If we’re naming fallacies, then I would say that this post commits the following:
The Linguistic Consistency Fallacy: claiming, implicitly or otherwise, that a word must be used in the same way in all instances.
A word doesn’t always mean the same thing even if it looks the same. People who worry about the purpose of life aren’t going to be immediately reassured once you point out that they’re just missing one of the relata. “Oh, silly me, of course, it’s a three-place relation everywhere else, so of course I was just confused when I was using it here”. If you ask people who are worrying about the purpose or meaning of life, “Purpose for whom?”, in my experience they tend to say something like “Not for anyone in particular, just sort of “ultimate” purpose”. Now, “ultimate purpose” may well be a vague concept, or one that we get somehow tricked into caring about, but it’s not simply an example of people making a trivial mistake like leaving off one of the relata. People genuinely use the word “purpose” in different (but related) ways.
That said, the fact that everywhere else we use the word “purpose” it is three-place is certainly a useful observation. It might make us think that perhaps the three-place usage is the original, well-supported version, and the other one is a degenerate one that we are only using because we’re confused. But the nature of that mistake is quite different.
If you think I’m splitting hairs here, think about whether this post feels like a satisfying resolution to the problem. Insofar as I still feel the pull of the concept of “ultimate purpose”, this post feels like it’s missing the point. It’s not that “ultimate purpose” is just a misuse of the word “purpose”, which, by the Linguistic Consistency Fallacy, must be used in the same way everywhere, it’s that it’s a different concept which is, for various reasons, a confused one.
FWIW I think “2-Place and 1-Place Words” is a bit dubious for similar reasons. Both this post and that make the crucial observation that we have this confusing concept that looks like it’s a good concept “partially applied”, but use this to diagnose the problem as incorrect usage of a concept, rather than viewing it as a perhaps historical account of how that confused concept came about.
Like I said, sort of splitting hairs, but it makes all the difference if you’re trying to un-confuse people.
The Linguistic Consistency Fallacy: claiming, implicitly or otherwise, that a word must be used in the same way in all instances.
I’m definitely talking about the concept of purpose here, not the word.
in my experience they tend to say something like “Not for anyone in particular, just sort of “ultimate” purpose”… That said, the fact that everywhere else we use the word “purpose” it is three-place is certainly a useful observation. It might make us think that perhaps the three-place usage is the original, well-supported version, and the other one is a degenerate one that we are only using because we’re confused. But the nature of that mistake is quite different. … If you think I’m splitting hairs here,
I don’t think you’re splitting hairs; this is not a word game, and perhaps I should say in the post that I don’t think just saying “Purpose to whom?” is the way to address this problem in someone else. In my experience, saying something like this works better:
“The purpose of life is a big question, and I think it helps to look at easier examples of purpose to understand why you might be looking for a purpose of life. First of all, you may be lacking satisfaction in your life for some reason, and framing this to yourself in philosophical terms like “Life has no purpose, because .” If that’s true, it’s quite likely that you’d feel differently if your emotional needs as a social primate were being met, and in that sense the solution is not an “answer” but rather some actions that will result in these needs being met.
Still, that does not address the . So because “What’s the purpose of life” may be a hard question, let’s look at easier examples of purpose and see how they work. Notice how they all have someone the purpose is to? And how that’s missing in your “purpose of life” question? That means you could end up feeling one of two ways:
(1) Satisfied, because now you can just ask “What could be the purpose of my life to ”, etc, and come up with answers, or
(2) unsatisfied because there is no agent to ask about such that the answer would satisfy you.
And I claim that whether you end up at (1) or (2) is a function of whether your social primate emotional needs are being met than any particular philosophical argument.”
I’m definitely talking about the concept of purpose here, not the word.
I think bryjnar is saying there may be two different concepts of purpose, which share the same word, with the grammatically 3-nary “purpose” often referring to one concept and the grammatically 2-nary “purpose” often referring to the other. This seems plausible to me, because if the 2-nary “purpose” is just intended to be a projection of the 3-nary “purpose”, why would people fail to do this correctly?
Maybe 2-naryish thinking about intentions in general is somehow useful. Maybe this has something to do with how we come up with new uses for things and spot other optimizer-thingies before they kill us. Maybe the brain makes new discoveries by confusing language with new meanings from time to time but unfortunately this can be a failure mode too.
Maybe it really is just a simple logical fallacy. The brain came up with the 2-nary grammatical shortcut, and didn’t properly keep it separate from the original 3-nary concept.
Maybe the brain is confusing the linguistic shorthand for a conceptual one. An agent is usually assumed even if the expression is grammatically 2-nary.
I’d really like to see someone taboo or at least write out what they mean with this 2-nary purpose. It surely got me confused before, and especially now after the op clarified my thoughts, it feels like a completely meaningless and incoherent utterance.
Can you give any other examples where purpose is used this way in common language with intended 2-nary meaning* except “the ultimate purpose”?
“What’s the point of that curious tool in your shed?”
“Oh, it’s for clearing weeds.”
The purpose of the tool is to clear weeds. This is pretty underdetermined: if I used it to pick my teeth then there would be a sense in which the purpose of the tool was to act as a toothpick, and a sense in which I was using it for a purporse unintended by its creator, say.
Importantly, this isn’t supposed to be a magically objective property of the object, no Aristotelian forms here! It’s just a feature of how people use or intend to use the object.
I think the op already addresses this and is not simply projecting minds. The important part is that an agent can be assumed and queried. I was hoping for an example where an agent cannot be assumed as in “the ultimate purpose”.
Your example would make no sense at all if an agent could not be queried.
Oh, I see. Sorry, I misinterpreted you as being sceptical about the normal usage of “purpose”. And nope, I can’t give a taboo’d account of it: indeed, I think it’s quite right that it’s a confused concept—it’s just that it’s a confused concept not a confused use of a normal concept.
He’s pointing out that the concept of purpose entails an agent with the purpose.
We don’t explicitly stating context for words all the time. But for words like purpose, people haven’t just dropped context, they don’t even understand the context, and think that their projections have singular meaning, and argue with other bozos suffering under the same confusion about a different singular meaning.
Meanwhile, when two people who understand the full context of the concept have dropped context, they may miscommunicate at first, but have no problem clarifying their commnication—they just identify the full context in which they’re speaking. “I mean Joe’s purpose for his life.” “Oh, I thought you were talking about my purpose for my life. Nevermind.”
As for the guy talking about “Ultimate Purpose”, the OP points out that the concept of purpose entails a agent with that purpose. If by your own statement “it’s not anybody’s purpose”, then you’re not really talking about a purpose at all, and are just confused. The OP can show them the way out of their confusion, but there’s not guarantee they’ll take the way. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him think.
I’d claim that there is a distinct concept of “purpose” that people use that doesn’t entail an agent with that purpose. It may be a pretty unhelpful concept, but it’s one that people use. It may also have arisen as a result of people mixing up the more sound concept of purpose.
I think you’re underestimating people who worry about “ultimate purpose”. You say they “don’t even understand the context”, as opposed to people who “understand the full context of the concept”. I’m not sure whether you’re just being a linguistic prescriptivist here, but if there are a whole bunch of people using a word in a different way to the way it’s normally used, then I’m inclined to think that the best way to understand that is that they mean something different than that, not that they’re idiots who don’t understand the word properly.
Nobody is calling anyone an idiot here, brilliant people can be confused too.
I think it’s a feature of the brain to confuse new language with the originally intended concepts. We wouldn’t have most of philosophy without this feature.
I used to fret about the “ultimate purpose” and then I thought about what it would MEAN for their to be some grand purpose, and it seemed like a dreadful prospect once I’d actually sat down and considered the idea that God might be Disappointed in me. The thing I wanted from my “ultimate purpose” was a guiding force, a Sign From God telling me what to do, and it’s obvious that this doesn’t exist. Even if there is a God, and even if He is deeply, deeply Disappointed in me, I’ve never been told—it can’t influence my decisions.
So now I embrace Discordianism, and the freedom to write my own purposes, and to just worry about disappointing myself and the people in my life. It’s really quite relaxing.
What I think of the post as saying, rather than “purpose has only the meaning (to english speakers) of a ternary relation,” is that “when one normally asks about something’s purpose, one implicitly uses its structure as a ternary relation, and since you haven’t established a ternary relation here you aren’t going to get a satisfying answer that way.”
I think I agree with you on at least one point, though, which is that “words” are really not the problem object; the sentence “what is the meaning of life?” is grammatically correct and not logically invalid and is somewhat a different use of the word purpose. The core object in these constructions I think is cognitive algorithms; in particular the “hear the word purpose, search for Z” algorithm breaks down when purpose changes meaning to no longer involve the same sorts of X,Y,Z.
FWIW I think “2-Place and 1-Place Words” is a bit dubious for similar reasons. Both this post and that make the crucial observation that we have this confusing concept that looks like it’s a good concept “partially applied”, but use this to diagnose the problem as incorrect usage of a concept, rather than viewing it as a perhaps historical account of how that confused concept came about.
What do you mean by an incorrect use of a concept? If you curry a function, you get a new function, in this case a new concept that happens to be confused because the original function needs all 3 places to make sense. It says so right here in this post. I’m inclined to believe the disagreement you posit simply doesn’t exist.
Would the historical account be that it was a less of a hassle to drop the agent from used language, and over time some people dropped it from the underlying concept, and got confused?
If we’re naming fallacies, then I would say that this post commits the following:
The Linguistic Consistency Fallacy: claiming, implicitly or otherwise, that a word must be used in the same way in all instances.
A word doesn’t always mean the same thing even if it looks the same. People who worry about the purpose of life aren’t going to be immediately reassured once you point out that they’re just missing one of the relata. “Oh, silly me, of course, it’s a three-place relation everywhere else, so of course I was just confused when I was using it here”. If you ask people who are worrying about the purpose or meaning of life, “Purpose for whom?”, in my experience they tend to say something like “Not for anyone in particular, just sort of “ultimate” purpose”. Now, “ultimate purpose” may well be a vague concept, or one that we get somehow tricked into caring about, but it’s not simply an example of people making a trivial mistake like leaving off one of the relata. People genuinely use the word “purpose” in different (but related) ways.
That said, the fact that everywhere else we use the word “purpose” it is three-place is certainly a useful observation. It might make us think that perhaps the three-place usage is the original, well-supported version, and the other one is a degenerate one that we are only using because we’re confused. But the nature of that mistake is quite different.
If you think I’m splitting hairs here, think about whether this post feels like a satisfying resolution to the problem. Insofar as I still feel the pull of the concept of “ultimate purpose”, this post feels like it’s missing the point. It’s not that “ultimate purpose” is just a misuse of the word “purpose”, which, by the Linguistic Consistency Fallacy, must be used in the same way everywhere, it’s that it’s a different concept which is, for various reasons, a confused one.
FWIW I think “2-Place and 1-Place Words” is a bit dubious for similar reasons. Both this post and that make the crucial observation that we have this confusing concept that looks like it’s a good concept “partially applied”, but use this to diagnose the problem as incorrect usage of a concept, rather than viewing it as a perhaps historical account of how that confused concept came about.
Like I said, sort of splitting hairs, but it makes all the difference if you’re trying to un-confuse people.
I’m definitely talking about the concept of purpose here, not the word.
I don’t think you’re splitting hairs; this is not a word game, and perhaps I should say in the post that I don’t think just saying “Purpose to whom?” is the way to address this problem in someone else. In my experience, saying something like this works better:
“The purpose of life is a big question, and I think it helps to look at easier examples of purpose to understand why you might be looking for a purpose of life. First of all, you may be lacking satisfaction in your life for some reason, and framing this to yourself in philosophical terms like “Life has no purpose, because .” If that’s true, it’s quite likely that you’d feel differently if your emotional needs as a social primate were being met, and in that sense the solution is not an “answer” but rather some actions that will result in these needs being met.
Still, that does not address the . So because “What’s the purpose of life” may be a hard question, let’s look at easier examples of purpose and see how they work. Notice how they all have someone the purpose is to? And how that’s missing in your “purpose of life” question? That means you could end up feeling one of two ways:
(1) Satisfied, because now you can just ask “What could be the purpose of my life to ”, etc, and come up with answers, or
(2) unsatisfied because there is no agent to ask about such that the answer would satisfy you.
And I claim that whether you end up at (1) or (2) is a function of whether your social primate emotional needs are being met than any particular philosophical argument.”
I think bryjnar is saying there may be two different concepts of purpose, which share the same word, with the grammatically 3-nary “purpose” often referring to one concept and the grammatically 2-nary “purpose” often referring to the other. This seems plausible to me, because if the 2-nary “purpose” is just intended to be a projection of the 3-nary “purpose”, why would people fail to do this correctly?
Why have brilliant people failed at these before?
Maybe 2-naryish thinking about intentions in general is somehow useful. Maybe this has something to do with how we come up with new uses for things and spot other optimizer-thingies before they kill us. Maybe the brain makes new discoveries by confusing language with new meanings from time to time but unfortunately this can be a failure mode too.
Maybe it really is just a simple logical fallacy. The brain came up with the 2-nary grammatical shortcut, and didn’t properly keep it separate from the original 3-nary concept.
Maybe the brain is confusing the linguistic shorthand for a conceptual one. An agent is usually assumed even if the expression is grammatically 2-nary.
I’d really like to see someone taboo or at least write out what they mean with this 2-nary purpose. It surely got me confused before, and especially now after the op clarified my thoughts, it feels like a completely meaningless and incoherent utterance.
Can you give any other examples where purpose is used this way in common language with intended 2-nary meaning* except “the ultimate purpose”?
*edited, sorry for the confusing wording
“What’s the point of that curious tool in your shed?”
“Oh, it’s for clearing weeds.”
The purpose of the tool is to clear weeds. This is pretty underdetermined: if I used it to pick my teeth then there would be a sense in which the purpose of the tool was to act as a toothpick, and a sense in which I was using it for a purporse unintended by its creator, say.
Importantly, this isn’t supposed to be a magically objective property of the object, no Aristotelian forms here! It’s just a feature of how people use or intend to use the object.
Sorry if I worded my question confusingly.
I think the op already addresses this and is not simply projecting minds. The important part is that an agent can be assumed and queried. I was hoping for an example where an agent cannot be assumed as in “the ultimate purpose”.
Your example would make no sense at all if an agent could not be queried.
Oh, I see. Sorry, I misinterpreted you as being sceptical about the normal usage of “purpose”. And nope, I can’t give a taboo’d account of it: indeed, I think it’s quite right that it’s a confused concept—it’s just that it’s a confused concept not a confused use of a normal concept.
Actually, “the ultimate purpose” seems double-confused, lacking both the object and the optimization process :)
If the object is “life”, I can’t tell if it is supposed to mean life-in-general, or my life, or all our lives.
I don’t think so.
He’s pointing out that the concept of purpose entails an agent with the purpose.
We don’t explicitly stating context for words all the time. But for words like purpose, people haven’t just dropped context, they don’t even understand the context, and think that their projections have singular meaning, and argue with other bozos suffering under the same confusion about a different singular meaning.
Meanwhile, when two people who understand the full context of the concept have dropped context, they may miscommunicate at first, but have no problem clarifying their commnication—they just identify the full context in which they’re speaking. “I mean Joe’s purpose for his life.” “Oh, I thought you were talking about my purpose for my life. Nevermind.”
As for the guy talking about “Ultimate Purpose”, the OP points out that the concept of purpose entails a agent with that purpose. If by your own statement “it’s not anybody’s purpose”, then you’re not really talking about a purpose at all, and are just confused. The OP can show them the way out of their confusion, but there’s not guarantee they’ll take the way. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him think.
I’d claim that there is a distinct concept of “purpose” that people use that doesn’t entail an agent with that purpose. It may be a pretty unhelpful concept, but it’s one that people use. It may also have arisen as a result of people mixing up the more sound concept of purpose.
I think you’re underestimating people who worry about “ultimate purpose”. You say they “don’t even understand the context”, as opposed to people who “understand the full context of the concept”. I’m not sure whether you’re just being a linguistic prescriptivist here, but if there are a whole bunch of people using a word in a different way to the way it’s normally used, then I’m inclined to think that the best way to understand that is that they mean something different than that, not that they’re idiots who don’t understand the word properly.
Nobody is calling anyone an idiot here, brilliant people can be confused too.
I think it’s a feature of the brain to confuse new language with the originally intended concepts. We wouldn’t have most of philosophy without this feature.
Anecdotal counter-evidence:
I used to fret about the “ultimate purpose” and then I thought about what it would MEAN for their to be some grand purpose, and it seemed like a dreadful prospect once I’d actually sat down and considered the idea that God might be Disappointed in me. The thing I wanted from my “ultimate purpose” was a guiding force, a Sign From God telling me what to do, and it’s obvious that this doesn’t exist. Even if there is a God, and even if He is deeply, deeply Disappointed in me, I’ve never been told—it can’t influence my decisions.
So now I embrace Discordianism, and the freedom to write my own purposes, and to just worry about disappointing myself and the people in my life. It’s really quite relaxing.
What I think of the post as saying, rather than “purpose has only the meaning (to english speakers) of a ternary relation,” is that “when one normally asks about something’s purpose, one implicitly uses its structure as a ternary relation, and since you haven’t established a ternary relation here you aren’t going to get a satisfying answer that way.”
I think I agree with you on at least one point, though, which is that “words” are really not the problem object; the sentence “what is the meaning of life?” is grammatically correct and not logically invalid and is somewhat a different use of the word purpose. The core object in these constructions I think is cognitive algorithms; in particular the “hear the word purpose, search for Z” algorithm breaks down when purpose changes meaning to no longer involve the same sorts of X,Y,Z.
What do you mean by an incorrect use of a concept? If you curry a function, you get a new function, in this case a new concept that happens to be confused because the original function needs all 3 places to make sense. It says so right here in this post. I’m inclined to believe the disagreement you posit simply doesn’t exist.
Would the historical account be that it was a less of a hassle to drop the agent from used language, and over time some people dropped it from the underlying concept, and got confused?