I find the very term "language game" rather strange. It apparently means nothing other than "set of restrictions". Still, it bothers me that there are people who choose to call it "language game" instead of something simpler such as "set of rules". There must be some kind of strange process going on behind the scenes. I am not following what is popular, apparently. Certainly not Wittgenstein's train of thought. — Magnus Anderson

Yeah. It is difficult to see what is considered special about this as it seems simply another restatement of pragmatist, or social constructionist, approaches to truth.

But at heart, it seems to be driven by a particular philosophical disappointment. AP had the hope that a mathematical kind of mapping relation would apply to language use. The meaning of our words would not be some free act of interpretation - an inductive connection - but instead a rigid act of designation, or deductive kind of connection.

So ordinary language, which seems sloppy, allusive, often ungrammatical and even paradoxical, would be shown to have a tight mathematical-strength logical structure as the sturdy skeleton supporting its spongy flesh. It should thus be possible to speak with complete and unambiguous precision.

But language does not represent meaning in this kind of simple, dyadic, mapping fashion. Talk about language games and ways of life then become an examination of how we actually use language. And that leads towards a more complex triadic relation which involves a “self” in a sign relation with a “world”. Words are used to achieve purposes. And so to the degree that purposes are purposes we have in common as communities, meanings seem easy to share. Yet also, we all have more personal purposes, and so there grows that which can’t be so easily and closely shared.

All this can seem like a game, a social game, as it makes meaning a matter of subtle negotiations. We are always engaged in interactions where the personal and the communal are in tension. So every sentence spoken and offered up for creative interpretation could be pulled either way.

There are no grounding rules as such. Or none that anyone must stick to in some ultimate way. But there are general constraints at work - a deep structure of developed communal habit, like a well worn forest path - that we can detect and respond to in terms of our own agendas. We can either decide to stick as closely as possible to an inductive sense of the “standard meaning” as we can, or instead play the other game of stretching the interpretation creatively in the direction of our own interest or advantage.

All this free play in the works completely destroys the hope of finding some inner skeleton of rigid and truth preserving connections in speech acts or propositional-sounding language. But on the other hand, language still works marvellously. It has an organic flexibility that is quite unlike the brittleness and mechanicalness of a rigid mapping operation - a computational kind of relation. And the secrets of that organicism are a pretty huge and important philosophical subject to explore.

Sadly, all those who are fixated on Wittgenstein seem caught up in the tragedy that was AP’s great failed dream. They only want to talk about what turned out not to work for them, and so the complete abandonment of any grand projects.

Meanwhile largely unnoticed, there always was the organicism project taking shape in the background. CS Peirce in particular had laid out a triadic semiotic which gets at the true deep structure of what is going on.

So far as hands and chairs and capitals of France go, it doesn't do too bad a job. — Banno

So to the extent that we neither have to question ourselves nor our worlds to any degree, commonsensicalism works fine as an epistemology?

It does appear that your philosophical ambitions are mightily limited.

Yes. That's rather the point. — Banno

Nope. The point was that there are constitutive principles as well as regulative ones. And that your game of always diverting the conversation away from the natural or necessary to the artificial or arbitrary is a transparent gambit.

The argument is, roughly, that in a given language game (and it is all language games), there are certain things that cannot sensibly be doubted. So in geometry the three angles of a triangle add to a straight angle and in Chess the bishop moves only diagonally.

However, language games themselves are subject to change. So in some geometries the angles of a triangle add to more than a straight angle, in others to less; once the pawn could only move one square, but to speed the game this was changed to two squares for its initial move.

In such cases it is very important to understand which game is being played. — Banno

As a point of interest, note how the quietist likes to confuse regulative and constitutive principles.

Arbitrary human-invented rule-based systems like chess are a favourite as they clearly have the least metaphysical-strength necessity. A bishop travels the diagonal just because we agree to say so to get a game going.

And then - in sly conflation - the same is suggested of geometric truths.

If we say the world is flat - make that arbitrary constraint - then the three angles of a triangle sum to a rotation of exactly pi. But if we relax that rule about the world being flat, then - hey presto - we have a new game called non-Euclidean geometry.

And I guess now we are not supposed to stop and ask what further games lie beyond curved metrics? We should continue to treat the situation as being as arbitrary as a game as chess?

It is a transparent quietist gambit.

Quickly - whenever the anti-metaphysicist senses that the removal of constraints is arriving at some fundamental limit - s/he will switch attention to the possibility of instead adding constraints in arbitrary-feeling fashion. As we get too near the bedrock of what might be constitutive, there is a bait and switch so we find ourselves safely talking about the merely regulative again.

Hey, step away from that foundational vagueness! It can really mess with your mind. Step away from the abyss and think instead about all the arbitrary rules we can freely invent to create a metaphysics-free structure for our reality.

We can understand our world in simple terms like the bishop that moves on the diagonal simply because that is a convention of a language game.

One thing that I worth doubting is any theory that claims to provide an ultimate answer. — Banno

What about a theory that claims merely to provide a better answer?

And indeed, a pragamatic theory of epistemology that says there are no ultimates as such, so a theory that would benefit from the self-endorsement of the very attitude it adopts?

Perhaps that is one mistake. Another would be to suppose that there is an ultimate arbiter. The world is complex. — Banno

But you often speak as if you believe the world is the ultimate arbiter. Curious.

Anyway, my pragmatic point is that the best epistemology has this self-limiting nature. Instead of taking the world as some brutely ultimate limit on inquiry, it sees inquiry as itself relative to a self-centred limit of interest. We enquire into the facts so far as they seem to matter to us. Beyond that, there is no particular point of view being served.

It gives epistemology a self-grounding basis while also allowing it to grow or develop as large and complex as it likes. It is a closed and reliable system, yet also open and adaptive at the same time.

And so far, I haven't seen your argument against it. That is probably because you are basically a pragmatist but hate to be identified as such. You have some strong bias towards a linguistic level of semiosis - an interest in "truth" as a language game - and so resist Peirce's more universal model of such games.

As I've said, a problem there is that it tends to conflate ordinary language games with mathematico-logical ones. And that is a very big problem in the social history of AP. It has been a bad turn in philosophical thought.

You want language games to stand for something epistemically generic. Yet you don't actually want to get forced too far from an ordinary language ontology. So your instinct for pragmatism lacks the semiotic machinery to cash itself out. It remains a vague gesture without the internal means to sustain a full theory as such. Therefore it has a considerable self-interest in decrying the very business of "having and arguing for an ultimate theory".

The self-interest at the heart of philosophical quietism is pretty transparent. ;)

There's something odd about thinking that one epistemological approach, perhaps one that looks good for science, will work in geometry; and organisational management; and ethics. — Banno

Odd? Or empirical evidence that it qualifies as being better?

The most radical implication of the new affective turn is that what has been considered unique to conscious subjects, the feeling of what it is like to be, the qualatiatice experience e of the world, is implied in all of what we call physical processes, not as one thing added on, but intrinsic to them. This is because in creating the abstractions that are so useful in the physical sciences, we don't recognize that qualitative transformation is intrinsic to, implied by all existents. — Joshs

... swinging the pendulum in the other direction to simply say that all all physical processes have an experience-of-what-it-is-like is to make the same mistake from the opposite side of things... — StreetlightX

The "affective turn" is hardly revolutionary in the history of psychology and neurology. But yes, the mainstream ontology of our culture is mechanistic, and so an organic conception of things continues to struggle to break through.

At the heart of the embodied/affective approach is the recognition that selfhood is itself a functional construct. It is a necessary part of the business of constructing "the world". We have to see the world from a point of view. So that is why there is "something it feels like what it is to be like". The brain is not merely modelling the world, it is modelling a self in its world. It is modelling a self for which a world exists - and exists in contrast to its desires, expectations, and possibilities.

So it is an "easy problem", and not a hard one, to see why consciousness is imbued with a subjective sense of self. That is a functional information processing necessity. The modelling must include the weaving of the "persona" for whom the world is a point of view. Talk of affect is simply talk about a functional sense of self that is buried deep in the neurobiological design of the brain's evolved archictecture.

As SX correctly says, there is no warrant from there to turn around and treat qualia as material properties - the panpsychic tendency.

Instead, what it should rightfully do is call into question our belief that we know either the world, or this "self", in any direct and unmediated fashion.

We have - for good functional reasons - constructed a model of reality that speaks dualistically to a concrete and objective physical world and an immaterial and subjective world-experiencing mind. And recognising that is the basic trick going on, it should call into question our deeply held convictions about both.

So rather than simply conflating the two - arguing that mind must pervade all matter ... as if we actually know truly what either of those two things are - we need to step back to a further level of ontology that deals with the modelling relation itself.

Instead of pan-psychism, that would be pan-semiosis. If we want to extend the neurocognitive revolution to physics in general, it would be the very thing of the subjective vs objective dichotomy that we would want to deconstruct in terms of sign relations.

And physics has been doing just that anyway with its own information theoretic turn. The Cosmos is self-organising not because it is perfused by vague feeling but because it is structured by a dissipative purpose coupled to informational limits.

Belief and doubt are complementary. You can't have one without the other as each is the ground of the other, and it is only together that you have any epistemology at all.

The majority of the posts appear aimed at arguing for either one or the other as somehow foundational, indubitable, primary, or whatever. The usual monistic response when faced with a dialectical choice.

But they are simply the opposing limits of the process of inquiry. And what matters is the way that they are balanced against each other.

A systems science or organicist understanding of balance says a dichotomy is a symmetry breaking, and a metaphysically complete symmetry-breaking is an asymmetry. An asymmetry, in turn, is a hierarchical organisation - a breaking that is local~global in its organisation.

So doubt and belief must be balanced in this fashion. Belief is the global or backdrop scale or epistemology - the broad and general ground of things not in doubt. While doubt is the local and particular scale - the various individual things which could be considered as failing to fit this background in some significant fashion.

A well-organised mind would have this well-developed hierarchical arrangement. There would be a robust backdrop of habitual or ingrained belief. And against that, doubts would arise in highly focused and meaningful fashion. Doubt could not be a general activity. But it would be a useful localised activity.

And again, belief and doubt would be just ideal limits, never absolute. A well-organised mind would simply approach those ideal limits by the end of its process of inquiry.

And also, a further important pragmatic principle is that this "truth seeking" behaviour has to have a purpose if it is indeed going to be optimised by a complementary principle of unconcern.

Again, a duality or dichotomy.

To have knowledge that is meaningful - that speaks to some purpose - means that the knower also has to be able to discard noise. The mind has to be able to filter out all the possible facts, doubts, uncertainties or unknowns that are the differences which make no difference ... to "it".

So meaningful knowledge is self-centred. The autonomous self arises - in contrast to the world in which it exists - to the degree it can effectively ignore that world in pursuit of its wishes.

It is fundamental to a pragmatic epistemology - the one that recognises selfhood to be a further epistemic constraint on knowledge - that this self gets to determine where to draw its own boundary of indifference. It is not a bug but the feature that this self can be indifferent to localised doubting - whether that is seemingly justified or unjustified.

The mistake is to think that the world is the ultimate arbiter. Out there, the actual truth of the matter lies.

That may be so, but first there has to be a genuine reason to care. Doubt only comes into play if a difference would make a difference. To some purpose. And hence the "self" that such intentionality would represent.

For example, if one claims to be lazy and stupid, but is actual hard-working and highly intelligent by that culture's general standards, then does one lie to oneself or is it an internal conflict with what actually constructs the definition of lazy and stupid? — Lone Wolf

It helps to see that this linguistic self is a social construction. And so the words society creates as descriptors are those that it would have us apply in our self regulatory behaviour on its behalf. These are the social judgements by which we are meant to judge ourselves, and in so doing, create that very self.

Society has some theory about what individuals ideally ought to be. And we learn the habit of constantly measuring all our behaviour against that. You are describing that self judgement here.

More than that, you are highlighting the pretty harsh and open ended standards that are characteristic of a modern developed nation state of mind. It is never good enough for a self actualising individual to be merely average. One must be transcendent. :)

which, being a pragmatist, doesn't bother him. — andrewk

But Hume represents the nominalist turn of thought. He was not a pragmatist in the sense of arguing for the reality of the general or universal. He was an atomist in regards to empirical sense data. So his epistemology reflects a particular brand of metaphysics.

...logic apparently was "inescapable" because reality is logical...Usually this is described logic being part of the "fabric" of reality (whatever that means). — MindForged

Isn't this confusing logic and causality, strictly speaking? Of course, the two are related.

We think of reality as being fundamentally reasonable or intelligible because there are certain emergent structural truths that appear to have the force of rational necessity.

This is how we reacted to the early discoveries of maths. Behind the accidents of the material world there was another world of inevitable formal necessities. Mathematical forms you could not escape as an ideal limit on being.

Eventually this did lead to mathematical logic - the "geometry" of computational, permutational or deductive form. And those syntactic shapes appear to be reflected in the material operations of the actual world. They seem to encode something about natural causality.

So there is a relation between logic and causality. But it remains a weakly expressed one. More work would need to be done to show if logic in fact describes natural necessity.

This is a live debate. Some folk simply presume Turing Universal Computation proves the physical world to be computable. One kind of mathematical model speaks to the true causal structure of existence.

But anyway, my point is that it is the causal structure of the material world that is the target here. And the mathematics of logic seem our best models of that. So it is easy to make the step of claiming reality is actually a product of logical necessity.

There certainly seems something in that line of thought. But also a lot of potential pitfalls to address.

But then I suppose this gets us back to the issue with there being all sorts of different algebraic logics (Boolean algebra, Heytin algebra, etc.), and we even know that some Non-Classical Logics can be constructed purely within their own meta-theory (e.g. Paraconsistent semantics). — MindForged

Yeah. And all these also presume some shared metaphysics. They presume an atomism about reality. So they really only can address material and efficient cause. They struggle to address formal and final cause.

So if you believe Aristotle - reality is a system involving all four causes - then you can see why mainstream logics, in being atomistic rather than holistic, might struggle to give a full account of the causal structure of reality. You can see the major problem that arises.

I'd mention ontic structural realism here. It leverages the maths of permutation symmetry and symmetry-breaking. Fundamental physics has show how that is the maths that best describes the logic/causality of the Big Bang universe.

So there is a connection to be made for sure. Our theories of mathematical necessity would seem to model the fundamental structure of existence in a way that makes its causal organisation seem completely reasonable or intelligible. We are getting there - with traditional logics perhaps having far less to do with the holistic picture than folk were expecting.

Or, taking Peirce's alternative, if we adopt the premise that "nature takes habits", we can deduce that it is most likely that the Sun will rise tomorrow, unless some greater unforeseen habit of nature intervenes. — Janus

This is important as Peirce is giving an actual reason for why induction is something that strengthens with time. A constraints-based view of the world says induction should become ever more reliable because a reasonable habit will keep growing stronger in being reinforced by its own success.

That is how science works. Our conviction strengthens as a belief survives challenge to its applicability.

And that is how the solar system works. In its early days, the sun came up everyday on the earth in a more unreliable manner. It took a while for a ball of debris to even accumulate into a planet. The early solar system was fraught with broken up junk that could have smashed into and derailed the earth, ending any nascent habit of a daily dawning of the sun.

But over time, the solar system got cleared up of all the junk, all the chaos, and settled down into a long-term groove. The inductive grounds of a belief became ever firmer.

So while there is nothing absolute to warrant that the past predicts the future, a constraints-based view of causality makes it deductively reasonable that regularity develops over time. Habits want to emerge. Order predicts not just order, but increasing order. Constraints develop a weight that make it increasingly hard for individual accidents to derail.

So the principle of induction is - as Peirce put it - about the taking of habits.

The Humean view arises from imagining a reality without real interactions. It is a Newtonian paradigm where everything reduces to local accidents - random collisions. Of course, in a world imagined like that, you would expect there to be no gathering history, no developing state of generalised coherence. If everything is imagined as fundamentally random and memory-less, then of course the deductive consequence - Hume's argument - is that even the laws of nature might change for no reason at any time.

But once you have a metaphysics which can take account of interactions - see how that requires a generalised coherence to emerge just due to "randomness" - then you will deduce something quite different about nature. You will have a different model-theoretic view to test by observation.

So really Hume is advancing a metaphysics-based hypothesis - and one that is believed due to Newtonian science. That is what gives it any credence it might have.

However, the "shock" is that this Newtonian causality just isn't what we observe in nature - on the whole. Instead we see a world where interactions result in a generalised state of coherence. Constraints or habits inevitably - and logically! (we can do the maths of self-organisation!) - must emerge to bring predictable and increasing order to their "worlds".

Hume had the right argument for the wrong metaphysics. And physics has since moved on as well.

Gosh it's like someome here has never read Hume before. — StreetlightX

Ah. Hear the plaintiff squeak of someone who has never stopped to truly consider what Humean doubt is about. Such a big difference between reading about something and thinking about something.

You cannot genuinely (coherently and consistently) doubt that there any 'thises' because to do so would undermine the coherence of all and any discourse. — Janus

Yep. It is on the whole that it rings true. We believe in the world as a generality.

First of all, I was talking about the relationship between certainty, certitude, doubt, and mistake. I don't see how "constraints" is relevant — Metaphysician Undercover

Belief is a constraint on doubt. Doubts are always possible to manufacture on some grounds. So belief simply aims to constrain doubt to a reasonable degree.

You are taking some absolutist position. The only position that works is a relativist one.

Secondly, to say that a free choice decision by a human being is limited to a difference which doesn't make a difference, is clearly wrong, because then we wouldn't have to think about any of our decisions, because they wouldn't make a significant difference. — Metaphysician Undercover

I was talking about the freedoms of the world, not human freewill.

So a cat may have a chewed ear and yet still function as a cat. The chewed ear is a difference that doesn't make a difference.

I then enter that cat in the cat show. Now the chewed ear is a difference that makes a difference.

So as you have previously argued, everything in the world is individual. Even two identical things are located at individual points of spacetime. But categorical beliefs are about generalities - what things have in common that make them "the same". And so such beliefs have to also know how much actual difference can be ignored as being differences that are insignificant or unsurprising.

When is a mistake a mistake? When it is a significant difference to what was predicted.

What you say doesn't make sense. You are claiming that the possibility of mistake is not grounds for questioning a belief. — Metaphysician Undercover

You misunderstand the nature of constraints. The free actions of the world are only limited to some threshold variety of differences that don’t make a difference. So it is the probabilistic view built into science. No two events are the same. But the question is whether they are similar enough? Is the variety essentially random rather than significant, that is due to some further undiagnosed cause?

So our beliefs are generalities that predict an acceptable range of outcomes. A mistake would be when instead we find evidence of some further causal mechanism that says something more that normal levels of chance are at play and we need a generalisation that makes better predictions.

You’re still talking engineering. — Wayfarer

Always better than mystical bollocks.

So your claim is now about past vs future tense and not past vs present tense. Do you blame me for feeling confused. Especially when you just won’t correct what you said.

But again, if we are now in the future that acceptance of induction predicted, then that is inductive confirmation of a principle. We decided to use the principle and now we can see how well it has worked. So it would be matchingly unreasonable to now drop the principle. It’s converse lacks any empirical support and only has empirical falsification.

So sure, induction says we can’t know that the past predicts the future. But when we speak to the principle itself, it has got a track record that makes that a reasonable bet.

We act according to our nature, which is to assume the principle of induction, without wasting time futilely seeking a warrant for the assumption. — andrewk

It’s hardly futile if we have a history of evidence. Again, the issue is not whether things are certain but whether there are good reasons to continue to hold a principle. And the evidence weighs heavily here for the principle and not its contrary, or even a null hypothesis.

You said the difference in tense between past and present was crucial - between worked and works.

So what was that about?

Well prove me wrong by actually making an argument and not merely an assertion.

If the difference in tense is crucial, demonstrate what practical difference it could make.

Sigh. The history of what worked up to a nanosecond ago then?

Crucial difference my arse. Pointless pedantry more like.

Experience. A history of what works. Reason seems reasonable as unreason has likewise proved itself as such.

All this talk about truth, knowledge, certainty, belief, doubt. The critical issue seems to be identifying the mind as the part that has some understanding that can’t be wrong. The mind appears to be the part that stands outside a world of facts or events. It has a timeless and displaced appreciation of what is actual in terms of spatiotemporal occurrences.

So we have Descartes. The mind bit of the equation got boiled down to some cognitivising soul. Everything about perception could be doubted. But there was the irreducible fact of the thinker thinking the thoughts, having at least the ideas.

Then Kant came out with a more cognitively elaborate story. The soul constructs a representation that corresponds, more or less, to the world. There was no absolute access to the facts of reality. Indeed, the issue seemed to be that in being mere representation, the goal of actually knowing reality was forever doomed to failure.

Descartes left the mind radically disconnected by doubt. Kant left it radically disconnected by the falsity of a representation. Then of course pragmatism turned things around by creating a more general theory of the mind in terms of a set of developed habits in fruitful interaction with the instabilities or contingencies of the world.

The world is no longer itself viewed as some stable realm of fixed objects or certain facts. It is not even there - present - to be “re-presented”. It is a dynamic flux, a sea of possibility, that can become organised by the imposition of constraints.

So the material world itself is re-imagined as lacking in counterfactual definiteness. It is at base vague or indeterminate. It requires the mind-like thing of developed functional habits to give it definite shape and direction.

This is a metaphysics. It is a new view of how reality is. It is a process philosophy, a self-organising and probabilistic view of nature. And a view conceived before quantum physics and dissipative structure theory arrived to show how true it was.

Anyway. A process ontology justifies a process epistemology. And so the mind’s job becomes not merely to know the world, to be certain of its facts. The mind is now that part of the world that is the source of its stability or regularity. The mind is the part that speaks to its formal and final cause. The mind’s role is not just to sit back in distant fashion and represent. It exists to use that displacement in order to act in a functional fashion. It exists to bring organisation to a world founded in material contingency.

Now the difficulty here is that the mind of which we speak is no longer the consciousness of a human soul. That is an image of mind that comes from a materialist ontology. It is the passive observer without an active role in the creation of “the facts”.

The pragmatist mind is instead the generalisation of reality’s own ontic need for an organisational potential that follows from spatiotemporal displacement - the epistemic cut. So the pragmatist mind is the more general thing of the interpretant, the habits; the information that provides the constraints, that provide the functional structure or limitations on material instability.

We can see the impact this re-conception has on epistemology. The idea of a re-presenting of a fixed world of facts to a perceiving mind just goes right out the window. A notion of truth, belief, knowledge, or whatever, in those terms, is simply redundant.

We are now talking about an interactive modelling relation. And this is an ontic-strength story. It is not merely about how a human mind understands the facts of the world. It is a pan-semiotic story of how a world is even created. Reality itself is some version of this process of instability become regulated by some system of displaced intentionality. Or as Pattee put it, rate independent information acting as the constraint on rate dependent dynamics.

So now this is why Wittgenstein and others would feel so convinced that our certainty, our truths, are expressed in our physical interactions with the world. What counts as true is a demonstration that we can regulate the instability of our environments. If asked, we know how to make the acts of measurement to produce the evidence. The evidence which is now a sign - the timeless information - speaking to our power over a temporal or dynamically unstable material world.

So epistemology is fundamentally entwined with our ontology, our view of nature. And pragmatism is not merely just another epistemology. It is a fundamental revision of ontology. It is the switch from a belief in a world that just statically exists as some mind-independent state of affairs, or collection of facts, or set of atomistic propositions, and the adoption of a process or systems metaphysics where material being is fundamentally contingent or unstable, and thus is in need of a regulating guiding hand.

Moore might have been right to believe that here is one of his hands, now here is the other. But what is being challenged by pragmatism is the whole idea that there is a world that can be known without our having something crucial to do with its making.

And this would be a mystical state of affairs unless we can revise our foundational notions about reality all the way down to a pansemiotic quantum level.

We don’t want to be left with a definition of mind that is still essentially dualistic and spiritual. We want one that cashes out in more psychological, then biological and eventually physical notions, such as habits, limits, information, laws and constraints.

Again, the converse is true. We can see from a history that believing the contrary of the principle of induction would have been as misleading as possible. So to adopt the contrary in regards to the future would be as unreasonable as possible. Hence it is only reasonable to continue to assume the principle.

We are talking about a meta-argument, remember. This is not about some particular belief. This is about the general method of belief. We are no longer talking about just events in the world. We are talking about a habit of mind.

I am not sure how to assess this, since you didn't answer any of my questions — PossibleAaran

LOL.

So, is it true that Paris is the capital of France? — Banno

Mind independently true?

I would assume a constant in the action of water currents upon small particules in relation to geographical features? — Akanthinos

But you mentioned a causal process that generally produces entities. Being particulate doesn’t seem a cause of a beach as such. The generality of currents as a process do.

t's because those processes leads to mass production of similar entities that we are warranted in speaking of category and kinds, not because the world is structured categorically — Akanthinos

So if a general process produces particular entities, then how does this structural fact about nature not justify a categorical representation of the situation in logic? Why would that picture fail?

just like we have no good reason to think it won't reverse — andrewk

But we do. We have inductive evidence that inductive principles have prevailed to date. This view has the weight of historic evidence. It’s abductive guess remains unfalsified. And the opposite guess has an equivalent lengthy history of not being true,

I’m confused. You say generality and particularity are points of view. I agree.

Then you make some further suggestion about individual worldly processes that produce entities en masse.

Apart from coke bottles and model T fords, did you have some natural process in mind here.

What kind of process produces beaches for instance? There are loads of those everywhere.

Do grains of sands run about and gang together at dead of night to build the beach you visit? Or were you thinking of something general like erosion and currents as the processes responsible?

We can know that it worked and so it’s opposite didn’t work.

Inductively, we thus have no good reason to think that the story would reverse itself in the future.

It still might. But we would have no good reason to think it would.

I am aware it is something like that — Banno

Just something?

The trouble is, even after the extensive process proposed, the community might be wrong. — Banno

In what sense is that “trouble”?

Especially given that in the limit, they would have no reason to care? If it makes no odds, it makes no odds.

So you seem to think that a capital called Paris or a language named English somehow creates a dreadful epistemic issue for pragmatism - bad enough that you are now officially a former pragmatist.

But you won’t now explain how proper names are truths of reality and hence something that pragmatism might expect to arrive at as the limit of rational inquiry into the facts of the world.

Well I’m sure you believe you have an argument in there somewhere. Now if only we could flush it out.

No, you gave me a clue, not an answer. — Banno

As I said, in multiple posts I’ve given the answer - truth is the limit of rational inquiry.

So where is the problem with that position exactly?

You got a definition, so what is your point?

I laughed so hard.

There is no such thing as interpretation without something which is doing the interpreting. — Metaphysician Undercover

Sounds legit.

So I gave you your answer on definitions. How does this next deflection relate?

But then why choose that axiom? We could try to say because it has worked well in the past, but that would be circular, as Hume pointed out. — andrewk

Not really. We would choose it because it works. It become safe to think the past predicts the future once you are in that future.

So we know what works vs what doesn’t work. It’s a historical fact. There is inductive confirmation of any abductive leap we might have made.

How do you think I use them?

If you are going to pretend it is a mystery, you will have to tell me in what sense. It’s not as if I haven’t repeated myself on the subject a million times now. So this is simply further evasion.

A clue. In multiple posts I’ve said that truth is the limit of rational inquiry. So it is belief exhausted in that regard for all practical purposes. And the limit is thus defined by the principle of indifference. We have no good reason to worry about the possible remaining differences or exceptions.

So on to your next deflection I guess. Anything to avoid having to make some actual counter argument of any kind.

Agency ought to be attributed to those who use words and language, not to the words and language themselves. — Metaphysician Undercover

According to dualism.

Language does not create speakers, speakers create language — Metaphysician Undercover

The causality is mutual according to my systems account.

No, words cannot function as constraints, the interpreter is free to interpret words in any way one desires, at the risk of misunderstanding what was meant. — Metaphysician Undercover

If interpretation is all there really is - there is no dualistic interpreter that is the soul exerting it’s further point of view - then my account describes the situation.

If you believe in souls, then you insist on a dualistic ontology.

How are you defining those terms exactly?

But if you like, you could explain the belief-truth thing, and explain to people how we do not know how high Mount Everest is. — Banno

Well I was quite happy to talk about the example you raised in this post - the social construction of Uluru as sacred. And that is a good example. There is the phenomenon of people returning sorry stones and a system of fines. Even souveniring sand is verbotten. Taking away the dust on your clothes could be problematic.

So there we had a fair test of truth theories. One that spans the mental and material realms pretty evenly in its truth claims.

You saw where that example of yours had to go and so now want to revert to what feels like safer ground - the height of Mt Everest. You want to argue from an example in which the presumptions are suppressed as a matter of ordinary everyday education. You would be laughed out of class for not assenting to some factual reply from a suitable expert in terms of some number of metres.

Your problem Banno is your rhetorical manoeuvres are transparent. And you simply walk away as fast as your argument starts to burn.

IN any case, when I have attempted any sort of analysis of your claims, you avoid them. — Banno

LOL. Sometimes you must even amaze yourself at your bare faced cheek.

A string of your one-liners have been knocked on their arse just as fast. Every attempt to deflect has failed. Nothing has been avoided, just sent over the boundary for six.

I accepted pragmatism for quite a few years, — Banno

LOL. Some half-arsed AP notion of it?