Terrapin Station wrote: ↑February 22nd, 2020, 2:36 pm
Apparently you didn't understand this comment of mine: "I'm after what is actually going on, in terms of physical details (or if someone would want to assert there are also nonphysical details, they'd need to try to support that, starting with trying to support the very idea that a "nonphysical" existent is coherent). And I do mean details--details of exactly how such and such is supposed to work, where exactly it's supposed to occur (remembering that locations can be complex and discontinuous), what exactly it's supposed to be a property of, etc."
Yes, you asked that before and I answered it before. You seem to be asking how learning (of a meaning, a fact, a skill, etc.) works --- how an association is formed between, e.g., a word and something else (a thing-in-the world, another word, a state-of-affairs, etc.). I answered that that is a question for neurophysiologists, not philosophers, though we know it happens in the brain. Is that what you're asking? If not, then I have no idea what you're asking.
BTW, there are innumerable non-physical existents, and there can be as many more as we care to invent. They exist as long as they have some descriptive or explanatory value. "To be is to be the value of a bound variable" (Quine). An odd comment coming from you, for whom minds, the paradigm non-physical existent, looms large.
"Okay, so let's say we have ink marks on paper or pixel marks on a screen that look like this: "Paris is the capital of France" (using that one since you liked it earlier--if you want to change it that's fine).
"Is the next step that you want to claim that those ink marks assert something independent of anyone's mind? How do they do that? Describe exactly how that works--and again, it has to be an explanation that's independent of anyone's mind."
Ink marks don't assert anything unless they are letters in an alphabet and are combined into words whose meanings are known to a group of speakers, and the words are arranged according to syntactical rules also known to those speakers. And, yes, what they assert is independent of anyone's mind. "Paris is the capital of France" asserts a state of affairs, namely, that Paris is the capital of France --- a state of affairs independent of anyone's mind.
Knowing that that sentence denotes that state of affairs does, of course, require a mind. To know that, each speaker will have had to learn the meanings of the words employed and the syntactical rules for combining them, which he will learn by observing others' behavior, including their uses of those terms --- not by reading anyone's mind. "The meaning of a term is its use" (Wittgenstein).
The challenge is to DETAIL how P in L is true iff s. Just how does that work, in terms of what physically obtains, where it obtains, etc.?
Answered above. But if that answer is not what you're looking for I have no idea what you're asking.
I'm not looking for the standard slogan. That doesn't tell us anything about what's going on ontologically.
For the most part ontology is fatuous nonsense, resting on various supernatural assumptions, usually unrecognized. I can't tell you what is going on ontologically because I have no idea what variant of the nonsense you've adopted.
- By Pattern-chaser