And yet your parable of the cardinal is a perfect application of Davidson’s triangulation.
How do you determine that you are hearing the other person as they hear themselves?
How do you yourself avoid the very problem you see in the ordinary language approach? How will you avoid using logic?
We might both do well to recognise that the discussion is not yet complete.
So you criticize me and then grant my point ?
If we dive deep, things become fascinating. If we dangle our feet in the water, we can say that others — those who dive — are deceived by ambiguity.
You pick out some of the deeper issues as examples. The implication is that those who take these issues seriously are fooled by a mask. “Mere ambiguity is mistaken by those lacking critical insight for mystery worth investigating.”
I’ve already shared my view on this. We continue the dialogue, if possible. If we are lucky, everyone involved comes to a share a sense of being mostly understood.
“Using logic” makes logic sound like a hammer that we pass around. “Logic” is a vague pointing at vaguely and imperfectly shared inferential and semantic norms. Approximately. I’m far from being anti-logic or anti-science. I’m instead trying to be “realistically empirical” about primate trading marks and noises, in the hope of positively adjusting their individual comportment and in the hope of a stronger sense of community.
I recognize that you created the OP, but that doesn’t mean that the conversation is organized around your preferences. But given your resistence and dismissive attitude, I will abandon this thread. I’ve said enough. Perhaps in some other thread at some other time we’ll have a more successful conversation. No hard feelings.
OLP goes back to the Oxford school of Wittgenstein interpretation. Many Wittgensteinians feel Oxford lost the thread of the later Wittgenstein. When the dissociation between language and the world (language as representation rather than enaction) began to come under question, thinkers like Heidegger found a way to burst the bubble of metaphysics while still calling themselves philosophers (although in later years, Heidegger substituted ‘thinking’ for philosophizing), while others, including Wittgenstein and Rorty, associated philosophy so tightly with metaphysics that they wanted to be rid of the whole enterprise.
I tend to agree with you that OLP harbors metaphysical presuppositions, but I dont feel the same way about Wittgenstein. Did he want to deny that mystery is at the core of thinking and experiencing? Only if that mystery is formalized into an ineffable something escaping explanation. For Wittgenstein, the mystery is in the grammar itself as it presents itself, not in explanation and its limits. We must always ask ‘what is this word doing now, here in this context of use?’
There is an element of mystery and surprise inherent in discovering what we are doing with words as we speak them. Isnt this the only mystery we need? In this regard Wittgenstein shares with Heidegger the sense of wonder over the utter uncanniness of the ordinary, the fact that the most ordinary is the most extraordinary.
I imagine Wittgenstein to take Nagel’s question about what it’s like to be something and replace it with ‘what is language doing with itself right now?’
I am very close to being done with you. You are not behaving like an honest interlocutor. You asked why ambiguity isn’t a mystery, and I gave an answer. If your response is “But everything is a mystery”, then you aren’t being serious about trying to understand me. I’m going to make one attempt to be very obvious, and if your response is entirely lacking in trying to have a meaningful discussion that involves the minimal charity in interpreting me, then I’m finished.
Ambiguity isn’t a functional mystery in the context of the subject of this discussion. You are free to disagree on this point, and if you offer an honest and thoughtful disagreement that meaningfully engages with this point. I will be overjoyed to engage with it as I have with all the other disagreement I’ve encountered here.
What are the quotation marks indicating here? I’m pretty sure I didn’t say that. Is that what you imagine I’m saying?
Hell, I can’t be sure you don’t have “salty” and “sweet” confused.
But I don’t think the electronic tongues we’ve made subjectively experience - “taste” - sweet or salty anyway. That’s my point.
.
Given that I have explicitly invited you to critique me, expressing that I’d be happy for a substantive critique, I find this characterizing unfair and more ad hominem. I can’t say that you leaving the thread will make the discussion worse though.
As if logic were monolithic. Indeed, that’s a view often seen hereabouts, but which does not sit so well with much of the formal treatment of more recent times.
You make use of structure in your discourse. There’s a point to keeping one eye on those structures.
We can build other more formal structures, and see how the pieces fit together. Comparing these to our discourse can be informative.
To ignore the structures in our discussions would be to deny ourselves a most useful part of that very discourse.
Of particular use in this thread would be mapping out the key sentences in order to be clear as to any ambiguity.
Hence, given that “what is it like to be a bat” asks for a first-person account, understanding the structural differences between the first person and third person is a central issue.
Kaplan gives us such an account. Others are welcome to present alternatives.
Refusing to consider Kaplan’s account would be another example of the sort of foreclosing on a part of the discussion to which objection has been raised. Pots calling kettles, and so on.
Perhaps much of the resistance of formalisation comes from the fact that it requires a bit of background work. It’s simply easier to mutter on, and it ensures a nice long thread, too. Is that why we are here?
Exactly. And yet neither of us put salt in our tea.
Taste is not so private as some suppose.
While your machine might identify some chemicals, saying that it tastes them might not be as obvious as some suppose.
But what are we doing when we don’t ignore them, when we play close attention to those structures? What happens to you and what happens to the structure when you attend to it? Is it present somwhere for you to scrounge around and find it, so you can then re-present it to yourself and then re-arrange its pieces? Are there first structures and then the things we decide to do with them? Or is structure always a verb, a deformation in a field?
I’m terrified to ask, but would it be off topic to suggest your understanding of how language works is germaine to your critique of Nagel? Specifically, do you believe that words represent things? Can you give the names of a few thinkers whose ideas on language are closest to yours?
There’s that troublesome word “like” again. The question could be simply “How does it feel to be a bat?”. And obviously, since we are not bats, we don’t really know. Then again I don’t know how it feels to be you other than by analogy based oin what you tell me. If you say you are sad, I can relate, because I know how it feels when I am sad.
The"know" in these kinds of cases is the ‘knowing of familiarity’: I am familiar with feeling sad. I am not familiar with your feeling of sadness, but I am familiar with your expressions of sadness.
Terrified? That seems dramatic.
If you can explain clearly how that is relevant, I’m happy to answer. I can’t see how it would be. The notion that we all have to explicate every possible metaphysical position, or to reduce everything to foundational principles seems crazy to me. Worse than crazy, really, it seems simultaneously fruitless in practice and hopelessly tedious. Again, make the case that it isn’t, and I’ll be happy to engage with it. Maybe I’m mistaken.
I’ll send you 10 bucks and a cupcake if you answer the question.
If I told you that I don’t adopt any philosopher’s models whole cloth, but that my views are informed by Wittgenstein, Davidson, Dennett, Pinker, Hume and others, but isn’t identical to any of them, would that give you any useful insight?
If I were you, and you wondered about if I held any specific assumptions or foundational beliefs that you think are relevant, I’d just ask specifically about those assumptions or foundational beliefs. In practice, I know for a fact that people can have meaningful philosophical dialogue without these sorts of precursors. In my experience, ignoring such things until they present themselves as relevant makes for even more fruitful dialogue.
I just want to bake an apple pie from scratch, not create the universe.
It would be naive or even daft to ask such questions like “How does it feel like to be a bat?” or “How do you feel like to be me?”, which is logical and material impossibility, and expect to get some reasonable answers from the question.
This type of questions only make sense when the phrase after “like” has happened in reality. Hence the questions need to be reformed into “How do you feel to be a bat?” or “How do you feel to be me?”
But here again, for any humans being a bat, or being another person is still impossibility, therefore they still remain downright nonsensical questions, which is not fit for getting reasonable answers.
The questions only make sense, when the event being asked has happened in reality such as if I won the lottery jackpot this week, then you could ask me “How do you feel to have won the lottery jackpot?”, in which case, I could give you a reasonable answer such as “Well great. Now I can retire, and start travelling the world.”
or whatever.
Anyhow, because the question at stake “How do you feel like to be a bat?” is absurd and downright nonsensical, I suggested to take the questions as a statement saying “The world appears different to you and to bats.”. That statement makes sense, and I could see the point. At that point, any nonsensical, absurdity or ambiguity issues transform into a clear philosophical statement, which we could consider for more discussions.
If someone asked you “Would I lie to you?”, then that is not a question, but a statement saying “He/She would be honest to you.” If you tried to answer that question, or wondering why ask such a silly question, then who is being silly?
Indeed. And?
*******
I like that speculation. Or I could imagine Witt asking, in genuine puzzlement, “Now we say that sort of thing all the time. Do we know what we mean?” Perhaps that’s not so different from your phraseology about what language is doing with itself.
I agree that Wittgenstein himself felt the mystery of the world. And of course the mystery of language. Yes, the “utter uncanniness of the ordinary.” As Spinoza also saw, the philosopher wonders at the rule rather than the exception.
We must always ask ‘what is this word doing now, here in this context of use?’
Yes. I take Bakhtin to push us toward the here and now and us use of the sign. In this moment of relating to the other, what is the other trying to show me ?
To assume a “universal grammar” is to leave novelty not only unexplained but inexplicable. We do change the way we talk, because individuals are inventive. They try to do new things with old signs.