• TheMadFool
    13.8k
    99%khaled

    I guess I don't fall in that category. Thanks though. Your point is worth noting.
  • Banno
    23.1k
    Like "Nothing is really 'true' (except this statement)".Isaac

    The problem I see with this is not the scope so much as the "really".

    Take it out and the statement is clearly wrong: "Nothing is 'true', except this statement.
  • Banno
    23.1k
    @Joshs Ok, that's got me thinking.Banno

    So I thinked.

    I'm not aware of Davidson writing anything explicitly political. Are you? So mention of political ramifications goes outside the purview of his thinking.

    So this should be interesting.

    ...Davidson’s suggestion of locating a shared background of beliefs would fail miserably in dealing with anything but the most superficial level of thought.Joshs

    Well, i won't sell him off so quickly. His interest is in statements of what is the case, and in that regard he limits his discourse, but we can have some fun extending it. One way to proceed while keeping some of his conniving relevant would be to look at direction fo fit, as discussed in Anscombe and Searle and elsewhere. One might characterised Davidson's interest as word-to-world rather than world-to-word.

    But in politics we change the world to fit the word.

    So can the notion of incommensurability he is working with be used in a world-to-word language game?

    I use chess games as a test case much too often. But it fits, and is at hand. Davidson might be understood as pointing out that we agree on the presence of a board and the pieces; on the squares, and perhaps even on the initial arrangement of the pieces on the board. But suppose someone does not recognise castling. The disagreement here is not as to how the world is, but how the world might be changed.

    One might describe the situation as incommensurable; one player wishes to castle; the other does not recognise this as a legitimate move. This is not a disagreement as to what is the case, but as to what is to be done.
  • Isaac
    10.3k
    The problem I see with this is not the scope so much as the "really".

    Take it out and the statement is clearly wrong: "Nothing is 'true', except this statement.
    Banno

    Ah, yes. I really only put that in as an example - to say that I didn't (contrary to a lot of arguments I've read) find anything wrong with the form of the proposition.

    As to it's content...well I agree, my inverted commas are doing a lot of work there. As you may recall (I believe we've discussed this before?) I come from an entirely linguistic approach to truth - 'true' is just a word and it's meaning varies depending on the use it's put to in various language games. So here it's being applied to the state of the world (by which I mean all that is the case) and being used to denote uniquely high confidence, wherein there is only one thing of which we can be absolutely confident, and that is that the world is such that we cannot be absolutely confident about any of its states (except that one). Perhaps "Nothing is certain" might have been a better choice.
  • Banno
    23.1k
    I think scepticism is given far more prominence than it deserves. A cultural extrusion form fablsificationism, itself an overrated notion.
  • Isaac
    10.3k
    I think scepticism is given far more prominence than it deserves. A cultural extrusion form fablsificationism, itself an overrated notion.Banno

    I agree actually. The amount of stuff we can believe to be the case without any problems arising massively outweighs the amount of stuff about which some doubt is useful. As we've encountered before, I think, my job requires I have a model which allows for that level of uncertainty. otherwise our best models of cognition don't work. Day-to-day (and I suppose philosophically too), it might well be useless and better replaced with a model of naive realism with occasional exceptions.
  • TheMadFool
    13.8k
    To be a law of logic, a principle must hold in complete generality
    No principle holds in complete generality
    ____________________
    There are no laws of logic.
    — Gillian Russell

    There are two ways to deal with this argument.

    A logical monist will take the option of rejecting the conclusion, and also the second premise. For them the laws of logic hold with complete generality.

    A logical pluralist will reject the conclusion and the first premise. For them laws of logic apply to discreet languages within logic, not to the whole of language. Classical logic, for example, is that part of language in which propositions have only two values, true or false. Other paraconsistent and paracomplete logics might be applied elsewhere.

    A few counter-examples of logical principles that might be thought to apply everywhere.
    Banno

    Gillian Russell, I'm sure, has many counter-examples for every logical law there is but all of them seem rather contrived. She reminds me of contortionists assuming odd positions - some funny, others painful - just so that fae can fit inside the box of logical nihilism.



    The end result is both amazing - flexibility par excellence - and repugnant - the contortionist looks like fae's been in a horrible accident!

    I don't know whether to congratulate Gillian Russell or offer her my condolences.
  • Joshs
    5.2k



    ...Davidson’s suggestion of locating a shared background of beliefs would fail miserably in dealing with anything but the most superficial level of thought.
    — Joshs

    His interest is in statements of what is the case, and in that regard he limits his discourse, but we can have some fun extending it. One way to proceed while keeping some of his conniving relevant would be to look at direction fo fit, as discussed in Anscombe and Searle and elsewhere. One might characterised Davidson's interest as word-to-world rather than world-to-word.
    Banno

    I haven’t read Anscombe and Searle on this, but the phenomenologically informed enactivist work I follow wouldn’t accept that the one direction ever proceeds independently of the other. Here perceptual processes may be instructive. When I perceive a visual pattern as something , I recognize it. Re-cognition implies two
    dynamics at once. From subject to world, there is expectation derived from previous experience of what I am likely looking at. This expectation is as much intersubjectively shaped as it is subjective. The other side of the coin is the direction from world to anticipating subject. My expectations concerning what I am seeing do not univocally determine the sense for me of the phenomenon. The world contributes a novel factor that makes recognition and representation always a contextually new sense of what is being recognized.


    But in politics we change the world to fit the word.Banno


    Or one could say we interpret the world according to our subjectively and intersubjectively formed expectations. But that is not limited to ‘politics’ unless you want to expand olp rica to include perception and cognition generally.

    Davidson might be understood as pointing out that we agree on the presence of a board and the pieces; on the squares, and perhaps even on the initial arrangement of the pieces on the board. But suppose someone does not recognise castling. The disagreement here is not as to how the world is, but how the world might be changed.Banno

    If we agree on the things you mention, it is likely because we abstract these particulars from our understanding of their role in the playing of the game called chess by based what matters to us about it. The game is a temporal unfolding guided by rules of procedure, an agreed upon way of going on, with an agreed upon goal. When one recognizes the pieces and board as belonging to chess , one is implicitly drawing upon this background knowledge of the unfolding activity called chess. In other words , the details get their relevant sense from their relation to the larger purpose of the game as one interprets it. If I do not recognize castling, that belief forms part of the superordinate scheme that frames my sense of the details. When we begin the game, having tacitly ‘agreed’ on the pieces, board , etc, my background belief about castling is already operative in my recognition of the pieces and other subordinate details. But since this belief retains only an implicit role in our activity until the point where it becomes explcit, when I say ‘hey, you can’t do that!’, it doesn’t initially affect our agreement.

    This is what I mean about agreements at a superficial level masking deeper discrepancies in outlook.

    One might describe the situation as incommensurable; one player wishes to castle; the other does not recognise this as a legitimate move. This is not a disagreement as to what is the case, but as to what is to be done.Banno

    I think the issue comes down to how integrated the pieces of our knowledge are in relation to overarching pragmatic purposes and goals. Davidson seems to allow for a compartmentalization and independence in components of cognitive and language schematics that the enactivists reject.
  • TheMadFool
    13.8k
    @Banno

    Playing along with Prof. Gillian Russell's general idea,

    The logical law of Logical Nihilism: All logical laws have exceptions (counterexamples). This is a logical law because, we can, by expanding the interpretation, demonstrate that all logical laws have counterexamples (exceptions).

    Therefore,

    All logical laws have exceptions (counterexamples) must itself have (an) exception(s).

    Ergo,

    Some logical laws have no counterexamples (exceptions). In other words there are universal logical laws.

    Ergo, logical nihilism is untenable.

    What say you?
  • Banno
    23.1k
    Personally, I support Lyotard’s differend.Joshs
    A copy arrived yesterday.
  • Thunderballs
    204
    All logical laws have exceptions (counterexamples) must itself have (an) exception(s).TheMadFool

    I feel Gödel lurking here. The law that all laws have exceptions can't be applied to itself.
  • Banno
    23.1k
    AN article relevant to this topic in Philosophy Now:

    One Logic, Or Many?
  • Richard B
    365


    Maybe they could re-title the article to “One Logic, Or Many, Or Just talking about something else”
123Next
bold
italic
underline
strike
code
quote
ulist
image
url
mention
reveal
youtube
tweet
Add a Comment

Welcome to The Philosophy Forum!

Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.