Miscellanea

The argument for inferentialism begins here.

(to be written)

(stray notes that will be assembled into something coherent later)

• 1:00 to 1:15 of Antirep 12 is helpful

• consider Wittgenstein’s private language argument

• 17 minute lecture 1 switcheroo

  • Explain problematic vocabulary in terms of nonproblematic vocabulary analytic philosophy, that’s the main project philosophy is to construct punctures Functionalism to Formalism of formal logic gives 20th-century philosophy its distinctive twist on earlier themes, but this is too powerful of a language given that what we care about is structure-preserving relationships, so category theory could be the next stage of a formal language/glue to a sample so soft girl ideas.

• My radical tolerance does have a hard time explaining cases of how people could be wrong, if ever. This is because calling something a thought or a thinking is placing it in the space of reasons (not giving a matter-of-fact description of it), which means that it has justification. In order to say something is a contradiction/wrong, one cannot say that the utterance was a thought. It’s possible for people, for example, to realize they have uttered things things without having truly thought them. Sometimes this happens, so it’s good to have an account for it.

Ontology (the theory of what really is, or the what is there ‘objectively’) makes conflict possible: e.g. without further auxillary hypotheses, there is no incompatibility between “Alice thinks there is a saber-toothed tiger coming” and “Bob thinks there is no such tiger coming”. We can think of the social function of the whole concept of objectivity as serving this purpose.

Clearly it’s useful in some situations, especially ‘ordinary empirical descriptive’ (OED) language (‘the frog is on the log’). So, we would lose the ability to cope with the world in important ways if we were to adopt a thoroughgoing idealism.

However, outside of the ‘home language-game’ of OED vocabulary, do we really need it? Could it be causing unnecessary conflict when pulled outside of its original motivating context, such as the tooth pain example?

For whatever sociohistorical reasons (which would be interesting to think about), objectivity-talk is incredibly pervasive. It takes serious work to unlearn it, to show one can coherently grapple with non-OED concepts without it. One example of this is detailed here: we’re primed to think of sentience as some objective phenomenon (because we’re primed to be descriptivists), but this is entirely unnecessary. We can completely sidestep talk of the ontological nature of sentience and get along perfectly fine. In fact, given a real world problem that depends on this issue (e.g. “Is this AI a sentient being?") it is a net positive because we can focus our attention on relevant things (our social practices relating to the AI, rather than some feature purely of the source code).

However, if you want power over others, couching your beliefs in objectivity talk is useful for gaining authority.