Agreeing on a use for our terms is the very stuff of philosophy.

Beginning with definitions is expecting to start at the finish. — Banno

In other words, play the same language-game as the other player/s.

Agreeing on a use for our terms is the very stuff of philosophy.

Beginning with definitions is expecting to start at the finish. — Banno

Typical Banno bologna. He transports into a discussion, tosses his usual smarty pants bullshit, then transports out without contributing anything substantive.

In other words, play the same language-game as the other player/s. — 180 Proof

Or if you choose to play a different game, do it explicitly.

Cheers.

Or if you choose to play a different game, do it explicitly. — Banno

:up:

Using as few words as possible is just as important as using the right words. Your argument could have been a lot clearer, less ambiguous, if you'd made the post a lot shorter. — T Clark

Philosophers love using words, the arrows in their quivers. And some, perhaps most, enjoy reading lengthy treatises. As an olde math person I admire brevity and conciseness, so, like T. Clark, I failed to make it through the OP, which, nevertheless, seems very well-written.

The premises of many philosophical efforts frequently seem vague, to the point where, for example, the word "being" triggers my full retreat. "Metaphysics" also is confusing, and I am curious what Stanford's metaphysical laboratory can produce as enlightenment. Mostly it's just me.

I admire brevity and conciseness — jgill

Brevity is the soul of wit!

math person — jgill

In English: The sum of two thousand six hundred fifty-seven and two million nine hundred sixty-eight thousand two hundred eighteen is two million nine hundred seventy thousand eight hundred seventy-five.

Character count: 190

In math speak: $2,657 + 2,968,218 = 2,970,875$

Character count: 25

Beginning with definitions is expecting to start at the finish. — Banno

Interesting thing about definitions: in order to know if you have the correct definition, you need to already understand the thing you are defining.

Yeah but there's just something almost ethereal, mystical even about a sentence or piece of literature that you can ascertain completely different yet equally profound meanings from by simply reading them once more.

Regrettably I'm unable to come up with one after a few seconds but when these aren't unintentional, they're the cream of the crop as far as literature goes in my view. Unintentional ones often become the butt of jokes (ie. "Disneyland Left" joke) or even the subject of legends (ie. "Pardon Impossible To be sent to Siberia"). Not just simple metaphors or profane and juvenile double entendres or 'squeezing blood from a stone' as it were, rather true literary craftsmanship dripping with wisdom. It's becoming rarer and rarer these days. For example, I've yet to think of or even recall one.. though it may just be the lateness of the hour.

The premises of many philosophical efforts frequently seem vague, to the point where, for example, the word "being" triggers my full retreat. "Metaphysics" also is confusing, and I am curious what Stanford's metaphysical laboratory can produce as enlightenment. — jgill

Funny - "metaphysics" and "being" are two of my favorite philosophical words. Because they both tend to mean different things to different people, I generally give a brief summary of what they mean to me when I'm discussing them in a post.

Yeah but there's just something almost ethereal, mystical even about a sentence or piece of literature that you can ascertain completely different yet equally profound meanings from by simply reading them once more. — Outlander

Perhaps for literature, but not, generally, for philosophy. As somebody somewhere once wrote - Clarity is so rare, it is often mistaken for truth..

The "concise philosophical terms" you're talking about rarely mean the same thing to everyone in the discussion. You're going to have to define them anyway, at least here on the forum. I thought that was one of the things you are recommending. — T Clark

Yes, I am recommending just that. However, this, at least to me, would require additional wordiness inasmuch as it requires, as you say, laying out the framework for, subsequently defining, or altogether avoiding such specialized philosophical terms (jargon), which is the other objection you’re raising. I just don’t see a way to satisfy both of these objections (namely, wordiness and jargon) as they seem to be mutually incompatible. Consider the following examples for a better illustration of what I’m saying:

1. (Concise paragraph including specialized philosophical terms.)

A. J. Ayers’ arguments for non-cognitivism mainly focus on the inability to determine truth value with normative sentences such as “Killing is wrong”. Ayer believed that normative sentences aren’t truth-apt, but meaningless. He subscribed to emotivism, a metaethical view which claims that a normative sentence such as “Killing is wrong” does not express a proposition, notwithstanding the speaker’s intention to perform a declarative speech act. Though the speaker intends for the sentence to express a declaration, what is actually performed is an exclamation expressing the emotional attitudes of the speaker. Therefore, according to Ayer, the burden of proof rests on the cognitivist to substantiate the claim that normative sentences not only express emotive exclamations but truth-apt declarations as well.

2. (Same content as paragraph one, but in simpler terms, and written without assuming the reader has philosophical background knowledge.)

Sir Alfred Jules Ayer, most commonly known as A.J., was a 20th century English philosopher best known for advancing logical positivism (an idea developed by members of the Vienna Circle which considered philosophical problems meaningless unless they could be solved through logical analysis), reasoned that sentences which express a claim that something is morally good or bad, right and wrong, or to have some other moral evaluation, such as “Killing is wrong,” do not express statements capable of being either true or false. Ayer believed that sentences which express a value judgment about whether a situation is desirable or undesirable are incapable of being true or false. This is to say that such language is not to be taken literally as true or false descriptions of the world.

Ayer subscribed to a worldview which took a perspective beyond that of moral theories and practical applications, considering whether or not we can have moral knowledge of moral truths or rather only moral feelings and attitudes, and which aims to understand the meaning of moral language as compared with other more descriptive forms of language. From this perspective, he began to regard language which expressed an assessment of something as good or bad, an action as right or wrong, a person as good or bad, or a situation as just or unjust, as expressions of feeling or attitude and prescriptions of action rather than assertions or reports of the actual world.

Through this holistic moral perspective, he came to conclude that whenever a speaker uses a sentence such as “Killing is wrong” though they use it in a literal sense which seems to denote something objective, which can be perceived through visible concepts that reference a specific person, place, or thing identifiable as an actual person, place or thing in the real world, they do not. What the sentence actually expresses is a projection of the speaker’s emotional states and feelings which is also capable of arousing the emotional states and feelings of others. It is not capturing something of the real world in which we can verify through observation.

Therefore, Ayers concludes that since it is obvious that such sentences express projections of the speakers emotional states and feelings, and not so obvious that they express descriptions of a domain of facts existing independently of our subjective thoughts and feelings, that his position needs no defense. It is those who claim otherwise, Ayers argues, who must prove that such sentences are capable of reporting something which can be objectively verified to be true or false, or to report a fact of the world. Without evidence, there is no reason to believe that sentences of value or moral evaluations express descriptions of facts existing independently of our thoughts and feelings, nor should they accordingly be thought of as capable of reporting that which can be objectively true or false — though, as a linguistic expression, they purport to do just that.

If you made it thus far, hope this illustrates my point. It certainly kept me from boredom for over an hour.

I think a simple passage from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations can be a reply to the sentiment being explored in this discussion: “71. One might say that the concept ‘game’ is a concept with blurred edges. “But is a blurred concept a concept at all?” Is an indistinct photograph a picture of a person at all” Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn’t the indistinct one often exactly what we need?”

Language is not perfectly definable because it isn’t perfectly qualifiable. For example if I were to give the best definition for an apple. I would also have to perfectly define the component words (for example “fruit”, “tree”, “edible” etc) that I used to make the definition. Then I would have to define the words I used to define those ones and so on ad Infinitum.

Language relies on vagueness and approximation of experience between two individuals because in order to use your exact precise “personal language” - ie that based off your personal experiences and knowledge, in the exact same way as you, one would have to be an identical copy of you - identical neural pattern/ thought processes with no more, less or qualitatively different knowledge whatsoever.

In many ways this is why mathematics is a more perfect/ precision language than spoken languages as it isn’t as subjective. Numbers are numbers. It’s not a debate and the functions we can apply to them are consistent and objective regardless of where you come from or your background.

Defining concepts, ideas and terms in a discussion is important of course but it is inversely proportional to the fluidity/ progression of said discussion, as extensively debating definitions is tangential to the original discussion.

-"Definition as navigational aid, not as destination. Meaning as destination. "
Well definitions should be based on direct descriptions. Only then they can be used as navigational aid.
Meshed up definitions can be equally damaging to definitions promoting a "destination".

Language is not perfectly definable because it isn’t perfectly qualifiable. For example if I were to give the best definition for an apple. I would also have to perfectly define the component words (for example “fruit”, “tree”, “edible” etc) that I used to make the definition. Then I would have to define the words I used to define those ones and so on ad Infinitum. — Benj96

Im not saying that our language needs to be perfectly definable but rather it needs to be precisely defined insofar as the terms we use are not vague to the point of obfuscation, or ambiguous to the point of equivocation. For example, consider how the vagueness of the following statement obfuscates its meaning: “They are down the road a ways”. (Who is ‘they,’ which direction is ‘down,’ which ‘road,’ exactly, and how far is ‘a ways’?). Moreover, as an alternative example, consider how the ambiguity of the statement “Only man is rational” could be equivocated as a result of the word ‘man’ used in multiple senses (‘human’ or ‘male’) within the following argument:

P1) If the only rational beings are man [human], and a woman is not a man [male], then a woman is not a rational being;

P2) A woman is not a man [male];

C) Therefore, woman are not rational beings.

I am only arguing for more clarity and intelligibility in our use of language to the extent that we reduce vagueness resulting from omitted contextual specificities, and to properly disambiguate our language in cases where a variety of known and reasonable interpretations (e.g., man as ‘male’ or ‘human’) are possible. This does not require us to define ‘man’ in terms of composition resulting in a mereological infinite regress (organ system, tissues, cells, proteins, amino acids, molecules, atoms, sub-atomic particles (hadrons, such as protons and neutrons, with emergent mass due to the binding energy of their component quarks), and quantum fields (a vacuum consisting of only fundamental physical forces); nor in terms of total causality (it’s not necessary to postulate the Big Bang in order to infer that the existence of a given human is contingent upon their birth).

In many ways this is why mathematics is a more perfect/ precision language than spoken languages as it isn’t as subjective. Numbers are numbers. It’s not a debate and the functions we can apply to them are consistent and objective regardless of where you come from or your background. — Benj96

I agree that the language of mathematics is more precise and less susceptible to err in deriving classical quantities or quantum probability distributions. However, such equations can only take on a meaning beyond purely abstract quantities or probabilities when applied to individual objects and their shared properties within the actual world. This means that any mathematical description of the real world must necessarily comport to the relations of objects and their shared properties, which is dependent upon knowledge derived from a subjective interpretation of empirical observations (a posterior information), or otherwise dependent upon knowledge derived from subjective introspection (a priori information) which depends upon a background of knowledge based on a body of prior interpretations of empirical observations one has made over the entire duration of their experience.

In other words, we are subjects (that which observes) and the external world is the totality of objects (that which is observed). As subjects, we have a unique perspective, experience, and consciousness, from which we can form relations with entities (objects or other subjects) that exist outside of ourselves. However, the information we extract in relation to the external objects of this presupposed ‘objective’ reality is not directly obtained. Our sensory perceptions do not give us an immediate experience of reality, but rather our experience of reality is mediated through sensory neurons and other stimuli detecting physiological apparatus of the central nervous system. The brain integrates the received information from the stimuli of our environment in order to produce visual, haptic, auditory, olfactory, and gustatory representations of the external world. It is a fact that our physiology is sensitive to only a small fraction of the total range of stimuli produced by events occurring in the external world. For example, only a fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum is detected by our visual nervous system (about 0.0035 percent).

The world around us is saturated with electromagnetic energy (pulses of light waves that carry information across space). These electromagnetic waves vary in wavelength (distance between the crest (or peak) of one wave and the crest of the subsequent wave) from gamma waves measuring only a fraction of a millimeter in length, to radio waves measuring hundreds of kilometers. We are blind to the vast majority of this energy—detecting only the range from about 400 to 700 nanometers (billionths of a meter), thus referred to as the visible spectrum.

In considering just this piece of evidence alone, we can infer that the visual imagery experienced internally by our mind is produced by our brains interpretation of a small fraction of the total available information extracted from light, as a vehicle for transmitting such information, and therefore not only is this information mediated (indirectly perceived, nonobjective) by virtue of being filtered through networks of hundreds of billions of neurons interconnected and communicating to the brain, but also the amount of information which is accessible to us is vastly limited.

Any language which expresses information that is intelligible to a human being, as not only an observing subject, but an active agent who constructs a representation of reality that has been naturally selected by evolutionary processes which favor (obviously an anthropomorphized, metaphorical description here) maximizing genetic reproduction—and, to a lesser extent, survival, it follows, that such information must necessarily convey a meaning which depicts a world that can only exist through the lense of the human mind. If our ideas of the world are necessarily constrained to the lense of the human mind, then, in every way conceivable, the world as we know it to exist, cannot exist independent of the mind. Mind dependence is necessarily nonobjective, and thus an element of subjectivity will never be eliminated.

So, even in granting that mathematical descriptions of quantities or probabilities are, for sake of argument, objective; once applied to corresponding phenomena and symmetries of the external world of objects in a way intelligible to a subject, a least a proportion of the overall objectivity is diminished. Not to mention that numbers and sets are abstractions which in-and-of-themselves could be said to be dependent upon a mind. Platonic realism aside, it seems rather obvious, subsequent to minimal familiarity with scientific data and philosophical investigation, that without a subject there can be no object.

'Real' may alternatively be understood as 'that which is' or 'what truly is'. It doesn't necessarily pertain only to propositions or statements, especially in this case, which is a discussion about the nature of something, namely, numbers.
— Wayfarer

I think that both ‘that which is’ or ‘what truly is' are examples of vagueness to the point of meaninglessness — Cartesian trigger-puppets

The distinction I tried to introduce was the sense in which 'real' is understood as subject to the attainment of insight - grasping meaning or seeing what is real, not in a propositional sense, but in a noetic sense. Perhaps it's something like what Maritain means by the 'intuition of being'.

Metaphysical enquiry—the enquiry into being as being—is, Maritain says, a mystery; being is, for example, something that is “pregnant with intelligibility” and too “pure for our intellect” . Nevertheless, the mystery of being is an “intelligible mystery”, and Maritain holds that, unless one does metaphysics, one cannot be a philosopher; “a philosopher is not a philosopher unless he is a metaphysician”.

Philosophical reflection on being begins with the intuition of being, and Maritain insists that one needs this “eidetic” intuition for any genuine metaphysical knowledge (or insight) to be possible. The intuition of being that lies at the root of metaphysical enquiry is not that of “the vague being of common sense” but an “intellectual intuition” or grasp of “the act of existing”. — SEP

So, even in granting that mathematical descriptions of quantities or probabilities are, for sake of argument, objective; once applied to corresponding phenomena and symmetries of the external world of objects in a way intelligible to a subject, a least a proportion of the overall objectivity is diminished. Not to mention that numbers and sets are abstractions which in-and-of-themselves could be said to be dependent upon a mind. Platonic realism aside, it seems rather obvious, subsequent to minimal familiarity with scientific data and philosophical investigation, that without a subject there can be no object. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

It's not that objectivity is 'diminished' but that it is only ever conditional in the first place - as you go on to say. Your conclusion 'without a subject there can be no object' is something I think is true, but far from being 'obvious' will often be vigorously contested, as it undermines scientific realism.

However I don't agree that this can be rationalised in evolutionary terms. I don't think epistemology ought to be subordinated to evolutionary theory, for reasons given in Thomas Nagel's essay, Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion.

What if, just what if, ambiguity & vagueness aren't accidental? In other words, there's a rationale why some words/terms/phrases are vague and ambiguous. In such cases, we should allow language to, you know, do its thing instead of trying to restrict it by imposing rigorous criteria on the word usage. That's to say ambiguity and vagueness are a feature, not a bug of language. We should then use them to full effect instead of steering clear of them.