The liar is like someone saying "but look, I can move the king more than one space!" — Banno

I definitely don't see the liar's paradox as the same as saying, "Look I can move the king more than one space." Although I do use this technique in chess when I'm losing.

I'm currently reading a paper entitled, A Wittgensteinian Way with Paradoxes by Rupert Read. I'm interested in whether anything he says applies to what we are discussing.

Your asking me to explain your own terminology — Banno

That's a common scenario around here.

I've no idea - that's your phrasing.


Your asking me to explain your own terminology, a terminology I think doesn't work. — Banno

What?

The exchange is right there. None of this my phrasing.

There's nothing in reality that is internal nor external; there's just the stuff we talk about. — Banno

@fdrake mentioned "'access to exterior reality'," and he put scare quotes on it.

I know roughly what he was trying to get at it, but I'm not pressing him for details because it was a broad, speculative post. You seemed to be making a specific point but I don't know what it is.

“The criteria which we accept for ‘fitting’, ‘being able to’, ‘understanding’, are much more complicated than might appear at first sight. That is, the game with these words, their employment in the linguistic intercourse that is carried on by their means, is more involved—the role of these words in our language other—than we are tempted to think. (This role is what we need to understand in order to resolve philosophical paradoxes. And hence definitions usually fail to resolve them; and so, a fortiori does the assertion that a word is ‘indefinable’.)” PI 182.

Ya, they're all sensory experiences. You're not saying it's all subjective are you? — Sam26

I don't much like the subjective/ objective framing. I was just pointing out that the absurdity of carving initials on a perception, which creative was attempting to use against what I had said, is inapt since the whole experience: carving, initials, tree and all the rest are all of the same perceptual fabric.

See PI§136.

So if it's @fdrake's terminology, you are asking me to explain to you a terminology used by the fire dragon, and which I think does not work.

@Sam26,

The point, a small one, is that in the Tractatus Witti aims to set ordinary language aright by building a perfect language, then came to see logic as ordinary language use. §131. "This sentence is false" is in English, after all.

It would be absurd to say Witti spurned logic.

I only asked about what you said. Thinking about it on the way home from work, I think I have some idea what you meant, but I'm not going to guess. If you don't want to clarify what you meant, I will live with the disappointment.

I'd still be happy to have some answers about talk of kettles.

It would be absurd to say Witti spurned logic. — Banno

Who would say the W. spurned logic? I surely never said such a thing.

I'm through for the night. Maybe I'll be back tomorrow, not sure.

,

It's well that you drew attention to this, since I missed it while out weeding.

But I'm not sure what to say in reply; a form of life involves both words and the stuff we do with them, doesn't it? The Kettle is a part of the form of life. Odd that you should think this as attributing agency to the kettle, but I guess it might work. That is, we don't just talk about kettles, but use them, buy them, plant flowers in them when they become holy.

So I don't understand the question.

I surely never said such a thing. — Sam26

Good. So logic is relevant to our discussion. I'm happy to leave this line there. Good night.

Generally, Srap, we seem to talk past each other. I'm not sure we are not saying the same thing, but arguing the expressions used.

I agree with you that the most basic (pre-linguistic) ways of understanding what is experienced (I won't say "the world") cannot be linguistically articulated, and that discursive schemes are only partially shared: each individual has their own unique set of of associations, images, impressions and feelings which make up their experience, and that these give rise to our primordial hopes and fears, which themselves are impossible to adequately articulate. The partially shared nature of our discursive schemes, what I would refer to as general vagueness and/ or ambiguity ensures that there is room for as much misunderstanding as there is understanding between us...a constant process of renegotiating ideas. — Janus

:up:

So I don't understand the question. — Banno

I was just hoping you would be more precise. As it stands, your position is that everything we do and say kinda goes together, and I don't know what use that's supposed to be. Not that I would claim it doesn't all kinda go together, but maybe there is something specific we can say now & then.

I'm not sure we are not saying the same thing, but arguing the expressions used. — Banno

I don't have any statistics on this, but I think a safer bet would be that I disagree with everything you say.

but I think a safer bet would be that I disagree with everything you say. — Srap Tasmaner

Well then, I must be wrong...

Well them, I might be wrong... — Banno

Heh. Saw what you did there.

And @Sam26 supposed the Liar had little to do with ordinary language...

P is true is just fancy talk for P — Pie

I also like this theory of truth quite a lot. I think that it accurately describes how we use the word "true", and avoids distinguishing between "What I think is true" and "What IS true". I don't see how we can know objectively what IS true, and I'm not even convinced that we even want to know what IS true. I also think that mindfulness and meditation can contribute to our understanding of truth. I think that meditation offers me a chance to experience the fundamental building blocks that everything else derives from, and any theory of truth must start from the meditative state of mind.

Well them, I might be wrong...
— Banno

Heh. Saw what you did there. — Srap Tasmaner

That joke might serve as an example for the revision theory.

Srap says everything Banno says is wrong.

Banno says "I must be wrong".

First revision: suppose Srap is correct. Then everything Banno says is wrong. Banno said "I must be wrong". Hence Banno is correct.

Second revision: Banno is correct. Then "I must be wrong" is correct. Then Banno is wrong. Srap says Banno is wrong. Hence, Srap is correct.

Third revision: Srap is correct.... and we are back to the first revision...

You get the idea. The truth flip flops with each revision.

that's an argument that we don't need concepts at all. — Srap Tasmaner

I think it's an argument about what concepts are, not whether we need them.

What kind of cognitive psychologist are you?Too much Quine and Wittgenstein in your diet. — Srap Tasmaner

Ha! You'd have hated my theories of 20 years ago. I started out research in social psychology, only moving to cognitive science in the last few years of my academic career. I'm basically a behaviourist masquerading as cognitive scientist in order to get goes on their cooler kit...

Wittgenstein and Quine came even later.

Second, absent a concept of jabberwocky-hood, I can't treat anything as a jabberwocky, because for all I know it is a jabberwocky. I am, when it comes to jabberwockies, incapable of pretense. — Srap Tasmaner

Yeah, so treating something as a Jabberwocky is what something's being a Jabberwocky is. Jabberwockies (or kettles, or tables, or teacups...) are not ready-made items, we construct them enactively, we interact with those hidden states and by our interaction construct those boundaries (between kettle and not-kettle).

suppose, perhaps because I was told to, I throw jelly at something, and do so with the understanding that this is how you treat a jabberwocky. I'm still incapable of inferring that I should pelt something with jelly because I believe, even erroneously, that it is a jabberwocky. And I am incapable of having a disposition to treat anything this way — Srap Tasmaner

I'm not seeing why. You'll have to join the dots. What actually is the concept of a jabberwocky, for you? What kind of thing is it? what properties does it have? You seem to want to invoke it as a necessary piece in the process, but I don't see it's role.

You're determined to sound like a behaviorist philosopher of fifty years ago or more, but you know that's a non-starter, so you push some of that style of analysis "inside." I'm sure there's a way of construing this that's uncontroversial -- neuroscientists are prone to talk about your brain telling you stories and so on, but of course that's largely picturesque; there's no cocoa or blankets involved. So did you mean the word "behaviour" as literally as I thought you might? — Srap Tasmaner

In all likelihood, yes. I don't know about behaviourist philosophers, but behaviourist psychologists are still very much alive and kicking, there's a difference between Skinnerian behaviourism and methodological behaviourism. The former is (thankfully) dead, but the latter is still bread and butter to a considerable volume of research, my own included.

What we're talking about, at root, is what it is to be an entity at all. What distinguishes an entity from all that is not it. In order to carry out that trick an entity must push against the homogenising force of entropy, it must resist being scattered hither and thither, and maintain, against the odds, it's unity. Right there is behaviour. Not only are we nothing but soup without behaviour, but behaving (acting against the gradient of entropy) is what we are. We are units of anti-entropic behaviour.

In this sense, there's only two relevant questions of cognition - what behaviour is that preparing us for, and what anti-entropic outcome are we expecting from it? The first part is the behaviourism, the second the story-telling.

If you are interested, let me know and I will make an attempt to articulate the topic more clearly in a new thread. — Banno

Yeah, sure. I fear we may well be on our own in such an interest, but I feel the same way from the other side (how the theories of cognitive sciences mesh with those of ordinary language philosophies and their descendants). There seems to be a trend, which I'm not at all on board with, to co-opt cognitive science's models into full blown idealism and/or relativism. It's a struggle, with our current tools, to find a route which keeps those insights that are important to my work (were important, I should say - mustn't pretend I'm not a corporate sell-out now!), yet doesn't fall into, what I see as a trap of assuming something like idealism.

Yeah, so treating something as a Jabberwocky is what something's being a Jabberwocky is. Jabberwockies (or kettles, or tables, or teacups...) are not ready-made items, we construct them enactively, we interact with those hidden states and by our interaction construct those boundaries (between kettle and not-kettle). — Isaac

The difference being that we can say what kettles, tables or teacups are, but not so Jabberwockies, it would seem.

I also like this theory of truth quite a lot. I think that it accurately describes how we use the word "true", and avoids distinguishing between "What I think is true" and "What IS true". I don't see how we can know objectively what IS true, and I'm not even convinced that we even want to know what IS true. I also think that mindfulness and meditation can contribute to our understanding of truth. I think that meditation offers me a chance to experience the fundamental building blocks that everything else derives from, and any theory of truth must start from the meditative state of mind. — IntrospectionImplosion

This is why "truth" is best defined in terms of honesty. Except for a bunch of epistemologists, who are always looking for more, and are never satisfied, it's how the word is commonly used.

You get the idea. The truth flip flops with each revision. — Banno

Hegelian dialectics? This is called "becoming" and it's like a circle, except it's not a true circle because it's not closed in the sense of the Aristotelian description of a circle. It's more like a spiral.

The RHS is a linguistic expression that can be in accordance with, correspond to, this collectively represented world or not. — Janus

Then what's the LHS?

I'm interested in any "finessing" you may care to offer. — Janus

How do I know the world is not my experience? It is self-evident. — Janus

.....just like that. Such knowledge is given immediately from that which constitutes experience, pursuant to a epistemological theory that proves what experience is and thereby the constituency of it.

Claiming self-evidence is dangerous, though, for, with respect to human cognition, that which is irreducibly self-evident concerns itself with logical form a priori without regard to objects, whereas “world” is an empirical conception a posteriori representing a manifold of all possible objects. In effect, that which is known or knowable, re: a multiplicity/plurality of synthetically derived particulars, is put in conflict with that which is merely thought or conceivable, re: an analytically derived universal.

On the other hand, however, that knowledge, and consequently, experience, of a manifold of infinite possibilities is itself impossible is categorically presupposed, from which it follows that knowledge of the world cannot be experience is necessarily self-evident to pure reason, which is metaphysically transcendental, but not necessarily to judgement, which is cognitively relational.

Make no mistake about it: the notion of “conceptual schema” cannot be divorced from empirical states of affairs. Not for us as humans, operating under the auspices of an intellect that absolutely requires it. And from that necessity, the assertion, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”, taken at face value, is catastrophically false, in that language makes no appearance whatsoever in mere representations of conceptual schema, which in and of themselves alone, are limits of a world. I am limited by what I can think, and that, at least sufficiently, by the laws of rational thought, not by what I can express by symbolic device.

Yeahyeahyeah.....I know: one guy’s finessing is another guy’s nonsense. But, hey.....you asked for it, so, there ya go.

You'll have to join the dots. — Isaac

Nothing complicated or subtle. I assumed concepts include at the barest minimum class membership and exclusion: if I have a concept of jabberwocky, then I'm in a position to say, rightly or wrongly, something is or isn't a jabberwocky. Then I can behave toward it in the way I believe appropriate to jabberwockies. I have to have criteria I rely on to reach a decision regarding an entity about whether it's a jabberwocky or not. Those criteria might be characteristics of the thing, but might be as simple as me believing that you possess such criteria even though I don't, and just asking you and trusting your judgment. But that's pretty weak, and doesn't allow me to have my own jabberwocky-specific dispositions.

That all sounds very old-fashioned. I'm sure there are problems there that need fixing. But it's a starting point, and I think something a lot like that should be a consequence of a better theory of concepts.

So described, concepts sound like predicates, and for some cases that's right. But for a long time I've been uncomfortable with the way classical logic is constructed, which treats all sorts of classification as predication of a completely generic x. I think quantification in natural languages is almost always implicitly restricted, so the logical form of "My dog is barking" is not "There is something such that it is a dog and it is mine and it is barking," but, for a start at least, "There is a member of the class my dogs such that, it is barking." I think we handle sortals quite differently from predicates. An entity that is barking might not be. Some entities that are mine might not be. An entity that is a dog is always a dog, and couldn't be, for instance, a lamp of mine that is now on or off.

(Note that's not a defense of ordinary usage against logic, but a claim that classical logic worked fine for mathematics where quantification is usually restricted but has always been an uncomfortable fit for natural languages where the restrictions on quantification tend to be implicit. Modal logics might get me a lot of what I want, dunno.)

That's my beef with classical logic, and it turns out to be relevant here, not just because jabberwocky is a sortal rather than a predicate, but because you're also erasing all the different ways we might reach for to describe entities and calling them all behaviours, and then even identifying the entity itself as a bundle of behaviours. It's behaviours all the way down, with no agents anywhere.

Which means all we ever do now is describe behaviours, and bundles of behaviours, and that makes them the new entities of unrestricted quantification. Which, you know, fine, but I'm going to be uncomfortable.

What we're talking about, at root, is what it is to be an entity at all. — Isaac

Well, it's not like philosophy has never been here before. I just find this

Not only are we nothing but soup without behaviour, but behaving (acting against the gradient of entropy) is what we are. We are units of anti-entropic behaviour. — Isaac

a bit of an odd halfway house between ontology and physics. I can totally see the appeal, in a unity-of-science way, of something like this, but you're starting with a lot of conceptual apparatus about entropy and the laws of thermodynamics and all that, and then using that to explain the being of entities. Even @apokrisis (who has a related big story) doesn't try to do that, but starts from a more fundamental metaphysics and then gets the physics out of that, eventuating in the universe of medium sized dry goods.

This is the same conversation we were having about truth. In essence, my claim is that you're cheating, but you don't know it. I'm not convinced there is a coherent account of belief that doesn't rely on knowledge as a separate category, and that implies a genuine category of truth distinct from people's opinions. Since you want to deny just that, you have to smuggle it in. Same sort of thing here: you want to explain being in terms of physics, but that's backwards, so you'll have to smuggle in all sorts of stuff physics needs and not acknowledge it.

One issue that's come up recently in this thread is the extent to which we might project the structure of our thought, particularly its linguistic structure, onto reality. I don't want to get into that here, but note that this is an odd area for scientists, because in everyday work they take an instrumental view -- we've got our models, we don't pretend reality is actually like the model, that's not even the point, the only question is how well the model works, we're pragmatists, and if we think about it at all what we think is that we should be self-consciously agnostic about what's really out there, it doesn't change the work anyway. That position only becomes untenable when working in really fundamental areas. (There's a similar situation in mathematics, where people not working in fundamentals take a whole lot of stuff for granted. Fundamentals is almost a separate field.) It gets harder to take the instrumental view, model over here, thing modeled over there. It gets harder to know what even counts as justification or evidence anymore if you're not even sure what the nature of your model is. (There are physicists who believe fundamental physics has been wandering off course for a while now, but even if they're wrong, that's a genuine possibility.) ----- Point being, you come along, a methodological behaviourist, and tell me, in essence, that it turns out your methodology is literal fact, that it's not just a matter of modeling entities in terms of their behaviour, but that entities just literally are their behavior. Now maybe you're right, and you were terribly lucky to have chosen a methodology that turns out not to be a research strategy but a factual description of the universe -- or maybe, just maybe, you're projecting the structure of your thought onto reality.

I was just pointing out that the absurdity of carving initials on a perception, which creative was attempting to use against what I had said, is inapt since the whole experience: carving, initials, tree and all the rest are all of the same perceptual fabric. — Janus

Not necessarily use against what you said so much as attempting to makes sense of how the 'actual world' posited earlier fit into the carving. You've also said that we don't see the world, but rather our perceptions, conceptions, impressions, and things of a nature which sound like a denial of direct perception.

Here though, you've posited the tree, and not your conception or perception of the tree, so at least the tree is included. I've little interest in nailing down flaws in people's positions for the sake of exposing them alone, so I'm not going to push on this or make any charges. My replies are more for my own understanding.