I have some sentimental attachments to the distinction between “understanding” and “truly understanding”. I share the sense that this approach is also foundational to various essentialisms.
In fairness, I guess it might be easy enough to say that we have a pragmatic sense of understanding that serves us in going about our business, but perhaps there is a high resolution version of understanding that we could employ if we knew how. Just as my mum used to always drive in third gear, never dreaming her car could do 150 in fourth.
I don’t know what it would mean to understand being, or even what being consists of. This site seems divided into those who think being is unfathomable, an absolute reality at the root of everything that exists, and those who don’t. And the obstacle as always seems to be what one already believes.
Simply that the measure of proper understanding is the object of understanding, not its role in some discursive system. So,truth is the adequacy of thought to being, not the adequacy of language to itself.
This is like the difference between truth simpliciter and “true in the context of x formal system,” or “true according to y community.”
The reason Kant might be a borderline case is because, for the most part, we can only speak to what is “true within the context of appearances.”
I suppose there is also a phenomenology of understanding that the weak sense tends to ignore. When understanding actually occurs, it presents itself as having revealed something. There is a difference between understanding and knowing the right words to say; this is a distinction that is lived before it’s theorized.
I wasn’t talking about resolution. There is a difference between:
“X is true according to (within the context of) Y community.”
Or:
“X is true, assuming P, Q, R, etc.”
And:
“X is true.”
Knowing that “people say x,” or that “x appears to be the case,” is not the same thing as understanding x. It’s the difference between appearances and reality (if such a difference is maintained).
Surely, there is a substantive difference between the thesis that “truth is the adequacy of thought to being” and something like “truth is the adequacy of thought to thought,” (i.e., the measure of truth is ,consistency, fit within a practice, or fit according to past data ), right? But then intelligibility also looks quite different in both senses. For instance, the question of which is prior and which is posterior.
Reminds me of actor Tom Baker (the Fourth Doctor in Doctor Who), who got frustrated listening to his verbose director and yelled into the boom mike, “Will someone shut him up? I’m getting psitticosis listening to this parrot!”
Isn’t asking if it “makes sense” something of a performative contradiction here? Surely it “makes sense” in the discursive context of most philosophical traditions and according to folk psychology. Thus, if truth is just truth within a community, model, or interpretation, there is nothing more to be made sense of, my point is simply validly assertable, which it surely is in many traditions and communities.
Right, so isn’t this just the assertion mentioned in the OP, that reason must be wholly discursive? Else it is “left hanging.” What does it mean to be “left hanging” though?
And Tarski is our “very best” theory of truth according to who? Isn’t this apparent normative claim itself only true according to some interpretations?
Presumably though, when you make that claim, you mean it as something more than: “x is the very best according to those communities who hold that x is the very best.” If your appeal to the “very best” only holds in the latter, deflationary sense, then I’d argue that it isn’t a claim about truth at all, but merely about sociological or theoretical consensus in some community.
That’s the problem with deflationary positions, they are forced to constantly equivocate and appeal to thick uses of key terms to make their case.
I’m interested in what you conclude from this harder problem of quiddity. Is it a David Bentley Hart–style, first step toward using reason to show that some kind of Neoplatonic account of God is the best explanation? Do you conclude from this that physicalism is almost certainly untrue, or is it more a case of saying that we don’t know why things are as they are, that there is currently an explanatory gap and we don’t have sufficiently robust explanations?
Well, I would say that borh entities and essences are not necessarily unchanging. For entities, think about a river: a river is a river precisely because its waters continue to flow (ironically, some scholars nowadays think that Heraclitus actually held this view as it would also cohere more with his doctrine of ‘harmony of opposities’… staying the same while changing). So, processes can be entities even if one of their defining characteristics is to change. This is actually quite consistent to how we experience life. Our process of growth is clearly a process of change. A similar observation could make about ‘essences’: I mean, they could also change over time. However, as @Count_Timothy_von_Icarus says if nothing remains the same, it is also quite difficult to speak of (an intelligible) change.
It is ironic how this point is so often misunderstood. I mean, before studying again Aristotle and the patristic Christian philosophers I also thought that entities were thought as necessarily static in the ‘Greek’. However, as you note, this is hardly true and, indeed, the view that change is an essential characteristic of entities was actually the norm until relatively recent times.
Yes. And this is also the reason why I think that intelligibility entails the potential existence of reason. But this doesn’t mean that ‘reality’ is a static ‘block’ and change is merely illusory.
Yeah. A sort of ‘Cratylean’ change in which nothing stays the same and in which we could only ‘point the finger’ and never name or truly understand anything.
However, before accepting such a view, I would weight out the costs. I admit that reality doesn’t seem ‘totally intelligible’ now. However, it is perhaps mainly because of our limitations. Leaving intelligibility just seems excessive to me now.
To clarify, I don’t think the problem is unique to physicalism per se.
The problem is analogous to the difficulty physicalism faces. Physicalism, in most forms, has to try to explain how first person experience, understanding, normativity, etc. “emerge” from mechanism. Similarly, a wholly discursive view of reason (i.e., as nothing but computation, Bayesian inference, etc.) faces the same difficulties in explaining understanding. How does understanding emerge from cumulative rule following?
I focused on computational theories, because they are popular, but the problems listed above apply for sense data theories, etc. As noted above in the post on Kripke, I don’t think replacing discursive rule-following between neurons with rule-following amongst agents resolves the issue at all. It simply relocates the problems.
I agree with this ‘Wittgensteinian’ point. I mean, one is freed to claim that ‘reality is unintelligible’. However, doing so requires a lot of ‘denial’ of how we normally navigate through life. So, in order to deny intelligiblity, I seriously weight out the benefits of doing this. And this to me an insight that helps also in philosophy.
The extreme Cartesian skepticism isn’t refuted by mere arguments but simply because it can’t be sustained in a coherent way in practical life. Unless there are truly convincing reasons to do otherwise, the model that helps more in practice is to be preferred.
The point about sentences as primary truth-bearers is well taken. Once you make that move, you’ve already abstracted away from the act that makes a sentence mean anything in the first place. Truth in the primary sense is a property of judgment — the act of affirming that what you’ve grasped in understanding is in fact the case. Sentences bear truth derivatively, as expressions of that act. Reverse the priority and you end up with all these puzzles about how inert strings of symbols “correspond to” or “hook into” the world, which is exactly the bind you’re describing.
And yeah, this is why Gettier problems have the shape they do. If truth is primarily a relation between sentences and states of affairs, and knowledge is just “justified true belief” understood as a relation between a subject and a proposition, then of course you can construct scenarios where all three conditions are met by accident. The accidentality is built in by the framework, becuase you’ve already dropped the element that would rule it out — namely that genuine knowing involves the subject actually understanding why the thing is so, not just having a true sentence in their belief-box for the right reasons. Interestingly, @Sam26 recently authored an OP on the old forum that addressed this from a Wittgensteinian perspective. I’d provide a link but I can’t seem to find it.
In any event, the LLM point is a nice illustration of this. You can have a system that produces well-formed, contextually appropriate sentences without any act of understanding having occurred. Which should tell us something about where meaning actually lives.
IDK if it is this easy though. Surely, the inability of the skeptic to have the courage of their convictions is given a solid explanation by realism (i.e., the actuality of the world is informing their intellect whether they accept this or not, and this is why they cannot act like driving into oncoming traffic has unknowable consequences). However, neo-Humean and eliminitivist narratives that explain intelligibility as a sort of illusion driven on by natural selection and adaptation are cogent in their own way, even if they ultimately succumb to all the problems mentioned in the OP.
Basically, the skeptic often has some (at least apparently) solid arguments for their skepticism, and also why they are incapable of living as true skeptics. Figuring out the problems in their arguments is often not particularly easy.
For example, eliminitivist versions tend to equate their narrative with “science” and appeal to the successes of modern science and technology as evidence of their theory (R. Scott Bakker’s Neuropath or Peter Watt’s Blindsight are good examples here). Explaining why this is a conflation is not always straightforward.
Now, I do think it’s true that this phenomenon is a great example of something like Wittgenstein’s theory of hinges. However, in the context of this thread, I also think that more deflationary readings of Wittgenstein tend to actually fall into the exact sort of thing the skeptic is guilty of, questioning the very grounds of their position having any meaningful content at all.
Yeah, good point. However, I would say that the ‘realist’ has the practical advantage that the explanation he makes is more intuitive than the ‘anti-realists’. In other words, the picture of the world that the ‘realist’ has is much more intuitive and ‘user-friendly’ upon reflexion.
However, they have to admit that their practical certainties have no grounds. And this groundlessness is not generally seriously held at the level of ordinary life.
To make an analogy, think about the Buddhists who deny the ‘ultimate reality’ of their selves. Until they reach enlightened they still have to engage reality as if the self ‘truly exist’. This creates a cognitive dissonance. Given the weight of this cognitive dissonance, is accepting the Buddhist model of the self worthwile? To me the answer is ‘yes’ only if one believes that somehow one’s own normal interpretation of immediate experience is wrong and that ‘realizing’ it gives an incomparable benefit.
However, if one doesn’t believe in the benefits of such a picture, it is hard to deny something as ‘seemingly existent’ as the self.
However, it is also clear that this ‘Wittgenstenian’ apporach has limits. That the Earth moves is something that certainly isn’t intuitive but it is true. Still, however, once the objections to the theory that the Earth moves were answered in a satisfying way, the benefits of accepting it were far more than the costs.
Ironically, I think that Wittgenstein’s hinges work on both ways. On one hand, they clearly endanger the ‘grounds’ and this appeals to anti-realists.
On the other hand, however, they are also often a sober analysis of the limitations of our capacity of knowledge and doubt and the need of faith in some kind of ground that we cannot prove.
In other words, the anti-realists, eliminativists etc do exactly what Wittgenstein himself warned no to do: using his insights to remain completely ‘groundless’. The realist, instead, IMO can use Wittgenstein’s arguments to his advantage because, after all, he can point to the ‘reasonablessness’ of his own model in a much less convoluted way than the other side.
A large part of the difficulty with your OP is that perhaps no one actually holds the view you are rejecting.
Tarski’s truth is not truth in a community, and certainly not relativism. But it is the basis of model theory and so of truth in logics more recent than the 1800s.
Wittgenstein and Kripke both propound against rule-following being merely a syntactic exercise.
Tarski shows that truth is not mere syntax; Wittgenstein and Kripke show that rule-following depends on more than syntax; so none of these folk hold that meaning or understanding follow from mere rules and computation.
These folk form the base of much of modern philosophy, so it’s not at all clear who it is you are addressing.
You say truth and understanding requires “adequacy of thought to being”, as if that were clear and precise and undisputed. It isn’t, of course. In many ways, what you are looking for is not so very far from Wittgenstein’s hinge propositions, Davidson’s causal interaction in a web of belief, or Kripke’s appeal to normative communal practice. None of these folk hold truth to be mere consensus in the way you seem to suppose. But they do reject a foundation in essential properties.
We might ask: what explanatory work is done by “adequacy of thought to being”? What is the relation of “adequacy”? And what is “being”?
These are the questions addressed by Wittgenstein, Kripke, Davidson, and others, but left hanging here.
If you want to address any of the specific points from the OP or the detailed post on Kripke, feel free. I’m not really sure how to respond to this one. For instance, I didn’t say anything about Tarski’s theory per se for instance, I just used it in an example showcasing the issues with the weaker sense of intelligibility as something like mere assertability, prediction, fit, adaptation, etc.
It might be helpful if you quote and responsed to specific points.
For instance, when you say that everything is wrong, I’m not sure where to go with that. Is the claim that “no one” actually rejects a faculty akin to noesis/intellectus? This strikes me as obviously untrue. This is a well-documented shift in modern Western thought and one of the key things that separates modern versus pre-modern thought, or East versus West, and while it is simply assumed later, it is explicitly asserted in early-modern thought all the time.
I find that difficult, given the generality of your protestations. It seems we agree that we cannot get genuine meaning or understanding from just following rules or computation. It seems we disagree as to who does such things. The lack of specificity is inherent in the OP.
I didn’t say “everything is wrong”.
I don’t know who “rejects a faculty akin to noesis/intellectus” partly because it remains unclear what you have in mind in positing such a faculty.
I gave a pretty detailed set of objections to Kripkenstein above, have a gander.
I think part of the issue is you have moved from “reason is wholly discursive,” to “reason is merely syntactical.”
But that wasn’t the distinction I was making re weak versus strong intelligibility. Even if rule-following is normative and communally grounded, as opposed to merely syntactic, it’s still entirely internal to the space of practice and discursive.
For example, Kripkenstein’s communal normativity is “normativity all the way down,” with no purchase on being independent of practice.
I won’t hazard to guess how Wittgenstein ought to be read here. It depends on if the “form of life” is a metaphysically thick thesis or whether the notion reduces to its discursive uses, as noted above.
Hume provides a fine parallel here. He appeals to “natures” to explain animal and human behavior. However, on his account, all natures amount to is an aggregate of past observations. Hence, the intelligibility here is weak, since it ultimately bottoms out in fit to prior observations.
That’s different from the “receptive” case where the actuality of the intellect is identical with the actuality of what is known and so is directly present to awareness, rather than being imputed through discursive analysis.