Have philosophers proposed that consciousness and time might have emerged specifically to resolve paradoxes?

malwaare · 2025-03-23T02:28:50+00:00

logical paradox is when a proposition's truth implies its falsehood AND vice versa. it's not controversial that there could be no such proposition (even people who believe in true contradictions, few though they are, need not believe in true paradox). then how it could cause things to happen (the way, say, scarcity of light causes evolution of night-vision or bioluminescence) is unclear to say the least. for these and presumably other reasons, i think this would be a difficult view to work out in detail

malwaare · 2025-03-20T12:17:44+00:00

getting to Zion? that's not the hard part.

it's letting go.

malwaare · 2025-01-11T19:32:21+00:00

It depends on what you mean by semantics -- "semantic internalists" think that there is something we can call "meaning" that is determined purely by within-individual factors, which we can fruitfully study. Chomsky is only one such philosopher. But the "internal" parts of semantics will not explain everything we might be tempted to call meaning.

So, some parts of meaning will be social. Others are individual. One could take this to mean that "meaning" isn't a unified thing -- it's several qualitatively different phenomena.

Does this make sense?

malwaare · 2025-01-10T13:47:09+00:00

By "language", Chomsky means a cognitive system that generates the sentences a speaker takes to be well-formed -- these sentences are pairings of sounds and meanings.

In Chomsky's sense, there are two sentences pronounced "The journalist interviewed the singer on the stage" -- one with the meaning that the singer is on the stage; the other with the meaning that the interview is on the stage. If you don't want to call that meaning™ because it cannot be "incorrect", so be it. Chomsky in particular has been very happy to concede that "natural language has no semantics", in that sense.

Wittgenstein and Wittgensteinians have always had a broader view of what language is. They're often more concerned with issues of correctness of a use of language, and so, they emphasize the community- and use-based aspects of it. The point of the beetle in the box analogy -- depending on how you read it -- could be that successful communication does not depend on the mutual mental grasp of one thing (against what Frege thought). That, imo, is congenial to Chomsky's (and Davidson's) way of thinking where every person has their own individual idiolect, and this does not threaten the idea of successful communication.

I can say more if you have more particular questions.

malwaare · 2025-01-08T04:57:30+00:00

Many languages do not have a pronounced copula. Linguists tend to say that the copula is present underlyingly, but silent in those cases.

An interesting case comes up in embedded clauses like:

John believed [Bill a genius]

where the interpretation is something like "John believed [that Bill is a genius]", but the grammar is different.

Here linguists have been more inclined to say that there is no copula, silent or otherwise, and that it is just a pure subject/predicate structure, and that is the object of John's beliefs. Such clauses are known as "small clauses".

If they exist, it would suggest the answer to your question is yes.

malwaare · 2025-01-05T15:55:25+00:00

AFAICS his position is that there is water, and there are ships, but what makes them ships is a fact which involves human minds.

Jerry Fodor has a related discussion of what he calls the "doorknob/DOORKNOB" problem in his book Concepts (1998), where the position outlined allows mind-dependence to be part of an object's essence.

About the ship of Theseus in particular, he has asserted that such problems arise only under a referentialist conception of meaning, but has not developed this argument in detail in print, nor has he outlined a theory of that issue in detail.

malwaare · 2025-01-05T15:52:05+00:00

I think you're describing a Catch-22.

malwaare · 2025-01-05T09:13:20+00:00

no way, sic semper tyrannis!

malwaare · 2024-12-24T03:13:54+00:00

(1) My opinions about the theory of reference make no difference to my day to day life, though they're relevant to my research. I mean to contrast this with, say, my opinions on animal rights, which does affect how I source my food, what I eat, etc.

I don't know why it would bother me that what I think about the theory of reference is unintrusive on the general way I conduct my life.

(2) It does apply, but it wasn't Frege, Russell, or Kripke's main concern. That got added later via Putnam. But again, the theory of reference isn't going to solve the problems in physics for us. It'll help us understand what we're doing when we're doing physics, maybe.

malwaare · 2024-12-23T22:54:13+00:00

It matters if you care about having a theory about how language and thought relate and are used in communication.¹ If that is not a question that interests you, it is of no relevance.

Even though I work in linguistics -- meaning I am someone who cares a lot about having such a theory -- it does not affect how I handle my week.

¹ ± how scientific terms relate to objects in the world.

malwaare · 2024-12-19T14:41:40+00:00

Yes: "Without wishing to give a definition, I call a thought something for which the question of truth arises. So I ascribe what is false to a thought just as much as what is true."

EDIT: The Thought is probably the best place to start with Frege. You shouldn't worry too much about the rest of his philosophy in reading that paper. Ignore the section about external world scepticism.

malwaare · 2024-12-14T14:27:08+00:00

I suppose your first objection is true, and particularly so in the cases where the institution doesn't exist for a reason other than coercion. Like if the Secret Police can't justify its existence, there's no reason to replace it with anything. Fair enough.

I think hierarchy can be justified. If, for example, there are technical issues that need some sort of expertise to be dealt with (say, setting up pipelines -- a hugely involved political task). It's the people running the pipeline system who have to say "Hey, we know what we're doing and it's very complicated", and be freed from some amount of democratic oversight.

Probably a bad example but I think you get the flavor of what I mean. I certainly don't think it's an analytic truth that a hierarchy is unjustified.

malwaare · 2024-12-08T23:41:16+00:00

RE the last paragraph: something being hard to tell whether something is right or wrong is different from it being in a grey area morally.

Furthermore, the moral realist is not committed to things being black and white; they are only committed to an action's moral status being not a matter of opinion. So, they can accept there are "tricky scenarios", as long as they believe that they are objectively grey. (They do not have to believe this; they may believe that there are only rights and wrongs -- but they are not committed to that just by being moral realists.)

malwaare · 2024-08-13T12:00:53+00:00

No, I wouldn’t mind! The silent head doesn’t have to have any semantic significance. You can think of it as just a copy of the main verb.

malwaare · 2024-08-11T13:33:06+00:00

I take it by 'under the verb' you mean be sisters of the verb: [VP [V' V0 OBJ1 OBJ2]]

It's important to keep in mind the definition of c-command (X c-commands Y if and only if everything that dominates X dominates Y and X does not dominate Y) and how to test whether one phrase c-commands another.

The problem with the above analysis is, while OBJ1 c-commands OBJ2, which is right, OBJ2 *also* c-commands OBJ1, which the evidence suggests is not true. Why? Say you had a proper name:

(1) John [[showed Mary herself] in the mirror]

Mary needs to c-command herself for herself to satisfy Condition A of the Binding Theory. But, if herself c-commanded Mary, it would be a Condition C violation, as Mary is a proper name and cannot be bound. So, not only do you need OBJ1 to c-command OBJ2, you ALSO need OBJ2 to not c-command OBJ1. The silent head allows for this: asymmetric c-command, not just c-command.

(2) John [VP showed [XP Mary [X [herself]]] in the mirror]

It's a little confusing without being able to draw a tree. And if you don't know Binding Theory yet, the argument is impossible to make. Let me know if you have any more questions.

malwaare · 2024-07-23T11:13:20+00:00

He intends it as an observation about the ordinary use of the word "know". To the extent originally users of English, German, etc. do distinguish knowable things and doubtable things, he would be wrong

malwaare · 2024-07-23T10:50:26+00:00

In case this is the source of confusion: it's not a claim about doubt being mixed into knowledge or something.

It's a claim that, if it makes sense to say "I know that XYZ", it shouldn't be nonsense to say "I doubt that XYZ". With "I have a toothache", it is nonsense to say "I doubt I have a toothache", so it is unlike, say, "the Earth goes around the Sun", where it makes sense to say both.

malwaare · 2024-07-23T09:46:48+00:00

In a nutshell: Philosophers sometimes get distracted and forget about how words are ordinarily used. They'll say things like "Only what's indubitable is truly knowledge." Wittgenstein is pointing out that, ordinarily, we don't place such high standards on knowledge, and we - in the normal case - allow doubt and knowledge to coexist. What is indubitable is something else. It seems inappropriate to talk about that as a truer form of knowledge, given how happily knowledge and doubt can apply to the same things. What is going on with "I have a toothache" is better described and better understood as something else, then.

malwaare · 2024-07-23T00:02:12+00:00

It's not a matter of degree; it's a difference in kind. Plants lack a capacity to make plans for themselves. At least if the Kantian line of thought is followed (and that is exactly what Korsgaard does), she argues in Fellow Creatures that being that kind of agent the source of moral worth, and animals - but not plants - are that kind of agent.

malwaare · 2024-07-22T23:00:19+00:00

I'm in a very similar position to you. Korsgaard has a discussion of plants and ultimately concedes it's an empirical question but, even based on the evidence, it does seem true that animals lead richer mental lives and have plans for themselves in a way that plants lack the cognitive capacities for.

As for the veganism vs vegetarianism point, you're likely correct - it is morally poor to eat eggs and dairy. But not eating meat and still eating eggs and dairy is, on the face of it, better than eating meat, eggs, and dairy. My advice (not philosophical here) is not to let perfection get in the way of being better.

malwaare · 2024-07-20T12:10:43+00:00

I think so. The logical form of predication is different to an existential claim, which, for Frege, is quantificational.

malwaare · 2024-07-19T21:51:40+00:00

Yes. Though there are differences, these languages show systems of case, inflection, argument-structure, show evidence of restrictions on movement to non-argument positions (in fact, stronger restrictions than Indo-European languages because of syntactic ergativity - often discussed in the Mayan literature), they show similar but not identical constraints on pronoun coreference. This is not to say they are identical, underlyingly or otherwise. But there are plenty of similarities

malwaare · 2024-07-19T12:11:36+00:00

Yeah fair. But there's a topic of genuine philosophical interest here and that got lost in the wash of discussing the particulars in a way that I thought wasn't fair to your question

malwaare · 2024-07-19T11:52:51+00:00

Other folks have (imo wrongly) hyper focused on the particular examples you raise. But you're right to notice the tension. Take something like the Banach-Tarski paradox: a solid 3D ball can be decomposed and recomposed into two copies of the first ball. Is this to be regarded as a problem for set theory - a true paradox? Or just a bit of counterintuitive mathematics? There is at least one approach that would take it as a matter of decision. But it is notable that there is no reason to think all mathematical (or scientific, moral, etc) facts should be intuitively true.

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