Nu. They are just patterns. No need for any additional metaphysics.

That’s part of the point of this approach. — Banno

So, the world-stuff creates patterns that we sometimes find useful and turn into mathematics and physics.

he patterns are forms, they are not useful, they are expressions in the extension of matter and energy.
The forms are dynamic, and they have dependence of ....time. — armonie

Shades of Heraclitus?

A pattern that is useful. — Banno

Right, so is math about useful patterns, or about making up arbitrary games, like Chess and Go are made-up games with well defined rules that allow for interesting patterns?

Or maybe both.

The contention here is that this game has similarities to mathematics, in that the playful creation of rules is at the core of both. — Banno

So let's try this out. I as ruler of the nearby city demand you pay a tax. I have my soldiers take three oxen out of your six. You complain that this only leaves three oxen to plow the fields. My official reply is that six minus three is five, by decree. I have only removed one of your oxen.

For some reason, that system doesn't last and is replaced by the 6 - 3 = 3 one we have today.

Let's say the rules of arithmetic are arbitrarily made up, like Banno's math game. The golden ratio is one result of arithmetic. The surprising thing is that it can be find in spiral patterns in nature. Now why might that be? Perhaps the rules or arithmetic are not so arbitrary.

Let's go back to their origins. How did humans come up with arithmetic? Probably when it became useful to track transactions and taxation. And that's not arbitrary.

If you include things like time and position then two objects can never be identical — khaled

There is a the one-electron universe hypothesis where all the electrons and positrons are just one entity traveling back and forth through time, thus explaining how they all have identical mass and charge.

Setting that idea aside, even if physical objects can't be identical, some properties do have that quality. Leading us to ...

Universals (or Tropes).

As an adopted convention, it doesn't make sense to ask whether two things really are identical. — sime

Like the morning and evening star, water and H2O, temperature and molecular motion, Samuel Clemens and Mark Twain, the empty set and 0, or the charge of every electron in the universe.

Or that damned ship that had all its parts replaced during its voyage.

If we say that there is a strict demarcation between science and pseudoscience, then we are committed to saying that all worldviews prior to our current scientific worldview are false and meaningless. To say that would look like a prime example of cultural chauvinism and the modernist myth of progress. — Janus

But there is clear progress, at least in terms of science and technology.

Hence my asking about information theory. Recognising that a signal contains a message seems to me to imply some level of understanding of the message. — Banno

Probably so. I was more focused on whether we could understand the concepts if either the aliens sent us something difficult, or they thought a lot differently, without trying to provide a simpler cipher to help us along.

In Contact, the aliens had included a decoding schema starting with basic arithmetic and chemistry, but the goal was to provide plans for building a machine, which is a little different than sending a cultural text. What was also discussed was the alien's intentions in doing so, which could have been nefarious. It wasn't included in the message, so there was no way to know their intent until operating the machine.

Whatever dudes. — Wallows

Mentioning that he starved himself to death because of a food paranoia tends to grab the attention.

Sure, it might be message.

But let's say the signal is in a pattern of prime numbers like with the book and movie Contact, so we would know for sure it was artificial. But let's say the aliens, for unknown alien reasons, decided to send us the works of some arcane philosophy in the writing style of someone like Derrida without any additional guide to their language or culture. That might be untranslatable to us.

If we couldn't translate it, how could we know it was an alien signal? — Banno

I believe it's possible to know that a radio source is non-natural without being able to decode the message. Or at least that's what I've heard from SETI talks. The first goal is detection, and then after that would be decoding it. You can't decode before you detect an artificial signal.

Or it's like, Western science is inherently imperialistic and sexist, so we should reject it's truth claims in favor of culturally appropriate ones.

Was there a philosopher who looked at things this way? — frank

Richard Rorty might be an example. Certainly relativism has been around since ancient philosophy. I believe the Sophists made arguments that truth was relative.

That makes sense.

We have to be able to say, "No, that is a thought we ought not have about others." — TheWillowOfDarkness

No, we have to be able to say that is an action we should not take against others. Thoughts are private to the individual and nobody else's business. We all have uncharitable and rude thoughts about this or that person for whatever reason. But it's what we do or say that matters.

To posit intranslatability without access to transcendence produces an incoherent picture. How could human Jim know the instructions were impossible to translate? If he couldn't know that, he shouldn't be insisting that there is incommensurability. — frank

If we were to detect an alien signal, but were unable to decode it despite our best efforts, wouldn't that imply incommensurability? Or just really strong encryption?

Who has suggested (or who do you think might suggest and so need correction) that the physiology of these systems might be mediated by language use - the act of communicating with words. — Isaac

The physiology wouldn't change, but brain processes that integrate that sensory information into perceptions might, if they're mediated by language. That's what the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests. Looks like Davidson is arguing in contrast that we all actually perceive the same world, we just form different schemas of reference based on those perceptions, which can be translated between one another.

So while Eskimos might have 50 words for snow, and we have one, they could point out how their words point out variations in snow we gloss over in our language. The interesting question there is whether we noticed those differences before becoming aware that you could differentiate snow into fifty different kinds?

There has been discussion on whether the Ancient Greeks saw a blue colored sky or water based on Homer's odd choices of color language.

Using philosophy to prove philosophy is bunk proves philosophy isn't bunk. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Its philosophical bunk all the way down.

Just to be precise: What Banno said to me was: Philosophy amounts to nothing. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Right, I take it by that he means there's nothing meaningful to philosophy that can't be addressed by either science or ordinary language use, with the possible exception of ethics, and maybe aesthetics, but here I'm reaching.

And I don't know whether that's true or not. But I want it not to be. It offends my need to scratch the itch.

Great. Have at it, a guy who was best friends with Einstein taught at Princeton and completely demolished Hilbert's program is... crazy. Is this shitposting taken to a new level on TPF? — Wallows

Hey, I've watched A Beautiful Mind. Being crazy doesn't mean you can't also be an accomplished genius. And I was only referring to the part about starving yourself to death out of food paranoia. That sounds like an untreated mental illness.

I don't expect big answers from philosophy. (I — ZzzoneiroCosm

i don't expect answers, but I do expect big questions.

It takes a lot of philosophical discourse to dissolve philosophical discourse. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Yeah, I don't know. An interesting question that comes to mind is to ask whether it's true that philosophy is bunk, and how we would know that to be case.

Maybe i'm just biased toward wanting to think philosophical problems are legitimate.

. He was paranoid about food and starved himself to death; but, not "crazy". — Wallows

Uhhhhh .... sure.

I get the deflation thing. It's almost a kind of anti-philosophy. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Banno stated in this thread he's convinced philosophy is bunk, so the goal would be to deflate/dissolve philosophical discourse.

Davidson claims to have "reestablished unmediated touch with objects." I don't see any basis for this claim. — ZzzoneiroCosm

That sure would make deflation easier.

Not because I know any better but because perfectly intelligent people possessed of all the same facts nonetheless disagree. — Isaac

Right. Take "The snow is white", for example. So we can all agree it's true in one sense when looking at a patch of white snow. But then turn it into a debate between a color realist and a scientific one, and there's no longer agreement. The statement is no longer trivially true, because we move beyond an agreement on how snow appears to human eyes to one over what properties snow actually has.

If we took the statement "The sun is setting" from some ancient cosmology made at the right time of day, would it still be true when translated to modern cosmology? Or is that statement only an ordinary language one that people from any culture or time period would agree on?

And here it seems that the intent of the speaker matters. Maybe an ancient Hebrew making the statement simply means the time of day when they look up at the sky, which we could all agree on for that date. But maybe they mean to say something about reality, which was also done, since they did have their own cosmology and beliefs about the heavens, and what it meant for the sun to set.

In which case the statement being true when translated to our modern cosmology would depend on what the speaker meant.

Their truth would be dependent on what was said no less than in any other scheme. The point is simply that it would be relative to what the terms refer to in the scheme, truth being a property of propositions and propositions always being in some language or other. — Isaac

Okay, but what if the terms of that schema are wrong (flawed, misleading, contradictory, etc)? Are they still referring to a translatable true statement in our schema?

They didn't have 115 either. They were missing some concepts. — frank

So if we were to translate 115 into their language, would we have to teach them the missing numeric concept first?

The distinction between appearance and reality is important to the notion of truth. So while it's true that the sun appears to set in the sky, and it's true that we can all agree on that, it's not true that the sun actually moves across the sky of a stationary Earth, which is what it appears to do, and it's what people in the past believed based on that appearance, which is where the term originated.

So while this is annoyingly pedantic to point out, it matters (or so I suspect) when it comes to deflating truth to ordinary statements. What does it mean for a statement to be true? Well, it can't simply mean what appears to be the case, since appearances can be misleading. And if we're talking about what the statement refers to, then we need to know whether it'a referring to an appearance of a moving sun, or the astronomical fact of the rotating Earth.

The being true part is kind of important when distinguishing between different theories of truth.

I guess I don't understand what role truth is playing in Davidson's argument. We can be pragmatic and agree that snow is white and the sun sets. But truth can also mean what really is the case, particularly in a philosophical discussion when correspondence, coherence and deflationary theories are brought out.

In real terms at the end of the day, the sun sets. — unenlightened

it doesn't though, it only appears to. Just like the Earth appears to be stationary, and to some deluded or ignorant folk, flat.

ou are confusing truth with a theory of everything which in our case we do not have. Does this mean that no one speaks the truth? — unenlightened

We don't need a theory of everything to understand the truth that the Earth rotates, creating the appearance of a rising and setting sun. That's a fact.

Truth is a property of propositions, not conceptual schemes, and in propositions, the translatability then becomes relevant again. — Isaac

Okay, so Norse conceptual schema: The stars are heaven's light peaking through the head of giant's skull.

So if a Norseman made some statement about the North Star, with that being translatable to a correct modern statement about the North Star, would both of them be true, since the North's belief about stars being radically different than ours?

The very idea! — unenlightened

Well, the truth of propositions got brought up in this discussion. So, if we're talking about truth, then pragmatic everyday talk isn't good enough.

But it is almost as dull to suggest that the sun does not set because the Earth rotates. — unenlightened

However, that was the astronomical view at one time, and there other things in ordinary language that people do believe which are scientifically incorrect.

Sure, but which one? You may favour one and I may favour another for our different purposes. — unenlightened

The one that's true.

if there is no reference to snow, then what does it mean to say snow is white?

Some. Not all. — creativesoul

Which world(s) do the others live in? Is that a support for conceptual schemas?

Do you understand this? — creativesoul

Yeah, he's arguing against incommensurability and that people can have these fundamentally different conceptual schemas that can't be translated. Which basically amounts to abolishing he notion of conceptual schemas. We all live in the same world. I more or less agree with that.

So what was the statements being true and rising suns of the last couple pages all about?

Why shouldn't it just be that we use words to talk to each other, and that's it? — Banno

Because although it works in everyday life, it doesn't survive philosophical scrutiny. In this case, what does it mean for a statement to be true?

So he means coherence among existing beliefs? A web of belief kind of view of truth? The sun's setting is coherent if it adheres with other beliefs about the world?