• Banno
    26.1k
    So if McDowell has a good argument, set it out for us. What is it that you understand from the lecture?

    Anscombe's discussion of intentionality is excellent, both agreeing and disagreeing with Davidson in details. Now while Anscombe did think the reasons for our actions could not always be reduced to a causal relation between beliefs or desires and intentions, and would likely say the "x believes that P" oversimplifies the issue, would she reject it outright? Well, I'd have to be convinced.

    Anscombe differed from Davidson, and here I am agreeing more with Davidson. But it is not a simple issue, and without the details (the transcript is shite)...?

    You are welcome to set out what you think McDowell is saying that Anscombe says.
  • J
    1k
    That goes for background and unconscious beliefs, too. Unstated is not unstatable.Banno

    But the problem is that we're now invoking an unstated something that is supposed to be identical to a statement. Or should I say, it would be a statement if it were stated? Maybe you can say more about how this works. I assume you're not saying that the belief only becomes a belief when it is stated.

    the person who believes this [that "tiger" is no more perspicuous about the world than "tiger + my left thumb"] ... is making a mistake.
    — J

    Well, yes, interesting. So what is the mistake here? Not grasping the essence, if grasping the essence is just using the word; not intending, since one can as much intend tiger-and-thumb as tiger.

    Maybe have another look at the rejection of atomism in PI, around §48. How far can the argument there be taken?
    Banno

    Yes, Witt's question is very similar. He asks, concerning the color-figure, "Does it matter which we say [concerning number and type of elements] so long as we avoid misunderstandings in any particular case?"

    Probably the best thing to do here is abandon my thumb and let Sider speak for himself. If you're willing, go here and read pp. 16-20. This is introductory material to Writing the Book of the World, and Sider is asserting his views, not arguing much for them. But it gives a good sense of what the "mistake" would consist of, and why it might be important to hold out for privileged structure.
  • J
    1k
    @Count Timothy von Icarus

    Quine collaborated on a short textbook intended for phil students, called The Web of Belief. He says something at the beginning that I remember being puzzled by, and looking at it again, I still am. He gives a fair account of the argument in favor of a "belief" being different from its statement, ending with, "Therefore, one tends to conclude that the things believed are not the sentences themselves. What, then, are they?" But then he says:

    This, like various other philosophical questions, is better deflected than met head on. Instead of worrying about the simple verb "believes" as relating men to some manner of believed things, we can retreat to the word-pair "believes true" as relating men directly to sentences. We can retreat to this without claiming that believed things are sentences; we can simply waive that claim, and the philosophical question behind it. After all, our factual interest in what some speaker of English believes is fully satisfied by finding out what sentences he believes to be true. — Quine & Ullian, 5

    Retreat? Deflect? And what does he mean by "waive that claim"? To waive a claim to something usually means, to give up one's right to it -- but that can't be his meaning here. Alternatively, to waive a rule means to declare the rule inapplicable in a given case Is this closer to Quine's meaning? -- the claim about "believed things are sentences" is inapplicable in this case? That doesn't sound right either. To me, it reads like he's saying, "We're just going to declare that issue out of bounds, and talk about 'believing true' instead." Very peremptory, without a justification. Or should we say that the justification is the final sentence about "our factual interest"? But the question about the ontology of a belief never was about any given fact about what is believed.

    Maybe someone else can make sense of the whole passage.
  • Count Timothy von Icarus
    3.2k


    You'd have to do a lot of unpacking there. It's an operationalization. It's not unlike how entropy is a very deep concept, but we certainly have useful ways to operationalize it. Is it a good move?

    English uses "know" in many senses, and then knowing is historically formulated as a type of believing in Anglo-American philosophy. Other languages have many words to cover what English does with two. It seems easy to argue that not all knowledge is propositional, but what about belief?

    For instance, an experienced CEO and a business student might both "know what it is like to be a CEO" in terms of affirming similar sentences, but there is a sense of "know" in which only the experienced CEO really knows. Likewise, everyone knows what it is like to lose a parent young or to fast in terms of affirming sentences about one's parents' deaths or eschewing food and drink, but many are not orphans and have never gone a day without eating, and so in another sense, they do not know what they are like.

    The gap becomes more obvious in the realm of practical truths. A social sciences student who has never been in any romantic relationship might affirm that "stable marriages are good," but we might take this belief to be quite different than that of the woman who has been in a happy, fulfilling marriage for 25 years, or even the priest who has never married, but has acted as spiritual guide for many couples, both happy and unhappy.

    There is a wealth of interesting findings on how affirmation of belief is "squishy," for lack of a better term. Experts panicked that so many US citizens were affirming beliefs like "Trump won the popular vote in 2016 and 2020 in a landslide and the CCP helped overthrow our government," or "COVID-19 is a hoax." One might think that if the type of people who claimed to believe the former "really" believed it, they would take up arms.

    But it certainly isn't that they are just lying, at least not as best researchers can tell. And they have their justifications and appeal to them. There is a question of "conviction" around belief, and this does not reduce neatly to mere assumed probability that the belief is true. Journalists might well have believed with near 100% certainty things like: "Stalin is carrying out an industrial scale genocide of Ukrainians," but it was not until they directly experienced it that they began to be willing to risk absolutely everything to bring it to the world's attention.

    Which might suggest that even in Quine's own terms of what constitutes valid evidence vis-a-vis "our factual interest in what some speaker of English believes," while it might be "fully satisfied by finding out what sentences he believes to be true," it will not be sufficient to merely observe which sentences he sincerely affirms. We might need to look at all their behaviors to gauge this, and assigned truth values might be inadequate to fully capture belief. And we might suppose that we also might need to appeal to their experiences to explain how they believe this.

    A lot of philosophy has a special role for sense knowledge and understanding, and this is captured in analytic philosophy by arguments such as Jackson's "Mary's Room," Searl's "Chinese Room," etc. The web of belief gets at this too. It's one of the places where holism is attacked. If two people disagree about dogs, do they both "have different dogs?"

    But surely the web gets something right, beliefs, like things, are not self-subsistent. This is an issue later synthesizers of Aristotle and Plato grappled with. It's impossible to describe what a horse is without appeal to other things. For the scholastics, everything existed in a "web of relations." Yet here, some sort of qualification is required, even if it isn't a formal operationalization, because we will be in a pickle if we "must know everything to know anything" in any context, including "what people believe."
  • Apustimelogist
    676
    and I find it so odd to see people hell-bent on impugning it.Leontiskos

    What kind of benefit do you think they would get from not impugning it? If it is just saying that there are statistical structures and regularities in reality, then fine. But why do I need to use the word "essence"? Seems to connote something more than is required so I don't need to use the word.
  • Leontiskos
    3.7k
    You are welcome to set out what you think McDowell is saying that Anscombe says.Banno

    You are welcome to listen to McDowell's lecture.
  • Leontiskos
    3.7k
    Retreat? Deflect? And what does he mean by "waive that claim"?J

    :up:

    It seems like he is making the 'factual' in "factual interest" do a heck of a lot of work.

    If you're willing, go here and read pp. 16-20.J

    Sider is an interesting figure for the discussion, and it's unfortunate that he was ignored in your thread on Ontological Pluralism. He is willing to consider forms of modal essentialism, and he doesn't see problems with bare particulars. He therefore fills an important gap between Aristotle and Quine.

    Here is Sider:

    A certain core realism is, as much as anything, the shared dogma of analytic
    philosophers, and rightly so. The world is out there, waiting to be discovered,
    it’s not constituted by us—all that good stuff. Everyone agrees that this realist
    picture prohibits truth from being generally mind-dependent in the crudest
    counterfactual sense, but surely it requires more. After all, the grue things
    would all have turned bleen at the appointed hour even if humans had never
    existed; under one of Reichenbach’s coordinative definitions one can truly say
    that “spacetime would still have been Euclidean even if humans had never
    existed”. The realist picture requires the “ready-made world” that Goodman
    (1978) ridiculed; there must be structure that is mandatory for inquirers to
    discover. To be wholly egalitarian about all carvings of the world would give
    away far too much to those who view inquiry as the investigation of our own
    minds.
    Theodore Sider, Ontological Realism, 18

    He is doing a good job of digging into an issue that Peter Abelard originally opened:

    Is a word called “common” on account of the common cause things agree in, or on account of the common conception, or on account of both together?Abelard via Paul Vincent Spade | Medieval Universals | SEP

    And:

    The main thrust of [Abelard's] arguments against the collection-theory is that collections are arbitrary integral wholes of the individuals that make them up, so they simply do not fill the bill of the Porphyrian characterizations of the essential predicables such as genera and species.[29]

    29. No wonder that in modern philosophies of language, mostly inspired by the “collection-theorist” view of quantification theory, we have the persistent problem of providing a principled distinction between essential and non-essential predicates.
    Abelard via Paul Vincent Spade | Medieval Universals | SEP

    The issue becomes protracted when nominalists like Ockham come on the scene.

    The problem for Abelard and Sider is this: Suppose we try to say that something "counts as" a tiger, without there being any common cause residing within each real tiger. That is, suppose that our common noun "tiger" merely indicates a collection of individuals. On this view, what holds the collection together as a non-arbitrary collection? What undergirds the "counts as" relation itself?

    Very little of this thread has been about Quine, but at some point a new thread should be created or else we should move this into the Sider thread.

    (CC: @Srap Tasmaner and @fdrake)
  • frank
    16.4k
    Do you think I hold that view, Tim?

    Edit: Or that such a view is implied by linguistic philosophy generally?
    Banno

    Everyone after Wittgenstein was deranged. Just a sad turn of events. :fear:
  • Banno
    26.1k
    But the problem is that we're now invoking an unstated something that is supposed to be identical to a statement.J
    "A believes that P" is not a restriction on what one might do, think or feel. It is a stipulations as to which of those things might be best called a belief. "A believes that P" says that a belief is had by someone, which I hope is not controversial, and also that the content of a belief can be true or false. It's by way of setting out what it is we are discussing.

    I'll ask again for an example of a belief that cannot be put in this form - not because I'n certain there are none, but because an example might show us more about he nature of belief. "I believe in Trump" might be considered a counterexample, with a proper name rather than a proposition as its content. Here a dictionary is useful, setting out differing senses of "belief", The first being to accept something as true, the second being more akin to "having faith".

    There's gold in those hills even if no one says so. That gold isn't identical to the statement about it. The belief need not be identical to the statement about it.

    Thanks for the read. Keeping to PI§48 for the sake of continuity, Sider is making the point that we might consider a monochrome square as consisting of two rectangles, as Wittgenstein suggests, but we cannot arbitrarily consider it to consist of two circles - these would not be congruent with the picture. And this is quite right; not just any proposition will do, there is a further restriction that the proposition be true. Two rectangles would make a square, but two circles would not.

    Let me know if I have miscomprehended Sider.

    And I think this fundamentally correct. Not just any proposition will do; it's the true ones that are to be preferred if our task is to set out how things are. And here Davidson is again of use. If we have two communities, one of which talks of squares, and the other of rectangles which are sometimes paired, then we might construct a translation from one language into the other, such that statements about squares in the first can be translated as statements about paired rectangles in the other. Using such a translation we might reach some agreement as to what is the case with the item at §48. Here the Principle of Charity comes in to play, since the translation is based on treating the beliefs of both communities as essentially the same, just expressed somewhat differently.

    What's salient here is that charity does not rely on a notion of objectivity, apart from shared belief.

    So in answer to Sider's question "what else beyond my use of words must the interpreter consult?" the answer provided by Davidson is, the interpreter's beliefs together with the assumption that those he is translating have the same beliefs.

    This avoids Lewis's use of the "the facts of naturalness". But I don't think it disagrees with Sider's view that the world is structured.

    I'll have to come back to this paper when I have some time. I would like to get a handle on the more formal aspects of Sider's account.

    This discussion is in many ways very similar to an ongoing discussion between @Joshs and I, but with Joshs in my lace and myself in yours. It sometimes seems to me that Joshs allows the mooted divisions in the world to be too arbitrary, as you seem to think I am proposing.

    Thanks again for taking this discussion seriously and engaging with it fully.
  • Janus
    16.7k
    The obvious response is that what it is we recognise when we recognise a tiger is, well, the tiger.Banno

    So would it be fair to say that, in the example of the tiger, we must refer to the tiger itself? And a disagreement about the tiger's "essentiality" (or definition, if you prefer) would be investigated by saying, in effect, "Let's return to the tiger. Let's examine him more closely in the relevant aspects so we can learn which of us is right"?
    — J

    This isn't meant to be some sort of trick question that implies there's no such thing as "being a tiger."
    Of course there is. Nor am I suggesting that "how to recognize a tiger" is the same problem as "what constitutes a tiger." But we should think carefully about how we determine both these things, because when we move to abstracta, the problems increase by an order of magnitude.
    J

    When we recognize an individual tiger we recognize the tiger, and we don't even need to recognize it as a tiger. So, it seems to me that the question is 'when we recognize something as a tiger what is it that we are recognizing?'.

    The answer that comes to me initially is that we recognize a unique example of a kind of pattern or form that we have come to associate with the concept 'tiger'. Not sure if that is an adequate answer.
  • Banno
    26.1k
    "We're just going to declare that issue out of bounds, and talk about 'believing true' instead."J
    My approach to answering this is quite different to , but that should not be taken as implying that he is mistaken.

    Would that I had the text, so I could see the context.

    Quine appears to be invoking what he elsewhere called semantic ascent, moving from talk about objects to talk about the language used to talk about those objects. But here he is reversing the process. To put this in an example, the move described is from "Pat believes the tree is an oak" to "Pat believes-true that the tree is an oak'". "We can retreat to this without claiming that believed things are sentences" becasue now what is believed true is the state of affairs that the tree is an oak. What is believed is not the sentence, so much as the way things supposedly are. So in "Pat believes the tree is an oak" is abut the belief. But in "Pat believes that 'the tree is an oak' is true" the subject is what is true. What's believed by pat is not the sentence "the tree is an oak" but the truth that the tree is an oak.

    "Therefore, one tends to conclude that the things believed are not the sentences themselves. What, then, are they?"J
    They are, speaking more roughly than one should, states of affairs or ways things are in the world.

    Again, I don't think Tim's more discursive reply is mistaken, belief is indeed complex and nuanced, and the whole of a belief might not be captured by a single proposition. Yet treating beliefs as beliefs in the way things are is at least a start, and at least not wrong. As Anscombe might argue, it's an oversimplification, but Davidson might reply that it works.
  • Count Timothy von Icarus
    3.2k
    I considered this thread closely and went for a walk today to ponder it. I've detailed the first part of the walk here: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15728/the-dark-wood-where-there-is-no-error/p1

    Of course, I am once again able to speak, but I shall have to pen the further cantos to discuss how I made it back to this state of speech. :nerd:
  • Banno
    26.1k
    The answer that comes to me initially is that we recognize a unique example of a kind of pattern that we have come to associate with the concept 'tiger'. Not sure if that is an adequate answer.Janus
    Presumably the process of recognising a tiger takes place in the neural web in one's head, and recognising patterns is what neural webs do. Attaching the word "tiger" presumably involves an extra layer of that web. I understand that recognition occurs in the Medial temporal lobe while the words are found in Wernicke’s area.
  • Leontiskos
    3.7k
    I'll have to come back to this paper when I have some time. I would like to get a handle on the more formal aspects of Sider's account.Banno

    It was one of the central pieces of the OP in "Quantifier Variance, Ontological Pluralism, and Other Fun Stuff," a thread in which you posted 69 times without once referring to Sider. :meh:

    Thanks again for taking this discussion seriously and engaging with it fully.Banno

    The reason this discussion has been so wily is because the OP is insubstantial.
  • Banno
    26.1k
    a thread in which you posted 69 timesLeontiskos

    It pleases me that you have taken such a keen interest in my writing. Tell us more about me.
  • Arcane Sandwich
    2.2k
    Tell us more about me.Banno

    I'll take that bet. You believe that words are the philosopher's tools, because you believe that anything that can be used is a tool (I disagree, but that's beside the point). You believe that the craftsman must take care of his tools, hence the philosopher should take care of his words. In that sense, you have some reservations on Quine as a philosopher. You see him as a good technician or an engineer, but you don't really consider him to be a philosopher. More like a person that studies grammar.
  • Banno
    26.1k
    Lovely. But not quite right. It's rather that tools are for using than that used things are all tools. And I do Consider Quine a rather fine philosopher.
  • J
    1k
    The belief need not be identical to the statement about it.Banno

    Good, but then what is it?

    If I have a background belief that the earth goes around the sun, and you ask me at this moment whether I believe it, I'll say yes, of course. What has happened? We agree that there wasn't some statement lurking around, unstated; a belief needn't be identical with a statement about it. Nor does it seem very likely that a proposition was there, being believed, awaiting statement. I can understand why some philosophers speak of beliefs as propensities for affirming this or that: This does rather feel like what happens. But, sadly, "propensity" is no more help than "statement" or "proposition." What's a propensity when it's at home? And to make it all that much worse, I don't want to have to settle for an answer that is psychological. I don't want to be told that a "belief" involves some gathering of neurons, that it's a mental event in that sense.

    I have no solution to this, just laying out why I think the problem is so intractable.

    Let me know if I have miscomprehended SiderBanno

    With respect, I think you have. Sider is saying that all the "bleen and grue" propositions are true. The bleen people aren't claiming that their world is pellow and yurple. Everything they say checks out, just as I could say true things about "tiger & thumb" if I had a mind to. So Sider wants an additional criterion for perspicuity: not just true but also "carving reality at the joints" or, very broadly, a good fit with a reality that really is out there, in terms of metaphysical structure. It's a bold claim. He won't be satisfied with anything resembling "Well, green and blue fit better because they're more useful" or "We're the sort of creature that sees properties which have duration in time." He really wants it to be baked into the structure of the world.

    I would like to get a handle on the more formal aspects of Sider's account.Banno

    Yes, I'd like to hear from you about that, and this essay is pretty non-technical compared to most of the book, which is a deep dive into contemporary logic and meta-philosophy.

    Thanks again for taking this discussion seriously and engaging with it fully.Banno

    But of course.
  • J
    1k
    Semantic ascent . . . but here he is reversing the process.Banno

    That's a plausible reading of "retreat." You're suggesting that Quine doesn't mean "retreat" in the sense of "withdraw his philosophical forces in the face of a powerful opponent," but rather "retreat" as in "descend a level." I'll buy it.

    "Therefore, one tends to conclude that the things believed are not the sentences themselves. What, then, are they?"
    — J
    They are, speaking more roughly than one should, states of affairs or ways things are in the world.
    Banno

    That would be my answer too. It seems reasonable, doesn't it? So why does Quine then reject that way of putting it entirely? The passage I quoted, which begins "This, like various other philosophical questions, is better deflected than met head on," is the next sentence after "What, then, are they?" (yeah, sorry we can't all look at an extended segment together). He's definitely saying that he doesn't want to give the answer you and I think is reasonable.

    Maybe the clue lies in the parenthetical "like various other philosophical questions". Could he be reacting to the ontologically brusque question, What are they? We know he doesn't care to reify what doesn't need reifying, on his view, and perhaps he thinks that, once again, a philosophical question is being posed that demands a description of a metaphysical object.
  • J
    1k
    @Banno
    Just found this: Sider has the opening chapter of Writing the Book available online. It's an even better introduction to his ideas about structure than the standalone essay.
  • Banno
    26.1k
    Good, but then what is it?J

    There's a presumption that it has to be a something. After all, it has a noun; and nouns name things, so there must be a thing that "belief" names.

    What do you think of that argument? It strikes me as an error to suppose that becasue there is a name there must be a thing named.

    ...propensity...J
    I agree this doesn't help. And here Anscombe's response comes more in to play, in that beliefs are more than just inclinations. We might also include the neural net pattern recognition mentioned in my reply to , but also the state of the world in "Pat believes the tree is an oak"...
  • Leontiskos
    3.7k
    What kind of benefit do you think they would get from not impugning it?Apustimelogist

    Intelligence, for one.

    If it is just saying that there are statistical structures and regularities in reality, then fine. But why do I need to use the word "essence"? Seems to connote something more than is required so I don't need to use the word.Apustimelogist

    I agree you don't need to use the word. Essences aren't exactly about objective structure, as that's more universals, but that is the core issue this thread floats around. That is, essences are about the objective structure of species, but we are more interested in objective structure per se.

    Note the way essences entered the thread:

    Let's assume for the sake of argument an older, realist perspective. Things have essences. Our senses grasp the quiddity of things. We all, as humans, share a nature and so share certain sorts of aims, desires, powers, faculties, etc. Given this, given we are already interacting with the same things, with the same abstractions, and simply dealing with them using different stipulated signs, translation doesn't seem like that much a problem. We might even allow that our concepts (intentions) and understandings of things might vary, but they are only going to vary so much.

    The idea that "all we have to go on is behavior" seems like it could be taken as an implicit assumption of nominalism. Yet then the conclusion seems to be, in some sense, an affirmation of nominalism.
    Count Timothy von Icarus

    That's pretty mild. It's pretty close to what Sider is saying (although a bit more expansive).

    But note that Banno then immediately starts in with his polemical trolling campaign against "essences," as he is so wont to do. The confusion around the term comes from this sort of polemical and ignorant propaganda, and this thread is no exception.

    If it is just saying that there are statistical structures and regularities in reality, then fine.Apustimelogist

    Yes, and that should be commonly accepted, right? The problem is that it's not. Sider knows he is being controversial when he says that reality itself has a structure, as lots of people on this forum and elsewhere are committed to denying that idea. In fact the thread on Sider never even got off the ground due to the fact that Sider was so effectively sidelined by those who are opposed to this sort of thinking.
  • Arcane Sandwich
    2.2k
    tools are for usingBanno

    Rorty says that a screwdriver can be used for scratching your ear or something along those lines.
  • J
    1k
    There's a presumption that it has to be a something. After all, it has a noun; and nouns name things, so there must be a thing that "belief" names.Banno

    Similar to what I was suggesting might be Quine's position on "belief," above.

    What do you think of that argument? It strikes me as an error to suppose that because there is a name there must be a thing namedBanno

    This usually comes up in the context of fictions, with "thing" meaning a physical bit of reality. Thus, the name "Pegasus" doesn't name anything that actually exists in that sense, and this is important because if you're in a pinch and call for your winged horse, he's not going to come.

    Do we want to transfer this name/thing-named conception to "belief"? Are we saying that "belief" might name something that can be talked about, used in meaningful sentences, etc., but doesn't actually correspond to anything in mental reality?

    Or -- and this is the more radical construal -- would we be saying that there is absolutely nothing named by "belief"? no equivalent of "the horse that isn't physical but has some other reality"? This would make belief-talk much more incoherent.

    Thus, I'm not sure what I think of the argument that a name implies a thing named, because I don't know how deeply the denial of thingness goes, if you follow me. What's your thought?
  • Banno
    26.1k
    Well, what exactly is a concept? You won't find one by dissecting a brain. It's the way we use the associated language, the things we do in the world, and the things we think... and so on. When we talk about a "concept" we reify and individuate all these, bringing them together and treating them as if they were bits of mental furniture. We say someone has the concept "five" when they can add to five, count five, divide by five and so on. On reflection, is the concept "five" a thing?

    So is a belief a thing, or a series of interconnected activities and ways of thinking?

    And now we might be approaching something interesting on this topic. But it must be past your bed time.
  • Leontiskos
    3.7k
    We say someone has the concept "five" when they can add to five, count five, divide by five and so on.Banno

    Yes, and we say that someone has the concept of a triangle when they can draw, identify, and work with triangles. But it does not follow that the concept of a triangle is the drawing of a triangle, or that the concept of five is the counting to five. Someone who counts to five is doing something with five, and thus this cannot itself be five.

    "Triangle" is a concept which encompasses all sorts of different images, both mental and real. It is universal - it spans many particulars. To understand triangularity or have the concept of a triangle is not a particular, whether that be a particular thought, action, image, etc.
  • Arcane Sandwich
    2.2k
    "Triangle" is a concept which encompasses all sorts of different images, both mental and real. It is universal - it spans many particulars.Leontiskos

    Is there a thread on medieval universals where we can discuss this? It interests me, but I don't want to start a new thread if no one cares.
  • Leontiskos
    3.7k


    I was thinking of starting a reading group on the SEP article, but I don't currently have time to field it. Feel free to start it yourself. A lot of current discussions are swirling around this issue, and I think that SEP article is very readable and easy to understand. Granted, you wouldn't need to utilize the SEP article if you don't want to, and it wouldn't need to be a reading group. The key in my opinion would be getting folks to understand the problem that the attempted solution presupposes.
  • Arcane Sandwich
    2.2k
    I was thinking of starting a reading group on the SEP article, but I don't currently have time to field it. Feel free to start it yourself.Leontiskos

    No, it's too much responsibility right now, I've a few other Threads that I've started that need my attention, I wouldn't be able to concentrate enough for the Medieval discussion on universals. It's a subject matter that I'm genuinely interested in, but I don't want to take the lead, here.
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