hyperboreanvoyager

[hyperboreanvoyager]

In grasping a sense, one is not certainly assured of a reference.

Gottlob Frege, “On Sense and Reference”

[hyperboreanvoyager]

Human beings need true beliefs about their environment, beliefs that can serve to guide their actions to a successful outcome. That being so, they need sources of information that will lead them to believe truths. They have 'on-board' sources, eyes and ears, powers of reasoning, which give them a primary stock of beliefs. It will be highly advantageous to them if they can also tap the primary stocks of their fellows—the tiger that Fred can see and I can't may be after me and not Fred—that is to say, if they act as informants for each other. On any issue, some informants will be better than others, more likely to supply a true belief. (Fred, who is up a tree, is more likely to tell me the truth as to the whereabouts of the tiger than Mabel, who is in the cave.) So any community may be presumed to have an interest in evaluating sources of information; and in connection with that interest certain concepts will be in use. The hypothesis I wish to try out is that the concept of knowledge is one of them. To put it briefly and roughly, the concept of knowledge is used to flag approved sources of information.

Edward Craig, Knowledge and the State of Nature

[hyperboreanvoyager]

If mental capacity is equated with potential processing depth, then it is obvious why it makes no sense to draw an arbitrary boundary line between the form and the content of a sentence. Form blurs into content as processing depth increases. Or, as I have always liked to say, ‘Content is just fancy form.' By this I mean, of course, that ‘content' is just a shorthand way of saying ‘form as perceived by a very fancy apparatus capable of making complex and subtle distinctions and abstractions and connections to prior concepts.’

Douglas Hofstadter, “On Self-Referential Sentences”

[hyperboreanvoyager]

The most important sort of union that obtains among things, pragmatically speaking, is their generic unity. Things exist in kinds, there are many specimens in each kind, and what the ‘kind' implies for one specimen, it implies also for every other specimen of that kind. We can easily conceive that every fact in the world might be singular, that is, unlike any other fact and sole of its kind. In such a world of singulars our logic would be useless, for logic works by predicting of the single instance what is true of all its kind. With no two things alike in the world, we should be unable to reason from our past experiences to our future ones. The existence of so much generic unity in things is thus perhaps the most momentous pragmatic specification of what it may mean to say ‘the world is One'. Absolute generic unity would obtain if there were one summum genus under which all things without exception could be eventually subsumed.

William James, “The One and the Many”

[hyperboreanvoyager]

The real work has been done by the scientists who developed the explanatory theories by patience and genius, or the societies which developed the moralities and institutions in struggle and pain. All the Platonic or Kantian philosopher does is to take the finished first-level product, jack it up a few levels of abstraction, invent a metaphysical or epistemological or semantical vocabulary into which to translate it, and announce that he has grounded it.

Richard Rorty, “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism”

[hyperboreanvoyager]

It is a feature of a science that the vocabulary in which problems are posed is accepted by all those who count as contributing to the subject. The vocabulary may be changed, but that is only because a new theory has been discovered which explains the phenomena better by invoking a new set of theoretical terms. The vocabulary in which the explananda are described has to remain constant. It is a feature of what I shall call "literature" that one can achieve success by introducing a quite new genre of poem or novel or critical essay without argument. It succeeds simply by its success, not because there are good reasons why poems or novels or essays should be written in the new way rather than the old. There is no constant vocabulary in which to describe the values to be defended or objects to be imitated, or the emotions to be expressed, or whatever, in essays or poems or novels. The reason "literary criticism" is "unscientific" is just that whenever somebody tries to work up such a vocabulary he makes a fool of himself. We don't want works of literature to be criticizable within a terminology we already know; we want both those works and criticism of them to give us new terminologies. By 'literature', then, I shall mean the areas of culture which, quite self-consciously, forgo argument on an encompassing critical vocabulary, and thus forgo argumentation.

Richard Rorty, “Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism”

[hyperboreanvoyager]

Let me call "romanticism" the thesis that what is more important for human life is not what propositions we believe but what vocabulary we use. Then I can say that romanticism is what unites metaphysical idealism and literary textualism. Both, as I said earlier, remind us that scientists do not bring a naked eye to nature, that the propositions of science are not simple transcriptions of what is present to the senses. Both draw the corollary that the current scientific vocabulary is one vocabulary among others, and that there is no need to give it primacy, nor to reduce other vocabularies to it. Both see the scientists' claim to discover the ways things really are as needing qualification, as a pretension which needs to be curbed. The scientist, they say, is discovering "merely scientific" or "merely empirical" or "merely phenomenal" or "merely positive" or "merely technical" truths. Such dismissive epithets express the suspicion that the scientist merely goes through mechanical procedures, checking off the truth-value of propositions--behaving like a glorified stockroom clerk inventorying the universe in accord with a predetermined scheme. The sense that science is banausic, except perhaps in those rare creative moments when a Galileo or a Darwin suddenly imposes a new scheme, is the essence of romanticism. Romanticism inverts the values which, in the third Critique, Kant assigned to the determinate and the reflective judgment. It sees the determinate judgment--the activity which ticks off instances of concepts by invoking common, public criteria--as producing merely agreement. Kant thought "knowledge," the name for the result of such activity, was a term of praise. Romanticism accepts Kant's point that objectivity is conformity to rule, but changes the emphasis, so that objectivity becomes mere conformity to rule, merely going along with the crowd, merely consensus. By contrast, romanticism sees the reflective judgment--the activity of operating without rules, of searching for concepts under which to group particulars (or, by extension, of constructing new concepts which are "transgressive" in that they do not fit under any of the old rules)--as what really matters. Kant, in saying that aesthetic judgment is noncognitive because it cannot be brought under rules, is assigning it a second-best status--the status which the scientific culture has always assigned to the literary culture. Romanticism, on the other hand, when it says that science is merely cognitive, is trying to turn the tables.

Richard Rorty, “Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism”

[hyperboreanvoyager]

For philosophic wisdom will contemplate none of the things that will make a man happy (for it is not concerned with any coming into being), and though practical wisdom has this merit, for what purpose do we need it? Practical wisdom is the quality of mind concerned with things just and noble and good for man, but these are the things which it is the mark of a good man to do, and we are none the more able to act for knowing them if the virtues are states of character, just as we are none the better able to act for knowing the things that are healthy and sound, in the sense not of producing but of issuing from the state of health; for we are none the more able to act for having the art of medicine or of gymnastics. But if we are to say that a man should have practical wisdom not for the sake of knowing moral truths but for the sake of becoming good, practical wisdom will be of no use to those who are good; but again it is of no use to those who have not virtue; for it will make no difference whether they have practical wisdom themselves or obey others who have it, and it would be enough for us to do what we do in the case of health; though we wish to become healthy, yet we do not learn the art of medicine.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics: Book VI

[hyperboreanvoyager]

The origin of action--its efficient, not its final cause--is choice, and that of choice is desire and reasoning with a view to an end. This is why choice cannot exist either without reason and intellect or without a moral state; for good action and its opposite cannot exist without a combination of intellect and character.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics: Book VI

[hyperboreanvoyager]

What affirmation and negation are in thinking, pursuit and avoidance are in desire; so that since moral virtue is a state of character concerned with choice, and choice is deliberate desire, therefore both the reasoning must be true and the desire right, if the choice is to be good, and the latter must pursue just what the former asserts.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics: Book VI

[hyperboreanvoyager]

We deliberate not about ends but about means.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics: Book III

[hyperboreanvoyager]

A deductive theory is said to be consistent or non-contradictory if no two asserted statements of this theory contradict each other, or, in other words, if of any two contradictory sentences (cf. Section 7) at least one cannot be proved. A theory is called complete, on the other hand, if of any two contradictory sentences which are formulated by employing exclusively the terms of the theory under consideration (and of the theories preceding it), at least one sentence can be proved within this theory. Now, if a sentence is such that its negation can be proved in a given theory, one usually says that it can be disproved in that theory. With the help of this terminology we can say, that a deductive theory is consistent if no sentence can be both proved and disproved within it; a theory is complete if every sentence which is formulated by employing the terms of this theory can be proved or disproved within it.

Alfred Tarski, Introduction to Logic and to the Methodology of Deductive Sciences

[hyperboreanvoyager]

What really shocks me is how these wizards and masters of the invisible, when they write to communicate or intimate their mysteries, all write abominably. It offends my intelligence that a man can master the Devil without being able to master the Portuguese language. Why should dealing with demons be easier than dealing with grammar? If through long exercises of concentration and willpower one can have so-called astral visions, why can't the same person – applying considerably less concentration and willpower – have a vision of syntax?

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

[hyperboreanvoyager]

The truth-conditions determine the range, which is left to the facts by the proposition. (The proposition, the picture, the model, are in a negative sense like a solid body, which restricts the free movement of another: in a positive sense, like the space limited by solid substance, in which a body may be placed.) Tautology leaves to reality the whole infinite logical space; contradiction fills the whole logical space and leaves no point to reality. Neither of them, therefore, can in any way determine reality.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

[hyperboreanvoyager]

The possibility of propositions is based upon the principle of the representation of objects by signs. My fundamental thought is that the 'logical constants' do not represent. That the logic of the facts cannot be represented.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

[hyperboreanvoyager]

I very much hold to the view that acute illnesses are, with a few exceptions, nothing other than curative processes instituted by nature itself to remedy some disorder in the organism; to which end the vis naturae medicatrix, invested with dictatorial powers, has recourse to extraordinary measures, and these constitute the illness we feel. The simplest type of this general procedure is provided by the common cold. When we get cold the activity of the outer skin is paralyzed and excretion by exhalation is thereby prevented, which could lead to our death. But when this happens the inner skin, the mucous membrane, takes over the task of the outer: and this constitutes a common cold, an illness, yet clearly no more than a process of curing the actual but not perceptible illness, the cessation of the functioning of the skin.

Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena

[hyperboreanvoyager]

The life force is actually identical with the will, so that what appears to the self-consciousness as will is in unconscious, organic life that primum mobile which has very fittingly been called the life force. It is from a simple analogy with this that we conclude that the other natural forces are fundamentally identical with will, only in these forces the will stands at a lower stage of objectivization.

Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena