Hence the plurality of formal logics.
There was a comic, years ago, first frame was a beginner skater trying to do a kickturn, and landing on their face. The second frame was of a much more advanced skater, mastering the kickturn, and following it with an ollie, nollie, flip and then landing on their face.
Same with philosophy.
I appreciate the beauty of formal logics, and I’m all for plurality. In some cases, formal logic may help people understand one another. In that sense, they extend informal language. I used logic primarily in the context of math, and the order of quantifiers can be important. If you learn to live in that language, it’s even preferable to English in many situations.
But I’m skeptical that formalisms can help us much the making sense of the signs “consciousness” or “being.”
Was Quine joking when he said this ?
to be is to be the value of a bound variable
I don’t think he was joking. Nor do I understand him to be an idealist. But there’s something fishy there. The formalism is put first. The world is reduced to what fits in the formalism.
I also think that philosophy makes progress, even if philosophers continue to disagree with one another.
Right. And each of us will sketch this average in an individual way. I can only give you my take on the ways things are done around here. I am one more perceiver, caught up in the mess.
I can learn the pose from the tradition of hovering over this mess like a god. I can forget my situatedness and encourage others to join me in this forgetting. Before long, we have instituted “truth” as something “much more” than the congealed situated beliefs that the “good” people are currently enacting.
We need some care here. If Quine were claiming that the whole of our natural language use of “exists” is to be restricted to “to be is to be the value of a bound variable” there would be a case for his foreclosing on other options. But if instead he is pointing out a clear case were if we accept this definition, we can move on to talk about its ontological implications, there is no such implication of foreclosing. It becomes hypothetical: If we understand “A exists” as “A is the value of a bound variable” then we can clean up more than one ontological issue.
And if someone does not accept this, let them make their case. No foreclosure, but the conversation has moved on in a new direction while maintaining the potential to backtrack.
A very reasonable approach ! Yes, in a particular dialogue it might be great.
…so in this particular dialogue, Kaplan’s formalism, and the question: where does it lead?
And the question: if we have one world, “the actual world”, with a standard first-order interpretation, and another interpretation in the formalization form Kaplan, we have first-person statements that are sayable in the second, but not in the first - “I am on the tallest mountain” in contrast to “Banno is on the tallest mountain”
And the question is, is there more to this difference than how it is parsed?
Follow?
This appears to be at least parallel to “what is it like to be a bat?”
So, is the difference between “I am on the mountain” and “Banno is on the mountain” merely a difference in representation, or does it reveal a feature of the world that cannot be captured from outside?
On the face of it, Kaplan seems to have an account that shows how to move from one to the other by moving from one logical system, to another, implying that the difference is not otological.
So, can Nagel’s account be reinvigorate?
I think we need to zoom out. In certain contexts, the statements are equivalent. But what does it mean that Banno is on the mountain ? Is this an empirical claim about possible perceptions ? Aren’t perceptions accomplished by individual perceivers ?
My objection to the elision of the “subjective component” is that I take perception to be primary. I cannot care about a “science” that has nothing to do with perception.
Well, “Banno is on the mountain” is true iff Banno is on the mountain; extensionaly, that’s all we need. And we can get from “I am on the mountain”, in Kaplan’s system, to “Banno is on the mountain”. That “empirical claim about perceptions” looks to be a bit of language.
So it seems you’ll need something more.
Unless you want to claim that the context is empirical. That might be a useful move. (Lewis)
I mean of course it’s language, since we are trading signs. But I see these signs as more things in the world, traded by organisms in that world that care about this or that.
I’m reluctant to believe that you dismiss the perceptual basis of empirical science.
What isn’t empirical ? My whole spiel about dialogical positivism is driven by a recognition of signs as perceptual objects in the world ( not above the world ). I don’t think ( and perhaps you agree ) that words are little vessels that carry immaterial ( trans-qualitative ) “meaning stuff.”
I take some philosophers ( though not you ) to assume something equivalent to a set of stable “essences” which can be used to generate eternal truths.
That lost me. And we were doing so well. 
So try again. “Banno is on the mountain” in third person is true IFF context: Banno is on the mountain and content: Banno says “I am on the mountain” and character: “I” refers to the speaker.
Here we have an equivalence between an utterance in the third person, on the left, and in the first person, on the right.
Now, what is the truth that is in one and not in the other? There is none, since they are logically equivalent.
And so, is there something empirical in the expression on the right that is not in the expression on the left? If the candidate is the context: “Banno is on the mountain”. This appears to be the sort of thing that can be determined empirically.
But it is also exactly the same as the expression on the left.
So what about the other candidate, the content: Banno says “I am on the mountain”? Also the sort of thing that is determined empirically.
And it is not on the left, except perhaps implicitly.
So we might have a way of bringing Nagel back, by looking at the content. And that’s were perhaps Lewis’s paper enters.
This post is not well written. My apologies. Could be clearer.
I don’t think we want to rehash the whole truth debate, so let me rephrase.
I would assent to either statement if I believed you were on the mountain. They are equivalent enough in this case.
Yes, basically because the specified Banno is the speaker. This my own sense of the norms and my sense of the usual sense of the norms.
I think implicitly in the typical context.
Long ago I did a video on Nagel’s paper. I liked it but did not find it assertive enough. But he aimed his signs at a particular audience, so it’s understandable.
Cheers to you also !
Ok, let’s focus on the content: “I am on the mountain”.
Of course it doesn’t have to be a literal utterance - it could be a belief or a realisation, any of the sorts of things that are typically called "propositional attitudes.
But it is intensional - as in, not extensional, not subject to substitution. And that’s an significant difference between the two systems; the first person language is extensional, the first, intensional. It’s getting treated as a whole, indivisible.
That’s were lewis comes in, by treating the content as a predicate, a property. The “something extra” Nagel wants. But it’s a long way from the strong anti-physicalism of Jackson and so on.
And there is general applicability here - to Mary, for example.
Anyway, it’s a lot to take in, and lacking in specifics, again, so I’ll eave it there for now.
Anyhow Nagel must have believed that the world appears to us must be different from to bats. If he believed it were the same, he wouldn’t have asked the absurd question.
Rather he would have started with a statement - “You don’t need to be a bat to see or feel how the world appears to bats, because it would be the same world appearing to us and to them.”
I agree on that. All I can feel on your sadness would be from expression for your sadness. There is nothing more I can access on your actual feeling of sadness than the expression.
One of my favorite philosophical koans! - “What is the sound of one quine laughing?”
So what was Quine’s “tone of voice”? If you go back to the original essay, I read the statement, in context, as not “joking” but somewhat exasperatedly tongue in cheek, for the exact reason @Banno gives, above. His tone, to me, is something like, “Fine already! If you’ve got to have a ‘definition of existence,’ then here you go.”
Now the surprising thing is that Quine wrote better than he knew. That little phrase stands up amazingly well in all sorts of contexts. It also reveals a truth about what can be said meaningfully here. I appreciate your worry that it either puts formalism first, or insists that the world fit the formalism. But I don’t think we have to walk into those traps. Rather, let’s take the dictum to mean, “If you want to use words in a certain way, a way common to logic and philosophy, then your best bet with ‘exist’ is to define it as I have. That leaves plenty of room for other usages, other encounters with the world.”
(Sorry this thread is huge, so I haven’t read all past posts; apologies if I’m repeating anyone)
The OP is right that some philosophical questions are largely rhetorical and maybe serve only to provoke further thought. But I would disagree with the 3 examples given.
The OP alludes to the hard problem of consciousness (twice) and the question of how/why anything exists. These are, in my opinion, the most significant questions in all of philosophy.
They aren’t rhetorical, they are just (at this time) intractable.
It would be great to have a model of what pain is (as I just mentioned in another thread). All we can say today is that when particular volumes of the brain are activated, we have a strongly negative experience. But we don’t know how negative experiences manifest. We don’t know how to relate this pain to that pain, or your pain to my pain. We don’t know if we might inadvertently make an AI that feels pain, or if that’s impossible.
In terms of “something from nothing”, many people just land on “the universe just is” at some point. But it’s worth being clear that that’s just relabeling the lack of an explanation. If the universe “just is”, why doesn’t another universe just start right now in the palm of my hand? Why doesn’t this universe just disappear tomorrow?
It could be that these questions have no answer, and never will. But what I am saying is that the lack of an explanation is not itself an explanation.
When we have an explanation, we have predictive (or at least inferential) power. If there’s no explanation then it means we’ll never have that power.
Idealism doesn’t happen here unless you (like Ryle and most people to be fair) misunderstand him to mean by ‘value’ a name or other constant. (“Value in the Ryle sense”.) But he means the object or objects if any that are named (albeit temporarily) by the variable letter.
He means the eagle not the cry
“I have capitulated and now see the interesting issue as being where the arguments from the intuitions against physicalism—the arguments that seem so compelling—go wrong.”
— Jackson, Frank, “Mind and Illusion” (2003)
Thanks !
I appreciate having more background. To me it’s reasonable to use formalisms. They don’t guarantee a genuine dialogue, but they may play an excellent role within such a dialogue. I’ve written many mathematical proofs, and those symbols become the most efficient and reliable sign system, at least in many cases.
I hear you. But I still say it’s weird that these little squiggles “eagle” are supposed to “mean” the “actual” eagle in a theoretical conversation. I mean I have to read your squiggles as “being” that abstract eagle.
It’s weird and amazing that we humans can find ourselves in such complexity. I can understand the relief of a good formalism.
Absolutely it’s amazing that they are supposed by speakers in some actual conversation to mean (denote) some actual eagle, or any and all eagles or eagle events, or any and all eagle pictures, or the class of all eagle-perceptions, or the platonic form of all eagles, etc. Although the speakers may of course disagree as to what it is they have agreed to suppose. And it’s amazing that children are somewhat aware of this inherent ambiguity as they learn to play along.