You don't defeat a charge of circularity by going in a circle again.

I agree with you, but a die-hard materialist would consider this circular reasoning.

I don't remember ever seeing idea being thought of as something that exists mind-independent — Lionino

Have you... heard of Plato?

What definition? Above I reply to your question. — jkop

The definition you gave. Go back and re-read. I'm not recapping what we just said. Re-read.

we recognize these words that we type by some (but not all) features that they possess — jkop

And now you're introducing "features", which are another abstraction introduced to explain the first. This is exactly what I said you'd do.

Any actual set that exemplifies the description. — jkop

Circular definition.

Again, it's not gonna work.

Descriptions are actual material objects. — jkop

I get what you're trying to do – reduce the abstract to the concrete. It ain't gonna work. Any reduction that successfully reduces abstracta fails to explain them, and any reduction that sufficiently explains them fails to reduce them.

Case in point: can a description be spoken more than once? If we both use the same description, which set of physical events is the description? You'll find that your response to that question either introduces some new abstraction to get rid of ideas, or fails to explain multiple realizability of abstractions.

Try reading what I wrote.

I prefer masturbating over semantics so I can score a point and ignore what's actually under discussion.

I don't really care what the current jargon is. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yep, it does create a cycle of violence. But the cycle continues precisely because both parties are left with no choice. You can't step in and say, "Break the cycle by allowing the other guy to hit you and get away with it!" That just ain't gonna work.

First vs third world = difference in level of technology

Israel is a first-world country in a third-world area.

Ideally, the situation would be for Israel to have advanced weapons and use them to hold off attacks from their technologically backward neighbors. That's what the Iron Dome is meant to do. "Launch all the rockets you want, and we'll just sit here and shoot them down." Hamas says, "Alright, then. Rockets don't work? We'll just charge in and slaughter as many of you as we can."

What is Israel supposed to do?

Yes, people will die. Children will be orphaned. Children will die. Many people will be maimed, crippled, impoverished, and immiserated. Homes and shops will burn. It's going to be horrible, and I think the Israelis know this. But still: what are they supposed to do? Just sit there and take it? Thus encouraging a second strike? No. They have to hit back, and it has to hurt.

What makes this difficult is the fact that Israel is overwhelmingly more powerful than Hamas. This makes the situation difficult for anyone with a conscience. It makes the situation especially difficult for Western leftists, who see everything through a prism of oppressed/oppressor logic. If the first question you ask is always, "Which person is the cop and which person is George Floyd?" then your moral prism will be skewed.

I think that P(psyop) > P(aliens). Between those two flavors of crazy, I pick the less crazy one.

Oh, they're doing the alien thing again. What am I being distracted from?

Ukraine must be losing.

Okay, so when I contemplate an object, I don't need identity conditions for it because my intellectual faculty perceives that object in its naked Being.

But what if somebody else comes up to me and says, "I, too, have contemplated mathematical objects, and I apprehend that there is no form of specific polygons, only a form of The Polygon, and all shapes, like squares and triangles, participate in it."

Then another person says, "I have also contemplated mathematical objects, and the opposite is true: there are separate forms for scalene and right triangles, and I have perceived them both."

Without positing some kind of identity conditions for abstracta, how do I even begin arguing with those two?

The question is, how do you know which form you are contemplating?

I don't know what that means. Your example was triangles. Triangles are identified up to similarity by their angles; and up to congruence by the lengths of their sides; and identified uniquely by their congruence class and position and orientation in space. — fishfry

Is there a distinct Platonic form of the isosceles triangle, or just of triangles in general? Take the exact shape that my shoe has at some instant (since the particles in it move around). Is there a Platonic form of that shape?

I understand what you mean by mathematical structuralism. But relations between objects are only identifiable if you have identity conditions for the objects between which the relations obtain.

If it helps: I'm primarily interested in answering the identity-condition objection to Platonism. The dialectic goes kinda like this, where P is a Platonist and AP is an anti-Platonist:

P: The triangle is a mathematical object that exists.
AP: All of the triangles, or just one?
P: All of them.
AP: Okay. So how do we tell the difference between two triangles? Do all acute triangles answer to the form of the acute triangle, or are there multiple acute triangles?

And so on. The two big objections to Platonism that arise from conversations like this are that Platonic objects lack clear identity conditions and that the ontology is profligate, a crowded slum, what Quine called Plato's Beard. Reducing every object to Math should answer both objections.

But what happens when one modifies the logic? — Marchesk

This is a good question. I would say that modifications to the logic introduce new subdomains. Provided that translation functions can be constructed between those domains, there shouldn't be any problem with all of this being and expression of Math.

EDIT: or perhaps, instead of translation functions, we can say that any logical space that gives us valid derivations from Math is constructed via identity statements.

Whence the boundary of the white triangle? In the perception or in the judgement? — Banno

Dualism of scheme and content. Davidson would tut at you.

Maybe I can say something.

Mysticism is harder to discuss than other subjects because, by definition, it's about stuff you can't talk about. It would be very Wittgensteiny of me to say that that settles it, but that would be premature. The word "ineffable" is a logical contradiction, because it's a word for things there aren't words for, but we can still use it.

I would say that talk about mysticism must be rooted in mystical practice, and ultimately circle back to it.

Yes, I care. I think that the OP's observation about non-combativeness make don't apply to mystical discussion in particular. Non-combativeness should be the rule, not the exception. This is coming from someone who spent years arguing with people on the internet, on this forum and its precursor. I can have discussions, and even debates, and the debates can even get heated, but I don't do "internet arguments" anymore.

Anyway, I think that talking about mysticism is like talking about sex; why talk when you can do?

If you want to be a panpsychist, the best way to do so is to attack emergentism as hard as you can. If you can say that emergentism isn't true, and that consciousness is real, then you can say that consciousness is fundamental.

Replace "such" by "most."

The part that vexes me: is that a bad thing? I'm no Humean, but other thinkers (and feelers) cast their shadow...

Personally I think it would help to normalize part-time work. If a software developer can do their job in 4 hours each day, why the hell should they be at the office for 8?

That's like saying medicine's therapeutic project failed because there are still sick people. — Banno

I think this is a tad uncharitable. Wittgenstein wants to cure a specific illness. The vaccination campaign against smallpox succeeded and there's no more smallpox.

Perhaps we could say that Wittgenstein's project is ongoing, in that it has to dissolve problems as they arise, and problems will always keep arising. But only a minority of professional philosophers are on board with this project, and it looks as if it will stay that way. I think you're right about the reason why.

I think that, assuming we agree on what Wittgenstein's therapeutic project is, it's helpful to ask what motivates it. Does it just see professional philosophy as a waste of time for a lot of really smart people? Is the point just to make the intelligentsia more productive? That seems wrong. It ought to be something more significant than that.

Well, the cure is one that must be self-administered. Many are loathe to be cured. They're like anti-vaxxers in that respect. — Ciceronianus the White

Quite so. Wittgenstein is completely correct that there are no philosophical problems.

But if everybody is just gonna ignore him, then it doesn't help to say that. And in that respect, his therapeutic project has failed.

I don't read him like that. I never thought he was commanding people what they're allowed to do. — jacksonsprat22

Certainly not commanding, but if he was able to do what he said he wanted to do, then you would no longer want to do philosophy after reading him.

He had some important points to make, but his therapeutic project failed; people still do the kind of philosophy that Wittgensteinian therapy was supposed to "cure."

We can argue back and forth all day about whether or not he's correct in his view of traditional philosophy. But the proof, I think, is in the pudding. 69 years later and the philosophers continue to philosophize. If philosophy is an illness, it appears to be terminal, for all of Ludwig's well-intentioned mental oncology.

Okay, let's try an example: the successor axiom in Peano arithmetic says that if a is a number, then so is its successor. And the induction axiom says that if s contains 0, and also every successor of every one of its elements, then s contains all the numbers.

So does Witty's constructivism make the induction axiom nonsense, or does it mean we have to construct the induction axiom from an intension and the number 0? The successor axiom, presumably, is or contains an intension.

SO a Turing Machine could be set up to calculate 1+1, and would halt - hence 1+1 has an extension; but if set up to find root 2, it would not, and hence root 2 has no extension... or something like that. — Banno

So the existence of potential infinites is secured by our ability to grasp a rule, and that rule becomes an intension in the sense used in the SEP article. If the rule allows to construct a finite extension, then we can get extensions from it, too.

So the extension of the set of integers is always finite, although it can be continued arbitrarily. And now I'm being assaulted by that giddiness of logical legerdemain that Witty talks about...

Maybe this is swinging too hard, but: the motivation for this eludes me. Abstracta are spooky, but so are ineffable rules grasped without interpretation. Why does Wittgenstein like this spook more than the Platonic spook?

In other words, how is it that finite signs, as expressed by finite beings, have a sense of infinity. This has more to do with Wittgenstein's later philosophy, i.e., what it means to master a technique or practice — Sam26

There is a means of grasping a rule that is not an interpretation, but is exhibited in following and going against the rule in actual cases, says (paraphrased) Witty.

Did he have anything to say about the Halting Problem? I have a sudden, strong hunch that it's related to this. Maybe I'm just seeing things, but grasping that a Turing machine goes on forever without doing any calculations seems to be a case of grasping a rule in Wittgenstein's sense.

Does anyone else find his absence from the forums a bit odd? His star status was once far greater than any other philosopher, with the possible exception of Russell. Yet he never gets a mention now. — Banno

Absent from the forums, yes, but still read by young people in crisis. When I was in high school, I had a friend who was obsessed with Sartre. So he still plays that role.

Of course you did. Reread your OP. — SophistiCat

Well, no. "I believe the probability is 50/50." This statement is not a probability. You'd have to be pretty dense to confuse those two.

Anyway, either you won't or can't figure this out, so I'm done. Have a nice day.

Maybe I'm just dense, but: the reals are uncountably infinite, which means, if we're Wittgensteinian constructivists, that the set of real numbers doesn't exist, since it can't be paraphrased as shorthand for something that can be done with an intension and a finite set of extensions.

But you said that those two things are unrelated. How come? How do you save the set of reals if it can't be constructed recursively?

So we have him baulking at the the diagonal and rejecting incompleteness as a result. Yet I am in agreement with his constructivist views, as set out above. I was bothered that the one might necessitate the other; however it seems now that they are unrelated. — Banno

I get the sense from the SEP article that Wittgenstein will allow what modern philosophers of mathematics call potential infinites. It looks like Witty would be okay with, e.g. saying that the successor function can be applies an infinite number of times.

I'm not sure how problematic this really is. "There is no set of all the real numbers" is only true from this perspective if we regard the set as an extension. What's stopping us from just paraphrasing it as shorthand for what can be done with an intention and a finite extension(s)?

EDIT: nevermind, I derped. Obviously you can't do that with the reals 'cause they're uncountable. So you have to junk the reals.

I don't see what these koans have to do with what is being discussed, unless you insist on interpreting my words super-literally. — SophistiCat

Okay, let's try it again.

A belief about a probability is not identical to a probability. Kind of like how a movie about you is not you. I have beliefs about the Milky Way, but my beliefs are not identical to the Milky Way. A biography of Otto von Bismarck is not the same thing as Otto von Bismarck, because he's a person, not a book.

This isn't a "koan." Insisting that this is somehow cryptic or hard to grasp is disingenuous in the extreme. This distinction is literally on the same level as telling colors and shapes apart and being able to count. So, if you can't grasp it after this, then I'm done.

No, that is not a given.

What is the probability that it's not a given?

You appear to be confusing "I can always ask about probability" with "every belief has a probability," which I never said.

If you did not, then what is this question supposed to mean? — SophistiCat

A picture of a pipe is not a pipe. A belief that a probability is 50/50 is not a probability.

I can believe that a squirrel is an animal. That does not mean that my belief is an animal. I can use my brain to think about a chair. My brain is not a chair. And so on.

You already channeled the discussion towards Bayesianism when you identified beliefs with probabilities. — SophistiCat

Did I? I think you can always ask a person what they believe a probability to be, but that doesn't make their belief a probability.

Why would they do that? — Baden

Why not?

What you have constructed is a contradiction; they can't both claim to be adding in the way we do and that 2+2=5 — Banno

Same as my question to Baden. Why do we assume that radical translation must yield the same thing we have?

And to both of you: I'm not just being difficult. It's all quite relevant, I think.

Counting this way is correct, because we make it so. And there are cultures that say, "One, two, many," and don't go past a certain number.

But suppose there were a culture that said, "2 + 2 = 5," and their definitions of two, five, equality, and addition were the same as ours. If they all agree, they can't be wrong, can they?