bruce
bden...@sonic.net

 "  'So are you saying that human agreement decides what is   true
and what is false?'  -  It is what human beings _say_ that is   true
and false; and they agree in the _language_ they use.   This is  
not agreement in opinions but in form of life.    "

Also  the bit at the end of 242 which I spared you all from:

"...This seems to abolish logic but does not do so.- It is one thing
to describe methods of measurement, and another to obtain and
state results of measurement.  But what we call 'measuring' is
partly determined by a certain constancy in results of
measurement."

The fact that we do, as a matter of fact, agree as to what following
the rule,  amounts to in a particular social practice (say as to
colour judgments or the application of 100 + n) is a condition for
the existence of that practice.   That we have a language as to
colour judgments, or as to simple calculations, shows that we
agree in what is to count as "going on in the same way" or "the
same" in respect of those matters.   Within the practice we may
then agree or  disagree - and be  right or wrong - as to whether this
or that particular instance amounts to a correct application of the
rule - whether this is a correct application of the word "red" or a
correct answer to a calculation.

Tthat is not a matter of just getting together to "agree to say" what
following the rule will mean.   We cannot for example, just "agree
to say" that 100 + 43 = 110, or every third instance of colour we
see we'll call "red".   Or, if we do, then  we're  wrong.

An agreement to apply a rule in one way or another presupposes
the convention of following a rule, that we already know what
following a rule is  - a bit like  cave men agreeing to invent language
in order to discuss their  hunting techniques.  

jeremy

Hi,

I'd appreciate any help with the following.  I got Quine's Pursuit of
Truth for Xmas and have been enjoying it.  However, there is something
(probably two things) I don't understand that appear(s) to be both
obvious and important - can someone please clarify?

The difficulty is in sections 12 ("Indifference of Ontology") and 13
("Ontology Defused").

First, with proxy functions, is he saying that it doesn't matter what
we call things?  For example, the observational sentence given
earlier:

For all x, if x is a raven, x is black.

If we operated on that with a proxy function to get:

For all x, if x is a cabbage, x is black.

Then we would have the same science, but in a language where what you
and I call ravens are called, instead, cabbages.  Is that correct?

Later (section 13) he says that we can change from rabbit to the
cosmic complement of rabbit (which I understand to mean everything
except the rabbit).  I think this is talking about something else -
this example isn't like the cabbage example above, but is concerned,
for example, with something like how science might evolve.  You might
imagine a school of advanced rabbitology saying that we in fact live
in a sea of rabbits, which we don't notice, and what causes the
rabbitty sensation is, in fact, a gap where there is a missing rabbit
(like a hole in a semiconductor, or Fermi's picture of positrons, I
believe).

Is that reasonable, or am I completely off the mark?

Thanks,
Andrew
(I'm not a philosopher, so please try and avoid technical terms in
replies if possible - thanks).

Everyone recognizes that we assign "propositional attitudes"; what is
important to someone like Quine is how they get
analyzed.  With his commitment to behaviorism (at certain points in his
career), he would like to analyze them without making reference to mental
entities called `meanings'.

Bruce concluded:

Well, what do cognitive scientists do, exactly?  People like Fodor & Katz
have argued that Chomsky-Style generative linguistics is 1) cognitive science
and 2) replacing philosophical accounts of propositional attitudes (among
other things) with more `scientific accounts' (in Fodor's words).  Ideas like
language innateness and etc. directly challenge certain philosophical notions
of language, and have at times been taken to be new-and-improved versions of
philosophy of language.  So in so far as
cognitive scientists are doing the kind of thing Fodor et al say they are,
then the philosophical speculation is fairly directly relevant to it.  So far
as they are doing something else, perhaps it is not.

Cheers,

M.J. Murphy

`The shapes of things are dumb.'
-L. Wittgenstein

 1. Murphy desires peaches and cream.
 2. Further, Murphy says he desires peaches and cream.
 3. Ergo, Murphy desires peaches.

By "verbs of saying", as opposed to "verbs of believing", I was following I
think an old grammatical distinction, viz. what traditional Latin Grammar
has it as the distinction between:

 Verbum dicendi
 Verbum credendi

(I vaguely recall the distinction had to do with eg the use of the
subjunctive or the infintive after the verb, as involved in various
grammatical rules for reporting speech/thought).

A "verb of saying" would thus be a verb by which we, in Austin's parlance,
report a LOCUTIONARY act (eg. say, conclude, suggest, hint, order). A "verb
of believing" (and also desiring) would cover the propositional attitudes
proper (e.g. believe, think, know, desire, want).

What I had in mind was nothing more serious than that, and Murphy got the
gist very correctly when he notes that "there are circumstances where we can
infer to have said as suggested, but also possible to imagine circumstances
where this might not be considered an accurate report".

The case may also have to do with the disinction that we draw in 'the verbs
of saying', but not, as far as I ordinarily use them, verbs of believing,
between:

 Direct speech (quotation)
 Indirect speech.

Thus, besides the indirect report, 'Murphy said THAT he desired peaches", we
can say, "Murphy said, "I desire peaches", and thus quote PART of his
tokening the utterance, "I desire peaches and cream". Part-tokening would
NOT be same-tokening, though.

Incidentally, I wonder if these distinctions may also have to do with what
is usually referred to as the difference between a "belief" (or generally,
any propositional attitude) being "de re" as opposed to its being "de
dicto". Quine is well aware of this distinction (his example concerning
Orcutt), and I think it is important to note that he allows for 'believing'
to have a purely transparent usage where quantifying in is permitted, as in
the reports:

  1. Paul believes a spy did it.
  2. There's a spy such that Paul believes he did it.

Regarding Bruce Denner's 'dilemma' and the sentential view of propositional

True, but isn't there a sense (or usage) in which we think of "translating"
as "giving the meaning"? e.g.

  'La nieve es blanca' means "snow is white".

For Grice to give the meaning is to make explicit the underlying
propositional attitude which brings us back to the problems of which
language to use in making the reporting. Grice's scheme allows for quite a
lot of freedom there.

Regarding J Bate's example concerning propositional attitudes as applied to
animals, Murphy adds an example from a different field:

 a colleague of mine recently purchased voice recognition
 software for their computer.  He noted that, if he coughed
 or shouted 'Hey!', the computer would begin to do things
 - open programs, etc, more or less at random. His explanation
 was, 'It thinks I am angry. It figures it should do
 *something*'.  The moral here is that we do ascribe beliefs
 to things which we know do not have beliefs, so I'm not sure
 that the fact we ascribe beliefs to dogs means that we are
 committed to their really *having* beliefs.

Indeed. And I think this is precisely the point of someone like Daniel C
Dennett in what he calls 'the intentional STANCE'. A stance being just that,
a *view* of things, but not something that commits us to some psychological
reality.

Thanks to J Bate for his interesting observations regarding Wittgenstein's
examples concenring the lion and the dog, and the different contexts in
which they apply.

I agree with Murphy (contra Denner?) re: the role of philosophical
speculation (:)) - based we hope on 'folk psychology' - and cognitive
psychology.

Incidentally, a minor point. Bruce Denner wonders if

  "I like to dance"

would count as a propositional attitude. Well, provided some grammatical
tranformations - in Chomsky's sense - I guess (:)). I mean, as Russell
introduced the notion, a propositional attitude is a psychological attitude
(such as agreeing or disagreeing) towards a proposition in its
logico-philosophical usage of this notion. The underlying "proposition" in
"I like to dance" (or "I like that I dance"?) would be, I guess, something
like "I am dancing", or "I dance". "I like to dance" may thus be read as "I
have a volitional attitude towards the fulfilment of the proposition, "I am
dancing"". A propositional atittude of simpler structure would, I guess, be
something like "I believe the cat is on the mat".

Best,

J L Speranza
Buenos Aires, Argentina.
j...@netverk.com.ar

The grammar of "belief" is such that many of us do talk
about the beliefs of dogs, although they aren't verbal beliefs
and dogs can't have beliefs about tomorrow. Another way to
put it is that many of us extend the use of "belief" to animals
with complex brains, if they behave as if they have
some nonverbal kind of beliefs. Most of us would not
seriously claim that a machine has beliefs -- because
the practices that inform our use of the word "belief"
restrict that use to people and certain animals (except
in jokes, poetry, children's stories about talking trains, etc).

Best,

Gary Goss

"Reason is . . . the slave of the passions, and can never
pretend to any other office than to serve and obey
them." ---Hume

J L Speranza seems to suggest so in his 1/3 Post

"Indeed. And I think this is precisely the point of someone like Daniel C
Dennett in what he calls 'the intentional STANCE'. A stance being just that,
a *view* of things, but not something that commits us to some psychological
reality."

But I find this puzzling. One has a "view", yet the "view" isn't
psychological. Or is the problem positing a separate reality called
"psychological". The latter I can do with out.

Thanks,

bruce
bden...@sonic.net

    I like to dance

does, as you suggest, contain an implicit clausal
component. What is involved here is what is called
a "PRO construction."  But what is important is that
while it is an "empty" category, it is not an empty
category that comes about by movement, as in

    John is likely e to leave

(where 'John' moves by transformation in order to receive
case marking and 'e' is the "empty category marker).
Instead, PRO is a "base generated" empty
category. The presence of PRO is motivated by the
fact that Chomsky's Principle of Projection requires a subject
of the verb, since it assigns what is called a "theta role." So
the form of the original sentence is actually

    I  like [PRO to dance]

Notice that "I" controls PRO. The philosopher James
Higginbotham has done some productive work on
"PRO control." It is worth pursuing, much more interesting
than,say, trying to decide whether 'p' is true for both my
auntie's old goat and Gig Young's nail clippings <g>.

STeve Bayne

"I like to dance"

would count as a propositional attitude. Well, provided some grammatical
tranformations - in Chomsky's sense - I guess (:)).

 ----------

Belief sentences are one kind of modal sentence and I modified Prior's
standard form for a modal,
It is __ that P is true.   to read:

<Asserter Modal-Verb that "P" is true>, thus

<I want peaches and cream> becomes

<I want that the proposition "I eat/have peaches and cream" is true.>

I have defined a modal verb to be a verb that  modifies the
straightforward truth claim of the proposition "P".  The thing wanted
here is no longer the objects, peaches and cream, but the truth of the
proposition which asserts their possession or consumption. My modals do
not operate on propositions directly, they operate on the truth-values
of the second, propositional part of the modal compound sentence. They
are like subjunctives in that they create supposed or imaginary
conditions which may or may not be realis.

J.L. Speranza's take on opacity, that is might be simply a kind of
vagueness, made a lot of sense to me, more than I've ever gotten from my
battered copy of W&O. Thus when modals are nested, as in

<I wish I could win the lottery> or

<I wish that the modal sentence: (I will be able to make the
proposition that: "I win the lottery" true) be true.>,

it is certainly vague whether "I win the lottery" is or could be a true
sentence.  Quine's example of referential opacity, if I recall,

<I want a sloop>

just seems to speculate on an inherently ambiguous English sentence
that cannot be said with certainty to point to one specific boat or a
member of the sloop class. To me the opacity or vagueness stems from
the extreme compression of the sentence and lack of context more than
any effect of modality from the modal verb onto the implicit missing
verb.

Thanks to all for a great thread. Usually I just lurk on this list as I
lack background, but this is a very interesting subject to me as I try
to improve the clarity of modality and tense in my new grammar.

Jerry Koenig

I could understand truth being independent of humans, but I could not
understand it being independent of some linguistic system.  (my vague idea
of truth here being a correspondence of sorts between something linguistic
and something in the world.)

So could we say that, before humans (before a linguistic system), '2 rats
and 2 rats equals 4 rats' was true?  Maybe this sounds too strange.  It
seems that we can only say that now *about* the earlier time, with this
*aboutness* being our connection to the certainty that that statement is
true (currently, in a lingusitic system--a necessary component of truth).
But was '2 rats and 2 rats equals 4 rats' true then and not just true about
then?

I bring this up because I wonder if the distinction has any bearing on the
necessity of truth claims.  If there was anytime at which the statement was
not true (owing to what seems like a technicality) should we conclude that
it is not necessarily true?  If we say that it was necessarily true within
language, is that a somehow weaker claim? (I say 'technicality' because
maybe truth's dependence on language is too obvious a point to mention, or
assumed for the purposes of the discussion.  Though perhaps the conclusion
that nothing was [technically] true before language would stike someone as
absurd enough to dispute)

 Alex Tsiatsos