David Chalmers, a contemporary analytic philosopher specializing in consciousness and possible world semantics, has embarked on another online philosophy service: online research in philosophy.

I’ll post a review of it after I have been able to spend sufficient time with it. Needless to say at first glance I am impressed. Anyone interested in academic philosophy should create a free profile.

Mine is available at http://philpapers.org/profile/6668

Wittgenstein discusses the deceptive way in which philosophy attempts to resolve the “peculiar” way in which names designate objects.

When we think of a method of designation as the correlating of an utterance and a particular thing (or object), the use or function of the utterance is no longer a primary concern for us.  Thus for Wittgenstein’s sense of meaning as use, we lose the meaning of what we utter.

Explanatory philosophy ends up reducing or constricting the use of an expression to a non-contextual, purely grammatical, mysterious relation. The substitution terms end up forming the relation itself. One that can be applied in a number of cases, but only at the expenses of a more grounded and useful description.

Take away the reason for a particular term to belong to the category “mental events” or “intentionality” and you take away the seemingly inherent mystery or intrigue that blinded you to the term’s original use (i.e. real meaning).

Here’s Wittgenstein’s comment, with the comments above as linked footnotes so you can see what I am exactly responding to:

#19.  The danger of delusion which we are in becomes most clear if we propose to ourselves to give the aspects ‘this’ and ‘that’ names, say A and B. For we are tempted to imagine that giving a name consists in correlating in a peculiar and rather mysterious way a sound (or other sign) with something. How we can make use of this peculiar correlation then seems to be almost a secondary matter. (One could almost imagine that naming was done by a peculiar sacramental act, and that this produced some magic relation between the name and the thing.)[DP1]

But let us look at an example; consider this language game: A sends B to various houses in their town to fetch goods of various sorts from various people.  A gives B various lists.  On top of every list he puts a scribble, and B is trained to go to that house on the door of which he finds the same scribble, this is the name of the house.  In the first column of every list he then finds one or more scribbles which he has been taught to read out.  When he enters the house he calls out these words, and every inhabitant of the house has been trained to run up to him when a certain one of these sounds is called out, these sounds are the names of the people. He then addresses himself to each one of them in turn and shows to each two consecutive scribbles which stand on the list against his name. The first of these two, people of that town have been trained to associate with some particular kind of object, say, apples.  The second is one of a series of scribbles which each man carries about him on a slip of paper.  The person thus addressed fetches say, five apples.  The first scribble was the generic name of the objects required, the second, the name of their number.

What now is the relation between a name and the object named, say, the house and its name? I suppose we could give either of two answers. The one is that the relation consists in certain strokes having been painted on the door of the house.  The second answer I meant is that the relation we are now concerned with is established, not just by painting these strokes on the door, but by the particular role which they play in the practice of our language as we have been sketching it.-Again, the relation of the name of a person to the person here consists in the person having been trained to run up to someone who calls out the name; or again, we might say that it consists in this and the whole of the usage of the name in the language game.

Look into this language game and see if you can find the mysterious relation of the object and its name.-The relation of name and object we may say, consists in a scribble being written on an object (or some other such very trivial relation), and that’s all there is to it. But we are not satisfied with that, for we feel that a scribble written on an object in itself is of no importance to us, and interests us in no way. And this is true; the whole importance lies in the particular use we make of the scribble written on the object, and we, in a sense, simplify matters by saying that the name has a peculiar relation to its object, a relation other than that say, of being written on the object, or of being spoken by a person pointing to an object with his finger. A primitive philosophy condenses the whole usage of the name into the idea of a relation which thereby becomes a mysterious relation.[DP2] (Compare the ideas of mental activities, wishing, believing, thinking, etc., which for the same reason have something mysterious and inexplicable about them.)[DP3]

[DP2]Explanatory philosophy ends up reducing or constricting the use of an expression to a non-contextual, purely grammatical, mysterious relation. The substitution terms end up forming the relation itself. One that can be applied in a number of cases, but only at the expenses of a more grounded and useful description.

[DP3]Take away the reason for a particular term to belong to the category “mental events” or “intentionality” and you take away the seemingly inherent mystery or intrigue that blinded you to the term’s original use (i.e. real meaning).

Fans take their love to extremes — but divine love? That’s the thesis of Theo Zijderveld, who’s doing postgraduate work on the intersection of faith and “World of Warcraft” at University of Colorado’s Center for Media, Religion and Culture.

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According to one study (Manisto, 1999) participants in an e-marketing questionaire indicated privacy concerns and censorship as the two top issues that were hindering the growth of e-commerce.  In developing countries, respondents painted a much different picture.  Respondents in emerging countries listed the following as major obstacles:

• insufficient local content
• costs associated with domestic plans
• ISP-associated performance and costs
• lack of content in native language

Strauss, El-Ansary, and Frost correctly implicate the additional cost of insecure online transactions as well as fradulent and/or malicious credit card users.

I’m not a fan of discussing something in the context of that thing’s nature.  Thus I dislike saying things like: “well the nature of Wittgenstein’s philosophy is such that…”  Use of the expression imitates that conception of natural and/or logical necessity that Wittgenstein’s later developments (language games, the concept of grammar) nicely opposed, if not the necessity per se, its ill philosophical effects.

This is going to seem irrelevant but and it sort of is, but we could introduce another sort of language game where I’m apt to use or convey that sense of necessity I just got through justifying a disagreement with.  This has more practical relevance – printing requirements.  I figured my undergraduate stint with philosophy would, naturally, of necessity (yes I’m stretching it) – represent more in terms of printing costs vs. my graduate studies information technology.  After all, those old philosophy research papers from the 1940s, they’re available in PDF, but nobody would think (I hope not) to try to read them on a monitor where resolutions are roughly (something like) 40% that of the resolution of the real deal (i.e., reading a real book).  And since IT itself is a new discipline, it stands to reason that documentation ought to be primarily available on screen, right?

None of this turns out, with me, to be true.  I’m beginning to mooch off the network printers and/or printers of my family/peers.  So yeah, this is all leading up to my find for the week.  Practical knowledge is the new metaphysical necessity, it helps to not purchase your printing equipment at oversized vendors with terrible prices.  So yeah, this is definitely a practical post.

Printing needs

IT security surveys typically run anywhere from 20-50+ pages with lots of images and/or non-text/colored content.  Lexmark printers – especially the inkjets -  are pretty good for undergraduate/mid-level printing requirements.  I bought the Z1300 a year or so ago and while basic, its completely fine for low to mid-level use.  My gripe has to do with the software, and an aspect of it that’s quite irrelevant to its functionality.  There’s this annoying voice that activates whenever you use the thing, so I recommend NOT wearing headphones if you’re about to print something.  Of course you could shut it off in the options but who remembers that?  I’ll have to dig up an article on CNET which – I recall – named the z1300 a definite grab for the price.  If I buy online I tend to gravitate towards vendors who’ve been around for awhile and that sport high customer ratings.

Anyway, for printer toners and ink/other printer supplies its probably easiest to buy the stuff online. Make sure to review CNET or Tom’s Hardware Guide or something to make sure the stuff you purchase is legitimate and/or corresponds with your printer.  Might pay a few extra bucks for shipping but from what I can tell the price is initially reduced at the best online vendors.  If the vendor’s been around for several years chances are you should feel confident buying printing supplies from them.

Scanners

Scanners probably aren’t too necessary for most undergraduates unless they’re into photo editing and/or really wanna share old pictures on social networking sites.  Color depth is important to watch out for, although honestly I dont’ know much about scanners other than a few good shopping places online.

Although, scanners would be extremely useful if you’re considering going into digital/online publishing for instance.  Especially if you were an editor or content producer for an academic publication, since physical documents are still digitally scanned as part of the update process for large academic databases such as EBSCO.

“We say that someone has the eye of a painter or the ear of a musician but anyone lacking these qualities hardly suffers from a kind of blindness or deafness.”

“We say that someone doesn’t have a musical ear, and aspect-blindness is (in a way) comparable to this inability to hear.”

These are quoted from Ray Monk’s great biography of Wittgenstein, The Duty of Genius. Apparently Wittgenstein uttered them in conversation with his friend, Drury, a psychologist.

As I venture deeper into my studies, I’m beginning to reaffirm my confidence in modal logic.  This is primarily a function of seeing how it can be used at an applied/industrial level.  I’m only beginning to understand, or in some cases, conjure, ways in which a logical model of a database, for instance, might be describable in modal propositional logic.  Since I haven’t been able to achieve this at a sufficient level, I’ll hold off on sharing my exact thoughts.  Needless to say, even this Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on modal logic characterizes some of its commercial and/or industrial application.

The applications of modal logic to mathematics and computer science have become increasingly important. Provability logic is only one example of this trend. The term “advanced modal logic” refers to a tradition in modal logic research that is particularly well represented in departments of mathematics and computer science. This tradition has been woven into the history of modal logic right from its beginnings (Goldblatt, 2006). Research into relationships with topology and algebras represents some of the very first technical work on modal logic. However the term ‘advanced modal logic’ generally refers to a second wave of work done since the mid 1970s. Some example of the many interesting topics dealt with include results on decidability (whether it is possible to compute whether a formula of a given modal logic is a theorem) and complexity (the costs in time and memory needed to compute such facts about modal logics).

My recent attempt involved attempting to translate simple E-R logical data flows into modal propositions, though without quantification it was difficult and/or probably impossible.

Yahoo News Search, Image Search and Yahoo Spell Checker services will all be offered as part of this effort. Combine this with Yahoo
’s recently introduced SearchMonkey tool, and you could build a search engine that is entirely your own

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Google launched Lively today, a 3D virtual world that can best be described as the search and advertising giant’s take on Second Life. Currently, the service is for Windows users only and requires Internet Explorer or Firefox, as well as a Google account, to take part in.

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As an undergraduate, I certainly acted on that impulse to procrastinate. In my limited experience, philosophers or aspiring philosophers are not different in this regard, and in some ways, seem to procrastinate to an even greater degree.

Is this part of the philosopher in me slowly dying? If picture below is any indication, then either (p) I’m growing up or (q) I’m slowly divorcing myself from philosopher-type habits. As it turns out, if p or q, then r: D tracks his assignments.

I’ve been attempting to finish a midterm in one of my classes before July 4th rolls around.  I was delighted tonight to realize that my opinion of one of the arguments I was to assess was to argue against the effectiveness of what I took to be a reductio ad absurdum.

I remember first learning what a reductio was while reading one of Plato’s dialogues.  I can’t remember exactly which one, probably The Theaetetus.  In any event, I came to the familiar question of how exactly to name my opposition to this particualr reductio.  Since a reductio ad absurdum is deductively invalid by definition, I could say “and this is inconsistent because…” The function of the argument WAS to be invalid and thus not sound.

I can’t discuss the specifics, but needless to say, it was entertaining to see a familiar problem arise in a quite distinct context or discourse.

Here are a few legitimate sources of information on reductio ad absurdum’s:

• Standard Encyclopedia article on Democritus

A reductio ad absurdum argument reported by Aristotle suggests that the atomists argued from the assumption that, if a magnitude is infinitely divisible, nothing prevents it actually having been divided at every point. The atomist then asks what would remain: if the answer is some extended particles, such as dust, then the hypothesized division has not yet been completed. If the answer is nothing or points, then the question is how an extended magnitude could be composed from what does not have extension

Millions of Americans are embarrassingly ill-informed and they do not care that they are. Are you one of those people?

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A (relatively) brief explanation of my senior thesis:

The general topic of my thesis is intentionality. The standard way to introduce intentionality is to describe it in much the same way Franz Brentano did: it is a term that more or less stands for the ‘aboutness’ of folk-psychological states like remembering, perceiving, thinking, wishing, intending, et cetera. Brentano’s use of the term was ontologically motivated in the sense that it justified the proper object of investigation for empirical psychology: here “the mental” was precisely that which admitted of ‘intentional inexistence’. I’ll introduce Brentano’s characterization of intentionality since he is often remarked as the starting point for contemporary discussions, but then head in another (more recent) direction.

My senior thesis is comprised of two essential parts: one part is an account of various contemporary efforts to explain the philosophical sense of intentionality; the other part is an application of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy of language in respect of this issue. By ‘contemporary efforts’ I mean efforts which might fall under an analytic and/or post-analytic label (not that I think that label is particularly healthy). In particular, these efforts could be said to fall under contemporary philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. In retelling the ways in which intentionality has been explained in these schools, I will posit two distinct levels of explanation: a logical or linguistic level, and a functional/teleological level.

The logical or linguistic level of explanation is comprised by thinkers like Roderick Chisholm and Saul Kripke. Here I’ll deal with Chisholm’s efforts to bracket off intentional propositions as those with representational content, opacity, and intentional inexistence (this latter term he borrows from Franz Brentano’s description of intentionality as the mark of the mental in Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint). I’ll also account for Kripke’s fracturing of the Fregean notion of sense (as distinct from reference) and its relation to the possibility of semantic analysis of a posteriori necessity. I’ll include an explanation of intension and the developments which lead to the contemporary method in post-analytic philosophy of mind called two-dimensional semantics. At this logical or linguistic level of explanation, it’s clear that intentionality is structured as a distinctly syntactical phenomenon. Properly speaking, the gist of this section is to point out that intentionality is conditioned at this level via the notion of intension. I may also include Putnam’s earlier work regarding intentionality and meaning in his Twin-Earth experiments and the externalist motives they indicated. It is here that the logical or linguistic level connects to or motivates the functional/teleological level: what starts as an essentially logical assessment of “mental predicates” yields an externalist prescription regarding the determination of meaning and the sense in which intentional phenomena are individuated or determined from “outside the head.”

The functional/teleological level of explanation is comprised by thinkers like Ruth Millikan, Fred Dretske’s, and Daniel Dennett. I’ll review Millkian’s theory of biosemantics, which may be essentially understood as an attempt to widen the scope of intentionality to include not just the human mind, but all biological entities, in some sense. Dretske’s naturalistic conception of intentionality predicates intentional states to instruments. He argues that because our instruments have a certain capacity to represent certain kinds of things, there is no reason why intentionality must be thought of as distinctly ‘mental’. Dennett’s notion of the intentional stance advocates a sense in which representational content exists in artificially intelligent systems. Again, there is nothing distinctly human or mental about intentionality: having intentional content comes to adopting strategies for dealing with nature’s obstacles. These three together can be taken to indicate a sort of scientism in some analytic and post-analytic accounts: intentionality is primarily cognitive, not uniquely psychological, thus our philosophical explanations of intentionality need to be made consistent with empirical claims we make about biological and cognitive function. If intentionality yields representational content, it does so for a reason: evolution. At this level of explanation, teleology trumps syntax/language.

The final piece of my thesis, and the most important (in the sense that it contains a proper ‘thesis’ and not a mere account) is an application of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy of language. I will use particular examples of language-games that indicate quite a different role philosophy should take in assessing intentionality; most of these examples occur throughout Philosophical Grammar, The Philosophical Investigations, and The Blue and Brown Books. Wittgensteins’ diagnosis is that philosophers are continuously deceived by language, but this deception is the result of bracketing off and defining intentionality absent the social contexts in which the ascription of folk-psychological states occur. Both the linguistic and the functional levels of explanation are possible only if the meaning of a proposition or utterance is conceived as “what the proposition is a picture of.” Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is a rebuttal of “the picture theory of meaning”. I’ll show that Wittgenstein’s successful critique of that theory is enough to cast doubt on the efforts described in the previous sections.

According to Wittgenstein, when philosophers describe rather than explain, when we look at language before us and keep in mind that the sense of a proposition is how it is explained according to its use in a social context, we see that making metaphysical and/or epistemological constraints on the notion of intentionality and “how something comes to represent something else” is at best limited and almost certainly unable to explain all the various sorts of language-games that intentional phenomena (like representation, mental content, et cetera) manifest within. The descriptive approach that Wittgenstein advocates yields the sense in which philosophy is undertaken therapeutically, to dissolve the sense of mystery that typifies experiences and separates our analysis of them from the social context that determines their meaning.

An additional (but somewhat secondary) motive of this part is to show how many contemporary specialists in intentionality (like John Searle, Daniel Dennett, et cetera) end up reducing the import of Wittgenstein’s method in using him to develop and justify their own theories. Many of these theorists do little in the way of providing a context for the passages they take as justification for the theories they advocate. My application of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy directly to these accounts will clear up systematic misunderstandings that (I think) are somewhat dangerous in the portrait of Wittgenstein they yield.

After showing how the above efforts fail and why they do (given my interpretation of Wittgenstein’s efforts in the aforementioned works) I will draw conclusions regarding the direction philosophical inquiry could take in attending to meaning and representation, including a discussion of the dissolution of various debates in the philosophy of mind and language relating to intentionality (in particular externalism vs. internalism, the boundaries of the individual with respect to representational content, and the relationship between conscious awareness and intentionality in the cognitive sciences/philosophy of mind). I argue that if one takes seriously the notion that the use of a concept in a social context determines its meaning, then a philosophical treatment of intentionality must specify the social context and describe (not formalize and/or define) the meaning of intentional acts as determined by its use in that social context. This will limit the scope or applicability of theories of intentionality and create more precise and grounded accounts.

]]> http://dprice218.wordpress.com/2008/05/25/an-attempt-at-explaining-my-thesis-andor-its-motivation/feed/ 0 David http://dprice218.wordpress.com/2008/05/24/wittgenstein-aspect-blindness/ http://dprice218.wordpress.com/2008/05/24/wittgenstein-aspect-blindness/#comments Sat, 24 May 2008 15:43:36 +0000 David http://dprice218.wordpress.com/?p=97 ]]>

“We say that someone has the eye of a painter or the ear of a musician but anyone lacking these qualities hardly suffers from a kind of blindness or deafness.”

“We say that someone doesn’t have a musical ear, and aspect-blindness is (in a way) comparable to this inability to hear.”

These are quoted from Ray Monk’s great biography of Wittgenstein, The Duty of Genius.  Apparently Wittgenstein uttered them in conversation with his friend, Drury, a psychologist.

My interview on ABC made one thing clear: In our society sex workers are still presented as tragic, lost, Dickensian characters.

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I’m a bit overwhelmed with finals and papers, but I did have a chance to read about half of Robert Wesley Angelo’s tutorial on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language.

He provides a very user-friendly characterization of Wittgenstein’s concept of grammar and more importantly, Wittgenstein’s intention with his overall project.  You can view it at http://www.roangelo.net/logwitt/

Hey (former) readers,

You might have noticed that my Typepad blog is no longer in existence.  This was simply a financial decision: I decided that the Typepad service did not per se justify the monthly expenditure (times are tight, and I’m a graduate student).  Thus I’m moving back to this blog and will shortly post those items that I posted previously on the Typepad blog while I used it exclusively.

Anyway, just thought I’d let everyone know.  I’ll try to send out an email to those folks who regularly read my blog too, to indicate to them what’s happening.

Freeware and/or open source websites are hardly uncommon. Having spent many hours (too many) searching out useful (and free) applications/software, there are a few websites I keep coming back to. Here’s a list and brief description of the top three, in my opinion.

1. SourceForge.net
2. MajorGeeks.com
3. FreewareGenius.com
   

These sites are good for many reasons. SourceForge has probably the largest repository of opensource projects out of the three. Its accurately described as a community, rather than a listing or review site, for instance.

Well, I took my own advice and have changed blog providers.  I’m now a user of typepad.  The biggest problem of course is that I’ll have next to nothing for inbound links.

That said, if you an owner of another blog and you link to this blog, please update your links and take note of the following NEW address:

http://theory.typepad.com/language_games/