I don't know whether every law is computable, I've just seen the claim that it is.

Real in philosophical context means ontological, not whether the term applies in some language game.

Does that make it real?

That's what the ladies have to wear when I'm in charge. — Terrapin Station

Better invisible pink than nothing at all. We have to keep Augustino's sensibilities in mind.

I see, so Satan helped create the best possible world. Always wondered why God let that snake into the garden. Now we know. It was necessary to maximize goodness.

We categorically deny that you were ever a member of the Church of the Invisible Pink Unicorn. It's all lies! Lies and falsehoods! And innuendoes! Icky ones, with little thingies growing on them. — Srap Tasmaner

My new church will categorically deny that categorical is necessary for existence. That is the great lie the the followers of the false IPU (which OP is clearly one) has propagated upon humanity.

You've left me no choice but to leak this to the BBC, The New Trump Times, and The Daily Prophet (just in case).

I shall write a book, alright. Detailing the abuses and lies of the original IPU church, and how it lost it's way. I will redeem myself by starting a new church. The IPU was never the IPU, but rather the new IPU.

Weird how some forums don't show edited information. I must have changed it as you replied.

infidel — Srap Tasmaner

I am eternally damned! But I may have just coined an alternative IPU into existence. Maybe it will save me.

Autocategorical.

agree with the OP. Science is essentially an umbrella marketing term for fundraising and shielding against criticism. There are no standards, there are no methods. Just some claims that are rarely challenged since the industry has so thoroughly insulated itself both in academia and commercial industry. Once in a while though there are some articles that challenge the scientific method myth, that are accepted in some journal, which are quickly shot down by the industries' hired censors self-named skeptics. — Rich

What sort of claims? Climate change, evolution, radiocarbon dating, QM, DNA, cell theory, the periodic table, the heliocentric model?

What you stated there is on the level of creationism or holocaust denial.

I read this science fiction story with a villain that sort of reminds me of you. This scientist had invented a time machine. He had a drinking buddy who would go on right wing rants. The kind of person you roll your eyes at but figure they are just venting their frustrations at life.

Well, the scientist had lost his wife or something, and decided that he had no more reason to stick around, so he takes off and lands a couple thousand years in the future. The human race has changed quite a bit, and so has society. I don't think you would approve. Everyone is a genderless genetic clone with the same status, and there are no authorities. Nobody needs to work. Nobody tells anyone else to do anything. It's all voluntary.

Anyway, our hero happens across his bar friend who had gotten a hold of his plans back in the past and hand an engineer to make another time machine. I guess the machine was geared to go the same amount into the future. So our right wing villain was none too happy with how things turned out, and thus set about trying to teach inequality and social hierarchies to the future humans, while creating a terrorist plot to bring the whole society down, in order to restart things with hard work and inequality. Of course the villain would get to be king of the new society.

To be honest though, I wasn't much of a fan of that future either (I don't want everyone to be the same), although I disagreed with the villain of the story.

There will be, for instance, snakes. — Bitter Crank

I'm guessing that human beings have caused far more suffering from snakes than vice versa. And when it comes to suffering, snakes never cross my mind amidst being stretched on the rack, burned alive, waiting on traffic lights, and having to socialize on occasion.

For some people, snakes are interesting. I can't say that a snake has ever caused me suffering.

The Invisible Pink Uniform categorically exists, and will judge all doubters most severely in the afterlife.

And 2:17 in the marathon is almost inhumanely fast. How many people out of 7+ billion could realistically run that fast (with any amount of training) over 26.2 miles?

My point is that a woman's top time today would have won a big margin against top male runners back in the day, look at the time difference. — Cavacava

True, which isn't as true for shorter distances, which lends support to there being less of a gap over longer distances.

Pretty much all athletic performances have improved since the 50s across genders.

It would never make biological sense to make the females more risk taking, regardless of any gaps in competence. — Wosret

Makes sense. I'm only arguing that there is a physical difference that can often be seen in athletic events. This isn't a value judgement, just that it exists. It's not universal, and it varies among individuals, obviously.

I don't think men or women are physically that much different, but the culture of physical training has changed them dramatically. — Cavacava

As opposed to hominid evolution over the past 2 million years? I don't see what the athletic training would have been for most males prior to the late 19th century. Would it have been military? Or perhaps physical labor?

Anyway, tennis is relatively recent. I don't believe Serena or her sister Venus were lacking in opportunity to get on a tennis court growing up.

When I grew up, females had the same opportunity to participate in athletics as the males did, and we often played sports together on the playground. There was still an athletic gap between males and females.

nd then wished to explain why men excel in some areas, and women in others. — Wosret

Fair enough. And Serena is still better than 99.99...% of human beings who have ever picked up a tennis racket, male or female.

You may be right about the general, and I don't know about marathon swimming. Perhaps women have an advantage there.

The context was McEnroe's statement, and Serena is elite.

We can compare the top 700 male marathon runner times to female.

Want to make a bet on it?

Did you just vaguely look up "marathon records" or something? Those numbers don't say much, and are not detailed research. — Wosret

They're not, but the context is elite male/female athletes, not an average across all marathon participants, and I have run and watched enough track & field to know the gap between males and females.

Do you think it completely irrelevant that the gap between men's mile record and female's is close to the same for the marathon per mile? Do you think that elite male milers don't get within a few seconds of that mile record? Because they do. It's not a total statistical outlier.

It isn't in fact true. In marathon conditions, the gap closes. Women tend to weigh less, so that things that require less explosive force, and more continuous effort, the more body weight becomes more and more disadvantageous. — Wosret

The men's marathon record is 2:02:57. The women's records is 2:17:01.

I used to run track and cross country. I was decent for a male, but would have been world class for a female. Maybe the gap closes over long distance for your average runner, but probably not as much for the elites (a 14 minute gap or around 30 seconds per mile) seems about right, and the context of this conversation is elite tennis players.

If you compare the mile record in men (3:43) to women (4:12), which is about 30 seconds, then you have the same gap, at least for world record holders.

but rather concepts is something the we shape and create, and they cannot be forced on us from 'outside' (whether by experience or innate nature), because otherwise they would cease to be concepts in the logical sense and will be nothing more then behavioral instincts. — Fafner

So it's a sociological explanation of meaning.

Is it conceivable that someone could be born (as a result of a mutation or whatever) with the WRONG sorts of concepts? Do we have a method to check this? — Fafner

Evolution would weed out concepts too out of sync with the environment. But it's probably more of an ability to form and build upon fundamental concepts, such as space, time, other minds, etc, which allows for a great deal of flexibility.

Of course the concept of 'length' is something the we have created. It really doesn't make sense to 'perceive' a length in an object as an empirical discovery, and for a simple reason: you must already have the concept of length in order to perceive something as having a length, otherwise how could you know that what you are perceiving is 'length' and not some other property? — Fafner

I would argues this is innate, not something language communities create. Some ability for making sense of perception must exist for language to employ concepts. And meaning would in part be built out of that.

That's why I reference Kant earlier, and how he showed that certain categories of thought were necessary to make sense out of the noise of sense impressions. Empiricism can't get going without that.

For comparison, I think the war over the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis and color words is still raging. See this wikipedia article. The nutshell would be something like this: many languages do not have separate words for what we call "blue" and "green" (just as an example); can native speakers of those languages distinguish blue from green? Common sense says so, and I tend to agree, but the research goes on. — Srap Tasmaner

Well, to make things more complicated, the use of language probably shapes the brain of those language speakers.

So if Whorf-Sapir is correct, then telling blue from green would be an ability developed by having words that pick out the difference. There was a Radio Lab episode on color making that very argument, and then one on Shakespear coining new terms as an example of one Researcher's claims that language connects different parts of the brain.

I guess that's a point in favor of language is use, but with a neural underpinning.

Of course it has a physical length, but this claim has to be distinguished from saying what exactly its length is in some unites of measurement. — Fafner

Right. So tying it back into what I've been trying to argue, the concept of length is not something created as part of a language game. It's something we cognate (perceive?) about objects. How we make use of length to measure things is part of language games.

Put it this way. The stick has a property of being extended in space by so much, such that when we settle on a standard of measurement, it will be so many units in that measurement system.

The spatial extension of the stick (along a certain dimension) determines its length. How we measure it is a separate matter.

↪Marchesk You have to keep in mind we're taking about a time when 1 meter was defined as the length of this stick. — Srap Tasmaner

I get that 1 meter is assigned to the length of a particular stick to create a standard. I disagree that the standard stick has no length. It has a physical length. It's extended in space.

he can't say, it's 1 meter by definition, which he can't because he says it has no length. — Srap Tasmaner

But it's simply not true that the 1 meter stick has no length. It most certainly has a physical length, and can be measured by all sorts of means, including non-arbitrary ones found in nature.

That we decided it was a unit of 1 meter is arbitrary. That it is a definite length (so many hydrogen atoms or Plank lengths) is not arbitrary at all.

I have not read Carnap. Summary of his view on this topic?

My understanding is that Witt noticed that rule-following can't account for the entirety of communication because there has to be some source of normativity outside the system of rules. He looked to human interaction to find that source. You're saying we should look inward to find it. — Mongrel

Both, of course. Human interaction accounts for how we assign meaning. Cognition accounts for how we have concepts at all, and why human language differs from animal signalling.

Well, it's more complicated than that, because human interaction can result in combining concepts and coming up with new metaphors and relations and what not. So yeah, he's right about that.

But the reason humans can do that is cognitive, not behavioral or social. And for humans to do that, there has to be a conceptual apparatus. So along the lines of what Chomsky argued.

We make the stick a standard by comparing stuff to it. See? He's talking about meaning and existence simultaneously. — Mongrel

Good point. But the meaning of length itself does not come from using an arbitrary standard, like a stick, or someone's foot. Length is innate to us, like time and space. We don't create the meaning for those things.

My argument is that meaning and language games are built up from fundamental categories of thought that have to exist, or there is no language. Sure, a stick acquires the meaning of standard length by it's use, but length itself does not.

Therefore, meaning can't ONLY be use.

Can't you measure the standard meter by other means? Say the time it takes light to traverse that distance, and then compare that to the time it takes light to go other distances? The speed of light isn't something we made up, so it could serve as an absolute standard, like atomic clocks can be an absolute standard of measuring time.

Here, though, you're surely at a crux where Fafner is right: you are conjuring up an imaginary Wittgenstein in order to make a point of your own. 'Philosophical Investigations' is a complex book and nowhere in it do I remember these 'arguments' that you mention. One thing I'm confident he's saying is that it's difficult to have a clear overview of language, since we only have language to do it with. What you are calling 'meaning' will involve comparing one word with another, or with a group of other words, and asserting that some greater clarity results. — mcdoodle

This is very strange, because you have other posters in this thread, and other threads, like unenlightened, Michael and Banno arguing along the lines that Witty did in fact mean that. Now possibly I have misunderstood their arguments. But it comes up regularly.

The conveyance of thought is its primary use and its communicative use is secondary — Cavacava

Agreed. Good point about talking to ourselves. Language is use is something defended by the Wittgenstein followers, although the interpretation may depend on the poster in question. I take it to mean behavior, given the talk of beatles in boxes and the impossibility of private language.

Not once in our exchange have you even used the word behaviour, — StreetlightX

So you weren't ready the rest of the thread? I mentioned behavior many times. Did you miss all the posts on Witty by me and others?

OK, and what does that have to do with meaning-as-use? — StreetlightX

Meaning as use has it's root in behavior, not cognitive science. I thought I made that clear?

Now if all Witty was arguing is that we assign meaning by how we use words in certain contexts, then no problem. But if he's saying that meaning IS behavior, then that's a problem.