Luiseach

And yet more irony?

But what, praytell, does all this John/Gurdur ironic repartee (amusing though it is) have to do with truth???

Gurdur

Rainy Sunday afternoon, is it, where you are ?
You make me feel guilty, hinny, I should complete my posts in the PD for you tonight,
Nope.
Convolution is a characteristic of the development of language [i]when it is unimpeded by poor communication, and it can follow in the normal wake of the attempts by humans to understand each other and external reality

assuming "reality" exists.

This may sound like a quibble to you, but I want to show later how this is in fact a very important distinction.

Gurdur

Multiple levels. Context- and person- dependent.
Correct. I'll be dealing with that soon.
Sometimes, not always.

A "truth" made up in the "higher" cognitive levels can outweigh a "truth" of your unconscious, instinctive feelings.
It's based there, but is further developed (sometimes contradictorily so) in higher cognition.

Gurdur

I'm beginning to wonder that myself.
John's last reply to me was terribly short on substance of any kind, and I tend to get impatient anyway with "discussions" like these, especially if it threatens to become a mere pissing contest, so I'm going to cut short to the chase and deliver what I see myself as being the closest approximation to the truth that there is at this time and possibly forever.

G.K.Chesterton did an essay on this very subject (or at least on a derivation of this subject); it had the usual brilliant Chestertonian style and rhetoric, but its conclusion was flawed:
In essence, he said, there was a full objective morality out there no matter what humans said (he used the example of "Thou shalt not murder").

One would like to think this was true (I would like to myself), but there's simply not one iota of evidence for that --- and plenty of evidence against it.

John Page seems to be pushing some peculiar kind of naturalist metaphysics, and denying all other alternatives --- his denial rests upon willful ignoring of those alternatives.
Additional to that, his one and only concrete point in his two last replies to me was:
which is bollocks according to one reading of Chomsky, on whom Page claims to be relying, since a Chomskyian version would say that there is an inbuilt drive to create language, that language is not created by response to enviroment ("naming"), but instead has its own origin and reaction to enviroment;
to put it provocatively, the names exist before the things.
A'course, there's a way around that little difficulty, but I'm getting impatient.

John Page refused to deal with my two examples of non-language-based cognition in chimpanzees and pigeons; if the conversation becomes so one-sided, it simply reinforces my native impatience.

Cutting to the chase
But what is truth ?
--- Pontius Pilate

Our empirical methods for determining "truth" are largely but not fully determined by our evolutionary history.
This is assuming a natural world and evolution

However, not even inbuilt methods of determing truth are foolproof; optical illusions are an extremely good example of how reality can be falsely represented to mechanisms built slowly upwards from reality-dependent evolutionary processes.

IOW, millions of years of evolution dealing with reality cannot be trusted to build failsafe mechanisms of recognising reality.

Which is a bit of a bugger, if you see what I mean.


Because of that, humans have slowly developed other methods of finding out the truth ----
most importantly, intersubjectivity (consensus between humans in a group),
and also, putting in intermediate steps between the observer and the observed -- i.e., machines ---- if you can't trust your own eyes on a particular phenomenon, you can trust a machine instead
(and which is the reason for the existence of the word "counter-intuitive").

But neither intersubjectivity nor interposed intermediate steps are foolproof.

To give an example, I could be in a group with 10 vociferous Libertarians. Obviously, they are all wrong and I'm right --- which is a blow to intersubjectivity.

Machines and other intermediate steps are built by humans --- and are therefore at least vulnerable to human biases (in their construction etc.).

Modern science rests upon intersubjectivity in a big way --- the best example being the peer-review process.
But this doesn't guarantee truth --- it merely guarantees:
If we accept logic, if we accept a natural world seperate from human perception, then we can build up powerful testing procedures, but even this has a drawback:

We can never prove something true, we can only look for ways it which we could test if it is possibly false, and test the hypothesis accordingly.

IOW, nothing is proven true; it is only ether proven false, or not proven false --- according to presupposed criteria, arbitrarily chosen.

{--- paraphrase of Karl Popper's work --- }

Our own subjectivity is especially prone to error,[/b] since we are prey to optical illusions, hormone-driven perception, clinical paranoia, and the like.

A clinical paranoid lives in an existence which is the truth for him.

Or to use another example, optimism will actually lead you to have a better life --- optimistic people tend to have better days than pessimistic people, since their very optimism has an effect on their behaviour and surroundings.

To sum it all up:
We act as though there was a Final Truth out there --- but that Final Truth is impossible to prove, and even the mechanisms supposedly formed by that Final Truth are error-prone in recognising that putative Final Truth.

Therefore,
when we seek to determine what is truth, we must make metaphysical decisions before undertaking that --- which leads one to say that metaphysics precedes empiricism.

But we can also claim we do that on an evolutionarily-determined basis, which means realism/empiricism precedes metaphysics.

Except, if we try claiming that, suddenly we are faced with all evolution's little mistakes (think optical illusions, paranoia etc.), and we're back at the start of the paradox --- a paradox that may well never be resolved.

__________

Edited coz i kant spel

John Page

Any lack of substance was due to the lack of content in your prior response, I asked a number of questions which you ignored. Discussion usually entails dialog.
Where did I claim to be relying on Comsky, chumsky?
Why do you think I believe this? The mind instantiates its own mental objects through analysis of sense data, it recognizes them through comparisons with the analyses of prior experiences, this done within a brain/nervous system which is an evolved physical entity. We must name the thing before we can converse about it.
:notworthy
Obviously my answer was too subtly ironic for you!! ("Go ask the birds, go ask the chimps", which you would have to use language to do). I think there is non-language-based cognition. I had a long dialog with Phaedrus about this where he/she seemed intent on the proposition that language and thought are intertwined. My position is that they can be where the thought is about language itself.
Agreed. Truth
Yes, no absolute truths.
Rather, we can only prove something true within a framework that defines what truth is. Axioms (of logical systems) are assumptions or suppositions and since axioms can only be prved true with yet more axioms we (mostly) end up with infinite regress. A truth-telling system that results in no contradictions is said to be internally consistent, or coherent, but this does not attain absolute truth. Truth is a relation.
We all do.
Perhaps the failures of empiricism lead to other metaphysiscs.

Cheers, John

Gurdur

Pot, kettle, black, *yawn*
Try here:
You might also like to keep the ad hom's more subtle.
Wrong. See all previous replies of mine. No, just too uninformative for me.

John Page

It was more an illustration of the levels on which we might conceive "stuff happens", not all of which we're conscious of (and IMO we can model consciousness as a number of different levels).

Example. The concept represented by the word "triangle" (which I am assuming we can intersubjectively share). To learn about triangles I suggest our mind/brain receives sense data and through a recognition process identifies the form of a triangle as repeatedly occuring. Thus, through repeated exposure to the form of trianlge, the mind instantiates the concept triangle. All this is happening unconsciously. Upper level processes in the brain (let's call them perception as distinct from recognition) are alerted (in some way) that a new form has been detected... etc. Eventually our conscious mind is stimulated to (my anthropomorphism) say, that's interesting, let's look at this a little more.

Of course, though language we can describe a concept to someone else and during this process may arise the illusion that the name preceeded the concept.

Anyway - must go do chores.

Cheers, john

John Page

You're right and wrong, we can perceive something and converse about it without having formally named it - we can converse about "it" (a temporary substitute same before a formal name) and say things like "look at this" using the label "this" as a non-formal name.

You're right in an oblique sense when somebody says "Look over there!" to commence dialog - but then the object being discussed hasn't been idenitified so the conversation is not really about the object at that point and not until we have used some kind of linguistic label to refer to "it" can we be conversing about "it".

Cheers, John

Luiseach

Agreed.

Makes good sense to me.

Ah... the illusion that the name preceded the concept. I hadn't actually thought about this.

Okay. So, from what you've posted here, I take it that the concept derives from perception of the 'real world out there,' and we are taught to connect this perceived 'reality' with signifiers (words). So that means that these signifiers are arbitrary in a sense... the language we attribute to reality-driven conceptualisations is merely a labelling system? Is this what you're saying?

Poor John!

John Page

Yes, but three points:

1. Names are arbitrary labels, for which I believe the evidence is the multiplicity of names (even within a single language) that we can use to refer to a single entity. (Note: This does assume some realsim/physicalism that "thing" is really out there.)
2. Compound concepts can be introduced. Example: The form or characteristics ascribed to trees (i.e. the mental idea or concept of a tree when recognized) can be broken down into sub concepts for leaf, branch, trunk etc. Coherence with the concept dog can be broken down into tail, legs, body etc. and the relativity between them (that makes them distinct from cats).
3. Internal conceptualization. Since concepts are mental entities, in order to achieve compound concepts the compiund concepts must be a greater level of abstraction. Truth, for example, can be considered the result of comparing two mental entities.

Now for a fine distinction. Representations as opposed to names. Both can be considered to "stand for" the real (external to the mind) object. The word "symbol" can be used ambiguously for example, a symbolic gesture is not the real thing but an information symbol is more literally passing the sense data untransformed. I wouldn't claim to be comletely unconfused by this dichotomy but think of the incoming sense data as an effect (related to the object we perceive) which is then analyzed against archetypes of the forms we have already learned.

I'll leave it here, I haven't formulated a clear hypothesis as to where names have to be used. Maybe its just a symbolic gesture!

CHeers, John