Where is the parent/child relationship located after childbirth? — creativesoul

I'd reply to you more quickly if you hit the "reply" button--that way I get a notification that you responded to me.

We'd need to clarify exactly what we're talking about. We could be talking about (i) the fact that the child developed in the womb of the mother, etc. Or we could be talking about (ii) DNA connections. We could be talking about (iii) social interaction. There are a number of things we could be talking about--that's not an exhaustive list. I told you where the (i) is located. After childbirth that particular relation is a historical fact. It no longer exists. (ii) is located in the cells of the people in question. (iii) is located wherever those people happen to be when they're interacting--in their home on Main Street, etc.

If I draw an association between a bell and food, and I grant your argument, then it only follows that the bell, the food, and the association between the two are located in my head. — creativesoul

Can't you read? It's difficult to have a conversation like this if someone can't read basic English. I wrote "All elements of the association, qua the association, are in the head, yes. The mental association is what meaning is." The bell is not the association. Also, note that the association is not two objects. It's a uniquely mental phenomenon.

John wrote:

...there remains a distinction between mere signalling, no matter how sophisticated, and symbolic language...

That's the one I'm interested in. Care to set it out?

Sigh...

The bell is a necessary part of the association.

Agree?

I have no doubt you can work it out for yourself. Hint: it has to do with reflexivity and generality.

It's part of what the association is about. It's not itself the association qua the association.

If I write the sentence "The cow jumped over the moon", a cow is part of what the sentence is about. But the cow isn't part of the sentence, part of my typing, qua the sentence or qua my typing.

I'd rather you clear it up for me. It seems that we're in agreement as far as he thread topic is concerned, however I am curious about this distinction.

I would add here that it is obvious that some senses of the term "meaning" cannot be prior to language, whereas others are. I think that that bit of knowledge is important.

I disagree that the bell is part of what the association is about for the exact same reason that the association is not about any of the other elemental constituents. However, I'm not inclined to argue about the framework you've put to use. According to it, that all just very well make perfect sense(be completely coherent). As you noted earlier, we have different positions. That said...

It is interesting to me though that we agree on the basic question in the OP. It is also interesting that the framework you're using seems to have a physicalist bent, aside from the talk about "mental" stuff.

I do strongly think that meaning is shared, whereas you reject that notion. That is a fundamental disagreement between us, that ought be avoided if there is any progress to be made. Unfortunately, I think that that is the basis of your talk about the location of meaning, so we may have nothing further to discuss, unless you've something aside from these things in mind.

Terrapin,

There is one question I'd like to ask you:What does a mental association between a bell and food consist of on your view?

OK. my thought is that the kind of meaning associated with language, made possible with language, is reflective, generalized meaning. The idea represented as 'tree' is an example.

A particular tree may have some meaning for a cat, because she, for example, climbs the tree, sharpens her claws on it or hunts birds in the tree. But in this case the meaning is associative; a kind of significance, for want of a better word; the tree stands out to the cat as a gestalt, you might even say.

We must be careful in such discussions, lest we fall victim to unjustifiable anthropomorphist claims. It does seem apparent that in order to make sense of rudimentary thought/belief and meaning we must carefully describe the only candidates at hand; statements thereof.

Agree?

I'm not sure what you're referring to here. For sure, we cannot get into the head of a cat in order to experience the meaning we might think a tree has for her. The notion that the tree has meaning for her is based partly on observing her behavior, but also on analogy with our own experience of things which have meanings for us, meanings that do not seem to rely on our linguistic abilities.

I agree with what's overtly expressed above.

I agree that we cannot get into the head of a cat.

We can know stuff about pre or nonlinguistic thought/belief(human).

Is counting prior to number? — Banno

Sure, counting can occur without language.

That doesn't stop us from knowing stuff about pre or nonlinguistic thought/belief(human). — creativesoul

Sure, but I can't see the reason for your disagreement, since I already acknowledged what you say here. Having said that I also want to acknowledge that at least sometimes what is known pre-linguistically may be distorted by being expressed in language.

I was probably mistaken in the earlier expression. There may be no disagreement. Seems we cross-posted, because I actually edited the disagreement out of the reply not long after it was posted. I realized that you were not putting forth your own thought/belief but rather you were mentioning an all-too commonly held one. I disagreed with the presupposition that we need to experience the cat's meaning in order to know what it's thought/belief consists of. Knowing that that presupposition 'belonged' to a belief that is not yours clears up my earlier confusion.

The last bit I would agree with as well.

Curious then, do you hold that all knowledge is JTB?

Curious then, do you hold that all knowledge is JTB? — creativesoul

That's a difficult question for me. I'm guessing that you would be referring to propositional knowledge here. There is the well-known tale (from Chryssipus?) about the dog chasing a rabbit, who comes to a triple forking of the path, sniffs down two of the paths, and detecting no scent runs headlong in pursuit down the third. Firstly, (assuming for the sake of argument that the story is not apocryphal) is his belief that the rabbit went down the third path truly a propositional belief, and if not, then what kind of belief is it? Is the dog's belief, assuming that the rabbit really did go down the third path, a JTB? Could the dog's belief ever be justified? What if the rabbit went off into the bushes and the dog failed to detect her scent?

Perhaps it's better to forget the dog, and think about our own beliefs. None of our propositional beliefs are absolutely certain, which means that we do not really know if any of them are true. So, perhaps it would be safe to say that, if any of our beliefs are true (even though we can never know whether they are true) and justified; then we sometimes have knowledge, but then it seems to follow that we can never know whether or when we have it. Can we know when our beliefs are justified? Can a false belief ever really be a justified belief in any case?

Given all this uncertainly I tend to think in terms of humans believing, rather than in terms of humans knowing.

counting can occur without language. — Hanover

How would you know whether someone can count without language?

Indeed, why choose to speak in terms which may add nothing more than unnecessary confusion. That said, perhaps that stuff can be discussed some other time, because I'm fairly certain that understanding certain aspects of all thought/belief allows one to provide satisfactory answers to many, perhaps all, of those questions. By my lights, there are several different topics of conversation in their own right being mentioned. The one we're having has consequences that rightfully apply to each.

I'll gladly plan on returning to this discussion tomorrow. In the meantime, perhaps the following question will pique further interest from you...

Given all that's been talked about thus far, how important is our methodological approach in terms of providing the strongest possible ground for positing the existence and the necessary elemental composition of pre and/or non-linguistic thought/belief and/or meaning?

Oh, and I hope you can pardon my lack of proper greeting. Too many discussions, I suppose, that I ought to have ended participating in much sooner than I did. This one looks rather promising. It's a welcome change, because it's been a while to say the least.

The idea of quantity is basic in nature

Number sense in animals is the ability of creatures to represent and discriminate quantities of relative sizes by number sense. It has been observed in various species, from fish to primates.

Wikipedia

Perhaps language evolved out of our sense of sense of size, our ability to convert quantity into meaningful expression vs instinct. Language is largely reducible to computation, as translation programs demonstrate.

I disagree that the bell is part of what the association is about for the exact same reason that the association is not about any of the other elemental constituents. — creativesoul

I don't understand that sentence. What's "the reason that the association is not about any of the other elemental constituents"?

And yes, I'm a physicalist.

Re this:

What does a mental association between a bell and food consist of on your view? — creativesoul

If you're asking me what it is physically, it's a dynamic set of brain states. We don't know exactly what states yet, if we'd ever know, and it's not going to be identical states in two different people (though it could be similar).

The answer seems simple to me.

If "meaning is not prior to language" is the case, then that must be the case prior to you saying it, or typing it up on a screen.

How would you know whether someone can count without language? — Wayfarer

If a bird sees two people go into the brush and sees one exit but continues to wait for the other to exit before it enters the brush, it has successfully counted. I'd guess it could count higher than 2, but I don't know how high.

Math is also a map, and particular systems are not part of the intuition. Quantification would dependent on signification. If it matters to be able to tell the difference between three and four of something, then you'd learn how to do that. That doesn't necessarily mean that you could count to three or four.

Perhaps language evolved out of our sense of sense of size, our ability to convert quantity into meaningful expression vs instinct. Language is largely reducible to computation, as translation programs demonstrate. — Cavacava

No, I don't agree with that, for the reasons given by John Searle, et al, through such arguments as the Chinese Room argument. Besides, computers are instruments created by humans and programmed accordingly, computers don't understand or make judgements in the same way that humans do. I know that fans of AI don't see it that way.

f a bird sees two people go into the brush and sees one exit but continues to wait for the other to exit before it enters the brush, it has successfully counted. — Hanover

It responds to stimuli - whether that amounts to 'counting' is moot, in my view.

No, I don't agree with that, for the reasons given by John Searle

I think his concern is that a computer can't understand what it does with its code. Machines simply manipulate symbols, no disagreement on my part, however that's not my point. If a machine can digitize language and generate meaningful translation, then at some level it suggests that language, as a system of symbols, is reducible to simple computational symbols (I believe Chomsky holds this position), and perhaps our semantic ability developed out of some very basic inherent computation abilities.

then at some level it suggests that language, as a system of symbols, is reducible to simple computational symbols (I believe Chomsky holds this position), and perhaps our semantic ability developed out of some very basic inherent computation abilities. — Cavacava

I doubt it. Have a look at the book review I posted earlier this thread - it is of a recent book co-authored by Chomsky on just this question.

My view is: obviously h. sapiens evolved along the lines known to evolutionary biology. But at the time we reached the capacity to 'grasp meaning', then at that precise moment, our faculties are no longer explicable in purely biological terms.

creative wrote:

I disagree that the bell is part of what the association is about for the exact same reason that the association is not about any of the other elemental constituents.

Terrapin replied:

I don't understand that sentence. What's "the reason that the association is not about any of the other elemental constituents"?

Short answer...

Because the dog isn't capable of thinking about stuff.

Long answer...

Talking about Pavlov's dog's mental association being about something or other presupposes that the necessary preconditions required for thought/belief being about something or other are present in the case of Pavlov's dog. That is a false presupposition.

In order for thought/belief(mental associations) to be about a bell, the thinking creature must first have some rudimentary and/or basic notion/concept/idea of a bell. That requires that the bell be previously identified, which requires that the bell be isolated and somehow bookmarked in the dog's thought as something. It is only then that thinking about something is even possible.

Here's a bit of and on the aforementioned methodology...

We first identify what human thought/belief consists in/of. We then separate the elements not existentially contingent upon language from the ones that are. If the elements of thought/belief not existentially contingent upon language are - in and of themselves - sufficient for thought/belief, then we have the strongest possible ground for positing the core of all human thought/belief. If all thought/belief formation consists of the same elementary constituents(there's no good reason to doubt it), then that core would also be the core of all other non/pre-linguistic thought/belief. There is no valid objection to our establishing such a core, for there is no stronger ground than that which is universally extant after all cultural, historical, and/or familial particulars are removed. That is precisely what is necessary in order to identify and posit such a core.

Other important considerations...

If all linguistic thought and belief have common denominators; some existentially contingent upon language, and others not, then we're justified in saying that the latter are universally extant, sufficient/adequate, and thus necessary(for there is no imaginable example to the contrary) elemental constituents of all thought and belief.

We first identify what human thought/belief consists in/of. We then separate the elements not existentially contingent upon language from the ones that are. If the elements of thought/belief not existentially contingent upon language are - in and of themselves - sufficient for thought/belief, then we have the strongest possible ground for positing the core of all human thought/belief. — creativesoul

Language is a means of expression. Any thought is a thought of x or that x, with x being a proposition. Whether or not a thought must be expressed, as part of an internal monologue if not externally communicated, is something neuroscientists ponder and seek to research.

If you want to disregard the empirical/scientific approach, then what are your options? You could approach it as a rationalist, in which case you'll need to lay out the principles you'll be using to draw your conclusions. Otherwise: phenomenology?