summary of the 3rd class by Alex

Alex sent me the following summary. The words in blue are Wikipedia links – if they don’t work, please do your own search. Congrats Alex for doing some extra research, but don’t count that much on Wikipedia.

My comments on what Alex wrote are inserted in square brackets: e.g. [comment]. I mean to clarify some issues – this was genuinely hard stuff. 

‘We started our third session with repeating Frege’s Principle, you might also call the principle of compositionality. It states that in a meaningful sentence, the rules of composition remain, if the lexical parts are taken out of the sentence. So Alexander = Alexander. No doubt on that. As soon as you know what the sign = mean, you might agree. But what about the information Alexander = German. Now you have to check whether the sentence is true or false. If I show you my passport, you might agree with this statement too.  

[There are a few things here:

1. The principle of compositionality says that the meaning of a sentence is a function, i.e. a composition according to some rules, of the meaning of each element in the sentence. So, 'Dogs bite' gets whatever meaning it has from the meaning of 'dog' and the meaning of 'bite'.

2. Now, what we discussed is only indirectly connected with compositionality. We don't really deal with meanings of whole sentences, but with the meanings of their parts - of words. We do that because we identified pre-theoretically concepts with word meanings.

3. Alex = Alex VS Alex = German. Now we're getting to something, but we need to be very careful with the examples. The '=' stands for 'is' in both cases and Alex was thus a bit misguided. In 'Alex=Alex' the '=' means identity, Alex is Alex. But in 'Alex=German' it means that Alex has a property, that of being German. We are only interested in the 'is' of identity, so we need to modify the second example, which uses an 'is' of predication. We should use proper names or a description that captures one individual [the noun 'German' applies to millions]. So let’s use this: ‘Alex=Herr Kempf’.

4. Now we have the problem. Alex=Alex is true, but not informative. Alex=Herr Kempf is also true, but informative – it tells you something new. Frege’s question is: how can that be given the assumption that the meaning of a name is the object it names. The two sentences above are about Alex – they say the same thing. Both should have the same status – but they obviously don’t. So there is more to meaning than the objects named. This something more is sense.]

As I understand Frege a concept is a proposition, which consists of an expression that signifies an object together with a predicate. Alexander is German therefore is an expression, which defines me as German. [Let's just bracket this part. Frege uses a special notion of concept. It is nota proposition. For him, a concept is expressed by an incomplete expression such as '...is a student'. Once you plug in a name, you have a complete sentence that expresses what Frege calls 'a thought'. Take home message: forget what Frege calls concepts; what we ask is if we can derive a notion of concepts from what he calls sense.]In class we discussed about the words reference, sense and idea according to Frege. As I understood George right, a sense is the result of a combination from an object and a fitting word. The word therefor is a reference. As we build sentences with sense we can transport ideas. 

[Alex is right to point to the distinction between reference, sense, and idea. This is a crucial point. The reference is just the object; the reference of 'Moon' is the Moon up there in the sky; the sense is a description or a definition of the object; it is the 'interface' through which we 'encounter' the object - we don't grasp 'naked' objects; so the sense of 'Moon' might be: 'Earth's natural satellite'.

So in the Alex/Herr Kempf example above the difference can be explained after all. It is not a difference in reference, but a difference in sense. 'Alex' and 'Herr Kempf' present the same object to us in two differentways. Frege does talk about senses as 'modes of presentation'.

What about the idea? Here is another crucial point. Ideasare in our minds, they are psychological. But Frege did not want senses to be psychological. If they are in our minds, then how could we communicate them?! How could we ever know what we mean by what we say - we don't see intominds. Frege thought senses are objective entities - they are thus public, so communicable. Sense are somewhat like numbers for Frege. The number one is not something in your hear, but it is not material either.

 We tried to say againstFrege that something can be BOTH in our minds AND communicable. We wanted to say that senses are a kind of ideas too, but they can't differ radically between individuals. See again the first pages of your first reading for a discussion of subjective/objective. See also the quotations from Frege on your first handout.]

Thinking abstract I see Frege’s point. Due to the fact I’am German too, I feel the need of structure and order. But is it practical relevant that we can distinguish between word, concept and meaning? Going back to the example Alexander = Alexander. Is this really a truthful sentence? As Alexander has been the most popular prename for years in Germany, there will be many others that bear my name. But am I somebody else? Or: I = somebody? 

[Good question - how do Frege's distinctions help us understand our linguistic practice? Well, do they? Can we talk differently about the same stuff? Misunderstading exists - how do we explain it? Alex is right to say that a Fregean passion for order - i.e. logic - might not help us. But we need then some other view of the issues. Wittgenstein?

Alex, of course we share our names with many people - but we can idealize and consider names to be unique. As long as 'Alex' has the same reference on both sides of the identity sign, the sentence is always true. So don't worry, you are yourself .

Enjoy what Alex says in the following, my nasty interference stops here. Nice touch there with Rilke. Anybody with other versions of the translation - maybe in Romanian?]

This leads us to the next topic we discussed. The ideas of Wittgenstein, an Austrian philosopher with a quite interesting vita. We spend some time in the class to trace his adventorous life. Did you know Wittgenstein attended the same school as Adolf Hitler? Being the youngest of eight children of one of the most prominent and wealthy families Austro-Hungarian empire Wittgenstein was surrounded since his youth by illuster figures. A look at his vita at wikipedia is highly recommended. 

In last class we went not too deep into detail. Wittgenstein’s idea will be the topic of the coming session. However it is good to know that there is a difference between the young and the late Wittgenstein. The only book published by Wittgenstein in his lifetime was the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in 1921. The 32-years young Wittgenstein, influenced by Arthur Schopenhauer and the new systems of logic put forward by Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege, believed he had solved all the problems of philosophy in this book. 

But philosophy is not Hollywood, so there is no Happy End. The late Wittgenstein renounced or revised much of his earlier work. His development of a new philosophical method and a new understanding of language culminated in his second magnum opus, the Philosophical Investigations, which was published posthumously. Critics still quarrel among each other, how to interpret this book. If there are tow opinions about the young Wittgenstein, there are four about the old one is a common joke. In any case Wittgenstein did neither explain the world nor the language finally. So still achievemens can be made by us. 

I, for one agree with a metaphor of the late Wittgenstein. 

“Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.” 

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 18  
 

One of my favourite German lyricists is Rainer Maria Rilke, who was born 14 years before Wittgenstein. Rilke, a dreamer and romanticist, was the straight opposite of the young Wittgenstein. In 1898 he published a poem I would love you to see and hear (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOVsoapTETk). As you won’t understand the meaning I will translate it in a poor English … 
 

Menschen Wort

word of the people 

Ich fürchte mich so vor der Menschen Wort. 
I’m afraid of the word of the people

Sie sprechen alles so deutlich aus: 
They pronounce everything that explicit

Und dieses heißt Hund und jenes heißt Haus, 
This is named a dog and this is named a house

und hier ist Beginn und das Ende ist dort. 
And here is the beginning and the end is over there.

Mich bangt auch ihr Sinn, ihr Spiel mit dem Spott, 
I also worry about their senses, the way they use sarcasm 

sie wissen alles, was wird und war; 
They know everything that has been and will be

kein Berg ist ihnen mehr wunderbar; 
No more mountain seems delightful to them

ihr Garten und Gut grenzt grade an Gott. 
Their garden, their goods and chattels adjoin to god.

Ich will immer warnen und wehren: Bleibt fern. 
I will forever warn and fend: Stay away!

Die Dinge singen hör ich so gern. 
I love to hear how the things sing

Ihr rührt sie an: sie sind starr und stumm. 
You touch them, they stand rigid and silent

Ihr bringt mir alle die Dinge um. 
You kill all those things. 

Rainer Maria Rilke‘

update: next class & more

We are a bit late with the summary of the 3rd class - we should have it [we will] later today.

 To make sure those who haven’t been in class last time know what to prepare: we will read and discuss sections 65 to 78 from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Do read them before the class.

In your reader you have a larger part of the Investigations. It wouldn’t hurt to read more. Try sections: 3, 7, 11 – 14, 23, 32, 36, 43, 79, 92, 97, 111, 115, 122-124, 126, 130, 133. These are section numbers, not page numbers. Take a look at the text or the online version [I e-mailed you the link, and you can also find it below or in 'webgate']

Perhaps some things were not clear, stuff like:

- attendance is not optional; last time, 5 of you – in a such a small class – informed us directly or indirectly, the day of the course, that they cannot come. Let me remind you that you chose to take this class and were informed in advance about the schedule, requirements etc. We kindly but firmly inform you that such conduct is not acceptable.

- please, read the requirements again; Friday is the 4th meeting, out of 6 in the 1st unit. High time to start writing reaction papers! Reaction papers should be written and sent before the class in which we discuss the paper in question. So e.g. this week you should have written about the Wittgenstein excerpt. If we knew how you dealt with the issues before the class, that would help focus the class on what seemed important or controversial to you. That is the purpose of reaction papers to begin with.

If reaction papers are too hard, fine, we give you the option of writing a summary of one class with a colleague. There are not enough classes left in the 1st unit for all of you though.

the outer limits

At some point during the last class I said, with reference to Frege’s notion of objectivity (i.e. shareability) of sense (Sinn) that it is a given that communication is possible, because there is a level at which inter-subjectivity works – a level at which we are similar enough, or similar in some relevant aspects. The problem is how to conceive of this level? I won’t say more here – since Diana and Alex will write a summary for the last class.

Let me just remind you (well, this holds for those of you who were there) that I also mentioned that this given – the fact that our minds are not (completely) opaque, that there are ‘windows’ between subjects, that meanings (i.e. concepts) can be shared – can be questioned when we go beyond the outskirts of the clinically normal mind. (Think also of an alien mind. What about an animal mind?) Could we understand a person that is deeply schizophrenic?

Here is a quote from Giovanni Stanghellini ‘Schizophrenia and the sixth sense’, p.132 (in Chung, Fulford and Graham edts. Reconceiving Schizophrenia, Oxford University Press 2007):

‘A second layer of displacement concerns the feeling I have that something is lacking while trying to communicate with a schizophrenic person. Phenomenologists think that schizophrenic persons show an enhanced aptitude to the bracketing of common-sense experiences and shared meanings [...] The same happens with the meanings we usually attach to words, so that we often lack a common ground for understanding each other. I may for instance have the impression that we use the same word but we attach different meanings to it. Thus, I have the sensation that he [the schizophrenic] does not share the same horizon of meanings that I take for granted to share with the other persons I usually get in touch with. ’

What do you think? Reflect also on what it might be to ‘attach a meaning to a word’? Is this something you do in your head? Does it depend on social, cultural or linguistic infrastructure (i.e. stuff outside your head)?

One more quote, from the same paper, p. 138:

‘If the taken-for-granted becomes explicit, ipso facto it becomes an object for reflection and doubting. This is the common premise for philosophy and insanity.’

weekend reading

In case you have time to kill online.

I mentioned Oliver Sacks. Here is a nice review of his latest book about music and the brain by a well-known philosopher.

And this is a piece from the New York Times about evolution and sociability (in hyenas ).

PS: Feel free to share with us (online) stuff that you find interesting - please write your recommendations under the ‘asides’ category.

summary of 2nd class

In the last post there were some of the side issues from the last class. Time for a tentative summary, since we were pretty deep in abstract-land.

1.       Structure of concepts

There is a difference between thinking of something red, and thinking of a red apple. ‘Red’ and ‘red apple’ are different, but they also seem to have something in common. How are we to explain such features of thought? Notice how common this is: we can always build more complex or more specific concepts. We can think of red apples, but also of the red apples that we bought yesterday, or the red apples that we bought yesterday from the NoName supermarket etc.

We discussed two ideas about structure: one, containment, says that complex concepts are literally made of simpler concepts – somewhat like Russian dolls; the other, inference, says that the relations between complex and simple[r] concepts are logical: if you say that you bought some red apples, you will probably accept that you bought some apples – it is not that the simpler concept – ‘apple’ – is inside the complex one – ‘red apple’. The relation between them is a stable pattern of inference. Once you accept one, you accept the other.

2.       Definitions

Let’s assume that people usually try to express what they think. They utter words that stand for whatever is in their minds. Suppose someone says she wants some coffee. She says that in English, in German, and in Romanian (this is to point out that we’re not talking about words). But, for some reason, the people around have no idea what coffee is. How could she make herself understood? And what is it that she knows – and understands – and they don’t?

One idea is that she knows something like that: ‘coffee is a drinkable liquid that contains caffeine’. When she talks about her desire for coffee, her word ‘coffee’ is a label for this definition. The definition shows the content and the structure of her coffee concept. She could try to explain what she means by making her knowledge explicit – by telling the definition to the ignorant crowd.

What is a definition? The usual way to define stuff is to give necessary and sufficient conditions. For example, the hypothetical person mentioned above would have to say something like this: ‘X is coffee if and only if X is a drinkable liquid, and X contains caffeine.’ The ‘if’ captures the fact that the conditions listed are (jointly) sufficient, while the ‘only if’ says that they are necessary. Whatever satisfies all conditions is coffee, whatever misses even one is not.

Of course the definition above does not work. Coke or tea are not coffee. But you get the picture: it was supposed for a really long time by many smart people that whatever we know and can express in language(s) can be captured by – or simply IS – a set of definitions. Concepts just are definitions. Their structure is definitional structure – conditions. One immediate problem is that when you define things, you need to stop somewhere. Where do you stop, so that your stopping point is not arbitrary?

You are free to define coffee in terms of liquid, drinkable, and caffeine if you wish. But then you must know what THOSE terms mean – that is, what concepts THEY express. What is a liquid? Suppose you say: ‘matter that flows’. What is matter then? You have an answer ready: ‘something that occupies space’. And what is space? Things get tricky soon enough.

The solution was thought to be available in the fact that we can – and must – ultimately rely on our senses. This is called empiricism in philosophy. So the basis of definitions – the primitive concepts – would be concepts of sensory impressions: patches of color, kinds of sounds or tactile stimulations etc. You can ask yourself if this can be done.

It is not necessary though to assume an empiricist line here – this is not really said in what we’ve read, so it’s worth mentioning. If one adopts the alternative to empiricism – rationalism – one can say that some primitive concepts are just innate. Our minds are never tabula rasa – we never see the world as a blur, even as infants. To come back to the example above, there might be no need to define space in terms of sensory concepts, since space might be a primitive building block of perception to begin with.

Note how this is connected with knowledge. What is the ultimate source of our knowledge? Our senses or our reason? Which if any can give us certainty? Do you know what Descartes had to say about this?

Note also how it is connected with the possibility and scope of communication. Is there a level at which we can clarify all misunderstandings that can be clarified? Is this level sensory? Can we tell what we really mean by appeal to what the senses give us?

It is, I think, in a sense true that we cannot communicate what we don’t understand quite well ourselves. But does that mean that we have definitions for what we understand? How often do we need to be VERY precise? If definitions are all or nothing (as they are in the logical sense), could  this be a realistic model of what we achieve in communication? Could it be that we have, at least within a culture, similar concepts, but different or no definitions?

3.       So why definitions?

Because we want some things from a theory of concepts and definitions seem to fulfill at least some of those desiderata (at a cost, of course). You have the list of motivations from the text – and at least we managed to say a few words last time.

We want to understand how we learn or acquire concepts. Definitions can be learned within a theory (the child supposedly develops a theory of the world – a view of how things are) by summation of conditions or features.

We want to explain why we see the world as made up of distinct objects and stuffs. We have categories and we place things into them. How do we do that? How do we classify something as coffee? Easy: check if it’s liquid, check if you can drink it, check if it has caffeine. There is another interesting question here: there is structure in our minds; but is it the structure of the world, or just an illusion? Plato wanted proper knowledge to cut nature ‘at its joints’.

We want to know why thoughts are systematic and generally consistent – why there is logic and argumentative structure in how we think about the world and ourselves. Well, definitions capture logical structure and logical relations.

Whatever the content of our concepts is, we want it to determine what the concepts are about. Say our concept of coffee is a kind of mental symbol. There must be something that connects that symbol with real, hot, nice coffee. Definitions suggest that it is a check-procedure. Reference determination – i.e. targeting what you are talking about – is done by satisfaction of the conditions specified in a definition. This is supposed to secure reference.

And so on.

Some of these ideas might seem interesting, some other might not alter you pulse at all. Try giving a thought to those that fall in the first category.

4.       What else?

The objections to the Classical theory, i.e. to concepts being definitions are on you. Take another look at the reading, but better think of your own intuitions and examples.

We’ll say a few words about Frege next time. It’s important that we understand the sense/reference distinction – and we will eventually. But mostly it’s gonna be Wittgenstein.

Cheers. 

a few thoughts about the second meeting

This is not the summary – I will write that soon enough. I’m not so sure in fact what this is .

Today, I thought, we were not very organized. Things could have been clearer. Sorry for that. I’m waiting for your reactions to estimate the damage done. I will come back to the central issues about definitions in the summary. And let’s see what you have to say about the problems faced by the ‘classical theory’. Don’t be shy.

It is not a problem if we get carried away in discussions. But we shouldn’t overdo it. Anyway, here are some of the things that came up today.

1. The question about colorblind people having color concepts:

> Oliver Sacks wrote a book called ‘The Island of the Colorblind’. Here is a review. I have the book - if any of you is really interested, let me know. The linked review will also tell you some things about Knut Nordby, the colorblind color scientist. And this is the island in question.

> In 1982 Frank Jackson wrote a famous paper called ‘Epiphenomenal Qualia’. The paper is famous mostly for the story [i.e. thought experiment] of Mary. What would happen if someone that was never exposed to colors sees something red? Suppose that person knows all the science of color already. Will the person learn something new? Btw, David Lodge uses this scenario in one of his novels – ‘Thinks…’. Can’t tell you much, I haven’t read it. Here is a review.

> My green is your red; we use the same names for colors, but they ‘feel’ different. How could we ever tell? This kind of example is called ‘inverted spectrum’ in philosophy. Read about it here. What about pain?

2. Neural networks [this is not directly relevant for what we're doing at this point, but we might talk about such things in the future]

> Basic stuff on Wikipedia

A nice weekend & many martisoare!