with no further justification than its usefulness — Banno

Is this usefulness just brute fact, or can we hope to explain why this grammar is useful?

If Anscombe addresses that, you can just point at her again.

Hmmm. Is there going to be any way to flesh out the idea of using something to do something that doesn't rely on causality?

I'm not quite following.

Is the idea to drop the idea of instantiation?

But what are you going to do with universals if not instantiate them?

If that model has issues you want to avoid, then you just go for predicates (which you're already keeping) and their extensions.

The idea of *starting* from resemblance and building everything from that might be worth pursuing. (@bongo fury has some ideas about how to police the borders.)

But then you won't start out talking about universals.

in the end we're doing things with words. The relevant context reveals what we're doing, not just the words or sentences themselves. — Andrew M

I just can't get around the idea that in most, but not all, cases we use the words we do because they're the right ones. I don't think a linguistics that is all pragmatics with no syntax or semantics is a real option.

Which, in turn, would seem to relate identity and convention to purpose. — Andrew M

I wouldn't deny that there are choices we make, sometimes implicitly, which enable us to enact our purpose; I just don't think that makes our purpose constitutive of the objects we interact with. I think they have to be there, as they are, for us to have the options we do, among which we select the one that aligns with our purpose. If you can sometimes sort papers by author and sometimes by keyword, depending on your purpose at the moment, it's because they have authors and keywords. If they didn't, these wouldn't be options for you.

Each and every property of a particular must be understood as essential to that particular, that's what makes a particular a unique individual, distinct from every other particular. This is what the law of identity recognizes. — Metaphysician Undercover

So now we're back to @Isaac's teapot and the missing screw. In that discussion, the question was only about successfully referring to a particular that (might or) might not possess a property you believe (or don't believe) it does. I think it's plain that you can; for some cases, I'm leaning on the causal theory of names, and for others on how demonstratives work: you can clearly demand someone get "that" off your kitchen table even when you know very little about what "that" is. Exactly how that works may be unclear; that it works, I believe, is not. (We may come back to the double-bind theory of reference eventually.)

Here, we might start with the question of whether "being on my kitchen table" is a property of the object in question. It can be expressed as a predicate, as I've just done, but we could just as well express the situation as my kitchen table having the property of "having that on it," assuming again that "that" will manage to refer to the object. Or we could define a two-place predicate "on" such that "on" is true of an ordered pair <that, my kitchen table>. For either of the one-place predicates (of that, or of the table), I would be asking you to make something that is true of one of them false; for the two-place predicate, I would be asking you to make something that is true of the two of them false.

There are a couple ways to take that: I described "on" as a relation not just of two objects but of two objects in a particular order, so that on(table, thing) was already false, but on(thing, table) was true and I want it to be false. on(table, thing) and on(thing, table) describe different states of the world; in this case, the demand to make whichever is true false needn't concern itself with the order, because context will take care of that. But if I asked you to put that thing on the table, my demand would not be satisfied by you putting the table on that thing. So if we want on/2 to carry the same meaning across different uses, we can't rely on context in that way, and have to build in the required order. How do we do that?

Do we say that "on" takes three objects, the two from before and a third that specifies the order? If so, the third would look something like this: "1 = thing, 2 = table". Such a list can be presented in any order, so we don't have a regress, only a rule about each natural number up to the arity of the predicate being used, so this is a genuine option. But our new on/3 takes two concrete objects and a third which, whatever it is, is not like that. I say "whatever it is," because the semantics of the ordering list are unclear at this point: are those objects in the list, or expressions referring to objects? I guess either would do, but we're still building in a lot of other stuff, some of which looks suspiciously abstract, so we could just give in and have "on" take a single abstract object which is the ordered pair <thing, table>.

If we do that, my asking you to get that thing off my kitchen table would be asking you to make "on" false of the ordered pair <thing, table>. No properties of the concrete objects will change when you do so. We've added a step, so that "on" is not true of the concrete objects themselves, but of an ordered pair of the objects, which is a bit of a surprise. I'm not sure how much that should count against the scheme.

Can we do something similar with other cases? For instance, if my bike tire is flat, is it a different object once it's inflated, or is it just a different arrangement of tire and air, the tire itself never changing? (In this case, we may or may not have any specific batch of air in mind.) But then what would we say about the shape of the tire, that surely changes when it's inflated? If anything is a property of an object, surely its shape is. But I make different shapes when I sit and when I stand — does that make me a different person? What all of these examples have in common is that there are at least two different times considered: the tire is never flat and inflated at the same time, I am never sitting and standing at the same time, and so on. So a first attempt at distinguishing what is essential to an object from what is accidental is, naturally, distinguishing what is constant or invariant about it, what does not change from one time to another, and what does or can change from one time to another. Essential is what is time-less, and accidental is what is time-dependent. The same dog barks at one time and not at another.

But Isaac's screw-missing teapot raises a batch of familiar problems: evidently material constitution is not a great candidate for the timeless identity of an object. If we replace the missing screw with another of the same size, we have the Teapot of Theseus: is it the same teapot after as before the installation of the new screw? (It's considerations like this, if memory serves, that drove Peter van Inwagen to conclude that inanimate objects lack identity altogether, and thus do not, strictly speaking, exist.) One solution offered, in a sort of conventionalist spirit, is that this is all a collective fiction: there are no things with identities that we come along afterward and refer to; rather, our various acts of reference, intended and accepted by us as such, and our deeming these acts successful, is all there really is here. Thus, the slight oddity of Russell's account of definite descriptions — that they involves implicit existence claims — is vindicated, because indeed we are asking others to accept , at least for the duration of this exchange, what amounts to a stipulation that there is a dog when we say "the dog is barking."

The conventionalist account doesn't automatically undermine a distinction between essential and accidental properties, of course; you could take it as simply falsifying all claims of essence, or you could conversely take essence as whatever we tacitly agree it is. We generally count me as being the same person sitting or standing, and since that's all there is, that's enough.

But there's an odd wrinkle to all this. If I, like Isaac's teapot, do have an identity, then a proper semantics of me would require everyone to speak of me as if I do, and we would expect the corpus of attempted references to me to roughly, and only roughly, follow this requirement. That means the conventionalist will argue that our broad agreement in how to talk is just that, and nothing more; while the identitarian will argue that our broad agreement is a consequence of there being objects with identities. The conventionalist would seem to have parsimony on their side, and can allow or disallow the hypothesis of concrete self-identical objects as their mood dictates; but the base position is that it is more perspicuous to venture only that we say what we say. The object-identitarian offers a theory that explains why we talk the way we do, and the conventionalist can just say he doesn't need one.

That means there are two overlapping arguments here: on the one hand, the conventionalist can keep poking holes in whatever theory of object identity the other side comes up, because he needs no such theory anyway, and may even think no such theory is possible; on the other hand, the object-identitarian has to come up with a theory that works and show that it is needed, which means he also has to find some flaw in the conventionalist account of our referential speech acts — not for the sake of his theory but to show that some theory is even needed. What's not clear in any of this is how the evidence is to be handled: I'll venture that most people's pre-theoretical intuition is that we talk the way we do because things are the way they are, and that our talking the way we do is in fact evidence that things are the way we say they are.

But we have those pesky scientific refutations of how we talk: sunrise, solidity, and so on. That doesn't show that how we talk is never evidence of how things are, but it does show that it isn't always such evidence. On the other hand, the conventionalist can shift from the claim that how we talk is only evidence of how we talk, and nothing more only for methodological reasons, to a claim that how we talk is only we how talk — now meaning our agreement is precisely evidence that there is nothing more.

If that were true, it would not only deny the object-identitarian what was counted pre-theoretically as evidence but change the character of what's to be explained by any such theory. If the mean girls call you a loser, that's just a thing they say: the truth-value of their statement matters to you, but not to them; what matters to them is producing some effect, of hurting your feelings. That's the sense in which it is "just something they say." But not only can you not conclude from someone saying something that it must not have a truth-value, in this case the effect is only produced if you assume that it does, and they assume that you will assume that it does. If they know you will discount what they say as being just mean-girl noise, or just noise period, there's no reason for them to say it. The conventionalist can retreat again and say that the hurt feelings are known inductively to follow utterances of "loser," and that's all the mean girls need. That might actually be true! But you have to show that such an account really will extend to cover all language use. This situation is so simple that I think what we're really seeing is not exactly language at all but something more like dominance signaling that happens to use language because, well, there it is; we tend to use words even when what we're doing is really nothing more than growling articulately.

Cannonball Adderley, Somethin' Else

what "trading intensions for extensions" means — Janus

Just that classical logic can't deal with propositions of the form "It is possible that you pick a red marble," but can happily deal with propositions like "There is a red marble in the set."

That's close.

The idea is just to show how what is a possible or a necessary result of you picking from a set can be cashed out in terms of what *is* or *is not* there to be picked.

(This is, to my understanding, the motivation behind possible world semantics: you get to trade in intensions for extensions, and then standard truth functions are available again.)

Have a link to the Watkins paper?

Nvm, searched it up

It's because the domain of the quantifier is explicitly restricted to the marbles in this set.

Let's look at another example, so we have a comparison. (There are features of the first example that may be confusing.)

Consider playground balls, the ones kids play dodgeball and four-square with. Those are (classically) all red. Why? Because they're made from red rubber. We would say, it is impossible to make a non-red ball out of red rubber. That seems straightforward.

Do we mean something similar when we ask if this red ball 'might have been' a different color, or if it 'can be' a different color? Or if we ask, of some ball, the color of which we do not know, if it 'must be' red?

Is this ball *this ball* if it is a different color? Is redness essential to it? For comparison, if this ball is flat, we can inflate it, and we will not usually say that being flat is essential to what the ball is, just its temporary state.

But it is nevertheless true that if it is flat, it is not fully inflated, and that's just the law of noncontradiction. When we say this red ball cannot not be red, are we even saying anything about the ball? Or are we only saying that at this world, as at all others, the law of noncontradiction holds?

To say that there are no worlds at which this ball is both red and not red is to say almost nothing at all. There simply are no such worlds, no worlds at which any ball, this one or another, is both red and not red. If we deem the redness of this ball essential to it, there are no worlds at which this ball is not red, on pain of simply being a different object. If it is inessential that it is red, like being flat, then there are worlds at which it is blue, is green, is white, and so on. And that's what we mean when we say this ball 'might have been' some other color.

When talking about particulars, like this specific ball, we can't make modal claims, I think, without considering what is essential and what accidental about that particular.

We're in very different territory if there's a bin of red playground balls and you're grabbing one of those. In such a case, it's perfectly clear what we mean when we say you cannot pick a ball that is not red: there is no such a ball to pick. To say that you might get the one with "Zeppelin rules" scrawled on it in Sharpie, is to say there is a ball in the bin so adorned, and this inscription makes it unique; to say you might get one bearing those words, is to say this is a thing someone might have done, that it is possible someone has done it.

But how do we get necessity out of the law of noncontradiction? That if something is red, it cannot not be red? Since the law of noncontradiction holds at each world, restricting to worlds at which "The ball is red" is true automatically embodies the necessity we were looking for: for any world w in that set, the ball is red at every world accessible (under this restriction) from w. That's our definition of necessity. No world at which it is not red, or also not red, can sneak in.

How have I used "opposite" to mean different things? — Luke

One predicate is distinct from another if they don't have identical extensions, even if they overlap (as various cases of possibility and necessity do). One predicate is the opposite of another, usually, if one is the complement of the other, includes everything it doesn't and nothing it does. I'm not sure we have an everyday word for only being disjoint, that is, being a subset of the complement.

Sorry, this just looks like gibberish to me. That's not how technology evolves, not how engineering works, this whole image you have of some cabal of the powerful imposing shit on the helpless plebs, that's just what you say about everything and has almost nothing to do with the evolution of the Internet, for example.

What you can do with it is not only a question of technical know-how, but of power. — Isaac

Yes, good point.

there's lots of other aspects of the non-renewability of Western growth that don't suffer from that problem - exploitation of labourers, pollution, habitat loss... These are all direct 'thefts' which don't have the problem of simple finite resources. We could just leave all the potential value from labour exploitation, pollution, and habitat loss untapped. We could just say it's not worth it. — Isaac

I think this is where we started.

Let's suppose there is a way of using the earth's resources that is largely sustainable — perhaps only up to a certain total population, whatever constraints we end up with — something more than using no resources but less than what we've been doing so recklessly. Can there be some similar happy medium with labor? Is employment inherently exploitation, or can we imagine an arrangement with safe working conditions, reasonable work/life balance, compensation above some level we'd see as fair?

I am somewhat attracted to universal basic income schemes, because I think the idea of at least partly detaching livelihood from employment could be very powerful. If you could be an adult with a secure, let's say "lower middle-class" lifestyle, and working only part-time, that would allow you more time for pursuits that could be of value to other people as well as yourself — volunteering for a charity, at your church if that's your thing, political activism, even the sort of civil society institutions like bowling leagues that have famously dwindled because people lack the time and energy. (It's what you do in retirement now.) Even civil service: maybe we should all be a garbage man once a month for our community, or help mind a kindergarten.

Anyway, question there, before waxing rhapsodic, was: as there might be an amount the earth can give sustainably with ruining her, might the same be true of people? Is it inevitable that employment be onerous? (God, feels like we're starting one of schop's threads.)

the systems we set up have emergent properties which none of us would rationally want individually. — Isaac

Oh yes, and by "dumb" I really meant not noticing that. Some of this is well-known to game theory. Schelling's segregation model, for instance. I've never had a close look, but I believe Robert Thaler's choice architecture stuff would be one way of attempting to address this sort of thing.

You are a part I meant as a consumer of the technology. Not sure how you took that literally. — schopenhauer1

Because if you thought of yourself as, or felt yourself to be, a depersonalized part of a great machine, then your position would make sense. It's still not clear why I should feel bad that I am consumer of the internet, anymore than Hank Aaron should have felt bad before playing a game he didn't invent using a bat he didn't make.

The idea seems to be that anything that I don't have complete control over has complete control over me. I should feel bad because I am not a god.

Before that was

Mal Waldron, Hard Talk
Mal Waldron, Quadrologue at Utopia
Mal Waldron, Crowd Scene

Most recently:

Dexter Gordon, Live at the Montmartre Jazzhus (Kenny Drew p, NHOP b, Tootie Heath d)
Duke Ellington, Black, Brown & Beige (The 1944-1946 Band) (studio recordings, on Bluebird)
Charlie Parker, Complete Dial Sessions
Duke Ellington, The Blanton-Webster Band (studio recordings 40-42, also on Bluebird)
Ornette Coleman, Something Else!!!!, Shape of Jazz to Come, Tomorrow is the Question, Change of the Century, This is Our Music, Ornette!, Free Jazz, Ornette on Tenor (most of the albums from 58-62, all of them because they're in a box set from Enlightenment, cost me maybe $15, worth it even duplicating a couple I already had)

Don't remember before that, was listening to a lot of Monk for a while. Don't know what I'll grab from the milk crates next.

You are but a spec in this technology — schopenhauer1

No, no I'm not. Neither are you, though evidently you think you are. I am a human being, not a network device, and I'm not part of the internet, but a user of the internet.

There are two possibilities here, I believe, and you needn't tell me which one applies if you don't want to:
(1) You think you are part of the internet.
(2) You feel you are part of the internet.
We may be able to talk about (1). I am not qualified to address (2).

But is it for his work or his biopic potential — apokrisis

The work. Deflation about truth. Subjective probability. Ramsey sentences. Other odd bits here and there.

It's an interesting moment. Quine had very strong nominalist leanings, did not want to allow sets into his ontology, but "To be is to be the value of a bound variable." We quantify over sets in our theories (i.e., models), so to accept that we are committed to their existence is a *pragmatic* decision par excellence.

This is about control right?

Because it becomes a hierarchy where you become a secondary character in your own life. You just support those who matter to the creation of the tools. — schopenhauer1

So Hank Aaron was a bit player in the story of the guy who made his bat?

I think you need something more there.

On my reading of the current situation in anglophone philosophy, which is admittedly limited, Ramsey cuts a wider swath than Wittgenstein. For what that's worth.

That is why I see pragmatism as the core of the philosophical project - the right balance between the logicist and empirical tendencies. — apokrisis

I think that's what we all want, and maybe why the mid-century titans of analytic philosophy, Quine and Sellars, each claimed the mantle of pragmatism at some point.

AP can get to lost in wonder at the power of predicate logic, for example. Ironic that is must set itself against dialectical logic as being “too metaphysical” for this boundary-policing reason. — apokrisis

There's history there, not all of it pleasant. But it is a simple fact that it is the analytic crowd that took modern science seriously, from Russell onwards. The more Hegelian continental tradition (at least because more Marxist) turned its back on science, or arrogated to itself the task of fixing science, rebuilding it as something else.

The generally pro-science sympathies of analytic philosophy, on the other hand, never fit comfortably with the linguistic turn, so there's a longish period when science is not particularly welcome in either camp. That seems to be all over now. I'm not convinced the continental tradition can find its way back, but analytic philosophy has changed a lot from the mid-20th.

Maybe it will embrace your dialectic yet. Maybe it already has, but it's hard to recognize in those funny clothes.

Gosh, in so many words? I dunno. I'm tempted just to say "everything."

Once epistemology is naturalized, and ontology defined as identifying what entities your theory commits you to, it seems the role of philosophy is to tidy up logical issues that might get in the way of, if not the practice of science, then the understanding of science.

The nature of mathematics and logic, for instance, are things that mathematicians and scientists are not to be bothered about; we philosophers will deal with that on their behalf. If mathematicians need sets, for example, even if we're not happy about it, we'll deal with the philosophers who say they can't have them.

I honestly think there are statements almost directly to this effect, early and late, but it's the whole tenor of his work, to my mind. Plenty of philosophers ignore aesthetics, for instance, or ethics, but I always thought Quine didn't so much ignore them as exclude them. Do you read him differently?

It appears to be a sequence of thoughts, of ideas. — Art48

Renoir or someone - I forget - once said to Mallarme, "Maybe I should try my hand at writing poetry. I have so many ideas!" To which Mallarme responded, "Alas, poems are not made of ideas, but of words." In a similar mood perhaps, William Carlos Williams defined the poem as "a small machine, made of words."

As it happens, John Huston's film of The Maltese Falcon is a nearly word-for-word adaptation, through a lucky historical accident. But that doesn't quite make it a new encoding of the novel; it is a new work of art that tells almost exactly the same story, and in a way we can recognize as similar. Nearer to the novel than any translation or paraphrase into other words could be, I think.

It's an interesting question.

Many may see the job of philosophy is to be anti-science - its challenger rather than its supporter. — apokrisis

Ick.

But I have sometimes thought there might be a role for philosophy if rigorous inquiry is possible for some domain that for some reason is not quite amenable to natural science. Mathematics and logic are bit like this, and in old books, but not newer, were often labeled sciences. And I have entertained the possibility that phenomenology could have such a character.

Quine had this idea that philosophy is the handmaid of science, and I never found that convincing either.

Drawing a hard line between domains of human inquiry seems a mistake. — apokrisis

Agree, it's just hard to explain in what sense philosophy is a type of inquiry, lacking candidates with wide support for what its domain is. Inquiry into what? <insert crappy answer, handwaving optional>

we can say we are natural philosophers — apokrisis

That's an appealing suggestion.

It doesn't help your case to implicitly compare yourself to perhaps the single most important figure in the development of modern science. Maybe aim your telescope a little lower.

This thread might provide a better opportunity for discussing the subjective and objective than this vague thread. The interpretation of a work of art is a good test case in part because, as I think @Dawnstorm suggested, there's stuff in there the artist didn't put in deliberately. But it is, objectively, there. Some stuff you find only if you bring it with you, so subjective.

There's also the peculiarity that what's not there, might not be there on purpose, which happens with expression not intended as art too, but plays out differently with art. There are various ways this is done for various purposes with various effects. Always cases. Since it's not there, but the place for it is, this is particularly interesting spot for addressing the objectivity and subjectivity of interpretation.

because he actually understands QM — Tom Storm

Assuming that's a thing people do.

But knowledge and understanding are on a scale anyway, so it's tempting to say that you only need to know enough about how QM works to know what kind of theory it is and how it intersects with metaphysics, so there should be a level of detail below which physicists will care, but for philosophers these are differences that don't make a difference.

In theory, but in practice a lot of us just aren't clear what sort of animal QM is.

And presumably he would see far more clearly than others what the actual gaps in QM are likely to be, where the science 'runs out' and the point where the metaphysical interpretations can begin. — Tom Storm

But on the other hand, will he recognize metaphysics, or where metaphysics should go, when he sees it? Or will scientists always perceive gaps as places to be filled in with more science later? The working hypothesis ought to be the latter. I doubt there is ever a clear point at which you can't do any more science, and it's probably best not to think, even in theory, that there is a lawn for us to chase them off. So maybe not recognizing the opportunity to go metaphysical is a feature rather than a bug.

So I'm back to thinking that philosophy is defined as whatever's left over, that it's whatever science hasn't been able to do much with yet. A mere science incubator — or nursery! — as it always has been. Maybe that's okay if we take that role seriously and try to raise good responsible little sciences.

We have not expanded the wealth of the world by expanding opportunity, we've done so by stealing opportunity from future generations via over-exploitation of non-renewable resources. — Isaac

I'm broadly in agreement, of course, but there are still some interesting puzzles here. The non-renewable resources are finite (but may not be finite in a way that matters to us if in a hundred years we're mining asteroids with robots), so that fits your story that there is a fixed amount of wealth. But part of my point was that what has value depends on what you can do with it. Rare metals don't have inherent value; they have value once you invent electronics that need rare metals for components. (There is a cobalt mine re-opening in the US because cobalt is needed for the batteries of electric vehicles and wind turbines. Cobalt is precious again.)

Leaving that aside, what is the fair way of handling finite resources across all future generations? They will run out, unless we go extinct or leave the planet. Do we calculate how much fossil fuel we can burn per year working backwards from the sun going supernova? Every lump of coal we burn is a lump of coal countless future generations have a claim on. I don't think there's any plausible solution to that sort of double-bind without the invention of new possibilities. And I think we can do that.

Humans being kinda dumb, and greedy, even that doesn't always work. I think of the example of Norman Borlog and the green revolution. It's a tragic story, because he only intended his work to provide a stopgap, a way to relieve starvation and buy humanity 20 or 30 years to get its shit together. Instead, it was rolled out everywhere at terrible cost, and integrated into the new world system to enable even more population growth and the ever faster consumption of resources. In some ways, he's more to blame than anyone else for our current climate catastrophe, but it's not what he wanted at all.

I wasn't aware of the distinction between Possible Not and Possible when I asked my question earlier. It's more logically pedantic than what I had in mind. — Luke

I do think it's because they do often go together for the sorts of things we reason about. ("He might be on time, or he might not.")

Possible Not and Possible both denote possibility, referring to "some" as opposed to "all" or "none". However, while I accept that Possible Not and Possible are technically different to each other, I think they can still be viewed as "opposed to" or distinct from Necessary and Impossible, respectively, each in the same (but inverse) way. — Luke

That's quite reasonable, but relying on "opposite" to mean different things will just lead to trouble. In the old square of opposition different sorts of pairwise contrasts get different names.

Can you give me a simple explanation as to why you switch from talking about whether or not "the book falls" (future, or perhaps tenseless)), to "the book is falling" (present)? — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, because I was — perhaps inadvisedly — using an example of a temporal event but trying not to prejudice the interpretation of the modality, so talking about this temporal event tenselessly.

I never even checked to see if there are problems if you read the example with tense in mind. If that comes out badly, I apologize for the confusion. It's just an artifact.

The example I went through with @Luke ended up being much easier to write.

You say a lot of things I agree with, but apparently thinking that I don't, because there's still some confusion about the handling of "not." One point I think I clarified somewhere else is that in something like "The book is not red," we place the "not" before "red" purely as a matter of English convention, and because, with no other scope in play, there's no ambiguity. But that's still a proposition-level "not" and a more verbose way to say the same thing is "It is not the case that ball is red." It's sometimes convenient to pretend that "not red" is something we might predicate of an object, but it isn't really. "Not red" is not a syntactical element of the proposition at all, and therefore not a semantic unit either. "Red" is, as a predicate, and "not" is, as an operator on the entire proposition. "Not" doesn't apply to predicates or objects. As long as we keep in mind the logical form of what we're saying, I see no harm in using ordinary English, but I'll switch to "philosophical English" when there's ambiguity to be avoided.

Does logical negation constitute an opposite? — Luke

I think so, yes, at least for the simplest cases. There may be some subtleties to the linguistics I can't call to mind at the moment.

Okey doke. Here's a link to that discussion. Having a look at Collingwood. Cheers.

and all the other ontological isms are metaphysical positions. — T Clark

Gotcha. But those are positions not statements. I assume you don't only mean statements like "materialism is true"; that's a weird sentence anyway, and hardly a statement of the position of materialism. Would you look for statements that maybe make up the position we call "materialism" and mark all of those statements as neither true or false?

I just like to see concrete examples. What's it look like in practice? Do you find yourself pointing to specific statements and saying "That's metaphysical and therefore not truth-apt"?

metaphysical statements are not true or false — T Clark

What's an example you reach for to explain this idea? (This is Collingwood, right?)

My question was why Not Necessary (◇~) is not also equivalent to Possible (◇).

In the section quoted above, you start out referring to Not Necessarily (red), which means that "there is at least one non-red marble to be picked". But you then make the subtle switch to talking about Necessarily Not (red), — Luke

There was no "subtle switch."

Not Necessarily Red is equivalent to Possibly Not Red.

Not Necessarily Red is consistent with Necessarily Not Red, which ought to be obvious because Possibly Not Red is clearly consistent with Necessarily Not Red.

If Not Necessarily Red (Possibly Not Red) is equivalent to Possibly Red, then Possibly Red is consistent with Necessarily Not Red. But it's not, therefore, Not Necessarily Red is not equivalent to Possibly Red.

If Not Necessarily (red) means "there is at least one non-red marble to be picked", then I still don't see how that differs from Possibly (red), which means that "at least one of the marbles is red" and that not "all the marbles are red" (otherwise red would be necessary). — Luke

What you're missing is that we only have Not Necessarily Red — so we know at least one marble is non-red — but we don't have Not Necessarily Not Red (i.e., Possibly Red), so it is entirely consistent for the set of marbles to be all non-red.

There is a kind of metaphysics which is just language on holiday. It's fun to follow its convoluted paths, but it's ultimately pointless. — frank

Opportunity to quote Ryle's quip, on being elected Waynflete Professor of Metaphysics, that a chair in metaphysics is like a chair in tropical diseases — doesn't mean you're supposed to be in favor of it.

Much more respectable business these days, of course, than what he had in mind.

Isn't Possibly P also ~▢P? — Luke

Should probably add that ◇P is consistent both with ▢P and with ~▢P.

With marbles, that's to say that there being at least one red marble in the set is consistent with all the marbles in the set being red, and with not all the marbles in the set being red (but at least one is).

~▢P by itself just says 'not all', P is not true of everything in the domain. Might not be true of anything.

There's definitely a limited pot of stuff and labour, and at the end of the day, that's what things like wealth and value are for. — Isaac

In the abstract, maybe? But practically there are two issues: first, it's not the total at a given moment that matters, but what's available, what's controllable, and that changes; second, we have credit, and the future is a long time, even at a discount.

Ownership is always about power. — Isaac

There's an old Carl Sandburg poem: guy tells a tramp to get off his land, the tramp asks what makes it his, guy says he got it from his father — where'd he get it? Got it from his father. Where'd he get it? Well, he fought for it. Alright then, I'll fight you for it.

I own my phone here because I have the power to do what I want with it uncontested and you don't. — Isaac

Hmmm. That sounds like right not power, but power is ever so slippery, and we don't want to confuse it with capacity or force. We both have the capacity to doom scroll on your phone, but only you have the right to, and I'm obliged to respect that right. You're saying further that there is some entity (perhaps yourself and some of your friends who work out, perhaps cops and courts, perhaps just the vocal disapproval of surrounding citizens) with the capacity to force me to respect your right, so rights come down to power in that sense, and thus property as well.

That's as may be, but how does it help us?

So in taking a European-type possession, the British stole something because they took away power. — Isaac

I mean, I'm getting the rhetorical effect there, but you've talked yourself into a circle: now power — the guarantor of property — is itself a possession that can be stolen. What would underwrite possession of power, since it can't be power? Is it going to be right after all?

(I hope it doesn't seem like I'm nitpicking here — I think this is the most productive disagreement we've ever had. You take care of the forest, and I'll look after the trees.)

Maybe the extent to which wealth is the basis of a society is the extent to which that society defines itself by in-groups/out-group distinctions, such that "I own..." has real meaning, whereas for societies where out-groups are rarely even encountered, wealth might be less relevant as there's not much meaning to "we own..." if there's no-one that excludes from those rights. — Isaac

I think that tracks. No anthropologist here, but we tend to name isolated societies for the word in their language that just means "people" right? But from my studies in college (wonderful lefty anthropologist who taught us from a book called Europe and the People Without History) and my son sharing what he's learned from Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything, population contact goes back as far as you want to go. The isolated tribe in a state of nature is mostly myth.

So the story of property is the story of power is the story of in-group/out-group. The first use of power is the denial of some land use by an out-group. With such a social technology available, a group within a group could deny the rest of the group use of something, claiming ownership the other members of the group are bound at spear-point to respect.

Now if that's the story, then the Europeans are just another out-group, and rather than being denied use of land and resources, they have the capacity to deny those already here such use. Seems like more of the same, not a break with history. The difference may be qualitative though, if the Europeans have a much more comprehensive conception of use and what exclusive rights they're inclined to enforce.

This starts to look a bit Hobbesian, or Trumpian, or even Hitlerian — it's always the struggle for power, everyone's a crook it's just that Europeans were better at it.

That's not where we want to end up is it?

Would be nice to cast a fond glance back toward where we started, with the nature of employment, the connection between risk and profit, all that. It's not that far at all, if it's all power struggle all the time, but I'm not convinced. I think there are genuine changes between the deep past and the present, and those changes include new forms of political economy that don't just amount to gang warfare. Economics may be the science of decision-making under scarcity, but that scarcity is relative, defined by opportunity, and not necessarily some definite depletable amount, but a pool we can grow and shrink by our actions.