Kantian

The powers-be should rename this forum Wittgenstein-free Zone.

Crude, but I get what you mean, as long as one can get away with superimposing Machiavellian categories of ethical behavior over theories of metalanguage.

You’re still not getting it, john. One must presuppose the ability to correctly re-identify objects in order to determine what passes for repeatability or persistence.

What happens when a person does not agree with the physical or material part of reality from the onset? I am asking you questions of a fundamental nature that calls for investigation before adopting theories of reality. You can’t bypass questions about ontological commitment by ignoring them in the hopes of preserving your rudimentary materialism.

Do you have a compulsion to shoehorn the sayings of other philosophers into your presuppositions? By the by, Quine used that catchy motto in his demands for a criterion of identity that is assigned for any class of entities to be quantified. Furthermore, I mention Jan Dejnozka in my paper, who showed in the book Ontology of the Analytic Tradition 29 private language arguments and 58 ‘no entity’ theories among the culprits of the analytic tradition.

Then that specific ontology is called the ‘onto-logic’ ? I didn’t know you would be amiable to Hegelian contortions. Does your ontology also accommodate the following: “Being and Nothing are identical; precisely because Being is the poorest and simplest unity, poor enough to blend with nothingness. Once all the concreteness and particulars of actual experience are abstracted away, we are left with Being, which also is Nothing.”

Why would I claim such? If we lack the ability to determine a clear standard of identity then we are unable to formulate the identity of anything specific. I’m more inclined to agree with David Wiggins, opposing Dejnozka, that the term identity itself is undefinable, because the attempt at assembling aggregates into unities doesn’t seem possible.

Apologies. I was trying to head you off at the pass and prevent you from boring me with any attempts at exhuming failed philosophical structures of representation.

Yet you mentioned that the sense data that becomes axiomatic concepts may be awarded ID w/o any internal language to describe the identity. Can’t blame me for taking you at your word.

My last ‘proposition’ ought to be looked at carefully. If one lacks the concept of a behavior, or precisely, the membership in a social group that promotes activities which identifies behavior he will not recognize his experience as such. Since I am taking the “No private language” argument to its logical end, I am denying the possibility of a person ever gaining the ability to identify anything without the advent of society. If a person does not participate in a society that promotes a label or word or symbol of a certain activity, he cannot be attributed to know the difference. Propositions or words contain meaning strictly within the margins of a mutually agreed language game. Therefore, you drank something that already had a name, thanks to the social structure you were born into, irrespective of your personal ignorance. In other words, the individual is not the final/original/sole arbitrator of knowledge. This cast the entire privileged status of empiricism under question.

Yes, as long as we do not disagree on the number of persons required to reach conclusions on what identifies a part of ‘out there.’

If only I could locate my files... I just returned home, and I am rummaging through the wayward stack of disks that grew at the end of last semester.

That sounds like what the analytic philosophers were hellbent on supposing- that identification is an ontological commitment that is prior to explanation or logical analysis. Yes or no?

I meant to refer to Chomsky’s universal grammar.

Why, you sound like being a rhetorician is a bad thing.

That still doesn’t answer the question. What kind of proof are you looking for, not what do you want proven. There are different types of proofs, FYI.

Fair enough.

That’s the troublesome ticket in explicating such a dualistic nature- merging the phenomenological contents of the first person with the hard data of the third person.

quote:
Originally posted by Kantian
Actually it’s vice versa. Space and time are ‘forms of intuition,’ or conditions of a possible experience the mind automatically assigns to experience, or brings to the table. Ergo, each bits of sensory data contains rudiments of spatial or/and temporal essentials. Otherwise experience would be unintelligible, and a naked empirical theory, at least a honest one will fall into skepticism. If you persist in claiming that the mind IS the brain, which is nothing more than a complex electro-chemical machine, then you are commiting a reductio ad absurdum of your beliefs about functionalism or materialism. True or false?


Is that why you wrote “mind/brain?”

Ah, I was aiming for a crude metaphor for the purposes of illustrating the brain as a causally functioning machine. Otherwise we would be inviting fairies in again, wouldn’t we?

I’m aware of nerve functions in the stomach being greatly underrated in the past.

Is that your attempt at being testy? Somebody needs to get familiar with the underdeterminacy of evidence. Furthermore, I suggest caution, because I thought I caught a whiff of the bifurcation fallacy there.

A collection of facts does not necessarily imply a singular theory.

John, that’s woefully and painfully incorrect. From this link: Recent discussions of the mind-body problem have failed to shed light on epiphenomenalism and free will. If we make use of a conceptual framework based on the medical practices of clinical neuropsychology, especially in connection with anosognosia, and add in a concept of physical causality formulated by Wesley Salmon, a strong form of epiphenomenalism is justified, and as a consequence free will must be rejected. Along the way, it is shown that Flanagan's use of Libet's experiment to show that a conscious experience is a cause is mistaken. An observation by Wilfred Sellars regarding axioms in science is used to show that in neuropsychology the mind-body problem may admit of no solution on logical grounds. The framework includes: 1) a phenomenological self that introspects, and observes its own introspection; 2) the neurological correlate(s) of that self; and 3) the neurological correlates of the neurological information available to the neurological self. Work by Fuster, and Kihlstrom and Tobias is cited here. Nagel's concept of subjectivity is shown to be in error due to his misunderstanding of the relation between introspection and the self. When the notion of a classical experiment, and Salmon's work on cause, is applied to neuropsychology, it turns out that conscious mental events can't have causal relationships with a physical system. This means brain events can't cause mental events, and mental events can't cause brain events I call this Neurological Epiphenomenalism. The concept of free will presupposes that one sort of mental event, an act of will, can cause physical changes in the motor centers of the brain. But no such causal relation can exist. Therefore, the concept of free will is empty for human beings Would you like another shot at playing the ephiphenomenalist and try addressing the concept of free will?

Check with me when you’ve done so.

I must’ve missed that link. Is it in another thread?


I’ll give you that much.

Are you trying to be cute here?

Dennett is crippled by his scientism, as are you; which is why I made the parallel. If it is unfair, I apologize and request clarification. Nevertheless, I owe it to Dennett or any other self-styled naturalist to read their books, despite all the negative press.

Ah, I see you have made more wicked posts! I will respond accordingly.

~Transcendentalist~
__________________
Reason has often led us into transcendent metaphysics that "overstep the limits of all experience, [and] no object adequate to the transcendental ideal can ever be found within experience."

John Page

I'm not going to let you get away with that!
Nope. Identification alone requires persistence. Maybe we're tripping up over semantics though - perhaps you're thinking re-identification is required for apparent identification in the first place.
Finally, though, I don't need to pre-suppose anything for perception to occur. Let us differentiate, though, between conscious perception and just regular perception (that we're not aware of but occurs within the mind).
Agree with what or whom? You mean intersubjectively?
Carp[sic]. BTW if you keep insulting my motherhood statements I'll just have to reach over the ether and knock some sense into you!
No. You're the one with all the quotes, do you have anything original to contribute?
SFW
No.
...thereby condemning yourself forever to misty transcendentalism. Identity is definable and methods are available to distill it from actual (physical) reality.
When a "new identity" first arises in the mind it is nascent and is not described anywhere within that mind other than by the circumstances that gave rise to it. e.g. I perceive a black dog for the first time, I make up the verbal description "black dog" and intersubjectively agree this as a meaningful label with others.
Yes, I recommend that you do this.
Society and language developed over a very long period, IMO, negating your "chicken and egg" proposition in reality. I repeat, I didn't know the name of root beer before I experienced it. Some might know the name beforehand but that doesn't mean you really know root beer.
I am no expert on analytic philosophers. It sounds to me like its your ontological assumption about the nature of them.
Universal to Chomsky, that is!
Yes, it all depends on your point of view, doesn't it. Hence the need to poke around in brains to gain a first person account of what its like to have the third person messed around with (or is it the other round?).
Yes.
Pure conjecture on your part!
Sigh. Like I said, I don't think the epiphenomenalist pleads anything. Consider again, if a thought is instantiated by an arrangement of matter, and if our thoughts allow some form of control or action over our material environment, we have a feedback loop. Look at your hand. You can decide to move your hand - e.g. thought can affect matter. Put your hand into a flame. You decide to move your hand - e.g. matter can affect thought. That we are not able to know directly how we take our decision creates the illusion of free will.
Here it is - Mind/Body Border

In conclusion, you seem to enjoy the abuse your peurile attempts to confuse a rational argument deserves. This being the case I shall desist immediately. I am, however, rapidly forming the opinion that your thoughts constitute epilinguism which is the most dastardly form of sophistry every to reach the ears of mankind. I look forward to hearing soemthing empirical from you other than hiding behind regurgitated neuro-speak.

Cheers, John

Kantian

Is that because you haven’t read all the necessary books on ontological matters? Moreover, Derrida doesn’t have much to say about outdated platonic leftovers like truth or ontology anyway.

Nope. Tarski was more concerned about the semantic theory of truth, or what role truth plays in semantic interpretation. He started from Frege’s position on reference. You must ask yourself, what conditions should a definition of truth conform to?

A couple of things – It is true that language is developed only by ostensible means, it is senseless to talk about reality in isolation from language. You’re still stuck in the illusion thinking language is on one side and reality on the other, and grappling with how they relate. In doing so you forget that you remain very much within language and are merely imagining that you can point at it. Language is self-contained and you cannot step out of it. Persons, bodies, and minds inhabit language. Hence, the connection between language and reality is a false one.

Two, I think you confuse the utility of existence with ‘truth’ here. We can evaluate the existence of an object by ascertaining its spatial and temporal properties, but such concepts are extraneous when discussing tautologies (such as mathematics and logic).

this is a question of identity and meaning.

There's a world of difference between ontic speech and ontological speech.

::: Drumroll ::::



Pragmatism. There is none other.





Anything other than that is platonic masturbation, and that includes your realist position.

~Transcendentalist~
__________________
Reason has often led us into transcendent metaphysics that "overstep the limits of all experience, [and] no object adequate to the transcendental ideal can ever be found within experience."

Kantian

...which is the result of the shadow cast by the inquirer himself.

Yet… visual art and music require meaningful symbols and that is the subject matter of semiotics, the theory of signs, (syntactics, semantics, pragmatics) which is a subset of linguistics, and that is the study of language. Language is not merely the collection of atoms, which are words. There’s far more to that than what you are making it out to be.

But alas! Language is not solely limited to mere words.

Yes.

Human beings learn language by pointing and using the words ‘this’ and ‘that’ to make the connection between the word and meaning. The fundamental form of explanation linking the words to their meaning is ostensive, or pointing. But be careful here, since words and gestures are not outside of language, and so they are not the explanation of the link between language and ‘what is out there.’

First we should ask what it means to think. The word thinking is used in many different ways, such as ‘speak thoughtfully’ or ‘speak w/o thinking’ or ‘think of someone’ or ‘speak before thinking’ or ‘let a thought cross my mind,’ etc. yet you are stuck on the assumption that the word ‘thinking’ refers to a single activity, and in different situations it doesn’t remain consistent. The word’s meaning depends on the circumstances or stage it is used. So, in order to understand ‘thought’ we first need to understand the rules for the use of the word ‘think.’ While we are capable of pointing at an activity and say “this is X,” we cannot do the same for the activity of “thinking.” No external body gestures are needed in order to think. Not even interior monologues or mental images. That does not help observers to identify the activity of ‘thinking’. The mark of thought is precisely when a person finds the answer to a problem, e.g. the square root of a number. It would be hard to look into one’s mind or brain to see whether they were being thoughtful. All that matters is if the thinker exclaims ”Eureka.”

The concept of thinking is not the same as the concept of experience. A thought should be understood as a pointer, not as a product. Thoughts do not whiz by like cars on the highway. We just think them. We can have a half a Volvo, but not half a thought. When you ask someone ‘what did you think?’ she will say something like ‘I thought this and that and etcetera.’ She expresses what she thought in an ordered way. But it is not possible to think without language and then report it. Otherwise there would be two processes, thoughts and language. If this is correct, then we can isolate thought from language when we speak thoughtfully. Since that’s not possible, we do not report a thought by observing a process- rather we think and then voice the thought. And so we cannot isolate thought from what it accompanies. There are no pure thought processes. There is no inner process, by which we communicate with the means of language.

All the time, especially talking with deaf people with their own dialect of sign language. They would invent a new sign of a word, or a phrase. The trouble was asking for definitions, and I would get another sign, and hopefully a familiar one

Easy. Language is essentially an ostensive enterprise. We learn words by pointing.

~Transcendentalist~
__________________
Reason has often led us into transcendent metaphysics that "overstep the limits of all experience, [and] no object adequate to the transcendental ideal can ever be found within experience."

Keith Russell

Kantian said:
"But it is not possible to think without language and then report it."

This is true, but that isn't the answer to the question I asked--
--and I think you know it.

The question was, is thinking possible without language. It was not whether one is capable of thinking and reporting that one is thinking without language.

I agree that language helps organize our thoughts, and I might even agree that certain complex thoughts are impossible without the organization structure of language.

But, I think that you have had to redefine 'language' (by blurring the lines separating thought and language) in order to support your claim that thought is impossible without language.

Keith.

John Page

How would I know what are the necessary books? - for you to even suggest such a thing belies your epistomological faith which seems to be "Thanks to Derrida the language fairy we no longer have to worry about what we're talking about."
Yes, I got beyond that. What I am trying to show you is that by analyzing truth semantically through reference to a metalanguage he avoided defining how truth actually arises.

Truth must be defined with clarity and with reference to reality. If not, one's conclusions as to the truth will become circular (as all words are defined in terms of other words) and occasionally paradoxical.
Fanciful. I don;t have to think in words of formal languages. Our thoughts may have their own circumsatnces but concepts can be equally well understood by speakers of many different languages.

Do not think that I ignore completely the symbiosis between thought and reality. Where you are mistaken is the statement "Language is self-contained...", you earlier declared "it is senseless to talk about reality in isolation to language" and you need to consider this vice-versa. Now, back to my indescribable root beer...
Are you asserting that truth is a tautology? Instances of the truth indeed occupy space and time and mathematics and logic also need them to operate.
Au contraire, Pragmatism leads to platonic masturbation since it involves making things up in a way that is convenient at the time. Of course, a smattering of intellectual honesty reveals:

a) that we can be wrong, therefore all truths should be held contingent, and
b) a truth borne of necessity or expediencey is merely convention and does not expose the underlying nature of truth.

Hence, as I have stated before, what we call "truth" is manufactured in the mind and is a product of two entities being assumed identical. This is not pragmatism but a physical fact, if it were not so then you would not be able to discern truth, let alone play "Because I say so" games. Get real!

Cheers, John

Keith Russell

Kantian said:
"...it is senseless to talk about reality in isolation from language."

Well, of course. How could one 'talk' about reality--or anything else--without taking?

But again, that isn't the point.

It seems you admit that we can talk about reality, even while you are seem to want to deny that there is any reality, other than 'talking'.

If the only reality is language (or if language creates reality) what could be the point of (or the difference between) saying 'talking about reality' (which you do say), rather than simply saying 'talking about talking' or 'talking about language'--which you do not say?

Keith.

Kantian

With what? aren’t you the one making the superimposing?

If identification requires persistence then persistence dictates identification, repeated states of affairs leads to identities, nothing needs re-identification, and everything is an absolute component of a changeless being. Begone thou neo-Parmenides! Since existence is a ceaseless fluctuating becoming, the identity of an entity actually presupposes the ability to re-identify entities for future instances. I don’t know about semantic quibbling, but there is a marked difference between your demands of the God of holistic reality and my allusions to Heraclitus.

Puh-leeze. The “myth of given” has been thoroughly debunked. You need to read Quine and Sellars and get on with the program.

You wrote: ”If you agree that there is a physical/material part of reality..’ and I asked in turn. I’ve heard that scrolling up will do wonders for the limitations of memory.

Am I to infer that you will not consider the question of ontological commitment before deciding on a theory of reality?

Heh. It’s quite apparent you do have such a compulsion, and you may dance as long as you want and continue denying otherwise. I quoted Quine to see your response and you behaved in a snappish fashion: “protect my position.” As for originality, it is mere judicious imitation. Do you have anything to say Dennett didn’t?

No need to get snippy. Sorry I bothered to explain the quote, in lieu of your surprisingly defensive posture.

Come on, don’t leave me hanging. Tell me what’s the difference between this and what you think your onto-logic found palatable.

Sad. Would you disagree with Gottlob Frege as well, where he says since every single definition expresses an identity, identity itself cannot be defined. The identity of an entity specifies its essence, its determinacy, and its existence. From the On Sense and Reference, Frege interprets identity as “a relation that obtains between the names or signs of objects.” However, since “identity relation itself needs being,” the being of the identity relation is its own identity. Is this ‘misty transcendentalism’ as well?

Methinks your unfamiliarity with analytic philosophers is why you are too quick to call what does not appear sympathetic to Dennett as transcendental.

Yes, others who have already seen a black dog, or are familiar with that phrasing. If you said that an elephant spoke to you at the zoo, they, being unfamiliar with that novel experience, would consider you silly for breaking the rules of common sense. Even at that point, when the elephant spoke to you, you would be mightily perplexed. Even if he spoke in English, you wouldn’t understand him because you do not share his ‘form of life.’

Are you from the “do as I say, not as I do” school of thought? I would like to introduce you to my father.

How exactly does that ‘negate’ my ‘proposition?’ If language developed over a long period, won’t that mean people had previously lacked an apparatus for identifying anything and sharing it with others? True they would function like animals, seeing, perceiving and reacting like any creature, and even determining the identity of certain particulars. Yet this wouldn’t mean that they had the capability of a private language in the least.

Am I at liberty to quote you, “SFW?” or would that be too unoriginal?

I am not saying you really know root beer. Just that you would not be able to name anything unless you belonged to a group of people who did the same activities.

Not to worry. They admitted as much. thus, I’m on safe ground on this one.

I guess you haven’t read Chomsky. On to your next mighty snort!

[quote]John Dennett: Yes, it all depends on your point of view, doesn't it. Hence the need to poke around in brains to gain a first person account of what its like to have the third person messed around with (or is it the other round?).[/qutoe]

This confuses me

And you also wrote that the mind has a spatial and temporal location. Where is that besides the brain? So my inference that you conflated both shouldn’t be held against me.

I had to say as much, in order to cut down your demands of privileging positivism.

Nice, but how do you reconcile this compatibilist position with the ephiphenomenalist I quoted?

I’m not going to bother touch that with a ten foot pole. Too many idiots, too little time.

Yet in the following posts… “Getting the last word in is for fools who think they have not said enough.”

I, a sophist? The blackguards of Plato were great men! You’re more than welcome!

~Transcendentalist~
__________________
Reason has often led us into transcendent metaphysics that "overstep the limits of all experience, [and] no object adequate to the transcendental ideal can ever be found within experience."

Kantian

A few ‘unoriginal’ quotes to digest before we start:

“Man makes the word, and the word means nothing which man has not made it mean, and that only to some other man. But since man can think only by means of words or other external symbols, these might turn around and say: You mean nothing which we have not taught you, and then only so far as you address some words as the interpretant of your thought... ...the word or sign which man uses is the man himself ... thus my language is the sum-total of myself; for the man is the thought. ” (Charles Sanders Pierce)
“Peirce goes very far in the direction that I have called the de-construction of the transcendental signified, which at one time or another would place a reassuring end to the reference from sign to sign.” (Jacques Derrida)
“...psychological nominalism, according to which all awareness of sorts, resemblances, facts, etc., in short all awareness of abstract entities – indeed all awareness even of particulars – is a linguistic affair.” (Sellars)
“It is only in language that one can mean something by something.” (Wittgenstein)
“Human experience is essentially linguistic.” (Gadamer)
“...man is in the process of perishing as the being of language continues to shine ever brighter upon our horizon.” (Foucault)
“Speaking about language turns language almost inevitably into an object ... and then its reality vanishes.” (Heidegger)

You don’t. How is one to know what to major in college without taking any classes?

You’re getting ahead of yourself again. I haven’t said anything about agreeing with what he wrote. I only wrote that remark in response to your blithe dismissals at the end of your previous post in order to alleviate any possible confusion. Just because I mentioned his name doesn’t mean he’s in my pantheon of philosophers.

Yes, Tarski had a distaste for ‘semantically closed languages’ and was concerned with the liar’s paradox.

Incorrect again. Tarski’s minimalist theories of truth is neutral, equally germane to both the building blocks of correspondence theory of truth as well as the holistic pragmatical theorists of coherence. They both say that their theory is the least that needs to be said and the most that can be coherently said. More and more it looks like there’s no reason to choose between correspondence and coherence, because they are merely competing descriptions of the same idea, a word in language.

What is formal language? I doubt a speaker of different language may understand a concept in isolation, because he decides on a language to be dominant and translates all the others in that filter. You are merely espousing an ancient notion of realism, the belief that words convey some sort of Platonist essence apart from their natural settings. Slowly, more embarrassing evidence of your Platonism is coming to the surface. In saying that a concept is independent of its natural settings you are ignoring the application of words. While it is true that there are similarities between various meanings of words, even across different languages, there are no sharp boundaries you are hinting at.

Do you mean to state that reality is senseless in isolation to language? Works both ways, chico. All descriptions and explanations of reality belong to the medium of language. Again, language is self-contained, despite the idiotic efforts of philosophers (and lamentably yours) at locating the underlying “reality” of our use of words. The word ‘reality’ has a role to play within our language game, and any attempt to describe reality that gets beyond these ordinary games is to invent a new game. The concepts that determine reality are linguistic, not mental. The semiotics of language does not represent any pre-linguistic reality. Signs just denote signs. Positivists think a thought is a representation of a certain aspect of reality. The view that beneath all statements and concepts are essentially and absolutely building blocks of reality is necessary to build a fixed and logical universe where formal language would apply. Positivism, despite your best efforts is impotent in its attempt at judging the relation between language and reality because its logical suppositions are metaphysical concepts and inventions of an ideal world. You should be more concerned with what motivates tired philosophical squabbles and their presuppositions, and what is the precondition for making the distinction of what is real and unreal. You guessed it- the precondition is nothing more than our intrusive guest: language!

No, just that spatial and temporal properties are not necessary when talking about tautologous truths. Not that truth itself is tautologous, for that would be meaninglessly self-referential.

Flatly wrong. Platonism is the urge to step outside our skins, our traditions, and compare ourselves with something absolute. Platonists and positivists/empiricists are eternal enemies, while pragmatists do not even bother with the tired presupposition that there is a distinction to be drawn between types of truth both the Platonist and the empiricist share.

This isn’t doing your platonic credentials much good

Still incorrect. There is no need to worry whether sentences are true because they correspond to some mythical substratum, or whatever makes such propositions ‘true.’ Nor is there any reason to worry about anything nonspatio-temporal that makes evaluations moral and true, and vice versa, that the absence of non-spatio-temporal entity makes such judgments subjective/emotions/conventions.

The opposition of physical fact to pragmatism smacks of bald positivism.

~transcendentalist~

Kantian

No, I have already shown you how one invents language without ‘thinking’ and mysteriously you haven’t addressed it. A proto- human may point at something and his brother might take that action to mean what the first dude pointed at. The first dude might not have been intending the same object, but the seeds of discourse is born.

I have explained myself, and see no reason to repeat it. Now you need to explain why you think thinking is possible without language, instead of demanding that it cannot be otherwise. You might feel comfortable defending what is common sense, but as long as you do not take the philosophical leap, you remain in the dark, clueless.

I very much doubt your charges of re-definition will stick at all. Language is an activity people participate in, yes or no?


~Transcendentalist~
__________________
Reason has often led us into transcendent metaphysics that "overstep the limits of all experience, [and] no object adequate to the transcendental ideal can ever be found within experience."