I don't think you have to talk about propositions. It's not a bad idea to know what it is, though. — frank

I agree with that. It's part of the jargon, so you will miss out if you have no idea what it's all about.

A proposition is along the lines of content. — frank

Yes. I know roughly what you mean. But making it clear is another question, and not an easy one.

A philosopher of art whom I respect, Susanne Langer, has pointed out that we can often learn more about an art by noticing what it does not have in common with other arts, rather than trying to find similarities and possible shared properties. — J

That's good advice. I find it particularly important when I'm confronted with sweeping statements beginning "Art is...." (or whatever).

So with philosophy, perhaps. We can discover many commonalities between phil and literature, phil and science, phil and logic, phil and rhetoric, ad infinitum. But what we should be noticing is what makes philosophy different, unique. — J

I don't disagree. But I do find that most philosophers are very much inclined to focus on what makes philosophy unique anyway. It's a balance - mapping similarities and differences (in an informal and pragmatic way).

And what is that? The candidate answer I like best is that philosophy inevitably questions itself, without leaving the frame of its own discipline. — J

Yes. It may be unique in not leaving the frame of its own discipline. Psychology, perhaps is also self-reflexive, in a way.

Yes, this is the type of "understanding" we want to highlight, over against knowledge. And to me, it's a feature, not a bug, that "perspicuous representation" requires some sort of consensus. When we discover that Phil X finds something brilliantly illuminating, while Phil Y finds it clear as mud, we are being invited into a critical moment in philosophical dialectic. What separates them? What discussion is needed to bring them together? Is it a framing problem? Just a misunderstanding? A confusion about evidence? A logical flaw? etc. etc. — J

Whether the two senses are a problem or not depends on the context. If you are talking to an individual, you will probably want to focus on what helps that individual. There are times when that runs out. One of my favourite articles is C.L. Dodgson's Dialogue between Achilles and the Tortoise after their race. Achilles claims the victory on the grounds that he crossed the line first. The tortoise refuses to concede. I won't spoil the story which shows Achilles trying to get to the end of another infinite regress. The moral is that if Achilles crossed the line first, he won the race. There's nothing subjective about it. Consensus? It matters. But I'm not sure how much. I notice that one can contradict it, if one has a very clear argument. If there was a consensus against Achilles, then the question will be who misunderstood the rules - Achilles or the rest of us.

However, the SEP article seems to want to say that a proposition is what is in common between a number of sentences or statements. That's what I don't get. — Ludwig V

That's exactly the standard analysis. The bolded part that follows the word, "that" is a proposition. — frank

You're offering an ostensive definition, and your problem is that when you point to a proposition "the bolded part", I see a sentence. If you think about it, it isn't possible to "bold" a proposition - it's like trying to italicize an apple. Wrong category.
Not sure whether mine is the standard analysis, but it may be. It's a work in progress, anyway.

We're expressing the same proposition by way of two utterances and two sentences. If you look back at your own analysis: "How about "collection of sentences that enable us to say that the cat is on the mat in different ways" — frank

Yes, but to the extent that the two sentences are different, you give me grounds for wondering whether it is the same proposition. I would prefer to stop talking about propositions, but it's too well embedded in philosophical discourse for that to be realistic - it's tilting at windmills. The formula I've offered does avoid some of the worst problems.

Tricky stuff. .....But in the end I cannot agree with the suggestion that our study is will be like the art students, primarily about a doing and producing. I do think there is a real and meaningful distinction between the productive arts (including the "fine arts') and science and wisdom, and philosophy is heavier on the other side of this division. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Very tricky. I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "productive arts", but I didn't mean to suggest that philosophy should be counted alongside painting and music and literature. I would say that philosophy is centrally interested in truth, but, arguably, in some ways, so is painting and literature. Many people want to classify it with science, but that misrepresents it, IMO. I was just suggesting that something that works well in painting and music and literature, also works well in philosophy.
In science, do students learn a definition of a theory or an experiment and apply that, or do they learn to do science by getting into the lab and reading up on various theories?
Most disciplines are practices and, as a result have things in common, and, at the same time, each discipline is a distinctive collection of sub-practices or "games".

This works for me. The reason for reading the cannon is to improve on it. But in order to "improve" on it, one does not need already to have an idea of the perfect or ultimate item. — Banno

That's one reason. But the concept of progress in the arts is very tricky, particularly because, for me at least, the idea of the perfect novel or picture or song is meaningless. Perfection does have some application in the arts, but only in a way that does not imply finality. However, I don't see finality (whether perfection or truth) in philosophy or, indeed, in science.

“Understanding” in this context often refers to a kind of clarity—seeing how language functions, how confusion arises, and how philosophical problems dissolve when we attend closely to our forms of life and linguistic practices. It’s not about accumulating true propositions (knowledge in the epistemological sense), but about achieving perspicuous representation. — Banno

That's definitely my page. I do worry, though, about the unselfconscious use of "clarity" to identify some sort of objective property (as in "perspicuous representation") and a psychological state. What is clear to one person is not necessarily clear to another. Sometimes it is just a question of learning how to interpret, but not, I think, always.

The debate, as can be seen in the many threads on the topic in these fora, gets nowhere, does not progress. — Banno

Light bulb! That's how progress in philosophy happens. The debate makes no progress, gets boring, so people move on. Group dynamics, I suppose.

The phrase "If meaning is use, then use must have an end" equivocates on “end.” It reads “end” as telos—as if every use must aim at a final goal or fixed purpose. — Banno

It seems that one cannot point out too often that Aristotle distinguishes between actions that have a purpose external to themselves and others are done for "their own sake". This is logically necessary to avoid an infinite hierarchy of purposes. So one needs, hastily, to go on and say that this does not necessitate one supreme good at which everything aims.

:up: If you note the part I bolded, that's what we call a proposition — frank

Um - forgive me. But that's what I call a sentence; I would say that when it is used - to tell someone where the cat is, for example, - it becomes a statement in that context. However, I've learnt the philosophical dialect and so I know what you mean, in one sense. However, the SEP article seems to want to say that a proposition is what is in common between a number of sentences or statements. That's what I don't get.

Quite right.

How about "collection of sentences that enable us to say that the cat is on the mat in different ways"
or "collection of ways to say that the cat is on the mat".
Suggestions welcome.

Right, that was more or less my point. It's not a logical entailment or something that's true by definition. We have to agree on it. — J

Yes. There are two points that one can make to articulate the difference. The first is that the relationship is what is called "defeasible". That means that sometimes, in particular cases, there is that evidence that the speaker is lying, or joking, or intends the statement ironically or sarcastically. In those cases, the link is broken. The second is that it helps to think of an assertion as what is called a speech act, and the link with "X judged that..." or "X believes that..." is part of what is done when one asserts - one gives the audience a basis for recognizing that I have judged, or that I believe. That would be, I believe, an example of illocutionary force.

Defeasibility, speech acts and illocutionary force are ideas that are quite well established in philosophy. But you may not. So if you have come across them, please forgive me if I seem to be teaching my grandmother to suck eggs.

So the moral of the story is: don't ask questions you don't already know how to answer, or don't just already have the answer to. — Srap Tasmaner

More like: Look for questions that look answerable, or at least for which you have some way of recognising the answer. — Banno

Well, there is the possibility of working out how to answer a question, if you don't know. But it will help to answer the questions you do know how to answer, and approach the big question through them.
But it's also worth setting aside the possibility that the big question will ever have a final answer. There's a sense in which the big question here - What is everything made of? - has still not been answered. It would seem that each version of the answer generates a new version of the old question.
This is a bit vague, but I take it that it is obvious that I'm writing in the context of the question that Williamson describes as "one of the best questions ever asked".
BTW, Williamson doesn't mention the fact that an atomic theory was developed in the 5th century BCE, and there are, apparently, even earlier precursors. The modern theory is, of course, a very different thing, but these earlier theories could count as precursors. He paints a picture which is not exactly wrong, but which suits his purpose. But then, it's only an introduction.

"Professor Banno, can you please explain what makes some conceptualizations and systemizations of our language better than others?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

It may help here to steal an idea from the study of the arts. There, you don't get an answer to the question what makes some novels or pictures, etc. better than others. What you do get is a collection of examples which have been widely accepted as good examples. The expectation is that you will not be limited to imitating them (although that might be a useful exercise). The expectation is that students will be enabled to create new work by developing a critical judgement from those examples. The examples are collectively known as the canon.
True, there are various theories about what makes one work better than another, and students are taught these, or some of them. But they are taught as theories, subject to criticism. Again, the expectation is not that those theories will dictate what students will do. It is that those theories will be the basis of developing new ones.

They're not. The point is that the scope of the "⊢" takes in all the propositions, so as to maintain extensionality - and this is so whether we understand "⊢" as "It is true..." or as "I judge..." or as "perhaps..." or even "quite likely...". — Banno

I'm inclined to think that some concept rather like that of the proposition, as usually understood in philosophy, may be useful or even necessary. But I'm also inclinded to think that a definition along the lines of "a proposition is a sentence with its use" has potential. So maybe it will help if I try to disentangle what I think it wrong with the usual understanding.

Two quotations from Stanford EP - Structured propositions:-

Proponents of propositions hold that, speaking strictly, when speakers say the same thing by means of different declarative sentences, there is some (non-linguistic) thing, a proposition, that each has said.

The grammar here slips. One can't say a non-linguistic thing. It is true that there is a collection of sentences that say that the cat is on the mat in diffferent ways. I deliberately do not say the same thing, because actual synonymy is very rare in natural languages, so "the same thing" is not appropriate. Compare the argument that because there are many shades of red, there must be something in common - the universal. But the universal is a metaphysical object and so nominalism is born. I repeat - all we need is a collection of sentences that say that the cat is on the mat in different ways.

A declarative sentence is true or false derivatively, in virtue of expressing (in the context in which it is uttered....) a true or false proposition.

I really don't see why one should not say that a declarative sentence is true or false. Natural language has a commonplace variation of this - "It is true that the cat whose name is Jack is on the mat". I think we can manage with that and the variant of nominalism I outlined above.

So today, to speak of ends in the Aristotelian sense is to reinvigorate a discredited metaphysical picture. Best left alone, unless one explicitly defends that framework. As, indeed, some do. — Banno

I'm afraid I think there is a lot to be said for Aristotle's hierarchy of purposes and actions done for their own sake. But not for his idea that there is only one such hierarchy, topped off by The Good. Ryle makes use of the former idea quite unself-consciously. Peters famously builds the latter idea into his philosophy of education.

The substitution between seperate judgements is not countenanced. — Banno

I've heard of the judgement stroke, but no-one has ever explained to me what it does before. Thank you for that.
I can see that this allows one to express what happens when we form a number of sentences into a valid argument. It gets round the uncertainty about whether P and Q are two propositions or one when there is a logical implication between them. Is that the point of the notation?

All this talk of assertions is making me think about speech acts. There are two ways of referring to the cat. What rules or habits might there be in choosing to say "Jack is on the mat" or "The cat is on the mat"? It's not a question of logic, really, but of pragmatics or perhaps semantics.
It seems reasonable to suppose that one consideration is which way of referring to this animal the person I am talking to will understand best. One might also suppose that referring to Jack or the car expresses something about the relationship I have with the animal.

I think I could assert a sentence without also judging it to be true. — J

I don't see any problem about that. We have some words for that. "Suppose that...", "Imagine that...", "Consider whether..." and possible "entertain the idea that..." - and so forth. Given that, I think that in natural language "assert" is normally taken to imply "assert to be true". Asserting to be false is usually called denying.

Seems Moliere agrees, but perhaps you do not. That's fine. Perhaps at the least we might agree that some folk value clarity, and not just as a means to an end. Then we might wonder if Williamson is one of them. — Banno

Could we not say that clarity has more than one value? It seems to me that clarity has moral value because there is a duty to tell the truth without obfuscation or evasion. It is also has pragmatic value, because clear communicaton is more likely to succeed. And, yes, there is an aesthetic dimension as well.

So we have
The cat is on the mat
The speaker believes that the cat is on the mat
The cat=jack
And by substitution,
the speaker believes that Jack is on the mat
Which is not the case. I'm just pointing to the opacity of propositional attitudes. — Banno

Yes. None of that is in question. Though you are assuming/presupposing that the speaker does not know that the cat = jack.
Question - suppose that the speaker does know that the cat=jack. Then, by substitution, the speaker believes that Jack is on the mat. Is that not the case?

Well, there's the issues of substitution. If the cat's name is "Jack", does the speaker also believe that Jack is on the mat? It seems not. And yet Jack = the cat. — Banno

Well, I do see this as a puzzle. I'm inclined to say that if the speaker knows that the cat's name is Jack, then they do also believe that Jack is on the mat; if they do not know, they do not also believe that Jack is on the mat. Implicit in this is the question of the identity of individual propositions. Are "the cat is on the mat" and "Jack is on the mat" two propositions or one? If the former, they do also believe .... However, if the latter, they do not also believe.

The classical definition of intentionality, in my view, is not incorrect, but could, and should go further. If we consider the speech-situation, we find that these contexts are not rigidly separate, but are often mixed. Suppose I'm telling a story about my cat. Yesterday, I was with a group of people who do not know that my cat is called Jack. Last week, Jack, who is fond of chasing his tail, accidentally caught it, and bit it. You should have seen his reaction; he was furious with the tail, but couldn't work out what to do about it. Obviously, I will tell the story, not about "Jack", but about "my cat". This morning, I was with a group of people who know my cat's name. I told the same story, but not about "my cat", but about "Jack". Choosing the appropriate one of inter-substitutable references depends on one's audience. This works for "believes" and a number of other concepts classified as intentional.

Davidson was not able to give up the search.
— Ludwig V
I missed something. — Banno

You didn't miss anything. The problem is that I failed to delete that sentence from a draft.

Pholsophers got board with the lack of progress and moved on. — Banno

Quite likely. It's quite a common phenomenon - and not irrational. Perhaps people concerned with lack of progress should take not.

But does this get us to "I judge that the cat is on the mat" or "I judge that it is true that the cat is on the mat"? Are these formulations also meant to say the same thing? How? — J

Those two statements do not assert the same thing, in my book. The link between them only holds in a very special situation.

Do you think that "learning" in philosophy amounts to becoming clear about what you already know? Or can philosophy provide us with knowledge we did not have before? — Srap Tasmaner

I think Wittgenstein, for one, would say that philosophy amounts to becoming clear about what you already know, or perhaps learning to find one's way about in circumstances that are confusing. But perhaps becoming clear about what you already know (or don't know) is, in a sense, acquiring new knowledge.

Yes. My question is whether "I judge that sentence to be true" ever follows from "That sentence is true"? If I assert the latter, have I also committed myself to asserting the former?
I say not. However, one could say that when I assert that the cat is on the mat, I'm expressing my belief or judgement that the cat is on the mat. — J

no astronomer (or even social psychologist) has ever said, "Whoa, have you seen the new data? We're gonna need a philosopher. — Srap Tasmaner

To be fair, I don't think that scientists ever say "hold on, this is a philosophical issue. We need to call an expert."

I really don't. That's right in SEP's wheelhouse though. I think of it primarily as a "recent literature review" for grad students. — Srap Tasmaner

As someone who was away from philosophy for fifteen years or so before I joined TPF, it is also very handy for me.
I'm going to have to work out how to present my case here. This stuff is an excellent starting-point. There's another article devoted to the thesis that propositions are structured objects. Another complicated confusion.

Yeah that's fair. My memory of the paper is probably colored a bit by knowing which side Williamson is on. — Srap Tasmaner

I wouldn't say that. I reckon that Williamson makes it pretty clear which side he's on right through th meat of the article (say pp. 4 - 9). It's a bit of a giveaway that he presents developments in logic which seem to him to give a lot of support (though empirical linguistics may be a bit of a stretch for philosophy) to one side and goes into great detail about the weakness of assertibility-conditions in relation to sentences not known to be true and not known to be false.
What I can't discern is whether he thinks his audience is open to conversion - in which case, I would have expected much more detailed argument - or he is frustrated no-one is paying him enough attention and he's declaring a plague on both houses, without expecting much change. Do you have any impression what's happened since 2004?

Or, more interestingly, our entire understanding of what a proposition is supposed to be -- as Ludwig V suggests above -- is in need of revisiting. — J

If you want an overview, try Propositions - Stanford E. P.

No, we're actually in agreement here. The difficulty with posting is that it's hard to convey the tone of voice, or the fact that something is being proposed for consideration rather than asserted as true! I also think the Fregean conception is, if not a mess, at least deserving of hard questioning. The "contextless sense" of assertion has been critiqued, fairly recently, by both Kimhi and Rodl. — J

I'm sorry if I over-reacted. I'm a bit obsessed about the need to kill the idea of a meaning-object. It's called a proposition in standard philosophese, but the name doesn't matter. It's the role that's the problem.

That said, I do think the "utterance/assertion" distinction is useful, as a place to start talking. After all, we need some way to acknowledge that something said by me at time T1, and something said by you at time T2, can assert the same thing, on one reasonable understanding of "assertion." As long as it's 3rd personal. — J

The vocabulary around this is incredibly rich and therefore compicated and difficult to organize. I don't think that there are answers waiting in natural language - anything we do would be a specialized use of the terms. Utterance/assertion for the distinction you have in mind might well work; the same is true of sentence/statement or a version of the type/token distinction. There was an idea around at one time that a proposition should be defined as a sentence with its use, which would be better. I don't have any answers. We could try to agree a list of issues, like this one and then try working down it. Perhaps others might join in.

This has a lot of consequences when scientists tend to be publishing many of the more philosophical best sellers. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Oh, yes, indeed. It can be very frustrating. But scientists have established first claim on knowledge and, for some reason, on wisdom as well. I have the impression that philosophers, since around the sixties, are confined to niche labelled "oddball". When I had a job in philosophy, from time to time people would ask me what I did. "Philosophy" was a real conversation-stopper.

Economics is a fine example, the texts I've taught are filled with properly philosophical presuppositions about politics and philosophical anthropology. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Economics has managed to establish itself as the most like "proper" science of the social sciences. It's all illusion. Fortunately, there are some cracks where economics is recognized as the result of human behaviour.

Since they refuse to get in the game, as he sees it, they have discredited not their ideas but themselves. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, but how do they see it? You can't have an argument or negotiation, decide on a winner or anything else unless the other side is in the game. If they won't play your game, you can just play by yourself or go and get involved in the other guy's game.
But in fairness to him, his actual complaint is that neither side takes seriously what he takes seriously - or is the following quotation not clear?

Surprisingly, however, most participants in the Dummett-inspired debates between realism and anti-realism have shown little interest in the success of truth-conditional semantics, judged as a branch of empirical linguistics. Instead, they have tended to concentrate on Dummett’s demand for ‘non-circular’ explanations of what understanding a sentence with a given truth-condition ‘consists in’, when the speaker cannot verify or falsify that condition. — Must Do Better p.3

I read this as saying that Williamson's problem is that most participants on both sides are ignoring what he thinks is important. It needs an argument to show how and why it is important, which is missing here. The other half of the problem is that most participants are concentrating on Dummett's demand. On the face of it, and without an argument, that does seem reasonable. The beef here is in the arguments, which Williamson does not discuss.
I am not particularly hostile to what Williamson wants to do and I'm not sufficiently well read to comment on it. But I don't think this is likely to resonate with anyone who does not already share his presuppositions.

Yes. I was using "we want to imagine" with a skeptical accent. Can we really imagine it? How much of formal logical structure depends on this imagining? — J

Well, Frege built his logic around the concept of a proposition, and I believe that Russell &co followed him. If that concept is a mess, answering your question is going to be difficult. I think it is a mess.

This is another way of showing the issue. In one sense of "assertion" -- the "contextless" one -- any statement asserted as true would carry with it all the logical consequences. But if "assertion" is understood as a perspectival, 1st-person activity, then no, just as you say. — J

Ah, but I don't think that the contextless sense makes any sense. An assertion is an action, an event, and requires an agent.

And perhaps a good way to talk about that is to distinguish between assertion and utterance. You and I have made two utterances of a single assertion, not two assertions. More in line with Fregean "thoughts". — J

Your difficulty is that the more you align with Frege, the closer you will get to propositions, and the less you will do anything to remedy the mess. (I'm a bit heterodox here. Frege deserves great reverence for his achievements, but in the end, he is just another philosopher.)

Williamson is advocating explicit and clear lines of reasoning. He's doing this in order to move past the discussion being a mere quarrel. — Banno

He is recommending that and also more than that.

But when philosophy is not disciplined by semantics, it must be disciplined by something else: syntax, logic, common sense, imaginary examples, the findings of other disciplines (mathematics, physics, biology, psychology, history, …) or the aesthetic evaluation of theories (elegance, simplicity, …).

This is a remarkably heterogeneous list. He discusses two cases. "technical work by philosophical and mathematical logicians ..... on how close a predicate in a language can come to satisfying a full disquotational schema for that very language without incurring semantic paradoxes" (p. 4). and "the success of truth-conditional semantics, judged as a branch of empirical linguistics" (p.6). in the context of Dummett's programme for realism vs anti-realism. He bemoans the lack of interest in these developments without telling us exactly why we ought to find them of interest. I found that disappointing. Perhaps I'm missing something.

The vision of philosophy being supported by other disciplines is certainly very interesting and makes an excellent change from the more traditional (and markedly unpopular outside philosophy) view that the role of philosophy is to police the other disciplines. Inter-disciplinary work has developed well in recent decades, but is difficult and complicated. An approach that suggest that one academic department should discipline another is unlikely to go down well. I suspect that a lead department calling for help as required from other departments as required is much more common. In the end, each department needs to discipline itself.

And he claims that there was no resolution, or even much progress, because the anti-realist side, in particular, did not develop their theories to a sufficient extent. That is, they were never clear enough for specific arguments to take hold and produce even local, partial answers. — Srap Tasmaner

That's how I read him at first. But

Surprisingly, however, most participants in the Dummett-inspired debates between realism and anti-realism have shown little interest in the success of truth-conditional semantics, judged as a branch of empirical linguistics. Instead, they have tended to concentrate on Dummett’s demand for ‘non-circular’ explanations of what understanding a sentence with a given truth-condition ‘consists in’, when the speaker cannot verify or falsify that condition. — Must Do Better p. 6

It seems that the problem is that most participants decided to concentrate on Dummett's demand.

Williamson's paper argues that if we don't do better (which would include your "clarity") we'll never learn anything. — Srap Tasmaner

It's not as bad as that.

We should not be too pessimistic about the answer, at least concerning the broad, heterogeneous intellectual tradition that we conveniently label ‘analytic philosophy’. — Must Do Better p.3

That fits with the title of the paper, though it doesn't explain the force of the "must".

He might write ""The speaker holds true the sentence 'The cat is on the mat.'" This makes clear that the speaker is doing something with a sentence. — Banno

I sympathize with Davidson's project. But I can't see that "The speaker holds true..." is at all helpful. What's unclear about "X believes that the cat is on the mat"?
There was a time, long ago, when a proposition was defined as the meaning of a sentence. That was at least based on an actual practice. (You say "the cat is on the mat" and I can ask what you mean and you can explain,) But once we have lost interest in meaning-objects, thanks to Wittgenstein, we feel the need to give that definition up. Some people proposed to define a proposition as a sentence with its use. But that seems more like a definition of statements, which didn't provide the expected unity. It seems, Davidson was not able to give up the search. I think you put me on to his article "On saying that", in which he argues that "that the cat is on the mat" (a noun-phrase) is what I assert. Perfectly straightforward. I though it was a helpful analysis and did something to escape from the prison of the standard usage.

We want to imagine a proposition as independent of a context of assertion. — J

But the meaning of an assertion is often, if not always, determined to a greater or lesser extent by the context. For example, whether "the cat" refers to Felix or Tiger or... is determined by the context. So is the reference of "the mat". Then what does the unity independent of the context of assertion amount to?

Rather, the issue is that if I assert "You are cold," I must also be asserting, "I judge that you are cold." — J

The implication is that every time I assert P, I am also asserting every logical consequence of P. I don't think that works at all. When I assert that the cat is black, do I also assert that the cat is not white, not red, not blue, etc? No, they are different assertions, linked by a logical relationship.

I was wondering how two individuals might separately use an assertion about the cat -- or the blanket. — J

There's no straight answer. If we both assert that the cat is on the mat (in the same context), we are both making the same assertion - . At the same time, because you asserted it and I asserted it, there are clearly two assertions. It just depends on what criteria of identity you choose to apply.

I get that. Science is not the primordial understanding of anything. The primordial understanding must be the understanding I have when I start the science. That's why I thought the present-at-hand was the primordial understanding. — Ludwig V

Sometimes my typing is an embarrassment. I should have said "That's why I thought the ready-to-hand was the primordial understanding." So Descartes' methodical doubt could not be the foundation of our knowledge and understanding of the world.

We must take care not to equate sentences with beliefs without anchoring them in a speaker's use. — Banno

Quite so. Statements, not propositions.

Thanks very much for that. I think I can follow most of it.

We can think of a metaphysics as a totality of relevance which is mistakenly reifed. — Joshs

OK. Mischievous questions. Does the totality of relevance include what Derrida calls bricolage (which I understand to mean, roughly, non-standard uses. Using a screwdriver to fish out a small object that has got into a space I cannot get my hand into. Does it include accidents, as when I trip over a screwdriver or drop one on the cat?

He is critiquing our thinking of it in reifying terms. — Joshs

I don't quite see what it is that is being reified. In fact, if it is a mistake to reify it, there is nothing to reify and "it" has no place in that sentence. I can't even ask my question. Do you mean thinking of the screwdriver as an object?

But the ready to hand doesn’t constitute the most primordial understanding of Being. — Joshs

I get that. Science is not the primordial understanding of anything. The primordial understanding must be the understanding I have when I start the science. That's why I thought the present-at-hand was the primordial understanding.

They also want to say, it would seem, that there's no logical space between "You are cold" and "I judge you to be cold." — J

There's clearly a logical space between the two. If the first is true, the second may be true or false. If the second is true, the first may be true or false.
The odd bit is that I cannot logically assert "I judge that you are cold but you aren't". There's no logical space between the two conjuncts when I assert them. This is just Moore's paradox.
But that so-called paradox is also the reason why if you assert "That person is cold", I can infer that you believe that person is cold (normally).

I'm pointing not simply to ambiguity about communication, but ambiguity about how we understand assertion. — J

There's ambiguity about assertion, but, IMO, there's a great deal more ambiguity about propositions. Philosophers talk about them all the time and apparently understand each other most of the time. But don't ask them for a definition.

You’re right that Wittgenstein equates philosophy with metaphysics and metaphysics with theory, but the situation is different with Heidegger: — Joshs

I must have misunderstood something. Heidegger understands our cognitive, theoretical, stance as "present-at-hand" and our real-life experience as "ready-to-hand". He analyses Descartes approach through presence-at-hand (which I'm equating to a theoretical stance and therefore methodical doubt) as implying a model seeing us as subjects, the world as object and knowledge as what links the two. These are what Heidegger calls ontological presuppositions and he therefore points out that this mode returns metaphysics to First Phiilosophy. Now, here's my confusion. Doesn't he also criticize this model because it does not begin to explain our everyday lives as active and engaged in the world - ready-to-hand? So, isn't the return of metaphysics part of his working through of a model which he does not deny, but which he wants to limit the role of to specialized occasions, positing "ready-to-hand" - as the model for our "real" lives.

Seems to be straying into the mystical there. Requiring understanding and knowing not just through the lens of the mind. But from other parts of the being. — Punshhh

Yes. I understand the parts of Heidegger that I understand. But there's much I don't understand and that I skirt round, hoping to avoid sinking into any marshes that are concealed there.

It’s not just that the duck-rabbit game may eventually no longer be playable, but that to play it is to use the meanings established by it, and to use the meanings is to reawaken and reinterpret its sense. — Joshs

Well, it will certainly be playable for as long as we (and the people we teach to play) are around, because we are the players. I agree that we cannot know what may happen afterwards. Nobody plays push-pin any more. No-one can rule out the possibility that the concepts necessary for duck-rabbit will disappear or change in such a way the game will no longer be played. But, by the same token, no-one can rule out the possibility that ii may last as long as human beings, or life on earth or till the heat death of the universe.

I'm sorry I've not been here for so long.

I’m getting this concept of metaphysics from contemporary Continental authors, who apparently treat the term in a less technical and more encompassing way than the writers you are drawing from. — Joshs

H'm. Well, there's no stopping people using a term like metaphysics in a different way. But I can't set aside the difference between a theoretical stance, which seems baked into the concept and essentially different from a form of life which is the engagement of a living being with needs and desires (and hence values) in the world. Certainly, for Wittgenstein (though he doesn't put it this way) and for Heidegger, insistence on the latter is a fundamental part of their philosophies - IMO.

Does D have to say that he should not have doubted the "eternal truths"? Or that he should not have been inattentive to them? Does this amount to the same thing, if they're irresistible? — J

The difficulty is that "irresistible" seems to mean that he could not have doubted eternal truths. Well, only in the way that he can utter the sentence "I doubt the Law of Non-Contradiction". My complaint is that he can't follow through with the consequences of that doubt. It's the follow-up that makes it real. (I'm sure that you are thinking, "Oh, but one can doubt the LNC". In a sense, yes. But think about what one would do and say that puts flesh on the bones. Descartes doesn't give us that, on the excuse that his doubt is (merely methodical). I say that it's not a real doubt.)

Do you mean that we should acknowledge that someone, somewhere, could be taught to see a lion in the duck-rabbit?" If that's the idea, I agree; it is not strictly impossible. — J

We can utter the words. But we can't put any flesh on the bones. (If we could, we could see the lion in the picture.)

I think Ludwig, and maybe Moore, mean the first; my hand, when seen, has the property of self-evidence. — J

I'm doubtful about the concept of self-evidence. I think the point here is that a claim like "This is my hand" explains what it is to have a hand. If you insist on doubting that, I shall ask why. You don't have any reason beyond repeating "That hand might be an illusion", I shall not be impressed. I'll think you just don't understand what it is to have a hand or to see a hand. Contrast the situation when I explain that I have a prosthetic hand, not a real one.

I suppose I could see my hand but not be sure that "this is a hand," because I don't know the concept. — J

If I have a hand, it is part of my life. You might think differently and not have the same concept, but the hand will show up in your thinking in one way or another. Your supposition that it might not is empty - just a form of words.

So, is there a difference between "not being able to see the lion" and "not being able to not-see my hand"? Does either one equal "simply true"? I'll keep mum. — J

Well, I'm not sure what to say, either. But those cases are clearly not the same as the duck-rabbit, because there is no coherent alternative interpretation. So I'm driven to say, on the one hand that there's no reason to withhold "true" from either and that our seeing involves a process just like interpretation.

But it is important to appreciate that it will never be the exact same sense, because the form of life or hinge making Moore’s assertion intelligible in the way that he means it is slowly morphing over time , but much more slowly than the empirical assertions and language games that it authorizes. — Joshs

That's just like Heraclitus' river or Theseus' ship. I don't exactly disagree. But I also insist that I am the exact same person as I was 20 years ago. It's normal for things to change over time without losing their identity. However, one could say that we now see hands differently from Moore's day, because physics has revealed that solid objects are not what we thought they were.

They are agreeing that it is a drawing, that their task is to identify what it resembles, that the figure within it can be interpreted in different ways, they see enough detail in the image to recognize a duck or a rabbit. — Joshs

Yes. But I don't think that any of that is metaphysics. But those practices are embedded in our form of life.

or enough to produce the ‘odd fact’ of actually seeing something as something. — Joshs

H'm. I'm reluctant to say that seeing something as something is an odd fact. It seems normal to me. I would say that the odd fact is the puzzle picture.

I’m equating metaphysical system with paradigm , worldview or Wittgensteinian form of life. — Joshs

Poor old W - he must be spinning in his grave. I can see that, in some ways, metaphysical systems may play a part in our lives similar to the part he attributes to "forms of life". But insofar as they are theoretical, in the sense that physics is theoretical, they can't be forms of life.

Is the duck-rabbit’s not being a lion is simply true, is it simply true in the same way as Moore’s declaration that ‘this is a hand’? — Joshs

I think the duck-rabbit's not beiing a lion is simply true. I'm not sure what to say about a picture that has, or at least appears to have just one interpretation - like my picture of my mother. We have to say, I think, that the puzzle pictures are a special case. But seeing my mother in the picture must also be an interpretation. I'm really not sure what to say about this.
I'm not sure what to say about the comparison with Moore's hand. However, one of the points about Moore's hand is that we would not know what to say to someone who insisted on doubting that he himself did not have a hand. We would have to work out what he meant. In that way, I think the two statements are comparable.

So, it seems reasonable to me to think the Presocratic speculations about cosmic constitution made sense to them in terms of what were thought to be the basic elements and the everyday experience of finding things to be made of different materials. — Janus

Certainly they made sense to them. But they don't make sense to us. Now, are we going to worry about whether they made sense simpiciter or in a non-relative sense of making sense. I hope not.

It's easy to dismiss their theories. But some of their questions survive to this day, in the form of logical paradoxes. (It's just that we don't draw the same conclusions from them.) They weren't idiots.

Hmm. What to make of this? It sounds like a flaw in the process of methodical doubt, though Williams doesn't go that far. — J

Fascinating. It looks like a flaw to me. Inattention is feeble. But it is possible to make mistakes in calculations and draw incorrect inferences, though philosophers seem curiously reluctant to mention the fact. No doubt any evil demons around will be only too happy to help that tendency along. So Descartes can maintain his usual premiss and sustain his methodical doubt. But then he faces another challenge, to explain how come those truths that he doubted a little while ago are now seen as are irresistible. There's a possible answer. I guess one could argue that seeing something clearly and distinctly requres that one pay attention to it.

But since such standards apply only WITHIN that metaphysical system, it has nothing to say about an alternative metaphysical stance within which it makes sense to say that a duck-rabbit may also be a lion. — Joshs

My remark that the duck-rabbit can't be a lion was not, so far as I'm aware, a metaphysical claim. It's simply true. The idea that it could be a lion really passes my imagination. What do you mean here by a metaphysical system? Kant versus Berkeley, vs Aquinas etc? Can you elaborate?

It is the impossibility of closure that leads me to say there can be no certainty in relation to metaphysical speculations. — Janus

Well, yes. In a way. But in case like this, you may find that people will infer that metaphysical speculations are always uncertain. But that's misleading. Better to say that metaphysical speculations are neither certain nor uncertain. But that doesn't mean that it's an open house. Interpretations do have to meet standards before they are acceptable. You can't interpret the duck-rabbit as a picture of a lion. That's why one talks of interpretations as valid or invalid, (or plausible or not, etc.) rather than true or false.

I say again that "amply demonstrated" and "impossible" are too strong. I'm agnostic, leaning toward skeptic, about metaphysical certainty, but the debate is hardly over. — J

I'm afraid that I have never understood exactly what metaphysical certainty is, so I'm not going to express an opinion.

Perhaps I am more skeptical than you in thinking that it is not possible that the debate could ever be over. I mean the situation seems quite different than in the sciences where new information can always come to light―in the context of purely rational thought, wherein it seems to be writ that empirical findings have no demonstrable metaphysical implications, where is any new information going to come from? — Janus

I agree that it's not a question of new information. But that doesn't mean that new ways of thinking about the problem, especially new ways of interpreting what we already know, are ever entirely impossible. I tend to see what are labelled metaphysical questions as questions of interpretation. So the developments that started the analytic tradition bring a new perspective to old questions and enable debates to radically change. Questions of interpretation don't have closure in the way that questions of information or even rationality sometimes do.

To give the most charitable hearing to Descartes' project, I think we ought to agree that this is what he meant. Consider a memory -- say, of the Brooklyn Bridge. When it comes to mind, do we say that I have "thought" the Brooklyn Bridge? Not really; in English, that's awkward. But such an example would surely serve for Descartes' point -- if I can have such an experience, I must exist. Whether we call it an English "thought" or a French "pensee" or simply a mental event doesn't really affect the point. — J

The quotation from the Principles does confirm Williams' reading. That reading is also at least compatible with the Meditations. I'm convinced. I've never been keen on the dancing around with Descartes' self. It all seems a bit gossamer, even subjective.

You don't have to form the thought "I think" in order to be thinking, on his usage. — J

I've not heard that before, that I remember. It cuts out a lot of messing about, so it is a very interesting idea.
So we can paraphrase it as "Whenever I think something, I exist", or "If I think, I exist" which certainly makes it not performative and supports the inference (provided we hold D. to a narrow interpretation of syllogism. It also cuts out Gassendi's argument about "I" and makes sense of the way that he derives the illumination by reflecting on what the demon has been doing to him, rather than what the demon is doing now. Does he need to trust his memory?

However, it is a subtle aspect of the meaning. I checked the classical Latin cogito and the entry did not clarify the point one way or the other. I don't know enough to argue about the finer points of 17th century French or Latin usage in 17th century France. Does he back his claim up?

attempting to find certainty in experience rather than what we would call analyticity. — J

Yes. Though I don't think he would have thought of it that way. Most likely, he would have thought of reason as the primary source of knowledge.

My view is that there's no reason to restrict one's actions to what can be based on certainty. — J

There's a bit of an ongoing issue about that. I prefer to insist on certainty, but alter the definition to something we can achieve - i.e. not simply the logical possibility of being wrong. People like you prefer to insist that it is not irrational to act on high probabilities. It's pretty much six of one and half a dozen of the other.

The book is so good that I'm reading it slowly, lots of notes, and have only gotten to God! Williams is quite hard on D here, as are most philosophers I've read. — J

It's wonderful to find a philosophy book that one just wants to read it slowly. Most philosophers are hard on someone who believes in God. Some people, though, suspect that he was just paying lip service.

Descartes himself dealt with a number of objections from people who pointed out that the "I" in "I think" could use a lot more specification. And there is the so-called "impersonal cogito," which considers whether it should more properly be phrased as "there is thinking going on" rather than "I think". (Williams analyzes this one at some length and believes it is an incoherent objection.) — J

I think the point is that D will be aware of his thought, but not of himself thinking it. The observing self is never part of what is observed, so it's existence is a deduction. So even on the impersonal view, D's own existence will be proved as the first next step. D's view of it is "he does not deduce existence from thought by means of a syllogism, but recognizes it as something self-evident by a simple intuition of the mind". The concepts of self-evidence and intuition are not popular in modern philosophy, mainly because they are unreliable guides to truth. (I'm sure you see the irony!).

Not that I think he is wrong. His argument is "If I convinced myself of something [or thought anything at all], then I certainly existed. But there is a deceiver of supreme power and cunning who deliberately and constantly deceives me. In that case, I, too, undoubtedly exist, if he deceives me; and let him deceive me as much as he can, he will never bring it about that I am nothing, so long as I think that I am something." So, the doubter can doubt everything, but the act of doubting reveals his own existence. To put it in modern terms, asserting "I am thinking" itself proves that he exists. It is a self-confirming assertion. Compare, for example "I am here". Stanford Encyclopedia - Descartes' Epistemology (See section 4.1) attributes this view to Hintikka and discusses it more detail

However, the idea that the cogito is an inference still has supporters, who argue that D's rejection of proof by syllogism does not exclude an inference. I think this is not a strong answer - a bit like a lawyer wriggling. However, you can find a detailed discussion in the SEP article above.

I think the two most discussed views nowadays are these two - inference and performance. There are others, including Williams' own critique. Wikipedia - cogito ergo sum has objections from Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Macmurray, and Whitehead. I hope you don't mind if I refer you to Wikipedia for those.

It is possible to get lost for quite a while in this. But, however it is interpreted, what matters most is what he does with it. So I suggest you at least look at the rest of Meditation II and consider whether his process does what he needs it to do. I'll be interested to know what Williams says about this.

PS - a last point.

I appreciate the reminder from Ludwig that logical truths and their role in reasoning was a different animal, back in Descartes' time. — J

I found it hard to find the answer to the question what philosophy of mathematics Descartes might have espoused. So far as I can see, the existing orthodox philosophy centred on the idea of mathematical objects - all variants of platonism, in a way. But mathematics was in the throes of a major upheaval at the time - to which Descartes contributed. So anything is possible. But I don't see how he could align mathematics and logic without modern logic.

I put the Brother's Karamazov far above any of the influential articles we read. Is it philosophy? Arguably not. But it's lent itself to a great many philosophical treatments. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes. There are some topics that benefit greatly from literature. Ethics is a prime example; Politics is another. A thumbnail sketch may be good enough for logic, but the issues in ethics really require a good imagination, so they benefit from a good story-teller. Raymon Gaita's books "The Philosopher's Dog" andin a different way, "Romulus, My Father"are a good examples. They sell well, too.

Either way, it's a thorny issue the formal solution simply obscures. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Is there a formal solution to the problem of free will?

This birthed the very influential, now hegemonic "neo-liberalism;" again, probably not to its credit. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Forgive me, but, in my book, proper (i.e. traditional, socially responsible) liberalism was hi-jacked in the eighties by capitalist interests. It has very little to do with neo-liberalism.

Continental philosophy still has a fairly large effect on culture through the arts and the humanities, although the effects on some fields like Classics hardly seem to its credit — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well, given that analytic philosophy has very little to say to or about the arts and humanities, that's hardly surprising. I have an impression that there's a good deal of suspicion of science, and a desire to distance philosophy from science. But, to be fair, analytic philosophy looks much more towards science than continental philosophy does. Some would say that it often approaches scientism.

One way this plays out is in the absolutely catastrophic job market for philosophy PhDs. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well, it's hard to sell a non-vocational qualification in the present climate of absolute obsession with The Career. But I do think we should try not to think of an educational qualification as primarily a qualification for a career. Nor is philosophy the only subject facing those issues. Fine Art and English (and languages in general) face the same issues.
Though I can't believe that students enrol for a philosophy qualification at any level expecting to get a job on the strength of it. Lots of them do other things, and, I hope, feel that they benefited from their philosophical training. When I enrolled for my Ph D, I expected to have to start a proper career when I had done the three years' residency. I was not at all sure that I even wanted a job in academia and getting an offer was quite a surprise.

What if he didn't drop the bomb and Japan surrendered after a year more of fighting? — Christoffer

That indeed is the alternative - except that it might have been more than a year, more than two - nobody knows.
I have to admit, though, that I would not have been surprised if there had been some bias on Truman's part in thinking it more important to save American lives that Japanese. It is more or less unthinkable that he would even contemplate no bomb and a higher American than Japanese body count, just in order to keep the overall numbers down.
Remember also the shock and fury at Pearl Harbour. Revenge is a disreputable motivation, but real, nonetheless.

We would essentially need a massive catastrophe due to climate change before we can build a world that is ecologically sound and rational. The world seems to not be able to do this on its own. — Christoffer

I think we need more than that. I think we need everyone, everywhere, to fear the effects of climate change on themselves and/or their families. Altruism won't carry normal people through the enormous adjustments (many of them reductions) in living standards that will be necessary. At the moment, there's an illusion that life can carry on as normal with a few technical adjustments to energy policy. People will do it for themselves, but not for people who are thousands of miles away.
Sounder and more rational is possible. Sound and rational, for me, is pie in the sky.

He also wasn't responsible for how nukes were to be used, as demonstrated by the scene with Truman. — Christoffer

Quite so. Truman's decision is not standing up well to the scrutiny of history. But he was balancing the destruction of dropping the bomb (and no-one really knew what would happen) with the destruction of fighting through to Japan the hard way. (Just as you describe.) No doubt he had a bias in favour of saving American lives. I don't say he was right. But I'm not at all sure he was wrong. It's all much easier from an arm-chair and with hindsight.

So, destruction, just like Shiva's role, is both an end and a beginning. Shiva both destroys and creates. — Christoffer

That's true. But can we ever calculate that the creation balances the destuction, morally speaking? If only there were a way of ensuring that no-one will use that thought to justify some total horror in the future. I wouldn't trust any human being with that decision. If it has to happen, let it happen without, or in spite of, human agency.

And it's why people now fear that when the last of the witnesses of that event in history dies, we will see a rise in new atrocities and conflicts because people's minds again start to build up an unhealthy ecosystem of thought. — Christoffer

The fear of atomic warfare has never prevented small wars in the years since then. But it seems that people are beginning to think that it is OK to threaten it. I suspect that complacency is a factor, but miscalculation is all too easy, so I'm not at all secure about it.

Indeed, he says that the evil demon could make us wrong even about "2+2 = 4". Would he agree, then, that his methodical doubt should exempt logical truths? Evidently not. "I think," for Descartes, has a certainty and an incorrigibility that "LNC" does not. — J

I have only just discovered this message of yours. It certainly changes things a lot. It shows how easy it is to get things wrong if you don't read the text again from time to time.
I think we need to remember that in Descartes's time, the idea that logic was the foundation of mathematics was far in the future. He would have seen the LNC and the cogito as a different category from mathematical truths. I really don't know what the ideas were at the time.

As I think Ludwig is suggesting my point was that any discourse which purported to deny the LNC must necessarily be involved in an incoherent performative contradiction because to do so would undermine discourse itself. — Janus

If we see the LNC and the Law of Excluded Middle as both undermining the possibility of making an assertion, then the cogito will fit beside them, because it is validated in the act of asserting it. I don't recall any commentary that takes on board his inclusion of mathematical truths in his methodical doubt.
Perhaps @J could check Williams' book and see what he says?

I don't see people as living wholly within the empirical world. As Sellars pointed out we live with both the scientific images and the manifest images of the world, or within the space of causes and the space of reasons. The latter cannot be understood (parsimoniously at least) solely in terms of causes. — Janus

I wouldn't say that people live wholly in the empirical world. That thought was badly expressed. I wouldn't disagree with Sellars.

Despite all the talk of rigour, logic, clarity, and convergence, Williamson’s piece is fundamentally rhetorical:
— Banno
If "rhetorical" is taken as the alternative to "argumentative," then yes. But rhetoric often gets rejected as not philosophy at all -- and sometimes for good reason. W's paper is very clearly philosophy. — J

I don't disagree with you. But I would go much further. We warp our understanding of philosophy by thinking that rhetoric is something that can be removed from our use of language, like cutting out the rotten bits of an apple. Rhetoric is often assumed to be an optional strategy, mostly relied on by those who do not have good arguments. Argumentation is not an alternative to rhetoric. When arguments are presented to an audience/readership, it is an attempt to persuade and consequently rhetoric. Much of what is labelled rhetoric is not an alternative to argumentation, it is simply bad argumentation.

Rhetoric covers a wide range of facets of writing. Good writing always invoves these as well. It's a cliche, that when we dress, we never simply cover our nakedness or announce our membership of some social group. Whether we intend to or not, we give an impression of the kind of person we are how we are feeling and much else. So we think about the effect we will have on people and dress accordingly. It's no different with language.

This post is intended to draw your attention, not necessarily to persuade you. But it is not difficult to see it in whatever you read, if you look for it. After a while, you can see the rhetoric in any writing - including the writing of whatever brilliant philosophers you love most.

Consider this from Williamson's last paragraph. He is talking about Dummett:-

But when participants in a debate are allowed to throw out both (Sc. the laws of non-contradiction and excluded middle simultaneously, methodological alarm bells should ring

So he is representing the debate as something like a boxing match. When a foul is committed the referee stops the match and makes the participants start again. That's not even possible in a philosophical discussion. If Dummett has committed a foul, someone will likely call him out and he will either accept the criticism and take the remark back or not. There's no referee. Why does he present things in this way?

The argumentation is not at issue here. It's about the way that (professional) philosophy works.

Agreeing to disagree about Descartes' project is almost a sure sign of philosophical maturity! :smile: — J

I hope, at my age, I can at least claim to something like philosophical maturity!

I'd thought we could focus more on why Descartes chose methodical doubt as a way to establish certainty. But given the many objections you raise, and given your honesty that you're not really open to the idea that there could be a sound basis for it, I'm fine with letting it go. — J

I'm not saying I couldn't be convinced. The core of the problem is that, so far as I can see, Descartes has little or nothing to tell us about what he means by "methodical doubt", so it looks as if he thought it was obvious. His astonishment that people took the idea of doubting everything more seriously than he intended shows, I would say, that he hadn't thought it through very much.

This is the only one of your objections I'd really want to push back on. I'm having trouble seeing why Descartes doesn't have a legitimate theoretical context. Maybe you can give an example of a theoretical context where "questioning one's data . . ." etc. does make sense? — J

That's fair enough. I have elaborated, or even qualified, my objection in my previous message. Here it is again:-

Reviewing one's assumptions is not a bad idea. Copernicus reviewed the assumption that the earth was the centre of the universe. Kepler reviewed the assumption that the planets moved in circles. Newton reviewed the assumption that different physical laws applied to the stars and the earth. In addition Euclid's geometry was a great success. It started from a few definitions and axioms and drew a whole world from it. Descartes is following success and taking it further. But that's where the problems arise. So, to question axioms with theoretical doubts in a theoretical context is a good thing (provided it is not over-done!). But Descartes doesn't set up a theoretical context that gives sense and meaning (and so the possibility of resolving things) to his doubts. — Ludwig V

If you consider these cases, you can see that the theoretical context includes ways of questioning axioms, replacing them with others and methods of working through the consequences and proving the results. (Essentially, mathematical workings to draw out the implications of the data and prove that the new model made better predications that the orthodox ideas.) You could argue that in following the mathematical format, that is what he is trying to do. But the format does not work in the context of this project. One obvious problem is that the data is not systematically organized or in a format that allows mathematical methods to be applied. The other is that the assumption that all knowledge can be turned into a single comprehensive logical structure is, to put it politely, a massive task with no guarantee of success. (Bear in mind, here, that the new science (with Descartes' help) decided to exclude anything that could not be handled mathematically, such as colours and sounds, not to mention emotions and values. But those are part of what he is now taking on.)
Perhaps looking at his constructive phase - the cogito and what follows will make this clearer.

This is another, separate question, also interesting. I assume you don't think Descartes was successful in raising his methodical doubt, given your objections to the method. But are you saying that he failed to set the doubts to rest on his own terms? -- that is, allowing for the purpose of argument that real doubts were raised, are you saying he failed to allay them in the ways he believed he had? — J

That's not just my opinion, There is a raft of issues about the cogito. I think we may be about to move on. I'll need to remind myself about all that, so it may take a little while.

Oh no worries. Just checking to make sure you didn't really believe it was that simple! :wink: — J

I'm glad of that. This medium is not kind to subtleties that can easily be conveyed in actual conversation. There was no way that I could inflect my voice or face to say - don't take this too seriously. I'm not adept with smileys.

We need code enforcement, but we need all the rest. And so do code enforcers. — Fire Ologist

I have no problem with the code on this (or other) forums. But laying down, and enforcing a code on philosophy as such seems like a futile project.

Think of it this way. One cannot legislate for language. What determines the language is the continuous use of the language and the consensus of users determines what works. (Yes, there are exceptions in France and Sweden. But those systems depend on acceptance and application of the code.)

Philosophers are a big enough and disparate enough community to make observation and enforcement of a code very difficult to impossible. In the end, what gets accepted by philosophers is what philosophy is. Yes, there are social forces at work here as well as the core reading and responding to texts. They may pollute the ideal, but one must acknowledge their existence.

Can you keep open the possibility that he is simply not "doubting things" in the ordinary way, and that there's method to his madness? — J

I can see that he has thought about what he is doing, and is not just doing it for entertainment or on some other impulse. But I can't pretend, to myself or you, that I think there is a sound basis for the project in what he says.
Reviewing one's assumptions is not a bad idea. Copernicus reviewed the assumption that the earth was the centre of the universe. Kepler reviewed the assumption that the planets moved in circles. Newton reviewed the assumption that different physical laws applied to the stars and the earth. In addition Euclid's geometry was a great success. It started from a few definitions and axioms and drew a whole world from it. Descartes is following success and taking it further. But that's where the problems arise. So, to question axioms with theoretical doubts in a theoretical context is a good thing (provided it is not over-done!). But Descartes doesn't set up a theoretical context that gives sense and meaning (and so the possibility of resolving things) to his doubts.
However, there's no problem about agreeing to disagree and moving on to other things. That's a perfectly normal thing to do in conversations like this. Is that what you had in mind?

Not Descartes! He insists on this. As discussed above, he is interested in what is possible, not actual. — J

I get that. But I don't think it defuses very much of what I've been banging on about. If he is prepared to believe in the possibility of the evil demon, his concept of possibility is much more elastic than mine. In the context of a pscychiatric assessment, that could count as evidence of losing touch with reality. But he has invoked "methodical", so I suppose he gets a pass.

It is possible, then, that I am something quite other than what I appear to myself to be, and only imagining the reality I experience. — J

There is a difficult argument here about how "other" you can be and still be yourself. You might have been born in a very different environment and grown up as a very different person - so different that you would not have been the person that you are. Where's that line? Hard to say, but it exists.
Again, if you opened up that discussion in a psychiatric consultation, you would have some explaining to do. But again "methodical" gets you a pass.

It's the "pre-emptive skepticism" idea again. — J

I can understand that. We can assess it, then, by considering how far he set these doubts to rest. Sadly, that was not very far. We might point out that it did provoke a good deal of serious philosophical thought about how to meet the challenge. Which is a success of a sort.

you're just saying that Descartes is over-scrupulous or too imaginative. — J

Perhaps. It is possible to be so scrupulous that you prevent yourself from achieving what you want to achieve. It is also possible to be so imaginative that you lose touch with reality.

It occurs to me that maybe the best way to do this is for you to say why Methodical Doubt is a "wrong idea." That way I could try to articulate what I understand as Descartes' reasons so as to address your points specifically, rather than just paraphrase the Discourse and Meditations. — J

If a quotation from the texts answers my objection, there's nothing wrong with quoting it.
But here is my attempt to rationalize the arguments I've put into a single, possibly coherent statement. But I haven't tried to re-state them. I'm assuming you can remember what they were. There's not an awful lot of text, so you should be able to find the relevant parts of my messages if your memory lets you down:-

What does “methodical” doubt mean (other than as a get-out-of-jail-free card)?
Questioning one’s data, axioms, assumptions in a theoretical context is fine. The context limits the corrosion and ensures that there are ways to distinguish true from false. But without context, one just gets universal corrosion.

Can one choose to doubt (or believe)?
One cannot doubt or believe to order. What gives rise to doubt or belief is evidence. Doubt and belief that is not based on, or at least open to the effects of, evidence is irrational.

The demon
This isn’t really an argument, but more of a way of making it easier to apply radical doubt more widely. In any normal situation it would be a paranoid fantasy, but so it’s as well that it doesn’t really affect the argument.

What can he not doubt at all?
He mentions that he is certain of his own sanity. His expresses concerns about his own memory but believes he has a way of relying on it.
He doesn’t mention reason (law of excluded middle and non-contradiction), his knowledge of language or his pen and paper or the existence of his future readers. Doubting any of these would wreck the project.

The Argument from Experience
He says he has been deceived by his senses, so he will mistrust all sense-experience. He also says he has been deceived in a dream, so he does not know he is not dreaming now.
Doubting some sense-experience makes sense, but not the whole class. It is more accurate to say that our experience (senses or dreams) does not prove that everything is doubtful, but that we can tell true from false.
Wittgenstein’s concept of hinge propositions and Moore's common sense fits here. Hinge propositions are (mostly empirical) propositions that are so deeply embedded in the network of our understanding that they cannot be coherently doubted without demolishing the possibility of ever knowing anything.

Doubt and Possibility.
There seems to be an assumption that if a proposition is contingent, it is possible that it is false, which means that it cannot becertain and can be doubted. This leaves Descartes with an impossibly strict criterion for indubitablity.
But the argument is invalid. It doesn’t follow from the fact that p is possible that p is true. Logical possibility does not amount to doubt or even uncertainty.

That's clever, but I hope you acknowledge that both those characterizations of the founders are highly debatable. If Descartes really "showed that it is not possible to know anything," why has that conclusion not won universal acceptance? — J

It is a serious distortion of what Descartes actually said. I was thinking more of his effect on generations of philosophers after him. Perhaps the failure of his constructive phase is, in a way, not his fault. But it was a serious failure, at least for philosophy. Ordinary life, of course, has muddled on as usual. But that's part of my complaint.
My parents had a phrase "that's clever-clever" which they frequently applied to me in my teens. It meant something like "clever and annoying" or "clever on the surface but pointless when you think about it". It applies to this paragraph. I should have deleted it rather than posting it.

Are there facts about what is useful, or is it just a matter of taste? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I would say that there are facts about what is useful, but that they are contextual, not absolute.

Is "the mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven," and is "nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

My answers are "yes" and "needs clarification".

.....more information helps ground practical judgement is at odds with the idea that they are afactual. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That's true. But there is no problem about that. Practical judgement is a combination of values, desires and facts. That's what makes it practical. Values and desires are not facts, because they are neither true nor false.

So, when Rorty debates Eco, he wants to say that what a screwdriver is doesn't necessitate (or even "suggest") how we use it, since we could just as well use it to scratch our ear as turn a screw, and yet in an obvious sense this isn't so. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't see a problem. A screwdriver has a standard use, which is what is designed for; but it can be used in many different, non-standard, ways. We could call this improvisation, but Derrida has a splendid term for it - bricolage.

A razor sharp hunting knife is not a good toy to throw into a baby's crib (at the very least, for the baby) because of what both are, and this is true across all cultural boundaries and seems that it must be true. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes. But I'm not sure how you interpret that in the terms of the philosophical arguments.

Hume says quite straightforwardly that reason can never motivate action, full stop. — Count Timothy von Icarus

He does indeed. "Reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions." One assumes that he is not deducing the "ought" from the "is". But Aristotle said it first, in the Nicomachaean Ethics, I think Bk. VI. Actually, he said "Reason by itself moves nothing." Not quite the same, but close enough to suspect an ancestral relationship with Hume's remark. (Aristotle goes on to construct the practical syllogism to explain the rational basis for action. Nobody has improved on it, but then nobody has explained how it moves us.)

So it doesn't deny that we might desire truth to attain some other means, but it does deny a rational appetite to know truth of itself that is a part of reason. IDK, this seems to be all over modern anthropology. — Count Timothy von Icarus

H'm. I take this as about the distinction between wanting something for the sake of something else "external" to it and wanting that thing for it's own sake. The difference between playing music to entertain people in order to earn money and playing music for it's own sake - no ulterior motive; ("For pleasure would not count as an ulterior (or external) motive).
It's curious that you call the latter ("for its own sake") a rational appetite, when the point is that it has no external ground or purpose, whereas playing music for money does, and therefore has a reason, so is clearly rational. Can you help me?

Nor can Hume just say, "but people just possess a sentiment for goodness itself," because this would obviously imply that there is something, goodness, to have an appetite for, which is distinct from people's other sentiments, which is at odds with the entire thesis. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't think that's a problem. What "useful" means depends entirely on the context - it isn't a property in its own right, capable of applying to something independently of other properties; it applies to something in virtue of some other properties or qualities that the something has or doesn't have. Similarly, what's good depends entirely on the context.

They don't, and I'm not sure how you read that as a denial of the existence of the field of ethics. Rather, the denial is that ethics has any real subject matter outside opinion and illusory judgement. It is just taste and emotional sentiment. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Oh, I see. I'm sorry that I misread you. Though, I'm sure you will agree that they would not necessarily describe what they are denying in that way.

"And when, after three or four hours' amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther." is not a philosophical resolution of skepticism. The anguished skeptic can just say: "well it still bothers me." — Count Timothy von Icarus

No, it is not. But then, Hume's point is that there is no philosophical resolution of scepticism. The reason he is not bothered by that is that he thinks it has no point, no consequences. Life goes on, just as usual. Essentially, that's his point about induction. There is no justification that reason can supply, so we will continue to rely on it, just as we have always done. It's not as if there is a useful alternative. He's not wrong, IMO.

Arguably, Hume might not contradict himself, if we take his "grounding in sentiment" to be purely descriptive. But then he hasn't done anything to ground morality either, and hasn't justified a move from moral nihilism the way he claims he has. So it's a sort of damned if you do, damned if you don't. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't remember the texts (not Hume, and not Macintyre, either.) enough to engage with this properly. You are right that if his theory is purely descriptive, then it cannot justify ("ground") morality. Perhaps Hume thinks that the fact that we do value the things that we value is all the ground we need? Or perhaps he is thinking of the issue in the same way as he thinks of the philosophical sceptic. The arguments may be impeccable, but they won't make any difference - we shall continue to value the things that we value. However, while we can comfortably let philosophical sceptics moulder in their prison, it is harder to ignore the moral nihilist who ignores the moral rules.
I did, a little while ago, look at his argument about miracles. There, he uses as his final court of appeal "universal agreement" about various things. That does seem a bit of a broken reed, particular when "universal" means "people like me". That is a real weakness. But philosophers do tend to refer to a "we" that believes or does, this and that. I've never been happy with that, but it is almost impossible not to rely on it without awkward and long-winded circumlocutions.

Logicians and philosophers now look to see both where formal systems can display the structure of natural languages, and were aspects of natural languages can suggest ways to develop new approaches within logic. — Banno

Thanks for the explanation. It would seem that there has been considerable progress on this issue since the bad old days.

I don't want to disrupt the discussion that is actually going on here. I hope that it is possible to ask a question in the margins, as it were, without doing so.

The present state of play, so far as I can make out, has the philosophers working in these areas developing a variety of formal systems that are able to translate an ever-increasing range of the aspects of natural language. — Banno

If I remember right, the original philosophical reason for the "translation" into logic was to clarify natural language, so that at least some philosophical problems could be resolved or dissolved. The other (possibly philosophical) project was the attempt to provide a foundation for mathematics. But I had the impression that both projects were abandoned, though to be honest I have forgotten exactly what the reasons were. My question is simply what is the aim of the translation project now? Is it the same, or something different?

But we can instead say, "This is why Descartes is a great philosopher, not just an interesting one. He believed he had found a whole new and important use for doubt, one that is precisely not its ordinary use. And the ramifications of his idea were so provocative that we've been discussing it ever since!" — J

Certainly we can say that. My arguing that he is wrong does not mean that I don't think he is a great philosopher (though it might mean that I think he is an even greater mathematician/physicist). His achivement is that he came up with a really interesting wrong idea - so interesting that it has dominated Western philosophy for over three hundred years. If I could achieve anything even close to that, I would be very pleased with myself.

Again, we'd need to really dig in to his reasons for "inventing" Methodical Doubt, and what he hoped it could accomplish. I'm willing, if you like. — J

OK. Hit me.
Lee Braver wrote a book called "Groundless Grounds" in which he argues that Wittgenstein and Heidegger both argue that a key part of their very different projects was to return philosophy from its obsession with the theoretical and derive its understanding from everyday life. I'm not scholar enough to know for sure, but I think he makes a very good case. That's why I'm going on about it.

He says he's been misled in a dream --and not known it at the time -- to such an extent that he thinks we have to take the possibility as real. But remember, the question is not "Did it happen?" but "Could it happen?" — J

Yes, he has been misled by a dream. But when he woke up, he realised the truth. It's that insistence on being absolutely certain now that creates much of the problem. These philosophers have no patience!
Suppose he told us that he dreamt he was an astronaut and flew to Mars last night. Are we to think it could have happened? And isn't the fact that it couldn't have happened the key reason why he, and we, are so sure that he dreamt it? And that is true even though it is not self-contradictory to assert that he did fly to Mars last night.

Of course you may feel it simply could not (sc. happen), but that's disagreeing about a result concerning what can be doubted, not the method itself. — J

In a way, you are right. I wouldn't seriously question the idea that, in a specific context, it might be helpful to re-examine one's assumptions. But Descartes' project is removed from any specific context, and it's target is everything he, and we, think we know. That's a very different kettle of fish - and that grandiose aim, to criticize everything is a typical philosophical over-reach.

People forget that something can be possible and not the case. It was possible that my parents might have lived to be a hundred years old. Yet I know that they didn't. Earlier, I gave as an example of something that is certain "I have two hands". That comes from G.E. Moore and Wittgenstein discusses it. It is a contingent statement, so it is, in theory, possible that I do not have two hands. But if I consider the idea carefully, it makes no sense; there is not the remotest actual argument for supposing that I do not have two hands.

Yes! That's why Descartes is so concerned to win back all (or most) of the territory he concedes as uncertain. He uses doubt to demonstrate, in the end, a method by which we can learn what is certain. — J

There are two moments in his project. Creating the doubt, and resolving it. I may be questioning the creation process, but, in a way, I am already participating in his project. There is another line available, which is to accept his project, and consider whether his retrieval is successful. Unfortunately, there is another vast literature on that. What's worse is that many since then have tried to rescue the situation. No-one's really put the issue to bed. It would seem that he achieved too much in the first phase and not enough in the second.
Of course, that may be because it has now become a standard exercise - no, initiation - for those beginning philosophy; no-one else, except Socrates, has achieved that. The two of them constitute the founding myths of philosophy. That's paradoxical, in a way; one of the founders of philosophy discovered that he knew nothing and the other unwittingly showed that it is not possible to know anything anyway. No wonder philosophy is a mess.

I think we should take Descartes at his word when he says that he does not intend "methodical doubt" to be applied in daily life. His quoted words in the letter make that pretty clear, and Williams cites a number of other instances. — J

Oh, I don't doubt his sincerity and I do take him at his word. But his move removes doubt from its usual context, and especially it's usual consequences. So it is a bit like shaking hands without touching. It's a greeting, but not a greeting. Or pulling a punch. That's what gives force to Hume's complaint that radical scepticism (not that he mentions Descartes) has no consequences. One doesn't quite know what it means.

He wants us to take methodical doubt very seriously indeed, as a method of ascertaining what might constitute certain knowledge. I called this a kind of "giving the Devil his due" skepticism; Williams calls it "pre-emptive skepticism," meaning much the same thing. Descartes wants certainty, not merely what seems overwhelmingly likely. So he's willing to make enormous concessions to what a hardened skeptic might claim. — J

Yes, in one way I understand all that. Perhaps you could think of my obstuseness as an application of his method to his method. (Oh, I do hate arguments like that. Don't take me seriously).

See what I mean?

And there are a number of modern arguments, broadly analytic or Wittgensteinian in nature, that make that case. — J

Oh, yes. We could get them out of the books and see what we think of them. But improvising on the basis of an unreliable memory is also quite fun.

It's not that "I have two hands" must be shown to be indubitable, but rather that "whatever I affirm that I perceive clearly and distinctly" is indubitable -- that is, cannot, under any circumstances, be mistaken. So, with respect, this isn't quite it: — J

Now you are switching back to wholesale undermining of an entire class. We have ways of telling when our sense our misleading us (I prefer "telling when we have misinterpreted our senses"). How else does Descartes know that he has been misled in the past? This won't do at all.

I read him as asserting what is possible, not what is the case. It's the difference between saying, "That bird could be an oriole" and "That bird is an oriole." These are both assertions; if I make the first one, it will be true if the bird could be an oriole, and false if it could not be. The second assertion says something quite different; it will be true if the bird is in fact an oriole, false if it is not. I believe the former mode is what Descartes is talking about. — J

Yes. I get that. It is a common way of presenting sceptical arguments. I'm not sure it is actually in the text. But it might be. The trouble is that the presentation usually collapses possibility into logical possibility, and establish what are now contingent statements on the basis premisses that make them all a priori or analytic (cf. Euclid or mathematics in general). But if we want to eliminate all contingent statements from our knowledge base, we'll end up in a sad state, don't you think?

It's just that, in the absence of egregious oppression and lack of quality of life, this never seems to happen. — Janus

No, it doesn't. Most people don't care much about the big picture and just want to be left in peace. True, that can be a mistake, but it seems to me that's how it is.

I think you know from past discussions that I would be the last to indulge in human exceptionalism and conclude that we are somehow more than mere animals. We are only exceptional inasmuch as we are very unusual animals. That said, there are also many other very unusual animals. — Janus

Sorry. That remark was intended in general, not in particular. I write quite quickly when I finally get to the keyboard. Sometimes I don't put things precisely enough. But I've found that if I write too slowly, I end up not writing at all.

It seems to me to be a question of what we can logically doubt, and I think the answer is 'anything that can be imagined to be false without logical contradiction'. It seems we cannot doubt the LNC itself without falling into incoherence. — Janus

There's a good point there. If Descartes does try to doubt the LNC, the project will fall apart. Same thing if he doubts his memory. He makes quite a fuss about that at the end of the first meditation.

The obverse is what we can absolutely certain of; and I think that would be only what is true by definition or according to some rule or set of rules we have accepted; i.e. tautologies and mathematics and they really tell us nothing outside of their contexts. — Janus

Yes. That's a trap. The price of absolutely certainty is paralysis in the empirical world. But perhaps we don't live in the empirical world? If we want to return to normal life (a dubious prospect, but still..) we need to re-cast this conceptual space. That's what Wittgenstein is trying to do - and, in his way, Moore.