Ok, that makes sense. Yes, how Quine defines "fact" here is at odds with most philosophy.



You'd have to define perfect I suppose. If it is the older usage of "having no privation" then yes, circleness cannot be deprived of any aspect of circleness.

I'm puzzled as to what a liger is. Is it a tiger? Is it a lion? Is it neither, or is it both?

Seems to me that this is not asking something about ligers, but about how we might best use the words "liger", "tiger" and "lion".

A liger is a hybrid, like a mule.

Let me ask, when we read a book about botany do we only learn about word use, theories, and models, or do we learn about plants?

Here is my thesis: words are not, at least primarily, "what we know," but a "means of knowing and communicating."

That is not to say that rabbit=gavagai is not truth-apt; but that the truth value is inferred and allocated as a part of our web of belief.

Right, and that's been my point, as you say "there are all sorts of problems with Quine's view." For instance, consider where some people have taken this. If is truth is just conformity to existing belief, as judged against it, then when a conspiracy theorist "discovers" that the COVID vaccine is a ploy to inject the populace with microchips, or that Trump won the 2020 election in a landslide but the CCP reversed it, they are discovering truth and they know these things.

Now, certainly elements of Quine's holism might usefully explain why people who accept one conspiracy theory are much more likely to accept others, but it seems easy to allow for this insight without accepting much that comes along with it. I think it would be rare to find anyone who didn't think beliefs influence other beliefs, or that gaining knowledge didn't involve refining and reformulating past beliefs.

He considered himself to have dispatched any notion of essence, still a quite active topic in contemporary philosophy, in a few sentences where he claimed he could imagine that Socrates was an alien. — Count Timothy von Icarus

@Banno is correct about that. Being human isn't essential to Socrates because he could have been an alien. He could have been an android who time travelled to ancient Athens.

If Quine is right, many others are wrong. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Who are you thinking of?

@Banno is correct about that. Being human isn't essential to Socrates because he could have been an alien. He could have been an android who time travelled to ancient Athens

No, this is profoundly misunderstanding what an essence is supposed to be, even vis-a-vis contemporary analytic essential properties. It's on a level with claiming that Quine is talking about how we can say "triangle" and "three-sided 2D shape."

No, this is profoundly misunderstanding what an essence is supposed to be, even vis-a-vis contemporary analytic essential properties. It's on a level with claiming that Quine is talking about how we can say "triangle" and "three-sided 2D shape." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Are you saying that it's necessarily true that Socrates is human?

Have you guys read Kripke? This might help clear it up. Or check out "Rigid Designators" here.

Yes, but Kripke's essential properties are stipulated. Do you think that's what Count means?

No, the idea is that if Socrates is a man he is a particular sort of thing. So if Socrates is a chimpanzee, then he is not a man. Essences are contingent vis-a-vis corporeal beings underlying material substrate. If Socrates is eaten by a tiger and his body is turned into tiger muscle and organs, then that substrate is:

A. No longer man.
B. No longer Socrates.

So you aren't saying essential properties are necessary properties. I don't know what you mean then.

Possibly not, but would it matter to what we wanted to say about Socrates' humanity? I'm not exactly sure what you two are disputing. Is it whether Socrates is necessarily a man, or whether, in referring to him, we are adopting a Kripkean understanding of proper names?

Is it whether Socrates is necessarily a man, or whether, in referring to him, we are adopting a Kripkean understanding of proper names? — J

We hadn't brought up Kripke. It works like this:
I could make it clear that the Socrates I'm talking about is the human one. I'm only looking at possible worlds in which he is, so we have a necessary property known a posteriori. It's a case of this Socrates. This particular one.

That kind of essential property doesn't travel outside discussions where that Socrates was identified, though. Everywhere else, Socrates could be anything. He could have been a talking fish because there's a possible world where he was.

Ok, that makes sense. Yes, how Quine defines "fact" here is at odds with most philosophy. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'm not sure if Quine uses "fact" in that way, but Banno and frank certainly are.

Here is my thesis: words are not, at least primarily, "what we know," but a "means of knowing and communicating." — Count Timothy von Icarus

:up:

Banno is not a good person to ask about this. — Count Timothy von Icarus

An understatement. Banno reduces all of philosophy to a few idiosyncratic decades in the 20th century and reads everything through that narrow, parochial lens.

-

Have you guys read Kripke? — J

Kripke flirts with essentialism:

Kripke would evidently agree that there is something that it is to amount to you, as opposed to anything else, and that your essence is what qualifies an object—you—to be the designatum of your name with respect to any possible world (he doesn’t say that your essence is qualitative though, and he outright rejects certain versions of that claim). But Kripke would deny that a speaker would have to know this essence, or to rely upon any other nontrivial criteria distinguishing you from world to world, in order to refer to you by way of a rigid designator (Kripke 1980, pp. 15–20; see also Plantinga 1974, pp. 93–98). — Rigid Designators | SEP

Medieval theories of signification and ampliation addressed much of this in greater detail than contemporary philosophy manages, and it's no wonder that the perennial problems of metaphysics began to return as soon as Logical Positivism died its own strange death:

In any case, if we look around the scene of contemporary philosophy -- which, despite all its eclecticism, is markedly different as a whole from the philosophical landscape of the beginning of this century -- what first hits the eye is the fact that metaphysics, despite its allegedly irrevocable and irreversible death, proclaimed repeatedly by several philosophical authorities of the past two centuries, is still alive and kicking. Well, of course, if someone were to say that this metaphysics is no longer that metaphysics, he would obviously be right. For most contemporary metaphysical studies are (quite paradoxically) the direct descendants of the logical positivist/analytic movement,[5] which in turn established its platform on a radical rejection of traditional metaphysics (proclaiming it to be simply meaningless). So, contemporary metaphysical investigations (here we should think of works of authors such as Armstrong, Bealer, Butchvarov, Gupta, Fine, Kripke, Lewis, Parsons, Plantinga, Putnam, Quine, van Inwagen, etc.) are radically different in their methods and principles as well as in their goals from anything that might pass for "traditional metaphysics". Nevertheless, one cannot fail to notice that in the works of contemporary metaphysicians, who in general are not quite familiar with, and who in fact do not care much about, traditional metaphysics, there is a slew of obstinately recurring traditional metaphysical problems: for example, considerations concerning "rigid designators" and "natural kinds" directly lead to contemporary views flirting with Aristotelian essentialism, problems with personal identity and "transworld identity" are closely related to the traditional problems of the principle of individuation, while questions regarding meaning and reference led to the revival of several aspects of the old problem of universals. Indeed, in general, the contemporary realism-antirealism debate with all its ramifications can quite fairly be characterized as being centered around the traditional problems of the relationships between modi essendi (modes of being), modi intelligendi (modes of understanding) and modi significandi (modes of signifying), primarily approaching the issue from the last member of this triad. In this situation, it is no wonder that we find a number of philosophically-minded historians as well as historically-minded philosophers (such as Adams, McCord Adams, Barnes, Burrell, Geach, Gracia, Henry, Kretzmann, Kenny, McInerny, Normore, Stump, Wolterstorff, etc.) who, being versatile both in analytic philosophy and in traditional metaphysics, are bringing the scholastic discussions directly to bear upon contemporary metaphysical problems and techniques. — Gyula Klima: What can a scholastic do in the 21st century?

They're essential as respects the idea that all men are necessarily a certain sort of thing, man, and not anything else. But the idea isn't that you apply some name "Socrates" and whatever has the name applied to it is Socrates; that sort of counter example simply begs the question. The idea is that, while there may be a possible world where people mistook a robot for a man named "Socrates", there isn't a possible world where a robot named Socrates is a man, or where a man named Socrates is also a tree, etc. Socrates's body might later decompose and become a part of a tree, but then it is no longer the man Socrates.

As Fine has it, essential properties are necessary because they are essential, they aren't essential because they are necessary.

Looking at possible worlds is fine. Suppose we have one where Socrates is a man and one where Socrates is a robot disguised as a man. The essentialist says that these two aren't identical to each other in the sense that they aren't the same sort of thing, even if they both bug the Greeks and get forced to drink hemlock.

Essences and essential properties are different on some views, but looking at properties is helpful. If one denies essential/accidental properties distinction then it seems to me that either all properties must be essential or all accidental.

So, in the first case, where everything is essential, it is simply equivocation to talk about different Socrateses in different worlds having different properties. If they have any properties that are different, they are different things. In which case, no, there is no possible world where our Socrates has different attributes. If something varies between the worlds, you have a different Socrates.

The other view would say that Socrates is whatever we call Socrates. All properties are accidents, and so there are, strictly speaking, no things at all. So Socrates can have any properties we'd like. Socrates after dying, decomposing, and turning into soil and plants? Still Socrates, if we choose to call it that. Socrates after getting his hair cut? Potentially not Socrates; we decide. It's just a name we choose to apply.

A radical empiricist might add conditions of verification to being. So, Socrates being a man versus a robot only makes him a different sort of thing if we can specify the difference based on available sense data. Because much of history is lost to us, and the evidence we have is consistent with both the man and the robot hypotheses, there is no fact about Socrates being a man or a robot. A less radical empiricist would allow a difference if anyone could potentially observe a difference. E.g., if the Greeks had cracked open Socrates's chest in one case they would find organs, in the other circuits, and this (provided they agree there are certain sorts of things and wholes at all) is enough to declare a difference.

Yes, but Kripke's essential properties are stipulated. — frank

SEP is correct here:

Even so, the appeal to stipulation is more like a promissory note than the satisfaction of an explanatory obligation. The appeal to stipulation puts off for another occasion any attempt to resolve how we succeed at doing what we take for granted that we manage somehow to do: namely, how we succeed at referring to the right individual, by means of our stipulative effort. — Rigid Designators | SEP

Ok. But how does this help you fix a reference? Or is this completely divorced from the OP?

So you aren't saying essential properties are necessary properties. I don't know what you mean then.

Also, not everyone agrees that essences are decomposable into discrete properties. So, one way to still use the idea is to say that Socrates's essence is "the property of being human."

The counter example to this would be to say that Socrates can lack the property of being human and still be human (seemingly a non-starter) or to show that there is no such thing as a "property of being human," which I would assume would also entail rejecting the claim that there are such things as humans. Something like "there are no humans, there are only assemblages of sense data with certain morphisms that are referred to as "human" due to social conventions, and these social conventions and the sense data involved in them are (best) explained without any reference to humans existing as a type of thing."

.

Being human isn't essential to Socrates because he could have been an alien. — frank

Why? Why not say, "Being Socrates isn't essential to Socrates because he could have been Patrocles"?

If there is any rhyme or reason to these claims; if possible worlds are to do any work at all; then there must be some necessary property or properties of Socrates, and once we admit that we're already into modal essentialism.

Cheers! :nerd:

When I first encountered the Logical Positivist thinking in Banno's thread on Kit Fine, it was very strange. It was strange to encounter folks who think of reference and essence as, "Either we have an infallible pre-packaged reference/essence, or else it does not exist at all." I am still working out how someone can get to such a confused position in the first place. And perhaps that was Quine's motive, "Reference doesn't work that way, kids. You're barking up the wrong tree." The adamant resolution to sever reference from speaker's intention is obviously at the heart of the problem, and this has to do with reifying language as an unchanging something that exists apart from speaker's intentions and extramental objects, and can therefore be studied in isolation from these things.

* Banno is a living example of these problems. For example, even the thought of taking speaker's intention into consideration makes Banno start shrieking, "Humpty Dumptyism! Humpty Dumptyism!" The propaganda campaign is well established by now.

Cheers! :nerd: — frank

I think Kripke saw the point I am making and instantiated it in his rigid designators. It's not that hard to progress the thought. Someone using a rigid designator is thinking of something which has continuity across possible worlds, and which therefore has at least one essential modal property.

Indeed, if you and I are arguing about Socrates, then we are both thinking of something which has at least one essential modal property. Then we navigate that difference and close the distance between our two conceptions by reflecting on the other person's essence-conception, or as you said, by "putting ourselves in their shoes." If at the end of the day we end up agreeing (which sometimes happens in the real world), then our two essence-conceptions of Socrates will have become aligned. That alignment is the first step toward better understanding Socrates in a dialogical context. For example, if two scholars of Socrates sit down and talk for a few hours, they may well come away with a more unified historical theory of Socrates, and that unified theory will in turn represent progress towards the goal of understanding the real Socrates.

Although essences are not of individuals, I think this helps to show how we get at the real, whether of individual (objective referent) or species (essence). The operative concepts (referent or essence) are operative throughout the entire dialogical process in tightly nested spirals. We are constantly switching between thinking about our subjective/intentional referents, our interlocutor's subjective/intentional referents, the objective referent that we are both aiming at, and then the various recursive mental acts, such as how our interlocutor is conceiving of our own subjective/intentional referents. In doing this, in allowing reference to be analogical in that it involves a complex intersubjective dance of different shades and colors of reference, we eventually arrive at knowledge of the referent that we are both ultimately aiming at. But if we make "referent" a flat, objective reality independent of our thinking, intentions, and personal understandings, then we are doomed from the start.

(I am obviously appealing to modal essentialism here.)

You and Count are both materialists.

Is believing in essences from Plato? Is that how we're supposed to be sorting out reference? We're contacting the ideal? — frank

I don't see how that could be made to work. it would be up to others to present such an argument.

You and Count are both materialists. — frank

Okay, Frank. Thank you for letting us know. :ok:

@Frank,

Banno is not a good person to ask about this. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Hmm.

He considered himself to have dispatched any notion of essence, still a quite active topic in contemporary philosophy, in a few sentences where he claimed he could imagine that Socrates was an alien. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That's not so. What I said was

Therefore the notion of essence is problematic. — Banno

And clearly it is.

And later I offered

I had in mind Fine's rejection of Quine's holism. Kripke's origin essentialism works well. One might make sense of essences by using Searle's status functions; something along the lines of Fine's argument but using "counts as..." to set up what Fine calls a definite. — Banno

by way of showing a path for making sense of essences.

I starter and ran a thread about FIne's view of essences, and several threads on Kripke, whom I studied while at Uni; a long time ago, and no doubt things have moved on.

Quine's conclusion is at odds with a great deal of contemporary and historical thought. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Often the mark of a good piece of thinking is found in the conversation about how it might be wrong. Quine made a deep impression in philosophy, but I do not agree with all that he said. The criticisms of Quine here somewhat misrepresent his view. I'd like to clear a few of those errors up.

For Quine, there are no discrete wholes out in the world to refer to. And what we have as evidence from the senses is based on the behaviorist notion of stimuli. We have energy interacting with nerves in a reductive physicalism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is roughly correct. Quine adopted a naturalist approach. He certainly is not alone in treating wholes as conceptual constructions, his rejection of what Sellers would call "the myth of the given". He does make use of behaviour; so in the Gavagai fable he is asking how we might translate "gavagai" based only on the behaviour of the community. But it is an error to say he relies on stimuli. We are, after all, talking about a philosopher who was most central involved in the dethroning of logical empiricism. He very much uses linguistic and behavioural responses to emphasis the wholistic nature of our briefs. That's kinda his thing. Quine would have outright rejected any association with "mereological nihilism grounded in corpuscular physicalism". Associating him with such a notion is a symptom of not having grasped his approach.

I addressed the place of language in categorising discreet individuals earlier. (I'll drop "discreet wholes" since it is liable to cause confusion with Quine's holism) Is a liger a tiger? Is it a lion? Is it neither, or is it both? Seems to me that this is not asking something about ligers, but about how we might best use the words "liger", "tiger" and "lion". But if that's so, then asking if a liger is a tiger is not asking about essences of "tigerness", but about word use. What counts as a rabbit or a lion is as much about the community of language users, or if Tim prefers, the "form of life", as it is about rabbits and lions. Quine was a part of the discussion that brought this idea to the fore.

Saying that an essence is "what it is" must strike one as incomplete. A tiger is "what it is" – a tiger? But that tells us next to nothing. As with "the idea that there is something that makes different types of things different types of things" – well, ok, but what? a different set of properties? a difference in definition? Or a difference in word use?

Sometimes it appears that there is not a "something that makes it what it is", famously in the cases of games and families set out by Wittgenstein.

And the point made by both Quine and Wittgenstein is that even if we cannot set out "what it is that makes it what it is" (a phrasing surely only to be found in the mouth of a philosopher), we can nevertheless make use of the words, and good, competent use as well.

If essence is sometimes taken to be a "magical spirit power inside things" it might be becasue those who advocate essentialism do not set out what it is...

It's rather difficult to form an opinion concerning essence while what an essence is remains obscure. — Banno

So if your aim is to preserve your essentialism, then yes, Banno is not a good person to ask about this. He is, after all, just a troll. And proud of it.

Let me ask, when we read a book about botany do we only learn about word use, theories, and models, or do we learn about plants? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Why not both?

Banno is correct about that. Being human isn't essential to Socrates because he could have been an alien. He could have been an android who time travelled to ancient Athens

No, this is profoundly misunderstanding what an essence is supposed to be, even vis-a-vis contemporary analytic essential properties. It's on a level with claiming that Quine is talking about how we can say "triangle" and "three-sided 2D shape." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Rather famously, Quine rejected the idea that we could not question analytic propositions. So for him perhaps even that a triangle has three sides might be subject to revision. Certainly that the angles of a triangle add to 180º has been questioned.

But if it is a misunderstanding, show how, and set out for us what an essence is. So fat all we seem to have is that an essence of a thing is what it is...

And while we are here, the idea that Socrates might have not been human is played out in the writings of Donnellan and Kripke, in their rejection of the description theory of meaning. Basic stuff that follows from Kripke's account of an individual being the same in other possible worlds, the basis of the possible world semantics that underpins modal logic.

Socrates might have been an alien. That individual, Socrates, might have had all manor of different properties.

@frank

Have you guys read Kripke? — J

:rofl:

Banno reduces all of philosophy to a few idiosyncratic decades in the 20th century and reads everything through that narrow, parochial lens. — Leontiskos

There are those amongst us who do much the same thing, but from a mediaeval perspective. Which to prefer?

I was thinking along these lines: Let's say someone wants to assert that Socrates is a Humandroid, defined as an android good enough to imitate someone like the historical Socrates. We could deny on this three distinct bases:

1. There are no Humandroids.
2. There is no evidence that Socrates was one, and a lot of evidence that he wasn't.
3. It is logically (analytically) impossible that Socrates was a Humandroid.

The first two refutations are empirical, and defeasible. The third, of course, is not, should it be true. So, is that what Count T is saying, when he says that Socrates is a man, not a chimpanzee? The question you asked about essential properties vs. necessary properties is the same question, perhaps.

Kripke addresses the point specifically in Naming and Necessity, using his pet example "Nixon":

If we can't imagine a possible world in which Nixon doesn't have a certain property, then it's a necessary condition of someone being Nixon. . . Supposing Nixon is in fact a human being, it would seem that we cannot think of a possible counterfactual situation in which he was, say, an inanimate object; perhaps it is not even possible for him not to have been a human being. Then it will be a necessary fact about Nixon that in all possible worlds where he exists at all, he is human, or anyway he is not an inanimate object. This has nothing to do with any requirement that there be purely qualitative sufficient conditions for Nixonhood which we can spell out.

. . . .

Suppose Nixon actually turned out to be an automaton. That might happen. We might need evidence whether Nixon is a human being or an automaton. But that is a question about our knowledge. The question of whether Nixon might not have been a human being, given that he is one, is not a question about knowledge [my emphases], a posteriori or a priori. It's a question about, even though such and such things are the case, what might have been the case otherwise. — Kripke, 46-47

The moral, I think, is that questions about necessary and sufficient conditions are modal, and hence not about what we know to be true in our world. Can we refer to "Nixon" without knowing he is a human being, in the same way that (to use another of Kripke's examples) we can refer to a table without knowing that it is made of molecules? As it happens, we do know both things, but if we knew as little about Socrates as Socrates himself knew about tables, we presumably could still refer to him, and be unconfused about him in possible worlds. So, in doing so, we don't have in mind some necessary and sufficient (or essential) qualities about him. We're not denying them, but we just need to be able to point to him, as it were.

But . . . "Anything coming from a different origin would not be this object." This is the lesson Kripke draws from his discussion about whether Queen Elizabeth could have been born of different parents. We should probably say the same thing about Socrates being engendered by robotics. Again, nothing to do with necessary and sufficient conditions.

Looking at possible worlds is fine. Suppose we have one where Socrates is a man and one where Socrates is a robot disguised as a man. The essentialist says that these two aren't identical to each other in the sense that they aren't the same sort of thing, even if they both bug the Greeks and get forced to drink hemlock. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Quite odd. One does not have to be an essentialist to agree that these aren't the same sort of thing. In one possible world, Socrates - that very individual - is a man, while in another he may be a robot. These sentences are both about Socrates. That is, they are both about the very same individual.

The alternative would be to reject transworld identification, which I supose is what you are doing. But I hadn't taken you as a friend of David Lewis and counterpart theory. Certainly his views on God would not suit you.

Kripke's essential properties are stipulated. — frank

Yep. I think this the least problematic way to understand possible worlds.

Yep. I think this the least problematic way to understand possible worlds. — Banno

That's how it clicked for me -- stipulation is what makes the rigid designator true, and while maybe it could work in general i tended to think that the stipulation was always about a particular individual we've already referred to.