• Solution to the hard problem of consciousness
    The unity of conscious experience is an undeniable fact of experience, a priori.Wayfarer

    I don't think so --that it's undeniable or obvious or given.

    If this is along the line of bachelors don't have wives, then that's no fun. But I'm afraid it might be. Contingent inherited linguistic habits accepted as the most eternal and solid fact there is perhaps. Parmenides, adjusted. There is a hole, one hole, through which the world shines.

    The 'experience' gestured at seems to be private in principle. Are we all supposed to check our intuitions (or similar) and make sure our 'conscious experience' is unified? If we need to check, it's not a priori. Also, we'd have know way to know if we were 'looking' at and talking about the same thing.

    I suggest what I find a more plausible alternative. The supposed unity of the mind is stolen from the unity of the body. It doesn't seem efficient to reward & punish this or that half or quarter of a body. So we also don't offer praise & blame to a multitude of spirits all forced to take turns with the eyes and mouth. One is one around here.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein

    Excellent questions!

    Let me play with them a bit.

    If philosophy provides a theory of science rationality, and then tries to, I don't know, 'measure up' to that theory, then philosophy is trying to meet a standard it has set itself.

    If philosophy humanity attempts to become more rational, does that mean that it accepts, from outside itself, a standard of rationality that it tries to meet, or, as above, does it set the standard itself?

    And what discipline is responsible for holding philosophy humanity to this standard, for measuring its progress, for determining 'how rational' it is? Is that, again, philosophy humanity itself?

    How does a moonwalking monkey evolve from a germ?

    Do we need a God to get better at thinking, better at living? We can think of the species and its durable cultural artifacts (dusty old books, skyscrapers, seeds) as an old organism still increasing in power.

    How can it do so? By the light of what superior entity?

    Is moral progress possible? Intellectual progress?
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    Labeling this as psychology is the same fear that causes philosophy to want to work outside the involvement of the human.Antony Nickles

    I'm not anti-psychology, by the way. I just read you as focusing on the psychological, as you do in the passage above.

    It's not unreasonable to suspect fear or distaste in the 'positivist.' And the same charge can be leveled by the 'positivist' against the 'sentimentalist' or the 'believer.'

    They might all be right.

    A torch in the darkness, a 'lie' to light the chaos.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    It's an investigation into the human condition--the constant threat of skepticism and the effect on our thinking in reaction to it.Antony Nickles

    Is skepticism really such a threat?

    I think there's a gap between the game of extreme skepticism (it's fun to play both sides) and a more serious and interesting attempt to pin down what it means to be rational or scientific. For instance, some have earnestly began with sensation, others with infinitely intimate ideas ...both constructing the world as we know, if possible, from there. Others (myself lately) take the ordinary world ('material') shared with other humans and all the rest as given, and derive "ideas" and "sensations" from that.

    I get that it is a tad poetic, but that is not just stylistic, those are grammatical claims, logical claims as it were--I'm saying that's the way our relationship to our expressions works. I make them in all seriousness, and to take them as merely therapeutic seems trivializing.Antony Nickles

    Your good at what you do, in my book. The difference is focus, emotional tone. The issue I'm focused on is relatively dry. How do words get their meanings? Or, better perhaps, what constrains any reasonable theory about how words get their meanings? I take for granted bodies in nature that need one another and that don't get to cheat by using ESP. Then we have beetles in box and inverted color-qualia spectra to show us what doesn't make sense.

    This is related to spiritual issues such as WTF do or even can people mean by 'God'?
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    This may seem minor, but aren't we indoctrinated in pointing? and then learn that we can apply that in the case of this sign?Antony Nickles

    I'd say that we are trained to respond to -----> by looking to the right and <------ by looking to the left. arrows.

    (Couldn't we take it as the start of a drawing of weapon? be confused as to what 1992 DOS emoji this was supposed to be?);Antony Nickles

    Yes, in my view. A mistake is always possible, and we have all kinds of signs for dealing with an initial failure of signification.

    there is something important about application/employment (given the number of index references). "The meaning of the brackets lies in the technique of applying them." (#557)Antony Nickles
    This 'technique of applying them' is just what I'm trying to cash out in terms of social organisms in an environment. Conversation, by mouth or keyboard, is still physical, organic, ..the contraction of muscles, the disturbance of a medium. What role does this or that token play in the world, as a type of (material) object? The temptation toward the immaterial is understandable. A token is (as I mean it) an equivalence class of actual marks and/or sounds. Our nervous systems ignore irrelevant differences.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    Might be worth mentioning a proto-Wittgenstein whose ideas in around 1764 were:


    Thought is essentially dependent on, and bounded in scope by, language—i.e., one can only think if one has a language, and one can only think what one can express linguistically.

    Meanings or concepts are—not the sorts of things, in principle autonomous of language, with which much of the philosophical tradition has equated them, e.g., the referents involved (Augustine), Platonic forms, or subjective mental ideas à la Locke or Hume, but instead—usages of words.

    Conceptualization is intimately bound up with (perceptual and affective) sensation. More precisely, Herder develops a quasi-empiricist theory of concepts that holds that sensation is the source and basis of all our concepts, but that we are able to achieve non-empirical concepts by means of metaphorical extensions from the empirical ones—so that all of our concepts ultimately depend on sensation in one way or another.
    https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/herder/#PhilLangLangThouMean

    I think this needs to be updated so that we take a detour around "sensation" and think instead of uncontroversial worldly objects. In epistemological terms, that's uncontroversial assertions (the temperature read 93°, the witness said "I shot the fucker.") Empiricism shouldn't base itself on (private) sensation, which leads to solipsistic games, but start immediately in 'language."

    Then 'conceptualization is intimately bound up with(perceptual and affective) sensation.' bodies interacting in/with a world. 'Sensation' points outside of the body. That's what it gets right. We know what it gets wrong. It can be read as an inarticulate shorthand for life in the world.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    You may not have taught me all the things to say, but some person or people did. “It takes a village.” Or, at least, they taught me up to the point where “Now I know how to go on”.Luke
    :up:
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    the goal of Philosophical Investigations was to understand our desire for seeing everything in one way (word-object).Antony Nickles

    That sounds like the goal of a psychologist. 'If you want to know why the word-object thing was so cool back in the way, read PI.' Does that sound right?

    still don't understand the "therapy" label--I mean I barely get what it is actually supposed to meanAntony Nickles

    Stuff like this:

    Yes, there are mistakes, lies, empty words, descriptions that fall short, but that is why there are excuses, the endless depth of language; it is not that our words systematically fail us as much as we fail them, to continue to be responsible for them, answer to make ourselves intelligible.Antony Nickles

    Not saying it's bad.
  • To What Extent Does Philosophy Replace Religion For Explanations and Meaning?
    we humans NEED a personal cosmotheory!
    Surely not the right one, surely not with all answers included, surely limited, surely "naive". BUT our own one!

    Our personal one that will help us endure and embody all these questions we have inside us and follow us till we die!To "use" it as to pacify ourselves at the moments when this Existential Void becomes like a volcano.
    dimosthenis9

    :up:

    When things are going great, maybe we don't need a grand narrative. But yeah it's nice to have one when the mud gets deep and the wind gets cold. I speculate tho that the 'existential void' you mention is itself a pacifier. An indifferent nature that might destroy you 'accidentally' and at least plays by rules is preferable to a deity who has constructed your life as a confusing torture chamber for His (or Her or Its of Their) amusement. The void is even beautiful in its way, a vast open space. The West is the breast. The wets is the beast. Who raw. I'm in the dark here kid.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    I would also say, not complete; as there are further contexts for concepts to be extended into.Antony Nickles

    :up:

    As part of dismantling the word--internal-referent picture, Witt can be seen as offering a picture of word-public "form of life" or "language game", but this is merely to substitute one "meaning" for another, when he is dismantling the entire picture/theorizing about meaning.Antony Nickles

    Perhaps you'll agree that that anyone can emphasize the destructive or constructive mode in Wittgenstein and cherrypick quotes to that purpose. Folks will connect the dots he left behind differently.

    I found this one earlier, which happens to fit my focus lately.
    475. I want to regard man here as an animal; as a primitive being to which one grants instinct but
    not ratiocination. As a creature in a primitive state...Language did not emerge from some kind of
    ratiocination.
    — OC

    I also like this one.

    How does it come about that this arrow >>>––> points? Doesn’t it seem to carry in it something besides itself?—”No, not the dead line on paper, only the psychical thing, the meaning, can do that.—That is both true and false. The arrow only points in the application that a living being makes of it.

    As in an animal, you or me, being trained to look to the right when we see this token. Mommy can't see the magic meaning of the arrow flashing or not flashing in our developing mind. She can react to whether we do or do not turn our head.

    We can apply this kind of demystification to "God" and "truth" and so on.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein

    I've read some Peirce, and he is indeed an influence.

    Never got that deep into Deleuze but wet my toes once.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    The rules of a game are not a description of the game.Srap Tasmaner

    OK, perhaps, but what's the status of that sentence? Are you not describing how one uses 'rules'? Or something like that?

    Also I think rules can function at least as the ideal description of a game. Hide & seek, chess.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    What is the genesis of these associations? Did these events just so happen to be fortuitously paired in temporal proximity at one point and then this created an association between the two? Or was there a pre-wired inherited association in some cases?Joshs

    I don't pretend to deduce the details from what's merely a general approach to the problem of meaning. I'd like to read more about biosemiotics. I suspect that something like a continuum makes the most sense here.

    Earlier I mentioned caloric efficiency. It makes sense that an animal would use a "cheap" motion to coordinate its behavior if possible (like shaping the air as it exhales anyway.)
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    I don’t think rules are discovered out there in the world. They are enacted. This is a different concept.Joshs

    You are just telling me what I've been saying, that meaning is in the 'material' world. What people call 'rules' aren't binding but merely low-resolution descriptions of social life.

    Grammar is beat and tickled into us.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    We always behave into our world on the basis of ongoing concerns , aims and goals. That makes us sense-making creatures. Sense-makers are anticipative, not simply reactive. This is what makes the world recognizable to us, and means that grunts barks and hisses are motivated and emerge out of a background context of anticipations.Joshs

    :up:

    I agree, but who said we were merely reactive?
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    It s a representational approach to determining sense.
    But for Witt lamguage isnt about adequating one’s understanding to a world or ‘territory’ by mapping it , but about producing or enacting a world.
    Joshs

    Funny that you should say that when I've been comparing our speech to barks, the movements of limbs, and so on. Mouths shake the air, hands smear liquids on solids or scrape shapes in stone. Cloth is sewn so that it can be waved prominently, guns are fired to start a race.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    I don’t think Witt ( or Antony) is interested in cutting nature at its joints.Joshs

    My point was that there's nothing magical or necessary about our current categories. We have the signs 'reading', 'thinking', and so on, each with their own grammar, we might say. That's still a massive simplification (which we can't avoid but which we can keep in mind.) 'Rules' are discovered out there in the world by looking. It's not chess but sociology, linguistics.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    My point is that the answer to the bolded question is, yes, I can "write down or give vocal expression to [my] inner experiences—my feelings, moods, and the rest", even "for [my] private use"--only here "private" is not the term that Witt makes of "private" (that no one else would understand), but with the ordinary criteria of personal, secret. I can even express my experience individualistically, say, poeticallyAntony Nickles

    Sure. We have a rich 'mentalistic' vocabulary, which we use for such things all the time. The question is whether animals coordinate their behavior 'materially' or by all gazing on the same immaterial referent, with the same immaterial organ. Do I know what 'pain' means because of some private experience? Or because my body has been trained by the bodies of those around me in the world we share to react to and employ the token in multifarious ways?
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    The point is there are different frameworks (grammar) for each different concept: thinking, reading, rule-following, sensations, justification, etc.Antony Nickles

    That's a reasonable assertion, but perhaps you'll agree that there's nothing final about those categories. Why not 23,546 categories? Why not a grammar for each word, for each finite sequence of words? Are you cutting nature at the joints here? Or is this just a handy improvised system, heuristic and traditional?

    As I see it, the map will never do justice to the teeming territory. The world which includes, among so many other things, almost 8 billion brains...is not going to be mapped or mastered in detail by any single brain. Or with a finite string of words.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    Note that I'm avoiding the terms "physical", "material" and "immaterial" because I do not quite understand or trust what they mean.Olivier5

    We're on the same page there. That's part of why I give the reference theory hell.

    If our marks and noises get their "meaning" from the world at large (something like the role they play in it as worldly objects among other worldly objects), then it should be no surprise that we don't "really" (exactly) know or control what we are talking about, anymore than a dog can give an exhaustive account of how the wagging of its tail will affect other dogs.

    I think it's simply false to assume that "I can't be wrong about what I think I mean." We are not fully transparent to ourselves IMO.

    In Wittgensteinian, you don't necessarily know all the beetles you have.
    Olivier5

    I agree that we are not transparent to ourselves, but I think that the beetle is typically understood to symbolize what we do have perfect access to. There's an old joke about atonal music: it's better than it sounds!

    The crude view is something like box as 'pain' and beetle as pain itself, directly but privately experienced.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein

    I don't think the trail of text above this post supports that. It has been suggested (in so many words, seems to me) that pain refers to a sensation, that signs refer to ideas. Private substances. The controlling picture seems to be that of the soul in unmediated contact with pain-stuff and meaning-stuff. Or perhaps of the soul as a self-referential bundle of such stuff.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    In exactly clearing up that there is not "meaning" (or a theory of it), Witt makes the space for the personal, by showing us the nature of human expression (and yes all the public yada yada).Antony Nickles

    It seems we are borrowing the Wittgenstein avatar for different projects. Yours reminds me of a therapist. I'm not objecting or mocking.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    To say they are just cries is to equate every expression as the same type, when Witt's point is that toothaches and rocks and honesty have different frameworks of criteria for how they work.Antony Nickles

    "Cries" is an intentionally jarring metaphor. "Just" cries suggests meaninglessness, where I'm simply looking at relationships of stuff in the world (stuff that includes our sounds and scribbles) for meaning. Because animals do coordinate their behavior, meaning is out there. Pain talk is part of us taking care of one another, surviving together.

    I agree that one can say there are many different frameworks. I'll always vote for the theory that acknowledges more complexity, more difference in this context.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    Who was speaking of science, or eternity, or even reality? None of that has anything to do with the fact that words carry meaning, and that's why people use them.Olivier5

    I was suggesting one motive among other possible motives for the philosophical insistence on immaterial entities. It gives philosophers a special domain, often take to be eternal and offering a kind of ideal, "direct" access. I "can't" be wrong about what I think I mean. I "can't" be wrong about my pain. This "can't" is more grammatical than logical (or, if you like, logic is a byproduct of grammar in some ways.

    If "meaning is use", then no meaning is no use. If words carried no meaning, people would have no use for them...Olivier5

    I think it's reasonable to speak of words carrying meaning. At least it's a gentler metaphor than reference. The vervet monkey cries when an eagle is before its eyes, and this cry triggers the other vervet monkeys to take an evasive action appropriate for that particular predator. To speak of carrying meaning adds a layer of interpretation, but it's not as thick and objectionable as postulating that the monkey cry refers to the Platonic form of the eagle or of evasion. (I'm suggesting that we be conservative here and be slow to smear immaterial substances on what these bodies are doing in nature. I extend this to us humans.)
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    But the game-theory version of all this you find in David Lewis's Convention kinda ends up in the wilderness without quite reaching the revelation it was looking for.Srap Tasmaner

    Haven't read it, but I'll look into it.

    don't see much to brag about with any of the previous attempts to make philosophy into a science, and I don't really need a new vocabulary, so I've been retreating from the whole approach.Srap Tasmaner

    I think philosophy has tried to become more rational which includes providing a theory of science. Imagine dismissing philosophy's attempts to become more rational. Would that make sense? Is the drive toward coherence aesthetic, practical, ethical, ...?

    once we upgraded from signaling to language, we didn't stop signaling. We use words now because, well, there they are. Sometimes when you utter a perfectly coherent bit of English, you're not really speaking at all, but only signaling. We know that, but we forget. ("How are you?" might be an English question or it might be the vocal equivalent of a smile and a nod.)Srap Tasmaner

    Sure, and the way "how are you" can pour out automatically is not so different from the way that philosophical clichés pour out. I think in terms of a continuum. "Speaking" has no definite referent, but we can discuss and debate situations where one either 'ought' to be or is more likely to be applied rather than another. So it becomes a normative (political?) or empirical question. Of course something like inference from analogy is also involved (analogy is the core of cognition, etc.) And this is why I can complain (playfully, like a gripey Seinfeld) about incoherent ghost stories and not just their theorized practical effects.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    I think that's what a language-game is supposed to be. In real life, the sense of things may be obscured by all sorts of other considerations and complexities. Strip all that away and you don't wonder whether something makes sense or how an exchange works; it's obvious.Srap Tasmaner

    :up:

    It seems you're not sure we know we're on firm ground until we get down to the biological, the material conditions of life, to something we might even do science with. I don't think Wittgenstein feels that need.Srap Tasmaner

    As far as ordinary life goes, I think we can and do feast on mentalistic language without hesitation. Even in the context of philosophy, I too can and have turned the crank on the old fog machine with a feather in my hat.

    I guess I do think we are theoretically on thin ice with theories of meaning that depend on what I'd call (and what I think Wittgenstein reveals as) habitual nonsense. But I also think that we do not practice what we preach, and it's perhaps precisely this distance that affords us our ignorance. So much of philosophy is so removed from practice that it seems to function more like peacock's feathers than the fang of a cobra (quasi-religious status grooming, etc.) It's fine to be wrong (incoherent) as long as one enjoys a morale boost that cashes out in the bigger picture...along the same lines religion may be an advantageous confusion. Our mastery of sign-slinging is mercifully tacit, while the account we give of that mastery is a confused, childish ghost story. To me it's adjacent to more classic forms of theology. I may indeed err on the other side to make a point, impatient at always being offered ectoplasm as explanation. (I asked for water, she gave me gasoline.)

    Just to be clear, I don't pretend to speak for long-gone Wittgenstein or even to have the same temperament. I'm working from passages in his text that I found essential, trying to draw them in out in a certain direction, purify them, if you will.
  • Is personal Gnosis legitimate wisdom?
    And how do you know that? You did the investigation?GraveItty

    Google it. Look at some data. As mentioned, I recently read Enlightenment Now. You'd probably hate it, which doesn't make it wrong.

    You don't sound pretty enlightened. As a child of it.GraveItty

    I think I'm OK with that.
    I like creativity, but I don't consider it crucial.GraveItty

    Perhaps read Popper? I meant for that for the advance of science hunches and metaphysical notions can be useful. Ideas can come into focus and slowly become testable & practical.

    Why? Because you are an atheist, and don't like the dogmas of church? Like the church has dogmas, so does science.GraveItty

    It's a sloppy metaphor.

    There is even the central dogma of biology. We are just vessels of genes and memes in urge to propagate them. So it goes.GraveItty

    Well that's your take on the theory. You know you aren't the first to dislike Darwin's "dangerous idea."

    Is it so bad to be an animal that evolved?

    Now what a view! Damned, do they really think this?GraveItty

    Let's get more specific.

    All life on Earth shares a last universal common ancestor (LUCA)[10][11][12] that lived approximately 3.5–3.8 billion years ago.[13] The fossil record includes a progression from early biogenic graphite,[14] to microbial mat fossils,[15][16][17] to fossilised multicellular organisms. Existing patterns of biodiversity have been shaped by repeated formations of new species (speciation), changes within species (anagenesis) and loss of species (extinction) throughout the evolutionary history of life on Earth.[18] Morphological and biochemical traits are more similar among species that share a more recent common ancestor, and can be used to reconstruct phylogenetic trees.[19][20]
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    From the Blue Book:
    The mistake we are liable to make could be expressed thus: We are looking for the use of a sign, but we look for it as though it were an object co-existing with the sign. (One of reasons for this mistake is again that we are looking for a "thing corresponding to a substantive.")

    The sign (the sentence) gets its significance from the system of signs, from the language to which it belongs. Roughly: understanding a sentence means understanding a language.

    As a part of the system of language, one may say, the sentence has life. But one is tempted to imagine that which gives the sentence life as something in an occult sphere, accompanying the sentence. But whatever accompanied it would for us just be another sign.

    Perhaps Wittgenstein should have stressed not only the other signs (the system of signs) but the world with which that system is entangled. It's not so trivial to separate signs from non-signs. It's also hard to make sense of a system of signs that has no use. So we need organisms and a world in which they strive.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    Or we could say hello in a context of hostility, expecting it to irritate the other. In that circumstance, we could be surprised by a return of the hello.Joshs

    Of course. See the comment about complexity above. I'm aware that humans can be sarcastic. But aggressive irony is not yet rocket science, as irony is a conceptually simple inversion. Also:

    .
    When we look at such simple forms of language the mental mist which seems to enshroud our ordinary use of language disappears. We see activities, reactions, which are clear-cut and transparent. On the other hand we recognize in these simple processes forms of language not separated by a break from our more complicated ones. We see that we can build up the complicated forms from the primitive ones by gradually adding new forms.
    — Blue Book

    In that circumstance, we could be surprised by a return of the hello.Joshs

    But not by an insult.

    The issue is perhaps whether one is willing to see humans as continuous with the other animals and then also (very much related) their language as continuous with the body-coordinating signals of those other animals.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    It would help if we could talk a little more about what materiality and physical action are supposed to be about.
    Materiality suggests to me a notion that is at least partially independent of context.
    Joshs

    Just as "knowing French" is far indeed from referring to some precise and complete (immaterial) "content," so is "material." Think material as the "plane" or "realm" of food & sex ... and medium-sized dry goods. It's a hot air ballon, a vomiting baby, a hot apple pie. It's more fact than interpretation, and therefore, yes, relatively independent of context.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    The other person could fail to return the hello, and thus lead to all sorts of further developments.Joshs

    Of course. And the rest of nature never surprises us? I like to visit a fossil bed and walk on rocks. Some of them give way. I've learned to prepare for that.

    Human conversation is arguably the most complex thing we are aware of, involving billions of human brains.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    Is the token ‘hello’ something we could call a member of a category?Joshs

    I hope so, since you are using it that way.

    As Nietzsche might say, it's a 'lie' we need to survive, treating the different as the same (ignoring the position of the word, the handwriting, the color of the letters, etc.)

    Expecting the same or a synonym is a move in a language game.Joshs

    You can describe it that way. But my point is to bring talking back to the world. I throw a rock to kill a bird. I make the sound for "food" and my mother feeds me. In one case I move my hand. In the other case I move my diaphragm and tongue. In the second case, between social humans, the sign is arbitrary (culturally inherited).

    (I don't think there's some perfect distinction between language and non-language.)
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    But what would it mean to suggest that the shitting, fucking and crying is always a different sense of these terms? That is , not examples of a larger category called shitting or fucking in general, but events that share a family resemblance without there being any category to hold them?Joshs

    I'm not clear on what you are asking here. But I'm happy to say that I don't claim to have some final theory of everything. I also don't pretend to deduce (in detail) our current, tacit mastery of the metacognitive molasses we're working within from brute biology.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    So for instance , if you intend ‘hiss’, ‘bark’ , squeak’ ,’buzz’ and ‘growl’ as meaningless in themselves, you defeat your own purpose, because ‘meaningless in itself’ works in the context of your aims as a specific pragmatic but confused sense.Joshs

    AFAIK, animal communication is generally less historical, so that signs are not arbitrary in the Saussure's sense. I suppose they are inherited genetically as opposed to culturally (for the most part, and I am just speculating.) For us, on the other hand, our conspicuously varying and largely " arbitrary" languages are "received like the law." Just a rock thrown into a pond causes rings, so does one wave of the hand tend to cause another. Cough up what can be categorized as the token "hello, "and expect the same in return or a synonym. (Spoken words are something like equivalence classes of sounds.)
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    When you use the words ‘bark’, ‘hiss’, ‘squeak’, ‘buzz’ and ‘growl’ do you mean to convey the idea of meaningless in themselves utterances which only take on sense when they interact in particular ways with other such utterances?Joshs

    No, I don't mean meaningless. I've used the example of the vervet monkey's cry several times now. Organisms coordinating their action in a shared world, that's my focus. You just mention other utterances above, forgetting all else. Instead think of utterances as physical actions among others, shaking the air. An animal shits, an animal fucks, an animal cries in the proximity of a predator. Or an ant chases the gland of another ant.

    The bark-grunt-roar metaphor gestures toward the animality and materiality of communication and away from the typical theology of the philosophers and its pure concepts, pure sensations. In both cases an infinite intimacy is suggested, or, if you like, a self-transparence.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    I am not sure what you mean here by "twist"; I'm seeing it more as "restrict".Janus

    Yes, restrict. I'm exploring a materialistic, biological, behavioristic perspective ... largely inspired by Wittgenstein, which I also take back into my reading of him.

    We can certainly say that this is a different kind of reference than ostensive reference, but I see no rationale for denying that it is reference at all.Janus

    For me the rationale is that the "beetle" serves no purpose. It's like phlogiston or the ether. If, as I do, you choose to start from the bodies of social animals in nature that need to coordinate their behavior, the "beetle" or "what-it's-like-for-them" can't play a significant role, since it's typically understood to completely invisible. Nothing constrains our speculation. Can we even falsify an inverted spectrum hypothesis? I don't see how.

    The inverted spectrum is the hypothetical concept of two people sharing their color vocabulary and discriminations, although the colors one sees—one's qualia—are systematically different from the colors the other person sees.

    I don't know if you and I see the apple in the same way, but I can confirm that we both call it 'red' (the uncontroversial public use of an uncontroversial public token.) I think, roughly, that rationality reasons from the uncontroversial toward the more controversial (not from sense data but from statements that all parties accept, which skips the quasi-mystical "given" that's been supposed as the source of knowledge.)

    You (presumably) take yourself to be referring to meaning when you speak of it, and yet meaning is not a determinate object.Janus

    It's very tough to avoid mentalistic language. Philosophy is something like a snake trying to crawl out of its own skin. Or it's Nuerath's boat. Or it's a cartoon in which a cat climbs a ladder by bringing the bottom rungs up to the top in order to keep climbing higher.

    On one level of this discourse I'd say I'm squeaking or buzzing rather than referring. I like to forget for a moment, if possible, all the inherited baggage of reference and think of a pack of wolves using a variety of signals to hunt successfully. In our case, the practical payload is so far down the stream that it's hard to (fore)see.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    By that, do you mean not all language usage is referential, or that no language usage is referential?Srap Tasmaner

    I think it's tough to deny the seeming referentiality of words like "cow" or "hat." But what is "refer" supposed to refer to? I feel as if I am trying to define a bark with a hiss and a growl.
  • Is personal Gnosis legitimate wisdom?
    Preferences and hunches are to be found in every knowledge system.GraveItty
    :up:
    I agree with Popper that creativity is crucial, so that science even grows in the soil of poetry. But we have to test those hunches.

    If I believe Covid is caused by a non-viral entity, then who are you to say I'm wrong? "Because you are wrong", I hear you say. And that's where you are wrong.GraveItty

    I'm not such a rigid realist. I have a soft spot for instrumentalism. The virus theory is cashed out in applications, in relatively reliable techniques. Examine the miasma theory. It's fairly reasonable, and I bet that it did help present disease. It's just that focusing on the microorganisms was more effective.

    Nature gave you the gift of life. TmYou have the same attitude of the separation of man and Nature as is posed by the dogma of science.GraveItty

    I don't personify nature. I am a Western personality, a child of the Enlightenment, an atheist. I am aware that there are others ways to be in the world. "Dogma of science" strikes me as a crude phrase. What seems to offend you about my attitude is all the stuff I don't believe in, don't take seriously. I don't care whether one says that quarks (and so on) "really" exist or whether they are just part of a calculation system that helps us practically. I prefer a minimal, relentlessly ordinary ontology. I like to see how little I can do with, ride the bike with no hands.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    .
    I think you might like this. I think we both have our own, radical interpretation of Wittgenstein.

    A characteristic distinguishing feature of linguistic practices is their protean character, their plasticity and malleability, the way in which language constantly overflows itself, so that any established pattern of usage is immediately built on, developed, and transformed. The very act of using linguistic expressions or applying concepts transforms the content of those expressions or concepts. The way in which discursive norms incorporate and are transformed by novel contingencies arising from their usage is not itself a contingent, but a necessary feature of the practices in which they are implicit. It is easy to see why one would see the whole enterprise of semantic theorizing as wrong–headed if one thinks that, insofar as language has an essence, that essence consists in its restless self–transformation (not coincidentally reminiscent of Nietzsche’s “self–overcoming”). Any theoretical postulation of common meanings associated with expression types that has the goal of systematically deriving all the various proprieties of the use of those expressions according to uniform principles will be seen as itself inevitably doomed to immediate obsolescence as the elusive target practices overflow and evolve beyond those captured by what can only be a still, dead snapshot of a living, growing, moving process. It is an appreciation of this distinctive feature of discursive practice that should be seen as standing behind Wittgenstein’s pessimism about the feasibility and advisability of philosophers engaging in semantic theorizing…


    [T]he idea that the most basic linguistic know–how is not mastery of proprieties of use that can be expressed once and for all in a fixed set of rules, but the capacity to stay afloat and find and make one’s way on the surface of the raging white–water river of discursive communal practice that we always find ourselves having been thrown into (Wittgensteinian Geworfenheit) is itself a pragmatist insight. It is one that Dewey endorses and applauds. And it is a pragmatist thought that owes more to Hegel than it does to Kant. For Hegel builds his metaphysics and logic around the notion of determinate negation because he takes the normative obligation to do something to resolve the conflict that occurs when the result of our properly applying the concepts we have to new situations is that we (he thinks, inevitably) find ourselves with materially incompatible commitments to be the motor that drives the unceasing further determination and evolution of our concepts and their contents. The process of applying conceptual norms in judgment and intentional action is the very same process that institutes, determines, and transforms those conceptual norms.
    That's Brandom, btw.
  • The Essence Of Wittgenstein
    This is where we disagree profoundly. A stop sign's meaning is out there; exemplified in the behavior it produces, but a toothache's meaning is both in here and out there.Janus

    I think I understand why you might say that, but I don't think the private sensation that you seem to be referring to (trying to refer to?) can affect what I gesture toward with "meaning." I confess that I am trying to twist the meaning of meaning here, just as Wittgenstein and others have.

    I don't the situation regarding what is private and what is public as close to being as cut and dried as you seem to want to be painting it.Janus

    This is tricky, because the implications of my view are that nothing is ever cut and dried (or only relatively so.) It's like Ryle's interpretation of "John knows French" (quoted above) applied everywhere. If meaning is out there in the world, it exceeds what might have otherwise been called my 'intentions.' In the same way, the 'meaning' of the predator warning cry of the vervet monkey is hardly something we'd want to ground in the consciousness of that monkey. Ants might be an even better example. Does the individual ant grok the genius of the system they've evolve to coordinate their actions? Humans, much clever, are plausibly still mostly in the dark on such matters, despite our relative metacognitive genius. Our skill exceeds our self-transparency.