/lit/ - Literature

>>2430943
Meaningless theoretical nonsense; I suggest you apply your brain to quantum theory.

>>2430946
...are you trolling me?

I mean, I guess you won't tell the truth if you are... Here: promise me that you'll be honest, then tell me whether or not you're trolling me.

>justice, truth, best, etc. don't imply a criteria in a vacuum
negro, what?

>no one cares

i dont think "no one cares". actually everyone does "care", but no one aware of it.

>>2430950

"true" is only meaningful when it's applied to something specific. "Truth" isn't a thing - you can't figure out what makes things true, only what makes a specific thing true.

>>2430952
no one is*

>>2430952

yeah, but no one cares to listen to the spiel because it takes away their puzzles and their expertise and makes their righteous indignation a little less righteous

that pic feels like a secret handshake and that's a bummer.

>>2430954
Truth is a relation. It may be a very simple kind of relation. But if what you're saying is "true" then there is nothing different cases of truth have in common and there can be no concept of truth.

>>2430943

It can be a very simple relation, but it isn't a relation between propositions and a Platonic form. And while I agree that it's a consequence that there can't be a "concept of truth," it doesn't take away "true" as an adjective for the beliefs that we've justified.

Think about that word "relation": is it possible that you're reifying an imaginary arm that reaches out and touches things?

>>2430959
>it isn't a relation between propositions and a Platonic form

ok. it's some kind of resemblance between propositions and states of affairs "out there".

>And while I agree that it's a consequence that there can't be a "concept of truth," it doesn't take away "true" as an adjective for the beliefs that we've justified.

There can be a concept of truth. It's just a heading titled "resemblance between propositions and states of affairs". Of course we built this concept up by noticing individual truths.

>>2430968

Is that how we "built the concept"? What does correspondence consist in? I know the term "correspondence" seems pretty simple in this way, but how do you go about cashing it out? And what does "out there" look like "in itself"? The whole notion of "out there" implies that it isn't interpreted.

Consider family resemblance: you might see two noses that look alike, but the "resemblance" isn't a third thing you see.

>>2430972
You're complicating what I'm saying. The resemblance is not an object like the noses are. It's a concept. We can analyze *how* it is that they look alike and abstract their looking-alike, conceptually. I'm saying nothing that contradicts what you're saying, you're just presenting your ideas as if they conflict with mine. Something being "out there" does not imply that it is not interpreted. "Out there" means that it exists even if it is not interpreted.

>>2430983

Nah. Here's why: by saying "truth isn't an object, it's a concept" what are you clearing up? I've noticed that correspondence-types assert things like that, then go on talking about concepts as though they were tables/chairs. "Abstracting their looking alike" is the invention of the third thing.

And for "out there" to do the work you'd like it to (truth corresponds to the facts, not our interpretation of the facts, right?), you have to be able to make the case that you can get at what "out there" looks like, which requires interpretation. It's bootstrapping.

I thought OP 's picture was a young Mussolini for a second

>>2430993
You originally said truth isn't a concept: "'true' is only meaningful when it's applied to something specific. 'Truth' isn't a thing - you can't figure out what makes things true, only what makes a specific thing true."

I say it is a concept. It matters because you seem to think I'm reifying truth by saying we can have a concept of it. No. It's a mental heading, a concept. You're now trying to make up problems to dissolve, Wittgenstein Jr.

>you have to be able to make the case that you can get at what "out there" looks like, which requires interpretation

Of course it requires interpretation. We can only access "out there" via interpretation. But through this interpretation we can reach the conclusion that "out there" existed before us and will exist after us. The fact that any conclusion we come to about "out there" is via interpretation (mediation) does not disqualify its subsisting completely independently of us.

>>2431002

Here's a good way to make the point: It might be natural to say "I see the resemblance" here, but that doesn't mean there are invisible hands that touch the black and white or the the haircut or the coat. Granted, I saw the black and white and the haircut and the coat, but I didn't see invisible hands and won't understand their nature by looking at these two pictures.

>>2431012

>You originally said truth isn't a concept: "'true' is only meaningful when it's applied to something specific. 'Truth' isn't a thing - you can't figure out what makes things true, only what makes a specific thing true."

>I say it is a concept. It matters because you seem to think I'm reifying truth by saying we can have a concept of it. No. It's a mental heading, a concept. You're now trying to make up problems to dissolve, Wittgenstein Jr.

Come on. If you're familiar with Wittgenstein, then you know I'm getting at the primacy of social convention rather than ontological status. There's a big difference between "we know what truth is by knowing the work the term does in the language games in which it's employed", and "the term 'truth' refers to a mental heading" - one is contextual, the other isn't.

>Of course it requires interpretation. We can only access "out there" via interpretation. But through this interpretation we can reach the conclusion that "out there" existed before us and will exist after us. The fact that any conclusion we come to about "out there" is via interpretation (mediation) does not disqualify its subsisting completely independently of us.

Ok, so let's grant you that: of what use is "out there" to a correspondence theory if you can't say anything at all about what it subsists as? How do you avoid bootstrapping if interpretation is necessary to determine the nature of a thing sans interpretation?

>>2431029
Wonderful. None of that precludes it from being a concept. All I'm taking issue with is that you seem to think we can't say it's a concept because that's saying too much. And you thought I was reifying whatever the relation of truth happens to be. I think we can agree that people use the word "truth" in a similar way in varying contexts and that it pretty much always is used to mean some kind of relation.

And for "out there": we can say what it subsists as but only by ourselves going through interpretation. Bootstrapping is necessary and we don't avoid it.

>>2431052

No it doesn't, it just precludes agreement about what a "concept" is., which is kind of a big deal for the purpose of this conversation.

And bootstrapping is absolutely avoidable here: don't buy the correspondence theory of truth

>>2431056
I don't see what the problem with bootstrapping with regard to interpretation/mediation is. The alternative is to pretend you have direct access to the world or give up on the idea altogether and become an irrealist.

>>2430943
Well, if the correspondence account depends on a paradox and the only alternatives are lying and nonrealism, I'll take the nonrealism.

Is that like when people say "What's the meaning in all this!?" instead of just saying "What's the use?" My mom used to say the former a lot, I should call her up and tell her what a fool she was.

>>2431067
I chuckled.

>>2431065
Hold on. I meant bootstrapping only in that to say something about the world as it exists independently of us we have to go through the phenomena, that which is immediately at hand. In other words, the fact that we only have direct access to phenomena does not mean we cannot access anything else: we just do it by figuratively pulling ourelves up by the phenomena.

>>2431077
Yeah: it means that we only have access to what we have access to. The whole point of "out there" as it functions in the correspondence theory is to ground our interpretations, but you can't ground the whole practice of interpreting with more interpretations.

>>2431090
Certainly not. But science works through phenomena and in doing so uncovers evidence that the earth, asteroids, the sun all existed before any mind or even life could exist to interpret. So we bottom out when we encounter this evidence of a world that existed without us. I am following Quentin Meillassoux and Ray Brassier here if you are interested.

>Certainly not. But science works through phenomena and in doing so uncovers evidence that the earth, asteroids, the sun all existed before any mind or even life could exist to interpret.

Just so we're clear, I'm not denying the utility of science to complete projects. But, what you think you mean by "the earth, asteroids, the sun all existed before mind or even life" is the product of an interpretive process - words don't reach out and touch noumena. Why does it make sense to think that words are somehow identical with objects?

>>2431102
Look up thing-in-itself.

Philosophy is such a load of shit. Thank the deities I'm over that phase.

>>2431128
It is the result of an interpretive process. But it is the kind of result that it is that matters. Quoting Meillassoux:

"For the problem of the arche-fossil is not the
empirical problem of the birth of living organisms, but the
ontological problem of the coming into being of givenness as
such. More acutely, the problem consists in understanding how
science is able to think - without any particular difficulty - the
coming into being of consciousness and its spatio-temporal forms
of givenness in the midst of a space and time which are supposed
to pre-exist the latter. More particularly, one thereby begins to
grasp that science thinks a time in which the passage from the
non-being of givenness to its being has effectively occurred -
hence a time which, by definition, cannot be reduced to any
givenness which preceded it and whose emergence it allows."

>>2431143

Really? You felt the need to point that out in a thread that started with a picture of Wittgenstein?

Whatever has been going on here, it's not likely what you think.

>>2431148

What we think isn't the world - to make the case that they're in any way identical requires standing on your own shoulders.

>>2431204
One cannot creep up on the thing in itself "from behind".

>>2431214

+1

>>2430943

I never understood why people think the extension theory of meaning is such a discovery. The meaning of a word can't be identical to all the things it has been used to refer to because this will make it impossible to ever use that word correctly again. So, the "use" of a word has to be, at least, a set of things that all of the objects in their extension have in common that's liberal enough to allow new references. You can call that rule, or sense or whatever, but it has little to do with usage.

>>2431242
To whom would you attribute that kind of view to, because that wasn't Wittgenstein's position at all.

>>2431263
What was his position, then?

>>2431270

That "meaning" is determined by the role utterances play in the language games in which they were employed. And a bunch of other stuff. You used some of the right words in your characterization, but it doesn't sound like you spent much time on him.

Why do we call something a ‘number’? Well, perhaps because it has a – direct – relationship with several things that have hitherto been called number; and this can be said to give it an indirect relationship to other things we call the same name. And we extend our concept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres. But if someone wished to say: “There is something common to all these constructions – namely the disjunction of all their common properties” – I should reply: Now you are only playing with words. One might as well say: “Something runs through the whole thread – namely the continuous overlapping of those fibres.

>>2431309

is from PI

>>2431316

er... this one, I mean

>Now you are only playing with words

sounds like a valid response to the wide open texture problem alright.

>>2431316
>implying no Chaitin's constant

>>2431325

everything is only everything else "ontologically" - "ontological status" is a field of play in a language game, not an actual place

if that's not what you're getting at, I'm not sure what you mean

>>2431332

I don't know what you're getting at with this

>>2431360
It's not always easy to say certain numbers are derived from or have a particular relation to other numbers.

>>2431351
>if that's not what you're getting at, I'm not sure what you mean
I mean that family resemblance definition has a number of supposed problems, e.g. its 'wide open texture', that in relegating what is common to all instances of a concept to the overlapping similarities in each case we are faced with the issue that any object is in some way similar to any other and that we can always find some resemblance between instances of one concept and those of another, thus implying the inability as a matter of application to mark out a secure boundary the limiting of extension of concepts.

There is then the more glaring, seeming redundancy of the family resemblance approach in that insofar as we are able to come up with a set of properties relevant to the concept in question we find ourselves ironically outside of family resemblance again because we have simply presented an essential definition, after all, if it can be specified which properties are relevant to similarity, then the extension of family resemblance concepts will become limited.

>>2431366
Oh, I see now. Don't take that quoted bit in the same way you'd take it if a mathematician said the same thing. Derivation isn't the issue here; he's talking more about the social processes by which we come to talk about numbers at all.

In fact, he's arguing against the idea that "number" means something like "the aggregate of all common properties amongst numbers".

>>2431382

This is only a problem if you still think that meaning resides somewhere outside the use of language. Whether or not something is meaningful begins and ends at whether or not is does its job in conversations.

Objections like these are precisely the reason Witt. carried on against philosophical theorizing of this kind. Moving from figuring out what someONE means in a particular instance to what someTHING in general is the "conjuring trick" when we stop talking about the same processes.

>>2431387
Makes sense.

>>2431403
>This is only a problem if you still think that meaning resides somewhere outside the use of language.
I'm not seeing how any of this affects the status of the claims made in my post, particularly considering I did not say anything explicitly about meaning. Can you clarify for me how exactly the wide open texture problem is only a problem if one still thinks that meaning resides somewhere outside the use of language? At the moment this just sounds to me like a stock lazy wittgensteinian objection.

>>2431414

I agree that it's stock Wittgenstein, but I disagree about the lazy part.

The open textures problem is only a problem if you aren't making a distinction between meaning and ontological status or if you think the former is constrained by the latter. Like I said before, anything can only be anything else ontologically - conversations aren't anarchic, but that's a product of pragmatic constraints, not ontological ones.

Family resemblance allows for linguistic practices in which any word can be used to refer to anything else, but I don't see how this functions as an objection seeing as how this kind of malleability bears itself out in reality all the time i.e. a cat named Pickes because of his sour personality.

"Ontological status" is realm of conversation, not a realm of existence - we make the rules as we go. And while it's a logical consequence of family resemblance that anything could be anything else, why that doesn't happen requires a psychological explanation, not a philosophical one.

>>2431429
*the cat's name is Pickles. Sorry, Pickles.

>>2431429
I had a bit more of a response for your other sentences in your post but field length was too long so I'll keep it short and restrained to the bit I am most interested in.
>Family resemblance allows for linguistic practices in which any word can be used to refer to anything else, but I don't see how this functions as an objection seeing as how this kind of malleability bears itself out in reality all the time i.e. a cat named Pickes because of his sour personality.
Family Resemblance is primarily method of definition, as I'm sure we agree, rather than simply another signpost for the conventional nature of signifier and signified.
>this kind of malleability bears itself out in reality all the time
Sure enough. I assume we wouldn't be having this exchange if it weren't the case, however, that there aren't some concepts, reality or otherwise, whose definition is disputed.

>And while it's a logical consequence of family resemblance that anything could be anything else, why that doesn't happen requires a psychological explanation, not a philosophical one.
This is firstly to assume that what has driven our methods of defining concepts, historically or otherwise, is explainable as family resemblance. I'm not sure you're entitled to make that claim, empirically speaking. You've made a good point in saying that it is a logical consequence of the structure of Family Resemblance that anything *could* be anything else, but I feel like one is perfectly within their rights to dispute that the explanation for this is psychological in nature. One could just as easily claim that an equally, if not moreso, valid explanation is simply that family resemblance did not, or does not, or cannot, actually account for the manner in which we produce definitions, given the sort of complaints raised against it here.)

>>2431467
>You've made a good point
This is not the real D&E.

>>2431481
hey korohemovievemoth what are you reading these days

>>2431467

>This is firstly to assume that what has driven our methods of defining concepts, historically or otherwise, is explainable as family resemblance. I'm not sure you're entitled to make that claim, empirically speaking. You've made a good point in saying that it is a logical consequence of the structure of Family Resemblance that anything *could* be anything else, but I feel like one is perfectly within their rights to dispute that the explanation for this is psychological in nature. One could just as easily claim that an equally, if not moreso, valid explanation is simply that family resemblance did not, or does not, or cannot, actually account for the manner in which we produce definitions, given the sort of complaints raised against it here

I don't think saying that a theory you prefer best accommodates the facts is begging the question. All I'm saying is that, if the objection is "yeah, but everything could be everything else," then why, in fact, everything hasn't become everything else can be adequately explained in terms of people's disposition to behave rather than the ontological constraints of concepts.

i hate you so much

>>2431496
why?

>>2431496

>>2431488
>why, in fact, everything hasn't become everything else can be adequately explained in terms of people's disposition to behave rather than the ontological constraints of concepts.
My point is that a psychological explanation, one that accepts the validity of Family Resemblance as a premise, of this phenomenon is not the only explanation one could posit in this argument, and it is incumbent on the individual advocating the psychological explanation to argue it, in light of other possible explanations. One could put forward the explanation, as I do for the sake of this argument, that Family Resemblance is simply not an accurate, nor an adequate account of definition on the basis of its wide open texture. Now, the wide open texture of Family Resemblance seems to me to signify its unfalsifiability in the Popperian sense and as such, its diminished explanatory value.

>>2431525

Its diminished explanatory value relative to what? keep in mind that I brought this up originally as an objection to correspondence - is that somehow more amenable to falsifiability?

I covered your objection and you haven't really responded to that - you just keep asserting that I'm wrong.

Witty was an Aspy.

He was like an anthropologist living amongst foreign people, trying to understand them. Quine takes a similar approach, but Witty was also trying to silence his questioning mind.

"If I read Hegel I'd go stark-raving mad" - The Big Witt.

Amen.

>>2431525

>>>Now, the wide open texture of Family Resemblance seems to me to signify its unfalsifiability in the Popperian sense and as such, its diminished explanatory value.

So much for the classification of species. Popper just raped Linnaeus.

No, the disagreement doesn't dissolve, it just changes character. Instead of disagreement over some meaning of a word, we disagree about how it should be used. If you reduce 'meaning is use' to a purely descriptive view, AND take its description to dissolve normative disputes about meaning then you hold a view that Wittgenstein never would have advanced and that, is on face value, implausible because it would dismiss any normative communication whatsoever.

But he never said "meaning is use".

>>2431714
But we won't disagree about how it would be used here: utility determines how it "should" be used.

And it doesn't dismiss normative communication, but it does dismiss the notion of extra-social normative evaluations.

>>2431732
>utility determines how it "should" be used

Utility cannot establish normative value. If you think otherwise you are wrong, and at the very least not in agreement with Wittgenstein.

>>2431739

I hope you don't think I'm talking about "utility" a la Bentham - I mean pragmatic utility.

And as to whether Witt. thought pragmatic utility was a source of normative value ("good" has sense as in "good for what"), he explicitly claimed as much post-Tractatus.

Wait a second. I just came into this thread.

You do not see resemblance as a third thing and the third thing would be hands and they would be resemblance in that their qualities would be appropriated as "invisible hands".

Isn't that whole statement is a conceptual(or contextual) negation. Hands already imply that the invisible is visible. Your already substituting truth value. Actually, the whole concept of invisible implies that invisible is in fact a real state of being. Since resemblance isn't a third thing but rather a concept. How can you appropriate any sense data to that concept except for the two noses, eye etc. Then again, if the concept exists in that proposition because of those two things. Can "resemblance" exist on it's own? The answer would be yes because resemblance isn't directly connected to our realm but rather exists for us only in our meaning pertaining to it. I've actually never read Wittgenstein....Wait...What are we talking about?

>>2431855

you're talking about Meinong (sort of) and other stuff.

bump

yay a thread full of morons who havent even read wittgenstein and know nothing about logic but think they have to discuss it

>>2434875

This!

Witty was bothered by how no one understood him.