Even if I know that Donald Trump is the President of the United States, it doesn't follow that "Donald Trump is the President of the United States" is redundant. — Michael

It is redundant for you to say that to yourself because you already know it, so why say it?

"Donald Trump" and "the President of the United States" refer to the same person, but they don't mean the same thing. The meaning of a word/phrase is not the same thing as its referent. — Michael

They refer to the same person and mean the same thing presently. They don't refer to the same person, or mean the same thing, when Obama was President.

The fact that this debate has gone on for over 30 pages is pathetic, and we can thank those that simply don't get that "use" implies intent and purpose. How you use something has to do with what you intend. For those arguing, "meaning is use" mean the same thing as "meaning is what you intend".

Just look up the meaning of "meaning" and "use" and "purpose" in any dictionary and you will find the word "intent" in the definition. Those arguing "meaning is use" don't seem to realize that they are arguing the same thing I am - that there is intent in the use of things, like words.

By removing intent from use, you are basically arguing that use is simply uttering sounds and drawing scribbles with no meaning (no intent).

I'm not necessarily disagreeing, but I have two questions (which are related): a) are you claiming that one can know the Fregean reference solely by virtue of knowing the meaning of the relevant predicates? (which clearly you can't since you cannot know apriori whether "Caesar" and "the conqueror of Gaul" denote the same person) — Fafner

No, of course not. First I was talking about the references of the predicates -- "...died" and "...was murdered" -- and not the references of the singular terms. And our knowledge of the references of the terms (or predicates) can be empirical, or gained through testimony, or (on Gareth Evan's account -- see chapter 11 in The Varieties of Reference) derived from our being "consumers" in a socially instituted naming practice in which some other individuals -- the "producers" -- who are directly acquainted with the named individual (or with the designated property) are participating (or participated).

Secondly, my claim was that the two events are numerically distinct by dint of the predicates "...died" and "...was murdered" referring to different sorts of actions/processes regardless of anyone's knowledge of the references of those predicates. But, of course, our knowledge of them, when we know them, isn't generally derived a priori form linguistic meanings except in the special case of so called "nominal definitions". (Though, how much can be inferred from knowledge of linguistic meaning might vary depending how you relate the idea of linguistic meaning to the Fregean concepts of sense and reference, and what the scope of linguistic 'analysis' might be. If such analysis is allowed to cover the examination of public language games for instance...)

and b) Is "the conqueror of Gaul" a rigid designator on your account? Because if it is not (and it is plain that it isn't) then I think your criteria for the non-identity of 'x' and 'y' (in the quote) becomes vacuous. Because consider that it is a contingent fact that "Caesar" and "the conqueror of Gaul" denote the same person (and you can further substitute 'Caesar' with another description to eliminate all names); but this you can know only aposteriori, so it means that on your criteria 'x' and 'y' (if 'x' and 'y' are definite descriptions) denote the same entity if their terms happen to denote the same entity, and of course everyone will agree with that...

But all I was suggesting was that, just in case Caesar wasn't the conqueror of Gaul in the actual world, then it trivially follows that the event of Caesar's death is numerically distinct from the event of that other guy's death. And so it is, I am arguing, if the event- of process-forms that specify the two event types are different. (I draw the concept of an event- or process-form from Michael Thompson). The issue is ontological and not directly tied with issues of knowledge or reference. Let me add, though, that while thinking about this case, and about criteria of event individuation, I have gained a better appreciation of the ground one may have to claim identity between the historical events of Caesar's death and of Caesar's murder. I think the case being discussed, and the implicit surrounding narratives, can be further filled up in such a manner as to warrant either one of the two intuitions depending on the kind of 'sortal concept' (or rather, the kind of 'event- or process-form', for the category of events) that most perspicuously attaches to the events being talked about and thereby determines their criteria of persistence and individuation. But I'll say a bit more about that at a later time; it also connects with the issues of occasion-sensitivity.

I appreciate your response because what I have is not so much an idea at this point as the 'aura' of an idea that has not quite yet arrived! I have classes on the brain, because of my quandary over how we make the leap from particulars to types.

My first thought was a little like what Harry's saying nearby, that "Caesar was murdered" is a fuller description of the event in question than "Caesar died," and one way to express that would be to compare the cofinal sets of propositions each entails. There are many propositions that will be true whether Caesar was stabbed to death or suffered a massive heart attack.

Suppose A has a private audience with the Emperor behind closed doors. After half an hour, A comes back out.
A: "He's dead."
B: "What do you mean? Was he sick?"
A: "I don't know."
B: "What did he die of?"
A: "His wounds."
B: "What wounds?"
A: "The ones I gave him."
One way to imagine this process, is that B initially grasps a set of propositions that he knows to be the cofinal tail of some more complete set, and there are several different candidates for what that larger set is. The process is to try out various propositions in order to more fully to determine what set you have the tail of: is it, for instance, the cofinal set of "The Emperor was sick" or the cofinal set of "The Emperor was killed"?

Thinking of this as a "more complete description" led me almost immediately to the concern you noted, that I would need to posit "fully determinate facts" at the head of such sets, and that seems a bit dubious. (They might still do as theoretical entities somehow.) But it then occurred to me that this process need not be imagined as how we pick out the unique, fully determinate facts that make up the world, but simply as comparative, that the use of the procedure could be precisely in what we've been at here, which is deciding whether two descriptions pick out the same thing or not.

It should be clear by now that in essence what I'm contemplating doing is substituting the classes of entailed propositions for concepts. (I'm testing my Fregean assumptions. Do we need concepts? Do we need propositions for that matter or will equivalence classes of sentences do?)

In your pigeon experiment, for example, it's clear that to determine whether you have the cofinal tail of "Responds to red" or "Responds to crimson," you had better test some other shades of red.¹

Your example of Pat's height is curious. (For the record, I'm just under 5'10".) I feel a little like I've wandered into the Wittgenstein-Moore conversation, because I want to say that I know every human being who has ever lived and every human being who ever will live is shorter than the Eiffel Tower. It's common sense! But how do I know that? When did I come to know that? The explanation I'm entertaining is this: it's somewhere out in the cofinal tail of "The Eiffel Tower is really tall" and I've never even looked out there.

So it's just something I'm fooling around with. No doubt something like this has been tried before and I'll discover why it doesn't work soon enough...


1. I once had a heat pump quit because it turned out there was a relay jammed with ants that had committed mass suicide on it. The repair guy told me he had seen this several times, and had actually asked an entomologist what the deal was. The explanation (hypothesis?) was that the ants happen to be attracted to the particular frequency this device hums at, not to all humming sounds.


EDIT: Should have noted that the Emperor may have accidentally brutally stabbed himself in the stomach while shaving.

Secondly, my claim was that the two events are numerically distinct by dint of the predicates "...died" and "...was murdered" referring to different sorts of actions/processes regardless of anyone's knowledge of the references of those predicates. — Pierre-Normand

I agree that at least on some cases we can know just on conceptual grounds that the same thing cannot satisfy two different description if it doesn't make sense to say that it does (e.g. to describe something both as an animal and as an inanimate object at the same time). But sometimes such identities can become aposteriori discoverable possibilities, as Kripke and Putnam have taught us about natural kinds. The interesting question here is what distinguishes the two cases and how can you know when you are confronted with the one or the other. And this brings me to another interesting thing that you said.

I think the case being discussed, and the implicit surrounding narratives, can be further filled up in such a manner as to warrant either one of the two intuitions depending on the kind of 'sortal concept' (or rather, the kind of 'event- or process-form', for the category of events) that most perspicuously attaches to the events being talked about and thereby determines their criteria of persistence and individuation. — Pierre-Normand

I believe that you are exactly right about sortals -- and this is directly connected to the question that I just raised -- it strikes me as very plausible to say that an identity statement can be ruled out on purely conceptual grounds if the two descriptions don't employ the same sortal concept (as in my example of 'animal' and an 'inanimate object').

So perhaps a more fruitful approach to our case would be to ask whether a death and a murder fall under the same sortal concept. Personally I think that the answer is 'yes' (they are both events for start, and furthermore events that involve a death of a person). But since we are talking here about a conceptual question, would you agree that at least on some understanding of 'death' and 'murder' it can make sense to employ the two terms in descriptions of the same event? For example, what you said about the component of criminal intent present in the case of murder is of course true, but it doesn't strike me as very intuitive to attribute the murderer's state of mind to the event of murdering itself (though it is something that we use as a criteria to determine whether a murder took place).

Well, two can play the "lazy" game. Perhaps you could offer an example of a "new usage" that bears absolutely no association or link whatsoever to the conventional usages of the time in which it arose. If you can do that I might agree there is a reason to doubt what I had said. Note, also that new names for newly discovered objects do not count (although probably most, if not all, of those are associated with, and derivative of, existent usages, anyway).

The issue is ontological and not directly tied with issues of knowledge or reference. — Pierre-Normand

If by this you mean, can we imagine a theory in which the distinction you are contemplating is deployed to pick out different entities, I suppose that would be fine, but you're not suggesting there is something like a "bare" ontological question here, outside the context of any particular theory, are you? That would seem very strange to me indeed. What's more, it seems to me the motivation for preferring either a theory that distinguishes actions from, say, occurrences, or one that doesn't, would be precisely its utility in dealing with issues of knowledge and reference. And of course the issue arose in this thread precisely as a question of reference.

At any rate, I'm not sure we are compelled to reach the ontological issue at all: clearly one could be in a position to assert that there was a death and not in a position to assert there was a murder; one could dissemble; one could be interested in the event only qua death and indifferent otherwise (the lawyer executing Caesars will). I suppose some of this is the sort of thing you would count as occasion-sensitivity.

And the unavoidable fact is that if Caesar does not die, there is no murder. Do we have a problem with theories where the existence of one entity (a murder) requires the existence of another (a death)? What about when the required entity is of a different type?

hzhxehd hskidkdd bskslkc kfofeudh dkdoepe jwuewownzv aajn'malnq llllllpealaf

This means something like "let's eat cake".

As does the phrase - in the way I use it - "to be, or not to be, that is the question".

As does a particular series of foot wiggles I'm doing right now, which, if only you were here to see, would entail a great deal of cake for you.

--

These examples are facetious of course, but they are not only facetious...

I thought we were discussing actual novel shared usages which had the potential to be conventionalizable. In any case, those phrases are meaningless, even to you in isolation, unless you translate them in terms of conventional use. I doubt you can even silently think their meanings without resorting to it. So, I can't see how you are getting away from conventional use even with these examples.

Why did you think we were discussing shared use? I don't believe either you or I even once used the word 'shared', nor any of it's cognates. And, given that I just told you quite explicitly what those phrases mean, I'm not sure either how you think they are meaningless.

My point is only that your "telling" has not, and cannot be, dissociated from conventional use, whether your "use" is private or shared; it inevitably relies upon it. Meaning cannot get started in a vacuum.

You misunderstand what is at stake though: the entire point is that it is a category error to speak of 'private' use. Use, by nature, is 'public' (which is not the same as shared or conventional). My uses may be idiosyncratic, but they are not private, by dint of their being uses of language at all. In any case, I'm not sure how you've at all demonstrated that meaning cannot be 'isolated from conventional use'. That one must translate, say, Japanese into English for you to understand does not entail the rather absurd conclusion that Japanese 'cannot be isolated from English'. And what I did above was no different to translation.

My uses may be idiosyncratic, but they are not private, by dint of their being uses of language at all. — StreetlightX

What language would that be?

Call it what you like.

Fair enough. What I'm wondering though is in what sense your typing was a use of language.

At a minimum one would have to grant that the phrases and gestures have a grammar particular to them (such that there would be different kinds of lexemes employed), and that this grammar would be transposable to other words or gestures that could belong to that same language. As Cavell puts it, following Wittgenstein, a language is at work where one can "learn and teach words in certain contexts, and [where] we are expected, and expect others, to be able to project them into further contexts."

This capacity to be to 'projected' into further contexts (because we know what 'kind' of things we are talking about - the grammar of a language) is what minimally distinguishes a use of language as opposed to language being 'on holiday' (which is not 'misuse', as some in this thread have spoken about, but simply, not a use at all) (c.f. PI §371/373: "Essence is expressed in grammar" / "Grammar tells what kind of object anything is".). Crucially, it's irrelevant whether or not the use of language under discussion has been established through convention or not.

At a minimum one would have to grant that the phrases and gestures have a grammar particular to them (such that there would be different kinds of lexemes employed), and that this grammar would be transposable to other words or gestures that could belong to that same language — StreetlightX

I'm sorry, are you saying I have to grant this, in the present case? Or are you saying that if this were an instance of language use, this is what I would be granting?

The latter.

Supposing, just for the sake of argument, you have a provided a criterion for what could or should count as a use of language, what would lead me to think the criterion had been met in this case?

What would lead me to think the criterion had been met in this case? — Srap Tasmaner

Nothing. At least, that's the whole point: these criteria must be 'lived', and the only thing that that guarantees their uptake (or not) is the 'form-of-life', the 'whirl of organism' in which they operate. Meaning is use means: look at the practices in which language is embedded in ("the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life"), and language or meaning cannot be grasped apart from that activity (see again the quote I put up from Cavell a few pages back: "Nothing insures that this projection will take place... just as nothing insures that we will make, and understand, the same projections. That on the whole we do is a matter of our sharing routes of interest and feeling, modes of response, etc etc..."

This is probably the hardest point to grasp in Witty: the immanence of 'criteria of meaning' to their employment. And this is what is at stake in the discussion of rule following, in which there is a way of grasping a rule that is 'not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call "obeying the rule" and "going against it" in actual case'. This is why I said all the stakes of the PI are condensed in this one passage.

You're mistaken if you think I've missed that. In fact my entire point has been that there is no genuinely private use in the sense that even your 'private' ( 'private' only insofar as they might involve you and no one else) examples obviously rely on conventional public usage for them to have any meaning even to you.

That one must translate, say, Japanese into English for you to understand does not entail the rather absurd conclusion that Japanese 'cannot be isolated from English'. And what I did above was no different to translation. — StreetlightX

This analogy fails utterly because Japanese is its own system of conventional usages and doesn't require "translation" in order to be meaningful; whereas the examples you gave are completely meaningless unless they are given meaning as being equivalents to words as conventionally used in some language or other.

You're mistaken if you think I've missed that. In fact my entire point has been that there is no genuinely private use in the sense that even your 'private' ( 'private' only insofar as they might involve you and no one else) examples obviously rely on conventional public usage for them to have any meaning even to you. — John

Eh, then you are using words in a different way than I am. That's OK, so long as we're clear. I'll only add here that this is not how Wittgenstein employs these terms, and insofar as this is a thread roughly about him, I'll continue to speak of idiosyncrasy rather than 'private' language in this case.

the examples you gave are completely meaningless unless they are given meaning as being equivalents to words as conventionally used in some language or other. — John

Unless? But this is only true because we're talking over the internet in a limited way (and it is also you begging the question). If I had some cake, and you were in the same room as me, and neither of us could speak to each other in terms other than in my made-up-on-the-spot language (assuming I was consistent with grammar), I wager you'd 'get' my invitation to eat cake eventually (this would be the 'rough ground' of language - life and it's being lived, language bound up with action - that secures meaning). This is how we teach children, no? Does it matter if we teach them with an already-established - i.e. conventional - language, or not?

Incidentally, it is just this rarefied, intellectualist, and 'thin' approach to language - in which meaning can only ever find its ground in more language ("meaningless... unless they are given meaning as being equivalents to words..."), shorn of any reference to human practice, lived context, and worldly action - in short, the entire order of the performative - that Witty rightly spent his entire late career arguing against. A particularly 'philosophical' failing.

Thinking of this as a "more complete description" led me almost immediately to the concern you noted, that I would need to posit "fully determinate facts" at the head of such sets, and that seems a bit dubious. — Srap Tasmaner

Before responding to this, and also to Fafner's most recent reply to me, I wanted to read again chapter 5 -- Events and States -- in Eric Marcus, Rational Causation, HUP 2012, a brilliant book that I had last read five years ago. It is especially relevant to our present discussion since it explains sortal concepts for substances, and event-type concepts for events, as both being in the business of providing identity principles for them. While Marcus was bringing up Wiggins's discussion of 'dummy sortals' (such as 'object' or 'thing'), I wrote down the following note this morning:

"Or 'mammal'?

Maybe we could say that 'mammal' is a determinable sortal. If does some of the job of individuation, but not all of it until it has been further determined into a species concept.

Maybe this idea provides the sought after stopping points for Srap Tasmaner's "cofinal tails". Determinable properties and dummy sortals don't determine such tails, but substance-sortals and event-types possibly do since they determine as fully as one might want *what* something is. Further, specifications (or further determinations of determinables) beyond such a natural stopping point only achieves the specification of merely accidental properties (including such things as the accidental microphysical realization or material constitution of events or substances.

Where occasion sensitivity might play a role, among other places, is where determination of some determinable has established membership in an equivalence class that is thereby fine-grained just enough to satisfy some practical purpose (including the founding of a meaning convention for effective communication, in some cases."

Here is the relevant paragraph from Rational Causation:

"I hold, then, that objects instantiate sortals and that to instantiate a sortal is at least in part for there to be a principle of identity that determines the conditions under which the object persists. Objects, however, do not instantiate principles of identity as such, but rather only insofar as
they are particular sorts of objects. Here is how Wiggins puts the idea: "If a is the same as b, then it must also hold that a is the same something as b,"7 where something is a quantifier ranging over determinate sortals. Or, if a is the same as b, there must be an answer to the 'same what?' question. To say that object is not a true sortal is to say that it is not a proper answer to the 'same what?' question. In saying that a is an object, we do not say what a is. Wiggins thus distinguishes 'dummy sortals,' such as object and thing from genuine sortals such as dog and table. Terms for dummy sortals share the grammar of terms for true sortals (e.g., they are modified by articles and quantifiers), but are not associated with a principle of identity." -- Eric Marcus, Rational Causation, p. 187 (bolds and italics in the original).

I'll finish re-reading the whole chapter before responding more fully to this and another reply of yours.

Because you are asking many irrelevant things, and life is too short (and anyway, I don't understand most of your questions). — Fafner

They aren't irrelevant unless you are saying that your post I was asking questions about was also irrelevant.

But, what does it mean to ask irrelevant things? I was using words in a conventional manner. I used the correct grammar and spelling. So, how is it that it is irrelevant, or that you don't understand the questions. What is it that you don't understand - my intent, or my use of words (which shouldn't be a problem if meaning is use because I used the words in a conventional and grammatically correct way).

When we disagree, what is it that we are disagreeing on - our use of words, or the state-of-affairs that the words refer to? How can we disagree with our use of words when we are both using them in a conventional way and that is grammatically correct? "Is language a game", or is language a game?

By 'irrelevant' I mean that most of what you say doesn't address my arguments. You say many things that even if they are true, they don't show that something is wrong with my arguments, so I don't think they are worth arguing about.

You still didn't address my question. What does it mean to not address your arguments? What does it mean to have something wrong or right with your argument? Again, both of our arguments follow the conventional use of words and are grammatically correct. So what is right or wrong with arguments? What are arguments other than using words, and how do you make the distinction between making an argument and not making one?

these criteria must be 'lived', and the only thing that that guarantees their uptake (or not) is the 'form-of-life', the 'whirl of organism' in which they operate. Meaning is use means: look at the practices in which language is embedded in ("the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life"), and language or meaning cannot be grasped apart from that activity — StreetlightX

Incidentally, it is just this rarefied, intellectualist, and 'thin' approach to language - in which meaning can only ever find its ground in more language ("meaningless... unless they are given meaning as being equivalents to words..."), shorn of any reference to human practice, lived context, and worldly action - in short, the entire order of the performative — StreetlightX

The only ground for the supposed meaning of your supposed use of language that you indicated was more language, that is, the translations you provided. We have been given no reason to believe there are practices in which your supposed language is embedded. You didn't even bother to fake it: you could have made up scenarios where you say "koijnufbab" to the postman each day, etc.

You might have said, here are some arbitrary strings of letters and some gestures that could conceivably be part of a language. Fine. You might have noted that the lived context of those strings and gestures includes the use of English, and that it is possible to treat those strings and gestures as loanwords from a language that happens not to exist. But by claiming there is such an unnamed language, that a few strings and gestures and their translated meanings is all it takes to have a language, it is you who have failed to take Wittgenstein seriously.

In fact, it's clear that what undergirds your claim that those strings and gestures were a use of language is something you will not say: that they were meant as language.

If I had some cake, and you were in the same room as me, and neither of us could speak to each other in terms other than in my made-up-on-the-spot language (assuming I was consistent with grammar), I wager you'd 'get' my invitation to eat cake eventually (this would be the 'rough ground' of language - life and it's being lived, language bound up with action - that secures meaning). This is how we teach children, no? Does it matter if we teach them with an already-established - i.e. conventional - language, or not? — StreetlightX

This is a tough sell because it's extremely difficult to imagine the "no other terms" part. I think we all reach in our minds for some foundational gestures we pretend are transparent and self-grounding. (If the goal is to share the cake, the thing to do is cut each of you a piece. That's what Wittgenstein would say.)

But the most important word in here is "consistent." What you teach someone when you teach them a language, the practice you invite them to join, is precisely the consistent and regular actions (not only the utterances, but the matching of utterance to occasion, and so on) that constitute its use, in short, its conventions. No regularity, no convention, and no language.

What does it mean to not address your arguments? What does it mean to have something wrong or right with your argument? — Harry Hindu

Two things can be wrong with an argument: it is logically invalid (the conclusion doesn't follow from the premises), and/or one or more of its premises is false. Everything else is irrelevant as far as the soundness of an argument goes.

But the most important word in here is "consistent." What you teach someone when you teach them a language, the practice you invite them to join, is precisely the consistent and regular actions (not only the utterances, but the matching of utterance to occasion, and so on) that constitute its use, in short, its conventions. No regularity, no convention, and no language. — Srap Tasmaner

But I have been quite clear, in almost every one of my posts, that by convention I mean already-established use (of language), and not grammatical regularity. If you want to call grammatical regularity 'convention', then so be it, but then we are not talking about the same thing, and there is no disagreement.

This is a tough sell because it's extremely difficult to imagine the "no other terms" part. I think we all reach in our minds for some foundational gestures we pretend are transparent and self-grounding. — Srap Tasmaner

I actually agree with this for the most part. My 'no other terms' qualifier is meant to apply to spoken or written language. I would however, modify your comment here to say not that we 'reach in our minds', but that we 'reach in our bodies', as it were. While it's not something I've mentioned yet for parsimony's sake, I'm a strong believer in the thesis that our elementary experiences of meaning are bodily. That is, what we 'share' to begin with our quite simply our physiognomies: we are (to a large extent) laterally symmetric, forward oriented, motile, and gravity bound beings with limbs for grasping and a swivelling neck, and the way in which our physiognomies interact with the affordances of our environment provides us with our 'initial', shared coordinates of meaning. It is the environmental relations we establish by means of our interactions with it that provide the germinal 'fund' of meaning out of which further meaning grows*. There's lots more to say on this, but I'll keep it short.

As far the this thread is concerned, again, one can call this shared physiographical ground a 'convention', but this would be a lexical stretch, and again, is not, and has never been, what I am arguing against.

*As argued by those like Lakoff and Johnson, David Olsen, David McNeill, Maxine Sheets-Johnston, and others (and anticipated, in fact, by Witty's famous line about a lion that could speak being totally unintelligible to us).

But by claiming ... that a few strings and gestures and their translated meanings is all it takes to have a language — Srap Tasmaner

Perhaps you could point out where, exactly, I make this claim. A direct quote would be nice. I did provide a couple of examples of "a 'new usage' that bears absolutely no association or link whatsoever to the conventional usages of the time in which it arose" (John's request) - which is what I was asked for, but if you think I meant these examples as 'all that it takes to have a language' then I'm afraid you're reading things that aren't there.

Two things can be wrong with an argument: it is logically invalid (the conclusion doesn't follow from the premises), and/or one or more of its premises is false. Everything else is irrelevant as far as the soundness of an argument goes. — Fafner

But what does it mean to be false?

When we disagree, what is it that we are disagreeing on - our use of words, or the state-of-affairs that the words refer to?