r/philosophy • u/SilasTheSavage Wonder and Aporia • 3d ago
Blog Many "problems" are nothing more than verbal disputes
https://open.substack.com/pub/wonderandaporia/p/stupid-word-games?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1l11lq43
u/ickypedia 3d ago
I always bring up legal language as an example for this. Very rigorously written and adjusted to leave less room for ambiguities and the like, and yet we have judges interpreting it and discussions of letter of the law vs intent, etc.
I wish people understood these limits more, but generally people assume we’re all talking about the same thing, and then get worked up when we find the same words carry different connotations and content, causing us to talk past each other.
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u/Necessary_Monsters 3d ago
Is pretty much every post on this subreddit someone promoting their Substack or Medium?
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u/Blackintosh 3d ago
Is this what Wittgenstein is saying in TLP?
I've only just started reading it and trying to get my head around it.
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u/ThinNeighborhood2276 3d ago
Agreed, many philosophical problems arise from misunderstandings or ambiguities in language. Clarifying terms often resolves these disputes.
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u/piamonte91 3d ago
Have there ever been a philosophical dispute that it is solved by clarifying a term?? My impression of philosophy, is that whenever an article with a more clear explanation of a given subject is published, many philosophers just pretend that it didnt happen and continue with their lines of work despite that the new essay contradicts what they are saying.
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u/jusfukoff 3d ago
Indeed. For example the whole ship of Theseus is just pointing at the limits of our language use. It’s not insightful nor thoughtful, we just don’t need words for a ‘half replaced boat.’
Too many thought experiments are just cases like this.
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u/jusfukoff 3d ago
Are you purposefully pretending not to understand? Or is the explanation not sufficient for your understanding?
Boats were mentioned in the theory originally. I thought everyone knew it was metaphorical? Is mentioning boats too much for your understanding? Do not need to explain it more simply?
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u/bluewales73 3d ago edited 3d ago
Are you suggesting the Ship of Theseus might be more than the sum of it's parts?
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u/banzzai13 3d ago
The tone you used while accusing someone of condescension and intellectual peacocking is absolutely hilarious.
The fact that you insist they actually meant it's about boats, on the other hand, that's just infuriating.
Sure, it was a silly judgement in the first place, but why so triggered? Theseus was your uncle or something?
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u/l_am_wildthing 3d ago
the fact you got triggered by this thread is hilarious. is it lost on you that continuing the cycle is just ironic? no, i guess not. If i tried explaining it to you but you only quack like a duck, I'm going to quack like a duck in response because it seems to be the only thing you understand how to do.
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u/banzzai13 3d ago
Ah so you're only doing it because I'm doing it? That's nice accountability right there.
The entire point of your comment is I'm continuing the circle? Very cool. Pointed taken.
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u/bildramer 3d ago
It is indeed nothing but a semantical hand wave. The "enduring within philosophical discourse through the length of multiple of your lifetimes" only happened because galaxy brained people like you can't sit down and work out the simple math of it, instead thinking they're geniuses for slowly and painfully rediscovering baby-level truths about how humans use language. Today, it's solved, done, there's nothing to say about it. Any random linguistics undergraduate has wiser thoughts on it than all philosophers who've spoken about it combined.
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u/WoodieGirthrie 3d ago
What is the solution? It's a metaphysical question right? How do we have an answer for what the essence of an object is? Or are you just saying that essence is a linguistic artifact that has no real meaning and thus the ship is just a collection if boards that get replaced and not its own discrete whole?
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u/bildramer 3d ago
There is no "the" solution. It's like asking "is the upvote color red or orange"? I'd accept "red", "orange", "orangered", "both", "either", "a mixture", "yes", "no". I wouldn't accept "it's green". And if I know why you were asking (e.g. you're making a palette), the acceptability of some answers can change.
That's how all words work almost all the time. Many valid answers, many invalid answers, many arguable answers, depends on context, depends on communication goals. You can formalize this in many ways that end up reaching very similar conclusions (Wittgenstein's language games, Gricean maxims, rational speech acts), but you don't really need to.
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u/WoodieGirthrie 3d ago
I mean, you literally said the problem was solved as if there was a mathematical general solution, but I see your point regarding the linguistics of the paradox. You are ignoring the metaphysical question itself though, and you can't abstract it away by claiming objects don't have essences as that ignores the broader argument. What would your solution to the ship of theseus human body getting all its cells replaced question? Does the being remain or is it disconnected in some way?
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u/bildramer 3d ago
Objects don't have "essences", whatever that means. If you're asking "would/should we call the body the same body", that's up for discussion. If you're asking "is it the same mind", the answer is plainly yes. If you're asking if we have epiphenomenal undetectable "souls" or "identities" that might or might not detach following such an operation, 1. that's an empirical question in disguise carefully designed to be unfalsifiable, and unrelated to the Theseus definition-wrangling, you can ask the teletransporter / cloning / etc. variants just as well, 2. obviously no such things exist.
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u/NicholasThumbless 3d ago
The Ship of Theseus is not simply a semantic issue about what we call half-finished boats. As much as one yearns for simplicity, and it looks really nice when it seems we've been overcomplicating things, that doesn't make it the case. The question of what constitutes identity and existence, when boiled down to "because it is" becomes circular: is it the Ship of Theseus still? Well yes, because we previously agreed to such. Does that seem like an insightful take to you? Seems like the linguists you praise so much would find fault with that line of logic.
It may be practical to a dock worker or carpenter working on the ship to see no distinction, as to them such distinctions are frivolous. However, questioning what constitutes a thing, how do we label it, and does that change as its constituent parts change seems like a relevant line of inquiry for philosophers.
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u/jusfukoff 3d ago
Yes. Philosophers gets hard ons when there isn’t a word for something like half an unfinished chair. Very very relevant line of inquiry indeed. If only more people thought that way life would be solved.
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u/NicholasThumbless 2d ago
Wow! What an extremely close minded perspective sprinkled with condescension. Here I was, thinking someone could manage to have genuine curiosity about the world and how it functions, rather than whine when anyone challenges their preconceived notions. Have the day you deserve.
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u/le_disappointment 3d ago
In some sense every problem is a verbal dispute due to the inherent lack of clear meaning in languages
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u/RoddyDost 3d ago edited 3d ago
Welcome to the vast majority of published philosophy. Sucks the wind out the room so fucking hard when the entire discussion boils down to two grouchy old guys fighting over definitions. One of the big reasons I didn’t go for my PhD, I hate what the field has become and do not have the energy to spend my life fighting a losing battle.
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u/piamonte91 3d ago
Could you expand on this pls??
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u/RoddyDost 3d ago
It goes back to the early 20th century, when science as we know it was becoming popular. Everyone was adding science to every field of study because it was the hot new thing, philosophy included. Spawned a new branch of philosophy which is now the dominant animal called analytic philosophy. Primarily uses pure logic to attempt to reach conclusions about the world. Unfortunately that mandate combined with the academic requirement to be constantly publishing has lead to the a large part of the field devolving into what are essentially pedantic quibbles over semantics. This is particularly bad when it comes to ontology and epistemology. It stops being about trying to find the essence of knowledge or being and turns into spats about what “counts” as an object or what “counts” as knowledge. Or in other words, it becomes about how we define knowledge, being, etc. rather than what they actually are.
If you’re interested in further reading I’d suggest Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, and later thinkers like Derrida, Foucault and Beaudrillard, especially the latter’s work Simulacra and Simulation.
Husserl pointed out this trend very early on and IMO correctly predicted what the field would become as well as posed a solution for it. Too much for a reddit comment, but he basically spawned a counter movement called phenomenology. There are plenty of valid critiques of that movement too, but in my opinion it’s much closer to what the actual purpose of philosophy is. But it’s very unpopular and many even consider it to be outdated at this point. Hence why I didn’t go for my PhD despite there being a lot to dig into. Slim chance I could land a job with that one.
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u/BirdieRumia 3d ago
I've never seen 'If a tree falls in the forest' used as a real question to try to stump someone, just as a joke 'falsely deep' question.
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u/night-reading 21h ago
i didnt even know that philosophers discussed these questions. the reason you are right is most people debate to prove the other side wrong, not for exchange of information. they are still hung onto their rivalry reflexes. take a problematic individual and send him to philosophy school - he is still a problematic individual. philosophy doesnt automatically make people more knowledged or more advanced in intellectuality and you shouldnt expect that.
but ill write my own responses to these popular questions just for the gist of it. you guys going to downvote me to hell anyway regardless of what i write so i might as well write something that entertains me.
If a Tree Falls in a Forest…
yes it still makes a sound and the birds, squirrels etc around hear it. it would still make a sound even if there was no one around to hear it, just like billions of other sounds around the universe, and the asker already admits knowing this by presupposing that if we were there we would hear the sound. just because something isnt observed doesnt make that thing non-existing; just unobserved.
Is Water Wet?
people claim that water wets, it isnt wet by itself. but you could also claim that water being surrounded by water still makes it wet etc. like the air being dry or the fire burning. no weirdness there. it's playing with semantics, like you said.
in linguistics the use of language is not essentialist but performative. it's called descriptive approach vs the prescriptive approach. if the majority of people use one definition than that definition is true. there is no "essential" meaning to the word. like the word gay used to mean happy but later started to mean homosexual. definitions transform all the time. dictionaries arent tools that invent definitions for words but they are documents that analyze how a peoples speak a language. so if the majority of the english speakers define wetness as one of the descriptions of water then yes water will be called wet, which is currently the case.
The Chicken and the Egg
chicken evolved from the reptiles so there were eggs before there were chicken. so the egg came first, sometime in history.
What is a Woman?
this question was answered horribly by faucault and i wont pursue it. if a person transforms themselves then society should respect that.
definitions are by the rule generalizations. and generalizations prove problematic when you are trying to coin down rules. you could say all cats are afraid of water but that wont make a cat who is not afraid of water not-a-cat.
the problem mainly occurs in sports and restrooms (rules part) and if thats solved justfully then there will be no debate. it's not the definition itself that creates these problems, it's the other way around.
Does Smith have knowledge?
im always amazed how philosophy people dont apply basic ontologic principles when trying to figure out if something is real or not. and im more amazed, day by day, to see that they confuse value with existence.
if you want to find out if knowledge is a concept or a vibe, simply look at how it affects the physical world (or how the physical world is conceptualized in accordance to that knowledge if you are a metaepistemological antirealist). knowledge is not perception. perception is not the medium of perception (photons, sound waves etc). people perceive through these mediums and form knowledge in their minds according to their perception. then they communicate this knowledge with each other to produce more knowledge. then they act in accordance to that knowledge and affect the physical world. how was i supposed to type something online if there were no knowledge of electronics and computers to begin with?
i think people waste too much time trying to figure out if things are real or not. there could be fallacies but denoting whole concepts to be unreal or unexisting is far fetched to me.
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u/CalligrapherMain416 3d ago
Relativist schlop
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u/SilasTheSavage Wonder and Aporia 3d ago
It is certainly not relativist. Even if the words we use don't have objective fixed meanings across speakers and time, that doesn't mean that the reality they describe is not objective. Given some set of word-meanings, the truth-value of sentences formed by these is fixed.
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u/CalligrapherMain416 3d ago
I dont believe in this idea that we are in cosmic dissaray because of word games. How does this equate for experience, universality, and subjectivity? Or for that matter any relation between subject and object that isn't just Kantian in nature.
The irony is you understanding exactly what I meant by "relativist schlop"
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u/SilasTheSavage Wonder and Aporia 3d ago
The point is simply that the words we use don't have some precise underlying meaning, which could be given in terms of basic properties and logical connectives. That doesn't mean that you can't communicate at all, since we are still in enough agreement as is necessary for communication. Even if there is no fact of the matter as to whether the term "wet" applies to water, since our use of the word is not sufficient to determine this, our use is certainly sufficient to settle that me right after a shower fits the term, with well enough certainty to make the communication we need possible.
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u/CalligrapherMain416 3d ago
Subjectivity is conditioned on the universality of conscious being. Please read Hegel
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u/WoodieGirthrie 3d ago
You can't just "read theory" someone with Hegel like a teenaged communist, expound on the point. Are you claiming that there is no semantic issue in philosophy ever? That no thoughts are ever elaborated in slightly different ways with slightly different, even contradictory, understandings of words by different philosophers? That seems a bit ridiculous.
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u/CalligrapherMain416 3d ago
Look man, if our ontologies are this at odds I cannot explain this in an EPIC reddit comment. I never stated any of that shit hahaha I'm telling you to read him because he is the source of my discomfort with your arguments.
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u/tooriel 3d ago
“if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it” is a nonsensical scenario, as any conceivable example of a forest would be made up of multiple symbiotic colonies or cultures of biological observers, and at the very least if we can identify something as a forest we have already observed it and with the proper analysis we could determine that sound had effected it physically in the past. A more elemental form of this old question might be “can structure exist without an observer” ...and he answer is quite simply no it can not, as at any point or time that structure has been identified it has been observed.
Structure cannot exist without the Observer, furthermore, structure cannot be verified or said to be relevant in any way unless it is shared with multiple perspectives.
https://tooriel.substack.com/p/saved-by-zero
Order is a property of conscious observation predicated on identity, another property of conscious observation. Order and identity are the same thing. Without an observer identity and order cannot exist.
https://tooriel.substack.com/p/whats-is-a-number-how-do-we-identify
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