I watched that second video and cannot see anything like that. — flannel jesus

It does work better as a companion to the first video.

The basic idea is that he has his camera mounted on a jib so that he can raise and lower it. At maximum height, you can see the far shore of the lake, which is like 7 km away, I think; when you lower it closer to the water, the far shore disappears. It disappears because it is now below the horizon. That's the math he explains in the second video.

I don't know what else to tell you.

For the second video I posted, the first five minutes goes over his camera setup and the math he is going to be checking. He explains exactly what measurements he will confirm or disconfirm in the video. The entire rest of the video is just a whole bunch of the footage he shot for the first video.

If you watch for a few minutes, you can see the curvature of the earth perfectly clearly.

this video is more a general reply to the op — flannel jesus

And a reply to things "looking pretty flat."

Dan Olson happens to live not too far from a perfect spot to test whether the earth is curved or flat, a very long straight lake. He's just an ordinary guy who makes videos and is capable of being careful and thorough. More or less exactly what you said you wanted.

He looked. The earth is not flat. Case closed.

That covers the whole flat earth cultural thing. He made a companion piece just about the experiment:

The earth's curvature is visible wherever there's a visible horizon — jkop


That's not my experience. Go to the beach, look out to sea, it looks pretty flat to me. Take a photo, I'm pretty sure it's not visibly curved. — flannel jesus

Dan Olson has done the test for you:

And the pragmatist isn't shielded from truth. If he wants his combustion engine to run he will need combustible fuel. Gasoline is either combustible or it isn't, and we don't ask norms, frames, or models whether it is combustible. We ask reality. The only use of norms, frames, and models is in mediating reality. — Leontiskos

Take another look at this argument. Anything odd about it? Anything at all?

Is it reasonably clear? — J

It is, though I wouldn't lean too heavily on the niceties of phrasing. There are just too many possibilities and too many shades of meaning.

Also, I'm not sure the first-person is all that important to the distinction being drawn. We talk about other people's mental events, just as we talk about other people's affirmations and claims and all that. "Judy thought you had gone home." "Judy thinks you should go home."

I guess the biggest question is how you intend to handle the mental events side. Space of reasons or space of causes?

"Judy thought you had left because she heard the front door" as causal: "If Judy had not heard the front door, she wouldn't have thought you had left"; or as not: "If Judy had not heard the front door, she would have had no reason to think you'd left." ― The trouble with the second is that it should really have "and so she didn't" at the end, but it's pretty hard to justify. People think all kinds of stuff, or fail to.

Does any of that matter for the theory?

I think that there is an important sense in which "things are what they do," can be affirmed without having to jettison the intuition that "things do what they do because of what they are." Where I believe we get into trouble is when we end up with something like: "things are what they do and what they do is unintelligible brute fact, i.e. they do what they do "for no reason at all." — Count Timothy von Icarus

But we all, I presume, want to avoid saying that a potion makes you sleepy because of its virtus dormitiva. The "because" in "because of what they are" feels a little thin. Are we sure that talk about how something behaves and talk about what it is aren't just equivalent vocabularies?

As for the second sentence I've quoted, I'm not sure "things do what they do because of what they are" will be much of an advance over "no reason at all." Why do ducks quack? Because it's in their nature? Is that different from saying a duck is a thing that quacks? No one is going to be excited to learn either that ducks quack because they're ducks or that ducks quack because ducks quack.

(Why do ducks quack rather than chirp or croak or bark or meow -- different kind of question, I think. Similarly, why do ducks quack on particular sorts of occasions and not others. There are lots of questions about quacking we can expect substantive answers to.)

a thing and its behaviors are one and the same — NOS4A2

Well, that's a question.

The thing is, models are sort of inherently hypothetical. They tell you what the world would be like if a duck were right there, what patterns you would see, what connections to other loci of behavior there would be, how the world system would work if it included that duck node.

But what about there actually being a duck there? Do you model that by embedding your model into a larger model, and in the larger model the duck existing sort of switches on the model you had before? But that's another kind of behavior, that switching on a model. So how do you model switching on a model? Do you keep going? Can you get actuality by making your model somehow recursive (or maybe reflective)?

It feels to me like actuality is something that always just escapes the model.

Am I wrong about that?

3. The “I think” is not experienced at all. 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. — J

I'd be reluctant to call this self-consciousness, but maybe ...

Imagine a slightly more schematic version: there's the tree, leaves falling from it, a great light on the far side of it. Until that light strikes another surface, there is no shadow. When it does strike another surface, the shadow is formed not just by the tree and the leaves falling; it also takes on the shape of the surface that hosts the shadow. If that surface is angled or curved or bumpy or fractured, so will the shadow be.

In this case, the thought that the oak tree is shedding its leaves is me-shaped. There was no thought until something passed from the tree to me, and if it had not found me, it would not be thought. Thoughts have such shapes, as shadows do. If you consider a shadow, and imaginatively remove it from its host, in the shape of the shadow there would be an impression of that host, just as there is an impression of the scene projecting the shadow. Since you are similar to me, a thought that fits me would come pretty close to fitting you.

But at the moment, it's me. So I would say I am implicated in the thought; it has my shape, after all. But is Rödl saying I am implicitly "aware" of this? Or is he only saying something like I've said, that besides the "content" of the thought ― like the projected shadow ― there is something like a form of the thought, and that form is of me?

if there is nothing at all stable — Count Timothy von Icarus

At the very beginning of this thread, I suggested that if you asked a "deflationist" "What is the being of a duck?", he would find the question incomprehensible, and if you asked it of a "model-builder", he would describe various duck behaviors, in a very broad sense, including how duck tastes. If you insisted you didn't mean any of that, he would stare blankly at you.

I think, @Count Timothy von Icarus, you've landed in a similar place. When it is suggested that the world may only exhibit relative and local stability, you find this unimaginable, incomprehensible. Yes, you're giving arguments in support of your view, but the point of those arguments is only that something else you find unimaginable and incomprehensible would be the case.

Now, if no one could imagine such a thing, we might feel ourselves on safer ground claiming, this just doesn't make sense, or this is against all reason. But in this case, you are disputing @fdrake's view, things he is actually saying. That might give you pause. Your position would have to be that @fdrake does not actually understand the position he claims to and claims to advocate, but not by arguing from a position of superior knowledge, that is, that this is something you understand and that's how you know he doesn't ― you don't have direct knowledge that he doesn't; you believe no one can, from which you infer that @fdrake can't, and finally that he doesn't. Okay. But how will you manage the inference from "I haven't made sense of this" to "No one can make sense of this"?

Near as I can tell, the point of all of this is to be able to say that everything is an assemblage; that is, to flatten the ontology of the world. Why do that?

The measure of success is evidently saving the appearances. Clouds and ducks don't look much alike, so you have to show how they can both be accounted for ("generated" perhaps), how using the same underlying mechanisms can produce endless forms most beautiful.

But as @frank noted, science is already pretty hard at work doing this. In biology, that's evo-devo, genetics, epigenetics, and all the rest. Clouds don't have generic material as such, but they are natural aggregations of the sort that abiogenesis looks to for the origins of genetic material, and there are common chemical mechanisms.

I think what you really want is something like a large set of dials: set them to a certain position, you get a duck, slightly different a mallard duck, quite different a cloud, more different again a nation-state. I'm sure it's an interesting project, but I don't know why you'd want to do that.

In particular, if you're committed to saving the appearances, what makes this an explanatory framework like science (which it really seems to want to be), rather than just a change in vocabulary?

Some quick hits, substance later. I guess.

I think this impulse is the one that I have — fdrake

Hey, so do I!

functionalist — fdrake

Right.

old discussions on the site about related issues with Isaac — fdrake

Yes, exactly. I've just now bothered to find that old exchange. Turns out I even used the phrase "bundle of behaviors" two years ago. Totally forgot I had shoehorned in a rant about sortals in that post.

And sortals were my logico-linguistic way of getting at

being/essence — Leontiskos

The word "essence" was very much in my mind writing the OP. Knew I could count on you to get it, @Leontiskos.

We don't talk this way much anymore. There was a time when "essence" was tidied up as "necessary and sufficient conditions" for ― for what? For truthfully applying a predicate, mostly. Being is scrunched down into the copula, and all that's left is being a value of a bound variable.

Where do Quine's bound variables live? In models. That was the whole point. If your model quantifies over ducks, you're committed to ducks as entities, no cheating. But the anti-metaphysics comes by flipping that around: ducks are entities just means you have a model in which you quantify over them. That implies "duck" has what amounts to a functionalist definition: what role ducks play in the model, how the duck nodes behave, interact with other nodes, and so on.

And the world is already such a place, a sort of real-life model ― as young Wittgenstein noticed about propositions.

And if that's the case, it provides a kind of justification for functionalist philosophy: we know this will work because we're just doing the same sort of thing the world is already doing. Sometimes there's a detour through neuroscience; we know our brains are already doing this sort of thing, and in philosophy we do more of that, for reasons that are a bit unclear.

Nevertheless, it's not exactly the relation "A is a model of B" that I was interested in. It's that functionalist "metaphysics". Now maybe this is a species of

process metaphysics — Count Timothy von Icarus

but those aren't waters I've swum in.

Either there is no being to speak of, or being is entirely unknowable. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, the deflationist view is that there's just nothing to say about the being of things, so don't bother. You can however talk a lot about their behavior, and in fact that's all there is to talk about.

if we stretch the word "behavior" quite far — Leontiskos

Oh yeah, really far. Most ordinary people aren't going to notice that the only consistent way to do this is, like @Isaac, to treat the universe as behavior all the way down, never bottoming out at some thing it's the behavior of. Which is why you might be right, @Count Timothy von Icarus, that this falls into the tradition of process philosophy.

It makes it hard, if not impossible, to find a counterexample in the functionalist approach's own terms. Which means the only way around that is a table flip - reframe the discussion. — fdrake

Exactly. Functionalism, the universal solvent. You and @Isaac and I had exactly this discussion I think ― in a thread about gender, was it?

So, yes, to understand this thread, the first thing is to understand that there will never be anything anyone can come up with that will force the functionalist to say "I can't model that." Never anything that has to be acknowledged as substance rather than behavior.

But precisely because there can, in some very real sense, be no counterargument to functionalism, no counterexample, there ought to be a niggling doubt, such as I have nursed for a long time. Ralph and Sam, striding through philosophy with their functionalist hammers for years, and one day Ralph says, "Hey Sam. You ever notice that the world is full of nails? That there's nothing but nails? That's funny, isn't it?"

That's the sentiment behind this thread.

all other numbers — frank

Hmmm.

All other natural numbers? Integers? Rationals? Reals? Complex numbers?

Sellars. He has a unique combination of nominalism and naturalism, which I really like. — fdrake

Which I think he also considered as falling somewhere within the pragmatist tradition, much as Quine thought of himself. And he was deeply engaged, as they say, with Kant. So everything @Leontiskos finds suspicious in one package.

"Counts as" is a pragmatist move. I think he revived James's talk of the "cash value" of an idea, for similar reasons. Though I might have the history wrong there.

But there is a little problem. Remember that Sellars argued in EPM that you can't reduce all talk of phenomena to talk of "looks" because it makes no sense to say that something looks green unless you know what it means for something to be green. That's his Kantian move. It's about conceptual priority.

Maybe this is different, but you have to wonder: does it make sense to talk about something counting as a duck, if you don't know what it means for something to be a duck?

It's conceptual priority again. It's not obvious that our concepts can be "counts as" all the way down. As a general matter, taking x as y requires that you know what y is, else the gesture is empty.

Unless of course all this talk of what "counts as" what is a suggestive way of talking about what is what.

One of my first lessons in philosophy to my children was the old joke: how many legs does a dog have if you call a tail a leg? And the answer is: four, because calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.

The thing about "counts as" is that we always have to clarify whether we are distinguishing it from "is". When we pretend, assume, suppose, hypothesize, and so on, we agree to treat something as something knowing that it isn't. But sometimes we do it differently: a win by forfeit counts as a win; we all know it's not the same as winning by the usual process of defeating your opponent, but for the sake of competitive standings it's the same as winning.

So to make our understanding "counts as" all the way down, we first smuggle in our pre-theoretical understanding of "is", and then to recover the usefulness of things "counting as" something, we'll have to tack on some distinction in types of counting as anyway.

Yuck.

@fdrake

Here's one more note ― not a direct commentary on this exchange, but another spanner I can't resist throwing in the works.

There's an interview where Orson Welles says this: "You have to distinguish between realism and truth. Look at Cagney: no one actually behaves like that, but every moment he's on screen is TRUE!"

I think we've had this discussion before. — fdrake

That may be, although I like the story you're telling well enough to have told versions of it myself here on the forum, and pretty recently.

I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with this sort of story, but I keep having the feeling that ― and this may not make sense ― it does less than I want because it does more than I want. It treats the universe as sort of flat and so it tells a story that is sort of flat.

things eat in the same sense as they walk, run, dance, skip, speak, interpret — fdrake

I'm not saying that's wrong, so there's no need to get started on a fix. But I don't always want a framework that doesn't distinguish eating from dancing from speaking, or leaves those distinctions optional, or builds up to them in a similarly generic way (apo).

I think there are other stories we can tell that meet different needs.

It's something like a stratum of human behaviour which does the revealing, isn't it? And it's inflected by norms but not totally determined by them. — fdrake

When I was a kid, we used to set the table for dinner, always the same way: on the left, fork, sitting on a paper napkin, on the right, knife and spoon, in that order, dinner plate in between, and all on a placemat. That was our custom. There's logic to it, but it could clearly be done other ways, and was done differently in other homes. There's also a more general norm here, of which we had a specific version, of having silverware for everyone on the table. That too has a logic to it, but needn't be done, much less done this way.

And we could keep going, with more and more general norms that underlie specific ones. But is eating -- rather than eating specific things in specific ways at specific times of day -- is that "just" a norm?

You could say yes if you intend to sweep in everything a human attaches value to; you could make eating a biological norm, so to speak. But we're no longer talking about custom or convention. There is nothing arbitrary about eating. (But it is "optional" if you value something else more highly than your own life, so still arguably a "norm" in some broad sense.)

So I'm just a little leery of a story that's "norms all the way down." The argument that we just happen to say "red" instead of "rouge" for "merely" historical reasons, how well does that extend to eating? If your history takes in the rise of multicellular organisms, which happen to be things that eat, maybe. But to make sense of that, we'd have to look at norms of conversation.

Now what about truth? There are old arguments for and against "truth by convention" that I don't want to rehash. Nor do I want to talk about what people think truth is; for one thing, it's part of the idea of truth that what people think isn't necessarily it. But I do think there's room to talk about the experience of truth, so that's what I've been trying to make a start on here.

Truth as a process. — fdrake

That might be, in a human-finitude sort of way. But I was saying something stronger: we don't so much tell the truth as reveal it, or at least do our part in revealing it. Here's that metaphor taken literally: there is a curtain hiding the facts; I pull it back on my side so that you can begin to see what's behind it, and if you pull the rest on your side, things as they are stand revealed. ― Now, maybe it's best to admit we never quite get the curtain pulled all the way clear, maybe in fact all we get are glimpses now and then when we manage a gap in the curtains, but those glimpses are real and what we see and understand is reality to that degree revealed.

Truth (as a concept) definitely seems to play a privileged coordinating role, even if you grant that it's all coordinating norms. — fdrake

Here too, I want to say something stronger. Or at least I want to make sure the norms in play aren't just matters of what we say and do ― the way these things usually cash out ― but in what we think and believe and know.

Whenever I speak to you, I invite you to see through my eyes, to see things as I see them, and that's so whether how I see things is accurate or not. It's the same when I understand you, which I can do even when I think you're wrong, I can see how you see things. But when I see more of the truth than you and I share that, where we want to end up is that your eyes are just fine, you just have to look where I'm looking and attend to what I'm attending to. ― Maybe that's a matter of deeply shared cognitive norms, at some community or even species level, I don't know.

The thing about truth is that perspective ― "No, stand over here and look. See?" ― may be necessary, in at least some circumstances, to get to it, but truth is never truth only from a particular perspective. Once you've bent down and looked from the right angle to understand how the thing works, you can stand back up. If you would have to be me or think like me to get it, we must be talking about an idea of mine rather than truth. So it is that at most you borrow my eyes, look through them just for a moment, and understand there was nothing special about my eyes anyway. It's not even unusual for you to "what's more ..." me. I was in a better position to see than you and I still missed something.

Alright, I'm beating this to death, which is too bad because I think there are limitations to the seeing business, and very often what we really need and share with each other is narrative.

So roughly, I don't think sentences "bear" truth in the sense required for this debate. It's the norms of use, and we coordinate those by using them in circumstances, and they leave a lot imprecise and unsaid. — fdrake

I want to have my cake and eat it though.

I have considerable sympathy for all of this, but I'm not convinced it's the whole story.

I think we can recognize precision and explicitness as thresholds that are negotiated, without idealizing them into unreachable and thus useless perfection. We say enough to be understood, counting on the audience to fill in as much as they need to to get it, and even that can be negotiated.

But that just kills off an unrealistic picture of how conversation works. Even if your speech doesn't have to carry the burden of truth entirely on its own, it has to do its part.

I keep finding myself thinking that the great value of saying something true to someone else is helping them see it ― like when you point out to someone that a photo of the faculty of your department has no women in it. And it's not just a matter of your words being understood and even credited; if I lie to you convincingly, my words hide the world from you, obstruct and undermine your relationship with it, divert your attention into a shadowy fantasy land. But when I tell you the truth, and you see it, my words fall away.

So I don't think norms and assertibility and all that are the whole story. I think even if sentences don't carry truth like a payload, they still ought to be truth-directed and truth-directing.

I want to take a couple more swipes at treating truth as a predicate.

1. Truth, or some equivalent or substitute, is prior to all the other predicates, underwrites them, and is necessary for doing things like defining their extensions as sets.

You can't define a sentence S as being true if the sentence "S is true" is true without circularity.

2. Intuitively, when you collect things with some property into a set, they're all there because they have something in common.

But if you try to collect true sentences, they each end up in the set for a different reason. "My car is red" goes in because my car is red. "I'm cooking pasta" goes in because I'm cooking pasta.

(I suspect the set of all and only true sentences is incoherent -- Liar? -- but I don't think we have to go there.)

Just as a sentence being true (or false) before it is said makes no sense. — Michael

What are the chances that anyone has ever said that 799168003115 + 193637359638 = 992805362753?

North American ones are ugly — frank

When I was a kid, my family kept some chickens and ducks as pets, I don't know why. Sometimes a fox ― or more often a feral cat ― would get into the pen and cause trouble. I remember running out to the pen one night with a flashlight to see what the ruckus was, and my light landed on a possum sitting there looking right at me with egg yolk dripping out of its little fanged mouth. Most horrifying thing I've ever seen.

In a way, if you put human intellect or human speech on one side and the world on the other, that's an expression of alienation. And there's a long tradition there, this view that because of our intellects and apparently unique cognitive abilities, we stand tragically apart from the world in the way that other animals don't.

And then truth is unattainable because, reach out as we might in language, we can never quite reach the world ― and it is a matter of reaching it, because there is a chasm between us and it. Language is artificial, a kludge. It doesn't belong to the world, anymore than we do.

I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.

This is tangential, but I sometimes think the most fundamental position a person takes -- the one that most shapes his or her worldview -- is whether the world is to be trusted or not. Is the world a good place?

For the skeptic, truth is defined as what eludes us. Nature seems to exist only to mock man's presumption.

You talked before about truth being a relation between a sentence and something else in the world. — Michael

And I don't think that's a terrible first thing to say, but then you have to think about what that relation is and what grounds it. Wittgenstein shows one way of doing that, but of course it's not the only way.

It's the same with all dualisms: having put language here and the world there, you have to put them back together somehow. The usual word for when they do fit together is "truth", because truth is showing things as they are.

In your telling, truth is external to being, a sort of optional add-on. Things are the way they are, and sometimes people say that they are, and sometimes they don't. There's at least a sense here in which things being as they are is embedded in saying that they are, but it's not clear this is enough to get you truth; if language is just a sort of wrapping paper, or labels we stick on things, what would allow you to distinguish one way of wrapping from another? We would still have things over there, and things we say over here, and truth would just be a preference for one design of paper over another.

I'd say the problem is that you want to put truth on one side and actuality on the other, but they are so closely related that in the Tractatus Wittgenstein treats them as different words for the same thing: the possibility of the book being on the table can be expressed in words, in a picture, in a model, or in the physical fact of the book being on the table.

It is because these are different modalities of expressing the same thing that one can be a picture of another. Going the other way, it's also the reason you can build the building depicted in a drawing.

Truth and being cannot be separated as you want.

Srap Tasmaner's response was both witty and important. — Leontiskos

Although, to be fair, you could say this about most of my posts.

@Leontiskos suggested a spot that already exists, that's all. How people use it ― well, they use it like they use the rest of the forum: being on topic is not a priority, and people never tire of rehashing the same debates.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/categories/16/reading-groups

Then I'll say a sentence is true when it corresponds to the facts. And I don't mean anything special by that.

Would you prefer it if I said “truth bearers are features of language”? — Michael

Do you want to say that? I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean, but be my guest.

I didn’t mean anything special by the term “entity”. — Michael

Clearly. It was a kind of placeholder "I don't know what to put here" word. But it is the natural word, in one sense, since you intend to attribute properties to these whatever-they-ares. So why are you backing away from it?

But I don't think this has anything to do with metaphysics at all. Metaphysics concerns the nature of truth makers, not truth bearers. — Michael

"Entities" was *your* word. If you want to pretend that's not a metaphysical word, I don't know what to tell you.

linguistic entities — Michael

Since this thread is, so I understand, in theory about metaphysics, I'm curious whether you have anything to say about these entities. Are you proposing some variety of dualism? What makes an entity linguistic or non-linguistic? (Rain, I take it, is not linguistic.) Are there other kinds of entities or just those two?

what did you mean with the following? — Banno

Consider that question for a moment, and then tell me again how it's the bare sentence and not the use made of it that matters.

Look, you can treat "is true" or "is greater than 3" or "is holding" each as attributing a property to an object, and the surface grammar agrees with you.

I'm just not that impressed by the surface grammar. "4 > 3" says something about 3 and about 4, and about ordering. "The paperclip is holding" says something about the whole Jerry-rigged business. And "What you say is true" is not just a statement about your words.

Or so it seems to me.

The picture theory of meaning? Do you really want to invoke that? — Banno

That would be Michael. Ask him.

the use to which it is put — Banno

This is what I was getting at.

Yes, well, everyone seems to think plain common sense supports their position. What fun.

It's an accurate painting of the front of your house on a rainless day. — Michael

I would say that what you described as a "property" of a painting is more accurately described as a relation between a painting and something else that holds in a certain way and under certain conditions.

being an integer greater than the number 3 makes no sense without reference to the number 3 — Michael

"greater than" is a relation between two integers; it is an arity-2 predicate from which you have produced the arity-1 predicate "greater than 3" by fixing the second value.

(And, not for nothing, but were you tempted to try to formulate this in terms of numerals rather than numbers? Aren't numbers the sorts of abstract objects you wanted nothing to do with?)

To say that a painting is accurate in itself makes no sense without reference to something outside the painting. — Leontiskos

Yes, that was my reservation about saying truth is a property of a sentence.

The case of paintings is curious. If you paint a nice picture of a farm, with a house in the foreground and a barn in the background, your painting may show the barn as being much smaller, even if the actual barn is much larger than the actual house.

Is that accurate? Yes, it is, but accurate as a representation of the world? Or as a representation of a perspective on the world?

(So even the pair <painting, world> looks inadequate.)

Like using a paperclip to replace a cotter pin? — Banno

That was the sense in which I was using "interpretation". Using a paperclip as a cotter pin. More or less.

much like accuracy is a property of paintings — Michael

Hmmmm.

So if you set up your easel in front of my house and make a lovely painting of it, will it seem, even to you, to be accurate if you look at my house from the back? (Or after dark? Or in the rain?)