humanities.philosophy.objectivism

On Apr 7, 5:04 am, Mark Sieving wrote:

> Ordinarily, I think we mean the concepts as the person who reads the
> sentence holds them.

So if a book contains the sentence "there is a bear in my backyard",
the book contains a falsehood for any reader whose backyard does not
contain a bear? Or, if I read a book written in German, it contains no
truths since I can't understand any of the sentences?

No. Ordinarily, we mean the concepts as the speaker held them. It is
only the unusual case where we mean anything else.

(Now you can certainly argue that you want to discuss the philosophy
of those unusual cases, but that doesn't change the fact that 99% of
the time, when we ask if a claim is true or false, we mean as it was
meant by its speaker.)

> > But then if that person ceases to exist, so do those concepts. The
> > statement now refers to concepts that no longer exist.

> The author of Ayn Rand's books no longer exists; Ayn Rand is dead.
> Therefore, the concepts referred to in those books no longer exist.
> Is that what you want to say?

Yes, of course. So long as someone else holds the concepts, they still
exist. If every English speaker dies, the concepts no longer exist.
They could, at least in theory, be made to exist again should some
future researcher re-learn English.

> The great advantage of written communication is that the concepts
> expressed no longer depend on the existence of the author.

The high-level concepts don't because the written communication can
build them out of lower-level concepts. But ultimately, it still rests
on the ability of someone to understand it by manipulating concepts
they already hold or rebuilding them completely anew.

> > > Would it matter if I
> > > told you that the statement was randomly generated in a spreadsheet?
> > > Would it matter if I didn't tell you that?

> > It would matter because then it would no longer be true in the
> > ordinary sense, which is whether the concepts it corresponded to in
> > the speaker or originator correspond with reality.

> I think that your "ordinary sense" is not so ordinary. If I present a
> random sample of people an anonymous note that says, "The Boston Red
> Sox won the 2007 World Series", and asked each person how they would
> determine if that was true, I expect that I would get responses like,
> "Check a baseball reference book" or "Read newspaper articles from
> October 2007". I doubt that many people would respond, "Find out who
> wrote the note and then find out what he or she meant". The meaning
> of the note is perfectly obvious, and doesn't depend on who wrote it.

Right, they would simply assume that the speaker meant this in the
ordinary sense, having no reason to believe any different. That
doesn't mean they wouldn't reconsider their answer if you told them,
for example, that the sentence is the first sentence of a work of
fiction.

It's very common to miss the obvious if in most cases it makes no
difference. For example, in most cases it makes no different that a
person who says "your wife is cheating on you" really means "I have
good reason to believe that your wife is cheating on you". But that
doesn't change the fact that the first is shorthand for the second.

To prove that they didn't consider the meaning to matter as meant by
the speaker, you have to create a situation where they have some
reason to think that the meaning of the speaker might be different
from the ordinary meaning and see if they think that matters.

I think you will find most people will think that it does matter. But
even if it doesn't, that doesn't prove anything. Most people's notion
of "position" assumes that objects have precise positions in
continuous time. That they may not know this or admit doesn't mean
it's not true. So your methodology of asking people doesn't work.

> You didn't directly answer my last question above, but you did in a
> sense. Before I mentioned anything about the sentence being randomly
> generated, you didn't hesitate to say: "Yes, in the sense that, *to
> me*, it expresses a relationship between concepts that I hold that
> accurately corresponds with reality." [My emphasis] You didn't need
> to know the origin of the sentence to make that judgement.

No, you don't. But you may reach erroneous conclusions in that case.
It's obvious with sentences that contain relative words like "I" or
"my", but the vast majority of claims contain implicit relative
concepts.

Language is a negotiation. Statements are always ambiguous because it
takes effort to resolve ambiguity and there is no reason to remove
ambiguity beyond what is expected to be needed for clear communication
between the speaker and the expected audience.

DS