The basic idea in Davidson's paper is fairly straight forward. That folk have different points of view can make sense only if there is some common framework from which we might notice the difference. But if we have such a common framework, then by that very fact, aren't we working in the same conceptual scheme? Doesn't the difference now become that of a disagreement within a conceptual scheme, and not between conceptual schemes?

And if that is the case, then any plurality of conceptual schemes reduces to at most one. — Banno

But this doesn't rule out varying conceptual schemes between say, humans and aliens. It just says that if there are such differences, we wouldn't be able to detect them. But consider this scenario, taken from the plot of the movie Arrival:

Aliens arrive and begin teach humans their language. But eventually, one woman discovers that the aliens have a completely different view of time. She realizes this because through association with them and their language, she has developed the same perspective on time they have. Yes, their language is now translatable to her, but what she's discovered is that in the past there was a conceptual rift.

I think in the same way, we could speculate that people in the past were missing some of the concepts needed to understand the world as we see it. In other words, Davidson doesn't really rule out scheme-content duality, he's just criticizing cases where people assert the existence of a rift, and immediately show that there is no rift by offering the translation. It remains possible that there could be aliens who have untranslatable languages.

Our beliefs are tested against the world, not against competing conceptual schemes. — Banno

The information @Pierre-Normand provided calls this into question. Davidson has been criticized for rejecting any rational influence of the world on our beliefs. I'll flesh that out after I've understood it better.

It appears that you manufactured the discussion in the previous post since you're addressing Tim Wood, and it doesn't look like he contributed to this thread.

What's going on?

Look up dark enlightenment. That's vice president Vance, soon to be President Vance.

Well, it's taking a lousy effort to take care of itself. Because a lot of what it has depends on that it is a Superpower. Yet many think it's just the sheer awesomeness of the US that it has this role. — ssu

It's actually not a stable situation to have only one superpower. There needs to be at least two.

The US dollar naturally would be important, but then it would be just one among many, — ssu

No, global trade needs one currency. It's the dollar now because the Chinese want it to be the dollar. When they change their minds, it will become the yuan.

Then continuing to the simple fact that other countries listen to what the US president says. — ssu

They shouldn't. Remember what happened to Syria?

I think the main reason is that nobody is telling to the Americans how their economy and thus their way of life has been depended on the country having the role it has. — ssu

The US debt will never be paid. It will disappear in the next global economic catastrophe. Everyone will start over and Americans will turn back to their own resources. As climate change sets in, the global network will weaken. War will become the norm again. I imagine the US will continue to maintain a nuclear arsenal and use it occasionally.

Nobody can tell Donald Trump what is the real price for him if the US would leave NATO. — ssu

Trump is 78. He may or may not get around to leaving NATO. Unless the Democrats come up with a superstar, the next president will be Vance, the "dark enlightenment" guy. Even if the Democrats do win an election, the cold war crew is gone. There is no reason to support Europe. The UK maybe, but not Europe.

I agree. When Americans talk about liberals or leftists, they mean people who favor solutions from the federal government and greater centralized authority. Historically, it's been American rightists who tried to protect democracy.

It explains the Trump talk of Europe "owing" to the US when the countries are spending less of defense. — ssu

I think what's finally dying out is the idea that the US is supposed to have global influence. That was cold war ideology. The new US only takes care of itself. That's been coming for a while.

Regarding Elon Musk using the government to advance his interests, that sounds bad, but that would be normal in Japan. The Japanese don't have the history of strife between government and big business. Maybe that has also needed to change in the US.

Still, change is scary.

Even if the Exodus is completely made-up biblical writers still had this idea of disloyal demographic threat in mind. — BitconnectCarlos

:up:

They were already in slavery at the time. They weren't enslaved because they were numerous, right? Cline thinks the Exodus is a memory of the Bronze Age.

Supposedly the reason Pharaoh enslaved the ancient Israelites is because they were multiplying too much and threatening the Egyptian state demographically. — BitconnectCarlos

They sold themselves into slavery because they were experiencing famine. But that's just a myth. There's no evidence that it happened.

Yea, but Nazis hated Communists, so obviously collectivism wasn't all there was to fascism. It was also about recreating some mythical lost greatness.

US freezes almost all foreign aid

The US was the world's largest humanitarian donor. No more.

Similarly, I find that more often than not a philosophical disagreement can be, if not resolved, at least better understood by assuming the problem is a terminological dispute — J

I would say look for the conflict in temperament, the hidden emotion on the scene. What's really being attacked? defended?

would say it's more a battle between authoritarianism and liberalism. In (what is suppose to be) a free society authoritarianism is the extreme. — Harry Hindu

I think the perception is that liberalism ended up screwing people over and leaving them without reliable income or healthcare. Or the perception is that liberalism opened the door to changes people didn't want, like LGBTQ.

You want real change? Stop voting for Democrats and Republicans. — Harry Hindu

I think the real political division in the West is moderates vs. extremists, with the moderates standing for old school liberalism and democracy. The extremists could be reactionary or progressive, but they have the same drive to upset the status quo.

Yep

Okay, that is one acceptable scenario. Another acceptable scenario is that Jesus never said those words when He was on the cross. So who knows!? — MoK

Some people thought he was calling for John the Baptist. Can't remember which gospel says that. One of them.

So you think that people make up the gospel of John, — MoK

Of course.

DNA tests show that British Celts had matriarchal societies prior to the Roman invasion.. Wow!

He's not smart, but he spends a lot of money on trying to show the world that he is. — Christoffer

He's pretty smart. He founded PayPal, started Tesla, acquired Twitter, and took a seat on the cabinet just by dancing around on a stage with Trump. He has a reputation for being unstoppable.

LMAO. Same shit different page. — AmadeusD

Conflict habituated

My thought is that a belief can manifest in various ways, but that in order to count as a belief, one should be able to set out what it is that is believed - some truth, and hence some proposition. So, at the risk of opening yet another can of worms, the cat cannot hold some proposition to be true, and yet believes the mouse is behind the cupboard. We can put its belief in a propositional form. — Banno

I think propositions are part of the human form of life. Language is so central to what we are that we interact with the world using a linguistic format. When we ask the world questions, we anticipate true propositions, as if the world has a narrator. That's why propositions are generally in third person.

In analyzing the way a cat interacts with the world, we translate it into human.

Trump's first presidency was nothing special, no fascism, no World War 3, no end of days, etc. and I see no reason to believe his second will be any different. — Tzeentch

Fascism isn't really about what one guy is doing. It comes from the whole political scene. It comes from a change in attitudes toward acceptance of strong-arm strategies, and of course, acceptance of dictatorship.

The only things we can't predict, yet, is how soon the civil war begins and which side will be supported by more of the professional military - in which I include police. — Vera Mont

I doubt there will be a civil war. We're too lazy for that.

Fascinating stuff. :up:

I think it would take losing a war or a deep economic collapse. Everything else is in place, ready to go.

I think he screams before he asks this in Mark. In Mark, Jesus is the most fiery, flipping money-changing tables over, calling out the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. Jesus is clearly being tortured to death in Mark, and because we understand him to have been a teacher of love, it's heartbreaking, after all these centuries, if you read it, it's hard not to feel the pain. It's saying that even if you've felt this way yourself, it's not in vain, and you shall overcome.

It's obviously in direct conflict with the gospel of John in which Jesus is calm and prescient all the time. John was written later and reflects the idea that Jesus was the Son of God. That's all Neoplatonic, Stoic stuff. The original Jesus was obviously just a prophet associated with the Essenes.

Is there any sort of noun-form, or are we saying that beliefs are simply acts of believing — J

There's a thought that your body responds to speech without any intellectual filtering, so if you're coaching someone, it's better to tell them what to do rather than what not to do. The body's only response to "no" is to stop. The body can't understand "not." The intellect has to handle the issue of being wrong or mistaken because it involves imagining something and then negating it.

So maybe there's the intellect's version of belief, which is an attitude toward a proposition, and the body's version which involves unconscious testing and responding.

So at least according to the algorithmics of machine learning, beliefs and goals aren't foundational when it comes to explaining behavior, rather they are concepts concerning model-fitting strategies for determining behavioural causes and behavioural conditioning. — sime

Maybe belief is a psychological construct. It's something unobservable, but we use it to explain and predict behavior. I think the more complex the behavior is, the more likely it is that we'll explain it in terms of belief. Simple behavior could be instinct, but something like plotting revenge needs propositions for the explanation.

I don't read frank as suggesting that mass is not real. Quite the opposite. — Banno

Yes. Mass and energy are real. They're both scientific constructs.

Mass in modern physics has multiple definitions which are conceptually distinct, but physically equivalent. Mass can be experimentally defined as a measure of the body's inertia, meaning the resistance to acceleration (change of velocity) when a net force is applied.[1] The object's mass also determines the strength of its gravitational attraction to other bodies. — Wikipedia

In physics energy is not a substance, nor is it mystical. Energy is a number. A quantity. And the quantity itself isn’t even particularly fundamental. Instead, it’s a mathematical relationship between other, more fundamental quantities. It was 17th century polymath Gottfried Leibnitz who first figured out the mathematical form of what we call kinetic energy – the energy of motion. He realized that the sum of mass times velocity squared for a system of particles bouncing around on a flat surface is always conserved, assuming no friction and perfect bounciness. Leibnitz called this early incarnation of energy vis viva – the living force. — Matt O'Dowd

Figures.

The Earth doesn't orbit around the sun, nor the sun around the earth, but both orbit around a common centre of mass, under the influence of the other bodies in the solar system; and this will be so regardless of the frame of reference chosen. — Banno

There's a kind of absolutism that belongs to a theistic outlook. It's the kind of absolutism that would have a person deny something as simple as Galilean transformation. Meh.

I understand the inscrutability of reference, and more generally the indeterminancy of translation to be more or less equivalent to contextualism as opposed to relativism, because semantic indeterminancy is a theory (for want of a better word) of meta-semantics that in effect considers the meaning of a proposition to be relative to the context of the agent who asserts the proposition, and hence the public inability to know what the speaker is referring to - as opposed to relativism that is a theory of truth that considers truth to be relative to the speaker. — sime

You're absolutely right. Quine's insight was touched on earlier, but lately the thread has centered on global skepticism.

Hold up. Let's go over it a little more slowly. We just start with the realization that when we say the earth orbits the sun, we have chosen a frame of reference. Doing so requires that we choose a point and call it stationary relative to the rest of the points in the system. Are you with me so far?

Physics, not philosophy, suggests nothing is really true? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I gave you an example of a truth that's relative to the choices we make.

It's true that the earth orbits the sun if we say the sun is stationary relative to the earth. We could instead pick the earth as the stationary point and then it wouldn't be true that the earth orbits the sun. This is not rocket science guys.

Also energy and mass are constructs. They aren't observable. The list goes on.

Do you believe it's true that the earth orbits the sun? Did you know that this "truth" is relative to choices that we little people make? If there's no one to choose a frame of reference, there is no truth of the matter. This is not philosophy. It's physics.

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:

I very much doubt you'd find any of my thoughts about this interesting, but I'll say it anyway.

When we think about a world, the whole thing is supposed to hang together spatially and temporally. A single moment in a world implies the rest of it. So we always use the same epistemological principles for pre and post human sections of a world. It's just crazy nonsense to say that there were no divisions before humans, but divisions existed afterwards.

So in order to avoid turning the topic into something only a lobotomy patient would understand, we will jettison talk of how the world was before humans. Instead, we'll talk about what we know of the world beyond our own conceptions of it. And many a great mind has decided that the answer to that is: diddly.

:up:

People say all sorts of weird things. Which philosopher thinks that affirming language games means that nothing existed before humans?