. I don't think this implies that there is no fact about any distinct things existing in the world prior to the act of some language community. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't either. I don't think anyone thinks that.

The rules of chess are stipulated, not arbitrary. They did not pop out of the aether uncaused. How much fun is it going to be to play a game with totally arbitrary rules and victory conditions (or perhaps no victory conditions, you just move pieces around according to some random ruleset until you get bored or expire)?

Anyhow, chess comes after language. The question is how to make a language with nothing to refer to, not "if we start with a language already in hand can we make arbitrary stipulations?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

The idea is that we don't passively engage our world like blank slates upon which the world faithfully writes. It's more that we deal with one another in activities which feature linguistic rules we've agreed upon, much like we've agreed upon the rules of chess.

In other words, language doesn't come from isolated individuals treating the world out on the range like Teddy Roosevelt. Language arises from interaction with one another, much like a community of birds squawking at one another.

I guess my thoughts are: "if it was arbitrary, we wouldn't be able to agree." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Chess

fremen

:up:

But is it metaphysically possible for him to have been born of different parents? I don't think Kripke would agree (not that he's the boss). — J

I think Kripke's concern would be about someone asking about an alternative Socrates who had different parents. To my mind, whether that question would make any sense depends on the context. Since it is metaphysically possible for Socrates to have had different parents, I would say there are contexts where it would make sense. And of course others where it wouldn't.

@Banno do you disagree with that?

. I'll go with naturalism, like Quine. — Banno

Me too, but with a big dose of skepticism about metaphysics. That bias thing again. :grin:

The first two refutations are empirical, and defeasible. The third, of course, is not, should it be true. So, is that what Count T is saying, when he says that Socrates is a man, not a chimpanzee? The question you asked about essential properties vs. necessary properties is the same question, perhaps. — J

I can't really speak for Count. I don't quite understand what he means.

It's metaphysically possible for Socrates to have been a chimp. Where I think confusion might be arising is if we're limiting possibility to that possible world we call the actual world. This would be a type of actualism. If we embrace that, then Socrates would necessarily be a human. This view is also hard determinism.

Is believing in essences from Plato? Is that how we're supposed to be sorting out reference? We're contacting the ideal?
— frank
I don't see how that could be made to work. it would be up to others to present such an argument. — Banno

I was wrong about that. We all lean toward materialism, so I don't know what's meant by "essence.".

You and Count are both materialists.

Cheers! :nerd:

Ok. But how does this help you fix a reference? Or is this completely divorced from the OP?

Is it whether Socrates is necessarily a man, or whether, in referring to him, we are adopting a Kripkean understanding of proper names? — J

We hadn't brought up Kripke. It works like this:
I could make it clear that the Socrates I'm talking about is the human one. I'm only looking at possible worlds in which he is, so we have a necessary property known a posteriori. It's a case of this Socrates. This particular one.

That kind of essential property doesn't travel outside discussions where that Socrates was identified, though. Everywhere else, Socrates could be anything. He could have been a talking fish because there's a possible world where he was.

So you aren't saying essential properties are necessary properties. I don't know what you mean then.

Yes, but Kripke's essential properties are stipulated. Do you think that's what Count means?

No, this is profoundly misunderstanding what an essence is supposed to be, even vis-a-vis contemporary analytic essential properties. It's on a level with claiming that Quine is talking about how we can say "triangle" and "three-sided 2D shape." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Are you saying that it's necessarily true that Socrates is human?

He considered himself to have dispatched any notion of essence, still a quite active topic in contemporary philosophy, in a few sentences where he claimed he could imagine that Socrates was an alien. — Count Timothy von Icarus

@Banno is correct about that. Being human isn't essential to Socrates because he could have been an alien. He could have been an android who time travelled to ancient Athens.

If Quine is right, many others are wrong. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Who are you thinking of?

It's not very deep philosophically. :sad:

Is believing in essences from Plato? Is that how we're supposed to be sorting out reference? We're contacting the ideal?

It's interesting to think of op-amps as a perfect symbol of reductionist thinking; powerful, useful, but ultimately simplified models of broader, relational systems. — Mapping the Medium

Electro-philosophy. :grin:

the ADC breaks the analog continuum into discrete, digital data points. — Mapping the Medium

Doesn't the central nervous system also deal with converted information?

My work requires that I research the history of information technology. — Mapping the Medium

Cool. Do you know the story of the invention of the step-by-step switch? And do you know whether that was the kind of switch Turing used in his Enigma decoder?

It is my understanding that analog chips are only added to increase efficiency of digital processing, but the foundation remains nominalistically digital. With the addition of analog, it speeds up the original method and is intended to require less energy. — Mapping the Medium

I was just talking about AD converters that are used for interfacing with the world. Did you know one of the first ideas for a computer was analog? That's what the op-amp originally was.

Interesting post. Quine's insight only eliminates agreement among us if recognition of another's reference is entirely empirical. My interest in the topic isn't so much in defending or killing it. It's more like part of a flow diagram. If you don't allow any innate language capability, you need to jettison folk ideas about communication. Take your pick.

Unlike the other animals, human thinking is an artificial intelligence. — ENOAH

That's a fascinating thought. Sentience isn't equivalent to human intelligence. It's something other than that. I think human thought is driven by emotion, which as you say is tied up in interaction with other people primarily, but emotion is part of interacting with the world, and much of that is biological at its base.

But computers have analog to digital converters to "sense" the world. Is this a kind of feeling? I mean, we could engineer something like a sympathetic nervous response for an AI. Would it be sentient then? I think I might be on the verge of asking a question that can't be answered.

So presumably if Alex had possessed more empathy he would have understood what "gavagai" meant? — Leontiskos

Yes. He'd need to live with the natives for a while to build empathy.

Then you either failed to read or understand the post. Why don't you explain how empathy solves the problem of reference? — Leontiskos

Suppose that understanding you requires that I put myself in your shoes. I must look at the world through your eyes. When I do that, the million things your speech could mean narrows down. Now I can test the waters to narrow it down even further. This would mean I understand you to the extent that our experiences are similar.

What we let go of in this scenario is that notion that words and sentences are little trollies carrying meaning as a payload. We're saying communication works because we're siblings with the same cultural birthright.

..

So there is no "fact of the matter"* about reference, but we can still know reference through empathy? I'm not sure how that would work, despite the newfound powers that empathy is continually granted in our day and age. — Leontiskos

It sounds like you're saying I'm wrong because the world is going to hell. :razz:

Was he right? — Arcane Sandwich

It's food for thought. :cool:

If Quine is right, then how could we be confident? If we can be confident, then how could Quine be right? — Leontiskos

Quine didn't say we aren't confident about agreement. He said there is no fact of the matter regarding a speaker's reference.

Affirming confidence requires attacking Quine's argument, — Leontiskos

No, it doesn't. You could say we understand one another through empathy, for instance.

We've been over that a bit. Quine's starting premises are dubious, and in particular there have been a great many challenges to his holism, although the particular sort of "view from nowhere" behaviorism assumed strikes me as more obviously objectionable. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't see how his holism is a premise for inscrutability of reference. Could you flesh that out? And I don't know what you mean by "view from nowhere" behaviorism. What work is that from?

However, even in the argument itself there are questionable leaps. The second linguist thinks to himself: "ah, what if this culture only recognizes clouds of particulars and no wholes, maybe they only ever refer to parts of things like feet."

But a foot or ear does constitute a sort of whole. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The point was that nothing settles the issue of whether the speaker was referring to a whole, or referring to a part. Do you disagree with that? If so, what would tell the linguist what the speaker was referring to? What state of the world? What fact?

Here is the thing: if an implicit premise is that there are no things to refer to, only arbitrary coorelations of sense data/observations and stipulated sounds, then it seems Quine has simply begged the question. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I kind of wanted you to stop guessing at what Quine's views are and zero in on what he actually thought.

You think they are just disagreeing over whether an arbitrary set of letters should be correlated to a concept? And that that is what Quine was worried about? — Count Timothy von Icarus

No. He was saying there is no fact of the matter regarding a speaker's reference. If you're interested in what I'm saying right now, you won't find anything in the world, any state of things, that tells you it must be this. He gives examples of why that is.

You can work to show why his argument is wrong. For instance, if it has logical problems, pick those out. If some fact clearly contradicts his conclusion, show that.

What are you talking about? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Quine's inscrutability of reference. It's that there's no fact of the matter regarding a speaker's reference.

It nearly did. I'm talking more about the Romans though. The destruction of the temple and the defeat in two major rebellions caused Jews to radically rethink and moderate their theology. — BitconnectCarlos

Other than giving up animal sacrifice, what changes did they make?

Defeat discredits and moderates. — BitconnectCarlos

If that was true, Judaism would have died when the Assyrians invaded.

:up:

Do you disagree?

It's just that there's no fact of the matter regarding a speaker's reference.

@Harry Hindu

With an intelligent agent, the goal is fixed and the path can be modified indefinitely. That’s my favorite characterization of intelligence. — Steven Pinker

I really like that. In the article the guy says, with regard to a goal, intelligence is "what you do when you don't know what to do."

I think we would agree that when natural selection solves a problem, it's merely following the path of least resistance. The question is: is human intelligence any different from that? If so, how? Is there something supernatural lurking in our conceptions of intelligence?