Yes, of course you're right. It's just that that it isn't like the resemblances between one dog and another, but between a dog and a sculpture of it. We wouldn't confuse a fossil with a living member of the species, would we?

Of course not. But if one wants to explain why we don't confuse them one has to move from the vague metaphor to something more concrete.

That was my only point on the comment. Wittgenstein clearly knows he is being very vague, he anticipates this charge. So to answer your point: "Vagueness is not necessarily OK. But I think that W has a point if he's saying that sometimes it is all you've got," yes, I think this is sometimes true. I was speaking to the specific application.

Family resemblance isn't intended as a basis for biological theorizing. The notion of family resemblances is not intended to do any intellectual work for a biologist.

But it is appropriate for the linguist, philosopher of language, or semiotican? Don't grunts and screams share a family resemblance with speech? The issue is that you still need the "right sort of family resemblance," since all things resemble each other in at least some ways.

The "oh, now I get it, moment" you mention is definitely included as part of enacting or demonstrating understanding, and I have many times had that kind of thing in mind when thinking about it.

Then we're in agreement. I did not take it that this is what meant by behavior. Perhaps he can clarify.

If someone's behavior is expanded to include their thoughts, experiencing, etc. then I see no issue in the saying that understanding a rule can be judged solely in terms of behavior. Although, in this case, wouldn't "behavior" constitute essentially everything it is possible for a person to do (e.g., thinking, perceiving, liking, existing, understanding, being angry, etc.)? Would there be anything a person can do that won't count as behavior? Or to use Banno's phrasing: if "that someone is following a rule is shown by what they do," is "what someone does," anything they do at all?

But then "rule following is something people do, as part of the sum total of anything they do at all," isn't saying much of anything. I was thinking of "what people do," or behavior in terms of Skinnerian stimulus and response. Such a framing has the deficit of being wrong IMO, but it does at least actually say something.

The idea is not to resolve indeterminacy. The idea is that we enact appropriate behaviors even when a characterization of them is simultaneously indeterminate in principle. Social interaction doesn't make rules less indeterminate. We learn how to act appropriately by interacting with our environment, including the appropriate use of words when we interact socially, para-socially or whatever.

Ok, but wouldn't this hold for all activities, not just social ones. And wouldn't this be true or animals as well?

I do think Wittgenstein brings in social interaction to fix the underdetermination problem. That part seems fairly straightforward. I think I might disagree that it actually addressed the problem though. The argument from underdetermination is too strong, it proves too much.

It would be vacuous for a biologist to say "all life shares a family resemblance," and to stop there. Whatever "all life," is it must surely have some sort of resemblance to be deemed "all life" in the first place. What biologists do in reality is posit a constellation of features that make up this "family resemblance," e.g. having a metabolism, undergoing selection, etc. If one stops at the metaphor and introduces nothing else one hasn't said anything. All of being can be said to resemble all that is in some way or another. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance is meant to prevent us from being tempted to subsume the particular within the general, to define the instances of ‘life’ on the basis of the category ‘life’ in such a way that we presuppose a centrally defining meaning of the category which can be understood independently of its instances.
Shared propensities, common responses , cultural norms, categorical patterns of word meanings, are only the presuppositions for the possibility of having shared rules if we recognize that what is common to a group, what is shared, what is associated with a rule, a norm, a category is nothing that strictly belongs to , is encompassed by any framework. There is nothing common to all language games or particular applications of a rule. Wittgenstein's metaphor of “spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre” shows the difference between language use as applications of pre-existing categorical , normative and rule-governed frames and language use as a subtle or not-so-subtle re-invention of the sense of norms, rules and categories. Family resemblance is the continuous overlapping of fibers altering previous patterns of language use via fresh contexts of use, rather than the churning out of a new instance of a superordinate theme or rule.

67.” I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than "family resemblances"; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way.— And I shall say: 'games' form a family. And for instance the kinds of number form a family in the same way. Why do we call something a "number"? Well, perhaps because it has a—direct—relationship with several things that have hitherto been called number; and this can be said to give it an indirect relation ship to other things we call the same name. And we extend our con cept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres. But if someone wished to say: "There is something common to all these constructions—namely the disjunction of all their common properties"—I should reply: Now you are only playing with words. One might as well say: "Something runs through the whole thread— namely the continuous overlapping of those fibres.

If one treats a rule as a logical inclusion structure, a category to which particular applications belong, then it seems perfectly reasonable to make a distinction between the idea that different senses of a word relate to each other via family resemblance, and the idea that a categorical, normative concept like rule , being that essence common to a family of resemblances , cannot itself be dissolved into an infinity of related senses. But I imagine Wittgenstein asking, is not ‘rule' also a word? And if so, are only some words situational senses tied to other situational senses by resemblance? Are there other , special words, like ‘rule', that exist in some metaphysical , empirical or theoretical space that resists the situational contingency of sense? Such that while its applications would always differ in sense, it in itself would remain ideally self-identical in its own sense whenever and wherever we speak the phrase ‘this rule'?I am inclined to construe actual situational sense as the precondition for the understanding of what would otherwise be considered ideal structure( an essence common to its particulars) , rather than the other way around.

But it is appropriate for the linguist, philosopher of language, or semiotican? Don't grunts and screams share a family resemblance with speech? The issue is that you still need the "right sort of family resemblance," since all things resemble each other in at least some ways. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Its appropriate where the description fits; you have agreed with the concept yourself when you said "There is no "One True Feature," to point to for defining life". Speech, grunts whatever may also be another example. If it is a valid concept then it is a valid concept.

The salience of the concept is that Wittgenstein was using it specifically as counter to philosophical positions that are directly the opposite to it, trying to create rigorous theories of meaning. That is where the significance of this concept is intended, not for creating linguistic or biological theories. It is not intended for linguists and biologists to say "life is a family resemblance and that's it, that's my theory of language"; nevertheless, does that stop someone saying that the concept of life is an example of family resemblances? Ofcourse not.

If someone's behavior is expanded to include their thoughts, experiencing, etc — Count Timothy von Icarus

I am not expanding behavior to include everything. Behavior is a special case of acts we do.

isn't saying much of anything. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I would say the intention is to dissociate the idea of categorizing actions, based on some rule which is inherently indeterminate, from the actions themselves. We act regardless of the indeterminacy. I would also say such a view is in direct contrast to views where thinking is something more than sequences of our surface experiences, e.g. computational theories of mind, "language of thought hypothesis" and views that there is some intelligible, determinate semantic representations / symbols / modules underpinning those sequences.

Ok, but wouldn't this hold for all activities, not just social ones. And wouldn't this be true or animals as well? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes.

I do think Wittgenstein brings in social interaction to fix the underdetermination problem. That part seems fairly straightforward. I think I might disagree that it actually addressed the problem though. The argument from underdetermination is too strong, it proves too much. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It demonstrably doesn't fix the problem because the indeterminacy is being described in terms of words we have learned socially. If social interactions fixed the problem then surely there would be no longer any indeterminacy for Wittgenstein to write about.

For me, the idea is that symbols cannot do work by themselves because of chronic indeterminacy so you cannot have a theory of meaning that pulls itself up on its own bootstraps. You need some additional "causal" mechanisms to explain why we can act appropriately in terms of the words that we use without the presence of apriori determined boundaries or taxonomies.

Sociality then becomes this invoked as this "causal" mechanism. Obviously though this is not much of an explanation by itself and I think probably much too restrictive. The deeper answer IMO is brains, which cannot be inherently be interpreted representationally (human-interpretably symbolic to be more specific [since the word representation can be plausibly used in an extremely vague sense]), interacting with the environment, and sometimes other brains.

I would say the intention is to dissociate the idea of categorizing actions, based on some rule which is inherently indeterminate, from the actions themselves. We act regardless of the indeterminacy — Apustimelogist

If a rule must always be applied in a specific context of use in order for it to have meaning , does that indicate that the meaning of a rule is therefore ‘indeterminate’, or that it is precisely determinate , but in a way that is unique to each use? It seems to me that to characterize this particularly of use meaning as indeterminacy presupposes what Wittgenstein is trying to get us to get beyond, the picture theory of meaning whereby exposing an ambiguity within ostensible definition indicates a failure to lock down epistemological meaning rather than a self-imposed grammatical confusion originating in the concept of ostensive definition. Lee Braver cites Kripke’s reading of Wittgenstein as a symptom of this misunderstanding.

Kripke understands Wittgenstein's “skeptical paradox” to be that since rules and, by extension, the meanings of words can be interpreted in indefinitely different ways, “there can be no such thing as meaning anything by any word. Each new application we make is a leap in the dark; any present intention could be interpreted so as to accord with anything we may choose to do. So there can be neither accord, nor conflict. This is what Wittgenstein said in §201.” 48 This is the problem that reveals the need for social interaction for both Kripke and Davidson. But, as has been pointed out many times, PI §201 continues past where Kripke stops reading:

“it can be seen that there is a misunderstanding here from the mere fact that in the course of our argument we give one interpretation after another…. What this shews is that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call ‘obeying the rule' and ‘going against it' in actual cases.” 49

The skeptical paradox that Kripke fixes on is actually being presented as “a misunderstanding,” a pseudo-problem produced by the artificial perspective that gets foisted on us when we cease interacting naturally:

“the confusions which occupy us arise when language is like an engine idling, not when it is doing work.” 50

When we stop performing the daily activities in which understanding comes easily, strange possibilities pop up that cannot be ruled out by reasoning alone. This is when it strikes us that “any interpretation still hangs in the air along with what it interprets, and cannot give it any support.” 51 Rules suddenly look terrifyingly unsupported and we are tempted to cry out in despair, as Kripke does, that “the entire idea of meaning vanishes into thin air.”

Luckily the point of PI §201 is not the endless interpretations but the non-interpretive immediate grasping that occurs “in actual cases.” The infinite interpretability functions as a reductio of the idea that we are interpreting rules rather than just following them in a more direct and practical sense. 54 If we can recover this mundane understanding, overlooked because of its ubiquitous inconspicuousness, 55 then we will dismiss the skeptical paradox the way Hume's philosopher laughs at his own bizarre thoughts once he gets a good beer and a pool cue in his hands.

“‘How can one follow a rule?' That is what I should like to ask. But how does it come about that I want to ask that, when after all I find no kind of difficulty in following a rule? Here we obviously misunderstand the facts that lie before our eyes.” 56

Wittgenstein considers his job to be assembling reminders of our normal immersion in the meaningfulness of everyday life.

Sociality then becomes this invoked as this "causal" mechanism. Obviously though this is not much of an explanation by itself and I think probably much too restrictive. The deeper answer IMO is brains, which cannot be inherently be interpreted representationally (human-interpretably symbolic to be more specific [since the word representation can be plausibly used in an extremely vague sense]), interacting with the environment, and sometimes other brains. — Apustimelogist

Isn’t the naturalized, empirical concept of brain an attempt to rescue a picture theory of meaning by recourse to a causal physiology as a ground for the seeming ungrounded indeterminacy of symbolic interaction?

Without further elaboration/clarification, I am not sure what I see written here is much different from Kripke's sceptical solution. Rules are indeterminate but we act coherently anyway blindly.

Isn’t the naturalized, empirical concept of brain an attempt to rescue a picture theory of meaning by recourse to a causal physiology as a ground for the seeming ungrounded indeterminacy of symbolic interaction? — Joshs

I don't really understand what's been asked here. The brain can provide an explanation for blind intelligible behavior without symbolic interpretation. The brain as a prediction machine that can correct or update the parameters (from "error") responsible for its behavior, and underlies our ability to act coherently.

Perhaps this whole debate is misguided because you need empirical/observational evidence to construct a theory of how "use" creates "shared meaning" or "intersubjective agreement", or whatever you want to call the accordance with an understanding of a utterance or sign. For example, cognitive psychologists and anthropologists' works would be a good place to start.

Trying to distill prophecy from philosophers of the early/mid 20th century to get your answers isn't going to get you any closer :wink:. Fuck, mine as well be my divine opinion on the matter. Well, I just did give it, so there you go. Take it and go forth and preach brotha! But you best do it in the name of Schop1 and not Witt1!

Hell, this high school video has more informed content than some of this debate between interpretations of philosophical heavyweights :lol:

Originally an edit to my post

blindly — Apustimelogist

that was replying to . But became too long I thought just make new self-contained post.

-

By blindly, I mean that if rules are underdetermined then there is clearly no observable foundation for the way we act; we just act confidently with intuition. There are no floating internal symbolic representations of rules that prescribe our acts perfectly, there is only a flow of unfolding acts over time within one's experience; we infer rules from this flow after the fact (not infallibly) and all there is to the demonstration of understanding rules is more acts embedded in the aforementioned flow (e.g. stating a definition is an act; expressing disagreement is an act). Understanding a rule does not require a symbolic representation of a rule.

If you trawl through all the ways of trying to determinatrly characterize an act as a case of a rule, we end up with no foundation other than "it just feels that way, strongly; this is the use of plus" even if it is actually difficult to define what 'plus' even means without circularity and more indeterminacy.

But we can continue to use concepts like plus ... invoking the word so long as the concept ... to borrow a phrase, is empirically adequate ... but again, there is a sense in which what is "empirically adequate" is just what seems to be the case -

If it is the case that: "it just feels that way, strongly; this is the use of plus", then surely it is also the case that "it just feels that way, strongly; this is empirically adequate".

I like this paper for articulating the blind nature of cognition:

Direct Fit to Nature: An Evolutionary Perspective on Biological and Artificial Neural Networks

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089662731931044X

Summary / Abstract
Evolution is a blind fitting process by which organisms become adapted to their environment. Does the brain use similar brute-force fitting processes to learn how to perceive and act upon the world? Recent advances in artificial neural networks have exposed the power of optimizing millions of synaptic weights over millions of observations to operate robustly in real-world contexts. These models do not learn simple, human-interpretable rules or representations of the world; rather, they use local computations to interpolate over task-relevant manifolds in a high-dimensional parameter space. Counterintuitively, similar to evolutionary processes, over-parameterized models can be simple and parsimonious, as they provide a versatile, robust solution for learning a diverse set of functions. This new family of direct-fit models present a radical challenge to many of the theoretical assumptions in psychology and neuroscience. At the same time, this shift in perspective establishes unexpected links with developmental and ecological psychology.

"On a moment-to-moment basis, the brain is assimilating dynamic, multidimensional information about the world in order to produce rich, context-dependent behaviors. Confronted with such complexity, experimental neuroscientists traditionally design controlled experiments to reduce the dimensionality of the problem to a few factors conceived by the experimenter (Fisher, 1935). This reductionist program relies on a core commitment to the assumption that the neural computations supporting many of our cognitive functions can be decontextualized and decomposed into a handful of latent features, that these features are human interpretable and can be manipulated in isolation, and that the piecemeal recomposition of these features will yield a satisfying understanding of brain and behavior.

In parallel to the research in neuroscience and psychology laboratories, artificial neural networks (ANNs; see Box 1) are attaining human-level behavioral performance across many tasks ... This research program effectively abandoned traditional experimental design and simple interpretable models ... Such models learn how to recognize faces or respond to natural-language inquiries directly from the structure of the real world by optimizing millions of parameters (“big” models) over millions of examples (“big” data;
LeCun et al., 2015)."

"Although the human mind inspires us to touch the stars, it is grounded in the mindless billions of direct-fit parameters of System 1. Therefore, direct-fit interpolation is not the end goal but rather the starting point for understanding the architecture of higher-order cognition. There is no other substrate from which System 2 could arise. Many of the processes in System 1 are shared with other animals (as in perceptual systems), and some are unique to humans (as in grammar learning), but all are executed in an automatic, fast, and often unconscious way. The brute-force direct-fit interpolation that guides learning in these systems, similar to evolution, can go further than we previously thought in explaining many cognitive functions in humans (e.g., learning syntax in natural text without imposing rule-based reasoning; see Box 2)."

"It can be tempting to impose our own intuitive or folk-psychological interpretations onto the fitted model, but this is misguided. If a generic network learns such a rule, this rule is likely inherent in the training set and is thus not so much a meaningful property of the network as it is a property of the data (see Figure 2). These interpretable rules arise incidentally, as an emergent byproduct of the fitting procedure. The incidental emergence of such rules is not a “goal” of the network, and the network does not “use” the rules to extrapolate. This mindset, in fact, resembles pre-Darwinian teleological thinking and “just-so stories” in biology [as opposed to blind Darwinian natural selection] (Gould and Lewontin, 1979, Mayr, 1992). Evolution provides perhaps the most ubiquitous and well-known example of a biological fitting process that learns to act in the world while being blind to the underlying structure of the problems and their optimal solutions."

I might say that our direct aquaintance with our own intelligence is accompanied by an ineffability because it is automatic, unconscious, "brute-fitting".

Which is why Kripke confessess this undeniable pull and intuition and confidence at his following of a rule despite his inability to justify it. We are directly aquainted with our ability to act coherently and this ability transcends determinate, human-interpretable foundations precisely because our brain doesn't require them to do what it does.

Edit: The phrase "directly aquainted" I used here may be a bit too strong but just trying to convey that it is some strong aquaintance that just comes from a direct feeling rather than looking at some other justification. This is not to say that it is necessarily infallible even if it is a product of an extremely sophisticated machine.

:up: :up:

Without further elaboration/clarification, I am not sure what I see written here is much different from Kripke's sceptical solution. Rules are indeterminate but we act coherently anyway blindly. — Apustimelogist

Braver’s point is that Kripke’s solution is no solution. Whereas Wittgenstein’s starting point is radically social , deriving individual subjectivity from sociality, Kripke tries to explain intersubjective objectivity on the basis of the combined activity of individual subjects. This leaves us in the thrall of a Cartesian skepticism, a gap between the subject and a social world outside of the subject (parallel to neural models positing an internal prediction machine adapting itself to an impervious external world). Kripke then tries to repair this gap with a theory of the activity of the subject which can then be applied to social relations. Put differently, Kripke comes up with rules describing the behavior of an autonomous subject which are not indeterminate, and then attempts to use them to explain the indeterminate use of rules in social situations.

Isn’t the naturalized, empirical concept of brain an attempt to rescue a picture theory of meaning by recourse to a causal physiology as a ground for the seeming ungrounded indeterminacy of symbolic interaction?
— Joshs

I don't really understand what's been asked here. The brain can provide an explanation for blind intelligible behavior without symbolic interpretation. The brain as a prediction machine that can correct or update the parameters (from "error") responsible for its behavior, and underlies our ability to act coherently — Apustimelogist

Where is the social component in the operation of this prediction machine? To put the question in enactivist terms, does it make sense to analyze behavior in terms of subpersonal mechanisms solipsistically ensconced within a brain? This is the critique often leveled against active inference predictive processing approaches. In recent years P.P. models have moved closer to fully embodied 4EA approaches in recognizing the inseparable reciprocity of interaction between brain, body and environment.

Evolution is a blind fitting process by which organisms become adapted to their environment. Does the brain use similar brute-force fitting processes to learn how to perceive and act upon the world? Recent advances in artificial neural networks have exposed the power of optimizing millions of synaptic weights over millions of observations to operate robustly in real-world contexts — Apustimelogist

What’s missing here is the crucial normative character of perception and cognition. Perception is not not a one-way fitting process between organism and world in which the organism must adapt its perception to the facts of an environment external to its functioning. It is instead a reciprocal process where the nature of the ‘external ‘facts’ confronting the organism arrive already pre-interpreted in accordance with the organism’s normative purposes and goals. What Merleau-Ponty wrote about the organism applies equally well to Wittgenstein’s view of social relations. One might even say that the normative organization of perception is akin to a the normative nature of a language game.

“[t]he world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject who is nothing but a project of the world; and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world that it itself projects”

and yet, you will never know how it is to be Chinese, because you were not raised in China, it wasn't the culture within which you learned about the world, you didn't attend Chinese middle school and your first friends weren't Chinese. — Lionino

If one accepts the interpretation of what it is to know something implicit in this claim, you are right. But trivially so. I see this as a variation of argument like "Mary's Room" and "What it is like to be a bat?" It is true that most people think there is something special about one's "mother tongue", one's upbringing and education. There is. But I don't think anything follows that is relevant here.

Here's my contention:That someone is following a rule is shown by what they do. — Banno

That seems obvious. However, I think one should respond to scepticism, whether of the kind Wittgensteing discusses or the points made under the heading underdetermination by adding: -
1 However, it may be necessary any characterization of what the rule is by amending, or, sometimes, replacing it when disagreements arise about how to apply the rule in specific cases.
2 There is also a practice of, let me call it, characterization of rules. Mostly, we agree about how to apply a rule to each case, but, from time to time, it may be the case that not everyone agrees about the application of a rule to a specific case, and in these cases, we may wish to revisit the characterization that has been applied so far. I don't think this implies any specific disagreement about what Wittgenstein says. It's just that he doesn't consider this possibility, since in the PI it is the principle that agreement underpins application of the rule that matters. We should understand disagreements that occur in practice need to be resolved within that framework. That's the critical bit of his discussion and the reason why general scepticism is not appropriate.

Of course not. But if one wants to explain why we don't confuse them one has to move from the vague metaphor to something more concrete. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That's right. Apply the metaphor to games. Asked about why any two games are both games, and we can give quite precise answers from the range of possible criteria. For example, there is, or used to be, some controversy about whether viruses could be considered to be alive, because they are incapable of independent reproduction. They have to hi-jack the reproductive machinery of a cell in order to replicate. That debate seems to have been settled now, but the issue is quite well focused. (Of course, there's another "vague" issue buried in it, because which systems of reproduction count as independent needs to be clarified. But again, that's not a particularly vague issue)
Actually, in the case of the fossil, the issue is quite clear. The fossil does not have any of the functions of a living organism even though the fossil, we might say, used to be a living organism. We also know exactly why a mummified body is not a living organism.

In recent years P.P. models have moved closer to fully embodied 4EA approaches in recognizing the inseparable reciprocity of interaction between brain, body and environment. — Joshs

I'm not sure what 4EA approaches are, but I'm fully in sympathy with the recognition that everything interacts. It is perfectly clear that the brain is deeply integrated into all the physical processes of the body, which itself interacts constantly with the "outside" world. I'm a bit cautious about the implications of listing brain, body and mind. It seems to me to be as peculiar as "She came home in a flood of tears and a sedan chair". Perhaps I'm just a bit paranoid about dualism and reductionism.

You can think however you like when it comes to rules, but the rule has force in how it's acted out, and whether one is following a rule correctly isn't a matter of what you're thinking, it's a matter of agreement amongst people. Moreover, whether you're thinking correctly or incorrectly about a rule (right or wrong) comes out in your actions. One's motives, intentions, and deceptions matter but are not determinate in rule-following. Whether one follows a rule is necessarily played out in one's interactions, i.e., in our forms of life. If this isn't so rule-following would boil down to personal taste, feelings, and any subjective thought, i.e., if you think you're following a rule, then you are.

Put differently, Kripke comes up with rules describing the behavior of an autonomous subject which are not indeterminate, and then attempts to use them to explain the indeterminate use of rules in social situations. — Joshs

I think this is ass-backward. He starts with indeterminacy of rules and then uses sociality to explain why we seem to pick out specific concepts for our experiences when they are in principle indeterminable. I find Kripke's interpretation of Wittgenstein very agreeable; it makes sense to me and I have never been tempted to look at Wittgenstein in a way incompatible with the Kripkean view of rules.

Quote from Kripkenstein:

We cannot say that we all respond as we do to '68+ 57' because we all grasp the concept of addition in the same way, that we share common responses to particular addition problems because we share a common concept of addition. (Frege, for example, would have endorsed such an explanation, but one hardly needs to be a philosopher to find it obvious and natural.) For Wittgenstein, an 'explanation' of this kind ignores his treatment of the sceptical paradox and its solution. There is no objective fact - that we all mean addition by '+', or even that a given individual does - that explains our agreement in particular cases. Rather our license to say of each other that we mean addition by '+' is part of a 'language game' that sustains itself only because of the brute fact that we generally agree. (Nothing about 'grasping concepts' guarantees that it will not break down tomorrow.) The rough uniformities in our arithmetical behavior may or may not some day be given an explanation on the neurophysiological level, but such an explanation is not here in question. 77

Note again the analogy with the Humean case. Naively, we may wish to explain the observed concomitance of fire and heat by a causal, heat-producing, 'power' in the fire. The Humean alleges that any such use of causal powers to explain the regularity is meaningless. Rather we play a language game that allows us to attribute such a causal power to the fire as long as the regularity holds up. The regularity must be taken as a brute fact. So too for Wittgenstein.

This leaves us in the thrall of a Cartesian skepticism, a gap between the subject and a social world outside of the subject (parallel to neural models positing an internal prediction machine adapting itself to an impervious external world). — Joshs

I think I see this point but I don't see it as a problem. It is not just parallel to a brain processing information from the external world but a special case. We have no access to what is going on in other things and people apart from externally observable regularities - what suffices for our intelligible models and concepts then is empirical adequacy:

How does agreement emerge in the case of a term for a sensation, say 'pain'? It is not as simple as the case of 'table'. When will adults attribute to a child mastery ofthe avowal "I
am in pain"?80 The child, if he learns the avowal correctly, will utter it when he feels pain and not otherwise. By analogy with the case of 'table', it would appear that the adult should endorse this utterance if he, the adult, feels (his own? the child's?) pain. Of course we know that this is not the case. Rather the adult will endorse the child's avowal if the child's behavior (crying, agitated motion, etc.) and, perhaps, the external circumstances surrounding the child, indicate that he is in pain. If a child generally avows pain under such appropriate behavioral and external circumstances and generally does not do so otherwise, the adult will say of him that he has mastered the avowal, "I am in pain."

Since, in the case of discourse on pain and other sensations, the adult's confirmation whether he agrees with the child's avowal is based on the adult's observation of the child's behavior and circumstances, the fact that such behavior and circumstances characteristic of pain exist is essential in this case to the working of Wittgenstein's sceptical solution. This, then, is what is meant by the remark, "An 'inner process'
stands in need of outward criteria." Roughly speaking, outward criteria for an inner process are circumstances, observable in the behavior of an individual, which, when present, would lead others to agree with his avowals. If the individual generally makes his avowals under the right such circumstances, others will say of him that he has mastered the appropriate expression ("I am in pain," "I feel itchy," etc.).

I feel like the emphasis on sociality comes from the feeling that language for insular, private individuals is redundant and unnecessary; and so regardless of the possibility alluded earlier that "The rough uniformities in our arithmetical behavior may or may not some day be given an explanation on the neurophysiological level", sociality is deemed by Wittge/Kripke-nstein as integral to the heavy lifting of constraining word use (including that describes the applications of rules) because word use wouldn't even arise for an insular, private individual.

Where is the social component in the operation of this prediction machine? — Joshs

It's a special case. Changes in brain parameters (e.g. changes in membrane ion channels, synaptic receptor growth / recession, plasticity generally) occur due to external input changing the cascades of firing reverberating through the brain. Social inputs are just a special case of that input. My description you were replying cggo can be contextualized from my earlier comment that the brain is a deeper explanation than sociality. You can view sociality as a mechanism of how language works but it doesn't actually explain why we agree, why we come up with new words, how thinking and underlying processes work that are ultimately responsible for how we can use language. So sociality is a more superficial explanation than brains imo and probably does not cover many cases of relevant learning.

To put the question in enactivist terms, does it make sense to analyze behavior in terms of subpersonal mechanisms solipsistically ensconced within a brain? This is the critique often leveled against active inference predictive processing approaches. In recent years P.P. models have moved closer to fully embodied 4EA approaches in recognizing the inseparable reciprocity of interaction between brain, body and environment. — Joshs

No, it doesn't make sense to analyze this way since neuronal behavior will appear meaningless to a scientist without knowing things about the world outside an organisms brain and what an organism does, how it lives.

But when we talk about the question of 'how a brain does what it does?', then it is just a fact that the only thing a brain has access to is its external inputs. A brain does what it does and achieves all of these incredible things without access to the outside world.

Personally, I think active inference and predictive processing can only make complete sense in an enactive characterization so I am with you there: (e.g. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1059712319862774)

What’s missing here is the crucial normative character of perception and cognition. Perception is not not a one-way fitting process between organism and world in which the organism must adapt its perception to the facts of an environment external to its functioning. It is instead a reciprocal process where the nature of the ‘external ‘facts’ confronting the organism arrive already pre-interpreted in accordance with the organism’s normative purposes and goals. — Joshs

I disagree about pre-interpreted (Darwinian natural selection is blind) but I know what you mean. I think the article I linked earlier is very amenable to this kind of stuff and mentions both evolution and ecological psychology:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089662731931044X

It makes explicit parallels between the blind-fitting of neural processes and the blind-fitting of natural selection. Therefore, while genes will lead to constraints on our biological phenotypes and how the brain works, there is no reason to think such constraints should be viewed teleologically or "pre-interpreted" or normatively except for as a kind of useful fiction when talking about evolution. The evolutionary blind-fitting has as little interpretable "comprehension" to the problems it is solving as the brain has access to what is going on past its sensory boundaries.

Some quotes from paper:

"Our affordances are constrained by our bodies and brains, and there is an intimate relationship between how our bodies and neural networks are wired and what we can learn."

"Direct fit, as an algorithmic procedure to minimize an objective function, allows neural networks to learn the transformation between external input to meaningful actions, without the need to explicitly represent underlying rules and principles in a human-interpretable way.

A major task taken up by the school of ecological psychology was to characterize each animal’s objective functions, conceptualized as affordances, based on the information the animal needs to behave adaptively and survive in the world (Gibson, 1979, Michaels and Carello, 1981). For cats, a chair may afford an intermediate surface for jumping onto the kitchen counter, whereas for humans, it may afford a surface on which to sit while eating. Like in evolution, there is no one correct way to fit the world, and different direct-fit networks, guided by different objective functions, can be used in the same ecological niche to improve fit to different aspects of the environment. Furthermore, as argued by the school of ecological psychology, information is defined as the affordances that emerge in interactions between the organism and its ecological niche. As opposed to strongly representational approaches common in computational neuroscience, the direct-fit approach learns arbitrary functions for facilitating behavior and is capable of mapping sensory input to motor actions without ever explicitly reconstructing the world or learning explicit rules about the latent structure of the outside world. Marr (1982), for example, speaks favorably of Gibson’s theory of vision but, unsatisfied with the theory’s vague treatment of information processing, instead suggests that the goal of vision is to recover a geometrical representation of the world. In contrast to the representational stance, the direct-fit framework is aligned with Gibson’s treatment of the goal of vision: to recover information in the world that affords the organism its adaptive behaviors.

Gibson believed that animals are entangled with their environment in a closed perception-action feedback loop: they perceive to act and act to perceive. Furthermore, actions and affordances are shaped and constrained by the structure of the environment and the organism’s physiology. Similarly, from the direct-fit perspective, neural networks implicitly learn the structure of the environment as a means to an end, but this learning is ultimately driven by internal objectives aligning perception to action with an eye toward adaptive fitness (see Box 3)."

So, yes for sure; for an indepth understanding of how an organism works, you will always want to look at what the brain is doing in the context of its environment and its evolved phenotypes. But when talking about how the brain actually achieves what it does, the brain is essentially insulated. The constraints from an organism's evolutionary history and body are filtered through the sensory inputs it receives (e.g. from its own body, partly in reaction to motor signals it sends out), and the actual internal structure of the brain.

Yep.

Hence forms of life are lived and shown, and cannot be incommensurable because they must all occur embedded in our activities in the world we share.

Which is another way of saying that some statements are true. And they will be true regardless of what one believes.

Agreed :up:

I see this as a variation of argument like "Mary's Room" and "What it is like to be a bat?" — Ludwig V

The difference with Mary's room or the bat is that it applies to everybody who is not you. But it is not as deep or epistemological as that, it is a simple practical fact of life: actual Chinese people share core experiences that you don't.

But I don't think anything follows that is relevant here. — Ludwig V

It is relevant to the fragment from Count's post that I quoted.

I might say that our direct aquaintance with our own intelligence is accompanied by an ineffability because it is automatic, unconscious, "brute-fitting". — Apustimelogist

This sounds a little reductionist. Sure, I am all for this kind of predictive/enactive/semiotic understanding of the neurobiology involved. The brain and nervous system are the basis of the modelling relation we call "consciousness". But then on top of neuro-semiosis is stacked socio-semiosis – humans learning how to think and behave at the level of "parts of a larger sociocultural organism".

Socio-semiosis shares all the same general processing principles. The same Darwinian and thermodynamic logic. Yet it is still a further level of "embodied intelligence".

I feel like the emphasis on sociality comes from the feeling that language for insular, private individuals is redundant and unnecessary — Apustimelogist

I would put it the other way around. The requirement for becoming the higher level thing of a social organism is to have a culture that can shape all its individuals into precisely the kind of self-regulating and socially-cooperating agents that would allow such a social organism to exist.

We aren't just born with the qualities of being a rationalising and abstracting self-aware beings equipped with a biographical past and an imaginable future. These are habits of thought shaped by social evolution and encoded in linguistic information. Or more latterly, numeric information as well.

The genetic constraints on human behaviour have become weak in proportion to the sociocultural constraints have taken over.

So that's a critical difference. Although it is also just more of the same in semiotic terms. It is still a story governed by the far more general ecological and environmental constraints of the world at large. We remain creatures exist by entropification. And evolutionary selection has the last say on our relative success at that.

This sounds a little reductionist. Sure, I am all for this kind of predictive/enactive/semiotic understanding of the neurobiology involved. The brain and nervous system are the basis of the modelling relation we call "consciousness". But then on top of neuro-semiosis is stacked socio-semiosis – humans learning how to think and behave at the level of "parts of a larger sociocultural organism".

Socio-semiosis shares all the same general processing principles. The same Darwinian and thermodynamic logic. Yet it is still a further level of "embodied intelligence". — apokrisis

I don't see what any of this has to do with what was in my quote. I'm talking about people experiencing and justifying beliefs about their own behaviors, not social dynamics. I don't think two areas do not share competing explanations.. from what I can tell.

I would put it the other way around. The requirement for becoming the higher level thing of a social organism is to have a culture that can shape all its individuals into precisely the kind of self-regulating and socially-cooperating agents that would allow such a social organism to exist. — apokrisis

I was alluding to Wittgenstein's arguments about the impossibility of private language argument as connected to why Wittge-kripke-nstein evokes social agreement regarding rule-following paradoxes. I just used the word 'sociality', perhaps rather idiosyncratically, to refer to that social agreement thing. I wasn't really making any general statements about social behavior in the way you are talking about now. But sure, culture is central to social behavior like you said.

So that's a critical difference. — apokrisis

Difference between what?

it is a simple practical fact of life: actual Chinese people share core experiences that you don't. — Lionino

I know what you mean. You seem to be very fond of the practical in life. So am I. Sometimes. But here I'm interested in the philosophical implications of what you say.

I would say the intention is to dissociate the idea of categorizing actions, based on some rule which is inherently indeterminate, from the actions themselves. We act regardless of the indeterminacy. I would also say such a view is in direct contrast to views where thinking is something more than sequences of our surface experiences, e.g. computational theories of mind, "language of thought hypothesis" and views that there is some intelligible, determinate semantic representations / symbols / modules underpinning those sequences.

IDK, if "language of thought" or CTM are correct then they are still describing "things we do." Saying rule following is determined by "acts" or "what we do," has to limit what constitutes an "act" or "doing" or else we are still left with something trivial. If anything a person can possibly do constitutes and "act" or "doing" then to say rule following shows up in these categories is to say essentially nothing at all. Clearly, our following rules can't be "something we do not do," or "an act we do not preform."

And clearly that we are following a rule does not depend on "anything we do at all," but rather our doing particular things, and this particularity is what must be defined in order to avoid something like: "someone's following a rule is constituted by them acting in accordance with the rule," which is just tautological.

While I think behaviorism is misguided for other reasons, it at least avoids this.

Why are we so in far up the realm of abstraction in these language talks. Language is something that comes from biological processes, no? We are evolutionarily primed for language, everything from vocal chord formation, to brain development. So things to include in this debate:

1) Why do humans have a SPECIFIC period (the Critical Period), in which a primary language is acquired at an extremely rapid pace? This indicates an internal structural brain period during development for which language is specifically acquired. If you want to link this to your debate about rule-following, it is indeed an "a priori" process going on whereby words are PICKED UP in various ways.

2) The words that are PICKED UP during the critical period aren't picked up in a clean linear fashion. There is some pruning (learning) going on whereby words are overused or used inappropriately and later corrected by looking at how the rules are used by adult users of the language.

So there is a sort of "internal rule-following" followed by an external correction process, both happening during that critical period and younger age development, it appears. This is why primary and secondary languages are very different from each other in terms of learning, or so most models seem to indicate.

Put differently, Kripke comes up with rules describing the behavior of an autonomous subject which are not indeterminate, and then attempts to use them to explain the indeterminate use of rules in social situations.
— Joshs

I think this is ass-backward. He starts with indeterminacy of rules and then uses sociality to explain why we seem to pick out specific concepts for our experiences when they are in principle indeterminable. I find Kripke's interpretation of Wittgenstein very agreeable; it makes sense to me and I have never been tempted to look at Wittgenstein in a way incompatible with the Kripkean view of rules. — Apustimelogist

As you probably know, Kripke’s reading of Wittgenstein’s solution to the skeptical paradox is controversial, and even Kripke admitted that Wittgenstien may very well not have approved of his interpretation. There’s no reason to reject his approach merely on this basis. After all, there’s far from a general consensus among Wittgenstein scholars as to how to read him. All I would like to do here is illustrate how far apart Krpike’s take on the later Wittgenstein is from writers whose perspectives I find more consonant with P.I. and other later works (Cavell, Braver, Antony Nickles).

As I understand it, Kripke’s argument begins with the skepticism that ensues from rejecting a classical realist approach to the factual justification of meaning interpretation. There is no fact of the matter that can determine whether the meaning for me of a rule like the plus sign is the same as I apply it now as when I applied it last year. The only form of justification that can be used legitimately involves determining assertability conditions in the public realm .

The evidence justifying us to assert or judge that Jones means green by “green” is our observation of Jones’s linguistic behavior, that is, his use of the word under certain publicly observable circumstances. We can justifiably assert that Jones means green by “green” if we can observe, in enough cases, that he uses this word as we do or would do, or more generally, as others in his speech-community are inclined to do. This is the only justification there is, and the only justification we need, to assert that he means green by “green”.( I.E.P)

Let me summarize the key points that I want to contrast with my reading of Wittgenstein. Kripke doesn’t deny that we form meanings of words that bring with them determinate (by determinate I mean that they are unchanging in their sense for as long as they are in effect) instructions , rules and criteria on how to apply them. For however long a period of time a particular meaning survives, it causally determines its use. The skeptical problem arises because the meaning can shift over time, and along with it the rules of its application. We can’t discern from the user’s disposition facts that will tell us how they meant to use a word. Put differently, Kripke thinks of a word meaning as an interpretation, a picture that determines how it is used, and we swap out pictures all the time. Kripke’s solution involves comparing the picture of one member of a community with the consensus picture of the community as a whole to see if there is a match between interpretations of meaning.

How does my reading of Wittgenstein differ from Kripke’s? For starters, the meaning of a word doesn’t function like a picture. Words aren’t first created and then used. They only exist in their use. Furthermore, to use a word is always to change the sense of its meaning, and this is a social process. Meaning something is a social enactment, the production of something new rather than the referring back to a picture. What allows for the relatively stable normativity of social use of word meanings is the stability of language games. A language game doesn’t lock down a determinate definition of meaning, it provides a framework of relative consistency of sense, within which the specific meanings of words constantly slide and shift in subtle ways without causing a crisis of intelligibility. Because we are always ensconced within one language game or another, the issue of skepticism never comes up for Wittgenstein. For Kripke , language games, and the normative ‘agreements’ that he claims they produce, accommodate themselves to already formed picture-like word meanings within individuals. Since this agreement occurs after the fact of creation of word meanings within individuals, it must undo a skepticism born of the indeterminacy of individually formed meanings, which in turn results from the assumption of a gap between how these meanings were formed and how they are interpreted within a community. For Wittgenstein, by contrast, word meanings are not created by the individual first and then submitted to social interpretation , they only emerge out of discursively formed language games , and thus never suffer from the interminably that Kripke’s model presupposes.

Whereas for Kripke we understand how someone means a rule by looking for a picture within their words that corresponds to our own, for Wittgenstein we do not rely on previously formed normative interpretations of the meaning of rules , either individual or collective, to understand each other (Kripke says the members of a speech-community agree to use “plus” in specific ways). Rather, within actual contextual discursive situations we transform the sense of our past history of word application This is what it means to use a word, and what it means for a word to have a meaning. According to Braver, Kripke’s grounding of word meaning in individually formed pictures which change their meaning over time is a “virulent distortion introduced by philosophical contemplation.”

As commentators continue to instruct Kripke's interpretation, Wittgenstein's discussion is a reductio of traditional conceptions of thinking. He is not bringing to light a profound discovery that exposes a heretofore unknown vulnerability of understanding, but charting a particularly virulent distortion introduced by philosophical contemplation. The philosopher's bafflement before suddenly mute or excessively permissive signs is an artificial product of the characteristic philosophical behaviors discussed in chapter 1: stopping ongoing usage and staring.

Wittgenstein writes:

“It is felt to be a difficulty that a rule should be given in signs which do not themselves contain their use [that is, which are not meaning-objects], so that a gap exists between a rule and its application. But this is not a problem but a mental cramp. That this is so appears on asking when this problem strikes one. It is never when we lay down the rule or apply the rule. We are only troubled when we look at a rule in a particularly queer way. The characteristic thing about all philosophical problems is that they arise in a peculiar way. As a way out, I can only give you examples, which if you think about them you will find the cramp relaxes. In ordinary life one is never troubled by a gap between the sign and its application. To relieve the mental cramp it is not enough to get rid of it; you must also see why you had it. (AWL 90)

Joseph Rouse argues:

..we cannot appeal to social regularities or collectively presupposed norms within a practice: there are no such things, but more important, if there were they would not thereby legitimately bind us. Any regularities in what practitioners have previously done does not thereby have any authority to bind subsequent performances to the same regularities. The familiar Wittgensteinian paradoxes about rule following similarly block any institution of norms merely by invocation of a rule, since no rule can specify its correct application to future instances (Wittgenstein 1953). Practices should instead be understood as comprising performances that are mutually interactive in partially shared circumstances.

The intelligibility of performances within a practice then depends upon the anticipation and partial achievement of appropriate alignment with others' performances and their circumstances, toward what I described above as their "end," as Aristotelian energeia. Through discursive niche construction, human beings have built up patterns of mutually responsive activity. These patterns make possible newly intelligible ways of living and understanding ourselves within this discursively articulated "niche.""

"Brandom's talk of "norms" is then misleading: norms are not already determinate standards to which performances are accountable but are instead temporally extended patterns that encompass how we have already been living this part of our lives as well as the possibilities open for its continuation. Just what this pattern of practice is-what we are up to, and who we are in our involvement in it-is always partly ahead of us, as that toward which the various performances of a practice are mutually, but not always fully compatibly, directed. The temporal open-endedness of our biological niche construction and that of social practices are two ways of describing the same phenomena."

"This understanding of conceptually articulated practices as subpatterns within the human lineage belongs to the Davidsonian-Sellarsian tradition that emphasizes the "objectivity" of conceptual understanding. Yet the "objects" to which our performances must be held accountable are not something outside discursive practice itself. Discursive practice cannot be understood as an intralinguistic structure or activity that then somehow "reaches out" to incorporate or accord to objects. The relevant "objects" are the ends at issue and at stake within the practice itself. "The practice itself," however, already incorporates the material circumstances in and through which it is enacted. Practices are forms of discursive and practical niche construction in which organism and environment are formed and reformed together through an ongoing, mutually intra-active reconfiguration.

You might say rule-following has its genesis and foundation in pattern recognition and mimicry.

CTM involves mental representations which would determine the connection between a rule and an act, and would prescribe how to act directly from the determinate rule representation. This kind of view is rejected. The point is not to define what a rule is, but that we can act coherently while there is inherent indeterminacy in characterizing what kind of rule is being acted in accordance to.

models do not learn simple, human-interpretable rules or representations of the world; rather, they use local computations to interpolate over task-relevant manifolds in a high-dimensional parameter space. — Apustimelogist

This would be how a brain learns to do a tasks or acts or behaviors like addition.

Imo, actually categorizing some behavior as addition or being aware of it, having knowledge about it... or whatever... would itself be nothing more than acts or behaviors (e.g. saying "I am adding", pointing out a mistake someone has made when adding).

We then make choices about these categorization acts or distinctions or knowledge acts despite inherent underdetermination. And we continue to use these categorizations until we perceive they are no longer fit for purpose, like a scientist (perhaps an instrumentalist scientist specifically) might continue to use theories until a better one comes along - criteria for better just being how well it works, how adequate it is at accounting for observations, agnostic to any notion of realism for these theories (Edit: maybe this last analogy needs some work I think; it was inspired by the Kripke Humean analogy I quoted here:

Note again the analogy with the Humean case. — Apustimelogist

).

The quote from above (about models not learning human-interpretable rules) imo also applies to the categorization act behaviors:

models do not learn simple, human-interpretable rules or representations of [categorizations]; rather, they use local computations to interpolate over [categorization]-relevant manifolds in a high-dimensional parameter space. — Apustimelogist

And again, the categorization itself is just a behavior or act, like saying "I am adding"; not necessarily assuming that there is any representational content to this phrase. It is just a phrase - phonemes, letters. They don't have any inherent significance in terms of some symbolic representation with semantics attached. Their significance is that if you plug these inputs back into some neural machine, the neural machine [whether your own or another person] will be able to return appropriate acts (to be extremely simplistic about all it). (I feel like the PI sections on reading particularly are good examples for the kind of thing - reading in terms of surface perceptions and acts and nothing more).

Alot of this is being filtered through through additional neuroscientific ideas that obviously were not around at the time, but that's how I flesh out these ideas to give them more tangibility. I still feel like they reflect the same kind of anti-essentialist leanings in PI.

The logic of adding goes back to grouping objects, animals, people, together.

The only form of justification that can be used legitimately involves determining assertability conditions in the public realm . — Joshs

I wouldn't say its a justification as opposed to an explanation for how people use words without being paralyzed by indeterminacy.

There is no fact of the matter that can determine whether the meaning for me of a rule like the plus sign is the same as I apply it now as when I applied it last year — Joshs

I would only add that I think this kripkean idea applies as much to your own meaning as anyone elses. But this is no impediment to your use of these words or behave correctly.

Kripke doesn’t deny that we form meanings of words that bring with them determinate (by determinate I mean that they are unchanging in their sense for as long as they are in effect) instructions , rules and criteria on how to apply them. — Joshs

I am not sure I agree because there can be indeterminacy when you define a rule. There may be indeterminacy about whether your past behavior is consistent with 'plus' or 'quus'; and if this is the case, then surely the fact you are using the word 'plus' or refer to 'plus' cannot rule out that you actually mean 'quus' when you were saying 'plus'. I agree though that also it is implied there is no fact of matter whether you would be using same rule now as before or future.

Kripke thinks of a word meaning as an interpretation, a picture that determines how it is used, and we swap out pictures all the time. — Joshs

Disagree. He is suggesting there is never a picture for determining anything because, it is always underdetermined. We act blindly according to Kripke(nstein); community members hence also agree and disagree blindly, but it is within a community of people agreeing and disagreeing, that some people are viewed as wrong and others right about things (by the community). For a person on their own, anything may go without backlash, as they assert and do what just seems right to them. Agreement and disagreement about use then help build language-games within a community.

we cannot appeal to social regularities or collectively presupposed norms within a practice

Any regularities in what practitioners have previously done does not thereby have any authority to bind subsequent performances to the same regularities.

I think Kripke would actually agree with this given his arguments against dispositionalism.

“It is felt to be a difficulty that a rule should be given in signs which do not themselves contain their use [that is, which are not meaning-objects], so that a gap exists between a rule and its application. But this is not a problem but a mental cramp

To me, this is just what Kripke's sceptical solution is describing.

So from your post, I don't agree with your and I guess some of the cited writer's characterizations of Kripkenstein. Kripkenstein's views don't seem necessarily incompatible with much of the other stuff that has been said imo.

Doesn't seem incompatible with anything I said

The point being that counting is intuitive...the act enacts a logic which is inherent to animal cognition, so no need to think of it as rule-following except in its more complex elaborations. But even there the foundational intuitive logic is the underpinning.