I'd agree that Saussure's semiotics have not had a particularly helpful influence (in part because they led to Derrida :rofl: ). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Oooff!! :D

It took me a long time, but I think I'm pretty much on team-Derrida.

****

I can accept the first picture over the latter. "The signified", at least in my understanding of Saussure, was always ambiguous in the sense that sometimes it referred to the idea people had and sometimes it referred to the physical object.

I don't think Derrida exploits that confusion, though. He calls into question "the sign" even here:

I should note that in the broader application, signification is happening everywhere, not just in language. For instance, in an analysis of the sensory system we might speak of light interacting with photoreceptors in the eye as the object, the pattern of action potentials traveling down the optic nerve as the sign vehicle, and then some particular resultant activity in the occipital lobe as the interpretant, or we might apply it to DNA and ribosomes, etc. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The words we use to describe these causal patterns aren't the linguistic sign. That's the mystery -- how does a bundle of quarks become able to speak and communicate and do language?

Seems kinda suss, right? :D

Does it? It seems neutral to me. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I supose it would.

One problem with the pictures is that there is only one signification/meaning/interpretant/dicible. Perhaps they are addressing a different issue to Davidson and Quine?

I have some radical conclusions that I'm exploring, but I don't believe Quine is there as much as serves as an entryway into what I'm thinking. — Moliere

Okay, right. We are on the same page then. :up:

By who? Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass is a joke, like Molière's Imaginary Invalid. "Language is used for communicating intentions" does not entail "words mean whatever a speaker wants them to mean." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Ding ding. :100:

Cool.

Glad at least one line of flight in the thread was resolved :D

One problem with the pictures is that there is only one signification/meaning/interpretant/dicible. Perhaps they are addressing a different issue to Davidson and Quine?

It's the basic framework from which the same issues could be considered. One key thing to note here is that the interpretant is not always an "interpreter," a whole person. It can be a thought. So sometimes we equivocate, and sometimes we do so intentionally. A joke might hang on signifying two different objects by the same sign vehicle, perhaps using a homonym. The most common way to approach this would be suppose two different signification relations, with two different objects, two different interpretants, utilizing the same sign vehicle.

So, from the perspective of convention, "cats are fish" has a quite determinant meaning (barring some unusual context), and "cat" is a sign vehicle signifying cats and "fish" a sign vehicle signifying fish. But supposing the Joker has told his vile henchmen that "cats are fish" is his codeword for taking hostages at Bruce Wayne's party (a poorly chosen venue), obviously there is a parallel act of signification achieved. Nor are the henchmen incapable of simultaneously understanding both meanings, hence more than one interpretant.

Side note: now if "cats" or "fish" might refer to areas directly adjacent to cats or fish, such that "cat" and "fish" are always present when cats and fish are, then "cats are fish" is at least sometimes true (it is true whenever a cat and a fish are immediately adjacent, since the spaces adjacent to each are the same spaces). But by convention, cats are not fish, and they cannot become so based on their spacial proximity to one another.

I can accept the first picture over the latter. "The signified", at least in my understanding of Saussure, was always ambiguous in the sense that sometimes it referred to the idea people had and sometimes it referred to the physical object.

Yes, I think the tripartite structure helps to clear this up. You can, of course, signify an idea, or even a complex collection of them (e.g. "the theory of special relativity") as the "object." You can likewise signify incorporeal "objects," such as an economic recession, or hypothetical ones. However, what is signified is different from the thought that interprets it, the interpretant.

Thinking and "talking to oneself" involves signs, but clearly what is signified and the interpretant are not thereby collapsed. So that's a common difficulty, an interpretant need not be conscious, nor need they be a whole person (an interpreter).

The emphasis on "sign" is problematic, in that it supposes that the main purpose, or fundamental element, in language is the noun. — Banno

Syntax as pattern, semantics as what we do with the pattern? — Banno

Hmm... I'm more familiar with linguistics than philosophy, but I'd say both syntax and semantics are patterns and how we use them. I think the actual real life interpretation can't complete until we add the third level of analysis: pragmatics. That's the huge contribution of mid-twentieth-century language philosophy: notably Austin, Searle and Grice.

I'll get to my take on Quine through all this; I've never read him, only about him, so there's that.

In linguistics, syntax and semantics are different ways words relate to other words. In syntax, we look at how words work together to make a sentence, regardless of what they say. Meanwhile, semantics is about what the words used typically mean ("lexical semantics"). Which words can you replace in this or this slot. Note that it's not about sign bodies. Ambiguity can be both semantic or syntactic. The textbook example is:

We saw her duck.

Syntax:
a) We [personal pronoun, first person plural] saw [verb, past tense, indictative] her [possessive pronoun] duck [noun].
b) We [personal pronoun, first person plural] saw [verb, past tense, indictative] her [personal pronoun, accusative case] duck [verb, bare infinitive].
c) We [personal pronoun, first person plural] saw [verb, present tense, indicative] her [possessive pronoun] duck [noun].

Lexical Semantics:
Two different words with the same sign body:
"to see" vs. "to saw". And "duck (n.)" vs. "to duck (v.)"

Syntax can change the meaining of a sentence, without touching lexical semantics:

1. The cat sat on the mat.
2. The cats sat on the mat.

The suffix -s indicates plural. Thus "cat" evokes one cat, and "cats" evokes more than one cat. That's a difference in meaning, but it's not expressed over different word choice ("lexical semantics"), but over syntax (plural suffix "-s"). You'll probably see how this is one pivot point for different theories to conceptualise the study of meaning. (Not all theories go this route.)

So I have one major problem with understanding this quote of yours:

The emphasis on "sign" is problematic, in that it supposes that the main purpose, or fundamental element, in language is the noun. — Banno

It's a problem with the lexical semantics of the word "noun": I do not know what you're referring to. I suspect that it has something to do with "nouns are words for things" and reification, but I can't construct a coherent meaning.

In lexical semantics we're basically creating a dictionary, a list of words we must know so we can use them. That is they're all, at this stage, decontextualised. Reference is not a reference to things, on this level, but a reference to abstractions: content words refer, function words (such as "the") don't. [Again, this is conroversial.]

For example, if I modify 1. above to read:

3. The dog sat on the mat.

then I haven't changed the syntax at all, but I've certainly introduced a new word. Since I just mention the sentence as an example, and I don't actually say anything about animals and mats, I'm not referring to real life set of affairs. I am, though, referring to certain common cultural abstractions: "cat", "dog".

If I were referring to a real life situation but couldn't quite remember who sat on the mat, I could say:

4. The mammal sat on the mat.
or
5. The furry animal sat on the mat.

Or any other combination.

And if I quite clearly remembered the cat, I could say:

6. The feline sat on the mat.

4./6. are purely semantic changes (though "feline" is morphologically different from "cat", being derived from an adjective, but we're not talking morphology...), and 5. also includes semantic changes.

When you want to know how people refer to things using words, you're not using that model, though it might be part of your methodology if you so choose. You also need to know what people do with words.
For example, you'd know that "What circumstances do you have in mind?" is not among the expected reactions to "Could you open that window over there?" even though the inventory-level interpretation would allow for the response. Language occurs in context.

So, on to the "gavagai" example:

The anthropologist would have two problems here:

1. the Lexical level: Am I making the same abstractions as the native?
and
2. the situational level: When I'm pointing towards the rabbit, am I paying attention to the same thing that the native is paying attention to when he sees me pointing?

And I think what Quine is trying to illustrate with that example is that we can't ever answer either of the two questions with certainty, because any clarification attempt runs into the same problem.

Not sure where Quine goes from there, but I think that real-life interactions lead to satisfaction among the participants, and when everyone's satisfied (actually, when everyone assumes of each other that they're satisfied while being themselves satisfied) people make working assumptions about what the words mean which they maintain until they have reason to modify it. And it's this sort of process, repeated over and over again by lots of people that lets people approach, assymptotically, some sort of ideal abstraction: people are constantly bringing into being and modifying what they assume is already there - as a concerted effort. So, yes, I'm a constructivist on that matter.

As for the triangles: I like the first one @Count Timothy von Icarus posted best, as the dotted line an the bottom makes sure to emphasise that relation between signifyer and signified is an imputed one. And I also like that the "thought" sits on top. I think the source is Ogden/Richards The meaning of meaning, but I'd have to check to make sure [it doesn't say]. I like that, because I tend to think of thought as a process: not one thought, one clear-cut piece of mental content, but a stream of consiousness, classified and edited by analysis, so we can think about that.

I'm not seeing how this addresses my post. I do not see where your diagrams take into consideration the fact of language as social phenomena, as the interaction of multiple people, doing things with words.

I think the actual real life interpretation can't complete until we add the third level of analysis: pragmatics. — Dawnstorm

I quite agree.

The diagram shows a relation between symbol and referent, linked by thought. Quine, Austin, Searle Grice and others showed this to be a somewhat keyhole version of what is going on. There is more to language than just reference, so a diagram that explains only reference will explain only a small part of language.

Count Timothy von Icarus I'm not seeing how this addresses my post. I do not see where your diagrams take into consideration the fact of language as social phenomena, as the interaction of multiple people, doing things with words

Language is not the only case of signification in the world. Nor is it entirely sui generis. For example, most mammals come fairly well equipped to make threat displays and signal aggression to one another. This is a communication of intentions accomplished without social conventions. Likewise, smoke signifies fire without any intentions involved.

So the basic signification relation shouldn't include reference to social conventions. It would be inadequate if it did (or we would have to suppose that human language does not signify in the way that all other animal communications does, which doesn't seem plausible for many reasons). Nor is conventional or stipulated signification sufficient for language. If it was, then we would have to allow that dogs and chimps are language users, since they can clearly learn to respond to stipulated signs and conventions.

The advantage of the semiotic and information theoretic frameworks is that they can explain disparate forms of signification, both natural and conventional.



An excellent post. I would ask though:

then I haven't changed the syntax at all, but I've certainly introduced a new word. Since I just mention the sentence as an example, and I don't actually say anything about animals and mats, I'm not referring to real life set of affairs. I am, though, referring to certain common cultural abstractions: "cat", "dog".

are cats and dogs best thought of as "cultural abstractions?" Or are they just abstractions of a certain type of organism.

I ask because some of the things we can reference certainly seem to be "nothing but" cultural creations. Something like "communism," "neoplatonism," or "French" might be a good example here. And with these sorts of things, it is common to run into "no true Scotsman" type disagreements, e.g. "how should true liberalism be defined?" But you don't tend to get the same sort of disagreements re lions, oaks, or carbon. You know: "no true carbon binds to just one oxygen ion!"

I think the distinction is important in considering how language might have emerged (and also acquisition in children). It seems that understanding abstractions of real things should comes irst (it certainly does in children, and quite early) and then the tools used/developed for this task are eventually employed to comprehend and communicate about other, more complex sorts of purely conventional/mental entities.

So, for instance, from a very early age, kids have no problem identifying different species of animal from pictures. But identifying labels like "Islamic," "French" or "impressionist" will be difficult to impossible, even in cases where any competent adult will have absolutely no problem making the identification. Likewise, identifying firefighters, or doctors, will probably come pretty easily, because, while a cultural role, it can be represented with clear, concrete characteristics.

~~

Language is not the only case of signification in the world. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yep.

Notice Quine is concerned with language?

are cats and dogs best thought of as "cultural abstractions?" Or are they just abstractions of a certain type of organism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What work does the "just" do in this sentence? They're cultural abstractions of a certain type of organism. If you're living in a society it's culture (or subculture) will influence how you abstract. (It will also influence how those organisms will act, which is another, more indirect, source of influence on how you abstract.) They're not abstractions of instituional facts, but the abstractions themselves are institutional facts. (That's something that's often left unacknowledged in current discourse on gender, for example - where we're talking about organisms.)

But you don't tend to get the same sort of disagreements re lions, oaks, or carbon. — Count Timothy von Icarus

will probably come pretty easily, because, while a cultural role, it can be represented with clear, concrete characteristics. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I would also argue the possibility though that "concrete characteristics" are contingent on how the world happens to be, but if you look at how the world could be otherwise, then it doesn't seem so clear. And it seems to me that the way we extract structure from the world depends on a kind of reference frame to which that structure is optimal, but may not be so in another (similar to how different descriptions become inappropriate when we move to different scales of observation). I think its very difficult to do anything with the carbon example without kind of going into silly speculative metaphysics and notions of unconceived alternatives, which may be meaninglessly intangible. But with regard to things like lions and oaks, when you just e pand the temporal horizons of the world we consider, the concrete characterization may no longer exists as you have to consider the gradual changes populations due to evolution over a long period. And here, the biological ambiguities of defining things like species may become more relevant. I think animals is a very good example since it clearly shows our ability to recognize different animals in an easy fashion is contingent on the fact that a lot of the diversity, variety, continuity between different animals is not observable to us, even though it clearly did exist if we consider out entire evolutionary history. Someone more radical might then want to argue that this kind of example should be seen as a general thing that applies to all things that exist when you consider the great diversity, variety, continuity in possible worlds. Things always could have been otherwise so that the boundaries or transition structures we tend to use to identify, distinguish or label things no longer seem to be as optimal or informative.

Well, "cultural" would tend to imply a diffuse, collective project, right? But surely a man stranded on a desert island can come to recognize new species of flora and fauna there, and abstract their properties from concrete particulars, or even come to name them, all in isolation.

If you're living in a society it's culture (or subculture) will influence how you abstract.

To some degree, yes. Yet disparate cultures only vary so much, which makes sense because the neurological and environmental underpinnings of our power of abstraction do not vary much by cultural context. For example, there are potentially infinite "objects" to identify in the world, but even cultures quite isolated from one another synch up pretty well in which they choose to identify, particularly when it comes to concrete entities (e.g. animal and plant species).

(It will also influence how those organisms will act, which is another, more indirect, source of influence on how you abstract.)

The direction of influence will be bi-directional, yes, but not all facts are institutional facts. So, if cats are worshipped, and not driven off when they try to get into buildings, then the cats will learn to act differently. Domestication is an extreme example. Yet this seems like it will tend to be a fairly distal influence. The way a cockroach or a tulip behaves is only going to be influenced by the surrounding human culture so much, and at any rate, the cockroach and the tulip existed prior to any human culture and their preexisting properties have shaped how any culture comes to interact with them in the first place.

Domestication, for instance, has much to do with the pre-existing properties of domesticated animals' ancestors, and those animals' behaviors upon encountering humanity. So, bidirectional yes, but you can have bidirectional influence where one direction is primary. A dog will never learn to talk or drive a car, no matter how we treat him. Is this fact merely institutional? People don't mate pigs to goats, regardless of culture, because it doesn't work; whereas they will mate horses to donkeys to get mules. But the fact that a pig and a goat cannot produce offspring is not an institutional fact, it is not a product of collective recognition. Rather, there is collective recognition of this fact because it is true that one cannot breed pigs to goats.

For another example, take hypotheses for why gold became a valuable medium of exchange in disparate cultures. It is scarce enough to be such a medium, while its properties are also very hard to counterfeit, giving it the cryptological features necessary for any good medium of exchange. Whereas pine needles, at least in much of the world, would make a terrible medium of exchange because they are everywhere, whereas something too rare also will not do, since there won't be enough around to trade in. Institutional facts are parasitic on facts that do not obtain due to collective recognition.

I would also argue the possibility though that "concrete characteristics" are contingent on how the world happens to be, but if you look at how the world could be otherwise, then it doesn't seem so clear.

Indeed, my cat surely could have been eaten by dog, and maybe by now it would compose parts of a dog, dog feces, my lawn, etc. But if it did, it would certainly no longer be a cat.

And it seems to me that the way we extract structure from the world depends on a kind of reference frame to which that structure is optimal, but may not be so in another (similar to how different descriptions become inappropriate when we move to different scales of observation). I think its very difficult to do anything with the carbon example without kind of going into silly speculative metaphysics and notions of unconceived alternatives, which may be meaninglessly intangible. But with regard to things like lions and oaks, when you just e pand the temporal horizons of the world we consider, the concrete characterization may no longer exists as you have to consider the gradual changes populations due to evolution over a long period. And here, the biological ambiguities of defining things like species may become more relevant. I think animals is a very good example since it clearly shows our ability to recognize different animals in an easy fashion is contingent on the fact that a lot of the diversity, variety, continuity between different animals is not observable to us, even though it clearly did exist if we consider out entire evolutionary history. Someone more radical might then want to argue that this kind of example should be seen as a general thing that applies to all things that exist when you consider the great diversity, variety, continuity in possible worlds. Things always could have been otherwise so that the boundaries or transition structures we tend to use to identify, distinguish or label things no longer seem to be as optimal or informative.

:up: You raise an excellent point. There is a tremendous multiplicity and diversity, and I'd add that a lot of it is quite observable. Every dog is different, and every person—each snowflake as well as each fingerprint. My copy of the Metaphysics has different dog ears than my professors, different coffee stains, different places where the ink didn't quite come off the press correctly. And the same person or dog is also different from moment to moment, year to year, sometimes dramatically so.

However, words generally try to focus on the actual, not the potential. The act of being a dog is what stays the same in all dogs. We could well imagine some sort of dog, bee, elephant fusion (horrific) and ask: "when does it stop being a dog and become a monster?" Yet no such animal actually exists, it is ens rationis, a being of thought. Language evolves through our interactions with actual beings, so we should only expect that our words will tend to indicate the beings we actually find around us. Language evolution isn't arbitrary after all.

As G.K. Chesterton puts it:

Evolution is a good example of that modern intelligence which, if it destroys anything, destroys itself. Evolution is either an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things came about; or, if it is anything more than this, it is an attack upon thought itself. If evolution destroys anything, it does not destroy religion but rationalism. If evolution simply means that a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox; for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly, especially if, like the Christian God, he were outside time. But if it means anything more, it means that there is no such thing as an ape to change, and no such thing as a man for him to change into. It means that there is no such thing as a thing. At best, there is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything and anything. This is an attack not upon the faith, but upon the mind; you cannot think if there are no things to think about. You cannot think if you are not separate from the subject of thought. Descartes said, "I think; therefore I am." The philosophic evolutionist reverses and negatives the epigram. He says, "I am not; therefore I cannot think."

Then there is the opposite attack on thought: that urged by Mr. H.G.Wells when he insists that every separate thing is "unique," and there are no categories at all. This also is merely destructive. Thinking means connecting things, and stops if they cannot be connected. It need hardly be said that this scepticism forbidding thought necessarily forbids speech; a man cannot open his mouth without contradicting it. Thus when Mr. Wells says (as he did somewhere), "All chairs are quite different," he utters not merely a misstatement, but a contradiction in terms. If all chairs were quite different, you could not call them "all chairs."

But if the point is that nominalism and the expulsion of quiddities (of any consideration of phenomenology or the phenomenological presence and whatness of things) seem to lead towards an incoherent (and ultimately arbitrary) account of language and the world, I won't object. As Joshua Hochschild puts it:

In short, the appeal to forms or natures does not just help account for the possibility of trustworthy access to facts, it makes possible a notion of wisdom, traditionally conceived as an ordering grasp of reality. Preoccupied with overcoming Cartesian skepticism, it often seems as if philosophy’s highest aspiration is merely to secure some veridical cognitive events. Rarely sought is a more robust goal: an authoritative and life-altering wisdom. Notice: even if contemporary philosophers came to a consensus about how to overcome Cartesian doubt and secure certainty, it is not clear that this would do anything to repair the fragmentation and democratization of the disciplines, or to make it more plausible that there could be an ordered hierarchy of sciences, with a highest science, acknowledged as queen of the rest—whether we call it first philosophy, or metaphysics, or wisdom...

So Richard Weaver was wrong. Or rather, Richard Weaver was right, but for the wrong reasons. He correctly saw that Ockham’s logical innovation was “a crucial event in the history of Western culture… issue[ing] now in modern decadence.” But Ockham’s innovation was not so straightforward a move as denying that universals exist. Rather, it was a subtle, seemingly discrete, but ultimately much more insidious decision to revise an account of mind and language by refusing to include intelligible natures and formal causality, the conceptual lynchpin of the entire classical and medieval heritage. The fact that this loss remains so hard for us to see and to accurately explain is itself evidence of how momentous it is, and how much work of recovery we have yet to do.

What’s Wrong with Ockham? Reassessing the Role of Nominalism in the Dissolution of the West

https://www.academia.edu/36162636/What_s_Wrong_with_Ockham_Reassessing_the_Role_of_Nominalism_in_the_Dissolution_of_the_West

However, words generally try to focus on the actual, not the potential. The act of being a dog is what stays the same in all dogs. We could well imagine some sort of dog, bee, elephant fusion (horrific) and ask: "when does it stop being a dog and become a monster?" Yet no such animal actually exists, it is ens rationis, a being of thought. Language evolves through our interactions with actual beings, so we should only expect that our words will tend to indicate the beings we actually find around us. Language evolution isn't arbitrary after all. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't think you have quite got my example.

If you consider every single mammalian individual that ever existed, you will not be able to identify discrete boundaries between the concept of dog and not-dog. You may not even be able to agree on the criteria. Again, I am not considering potential, possible, counterfactual examples. I am considering all individuals that have ever existed in earth. I can't refer to most of these specific individuals, but I know for a fact that they existed. Sure, they don't exist now... and that is like a frame of reference on which the statistical structure of what is being talked about is different o if we change the reference frame, change the scale, change the inclusion of individuals, genetic structures that have actually existed.

All organisms on earth share a common ancestor; it is surely the case that if you trace the changes of all of your ancestors, generation by generation, the changes in genetics will be tiny every time in the context of all of the genetic variation that has ever existed. If, from your earliest ancestor to you now, your lineage has gone through all of the different stereotypical biological kinds - we at least know apes, mammal, reptile, fis, I believe - there is absolutely going to be no dicrete boundaries along the way. Its more-or-less a continuous path of infinitesimal change.

Your ability to identify dogs as a kind of concretization depends on the context of what kind of biological structures just happen to exist right now and happen to be rasily distinguishable. But importantly, the bits inbetween have existed.

Well, "cultural" would tend to imply a diffuse, collective project, right? But surely a man stranded on a desert island can come to recognize new species of flora and fauna there, and abstract their properties from concrete particulars, or even come to name them, all in isolation. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sure. New words crop up all the time. Someone (or a group of people) would have named the computer mouse "mouse", for example. I maybe wouldn't call it a "project", though. It's less directed, more just a process of people living together - an iterative process to be precise. When you use a word you both reaffirm it and change it ever so slightly.

I'll pick out a line from your response to Apustimelogist, because it struck me as interesting:

However, words generally try to focus on the actual, not the potential. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I have a hard time formulating my thoughts. On the one hand, it's clear that we can only name what's there (or what we thought of, see science fiction/fantasy for example, but that doesn't impact your point I think). But on the other hand, a word needs to be general enough to accommodate the unforseen, or we'd have far more neologisms than we actually have. That is: a certain openness must be baked into language for it to be useful.

Take a look at Apustimelogist's latest post about evolution. That's basically the old paradox: if you remove a grain of sand from a heap and keep going, when does the heap stop being a heap? In other words, when do you need a new word? Chesterton, in your quote, doesn't seem to like considering grains of sand in a heap, if that makes sense.

If you consider every single mammalian individual that ever existed, you will not be able to identify discrete boundaries between the concept of dog and not-dog. You may not even be able to agree on the criteria. Again, I am not considering potential, possible, counterfactual examples. I am considering all individuals that have ever existed in earth. I can't refer to most of these specific individuals, but I know for a fact that they existed. Sure, they don't exist now... and that is like a frame of reference on which the statistical structure of what is being talked about is different o if we change the reference frame, change the scale, change the inclusion of individuals, genetic structures that have actually existed.

Well, the underlined part is pretty important there. It depends on what you mean by "discrete boundaries." If this amounts to a demand for "metaphysical superglue" between word (or concept) and thing, discussed pages earlier, then this demand cannot be met. Yet it doesn't need to be met to imply that a dog is a distinct type of thing, that dogs are not men, or cats, or trees, or that the distinction between dogs and men is not just a cultural contrivance, or even ambiguous.

I am also not sure about the factual claim you're making. Numerous different species that are so similar we could not distinguish them exist for every existent species? But that is not what the fossil record suggests for man, for just one example. There have not been "very many species indistinguishable from man" existing throughout the Earth's history. There have been, on contemporary accounts, just the one. And this certainly wouldn't be true for domestic animals either. Cows and chickens didn't exist prior to man, "back in the mists of history," or if they did, there is no evidence of them remains.

Unless you are merely speaking of the transition from wolf to dog, in which case what of it? Yes, domestication is not a binary. Yet the aurochs is extinct, the cow is not. More to the point, a stegosaurus is not a dog, an oak is not a dog, a rock is not a dog. These are quite discrete distinctions between dog and not-dog. They just aren't based on the "metaphysical superglue" discussed earlier.

All organisms on earth share a common ancestor; it is surely the case that if you trace the changes of all of your ancestors, generation by generation, the changes in genetics will be tiny every time in the context of all of the genetic variation that has ever existed. If, from your earliest ancestor to you now, your lineage has gone through all of the different stereotypical biological kinds - we at least know apes, mammal, reptile, fis, I believe - there is absolutely going to be no dicrete boundaries along the way. Its more-or-less a continuous path of infinitesimal change.

Yes, and this is indeed a problem for what I like to call "Excel spreadsheet metaphysics." On this view, what makes something what it is has to be defined in terms of something akin to a string an Xlookup function could match. Maybe this is some "bundle of properties," or perhaps it is some sequence of genes. And so, for biological species to exist at all, there must be some sort of code (properties, genes, etc.) that uniquely species it, such that we fill in "dog" in one cell and, through a series of lookups, bring back an array with all the dogs (past, present, and future) identified. Each dog is no doubt different, so the abstraction then has to function as some sort of search term.

As I think we both agree, such a "lookup" variable cannot exist. But if the argument is something like:

P1: For any discrete class/category of things to exist (e.g. dogs), a unique identifying "code" must exist to uniquely specify it.
P2: Such a code cannot exist.
C: Therefore, there are no different types (dog, oak, etc.) of things.

Then the absurd conclusion should lead us to question our premises. You could make the same sort of argument re life, both vis-á-vis "when life began on Earth" and "when any individual organism dies." Where is the exact, discrete moment where any individual dog dies? If we cannot find it, shall we conclude that either no dogs ever die, or that none have ever lived? Or perhaps that "life" and "being a dog" are mere cultural or mental constructs, ens rationis and not ens reale?

My take is that these problems are the result of inappropriate analysis. Change cannot occur "in no time at all." Change occurs over some interval, as does all experience of change (or of anything). And we can indeed distinguish intervals over which any individual dog clearly and unambiguously changes from living to dead. Likewise, there are intervals over which some biological species clearly and unambiguously emerge from others.

Take a look at Apustimelogist's latest post about evolution. That's basically the old paradox: if you remove a grain of sand from a heap and keep going, when does the heap stop being a heap? In other words, when do you need a new word? Chesterton, in your quote, doesn't seem to like considering grains of sand in a heap, if that makes sense.

Chesterton is a gifted rhetorician, but he is a far better critic than positive theorist. I think his point is this:

If the sorties paradox, problem of the many, problems of ordinary objects, etc. lead us to think that there are neither grains of sand nor heaps, but just one heap—a heap composed of nothing in particular—then our reasoning has gone off the rails. Indeed, arguably it has become self-refuting. If there are no such things as cows or pines, then it also seems there can be no such things as words or meaning, but then claims along the lines of: "there are no such things as cows," are completely vacuous. So, one has to settle somewhere above the horizon of an all-encompassing eliminitivism. Otherwise, we are rewinding the tape back to Parmenides or Heraclitus.

But, per my post above, I think we can do a bit better than that. I think, for instance, that one can resolve the difficulties of feeling one needs to specify "the exact moment the first man existed" in order to distinguish men as a species, by realizing that change does not occur in "exact moments" but across a temporal series. And the same is true of physical being. Beings are always changing, so one does not differentiate them through a universal that acts a sort of static database filter, a metaphysical SQL query or something of that nature.

Yes, I think the tripartite structure helps to clear this up. You can, of course, signify an idea, or even a complex collection of them (e.g. "the theory of special relativity") as the "object." You can likewise signify incorporeal "objects," such as an economic recession, or hypothetical ones. However, what is signified is different from the thought that interprets it, the interpretant.

Thinking and "talking to oneself" involves signs, but clearly what is signified and the interpretant are not thereby collapsed. So that's a common difficulty, an interpretant need not be conscious, nor need they be a whole person (an interpreter). — Count Timothy von Icarus

As for the triangles: I like the first one Count Timothy von Icarus posted best, as the dotted line an the bottom makes sure to emphasise that relation between signifyer and signified is an imputed one. And I also like that the "thought" sits on top. I think the source is Ogden/Richards The meaning of meaning, but I'd have to check to make sure [it doesn't say]. I like that, because I tend to think of thought as a process: not one thought, one clear-cut piece of mental content, but a stream of consiousness, classified and edited by analysis, so we can think about that. — Dawnstorm

I quite agree.

The diagram shows a relation between symbol and referent, linked by thought. Quine, Austin, Searle Grice and others showed this to be a somewhat keyhole version of what is going on. There is more to language than just reference, so a diagram that explains only reference will explain only a small part of language. — Banno

I find myself surprised -- in many ways.

I think the main thing I'd like to be able to distinguish is between when a person is talking about an object we are perceiving and when a person is talking about all the things we perceive when perceiving an object** -- I suspect that we do not need the notion of "the sign" to do this, but if we are speaking in terms of signs then I want to distinguish between the two references because I'm contending that language is not an object in the world like the other objects.

Which I think -- and correct me if I'm wrong -- @Dawnstorm and @Banno agree with me on only because I've been agreeing with what they've been saying.

So I'm left wondering where I'm losing the plot :sweat:

**EDIT: The confusing wording is because I'm trying to avoid "thought-objects" in the expression.

Tim apparently thinks that there is at most one correct way in which the world can be divvied up. God's way, presumably.

Others, perhaps you and I and maybe @Dawnstorm, think that there may be multiple ways to divvy up stuff, each of them capable of being coherent if not complete.

Does that help?

Yes. Thanks. I mean, that's the plot I'm seeing so far -- I was thinking that agreeing with the tripartite diagram furthered the "multiple ways" by making us able to talk about both object-reference and language-reference.

So I was thinking we'd all want to adopt the tripartite diagram -- not as a rule, just as a distinction in trying to understand the beast that is reference.

So I was thinking we'd all want to adopt the tripartite diagram -- not as a rule, just as a distinction in trying to understand the beast that is reference. — Moliere

Though going back over a bit ...

as the dotted line an the bottom makes sure to emphasise that relation between signifyer and signified is an imputed one. — Dawnstorm

That I agree with. It's imputed. There needs to be a speaker and an interpreter for meaning to be/happen/whatever.

There is a tremendous multiplicity and diversity, and I'd add that a lot of it is quite observable. Every dog is different, and every person—each snowflake as well as each fingerprint. My copy of the Metaphysics has different dog ears than my professors, different coffee stains, different places where the ink didn't quite come off the press correctly. And the same person or dog is also different from moment to moment, year to year, sometimes dramatically so. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I like this description of multiplicity. That's what it feels like when I think about every fact, rather than every relevant fact.

I think the main thing I'd like to be able to distinguish is between when a person is talking about an object we are perceiving and when a person is talking about all the things we perceive when perceiving an object** -- I suspect that we do not need the notion of "the sign" to do this, but if we are speaking in terms of signs then I want to distinguish between the two references because I'm contending that language is not an object in the world like the other objects.

That's a very interesting question. Are the two different? Clearly, on a common sense view, our vision of a tree is not identical with it, but in some philosophies there is just sense data and we are just naming similar bundles of sense data as suits our needs.

Or even on a realist view: "are things anything other than the sum total of their (fundamental) observable properties?" i.e. "bundle theories." Most bundle theorists argue "yes," there is a substratum or haecceity to things to which properties "attach." If this seems odd (I think it does), it's because a great deal of difficult problems result if one denies any substratum, and makes things nothing but bundles of universals or tropes.

I feel like this is an area where metaphysics and philosophy of perception has to come prior to philosophy of language. How can you solve "how do we refer to things?" if we are not sure if there are things to refer to, or if we can perceive them?

Tripartite semiotics were developed on the assumption that the senses are the means by which we know things. On a representationalist view, the senses are instead what we know, i.e. "mental representations." I don't think tripartite semiotics has to imply a rejection of representationalism, but they often go together. The sign relation is said to be irreducibly triadic; the sign is what joins the object and the interpretant (in a "nuptial union" of sorts). The senses (imperfectly to be sure) communicate the actuality of things. The type of causation specific to signs is their capacity to make us think one thing instead of any other, so there is a sort of "in-forming" caused by the transfer of information in perception.

Hence, on this view, we would _normally_ be referring to _the things_ we perceive. I think it's fair to say this is normally how linguistic convention is popularly understood. "Dog" is taken to mean dog, not "our perceptions associated with 'dog.'" However, it is certainly possible to refer to our perceptions instead of the object of perception. It just requires extra specification because it isn't the way people normally communicate. So, the clause: "my perception of dogs," would work fine for signifying this difference (for most interpretants, viz. competent English speakers).

I am aware of philosophies that would deny this though. They would say "dog" really just means "our perceptions associated with dog," and that popular understandings to the contrary are just confusion. Likewise, there are those who would argue that any dog is just a heap of properties (or perceptions), and we could further subdivide this into those who think the properties are universals (realists) and those who think they are tropes (trope nominalists), or those who think they are just "useful fictions," etc. etc.

Tim apparently thinks that there is at most one correct way in which the world can be divvied up

I would put it this way: "not all ways are equally correct." For example, I claim that dogs and trout exist as discrete things, organic wholes, in the world. Their existence is not a merely linguistic fact; it is not dependent on linguistic conventions. By contrast, non-continuous trout halves and fox halves combined into "fouts" can certainly be named as "objects," but they do not have the same ontological status as proper wholes, such as trout and foxes. Do you disagree with that?

One can allow that there might be many ways to be right without having to agree that all ways must be equally correct. If all ways to "divvy up the world" are equally correct, then "all ways of divvying up language," something in the world, must also be equally correct. But then there would be no point in doing philosophy of language, for one could never be wrong.

Likewise, I don't think propositions about the physical world can be both true and false, at least not without equivocation or qualification. However, I don't think rejecting contradictions is a sort of fundamentalism. For one thing, people can certainly be fundamentalists in the opposite direction.

I would put it this way: "not all ways are equally correct." For example, I claim that dogs and trout exist as discrete things, organic wholes, in the world. Their existence is not a merely linguistic fact; it is not dependent on linguistic conventions. By contrast, non-continuous trout halves and fox halves combined into "fouts" can certainly be named as "objects," but they do not have the same ontological status as proper wholes, such as trout and foxes. Do you disagree with that? — Count Timothy von Icarus

As you already know (but perhaps other forum members don't), metaphysical permissivists do indeed disagree with that. They claim that fouts exist, just as dogs and trouts do. And objectively so, they exist independently of language and thought. If there were no human beings, fouts would still exist. The only difference between them and ordinary objects is that they're extraordinary objects. The permissivist answer to the Debunking Argument is simply that there's nothing particularly impressive about our ways of dividing up the world into objects: we simply pick up on the ordinary ones while we usually ignore the extraordinary ones. Shorter: there is an object answering to every conceivable way of dividing the world into objects, no matter how capricious or bizarre such divisions are. There is an object composed of the trout's left eye and the dog's right paw. There is an object composed of the trout's stomach and the dog's nose. There is an object composed of the trout's brain and the dog's tongue. And so forth. It sounds insane, and it is (to my mind, at least). So why do they uphold such crazy views? Because if there's good arguments against metaphysical conservatism (and permissivists believe that there are), then the only serious rival to permissivism is metaphysical eliminativism. And, by permissivist lights, if we need to embrace the idea that extraordinary objects exist, in order to secure the existence of ordinary objects (contra the eliminativists), then it's an idea well worth embracing. Shorter: it's better to have both trouts and fouts, instead of not having either.

(slightly edited)

Shorter: it's better to have fouts and trouts, instead of not having either. — Arcane Sandwich

I prefer "names are weird"

:D

But they're not just names. These are actual, mind-independent objects, according to permissivists. Fouts exist just as much as your kitchen table does. You don't notice their existence because they're irrelevant to your ordinary life. But they're out there, in the world, not just in our thoughts or language.

Kinda weird, though, right?

Isn't it as weird as accepting that the vinyl scratches record meaning?

I think that permissivism is far weirder. And it gets even more insane once you realize that their ontology doesn't stop at strange mereological fusions such as fouts. There are objects that have extraordinary modal profiles as well. For example, there are curlterpillars: caterpillar-like objects that begin to exist when a caterpillar rolls up into a ball. There are incars: vehicles that look like ordinary cars, but that can only exist when they're inside a garage. There are snowdiscalls: snowball-like objects that can continue to exist when an ordinary snowball is flattened into a disc, etc.

Sure, some ways of divvying don't work.


We can juxtapose two views, that either the dog is an whole regardless of language, or it is a whole in virtue of language. Then we can pretend that the one must be true, at the expense of the other.

But perhaps the juxtaposition is fraught with problems. We might treat the trout as a whole while catching it, becasue that's what works. Then we filet it, treating it as a compound, then serve it along with spuds, greens and a béchamel as a part of a meal. What counts as whole or part is a result of what we are doing.

And language is a part of the stuff we do.


Meaning is not found, it's made. Or better, drop meaning and reference altogether and talk instead about use.