tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post5361946608523736980..comments2023-05-13T07:41:26.217-05:00Comments on SOH-Dan: The Endogenous given: why I am not satisfied with McDowell on this frontDaniel Lindquisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05443116324301716578noreply@blogger.comBlogger44125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post-23765321994136118782012-03-14T12:17:03.346-05:002012-03-14T12:17:03.346-05:00Hi, Dan -
We had an e-mail exchange last June mot...Hi, Dan -<br /><br />We had an e-mail exchange last June motivated by my response to the Leiter post re suggested reading lists - mine being, apparently, closely aligned with yours: PMN, EPM, Ramberg's R&Critics essay, et al. I recently checked in here and belatedly found this sequence of postings that are closely related to my current pursuits. I assume that you're flagged by comments even if they aren't on currently active posts.<br /><br />I've been battling DD's scheme-content essay, JM's response (which you sent me - thanks!), and these posts of yours. I think I have a reasonable grasp of the first two. All appear to start "in the middle" of the epistemic trek from non-cognitive infant to fully cognitive pre-schooler. This strikes me as problematic.<br /><br />As JM says, S-C duality isn't just a dogma, it's inherently incoherent. And perhaps the problem is viewing the world-scheme-content interaction as being confined to the context of an individual. If we accept Sellars' dictum about awareness being "a linguistic affair", it would seem that the context should be social. And sure enough, society - at first personified by mom, dad, and other caregivers - provides the conceptual scheme that the infant comes to use (unknowingly, of course) in organizing - ie, segmenting - the undifferentiated sensory stream with which she is initially confronted. Then Lear (and according to deVries and Triplett's explication of EPM §33, Schlick as well) may have been on the right track with their applications of ostension, except that its application is most critical not at any cognitive stage of development but way back at pre-awareness. A caregiver presents an object and says a word. In time, this establishes an association between pieces of one sensory stream (the visual) and another (the aural). While Lear is right that initially the infant can't say the word, in time she is able to do so. And although I'm a bit of a skeptic about "thought" as a separate ability, if one wants to label the infant's new-found ability to recognize an object and parrot an associated word "pure thought", fine. In any event, that ability isn't "given", it must be learned.<br /><br />Put in the terms of the DD and JM papers, in this view the world provides the sensory content streams, the caregivers embody the socially accepted conceptual scheme (AKA, language), and their ostensive teaching conveys to the infant where to put, so to speak, commas that segment the stream in accordance with the scheme.<br /><br />From that perspective, I see the issue of an "endogenous given" as amounting to addressing what pre-awareness abilities must be in place in order for the infant to be able to engage in this process. And whatever the answer, those abilities will be the product of evolution, which provides one tie into "the world". They will be justified in the ultimate sense of having contributed to the survival of the species. Being innate, they will be unrevisable, other than perhaps as the result of further evolution. The linguistic scheme will be a product of social evolution and thus similarly justified, thereby providing another tie into "the world". <br /><br />I'm not sure what "rationality" is. What I assume the word is supposed to capture seems to me not a matter of acquiring a new ability but of an existing ability having achieved a level of complexity. As Rorty describes it in PMN, at some point people notice that a child is no longer just parroting but "knows what she's talking about". Ie, becomes "rational"? In any event, that change seems likely to occur over time during the continuous developmental process rather than at some discernible point of discontinuity.<br /><br />Since it's extremely unlikely that a novice has discovered something that experts have missed, I assume there's a major flaw somewhere in this view. So, I'd appreciate any corrective insights you care to provide.Charles T. Wolvertonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12309746685166449683noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post-69395271669889660492012-03-05T11:19:15.158-06:002012-03-05T11:19:15.158-06:00Next, w/r/t Nick's first comment, I'm not ...Next, w/r/t Nick's first comment, I'm not sure that what we're doing when we decline to "define the bounds of what can/should be thought" is acknowledging "the authority of reason as such" due to "the transcendence of thought". I suppose whenever you reject what looks like a reductive account of thought then you are saying that thought "transcends" that account of it (here, its supposed limits); but what we are "accepting" here seems more (as in line w/ the account of OC above) is more the fact (of which we may indeed need to be "reminded") that (as W puts it) some things are "in fact not doubted".<br /><br />That is, with the quantifier in the right place, as Daniel points out: It is always the case that some things are in fact not doubted; and these need not be the same things at all times.<br /><br />So it's not so much that when we try to draw our line, some things (the same things?) always escape; it's that we are concerned with a domain in constant motion, so that drawing a line in the dirt and expecting your chickens to stay on one side of it is pointless, and building a fence to keep them in equally so.Duckhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11349267352262603510noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post-77538613858015349242012-03-05T11:08:03.367-06:002012-03-05T11:08:03.367-06:00A few isolated comments here, for what they're...A few isolated comments here, for what they're worth:<br /><br />First, thanks for explaining OTL. I was looking at it wrong, and now I see it. Aspect dawning!<br /><br />As for <i>On Certainty</i>, I agree with Daniel above, where he says:<br /><br />"My preferred treatment of "hinge propositions" is just to repeat the Sellarsian dictum: You can put anything in doubt, but not all at once! You always need to leave some things not (presently) doubted. But I don't see any reason to believe in a special class of sentences which must not be doubted. There must always be some sentences which are not doubted, but there needn't be some sentences which are always not doubted. Note the quantifier shift."<br /><br />That's right, but note also that the best word for "sentences which are presently not doubted" is "beliefs". "Hinge propositions" are current beliefs. Nick allows that this "seems perfectly reasonable", but if so I'm not sure why should go on to say that they are not propositions at all, as he does. He must mean "that seems perfectly reasonable, but I'm going in a different direction myself", because the views are clearly not compatible.<br /><br />I also agree that OC is just a collection of notes where W is playing around (however seriously) with some ideas and never really settling on a solution. That's okay, it's still interesting; but I think claims of a "third stage" in his thought are a bit exaggerated.Duckhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11349267352262603510noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post-73044535481613731702012-02-29T12:56:41.593-06:002012-02-29T12:56:41.593-06:00O is his head
T is his arms and torso
L is his leg...O is his head<br />T is his arms and torso<br />L is his legs, knees on the ground<br /><br />OTLDaniel Lindquisthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05443116324301716578noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post-64970718789586065122012-02-29T12:53:52.677-06:002012-02-29T12:53:52.677-06:00So you did – partial credit (failure) on this one....So you did – partial credit (failure) on this one. Wikipedia says "OTL" is an emoticon signifying failure (a man bowing) but after turning my head sideways for several minutes I still can't see it. OTL<br /><br />Thanks for the Costa paper you sent, but now you'll have me reading instead of writing.Duckhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11349267352262603510noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post-22983589085461040732012-02-29T11:42:42.909-06:002012-02-29T11:42:42.909-06:00"First, it's [Richard] Jeffrey, not Jeffr..."First, it's [Richard] Jeffrey, not Jeffries."<br /><br />I spelled it right in the post! ;_;/<br /><br />I think I keep confusing his name with "Jefferies tube". Which I also mispell. OTLDaniel Lindquisthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05443116324301716578noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post-53549386324400102102012-02-29T10:50:28.784-06:002012-02-29T10:50:28.784-06:00Thanks guys, this is really helpful (if also frust...Thanks guys, this is really helpful (if also frustrating in the usual way). I will try to say a few things (maybe at my place if I get long-winded or ambitious) while Daniel is getting back to work, but as you know this claim should not be believed in advance of the evidence for its truth. Here let me just say a few random things.<br /><br />First, it's [Richard] Jeffrey, not Jeffries. (Also, you often write "lead" or "mislead" for the past tense when it is "led" and "misled." This is quite common, and I sympathize, having read "misled" at first (when a child) as the past tense not of "mislead" but instead of some unknown verb "to misle," and thus as sounding like "mize-eld". Anyway.<br /><br />Also, Blade season 1 is good? Okay, I'll check it out.<br /><br />I also failed to make it through <i>McDowell and his Critics</i>, but the way I thought of it was not that the critics were uncomprehending, but instead that they were zooming in on aspects of McD's work which were of less interest to me (as what I want to hear about is more about how "Wittgensteinian" "quietism" and "Pittsburgh" "Hegelianism" go together, with each other and with the other stuff about Davidson and Gadamer. But now I wonder if maybe these two reactions are more similar than they appear – that is, that reading McD as propounding just another philosophical doctrine about perception gets him way wrong (in the way that Davidson's critics so often do, <i>mutatis mutandis</i>), so that to pick at it in the way these critics do is to be "uncomprehending" of what he is really up to. I don't remember if I have seen the Murray piece before, so I will take a look at it – thank you.<br /><br />I liked the bit in Daniel's comment (at 2/23 10:24 AM) about Rödl and intention, which I had not heard before. In general I don't see why statements of intention can't be factual in something like this way, and the same goes for "definitions," which I will try to say something about later. Oops, time for lunch.Duckhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11349267352262603510noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post-71262409288730402062012-02-26T23:56:18.826-06:002012-02-26T23:56:18.826-06:00Noooooo!!!! Page 57! It's like getting to the ...Noooooo!!!! Page 57! It's like getting to the cliff-hanger ending of Season 1 of <i>Blade: the Series</i>, only to realize that no second season has been made and likely never will be.<br /><br />Well Season 1 was still great, and so is Murray's paper. What an incredibly lucid and satisfying explanation of McDowell's project. Thanks for telling me about it!<br /><br />Now what I'm most interested to find out is how McDowell's use of second-nature allows him to dispense with the claim that experience is extra-conceptual (Murray's EEC), i.e., how second-nature grounds the unboundedness of the conceptual.N. N.https://www.blogger.com/profile/05983492370711591794noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post-78792163519165154582012-02-26T14:04:00.066-06:002012-02-26T14:04:00.066-06:00"You speak as if there are other volumes of t..."You speak as if there are other volumes of this genre? Also, in your opinion, where should one go for the best outside account of Mind and World"<br /><br />There are in fact. "Experience, Norm, and Nature" and <a href="http://web.uni-frankfurt.de/fb08/PHIL/willaschek/mcdowellkolloq.pdf" rel="nofollow">Reason and Nature (PDF)</a> take this form, and I think I'm forgetting at least one other.<br /><br />The best account of McDowell's <i>Fragestellung</i> is, awkwardly, in this <a href="http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/wittgenstein/files/2008/02/murray-second-nature.pdf" rel="nofollow">paper draft that was presented to the Wittgenstein Workshop a few years ago</a>. It's not a complete paper as posted, and Murray's never responded to my e-mails when I ask if he's gone back and finished it. But the thing that got posted to the workshop website is really penetrating, in a way that most accounts of "Mind and World" are superficial. He does a good job laying out who "Mind and World" is addressed to, what McDowell is assuming about his audience, and what background has to be in place for the "see-saw" McDowell addresses in that book to appear.<br /><br />I'll address the substantive stuff later; I have two papers to write in the next two weeks, and this has been taking up more time than I like.Daniel Lindquisthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05443116324301716578noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post-80936167448804174152012-02-26T13:28:23.815-06:002012-02-26T13:28:23.815-06:00I couldn't make it through "McDowell and ...<i>I couldn't make it through "McDowell and his Critics". I thought that the essays in that volume were uniformally uncomprehending, and McDowell's replies were thus tedious rehashings of views already clearly laid out elsewhere. It's the worst "McDowell replies to essays" collection out there; "Reading McDowell" is easily the best.</i><br /><br />Actually, tedious rehashings may be of help to me. I'll be sure and read McDowell's replies before I read the essays. And I'm looking at the <i>Reading McDowell</i> first, so that will help me avoid falling into incomprehension when reading the <i>Critics</i> collection.<br /><br />You speak as if there are other volumes of this genre? Also, in your opinion, where should one go for the best outside account of <i>Mind and World</i>N. N.https://www.blogger.com/profile/05983492370711591794noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post-77609042029065230892012-02-26T13:24:24.498-06:002012-02-26T13:24:24.498-06:00Concerning your biconditionals, consider an analog...Concerning your biconditionals, consider an analogous case. A command (e.g., "Clean your room") is neither true nor false. But we do talk of them as being in effect or not (e.g., military orders are sometimes accompanied by an effective date, say, "effective immediately"). Let 'C' be a schematic letter that stands in for a command. Let 'X' be a schematic letter that stands in for an unknown sentence. Here are two biconditionals:<br /><br />(The order) 'C' is in effect (relative to a speaker on an occasion) IFF X.<br /><br />(The order) 'C' is not in effect (relative to a speaker on an occasion) IFF not-X.<br /><br />Now, I think it is clear that X cannot be C. For example, it does not make sense to say, "The order 'Clean your room' is in effect IFF clean your room." I'm not sure what to put in for X. But whatever we replace it with, the result will not have the form of Tarski's T-schema. Definitions can also be expressed as orders, e.g., "Call this color 'red'" or "Let us call this color 'red.'" And X and S in your biconditionals cannot both be replaced by such a definition.<br /><br /><i>To state that "Thinking involves belief, just as being a vixen involves being a female fox" would contribute nothing to the project of inheriting decision theory and answering Jeffries's understanding of it. It would be sheer dogmatism, of a sort I find entirely foreign to Wittgenstein's view of philosophy.</i><br /><br />And the claim that "thinking involves consciousness" would contribute nothing to the project of inheriting psychoanalysis and answering Freud's understanding of it, but it's nonetheless part of what we mean by "thinking." And someone who maintains that there can be "unconscious thoughts" is either talking nonsense or recommending a new notation (cf. <i>Blue Book</i>, 22-3). In either case, he is not saying anything that conflicts with our understanding of thought. Calling this (patently Wittgensteinian) view sheer dogmatism is simply name calling.N. N.https://www.blogger.com/profile/05983492370711591794noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post-14851925057225837232012-02-26T13:23:32.139-06:002012-02-26T13:23:32.139-06:00You often ask questions, and then answer them for ...<i>You often ask questions, and then answer them for me.</i><br /><br />My apologies. It's a bad habit.<br /><br /><i>As Quine lays out his views, I think this is wrong. There is no "have to" or "must" involved in the way experiences leads us to revise our webs of belief. Experience simply does, as a matter of fact, lead us to revise our beliefs.</i><br /><br />Reviewing Section 6 of "Two Dogmas," there is a "have to," but there is also a "does" (or rather, an "occasions"):<br /><br />"A conflict with experience at the periphery occassions readjustments in the interior of the field. Truth values have to be redistributed over some of our statements."<br /><br />As I read "Two Dogmas," the "have to" is Quine's position. He continues:<br /><br />"Even a statement very close to the periphery can be held true in the face of recalcitrant by pleading hallucination or by amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws."<br /><br />This suggests that, unless we make such changes, peripheral statements <i>cannot</i> be held true in the face of recalcitrant experience. That is, the experience demands that we change something.<br /><br />Reviewing "Two Dogmas" also gives me a chance to defend my claim that, according to Quine, analytic truths are true in virtue of the antecedent meanings of their parts. In Section 2, Quine says:<br /><br />"For the rest [i.e., for any sort of definition other than "the explicitly conventional introduction of novel notations for purposes of sheer abbreviation"], definition rests on synonymy rather than explaining it."<br /><br />For Quine, a definition does not make one sign synonymous with another, but depends on prior synonymy; e.g., "vixen" already has its meaning, and "female fox" already has its meaning, and the definition "a vixen is a female fox" rests on that synonymy rather than explaining it. Presumably, Quine thinks that definitions are analytic truths, so at least this class of analytic truths are true in virtue of the antecedent meanings of their parts. And if Quine thinks that's so with definitions, I have every reason to believe that he thinks the same of analytic truths more generally.N. N.https://www.blogger.com/profile/05983492370711591794noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post-85908408857944059972012-02-25T23:08:32.847-06:002012-02-25T23:08:32.847-06:00"I'm finally getting around to reading th..."I'm finally getting around to reading through Reading McDowell, and I just bought McDowell and his Critics. I think I need to read these before having another go at Mind and World."<br /><br />I couldn't make it through "McDowell and his Critics". I thought that the essays in that volume were uniformally uncomprehending, and McDowell's replies were thus tedious rehashings of views already clearly laid out elsewhere. It's the worst "McDowell replies to essays" collection out there; "Reading McDowell" is easily the best.Daniel Lindquisthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05443116324301716578noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post-26594199869503399812012-02-25T23:03:36.321-06:002012-02-25T23:03:36.321-06:00"As I understand your understanding of McDowe..."As I understand your understanding of McDowell's understanding of the endogenous given, it includes (a) "definitionally guaranteed truisms like 'A vixen is a female fox'" and (b) (what Kant would view as) "synthetic a priori" statements such as "all thinkers have beliefs." I gather that McDowell thinks that (b) is immune to revision. Does he also think that (a) is immune to revision?"<br /><br />It's a matter of speculation on my part that McDowell would include the synthetic <i>a priori</i> in the "endogenous given". His explicit statements on the subject say that it includes analytic truths in a sense more interesting than "A vixen is a female fox", in a context of thinking through Davidson to undo Quine. So I think McDowell regards it is trivially obvious that "uninteresting" analytic truths like "A vixen is a female fox" are immune to revision. Thus ends my exegerical remark.<br /><br />A substantive remark:<br /><br />"One result of this is that statements such as "thinking involves belief" are no more interesting than "vixens are female foxes." Both are definitionally guaranteed "truisms.""<br /><br />I think this gets the examples I mentioned in my post <i>wildly</i> wrong.<br /><br />It takes careful work to lay out what good belief-talk does us to argue that Jeffries was wrong to think that "Ramsey sucked the marrow out of the bone of belief", such as is done in Mark Kaplan's "Decision Theory as Philosophy", or in the first chapter of Isaac Levi's "The Enterprise of Knowledge". To state that "Thinking involves belief, just as being a vixen involves being a female fox" would contribute <i>nothing</i> to the project of inheriting decision theory and answering Jeffries's understanding of it. It would be <i>sheer dogmatism</i>, of a sort I find entirely foreign to Wittgenstein's view of philosophy. I think it is equally useless to claim dogmatically that Sextus could not have <i>really</i> advised us to live without <i>dogma</i>, in our ordinary understanding of that concept; Sextus is aware that he is recommending something not normally considered as an option, but surely he did not mean by this that he wishes to <i>change the topic</i> from the one discussed by dogmatic philosophers!Daniel Lindquisthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05443116324301716578noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post-9921150311685155972012-02-25T22:39:30.928-06:002012-02-25T22:39:30.928-06:00"Because they are unrelated we can isolate, s..."Because they are unrelated we can isolate, so to speak, the definitional part of the utterance. That part is neither true nor false. Rather, it is either in effect or not."<br /><br />Let 'S' be a schematic letter that stands in for a definition. Let 'X' be a schematic letter that stands in for an unknown sentence. Here are two biconditionals:<br /><br />'S' is in effect (relative to a speaker on an occasion) IFF X.<br /><br />'S' is not in effect (relative to a speaker on an occasion) IFF not-X.<br /><br />If definitions can be true, then there is an easy way to make all instances of this schema true: X is S. It is also then easy to see that "being in effect" and "not being in effect" look to be just variant names for "truth" and "falsity" which are being restricted in application to definitions, at least if one thinks that Tarski's T-schema tells us something about truth and falsity.<br /><br />If definitions are not true or false, then I don't know what else you can put in for X to make my two biconditionals true for a given definition 'S'. But it seems to me that there should be something that could be put there, and that it should have something to do with the particular S in each case. If the only thing you can offer which fits this requirement is just "'S' is in effect" again, then I confess to not understanding what you mean by this string.Daniel Lindquisthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05443116324301716578noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post-28191567439033048852012-02-25T22:18:18.163-06:002012-02-25T22:18:18.163-06:00In laying this out, I just realized that here Davi...In laying this out, I just realized that here Davidson can be seen as closer to Carnap than Quine: he does think that revisions of our webs of belief can be rationally demanded, and not simply caused to happen. But unlike Carnap, he doesn't think there are any sentences in our language which are immune from revision, which goes along with his rejection of the idea that we choose which language to use from some supposedly external standpoint (where this decision is made "pragmatically" rather than rationally). Quine and Carnap both say that we can chose to use whatever conceptual scheme we like, but differ on whether what we choose here puts any rational demands on us; Carnap and Davidson both say that there are rational demands on how we revise our beliefs, but differ on whether there is some other way we can choose to revise them; Quine and Davidson thus both say that Carnap was wrong to think there are two different ways (rational, pragmatic) in which we revise our language/beliefs, but take very different lessons away from this. Davidson has only only rationally managing the webs of belief we happen to find ourselves with <i>in medias res</i>, where Quine has us only ever acting a-rationally. Carnap has some things we adopt arbitrarily putting rational demands on us, and Quine and Davidson reject this idea in <i>fundamentally</i> different ways.Daniel Lindquisthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05443116324301716578noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post-42845692483173779442012-02-25T22:15:08.232-06:002012-02-25T22:15:08.232-06:00"One more clarification. As I understand Quin..."One more clarification. As I understand Quine on changing one's scheme in the light of experience.... Given the Duhem-Quine thesis, I could hold onto Einstein while giving up something else, but I would have to give up something. That is, experience would compel me to make some conceptual change. I can decide what to change, but I am forced to make a decision, to change something."<br /><br />As Quine lays out his views, I think this is wrong. There is no "have to" or "must" involved in the way experiences leads us to revise our webs of belief. Experience simply <i>does</i>, as a matter of fact, lead us to revise our beliefs. Quine has a resolutely alienated view of inquiry: he means only to be reporting on what people in fact do, and not saying anything about how one should do it. The summary you give matches Carnap's views in <i>Logical Syntax of Language</i>, which Quine is rejecting in "Two Dogmas". Carnap held that there could be things internal to your current language that rationally demanded you to make certain revisions (for instance, you would have to reject at least one of each pair of protocols that lead to contradictions, assuming that your language's L-rules prohibited contradictions from being true, which is the case for all of the languages Carnap ever constructs). Carnap also held that there were some changes you could make in inquiry which were not rationally demanded by your current language, or by anything else: choice of which language to use was among these, and so also was change of language. Carnap's term for this sort of change is that it is "pragmatic": it is not open to dispute, because it outside of the frameworks (languages) which make disputes intelligible. It's a matter of a-rational things, like feelings. Quine's quip at the end of "Two Dogmas" that our revisions are "where rational, pragmatic" is referring to this: the view that Carnap took towards changes of language, Quine takes to all changes of language/belief. Quine will let himself talk about "disputation" and "argument" and that sort of thing, but his way of cashing out all of this language is in resolutely alienated terms: it is simply a matter of how noises and scratches in fact make certain bodies change their dispositions to make noises and scratches. "Logical truths" are "central" to a web of belief, for Quine, just because the dispositions to make those sorts of noises and scratches is in fact not changed by things that happen to the bodies we are in the course of our existence. So, when you happen to have dispositions to assent to all of "Einstein was right about...", "The sun and starts were observed to be..." (etc.), you will in fact revise your dispositions to assent to sentences in some fashion. That is what Quine understands by your being "forced" to revise your web of belief when it's incoherent: you do in fact do this.Daniel Lindquisthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05443116324301716578noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post-49066693049933118432012-02-25T22:14:46.787-06:002012-02-25T22:14:46.787-06:00"Is there something queer about misspeaking (..."Is there something queer about misspeaking (e.g., meaning to say "blue" but saying "red" instead)? And if I misspeak, is the definition false?"<br /><br />No, and no. I say that what you mean when you speak is what you meant to mean, even if it doesn't come out right; if you write "I shall mean by 'blork' a red rook", and then go on to use it as if you've defined it to mean "red book", with no mention of chess-pieces, then I can catch your meaning; the typo does nothing to hinder it. Using the "right" signs to get your meaning across is not a real requirement on communication any more than printing neatly is a requirement on proving theorems in mathematics. In both cases, going <i>too</i> far afield can cause trouble for completing your task, but occasional oddities are of no consequence at all.<br /><br />Asking what someone's words meant even if they said something they didn't mean to say is not a way of understanding what someone said, because understanding what someone said is understanding what <i>they</i> said, and this is not independent of whether or not they said what they meant to say.<br /><br />This brings me to a broader point in our discussions: You often ask questions, and then answer them for me. But you are not good at predicting how I will answer your questions. But then you go on to ask questions which you <i>do</i> want me to answer, but which presume the answers you've given yourself to questions you asked yourself earlier. -- There is a reason that Plato's dialogues have constant interruptions for the interlocutors to say "It is so, Socrates"!Daniel Lindquisthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05443116324301716578noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post-89722827893269339372012-02-25T12:11:39.106-06:002012-02-25T12:11:39.106-06:00As I understand your understanding of McDowell'...As I understand your understanding of McDowell's understanding of the endogenous given, it includes (a) "definitionally guaranteed truisms like 'A vixen is a female fox'" and (b) (what Kant would view as) "synthetic a priori" statements such as "all thinkers have beliefs." I gather that McDowell thinks that (b) is immune to revision. Does he also think that (a) is immune to revision?<br /><br />This brings me to a question about what "immunity" means here. In a strong sense, "immune" means "incapable of undergoing." On that sense, we <i>cannot</i> revise analytic statements. On a weaker sense, being "immune" to revision would mean that, while analytic statements <i>can</i> be revised, then need not be. In this sense, "immune to" would mean something like "independent of." Analytic statements, being independent of experience, do not come into any sort of conflict with experience. <br /><br />Now, it seems to me that (a) and (b) can be seen to be the same if we use something like Wittgenstein's idea of a grammatical statement. One result of this is that statements such as "thinking involves belief" are no more interesting than "vixens are female foxes." <i>Both</i> are definitionally guaranteed "truisms."<br /><br />But aren't definitions revisable, and doesn't McDowell hold that statements such as "thinking involves belief" are immune to revision (here I'm going with the strong sense of "immune")? Therefore, McDowell can't hold that such statements are grammatical statements. But can a definition really be revised? Suppose I "revise" my definition of "vixen": "A vixen is a fox (male or female)." Have I changed the first concept? Have I, as it were, added something to <i>it</i>? Wittgenstein's answer is <i>No</i>! We can see this by asking whether the two definitions conflict with each other. They do not because the two occurrences of "vixen" are equivocal.<br /><br />Applying this to "thought" or "thinking," someone who maintains that thinking does not involve belief is recommending a different grammar. His understanding of thought cannot conflict with ours because he means something different than we do by "thought." For us, "thought" <i>just is</i> an activity involving belief. And to talk about "thought" that does not involve belief is to not to talk about "thought" (in our sense) anymore. <i>Our</i> understanding of "thought" is unrevisable because any attempt to revise <i>it</i> will result in a different concept. Thus, equivocation makes this sort of revision impossible.<br /><br />I hope that's fairly clear. I don't have a good enough grasp of McDowell (or Davidson), but I'm working on it. I'm finally getting around to reading through <i>Reading McDowell</i>, and I just bought <i>McDowell and his Critics</i>. I think I need to read these before having another go at <i>Mind and World</i>. But I have this vague sense that some Wittgensteinian distinctions (as I read him) can have an impact on the debate.N. N.https://www.blogger.com/profile/05983492370711591794noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post-36692361241028551922012-02-25T11:33:44.727-06:002012-02-25T11:33:44.727-06:00If you'll indulge me, I'd like to have ano...If you'll indulge me, I'd like to have another go at the narrow question of if and how definitions are true, as well as at the more general dissatisfaction I have with some ideas in your posts.<br /><br />First, the narrow question. As I think about the form of definition "I shall call this color 'red'" (as opposed to the "I call this color 'red'"), it seems to me that <i>if</i> it is <i>also</i> a prediction (or whatever), then the prediction is completely irrelevant and unrelated to the definition. This is because the two can come apart. That is, the status of the definition (in effect, not in effect) is completely independent of the truth-value of the prediction. If I misspeak, for example, and the prediction turns out to be false, this has no bearing on whether or not I continue to accept the definition I've given. Because they are unrelated we can isolate, so to speak, the definitional part of the utterance. <i>That</i> part is neither true nor false. Rather, it is either in effect or not. And now, if we recognize that, strictly speaking, the definition is the definitional part of the utterance, then the definition <i>as such</i> (i.e., the utterance insofar as it is a definition and not a prediction) is neither true nor false.<br /><br />I'll continue with the more general concern in the next comment.N. N.https://www.blogger.com/profile/05983492370711591794noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post-19654106164547634552012-02-23T16:07:35.323-06:002012-02-23T16:07:35.323-06:00But in either case, if you say this and then don&#...<i>But in either case, if you say this and then don't use "red" in that way, something queer has gone on.</i><br /><br />Is there something queer about misspeaking (e.g., meaning to say "blue" but saying "red" instead)? And if I misspeak, is the definition false? For if the definition says that I shall use a word with a certain meaning, and then (for whatever reason) I don't, then what it says will be false. Whether one uses the word "prediction" or not is beside the point.<br /><br />But even if I misspeak, the definition is not withdrawn. It's still in effect. Indeed, the idea that I have misspoken depends on the definition's being in effect. But then it's being in effect comes apart in a strange way from its truth-value. The same utterance ends up being successful definition but a false prediction (or whatever you want to call it). Doesn't that seem odd?N. N.https://www.blogger.com/profile/05983492370711591794noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post-69006419555202156362012-02-23T13:16:59.915-06:002012-02-23T13:16:59.915-06:00One more clarification. As I understand Quine on c...One more clarification. As I understand Quine on changing one's scheme in the light of experience, it is exactly the same as changing one's scientific theory in the light of experience (the conflation of scheme and theory is, in my opinion, a confusion, but I'll ignore that for now). So, for example, I hold that Einstein's theory of general relativity is correct. If it had turned out that stars behind the Sun were in their usual relative positions during an eclipse, I would be <i>forced</i> by experience to reject some bit of theory. Given the Duhem-Quine thesis, I could hold onto Einstein while giving up something else, but I would have to give up something. That is, experience would <i>compel</i> me to make some conceptual change. I can decide <i>what</i> to change, but I am forced to make a decision, to change something.<br /><br />Contrast this with the "blork" example. There is no experience that could force me to make a change. I can, in the light of experience, decide to make assign a different meaning to the word. But I cannot be forced by experience to make such a decision.N. N.https://www.blogger.com/profile/05983492370711591794noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post-38051390235930730882012-02-23T13:14:28.964-06:002012-02-23T13:14:28.964-06:00"I'll need you to explain Dewey's sen..."I'll need you to explain Dewey's sense to me."<br /><br />It's the sense in which a job listing can say "Typist wanted; three years' experience required"; where "experience" is what living well gives you more of than living poorly. It's the sort of experience that Rorty always held was important, even at his most rampantly anti-empiricist.<br /><br />Quine's sense of "experience" is simply incoherent gibberish: it's supposed to be something like Dewey's sense, something like Locke's sense, and something like the nervous stimulations that happen on my retinas. There just isn't any one thing that is all of those, but Quine needs something like that to do the work he attributes to "experience".<br /><br />McDowell's sense of "experience" is a normal one in philosophy: sensory episodes that provide reasons for action & belief. Dewey's is much broader, Quine's narrower and incoherent.<br /><br /><br />"The first explanation of "blork" was not wrong in the sense that it was somehow refuted by experience."<br /><br />Yes, you changed how you used a sign, and this is not a matter of learning a new fact via sensation. This does not make the previous definition false. What I don't see is why you want to prevent me from saying it was true.<br /><br />"Thus, no pressure from the experience forced the change. Rather, in the light of a certain kind of experience, I decided to make the change. And that decision was unconstrained by experience."<br /><br />This I think is incoherent: experience never forces anyone to do anything particular (unless it makes them act by accident, as a man being thrown by a giant), and decisions are only ever made in the light of experience (at a particular time in a particular place in a particular mood, etc.). There is not a purely active subject unconstrained by the world facing a world which is able to overpower him; there is an agent within the world negotiating his path through it. None of his actions are due solely to the world, and none of them are without the world.Daniel Lindquisthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05443116324301716578noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post-11715336702371258352012-02-23T13:14:23.745-06:002012-02-23T13:14:23.745-06:00"Prediction" is not a word I feel a need..."Prediction" is not a word I feel a need to use here.<br /><br />I don't think that removing "shall" changes anything, unless it's by making the prop unclear again. I do think that removing the first-personal reference changes things: <br />"This color is called 'red' (in English)" and "This color is what I call 'red'" are two different disambiguations of "This is called 'red'". But in either case, if you say this and then don't use "red" in that way, something queer has gone on. An explanation of a rule is not something you can do once, and then have nothing hang on it.<br /><br />"Consider an analogous case (sorry for the addition of examples, but I find it helpful to use several). I'm explaining the game of chess to you, and I say "This piece, the bishop, is moved like this." If I go on to move the bishop differently, does it follow that my explanation of the bishop's movements was false? Clearly, the answer is "No.""<br /><br />I don't think this example is clear, either! On one way of reading this, the fact that you say (in your summary) that you are explaining CHESS means that what you told me (in the story) is irrelevant: the rules of chess are not up to you; the game is public domain. Your "telling me the rules" will be simply a reporting of facts about an existing boardgame, and you can be right or wrong about them. On another, the fact that you are explaining "chess" can drop out, and then what you told me of the piece's movements of might leave it indeterminate whether a future move is in accord with it or not. (Did you mention that it can move diagonally towards the starting row, or only away from it? Towards either the right or the left edge of the board? Was it clear that the bishop can move any number of squares, and not just the particular number you happened to move him in your example?) -- In which case you might make a future move which you meant to be in accord with the explanation you gave me which I'll quarrel with, and then I don't see why you can't have just given a bad explanation of the rules you meant to teach me to play with. And if you did do a bad job explaining the rules you wanted us to play with, I don't see any reason to deny that your explanation could include false bits (or at least false implicatures, etc.).<br /><br />"Similarly, if I follow the rule, this does not make it true. It doesn't because to establish the rule is not to make a prediction."<br /><br />The only way this inference works is if I add a suppressed premise: "And only predictions can be true." But why should <i>that</i> be true?<br /><br />"...it is clear that there is no such thing as defining "blork" wrongly. Likewise, there is no such thing as defining it rightly. Right and wrong simply don't apply to the coining of words."<br /><br />This I agree with. I don't see why it's any barrier to saying that definitions are true. <i>Definings</i> are not definitions -- one is done by men, the other is a prop.Daniel Lindquisthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05443116324301716578noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8042142443470259188.post-2923045635795775792012-02-23T12:40:59.641-06:002012-02-23T12:40:59.641-06:00Apparently, my post was too long. Here's the s...Apparently, my post was too long. Here's the second half.<br /><br />"But you can certainly revise your intentions in the light of experience in Dewey's sense; you can change your mind about what the best path is."<br /><br />I'll need you to explain Dewey's sense to me. Quine's sense is the one I'm responding to. Where does McDowell fall in this regard?<br /><br />Certainly, there are reasons having to do with my life (my experience) which may lead me to change my definition of "blork." Suppose, for example, that I discovered that there were fewer purple flowers than I at first believed, and hence that my word for purple flowers was not particularly useful. Furthermore, suppose I noticed that purple flowers regularly grow near blue flowers of a certain shade. And that the latter are for more common. To make my word more useful, I might give it a new meaning: "A blork is a purple or blue flower." Here is something that might be called "conceptual change" (though, in fact, what we have are two different concepts which are genealogically related). And it is the result of experience. But we must be very careful here. The first explanation of "blork" was not wrong in the sense that it was somehow <i>refuted</i> by experience. And it was not even wrong in the sense of being not particularly useful. I could have retained it's original meaning (we have lots of specialized words that are not very useful), and coined a new word for the broader category. Thus, no pressure from the experience <i>forced</i> the change. Rather, in the light of a certain kind of experience, I <i>decided</i> to make the change. And that decision was unconstrained by experience.N. N.https://www.blogger.com/profile/05983492370711591794noreply@blogger.com