tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post2916649367634852891..comments2023-05-13T07:41:26.217-05:00Comments on SOH-Dan: "There are here hugely many interrelated phenomena and possible concepts."Daniel Lindquisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05443116324301716578noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post-48997376409397998952008-10-27T21:26:00.000-05:002008-10-27T21:26:00.000-05:00There you go censor-dan. A bit of Russell, and AYN...There you go censor-dan. A bit of Russell, and AYN RAND, and time to delete....Most quasi-analytical sorts of really don't take on Quine's nominalism (because they don't know what it implies, or don't have the chops). PMS Hacker has of course......<BR/><BR/>Question: how'd you do on GRE's, S-dan? Or was it like ... hush hush......<BR/><BR/>Really, I think U of Chi Philosophy should have the GRE scores of all faculty posted online. <BR/><BR/>Sorta Kantian even................Jhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11567400697675996283noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post-79750938315860667452008-10-27T19:46:00.002-05:002008-10-27T19:46:00.002-05:00Jon's second comment:I think I know who you are, b...Jon's second comment:<BR/><BR/>I think I know who you are, but I'm not sure. I'll try to figure it out on Tuesday.<BR/><BR/>I was also disappointed with the mention of Davidson. I want to say that Davidson's target in that article is not at all whatever Haugeland means by 'ways of being.'<BR/><BR/>The invocation of Quine made me similarly uncomfortable. You're definitely right to point out that the purpose of Quine's slogan involves alleviating confusions about what we say about fictional or non-existent objects. (This may be an idiosyncratic understanding of Quine coming from someone with distinctly anti-naturalistic sympathies, though.)<BR/><BR/>Clark seems cool. I have another thing during the discussion sections, which is why I haven't gone to them. Maybe I'll try to shuffle things so that I can.Daniel Lindquisthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05443116324301716578noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post-81416369311775247802008-10-27T19:46:00.001-05:002008-10-27T19:46:00.001-05:00My comment:Yeah, I am. I dropped NDI for the analy...My comment:<BR/>Yeah, I am. I dropped NDI for the analytic course shortly after posting about it, since I flipped a coin and that's how it came up. (It helped that I didn't want to write on any of the paper topics he listed.) But I'm still taking Haugeland's class.<BR/><BR/>I generally sit towards the front, on the side by the door, since I keep having to get up to blow my nose. You could probably identify me just by looking for someone who left the room more than once a class. I'm 6' even and I wear glasses and a black hooded sweatshirt (because it is cold outside). Feel free to say hi or something if you figure out who I am. (I'm sorry, but I can't recall which inarticulate question about normativity you might have asked.)<BR/><BR/>I was the one who kept going on about the guy who used a rock & a wrench to drive nails into boards to make doghouses etc., and whether there was an interesting sense in which he was doing things incorrectly. (I still don't think there is. Sure, "a hammer is a hammer" and it's "for hammering" but I see no reason not to discard these ways of talking as soon as one has some idea for what may be a better way of getting about. Someone asked a follow-up question about invention that clearly irritated Haugeland, but I think that's a good way to press the point: if equipment can only show up according to its antecedently established roles, then it seems like you can't talk about someone just using an "old tool" in a "new way", and so you need some stranger story to tell about how invention is possible. For any "new way" would i) have to be already part of a referential matrix to count as a way of using equipment at all, ii) would only be a misusing of the equipment, and so not a new use for it in a positive sense. How invention happens is thus something Haugeland's Heidegger has to confront.)<BR/><BR/>Incidentally, "In a few years we'll all be drinking from our shoes" is a fun sentence to utter.<BR/><BR/>I also asked about the scheme-content dualism and was disappointed to find out that Haugeland hasn't looked at Davidson in years, and thinks that "ways of being" are something like conceptual schemes.<BR/><BR/>I think I've tried to press Haugeland about what sorts of entities have their "way of being" as presence-at-hand (I don't think there can be any, if an entity can only have one "way of being" -- thus the floundering whenever an example is reached for, and Heidegger's use of "Things", "Nature", "bodily properties" etc. as "examples" of entities present-at-hand), but maybe I brought that up in the reading group. Haugeland's account of "present-at-handedness" really does bother me, but I've found it's damnably hard to figure out just what Heidegger means by it. He seems to use it very loosely -- it doesn't have a "strict sense", as far as I can tell. It's almost always brought up as a negative contrast case -- other entities are not present-at-hand.<BR/><BR/>I probably should've bugged Haugeland about Quine when he made that remark about "to be is to be the value of a bound variable" as a paradigm of "presence-at-hand". To say that whatever there is can be mentioned in a sentence of the form "There is at least one X such that F" does not, I think, say anything about "ways of being". And so it doesn't say that everything has the same way of being. I don't think Quine's famous claim amounts to anything more substantial than Haugeland's "Entities are just whatever there is". In fact, I think Haugeland himself has called an entity "something which there is". But Something which there is is just the value of a bound variable (="something").<BR/><BR/>Quine, "On What There Is": "Now how are we to adjudicate among rival ontologies? Certainly the answer is not provided by the semantical formula “To be is to be the value of a variable”; this formula serves rather, conversely, in testing the conformity of a given remark or doctrine to a prior ontological standard. We look to bound variables in connection with ontology not in order to know what there is, but in order to know what a given remark or doctrine,, ours or someone else’s, says there is; and this much is quite properly a problem involving language. But what there is is another question." Quine's "ontological" point, insofar as he has one in "On What There Is", is just to make clear how we can avoid having to posit nonexistent entities for people to talk about when they discuss things that don't exist. I don't think this can possibly conflict with Heidegger's project; Quine's small point isn't about anything like what Heidegger (or at least Haugeland's Heidegger) wants to talk about.<BR/><BR/>Incidentally, the sign on the door that says "Haugeland's Heidegger's Being and Time"? I made a joke about that sign in the reading group, and Clark said that was intentional -- it's a class on Haugeland's Heidegger's Being and Time. (Clark is cool.)<BR/><BR/>It's an interesting course. Definitely not what I was expecting, but interesting.Daniel Lindquisthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05443116324301716578noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post-54021014360013957232008-10-27T19:46:00.000-05:002008-10-27T19:46:00.000-05:00Jon's comment:Are you in Haugeland's class? I have...Jon's comment:<BR/><BR/>Are you in Haugeland's class? I have yet to figure out who you are IRL. I'm the kid in the back who always has his computer open, who asked a very inarticulate question about normativity.Daniel Lindquisthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05443116324301716578noreply@blogger.com