I will just leave them here:

17.03

Glover on responsibility

– on the dependence of responsibility on psychological factors – mental illness and punishment

this makes things a bit difficult for me

reacting as expected to praise and blame is one criterion for responsibility (one way to think of it); however, the free will discussion seems to point out that one could fulfill such a criterion and still not be responsible (in fact, that discussion seems to point out that one could fulfill any kind of empirical criterion and still not be responsible (in a sense);

*

on types of conceptual troubles:
– ambiguous concepts the use of which leads ppl to verbal dissagreements and more;
– something we still do not have a concept for (new kind of thing, a new way of looking at things etc.)
– contradictions (see the concept of God, shadows etc.); sometimes the common application of more than one concept (two different vocabularies a.s.o.) leads to contradictions (or to some perceived incompatibilities – see value terms and quantities, for instance)
– new, weird, unheard of cases, such that we do not see how to apply our concepts to them (beta-testing of our conceptual technology)
– precision in the application of a concept is required; ppl sometimes talk about clarity with respect to such cases, but they are the least important;

– the intersection of several concepts with the ontological vocabulary produces a lot of problems (see, for instance, the case of ‘concept’, even – how do concepts exist? what sort of things are they? abstract artifacts? but how do abstract entities exist, if they do not have spatio-temporal qualities? and if they do not, what are they reducible to? and what type of reduction are we talking about? – why not reject any ontological commitment in such a case?);
– the list is open, of course…

*

lying to save someone’s life – this case resembles the case of an actual centaurus – is the centaurus human or not? on one view, it is, since it has a human upper body; but it also has the lower body of a horse, and horses aren’t human; it is morally wrong to lie, but how could be morally wrong to save a life by deceiving a murderer?

as in the case of the Centaurus, the same action seems good and wrong at the same time – the problem is not insoluble; just that we did not encounter such difficult cases (or we haven’t been paying attention to them, if we did); what one needs in such cases is conceptual engineering, not conceptual analysis; there is nothing already present in our concept of human that could help us; we want to extend the application of the concept, not to find some hidden properties in virtue of which our concept was applicable to the new case from the very beginning.

*

so philosophy is conceptual engineering, then; now, my conceptual proposal seems to help me overcome some conceptual troubles, but I have to make sure that it does not foster new ones;

*

and now I can return to the point in case; being able to assume resonsibility for one’s actions seems to me a better criterion for personhood than any other psychological (or naturalist) criteria; but now I have to say that I do not conceive this ability in a psychological manner and also that I want to speak of persons as existing in a completely different way from any kind of objects (events are a kind of objects here); but now responsibility seems to depend on some psychological traits; so what do I do?

Of course, I have to cut any links between the reponsibility I have in view and any psychological considerations. But can I do this?

In a sense, yes. Institutions and organizations do not have a mind or psychological states, yet they can be responsible for some things.

‘But are they persons, in this case?’

Assumption of responsibility is a necessary condition for personhood. It might not be sufficient. I cannot befriend the University of Bucharest.

‘So persons must be able to be your friends?’

I do not know, but it all comes down to this. One can be a person only if one can perform an entire class of actions (beyond the assumption of responsibility type, perhaps; or perhaps the class of responsibilities one must be able to assume is bigger);

‘Ýou seem to oscillate between actions and responsibility.’

I do, but I might want to equate the performance of a particular action with the assumption of zero-level responsibility for that particular action, in the end. I really do not know how to proceed here.

[…]

*

20.03.2017

so, what kind of connection do you want between your words and your actions? mimiquery? causality? isomorphism?

I say they are connected by reason; which sounds high and mighty, but…

*

language – world

no mirroring relation

it all fits

*

27.03.2017

Preliminaries for my theory:

1) Philosophy as conceptual engineering / tinkering – conceptual proposals, how they work, concepts as artifacts, beta-testing etc.
2) My conceptual proposal – why: to be able to conceive the relation between language (+knowledge) and reality consistently (without modifying our pre-existent conceptual scheme too much) without getting into a lot of philosophical troubles etc.
[…]

3) No ontological commitment talk – how is this possible, how does it work …

see, for instance:

“Hofweber (2005) agrees that quantification in ordinary language is sometimes ontologically committing, but not always, and not when we quantify over abstract entities, such as numbers and properties, in ordinary (i.e., non-philosophical) contexts. Hofweber claims that there are two distinct readings of ordinary language quantifiers, readings that make different contributions to truth conditions and perform different communicative functions. One reading, which he calls the “domain conditions reading”, is tied to ontology: it places conditions on what exists in reality. If I say “something fell on my head” (in a standard context), I am thereby committed to the existence of an object meeting the condition “fell on my head”. But, Hofweber argues, there is another reading of ordinary language quantifiers that is not tied to ontology, what he calls the “inferential role reading”. On this reading, the inference from F(t) to F(something) is trivially valid, even in cases where we do not take the term t to refer to anything in reality. On this reading, I can infer “there is someone whom I admire” from “I admire Sherlock Holmes” without my quantified assertion conveying any ontological commitment.” (SEP, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ontological-commitment/#OntComOrdLan; Hofweber, Thomas, 2005, “A Puzzle about Ontology”, Noûs, 39: 56–83)

4) Introducing the personal – actional – intentional – responsibility vocabulary as being used with no ontological commitment
5) Basic actions, opposing actions, actions which follow by reason from one another – this is a way to conceive the language games Wittgenstein talks about – language games which tie language (i. e. communicative actions) to the world (i. e. the medium of our noncommunicative actions). The ties are “logical” in a large sense. (connection with inferentialism)
6) Reference as acting on objects (revisit https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reference/)
7) Knowledge starting with empirical actions

7.04

[Sellars seems to try to put the use theory of meaning into a theory, after all.]

My conceptual proposal.

First a distinction between two vocabularies. One is used to talk about objects and their properties and relations, states of affairs, phenomena and so on. Maybe it’s not the vocabulary that matters, but the activities for which it is deployed – describing, explaining and predicting, mainly. The other class of activities (the other vocabulary) has to do with justifying (providing reasons for…), criticizing, asking for reasons and so on. More simply, one could relate this to the distinction between arguments and explanations. Informally speaking, the first vocabulary depicts a reality the glue of which consists in causal relations, while the second paints a realm of inferences and contradictions.

The two vocabularies are pre-existent. Conceptualizing them and the difference between them would pe part of my conceptual proposal. Another part of my conceptual proposal would be to point out that psychological talk is part of the first vocabulary and not of the second.

When we talk of intentions, for instance, we could be using either the psychological (i.e. a naturalist) vocabulary, or the vocabulary of reasons. (Sellars talks about the space of nature and the space of reasons – perhaps I should take care not assume that his view is identical to mine)

For instance, in saying that by doing action A I intended to achieve P I could (mean to) provide a psychological description, but I could also provide my reasons for doing A. In the second case, it is not important to talk about the psychological state of “intending that”.

Similarly, one could talk about one’s beliefs either in the psychological vocabulary, or in the vocabulary of reasons (persons, actions, responsibility a.s.o.). If I provide you with my reasons to believe that p and in doing so I talk about the plausible belief that q (from which p can be inferred), it does not matter whether I did have the psychological state of believing that q in the past (it is meaningless to ask: `At what point did you believe that q and what caused that belief in you?’). [I suppose that McDowell says something similar when talking about epistemic justification; still, I might be mistaken]

It is the same when I say that I am a person and not an object, or when I talk of actions.

I am tempted to leave completely aside any questions pertaining to ontology when I consider the second vocabulary, but this might lead to the wrong impression. I do not want to say that persons do not exist, or that it is completely meaningless to say that either they do, or they don’t. The Holly Grail does not exist, but Harry Potter is a character, not a person. What I mean to say by this is that the regular ontological distinction – x does exist / x does not exist seems to be related to the first vocabulary, but it has some correspondence in the second vocabulary.

Now, the relation beween us and the world can be painted very differently in the two vocabularies. In the first one, we are part of the world – natural living beings interacting with their environment. In the second vocabulary, the world is the medium of our actions. We act upon the world (which includes ‘to observe, study, describe [or just tag], manipulate in various ways, produce or destroy’ etc.).

It is part of my conceptual proposal not only to distinguish the two vocabularies and to solve conceptual troubles produced by their confusion, but also to enrich them (especially the second one).

There is one problem with this entire project. As I see them, both these vocabularies are similar to two operating systems (in computers). You cannot use both at the same time. One can be emulated within the other, perhaps – this is what the naturalist project seems to be about – emulating the second vocabulary inside the first one (the same can be done the other way arround, I think – see, for instance, what Heidegger says about our concept of causality originating from on older concept of ‘responsibility’, or his suggesting that the objects of modern physics are ‘raw materials’, if I understood him well).

So the biggest challenge seems to be to solve this conceptual problem – how to account for our use of both these vocabularies (in a non-emulated manner)?

How can I, as a person, cause changes in the natural realm by my actions? How can I, as a person, be causally affected by natural processes?

If a person (which is not a mind) cannot be placed among natural objects,…

“Why not?”

Because I am not an object.

“You deserve to be treated differently from how ‘regular objects’ are treated. But that does not mean that you are not an object.”

What object whould that be?

“Your body, of course, with all the changes it undergoes.”

I am using my body, so I cannot be both the one using it and _it_. It is more like this. The body is similar to an avatar which I can use to play a game, but I am not in the game, only because my avatar is. The analogy, however, stops at the point at which one would talk about the reality behind the game. I am not in the world, but that does not mean that I am a body behind the world.

“But then you cannot say what you are.”

A person, of course.

“But being a person seems to be identical to not being a body. Which makes your point circular.”

Being a person means being responsible for your actions. A body cannot be responsible for anything. A body does not perform actions. It only undergoes physical changes.

“Animals can act.”

In a sense, maybe. When we talk about animals we rather use terms like “behaviour”. However, I, as a person, have not only a behaviour, but proper actions.

“You want to say that you have a mind.”

My cat has a mind as well. Meaning, it has a brain, neurophysiological processes describable in therms of folk psychology and so on. That is not the point. I can assume responsibility for what I do. This might be an ability reducible to something natural, but only a person can have this ability. When I talk of persons being responsible for their actions I want to talk of something which has nothing to do with bodies or psychology. Companies can act and be responsible for their actions.

“Are companies persons?”

Well, they are aggregates of persons.

“Right, but is Microsoft a person?”

Well, I do not conceive companies as persons. However, this is not because they lack a body. I could conceive a person without a body. For instance, I can think of an email exchange between me and another person, which does not have a body.

“Not even a physical location?”

A physical location is different from a body. Also, a physical location is different from an address. A company could have an address, although it might be weird to talk of the physical location of a company (as if it was a physical object).

All these exchanges are distractions, however. Maybe I could agree that I am my body. However, “my body”, in such a context would not mean “a physical body” or “an organism”. It would be me. My “personal body”, if you wish.

“You should be able to say what you are.”

I can tell you who I am. My inability to tell you who I am might indicate that I am not a “what”. The problem is that what I do seems to be relevant to who I am. This link between “who” and “what” is what we are trying to conceptualize. How can someone (a “who”) do / or undergo something (a “what”)? – This is our question.

“Your point being that this question goes deeper than the body / mind problem, perhaps?”

Indeed. But I am still affraid of a missunderstanding.

“No, you’re not. You are just oscillating between cutting the ‘personal’ talk from any ‘naturalist’ talk and letting the personal talk be ’emulated under the system of a naturalist talk’.”

…

“Also, you are against psychology (let’s be open about it), but could you really ignore your feelings? Could you re-describe them all as attitudes?”

I do not see why not. Whatever I ‘feel’ is just something happening in my brain. It’s the animal. We did a great deal of raising animal reactions to a noble status. Love (as a feeling) is but some sort of animal attraction. This has nothing to do with love, conceived as a commitment (of some sort). Why should animal attraction matter to me? If I say, for instance, that I love my students, this has nothing to do with animal attraction. It is just an expression of my commitment to teach them something the best I can and so on. Why should this change when I say that I love my lover? Psychological animal reactions should be ignored. They are irrelevant.

“Right, but,…”

Sorry, but this is leading us astray. The problem was the relation between the two vocabularies. I am tired of it. Also, the analogy with the two operating systems might be misleading, since it suggests that we pursue the same goals by using either of the two. Which is not true, of course.

“Right, but you cannot talk about your actions and your intentions and assume responsibility for whatever you want to assume responsibility for without talking about the effects of your actions and natural processes. You cannot say that you failed to do something without using a concept of causality.”

Ok. Let’s take an example, then. I can get out of my house. This is a complex action, but it’s components do not matter right now. It is something which I can do. What do I do when I get out of my house? A naturalist account would be to say that I “see to it that” (see the STIT analysis) my body is located outside the walls of my house etc. Of course, the phenomenological approach would point out that this has nothing to do with the physical location of either my body or my house. We are considering _places_ here, not physical locations. Also, the movement is not physical, but phenomenological.

From the very beginning, then, what I do is described differently.

“Right, but there is an effect of your action, no matter how you describe it.”

It could as well be said that there is something which I am responsible for. I am responsible for being in a different place. I could get out of my house by making myself view the space I am in as non-familiar. A change of perspective. I would be responsible for it.

“But how could you be responsible for it whithout having caused it? Causality is assumed here. No matter how you describe it, there is an effect of your action and you are the cause of it.”

Oh, well. You could say that being outside my house is an effect of my action, conceived as an event. The action, however, was not caused by me. I did not cause the action of getting out of my house. I just did it. I have performed the actions which add up to this complex actions is composed. I got out. The result (or the effect) is that I am outside, in a place which I cannot call ‘my house’ anymore.

“But were the result not achieved, you wouldn’t have performed the action.”

True. We often describe our actions in terms of their effects. This does not have to mean, however, that we cause the effects in question. We perform the actions. Our actions have effects. Compare:

I caused A (where A is ‘being out of my house’)
and:
I did A (where A is my action to the effect that I got out of my house)

“Now you are just taking actions out of the world, so to speak. They are like pushing the buttons of your controller while playing the game. Such actions cause things to happen in the game (to your avatar), but they are not performed in the game. Is this what you are saying?”

[…]

10.04

No, I do not want to say this. However, if we talk about events, we are always left with a gap. My intention that an event should occur is not my intention to act. My intention that an event should occur because of me is still not enough. I intend that I cause some event to occur. This can be achieved in such a way that the event in case is not my action. Intentions conceived as psychological states, events and causal relations are not enough to capture actions. Suppose I have the following psychological state: “I intend to cause the movement of my hand such that it will grasp the cup on my desk”. To this we can add a lot of other conditions. Perhaps one would like to add the condition that the intention itself must cause the movement of my hand a.s.o. However the intention itself could have been the result of some hypnotic suggestion. Psychological states can be caused in various ways. Even if we managed to specify the “standard way” of forming an intention to cause an event (such that the intention itself would play a role in causing the event, etc.), an intention to cause an event is not an intention to act.

Suppose that I had some sort of supernatural powers, such that I could move objects with the power of my mind by intending them to move. I could move your hand in this way and make you grasp a cup on your desk. It would be clear that you did not perform the action in case, but it would also be weird to say that I did grasp the cup on your desk with your hand. What I did was to make you grasp the cup on your desk. In a similar way, I could perhaps make myself grasp the cup on my desk without performing the action of grasping the cup on my desk.

This is why I am inclined to say that we must start talking about actions directly. We do not cause events but perform actions. Now, since our actions can produce effects, it is our actions which enter into causal relations, not us, the personal agents. Now, if one believes that only events can have effects, then it follows that actions must also be conceived as events. This, however, is not the only possible choice. We could say: “actions are not a kind of events, but something different, which could still have effects; after all, some events could cause actions to be performed.”

“Doesn’t the intention distinguish between simple events and actions?”

You do not get actions from a system of events, no matter how complicated. Having an intention, in the psychological sense, is undergoing a mental event. Some events are occuring in my mind (that is, in my brain), they cause other events a.s.o. This could always be viewed as a series of natural phenomena which do not add up to the picture of an agent performing an action which she could be responsible for.

I am responsible for my actions. I can still be responsible for my actions if I describe them as events. I can be responsible for the events caused by my actions and for other events which I should have prevented from happening through my actions, but failed. Perhaps I can even be responsible for events which are not causally connected to my actions in any way. If my dog throws up on your shoes, I am responsible. I did nothing to produce this effect and there was nothing I could have done to prevent this from happening. I have to walk my dog, I cannot stop people all the time from getting close to my dog, etc. Better examples could perhaps be produced.

“So actions are not, simply, events which you are responsible for?”

Well, we could talk about different concepts of responsibility (as I did some time ago). If we could distinguish something like zero-level responsibility, then perhaps I could say that all the events for which I am zero-level responsible are my actions.

“Isn’t ‘feeling responsible’ also a mental event?”

I haven’t said anything about feeling responsible. I have only talked about ‘being responsible’.

[…]

*

In any case, some symbols could perhaps be usefull. Here is a proposal:

A, A1, A2, A3 – actions (perhaps they could be somehow grouped by series of actions);
A R-> B – B follows by reason from A; this could also be written like B <-R A CtrlZ A - the action by which one takes back (undoes) A / Cancel A - an action which cancels all the effects of A Prev A - an action which prevents the performance of A RefA - the action of refraining from doing A All these could be viewed as opposed to A (in a series or generally). If we do not need to specify the case, we could write OppA A & B - both A and B are performed (A & B could be a complex actions, the parts of which are A and B; the temporal order of A and B does not matter) If A is 'opening a locked door' and B is 'unlocking a locked door', for instance, one could say that A = B & C, where C is 'opening a door (which is unlocked)', but also that B <-R A. Given this, if one refrained from unlocking the door, it would follow that one performed an action opposed to A. The scheme would look like this: A R-> B
OppB
——-
OppA

Now if we replace A and B with speech acts:

A – Asserting that something is red.
B – Accepting that there exists at least a red thing (agreeing to the assertion / claim that there exists at least a red thing).

OppB disagreeing / rejecting / denying that there exists at least a red thing (this is perhaps of the PrevB kind)

This would show that from the act of OppB it follows that OppA. In this case, this would be a reconstruction of our usual claim that the sentence ‘c is not red’ logically follows from ‘Nothing exists which is red. ¬(Ex)Rx’

‘B follows by reason from A’ means, of course: ‘A can be performed (successfully) only if one assumes a responsibility for the performance of B’.

[…]

12.04

Sooo, what do I think about representationalism? Am I an anti-representationalist?

First of all, I do not believe that the key to understanding how our (use of) language is related to our environment is any kind of mirroring relation. Any mirroring relation must use some correspondence map or function. My problem is not that “there are no facts” or that the correspondence theory of truth is wrong or it should not be used for certain statements (about mathematical objects and structures, mental stuff etc.). I think the reference relation (or any other correspondence relation) conceived as a function from linguistic elements to objects (or facts, events, sets a.s.o.) does not work. It does not work for the simplest cases. How does a name refer to a name bearer? Suppose the name is uttered while pointing to the name bearer. This is not enough. The pointing gesture must be understood as an ostension (it could be a different gesture). However, even if we have ostension, by uttering the word we just perform a verbal action on the object pointed at. What kind of verbal action is not yet decided. The name is not a tag. It must be understood as a name in order to refer to the object in case. When the name is introduced, it must be used as a handle to the object. Afterwards, it has to be used like that.

Nevertheless, we can even suppose that we recognize that X is a name. Now we have X and an object, which is shown to us when X is also presented to us. This still does not mean that X refers to the object in case. One could get from such a presentation to the conclusion that X is the name of that object only by abduction. This wouldn’t be good reasoning.

However, knowing that X is a name does not have to mean “knowing that X refers (stands for / corresponds to) to a particular object)”. It could mean: “when X is used, it is as if a particular object was used to talk about it”. We only need to recognize this sort of practice – a particular object being used to talk about it (to tag it as “food” or “bad”, etc.). Then we could recognize a name as a word which is used in the same way. We could do this even if the name was invented and there was no name bearer. No “relation of reference” would be necessary. There would be no point in saying that such a name refers to the empty set or to a nonexistent object a.s.o.

After all, the whole problem of reference comes to this: How could one object (a word) refer to another? If a call a dog and it comes every time, there is a connection between the dog and the “name” by which I call it. This, however, does not mean that the “name” _refers_ to the dog. One could say (as Strawson does) that only a speaker can refer to something by a name. This, however, is still misterious. If my intention to refer to something by a name has the real dog as an object, the question raises how can this be so? How can an intention aim a something from reality? If the object of my intention is a representation of the real dog in my mind, we still have one more step – how does the representation in my mind stand for (or refer to) the real dog?

All these things are well known. Still, a lot of people seem to thing that we must conceive the relation between language and reality as some sort of function between two sets. I do not know why. If saying that this model is wrong makes me an anti-representationalist, then perhaps I am an anti-representationalist.

There are some other views which I hold:
– one cannot really talk about mental objects; there is no need to show how can the psychological vocabulary be reduced to a neurophysiological vocabulary; I agree with eliminativists in this respect;
– several other vocabularies can be used in a particular kind of talk (no ontological commitment talk; see the case of a child counting out loud); this is the case of mathematical talk, but also of logical talk (perhaps); this might also be the case of a good part of the vocabulary of economy and sociology; perhaps this could also be said about all the parts of the vocabulary which we use when justifying our actions (including assertions and other verbal actions).
– there are also uses of language which have nothing to do with ontology because they have nothing to do with assertions (they are not verdictives, but other kind of speech acts)
– in the case of verdictives, the correspondence theory of truth does not allways help; sometimes, it produces a lot of philosophical problems; a map could correspond to the teritory which was represented in it (from a certain perspective, using some projection method, taking some elements into account and leaving others aside a.s.o.); a model could also correspond to a phenomenon (or an object); this, however, is not necessary related to truth or falsity; this is a long discussion;
– a theory of epistemic justification has to do with the rules embeded in our knowledge producing practices;
– everything important (from my point of view) has to do with our practices, especialy with the practices in which verbal and non-verbal actions are intertwined; they way in which such actions can be intertwined can be conceptualized within the “space of reasons”;
– I sympathize with a naturalist description of the world (if questions are asked with respect to the ontology of such a description, I would favour the reply provided by the natural ontological attitude); however, this description of the world is the result of specialized research practices (which include linguistic practices, specialized empirical / experimental actions a.s.o.); we do not live our lives in the natural world; the image of the world presented by natural sciences is fascinating (for some of us) and we enjoy being presented parts of it in a way similar to the way in which one would enjoy looking at some work of art; this does not mean that one goes home to live in a work of art (or in “nature” / or in a world of superstrings vibrating in 10 dimensions); the world we live in is that of artifacts, raw materials, garbage and other things (which are mainly characterized by their functional properties), persons, animals, fictions a.s.o. we ourselves are not part of this world, in a sense; we are the agents acting in this world; we define ourselves by what we do in this world (thinking is a simulated verbal action – sometimes a communicative action, sometimes just a verbal action which is not directed at anyone else; the kind of talk we hear kids perform when they are young and rehearse some stuff they have said during the day before they go to sleep, for instance);
– Our nonverbal actions by which this world was constituted in the very beginning already had conceptual content, in a sense; this weak conceptual content hardened with language; one could develop this into a naturalist story, but I do not think it would be important to do so; suppose that we got evidence (I do not know how that could be possible, but let’s just suppose this) that our ancestors did not use any tools before they started to speak; would this invalidate my story? I would say that even other animals have some primitive concepts like ‘danger’ and ‘safety’ (or even ‘home’). That is to say, I would grant them some role which they could play in some practices. Old miners did so with rats, for instance. They did not view rats as some devices indicating that the situation was dangerous. Neither did they have to think that rats were communicating anything to them. However, running from danger was some sort of primitive action which they thought rats could perform. It was a primitive action which had some primitive conceptual content. Perhaps I am going astray with these stories right now, I must be tired.
– in any case, I am strongly tempted to think that several philosophical troubles are caused by imperfections in our conceptual tools; others I would call pseudo-problems – our regular conceptual tools are good enough, philosophical additions to these tools are creating the problems; the difference is not always clear.

[…]

15.04

Maybe there is no need to bridge the two vocabularies I am talking about. Lots of philosophical problems appear precisely because we fail to see that they are different and try to mix them. To recap, one is the vocabulary of the natural science. It is used to talk about existent objects, their properties and relations, facts, phenomena, events and things like that. One could add: natural functions, behaviour, organisms, natural processes (biological, chemical, etc.). It is the vocabulary used to paint the scientific image of our world.

On the other hand, there is the vocabulary we use to talk about artifacts (including abstract artifacts, perhaps) and their functional properties, art, math, persons, values, social roles, relations, rules, practices, actions and intentions. Some kind of reductionism might be present here as well (in the case of the other vocabulary everything should be in principle reducible to talk of physical objects, properties, forces and causal relations). Here everything is in principle reducible to social practices constituted from personal actions, practices which incorporate socially constructed and maintainted rules. The artifacts’ functional properties depend on our practices. Our most general social role, that of “being a person”, is also dependent on (the whole of) our practices.

What I am trying to say is that perhaps the philosophical understanding of a sentence like “I am not an object” is precisely the kind of mixture between these two vocabularies which leads us into trouble. Such a sentence should be rejected altoghether. In real life situations, I never try to say that I am not a physical object. At most, I complain that somebody is treating me like a tool (an artifact). I am trying to remind somebody, perhaps, of some settlement, some trait of a common practice in which we are involved.

The psychological vocabulary also produces a lot of problems, due to its dual nature – it can be used as part of the naturalist vocabulary, but also as part of the social vocabulary.

“Isn’t this the distinction between Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften all over again?”

I am not talking about scientific disciplines. Our everyday talk can contain elements from each vocabulary. For instance, I could justify the functional property of an artifact by talking about some physical properties of it’s shape or of it’s constituents. Artifacts are made from raw materials, which can also be viewed as physical objects in a natural space. The same goes for actions. Their constituents are reducible, somehow, to physical events which enter into causal relations with other events (some of which are not actions). Persons are viewed as constituted from bodies and minds (i.e. neurophysiological processes).

This does not mean the persons are physical objects (or reducible to physical objects).

*

We talk of raw materials (ingredients) and use mass terms when we cook. We could even use some knowledge in organic chemistry, but we do not view ourselves as scientists performing experiments when we cook. (It could be said that chemistry is rather some sort of abstract cooking – alchemists still used a lot of cooking terms; they were mostly men, imitating what their wives did in the kitchen but pretending that what they did was a lot more important).

*

We could think of beliefs, for example. We talk, on one hand, of ‘believing that p’ as some sort of mental attitude, the object of which is a thought or a sentence. On the other hand, we have the practice of belief attribution. We can attribute beliefs to persons, including ourselves (and even to groups of persons, organizations or institutions), we can provide reasons for our belief attributions, we can accept or reject belief attributions and so on. Also, we mark something (an assertion, perhaps) as ‘a common belief’ when we do not want to grant it the status of knowledge. We express beliefs, without feeling any need to instrospect ourselves in order to do so (similarly, we do not feel the need to introspect ourselves when we talk about artifacts and their functional properties (color properties, in this context are more like functional properties); “Can I match these red shoes to my blue dress?” – when one asks this, one does not talk about private “sensations of color”.

*

What I am trying to say is that some practices do not mix. You cannot combine sky jumping and chess into a single new sport. When people run into philosophical problems with respect to “beliefs” it is as if they are talking about a unique activity which is a combination of a psychological examination (or even research) and a public debate with arguments on some topic of interest. This cannot work.

23.04

Maybe the distinction between appearance and reallity shouldn’t have been elevated to philosophical status, after all. This is not naive realism. For instance, saying that we do not usually deal with perceptions, but with tools, other persons and ourselves (SuZ) has nothing to do with naive realism.

Something may appear to be water in a desert (a mirage), but the point of that is not that the water I was perceiving was not real. I can’t quench my thirst precisely when I have got an expectation to do it. I was prepared to perform an action which I cannot perform anymore. My hands can still be cuped to hold water and drink it, but the raw material is missing. Analogy: a chain of supply is broken suddenly, so the production line has to be stopped. One does not have to talk about perceptions in order to account for such a happening. In these and similar situations one does not think about what is real and what is merely perceived, but of reasonable expectations and actions which cannot be performed anymore. I do not need to perceive something in order to have a reasonable expectation.

X usually keeps his promises. He said he would meet me today at 3 PM, but it is half past three and he did not come. I did plan to talk to him about something and now I cannot do this anymore, but it was reasonable for me to make that plan. I do not need to say that his comming to this meeting was a deceiving appearance.

In other cases, one might say “I thought I saw a rabbit over there”. If by “seeing” one means the empirical action of observing something, then this is right. What appearance (as opposed to reality) is one talking about in such a case?

“It seemed that my empirical action (of observing a rabbit over there) was successful, but it was not. Talk about actions does not help you get rid of the appearance/reality distinction.”

Well, talk of actions has zero ontological commitment, to start with. One might consider an action successful, only to learn afterwards that it failed. This could be due to several reasons.

Of course, bringing “appearance” back to our everyday vocabulary is a distinct move, unrelated to my switch to action talk, perhaps. Remember NOA. One can bring “appearance” back to a scientific vocabulary as well. (de-elevation)

*

“A follows by reason from B (where A and B are actions)” is the ancestor of “A logically implies B”. One could perhaps wonder what is meant by ‘is the ancestor’ in this case.

In any case, since I have defined “A is opposed to B” and have managed to trace the relation between that and the relation of logical contradiction, perhaps things could also be said as follows:

A follows by reason from B (where A and B are actions) IFF
for any X, if X is opposed to A (insert some stuff about series of actions here), then X is also opposed to (assuming zero-level responsibility for) B;

“This does not seem right. Asserting that Socrates is not a man is opposed to asserting that Socrates is a man. However, Asserting that Socrates is not a man does not seem to prevent you from assuming a zero-level responsibility for asserting that there exists at least one men in the world. But the last assertion should follow by reason from ‘Socrates is a man’.”

Indeed, but when I say that there exists at least one man in the world after saying that Socrates was not a man, I seem to open a new series of actions. In any case, my assertion cannot follow from reason from Socrates is a man anymore. Were I to provide reasons for my assertion, I could not talk about Socrates anymore.

“This only shows that your definition is circular, since you must add to it ‘assuming zero-level responsibility for B _based on_ the performance of A.”

I need to thing about this more.

[…]

Ok, so my problem seems to be this. A person can say anything. While opposing actions are such that they usualy exclude each other (not always, though), opposing utterances do not seem to exclude each other.

This rests on a mistake, of course. Nothing prevents me from putting a cup of sugar in my soup pot, right before it’s ready. Of course, I won’t be able to make soup anymore. The stuff about series of actions seem to be important. Let’s call a series of utterances a discourse. Now, if the purpose of my discourse is to establish that there exists at least one man, then saying that Socrates was not a man seems to take me further from achieving my purpose and not closer.

It could be said, generally speaking, that in all the cases in which if X is opposed to A and B is conceived as the final action (the purpose) of a series to which A belongs (an action belongs to a series only if it plays an active role in achieving its purpose), then X is also opposed to B – it could be said that in all such cases B follows by reason from A.

“Right, but how does this work for the concept of a logical contradiction? After all, ‘Socrates is not a man’ does not contradict ‘There exists at least a man.'”

Well, that is precisely due to the fact the the concept of opposition is much larger than that of logical contradiction. A and B contradict each other IFF no matter the series to which they belong (and in what order the figure in that series), doing A is opposed to doing B. A logical contradiction is something which prevents you for achieving the purpose of your discourse, no matter what that purpose was.

“Maybe my purpose was to make you think I am stupid or something.”

Right, but then you do not have a discourse, made up of utterances performed with a discoursive purpose. You just display some verbal behaviour aiming at a non-discoursive purpose.

*

I am trying to say, as it seems, that logical relations are possible only within ideal models of our actions. Our everyday concept of contradiction is not that of “logical contradiction”, after all.

“What’s the difference between the two, then?”

Two parents. One tells the kid that she shold never cross when the light ss red. The other says: “Except when there is no car in sight and you are in a hurry, perhaps”. “Why do you always contradict me?”, says the first parent.

Now the logician could say that what the second parent said implies that sometimes it is ok to cross the street, even if it’s red, while the first parent said that it was never ok to cross the street if the light was red. This would be a “proper” logical contradiction. However, the logician has used semantical rules (and perhaps a certain interpretation) in order to show that what was said by the two parents led to a contradiction. By contrast, the first parent spoke about a direct contradiction. Given the purpose of the first utterance – to teach the kid never to cross at a red light, what the second parent said was taken as directly opposed to that purpose. I do not think the first parent is wrong.

Similarly, perhaps in our everyday life we view the concept of ‘many’ on pair with that of ‘three’. Both are part of the same family of concepts. This shows that our everyday concept of ‘three’ is different from that of a mathematician (not very different at present, perhaps, since we have all received some mathematical training in school, but nevertheless different).

“But then our ordinary concepts are different from those of the social scientist as well. So why do you say that our concept of a ‘person’ is the concept of a very general social role? Ordinary people do not think in terms of social roles. Isn’t that, too, an idealization?”

…

“Also, how could logic work with an idealization if logical theories are not descriptive, but normative?”

Let me take a break to think about this, please. – “Ok.”

7.05

This is not about my book in particular, but about my philosophical views in general. By ‘philosophical views’ I do not mean a series of truths, but a conceptual proposal. It’s essence could be captured by saying that my strongest belief is that, in the aftermath of our failure to conceive our relation with the world by using the (epistemic) subject – natural object distinction, our best alternative is to conceive our environment as that which we act upon and us as acting agents. However, this can be done in at least two different ways: (a) by employing a naturalist vocabulary (our environment is the nature, acording to the physical (and biological) sciences, we are part of the nature and object to the same kind of scientific research and the relations between us and our environment are causal; (b) by employing (at least) an epistemological vocabulary – we can form beliefs about our environment, talk about it, provide reasons for our beliefs and actions, assume responsibility for what we say or do, obtain some knowledge of our environment and act based on what we know, which distinguish us from (at least) a big part of the rest of the nature. The two vocabularies might be reducible to each other (in fact, naturalism could be seen as an attempt to reduce (b) to (a), although this sort of reduction mistakes most of the terms from (b) for psychological terms; the reduction of (a) to (b) is also possible, along some lines sketched by Heidegger, in my opinion). This, however, is not at stake. The later Wittgenstein was trying to develop (b) and my conceptual proposal is, in a sense, a continuation of his work (although I do not share his anti-theoretical attitude, for reasons which I will not state right now).

According to Wittgenstein, then, the link between what we say and the world we live in is provided by our form of life. We live in the world. That means, we act in the world. The fact that we perform actions shows that we act in the world, since our actions can have purposes which are not fulfiled when we act. We act in order to achieve a purpose (not always, of course). This shows that we act in an environment which is independent from us. Our form of life includes different practices. Some of this practices assume the performance of several communicative actions – Wittgensteins calls them language games – it is important to note that they do not include only actions of the kind ‘saying that…’, but also some actions which we perform directly on our environment.

It is part of my proposal that the relation between the communicative actions and the non-communicative actions which are intertwined in our language games should be conceived as one pertaining to reason. Saying something can be opposed to doing something (and the other way arround), in a relation which could be considered an ancestor of the relation of logical contradiction. The same can be said about saying and doing with respect to the relation of inference (or its ancestor, rather – ‘a follows by reason from b’). Saying something can follow by reason from doing something (and the other way arround). This relation, on closer examination, seems to depend on our ability to assume a responsibility for both what we say and what we do. Thus the space of reasons is constituted whithin a network of responsibilities. (nothing is completely original in what I am saying up to this point, I think; my view is close to the one presented by Robert Brandom in his books).

Of course, there are lots of conceptual refinements to be made with respect to this. My task, as I see it, is:

(i) To say these things in a less confusing way.
(ii) To develop the articulations of my conceptual proposal (in fact, this is what I have been trying to do for the last 9 years).
(iii) To show why my conceptual proposal is useful (i. e., what are the conceptual problems which we do not need to face anymore if we accept it)
(iv) To continue beta-testing this proposal and pin down any conceptual problems it might raise in its turn.
(v) To fine-tune my proposal in order to avoid those problems.
(vi) Finaly, to think of a proper way in which one could conceive the relation between (b) and (a).

*

Now, let me assume that I was successful with all these tasks. What would I achieve by this? In short, I would have a way in which to think of myself both as a part of nature and as a person, which has reason, can be responsible, perform actions and conceive the environment from a human perspective (that is, not as nature, but as a conglomerate of raw materials, to be acted upon, artifacts, tools, garbage and so on). This entire conceptual framework might perhaps even support Wittgenstein’s claim that the concept of God is assumed by this vocabulary, in a way similar to that in which the naturalist vocabulary must assume the concept of an object. In any case, this conceptual framework should enable anyone to focus on existential matters without stumbling into philosophical puzzles all the time.

In a sense, I think my entire philosophical proposal can have only this purpose (if successful, of course): to clear a path for thinking about what matters in life (for me and anyone else).

“And what is that?”

How to evolve, as a person, how to create a world in which other persons can focus on improving themselves. (To take a random example, how to improve my relation with my cat would be a topic on which I would like to reflect at some point.)

“To improve yourself, the world, your relations with other people. What for? Don’t we all die in the end? Is the whole Universe going to end at some point?”

Well, suppose that we are close to that point. In fact, suppose that we know that the entire Universe will cease to exist tomorrow. Nothing is going to happen afterwards. Absolutely nothing. Nothing is going to be remembered (except by God, I am strongly tempted to say; but we will ignore that right now).

How to spend these last hours? I think I would spend most of that time apologizing to all the people who mattered to me – for not being a better father, a better husband, a better friend, a better teacher and so on, trying to think what should I have done better and so on. In the end, I hope I’ll be able to feel sorry enough for not having been a better human being than to fear my disparition (along with everybody else’s). I will be sad that everything ends, of course, and I would pray, in my heart, that at least some people will get some sort of salvation (I would think about my beloved ones, of course, but my prayer would be “such that this is not the complete end, at least for some nice people, even if I do not know them at all”).

The point is, I do not think that I would say, even to myself, that everything was pointless. Our lives were not pointless. If we consider “nothingness” as the default state, the fact that we existed would be something gained over the default state. Nothing can erase that.

Most certainly, I will die at some point. However, I had a life. In a sense, even a short life full of pain and suffering is more than nonexistence. Even if an omnipotent atemporal God would make it such that the Universe never existed to begin with,… I mean, not even that could erase my life, in a sense.

*

I should stop here, since these ideas are too confused for the time being.

23.05

I need to focus more on what I am trying to do in philosophy.

19.06

I did a lot of things, but did not find time to write here. Today Razvan celebrates his 10th birthday.

*

So, what about persons who (for one reason or another) do not use language? Do they have concepts or intentions? I would say yes, in a sense, but not because they have “thoughts”. If such a person can be said to perform some actions (which do have some conceptual content), then…

“Right, but an action’s conceptual content comes from the description under which I am ready to accept what I did and provide reasons for it. Nothing of this sort can be happening in the case of your non/pre – linguistic agents.”

Not speaking is not equivalent with not understanding anything spoken at all. I have the living proof of this in front of my eyes everyday (Mihai).

*

Do I still want to say that our actions have a (proto-)logical structure? I do. One could reply that “logical” doesn’t mean much when I say it. I must confess that I do not know what “logical” means anymore outside a formal system.

*

Does it help to say that a name is similar to a programming variable? The variable is a handle – I use it instead of it’s content. But the content can change. A name bearer can die and another one could get the same name, but we say that the second is a new name.

There are some special variables in Python, which are declared at the beginning of some code and are never modified afterwards. Thus, I could use “CATIMAGE” instead of the name of an actual file (and the path to it) in my code, as if I was using that other name (or even the image itself).

Perhaps computer analogies are not very helpful, after all.

(I feel old, fat and tired. My body aches all over.)

[after sleep]

B follows by reason from A IFF the performance of B leads to the assumption of a (zero-level) responsibility for the performance of A. – Ok, but how? What does it mean to say that something “leads” to something else?

27.06

There are too completely different tracks here:
1) What is the relation between our language and our world? How does language mesh with our life? How can one conceive a logical-semantical space encompassing both our communicative and non-communicative actions? – When following this track I should perhaps leave aside several interesting problems in the philosophy of action (the ontology of actions, the relation between actions and causality a.s.o.). I should focus instead on language, logical matters etc.
2) How to conceive the relation between the naturalist vocabulary and the vocabulary developed at (1)?

Other problems:
3) How can we conceive actions as grounds for knowledge?
4) What are the components of every action? How could we classify all our actions? What distinctions are important here?
5) How can we relate the “grammar” of our actions to the “grammar” of our artifacts?

26.07

One more time, in relation to (1) above. Am I an anti-representationalist? Well, I seem to say that we do not need to represent objects in order to talk about them (or think about them). Instead we can just perform verbal actions on those objects (I am offering this particular apple to you etc.). What about predicates? Don’t we need some representations in their case? Let’s say that I predicate ‘is red’ of the apple directly. Perhaps I do not need to represent the apple, since I act directly on it (of course, things become more difficult for this perspective if the apple is not directly accessible, but let’s leave that aside for now). Still, it seems that I need to represent the property of being red in order to know what I predicate of the apple.

To this, of course, the answer is that the content of ‘is red’ depends on it’s inferential role. In my view, the content is established by communicative and non-communicative actions which either _follow by reason_ from tagging the apple as ‘red’, or are such that the red-tagging follows by reason from them. One could, however, hold that this sort of inferential content is not rich enough in some respects and too rich in others.

(let’s just notice, as a side note, that we distinguish between ‘being red’ – by nature, as it were – and ‘being painted red’; cases could be imagined were no representation could help one distinguish between a red apple and an apple which was painted red; however, only asserting that the apple was painted red follows by reason from painting the apple red; if one distinguishes between ‘painting something in a certain color’ and ‘painting something over in a certain color’, asserting that the apple was painted red prevents one from painting the apple in a different color (since one could only paint the appe over in a different color); also, this could be disputable but asserting that the apple was painted red might even prevent one from overpainting it red; the bottom line is that we might have different concepts, related to different actions which could produce the same result in terms of how the result was represented; one could of course reply that in such cases we need to represent not only the result, but also the actions by which it was produced, but now it should be clear that my view is better, since it doesn’t assume representations of those actions in the mind of the concept user; one could still reply that something must happen in the mind of the user, but this a problem for externalist views generally and not only for my view; the reply whould be that ‘following-by-reason’ relations are embedded into practices to which the user must take part by socialization etc.)

I suspect that the reproach that the inferential content is not rich enough has to do with qualia talk (which I reject), while the reproach that in some respects it is too rich comes from a failure to understand that ‘follows by reason’ does not include any moral obligations (like ‘you can cross the street only when the light is not red’ a.s.o.).

In any case, my point is that our language is connected to reality because we act directly in our environment and our actions are structured into practices which (gradually) build up to a point at which we get tags, predicates, robust following-by-reason relations and conceptual content. This story has nothing to do with our attempt to rise ourselves above all other species by attributing the special role of “mind-bearers” to ourselves.

Suppose there were some animals which we did not want to consider our equals. Now, suppose those animals had practices complex enough to be described in terms of ‘trying to adapt to their environment through cooperation and communication’. We could use such descriptions without saying anything about those animals having any mental representations or a mind at all. Now, if one accepts the naturalist view and still wants to talk about minds, one would be forced to talk about animal minds, of course, but this only produces new problems. How could minds appear gradually along the natural history of life on Earth?

I would suggest, instead, that we focus on our abilities to assume responsibility for our actions (and grant such responsibilities to others). This is related to practices which are fully formed only in human societies – a trial by law is perhaps the best example here. Of course, such practices have also evoled gradually and the point starting from which it could be said that some living beings have aquired such abilities (assuming and granting responsibilities) is perhaps arbitrary. This, however, does not seem to rise so many philosophical troubles.

*

Naming is attaching a handle to something (like a string to a balloon; I can give you my balloon by handing its string to you); the action of naming is performed directly on the named object; the handle can be passed on; some notion of what is at the other end of the string might be necessary when one does not see the other end;

“Right, but how does one attach a name to a thing? Couldn’t you make your metaphor explicit?”

[…]