Philosophy Discussion Forums

Posted: **March 30th, 2020, 2:06 pm**

Peter Holmes wrote: ↑March 30th, 2020, 7:13 am
So. let's be precise. A principle is not a proposition, so it can't be objective or subjective. We 're discussing the status or function of moral assertions.

Of course. All philosophical argumentation --- all discussion of any kind --- consists in the consideration and evaluation of propositions.

Yes, the adoption of any of those is a choice. But that a principle is adopted (followed, accepted, etc.) has no bearing on whether it is objective. It is objective if its truth conditions are public. Whether a principle or rule does or does not further a moral goal is (usually) empirically determinable, and hence is objective.
Hold on. This is muddled, again. To clarify, please can you state a moral principle using an assertion that you think has a truth-value - one that, say, you think is true, but which would be false if things were different? And please can you also state a moral rule with the same property? I obviously don't understand what such things are, so clear examples would be useful.

Sure. Principles are a kind of rule also, but more general. A moral principle might be, "One ought not cause human suffering." That principle is true because it is obviously inconsistent with the goal of maximizing the welfare of all moral agents. A moral rule is more specific: "One ought not enslave other humans." It is true because slavery entails suffering. Both the principle and the rule would be false if suffering advanced the welfare of all moral agents.

So the definition of a moral agent, and therefore the applicability of moral principles, are stipulative, have no truth-value, and are not objective. Good to get that sorted.

Correct. Definitions are conventions, not propositions.

Posted: **March 30th, 2020, 4:28 pm**

Peter Holmes wrote: ↑March 30th, 2020, 12:17 pm I find what you say utterly incredible. What and where do you think meaning is?

It's a mental state--specifically, the mental state that amounts to making associations. As such, that occurs in brains. So that's the location of meaning--brains.

And do you think other abstract nouns are names of things?

Well, abstractions per se are something else we do mentally. Abstractions amount to concepts we formulate--it's a mental process of glossing over details in particulars so that we can consider multiple particulars the "same thing," which is necessary/useful for dealing with the plethora of information we'd otherwise have to deal with. As something mental, those abstractions or concepts are another subset of brain phenomena.

Of course, what the abstractions are in response to are not necessarily brain phenomena, so not necessarily located in or at brains; it just depends on the phenomenon in question.

So for example:

Do you think the word 'justice' is the name of a thing of some kind? And if so, what and where is that thing?

What one counts as "justice" will depend on the concept one has formulated. That concept is located in your brain.

That concept will count particular actions as just or not. The actions are located where the people performing them are located. So, for example, one might think that a jury or a judge has or has not arrived at a just verdict in a court case. Those actions have a location, obviously--they're the utterances of the jury or the judge.

I have absolutely no idea. And that you think meaning exists in the way an electrochemical process exists - physically, measurably - is so ridiculous that I feel we can have nothing useful to say to each other.

I'm a physicalist. I don't believe that anything exists that's not physical. (What I mean by physical is matter (in the "chunks of stuff" sense) and its dynamic relations to other matter.)

I'd be very interested in someone trying to make coherent what a nonphysical existent would amount to, but no one has been able to yet.

Posted: **March 30th, 2020, 4:35 pm**

GE Morton wrote: ↑March 30th, 2020, 1:49 pm TP, this entire "mental/extramental" dichotomy of yours is a postulate of a particular ontological theory, which, like most ontological theories, is nonsense. The only evidence you can possibly have for any "extramental" phenomena --- entities, events, properties, etc. --- is sensory phenomena, which are all "mental phenomena."

Once again, there absolutely no basis for positing that one can only experience mental phenomena.

The arguments for that always either (a) rely on claims that we can observe nonmental phenomena--for example, a la observing just how perception works, or (b) they posit phenomenal appearances--say of a tree, for example--with no mental content attached (that is, no thought of a tree, no conscious content a la "I'm observing a tree," etc.) as something mental simply willy nilly, simply by royal proclamation.

Neither of those tactics work, for reasons that should be glaringly obvious.

If you're simply following Kant, he was a buffoon in his reasoning about this. Something we could easily enough demonstrate by systemically, sentence-by-sentence, examining a work like his Critique of Pure Reason.

Posted: **March 30th, 2020, 7:06 pm**

Terrapin Station wrote: ↑March 30th, 2020, 4:28 pm
Peter Holmes wrote: ↑March 30th, 2020, 12:17 pm I find what you say utterly incredible. What and where do you think meaning is?
It's a mental state--specifically, the mental state that amounts to making associations. As such, that occurs in brains. So that's the location of meaning--brains.

Yikes, you're still peddling that foolishness, despite that it leads to a reductio ad absurdum?

No, meanings (of words and sentences) are not mental states; knowledge of a meaning is a mental state. Nor do they exist in brains. They exist in speech communities, and are evidenced by the behavior of members of those communities when using and hearing various words and sentences. They exist wherever a group of speakers of given language exists. In order for language to work to transmit information, the meanings of its words must be common between speaker and hearer. But no one can see what is in someone else's brain; the only way for Alfie to know what Bruno means by "dog" is observing how he and others use that word and how they respond when hearing it. That is how we all learn the meanings of words --- meanings which existed long before we arrived in the world.

What one counts as "justice" will depend on the concept one has formulated. That concept is located in your brain.

Then,

I'm a physicalist. I don't believe that anything exists that's not physical. (What I mean by physical is matter (in the "chunks of stuff" sense) and its dynamic relations to other matter.)

So the concepts to which you referred above don't exist? Or do you mean they are "chunks of stuff"? If the latter, how much does, say, the concept of justice weigh? You have an embarrassing dilemma there.

Do you see the silliness to which that ontology of your leads?

PS: You also need to mind the distinction between concepts and conceptions. Concepts begin as conceptions in someone's brain. If they prove to have explanatory value they enter public "conceptual space" and become part of "common knowledge," learnable by others.

I'd be very interested in someone trying to make coherent what a nonphysical existent would amount to, but no one has been able to yet.

I've already answered that. An existent is anything postulated which contributes to understanding of experienced phenomena. Some existents are physical (they have mass and occupy specific volumes of time and space), and some are non-physical, without mass and with no specific spatio-temporal coordinates.

Posted: **March 30th, 2020, 7:10 pm**

Terrapin Station wrote: ↑March 30th, 2020, 4:35 pm
Once again, there absolutely no basis for positing that one can only experience mental phenomena.

LOL. Experience is NOTHING BUT mental phenomena.

If you're simply following Kant, he was a buffoon in his reasoning about this. Something we could easily enough demonstrate by systemically, sentence-by-sentence, examining a work like his Critique of Pure Reason.

Well, such a demonstration would be received with great interest by most contemporary philosophers. You should get to work on it!

Posted: **March 30th, 2020, 7:31 pm**

GE Morton wrote: ↑March 30th, 2020, 7:06 pm Yikes, you're still peddling that foolishness, despite that it leads to a reductio ad absurdum?

There's no reductio ad absurdum.

Your half-assed comments are certainly not going to change a view that I've had for decades and published on in peer-reviewed philosophy journals.

In order for language to work to transmit information,

Language doesn't work by literally transmitting meanings. You can transmit text or sound strings (strings of phonemes in the latter case) that are correlated to meanings you've assigned, but you can't literally transmit meanings. People reading text strings or hearing sound strings have to assign meanings to the observables (the text or sound strings) themselves. Meanings do not at all have to be the "same" (they can't literally be the same, because nominalism has things right) for communication to occur. All that's required for mutual understanding is that the parties involved feel that subsequent actions, including subsequent utterances of text and sound strings, is coherent and consistent, including with behavioral expectations. Whether meanings are similar is irrelevant to this.

Posted: **March 30th, 2020, 7:33 pm**

GE Morton wrote: ↑March 30th, 2020, 7:10 pm LOL. Experience is NOTHING BUT mental phenomena.

Obviously this is what you're positing. What I said is that there's no cogent basis for it. Simply making the claim as you're doing above isn't a basis for it.

Posted: **March 30th, 2020, 7:48 pm**

Oops typo: obviously "including subsequent utterances of text and sound strings, is coherent and consistent" should be ". . . ARE coherent and consistent."

Posted: **March 31st, 2020, 4:41 am**

Peter Holmes wrote: ↑March 30th, 2020, 1:15 pm
Belindi wrote: ↑March 30th, 2020, 12:38 pm When someone thingifies an abstract concept the error is sometimes due to the concept's being denoted by a noun.

If,say, justice did not exist as a word but instead we had a verb 'justicing' or a verb phrase 'behave justly' then Peter would not thingify that concept.
Maybe. But a concept is just another fictional abstract thing. Saying the supposed thing named by the word 'justice' is a concept explains absolutely nothing. What and where is a concept supposed to be? In the mind - another fictional abstract thing? That this metaphysical nonsense still passes muster is astonishing.

Concepts with accompanying physical(material) attributes may be measured with scales, rulers, pint pots , how much two oxen can plough in a day, the cost in money of sending a ship to the moon, and so forth. Some concepts , such as justice, are measured only by people's behaviour and intentions.

We call the latter 'abstract' because we abstract them from people's behaviour and intentions.And that's another example of elucidation by way of substituting a verb for a noun.

Posted: **March 31st, 2020, 4:42 am**

Belindi wrote: ↑March 31st, 2020, 4:41 am
Peter Holmes wrote: ↑March 30th, 2020, 1:15 pm
Maybe. But a concept is just another fictional abstract thing. Saying the supposed thing named by the word 'justice' is a concept explains absolutely nothing. What and where is a concept supposed to be? In the mind - another fictional abstract thing? That this metaphysical nonsense still passes muster is astonishing.
Concepts with accompanying physical(material) attributes may be measured with scales, rulers, pint pots , how much two oxen can plough in a day, the cost in money of sending a ship to the moon, and so forth. Some concepts , such as justice, are measured only by people's behaviour and intentions.

We call the latter 'abstract' because we abstract them from people's behaviour and intentions.And that's another example of elucidation by way of substituting a verb for a noun or adective.

Posted: **March 31st, 2020, 4:42 am**

Belindi wrote: ↑March 31st, 2020, 4:42 am
Belindi wrote: ↑March 31st, 2020, 4:41 am

Concepts with accompanying physical(material) attributes may be measured with scales, rulers, pint pots , how much two oxen can plough in a day, the cost in money of sending a ship to the moon, and so forth. Some concepts , such as justice, are measured only by people's behaviour and intentions.

We call the latter 'abstract' because we abstract them from people's behaviour and intentions.And that's another example of elucidation by way of substituting a verb for a noun or adjective.

Posted: **March 31st, 2020, 6:34 am**

Belindi wrote: ↑March 31st, 2020, 4:41 am
Peter Holmes wrote: ↑March 30th, 2020, 1:15 pm
Maybe. But a concept is just another fictional abstract thing. Saying the supposed thing named by the word 'justice' is a concept explains absolutely nothing. What and where is a concept supposed to be? In the mind - another fictional abstract thing? That this metaphysical nonsense still passes muster is astonishing.
Concepts with accompanying physical(material) attributes may be measured with scales, rulers, pint pots , how much two oxen can plough in a day, the cost in money of sending a ship to the moon, and so forth. Some concepts , such as justice, are measured only by people's behaviour and intentions.

A concept is a supposed abstract thing. It doesn't have measurable physical attributes. Do you have an example of such a concept? And can you explain what it could mean to 'measure' the supposed concept of justice by people's behaviour and intentions? (Sorry, but I think this is wandering in a metaphorical wilderness.)

To repeat: what and where is a concept? It's not supposed to be either a word or a physical thing that we name by means of a word.

We call the latter 'abstract' because we abstract them from people's behaviour and intentions.And that's another example of elucidation by way of substituting a verb for a noun.

So you think a so-called abstract concept is a thing of some kind 'abstracted' from people's behaviour and intentions. I have no idea what those words mean - what sort of process this is. Can you explain it in terms that don't involve explaining how we use a word such as 'justice'?

I've never seen a rational, plausible explanation. So I think it's hand-waving blather designed to give ourselves the impression that we've explained something - where in fact all we've done is invented a mystery to explain a mystery of our own invention.

A dog chasing its tail needs to re-think the premise.

Posted: **March 31st, 2020, 6:58 am**

Terrapin Station wrote: ↑March 30th, 2020, 4:28 pm
I'm a physicalist. I don't believe that anything exists that's not physical. (What I mean by physical is matter (in the "chunks of stuff" sense) and its dynamic relations to other matter.)

I'd be very interested in someone trying to make coherent what a nonphysical existent would amount to, but no one has been able to yet.

Agreed. GEM, for example, just asserts that, if they help us explain things, non-physical things exist - which is complete nonsense.

But, as physicalists, we deny the existence of non-physical things. And supposed abstract things are non-physical things. And what we call - by a grammatical misattribution - an abstract noun is (we delude ourselves) the name of an abtract thing: meaning, truth, knowledge, justice, beauty, identity, being - and so on.

You say that what we call meaning - or the meaning of something - is a mental state or process. And that, since mental states and processes exist, then meaning exists. But why do you say mental states and processes exist? If they're identical to physical states and processes, what makes them mental? As you'd put it: what work does the word 'mental' do?

Genuine questions, TS.

Posted: **March 31st, 2020, 10:23 am**

Terrapin Station wrote: ↑March 30th, 2020, 7:31 pm
GE Morton wrote: ↑March 30th, 2020, 7:06 pm Yikes, you're still peddling that foolishness, despite that it leads to a reductio ad absurdum?
There's no reductio ad absurdum.

Ah. Despite having outlined it several times, I suspected you did not understand why your thesis entails a reductio. Or perhaps don't understand what a reductio ad absurdum is.

A reductio ad absurdum is an argument that yields a conclusion which is absurd; which is obviously, self-evidently, false.

Let's go through it again.

1. In order to communicate information via language, speaker and hearer must attach the same denotative meanings to the words employed.

2. In order for both speaker and hearer to attach the same meaning to a given word, that meaning must be public, i.e., accessible to and learnable by both speaker and hearer.

3. Meanings are "mental phenomena" in people's heads.

4. But "mental phenomena in people's heads" is inaccessible to anyone except the person whose head it is.

5. Hence (from 4) no hearer can know whether the meaning attached by a speaker to a given word is the same as the one he attaches to it.

6. Hence no hearer can know what a speaker is saying.

7. Hence no information can be communicated via language.

Which is absurd.

Your half-assed comments are certainly not going to change a view that I've had for decades and published on in peer-reviewed philosophy journals.

Oh, I realize that people can be very stubborn about abandoning views they've held for decades. Thomas Kuhn wrote a whole book on that subject.

In order for language to work to transmit information,
Language doesn't work by literally transmitting meanings.

Why do you keep changing "transmit information" to, "transmit meanings"?

As I've said before, there is no need to transmit any meanings in most verbal communications, because the hearers already know the meanings of the words employed. What is transmitted is information about some state-of-affairs in the world.

However, in fact, language can also transmit meanings, if that is necessary or desired. That is what dictionaries do. (That "dog" means --->[dog] is itself a fact, a state-of-affairs in the world).

Meanings do not at all have to be the "same" (they can't literally be the same, because nominalism has things right) for communication to occur. All that's required for mutual understanding is that the parties involved feel that subsequent actions, including subsequent utterances of text and sound strings, is coherent and consistent, including with behavioral expectations. Whether meanings are similar is irrelevant to this.

Yes, they do have to be the same. If Alfie and Bruno both point to the same animal when asked, "What is the meaning of "dog"?, then the meanings they attach are the same --- in the only sense of "same" that is relevant. Those "subsequent actions" you mention certainly can demonstrate that speaker and hearer attach the same meaning to "dog." But they can't explain how it happens that they do. Is it just an accident? Of the infinite number of meanings Alfie might attach to that word, it just happens that he attaches the same meaning Bruno does?

Or does it happen because both Alfie and Bruno have learned that meaning, which existed somewhere before either of them learned to speak?

Posted: **March 31st, 2020, 11:52 am**

Peter Holmes wrote: ↑March 31st, 2020, 6:58 am
Terrapin Station wrote: ↑March 30th, 2020, 4:28 pm
I'm a physicalist. I don't believe that anything exists that's not physical. (What I mean by physical is matter (in the "chunks of stuff" sense) and its dynamic relations to other matter.)

I'd be very interested in someone trying to make coherent what a nonphysical existent would amount to, but no one has been able to yet.
Agreed. GEM, for example, just asserts that, if they help us explain things, non-physical things exist - which is complete nonsense.

But, as physicalists, we deny the existence of non-physical things. And supposed abstract things are non-physical things. And what we call - by a grammatical misattribution - an abstract noun is (we delude ourselves) the name of an abtract thing: meaning, truth, knowledge, justice, beauty, identity, being - and so on.

You say that what we call meaning - or the meaning of something - is a mental state or process. And that, since mental states and processes exist, then meaning exists. But why do you say mental states and processes exist? If they're identical to physical states and processes, what makes them mental? As you'd put it: what work does the word 'mental' do?

Genuine questions, TS.

So, obviously to myself, I have thoughts, desires, ideas, concepts, goals, likes/dislikes, etc. I daydream (and night-dream, of course), I fantasize, I perceive things--I'm aware of things in my environment, and so on. A term that lumps all of this sort of stuff together, all this subjective phenomena that I can experience for myself, and if I want to, that I can keep hidden from others, is "mentality." So the work the term does is that it serves as a catchall name for this sort of phenomena.

With terms like "meaning," "truth," "justice," etc.--we're talking about something--if we weren't, we wouldn't be able to make any sense of the talk about that sort of stuff, and we could swap out any of those terms for the other and it wouldn't make any difference.

What we're talking about must be something physical, because only physical things exist. So part of the job is to peg, to pin down, exactly what it is that we're talking about, exactly what those terms are referring to with respect to the physical things that exist.

A common belief might be that abstractions are nonphysical, but that's mistaken. Again, only physical things exist. And there are abstractions, there are abstract terms that are referring to something. (Again, we're naming them with terms like "meaning," "number," "type," and so on, where we can make sense of that talk.)

Abstractions are physical states that our brains can be in. What physical state? They amount to formulating a type in thought, or in other words ignoring certain details of particulars and considering certain similarities a type of thing--in other words, they're concepts we formulate (as individuals, where what those concepts are ontologically are particular brain states at particular times). So re abstractions, there are the concepts that are the abstractions, which are particular brain states in particular individuals' brains, and there are the other particulars (which could be external-to-oneself things, actions, etc.) that the individual is combining and removing details from to formulate the concept.

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