It sounds to me that you’re expecting something from Putnam’s argument that he isn’t trying to give you. He’s trying to clarify what’s going on when we talk about words having “meaning”. His conclusion is that the “meaning”, insofar as it involves “referring” to something, depends on stuff outside the mind of the speaker. That may seem obvious in retrospect, but it’s pretty tempting to think otherwise: as competent users of a language, we tend to feel like we know all there is to know about the meanings of our own words! That’s the sort of position that Putnam is attacking: a position about that mysterious word “meaning”.
EDIT: to clarify, I’m not necessarily in total agreement with Putnam, I just don’t think that this is the way to refute him!
It still looks to me like arguing about a wrong question. We use words to communicate with each other, which requires that by and large we learn to use the same words in similar ways. There are interesting questions to ask about how we do this, but questions of a sort that require doing real work to discover answers. To philosophically ask, “Ah, but what what sort of thing is a meaning? What are meanings? What is the process of referring?” is nugatory.
It is as if one were to look at the shapes that crystals grow into and ask not, “What mechanisms produce these shapes?” (a question answered in the laboratory, not the armchair, by discovering that atoms bind to each other in ways that form orderly lattices), but “What is a shape?”
It is as if one were to look at the shapes that crystals grow into and ask not, “What mechanisms produce these shapes?” (a question answered in the laboratory, not the armchair, by discovering that atoms bind to each other in ways that form orderly lattices), but “What is a shape?”
Why aren’t both questions valuable to ask? The latter one must have contributed to the eventual formation of the mathematical field of geometry.
I find it difficult to see any trace of the idea in Euclid. Circles and straight lines, yes, but any abstract idea of shape in general, if it can be read into geometry at all, would only be in the modern axiomatisation. And done by mathematicians finding actual theorems, not by philosophers assuming there is an actual thing behind our use of the word, that it is their task to discover.
And done by mathematicians finding actual theorems, not by philosophers assuming there is an actual thing behind our use of the word, that it is their task to discover.
I don’t mean to pick just on you, but I think philosophy is often unfairly criticized for being less productive than other fields, when the problem is just that philosophy is damned hard, and whenever we do discover, via philosophy, some good method for solving a particular class of problems, then people no longer consider that class of problems to belong to the realm of philosophy, and forget that philosophy is what allowed us to get started in the first place. For example, without philosophy, how would one have known that proving theorems using logic might be a good way to understand things like circles, lines, and shapes (or even came up with the idea of “logic”)?
(Which isn’t to say that there might not be wrong ways to do philosophy. I just think we should cut philosophers some slack for doing things that turn out to be unproductive in retrospect, and appreciate more the genuine progress they have made.)
For example, without philosophy, how would one have known that proving theorems using logic might be a good way to understand things like circles, lines, and shapes (or even came up with the idea of “logic”)?
How people like Euclid came up with the methods they did is, I suppose, lost in the mists of history. Were Euclid and his predecessors doing “philosophy”? That’s just a definitional question.
The problem is that there is no such thing as philosophy. You cannot go and “do philosophy”, in the way that you can “do mathematics” or “do skiing”. There are only people thinking, some well and some badly. The less they get out of their armchairs, the more their activity is likely to be called philosophy, and in general, the less useful their activity is likely to be. Mathematics is the only exception, and only superficially, because mathematical objects are clearly outside your head, just as much as physical ones are. You bang up against them, in a way that never happens in philosophy.
When philosophy works, it isn’t philosophy any more, so the study of philosophy is the study of what didn’t work. It’s a subject defined by negation, like the biology of non-elephants. It’s like a small town in which you cannot achieve anything of substance except by leaving it. Philosophers are the ones who stay there all their lives.
I realise that I’m doing whatever the opposite is of cutting them some slack. Maybe trussing them up and dumping them in the trash.
I just think we should cut philosophers some slack for doing things that turn out to be unproductive in retrospect, and appreciate more the genuine progress they have made.
What has philosophy ever done for us? :-) I just googled that exact phrase, and the same without the “ever”, but none of the hits gave a satisfactory defence. In fact, I turned up this quote from the philosopher Austin, characterising philosophy much as I did above:
“It’s the dumping ground for all the leftovers from other sciences, where everything turns up which we don’t know quite how to take. As soon as someone discovers a reputable and reliable method of handling some portion of these residual problems, a new science is set up, which tends to break away from philosophy.”
Responding to the sibling comment here as it’s one train of thought:
How might one know, a priori, that “What is a circle?” is a valid question to ask, but not “What is a shape?”
By knowing this without knowing why. That’s all that a priori knowledge is: stuff you know without knowing why. Or to make the levels of abstraction more explicit, a priori beliefs are beliefs you have without knowing why. Once you start thinking about them, asking why you believe something and finding reasons to accept or reject it, it’s no longer a priori. The way to discover whether either of those questons is sensible is to try answering them and see where that leads you.
That activity is called “philosophy”, but only until the process gets traction and goes somewhere. Then it’s something else.
That’s all that a priori knowledge is: stuff you know without knowing why. Or to make the levels of abstraction more explicit, a priori beliefs are beliefs you have without knowing why. Once you start thinking about them, asking why you believe something and finding reasons to accept or reject it, it’s no longer a priori.
The problem is that there is no such thing as philosophy. You cannot go and “do philosophy”, in the way that you can “do mathematics” or “do skiing”. There are only people thinking, some well and some badly. The less they get out of their armchairs, the more their activity is likely to be called philosophy, and in general, the less useful their activity is likely to be. [...]
When philosophy works, it isn’t philosophy any more, so the study of philosophy is the study of what didn’t work. It’s a subject defined by negation, like the biology of non-elephants.
I think there are useful kinds of thought that are best categorized as “philosophy” (even if it’s just “philosophy of the gaps”, i.e. not clear enough to fall into an existing field); mostly around the area of how we should adapt our behavior or values in light of learning about game theory, evolutionary biology, neuroscience etc. - for example, “We are the product of evolution, therefore it’s every man for himself” is the product of bad philosophy, and should be fixed with better philosophy rather than with arguments from evolutionary biology or sociology.
A lot of what we discuss here on LessWrong falls more easily under the heading of “philosophy” than that of any other specific field.
(Note that whether most academic philosophers are producing any valuable intellectual contributions is a different question, I’m only arguing “some valuable contributions are philosophy”)
Well, we seem to have this word, “meaning”, that pops up a lot and that lots of people seem to think is pretty interesting, and questions of whether people “mean” the same thing as other people do turn up quite often. That said, it’s often a pretty confusing topic. So it seems worthwhile to try and think about what’s going on with the word “meaning” when people use it, and if possible, clarify it. If you’re just totally uninterested in that, fine. Or you can just ditch the concept of “meaning” altogether, but good luck talking to anyone else about interesting stuff in that case!
Well, I did just post my thinking about that, and I feel like I’m the only person pointing out that Putnam and the rest are arguing the acoustics of unheard falling trees. To me, the issue is dissolved so thoroughly that there isn’t a question left, other than the real questions of what’s going on in our brains when we talk.
Okay, I was kind of interpreting you as just not being interested in these kinds of question. I agree that some questions about “meaning” don’t go anywhere and need to be dissolved, but I don’t think that all such questions can be dissolved. If you don’t think that any such questions are legitimate, then obviously this will look like a total waste of time to you.
the “meaning”, insofar as it involves “referring” to something, depends on stuff outside the mind of the speaker. That may seem obvious in retrospect, but it’s pretty tempting to think otherwise
The idea produces non-obvious results if you apply it to, for example, mathematical concepts. They certainly refer to something, which is therefore outside the mind. Conclusion: Hylaean Theoric World.
Being convinced by Putnam on this front doesn’t mean that you have to think that everything refers! There are plenty of accounts of what’s going on with mathematics that don’t have mathematical terms referring to floaty mathematical entities. Besides, Putnam’s point isn’t that the referent of a term is going to be outside your head; that’s pretty uncontroversial, as long as you think we’re talking about something outside your head. What he argues is that this means that the meaning of a term depends on stuff outside your head, which is a bit different.
There are plenty of accounts of what’s going on with mathematics that don’t have mathematical terms referring to floaty mathematical entities
Could you list the one(s) that you find convincing? (even if this is somewhat off-topic in this thread...)
What he argues is that this means that the meaning of a term depends on stuff outside your head, which is a bit different
That is, IIUC, the “meaning” of a concept is not completely defined by its place within the mind’s conceptual structure. This seems correct, as the “meaning” is supposed to be about the correspondence between the map and the territory, an not about some topological property of the map.
Have a look here for a reasonable overview of philosophy of maths. Any kind of formalism or nominalism won’t have floaty mathematical entities—in the former case you’re talking about concrete symbols, and in the latter case about the physical world in some way (these are broad categories, so I’m being vague).
Personally, I think a kind of logical modal structuralism is on the right track. That would claim that when you make a mathematical statement, you’re really saying: “It is a necessary logical truth that any system which satisfied my axioms would also satisfy this conclusion.”
So if you say “2+2 = 4”, you’re actually saying that if there were a system that behaved like the natural numbers (which is logically possible, so long as the axioms are consistent), then in that system two plus two would equal four.
See Hellman’s “Mathematics Without Numbers” for the classic defense of this kind of position.
Thanks for the answer! But I am still confused regarding the ontological status of “2” under many of the philosophical positions. Or, better yet, the ontological status of the real numbers field R. Formalism and platonism are easy: under formalism, R is a symbol that has no referent. Under platonism, R exists in the HTW. If I understand your preferred position correctly, it says: “any system that satisfies axioms of R also satisfies the various theorems about it”. But, assuming the universe is finite or discrete, there is no physical system that satisfies axioms of R. Does it mean your position reduces to formalism then?
There’s no actual system that satisfies the axioms of the reals, but there (logically) could be. If you like, you could say that there is a “possible system” that satisfies those axioms (as long as they’re not contradictory!).
The real answer is that talk of numbers as entities can be thought of as syntactic sugar for saying that certain logical implications hold. It’s somewhat revisionary, in that that’s not what people think that they are doing, and people talked about numbers long before they knew of any axiomatizations for them, but if you think about it it’s pretty clear why those ways of talking would have worked, even if people hadn’t quite figured out the right way to think about it yet.
If you like, you can think of it as saying: “Numbers don’t exist as floaty entities, so strictly speaking normal number talk is all wrong. However, [facts about logical implications] are true, and there’s a pretty clear truth-preserving mapping between the two, so perhaps this is what people were trying to get at.”
Seems to me that you can dodge the Platonic implications (that Anathem was riffing on). You can talk about relations between objects, which depend on objects outside the mind of the speaker but have no independent physical existence in themselves; you need not only a shared referent but also some shared inference, but that’s still quite achievable without needing to invoke some Form of, say, mathematical associativeness.
Well, sure, you can do philosophy wrong!
It sounds to me that you’re expecting something from Putnam’s argument that he isn’t trying to give you. He’s trying to clarify what’s going on when we talk about words having “meaning”. His conclusion is that the “meaning”, insofar as it involves “referring” to something, depends on stuff outside the mind of the speaker. That may seem obvious in retrospect, but it’s pretty tempting to think otherwise: as competent users of a language, we tend to feel like we know all there is to know about the meanings of our own words! That’s the sort of position that Putnam is attacking: a position about that mysterious word “meaning”.
EDIT: to clarify, I’m not necessarily in total agreement with Putnam, I just don’t think that this is the way to refute him!
It still looks to me like arguing about a wrong question. We use words to communicate with each other, which requires that by and large we learn to use the same words in similar ways. There are interesting questions to ask about how we do this, but questions of a sort that require doing real work to discover answers. To philosophically ask, “Ah, but what what sort of thing is a meaning? What are meanings? What is the process of referring?” is nugatory.
It is as if one were to look at the shapes that crystals grow into and ask not, “What mechanisms produce these shapes?” (a question answered in the laboratory, not the armchair, by discovering that atoms bind to each other in ways that form orderly lattices), but “What is a shape?”
Why aren’t both questions valuable to ask? The latter one must have contributed to the eventual formation of the mathematical field of geometry.
I find it difficult to see any trace of the idea in Euclid. Circles and straight lines, yes, but any abstract idea of shape in general, if it can be read into geometry at all, would only be in the modern axiomatisation. And done by mathematicians finding actual theorems, not by philosophers assuming there is an actual thing behind our use of the word, that it is their task to discover.
I don’t mean to pick just on you, but I think philosophy is often unfairly criticized for being less productive than other fields, when the problem is just that philosophy is damned hard, and whenever we do discover, via philosophy, some good method for solving a particular class of problems, then people no longer consider that class of problems to belong to the realm of philosophy, and forget that philosophy is what allowed us to get started in the first place. For example, without philosophy, how would one have known that proving theorems using logic might be a good way to understand things like circles, lines, and shapes (or even came up with the idea of “logic”)?
(Which isn’t to say that there might not be wrong ways to do philosophy. I just think we should cut philosophers some slack for doing things that turn out to be unproductive in retrospect, and appreciate more the genuine progress they have made.)
How people like Euclid came up with the methods they did is, I suppose, lost in the mists of history. Were Euclid and his predecessors doing “philosophy”? That’s just a definitional question.
The problem is that there is no such thing as philosophy. You cannot go and “do philosophy”, in the way that you can “do mathematics” or “do skiing”. There are only people thinking, some well and some badly. The less they get out of their armchairs, the more their activity is likely to be called philosophy, and in general, the less useful their activity is likely to be. Mathematics is the only exception, and only superficially, because mathematical objects are clearly outside your head, just as much as physical ones are. You bang up against them, in a way that never happens in philosophy.
When philosophy works, it isn’t philosophy any more, so the study of philosophy is the study of what didn’t work. It’s a subject defined by negation, like the biology of non-elephants. It’s like a small town in which you cannot achieve anything of substance except by leaving it. Philosophers are the ones who stay there all their lives.
I realise that I’m doing whatever the opposite is of cutting them some slack. Maybe trussing them up and dumping them in the trash.
What has philosophy ever done for us? :-) I just googled that exact phrase, and the same without the “ever”, but none of the hits gave a satisfactory defence. In fact, I turned up this quote from the philosopher Austin, characterising philosophy much as I did above:
“It’s the dumping ground for all the leftovers from other sciences, where everything turns up which we don’t know quite how to take. As soon as someone discovers a reputable and reliable method of handling some portion of these residual problems, a new science is set up, which tends to break away from philosophy.”
Responding to the sibling comment here as it’s one train of thought:
By knowing this without knowing why. That’s all that a priori knowledge is: stuff you know without knowing why. Or to make the levels of abstraction more explicit, a priori beliefs are beliefs you have without knowing why. Once you start thinking about them, asking why you believe something and finding reasons to accept or reject it, it’s no longer a priori. The way to discover whether either of those questons is sensible is to try answering them and see where that leads you.
That activity is called “philosophy”, but only until the process gets traction and goes somewhere. Then it’s something else.
This is a nice concise statement of the idea that didn’t easily get across through the posts A Priori and How to Convince Me That 2 + 2 = 3.
I think there are useful kinds of thought that are best categorized as “philosophy” (even if it’s just “philosophy of the gaps”, i.e. not clear enough to fall into an existing field); mostly around the area of how we should adapt our behavior or values in light of learning about game theory, evolutionary biology, neuroscience etc. - for example, “We are the product of evolution, therefore it’s every man for himself” is the product of bad philosophy, and should be fixed with better philosophy rather than with arguments from evolutionary biology or sociology.
A lot of what we discuss here on LessWrong falls more easily under the heading of “philosophy” than that of any other specific field.
(Note that whether most academic philosophers are producing any valuable intellectual contributions is a different question, I’m only arguing “some valuable contributions are philosophy”)
How might one know, a priori, that “What is a circle?” is a valid question to ask, but not “What is a shape?”
Well, we seem to have this word, “meaning”, that pops up a lot and that lots of people seem to think is pretty interesting, and questions of whether people “mean” the same thing as other people do turn up quite often. That said, it’s often a pretty confusing topic. So it seems worthwhile to try and think about what’s going on with the word “meaning” when people use it, and if possible, clarify it. If you’re just totally uninterested in that, fine. Or you can just ditch the concept of “meaning” altogether, but good luck talking to anyone else about interesting stuff in that case!
Well, I did just post my thinking about that, and I feel like I’m the only person pointing out that Putnam and the rest are arguing the acoustics of unheard falling trees. To me, the issue is dissolved so thoroughly that there isn’t a question left, other than the real questions of what’s going on in our brains when we talk.
Okay, I was kind of interpreting you as just not being interested in these kinds of question. I agree that some questions about “meaning” don’t go anywhere and need to be dissolved, but I don’t think that all such questions can be dissolved. If you don’t think that any such questions are legitimate, then obviously this will look like a total waste of time to you.
One person pointing it out suffices. (I tend to agree with your position.)
EY discussed this in depth in the quotation is not the referent.
The idea produces non-obvious results if you apply it to, for example, mathematical concepts. They certainly refer to something, which is therefore outside the mind. Conclusion: Hylaean Theoric World.
Being convinced by Putnam on this front doesn’t mean that you have to think that everything refers! There are plenty of accounts of what’s going on with mathematics that don’t have mathematical terms referring to floaty mathematical entities. Besides, Putnam’s point isn’t that the referent of a term is going to be outside your head; that’s pretty uncontroversial, as long as you think we’re talking about something outside your head. What he argues is that this means that the meaning of a term depends on stuff outside your head, which is a bit different.
Could you list the one(s) that you find convincing? (even if this is somewhat off-topic in this thread...)
That is, IIUC, the “meaning” of a concept is not completely defined by its place within the mind’s conceptual structure. This seems correct, as the “meaning” is supposed to be about the correspondence between the map and the territory, an not about some topological property of the map.
Have a look here for a reasonable overview of philosophy of maths. Any kind of formalism or nominalism won’t have floaty mathematical entities—in the former case you’re talking about concrete symbols, and in the latter case about the physical world in some way (these are broad categories, so I’m being vague).
Personally, I think a kind of logical modal structuralism is on the right track. That would claim that when you make a mathematical statement, you’re really saying: “It is a necessary logical truth that any system which satisfied my axioms would also satisfy this conclusion.”
So if you say “2+2 = 4”, you’re actually saying that if there were a system that behaved like the natural numbers (which is logically possible, so long as the axioms are consistent), then in that system two plus two would equal four.
See Hellman’s “Mathematics Without Numbers” for the classic defense of this kind of position.
Thanks for the answer! But I am still confused regarding the ontological status of “2” under many of the philosophical positions. Or, better yet, the ontological status of the real numbers field R. Formalism and platonism are easy: under formalism, R is a symbol that has no referent. Under platonism, R exists in the HTW. If I understand your preferred position correctly, it says: “any system that satisfies axioms of R also satisfies the various theorems about it”. But, assuming the universe is finite or discrete, there is no physical system that satisfies axioms of R. Does it mean your position reduces to formalism then?
There’s no actual system that satisfies the axioms of the reals, but there (logically) could be. If you like, you could say that there is a “possible system” that satisfies those axioms (as long as they’re not contradictory!).
The real answer is that talk of numbers as entities can be thought of as syntactic sugar for saying that certain logical implications hold. It’s somewhat revisionary, in that that’s not what people think that they are doing, and people talked about numbers long before they knew of any axiomatizations for them, but if you think about it it’s pretty clear why those ways of talking would have worked, even if people hadn’t quite figured out the right way to think about it yet.
If you like, you can think of it as saying: “Numbers don’t exist as floaty entities, so strictly speaking normal number talk is all wrong. However, [facts about logical implications] are true, and there’s a pretty clear truth-preserving mapping between the two, so perhaps this is what people were trying to get at.”
Seems to me that you can dodge the Platonic implications (that Anathem was riffing on). You can talk about relations between objects, which depend on objects outside the mind of the speaker but have no independent physical existence in themselves; you need not only a shared referent but also some shared inference, but that’s still quite achievable without needing to invoke some Form of, say, mathematical associativeness.