@dddmemaybe what are you talking about with this specific things at specific times? I was joking about his time wasted. It kills a joke to have to explain what is meant though.
I never took any philosophy courses when I was in college some 40+ years ago. I truly love seeing a bit of what I missed by watching these videos. My sincere thanks for taking the effort to pull these off!
Keep doing what you are doing. You're a fantastic professor. You present important topics in an interesting and engaging way. Among my favorite philosophy RUclips channels.
New Kaplan video day is a good day. Mate, you're my number one go-to teacher to fire me up when I get bogged down in my PhD candidature. I'm halfway through, and I'm going to have to include you in my dedications because you've been with me from the start and are honestly right up there among the most influential professors in my life. I link my undergrads up to your channel and on occasion I've let your videos do some of the heavy lifting in the classroom, because the students consistently respond positively to the material discussions afterwards.
Your videos give a deeper understanding of the everyday world we live in. They provoke a person think about and analyze their surroundings using critical judgment of the issue.
How long have I been missing out on these videos? My goodness, what a wonderful professor he is. I’m now going to lose hours of my life watching all his videos.
I love that I get to see you today. It's actually crazy that you would post a video on Mill right now because I just finished reading "The Subjection of Women."
Oh, man, don't leave me hangin' Dr. Kaplan! I'm not used to watching these as they are produced. I've been spoiled by such a rich back catalog to explore. Please, keep 'em coming.
He writes normally on his side of the glass, which would appear backwards on our side of the glass, but his phone is in selfie mode, which mirrors the image and makes the text appear normal again. 🤓
5:05 "Now is when things get interesting." Except they don't. I watched to the end, just because Prof Kaplan has such an engaging style. Must I watch the next video, or more, to find out why this matters? Will I? Not likely.
I really appreciate it when a short talk like this gives me some insight into how my own mind works. My memory for names is just terrible. I will generally say that it;s the fault of them being proper nouns and just leave it at that. But to learn that it's due to the connotative vs non-connotative distinction which lets me easily retain the link & association of what someone does to their identity. e.g. the actor that played Dr. David Banner in "The Incredible Hulk" and played the father in "The Courtship of Eddie's Father", yet I cannot *instantly* recall his character name, or the name of the actor, even though I know it's Bill Bixby.
Looking forward to the next lecture, because clearly there's still *some* attribute about Frank which we're identifying with. We're not just applying labels to empty vessels with no informational content, or we wouldn't be able to preserve the meaning of what we're labeling.
Then my doubt Is: Electron are the fundamental particles it does not made up of anything, if we name a electron as 'AK' the it is "Non Collective" I think.
The world doesn't know it yet, but your're one of the greats, you'll live atop the mount Rushmore of education alongside Bill Nye, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Vsauce, Veritasium, Mark Rober. I genuinely really love and appreciate your content an enjoy it, though I am a new subscriber.
The collective thing is an important distinction because the head of the regiment can leave the regiment and the regiment will still be the regiment, bit (a) the head of the cat cannot decide to leave the cat, and (b) it it does it will not be a cat any more. So there is a difference. Mill was not confused, he was trying to prevent confusions for people thinking of collectives as if they are cats :-)
Bits of the cat are constantly leaving the cat and being replaced with new bits of cat. Anyone with a cat will know this and regularly have to vacuum up the bits that are collecting in the corners of their home. 😉
@@dogcarman The bits constantly leaving the cat, are not deciding to leave the cat. And of course they cannot join back the cat that dropped them or some other cat. That is, the cat is dropping them, or they are are dropped off from the cat. Their 'cat-ness' is an attribute of the singular cat which is why you recognize them as having been part of a cat at an earlier time.
I thought so too - glad someone agrees. I think that if we start thinking of singular things as 'really' just collectives of smaller things then we will run into a regress of atomising parts of wholes into their own wholes and then atomising those wholes ad infinitum.
@@dimitristsagdis7340 What about getting a haircut? If you think of a human being as one singular thing, and you agree that my hair is a part of me, what does the fact that I regularly choose to get rid of parts of myself mean for this distinction between collective and non-collective? If the two criteria for collectivity are like you say A) a part can decide to leave the whole and B) the whole will remain intact if a part leaves, then getting a haircut definitely fulfils B, and may not fulfil A. But if there was a rule in all regiments where someone who leaves can't ever come back, would regiments no longer be collectives?
@@patrickbyrne9509 the hair parts or other bits of you cannot get together and reconstitute you. The members of a collective can. The members of a regiment can decide to leave and form a new regiment. There are unique properties in collectives and that's why they need to be a separate category otherwise if one treats them as a cat they will run into difficulties of logic, language, ontology.... Feel free to try.
9:31 North Carolina is actually a pretty bad example for this argument right? Since it indicates it being North of something. In this case South Carolina. Hmm should've watched further before commenting. Still not exactly sure of that explanation though. North Carolina without South would just be Carolina, but it would still be Northern. Maybe the North Pole? It's still the North Pole with or without the existence of the South Pole.
I learned all this in language class in elementary school. (Not English-English is not my native language. But these concepts-common nouns, proper nouns etc.-exist in all languages.) I, however, had no idea it had so much 19th century philosophy behind it. I also had no idea that language creators had put so much thought into it. I assumed that languages, you know, just evolved, based on needs. BTW, in high school physics, I learned that certain so-called "fundamental" particles-such as photons, quarks, leptons etc.-are not composed of anything smaller. So JS Mill might've been right about the "non-collective" after all, even though he didn't know about the Standard Model back then.
Earned all of this language in LATIN and that Latin, Greek and other ancient languages are this way . Most schools ,especially in the USA haven't caught up to this or the physics.
14:49 This is not just "some guy + information", it's neither the guy, nor information. The connotative name is non-connotative when referred not to the guy but to a position, so "The Chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro" is a title to a position, not to a concrete guy + some info. If you seek the guy because, you owe him money personally and you need to return it, you seek his name, if you have to resolve some matters that only the Chancellor will resolve, you'll seek ANYONE who is in this position.
I'm looking forward to the lecture(s) about adjectives & adverbs, to see if Kaplan recognizes that nearly all of them are vague shorthands that actually allude to a relative comparison to an unstated alternative. For example, the relative comparison in "X is bigger than a breadbox" isn't vague because the alternative (breadbox) is stated, but the adjective in "X is big" is vague because the compared alternative is unstated. (Breadbox? Trolleycar? Mountain? Planet? Galaxy?) In the game Twenty Questions, the classic question "is it bigger than a breadbox" is very useful, but the answer to "is it big" would have no clear meaning. The general problem is that adjectives, adverbs, and many other kind of words create false dichotomies when there's more than one possible (unstated) alternative... and usually there is more than one possible alternative. Consider an "approval" poll in which 60% say they "disapprove of" Joe Biden, or consider a "right track / wrong track" poll in which 80% say "we're on the wrong track." Those options are false dichotomies, and such polls misleadingly lump together people who have opposite preferences. Someone who says he "disapproves" of Biden could mean he prefers Trump over Biden, or it could mean he prefers Bernie Sanders over Biden, or it could signal disappointment that Merrick Garland hasn't yet indicted Trump, etc. Someone who says "wrong track" could mean he prefers a track further to the left, or it could mean he prefers a track further to the right. Suppose 45% prefer a track further to the left and 35% prefer a track further to the right... that would lead to 80% saying "wrong track," which would create the false impression that the current track is unpopular. But that's a faux majority, because 65% (45%+20%) prefer the current track over a track further right and 55% (35%+20%) prefer the current track over a track further left. These two head-to-head majorities mean the current track is actually the most popular. Head-to-head majorities when pairs of alternatives are compared are the meaningful majorities (and all of the head-to-head majorities can be counted by a single round of voting or by a poll in which each voter expresses his/her order of preference).
5:51 A cat is not a 'collective thing' in quite the same way as a regiment is though. A cat is not just a collection of molecules but a collection of molecules arranged in a very specific way. A random arrangement of those molecules would not generally be in the form of a cat. A regiment, on the other hand, is a collection of soldiers regardless of how they are physically arranged.
well, no, the soldiers can't be arranged any arbitrary way, can they? If one soldier is on the moon, another dead, and a third at the bottom of the ocean, how could you call them a regiment? Hell, how do you even know they're "soldiers"? That's just yet another collective thing. I think the real counter argument would be to say "but why do I have to accept your reductive move?" In other words, we're not obligated to define a cat in ways of its molecules if we don't want to. And no conclusions drawn from doing that have to be accepted.
@@Google_Censored_Commenter I don't think Kaplan was defining a cat as a collection of molecules. It's something that is true of a cat, but it's not a definition. Also, I think if a collection of soldiers that are widely dispersed in the way you mention had all been assigned to a particular named regiment (an institutional fact), I would still be happy to call it a 'regiment', even if some were dead. Why not?
@@cavalrycome Well it just doesn't suit the common definition of a regiment. No one speaks of dead members of a set as still being part of it. You might as well just define them as having human dna, if you don't care about any other physical facts. But guess what, human dna is still organized a particular way we can identify. Here's another way of thinking about it, every collective thing, is just multiple instances of individual things, which you already agree are defined by some arrangement of molecules, or whatever other physical facts we identify them by. So to say the collective thing doesn't care about the details of the individual things inside the collective, doesn't work, because it's those details that made us group them together in the collective to begin with.
@@Google_Censored_Commenter In some cases, people do still refer to dead soldiers as members of a regiment. For example, I can imagine it being quite natural for a soldier in the immediate aftermath of a disastrous battle saying something like "Half of our regiment is dead!" Some time later, those soldiers who have been registered as dead with the relevant institutions will more naturally be referred to as former members of the regiment. But even if we accept your notion that they immediately cease to be members of the regiment at the point of death, I actually don't see how that supports your initial point. Dead people can't be members of regiments so a soldier being dead isn't a fact about the physical arrangement of soldiers in a regiment. To use the terminology of sets, I regard a regiment as a set where the elements are restricted to a particular type of thing, namely soldiers. Sets are unordered so {A, B, C} and {A, C, B} are exactly the same set. Cats are more akin to tuples, which do have an ordering so (A, B, C) and (A, C, B) are two distinct tuples. A DNA sequence is also like a tuple because the order matters and because the same gene will often appear more than once on the same chromosome.
@@cavalrycome all you're doing is kicking the can down the road. Definition of a soldier is no different than that of a cat. They have traits that define them. So to say a collection of soldiers somehow isn't similar to the cat, is incoherent.
These videos are great. So well explained. I hope your boss is happy with your description of him. BTW, your spelling (admittedly while writing backwards) is a bit off, e.g., "Chanellor".
Skip Kripke. And Davidson. And Quine. And Montague. And Lewis, etc. It's all not worth your time. Start learning about cognition & cognitive science, and skip the talking heads. Just an advice from an old guy who spent way too much time (many years) on trying to understand the word flood of these self-satisfied word producers.
Thank you for this informative video. I was struggling with the mathematical theory of categories and why it was replacing the set theory through excluding the notion of element. I feel Stuart Mill ideas provide some light as for why it was necessary.
I think I get the gist. That if Frank Gillian Jr. was a meter stick named jones gardening , holding a glass of wine, then in all possible worlds hesperus is necessarily phosphorus (I might have read ahead)
Just watched your Russell Paradox video. I have a question…. The sets you described (cats, dogs, LeBron) are all positive integers. There are a real number of cats, dogs, and one LeBron. You also said there can be a null set, equivalent to zero. So my question is…. Can you extend the math into negative numbers? You have positive numbers and zero. Can you have a negative set? And what would a negative set look like? If you have a set that says, “Anything that is NOT in a set is in this set,” would that be a negative set? And, if something is not in a set, but now becomes part of this set, must it now be tossed out because it has become part of a set? Is that another paradox? If “everything in the Universe” is a set, can anything be “not part of a set.” Should another rule of sets be: Sets may only consist of positive integers
Surely Mill is right about collective names. The subject of a proper name, say Garfield, may be assembled from cells, or strokes of the pen, or whatever; but having been assembled into a 'whole system', an entity with its own logic, it has an identity (a cat), different from that of a bunch of cells (or strokes of the pen) which might be arranged to form a dog, and (being a complex entity, a cat, rather than a simple entity like an atom) having in addition an individual identity denoted by 'Garfield'. A thing, an entity, will always be composed of parts but these parts have a governing system logic which makes that entity what it is. And that is what we give the name to, surely? We can't go around referring to things as 'bunches of cells'. It fails to communicate what is most important, identity.
I was surprised that with all this there has been nothing about the distinction between substantive (or concrete) nouns like "staple" versus reifications (or abstract nouns) like "system". There obviously is an overlap with the non-collective versus collective distinction, and even "suffers" from a similar gray area problem, but I think it is not completely the same. It may be seen as a different axis where for some reason a certain type of terms seems to happen to line up on both these axes ("city"), but there are other terms that don't ("bicycle", "surprise").
At 5:51 isn't this assuming ontological anti-realism? In other words, couldn't an ontological realist argue that there is indeed some "Garfield-ness" above and beyond just a Garfield-wise collection of subatomic particles (if we assume some non-fictional cat named Garfield)?
I also think, mill was wrong with connotative names being tossed away for an individual (or a collective) right as the description no longer applies to them. For example if I say: "Barack Obama, the president of the US..." I don't think that many people will look confused even though it's (technically) wrong and no longer a description of him. Of course it can be argued, that connotative names can become non-connotative names over time, but then it muddies the whole thing, mill wanted to show imo. Other examples: People might refer to someone who retired still by their job-title (similar to obama). Or if a sports team wins a championship and then loses it, they might still be referred to as "the champions".
When you say _"Barack Obama, _*_the_*_ president of the US,"_ it's pretty obvious to most people that you mean _"Barack Obama, _*_a former_*_ president of the US."_ However, if someone says _"Donald Trump, the president of the US,"_ what do you think they mean? 😜
Wait. Based on quantum mechanics there are things are not collections of things. They are the base. That was the original meaning for the word atom. I mean yeah sure that means that there are a specified amount of stuff that this applies to but there are so we must include them. So maybe Mill wasn't wrong on that regard. They are just really limited.
I guess Mills never considered that Augustus and Caesar became connotative proper names by the significance of their attribution. Emperors of Rome would adopt those names to the rest of their name and change other parts of their original name to reflect the prestige of their stature. The names and the title/job converged. The arbitrary label became a specific description to denote the most powerful men of the Roman Empire at given time after the deaths of Caesar and Augustus.
You said that Mill was wrong about non-collective names, that actually all things are collections of other things. Philosophically speaking, is it possible for something to be irreducible? Say a quark, for instance? Can anything be singular?
I conculde from the video that Jeffrey wants to be named not only by the non-connotatibe name "Jeffrey Kaplan", but also by the Connotative name "The Chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro". But, of which Jeffrey am I talking about, asks Frege? Well, I'll have to watch the next video
A collective can have properties at the collective level like the flag of a regiment, or at the member level, like the color of the uniforms. If the properties at the collective level are more important, we can think of it as a non-collective thing, e,g. a cat. If the properties at the member level seem more important we can think of it as a collective thing, e.g. a regiment,
I think Mill is a little off when he describes both the Sun and day as “facts,” i.e. things that exist in reality, independently and objectively and so on. The Sun is a fact in this sense, sure. But day is not objectively real. Obviously the earth turns into and away from the sun’s light in cycles, but that the lighted portion of these constitutes some separate entity, the fact called “day,” does not seem true to me. Idk if you will address this in this video. I’m less than two minutes in. Just a thought I had.
Connotative names showing probability of certain persone to have certain obligations, accidentally. Non-connotative just labeling one from his holistic perspective. JS Mill was definitely right.
A cat may be a collection of bones, muscle and ligaments but remove any of those parts and it is no longer a cat - it is at best a dead cat. However, remove one soldier from a regiment and it is still a regiment. So is there still no distinction between collective and non-collective nouns?
A football team without a goalkeeper stops being a football team - according to the rules, which specify that one is needed. Does this mean a football team is not a collective name?
@@Joald : I disagree, because I know from experience that a shorthanded softball team is listed in the results as losing by forfeit, and their opponent is listed as winning. Being able to play without forfeiting isn't essential... consider a team practicing on the day before a match, and their goal-keeper leaves practice early... they're still a football team even though they aren't playing in an official game that day.
@@brothermine2292 i guess that depends on how broadly you consider a football team, what I meant was "a group of people collected at a given for the express purpose of playing football". In any case, it is not hard to come up with at least a synthetic example of a group of people, that has a name, but removing one person from a group necessitates that the name stops applying, so the point still stands.
There is/was a British character actor who is/was the spitting image of Mill but I can't remember his name and google has an acquired brain injury these days and isn't what it used to be.
Consider John Smith. I do not know any people of that name. To what does “John Smith” point; what is the meaning of the word? The class of all people with this name? I know it’s a name because of English capitalization rules ( that’s not the case in German, in which every noun is capitalized), but what is its meaning when I cannot identify single object that attaches to this name? We could reasonably suppose that most proper names started out with an explicit meaning, for example, “Sorry your horse threw a shoe, I will show you the way to local smith”. Eventually, the professional name of that smith becomes a surname. Many names once had a meaning that became obscured through language drift, eg, Peter once meant “stone”.
Anything that can function as the subject of ones focus must have a name. So can we have a name for that which does not exist, for that which we have no awareness of, have no knowledge of? If that be not so we must question what is possible with the word “exist”, which of a necessity cannot be limited to that which is physical, that which is only perceived by the five senses. For we also perceive with the mind’s imagination, the mental faculty of conceptualization, the sixth sense as it were that which is not tangible yet is of Reality.
Both Frank Gilliam Jr. and North Carolina imply attributes. Mr. Gilliam Jr. has or had a father with the same name. North Carolina is above South Carolina on a map.
I have to take several philosophy courses at college back in the seventies. I found them to be the most boring hours! I wish I had Dr. Kaplan as I would have gotten much more out of them.
i feel like the distinction between collective and non collective names is less about what is physically there, like the collection of muscles and cells of a cat making it a collective name. I think the collective name is more about what you're referring to. take "the regiment has walked a mile" the message is "the humans that form the regiment have walked a mile", compare that to "the cat has walked a mile" the intended messege is not that "the bones and muscles of the cat have walked a mile" its just that "the cat has walked a mile" im not great at explaining so i hope that makes sense
I disagree with your argument that a collective name is not a meaningful distinction. Yes a "cat" may be though of as referring to a collection of items but there are 2 limitations. First of all, what exactly is a cat a collection of? Limbs, organs, molecules? There is no well defined unit in this collection. Additionally, we don't think of the cat as collective but rather as an individual. Instead we view the components as being subsumed into the individual whole. Whereas a regiment is clearly a collective of soldiers and has no meaningful identity other than the individual soldiers which compose the regiment.
I cannot believe that John Stuart Mill fell for such a basic mistake. He knew that names are given because of certain reasons. Then he should have realized that even though the names would still be names if those reasons are no longer true, the names would still signify that there once was a reason that was true. And this fact is not merely pedantic, because "there once was a reason that was true" is an idea that is used as justification in many ideologies. To nationalists, "there once was a reason that explains why you have certain cultural markers now, which belongs to the nation" can justify you having an obligation to be loyal to the nation. To social contract theorists, "there once was a reason that explains why you are participating in society, which implies tacit consent" can justify you having an obligation to obey the social contract. So, this fact is not merely pedantic, but the justification used by many ideologies to deeply affect the lives of those who have to interact with said ideologies. As long as you have a name, there are reasons behind that name being given, and ideologies can construct justifications using those reasons, even if you would still have the name if those reasons are no longer true.
My day is made when this man post a video
I know, right? All his time wasted teaching actual classrooms
My satisfaction is immeasurable and my day is made !
@@IHaveaPinkBeard I wish this was sarcastic. There are specific things at specific times. Think again.
@dddmemaybe what are you talking about with this specific things at specific times?
I was joking about his time wasted. It kills a joke to have to explain what is meant though.
I’m still catching up on all of your content. Thanks for making these videos for public consumption you are truly a gold nugget in a pile of slag.
Too often, the ability to teach well is overlooked and undervalued. I appreciate your skill and passion. Keep it up, homie.
I never took any philosophy courses when I was in college some 40+ years ago. I truly love seeing a bit of what I missed by watching these videos. My sincere thanks for taking the effort to pull these off!
Keep doing what you are doing. You're a fantastic professor. You present important topics in an interesting and engaging way. Among my favorite philosophy RUclips channels.
New Kaplan video day is a good day.
Mate, you're my number one go-to teacher to fire me up when I get bogged down in my PhD candidature. I'm halfway through, and I'm going to have to include you in my dedications because you've been with me from the start and are honestly right up there among the most influential professors in my life. I link my undergrads up to your channel and on occasion I've let your videos do some of the heavy lifting in the classroom, because the students consistently respond positively to the material discussions afterwards.
man i'm up here doing just that, getting myself some inspiration so i can go back to the small daily work we have to do..
Your videos give a deeper understanding of the everyday world we live in. They provoke a person think about and analyze their surroundings using critical judgment of the issue.
How long have I been missing out on these videos? My goodness, what a wonderful professor he is. I’m now going to lose hours of my life watching all his videos.
I love that I get to see you today. It's actually crazy that you would post a video on Mill right now because I just finished reading "The Subjection of Women."
@@fukpoeslaw3613 where is the connection/proof to jesus?
Oh, man, don't leave me hangin' Dr. Kaplan! I'm not used to watching these as they are produced. I've been spoiled by such a rich back catalog to explore. Please, keep 'em coming.
Great video, just went through this material in Principles of Logic at university, it was a great class, I loved it. Great video as always!!!
Great video- I tried reading Mill's paper in advance and had real difficulty visualizing his meaning on regiments, which you explain so clearly!
your skill to write backwards is impressive. i would never know it was backwards if seen on its own.
He writes normally on his side of the glass, which would appear backwards on our side of the glass, but his phone is in selfie mode, which mirrors the image and makes the text appear normal again. 🤓
I'm not going to lie, this is your only video as of yet that I cannot fully grasp... but I'm always impressed by your content!
Oh you don't believe in John Stuart Mill's theory of names? Name every single cat
I love how the first 2 names that immediately came to Jeffrey's mind to give examples of proper names were "Abraham" and "Sally"
5:05 "Now is when things get interesting." Except they don't. I watched to the end, just because Prof Kaplan has such an engaging style. Must I watch the next video, or more, to find out why this matters? Will I? Not likely.
He died in 1873, but wrote this essay in 1881? Pretty impressive. I forgive him his mistake.
By 1881 he was a bit past his prime, to be sure.
I really appreciate it when a short talk like this gives me some insight into how my own mind works. My memory for names is just terrible. I will generally say that it;s the fault of them being proper nouns and just leave it at that. But to learn that it's due to the connotative vs non-connotative distinction which lets me easily retain the link & association of what someone does to their identity. e.g. the actor that played Dr. David Banner in "The Incredible Hulk" and played the father in "The Courtship of Eddie's Father", yet I cannot *instantly* recall his character name, or the name of the actor, even though I know it's Bill Bixby.
Looking forward to the next lecture, because clearly there's still *some* attribute about Frank which we're identifying with. We're not just applying labels to empty vessels with no informational content, or we wouldn't be able to preserve the meaning of what we're labeling.
Then my doubt Is:
Electron are the fundamental particles it does not made up of anything, if we name a electron as 'AK' the it is "Non Collective" I think.
The world doesn't know it yet, but your're one of the greats, you'll live atop the mount Rushmore of education alongside Bill Nye, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Vsauce, Veritasium, Mark Rober. I genuinely really love and appreciate your content an enjoy it, though I am a new subscriber.
This dude videos lowkey entertaining and educational as fuck bro top class frfr
9:25 in the context of this argument by John Stuart Mill, would the proper name “Superman“ be considered a connotative name?
your videos are crazy good. pls never stop doing youtube
Please keep on going man
The collective thing is an important distinction because the head of the regiment can leave the regiment and the regiment will still be the regiment, bit (a) the head of the cat cannot decide to leave the cat, and (b) it it does it will not be a cat any more. So there is a difference. Mill was not confused, he was trying to prevent confusions for people thinking of collectives as if they are cats :-)
Bits of the cat are constantly leaving the cat and being replaced with new bits of cat. Anyone with a cat will know this and regularly have to vacuum up the bits that are collecting in the corners of their home. 😉
@@dogcarman The bits constantly leaving the cat, are not deciding to leave the cat. And of course they cannot join back the cat that dropped them or some other cat. That is, the cat is dropping them, or they are are dropped off from the cat. Their 'cat-ness' is an attribute of the singular cat which is why you recognize them as having been part of a cat at an earlier time.
I thought so too - glad someone agrees. I think that if we start thinking of singular things as 'really' just collectives of smaller things then we will run into a regress of atomising parts of wholes into their own wholes and then atomising those wholes ad infinitum.
@@dimitristsagdis7340 What about getting a haircut? If you think of a human being as one singular thing, and you agree that my hair is a part of me, what does the fact that I regularly choose to get rid of parts of myself mean for this distinction between collective and non-collective?
If the two criteria for collectivity are like you say A) a part can decide to leave the whole and B) the whole will remain intact if a part leaves, then getting a haircut definitely fulfils B, and may not fulfil A. But if there was a rule in all regiments where someone who leaves can't ever come back, would regiments no longer be collectives?
@@patrickbyrne9509 the hair parts or other bits of you cannot get together and reconstitute you. The members of a collective can. The members of a regiment can decide to leave and form a new regiment. There are unique properties in collectives and that's why they need to be a separate category otherwise if one treats them as a cat they will run into difficulties of logic, language, ontology.... Feel free to try.
9:31 North Carolina is actually a pretty bad example for this argument right? Since it indicates it being North of something. In this case South Carolina.
Hmm should've watched further before commenting. Still not exactly sure of that explanation though. North Carolina without South would just be Carolina, but it would still be Northern. Maybe the North Pole? It's still the North Pole with or without the existence of the South Pole.
This is the second of your videos that I watch (actually I haven't yet finished the first one, about numbers). It seems to me you really like Le Bron!
I learned all this in language class in elementary school. (Not English-English is not my native language. But these concepts-common nouns, proper nouns etc.-exist in all languages.) I, however, had no idea it had so much 19th century philosophy behind it. I also had no idea that language creators had put so much thought into it. I assumed that languages, you know, just evolved, based on needs.
BTW, in high school physics, I learned that certain so-called "fundamental" particles-such as photons, quarks, leptons etc.-are not composed of anything smaller. So JS Mill might've been right about the "non-collective" after all, even though he didn't know about the Standard Model back then.
Earned all of this language in LATIN and that Latin, Greek and other ancient languages are this way . Most schools ,especially in the USA haven't caught up to this or the physics.
14:49 This is not just "some guy + information", it's neither the guy, nor information. The connotative name is non-connotative when referred not to the guy but to a position, so "The Chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro" is a title to a position, not to a concrete guy + some info. If you seek the guy because, you owe him money personally and you need to return it, you seek his name, if you have to resolve some matters that only the Chancellor will resolve, you'll seek ANYONE who is in this position.
I'm looking forward to the lecture(s) about adjectives & adverbs, to see if Kaplan recognizes that nearly all of them are vague shorthands that actually allude to a relative comparison to an unstated alternative. For example, the relative comparison in "X is bigger than a breadbox" isn't vague because the alternative (breadbox) is stated, but the adjective in "X is big" is vague because the compared alternative is unstated. (Breadbox? Trolleycar? Mountain? Planet? Galaxy?) In the game Twenty Questions, the classic question "is it bigger than a breadbox" is very useful, but the answer to "is it big" would have no clear meaning.
The general problem is that adjectives, adverbs, and many other kind of words create false dichotomies when there's more than one possible (unstated) alternative... and usually there is more than one possible alternative. Consider an "approval" poll in which 60% say they "disapprove of" Joe Biden, or consider a "right track / wrong track" poll in which 80% say "we're on the wrong track." Those options are false dichotomies, and such polls misleadingly lump together people who have opposite preferences. Someone who says he "disapproves" of Biden could mean he prefers Trump over Biden, or it could mean he prefers Bernie Sanders over Biden, or it could signal disappointment that Merrick Garland hasn't yet indicted Trump, etc. Someone who says "wrong track" could mean he prefers a track further to the left, or it could mean he prefers a track further to the right. Suppose 45% prefer a track further to the left and 35% prefer a track further to the right... that would lead to 80% saying "wrong track," which would create the false impression that the current track is unpopular. But that's a faux majority, because 65% (45%+20%) prefer the current track over a track further right and 55% (35%+20%) prefer the current track over a track further left. These two head-to-head majorities mean the current track is actually the most popular. Head-to-head majorities when pairs of alternatives are compared are the meaningful majorities (and all of the head-to-head majorities can be counted by a single round of voting or by a poll in which each voter expresses his/her order of preference).
Excellent beginning about Names.
I'm really looking forward to this.
Can't wait for the planet Venus and the present king of France to show up.
Brilliant and informative video, excellent Job
Waiting for Frege Russel to Kripke video
5:51 A cat is not a 'collective thing' in quite the same way as a regiment is though. A cat is not just a collection of molecules but a collection of molecules arranged in a very specific way. A random arrangement of those molecules would not generally be in the form of a cat. A regiment, on the other hand, is a collection of soldiers regardless of how they are physically arranged.
well, no, the soldiers can't be arranged any arbitrary way, can they? If one soldier is on the moon, another dead, and a third at the bottom of the ocean, how could you call them a regiment? Hell, how do you even know they're "soldiers"? That's just yet another collective thing.
I think the real counter argument would be to say "but why do I have to accept your reductive move?" In other words, we're not obligated to define a cat in ways of its molecules if we don't want to. And no conclusions drawn from doing that have to be accepted.
@@Google_Censored_Commenter I don't think Kaplan was defining a cat as a collection of molecules. It's something that is true of a cat, but it's not a definition.
Also, I think if a collection of soldiers that are widely dispersed in the way you mention had all been assigned to a particular named regiment (an institutional fact), I would still be happy to call it a 'regiment', even if some were dead. Why not?
@@cavalrycome Well it just doesn't suit the common definition of a regiment. No one speaks of dead members of a set as still being part of it. You might as well just define them as having human dna, if you don't care about any other physical facts. But guess what, human dna is still organized a particular way we can identify. Here's another way of thinking about it, every collective thing, is just multiple instances of individual things, which you already agree are defined by some arrangement of molecules, or whatever other physical facts we identify them by. So to say the collective thing doesn't care about the details of the individual things inside the collective, doesn't work, because it's those details that made us group them together in the collective to begin with.
@@Google_Censored_Commenter In some cases, people do still refer to dead soldiers as members of a regiment. For example, I can imagine it being quite natural for a soldier in the immediate aftermath of a disastrous battle saying something like "Half of our regiment is dead!" Some time later, those soldiers who have been registered as dead with the relevant institutions will more naturally be referred to as former members of the regiment. But even if we accept your notion that they immediately cease to be members of the regiment at the point of death, I actually don't see how that supports your initial point. Dead people can't be members of regiments so a soldier being dead isn't a fact about the physical arrangement of soldiers in a regiment.
To use the terminology of sets, I regard a regiment as a set where the elements are restricted to a particular type of thing, namely soldiers. Sets are unordered so {A, B, C} and {A, C, B} are exactly the same set. Cats are more akin to tuples, which do have an ordering so (A, B, C) and (A, C, B) are two distinct tuples. A DNA sequence is also like a tuple because the order matters and because the same gene will often appear more than once on the same chromosome.
@@cavalrycome all you're doing is kicking the can down the road. Definition of a soldier is no different than that of a cat. They have traits that define them. So to say a collection of soldiers somehow isn't similar to the cat, is incoherent.
These videos are great. So well explained. I hope your boss is happy with your description of him.
BTW, your spelling (admittedly while writing backwards) is a bit off, e.g., "Chanellor".
Can connotative names contain non-connotative? ‘The artist formerly known as Prince’ for instance
And I thought his only mistake, all be it of his own free will, of drinking half a pint of cider. And subsequently being particularly ill.
I think you will find it was half a pint of shandy.
@@Canalcoholic My copy of Matching Tie and Handkerchief is as worn and crackly as my memory, it would appear.🤕
Looking forward to the Kripke one! :D
Skip Kripke. And Davidson. And Quine. And Montague. And Lewis, etc. It's all not worth your time.
Start learning about cognition & cognitive science, and skip the talking heads.
Just an advice from an old guy who spent way too much time (many years) on trying to understand the word flood of these self-satisfied word producers.
Thank you for this informative video. I was struggling with the mathematical theory of categories and why it was replacing the set theory through excluding the notion of element. I feel Stuart Mill ideas provide some light as for why it was necessary.
Awesome presentation style.
Where is this topic continued? He says "we will get to it next week in this course". Is there anyway I can gain access to this course?
What about "former chancellor"? In that case a connotative name would be immutable?
Could you please make videos on George Santayana?
After this lecture I'd love to hear you discuss Baudrillard
I think I get the gist. That if Frank Gillian Jr. was a meter stick named jones gardening , holding a glass of wine, then in all possible worlds hesperus is necessarily phosphorus (I might have read ahead)
waiting for your next class
will you post the conclusion to this lecture?
Didn't Aristotle spend some time with names and subjects etc.?
What's your problem with Frank Gilliam Jr?
Great stuff as usual
Just watched your Russell Paradox video. I have a question….
The sets you described (cats, dogs, LeBron) are all positive integers. There are a real number of cats, dogs, and one LeBron. You also said there can be a null set, equivalent to zero. So my question is…. Can you extend the math into negative numbers? You have positive numbers and zero. Can you have a negative set? And what would a negative set look like? If you have a set that says, “Anything that is NOT in a set is in this set,” would that be a negative set? And, if something is not in a set, but now becomes part of this set, must it now be tossed out because it has become part of a set? Is that another paradox? If “everything in the Universe” is a set, can anything be “not part of a set.” Should another rule of sets be:
Sets may only consist of positive integers
I hope and predict that you'll be getting more into Russell and Wittgenstein with this philosophy of language series.😛
I wish that you Professor made lectures about heidegger, thanks for this❤
Wasn't Mill dead in 1881?
Great videos you covered the "Jr" part of Frank Gillian's name, but his name also tells us he is a gent, is being a man in a society an attribute?
Are we to believe that others hadn't distinguished a proper name from a title ?
Does anybody know where I can find JS Mill's Of Names online? thanks
So he writes everything backwards on the glass so it’s forwards for the audience?
If those markers are fluorescent then maybe getting a black light to shine on your board will make the writing pop out. That would be cool.
Why no comments for the Peter Singer video.
Frank Gilliam, JR is connotative. It tells me he has a father named Frank. It tells me he looks up when someone yells out "Frank".
Surely Mill is right about collective names. The subject of a proper name, say Garfield, may be assembled from cells, or strokes of the pen, or whatever; but having been assembled into a 'whole system', an entity with its own logic, it has an identity (a cat), different from that of a bunch of cells (or strokes of the pen) which might be arranged to form a dog, and (being a complex entity, a cat, rather than a simple entity like an atom) having in addition an individual identity denoted by 'Garfield'. A thing, an entity, will always be composed of parts but these parts have a governing system logic which makes that entity what it is. And that is what we give the name to, surely? We can't go around referring to things as 'bunches of cells'. It fails to communicate what is most important, identity.
I sort of realized this when I decided not to change my name.
I was surprised that with all this there has been nothing about the distinction between substantive (or concrete) nouns like "staple" versus reifications (or abstract nouns) like "system". There obviously is an overlap with the non-collective versus collective distinction, and even "suffers" from a similar gray area problem, but I think it is not completely the same. It may be seen as a different axis where for some reason a certain type of terms seems to happen to line up on both these axes ("city"), but there are other terms that don't ("bicycle", "surprise").
At 5:51 isn't this assuming ontological anti-realism? In other words, couldn't an ontological realist argue that there is indeed some "Garfield-ness" above and beyond just a Garfield-wise collection of subatomic particles (if we assume some non-fictional cat named Garfield)?
I also think, mill was wrong with connotative names being tossed away for an individual (or a collective) right as the description no longer applies to them.
For example if I say: "Barack Obama, the president of the US..." I don't think that many people will look confused even though it's (technically) wrong and no longer a description of him.
Of course it can be argued, that connotative names can become non-connotative names over time, but then it muddies the whole thing, mill wanted to show imo.
Other examples: People might refer to someone who retired still by their job-title (similar to obama). Or if a sports team wins a championship and then loses it, they might still be referred to as "the champions".
When you say _"Barack Obama, _*_the_*_ president of the US,"_ it's pretty obvious to most people that you mean _"Barack Obama, _*_a former_*_ president of the US."_ However, if someone says _"Donald Trump, the president of the US,"_ what do you think they mean? 😜
Wait. Based on quantum mechanics there are things are not collections of things. They are the base. That was the original meaning for the word atom. I mean yeah sure that means that there are a specified amount of stuff that this applies to but there are so we must include them. So maybe Mill wasn't wrong on that regard. They are just really limited.
I need friends that would watch this channel too 😂
Spent the entire video after 3:30 thinking of famous cat names other than Garfield
I guess Mills never considered that Augustus and Caesar became connotative proper names by the significance of their attribution. Emperors of Rome would adopt those names to the rest of their name and change other parts of their original name to reflect the prestige of their stature. The names and the title/job converged. The arbitrary label became a specific description to denote the most powerful men of the Roman Empire at given time after the deaths of Caesar and Augustus.
You said that Mill was wrong about non-collective names, that actually all things are collections of other things. Philosophically speaking, is it possible for something to be irreducible? Say a quark, for instance? Can anything be singular?
Why not just can it "name" or "descriptive name"?
I conculde from the video that Jeffrey wants to be named not only by the non-connotatibe name "Jeffrey Kaplan", but also by the Connotative name "The Chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro".
But, of which Jeffrey am I talking about, asks Frege? Well, I'll have to watch the next video
This a long topic on language but if just philosophy still a ling topic ...and added to my playlist on ego and language
A collective can have properties at the collective level like the flag of a regiment, or at the member level, like the color of the uniforms. If the properties at the collective level are more important, we can think of it as a non-collective thing, e,g. a cat. If the properties at the member level seem more important we can think of it as a collective thing, e.g. a regiment,
Just a quick point of fact. J.s.mill could not have written this in 1881. He died in 1873 so...
Really interesting!
Can't help wondering how Frank responded to this video!
Or to put it in other way: Connotative includes metadata, Non-Connotative does not.
Is not the idea of the sun made with electricity and hormone?
I think Mill is a little off when he describes both the Sun and day as “facts,” i.e. things that exist in reality, independently and objectively and so on. The Sun is a fact in this sense, sure. But day is not objectively real. Obviously the earth turns into and away from the sun’s light in cycles, but that the lighted portion of these constitutes some separate entity, the fact called “day,” does not seem true to me. Idk if you will address this in this video. I’m less than two minutes in. Just a thought I had.
Connotative names showing probability of certain persone to have certain obligations, accidentally. Non-connotative just labeling one from his holistic perspective. JS Mill was definitely right.
A cat may be a collection of bones, muscle and ligaments but remove any of those parts and it is no longer a cat - it is at best a dead cat. However, remove one soldier from a regiment and it is still a regiment. So is there still no distinction between collective and non-collective nouns?
A football team without a goalkeeper stops being a football team - according to the rules, which specify that one is needed. Does this mean a football team is not a collective name?
@@Joald : Is it not a football team (as you say), or is it a football team that forfeits the matches it tries to play?
@@brothermine2292 I would say that being able to play matches is an essential property of a football team
@@Joald : I disagree, because I know from experience that a shorthanded softball team is listed in the results as losing by forfeit, and their opponent is listed as winning. Being able to play without forfeiting isn't essential... consider a team practicing on the day before a match, and their goal-keeper leaves practice early... they're still a football team even though they aren't playing in an official game that day.
@@brothermine2292 i guess that depends on how broadly you consider a football team, what I meant was "a group of people collected at a given for the express purpose of playing football".
In any case, it is not hard to come up with at least a synthetic example of a group of people, that has a name, but removing one person from a group necessitates that the name stops applying, so the point still stands.
That should be in a fundamentals for progamming class
There is/was a British character actor who is/was the spitting image of Mill but I can't remember his name and google has an acquired brain injury these days and isn't what it used to be.
Maybe collectives are subsets of non-collectives, just one of the many different types of non-collectives?
Consider John Smith. I do not know any people of that name. To what does “John Smith” point; what is the meaning of the word? The class of all people with this name? I know it’s a name because of English capitalization rules ( that’s not the case in German, in which every noun is capitalized), but what is its meaning when I cannot identify single object that attaches to this name?
We could reasonably suppose that most proper names started out with an explicit meaning, for example, “Sorry your horse threw a shoe, I will show you the way to local smith”. Eventually, the professional name of that smith becomes a surname. Many names once had a meaning that became obscured through language drift, eg, Peter once meant “stone”.
Anything that can function as the subject of ones focus must have a name. So can we have a name for that which does not exist, for that which we have no awareness of, have no knowledge of? If that be not so we must question what is possible with the word “exist”, which of a necessity cannot be limited to that which is physical, that which is only perceived by the five senses. For we also perceive with the mind’s imagination, the mental faculty of conceptualization, the sixth sense as it were that which is not tangible yet is of Reality.
Does the name “woman” connote an attribute?
Both Frank Gilliam Jr. and North Carolina imply attributes. Mr. Gilliam Jr. has or had a father with the same name. North Carolina is above South Carolina on a map.
I have to take several philosophy courses at college back in the seventies. I found them to be the most boring hours! I wish I had Dr. Kaplan as I would have gotten much more out of them.
what is the usage of the proper name?
why we study them?
i feel like the distinction between collective and non collective names is less about what is physically there, like the collection of muscles and cells of a cat making it a collective name.
I think the collective name is more about what you're referring to. take "the regiment has walked a mile" the message is "the humans that form the regiment have walked a mile", compare that to "the cat has walked a mile" the intended messege is not that "the bones and muscles of the cat have walked a mile" its just that "the cat has walked a mile"
im not great at explaining so i hope that makes sense
If all members of a regiment walk a mile from a single point but each member in a different direction has the regiment walked a mile?
“Tired of those damn meetings” 😂
I disagree with your argument that a collective name is not a meaningful distinction. Yes a "cat" may be though of as referring to a collection of items but there are 2 limitations. First of all, what exactly is a cat a collection of? Limbs, organs, molecules? There is no well defined unit in this collection. Additionally, we don't think of the cat as collective but rather as an individual. Instead we view the components as being subsumed into the individual whole. Whereas a regiment is clearly a collective of soldiers and has no meaningful identity other than the individual soldiers which compose the regiment.
l've always thought fiction & nonfiction were backwards. It just seemed like nonfiction would be non-true.
Kaplan definitely had a bet with Frank Gilliam Jr. about how many times he could put his photo up in this video 😂
I cannot believe that John Stuart Mill fell for such a basic mistake. He knew that names are given because of certain reasons. Then he should have realized that even though the names would still be names if those reasons are no longer true, the names would still signify that there once was a reason that was true.
And this fact is not merely pedantic, because "there once was a reason that was true" is an idea that is used as justification in many ideologies. To nationalists, "there once was a reason that explains why you have certain cultural markers now, which belongs to the nation" can justify you having an obligation to be loyal to the nation. To social contract theorists, "there once was a reason that explains why you are participating in society, which implies tacit consent" can justify you having an obligation to obey the social contract. So, this fact is not merely pedantic, but the justification used by many ideologies to deeply affect the lives of those who have to interact with said ideologies.
As long as you have a name, there are reasons behind that name being given, and ideologies can construct justifications using those reasons, even if you would still have the name if those reasons are no longer true.
What was the reason you were named Ivan? How arbitrary was that choice?