what I see is the ship or star. — Ludwig V
But that does depend on linking perception with action rather than experience. — Ludwig V
If you suppose anything like an image or model in the brain, the question arises how the brain can access it in order to apply it to the incoming information. The answer is always an observer of some kind. But then, that observer will need to construct its own model or image and there will have to be a second observer inside the first one.... I'm sure you see the infinite regress that has begun. The brain is not an internal observer - unless you call it an observer of the outside world. — Ludwig V
Some images are images of something, some are just patterns. If you treat them all as of the second kind, you have lost the significance of the image. — Ludwig V
I don't understand what you mean here. — Ludwig V
If "directly" just means inside the body, then obviously I cannot be directly acquainted with objects outside my body. — Ludwig V
So, classification needs to be agreed before the facts can be agreed, and if people are in the grip of the idea that animals are just machines, that agreement is not possible. — Ludwig V
We do agree pretty much on how the eye works, yet we describe the facts differently. Our disagreement is not about the facts, but about agreeing a coherent way of describing them, i.e. how to think about them, i.e. a coherent conceptual structure for understanding them. It's not a straightforward task. — Ludwig V
Ironically, much of the recent neo-Aristotelianism flows from a growing dissatisfaction with the artificiality of possible worlds semantics. We are slowly correcting modern errors, first with Kripke's modal form of essentialism, and then moving with Fine and Klima towards more traditional and robust forms of essentialism, that do not rely on the overrated device of possible worlds. — Leontiskos
Perhaps not. But a knuckle joint or a thumb or an arm or a spine can. — Ludwig V
None of those is true of images of the car, no matter how many you accumulate. — Ludwig V
wouldn't object to that. But what validates the inference? There must be some way that you can compare the image of a 3D object with the 3D object. But you seem to deny that we can. — Ludwig V
So the image of my car is no different from an image of starship Enterprise or a dragon - and even in those cases, we know what it would mean to see the real thing, even if it never happens. — Ludwig V
It depends what you mean by "literally". For me, when I walk through my front door, I literally see my car. If I only see the image on my retina, then I don't see "literally" my car, but an image of it. — Ludwig V
An image is always an image of something else, never the real thing. So my anchor is the real thing. That's what makes the image of a car an image as opposed to a complex array of coloured shapes. — Ludwig V
But it is not the same as a disagreement about the facts and cannot be settled in the same way. — Ludwig V
The problem here is about the meaning of "direct" and "indirect". — Ludwig V
If what we see is the image on our retina, how is that any different? — Ludwig V
The image is more like a lens, by means of which I see my car. — Ludwig V
But I don't see that we ever see that image, because it is extensively processed, including the amalgamation of two images. Don't forget. that retinal image is broken up into what, presumably is an encoding that is quite different from any image.
I'm not sure whether to count the result of comparing two images or the extent to which our lens needs adjusting to produce a clear image a visual cue. It could go either way, I suppose. — Ludwig V
"What you see" is ambiguous. — Ludwig V
I partly agree with that. But what is learning is not me, it is, let us say, my brain. I don't ever hear two sounds, one for each ear and then realize that I can deduce where the sound is from that. I hear one sound, located in space. The learning and the processing takes place way "below" consciousness and involves an encoding process that is nothing like a sound even though it is caused by sound — Ludwig V
trompe l'oeil painting. — Ludwig V
Please let me know if I am annoying you. — Ludwig V
But the disagreement is not a question of evidence, but of interpretation of the evidence. So Davidson's thesis that we can abandon talk of conceptual schemes and return to beliefs and experiences seems to me to be false. — Ludwig V
But how could we have 3D bodies in a 2D world? — Ludwig V
BTW, you are forgetting that we have 3D hearing as well. — Ludwig V
We have learned to interpret 2D pictures as 3D scenes. If all we experienced were 2D, how could we even get the idea of 3D? — Ludwig V
A non-minimalist would have said "to a greater or lesser extent" and cut out all the "maybe" qualifications. — Ludwig V
But none of that is 2D information. — Ludwig V
It would seem you are a minimalist on this question. — Ludwig V
Yet we experience them in 3D. — Ludwig V
We don't make the inference - the results of an inference made "unconsciously" are available (are reported) "directly". — Ludwig V
That fits with Wittgenstein's idea that human life and practices are the essential context for everything. It would seem that he did not see any similarities with non-human life. This is somewhat puzzling to me, though I would not automatically extend that understanding to all life. There is disagreement among human beings about that.
There is more to be said about how we deal with extreme - non-regular - contexts. — Ludwig V
Yes. But that's a misunderstanding of what intelligibility is. Intellgibility is not black and white, but a spectrum. He seems to think that "conceptual schemes" are a tight logical structure which is either completely intelligible of completely unintelligible - which leads to his reductio. That fits with what appears to me a very naive view of translation as just a set of equivalences. That's seldom or never available — Ludwig V
That's very close to what I would call a concept. — Ludwig V
Not quite right. We have 3D stereoscopic vision because of our two eyes; it fails at larger distances, but it works well at smaller distances - as the 3D films show. Our ears manage to give us 3D hearing as well. — Ludwig V
I dont like the metaphor of lens as a depiction of the relation between mind and world. It implies a detached, subjectivist view of how we make sense of the world, as though the information contained in reality is already sitting out there and all we have to do is notice and process it internally. — Joshs
We don’t pick out factual aspects of the world based on relevance for our purposes, we actively do things with the inanimate and social world, and the patterns of our doings forms normative structures of intelligibility and purpose which determine HOW the world appears meaningfully to us — Joshs
IF that concept gets its sense from a discursive system of practices that is only peripherally shared by you. — Joshs
In particular, it is not clear that conceptual schemes correspond in any helpful way with "models" in cybernetics, whatever they are. — Banno
It seems to me that it is the various explanations for how and why the world we perceive is as it is that involve various conceptual lenses (conceptual schemes), and that is not that what we perceive is determined by conceptual lenses, but rather by what is noticed, what is selected, which in turn is determined by what is of interest or use.
I think part of the motivation for deflation arises from the position that truth applies only to sentences — Count Timothy von Icarus
But if you can imagine a dog does not need to think to yelp and leap from being burnt, why can't we imagine the dog is behaving according to the exact same impulses in everything the dog does? Like a plant cell photosynthesizing - wherefore belief as a component of these motions? — Fire Ologist
Organisms are quintessentially beings instead of mere heaps (existing according to a nature, not solely as a bundle of external causes) because they are self-organizing, self-governing, and most of all, goal-directed. The parts of an organism are proper parts of a proper whole because they are unified in terms of a goal that is intrinsic to the organism. This is the idea of "function" and teleonomy in biology. The parts of a flout or rock are not organized in this way.
And perhaps, ↪Arcane Sandwich, this is also a way of finding a via media between permissivism and eliminativism.
— Count Timothy von Icarus
Conservatives would reject the first premise: there is indeed an ontologically significant difference between bikinis and fouts. But that difference can't have anything to do with the question about scattered objects — Arcane Sandwich
The idea of an ontological potential endows even simple physical systems, such as rocks, with a kind of weak coherence and ‘monitoring’ of internal states...
Namely, the FEP covers a broad class of objects as cases of particular systems, including adaptive complex systems like human beings, simpler but still complex systems like morphogenetic structures and Turing patterns, and even utterly simple, inert structures at equilibrium, like Objects that have no structure or no environment, either of which fail the FEP for obvious reasons, exist at one extreme...
Although it does not seem that evolution is always very gradual (e.g. proposed cases of observed speciation). There is evidence for rapid evolution due to bottlenecks, fertile hybrid offspring reproducing in the wild, etc., and the whole EES controversy. It's an open question how larger shifts in anatomy (e.g. hands to wings, hands to fins, fins to hands, etc.) — Count Timothy von Icarus
Yet neither is the argument: "Either species are defined rigidly in this way, or they don't exist," a good one. It's a false dichotomy. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Processes can be more or less stable. We can think of an entire ancestral line as a process. For some species, such as the cockroach, the process has been in a fairly stable equilibrium for an extremely long time, perhaps 100-300 million years. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Yet if two species are indistinguishable, even upon close inspection with instruments, then in virtue of what could they even be said to be "two species?" — Count Timothy von Icarus
But it's the thing signified by the scientific term that existed before man existed, not "whatever the term can apply to." I hope you can see the problem here. Insects can't have existed before man and be defined by however "insect" is used in normal language, because the term is used in various ways in different contexts in normal language. This would mean that some things would be both insect and not-insect. Nor can they be defined by "however science currently defines 'insect,'" since this would imply that whenever a scientific term is refined the being of past entities is also thereby changed. — Count Timothy von Icarus
This seems like an argument from ignorance. I know of no reputable biologist who claims that there have actually been very many hominid-like families throughout the history of Earth, just "lost to time." There are just the fairly recent hominids. And the same are true for many families.
What's the idea here. "A man like species could have walked the Earth with the dinosaurs, or any time since, but we just don't know about it." But not only this, but it's "very likely." I don't think so.
The idea that very many families of hominid-like animals have evolved many times is highly unlikely for a number of reasons. — Count Timothy von Icarus
And "fish" was used to describe whales for a long time. But clearly, while whales were whales before man, whales were not both fish and not-fish during this period. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Anti-essentialism can only get one up to a certain point. "Essence" might be an ugly word for an analytic ear, yet Kripke argued that the essence of a gold atom is the property of having an atomic number of 79, which is the number of protons in the nucleus of a gold atom. Kinda hard to argue with that, even if one isn't an essentialist. — Arcane Sandwich
even ambiguous — Count Timothy von Icarus
But that is not what the fossil record suggests for man, for just one example. — Count Timothy von Icarus
There have not been "very many species indistinguishable from man" existing throughout the Earth's history. There have been, on contemporary accounts, just the one. And this certainly wouldn't be true for domestic animals either. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Unless you are merely speaking of the transition from wolf to dog, in which case what of it? Yes, domestication is not a binary. Yet the aurochs is extinct, the cow is not. More to the point, a stegosaurus is not a dog, an oak is not a dog, a rock is not a dog. These are quite discrete distinctions between dog and not-dog. — Count Timothy von Icarus
If we cannot find it, shall we conclude that either no dogs ever die, or that none have ever lived? Or perhaps that "life" and "being a dog" are mere cultural or mental constructs, ens rationis and not ens reale? — Count Timothy von Icarus
For example, there are curlterpillars: caterpillar-like objects that begin to exist when a caterpillar rolls up into a ball. There are incars: vehicles that look like ordinary cars, but that can only exist when they're inside a garage. — Arcane Sandwich
However, words generally try to focus on the actual, not the potential. The act of being a dog is what stays the same in all dogs. We could well imagine some sort of dog, bee, elephant fusion (horrific) and ask: "when does it stop being a dog and become a monster?" Yet no such animal actually exists, it is ens rationis, a being of thought. Language evolves through our interactions with actual beings, so we should only expect that our words will tend to indicate the beings we actually find around us. Language evolution isn't arbitrary after all. — Count Timothy von Icarus
But you don't tend to get the same sort of disagreements re lions, oaks, or carbon. — Count Timothy von Icarus
will probably come pretty easily, because, while a cultural role, it can be represented with clear, concrete characteristics. — Count Timothy von Icarus
The dog doesn't know that the blue ball has anything in common with their blue collar or with the blue cabinet in the living room, for instance, unless its being trained and rewarded with food when it point to blue objects — Pierre-Normand
Indeed, it is problematic to attribute beliefs to the spider at all, since beliefs sit within the broader framework of of triangulation, interpretation, and hence occur at a level that it utterly foreign to the spider. — Banno
instead, mental descriptions are interpreted within the broader context of social practices and linguistic frameworks. — Banno
I will say that Moliere and I are referring to the same thing with 'chair' or 'rabbit'. — Leontiskos
Someone else will come along and tell me that there is a 0.1% chance that we might disagree on what is a chair or a rabbit. And then we can argue about whether that 0.1% chance secures some particular thesis of "inscrutability of reference." — Leontiskos
Our disagreements about the world don't stem from an inability to agree on what it is "in itself" but rather are manifestations of our willingness to negotiate how it is that we can most perspicuously define it in relation to us and us in relation with it. — Pierre-Normand
"Moliere understands 'chair' to signify <chair-concept>."
"Leontiskos understands 'chair' to signify <chair-concept>."
"Therefore, Moliere and Leontiskos understand 'chair' to refer to the same kind of object." — Leontiskos
For instance, I agree with anthropologists that agriculture brought about changes in human life that would represent a shift in conceptual schemes related to the passage of time and the idea of home. — frank
It might be worth adding "... and get the same result". The same behaviours might be seen with very different interpretations - we get a rabbit stew even if "gavagai" means undetached rabbit leg. — Banno
For what could be more obvious then that we do refer to things with our words and mean things by them? — Count Timothy von Icarus
Except Quine literally says, "the meanings or ideas expressed in their identically triggered and identically sounded utterances could diverge radically." If the meanings and ideas expressed by our identical utterances diverge radically, then I would say we are talking past each other by definition. — Leontiskos
But that becomes more implausible the longer we draw out their conversation (say, from 15 seconds to 2 minutes to 5 minutes to 30 minutes...). The longer we talk the more likely we will realize that we are using words in radically different ways. — Leontiskos
Doesn't the quote you provide imply that, if they started talking to each other, they may talk past each other entirely? — Leontiskos
Ah, but therein lies the counterintuitive part. If one takes themselves to be making definitive references, or, through one's understanding of one's own sense of making definitive references, takes others to be doing the same, one is mistaken about what is truly going on. — Count Timothy von Icarus
and one takes another's "that rake right there," to be definitive, one has misunderstood, no? — Count Timothy von Icarus
What definition of "inscrutable" would you offer, such that inscrutable reference poses no barrier to communication? — Leontiskos
Two men could be just alike in all their dispositions to verbal behavior under all possible sensory stimulations, and yet the meanings or ideas expressed in their identically triggered and identically sounded utterances could diverge radically, for the two men, in a wide range of classes