On Monday, January 31, 2005 at 10:58:49 PM UTC-8, Jason wrote:

[snip]

The point is that the sense of a sentence is a thought; that is to say, >>what is individual about a sentence's meaning is purveyed by its sense. >>Without sense, on Frege's account we would simply have instantiations of >>the True and the False, and this makes a hash of the fact that sentences >>express individual meanings. But if sense is not objective, then it >>would not be possible for two people to have the same thought;

We don't need to be having the same thought. Thoughts could simply be a desideratum that fills the functional role of coin in social currency.

After

all, what is a thought? They might appear to be functionally the same, but

may

not be. It seems to me that it is the function that is important.

If thoughts are simply a "desideratum that fills the functional role of coin in social currency", what is left to be desired? If human beings
are successfully socially coordinated by thoughts having
indistinguishable content, why would we find the notion to be an
incomplete one?

It seems incomplete in that a sense or thought's "objectivity" has become a shadow; the ideal of objectivity drained by qualification. What is left over is an "objectiveness" that is now itself a token for something-we-know-not-what.
Or worse, an illusion/elusion for the purposes of completing a schema. That is,
if it cannot be established as something tangible and other than arbitrary, then
there doesn't seem to be a good case as to why a sense or thought should be able
to determine a referent or truth value.

I am of the opinion that the social character of reason
is not undercut by subjectivity, for the reason that reason is what is compatible with the forms of receptivity possessed by the individual subject. Thusly, there's no objection to be mounted against a "social" concept that is compatible with the operations of the individual mind:
that is what a reasonable notion is.

Fair enough. It lends itself to a post-structuralist viewpoint of reason. Individual minds can swim in many directions, but there is an overall current that is created by them. This current is the social character of reason that has a lot of momentum behind it - while slow to change it may do so. From what
I understand of the current schema, it is subjective from a social perspective
but "objective" from an individuals'. A closely related question is whether reason can be truly objective. To labour the metaphor, are there canals outside
of the sphere of society that help shape the overall current of reason? The answer to this question, I figure, is where modernism and post-modernism differ.

and this
is clearly a desideratum for the analysis in question. What we are left >>with is the question of how we reach cognitions, that is to say the path >>by which thinkers come to similar results at the end of the line in >>affirming the same truth-values for sentences. So it doesn't seem to me >>that Frege is being particularly restrictive here, just excluding the >>case of an individual's idiosyncrasies in thought.

Okay, I see what you mean. I don't agree in this exclusion though. I think

it

is a hack to fit his schema.

Well, the point is that a full story about how thinkers come to grasp contents on the level of reference is compatible with the version of
sense sketched above: and this can contain a great deal more of the cognitive concerns about how individual thinkers are epistemically
related to the world that you raise. There's no reason that the theory
of reference cannot address all the various forms of an individual's
coming to know about certain things, in fact that is what it
historically has consisted of (down to Gareth Evans). But the theory of sense needs to serve the function of regulating the processing of information such that various forms of thought we enjoy are not ruled
out by scruples about how reality hooks onto language: it represents the role of language as instrument of communication, the idealities built
into our attempts to communicate particular matters of fact.

A fill-in-the-blank theory must demonstrate the necessity of what is to be filled in. If the role of this blank is to mediate reference then it needs to attach itself to reality in some way unless by "reference" we don't mean the world but the world constituted in language. I would argue that we learn language because of our experiences in the world, but once language is in operation I wouldn't go so far as to say that our experiences are now fully linguistic. This seems language-centric and blind to the mechanisms that produced it; a kind of kicking away of the ladder type thing.
Language has taken the role of idealism and nominalism in contemporary philosophy, it is the new Cartesian cogito. And for all its arrogated status of
being uniquely human and intricacies derived from trying to carve new ground, it
is in principle still framed in this role of the (shared) cogito and privy to its critisisms. Except now, instead of the "I", it is the "We".

[snip]

I would say (provided the difficulties with language are intense enough) >>they don't *know* how to sex ducklings, just how to perform the actions >>involved in sexing. If they happened to be reliable sexers, we would >>have discovered something about the human brain (a reflex) rather than >>knowledge per se.

What if this was a learned "reflex"? We are likely to say that they didn't
*know* how to sex duckling before, but now they do... The theory seems

somewhat

prescriptive of what knowledge should be counted as, rather than capturing

our

typical use of the term.

Well, these are not exactly typical usages of "knowledge". But it is
true that I am proposing there is no sense in which a linguistically inexpressible thought can be had: that I relegate to the vicissitudes of individual psychology, rather than thought per se. Although this is not
an original thought, it strikes me more forcefully for the reason that a conception of language oriented to language's social function rather
than words-and-rules militates for a deeper role for language in epistemology than is commonly allowed.

I don't know that I agree, but I respect your view. Derrida plays on the boundaries of what can't be expressed. Writers often play on this boundary as well, where words convey meaning by association rather than explicit narrative.

[snip]

Well, I don't know if Tarski had a metaphilosophical intention in >>constructing his theory as he did to avoid the pitfalls of >>axiomatization, but it *is* interesting that truth is completely defined >>in terms of satisfaction: truth is not a theoretical primitive of the >>semantic definition of truth. This means that it is possible to take >>Tarski's side, as it were, on the question of the metaphysics of truth >>and insist on the importance of satisfaction as against truth: and one >>way of understanding satisfaction is as a "will to figurate" not far >>removed from Nietzsche. Truth is therefore "submerged" in semantics, and >> instead of taking truth as self-explanatory it is necessary to explain >>truth's role in various forms of judgement.

Yes, this is interesting.

What do you mean by "metaphilosophical"?

A comparison of philosophical viewpoints without the advancement of substantive theses; an assessment of philosophies from a standpoint
"above" them (for example, an analysis of world-views). This newsgroup
is ostensibly dedicated to metaphilosophical issues, although I like to think metaphysical viewpoints are not out of the question; but it is an interesting question whether any such thing can actually exist.

Interesting. I wouldn't have thought there is such a thing as meta-philosophy,
but I see now that this is a function of my view of philosophy. To me there is
no such thing as a philosophical theory because I see philosophy as an activity.
What comes out of this act may result in a theory, but this belongs to the subject in question, as I see it. For example, a theory of science would belong
to the collective sciences. A commentary on various theories of science would be meta-science under the philosophy of science. The philosophy of philosophy is still philosophy, but perhaps meta-philosophy can be a subject under the science of philosophy or something. But this is just me. I appreciate that phil is different things to different people.

2022 Update: This was seventeen years ago...

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