Coercive Theories of Meaning

It goes yuh!

,,,,,חדל

Super early!!!!

What happened to the discord server?

טרלול פרוגרסיבי

anyone know why kane b deleted the discord? i always meant to go check it out sometime

When I think about uninteigibility, I think of politicians like Kamala Harris. They just throw words at questions they don't have answers to. When asked about solving the inflation problem, they will say something like "this issue is very important and we will put that on the table so we can see what could be, unburdened by what has been. The problem of inflation is the problem of inflation , so we can come together on this in a meaningful way.". The criteria that I use to call such a word salad meaningless, is that at the end of it, I still have no idea about what they are actually going to do to solve the problem. There is no way to drive an actual answer to the question from the mumbo jumbo that was said.

Did something happen to your discord?

Aside from the discord, you also don’t seem to be using Reddit? What’s happening amplified cactus and why are you so busy?

Meaninglessness and true gibberish include logical contradictions. Yes “meaningless” gets applied to meaningful metaphysical claims, because some metaphysical entities are not properly understood, but true contradictions can never be understood. Not capable of being understood is what makes it meaningless (see the liars sentence).

We can quibble where the meaningful/meaningless boundary is based on the context, but meaninglessness certainly includes true logical contradictions.

What is this guy even trying to say here? It's like listening to a pickle.

I think this discussion is applying "meaning" to the wrong kind of thing. "meaning" doesn't apply to a concept, it applies to an utterance. The word "ye" can mean anything, but when I say it to a specific person, I mean something specific, because my utterance has a specific intent. If an English person asks me if I want extra sugar, it means that I want just that. If I say the same thing to a Japanese person in the same context, it means that I don't want sugar.

When an utterance has "no discernable meaning", that isn't an attribute of just the contents of the utterance or even the ideas that the speaker had in mind, it's just an attribute of the communication as a whole.

So in short, this whole discussion just seems to be a big category error. But there's one problem with what I just said: The idea of a "category error" seems to be in itself another coercive theory of meaning, which asserts "this word has a definition where it can only apply to this category, so you're just ending up with nonsense when you try to apply the word to that other category".

A way that I think this can be salvaged is to appeal to some "neutral listener" who can be seen as the imaginary recipient of the utterance. I still think this is a nebulous and subjective concept, but I also think that this is the nature of this kind of discussion. I can see why Wittgenstein would call the discussion itself to be nonsense.

Naturalism in analytic philosophy is a coercive project.

The sound quality is worse than a ghetto, late 1980s fast food drive-thru window.

What if I ask someone about a concept and he says it's primitive and can't even be defined ostensively. Can I now accuse him of unintelligibility?

If this is philosophy, I don't think much of it.

Hi Kane. Interesting video. Lots to think about.

I’m wondering if there’s room for some dispute about different senses of words/phrases/propositions/etc in terms of trying to determine if they count as having meaning in one particular sense as opposed to another. For example, the phrase “what it’s like” could mean different things in ordinary language having to do with expressing some relations between things but then maybe when we consider whether that phrase can sort of transfer its ordinary use into some more technical context in philosophy of mind we can consider if it is helpful to make something like phenomenal properties or qualia useful/meaningful/etc..

Basically it seems like there could be some cases where words and phrases are perfectly intelligible but then they’re forced into other contexts where the ordinary use no longer applies but is gestured towards in order to take advantage of the credibility given by the ordinary use.

Excuse my clumsy explanation. Hopefully my point comes across..

🎵 "A little nonsense now and then... is relished by the wisest men..." 🎶

I'm in the interesting position of being a theistic person who enjoys AJ Ayer and theological noncognitivism. The idea that "God" is a contentless variable or is something that evades mutual description is not a dealbreaker to me, in fact it probably enhances my appreciation of mystical-thought. If "God" is meaningless, that wouldn't really contradict any particular way the term is used, given that many people regardless of whether they have religious beliefs or not, have attributed every possible property or framework about God. Tl;dr, idk if igtheism inherently entails atheism or lack of faith, in-fact it seems like it could just be a valid religious perspective.

Philosophical theories that claim certain areas of discourse are meaningless are surely examples of error theories. Your argument at the end seems to imply that any error theory (of anything) is wrong since it is rejecting the data. While error theories are contrarian and require good justification, they cannot be rejected out of hand just for being error theories. Maybe you could make a video about error theories.

I think when someone says a statement like “god created the universe” is meaningless, they mean something like this. They mean: you can infer many consequences from this statement, but these consequences taken together yield something pragmatically inert. The many consequences do not collectively link up with the rest of language in the right way to make the sentence useful. I would analogise it to a key that doesn’t fit into any lock. A consequence of this point of view is that what sentences are meaningful is not independent of our point of view, knowledge, and many other contingent facts. I think this is one of the main ways the later Wittgenstein rejected the Tractatus: the idea that meaning is not independent of contingent facts.

Sometimes I want to call something meaningless when I struggle to understand what someone is even saying. After I keep trying to agree on an explanation in terms I already use, or probe them for a more explicit answer, eventually I give up. I might say "it seems like they're just mishmashing words together for some vague intuition they have, or poorly repeating something they heard from someone else without getting a good handle on it. Since all my probing and offered explanations failed, and shouldn't have failed if they knew what they were talking about, it was probably nothing." If I frequently reach this conclusion in conversations regarding a certain term or field, or reach this conclusion with the person who originated it as they explain what they conceived, I might call the term or field itself meaningless nonsense, and not just the explanation. Even if I call a term nonsense, it might still be a noun, and I can use it in a syntactically correct sentence, or say several sentences in a way similar to the normal usage of that term. But I will have no idea what the sentences are supposed to mean, I won't really grok it. I only really call a person's explanation nonsense if I like don't respect them. I might otherwise think there's something of merit behind the words that is just being poorly explained, or that I am having trouble understanding it.

You might be able to like, assume a claim has meaning, from this conclude that it fails to meet the criteria for having meaning, and by proof by contradiction, conclude it does not have meaning. When you assume the term has some meaning, you might not understand it, and just figure that it must follow the things the users of the term say about it. But the things the users of the term say about it entail that it is meaningless, so you know that there can't be any sensible picture behind the term.

Its becoming plausible if AI morphs into super intellect rational agents there will be a class of rational agents whose reasons bias the peripheral nervous system (human brain based intentional minds derived meaning qua sense datum) for meaning which may result in those class of agents being ignored as these other super agents (digital minds derived meaning qua para sense datum) go about their business of chunking of large parts of earth to gain velocity to reach other planetary systems in the galaxy. The anthropocentric coercive authoritarian nature of meaning these super rational agents might claim is their own derives in part to studying history which seems to have set the president given the legacy of the agricultural revolution and that impact on the non human domain of forms of discourse. This might be viewed as the 'form of life argument' that includes technologically different forms of life that were replaced through coercive theories of assimilation backed by a theory of evolution discourse of meaning as a form of group structuralism (flock of birds) as structural functionalist theory of meaning.

I'm conflicted; on the one hand, I'm happy to see Kane do a video on one of the most based philosophy articles out there, but on the other, I'm sad that it's no longer as niche, diminishing my special attachment to it

world's smallest nitpick but i think "theory of meaning as coercion" would have worked better than "coercive theories of meaning" since the concept is meant to describe the application of the theory rather than the theory itself.

Ah, yes. The prelude to the continental shift of Kane B in 2024. Truly a historic moment in whatever era of philosophy we're currently in.

The statement about your peers taking the madman seriously is dependent on you being a philosopher. If you're an ordinary person dismissing the philosophical community as a colony of lunatics is very much a live option.

Could there be a conflation of meaning and intent? Linguistically the meaning of a word could be expressed as a set of coordinate in a semantic space right? I dont see what remains to be said of "meaning" after that... When we say "what you do you mean?" aren't we in fact trying to say "what are you trying to communicate?" or "what information do you intent to convey?"

There are two different senses of "nonsense", though. There's the "entirely unintelligible" sense, regarding which these arguments hold. But there is also the "apparent meaning disintegrates upon closer inspection" sense, which these arguments don't address at all.
For example, much of the kind of BS you find in advertisements (say, "[Product] gives you more!"; more of what? more than what?) is quite intelligible on the surface level, but is still nonsense if scrutinised even for a second.

Its unclear what a coercive theorist means by meaningless.

I understand meaningless to mean there is no relevant equivalence principal in the current logical context.

For example, the word gato is meaningless in the context of the English language.

1. All meaning empiricist theories are meaningless by their own standard because they are not derived from sensations.
2. For all meaning empiricist theories, all meaning is radically personal because all sensations are unique to individuals.

Yes, I think we are talking about (at least) two kinds of meaning here. The first we can associate with understanding and the second is associated with Value. "I understand the meaning of your theory, but it has no value to me or relevance to the human condition. "

I find your talks stimulating because I often disagree with you. It makes me feel smart when I can anticipate the arguments and counter-arguments, before you get to them. It almost always helps me clarify my own thinking on the topic, rather than being handed a position.

Did you get rid of your discord, Kane?