Tractatus Notes 3: On Truth

The referent of knowledge is an infinite regress. Despite this, it can be useful. However, reality is by definition, pre-conceptual.

The form of verification does not then ground it in absolute truth, but rules of correctness. Truth for me is my relation to these rules, actualized in my conception of how conceptual relates to pre-conceptual truth.

Absolute truth is a contradiction in terms because truth is a quality of relation to something which transcends it. This is to say that there is a pre-conceptual that cannot be defined, as a necessity of truth.

Note 114

A caveat on the use of data or broad narratives for the basis of social action which affect individuals: the facts of the case in any problem are individual, requiring a targeted approach. Broad capacities can be built, but the interrelation of problems are individualised. Power can be defined as the level of control one has over the factors in this game of life, both in terms of internal and the external capacity to have them taken into consideration. The levelling role of the state ideally builds and extends capacity to solve problems.

Dualism

Experience is constituted by an intentional stance as structure, and content given through it. Nothing can be given without both structure and content. It is nonsensical to speak of one without the other. Questions about the intentional stance are questions about the space of possible structures; questions about the facts of experience the space of possible contents.


Dualism is a means of relating the intentional stance to its contents. However, the intentional stance is not itself given in content, but content is given through it.

So, how to reinterpret intentional stance and content in a way that transcends dualism? One suggestion is to divorce perceptual content from facts about the world. So the experience of an intentional stance does not suggest a subject agent, and the experience of content does not suggest the presence of external objects.

Another would be to suggest that the intentional stance itself is the content of a language game. This leaves space for other types of language games (phenomenology, Dennett).

Philosophical Investigations Note 1

Meaning is sited in use, which depends on the language game, given within forms of life.

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But family resemblance is not a substitute for definition, for one must be able to say why one form of family resemblance applies and another does not, and for this, definition is still required.

These definitions are matters of convention, not fact, so the absence of consensus of what categories are at the boundaries speak to different definitions, and not to the metaphysical "blurriness" of definitions, as is claimed.

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Is truth and falsehood only meaningful within the context of a language game? We can develop a philosophical language game where it can be used.

Think of truth as a function that ties all the dimensions of a game together, like the concept of competition that gives meaning to the rules of a chess game. A proposition would be a general form of a chess game, like "a board game where the goal is to retain certain, or a maximum number of pieces".

Tractatus Notes 2

"Philosophy represents the limit of what can be thought" - what does this mean? As an example, consider a solipsist and an anti-solipsist. One is wrong and another right. But perhaps both are right. Perhaps philosophical questions are defined as those in which answers are contradictory. Or rather those in which we cannot preclude a contradictory solution. So the question is meaningless.

Soft Power

Soft power is meta-power that defines the ideological and institutional frames within which power is defined, created, and reproduced. A specific form is Nye's definition of ideological suasion to achieve a given end, rather than the general form suggested here, a framework that is not predefined in terms of a given function. Nye's conception relates to agenda setting as power insofar as it fulfills the function that Nye describes. Our conception is essentially a Hegelian one.

Note 113

Democracy is a process of meta-government made explicit. It describes processes of governance as opposed to processes of government. This gives it durability compared to systems based on specific features of governments, although, underlying these are forms of governance which have been appropriated by the state, but not made explicit.

Note 112

The world as a game; solipsism as a specific form of coherentism. It just happens to be the self this time round as subject. If there is a question, there must be an answer. If there is truth, there is a questioner. There may be as many truths as there are questioners, but only one truth to one questioner.

The problem is not the problem, it is the solution.

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Subjectivity and objectivity are akin to structure and content. There can be no structure without content, and no content without structure; the former to concretize, the latter to relate.

Note 111

Why we have not reached the end of history: just as private conflicts can be regulated only by the action of the society in which the individuals live, so inter-societal conflicts can be regulated only by a society which comprises in its scope all others. (Durkheim) World history includes this process of incorporation by a world society which is not yet formed.