You seems to be suggesting that if one is not following an explicit rule, one is acting arbitrarily. Do you really want to make such a claim?

No, I am suggesting that if one chooses something "for no reason at all," then one is acting arbitrarily. Now, you suggest that there is "no reason," no prior truth to point to, in selecting any one of the infinite possible logics. Such a selection is instead based on the fact that "others have already chosen to agree to some game rules," and so it is "useful to agree." (Note here though that the very truth of your argument for the utility of "agreement" would itself depend on a particular logic though. In a trivial logic, it is trivial to prove that it is actually better to pick a logic that no other human agrees with, because one can prove anything expressible in such a logic.)

Anyhow, were this true, it would mean that each individual "picks a logic" only because other people have already picked it. Yet there cannot be an infinite regress of people picking, say to affirm LNC, just because other people have already agreed to it. The choice has to bottom out in some arbitrary first mover. So, the dominant "custom" is just that, arbitrary custom. This also means that the pluralist, in bucking the dominant custom, is also being arbitrary. The utility of a logic rests in "how many other people agree to it."

I think this is obviously not the case. The fact that trivial logics, which are very common, lack utility, is because it is not the case that every statement one can formulate in language is both true and not true. That's absurd. It's false. And people eschew trivial logics because they allow for false conclusions; they are not actually truth preserving, only "truth preserving" vis-á-vis some deflated notion of truth.

But at any rate, simply choosing to affirm something as true solely because "other people are doing it," is not good reasoning. This is the old: "if everyone jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge would you do it too?"

The most important phrase, perhaps, is the first, since it links intelligibility with "anything being anything" -- thinking with being, in other words. I believe this is probably true, as a description of consciousness in the world. And that may be good enough, since philosophy doesn't pretend to tell us what philosophy (thinking) would be like, if no one were doing it! It does, however, often try to talk about what the world is like, unmediated by the experience of human consciousness. From that perspective, can we say that "there can be no 'physical order' without an intelligible order by which things are what they are"? We simply don't know.

This skepticism relies on a particular metaphysics of consciousness and appearances. In materialism, potency is king, thus contingency and accident reign over necessity and essence. Consciousness becomes an accidental, contingent representation of being (i.e. representationalism). Appearances are, or at least can be, completely arbitrarily related to reality. It's a world where intelligibility must be projected onto things, or at least "constructed by the mind" (and this also involves a different conception of reason and knowledge). Obviously, if appearances can be arbitrarily related to reality, so can language (by contrast, we could consider someone like Hegel, who would argue that the historical evolution of language and logic cannot be arbitrary).

That's sort of the deep separation between modern and pre-modern metaphysics, their understanding of appearances/eidos. Plotinus and a number of his followers take up the criticisms of Sextus Empiricus on what are, in some ways, very modern questions of the sort you mention, but have a much easier time resolving the problems because of these differences. So to, Aquinas' consideration of the question of "if the minds knows its own phantasms instead of things."

I don't want to get into all that, except to say the priority of potency (sheer possibility) over actuality is a presupposition of the "raw material world the can be arbitrarily related to intelligibility." First there is potency, and then there is something that actualizes something from it (presumably , potency itself). One of the counterarguments against this is that this doesn't make sense, sheer potency, being nothing in particular, cannot result in any specific actuality; act is always prior to act. But modern thought tends towards just denying this. Actuality comes either out of God's sheer, indeterminate power/potential (all act coming from the Divine Will), or in later atheist cosmology our actual world springs from the possibility space of possible worlds "for no reason at all" (and being a mathematized world, intentionality and meaning are either illusory or spring from man's will as power).

Which is just to say that, while there are other issues, I think this might boil down to the priority of act over potency or vice versa. That's very abstract, but one should expect such for the root of major metaphysical differences.

I wrote that, and then recalled I had a good quote on this re causes, and why causes used to bridge the sort of gap you're bringing up, but do not with with Humean causation:

Forms had explanatory power in the older realist framework, not because general belief in that power was supposed to replace the empirical work of discovering and characterizing how they operated, but because confidence that there were such causal powers helped to account for the order of nature and the very possibility of successful scientific inquiry.

It is commonly said that modern science neglects formal causes but attends to efficient and material causes; but classically understood, efficient and material causes cannot function or even be conceived without formal causes, for it is form which informs matter, giving concrete objects their power to act on other objects. The loss of formal causality is thus in a sense the loss of efficient and material causality as well—an implication that is not quite fully realized until we see it brilliantly explored in the philosophy of David Hume.

Of course, the gravity of the loss of teleology is also evident in the realm of ethics. Ockham was no libertine or relativist, but he prepared the way for the intractable confusion of modern moral reflection. Morality is concerned with ends, and humans, having the natures they do, need to acquire certain further qualities or forms—virtues—which help them fulfill their essential natures and achieve their
ultimate end. Alasdair MacIntyre has most famously traced the inevitable failure of the Enlightenment project to explain morality without teleology. Ockham’s denial of forms and formal causality is unquestionably part of the conceptual disaster that left Enlightenment thinkers with only misunderstood fragments of a once very different project of moral theorizing.

There is another, even more basic, implication of the nominalist rejection of forms and formal causality. In the realist framework, the intrinsic connection between causes and effects was particularly important for explaining how the mind knows the world; concepts formed by the mind, insofar as they are causally connected to things which are the foundation of those concepts, necessarily retain some intrinsic connection to those things. While we can be mistaken in particular judgments, we can be assured of the basic soundness of the mind’s power, thanks to the intrinsic connection between concept and object. The kind of radical skepticism Descartes proposed, even if only methodologically, was simply never entertained through most of the middle ages.

More classical versions of skepticism, usually having to do with the fallibility of the senses, were commonplace, but the possibility of a complete incongruity between the mind and reality—such that even mathematical concepts could be the product of some deceptive manipulation and have no connection to the mathematical “realities” they seem to represent—this was not available in a realist
framework for which concepts are formally and so essentially related to their objects. Ockham’s nominalist innovations almost immediately raised the specter of such radical doubt; this was noticed not only by the first generation of Ockham’s critics, but even by Ockham himself, who proposed thought experiments about God manipulating our minds to make us think things that are not true. For Ockham, such thought experiments were possible not only because of God’s absolute transcendent power, but because the human mind retained for him no intrinsic connection to an intelligible order. Ockham was no skeptic, and he was no Descartes; indeed, he was rather confident in the reliability of human cognition. But the law of unintended consequences applies in the history of philosophy as elsewhere, and it was only a matter of time before some philosopher exploited, as fully as Descartes did, the new opportunity of skepticism made possible by the nominalist rejection of forms and formal causality.

Accordingly, Thomists and other critics of Ockham have tended to present traditional realism, with its forms or natures, as the solution to the modern problem of knowledge. It seems to me that it does not quite get to the heart of the matter. A genuine realist should see “forms” not merely as a solution to a distinctly modern problem of knowledge, but as part of an alternative conception of knowledge, a conception that is not so much desired and awaiting defense, as forgotten and so no longer desired. Characterized by forms, reality had an intrinsic intelligibility, not just in each of its parts but as a whole. With forms as causes, there are interconnections between different parts of an intelligible world, indeed there are overlapping matrices of intelligibility in the world, making possible an ascent from the more particular, posterior, and mundane to the more universal, primary, and noble. 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

"What's Wrong With Ockham?"

Can we say that "there can be no 'physical order' without an intelligible order by which things are what they are"? We simply don't know. - J

This skepticism . . . — Count Timothy von Icarus

It wasn't meant as skepticism, but as a literal statement: We don't know. Better to say, "I don't"? But I hadn't thought you were claiming to know such a thing either.

Now, you suggest that there is "no reason," — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well no, I didn't. That's your wording. What I sugested is the possibility that

Rules such as non-contradiction are stipulated and constitutive rather than intuitions or being self-evident... — Banno

Indeed, your post has several quotes that you are apparently attributing to me, that are things I did not say, or were said by you, not by me... "for no reason at all", "no reason", "others have already chosen to agree to some game rules," and "useful to agree." Odd.

In a trivial logic, it is trivial to prove that it is actually better to pick a logic that no other human agrees with, because one can prove anything expressible in such a logic.) — Count Timothy von Icarus

Such a trivial logic would, by the very fact that no one agrees with it, have the singular misfortune of being quite unless. Choose it if you like. It would be like dribbling a ball around the field while those around you play Football.

Logic exhibits some of the structure of our languages, and as such is a communal activity. It's not something granted by god, so much as a project undertaken by you and I.

When did humans first ask about what's real? It requires the idea of falseness, the ability to totalize, and some cultural conflict to insert as the choices.

I don't think it existed in Bronze Age cultures. It may have to do with early free markets where fraud was rampant. Trade was crippled by people who put the peanuts on the top of the caravan and gravel at the bottom. So could falseness be tied to valuelessness?

You're attempting to ground logic itself in a notion of what is "logically compatible." This is circular without intuition. This is just an appeal to LNC as being intuitive. This seems like: "no intuition is required because the LNC is self-evident." I agree it is self-evident. However, this is the definition of an intuition, perhaps the prime example of it historically. There are logics that reject LNC at any rate. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You seem to be trading on an equivocal idea of intuition. Self-evidence obtains when something is true by definition. We don't need intuition to see it, it is obvious by virtue of the meaning of the terms. If you make a statement that contradicts itself, it is clear that you haven't asserted anything because you have asserted two things which cancel each other out.

Intuition on the other hand refers to when you feel something is so, when its being so just "rings true' to you. Intuition and self-evidence are two very different things ̶ with intuitions you don't know whether they are true, with self-evidence there can be no doubt.

I have heard there are logics in which the LNC plays no part. I can't imagine how that would work, but then I haven't studied exotic logics. I can't imagine them being much use in everday life or science, but of course I could be mistaken. In any case the LNC is basic to our default logic.

I think you were on the right track to start with. — Banno

The implication seems to be that I deviated and went off-track somewhere. Perhaps we disagree about self-evidence as I explain it in my response to Tim above?

What's real is whatever hazards Bayesian updating and persists.

That's an interesting question. I have heard, but not really looked into, the idea that Egyptian Memphite Theology contains an early version of Plato's Theory of Forms. This wouldn't be totally out of left field because there has always been a story attached to Plato that he went to study with the Egyptian priests and learned their wisdom when he was young. Michael Sugrue, among others, also connect Parmenides and thus Plato to older traditions coming out of India and the Orphic tradition (hence the transmigration of souls according to one's karmic/virtuous actions in life).

This would place these ideas pretty far back, but not necessarily before the Bronze Age collapse. However, and I might be conflating later notions of Brahman with earlier ones here, those notions of Brahman as "fundamental reality" would seem to go all the way back to the second millennium. Likewise, ancient Sumerian and Egyptian myths (and Native American ones) seem to at least have the idea of illusion vis-á-vis magic (but this is perhaps not quite the same thing).

You might be on to something, but I would guess that there is also a more primordial grounding of a reality/appearance distinction in the phenomena of dreams, optical illusions, mistakes of judgement, the fallibility of memory, and deception in warfare and hunting (which has apparently always been around). Yet I could absolutely see how civilization, and the problem of standards, media of exchange, and commerce could inflate this notion into something with greater depth.



Why would any one agree or not agree to a logic? That's the question.

Odd.

You might find this helpful: https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/91492/whats-with-philosophers-and-their-use-of-quotation-marks/91501#91501

Intuition and self-evidence are two very different things ̶ — Janus

I agree this distinction is important, and your description of what counts as self-evident seems fine. But I think you've begged the question a bit against what "intuition" might refer to. Does it have to be a feeling? Can something "ring true" on other grounds? Part of the problem is that we lack a decent vocabulary for intuitions, and so we range from the cozy ("feelings", "ring true") to the theoretical ("noetic understanding", "direct intelligibility"). And naturally this makes us wonder whether there's really anything to it at all, if clear descriptions are so hard to come up with.

You also say:

with intuitions you don't know whether they are true — Janus

but that's precisely the issue. The claim about intuitions is that we do know. And the debate is about whether such self-credentialing knowledge, absent either self-evidence or rational argument, is possible. I think what you meant was, "We can't know whether they are true, given the usual philosophical understanding of what 'knowing to be true' means." But this is exactly what the intuitionist wants to challenge. They may be entirely misguided, of course.

The word “real” serves us with a great function, it sets us up for a contrast that may help us navigate the world.

For example, “That egg is real and that one is not” This may mean that one can be eaten and that one is just used for decoration. But the very same egg used for decoration may be the “real thing” while the other is a mere replicate of the artist original.

So, the same object can be “real” and “unreal”. Wait that is a contradiction. Funny how language works, but feel free to adjust your ideas of language, logic all you want, but remember there could be practical consequences to such creativity.

Part of the problem is that we lack a decent vocabulary for intuitions, and so we range from the cozy ("feelings", "ring true") to the theoretical ("noetic understanding", "direct intelligibility"). And naturally this makes us wonder whether there's really anything to it at all, if clear descriptions are so hard to come up with. — J

This is a really good point; it focuses the issue nicely. I would say that intuitions are certainly feelings and the question would be as to whether they are anything more than that. We think an intuition is true if it "feels right". I wonder how else we could gauge its seeming truth. We can theorize further and posit noesis, direct knowledge, innate intelligibility and so on, but we have no way of testing those theories.

but that's precisely the issue. The claim about intuitions is that we do know. And the debate is about whether such self-credentialing knowledge, absent either self-evidence or rational argument, is possible. I think what you meant was, "We can't know whether they are true, given the usual philosophical understanding of what 'knowing to be true' means." But this is exactly what the intuitionist wants to challenge. They may be entirely misguided, of course. — J

Again, I agree entirely. I put stock in my own intuitions, but I would never claim that anyone else ought to believe anything on account of what I believe in following my own intuitions. So, the point for me is that intuitive knowledge is not amenable to intersubjective corroboration. This is something some people find very hard to admit, so I get labelled by some a positivist, which I am most certainly not.

I would say that intuitions are certainly feelings and the question would be as to whether they are anything more than that. We think an intuition is true if it "feels right". I wonder how else we could gauge its seeming truth. We can theorize further and posit noesis, direct knowledge, innate intelligibility and so on, but we have no way of testing those theories. — Janus

Yes that's very important.

Again, I agree entirely. I put stock in my own intuitions, but I would never claim that anyone else ought to believe anything on account of what I believe in following my own intuitions. So, the point for me is that intuitive knowledge is not amenable to intersubjective corroboration. — Janus

Nice.

I believe that not all intuition is equal. For example, when I interview people for jobs, I often have a strong sense about whether they’re going to be the right fit or not. This isn’t just a vague feeling; it’s based on a kind of digested, accumulated experience that I’ve built up over time. But it can't be put into words.

But my intuitions about whether someone is guilty of a crime or whether gods are real are far more speculative - rooted not in experience or repeated exposure, but in emotion, upbringing, and the general atmosphere of ideas I've been exposed to. I tend to believe there's a distinction between intuition that’s grounded in accumulated, tacit knowledge and intuition that is more reflective of personal background and impressionistic feeling.

"There is meaningful discourse. What, therefore, must be the case in order for this to be true? Answer: logic." — J

And what is it for discourse to be meaningful? Of course we can turn from this to consider what we are doing...

"we are playing a language game; what must be true in order to play this language game?"

Well, what constitutes the game?

Ideas such as being self-evident or intuitive or analytic have considerable baggage. Set them aside and just consider p⊃q. Taking on p⊃q and p counts as taking on q. To suppose otherwise one must misuse either p or p⊃q.

No authority here, no intuition or cumbersome structure of analytic and synthetic. It's just what we do when we use hook.

Of course folk can do other things with these symbols. They would not be participating in the same activity. If someone claims to have understood p and p⊃q, and to agree that p and p⊃q are true, but disagrees with q, then we have grounds to say that they are doing it wrong (or at lease differently), and have not understood p and p⊃q at all, or some such rejection of their view.

, can you see how this avoids the fraught notion of intuition?

The implication seems to be that I deviated and went off-track somewhere. — Janus

Not that so much as that your position may have been misrepresented in the other replies.

We think an intuition is true if it "feels right". I wonder how else we could gauge its seeming truth. — Janus

... and thereby hang all the problems of private languages and so on. Intuitions will not hold up. Indeed, I am somewhat surprised to see them being used at all, given their poor track record.

So if you were to disagree with someone's intuition, not to share their intuition, they have no comeback. It's difficult to see how not having an intuition is something you can be wrong or mistaken about. i think we agree on this. It's a pretty poor grounding for the whole of rationality.

The alternative, that being rational is something we do, bypasses this by setting rationality in our shared accounts of how things are - our language.

Why would any one agree or not agree to a logic? That's the question. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You're perhaps under no obligation to be logical. But we might not pay you much mind if you so choose.

Thanks for the link but it was not of much use. You did not appear to me to address, and perhaps did not understand, the issues I raised.

Yet I could absolutely see how civilization, and the problem of standards, media of exchange, and commerce could inflate this notion into something with greater depth. — Count Timothy von Icarus

:up:

And what is it for discourse to be meaningful? Of course we can turn from this to consider what we are doing...

"we are playing a language game; what must be true in order to play this language game?" — Banno

Not all language use is game playing. If it was, you wouldn't be able to express the idea of a language game.

I don’t agree. That doesn’t fit my understanding of “language game”.


And why not have a language game about language games?

yep. That’s a real egg- an Easter egg. But it’s not a real chook egg, unlike the one next to it. Those two are real, the third one is not a real egg, it’s a hologram.

“Real “only makes sense in contrast to unreal or not real.

Except when you’re doing metaphysics, apparently. Then you ask for license to talk about what’s real without telling us what is unreal.

And why not have a language game about language games? — Banno

infinite regress

To dissolve such a profound question, “how do we know what is real?” with such banality….but as Sraffa demonstrated, a common gesture can make one reconsider their position.

I put stock in my own intuitions — Janus

Yes, I was going to suggest that it would be good, at this point, to examine what we actually say about our own intuitions. You say you put stock in them. Am I right in thinking that this means you trust them to be accurate, all things equal, but wouldn't claim knowledge about their objects? You rightly contrast this with trying to convince someone else to accept what you intuit, but is there ever a case when you do know, for yourself, that something you've intuited is true? Can the object of intuition ever be as solidly known as our rational and perceptual objects? (please take "object" loosely, of course)

I think there are such cases, in my own experience, and that they carry some intersubjective weight. I'll try to get back to this soon. . . a long day away from the computer lies ahead.

Why would that be a problem?

There are times, though, when an intuition feels so internally consistent and repeatedly validated by experience that it gains a kind of personal certainty. Whether that ever rises to the level of the reliability we give to empirical or logical knowledge is debatable, but I think there’s room for intuitions to have intersubjective influence when enough people independently arrive at similar conclusions

,

I put stock in my own intuitions — Janus

A more coherent plan than putting stock in some else's... :wink:

Supose we wanted a logic that could take on a public, normative, and accountable role in our reasoning.

If we ground our logic in self-evidence or in intuition, we are isolating it to those who share that intuition. If those intuitions are not shared, then the resulting logic cannot be generalised across all individuals, we do not have a criteria for their correctness that is independent, or that can be generalised. Such a logic loses normative traction. Hence we can answer this:

There are times, though, when an intuition feels so internally consistent and repeatedly validated by experience that it gains a kind of personal certainty. — Areeb Salim

Quite so. But the issue then becomes why you should accept my certainties. So we might ask, how do we tell "when enough people independently arrive at similar conclusions"? And here it will not do to simply stipulate that this occurs when we have agreement - that would be to say that we agree when we agree.

What we need is an doing, a cooperative action that demonstrates our acceptance. A showing, if you will.

And that is what hook, and the language games thereabouts, provide. To understand the operator "⊃", is to understand that if p and p⊃q, then q. Asserting p and p⊃q counts as asserting q.

See the account of status functions I gave previously. Logic is the setting up of a way of using language that we can do together, or not, as we prefer. Our personal intuitions become superfluous.

Why would that be a problem? — Banno

You can't get there from here.

Here's a simple language game involving an infinite regress.

Here's a sqip: i

If you take any squip, and put an "i" on it's left side, the result is also a squip.

So since i is a squip, so is ii. and since ii is a squip, so is iii.

You get the idea.

Here's a language game about that language game: Is there a largest squip?

Now, where is the problem?

I believe that not all intuition is equal. For example, when I interview people for jobs, I often have a strong sense about whether they’re going to be the right fit or not. This isn’t just a vague feeling; it’s based on a kind of digested, accumulated experience that I’ve built up over time. But it can't be put into words.

But my intuitions about whether someone is guilty of a crime or whether gods are real are far more speculative - rooted not in experience or repeated exposure, but in emotion, upbringing, and the general atmosphere of ideas I've been exposed to. I tend to believe there's a distinction between intuition that’s grounded in accumulated, tacit knowledge and intuition that is more reflective of personal background and impressionistic feeling. — Tom Storm

That's an important distinction. Intuitions which are based on accumulated experiences and prior processes of reasoning are different than intuitions about gods or metaphysical ideas. Intuitions about people such as your example of intuitions about whether someone is guilty of a crime, can be based on sub-conscious attitudes about their appearance. Do they have a hard face or a kind face? Do they look like a criminal? Do they look shifty or trustworthy?

So, you have rightly drawn attention to the fact that intuition is not one simple kind of thing at all.

Indeed, I am somewhat surprised to see them being used at all, given their poor track record.

So if you were to disagree with someone's intuition, not to share their intuition, they have no comeback. It's difficult to see how not having an intuition is something you can be wrong or mistaken about. i think we agree on this. It's a pretty poor grounding for the whole of rationality. — Banno

Yesd, it seems we can only be wrong about intuitions which predict something which fails to occur or judge something to be so which turns out to fail to be the case. If someone, for example, has an intuition that God or something divine exists and that its qualities are beyond human understanding they can never be shown to be wrong...or right.

They may feel that they understand something which others don't, that they have a special kind of sense that is generaly lacking, and so they are bound to be misunderstood. They may even feel that what they intutively know is an absolute or objective truth, but none of this can be anything more than faith-based, and as such not susceptible of rational justifiaction. This seems to be very hard to accept for those who think thius way.

I agree with you that intuition plays no justificatory part in logic. The LNC is just a necessary rule we must adhere to if we wish others to be able to make sense of what we say. That said, I think it also reflects our experience as @J alluded to before with the example that things are never all one colour and all another colour all over.

Am I right in thinking that this means you trust them to be accurate, all things equal, but wouldn't claim knowledge about their objects? — J

It's not so much that but that if I feel something is most likely the case in conditions where I have no way of knowing for sure, then I trust that feeling provisionally and act accordingly. I guess you could say I treat the intuition as though it is accurate, but I don't at all believe it must be accurate.

You rightly contrast this with trying to convince someone else to accept what you intuit, but is there ever a case when you do know, for yourself, that something you've intuited is true? — J

I'm trying to think of an example which fits this question. Do you mean are there any cases where I feel absolutely certain that something I intuit to be true, but which cannot in any way be tested, is really the case? If so, I think I'd have to say no.

I think there are such cases, in my own experience, and that they carry some intersubjective weight. I'll try to get back to this soon. . . a long day away from the computer lies ahead. — J

I'd be interested to hear about such a case, and how you think they might carry some intersubjective weight.

Here's a simple language game involving an infinite regress.

Here's a sqip: i

If you take any squip, and put an "i" on it's left side, the result is also a squip.

So since i is a squip, so is ii. and since ii is a squip, so is iii.

You get the idea.

Here's a language game about that language game: Is there a largest squip?

Now, where is the problem? — Banno

That's not an infinite regress.

Ok, then. It is an example of a language game about a language game, though. It's your criticism. I'll leave it to you to make clear.

Witt didn't believe all meaning is in the context of language games (PI 43). That's your outlook.

That's your outlook. — frank

Not so much. But whatever.

Added: PI 43 doesn't say anything about the scope of the term "language game".