I understand the sorites paradox. The point is that only becomes a problem for language under certain conditions. That is, if you think that "heap" actually means something well-defined. If you don't think "heap" means something well-defined in the first place, then you can't have a sorites paradox about what heaps are. If you just accept that there's no fact-of-the-matter about what is and what isn't a heap, it's not an issue...
If you can represent vagueness formally then doesn't it cease to be vagueness?
"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."
^yeah so I think that's stupid. I think language is primordially poetic and metaphorical, and that the attempt to make it otherwise is something that only arises once philosophers start to get anxious about what language means precisely.
After finishing The Hobbit and LotR a little while back I picked up The Silmarillion the other day and finished it last night. Really enjoyed it and its nice to see gaps from the LotR being filled in even though at times it feels long winded but I think that's just the difference between modern works and stuff from over half a century ago. My biggest complaint is the lack of talk about Dwarvish lore and sort of giving more insight into there histories and heroes since obviously if elves and men had so many warriors of great renown surely the dwarves did as well in the time before the ages begins as well as the 1st and 2nd ages.
What do you mean there's no fact of the matter about what is and what isn't a heap? Is there a fact of the matter about whether you're a heap? Is there a fact of the matter about the 1 grain "heap"? What about the 10,000 grain one?
Unless you want to say there's no fact of the matter about pretty much everything, you have to instead mean that there is no fact of the matter about the borderline cases of heaps as to whether or not they are heaps. This is precisely what the formal models attempt to capture.
The problem is there without the formality, hence the paradox with appealing-sounding premises phrased thousands of years before the formalism. The formalism helps explain where it goes wrong while showing how our best theories semantic theories can be consistent with vagueness.
I don't understand your positive view about primordial metaphor.
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.
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.
no one really questioned the existence of cjesus. and it's fairly trivial and uninteresting to say that hjesus existed because there is a person who was the original referent. when you make a claim like "there is (an/no) historical jesus you are making a claim about whether someone existed who acted as a basis or template for the future character of jesus as we know it. im with sam in saying that kripke doesnt really explain anything that commonsense cannot tell me about the argument around this proposition. hence my confusion in your original post citing kripke (btw what work of his is from 1980)?
yeah, heapness is a vague idea and there's no point about obsessing over boundary conditions. The boundaries between things are undecidable. There's a fact of the matter that 1 is not a heap and that 10000 is a heap, but there's no fact of the matter about when those things change over into one another. But this is only a problem if you're committed to the idea that language has to be unambiguously formalizable
my point is that I think poetry comes first and semantics comes later. So if you think poetry is the little brother of semantics you are thinking backwards
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.
no one really questioned the existence of cjesus. and it's fairly trivial and uninteresting to say that hjesus existed because there is a person who was the original referent. when you make a claim like "there is (an/no) historical jesus you are making a claim about whether someone existed who acted as a basis or template for the future character of jesus as we know it. im with sam in saying that kripke doesnt really explain anything that commonsense cannot tell me about the argument around this proposition. hence my confusion in your original post citing kripke (btw what work of his is from 1980)?
To talk about "the historical Jesus" is to talk about what Jesus was actually like (potentially) as opposed to how he was represented as being. Jesus can exist and be referred to by the stories without acting in any way as he is described in the stories. So the question of the existence of the historical Jesus does not depend on any actual person's likeness to the descriptions in the bible. The work is Naming and Necessity. 1980 was it's original year of independent publishing, though I believe 2/3 of it was also published in Harman and Davidson's Semantics of Natural Language in 1972, give or take.
@Sam, I didn't intend the little brother relation to be one of metaphysical priority. I'm open to pragmatics (e.g., in the form of speaker meanings) being the ground for semantics. It's just that typically pragmatics is loosely characterized as the meaning stuff that isn't semantics.
Also, no one is obsessing over the boundary conditions. No one thinks there will be interesting necessary and sufficient conditions for being a heap, or that these would be valuable if they existed. We still have to reconcile these facts with our best theories of meaning, which is, among other things, what accounts of vagueness do.
edit: I should post the image, in book thread fashion:
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.
no one really questioned the existence of cjesus. and it's fairly trivial and uninteresting to say that hjesus existed because there is a person who was the original referent. when you make a claim like "there is (an/no) historical jesus you are making a claim about whether someone existed who acted as a basis or template for the future character of jesus as we know it. im with sam in saying that kripke doesnt really explain anything that commonsense cannot tell me about the argument around this proposition. hence my confusion in your original post citing kripke (btw what work of his is from 1980)?
To talk about "the historical Jesus" is to talk about what Jesus was actually like (potentially) as opposed to how he was represented as being. Jesus can exist and be referred to by the stories without acting in any way as he is described in the stories. So the question of the existence of the historical Jesus does not depend on any actual person's likeness to the descriptions in the bible. The work is Naming and Necessity. 1980 was it's original year of independent publishing, though I believe 2/3 of it was also published in Harman and Davidson's Semantics of Natural Language in 1972, give or take.
@Sam, I didn't intend the little brother relation to be one of metaphysical priority. I'm open to pragmatics (e.g., in the form of speaker meanings) being the ground for semantics. It's just that typically pragmatics is loosely characterized as the meaning stuff that isn't semantics.
Also, no one is obsessing over the boundary conditions. No one thinks there will be interesting necessary and sufficient conditions for being a heap, or that these would be valuable if they existed. We still have to reconcile these facts with our best theories of meaning, which is, among other things, what accounts of vagueness do.
edit: I should post the image, in book thread fashion:
except that you have no way of connecting who hjesus was according to kripke with cjesus. is the author of matthew referring to hjesus or to hid concept of cjesus for his own purposes? its trivial to say that hjesus exists because someone is referring to a referent
On November 17 2013 11:46 babylon wrote: 1.) Good intro book for ancient Greek? Had someone recommend Mastronarde to me. Y/N?
I started listening to this Yale course on my way to work (~30 minutes walk per direction). So far I really like it, so maybe this would be interesting for you as well. The book he mainly uses is
Pomeroy, Burstein, Donlan and Roberts. Ancient Greece. Oxford University Press: New York, 1999.
I have just read the first pages of the introduction, so I cannot tell you if it is good.
@Igne, yes your theory of reference won't tell you that. You need historical/bible scholarship to figure that out.
@sam, as usual I never claim these things are relevant to everyone regardless of their interests. I would be surprised, however, if finding out what some analytic philosophers have said about, e.g., speakers meaning vs. sentence meaning wouldn't be at least as valuable to you figuring out what texts mean as your average lit reading.
I finished Zizek's _Plague of Fantasies_. I enjoyed Zizek's writing and ideas, but I feel like I only got maybe half of the meaning from the book since I am not as familiar with Lacan/Hegel/Kant as he is. Also the Appendix essay on Schumann totally went over my head since I know very little about classical music. His essay on cyberspace was very good though.
i learned a good chunk of what i know about kant, hegel, and lacan by reading zizek, going "huh?" and then reading more zizek until I understood what he was talking about. that's why it's ok that he plagiarizes himself.
don't think about it as trying to understand an explicit theory, think about it as letting his words invade yr brain :D
edit: oh and you are in for some awesome reading there
EPT![[image loading]](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/83/Naming_and_Necessity.jpg/200px-Naming_and_Necessity.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/4/4e/TWRLDI1972.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Po2s-06w4x0/TRsVRPSpxII/AAAAAAAABxY/qNu0r_z8i-Q/s1600/A%2Bbrief%2Bhistory%2Bof%2Bneoliberalism.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://www.versobooks.com/system/images/261/original/9781844673049-frontcover.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://cambridgeforecast.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/faultbook.gif)
