Both the "I" and the "it" do not refer to anything in particular. — Janus

Could you say more? The "I" refers to the thinker/speaker, and I'm not sure which "it" you mean. Sorry, I'm probably missing your point.

q = "Grass is green"
p = "I think q" = "I think 'grass is green'"

This is the problematic structure I was referring to. How should we talk about the force and the content of p? Is "I" the subject (or "argument," in Frege's terms) of p? We need a workaround, and (at least) one is available, but before we consider how this problem is usually resolved, I was trying to get clear about what's wrong.

@Banno @Janus Have to leave now -- rats. I'll look forward to seeing where y'all take this.

What is the logical status of a judgement or proposition apart from its being made or beleived by anyone? If anything, it would be merely content, no? — Janus

That's a great way of putting one of Rodl's puzzles. He challenges us, "What is 'merely content'? What can that mean?"

I would have thought that the force/ content distinction reinforces the role of the "first person" — Janus

Yes, in the way you describe, but look what happens when the proposition itself -- p is "I think q". How do we accommodate this?

Well, I was trying to go a little slower. Ignore Rodl's possible solution. Is there something that needs solving about the 1st person in order to keep propositional logic workable?

I am missing something here, but what? — Banno

I'm not sure, but following along in this thread, I believe what separates the Rodl-deniers from the Rodl-curious (I don't think we have any committed Rodelians, certainly not me) is whether or not they can see a problem about p. I do see the problem Rodl (and Kimhi) see. How can there be objective content that is also thought? This is not a problem in logic, it's an ancient epistemological puzzle. It's the "view from nowhere" problem, which is why Rodl spends so much time on Nagel. Rodl's concerns about p are a relatively new and often infuriating way of going at this, but I don't think we can just say he's confused.

Can I ask, if a bright child asked you, "What do philosophers mean when they talk about p?" how you would answer? In the simplest terms, what do you think p is meant to signify?

Sorry, which bit? There are so many "I thinks" here!

Let me ask you both, then, what you make of this:

The [force-content] distinction is introduced as a matter of course; the student is trained not to be tricked by the act-object ambiguity. But there is an awareness that the force-content distinction and the doctrine of propositions have difficulty accommodating 1st-person thought: I ____. — Rodl, 22

Rodl goes on to argue that the 1st person must be understood as self-conscious, but let's not worry about that right now. @Banno, I think you've noted before that we need to do some tinkering within Fregean logic to accommodate the 1st person. Would you agree with Rodl that, without such tinkering, there is indeed a difficulty presented for the "doctrine of propositions"?

What I said should be read as a general critique of some forms of phenomenological method. — Banno

OK.

In so far as Rödl is dependent on such a method his argument doesn't hold unless one is willing to insist that Pat is wrong in her account of her own mental life. Which is what Rödl appears to be insisting on in the section referred to by ↪Wayfarer. — Banno

I'd need to see what @Wayfarer comes up with here. I don't recall Rodl saying this. But way back in the OP, that was my possible response #2 to Pat:

"The “I think” is an experience of self-consciousness, and requires self-consciousness. When you say you are “not aware of it,” you are mistaken. But you can learn to identify the experience, and thus understand that you have been aware of it all along."

I don't think it's a good response, but not because it would be impossible for a person to be wrong about their mental life. I think it's misguided because Rodl's thesis about the "I think" doesn't describe a mental event at all. Thus, response #3:

"The “I think” is not experienced. It is a condition of thought, a form of thought, in the same way that space and time are conditions of cognition. Self-consciousness, in Rödl’s sense, is built in to every thought, but not as a content that must be experienced."

This is correct according to Rodl, I believe. What we've been chasing up and down the yard these 20-odd pages is whether this is a coherent thing to say.

An ingenious idea for "translating away" the 1st person. I think I know what Rodl might say, though: Pat is still performing an act of judging, regardless of whether the object-language sentence concerns herself or a sentence-token. "A declarative sentence" can't refer to anything at all, or judge anything; only a person (or thought) can do that, he would maintain. It's a variation on his skepticism about p -- "It stands ready quietly, unobtrusively, to assure us that we know what we are talking about. . . . If only we understood the letter p, the whole world would open up to us." (55)

But I disagree about redundancy. — bongo fury

Me too.

If someone disagrees with this, if they perhaps insist that their thought of judging that things are so just is judging that things are so...

What are we to do? How are we to settle such an issue? Are we to say they are mistaken? Wrong? Misunderstanding the issue? — Banno

Why presume there is even some fact of the matter? — Banno

First, note that Rodl does disagree with this. The quote is his version of what an opponent of his views might say. His own view is much closer to your "judging that things are so just is judging that things are so."

But your question about how to settle a disagreement here is one of my favorite meta-philosophical problems. Philosophy always seeks to understand itself, to know its own nature, to comprehend what it is capable of. The question of resolving a philosophical issue is central to one's conception of how philosophy can proceed. What sorts of resolutions can philosophy accomplish, in a case like this? Is somebody right? If we trace the disagreement back to a divergence in some fundamental premises, what do we do next?

Sorry for the mini-essay, but it's a prologue to replying that it's a lot easier to say what wouldn't settle the issue. I don't think an appeal to differing personal experiences will do it; Rodl wants to say something about all thought. More broadly, I don't think there's any empirical resolution; the issue is metaphysical. Whether there is, then, no "fact of the matter" will depend on how you feel about metaphysics.

To conclude with something optimistic: You know how, when something goes wrong with some electrical or digital set-up, 9 times out of 10 the problem is something silly and hardware-related, like forgetting to attach a cable? And you've been sitting there trying to understand the software and figure out what you're doing wrong? Similarly, I find that more often than not a philosophical disagreement can be, if not resolved, at least better understood by assuming the problem is a terminological dispute. That's part of why I've been going at this thought1/thought2 business so heavily.

The problem of one thought and then another is a product of the view of propositions Rödl is militating against. — Paine

Yes. For Pat to think, "Hey, I'm thinking about a tree" would be an example of a second thought being simultaneous (or nearly so) to a first thought. Rodl, as I read him, is fine with this; it's of no interest to him. What he denies is that the "I think" works like this.

So when I followed his lead in making the distinction between "my thought of judging p" and "judging p", I was well aware that this is a terminology he's putting in the mouth of his opponent. But we can still ask, If the "I think" is not "my thought of judging p", what is it? And what I'm suggesting is that we have a problem no matter which horn of the dilemma we choose -- see my response to @Wayfarer

I think the problem of talking about what is a new 'thought' has to first pass through the issue of the first person being the one making the judgement. — Paine

Yes. One of the central issues of S-C&O is whether 1st-person thought is "a thorn in the flesh of the friends of propositions," or merely "a local problem" concerning a type of reference. What I've read so far, in terms of argument for this, seems equivocal, but there is much more I haven't yet gotten to.

rejection of the "affirming subject" — Paine

. . . understood as a subject who is always affirming in a context. So any other subject could theoretically be plugged into that context, leading to "objectivity." Being true for one means being true for all. Rodl rightly calls this trivial:

First-person thought, insofar as it is first-personal, is not objective. — Rodl, 27

. . . but so what? The problem is not rooted in this obvious fact. This is not the "thorn in the flesh."

The force-content distinction is a close parallel to the distinction you're trying to draw between thought1 (the act) and thought2 (the content). — Wayfarer

It is, with a key difference which is obscured by Rodl's insistence on using "think that" as synonymous (or at least interchangeable) with "judge that".

The idea of "content" is more or less the same, but my "thought1" is not the same as Frege's "force" or Rodl's "judgment". I intend thought1 to be much more neutral, a simple label we can apply to any mental event. Such a thought doesn't assert anything, nor judge anything to be the case.

Now, do you read Rodl as denying that there can be any such thought? I don't. I read him as denying that we can think, in the sense of "judge", any proposition without an accompanying "I think".

Is this "I think" a thought2? -- that is, some piece of propositional content? Clearly not. But nor is it a thought1, a new mental event; Rodl rejects this. I hate to multiply entities, but it seems as if the "I think", as an act of self-consciousness, must be yet a third term we require in order to understand what it means to think. It is not, properly speaking, a thought at all, but rather constitutive of a certain kind of thinking, much as space and time function in Kantian metaphysics. "The very framework within which all thinking and evaluation occur," in your words, though I'm not yet ready to say "all thinking."

For Rödl, these are not separable aspects of judgment. — Wayfarer

Yes. But to say they cannot be separated at all, or do not successfully refer, is a further step. If Rodl is indeed trying to take that step, then I'm tentatively saying he's wrong to do so.

I think the error lies in the attempt to objectify thought (although that is not Rödl's terminology or method.) But it relates to his later point from Thomas Nagel about 'thoughts we can't get outside of'. — Wayfarer

I'll wait till you get to the Nagel/Moore material before offering any responses about that. As to objectifying thought in general, I believe Rodl is saying that there is no such thing as a thought which hasn't been thought. The whole idea of a "p" which resides somewhere in the ether, waiting to be thought, makes no sense to him. And we know that he affirms objectivity, in his own way: thought can be objective precisely because it is self-conscious, and vice versa. It knows itself to be judging what is the case. What I'm still working to understand, as you can tell from my other comments, is whether this way of seeing objectivity forces us back into some version of the force/content distinction -- which was the point you began your post with, and it's a good one.

Very good! I can't give this the response it deserves right now, but I will, next time I'm online here.

Thanks for the excellent synopsis. Here's what I've realized about Rodl's claims here:

On p. 38, in laying out the objection of his critic, he says (speaking for the critic):

My thought of judging that things are so is a different act of the mind from my judging that they are so. The former is about my judgment, a psychic act, a mental state; the latter, in the usual case, is not; it is about something that does not involve my judgment, my mind, my psyche. It is about a mind-independent reality. — Rodl, 38, my emphases

Now combine this with what Rodl tells us about his terminology:

I use "judgment" and "thought" interchangeably, following ordinary usage: "He thinks that things are so" represents him as judging, as holding true, that things are so. — Rodl, 4

(Whether this is the only ordinary usage is debatable, but let that go. We're trying to understand Rodl's scheme.)

So Rodl believes that the force/content distinction is a discrimination between a "psychic act" or "mental event" and a "mind-independent reality" that does not involve "my mind, my psyche." It is this that he denies.

Earlier, I suggested distinguishing two uses of "thought". Thought1 is meant to refer to what Rodl is calling a mental event. Thought2 refers to the (somewhat mysterious) propositional content that is the subject of a thought1, and, as Rodl says, is understood to be independent in some important sense from any particular mental event.

What Rodl is claiming, using the synonymy of "thought" and "judgment," is that thinking that things are so is not different from being conscious or aware of so thinking. So the million-dollar question is, When I think about my judgment, which we know is a thought1 (a mental event), is my new thought about that judgment also a thought1? I think much of Rodl's thesis rests on denying this. Self-consciousness has got to be a thought2 item, something "accompanying" any thought1, not an additional simultaneous thought1 (mental event).

One important qualification: As Pat noted in the original OP, one can "think about one's thought" in a perfectly ordinary reflective way, pondering its occurrence, wondering if it's true, etc. Sometimes we do that, sometimes we don't. In doing this, we are engaging in a mental event, a new thought1. That is not the kind of "thinking about thought" that Rodl means, and I certainly wish he had made this clearer from the outset. Or maybe he thought he did, simply by asserting that the "I think" is not a new thought. In any case, we mustn't get confused and say either that we never have a separate, self-reflective thought about thought, or that the ubiquitous "I think" is that kind of thought.

The question might be asked, what of incorrect judgement? — Wayfarer

Your explication here is clear, and we ought to agree with Rodl, regardless of whether we endorse all of his views. Incorrect judgments are not made so by virtue of anything within the act of judging itself, but rather because of the facts on the ground. As you put it,

When a judgment is incorrect, it does not negate the self-conscious aspect of judgment; rather, it indicates that the grounds or reasons upon which the judgment was based were flawed or incomplete. — Wayfarer

Is all this consistent with your understanding of Rodl so far?

Again, thanks for the interesting response.

This sounds like the anti-metaphysical movement redux. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think I understand exactly what you mean here. If we link the word "existence" with some particular feature of metaphysics, and then deny that this feature has an application, we would indeed be banishing a central point of metaphysics, at least of the traditional variety. But that's not what I'm suggesting. Again, it comes down to the difficulty I think you're having with severing the link between word and concept.

Try to imagine your metaphysics, whatever they may be, laid out as a series of groundings. Some level grounds another, is thus more essential than another; there may be a level that can be shown by transcendental argument to be necessary for human cognition; etc. etc. Now -- and this is the hard part -- go ahead and put words to it, but don't use the terms "existence" or "being". It can be done, and the doing is quite revealing, I believe. What it shows is that structure -- which is what we care about, you and me*, what we want to understand about the world -- remains intact no matter what words we use for our labels. And that is all I'm saying. It's not the least bit anti-metaphysical. In fact, the whole reason I urge this way of looking at it is to help metaphysics, to get us free from a terminology that, however time-honored, hinders us talking about the important things.

Unless the notion is that existence/being should just mean "every possible thing that has or can ever be quantified, for all philosophers, everywhere, — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes and no. What I would rather is that "existence/being" should be declared meaningless, dead by the thousand cuts of equivocation and ambiguity. (And remember, I'm talking about the word, not any of the various metaphysical carvings of the world that have been given the name "existence.") But if we must use the term, it has a pretty good use within quantificational logic. You're wanting to say that this reduces the idea of existence to something trivial. It would if I were linking word and concept. But I'm not. It's the word "existence" which is trivial in this context, though important for doing logic. This is what I meant when I wrote:

"Now I completely agree that this [Quine's motto] tells us next to nothing. [i.e. it is trivial.] (In particular, it is neutral about some of the uses of "exist" that traditional metaphysics wants to privilege as "real existence" or "what being means" or some such.). But nor should it be controversial."

"all thinkers should be uncontroversially committed to the idea that 'existence' is just 'whatever anyone can or does quantify over.'" — Count Timothy von Icarus

So, just to say it one more time, my idea is most decidedly not this. Maybe by using scare-quotes for "existence" you're leaving it open whether you're referring to the word, or to one of the many concepts of what it means to exist that metaphysicians have proposed. But I think you're saying -- and tell me if I've got this wrong -- that the problem for you here is that existence itself is being reduced to something about quantification, and that doesn't remotely do it justice. And thus would begin the endless wrangles about existence itself. It's those wrangles that I'm proposing (vainly, I know; it's too entrenched) that we stop.

*Reading this over, I see I've assumed that structure is indeed central to your concerns as a metaphysician. But even if you want to understand the world in some other way -- perhaps more phenomenologically, by focusing on individual items of experience rather than the way they relate together -- I think the "existence" terminology is a hindrance. We can find a paraphrase for all questions about being, from Aristotle to Husserl. Same point here: What counts is the thing itself, not how we label it.

1975 (when the liberals and pacifists took over the western world) — Eros1982

I missed that! Dang, and I would have enjoyed it too.

Gadamer says this, in Truth and Method:

That which can be understood is language. — Truth & Method, 442

This is a little cryptic, taken out of context, but what he means is that there are many things we experience that aren't candidates for understanding -- not everything conveys truth or meaning or even comprehension. But what can be understood is language. Nor does this mean that there's nothing but language, or that in understanding language we are only understanding words and symbols. He means, I believe, that we "do understanding" using language, it is our human mode of interpreting the world.

Quite similar, really, to the end of the Tractatus. I know opinions differ about this but I always took Witt to be saying only what is obvious: There are plenty of things we can't talk about -- entire worlds -- but therefore we have to hold our peace and not try to force what can't be articulated into words that we've stipulated can't express it.

(this is only half facetious) — Banno

Aargh! Let's keep it completely facetious! No psychologism :razz:



These are good descriptions of how background beliefs might function, and indeed, I don't think there's a problem with understanding what we mean by them, and how they show up in ordinary life. My worries begin when we try to put them under the same umbrella as "belief" understood as a propositional attitude. Maybe I should just stop there and ask, If I say of Joe, 'He believes that water is H20', when "believes" is understood to refer to background belief of Joe's that he is not currently entertaining, am I ascribing a propositional attitude to him?

Incidentally, I think switching to 3rd person makes the issue clearer, because when we say "I believe such and such .... " it's tempting to say that I couldn't both make the statement and be unaware of the belief. In 3rd person, the believer is not the one doing the stating.

I appreciate your thoughtful response to this.

But there does seem to be an issue in kicking existence out to predication in that a diverse group of thinkers from Kant to St. Thomas have rejected being as a predicate. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The point I'm making about the word "existence" necessitates a kind of viewpoint shift that may not come easily. Let me rephrase it a little: The only thing that all the various uses of "existence" have in common is that they introduce the term as referring to something we can talk about, something we can quantify over. So if we insist on using "existence" and asking what it means for something to exhibit this feature, all we can do is point to the one characteristic they have in common, "being the value of a bound variable." Now I completely agree that this tells us next to nothing. (In particular, it is neutral about some of the uses of "exist" that traditional metaphysics wants to privilege as "real existence" or "what being means" or some such.). But nor should it be controversial. As some like to say on TPF, it's just common sense.

When you say that my modest proposal entails "kicking existence out to predication," that doesn't capture the emphasis I'm placing on language. I'm not saying that the word "existence" be used to cover one sense of existence but not another; I'm recommending we drop the word entirely. (And as I've probably said before, I know this will never happen; but a fellow can dream!). The various grounding and entailment relations that legitimately exist among the various types of being will remain unchanged. A traditional, metaphysically conservative philosopher has nothing to fear here.

The question of existence as a predicate, and Kant's opposition to it, has, I believe, been settled, or at least stabilized, in modern logic. See @Banno's response, above, for a short version. Quantification and predication are two different things. The hot issue here is quantifier variance, but that is (and was) another thread.

Should predicates not include an ontological commitment? — Count Timothy von Icarus

The terminological problem raises its head again, in different guise. Let's say we answer, Yes, they should include such a commitment. What, then, are we committed to? How are we using "being" in a way that clarifies, rather than merely reveals our preferred usage?

does Brutus have a right to be miffed over what seems to be sophistic equivocation here? — Count Timothy von Icarus

No. If Brutus insists on misunderstanding what Cassius is saying, we can't help him, but he doesn't have to. And in fairness, Cassius is obviously trying to get Brutus' goat. He ought to be clearer, and explain that the word "exists" can be used in several different ways . . . which is why I dislike it so much as a keystone philosophical term. But I guess you think it should only be used one way?

At the risk of being repetitive, my complaint is with the term "existence", not the various concepts associated with its use.

My preferred solution, as many of you know. I've seen you refer to this as Quine's "joke" about being, but it's about time we took him seriously. And to the question of "vindicating ordinary speakers," I find it's relatively easy to explain what this means to an intelligent non-philosopher, especially once they understand that it's a wrangle about terminology. It leaves the obvious difference between Pegasus and a table unaltered.

Nothing here should be construed as suggesting that there are no such thing as beliefs. And I'd even go along with reifying them, when we use them as explanations for actions, for example, so long as we are aware that this is what we are doing. — Banno

This would be a happy place to leave the issue, except . . . isn't there a way of posing the question "What are beliefs?" that doesn't have to involve either reification or essence-talk? Do beliefs have an ontology? Is there any sort of noun-form, or are we saying that beliefs are simply acts of believing -- about which we can say a great deal?

I think this is a good candidate for Witt's observations about the bewitchment of language and all that, and I'm open to that perspective, but I'd like to look at it more closely.

In particular, I'm still troubled by background beliefs. If I say, "I [background] believe that the earth is round," what am I claiming?

It strikes me as an error to suppose that because there is a name there must be a thing named.
— Banno

If that's what you think, then you run directly into the following metaphysical problem, known in the literature as a Debunking Argument against Ordinary Objects:

(DK1) There is no explanatory connection between how we believe the world to be divided up into objects the how the world actually is divided up into objects.
(DK2) If so, then it would be a coincidence if our object beliefs turned out to be correct.
(DK3) If it would be a coincidence if our object beliefs turned out to be correct, then we shouldn’t believe that there are trees.
(DK4) So, we shouldn’t believe that there are trees.
— Daniel Z. Korman — Arcane Sandwich

I'm still stuck on this. What does this argument, valid or not, have to do with names and the alleged things they name? Do you mean that to "divide up" the world is to assign various names?

Let q be any thought…..
— J

Nahhhh….I ain’t doin’ that. Language use is tough enough without that nonsense. Sorry. — Mww

No problem, but sometime I'd love to hear why you think it's nonsense. Sounds as radical as Rodl!

To translate the mental event thinking-p into propositional form, you must include "I think". — hypericin

Having given this some thought (ha!), I'd say it captures one of Rodl's ideas about self-consciousness provided we're very careful about what "include" means. Rodl is clear that by "include" we can't mean "have a second thought along with p". The nature of the inclusion -- or "accompanying," to use Rodl's preferred term -- is a bone of contention on this thread. Would you like to say more about how you understand "include"?

Well, what exactly is a concept? You won't find one by dissecting a brain. — Banno

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

The comparison to "concept" is good. Neither one can be reduced to physical items. But don't we agree that there's more to existing than being physical? (Actually, let me interrupt myself here to say that I still think, as I've argued elsewhere, that we'd be better off dropping "exist" and "existence" entirely in metaphysical discussion. But let's go along with it for now.) So my question about how deeply our "denial of thingness" goes was meant to differentiate two positions. One would say that beliefs (and concepts too, perhaps) are valid terms to refer to in propositions, that they pick out important aspects of experience, that they are capable of being understood and related to other abstracta, etc. etc, but they aren't "things" in the sense that a tiger (or a neuron) is. The other position, which I called more radical, would say that beliefs aren't even that, that if we can't be more specific about their ontology, then there's no point in invoking them at all. They don't refer, except as describing a propositional attitude.

It sounds to me as if, by using the phrase "series of interconnected activities and ways of thinking," you lean more to the first construal. That is, there's nothing wrong with talking about beliefs as long as we don't reify them. Is that about right?

An interesting comparison with the word "darkness": I doubt if anyone wants to say that "darkness" is incoherent, or doesn't refer, or betrays a misunderstanding of some sort. At the same time, just about everyone wants to say that there is "no such thing" as darkness. I'm not saying this is a parallel with "belief", which presumably isn't the absence of something else, as darkness is. It's just another example of how we can insist on the existence (that word again) of a phenomenon that can't be understood as a physical item in the world's inventory.

@Mww

This is how it strikes me as well, though Mww has certainly brought out details in the Kantian scheme that are more, well, detailed, than what Rodl provides. (And I'm looking forward to Mww's response, if they have the time, to my question about whether "thought" should be understood as mental product or propositional content in Kant.) But your comparison of the two passages allows us to take a breath, and a step back, and ask, What is our target here? What are we aiming to understand?

For myself, I am always curious to improve my understanding of Kant, and in general to understand any interesting philosophical position at the level of detail. But the larger issue has to do with consciousness and thinking -- how our thoughts connect the world (objectivity) and ourselves (self-consciousness). I want to say that Kant and Rodl are in agreement here -- details of terminology aside, they both present the same picture. “I unite them in one self-consciousness, or can at least so unite them,” says Kant of the representations given in intuition. Why does he not say "in one consciousness"? Why "self-consciousness"? I suggest this is because he would endorse Rodl's view: "Being self-conscious, thought is thought in the first person: I think." Put Kant and Rodl in an ideal room together and I have no doubt they'd argue the details for hours, but also recognize the common conception that unites them.

We can worry about the best ways to use terms like "representation", "conception," "thought", "judgment" et al. -- and these are perfectly good worries, especially if we were all as erudite as Mww in Kantian matters. I'm just trying to pull our focus toward what this entire issue opposes, namely a philosophical view that claims that objectivity is strictly a matter of what is "out there," and that there is a clear separation between what I judge and the act of judging it. It is in this context that the entire fraught issue of "I think" can most usefully be considered.

Sure is. You Aussies sleep during the day, I see. (US-centric gag.) To be continued.

Even to say I think something is to say I have a thought that refers to that something, so again, that thought stands as an object of my thinking, hence a noun. — Mww

Hmm. Let q be any thought (not necessarily a proposition). It isn't clear whether q is 1) the product of thinking, that is, an event that occurs at time T1 to a particular person, or 2) the "something" (content, to use a non-Kantian term) which is thought, and might equally well be thought by someone else.

Tell me if that makes any sense, and then I'll try to address the question of the "I think" accompanying all our thoughts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thus, I'm not sure what I think of the argument that a name implies a thing named, because I don't know how deeply the denial of thingness goes, if you follow me. What's your thought?

@Banno
Just found this: Sider has the opening chapter of Writing the Book available online. It's an even better introduction to his ideas about structure than the standalone essay.

accurately notating that you are indeed thinking-p, and reflecting on your own thought, can both be represented as "I think p" in English. — hypericin

This, and other related puzzles about the use of "think", generated a lot of back and forth in the thread.

I want to think more about your post. You say:

To translate the mental event thinking-p into propositional form, you must include "I think" — hypericin

I need to check back in Rodl to see if I think it's a good paraphrase, but leaving aside Rodl-world, it's a good test case to help us understand what job the "I think" is supposed to be doing in all this.

Semantic ascent . . . but here he is reversing the process. — Banno

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

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

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

Maybe the clue lies in the parenthetical "like various other philosophical questions". Could he be reacting to the ontologically brusque question, What are they? We know he doesn't care to reify what doesn't need reifying, on his view, and perhaps he thinks that, once again, a philosophical question is being posed that demands a description of a metaphysical object.

The belief need not be identical to the statement about it. — Banno

Good, but then what is it?

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

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

Let me know if I have miscomprehended Sider — Banno

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

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

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

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

But of course.

Probably not much help, I know. — Mww

Not at all, very helpful indeed. I've read the entire CPR exactly once, and that was decades ago, so I appreciate the elucidation.

So, to put it crudely, representations would be the stuff of thought via conceptions. In particular, they are those representations of the faculty of understanding, not those of the faculty of intuition, which we call phenomena rather than conceptions. Representations are unexplained, a sort of axiom of epistemology. All we know is, we have them.

I think, based on this, that I see where some of the questions via Rodl arise. Again, forgive me if a simple question prompts a long answer, but if I may: You say that "thought is an activity," something done by means of concepts. But does Kant have anything to say about what the noun "thought" refers to? I always assumed we could harmlessly substitute "conception" or "representation," but how does he in fact understand this?

Interesting. I actually think Kant may be more important to Rodl than you're saying. So I do want to understand any Kantian subtleties here. I may have asked this before, but is it possible to give a simple discrimination between "representation" and "thought," in Kantian terms, if that is indeed the issue that warrants the weight?

@Count Timothy von Icarus

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

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

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

Maybe someone else can make sense of the whole passage.

That goes for background and unconscious beliefs, too. Unstated is not unstatable. — Banno

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which is what I meant by:
Anyway….not that big a deal.
— Mww — Mww

And I by

The whole issue is putting an enormous amount of weight on a very minor difference of wording — J

But I appreciate your take on it.

I liked that ↪J equated statements and beliefs. We'll make a Davidsonian out of them yet. — Banno

:smile: No, at best a small-d davidsonian. There are problems with background beliefs and even unconscious beliefs. "I believe that p" is only one way in which our beliefs surface. Can they surface non-linguistically? A tricky question, off topic here.