I hope I will be forgiven for abusing the term “skepticism” here — for what I have in mind is not a perfectly innocuous “claims require evidence” epistemic prudence, but rather Cartesian skepticism.
According to the Cartesian skeptic, one can be perfectly certain about one’s own mental contents and yet also be in total doubt about what really corresponds to those mental contents. Hence she needs an argument that will justify her belief that there is any external reality at all, and that at least some of her mental contents can correspond to it.
There are many responses to Cartesian skepticism, and here I want to pick up on one strand in the pragmatist tradition that, on my view, cuts deepest into what is wrong with Cartesian skepticism.
I think that one cannot talk, in any intelligible sense, about justification in the first place without also committing oneself to a belief in other minds with whom one shares a world. (Not that I like that way of putting it — “a belief in other minds” is a much too intellectualistic interpretation of the myriad ways in which we experience the sentience of nonhuman animals and the sentience-and-sapience of other human animals.)
I say this because justification is itself a social practice — and one that we ourselves are taught how to participate in. (In the contemporary jargon, I’m a social externalist about justification.) For what is justification? It is a normative assessment of the evidence and reasons for one’s claims. But that normative assessment necessarily involves other rational beings like ourselves.
Think of it this way (taking an example from Wittgenstein): suppose I’m waiting for a train, and I want to know if it will be on time. I could look up the schedule. But suppose further that instead of doing so, I imagine the schedule: I look up the time in my imagination. Why isn’t that the same thing as looking up the actual schedule?
The answer is that there’s no constraint on how I imagine the schedule. It could be whatever I want — or subconsciously desire — it to be. But without constraints, there are no norms or rules at all.
Justification is much the same: it is a normative assessment of evidence and reasoning according to rules or norms, and there are no private norms. (Though Wittgenstein doesn’t put it this way, he might say that the very idea of a “private norm” is a category mistake — a category mistake on which Cartesian skepticism and several hundred years of subsequent philosophy have depended.)
So whereas the Cartesian skeptic thinks that we need to justify our belief in the world and in other minds, I think that this makes no sense at all. We cannot justify our belief in other minds and in the world because there is no such thing as justification at all in the first place without also accepting (what is indeed a manifest reality to everyone who is not a schizophrenic or on a bad acid trip) that there are other sentient-and-sapient beings other than oneself with whom one shares a world.
.A further point to make (and the subject of my current article-in-progress) is that justification and truth require both sentience and sapience.
The clue I’m following is Davidson’s triangulation argument: suppose there are two creatures who are each responding sensorily to some object in a shared environment. How is an onlooker supposed to know which object they are both responding to? If both creatures can compare its own responses with the responses of the other creature, then each can determine whether or not they are cognizing the same object.
The point here is that two (or more) sentient creatures — intentional beings that can successfully navigate their environments — can each have a grasp of objectivity if and only if each creature can
(1) represent the similarities and differences between its own embodied perspective and an embodied perspective occupied by another creature and
(2) be motivated to minimize discrepancies and eliminate incompatibilities between its own action-guiding representations and its action-guiding representations of the other creature’s action-guiding representations, and in the process
(3) attain the metacognitive awareness whereby it can take its own embodied perspective as an embodied perspective, and thereby be aware that how it subjectively takes things to be is not (necessarily) how things really are.
This process is facilitated by a shared language that allows each creature to monitor how each is representing the other’s representations and revise its own representations when incompatibility between representations is discovered. The function of norms — of discourse and of conduct — is to motivate each creature to revise its representations when incompatibilities are discovered.
One important implication of this argument is that sentient creatures cannot distinguish between their own subjective orientation on things and how things really are. They lack an awareness of objectivity and an awareness of their own subjectivity. By contrast, sapient creatures are aware of both objectivity — how things really are, as distinct from how they are taken to be — and subjectivity — how things are taken to be, as distinct from how they really are.
This line of thought also explains why I have been adamant that objectivity does not require absoluteness: sapient creatures can be aware of the difference between how things are and how they are taken to be, and thus be aware that they might have false beliefs, even though no sapient creature can transcend the biological constraints of its form of sentience.
I understand objective morality to consist, more or less, in empirical facts about human beings about the conditions that tend to promote successful cooperation. I’ll start a new thread on this topic so that this one doesn’t get derailed.
Says the guy who has no idea what it would mean to arrive at truth.
I have this general assumption: Your statements, taken together, form a coherent whole. I have been proven wrong on this many times. One more time will not make any difference.
Now, just to be sure, tell me what you take “objective” to mean with regard to morality. I am quite ready that you will not use the word “intersubjective”. I’m interested in what other word or phrase you will find which will mean precisely the same.
Yes, given a shared reality and given that we are more similar then we are different that there are shared truths that on average promote the success of the group.
I don’t disagree. But that’s not how some use the term, as you note.
And yet on balance I find KN interesting and you to be just another one of that type repeating the same tired old tropes as if they were sparkling and new.
Oh, you answered to OMagain,
So, morality is “successful cooperation”, nothing to do with conscience or uprightness or truth. So, you are saying that when you redefine morality so that there’s nothing moral in it and only happy social buzz is left, then you can say you are being objective.
Well, looks like I was not quite right. You take morality, make it to mean social interaction and you call that objective, in the sense that economics or sociology are objective. Along the way you have been left with no morality whatsoever.
This was a slightly different tack than I expected, even though I was right in that you permit no individual morality and ethics, only social or interactive. Still, I was totally wrong in having some hope that there would be anything moral in your definition of morality.
You see, morality consists of value judgements like right versus wrong. And objectivity (unless you have redefined this too) consists of something being (f)actual regardless what anybody thinks. In this sense, you were pointing in a moral direction when you said “successful cooperation” by giving a value judgement (namely, “successful”). But you failed to show how a cooperation can be judged successful or unsuccessful objectively, i.e. regardless what the participants of the cooperation themselves think.
Is it wrong to deny two people of the same sex the right to marry?
You have taken what KN said about “objective morality”, and interpreted that as about “morality”.
To me, that seems like a serious misreading.
By “God’s eye view”, I am asking if there a single, correct conceptual scheme in which to state “what is the case”.
OK, but I was asking not asking about truth, but about what you meant by the “what is the case” part of your statement:
“IMO, “arriving at the truth” roughly means coming to believe what is the case”.
Since I understand you to reject truth as depending on what we can determine, I assume you mean something more by “what is the case” than “what results of our best means of determining truth”.
(ETA: edited to correct misquote of “what is the case”)
I always consider the possibility that I might be misreading. That’s why took his statement apart and tried to see if there is any morality in it or any objectivity. I found there to be neither of those things. Feel free to show how at least one of them is there. Or show how “objective morality” apart from morality and objectivity is there.
Or show how you can have “objective morality” which has nothing to do with morality. Because you seem to be assuming that such a thing is possible, unless I am misreading you.
It appears to me that is what is going on.
Wait a minute. you just said that assuming a mind behind the universe was nonsense. There is a huge difference between nonsense and completely mistaken. To say something is nonsense is to say it’s not even wrong
Apparently we do need it to reconcile your epistemology with that of other people.
If there is no Mind behind the universe your understanding of epistemology is totally incompatible with that of the others expressed here that much is obvious. On the other hand if there is a mind behind it all the two approaches are just just different perspectives that are essentially equivalent.
If I understand your approach to knowledge you justify your beliefs by comparing your inferences with those of others.
It seems that if you want be justified in your epistemology either you must “know” everyone elses understanding here is wrong and you are alone correct or there is a mind behind the universe.
That’s quite a conundrum
peace
Consider these two situations:
(1) a pre-linguistic tribe of hunter-gathering hominids can tell poisonous plants from edible plants and can train children how to do so. I understand you to be saying that members of such a tribe know how to tell poisonous plants from non-poisonous, but that they do not know that a given plant is (say) poisonous. (In fact, I think you would even say such a tribe cannot hold beliefs, let alone knowledge).
(2) A modern-day chicken sexer can reliably tell the sex of chicks, but cannot introspect or explain how to do so. So again, I understand you would say the person knows how to tell chick sex, but not that a given chick is (say) male.
Is that fair?
I personally don’t find such a use of the word “knowing” to align with my intuitions.
I believe such differences of intuitions underly many borderline examples used in reliablilism versus evidentialism discussions in epistemology. Although that seems to have led to a philosophical stalemate, it does make it a fertile subject for experimental philosophy.
FWIW, your discussions of objectivity I find much more intuitively attractive.
That was addressed to KN. But I’ll give my answer.
I’m inclined to say that tribe members do not know that a particular plant is poisonous. But that’s because I doubt that they would have our concept of “poisonous”. They might well know which plants to avoid eating. Here, I take “know” to be “knowing how”.
I think these all mean basically the same thing.
‘P’ is true.
That p is the case.
P.
As we’ve discussed previously, the conceptual scheme question is hard. See the Putnam thing on Carnap and the Polish Logician. But however it comes out, it must be consistent with the equivalences above.
ETA: BTW, I guess it’s clear that I don’t agree with Neil’s remark that the ‘laws of thought’ only apply to formal languages–except maybe excluded middle. Without the other two, we might as well stay in bed (not bed).
In hopes people will actually read this twice.
To deny them is to affirm them.
I can definitely remember discussions about Quine and conceptual schemes/relativity, but not Putnam, whose ideas of conceptual schemes and conceptual pluralism I find more attractive.
I understand that post-IR Putnam had a much more restricted view of conceptual relativity (not pluralism), and at the end seems to have believed that it only arose in fundamental physics.
On that topic, I just finished Gefter’s Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn which explores that aspect of current speculative physics. She mostly report ideas of physicists, although the philosopher Ladyman is interviewed and convinces her that structural realism is part of the correct approach. The book has too much biography and of her personal speculation for my taste, but the interviews with the physicists and her non-mathematical explanations of the ideas make the book worthwhile for anyone interested topics like multiverses, the holographic principle, the anthropic principle, what is real from a speculative physics viewpoint.
So I understand you to say that knowing-that requires conceptual abilities which are impossible for non-linguistic creatures to possess. Is that fair? It reminds me of Davidson’s ideas.
I am pretty sure I will regret this because I won’t understand your answer, but I’ll throw caution to the winds and ask what you think propositional attitudes are. (I will guess you will not say they exist in the LOT sense because of your attitude to the related ideas of GOFAI.)
I currently prefer Dennett ‘s approach to interpretationism to Davidson’s on this question.
Well, the “behind” is kind of nonsensical, but I, for one am willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and say that you’re wrong. But KN is likely correct if he’s attributing your errors to confusions. The difference between being very wrong and spewing nonsense is often not a terribly bright line.
One of the difficulties in answering this is that you need criteria for the identity of conceptual schemes. For example, if scheme 1 is a proper subset of scheme 2 are they separate? Again, CAN one scheme be a proper subset of another or do the concepts share in the whole in such a way that if you scrape even some little thing from the outside edges of one, you’ve changed all the other concepts in it?
I’d probably say “unlikely” rather than “impossible.”
I don’t see concepts as requiring language. However, in practice, our concepts are much refined due to using them with language (and arguing about them).
My quick answer is that they are philosophers’ mistakes.
As a mathematician, I understand idealization. It can be useful to idealize. But I don’t think it works in philosophy. Most of what is important to human cognition and human behavior is in the ways that we violate the ideals.
You actually have to make those value judgements however.
Which means KN has to try much harder to prove morality objective. The problem is he seems to be talking about something completely different under the label “morality”.
I actually don’t endorse the distinction between knowing-how and knowing-that. I’ve become persuaded by Jason Stanley that this distinction is basically a transposition into epistemology of elitist denigration of manual labor — though a tradition of denigration that goes back to ancient Greek views about slavery. Stanley’s response is to say that all knowing how rests upon knowing that — to know how to swim to know some truths about swimming, etc.
I find this problematic, not least of which that it relies on some rather extraordinary views about Fregean senses. But Stanley is neither a pragmatist nor a naturalist, and I am both. So I prefer to think of all knowing-that as relying on knowing-how. After all, even assertions require knowing how to assert.
I think we might be able to transpose JTB into a knowing-how framework. (I’m sure there’s a vast literature on how to do this. I don’t know any of it, so this is all off-the-cuff.) We can start by thinking about “belief” a la Peirce and James (following Alexander Bain) as dispositions to behave. This is not quite right because we will want to capture Gendler’s distinction between beliefs and “aliefs”. So I would probably want to think about beliefs as dispositions to behave that can be attributed to the center of narrative gravity, or something like that — beliefs are the sorts of things that can play a role in the story we tell about who we are. And of course those narratives have a pragmatic function.
And those beliefs are justified if they conform to social norms of what counts as a good or good-enough reason for holding a belief, and true if they are roughly accurate portrayals of the world’s hidden causal & modal structure as implemented in reliable techniques and technologies. So I see JTB as a perfectly generic way of thinking about sapient knowledge even if we think that all sapient knowledge is (or relies on) knowing how.
Jenifer Case has a couple of papers on the later Putnam’s ideas on conceptual schemes which are on my list for detailed study. He commented very positively about them (“they helped me clarify my ideas” or words to that effect). You can find the second one and his comments on JSTOR, but I could only get at the first by using sci-hub*.
On the Right Idea of a Conceptual Scheme (Case, The Southern Journal of Philosophy (1997) Vol. XXXV)
THE HEART OF PUTNAM’S PLURALISTIC REALISM
Authors(s): Jennifer CASE
Source: Revue Internationale de Philosophie , Vol. 55, No. 218 (4), PUTNAM with his replies
——————–
* piracy-site-for-academic-journals-playing-game-of-domain-name-whac-a-mole
So in my example of the pre-linguistic tribe that had cultural “knowledge” of poisonous plants, I understand you would say it is not knowledge as it is not justified by our social norms. Or maybe you would say only linguistic social norms count towards justification, and not the (presumed by me ) non-linguistic behavior of tribe members in justifying and teaching such “knowledge”.
By the way, where does the intentional stance fit into your ideas, assuming it still does fit somehow. For example, if we have language, why can’t we use it to attribute knowledge/beliefs to non-linguistic behavior of animals by taking the intentional stance towards that animal.
Thanks, Bruce. I’ve never heard of sci-hub. When I check out their site, I only see six journals, all starting with the letter “A”. Incidentally, I’ve spent some money on papers from the Southern Journal of Philosophy, which is not in JSTOR. Neither is Journal of the History of Philosophy, and I just spent $40 this week on a subscription so I could download two old articles from there. Anyhow, it’d be nice to find a free access place. But I don’t see anything at sci-hub, unless I’m looking in the wrong place.
I agree that the concepts (and knowledge) that adult humans possess are different from those of infants and animals.
Well, that makes one of us (as applied to this context). But if I go with the Wiki defintion of idealization, it sounds somewhat like the intentional stance. So I will quit there.
Try here
http://sci-hub.cc/10.1111/j.2041-6962.1997.tb00822.x
I got there by navigating to sci-hub.cc, searching for the article title, answering the captcha (on a page with Russian text). You”ll likely have to respond to different captcha.
There is a sci-hub twitter https://twitter.com/sci_hub for the site where I think she posts latest URL in case one is blocked or taken over by the journal powers that be.
Thanks again!
In a sense, all knowledge is local. (Whether science is an exception is actually an issue I’m deeply conflicted about.) A group of pre-linguistic scavengers — early Homo — would still be able to transfer reliable information about their environment to their offspring, even if doing so didn’t count as JTB knowledge because they lacked discursive norms.
It’s not that they would lack knowledge or they only have “knowledge” or “schknowledge” — they really do know things, just as chimps and dolphins really do know things. It’s that they would have a qualitatively different kind of knowledge. As I am describing the case, they would not be able to ask of themselves if what they took to be true really was true. They not be able to doubt, or resolve doubt through deliberate inquiry. Their trial-and-error problem-solving would not be under their control — they couldn’t deliberately construct problematic scenarios in order to find out if their beliefs were really true or not.
Well, I find Dennett a bit funny here, because I find his refusal to commit to realism or anti-realism frustrating. I suppose I want to say that intentionality is real, and not just something we project onto the world by means of a “stance”. But I also think — here adopting a nice line of argument from Kukla — that what it is to adopt a stance is to adopt an embodied strategy of coping with the world, which has got to be causally efficacious.
Even though our best cognitive neuroscience shows that brains don’t represent the world in sentential structures, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t such things as beliefs or desires. (The eliminatiivist inference doesn’t work.) After all, we have millennia of poetry and politics amply demonstrating that pragmatically coping with each other using a vocabulary of propositional attitudes is sufficiently close to the hidden causal structures of affect and cognition as to be causally efficacious for the most part. Is there a better criterion of ontological commitment than that? Not for the pragmatist!
Likewise, non-human animals don’t have anything like pragmatic discursive statuses that institute sharing of neurocomputational representations by attaching propositional contents to those representations. They can’t pool their semantic and epistemic resources for collective problem-solving and improving cognitive grip on objective reality. But they do often engage with their environments in richly structured, highly complex combinations of cognition and affect such that attributing beliefs and desires to them is often very successful.
As a more general methodological remark: the task of the scientific image is to explain why the manifest image works as well as it does, and not just to explain how it doesn’t.
OK, I think I understand your position better, now.
It’s been a while since I looked at the Kukla paper you suggested, but as I recall she uses the physical nature of our stances to claim that they must be grappling with something physical in the subject that the stance is taken towards, hence the patterns picked out by the intentional stance also are causally efficacious and so they are real.
Clark outlines a different argument for a causally efficacious basis of those patterns in his Mindware. He claims the patterns reflect underlying scattered causes implemented in neural events. He justifies treating them jointly as a single cause by appealing the Woodward’s model of counterfactual causation for their joint causation as captured by the pattern attributed by the agent taking the intentional stance.
I have a vague idea that one could use PP to tie these approaches together: the agent attributing the intentional stance is building a generative model of the causal patterns in the subject of the stance through PP. Since PP emphasizes action as the goal of the models one could try to could relate these actions to to the active stances of Kukla’s version.
Perhaps that is related to something you had in mind.
I don’t know whether any sort of causal/descriptive model can be used to fully naturalize intentionality based only on the natural sciences, ie assuming one means a non-liberal type of naturalism. I know what Putnam says on the matter ( “no”).
That is a fascinating proposal, and one I’d like to explore in detail. Do you happen to have handy a page # for the stuff from Mindware you mentioned?
I have a different view from Putnam and most philosophers of mind — I actually think that the very distinction between liberal naturalism and non-liberal, “scientific” naturalism assumes the reducibility of the sciences to fundamental physics, or the reducibility of explanations to laws, or something like that — to demarcate the non-liberal or scientific naturalism from its liberal cousin.
This is most evident in McDowell — he assumes that the natural scientific conception of nature is “nature as the realm of law”. He is perfectly and emphatically explicit about this. It’s a 19th-century conception of what natural science does, and one that McDowell takes over from Kant and neo-Kantian philosophy without any recognition of how it has been abandoned by recent philosophy of science.
My preferred approach is to show that liberal naturalism is scientific naturalism, if we take our scientific naturalism from some prominent ideas in both contemporary science (esp. complexity theory, dynamical systems theory, etc) and contemporary philosophy of science (anti-reductionism, anti-unity of science). Thus I would set my version of naturalism at sharp odds with both the hardcore reductionism of Alex Rosenberg and the liberal naturalism of McDowell and the later Putnam.
That aside, I think that the prospects for naturalizing intentionality are extremely good. I gave it a shot in my book, and the versions by Rouse (in Articulating the World), Okent (in Rational Animals) and Clark (in Being There and Surfing Uncertainty) are much better. I’m actually very confident that we can get at a fully satisfactory naturalized theory of intentionality, with the right distinctions in place. That’s what I’m working on now.
Do either of you know if that Clark is Romane Clark’s son? I understand he is a professional philosopher–but “Clark” is a pretty common name.
Romane died in 2007.
Its the 2nd edition of Mindware that I have, and the argument I mentioned starts on page 57, ie section 3.2. It is just an outline, as I said; not a detailed argument.
Mario De Caro has a 2015 summary of his understanding of Putnam’s final position on liberal naturalism; see his Putnam’s liberal naturalism. As far as I can tell, Putnam’s ideas are fairly close to yours, perhaps even less reductive.
I understand Putnam relied on McDowell’s account of perception (a form of disjuntivism, I believe) in Putnam’s rejection of his previously held Internal Realism and, in particular, in rejecting his previous view that truth was verifiability under epistemically ideal conditions. However, I believe that by the the end he had moved closer to Block’s ideas on perception.
I have seen Putnam say kind things about Ruth Millikan, but I think he believes that intentionality can never be fully naturalized since it is baked into any scientific explanation. Or something like that (any thoughts, Walt?).
Bruce, I agree with everything in your penultimate paragraph about Putnam viz. Mcdowell, disjunctivism, Block, and internal realism. Don’t know enough about the other stuff to opine, though.
BruceS,
Thank you for the page reference!
I think where I differ from Putnam (and McDowell, and De Caro & Macarthur) is that I am much more persuaded by (1) the anti-reductionism of John Dupre, Nancy Cartwright, and Stephen Horst that there’s no threat of reducing biology to physics (even “in principle”), and (2) the new materialism coming out of Prigogine, Stuart Kaufman, Steven Shaviro, etc. that draws on Whitehead and Deleuze to emphasize nature as multiplicity of processes.
[Though I was initially quite taken with Ladyman and Ross’s Every Thing Must Go, I now see it as an extremely good but ultimately failed attempt to defend the Unity of Science thesis.]
Given those influences, I’m much more inclined to think that “scientific naturalism”, if done correctly, converges with “liberal naturalism”. We might take liberal naturalism as the explanandum and scientific naturalism as the explanans, if that makes any sense.
I do share Putnam’s and McDowell’s disjunctivism about perception, though I think Merleau-Ponty’s version is far superior. And I don’t think that Putnam ever worried enough about how to reconcile direct realism about perception with his continuing commitment to conceptual pluralism. I think that I was motivated to distinguish between discursive intentionality and somatic intentionality in large part to work through those problems myself, though I now do so in terms of sentience and sapience.
To be honest, this view has never made sense to me. It’s true that any scientific explanation — or any kind of intelligibility — presupposes intentionality. But why should that be an obstacle to naturalizing intentionality, which I understand to mean nothing more (or less) that explaining intentionality using concepts and models drawn from the relevant empirical sciences?
FWIW, I understood Putnam to be co-writing a book on perception with somebody the last couple of years. Dunno if it’s come out or if it soon will or if it never got off the ground.
W
If that’s what it means to naturalize intentionality, then intentionality will never be naturalized.
Science does not have an intentionality problem. It’s a philosophical problem, not a scientific problem. The concepts and models from the sciences will not be of much help.
I think it boils down to definitions. One could define “belief” such that language is required. One could also define “belief” as more or less separate from knowledge. I’m more interested in what’s really the case. It appears that some non-human animals have mental models of the world that are adjusted by experience. I don’t think calling that “knowledge” or “justified true (accurate) belief” is unreasonable. Whatever label one attaches to it, I think it suggests that language is not required for knowledge.
My apologies to everyone in this thread for my late replies. I was off the ‘net this weekend. It was glorious.
It means that real world actions have results that reinforce the support for the belief. Eating this fruit is safe. Eating that mushroom is not.
I don’t think so, but feel free to persuade me otherwise. I see no reason to believe P if that belief is not justified.
Very well put. That’s my view as well.
Leaving aside the possibility of financially motivated fraud, if the objective, empirical evidence supported that conclusion then his belief was justified. All knowledge is provisional and subject to change based on new evidence. That doesn’t make it not justified.
Whether or not we’re justified depends on the evidence. Social standards do not trump objective reality.
Again, you seem to be defining “justification” to require language. I don’t see any, um, justification for that. What makes a belief justified is whether or not it corresponds more or less closely to observed reality. It’s easier to communicate that with language, but non-human animals can get feedback through trial and error to hone their mental models of the world.
Why? If accurate knowledge about the real world is acquired, why does it matter how it is acquired?
So you are defining “justification” as requiring language.
Why not? Why is language required to create a mental model of the world, make predictions, and adjust that model based on feedback from reality? Corvids and some primates use tools and seem to have a theory of mind. How is their knowledge about the world not justified?
Ah, what’s really the case! Unique approach! KN, you should really consider thinking about THAT!
I have trouble in this thread distinguishing between “justified” and “supported by evidence”. When I think of justified, I think of theology and claims of certainty. When I think of evidence, my metaphor is a courtroom, and beyond reasonable doubt.
I think that philosophical discussions are suffering from computer envy.
Computers and programs deal in Boolean operations that are either correct or incorrect. The machine works, or it is defective. The program works as intended, or it has bugs.
Language is not at all like that. Language is full of hidden connotations and emanations and penumbras (to borrow from a famous court decision). It would seem that the work of philosophy is to expose these difficulties and attempt to work around them.
That seems to work when philosophers share worldviews, but doesn’t seem to work when worldviews collide.
Mostly on sites like this.
Maybe, but I see people using words as if they have some agreed upon meaning, or can be given an agreed upon meaning. And I see little evidence of agreement.
It goes a bit deeper than definitions. There doesn’t seem to be any foundation upon which definitions can be made.
It goes all the way to presuppositions
I know of a foundation that is up to the task 😉
peace