What does "not-P is true" mean according to the deflationist? — Luke

Does anyone really fear death given its inevitability and the fact sleep comes for us every night?

As social animals, if we are hardwired for anything, it is to defend against threat to our tribal identity. We are quick and reckless in our willingness to sacrifice ourselves for that.

The impact of exponential growth seemed a issue that any simpleton could understand when I was doing ecology in the 1970s. By about 2000, I had already concluded that folk weren’t going to react.

Changing the world seems easy compared with being asked to change your self - to challenge the unconscious roots of your standard issue modern world identity. — apokrisis

I'll take that to mean 'I'm playing'. I recommend buddhism. — Bartricks

Mr Bloom watched her as she limped away. Poor girl! That’s why she’s left on the shelf and the others did a sprint. Thought something was wrong by the cut of her jib. Jilted beauty. A defect is ten times worse in a woman. But makes them polite. Glad I didn’t know it when she was on show. Hot little devil all the same. I wouldn’t mind. Curiosity like a nun or a negress or a girl with glasses. That squinty one is delicate. Near her monthlies, I expect, makes them feel ticklish. I have such a bad headache today. Where did I put the letter? Yes, all right. All kinds of crazy longings. Licking pennies. Girl in Tranquilla convent that nun told me liked to smell rock oil. Virgins go mad in the end I suppose. Sister? How many women in Dublin have it today? Martha, she. Something in the air. That’s the moon. But then why don’t all women menstruate at the same time with the same moon, I mean? Depends on the time they were born I suppose. Or all start scratch then get out of step. Sometimes Molly and Milly together. Anyhow I got the best of that. Damned glad I didn’t do it in the bath this morning over her silly I will punish you letter. Made up for that tramdriver this morning. That gouger M’Coy stopping me to say nothing. And his wife engagement in the country valise, voice like a pickaxe. Thankful for small mercies. Cheap too. Yours for the asking. Because they want it themselves. Their natural craving. Shoals of them every evening poured out of offices. Reserve better. Don’t want it they throw it at you. Catch em alive, O. Pity they can’t see themselves. A dream of wellfilled hose. Where was that? Ah, yes. Mutoscope pictures in Capel street: for men only. Peeping Tom. Willy’s hat and what the girls did with it. Do they snapshot those girls or is it all a fake? Lingerie does it. Felt for the curves inside her déshabillé. Excites them also when they’re. I’m all clean come and dirty me. And they like dressing one another for the sacrifice.

Is it possible that that player Shakespeare, a ghost by absence, and in the vesture of buried Denmark, a ghost by death, speaking his own words to his own son’s name (had Hamnet Shakespeare lived he would have been prince Hamlet’s twin), is it possible, I want to know, or probable that he did not draw or foresee the logical conclusion of those premises: you are the dispossessed son: I am the murdered father: your mother is the guilty queen, Ann Shakespeare, born Hathaway?
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—The soul has been before stricken mortally, a poison poured in the porch of a sleeping ear. But those who are done to death in sleep cannot know the manner of their quell unless their Creator endow their souls with that knowledge in the life to come. The poisoning and the beast with two backs that urged it King Hamlet’s ghost could not know of were he not endowed with knowledge by his creator. That is why the speech (his lean unlovely English) is always turned elsewhere, backward. Ravisher and ravished, what he would but would not, go with him from Lucrece’s bluecircled ivory globes to Imogen’s breast, bare, with its mole cinquespotted. He goes back, weary of the creation he has piled up to hide him from himself, an old dog licking an old sore. But, because loss is his gain, he passes on towards eternity in undiminished personality, untaught by the wisdom he has written or by the laws he has revealed. His beaver is up. He is a ghost, a shadow now, the wind by Elsinore’s rocks or what you will, the sea’s voice, a voice heard only in the heart of him who is the substance of his shadow, the son consubstantial with the father.
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He Who Himself begot middler the Holy Ghost and Himself sent Himself, Agenbuyer, between Himself and others, Who, put upon by His fiends, stripped and whipped, was nailed like bat to barndoor, starved on crosstree, Who let Him bury, stood up, harrowed hell, fared into heaven and there these nineteen hundred years sitteth on the right hand of His Own Self but yet shall come in the latter day to doom the quick and dead when all the quick shall be dead already.
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—A father, Stephen said, battling against hopelessness, is a necessary evil. He wrote the play in the months that followed his father’s death. If you hold that he, a greying man with two marriageable daughters, with thirtyfive years of life, nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, with fifty of experience, is the beardless undergraduate from Wittenberg then you must hold that his seventyyear old mother is the lustful queen. No. The corpse of John Shakespeare does not walk the night. From hour to hour it rots and rots. He rests, disarmed of fatherhood, having devised that mystical estate upon his son. Boccaccio’s Calandrino was the first and last man who felt himself with child. Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten. On that mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro and microcosm, upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?
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—Man delights him not nor woman neither, Stephen said. He returns after a life of absence to that spot of earth where he was born, where he has always been, man and boy, a silent witness and there, his journey of life ended, he plants his mulberrytree in the earth. Then dies. The motion is ended. Gravediggers bury Hamlet père and Hamlet fils. A king and a prince at last in death, with incidental music. And, what though murdered and betrayed, bewept by all frail tender hearts for, Dane or Dubliner, sorrow for the dead is the only husband from whom they refuse to be divorced. If you like the epilogue look long on it: prosperous Prospero, the good man rewarded, Lizzie, grandpa’s lump of love, and nuncle Richie, the bad man taken off by poetic justice to the place where the bad niggers go. Strong curtain. He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible. Maeterlinck says: If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend. Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves. The playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light first and the sun two days later), the lord of things as they are whom the most Roman of catholics call dio boia, hangman god, is doubtless all in all in all of us, ostler and butcher, and would be bawd and cuckold too but that in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there are no more marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself.

One can believe that they approve of P? — Luke

Are you a philosopher, or are you just playing games? — Bartricks

Gerty MacDowell who was seated near her companions, lost in thought, gazing far away into the distance was, in very truth, as fair a specimen of winsome Irish girlhood as one could wish to see. She was pronounced beautiful by all who knew her though, as folks often said, she was more a Giltrap than a MacDowell. Her figure was slight and graceful, inclining even to fragility but those iron jelloids she had been taking of late had done her a world of good much better than the Widow Welch’s female pills and she was much better of those discharges she used to get and that tired feeling. The waxen pallor of her face was almost spiritual in its ivorylike purity though her rosebud mouth was a genuine Cupid’s bow, Greekly perfect. Her hands were of finely veined alabaster with tapering fingers and as white as lemonjuice and queen of ointments could make them though it was not true that she used to wear kid gloves in bed or take a milk footbath either.
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Her every effort would be to share his thoughts. Dearer than the whole world would she be to him and gild his days with happiness. There was the allimportant question and she was dying to know was he a married man or a widower who had lost his wife or some tragedy like the nobleman with the foreign name from the land of song had to have her put into a madhouse, cruel only to be kind. But even if—what then? Would it make a very great difference? From everything in the least indelicate her finebred nature instinctively recoiled. She loathed that sort of person, the fallen women off the accommodation walk beside the Dodder that went with the soldiers and coarse men with no respect for a girl’s honour, degrading the sex and being taken up to the police station. No, no: not that. They would be just good friends like a big brother and sister without all that other in spite of the conventions of Society with a big ess.
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And she saw a long Roman candle going up over the trees, up, up, and, in the tense hush, they were all breathless with excitement as it went higher and higher and she had to lean back more and more to look up after it, high, high, almost out of sight, and her face was suffused with a divine, an entrancing blush from straining back and he could see her other things too, nainsook knickers, the fabric that caresses the skin, better than those other pettiwidth, the green, four and eleven, on account of being white and she let him and she saw that he saw and then it went so high it went out of sight a moment and she was trembling in every limb from being bent so far back that he had a full view high up above her knee where no-one ever not even on the swing or wading and she wasn’t ashamed and he wasn’t either to look in that immodest way like that because he couldn’t resist the sight of the wondrous revealment half offered like those skirtdancers behaving so immodest before gentlemen looking and he kept on looking, looking. She would fain have cried to him chokingly, held out her snowy slender arms to him to come, to feel his lips laid on her white brow, the cry of a young girl’s love, a little strangled cry, wrung from her, that cry that has rung through the ages. And then a rocket sprang and bang shot blind blank and O! then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lovely, O, soft, sweet, soft! — Joys

This can be translated as: you can believe you endorse P although you endorse not-P? — Luke

I have taken you by the hand and shown you what a reason is. It is a directive. And directives have a director. And that director is Reason. And Reason is a person, because directors are persons. And now you know what Reason is. — Bartricks

This can be translated as: you endorse P although you endorse not-P? — Luke

And can't an entire tribe of us, no matter its size, be mistaken about what it thinks it has reason to do? — Bartricks

Are you saying that now that no tribe exists I no longer have any reason to do anything or believe anything? — Bartricks

How can a tribe issue a directive? Tribes are not persons. — Bartricks

Sovereignty is the power of a state to do everything necessary to govern itself, such as making, executing, and applying laws; imposing and collecting taxes; making war and peace; and forming treaties or engaging in commerce with foreign nations.

The individual states of the United States do not possess the powers of external sovereignty, such as the right to deport undesirable persons, but each does have certain attributes of internal sovereignty, such as the power to regulate the acquisition and transfer of property within its borders. The sovereignty of a state is determined with reference to the U.S. Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land.

Enlightenment is the human being’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding [= reason] without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. Sapere aude! [Dare to be wise!] Have courage to make use of your own understanding [= reason]! is thus the motto of enlightenment.

Reason must subject itself to critique in all its undertakings, and cannot restrict the freedom of critique through any prohibition without damaging itself and drawing upon itself a disadvantageous suspicion. For there is nothing so important because of its utility, nothing so holy, that it may be exempted from this searching review and inspection, which knows no respect for persons [i.e. does not recognize any person as bearing more authority than any other—GW]. On this freedom rests the very existence of reason, which has no dictatorial authority, but whose claim is never anything more than the agreement of free citizens, each of whom must be able to express his reservations, indeed even his veto, without holding back. (A738f/B766f, translation slightly modified)

It is requisite to reason’s lawgiving that it should need to presuppose only itself, because a rule is objectively and universally valid only when it holds without the contingent, subjective conditions that distinguish one rational being from another. (5:21) — Kant

To think for oneself Kant describes as the maxim of unprejudiced thought; its opposite is passivity or heteronomy in thought, leading to prejudice and superstition.[25] To think in the place of everyone else is the maxim of enlarged or broad-minded thought. And always to think in accord with oneself is the maxim of consistent thought (5:294). Although the last maxim sounds more straightforward, Kant is careful to emphasize its difficulty: it “can only be achieved through the combination of the first two and after frequent observance of them has made them automatic” (5:295). Consistency does not just involve getting rid of obvious contradictions in our explicit beliefs. It also requires consistency with regard to all the implications of our beliefs—and these are often not apparent to us. To achieve this sort of law-likeness in thought depends both on the genuine attempt to judge for oneself and the determination to expose one’s judgments to the scrutiny of others. In other words, it involves regarding oneself, first, as the genuine author of one’s judgments, and second, as accountable to others. As we might also say, it represents a determination to take responsibility for one’s judgments.

But what is a norm? Is it not a directive? — Bartricks

Common normative sentences include commands, permissions, and prohibitions; common normative abstract concepts include sincerity, justification, and honesty. A popular account of norms describes them as reasons to take action, to believe, and to feel.

What does the second instance of "true" mean in the statement above? — Luke

I can simply think that P is true (believe P) with P not actually being true. — Pie

Being rational is a about how responsive one is to the rational impressions one's faculty of reason generates in oneself. — Bartricks

I don't understand the terms being employed and those quotes make no sense to me at all. That is, I don't know what Brandom is talking about. — Bartricks

How do we know that we’re smarter than machines? Machines are texts translated into material processes. — Joshs

Right, but as above, what can we say, and how do we justify what we say, about the justifiability of claims that lie outside the logical or empirical contexts? — Janus

So, you mention self-knowledge; how do I know that I am knowing myself, that is how do I tell that the ideas I have formed about myself are justifiable? — Janus

In logical contexts what is warranted is what is valid, In empirical contexts what is most directly warranted is what is observable. — Janus

In essence, basic statements are for Popper logical constructs which embrace and include ‘observation statements’, but for methodological reasons he seeks to avoid that terminology, as it suggests that they are derived directly from, and known by, experience (2002: 12, footnote 2), which would conflate them with the “protocol” statements of logical positivism and reintroduce the empiricist idea that certain kinds of experiential reports are incorrigible.
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Popper therefore argues that there are no statements in science which cannot be interrogated: basic statements, which are used to test the universal theories of science, must themselves be inter-subjectively testable and are therefore open to the possibility of refutation. He acknowledges that this seems to present a practical difficulty, in that it appears to suggest that testability must occur ad infinitum, which he acknowledges is an operational absurdity: sooner or later all testing must come to an end. Where testing ends, he argues, is in a convention-based decision to accept a basic statement or statements; it is at that point that convention and intersubjective human agreement play an indispensable role in science:

Then there is the less determinable criteria of what makes sense in terms of our causal understandings of how things work. What would be the criteria for warrantability in metaphysics or aesthetics? — Janus

Doing the prospective work of coming up with a new revision [to a set of conceptual commitments] and doing the retrospective work of coming up with a new recollection that exhibits it as the culmination of an expressively progressive process in which what was implicit is made gradually but cumulatively more explicit are two ways of describing one task. Coming up with a "new, true, object," i.e., a candidate referent, involves exhibiting the other endorsed senses as more or less misleading or revelatory appearances of it, better of worse expressions of it. What distinguishes the various prospective alternative possible candidates revisions and repairs of the constellation of senses now revealed as anomalous is just what retrospective stories can be told about each. For it is by offering such an expressively progressive genealogy of it that one justifies the move to a revised scheme. — Brandom

If "true" means only "endorsing P", then that's all there is to the truth — Luke

how can a justified belief be false? — Luke

In what sense could we "still be wrong" about P if to say that P is "true" is merely to endorse it? — Luke

The point being we seem to have two strains of not entirely consistent progressive liberal thoughts going on here: (1) gender roles and gender expression should not be designated by biological sex, and (2) transsexuals should be able to express themselves by the gender roles traditionally assigned to them by their biological sex. — Hanover

That's not about endorsing P. That's about P being true or false regardless of our endorsement. — Luke

Yes. But how do you reconcile that with this: — Luke

That's not about endorsing P. That's about P being true or false regardless of our endorsement. — Luke

How does the deflationary theory offer a better account of truth than other theories? — Luke

Vervet monkeys have four confirmed predators: leopards, eagles, pythons, and baboons. The sighting of each predator elicits an acoustically distinct alarm call.[18] As infants, vervets learn to make the variety of calls from observation alone, without explicit tutelage.

To my way of thinking if I'm looking at plums in the icebox, I don't believe they are there, I see them there, I know they are there. — Janus

According to you, the meaning of "true" is independent of anyone's beliefs or judgments. — Luke

If this person's existence makes any of you angry, I suggest the problem is with you, not him. — Baden

He thinks that we institute norms that govern our attitudes by engaging in a special kind of process: recollection [Erinnerung]. Recollection retrospectively rationally reconstructs the prior applications of a concept, picking out an expressively progressive trajectory through them. To say that the rationally reconstructed tradition is “expressively progressive” is to say that it takes the form of the gradual emergence into explicitness of a determinate conceptual content, which provides a norm governing applications of that concept. That content is exhibited as having been all along implicit. Each application reveals some contour of the concept.

The process of recollection adopts an essentially retrospective perspective: “The owl of Minerva flies only at dusk….” It is this process that turns a mere past into a history, something with the edifying narrative structure of a tradition: a past as comprehended. It is “Reason’s march through history.” The idea of recollective rationality is one of Hegel’s Big Ideas.
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The key to understanding the way Hegel moves beyond the basic Hegelian normative statuses socially instituted by synchronic reciprocal relations of recognitive attitudes consists in appreciating the orthogonal diachronic historical dimension of recognitive processes. It is in particular the recollective phase of diachronic recognitive processes that explains the attitude-transcendence of normative statuses. That includes the special cognitive representational norms according to which representing attitudes are responsible for their correctness to standards set by what counts as represented by those representings just in virtue of exercising that distinctive kind of authority over them. Discursive norms, both practical and cognitive, are understood according to the categories of Vernunft as features of essentially social and historical recognitive processes, developing in tandem with the attitudes that articulate them. Understanding operating according to the categories of Verstand is blind to both the social and the historical dimensions of conceptual norms.
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Forgiving recollection can be understood on the model of the institutional common or case-law jurisprudential practices mentioned earlier. There, the current judge rationally reconstructs the tradition by selecting a trajectory of prior precedential decisions that are expressively progressive, in that they reveal the gradual emergence into explicitness of a norm (the content of a law) that can be seen to have implicitly governed (in the dual sense of serving as a standard and having the precedential attitudes be revealed as subjunctively sensitive to it) all the decisions (attitudes) in the reconstructed tradition. It is that norm that then justifies the current judge’s decision. The norm that is seen as emerging from the rationally reconstructed tradition of decisions sets the standard for normative assessment by future judges of the current decision, which claims to be subjunctively sensitive to that very norm. So the recollecting judge subjects herself to (acknowledges the authority of) the norm she retrospectively discerns. The more of the prior decisions the recollection rationalizes and exhibits as expressive of the norm, the better the recollective warrant that norm provides for the current decision. Whatever residue there is of decisions that cannot be fit into the retrospectively rationally reconstructed tradition as precedentially rationalizing and expressive of the norm, increases the scope for criticism of the current decision by future judges, who may or may not acknowledge it as correct and itself precedential. For the only authority the decision has derives from its responsibility to the tradition of prior decisions.

Forgiving (recollectively recognizing), on this account, is hard work. It cannot be brought off with a single, sweeping, abstractly general gesture: “I forgive you for what you did.” One could always say that, but saying it would not make it so. Besides commitment to practically affect the consequences of the doing one is forgiving, one must produce a concrete recollective reconstruction of the deed, under all of its intentional and consequential specifications. Recollection is a making—the crafting of a distinctive kind of narrative—that is successful only insofar as it ends up being recognizable as having the form of a finding. Doing that seems perverse, but it is giving contingency the normative form of necessity. Recollection is the narrative genre in which the rationalization of decisions appealing to common or case law also belongs. One must recruit and assemble the raw materials one inherits so as to exhibit a norm one can endorse oneself as always having governed the tradition to which one oneself belongs, with which one oneself identifies—a tradition that shows up as progressively revealing a governing norm, making ever more explicit what was all along implicit. The expressively progressive tradition discerned culminates (for now) in the consequential specification of the doing that is the recollection itself.
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The responsibility the individual tragic heroic agent takes on himself is accordingly spread out and shared. The doing of each (in one sense) is now in a real sense the doing of all (in another, recognitively complementary sense). For all share responsibility for and authority over each action. The distinctive role played by individual agents is not obliterated, for the responsibility and authority acknowledged by and attributed to the initiating agent is different from the reparative and recollective responsibility and authority acknowledged by those who take up the burden of forgiving the agent. Every deed now shows up both as a practical contribution to the content of all that came before it, and as acknowledging a recollective responsibility with respect to all those deeds. The temporally extended, historically structured recognitive community of those who are alike in all confessing the extent of their failure to be norm-governed, acknowledging their responsibility to forgive those failures in others, confessing the extent of their efforts at recollective and reparative forgiveness, and trusting that a way will be found to forgive their failures, is one in which each member identifies with all the others, taking co-responsibility for their practical attitudes. It is the “‘I’ that is ‘we’, the ‘we’ that is ‘I’.”

Our machines dont have to be algorithmic and mathematical. They are that way because we used to assume human cognition was that way. — Joshs

The evolution of our thinking machines doesnt simulate a past natural evolutionary process. — Joshs

Subjective is what things are 'for us' and objective is what things are 'in themselves' - with the clarifying comment that things as they are in themselves are 'the form of empirical reality'. Presumably this is the constellation of material inferences+events which plays a representational role in how we do stuff. — fdrake

Doing the prospective work of coming up with a new revision [to a set of conceptual commitments] and doing the retrospective work of coming up with a new recollection that exhibits it as the culmination of an expressively progressive process in which what was implicit is made gradually but cumulatively more explicit are two ways of describing one task. Coming up with a "new, true, object," i.e., a candidate referent, involves exhibiting the other endorsed senses as more or less misleading or revelatory appearances of it, better of worse expressions of it. What distinguishes the various prospective alternative possible candidates revisions and repairs of the constellation of senses now revealed as anomalous is just what retrospective stories can be told about each. For it is by offering such an expressively progressive genealogy of it that one justifies the move to a revised scheme.

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The disparity of the senses (appearances, phenomena, ways things are for consciousness) that is manifest prospectively in the need to revise yet again the contents-and-commitments one currently endorses, and the unity of referents (reality, noumena, ways things are in themselves) that is manifest retrospectively in their gradual emergence into explicitness as revealed by an expressive genealogy of the contents-and-commitments one currently endorses, are two sides of the same coin, each intelligible only in a context that contains the other. — Brandom

And in that regard reading those relationships of conceptual inference, whether material or nonmaterial, as psychological events will probably be a misreading. — fdrake

I imagine that relations of material inference can only be learned with reference to, or in derivation from, stuff which has been seen and done. — fdrake

Because "the Concept is Time" and "man is Time," the basis for humanity's comprehension of the historical unfolding of the empirically existing concepts, which describe the real, is to be located in our existential experience. The key to this experience is the struggle for recognition; and the key to recognition is death as the possibility of the "absolute refusal of recognition". But for Kojève, Hegel's concept of 'death' is insufficiently distinguished from natural death.

The main point of Hegel's dialectic of recognition - as opposed to Heidegger's existential analysis whereby a Being individualised by its anticipation of death is considered, by virtue of its throwness, to be 'with-others' - is that "self consciousness exists for a self-consciousness". If this is true, then as a self-interpreting, self-conscious being, Being's individuality cannot be derived from its anticipation of death independently of its relations to others. Rather, Being must first, or simultaneously, be constituted as a self-conscious being through its relation with others, in a dialectic of recognition, in order that it may become the kind of being which is capable of anticipating its death as the end towards which it is thrown, and hence of constituting itself existentially as a being-towards-death. This disrupts the whole ontological problematic of being and time, for it challenges the foundational status of Heidegger's description of Dasein - a being for whom being is 'there' in the fundamentally inquisitive form of the question of the meaning of being - revealing it as a dogmatic presupposition of Heidegger's inquiry; the result of a prior commitment to 'the question of the meaning of being' which falls outside the scope of the inquiry's own critical procedures.

On the Hegelian model, being can only be 'there' in Heidegger's sense of presenting itself as the object of inquiry for a fundamentally self-interpreting entity, if this entity has previously been constituted as an entity of this kind, through a process of mutual recognition. Furthermore, it is only through this process of mutual recognition constitutive of Dasein's consciousness of itself as a self-interpreting being that Dasein can acquire a sense of death in the first place. The point for Hegelians is not only that Being is first and foremost a being-with-others, but that its being with others is constitutive of a death which, while ultimately grounded ontologically in our inscription within cosmological time, nonetheless derives its existential reality from the form of our relationship to it. Heidegger's analysis may register that it is by the deaths of others that that 'mineness' of death is confirmed, but it provides no account of whence this thing called 'death' comes, or what its existential anticipation has to tell us, ontologically, about the character of Being as a social being. In Hegel's analysis on the other hand, the dual priority of recognition over the anticipation of death appears explicitly in the depiction of the 'struggle for recognition' in which each must risk their life in order to be recognised by the other as a self-conscious being - the process leading up to the notorious master-slave dialectic.

The master and slave are allegorical forms, typifications of power relations inherent in the structure of recognition. What they mark is, on the one hand, the necessarily social character of all self-consciousness, and, on the other hand, the contradiction between dependence and independence that self-consciousness beings must consequently experience outside of an association 'in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all'; or, as Hegel puts it, 'an absolute substance which is the unity of the different independent self-consciousness which, in their opposition, enjoy perfect freedom and independence'.

The presentation of this struggle as a trial by death is somewhat obscure. In order to know itself as a consciousness, consciousness must know itself as both subject and object of knowledge at the same time. But without another self-consciousness, this is impossible, since any relation of consciousness to itself which is modelled on its relations to objects can only oscillate between an assertion of its independence from itself as the object of knowledge, and a supersession of this independence which establishes the self-certainty of the knowing subject only at the cost of demonstrating its dependence on the negated object: therefore "self-consciousness achieves its satisfaction (the satisfaction of its desire to supersede itself as an object) only in another consciousness."

The duplication of self-consciousness, their mutual recognition, and hence their mutual dependence (replacing dependence on an object) are thus all shown to be conditions of the possibility of self-consciousness, and hence, conditions of the possibility of Dasein as a self-interpreting being for whom being is in question.

The chirps aren't about anything. They're just chirps. — Tate