EPTOr maybe, 'Jesus'.
edit: I've never actually seen discussions of what Kripke means for phil religion, but I have seen some truly pointless articles applying Kripke-like thoughts to phil race and feminist phil. I think we can probably agree on those.
What Are You Reading 2013 - Page 156
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frogrubdown
1266 Posts
Or maybe, 'Jesus'. edit: I've never actually seen discussions of what Kripke means for phil religion, but I have seen some truly pointless articles applying Kripke-like thoughts to phil race and feminist phil. I think we can probably agree on those. | ||
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
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IgnE
United States7681 Posts
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frogrubdown
1266 Posts
edit: to elaborate, CJesus exists (as an abstract object) just in case some story represents him as existing and HJesus exists just in case [insert Kripke]. On November 17 2013 06:05 IgnE wrote: what sam said. historical "jesus" At least one of us is not understanding at least one of the others. I took Sam to be claiming that Kripke only applied to the historical "Jesus", not the character. You seem to be clarifying that you meant the historical one, but that's who I was always applying Kripke to. | ||
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IgnE
United States7681 Posts
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
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frogrubdown
1266 Posts
On November 17 2013 06:39 IgnE wrote: what's the insert kripke part? the question is to what degree hjesus resembles cjesus is it not? That's a fine question. It's just that the existence of either "Jesus" (or the reference of either word) does not depend on the answer to it. 'Jesus' does not refer to whoever satisfied a sufficient number of the properties that are typically associated with that word by its speakers. That is Kripke's point. The insert bit would be an elaboration of Kripke's positive view of reference, though it didn't seem worthwhile to go over it. edit: On November 17 2013 06:46 sam!zdat wrote: the question is just about whether or not the gospels report a story with a historical basis, no matter how distorted, or whether, as allegro alleges, it is just a code. I feel like these puzzles about identity and reference are just angel-counting exercises that are more artifacts that arise from a particular view of what language is (properties and classes and extensions and so on) than real puzzles about the world. I'm all ears if you have a story about how we succeed in communicating/representing the world using language that doesn't involve such things as extensions. | ||
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Bunn
Estonia934 Posts
Speaking about meaning of life, can anyone suggest some books on it? I don't want full on philosophical mumbo-jumbo, but something in the form of fiction, such as the book mentioned before, or Catcher in the Rye. I'm at a point in my life, where I really need to read something like that, because otherwise I will just stagnate mentally. I'm feeling stupider by each day. Or do you think I should go full-philosophy? If so, what are some of the most important works I should read (and not just the American perspective)? | ||
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
On November 17 2013 06:52 Bunn wrote: Speaking about meaning of life, can anyone suggest some books on it? I recommend starting with Genesis and working your way through the history of literature chronologically until you get to Infinite Jest  "philosophy is the history of philosophy." | ||
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IgnE
United States7681 Posts
On November 17 2013 06:46 frogrubdown wrote: That's a fine question. It's just that the existence of either "Jesus" (or the reference of either word) does not depend on the answer to it. 'Jesus' does not refer to whoever satisfied a sufficient number of the properties that are typically associated with that word by its speakers. That is Kripke's point. The insert bit would be an elaboration of Kripke's positive view of reference, though it didn't seem worthwhile to go over it. edit: I'm all ears if you have a story about how we succeed in communicating/representing the world using language that doesn't involve such things as extensions. i think its worthwhile to go over | ||
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frogrubdown
1266 Posts
On November 17 2013 06:56 sam!zdat wrote: because language is fundamentally hand-wavey. you say, "uh... you know... that thing over there, kinda like that" and then people try to understand what you are trying to mean. All this stuff about extensions and predicates is something you apply to language because you are unsatisfied with its inherent ambiguity and you want to communicate more rigorously, it's not how language works at a fundamental level. So ultimately these puzzles that arise in analytic phil of language are artifacts of the procrustean bed you are trying to fit language into, not puzzles about language. These puzzles reveal the limitations of a certain mathematized and historically embedded view of language, not language itself. This isn't an explanation of how communication/representation are possible. It's burying your head in the sand and pretending they don't really exist due to ambiguities and stuff. It's not like semanticists have never tried to account for ambiguity before. The fact remains that I can give you directions (in words) to my house and you can show up there the next day. Or I can read a cookbook and derive how to make something tasty. Or I can read chess notation to create the exact same chess problem as the one that its writer looked at. Or [countless other occurrences too frequent for most to take note of]. It would be nice to have an understanding of this beyond claiming it's a miracle. And what is that "historically embedded" parting shot supposed to amount to. Every view is historically embedded because every viewer is historically embedded. You know perfectly well that you don't get to magically undermine a view's legitimacy by calling it "historically embedded". I recommend starting with Genesis and working your way through the history of literature chronologically until you get to Infinite Jest "philosophy is the history of philosophy."Is that the last good one? The positive view? Well, one reason I didn't want to go over it is because I don't think it fully succeeds either (neither does Kripke, I think). But roughly, it says that the reference of a proper name is established typically either by ostension (e.g., point or think about a baby while saying, "this is Kevin") or by description (e.g., let 'John' refer to the first baby born in the 23rd century). The reference of that name is then supposed to be passed along by a causal chain of speakers intending to use the name with the same reference as the person they heard it from. This allows you to have indefinitely many false beliefs (and indefinitely few true ones) about the bearer of a name you use. | ||
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Bunn
Estonia934 Posts
On November 17 2013 06:56 sam!zdat wrote: I recommend starting with Genesis and working your way through the history of literature chronologically until you get to Infinite Jest "philosophy is the history of philosophy."Thank you! I will start ASAP! | ||
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farvacola
United States18826 Posts
On November 17 2013 06:56 sam!zdat wrote: because language is fundamentally hand-wavey. you say, "uh... you know... that thing over there, kinda like that" and then people try to understand what you are trying to mean. All this stuff about extensions and predicates is something you apply to language because you are unsatisfied with its inherent ambiguity and you want to communicate more rigorously, it's not how language works at a fundamental level. So ultimately these puzzles that arise in analytic phil of language are artifacts of the procrustean bed you are trying to fit language into, not puzzles about language. These puzzles reveal the limitations of a certain mathematized and historically embedded view of language, not language itself. What does reveal the limitations of language, and can it resemble a puzzle? | ||
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IgnE
United States7681 Posts
maybe you are looking for _Chicken Soup For The Soul_ | ||
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
the bit about historical embeddedness is that I believe this way of thinking about language will, in the not-too-distant future, be regarded as an amusing historical curiosity of the 20th century. That doesn't mean we can avoid making that sort of the mistake - this is a sort of mistake that we needed to make at that time. But the project is a little bit insane. My claim is not that it's a miracle. Precisely the opposite. I think that the ability of language to reference the world is obvious and unproblematic. You just point at stuff and go "ugga bugga." It's only when you try to make language reference the world BETTER that these problems arise - they are not fundamental to language, they arise only after a certain point in the history of language and in the history of thinking about language. (Infinite Jest is just a random example. I just find it amusing to be asked for a recommendation for literature about the meaning of life, since that's what all literature is about). On November 17 2013 07:08 frogrubdown wrote: The fact remains that I can give you directions (in words) to my house and you can show up there the next day. Or I can read a cookbook and derive how to make something tasty. Or I can read chess notation to create the exact same chess problem as the one that its writer looked at. Or [countless other occurrences too frequent for most to take note of]. It would be nice to have an understanding of this beyond claiming it's a miracle. but it's not a miracle. it's not even puzzling. we can accomplish all of these things without ever thinking about any of the questions that analytic philosophers think about. Analytic phil of language reveals the fact that these are ill-posed problems, but that doesn't actually cause problems for the way we use language (in the same way that the fact that depth-perception is an ill-posed problem doesn't mean we don't have depth perception, it just means we get tricked sometimes). On November 17 2013 07:18 farvacola wrote: What does reveal the limitations of language, and can it resemble a puzzle? well, they DO reveal the limitations of language, in that they reveal the limitation of language to do what is being asked of it by the analytic philosopher (i.e. to be the Language of God.) in other words, the idea that these problems are fundamental to language is a retroactive illusion (I think that words are memes and that language is literally an evolutionary system. words can reference reality for the same reason that, to appropriate a wonderful image from deleuze, the orchid can reference the wasp.) | ||
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frogrubdown
1266 Posts
On November 17 2013 07:50 sam!zdat wrote: but analytic philosophy of language doesn't try to understand language. it tries to improve language and make it more rigorous so that we can communicate better. But the problem is that the attempt to impose rigor ends up generating paradoxes that don't exist before you've attempted to do this because they simply don't arise. The more powerful and precise you try to make language the more paradoxes it spawns, for quasi-godelian reasons. This is not a strong skeptical thesis, I think these things exist in dialectical tension. Certainly it's useful and interesting to pursue these questions, but fundamentally the project is not about understanding language, it is about reconstructing the Language of God. This roughly characterizes parts of the projects of Frege, Russell, earlyW and the positivists (sometimes referred to as "ideal language philosophers" in contrast to "ordinary language philosophers"), but it's super sketchy as applied to philosophers since then. It's certainly a bad characterization of the goal of semanticists and the philosophers that work on semantics. They aren't trying to replace language but to produce models which explain important features of language as actually used, such as inference relations and compositionality. And they do so using concepts like extension. the bit about historical embeddedness is that I believe this way of thinking about language will, in the not-too-distant future, be regarded as an amusing historical curiosity of the 20th century. That doesn't mean we can avoid making that sort of the mistake - this is a sort of mistake that we needed to make at that time. But the project is a little bit insane. I know this is what you meant, but the way you expressed was based in a bad method of argument that makes quick metaphysical inferences based on banal sociological/historical facts. I was just pointing out that you know better than to associate yourself with such practices. My claim is not that it's a miracle. Precisely the opposite. I think that the ability of language to reference the world is obvious and unproblematic. You just point at stuff and go "ugga bugga." It's only when you try to make language reference the world BETTER that these problems arise - they are not fundamental to language, they arise only after a certain point in the history of language and in the history of thinking about language. But we don't do that! We speak a language with complicated syntactic relations that importantly influence the way in which the meaning of the whole is dependent on its parts. Again, if you have a better account of these features than the kind employed by semanticists, I'd like to hear it. The analogy to psychological abilities favors me, not you. Just because it's routine that we are able to acquire 3d info from 2d retinal images doesn't mean we have an explanation for that fact. It makes the call for the means of that information all the more pressing. The same goes for acquiring (and conveying) information using language. well, they DO reveal the limitations of language, in that they reveal the limitation of language to do what is being asked of it by the analytic philosopher (i.e. to be the Language of God.) in other words, the idea that these problems are fundamental to language is a retroactive illusion (I think that words are memes and that language is literally an evolutionary system. words can reference reality for the same reason that, to appropriate a wonderful image from deleuze, the orchid can reference the wasp.) Lots of analytic philosophers believe in the same analogy. Check out the SEP on teleological theories of mental content if you want to confirm. But these are issues of metasemantics (about the facts in virtue of which words have meanings), and we're talking about the field that explains stuff using extensions, i.e., semantics (about what those meanings are). | ||
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
Do you think words have to have well-defined, unambiguous referents? isn't that what all of this is designed to show? I think that most of the time people don't really know what they are talking about, so it seems like a nonsense question to worry about precisely what people mean when they say things (because most likely they don't mean anything precisely). So all this stuff is something which is constructed on top of language, the way I see it... also, I think the imprecision and ambiguity of language is what makes it powerful because it opens up a whole field of metaphor. Do your semanticists have accounts of metaphorical and poetic language? edit: let's not lose track of the point - I'm not dismissing all of semantics. Can you relate what you want to say back to the original question about the historical jesus and explain why any of this kripke stuff makes any difference to that question that I didn't already know with my common sense? Originally you said something like "it doesn't matter whether any of the claims about jesus are true for jesus to exist" which just seems to conflate the character and the historical personage. | ||
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babylon
8765 Posts
1.) Good intro book for ancient Greek? Had someone recommend Mastronarde to me. Y/N? 2.) So who is this Daniel Ogden fellow? He appears to be a serious classicist, and yet I found that he recently published two books on DRAGONS, which is totally awesome and cool, and I am going to leaf through them to see what exactly he did with DRAGONS since I can't recall the last time I saw someone serious write on DRAGONS. But now I am wondering about his reputation in the Classics field. Solid scholar, laughingstock, or both? | ||
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
On November 17 2013 11:46 babylon wrote: Two questions: 1.) Good intro book for ancient Greek? Had someone recommend Mastronarde to me. Y/N? the one my school used was Groton, people seemed to like it | ||
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frogrubdown
1266 Posts
On November 17 2013 11:38 sam!zdat wrote: I just don't think language works with checklists of properties that match up referents to concepts. I think that's something we impose on language in an effort to make it work better and match our ontology. And that's the view of language that gives rise to sorites paradoxes about how many properties something has to match in order to be an X which I think are a distraction. I don't believe that either. That's, roughly, a descriptivist Fregean approach to language, which is part of what Kripke argued against. The reference relation is not mediated by a sense relation. The Sorites paradox arises with or without that picture. We tend to phrase the paradox in terms of language because most people take the paradox to be linguistic in nature, but there's no need to invoke any linguistic premises in phrasing the argument: 1. 0 grains aint a heap 2. For all n, if n grains aint a heap neither is n+1 3. 10000 grains is a heap. No linguistic premises, as in the original Sorites, still a contradication. Do you think words have to have well-defined, unambiguous referents? isn't that what all of this is designed to show? I think that most of the time people don't really know what they are talking about, so it seems like a nonsense question to worry about precisely what people mean when they say things (because most likely they don't mean anything precisely). So all this stuff is something which is constructed on top of language, the way I see it... Some words are unambiguous, some aren't. I take you to be including vagueness as a type of ambiguity. Almost every single word/concept in our whole language exhibits vagueness of some form or another. There are competing ways of representing this vagueness formally, including supervaluationism, 3-, and many-valued logics. Semantics isn't the study of what speakers mean. It's the study of what sentences mean that allow them to be the successful vehicles of speaker meaning that they are. Some, like Grice, think sentence meaning is ultimately grounded in speakers meaning, but the notions are different. Grice also has a cool, non-semantic account of speaker meaning in terms of reflexive intentions in one of my favorite papers. also, I think the imprecision and ambiguity of language is what makes it powerful because it opens up a whole field of metaphor. Do your semanticists have accounts of metaphorical and poetic language? Some people have accounts of metaphor and poetic language, but it is generally considered to not be a semantic phenomenon. More often, it's included semantics' little brother, pragmatics. Theories here are less often, but still sometimes, expressed formally. edit: let's not lose track of the point - I'm not dismissing all of semantics. Can you relate what you want to say back to the original question about the historical jesus and explain why any of this kripke stuff makes any difference to that question that I didn't already know with my common sense? Kripke can teach you about the conditions under which a given use of 'Jesus' refers to a given individual. How relevant that will be to you depends on what you're interested in. I wouldn't be surprised if it was more or less entirely irrelevant to them. edit: Originally you said something like "it doesn't matter whether any of the claims about jesus are true for jesus to exist" which just seems to conflate the character and the historical personage The character of Jesus does not exist just in case some real dude existed that has many of the properties assigned to the character. This would be like saying that the character of Sherlock Holmes would exist if it turned out that, unbenknownst to Doyle, there really was a genius detective with many of his qualities in London. There isn't anyone, fictional or real, who exists just in case some real person satisfies most of the claims made about Jesus. | ||
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