That's why a lot of movies move you superficially, as many have experienced, having a great time in cinema and then walking out and forgetting what you were seeing just 15 minutes before. — Henri

If you were to read something for just 90-100 minutes, say, and then not read it again, or if you were to listen to a piece of music just once and not listen to it again, and especially if you were to do this regularly, do you think you'd remember the reading or music long-term any better than you remember films you just watch once?

There's not a right answer there--it's going to depend on how your individual mind works, but I'm just curious what your answer would be.

I’ve read the first 50 pages of Naming and Necessity ... I’ve found it to be a complete waste of time up to now. Does he actually have anything to say or can I expect the same pointless drivel for another 100+ pages? — I like sushi

It's important to be familiar with it if you want to be familiar with analytic philosophy, and especially the developmental history of analytic philosophy, but in my opinion, the whole project that Naming and Necessity is a "symptom" of is a big mess, with Naming and Necessity doing nothing to make it less of a mess.

So unless there's a good reason that you want to be well-versed in analytic philosophy, there's probably no reason for you to slog through the rest of the book, especially if it's not doing anything for you yet, especially if you're not retaining much of it--which you're probably not since it's seeming like a complete waste of time to you. Reading through the rest at this point would probably have the impact of reading a long string of arbitrary words.

Naming and Necessity is really best approached with a robust familiarity with the project it's stemming from, going back to at least Frege's philosophy of language work, then Russell's theory of descriptions, a bit of the mountain of commentary on both in the wake of the theory of descriptions (Russell played a big part in sparking later interest in Frege), etc.

The *inter-subjective* is something that exists within the communication network linking the subjective consciousness of many individuals. — Matias

You can't have a judgment anywhere but in an individual's mind.

If you're a human being, which is something determined by biological facts, then however you think is a way that human beings think, and whatever it might "mean" to be you is part of what it "means" to be a human being. So there's no reason to worry about it or to think that you need to be (or need to be doing) something that you're not (something you're not doing).

You might want to explore what you really want, what your goals really are, and then you can focus on those . . . and you're entirely free to adjust them or abandon them completely and pick other goals as you go along, as you change/feel differently/have different interests, etc.

Some people are better at judging than others. — I like sushi

By what criteria?

I have seen the film ‘The Thin Red Line’ and thought it a great film — Brett

That's one of the very few films I've ever been tempted to walk out of. I hate Malick.

People may "disagree", but it's quite clearly the case that when reading a novel you must use your imagination to visualize the characters, things, places and events described, whereas you do not need to use your imagination at all to see the characters, things, places and events shown in a film. — Janus

Books are just sets of marks on paper. Films are just sets of shapes, colors and sounds. To understand either, you need to think about what you're seeing, you need to supply semantic content, you need to fill in/imagine things that you're not told/shown, etc.

Trying to quantify which requires "more imagination" is a ridiculous notion in my view. Not only because the very idea of quantification is not well-defined here, but because every experience is going to be unique--each book, film, and person, on each occasion, is going to be different.

She's not taken seriously because objectivism is crap. — Benkei

That's not the only reason, though. Surely you don't think that everything that's "taken seriously" by philosophy departments, peer-reviewed journals, etc. is not crap, right? If that's the case, then work being crap isn't sufficient to explain this.

But most people think that some things are inherently good or bad. — Coben

Plenty of people think that. They're wrong. There's no (ontological) difference between "That is good" and "I like that."

But sure, you might never think that anyone is wrong. That it is all taste. That's a pretty strong philosophical position, much like the one that says there are not objective values. — Coben

Right, it's part of there being no objective values (which is correct--there are no objective values).

You can't "get wrong" liking or disliking anything.

Even if it is true that it is all taste, there still might be reasons to teach children certain classive works rather than showing them Michal Bay films. — Coben

Sure, there are subjective reasons that we stress some things rather than others (where what's stressed isn't uniform). For one, it's not unusual to want the sort of stuff we prefer to be preferred by others, too, because that increases the chances that there will be more material in that vein.

If you say something is good you are attributing quality/qualities to it. You are saying what it is. — Coben

Some people might mistakenly believe that's what they're doing, but there are no objective qualities in that vein. Saying that something is good is really a result of liking it (at least liking the aspects that one feels are good). Thinking that "That is good" is attributing properties to the item in question is simply an example of psychological projection.

What nonsense is this? — Benkei

I'm not sure you understood what I wrote. Did what I write come off as an endorsement of Rand for some reason?

I said judge them as not good. Which is different from saying you dislike them. — Coben

No it isn't. What are you claiming the difference is?

I'd say why you should value art is because you like it as art, for its (more or less) formal properties. (I only say "more or less" there because content (what's depicted in visual art, the story in fiction, etc.) will have something to do with it, too.)

If artists' purposes include things like, "I want to write some music that moves me because of its formal properties--the way the pitches and rhythms etc. work together, or the way these shapes and textures etc. work together" or "I need to put out a new album before going on tour" etc., then I'd say that there's probably little work that doesn't have a purpose behind it, but I don't know if you'd include those sorts of things. At any rate, the problems with knowing an artist's intentions, the purposes they had in mind, remain.

The secret is out. This forum is actually an attempt to create the ultimate AI philosopher — Wallows

We'd better start recruiting if that's the goal.

You don't see how this is psychological weaponization of private information? — THX1138

Not really, because I don't really buy the idea of "psychological weapons," especially with respect to people who are more or less strangers. If someone is judging, taunting, etc. me, I don't see it as my problem. It's similar to why I'm not offendable. I might want someone to not bother me because they're annoying or whatever, but I'll simply take whatever measures I need to in order to get them to stop interacting with me.

Exactly.

That would be a very quieer move for someone to make. Each and every day people say meaningful things in common language that are not amenable to logical translation. There are thought/belief governed by common language that cannot be aptly put into terms of being the value of a bound variable.

The semantics of common language is directly at odds with many a philosophical notion. "An abstract object of thought" is one such notion. Quine aimed at abstract objects of thought. "Existence" is held by some to be such an object. Quine had the right target. He did not have the right ammunition. — creativesoul

Again, as I remarked above, Quine's comments here are building upon Russell's theory of descriptions. Quine's comments are not going to make much sense outside of that context. So it's important to not only be familiar with Russell's theory of descriptions, but the motivation for Russell's theory of descriptions, which was Frege's "semantic puzzles" and the background to those. The background is largely the anti-psychologistic theories of reference that Frege endorsed (and that subsequent analytic philosophy has continued to endorse), where those theories create problems when it comes to the ability to refer to nonexistent entities for example (a la "The present king of France is bald"), as well as referring to entities where the referent is identical but the referring terms are not (a la Frege's morning star/evening star example).

I'd agree that ultimately the whole thing, including Russell's theory of descriptions, is rather silly, really, but it's because of the wrong turn of rejecting psychologism. That was the bad move that a lot of inane, rococo work is intended to patch up, and that's still ongoing. (The reasons for rejecting psychologism are deeply-rooted in analytic phil, though, stemming initially from wanting philosophy to be more like a science, since science was seen as the academic ideal, where it was believed that that goal is not possible by admitting individual psychological foundations.)

(On the positive side of all of this, though, an initially unintentional upshot of the work in question is that it's had a lot of practical benefits for computer programming.)

mplies you've already made answers that you consider satisfactory the issues raised here and are only here providing the nutshell version. — boethius

Ah, a link to other threads specifically for my answer. For one, I'm pretty sure the last time it came up the thread was deleted. The mods seem to get annoyed that Rand is asked about so frequently--I know other Rand threads have been deleted, too. Partially because it's the same thing over and over again. You could search for other Rand threads if you're that interested. I think the longer version of my response here may have been deleted with that other thread though. I'm not that interested in it, really, but I enjoy going back and forth with people who act like as much of an unjustifiably arrogant asshole as you do, especially when I can goad you into typing so much in response to short answers.

Re "the reasons I believe my answer was 'complete'"--what the heck would a "complete" answer be for this?

But it's worth a look, because if you find that you also would judge some things as not every good, then you are like the
elitists, but with a different taste, at the very least. — Coben

Elitism isn't about judgments per se--it's not about liking/disliking things, or what specific things one likes or dislikes. Elitism is about one's attitude and beliefs about those judgments and the people who make judgments. Elitists think that there are right and wrong judgments, they think that people who make right judgments are superior to people who make wrong judgments, they think that there's something deficient or flawed with people who make wrong judgments, and they have a lot of attitude about all of this.

Surely art is presented to you (to us) by the artist, and we like it or we don't. I can imagine that, sometimes, the artist might pass along some idea of her intention, but is this really necessary? — Pattern-chaser

I was saying you need that if you want to know the purpose the artist had in mind, if any, for the art. You can't glean the purpose from the art itself.

I don't personally think one needs to know the purpose, and I don't personally evaluate any art relative to the artist's purpose (I more or less buy the tenets of "the intentional fallacy").

If I really like someone's work, I will be interested in some of the background info, but just as general curiosity about something I like a lot.

Please provide a link and the reasons you believe your answer was complete and correct in the other discussion you mention. — boethius

I didn't respond to that because it made no sense to me. What relevance would a "link" be first off?

"Be good little conformist robots"

I think it's mostly looked at as a combo of making concessions because:

(1) the kid has to go to the toilet
(2) the kid is often uncomfortable going into a closed room with a bunch of adult strangers
(3) if the kid is young enough they might need assistance
(4) parents often tend to be a bit paranoid and overprotective about their kids
(5) for a number of reasons it's often a situation where mom has to take the boy(s) with her or dad the girl(s)
(6) some adults are (oddly in my opinion) uncomfortable with adults of the opposite sex being in the bathroom; they're usually less uncomfortable with kids of the opposite sex being in the bathroom.

If you find yourself uncertain how much this applies to you, there is a simple 3-minute test: — ernestm

Not much mystery to the way the questions are going to align with the results there!

And yet you make 3 successive posts about more than one thing. What gives? — boethius

"You also never responded . . ."

The next day, I'll be out and about and stop by a Wal-Mart to buy something to eat and for other miscellaneous purchases. I'm going through the isles when all of a sudden a woman pops out as I'm making a turn, wearing a cat themed hoodie and waving around a broomstick. She contrively blurted out "Ooops.. " and walks away, as she's cackling and strolling off with her friend or husband. — THX1138

So, even taking that at face value, what is "weapony" about it?

Im not trying to be so provocative. If I call it a nuclear war, then I get weird people from the Middle East writing me and asking for my support in their criticisms of the USA. — ernestm

I'm stumped at what that response has to do with the simple question I was asking.

You already responded to that. I was hoping you'd answer, "So that's a more specific idea, no?"

You also never responded to me asking you about the claim about Shakepeare, etc. being "taken seriously."

Let's solve one thing at a time. So we don't have to keep going back and forth.

You didn't comment, by the way, on the fact that (c) (i) has nothing to do with her views of other philosophers. You had just said that's all it was about.

"(i) not being a 'systematic' philosopher" also says nothing about quality of arguments. — boethius

It's an impression of her quality as a philosopher, which is about argumentation.

It's assessment of only part of her content, the part dealing with views of other thinkers, it says nothing of what arguments she presents herself from first principles, the much more important part. — boethius

What does (c)(i) have to do with other thinkers?

Your points a, b and c, are all extraneous to the quality of argument. — boethius

(c) is about the assessment of her content.

You've advanced the theory that it's for reasons extraneous to the quality of her arguments: — boethius

No, I didn't. That was part of the reasons that I gave.

I only read the above by the way.

One thing at a time. Of course, you can type and blah blah blah on and on as much as you want, but I'm only doing one thing at a time. I see it as more or less a disease to have to type so much in response to simple comments. Aren't you capable of keeping things brief and focused?

Assuming the facts reported are accurate, do you not see this as murder? — Hanover

No. Not unless it's against someone's will.

It is analogous to the notion of "something out of nothing"; which also isn't much of a paradox if we realize that nothing is creating something. — Merkwurdichliebe

You just need to have a non-Aspie understanding of "create."

I'd tell people to talk (and think) for themselves . . .unless they have big secrets they don't want to reveal, I suppose.

Okay, but folks might be curious re your comment that "The reasons are that we have ideals, desires, goals, etc. and we can judge whether some things meet them" is too broad, and they might want to know how you'd narrow it. I guess they'll never know. It's a big secret.

If only I agreed with Putnam. :wink:

Are you figuring that only you and I will ever read this? You don't want to reveal the answer to others who might read the thread, and thus share your wisdom with those folks?