Quine's stuff on reference is not dissimilar to Wittgenstein's stuff on silence. — Banno

I think it's fairly dissimilar unless you take all of Witt's ideas and dump them into a blender with some Tequila.

That, indeed, seems to be what ↪Janus is claiming... or reporting. He is trying to tell us of something of which he cannot tell us. And like the beetle it must drop out of the conversation. — Banno

I was talking about Quine. I'm afraid there's a field of incomprehensibility surrounding him. You've been deflected by it and stumbled into Janus. :sad:

Now that's not so far from Wittgenstein, except that the phenomenologists seem to insist on continuing the impossible conversation were Wittgenstein would be silent, choosing instead to enact, and perhaps show by enacting. — Banno

Witt did say that Heidegger was trying to do the impossible, but that had nothing to do with enacting anything. That's your bugaboo resulting from your immense laziness. Probably.

Really? I had no idea. Perhaps he wasn't a philosopher, then. — Ciceronianus

I think you'd like his Wisdom of the West. Lots of laughs, although the purpose of the book is serious.

Bertrand Russell was hilarious.

It occurs to me that if reference is inscrutable, and one takes all of meaning to be referential, then Quine pretty much renders language inscrutable.

I'd been taking Quine as a criticism of the referential theory of meaning. But if one supposes that meaning just is reference, then he shows that language can't work.

Is that what you are suggesting? — Banno

I think he means that it's just a folk theory that language refers. It's a theory that ignores the limits of knowledge vis-a-vis beetles in boxes.

I don't know what you're thinking about. All I know is the way you behave. So Quine is arguing against meaning internalism, and for some sort of behaviorism.

In a behaviorist context, ineffability doesn't mean much. There is no aboutness to language in the first place. To cling to ineffability is to cling to some kind of internalism.

What this whole discussion misses is the interplay between the words and the world; it's not that the tacit knowledge is off by itself somewhere, but is there in the "a bit more gain, and a little reverb", said or done. — Banno

I think Quine's point was that there's nothing in your knob twiddling that stands as evidence that what you mean by 'gain' coincides with what the engineer who designed the amp meant by it.

It's not a matter of imprecision. It's that everything is actually ineffable. Speech with a lack of clear reference is never about anything in particular.

I've spent a few days trying to get the lick for Mannish Boy right. I'm after something like the the Johnny Winter sound, but have a Gretch semi rather than a Fender. Playing with the gain I can get a satisfactory sound, but it's missing something, which I think is an overdub of a bass run. Or it might be keys. — Banno

Don't hurt me, don't hurt me now.

It just seems like if one acknowledges that meaning is use, one would want to downplay the aboutness of language. Why even care about reference if it's just action that matters?

Actually, what makes the Hebrew Bible unusual is that argument with God is acceptable and even shown to be effective. — Hanover

Proto civil rights

Thing is, it ain't as different now as people like to believe. At least in my estimation. — Moliere

Human nature probably hasn't changed, but the need to write down moral principles would be much more important during a relatively chaotic time like the Iron Age. We take the stability of the global political scene for granted. We need no cultural anchor in the form of an arch of the covenant.

This ties in with what @Hanover pointed out in his thread on freedom of speech. Moses and God fiercely punish Hebrews for exercising religious freedom and freedom of speech. Moses has to control the narrative for the sake of the survival his adopted culture.

All those years of seminary paying off... :D — Moliere

Did you actually go to a seminary? But yeah, as Christopher Walken said in that movie, "It was the iron age. You had to do a lot of bad stuff just to survive."

And, after Moses found his wisdom, he came back from the mountain and condemned the people for doing what they had been doing to the point of recruiting one of the tribes to kill them all. "Thou shalt not kill... well after this" so saith the lord. — Moliere

I missed that. Where in the text does this transpire?

Despite protestations to the contrary, the commandments were not a highpoint for meta-ethics. — Banno

It was the fucking iron age.

I don't think Wittgenstein's point is that we know ethical principles, but we just can't put them into words (ineffable).
— frank

Putting them into words is irrelevant. What counts in "ethical principles" is enacting them. — Banno

According to Moses, God thought very highly of putting them into words. What did you name your religion?

I'm going to midrash traffic signs. For real.

Like much of Wittgenstein, it's ineffable, understandable only through midrash. — Hanover

I hadn't heard of midrash. Can you midrash anything? Or does it have to be scripture?

A difficult sentence. For Wittgenstein, ethics is not transcendent, but done. — Banno

I think that's your own personal Wittgenstein.

Ethics is transcendental. — Constance

Where ethics is statements that transcend all times and places, to speak these statements would require a vantage point that's unavailable. People still go on and on as if they do have this vantage point, though.

I don't think Wittgenstein's point is that we know ethical principles, but we just can't put them into words (ineffable). It's that we can't know these transcendent facts to begin with. That's the problem with ethical discourse.

But imagine you saw that in a gallery and then noticed the name of the painting. You'd be like, "That's cool!"

But for AI software, it doesn't mean anything. That's weird. Mine also has trouble with hands. Not sure why.

"girl carved from wood with smoky background"

The science of perception is built on confidence in our knowledge of the external world.

We can only speculate about why that confidence is so easy to come by, but we can't explain it by empirical or logical means.

"gravity's rainbow book cover"

"Russian soldier hugging a raccoon"

Nice!

"mushroom cloud made out of pumpkins"

This is "fish in Japanese clothing on a sea of catsup"

Your quote...

f you're claiming we don't have experiences of red and pain — Isaac

See I knew you weren't denying that. You're too smart for that.

If you're claiming we don't have experiences of red and pain, you're making a strong claim and you'll need a strong argument for it.
— frank

It's a 'strong' claim because you said so?

Hers' my 'strong' argument for it. There's absolutely no evidence for it. No one can describe such an experience, no-one can pin down such an experience, there are no tests for it, there's no mechanism in the brain which could account for it, there's no cortex in the brain which could process it, and every test that's ever been done to try and identify such a thing has failed utterly. — Isaac

It's a strong claim that we don't have experiences because it's counter to common sense. If you don't have that, you wouldn't notice.

Lack of evidence is not evidence of lack. Try again.

For some things yeah, you can do that, for others its much harder. I mean you have to consider military personal, construction workers, tax payers. Automation can only do so much. Maybe some radical new AI discovery will render people obsolete in most things, but we are far from reaching that point. — Manuel

Yes, we need humans for some things. China's progress toward great power status won't be hindered by having a slightly smaller population.

In any case, whatever happens in Ukraine in terms of winning or losing, has no consequence for us in terms of who will lead us. It's not a serious issue for people who don't border Russia. — Manuel

The war has weakened Russia's international standing and has positioned Russia as a client of China.

First of all, this overlooks a crucial problem for China: drastic declining population numbers. This is going to severely impact economic output. — Manuel

Like the Chinese don't know how to automate?

OK, well let's explore one. When was the last time you had an experience of red and how did you know that that's what you were having at the time? — Isaac

If you're claiming we don't have experiences of red and pain, you're making a strong claim and you'll need a strong argument for it.

But you wouldn't be so silly as to claim that, would you? :razz:

Really? That surprises me. I associate with folk in the general disability community, where the implication that blind folk cannot understand colour words would be treated as offensive ableist crap, and suitably mocked. — Banno

If you stopped equivocating, they would say, "Yes, of course."

I understand your argument. I think most blind people would disagree with you.

As a child I would pretend to be blind, walking around with my eyes closed. To me, blind people are silent super heroes.

That is, do you also agree with:
What the blind cannot do re color words is know what they are talking about.
— hypericin — Banno

The blind can know how to use the word, that color is often a property of objects, for instance. They also know that they don't know what it is in the sense of being able to see it.

Ok. It might help if you stated what you think he is claiming. — Banno

I think he's claiming that you can't teach someone what red is. You can only point to it. If they have the anatomy and physiology that allows them to have that experience, you can help them attach the word "red" to it.

Plus there's a Meno's paradox situation here. All speech ever does is point, and then we hope they got it.

the experience of color cannot be communicated.
— hypericin

Yeah, it can. The cup is red. — Banno

Listing properties communicates experience? Only if speaker and listener have common ground. Hypericin is correct wrt congenitally blind listeners.

That's just the way it is.

frank

Ah, but I wasn't summoned, you see. That would require evocation by use of a name, as one would the Lord of the Flies, i.e. Beelzebub, the chief follower of Satan/Lucifer in Milton's Paradise Lost. — Ciceronianus

Is it e-voke or in-voke? I don't want to get it wrong and blow up the high school.

which is exactly what we were discussing before your mindless interjection. — Isaac

I think you're kind of over doing it tho. Back to USD's and GBP's.

Just restating it doesn't make it true. If I dropped a nuclear bomb on your neighborhood because I was justifiably concerned you were going to kill me, people would definitely condemn my actions. The collateral damage my actions resulted in would be out out of proportion to the harm I was trying to avoid. — Isaac

True. Shooting me in the head would be legal though.

the execrable must be summoned. — Ciceronianus

And here you are!

Ineffable: a useless euphemism intended to obfuscate the fact it is impossible to conceive anything too great to be talked about. — Mww

I don't think it's usually about greatness. "The ineffable aroma of the autumn wind...". It's just that words are sometimes like fingers and some of experience falls through the open hands of language.

Haven't you ever had dreams that couldn't be adequately put into words? I have. Interestingly, years later, all I remember are the metaphors I came up with to explain it: it was like a bee hive and I could feel each bee. I know that's not what the dream really was.

Maybe memory is a factor here. It's hard to remember what you couldn't put into words

"Only one Republican senator has announced publicly that he will support former-President Trump’s 2024 reelection bid, a sign of the uphill battle Trump faces in his quest to win the Republican presidential nomination and a second term in the White House.". -The Hill

wow! times have changed!