Thread 24653873

>There are no things.
>Learning words is just learning to associate one stimuli (a word sound) with another set of stimuli.
>A multitude of stimuli always accompanies the presence of a rabbit or any other "thing."
>Hence any word can always refer to many different sets of stimuli.
>THUS, words cannot refer to things.

Isn't the premise: "there are no things," and the rather severe constriction of what counts as relevant data for explaining learning doing all the heavy lifting here. If one starts from "there are no things to refer to," it can hardly be surprising if one concludes "words cannot refer to things." Of course not, you've begged the question and assumed from the start that words refer to stimuli clusters.

I have a strong suspicion that Kripke's version of Wittgenstein, "Kripkenstein" is guilty of the same thing in order to deny words' meaning.

>>24653873 (OP)
>there are no things
>but stimuli is a thing and the mind is a thing
>ergo there are things and Quine is retarded

alternatively:
>there are no things
>ergo stimuli aren't things
even further
>the mind isn't a thing
>ergo, learning is impossible, for there is nothing to learn, and there is nothing that does the learning

why are analytics so retarded?

>>24653900
Well, he doesn't exactly say there are no things. It's more:

>Quine restricts evidence to observable correlations between stimuli and utterances.

>Crucially, he denies that the linguist has any privileged access to “meanings” or “concepts” in the native’s mind.

>That’s the behaviorist move: reference must be fixed by stimulus–response patterns, not by any appeal to inner understanding or objective essences.

>No observational data privileges one ontology (whole rabbits) over another (rabbit-stages, undetached parts).

But this IS essentially presupposing nominalism and also making philosophy of language first philosophy. He then, because he badly, badly misunderstands "Aristotleian essences" argues that this finding on language helps support removing essences. His work is also used to deny the existence of "ordinary objects," instead objects are linguistic conventions and arbitrary, or determined by "use" where "use" is a sort of primordial primitive. This is very volanturist in a way. Human will/desire makes everything what it is.

The problem is that Continentals love this sort of stuff because it helps their move towards linguistic idealism and anti-realism, which they love because they see it as a move towards "freedom" (because they see freedom as largely potency/power, with no determinant end). So no one challenged this, because analytic philosophy, following Hume and Mill, likes iconoclasm, the counterintuitive, and "creative."

To be fair, those who still hold to Stoicism, Platonism, Thomism, etc. called bullshit on these moves as soon as they were published. It's worth remembering here that while people largely focus on the Neoplatonists high flying metaphysics and natural theology, they also did more hum drum work in epistemology and it was they who struck the original Empiricists with a knock out blow so hard that it went to sleep for 1400 years, and needed everyone to forget about how it had been BTFO to come back to life.

>>24653922
BTW, Quine's incredibly flawed take on Aristotle spawned an entire analytic literature on "Aristotleian essences." It is a right of passage of sorts for historical philosophers to write articles explaining how Quine has no idea what he is talking about and the idea is easily dismissed because it is indeed stupid, but not an idea held by those Quine tries to dismiss.

>>24653873 (OP)
>semiotics

>>24653900
Rabbits are subjective. Ergo, they do not objectively exist.

>>24653947
>Sausserean post-modern semiotics

This is a better introduction: https://ojs.utlib.ee/index.php/sss/article/view/SSS.2001.29.2.17

>>24653961
woof

>>24653922
>there are no understandings or things to be understood, just patterns and the stimulus-response that connects them
it sounds like he just hates icky words like essences and understanding, since he just swapped them out for something else which occupies the same niche and performs the same role, but gayer and dumber

>>24653947
>no Peirce
garbage. cast it all in the flames. how the fuck can people write so much crap about signs it blows my mind
>>24653961
there we go, my nigga

>>24654086
It always brings a smile to my face to think about how that post-modern and linguistic turn subset pours out thousands of pages of hyper complex terminology and "advances" only to get dabbed on by Saint Augustine writing in clear, crisp, every day Latin with concision and clarity.

>>24653873 (OP)
>THUS, words cannot refer to things.
>Do the words of your book refer to things, or are they meaningless too?
>. . .
Linguistic anti-realists are so easy to dunk on it's not even funny

>>24654114
He would say that there are absolutely no facts about what words refer to, but that communication is still possible via holistic analysis of social norms and the pairing of stimuli and response. We can still use the linguistic web to predict experience and communicate with others who share the web. But this doesn't mean "the dog in this room" picks out a metaphysical reality, or that "dog" can refer to a particular type of thing.

This isn't that unlike Kripke's solution to Kripkenstein when he says that we can never know which arithmetic operations we are doing (or more broadly, which rules we are following). We might think we are doing addition, and not quaddition where every answer over a certain figure is "253," but there can never be any fact of the matter because any set of prior behaviors is consistent with an infinite number of potential rules. And your own sense of "knowing addition" cannot count as a grounding fact (on account of empiricist epistemological starting points which forbid such a thing, or a 'private language').

Addition is not about quantities but about social conventions. "Social conventions" aren't really things either, but bundles of social convention.

A tough conclusion, but what else is to be done. Rejecting empiricism would be rejecting science!

This sort of things holds for scientific theories and paradigms too. There is always an infinite number of explanations consistent with any evidence. Hence, scientific explanations that go beyond patterns and prediction are just social stories we tell about prediction. The same is true of math, which is a sort of invented game, not something discovered. To say something is "true" is simply to say "I find it good to assert this and act as if it is true." True is just a sort of 'hooray for x belief," and false is 'boohoo for y belief,' just as the emotivists earlier pointed out that "good" is just a way to say 'hooray for x' and "bad/evil" is just a way to say 'boohoo for y.'

So, "the Earth is round" is "my culture says hooray for 'the Earth is round'" just as "molesting kids is evil" or "eating cyanide is bad for you" is just a way of saying 'boohoo' to these things. People who think otherwise are stuck on outmoded philosophy and bewitched by language. Progress in science and language suggests against any sort of metaphysical explanation of "good," or "true' or meaning or essence. Because man has no essence, what is good for him is ultimately up to us to decide.

>>24654244
The patterns we recognize as a dog need some form of existence independent of anything physical or there would be no way a representative system like a brain could represent it and recognize instances of it without containing a physical dog.
Science suggests the "essence", the formula that lead to man is shaped by the goal of long term survival. A natural reaction to this observation was to try to debunk it as it apparently leads to venerating cruelty over empathy. A lot of this bullshit like these attempts to undermine science through making everything meaningless are rooted in this reaction to a misunderstanding of what science suggests about reality. If you can't conceive of man in the traditional frameworks as anything but cruelty and evil embodied then you'll try to undermine those traditional frameworks, instead of aiming for a synthesis that can be built on you'll want to undermine and destroy anything that leads back to your fundamental error.

>>24653873 (OP)
I don't recall Quine saying there are no things in W&O. In some of his works he clarifies he's kind of a structuralist. All we really can know, via science and whatever, is some logical structure of predicates and quantifiers describing the world, but we don't know what the values of the variables correspond to. So he's agnostic about knowing what things our words refer to. It's the same problem Newman raised to Russell, and the Skolem theorems almost imply, which Putnam talks about with his model-theoretic argument, and overcoming radical indeterminacy of interpretation is one of the roles Lewis gives naturalness, to overcome Putnamian skepticism. And so, also Quine's view.
>>24653922
>>24653928
>>24654081
When does Quine talk about essences? Someone refresh my memory. I don't see immediately what essences have to do with anything. But I guess the E.J. Lowe-type rationalists (and by extension the Jackson/Chalmers two-dimensional semantics people?) take grasping of essences to fix reference. I think Lowe and 2D semantics people go too far.

>>24655523
>FAGPOW
wdhmbt?

>>24653873 (OP)
Yes, language is imprecise in how it relates to physical world.

>>24654421
Good point, although I think you are missing that the Reformed/Calvinists tradition, which is hugely influential in Anglo thought and modern liberalism (through political-economy, which became economics, political science, and areas of psychology) actually *does* want man to be evil in this way. Homo oecononimicus is an essentially amoral rational utility maximizing atomized agent. Any "morality" he has is just rolled up into utility, into appetite, and is seemingly arbitrary. The "normative" is wholly removed. A main idea here is that society must be organized to prosper despite man being, in a sense, evil. And then you also have later moves away from Christianity which don't change this anthropology. Man is in the image of God and the Reformed God is sheer inscrutable will, volanturism. And these philosophies where everything is what it is because man says it is this, creating it from the darkness, is basically Calvinism with God removed and man, the language community, or an amorphous Will to Power put in its place. (Arguably, this core claim of liberalism and economics is unfalsifiable, every observation contrary to it is simply read as ultimately a form of egoistic utility maximization, that is, it is arguably as pseudoscientific and theological as Marxist economics was recognized to be, which isn't to say that huge parts of economics aren't a valid science, just that its anthropology and interpretation is.)

I think the fear you highlight is real, but then there is a parallel ambition to make man thus that also drives it on. And then in Nietzsche, we get the "joy of the knife" and the positive embrace of a sort of Dionysian criminality and violence. Who can deny this? Large parts of Western culture worship criminals and super villains.

>>24655523
Here is a good paper on Quine's attack on essences: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://pvspade.com/Logic/docs/WarpWoo1.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwj50LmMh5yPAxXK5ckDHbh9LK8QFnoECCIQAQ&sqi=2&usg=AOvVaw1XwkMjcPAAZ0aM2Ne2b-c-

I think you are missing that on the realist views that dominated most of philosophical history, Quine is essentially denying things. >>24653922 puts it more clearly. His uses a sort of methodological bracketing to pretty much presuppose nominalism at the very least.

And, while I don't think this is explicit in Word and Object, his later views do make "objects" sort of arbitrary. He was a big inspiration for the later denial of ordinary objects, which splits into two theses: that there are no objects, or that there is an infinite number of possible objects we could name, for example, a flout, discontinuous trout and fox halves. But both of these lead towards a sort of linguistic idealism because it is linguistic conventions that makes things appear. Whereas, the older view would say that ants and trees are biological unities and metaphysical realities, true organic wholes, in a way arbitrary terms are not, and in a way prior to human language (indeed human language is caused to be what it is by these prior actualities, the cause of the word "tree" is the organic unity of trees, and the cause of every human language recognizing species is the existence of essences in some sense). Quine doesn't deny objects so much as lean towards the idea that we could categorize a sort of endless set of ensembles and none have priority. Likewise, "to be is to be the value of a bound variable" has often been taken in the direction of linguistic idealism and volanturism. Quine is mum here, but I think his position indicates in this direction (or towards denying any priority or posteriority).

>>24656721
That's not really his thesis though. All sorts of philosophers agree with this. He says there is absolutely never a fact about what words refer to, that reference is inscrutable. That is different from saying that language is imprecise. Plato and Aristotle think language is imprecise too.

>>24657020
>He says there is absolutely never a fact about what words refer to
Then you might as well lean into solipsism and Descartes's demon and say that nothing is factual about reality. But in practical life this doesn't matter.

>>24657042
I'm not disagreeing here. Analytics are generally sophists. They take bad but plausible premises to make absurd conclusions seem plausible, generally in defense of the hegemonic neo-liberalism. I mean, their pragmatism is often explicitly what Plato meant by misology and sophistry; it is just using words and ideas for advantage ultimately. They just think they can find mutual advantage is liberalism.

>>24657017
Thanks for the Spade link. Will check that out some time.
>And, while I don't think this is explicit in Word and Object, his later views do make "objects" sort of arbitrary.
That he does. I mention it in my post, the one you responded to. Quine makes his structuralism kind of explicit in his later works. People do in fact deal with this either with a subjectivism and anti-realism about external metaphysical structure, or with a very plenitudinous ontology so that any description possible describes something. But as I mentioned in my last post, Lewisian naturalness kind of gets past that. Sider's extension of the notion is especially fruitful. I don't think we need Aristotelian or Platonic essences per se, but it's fine to make appeals to a sparse set of natural properties or universals. Lewisian naturalness is really a twin of Armstrongian sparseness, after all. Have you read Lewis' 1983 "New Work for a Theory of Universals"? I guess if you're the anon mentioning essence literature on Quine, you probably know of what neo-Aristotelians like Kit Fine, E.J. Lowe, Kathrin Koslicki, etc are up to. And of course David Armstrong.