson failed to solve. It's Sellar's problem of integrating the space of causes with the space of reasons, and I see little reason to think that it can be achieved. I think it's just a fact about our limitations, and about our inability to transcend dualism in thought.

We can recognize that the world is not really dualistic, but it seems that language is nonetheless inherently dualistic because to understand propositionally is to separate what is experienced from the experiencer. Just look at the title of McDowell's book: Mind and World for example.

How are basic empirical judgments primarily justified? You might judge that the cat is on the mat because you looked and saw that it is. What happened when you looked? On McDowell's view, the conceptual elements that make up this perceptual content—along with your self-conception as a being with sense perception, the Kantian 'I think'—are passively drawn upon in experience. This allows you to judge that the cat is on the mat based on it visually appearing to you that it is. — Pierre-Normand

On Davidson's view, the presence of the cat on the mat causes you to acquire the belief that the cat is on the mat. New perceptual beliefs might trigger revisions of prior beliefs, in line with his coherentism. However, Davidson would describe illusory or misleading perceptions as cases where the world causes us to form a false belief. The experience is still the causation of a belief, regardless of its truth. — Pierre-Normand

If on McDowell's view my acquisition of language including the categories of *cat* and ^mat* along with my self-conception as a being with sense perception enables me to judge or believe there is a cat on the mat when I see one, what would allow a dog to believe it sees a cat on the mat?

I don't find any convincing reason for bringing belief into it as a primary aspect of the experience. I see the cat, just as the dog does. The fact that I am symbolic language-competent enables me to formulate the judgement or belief that I see a cat. I see that as the only difference between myself and the dog. How it is that the pre-cognitive effects the environment/ world have on dogs and humans enable the dog and me to see particular things in our respective umwelts, to "see things as whatever" cannot be anything to do with language and culture.

It seems to me that language and culture just enable a voice to be given to what is seen—I see no reason to think they determine what is seen beyond perhaps what variously stands out for the dog and for me. Even there we might say that in the dog's case what stands out is determined very little or not at all by culture, but by physiology and biology, and even in my case physiology and biology would seem to be prior to culture in the order of such determinations.

Looked at this way I don't see that McDowell improves on Davidson's view. Do you think we can say that the world is always already interpreted for the dog?

Where is the problem, though? If our epistemology is Cartesian and representationalist, then "The World" is what it is regardless of the manner in which we conceive it to be and it is also forever hidden behind a veil of perceptions. — Pierre-Normand

Well, if we are always and only working with and within the always interpreted world that would seem to dispel any significant difference between Davidson's and McDowell's positions. Within that interpreted world we inhabit and understand there would seem to be no problem regarding the rationality of our judgements, at least when it comes to empirical matters.

On the other hand, if we acknowledge that we are pre-cognitively causally affected by the pre-interpreted world and that those affections feed into our thinking in ways we cannot hope to understand (which seems most plausible) it would seem the problem of just what is primordially given to us remains untouched.

Am I missing something here?

But that's because Davidson conceives of the content of experience as the contents of (conceptually informed) belief states that are somehow caused to occur in an individual by the world. The whole thrust of McDowell's Mind and World (which is the reprinting of his 1991 John Locke Lectures) is to thread a middle path between a conception (like Quine's) where the empirical source of our beliefs (the "irritations of our nerve endings") resides outside of the sphere of the conceptual, but cause events within that sphere (in the form of intentional attitudes that are "Given", as Sellars would put it) and a conception like Davidson's where empirical contents reside within that sphere, and aren't "Given" in the Sellarsian sense, but still are caused by the world to occur in a non-normative fashion that makes them unsuitable for grounding empirical beliefs, according to McDowell. — Pierre-Normand

The problem I see is that if our experience of the world is always already interpreted, and we acknowledge that we are being affected pre-cognitively by the world (although it would seem inapt to refer to those affections as "empirical contents" since those are part of cognition), and we also refer to what we cognize as 'the world', then it seems that when we speak of the world we are not speaking unequivocally.

Add to that the fact that we are arguably 'brain blind' and if we also accept that we are part of the world both in the pre-cognitive and cognitive senses, then i wonder where that leaves us in our attempt to make sense of much less answer such questions. To me it looks like a Gordian knot; which edge of the sword will we use to cut it? Perhaps we cannot cut it because we have access to only one edge of the sword.

I read through your conversation with the LLM about Davidson vs McDowell in the thread you linked. From the little I know of Davidson's work I had formed the opinion that the idea that experience is always already interpreted is central to his philosophy. If that is the case, I am not seeing how his view differs in any important way from McDowell's.

Any ideas?

Could you say more? The "I" refers to the thinker/speaker, and I'm not sure which "it" you mean. Sorry, I'm probably missing your point. — J

If taken as merely general examples of sentences that could refer to actual states of affairs, but in merely being considered as such do not refer to any state of affairs, then in "I believe q" and "it is raining" both the "I" and the "it" has no particular referent.

Yes, in the way you describe, but look what happens when the proposition itself -- p is "I think q". How do we accommodate this? — J

Could we not think of that as just the general form of a particular kind of proposition, really no different than 'it is q'. Both the "I" and the "it" do not refer to anything in particular.

I would have thought that the force/ content distinction reinforces the role of the "first person"—when judgements are believed we have the subject in action, that is force. What is the logical status of a judgement or proposition apart from its being made or believed by anyone? If anything, it would be merely content, no?

Yes, it's puzzling.

If the quote <here> were true then we would talk past one another much more often than we do. — Leontiskos

Two men could be just alike in all their dispositions to verbal behavior under all possible sensory stimulations, and yet the meanings or ideas expressed in their identically triggered and identically sounded utterances could diverge radically, for the two men, in a wide range of classes

Do you think Quine intends this to be read as indicating a common occurrence or merely an outlying possibility?

Given charitability and good will I see little reason to think that divergences of intended meaning could not be discovered quickly enough and taken into account.

Doesn't the quote you provide imply that, if they started talking to each other, they may talk past each other entirely? — Leontiskos

That that it is possible to "talk past one another" relies on it not being the case that we always, or even mostly, talk past one another. It seems obviously possible to understand one another very well and yet disagree, nonetheless.

So Rodl believes that the force/content distinction is a discrimination between a "psychic act" or "mental event" and a "mind-independent reality" that does not involve "my mind, my psyche." It is this that he denies. — J

This seems obviously wrong. There is clearly a valid distinction between the content of judgements and the force of judgements. When I believe a judgement there will always be a force, the force of my belief. On the other hand I can consider some judgement, wonder whether it is true, or just analyze its content without believing anything.

The other thing that seems obviously wrong is that the self-conscious awareness of making a judgement is always present whenever a judgement is made. It seems an obvious fact about human life that we can make judgements without even being aware of doing so.

It is only in a kind of tendentious analysis-after-the-fact formal sense that the "I think" accompanies all judgements. And obviously, the "I think" is not synonymous with self-conscious awareness if it is considered merely formally.

Judging from Rödl's work as it is presented here by those who are reading him, he seems seriously confused. And I am self-consciously aware of making that judgement.

What definition of "inscrutable" would you offer, such that inscrutable reference poses no barrier to communication? — Leontiskos

No clear way of showing just how words refer to what we take them to refer to? And no clear way of showing that they refer to exactly and exclusively what we take them to refer to.

At any rate, what constitutes the center of a star system or galaxy is not arbitrary. — Count Timothy von Icarus

There's a kind of absolutism that belongs to a theistic outlook. It's the kind of absolutism that would have a person deny something as simple as Galilean transformation. Meh. — frank

Banno and Timothy are correct, it's not a matter of "absolutism' and it's not arbitrary. The Solar System as a whole has a centre of mass known as a barycenter around which everything in the system orbits. It is constantly changing its position depending on the positions of all the planets. The position of the barycenter is relative to the whole system, so it is not absolute but is also not a matter of perspective.