Philosophy Now Forum

There are electrical potentials flowing from high to low, but that is not language. When you turn a switch to turn on a light, there are flow of electrical impulses but we do not regard that as 'language'. There are flow of electrical impulses between potential within slugs and other organisms [eve...

I'm just stating the obvious here, but language and definitons change over time, especially now with this scientific explosion of the last few centuries. We can't freeze language in time, in that case we would still be talking caveman language, and had no good way of going beyond the very basic thi...

This is a fundamental mistake. Features of reality - such as cats and dogs - are what they are, how ever we identify, name and describe them. They are not obliged to conform to our ways of talking about them. Outside language, reality is not linguistic. You're missing the point. And you're making a...

I understand there is some sort of computation going on but I would not regard it as language in the general sense. Let's try this analogy. One and the same bitmap image can be accurately stored in computer memory in more than one way. A bitmap image is a two-dimensional grid of tiny dots called pi...

Atla wrote: ↑Sat Sep 30, 2023 7:32 amThe language of everyday convention, yes.
Not the language of the more fundamental scientific picture, where value is not a property of external physical objects.

Are you saying that scientists redefined the word "value" and that we should care about it? Why should we?

Okay then you are only talking about a convention (which is based on an illusion), not what value actually is (ontologically). And calling this convention a fact, well yes it's a "fact" that that's how we usually use langage in everyday life. Language decides what something is. For exampl...

Your idea of intrapersonal language is your own invention. That's not much of an argument. I understand that you're highly uncreative and unoriginal, and that all of your ideas are borrowed from the people that you look up to, such as Kant and now even Chat GPT, but you have to understand that, if ...

Your mind is made out of many different parts and these different parts must communicate with each other. Hence the need for a language that is INTRA-personal rather than INTER-personal. It facilitates communication between different parts of one's mind, rather than between different minds ( even if...

Your knowledge base is rather shallow and narrow Well, if you say so. I am actually pretty confident that it's the other way around. You're still stuck in Kant's philosophy and have a lot to learn. Note this from ChatGpt [with reservations] which does not jive with your claims above Chat GTP is tal...

Try this analysis with 'water is H2O'. Its truth or falsehood has nothing to do with who it's 'true for. It just is or isn't true. Cos it's a factual assertion, unlike 'X is morally wrong'. Shot in the foot? Try this with "X is morally wrong for Peter Holmes ". That's a moral statement, i...

I can value something based entirely on how much I like it without any consideration of usefulness. "I like X" means "I perceive X as valuable". When you like something, your brain is perceiving it as something that is valuable to you. And "valuable" means the same thi...

All "perception" is happening in the head, so it doesn't mean much when people say that they perceive something as valuable. It doesn't follow at all that the value is an inherent property of the external object. I think you're downplaying the role of language in perception, a mistake mad...

In this case, evaluative properties such as moral and aesthic qualities are at best relative, or are they just entirely subjective? Nobody is wrong when they evaluate anything, it's all just "this vase is ugly for me and not ugly for you"....... Personal truths. They are relative in the s...

I don't know how Peter Holmes would respond to that, but I would respond by saying that the subjectivity of morality is in its definition, and therefore morality does not fall into the category of things that can be proved to have a truth value. The only way a moral precept could be proved true, is...

If I look at the vase and it has the properties ["dirty","boring","cheap","£0.45"] But somebody else looks at the same vase at the same time and sees ["smudged","inspirational","vauable","£700"] The vase now holds at on...