Does the formal identity 'Obama' signify a totality of processes from birth to death, or the entity that undergoes these processes? — John

I would say that Obama is a name we give to a process that at least encompasses birth to death. Like most human concepts, it has fuzzy boundaries, so in some contexts we may want to extend the domain of reference to include times before or after death - eg a foetus, an embryo, maybe even a parent's sperm or ovum and, at the other end, a corpse, a skeleton or ashes.

When we talk about imagining Obama speaking Mandarin, I would explain that as the activity of visualising a world in which there is a POTUS and that POTUS is exactly like Obama except that he speaks Mandarin.

The objection from the Kripke side seems to be that what we visualise is 'the Obama', not a POTUS almost identical to Obama. My response to that is

'what's the difference?'

What experiment could you do to determine whether the being you visualise is 'the Obama' or just almost identical to him? If there is no such experiment (and I believe there is not) then there's nothing to argue about. The Kripkeans can say that what I am visualising is the Obama, and I can say that I am visualising somebody almost exactly like Obama, and the difference is only the words we choose to use. It's like asking whether Swampman is the 'same person' as the one that got hit by lightning. It is or isn't depending solely on which way you want to define it. The difference is just the choice of words.

Nor is there any point in appealing to common, non-philosophical usage in this matter, because non-philosophers don't trouble themselves with such distinctions. In my experience, they would be perfectly happy with either form of words.

Kripke appears to define Obama to be the actual Obama process in this world, together with all counterfactual and contingent-future visualisations of Obama. By contrast, I define Obama to be solely the actual Obama process in this world (I haven't yet worked out whether it can make sense to me to include contingent-future visualisations. I'm still mulling that over). Hence Kripke's Obama can possibly speak Mandarin, and mine cannot, because it is an Obama-like entity that possibly speaks Mandarin. But the difference is only words. There is no difference of substance.

So Kripke and I can agree that the rigid designator 'Obama' refer to the same ensemble of actual and visualised entities. We just categorise those entities differently.

Nevertheless, I am left wondering:
(1) What problem does Kripke think he is solving by introducing the rigid designator concept, that is not adequately covered by Wittgenstein and/or Russell (subject to minor adaptations for unusual cases they did not consider)?

(2) Under Kripke's approach, it seems possible, on a formal basis, to imagine that Obama is a mountain. I don't know how that can mean anything without having to sign up to essentialism boots and all.

Kripke's point is that your very ability to speak of two different Obamas..... — StreetlightX

That's where my disagreement with Kripke begins. I don't think we do, or can, speak literally about different Obamas. There is only one POTUS Obama, and he is not fluent in Mandarin. I believe that when people talk about imagining a counterfactual, they are visualising a world identical to this one except for a few specified differences.

It seems to me that Kripke's approach stems from interpreting phrases like 'Imagine if Obama spoke Mandarin' as meaning something different from what I believe people would say they meant - if they stopped to think about it, which - unless they are interested in philosophy of language - they almost certainly never will. His rigid designator approach is an attempt to solve a problem that he believes exists based on his interpretation of what people mean, and which I believe doesn't exist based on my interpretation.

But who knows whether Kripke or I am right about what people mean? We're all just guessing.

This gives me an idea for a practical research project for a philosophy of language PhD candidate. They could survey people - selected particularly for never having had any exposure to academic philosophy - and ask them a bunch of questions about phrases involving imaginings, both counterfactual and future-contingent - to find out what they feel those phrases mean when they use them. The tricky thing is that the PhD candidate would have to be someone that is not particularly committed to any particular PoL account, otherwise they might unconsciously bias the sampling by the phrasing of the questions.

I did a survey of one (!) with a non-philosophical, but highly intelligent, friend of mine the other day - asking him what he thought it meant if someone said 'Japan could have won the war in the Pacific and colonised Australia'. He said he'd have to think about it and get back to me. I haven't heard back yet.

It looks like you disagreed with everything I wrote in my post, and I disagree with both paragraphs of your last post.

Do you think we can at least agree that an impasse has been reached?

whereas the counterfactual language we're speaking of is literal and non-idiomatic. — The Great Whatever

I have no problem with taking it as idiomatic. But maybe it is literal if we take what is - for me - the most intuitive interpretation of the verb 'imagine', which is to visualise an alternative world. That world can be very different, as in a fantasy novel, or it can be almost identical to this one except that POTUS speaks Mandarin.

In the case of future contingencies 'imagine' has a subtly different meaning, so let's stick to counterfactuals for now. As I understand it, you think that (counterfactual) 'imagine' does not mean what I said it means to me. But unless you can explain what it means to you, without circularity, I don't think we can make any progress.

Why, in these constructions, would this suddenly change to us referring to someone completely different? Why doesn't the name just refer to who it usually refers to, i.e. Barack Obama? — The Great Whatever

Because BO is a process that has a bunch of known properties, one of which is that it doesn't speak Mandarin. Change any one of those known properties, however trivial, and we are talking about a different process (we can talk about alternative unknown properties - such as whether BO will live to 100 - without difficulties, because that is simply a question of what we currently know) . Believers in Aristotelian essences may try to get around that by dividing the properties into essential and non-essential ones. But as I have explained above, I do not accept that approach.

Hence, since one cannot imagine a BO that speaks mandarin (one says one does, but one also says that one laughs one's head off), one does the closest possible thing, which is to imagine a world identical to this in almost every way except that the POTUS differs from our POTUS in only one noticeable way - that he speaks Mandarin.

I understand the position of a Kripkean who is an Essentialist, although I do not share it. But I cannot understand how anybody that is not an Essentialist can subscribe to Kripke's account of language.

I know it is the wrong meaning only in the sense that there is an obvious difference between 'Barack Obama could have spoken Mandarin' and 'Someone like Barack Obama in the relevant respects could have spoken Mandarin.' Do you not see a difference, or does this misrepresent your position? — The Great Whatever

Actually when I look back on the post sequence I see that the verb in question in the discussion of BO and Mandarin was 'imagine if', not 'could have'. The discussion turned to 'could' when you asked if my position was that nothing 'could' be different from how it is. I muddled the two together in that sentence in the last post. I should have either written about imagining BO speaking Mandarin, or alternatively, whether anything in this world could be different from how it is.

Since I think the 'could' and 'imagine if' qualifiers have different interpretations, and your latest question best matches the 'imagine if' one, let's concentrate on that.

Do I interpret the invocation 'Imagine if Barack Obama spoke Mandarin' as equivalent to
'Imagine if there is someone very like Barack Obama, in this world, who speaks Mandarin.'?
No. I interpret it as 'Imagine a world that is almost identical to this one, including having a USA and a president of that country called BO, who is like the BO in this world in almost every respect except that he can speak fluent Mandarin'.

What are you going to say? — The Great Whatever

I suppose we'll find out if it happens. It didn't happen with my interpretation of what 'BO could have spoken Mandarin' means, because you said that my meaning was the wrong one and, in order to know it was the wrong meaning, you must have understood it.

It looks like we're at an impasse then. You believe there is a distinction between the two, but are unable to articulate what the distinction is. I see no distinction, and you interpret that as a failure to observe the 'obvious'. There doesn't appear to be any way around that blockage.

Maybe somebody else will come along that can serve as interpreter.

I think it means what it says, — The Great Whatever

That sentence conveys no information whatsoever. Can you explain what it means to you or not?

I don't know where you got the idea that I'm insisting on anything. I'm asking you what you think the sentence means.

Perhaps it just comes down to a disagreement over which properties are necessary and which are contingent. And, I wonder, what makes it the case that being a planet or being the president is one or the other? — Michael

It seems that way to me. That then leads us in the direction of Aristotelian essences. Under that approach Barack Obama is any process in any possible world that has the 'essential/necessary properties' of BO, but which need not have the nonessential/contingent ones.

Does one have to subscribe to an essence-based metaphysics in order to make sense of Kripke's approach to counterfactuals? If so then I suppose that leaves me out. I had to give up in believing in essences decades ago when I realised I just couldn't persuade myself any longer that the small, circular, odourless, tasteless wafer at communion really was the bleeding, crucified body of Christ.

If an essentialist approach is not required, then the question remains: what does it mean to say that a human-like organism in another possible world, that shares many of the properties of the BO of this world, is Barack Obama? Or, more crudely, what is the difference between a BO-like organism in an alternative possible world that is BO, and one that is not?

This is basically an assertion that nothing could be other than exactly as it actually is — The Great Whatever

Whether or not I agree to that depends on what the 'could' in that sentence means.

I think when people say things 'could have turned out differently', they just mean they would not have been astonished if they had turned out differently. With that meaning, I think things 'could have happened differently'.

How do you interpret the sentence 'That could have turned out differently' (or perhaps a concrete example thereof, to make it more tractable)?

That makes sense to me. If the notion of 'rigid designator' were confined to 'possible future worlds' then it would be a coherent concept. Statements that 'X might happen to me' are statements about my current state of knowledge about future events in this process that I call 'me'. The reference to this process is rigid.

It's when it is applied to counterfactuals that it seems to become incoherent. The process that I (perhaps rigidly) refer to as 'me' did not win the lottery of date 7 December 2016, so if I wish to talk about a process that wins the lottery of date 7 December 2016, that must be some other process. It can be a process in an imaginary world that is similar to this in almost every respect except those relating to the lottery, but it cannot be this process.

It refers to me. It can be rendered without the conditional by saying 'I have bought a ticket in this week's lottery, and I am at this point in time unable to predict whether this week's lottery winner is me.'

Referring to last week's lottery, we can say 'I bought a ticket in last week's lottery and, prior to the draw, I was unable to predict whether that week's lottery winner would be me.'

It's only when this week I want to consider a counterfactual in which I did win last week's lottery, that I need to consider alternative worlds, and people like me in those worlds.

I think those are different from the other statements discussed, because they are not counterfactuals. I interpret those statements epistemologically. When I say 'I might win the lottery next Saturday' I mean 'It would not cause me to revise my theory of how the world works, or to conclude that I had misread the current state of the world (made faulty observations), if I were to win the lottery next Saturday'. A possible future is simply a future event that is not ruled out of contention by current observations and currently known theories of science.

I would interpret the claim as follows:

I (Michael) can imagine a world that is like this one in almost every respect, except that the person very like BO, who is named BO in that world and became POTUS, learned Mandarin.

That's what people seem to mean when they use counterfactuals like '.... if BO spoke Mandarin ...'.

If anybody wants to offer a different interpretation, that would be fascinating and I'd love to discuss it.

I don't think that Barack Obama being the president is a necessary part of his identity, though. Although in one sense we might say that he's not the same man he was before he became president, in another sense it's correct to say that he is the same man (i.e. that he isn't two different people). To say that the man who is the president once wasn't the president seems to be both sensible and true. — Michael

I agree. I regard people, and objects more generally, as processes. So the event that is the human called BO doing POTUS things in 2016 is a part of the same process (which we could call a 'man') as the event that is a little boy called BO learning to read with his mother at the age of three.

Where I seem to differ from the views of a number of people in this thread is that I believe that when people say 'Imagine if BO could speak fluent Mandarin', what they mean is 'Imagine if we lived in a different world that was the same as this in almost every respect, and had a POTUS called BO that was almost identical to the one in our world, except that that one could speak fluent Mandarin.'.

It's always risky to make statements about what others mean. So to soften that, let me say that what I mean by the previous paragraph is that, if when people say 'Imagine if BO could speak fluent Mandarin' they don't mean the interpretation I gave, then I have no idea what they mean.

Given that interpretation, whether BO is a rigid designator seems to be a matter of arbitrary choice, with no meaningful consequences. We can declare that the imaginary, Mandarin-speaking person is BO, so that the name BO is a reference to either the real one or the imaginary one. Or we could declare they are not. It makes no difference (Or so it seems to me).

If Barack Obama were different he would not be Barack Obama. It's the law of identity: A=A. I can imagine somebody that is very similar to Barack Obama, but possessing one or more different properties, if that's what you are trying to say.

I didn't say it amounted to a proof, but if true it'd give me the impression you lack some basic cognitive capacity or linguistic competence — The Great Whatever

To disagree with TGW is to lack some basic cognitive capacity or linguistic competence? OK, if you say so.

[That's just a call-out, not a reference to the specific post that generated the blue arrow. Does the @name functionality work on here?] I'm interested in your thoughts on my post, as I think the perspective of someone that is not committed to a materialist ontology (which (being uncommitted) is my position and, IIRC, yours), towards Kripke's designator notions, may be quite different from that of someone that is so committed.

There is a difference between imagining Barack Obama was different, and imagining that a different person was named 'Barack Obama.' I have a hard time believing you don't understand this difference — the great whatever

Last time I checked, saying. 'I assert P. I can't believe you don't understand that P' did not amount to a proof of P.

Hooray, a polite interlocutor! Excellent, and a good day to you John!

To your question: it is the former I was thinking of. Now that you mention it, I think that evolution may possibly also have a role in the type of logic we mostly tend to use - eg a preference for including double-negative elimination in our rules rather than restricting ourselves to constructivist logic, but I am less sure of that.

Of course not. A courteous retraction of the 'fallacy' accusation would be perfectly sufficient.

But consider this; do you understand the difference between talking about a possible world where Barack Obama isn't the president and a possible world where there's a man called "Barack Obama" who isn't the president? — Michael

I don't, and this is close to the heart of why I have never been able to make any sense of Kripke's approach.

In my view, 'Barack Obama' is a name that I use to refer to an element of my model of the world and, when I'm talking to someone else, it refers to what I believe to be a shared element of our two models.

Since I cannot talk to someone in a different possible world, the second of these meanings becomes moot. As for the first meaning, I can imagine any world I like, and label any arbitrary element of it with the name Barack Obama - a mountain, a colour, a sort of dance. If I also label a country in that world 'USA' and imagine it having a president then I suppose it's true to say that Barack Obama (the imaginary mountain) is not the imaginary president of the imaginary USA in that world. But I can't see what insight that gives us to anything interesting.

And you're committing the Evolution fallacy: "Evolution explains p" while p is used to explain evolution. — Mongrel

No.

Evolution explains q, while p explains evolution.

q is the proposition 'Humans can't help but use logic'
p is 'Logic'

p=/= q

I don't know if I agree with it in general. I am dubious about words like 'anchoring'. But in this case it seems an OK question, the answer to which, I think, is that it is anchored in our nature: we are programmed by evolution to be inclined to follow the rules of the logic game.

How do you understand entailment? Does it come down to necessity? Reasoning? — Mongrel

I used to puzzle over this quite a lot - assuming that what you're actually asking is about the meaning of logic. In the end I dissolved the puzzle by concluding it's just a language game. We play the game because we have found it useful in the past and we are programmed by evolution to believe that things that have been useful in the past will be useful in the future.

Under that interpretation, the statement that A entails B just means that the two events, or propositions, satisfy a certain relationship that is specified in the language game we call logic.

I conclude that the simplest coherent belief is that no others, capable and knowing, exist, that are as good as the neighbor on the right (or otherwise benevolent/loving). — jorndoe

Are you trying to argue that therefore no omniscient, powerful God exists? That is easily countered by the 'God works in mysterious ways' defence, which basically says that there is additional information that explains the lack of action, which we do not know, and possibly couldn't even understand if we were told it.

Now that defence doesn't satisfy me, so I don't believe in such a God, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't satisfy you either. But if somebody wants to believe in such a God and avail themselves of that defence, there is no logical way to attack it.

I reject the defence simply because it's arbitrary, aesthetically displeasing and 'feels' wrong. If God is so very mysterious that he can stand by and let the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami happen, then I see no point in trying to believe in, communicate with, or understand such a God at all. But if somebody else does, good luck to them.

I'm all in favour of a discussion of what you said. One of my pet hates is the (in my view) lazy assumption that if some semblance of a notional continuum can be constructed, on which two conflicting points of view can be plotted, then the 'truth' must lie somewhere between them (and probably round about halfway). I would welcome a platform on which to rant about that, at length, and immoderately.

To be irrational is not to attempt to be rational and to get it wrong, (which would be to be inadequately or inexpertly rational; or to suck at being rational) it is to be motivated to belief by unexamined emotion and/or habit of expectation. — John

I think I can accept that interpretation. But it still doesn't apply to me. I have closely examined the thought processes, the emotions and the habits involved in my acting on the expectation that the future will be like the past. I have found them to be lacking in any rational foundation and have resolved to not fight my instinctive inclinations to follow them.

Having examined something does not entail that one has located a logical ground to justify it. Indeed one of the greatest blessings philosophy - the practice of closely examining one's life, experience and beliefs - has had for me, is to come to believe that almost nothing appears to have any fundamental logical grounding, and to learn to rejoice in that belief.

So it seems that my position that it is not irrational for a sceptic to expect the future to be like the past, as long as she does not claim to have any proof to support that expectation, stands firm under that definition of irrational.

Am I right to think that you just don't know how to respond, that you don't know what you would do? — John

I wouldn't put it like that. I'd say that very few, if any, people in this world could know how they would act, because they are trying to predict the values they would have in a situation in which they would have undergone such monumentally transformative experiences that they could not say how they would act. I would say that those that gave definite answers to the question - in either direction - were exhibiting a lack of imagination and a lack of reflection on what the scenario really entailed.

But if you were a good Humean you would not be wedded to your scientific understanding of the world, since it could be based only on the irrational habit of expecting the world to be the same in the future as it has in the past. — John

I have no interest in being a good Humean. I admire the man, but it's not a religion, and I can differ from him where I like. For instance I never really got what he was talking about in relation to the 'missing shade of blue'.

But I regard your quote as a misinterpretation of Hume's view. He did not think it was irrational to expect anything. He just thought that there was no way to prove that the expectation had a solid logical foundation. At worst that would be 'a-rational', not 'ir-rational', which means something that can be proven to be false. He famously concluded his deliberations on expectations, and whether his dinner would poison him, by saying that he would eat his dinner anyway, and he did not expect it to poison him.

Although I generally reject all labels and classifications of philosophies, I readily admit that I greatly admire David Hume and find myself more in agreement with what he has written than for any other philosopher that springs to mind.

I do not believe that 'anything is possible'. Like Hume I am very sceptical of ontology, so my definitions of key philosophical terms are epistemological. Further, it seems to me that those are the only meaningful definitions that one can give to such terms.

For me, to say that something is 'impossible' means that if it occurred I would not have to either discard my current tentative theories of how the world works (my science) or admit to having made a mistake of observation or calculation. If I were to find myself in the situation described, my scientific understanding of the world would be destroyed, so under my definition it is not a possible scenario.

Also, bear in mind that, for the scenario to present any sort of a dilemma the subject must be absolutely convinced that the impact of pressing the button would be for everybody to become perfectly happy. When the stakes are as high as that, the level of certainty required is astronomical. As a sceptic, I cannot imagine any experience that would give me that level of certainty about anything. Hence, to be in the position described, I would have to have undergone some unimaginably weird experiences in order to acquire that level of certainty. Those experiences would be so thoroughly powerful and engulfing as to make the subject no longer the same person as they were before.

What is it that you mean here? I'm trying to understand the sentence and read it a few times but I don't get it. Are you trying to say you don't think you're in the position to decide what would be good for everyone else in the world? — Agustino

Any person that could be in a position to have that choice could not be the person that is writing this post. So it does not mean anything to ask me what I would do in that situation. It is like asking 'who would I be if I were not me?" or 'who would I be if I were born into a different family?'

in that case what choice would you make for yourself? — John

For me this is a null question. I could never be in the position to make that choice because for the choice to be possible the world would have to be so inconceivably different from how it is that 'I' - the person with the preferences, inclinations and values that the organism writing this has - could not be in it.

That goes along with my view that thought experiments like this can tell us nothing. They portray ethics as something involving ontological commitments, whereas for me ethics is fundamentally a practical activity, founded in our experience of this world.

Peter Singer, despite being in my view a very practical ethicist, did at one stage write an essay considering Nozick's experience machine. As I recall his response was nevertheless a fairly practical one: that he would not leave to go into the machine because there was too much suffering in the world that he felt he could help ameliorate by remaining in it, and that if at some indescribably distant point in the future the world had no such suffering in it, and the Machine was offered as an option at that time, then he doesn't know what he'd do because the world would be so different from this one that he wouldn't recognise himself or his feelings.

A few thoughts:

The first is to ask 'what is the point of the thought experiment?' It is so far removed from anything that could be possible in this world, and presumes such an extreme degree of certainty about outcomes, that it cannot give us any insight into morality, which is about how to make decisions in this world, in the presence of uncertainty.

The second is that it has quite a few similarities to Robert Nozick's experience machine.

The third is that different answers would be likely between preference utilitarians and hedonic utilitarians - the former aiming to maximise satisfaction of preferences, and the latter, to maximise net pleasure. A hedonic one may perhaps say 'push the button', but a preference one would not, because they would reason that most people, given an opportunity to abandon this life and all that they love, for a future life of unknown pleasure, would prefer not to.

Really? I think by definition if someone feels icky to physically interact with a clearly transgendered person then it means they think there is something unacceptable about that person or their choices. Otherwise they wouldn't feel icky. — intrapersona

By what definition? I don't know any definition that says if one feels 'icky' (squeamish? uncomfortable?) about something that they consider it unacceptable.

How does that work with somebody trying to overcome a phobia, or a new medical student learning to get comfortable with giving injections and handling dead body parts?

Many people feel squeamish about handling insects, birds or even animals, and recognise that as a weakness in themself, of which they would like to be rid.

For the same reason that we find it OK to allow doctors to make money from people requesting rhinoplasty. Some people are just uncomfortable with their body, and I see no reason to suggest that it is wrong to make changes to it. It's not like it's some holy object that ought be preserved in its natural state. — Michael

Nice analogy. I'd never thought of it like that.

I feel uncomfortable around obviously transgender people in the same way I feel uncomfortable when I see a man get kicked in the testicles - it makes me involuntarily imagine being kicked in the testicles / castrated / administered feminising drugs.

But that's my problem, not the problem of the transgender person. It's just one of the many ways in which I am a less than optimally resilient human.

I certainly can't see any reason for laws preventing gender reassignment surgery, provided the patient is (1) determined to be a mentally competent adult and (2) they have had psychiatric assessments to ensure that the desire for the operation is sufficiently genuine, deep-seated and very unlikely to be the subject of later regret.

As I understand it, those are the only conditions applied to such surgery where I live (Australia). There's an additional question of whether it can be funded by public health arrangements, but that only arises in civilised countries, where public health exists. I don't know what the Australian rules are for that, but I know that at least one army veteran has had the procedure, paid for by his (government-funded) veterans' health care arrangements.

Nazism is banned. — tom

Unless you live in Germany - where very special historical considerations come into play - that is unlikely to be the case where you live. Most Western countries are grown up enough to not have banned political movements, no matter how repulsive, as long as they don't clearly and strongly advocate violence. Have you checked the laws where you are?

In the early seventies we even had a Nazi party candidate standing in our electorate. I still remember my father trying to explain to incredulous little me why it was important that that was possible, regardless of how much we were repelled by their ideology.

David Hume was a skeptic throughout his career, yet he wrote a lot of great philosophy in that time. The vast majority of philosophy isn't about proving stuff.

The two scenarios are unlikely but conceivable in the same way that the scenarios of a mosquito bite being wrongfully sentenced to 30 years in prison are regrettable but non-fatal.

If one drives drunk, even in the country, there is a significant likelihood of killing people, even though it may be less than 50%. Nobody would say 'Really? that's amazing!' to hear that a drunk driver in the country hit and killed somebody. But I don't know anybody that wouldn't be utterly amazed to find your bizarre misery scenario to be true.

'Fairly low' is orders of magnitude different from 'ridiculously unlikely', so no tension arises from one making different decisions based on the two different indicators.

The other factor to consider is the misery that is likely to be inflicted on the children you have if you have a great number of them - because of lack of resources, competition, lack of attention and affection etc. There is no similar misery arising in the drunk-driving case from choosing the only morally defensible option, which is to walk home, call a cab, hitch a ride or stay the night at somebody else's house. To call that scenario a dilemma makes no more sense than calling it a banana.