Well, yes. — Banno

I disagree. The act of referencing does not succeed or fail. It's just done by fiat. Communication can succeed or fail.

No. You use what is said or shown. We do not have access to intent. We might infer it, but... — Banno

You do have access to intent by observation. If you have any questions about it you can ask.

This raises the question, Could there be a private language of reference? — J

If you're using "private" the way Wittgenstein did, the answer depends on the extent to which meaning arises from rule following. If it's mostly rule following, then you couldn't establish rules by yourself.

If you're just asking if you can keep some information to yourself, yes.

@Pierre-Normand Do you agree with that?

Pretty obviously, the reference is a success if the hearer and the speaker are in agreement as to who is being talked about. — Banno

So if no one understands what's being referenced, the reference failed? That doesn't make much sense to me. Referring is something done by fiat.

So we can't use your intent to fix the referent. — Banno

We do it all the time.

But reference is a matter of triangulation, not just what pertains to the speaker or pertains to what she speaks of. — Srap Tasmaner

Reference is set by the speaker.

All posts will eventually fall into a massive bit bucket that will collapse in on itself and become a wormhole.

In that quote I think he's saying that when we turn the dialectic on itself we find that the synthesis (unity) is dependent on its negation: the disunity of thesis and antithesis. I think Adorno's materialism is based on this insight. He points out that this fact doesn't appear to us until discrepancies show up, such as between the great hope of communism crashed by the Holocaust.

Hegel clearly knew this because he highlighted the way any concept has its history (and its negation) wrapped up within it, again, like the yin-yang symbol. You could say the absolute Spirit is supposed to be the whole yin-yang symbol. But that wholeness is made up of oppositions. We never escape them (until philosophy is finished?)

But it is necessary that he say this in order for the designation to refer. — J

:grin: Yes, I think that's what @Pierre-Normand was pointing out about my pillow example:

On its de dicto reading, your sentence is correct. But then the essentialness that you are talking about belongs to your speech act, not to the object talked about. Say, you want to talk about the first pillow that you bought that had a red button, and you mean to refer to it by such a definite description. Then, necessarily, whatever object you are referring to by a speech act of that kind, has a red button. But this essentialness doesn't transfer to the object itself. In other words, in all possible worlds where your speech act (of that kind) picks a referent, this referent is a pillow that has a red button. — Pierre-Normand

I was not aware of any issues. I was arrested a few weeks ago, then held in a psychiatric facility on suspicion of "illusions of police harassment" and held for observation for psychosis, so have my own stuff to deal with. — boethius

Hmm

When he's panicking, he definitely thinks the snake is dangerous.

Other times, he may know the fear is irrational. He may even be a little baffled that this fear can take over in spite of his rational mind's insight.

But are we amenable to rational persuasion with regard to our beliefs? And to what extent? Should a mental state that is not amenable to persuasion based on evidence or justification properly called a belief? That's the direction this discussion might go. — Banno

If Bob has an irrational fear of snakes, does he believe snakes are dangerous?

I can say that Obama might be a robot, but I can't say that Obama could have been a robot. Doesn't that show that the properties of the rigid designator are set by the speaker? Or maybe not, maybe it's just that the exact object is picked out by the speaker. The properties follow from there.

I agree, but in that case we're talking about epistemic possibilities, or epistemic humility. — Pierre-Normand

:up:

I see what you're saying. So with that in mind, @J is right that I can't become Obama because there would be a conflict in necessary properties of me versus him, and that comes down to what's necessary about being a human.

With some wild metaphysical shenanigans we might be able to work it out that Obama is the next stage of my existence, parenthood isn't what we think it is, etc. That wouldn't be excluded by Kripke, because he wasn't weighing in on the nature of the universe. But that's the only point that's made by insisting that I could become Obama, that the universe could work differently than the way we think it does. Do you agree with that?

When does speech about a proper name become nonsense because a contradiction has arisen between an assertion and something essential about the object of the assertion? How did Kripke handle this question?
— frank

"Elizabeth Windsor was born of different parents" -- would that be an example? — J

I think so, yes.

What is a matter of the speaker's intentions, according to Kripke, isn't what properties the object they mean to be referring to has by necessity (i.e. in all possible worlds) but rather what properties it is that they are relying on for picking it (by description) in the actual world. This initial part of the reference fixing process is, we might say, idiolectical; but that's because we defer to the speaker, in those cases, for determining what object it is (in the actual world) that they mean to be referring to. — Pierre-Normand

Right. Once I've picked out an object from the actual world, though many of its properties might be contingent, for my purposes they're essential to the object I'm talking about. Right?

The second part of Kripke's account, which pertains to the object's necessary properties, is where rigidity comes to play, and is dependent on our general conception of such objects (e.g. the persistence, individuation and identity criteria of object that fall under their specific sortal concept, such as a human being, a statue or a lump of clay) — Pierre-Normand

Why couldn't rigidity come into play regarding a contingent feature of an object?

Say X is a pillow with a red button. Broadly speaking, the button is a contingent feature. But any pillow that doesn't have the button is not the pillow I'm talking about. The button is essential to X.

Regarding the essentialness of filiation (e.g. Obama having the parents that he actually has by necessity), it may be a matter of metaphysical debate, or of convention (though I agree with Kripke in this case) but it is orthogonal to his more general point about naming and rigidity. Once the metaphysical debate has been resolved regarding Obama's essential properties, the apparatus of reference fixing (that may rely on general descriptions, and then rigid designation, still can world very much in the way Kripke intimated. — Pierre-Normand

True.

The default assumption is that what goes for one, goes for all, if the property in question is putatively essential (as "identity" would be). If I am a mind, why would any other person be anything else? If tiger A is a mammal, why would tiger B be a bird? etc. I'm calling this an assumption, because there's nothing that immediately shows it must be true, but it would take some powerful reasons to unseat it, I think. Remember, we're talking about our world, not just a possible, "idiolecty" world. In our world, we don't declare one person to be a mind, another a body, except maybe in some unusual cases of brain death or similar perplexities. At any rate, we don't do it when there is no other difference between the two. — J

I see what you're saying. There are definitely situations where concise, unambiguous language is required, like in the repair instructions for a spaceship. Otherwise, language is pretty metaphoric, poetic, unconsciously Shakespearean. I guess it depends on the situation.

Maybe there aren't any other minds! — J

For thousands of years there have been people who believed the universe is one giant mind. Some physicists think it's actually a black hole inside a bigger universe, which might also be a black hole. Craziness all around.

What does Adorno say about this? And can you say more about how we might understand persons, if they can be categorized as either minds or bodies, depending? — J

Negative Dialectics circles around the idea of the unification of subject and object, sometimes known as mind and body. A dialectical approach says they have to be mutually dependent, and this leads to the idea that the separation is an illusion, if one truly had their shit together, one would see that the two are one. Heidegger could be interpreted as seeing it that way. Adorno disagreed with the rush to some sort of mystical marriage of the opposites because one is apt to become blind and numb that way. Leave the mind and body, soul and Christ, self and world, however you put it, alone. They're separate in our consciousness for a reason. There are necessary dramas playing out, much of which really hurts. Stop trying to bypass it and let that pain transform us.

I actually agree with you. It's pretty strained to say that I could be Obama. It probably just means I'm giving advice, "if I were you..." :grin:

I'm suggesting that it's a genuine, if trivial, reason, but defers the interesting question of why you'd want to talk that way. — J

Science fiction is fraught with disembodied minds being transferred around, like an uploaded version of a person subsequently downloaded to a clone and whatnot. In fact one of the first books I read as a child was by Jack Vance and had the plot of a guy who wakes up in a body and can't remember what happened in his last iteration. A murder mystery ensues. If you recall, in the Matrix movies an AI manages to download himself into a human. I'm just used to that kind of thing.

Were you suggesting the "frank=mind / Obama=body" structure as something that might reflect how things stand in our world? — J

I guess it could be. I don't know. Heidegger would say no, I think Adorno would say yes, the issue being whether the self and the environment it evolved in are inextricable. What do you think?

Because it only defers the real question, "Yes, of course, but why do you want to say that?" — J

Why do you say that's the real question? When Kripke says Nixon could have lost the election, would you say we need to know why he would say that?

Were you additionally suggesting it as a real possibility? — J

What do you mean by "real" possibility?

I see a non-serious and a serious answer to this. The non-serious answer is, "Well, it's an ad hoc way of allowing us to speak about the possibility that frank could have been Obama." A reason, admittedly, but not a very good one, since nothing of philosophical interest follows from such ad-hocness. — J

It wasn't ad hoc. It's what I was thinking about from the beginning of our discussion. I really don't know how the world works. I normally think about it as a tree of possibilities.

This example isn't so much a matter of being stripped of properties as it is of being saddled with absurd ones. — J

It's just straight Descartes. That we can't say the mind is necessarily identical to the body was mentioned by Kripke in N&N. I'm guessing his restraint about metaphysical pronouncements is due in part to Wittgenstein's influence.

Cool, so I'll give an explanation for why Kripke might be ok with the proposition that I could have been Obama. There are a couple of options for how we interpret the word "I" in that statement.

1. I am defined as the frank who was born at a certain place and time of certain parents.

2. I am defined as a mind that can occupy any living body. Here think of Charlie Kaufman's Being John Malkovich, in which the image of the mind as a puppet master recurs, and the main character travels through a tunnel that leads to John Malkovich.

So if the reference of my proposition is 1, then the proposition is false, because we would have a contradiction. If the reference of my proposition is 2, does that work? The problem is that I'm defining myself as my mind, but I'm defining Obama as his body. This is the conundrum of Kaufman's movie.

But since the references of the objects in the proposition are set by intention (whose intention is another cool question), we could have it that the proposition does refer to me as my mind, and Obama as his body, so it works. I think my argument might be a little flimsy. What do you think?

Yes, one way, and on one understanding of necessity (a priori). And notice how we're forced to phrase it: the object obtains the properties. Is this magic? :smile: Can this be what Kripke literally means? — J

This isn't about necessity in general. It's that when I pick an object, like the pillow with the red button, I'm only looking at possible worlds where that object exists. There are possible worlds where the pillow doesn't have a red button, but I don't care about those. For the purposes of my communication, the red button is necessary because it's in all the possible worlds I'm paying attention to. I magically made the red button necessary by fiat.

BTW, do you take "in the idiolect of the speaker" to be Kripke just being careful (like "in language L"), or is he making some additional point? — J

He's saying that when I rigidly designate an object, like the pillow with the red button, you're supposed to pick up on what I mean by it. It's all about me and my intentions as a speaker. I think we recently had a thread where we were talking about Quine's inscrutability of reference and someone kept saying, "but doesn't intention pick out the thing?" Naming and Necessity is an effort to flesh out that idea, among other things. The distinction between rigid and non-rigid designators becomes valuable when he starts talking about the mind-body problem. It cuts through some fog.

The reference is entirely subjective.
A human is saying your words and it will obviously fall to that persons view — Red Sky

That's what Kripke is describing here in lecture 2:

1, To every name or designating expression 'X', there corresponds a cluster of properties, namely the family of those properties q> such that A believes 'q>X'.

2. One of the properties, or some conjointly, are believed by A to pick out some individual uniquely.

3. If most, or a weighted most, of the q> 's are satisfied by one unique object y, then y is the referent of 'x'.

4. If the vote yields no unique object, 'x' does not refer. •

5. The statement, 'If X exists, then X has most of the q>' s' is known a priori by the speaker.

6. The statement, 'If X exists, then X has most of the q>' s' expresses a necessary truth (in the idiolect of the speaker).

For any successful theory, the account must not be circular. The properties which are used in the vote must not themselves involve the notion of reference in such a way that it is ultimately impossible to eliminate. — Naming and Necessity, Lecture 2 p.71

What picture of naming do these Theses ((1)-(5)) give you? The picture is this. I want to name an object. I think of some way of describing it uniquely and then I go through, so to speak, a sort of mental ceremony: By 'Cicero' I shall mean the man who denounced Catiline; and that's what the reference of 'Cicero' will be. I will use 'Cicero' to designate rigidly the man who (in fact) denounced Catiline, so I can speak of possible worlds in which he did not. But still my intentions are given by first, giving some condition which uniquely determines an object, then using a certain word as a name for the object determined by this condition — ibid p.79

@J Would you agree that #6 of the theses explains how an object obtains necessary properties? It's a matter of the speaker's intentions. That's at least one way..

I don't understand why you are putting extra emphasis on this. — Red Sky

It's just because the issue of reference became a hot topic in analytical philosophy, starting with Russell and Frege, who advocated that names are symbols for a collection of descrtiptions, through Quine who claimed reference can't really be fixed. It's just part of this ongoing philosophical debate about how speech works.

Not surprisingly for a thread called "What is real?" this one has taken a lot of detours. How about a new thread? — J

While looking for an online copy of N&N I can copy from, I came across this paragraph from lecture 3. It touches on the question of whether Kripke was doing analysis or building a metaphysical picture:

Descartes, and others following him, argued that a person or mind is distinct from his
body, since the mind could exist without the body. He might equally well have argued the
same conclusion from the premise that the body could have existed without the mind.
Now the one response which I regard as plainly inadmissible is the response which
cheerfully accepts the Cartesian premise while denying the Cartesian conclusion. Let
'Descartes' be a name, or rigid designator, of a certain person, and let 'B' be a rigid
designator of his body. Then if Descartes were indeed identical to B, the supposed
identity, being an identity between two rigid designators, would be necessary, and
Descartes could not exist without B and B could not exist without Descartes. The case is
not at all comparable to the alleged analogue, the identity of the first Postmaster General
with the inventor of bifocals. True, this identity obtains despite the fact that there could
have been a first Postmaster General even though bifocals had never been invented. The
reason is that 'the inventor of bifocals' is not a rigid designator; a world in which no one
invented bifocals is not ipso facto a world in which Franklin did not exist. The alleged
analogy therefore collapses; a philosopher who wishes to refute the Cartesian conclusion
must refute the Cartesian premise, and the latter task is not trivial — Naming and Necessity, Lecture 3

Notice that Kripke isn't here worried about whether Descartes was right or wrong. He's exploring what happens from various starting points. If we start with accepting that the mind could be distinct from the body, we can't subsequently assert that there's a necessary connection between the two. We can gather evidence of that in some way, but that's it.

But you're wondering whether he means, more precisely, to be asking: "Would we refer to this woman as the Queen if she came from different parents?" Possibly. "Necessity in the realm of selfhood" would be something about this woman that must pick her out from all others, in all possible worlds. So we're asking, Can such a property exist, or inhere, within the woman herself, as opposed to within the process of picking-out? One is tempted to reply, "Yes indeed. The genes, the DNA. They are there regardless of whether we use them for any reference-fixing." — J

I guess the wildcard is how you pick yourself out in (or at) possible worlds. If you identify yourself as the person with particular parents, then you can't be Obama. If you get existentialist about it and you're 'that quality of being that comes to rest in the sanctuary of the form' as Kierkegaard put it, then the door would be open to a plot like Being John Malkovich. I think the point I'm making is pretty obscure and wouldn't come up very often.

Well, yes, in the sense that he's availing himself of terminology that has a long fraught history. — J

Sometimes you need a little fraught in your life. Do you want to examine the lectern example in this thread? Or a different one?

And at several other places he's clear that what makes a person that person is being born of certain parents. — J

I take him to be assessing the way a person normally comes up in conversation. He's analyzing the way we think and speak, not revealing necessity in the realm of selfhood.

Whether this equates to an essence is a fraught subject, of course. — J

I was referring to the way Kripke uses the concept of essence in N&N. Is that use fraught in your view?

Can you say more about the context question? I read Kripke as saying, not that one could refer to an Obama who has certain parents, but that we must -- that's where the "baptism" starts. — J

Yes. I'll get some cool quotes together. Maybe we could go over the lectern example.

That's fair. I was agreeing with Kripke's view here. — J

I don't think I'm contradicting Kripke. He would agree that essential properties are chosen in context, right? One could refer to an Obama who has certain parents.

Yes. See the exchange above about "If I were Barack Obama . . . " Taken literally, it can only mean "If I were not I . . . " which can't get off the ground. When we say things like "If I were you . . . " we mean either "Here's what I think you should do/think etc." or "If I (still being me!) were in your situation, here's what I would do; perhaps you should do the same." — J

I think you're insisting that a person who didn't have your history, parents, DNA, can't be you. That's a choice regarding essential properties. It's not a necessary stance, I don't think, by way of the Cogito.

That position doesn't make sense to me. If what we see is an hallucination or other phantasm, then our eyes must be, also — Patterner

If you're at the Overlook Hotel and you see people who shouldn't be there, you should question whether you're hallucinating.

It's not not about the body either. Your body wrote the reply, making use of what you knew about Tully, in a way not that dissimilar to how you ride a bike, making use of what you know about peddles and wheels.

The classical approach is to divide "know how" from "know that", and treat of each with an utterly different account. I want to consider an alternative: that knowing involves doing, including doing speaking and thinking — Banno

There's a passage somewhere in the Old Testament that says there's no knowledge in the grave. Knowledge is about living, it's part of living, and that's not something anyone does inside their skull. I understand.

These are the problems with the classical approach - might call it the cognitive theory of knowledge, that are addressed by treating knowledge as embodied, as an activity. — Banno

But riding a bike is partly a matter of muscle memory. I don't see how the knowledge that Tully wrote X is something about the body. It seems to be about thought.

But if you know that Cicero wrote De Officiis, it does not follow that you know that Tully wrote De Officiis, despite Tull=Cicero. — Banno

Knows is an intensional operator. That knowledge has this intensional aspect puts weight to the idea that knowledge is about a relationship between a knower and an object of thought.

How do we know what is real? It hurts! — karl stone

Aspirin makes the world disappear.

What's wrong with saying knowledge is a relationship between a knower and a proposition?

That basic illusion, the so-called "façade of life", is the fundamental claim to facticity itself, supported by that principal postulate, of a real distinction between appearance and essence, which justifies factuality at its base. Smashing that façade is what provides to the subject, freedom of thought, happiness of thought, and depth of speculation, to go beyond those conventional limits which formulate "what is the case", facticity. — Metaphysician Undercover

:up: Essence is the unchanging core of an object, the idea. Appearance is the transient expression of the core, alive in time, like music, unfolding out of itself. Any object is the dynamic tension between the two. We do move in a domain of ideas, but if we let those become concrete to us, it's like we're living in a dictionary. Life won't tolerate that for long.

I am not talking about the reality in China, I am talking about normative claims. The current reality in China is that the people cannot decide which public demands the government should achieve. China has had a period of time when economic development was at the center, and the future of local government officials was strongly correlated with economic data. I think it is right to use clear standards to guide government behavior. — panwei

Imagine a point when there is unrest among the people, perhaps people in Chinese cities who aren't receiving public support because they have left the countryside. The government will have to make them a priority eventually, or an event will take place that wounds the soul of China. That's often how governments respond, not through democracy, but because the cost of being unresponsive is greater than preserving the status quo. That's true in the USA as well. There are mechanisms of the US government that resist popular demand. There are many of them. The goal of those mechanisms is to make it so popular demand has to be very strong in order to make significant changes in direction. That's supposed to keep government priorities from flipping back and forth, but it's not working right now. Something has changed so that the US is like a loose cannon, swinging one way, then the other.

:grin:

Perhaps it's better explained if we consider the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Some might say that if the many-worlds interpretation is correct then there is a world in which I won the lottery. And I would counter by saying that none of the people who exist in these parallel universes are me. I just am the person who exists in this universe, and any person from a parallel universe who superficially resembles me – in appearance and name and background – only resembles me and shouldn't be thought of as being me. — Michael

This is the issue Kripke was addressing, yes.

Therefore, it is a reasonable arrangement to be eliminated if you fail, except that your current elimination criterion is votes, while the criterion I advocate is "the extent to which the people's public demands are realized." — panwei

You have candidates who were in charge of various provinces, and each is evaluated in terms of meeting public demands. The winner is chosen as the supreme leader. Is that right?

Didn’t Kamala Devi Harris get eliminated? — panwei

She lost the election, yes.

Wasn’t Biden eliminated after his election defeat? — panwei

He eliminated himself. He decided not to run.