Not really. More a bunch of assertions. It didn’t engage with the arguments he presented. I don’t for example see where you address Kripke’s sceptical paradox itself as opposed to rejecting its conclusion. But even so, Kripke’s antirealism is the weakest of these accounts in this regard; I suspect that Wittgenstein might pretty much agree with the direction you are taking.
that’s not my understanding. You seem to picture "the space of practice and discursive” as if it were independent or seperate from what I suppose you would call “the space of being”. It isn’t, in the accounts that you seek to critique.
It’s just not obvious or apparent that they do as you say they do: “reject a faculty akin to noesis/intellectus”. They just don’t phrase it in Thomisitc terms.
Anyway, our differences are clear. You want a metaphysical grounding for your ideas, and I’ll point out that any such grounding must be discursive.
This seems, by my lights, to misconstrue Aquinas’ idea of the need of an immaterial faculty by trying to reduce it to material processes (unless I am misunderstanding): the material data being processed certainly contains within it the content necessary for the intellect to extract and receive the object’s form (which originally impacted the senses), but the material processes themselves do not ever facilitate such an extraction nor reception of form. Unless I am misunderstanding, it seems like this reading of Aquinas allows for the ‘form’ to be there in the material sense-data (or subsequent processed-data); as exemplified by:
This doesn’t seem coherent with Thomism to me: the point of the intellect being immaterial is exactly that data is material and thusly can never contain itself a valid equality to a form—it can merely provide the approximate content that an intellect can use to extrapolate a form out of it.
Would this view you are expounding, then, be compatible with the brain facilitating proper reason (since the form is referential in the sense-data in some manner)?
As a person that is prone to that kind of problem I found that Wittgenstein’s analysis is helpful. I was pleasantly surprised to find the concept of ‘hinges’ used also in psychoterapy. Also, IIRC the concept has been applied to the phenonenological analysis of psychotic disorders like schizophrenia spectrum disorders (you can check the idea of ‘loss of natural evidence’/‘loss of common sense’ in which patients, even while not having an occurring episode, have difficulties to ‘grasp’ the certainties commonly assumed and have a tendency to excessively question them…).
My main reticence in citing that paper was to avoid misunderstanding that I believe that questioning the hinges is a sign of mental illness. However, I found it an interesting application of the concepts.
This misunderstands Kripke. Kripke is using a model-theoretical notion of truth, as would all logicians since the 1950’s. In that approach truth has a rigorous definition. That definition is not “assertable within a given community”.
The whole force of the “quus” example depends on the idea that different interpretations make different statements true in different models.
Truth is defined recursively:
P(a) is true in a model if the object assigned to a falls within the set assigned to P.
¬φ is true if φ is not true.
φ ∧ ψ is true if both are true.
∀x φ(x) is true if φ(x) holds for every element in the domain.
That’s it; nothing about “assertable within a given community”.
At the very least, the beetle-box argument excludes any noetic faculty from playing a role in language.
The beetle in the box is designed to show that, even were there some private inner object: a mental state, direct intuition, noetic grasp, etc., it would be irrelevant to a language game. Whatever is in the box, it cannot do any semantic or epistemic work. Thus, meaning is constituted wholly by public use; any noetic faculty that supposedly grasps content directly is either:
A. Inaccessible to verification and so semantically inert;
B. Or reducible to its public behavioral expression, in which case it’s not doing independence work outside of use.
Kripke goes even further here because, from his inability to secure an empirical, third-person verification of a “fact” grounding meaning, he concludes that there can be no “fact of the matter” (a metaphysical, as opposed to merely epistemic thesis). No third-person, discursively demonstrable fact determines correct rule application… therefore there is no fact of the matter about correct rule application (aside from community standards).
Actually, Kripke allows that his skeptic sounds “insane,” which prima facie means it isn’t assertable within a community. If assertability conditions are determined by communal practice, and the sceptical conclusion strikes virtually everyone, including Kripke, as “insane” and “absurd,” then by his own standard it must fail the assertability condition.
Now, I do think these are fine critiques against certain theories of meaning, it’s just that they don’t really apply outside a narrow band of targets. And I have already pointed out above why I don’t think moving from internal discursive relations to communities of agents actually fixes any of the issue for wholly discursive understandings of meaning.
It’s unfortunate that Wittgenstein never made it very far with Saint Augustine, and only uses him for a framing a naive, ostensive view of language, because the Docrtina Signorum opens up another option here, since signs are not Cartesian private representations, but participatory and teleological.
The skeptical conclusion is not drawn from model theory; it would be remarkable if it were, if one could prove that there is never a fact about what someone means from sheer formalism. The argument hinges on the claim that there is no fact of the matter about what someone means. That’s not a model-theoretic claim, it’s a first-order metaphysical assertion about meaning and mind, one totally beyond the formal apparatus entirely used to show underdetermination.
Yes, he uses standard logical tools in his work. That doesn’t change what his conclusion says about what any of that means.
Also, is the skeptical conclusion only supposed to hold in some given models? Isn’t the whole point that no model can be privileged? But surely it is supposed to be a thesis about meaning tout court, (e.g., “no fact of the matter”).
Edit: I suppose we should clarify, this is “Kripkenstein,” he doesn’t tend to advance the view as “his” per se. I assume you are familiar with this though.
You are arguing that public behaviour cannot be what fixes meaning, but why must we think of meaning as uniquely fixed? Why shouldn’t meaning be fluid, or in flux?
“Quiddity” and “noetic content” are philosophers’ fictions. We get on fine without presuming them, because understanding involves activity, not just a state of mind. Your “harder problem” is a mere philosophical contrivance. We might avoid denying that understanding is inherently a state of mind while insisting that understanding is demonstrated in our actions.
I don’t think we do. We do need to think of it as ordered to something outside current communal practice however. There is a telos to understanding. The question of whether meaning is fluid or static is beside the point, the issue is rather the formal object and measure of understanding.
I disagree. The act of understanding is the primary datum of any question of meaning or epistemology. If empiricist presuppositions render these “eliminable,” or theoretically inert, my thoughts are “so much the worse for empiricism.”
Particularly when conclusions like:
You can never independently know when you are preforming addition as opposed to some other operation;
Words can never refer to specific entities;
etc. seem to function as reductios against those epistemic presuppositions.
I don’t think we do. I’ve given several examples above that explain why I think attempts to deny the act of understanding, or to reduce it to mere pattern recognition, etc., invariably slide into equivocation. The denials are themselves parasitic on the very noetic content they deny. They are performative contradictions.
Consider for instance:
What does it mean for them to be “fictions?” Surely people can use them correctly or incorrectly within the communities they have currency in. Surely, they are used to fine effect in those communities. So, what exactly is wrong with them, but right with “activity” and “use?” Does the latter correspond to some ontic reality and the former fail to?
Sure, few deny it. Of course there are some hardcore eliminitivists who do deny it. But the more common problem is to make understanding wholly irrelevant to epistemology, meaning, etc. That is, it is epiphenomenal. I don’t see how this is any less problematic though. All the arguments against epiphenomenalism apply here, and I’d argue that the beetle-box argument, if you accept its premises, renders noetic content epiphenomenal in just this way.
(Note: Kripke does this one better. If there is “no fact of the matter” about what our state of mind means (i.e., its intentional, noetic content) I am hard pressed on how one could say that it is a “state of mind” at all).
Consider, a Chinese Room or P Zombie would be, in theory, just as able to participate in community activities. Actually, Peter Watt’s Blindsight in interesting because it proposes that P Zombies might be better at community life (which I suppose makes sense on his reductionist, non-teleological account of life).
Oh, and I’ll add on Beetle Box’s epiphenomenalism:
If noetic content and intentionality is epiphenomenal (if it is not constitutive or a determining cause re meaning), then noetic content itself simply couldn’t have ever caused anyone to produce arguments that establish its epiphenomenal status. It is semantically inert, so nothing in language is communicating this sort of “inner word” (to use Augustine’s term). But this seems odd, since such arguments are very common, both pro and contra. How does something inert dominate Western and Eastern thought for millenia?
Further, arguments themselves, as meaningful interventions in a philosophical discussion, presuppose that understanding their content makes a difference to what one asserts and does.
Wittgenstein’s own use of careful distinctions and thought experiments suggest, to my mind, the expectation that his readers will grasp something through his words. Yet this is inexplicable if understanding doesn’t shape meaning (if understanding is not somehow “in” use).
Whereas, if use is causally downstream of noetic content, then there is not really a problem here. Causes are “in” their effects, and noetic content can be “in” or revealed by use.
I won’t hazard to guess where Wittgenstein actually ended up here. The Beetle-Box taken alone, and as commonly read by deflationists, seems straightforwardly epiphenomalist though.
Perhaps the problem is the assumption that understanding, if it is noetic, and so the “private” possession of a mind, must be “private” in the sense of Locke or Descartes. But if noetic content is the cause of human signs, it can hardly be private under many metaphysical interpretations; the culprit here is representationalism. And if there is a formal ontic relation between knower and known, I am not sure why it would be irreducibly private in the way modern subject/object dualism makes it.
To be honest, I’m coming around on the idea that it is not even representationalism is the ultimate problem here, but rather the strict subject/object dualism, paired with a metaphysics where appearances can be arbitrarily related to their causes.
It’s my view that forms, ideas, universals, and other such intelligibles are real but not existent. Platonic epistemology allows for different modes of realness. Aristotelian universals were real in that sense, but not phenomenal existents. Which is why the rejection of metaphysics has had profound consequences.
Which is also a consequence of a tectonic shift in consciousness, from the participatory ontology of the Medievals, to the subject-object divide which appears in Descartes and later philosophers.
I think you might be understanding Lyons’ account as a theory of intellection (i.e, how the intellect grasps universal forms)?
That’s probably my fault with how I introduced it.
However, in this chapter he is working on elucidating what is prior to that. So, the focus is sensory semiosis, i.e., the physical transmission of intentional species through inanimate media to the sense organs. These are two distinct moments in Aquinas’ account. As the Peripatetic Axiom goes: “nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses.” The theory here is explaining how we get intentionality and quiddity into the senses.
So, Lyons isn’t claiming that material processes accomplish the immaterial intellect does. Intention is virtual, in potency, in inanimate material composites. He’s claiming that the medium between object perceived and the perceiver already has an intentional (representational/referential) character, even before we even get to the question of the intellect. You can contrast this with materialist accounts, where value, quiddity, and intentionality are all sui generis products of the mind, and are absent from “thing-in-themselves.”
In the example, the eucalyptus tree patterns the ambient light, then that patterned energy is a sign-vehicle carrying the form of the tree through physical space. None of this yet involves intellect, or even sensation. It’s happening in the inanimate environment, whether it is actualized as sensation or knowledge or not.
The reason I thought it was relevant was because it’s an explanation of how value, intentionally, etc. can be already “out and about” prior to being in the intellect, even if it is only fully actualized and universal on the intellect. So we don’t have to posit the mind as the sui generis source of intelligibility, either creating it ex nihilo, through some process of “strong emergence,” or because intelligibility reduces to mechanism. This “leg” of the explanation gets at how the knower is unified with the known.
Sokolowski looks at this from the opposite end, starting with phenomenology (it’s a shame he doesn’t really get into semiotics unfortunately).
That seems a profound book. I hadn’t encountered it. I have an immediate affinity with it as it’s not remote from the topics I cover in On Purpose. But I’m not trying to reconstruct a naturalist account of cognition that can be reconciled with the Aristotelian. When I say that intelligibles are ‘real but not existent’, I mean they’re transcendent in the original sense that they can be grasped by the rational faculty (nous) but not by the senses, as explained in the section ‘The Meaning of Separation’ in the chapter on Plato, in Eric Perl ‘Thinking Being’. My claim is that this was the insight that was preserved in Aristotelian and scholastic realism but that was lost with the ascendancy of nominalism. I take ‘transcendent’ to mean ‘beyond the vicissitudes of coming and going’ i.e. not contingent but necessary. That too is traditional.