Moral realism and categorical reasons: ruclips.net/video/gFhMBRyZ4fQ/видео.html Conceivability: ruclips.net/video/BYsT1Bk1_8Q/видео.html The indeterminacy of truth: ruclips.net/video/2HN05QZ7eXE/видео.html
Hello Kane, i was banned from your discord server by an overzealous admin simply because I was in possession of a book that they felt they did not agree with. I have been a long-time fan, contributor, and promoter of your work, and I feel it was unnecessary.
@@CollectiveDismal. I don't actually run the discord; what happens isn't up to me. That is, I'm the king of the discord, but like many modern kings I have chosen to give up my powers. It's entirely up the mod team who gets banned. FWIW, my best friend is banned from my discord as well (Jacques, who I've done a couple of videos with).
I think I basically agree with this. Your "schmeaningful" move was interesting and reminded me of Enoch's paper "Agency, Schmagency". Enoch's point was that the accusation of practical irrationality is only an objection for those already committed to a certain conception of practical rationality. Similarly, the charge of meaninglessness is only problematic for an opponent who buys into the same conception of meaningfulness as their interlocutor. But that charge only comes up when there's disagreement about what is meaningful, so it turns out never to be problematic. And it's hard to imagine what a principled argument for adopting a certain substantial account of meaningfulness would look like. If the account is given as part of a more general program, like verificationism was given as part of logical empiricism, then there can be more general arguments in favor of the program. But getting one's opponent to buy into that sort of program is probably a much heavier burden than what was initially at stake. Then there's the added difficulty that this charge is almost always issued against some discourse used by a community whose members take themselves to be saying meaningful things. This is the case with "categorical reasons" and also with the kinds of statements logical empiricists opposed, like metaphysical and religious discourse. Again, how on earth would one hope to convince those speakers that their discourse is meaningless? Insofar as we can expect to have any reasonable criteria to objectively assess the meaningfulness of some discourse, then I'd argue consistent use in a linguistic community is as good a candidate as any for a criterion. It could very well be that the accuser's failure to grasp the meaning of a statement is just a matter of not belonging to the relevant linguistic community. (edit: typo)
Intelligibility for the two Purist painters, Cubism was pure decoration-"if a cubist painting is beautiful" they write, "it is in the same way a carpet is beautiful." Although Cubism made ample use of geometrical forms, Ozenfant and Jeannette claimed, it did so without recourse to any laws- its compositions were arbitrary, they were not controlled by any "standard". Pictorial representations as an arbitrary system so signs seemed to be unintelligible to the Purists. So from this the meta analysis is that the binary of intelligibility verses intelligibility is a in-group to out group phenomenology and has liminal zones where agents shift perspective based on self evaluation with intra group and inter group dynamics.
Shmeaning: 1. I understand terms used 2. Phrased in grammatically correct way 3. Can make further inferences In a sentence, do you care about knowing the intended meaning behind the entire sentence or just certain sections of the sentence?
"So I think it's very important, as you have heard from so many incredible leaders for us at every moment in time and certainly this one, to see the moment in time in which we exist and are present, and to be able to contextualize it, to understand where we exist in the history and in the moment as it relates not only to the past but the future." - Kamala Harris
With respect to the "why can't the world be unintelligible" argument: Sentences and statements can be intelligible or unintelligible. An unintelligible sentence doesn't signify anything. I don't think the relevant question is "is the truth intelligible or not?", it's more like "can unintelligible statements have any truth value at all?". Imagine that the universe is fundamentally unintelligible. Does that make the sentences "hsbrjeosj jfieh ggghez" or "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" true? It's not that an unintelligible statement is [meaningful but corresponds to an unintelligible state of affairs], its that an unintelligible statement [doesn't correspond to any state of affairs at all] and therefore can't be more true or more false then the sentences above. With respect to the quantum mechanics argument: I think there's some ambiguity about how you're using the word "intelligible" here. QM itself is very intelligible (as a specific set of equations that provide accurate statistical predictions of observations). There is no real misunderstanding or ambiguity about them. The "theory of QM" is specifically math + associated predictions of observations, and the "meaning of QM" or the process of "getting QM" is just understanding how to calculate + predict. The point where QM becomes "unintelligible" is exactly the point where IMO there is no good reason to believe it (because the unintelligible parts are invariably interpretations decoupled from the actual calculations and aren't agreed upon by the scientific community). With respect to the "Any statement is meaningful if you can make inferences from them": Meaningfulness is relative to a context. Is the sentence "donde esta la biblioteca" meaningful? You can't actually say without assuming a language. How about "the square root of two"? That depends on if you're using the Rational numbers or the Reals. Your example of the square-circle window being covered + not-covered by the cardboard is implicitly assuming a set if rules where the square-circle cardboard would cover AND not-cover the window, but you sort of said that as if it was an obvious consequence. If I was going to answer the question "would a square piece of cardboard cover a square-circle window", I would have just said yes it would cover it because they're both squares, but it wouldn't not-cover it. ln your world where you have a "correct" answer, it might be intelligible. In normal speech, however, we have no way to adjudicate the question "does a square piece of cardboard not-cover a square circle window" (I have no idea how you would even theoretically judge that), so it would be unintelligible. IMO, claiming that "metaphysics is unintelligible" basically means that NOBODY can actually "talk the talk" in a satisfying way (if you keep making statements, youll quickly get to a point where people don't know what is implied by something else). The fact that meta-physicians write papers that resemble eachother doesn't make them automatically meaningful, surrealists paint similar pictures but it would be strange on that account to call them "meaningful" in a way that accords them a truth value. Of course, you can define words however you want and create arbitrary contexts in which statements imply each other. If I play a social deduction game where "if you are blorp, then you're morp" then the sentence "are you blorp?" can be considered meaningful. IMO, It's mostly un-interesting to invent non-standard contexts if you want to understand language as it is usually practiced. It's more something you would do if you were trying to invent a game or a language like Klingon for fun.
I'm not sure how your first points address the first argument, though perhaps this is just because I didn't do a good job of explaining the argument. The idea is that the following scenario might occur: There is some set of propositions P, P* ... Pn. By whatever criteria we are using to judge intelligibility, P is intelligible, and moreover we think we have good reason to believe that P. P* is intelligible, and we think we have good reasons to believe that P*. And so on. But then it is noticed that P, P* ... Pn entails or supports Q, where Q is unintelligible per our criteria. That scenario strikes me as epistemically possible; I don't know how we could rule that out a priori. Perhaps there are some criteria for intelligibility on which we could rule this out a priori, but what exactly intelligibility is open to debate, so even if we do accept such criteria provisionally I think we should be open to the possibility that we might be wrong about this. Now, if that scenario occurred, I think this would count as evidence that the universe is unintelligible. Or to put this in terms of statements, we should say that Q is true, even though Q is unintelligible. QM might be an actual example of this, though of course that's extremely controversial. Some people will take an instrumentalist interpretation, as you do (and as I do, actually; I'm not a scientific realist). Others will be realists but will insist that, contrary to the comments of folks like Feynman, we actually can form a robust conception of its picture of the world. Unfortunately, there are no non-controversial examples of this scenario. Still, I don't know how to rule out that scenario. With that in mind, I'm inclined to think that, if I give a compelling argument that some position is unintelligible, it is reasonable for defenders of that position to say that it is, in fact, an actual example of that scenario. >> IMO, claiming that "metaphysics is unintelligible" basically means that NOBODY can actually "talk the talk" in a satisfying way What counts as a "satisfying way", though? Metaphysicians seem to be fairly satisfied with the way that they talk. Even many of the people who are skeptical of metaphysics are satisfied with it -- their objections to metaphysics may not have appeal to concerns about meaningfulness. For instance, Ladyman & Ross in "Every Thing Must Go" present a vicious attack on contemporary metaphysics, but if I recall their arguments correctly, they do not claim that contemporary metaphysics is meaningless; their objections lie more in how metaphysicians regularly present theories that are inconsistent with our best physics.
@@KaneB Re-doing my reply to your reply because I misunderstood something you said initially: I think the core of my first thought is that the word "unintelligibility" should be used to mean "does not interface nicely with the rules of the discourse" in some sense. It seems to me like if a set of premises (P ... Pn) can ever lead to / imply / exclude / sit in nice specific relationships with Q then that would definitionally make Q intelligible. If it doesn't, then Q is unintelligible. Because IMO this is what unintelligibility "really means", then it is basically a priori impossible for Q to be implied by proposition (P ... Pn) using any rules of discourse. RE the second point: I myself wasn't saying that I think metaphysics is unintelligible. Unintelligibility to me is defined relative to a specific set of discourse rules [EX: sqrt(2) is unintelligible in the rationals but not the reals]. Someone who claims that metaphysics isn't intelligible might only include statements about theoretically observable entities as "legal" or "satisfying". There is no such thing as a universally unintelligible statement, because given any proposition (for example "kfjeh jfig ops") I can invent a context / language in which that statement means "2+2=4" (like, I'm inventing a language for my sci-fi alien species). I think this is a definitional point, but just because it's definitional doesn't mean it's arbitrary. I can use the word "apple" to mean "a fuzzy animal with two legs", and that definition is in some sense just as good as the usual definition but it's also (by reasonable metric) wrong and if a kindergartner was using it that way you would try to correct them. I don't think I understand what concept you mean by the word "unintelligible" which is maybe why I'm confused
On intentionalist theories of meaning + correspondence theories of truth; Correspondence relations aren’t necessarily truth-apt, but all truth-apt statements necessarily have correspondence relata. On this view the essential condition for directives is satisfaction/frustration which corresponds to the intentional content of the expressor - no truth-aptness (even tho the content has secondary truth-apt content). For assertives the essential condition is truth-aptness which corresponds to the facts in relation to the intentional content of the expressor. The difference between the two is the direction-of-fit. The dof for directives is world-to-mind, whereas assertives the dof is mind-to-world.
"So what" seems like a somewhat hard objection to a lot of philosophy, at least in practical terms :) (I do care about meaning and what it means for something to mean something, since it's pretty fundamental, but also, very hard to define without getting circular, at least from my very unschooled perspective.)
@@strangebird5974 Ah, true! So then I imagine some philosopher reading literature on the meaning of, for example human nature, notices how everyone uses the word "meaning" in slightly different ways. This makes it so the discussion stagnates, because everyone's conceptualization of the meaning of human nature is actually incomparable to one another's. One talks about how human nature is that thing which determines an organism to be part of the species "human", another talks about what humans tend to be like (good or evil; rational or irrational). And so a theory of meaning may be quite useful, so that people will start talking with and not past each other I wonder what contemporary theories of meaning would entail, and if they relate to day-to-day or even academic use
@@captainzork6109 I left philosophy, fortunately or unfortunately, before I could properly look into theories of meaning - but I was meaning (!) to do that at one point. In formal logic, we were taught one proposed definition, namely, that meaning equals conditions for truth for some proposition. Rather reductive, and I remember having some issues with that definition, though I can't remember all of them in detail right now...
your last point on meaningfulness is something I've found a lot around nihilism recently. Perhaps you don't mean "meaning" in the same kind of existential sense but I think it still works here. A nihilist can claim that meaninglessness is ubiquitous in our universe, but that statement uses a narrow and pretty objectionable sense of "meaning" that there's no clear reason to endorse. I could, for example, say that "meaning" to me is what brings me fulfillment in life, and suddenly the nihilist's claims of universal meaninglessness seem unintelligible to me. I think the idea works with most philosophical positions. So communication is important to make sure the same words aren't being used differently.
Yep, the same kind of argument can be applied in lots of contexts. If you give an argument for the claim that x does not have some property P, your argument will appeal to some conception of what is for something to be P, and this is going to be open to dispute. There will probably be multiple different ways of thinking about what P is. So it's open to your opponent to grant that x does not have P in the sense that you mean P, but then say that your sense isn't the sense that matters to them.
This is like the Buddhist claim that 'all things are empty...' (which the nihilist would agree with) '..., and, since emptiness is a thing, emptiness is also empty' (which the nihilist would presumably object to, since it neuters their claim of meaninglessness) (if that seems confusing, another way to put it is that meaning exists *only* by convention, and the definition of meaning itself is therefore necessarily a matter of convention too)
While I appreciate your insight, I don't really agree with the example you used. It's pretty much built into existential nihilism that only cosmic/"objective" meaning doesn't exist, with some leeway given to subjective applications of purpose. Even then, one could argue that the notion of personal fulfillment being the basis for meaning still doesn't exist,( appealing to the incoherence of the very notion itself.) It's like, say, conflating childfree with antinatalism. As an antinatalist, I would view procreation as a universal harm to any sentient being born. You don't need to elaborate on that part if you're an antinatalist as opposed to just being childfree as the ethical weight of such action isn't intrinsically involved in the latter. Sure, there are some differences, but you don't need to specify anything as the ideas behind both already diverge.
I can't imagine a situation where it's both the case that: -I think X is unintelligible -I think an argument for X is good How am I going to make the link between the premises and the conclusion if the conclusion makes no sense? You give the example of the square circle, the cardboard completely covers it and also it doesn't. But there's no situation that I'll recognize as fulfilling that contradictory criteria, so no matter what I find when I play with the cardboard, the window won't count as a square circle. Or maybe I do find myself in a situation where I go "wow, it does both fully cover it and not fully cover it". But then it's no longer unintelligible, I do understand the square circle now.
* I can't imagine a situation where I think there's a good argument for an unintelligible position, UNLESS I'm relying on someone else's judgement. Like, if god shows up and says square circles are real, then ok sure.
Could you do a video on arguments for/against Longtermism (or Effective Altruism, or "Earning to Give")? Or on Global Priorities Research more generally? I'm asking this because lately I've been reading EA/Longtermism/80,000Hours stuff and I've been seriously philosophically persuaded by it, as counterintuitive and anti-commonsensical as they may be. So in the spirit of open-mindedness, I want to be exposed to more objections against it, and I feel that you, Kane B may be just the sort of philosopher I need on that score.
@@jackeasling3294 My video on the hinge of history is related to some of that stuff: ruclips.net/video/DpckMBO0hHk/видео.html Honestly though, I find most of the literature here very dull. It just isn't a topic that interests me much.
@@KaneB I watched your AMA responses where you talked briefly about EA and Singer's drowning child thought experiment. I honestly don't understand how you could be apathetic towards normative ethics and think It's okay to draw arbitrary lines in moral treatment! How could you live with yourself knowing that had you been timetravelled to the past, you would've condoned arbitrary discrimination by race, not helping Jews in Nazi Germany or Blacks in Early America "just because you don't feel like it" and instead fund weird art instead?
@@jackeasling3294 I'm not sure how to answer that question. First, I would be (and am) opposed to arbitrary discrimination by race, so I don't think it's fair to say that I would condone it in those circumstances. It's true that my opposition to it probably wouldn't manifest in any significant way in my actions; certainly, I would do everything I could to avoid fighting in WWII, for instance. Perhaps that counts as "condoning" it in your view. As for why I am the way I am, I don't know. I've never been inclined to reflect much on my motivations.
If any component of an argument is unintelligible, that renders the entire argument unintelligible, and thus I can't accept it. That doesn't prove the conclusion false, but I simply can't accept it. I place many arguments for God in this category: any argument that includes free will and an omniscient being; any argument that includes an all-loving God and any suffering; etc.
Now I wonder what this means for continental philosophy - my intuition is that a great part of it is pure gibberish, but they seem to be capable to read each other and communicate, so maybe it's in fact meaningful. Maybe Jacques Derrida doesn't write complete nonsense.
I'm not sure what the last point is supposed to do - when "meaning" is used in a more general sense, it's a round-about way to point to how pragmatically significant something is. It can convey emotions, pictures, actions, values, descriptions, etc. When a sentence or word or theory conveys nothing, none of those things listed, it's meaningless. So your response is essentially "I don't care that such and such conveys nothing pragmatically, I care that I can understand the terms used in such and such, and that it's gramatically correct". That's fine, but is that not talking past the matter at hand? You've used the term "meaning" in a way most people don't, so you're past talking about meaning - you're talking about shmeaning, your version of "meaning". You're just saying that you're fine with empty sentences (convey nothing) as long as they're gramatically correct. Most people don't use "meaning" in this way, and most care about a sentence or term conveying something, and hold it against a theory/sentence that it doesn't convey anything. Example: My friend tells me "Close the door but don't close the door". To you that's meaningful and so valuable. But to anyone else that has no meaning and so no value - what am I even supposed to do? Then, imagine my friend tells me "My favorite shape is the square-circle". What am I supposed to imagine? Have I gained any knowledge? Was that even an information? Or imagine a politician who makes a policy he says will "Make the homeless prime numbers" - and he means that literally, like it's not a metaphore or whatever. What are people supposed to understand from that? Well they'd rightly call his policy "meaningless" right? They would say his policiy is empty, has no value, is unintelligible. They couldn't even say that it's good or bad, that can't even think it, let alone what it entails. It's not because something is gramatically correct that it's enough to be valuable. Also, if you're taking this path - why stop there? Why do you need a sentence to be gramatically correct? The sentence conveys nothing anyways. In this sense the bad sentence "Cesar is and" is as meaningful as "The square circle". Why make a difference at this point?
First, I don't accept that I'm using the term "meaning" in a way that most people don't. I doubt that most ordinary people have any particular view of meaning, and if there is any implicit theory of meaning that underlies our ordinary uses of terms such as "meaning", it's probably vague and incoherent. Second, the deflationary view of meaning is not that a sentence P is meaningful just in case P is grammatical. There are two other conditions: (i) the person must know how to use the terms used in stating P and (ii) the person must be able to make inferences from P, or tell a further story about P, or something like that. Perhaps, on your view of meaning, there could be sentences that meet all these conditions but nevertheless are "empty" or "convey nothing". It seems to me that, if I can make inferences from P, it is rather odd to say that P "conveys nothing". But fair enough; presumably, if you are adopting a more robust view of meaning, you will say that there could be sentences that meet these conditions that do not convey any meaning, at least. >> That's fine, but is that not talking past the matter at hand? The context is this. I defend P. You have given an argument to the effect that P is meaningless. Your argument appeals to some conception of meaning with identifies it with some property M. Perhaps your conception of meaning just is the ordinary language conception; M is what most people have in mind when they talk about meaning. Let's also just grant that M is able to overcome all the technical objections that usually face theories of meaning. So we have a good argument for the claim that P is meaningless. But I don't care about making claims that have property M. My favoured conception of meaning is something less stringent, M*. We need not even dispute whether this is "really" meaning; I'll give you the word "meaning" and talking about "schmeaning" instead. I want my claims to be schmeaningful, but it doesn't matter much to me if they are meaningful. I care about M*, not M. At this point, I don't think we are talking past each other. I understand you perfectly well, and you understand me perfectly well, at least with respect to how we are each conceiving of meaning, and to the value we each place on it. >> Well they'd rightly call his policy "meaningless" right? They would say his policiy is empty, has no value, is unintelligible. It probably comes as no surprise that, in my view, his policy is totally meaningful. The problem with the policy is not that it is meaningless. It's that it can't be done. Indeed, part of what allows me to know that it can't be done is that I understand perfectly well what the policy is supposed to be. If the politician had said, "make the homeless diddle diddle doddle doddle," I would be confused and ask for clarification, because I don't know what "diddle" or "doddle" mean. I know what prime numbers are, and I know that people cannot become prime numbers. Moreover, I don't think this reaction to this case is all that counterintuitive. (I suspect that many people, if you were to describe this scenario to them, would agree with the judgment that the policy is meaningless. But I also suspect that many of them would agree with my judgment that the policy is meaningful but impossible to execute.) >> Also, if you're taking this path - why stop there? I agree. For any conception of meaning C that imposes any conditions whatsoever, we can always come up with some other conception, C*, on which some of those conditions are removed. If C* is what I care about, it's not going to concern me that something I say counts as meaningless under C.
@@dr.h8r how so, if we're always ever only talking about the words and not the things? Are our arguments really about words doing stuff that only things can do? Being unintelligible seems akin to comitting category errors.
My comment was tongue-in-cheek. The point was (on use/intentionalist theories of meaning) the expression “an unused expression is unintelligible” is basically a tautology.
I still think you can only accept quantum mechanics to the extent that it is intelligible. When physicists say things like that they don’t understand quantum mechanics, what they really mean is that they don’t have an intuitive grasp for it or that there are missing pieces in their understanding. But they do understand the mathematics behind it as well as the concrete predictions that the theory makes. I would say it’s the part that they understand that they accept.
Favorite video in a longtime. I hope Lance Bush watches this and feels like a cop. I actually think after this video he should start wearing a police uniform.
I claim that "Ciz ocikh uco yuilwx prni ciz wmmu auni kmj;" is meaningless and unintelligible. I'm reasonably confident that there's no meaning there to make sense of, because I just hit arbitrary keys on the keyboard, other than spaces to break it up into segments of an appropriate length to be words. And I don't think that I need a fully-worked-out account of meaning in order to be able to make this claim. I can accept, for the sake of argument, any of a wide range of views on what intelligibility really is exactly and how meaning works, and still have good reason to say that the pseudo-random string doesn't have any.
You raise a good point! Sometimes we can justify unintelligibility in a purely *empirical* way! Like asking people to tell the difference between a Deepak Chopra quote and a randomly generated gibberish quote.
I think Feynman was joking. His point was that QM runs counter to our intuition. My personal view is that QM is intelligible, but the Copenhagen interpretation is not. What do we mean by "wave function collapse"? How does it happen? Where does the rest of the wave function go? How can we identify collapse when it happens?
Claims that some proposition is unintelligible or meaningless are themselves usually either false or pointless. In my experience one of the distinguishing features of philosophical newbs and wannabes is that they are very fond of throwing the word 'meaningless' about. I suspect it is an unfortunate hangover from the influence of Ayer's Language Truth and Logic.
To me it seems like I could understand quantum mechanics if I put sufficient time into figuring it out. But for categorical reasons it seems like no explanation would ever be produced because I maybe doubt the processes that led to this idea would have made its true description out of the things I want to explain everything in terms of. So I doubt it would have been made of actual stuff idk. But quantum mechanics theory seems like it would have been formulated in terms of actual stuff and I just havent learned it idk.
and for moral nonnaturalism i think that there cant be evidence for a statement that doesn't say any particular thing at all. Like how could there be evidence for a random string of letters being true? Iguess the only possibility is if the evidence refers to the statements directly, like if an omniscient being or trusted expert believed or agreed with the statement. But if that happened then it would probably require that the position does have a meaning in terms of actual stuff, since it has to have a meaning to be true. It wouldn't make me doubt the idea that unintelligibile means unacceptable. In an extreme case like an omniscient being saying that a random string of words is true, I might sooner doubt the being is actually omniscient, or if really pushed I might think we have different conceptions of truth or meaning, or I might doubt my logical faculties, because it doesnt seem possible to me for something that doesnt say any particular thing at all to be true.
For a square circle, it is made of 2 intelligible but contradictory statements about the shape, and is impossible to picture because every picture is wrong.
imagine 5 guys, starved for days end by some authority, put into a room together. a cake is thrown into the center. 4 of those guys are going to use their faculties to get as much of the cake as possible. the 5th guy, a classically trained philosopher, is gonna be like 'well hold on fellas, isn't anyone interested about where the cake came from? or what it's made of?' he surely will die first
Can’t we give some sufficient criteria for a notion of unintelligibility easily enough, so that we can use some versions of unintelligibility to unhesitatingly reject such unintelligible arguments or positions? For example, it seems to me to make sense to declare arguments purportedly presented in a language L that fail to actually meet the syntactic or grammatical requirements of the language as unintelligible. An example for me is in English, using the phrase “ain’t no sunshine when you’re gone” in a philosophical argument or debate is unintelligible in part because it’s grammatically incorrect; on the other hand it’s an entertaining song lyric. Another reason to credibly deny the intelligibility of an argument can be based upon semantics of the language in which it is purportedly formulated. For example, the phrase “that limit doesn’t exist” violates the semantics of English because the phrase “that limit” means that we’re (verbally) pointing at a thing that we’re calling a limit, and “doesn’t exist” means there is no such limit, so where are we verbally pointing? At a blank region of space? …
The second example reminds me of the cases discussed in Graham Priest's book "Beyond the Limits of Thought" -- there are lots of theories in philosophy that propose limits to what can be conceived, or thought, or expressed; but then stating these very theories involve operations that do in fact cross those limits. Take, for instance, the Kantian view that there is a distinction between phenomena and noumena, where only the phenomena can be known and we have no access to the noumena. In drawing this very boundary, we must say something about the noumena, and so if the theory can be known then something about the noumena can be known, after all. Priest takes at least some cases like this to be true contradictions: there are limits of thought which cannot be crossed, but which nevertheless are crossed.
@@KaneB To me it’s interesting that your response references Kant, and doesn’t mention mathematics, because the cases in which I’m most annoyed with the phrase “doesn’t exist” showing it’s ugly has are in mathematics textbooks and on the papers I’ve graded, by students who’ve been brainwashed to think that it makes sense to use that phrase when tasked with “computing” limits in, for example, elementary analysis (calculus or real analysis, or their applications). Before I forced my current thoughts on this linguistic and semantic issue, my introduction to a way to make the intended information clear in a real analysis class, in which my professor just didn’t use that phrase. That is, rather than something like “the limit of that sequence doesn’t exist”, his notes read “that sequence has no limit”. I remember being struck by how much more compatible with the structure of predicate logic was this way of writing, philosophically and pedagogically. Eventually I learned a small amount of philosophy and the following quote, which I think was attributed to Kant, fits my understanding and intuition about this: “Existence is not a predicate.” This expresses it so nicely and succinctly. Thanks for the videos and the interaction.
It depends on which critique you're talking about. Lance has lots of objections to analytic philosophy, some of which I'm inclined to agree with, many of which are derived from his pragmatist views which I don't get on board with at all.
@@KaneB I think the strongest one is that related to analytic philosophers' tendency to approach problems by thinking hard how English Speakers use words. I remember reading an article on philosophy of time, where the author was analysing time based on English grammar for past tenses. As a Romanian native speaker it seemed a bit odd, given that my language has different past tense structures :))
@@KaneB also, the appeal to intuitions when it is claimed that "X is intuitive", without saying for whom. It is an empirical claim to say that X is intuitive for everyone.
I'm not sure what to say about your second point about different senses of meaning. However, I think I see a problem with the first point about there potentially being compelling arguments for unintelligible positions. I think you meant something along these lines. There is no reason to suppose that there could not be something that is unintelligible to us, so there is nothing in principle stopping us from making an argument that concludes with the existence of something unintelligible. However, any argument for the conclusion of categorical reasons, for example, would require a premise that contains the term categorical reasons. But if we find this unintelligible we should not accept this premise because meaningless statements cannot be true or believed. I think this just follows from most theories about truth or belief. For example, an unintelligible premise doesn't seem like it could be true given the correspondence theory of truth. The premise has no meaning so it cannot describe or represent something in the world for it to correspond to. Even if you reject these conceptions of truth and meaning, how do we distinguish between beliefs about different unintelligible objects? We cannot distinguish between them on the basis of the difference in certain features or properties because we can't understand what features or properties they have. My last paragraph seems kinda suspect actually. But this comment is already kinda long, so I'm just gonna leave it. Something along these lines might work though.
There isn’t anything problematic with that. You’ll hear the persons definition of meaning and agree whatever the subject was isn’t meaningful with their definition but is meaningful with yours. I guess the issue is if everyone has different definitions in their mind than the next person which is pretty likely. Maybe bordering on the “your red isn’t my red” territory
We can't see the quantum so all we have is data collected by sensors at certain intervals. The math explains what happens in a way that is useful to us but there is no way to observe what is actually happening with quanta using our eyes. Instead we get interpretations of a cause for effects that we observed with indirect methods.
You will find lots of useful fictions in physics. It really depends on what field you're in and what you've studied that drives one towards a particular interpretation.
I'm not convinced "square circle" is meaningful even given the deflationary definition. While I do usually know what both "square" and "circle" mean, when applied to circles, I don't know what "square" means, and in the category of square things I don't know what "circle" means. So in the phrase "square circle" I understand at most one of the terms
The deflationary view does not require you to know what "square" means when applied to circles. It only requires you to know what "square" means, and that only requires that you be able to do things such as provide the dictionary definition of "square".
@@KaneB not having to know what it means in the relevant context seems problematic to me. Consider the meaning of "5 > -6", but let's say I have only thought about ">" in the context of positive numbers and therefore defines it as A > B iff the line from A to 0 passes through B. This definition works perfectly when A and B are both positive but gives the wrong meaning to "5 > -5" even though I know each term in a different context.
@@MsNikeNike I'm not sure what the issue is here. In the scenario you describe, it seems that you are assigning a meaning to ">", you're just using it in an unconventional way. Well, that does in fact happen. People do use symbols in unconventional ways. Any conception of meaning that approximates the ordinary understanding of the terms would need to accommodate cases like this.
Self evaluation seems unintelligible. How is it possible to verify that an evaluation of an instance of any given time slice of objective self is a kind of thing in the world that could be a subject of evaluation similar to say the intrinsic evaluation of pure gold? Easy pease, I ether downward evaluate or upward evaluate and this verifies I am relative to another persons logical domain or luminary properties or athletic olympian skills given I can jump over 2meters. This seems like a logical positivist stance pertaining to self evaluation based on observing the Olympic Games but makes no sense in the logical domain and even less so for luminary properties like believing so and so is charismatic so is my leader.
Im not sure what the deflationary account is trying to do. To me meaningful sentences "make a difference" in some sense, I can imagine a state of affairs, make predictions, explain things, etc. But the deflationary account seems to be perfectly fine with saying "red prime numbers jump on the yard" is meaningful. I mean sure you can stipulate it so... but then why not just call the deflationary system "closed under grammar and implication" and not "meaningful"
Why does it have to do anything? In any case, per the deflationary account, meaningful sentences do need to "make a difference" -- they need to be such that you can elaborate on them, either by making inferences from them or by telling further stories about the scenarios.
"red prime numbers jump on the yard" is creatively meaningful for at least some subset of people. Sure, it's not a coherent proposition per se, but it can prompt particular visualization or evoke certain themes that differ from other sentences, and if you then create something with those themes / ideas, surely some practical difference has arisen? It's kind of hard to actually find uses of language that can be said to definitely lack meaning, because humans are so aggressively pattern-recognizing (even to the point of hallucination)
An idealist would object to the intelligibility of your concept of "making a difference". Does the thought "red prime numbers jump on the yard" have _an effect_ on your mind? It certainly does. And to an idealist, _there are no ways of making a difference other than _*_that_*_ one._
If we say that something is unintelligible even in principle, then aren’t we claiming that no higher intelligence than the current “smartest” human can ever exist in the universe? And if we aren’t saying it’s unintelligible in principle, then like you said, perhaps it’s just circumstantially unintelligible at the moment, in this one location in the universe, to these specific entities.
I mean for quantum mechanics I think it's more a problem of Representation breaking down at the most fundamental levels of reality & that Determinism as a premise was never actually experimentally verified
Charges of an argument being unintelligible just always struck me as a cheapshot, or a thinly veiled ad-hominen - I mean it basically amounts to just saying "you're talking nonsense, you have no idea what you're on about." But philosophers are generally not unintelligent people, and don't spend their careers advocating for positions they literally don't understand - that would be silly. It's why I always found the moral anti-realists supposed puzzlement or inability to make sense of categorical reasons to be largely performative, a rhetorical trick. Can you make sense of mathematical platonism? Can you make sense of colors existing out there, independent of your perception, can you make sense of any other realistic conceptions of objects, things, etc? Obviously yes. You don't have to accept it, but it's not unintelligible. Then why the big issue with moral realism?
Do you think that my puzzlement is a rhetorical trick? I find much talk of "reasons" in metaethics baffling, but as I explain in this video, I don't see this as a particularly compelling argument against any position. So what does the rhetoric achieve in my case? >> Can you make sense of mathematical platonism? Can you make sense of colors existing out there, independent of your perception, can you make sense of any other realistic conceptions of objects, things, etc? Obviously yes. I don't think this is obvious. There are plenty of philosophers who will challenge the intelligibility of all these things. Logical positivists, pragmatists, ordinary language philosophers, Wittgensteinians, etc... many of them target analytic metaphysics in general, and more.
>a thinly veiled ad-hominen - I mean it basically amounts to just saying "you're talking nonsense, you have no idea what you're on about." What makes that an ad hominem? If that's what you think of what they say, I don't see why that would be any more of an ad hominem them telling what they said is false. >But philosophers are generally not unintelligent people, and don't spend their careers advocating for positions they literally don't understand - that would be silly. (1) Intelligence has nothing to do with it. The causal factors that would lead one to hold unintelligible views could be less transparent, less obvious, and more difficult to recognize than the factors that would cause one to recognize that a belief is false. If, for instance, a very smart philosopher is *not* saying anything unintelligible, and both they and their opponents share the same methods, tools, and read the same literature, and everything they're saying is meaningful, but they somehow still fail to arrive at the correct conclusion, and therefore endorse an intelligible but false view, one might regard that as even more of an ad hominem: It'd be like saying "Yes, you have everything you need to arrive at the right conclusion, but you fail to do so, anyway." In other words: that someone endorses an unintelligible view is not necessarily an indication that they're less competent or intelligence than if they held a false view; in fact, the opposite might be true. (2) I think philosophers do spend their careers advocating for positions they literally don't understand. What's silly about that? > It's why I always found the moral anti-realists supposed puzzlement or inability to make sense of categorical reasons to be largely performative, a rhetorical trick. I'm Lance Bush, the person mentioned at the start of the video. I am one of the most public proponents of the view that non-naturalist moral realism is unintelligible. I'm not puzzled, and my belief that non-naturalist moral realist concepts are unintelligible is not performative and not a rhetorical trick. It's ironic that you seem to object to the claim in part on the grounds that it's an ad hominem, yet here you are *publicly claiming that I am am lying and engaged in rhetorical tricks.* That is a far better candidate for an ad hominem than my own position. It's incredible that people continue to make this claim. We're dishonest? Just engaged in performative tricks? I talk about this topic day in and day out. I correspond about it with colleagues, and I speak about it with friends and family. I talk to my wife about it constantly. If I were lying and engaged in performative tricks, this would mean that I continue to keep up the charade and lie to my wife, my friends, and my family, constantly, for years on end, and never drop the act. They could readily inform you that I privately maintain that I think the concepts in question are unintelligible: if anything, with even more forcefulness than I do publicly! To suggest I'm engaged in some kind of performative trick isn't just extremely insulting and rude, it's ridiculous and there's no good evidence to suggest that it's true. > Can you make sense of mathematical platonism? Can you make sense of colors existing out there, independent of your perception, can you make sense of any other realistic conceptions of objects, things, etc? Obviously yes Even if I could, that doesn't mean that irreducible normativity or categorical reasons are intelligible. What even is the reasoning here? Simply because other things may be intelligible doesn't mean non-naturalist realist concepts are. >Then why the big issue with moral realism? One difference with those positions is that they all involve descriptive claims. My specific issue with moral realism is the notion of irreducible normativity. On my view, there are only descriptive facts. If there were normative facts, they'd have to be a kind of descriptive fact. Insofar as some realists maintain that there are normative facts that cannot be reduced to descriptive facts, this strikes me, at least, as conceptually confused, as literal nonsense.
@@dr.h8r Right. It certainly does not mean that and I find it really bizarre people see "I don't think what you said is meaningful" as some kind of insult or attack on the person making a claim. For what it's worth, I rarely say "I don't understand the content of x" when suggesting that a given claim is unintelligible. Doing so gives the misleading impression that you think there is or plausibly could be something to understand, but that you, personally, don't understand it. I might say this about scientific terms I'm not familiar with, or if I'm struggling to understand a language I am learning. But I don't say this (at least not anymore) about philosophical positions I find unintelligible. I say that I don't think the terms or claims are meaningful. Technically speaking, if true this entails that I don't understand them, but it also entails that *nobody* understands them, including the people making them.
People do talk a lot of nonsense, and I don't see any reason to necessarily assume that intelligent people will talk *less* nonsense -- there is for example the quote "Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals can believe them", which IMO reflects that greater skill != greater wisdom. As a general rule I think as the level of abstraction of the topic rises, people fail more and more to say things that could be even theoretically possible. (there are computational reasons for this IMO) The things you are asserting as 'obviously understandable' are precisely those things which seem to me to be, on reflection, failing to make any kind of coherent claim, and doing so in a way that is consistent with having considerable skill with language. One of the reasons that these seem that way to me is that there are identifiable patterns in constitutionally-incomplete claims -- never characterizing anything specifically enough, "non-explanations" that simply define one term within the theory in terms of another term within the theory (which itself is not adequately defined), the explanation being not obviously incompatible with any particular state of affairs we might potentially observe in the world, etc..
Moral realism and categorical reasons: ruclips.net/video/gFhMBRyZ4fQ/видео.html
Conceivability: ruclips.net/video/BYsT1Bk1_8Q/видео.html
The indeterminacy of truth: ruclips.net/video/2HN05QZ7eXE/видео.html
Hello Kane, i was banned from your discord server by an overzealous admin simply because I was in possession of a book that they felt they did not agree with.
I have been a long-time fan, contributor, and promoter of your work, and I feel it was unnecessary.
@@CollectiveDismal. I don't actually run the discord; what happens isn't up to me. That is, I'm the king of the discord, but like many modern kings I have chosen to give up my powers. It's entirely up the mod team who gets banned. FWIW, my best friend is banned from my discord as well (Jacques, who I've done a couple of videos with).
Not liking and commenting on the video is the most unintelligible position, especially if you watch the whole video.
Facts
I think I basically agree with this. Your "schmeaningful" move was interesting and reminded me of Enoch's paper "Agency, Schmagency". Enoch's point was that the accusation of practical irrationality is only an objection for those already committed to a certain conception of practical rationality. Similarly, the charge of meaninglessness is only problematic for an opponent who buys into the same conception of meaningfulness as their interlocutor. But that charge only comes up when there's disagreement about what is meaningful, so it turns out never to be problematic.
And it's hard to imagine what a principled argument for adopting a certain substantial account of meaningfulness would look like. If the account is given as part of a more general program, like verificationism was given as part of logical empiricism, then there can be more general arguments in favor of the program. But getting one's opponent to buy into that sort of program is probably a much heavier burden than what was initially at stake.
Then there's the added difficulty that this charge is almost always issued against some discourse used by a community whose members take themselves to be saying meaningful things. This is the case with "categorical reasons" and also with the kinds of statements logical empiricists opposed, like metaphysical and religious discourse. Again, how on earth would one hope to convince those speakers that their discourse is meaningless? Insofar as we can expect to have any reasonable criteria to objectively assess the meaningfulness of some discourse, then I'd argue consistent use in a linguistic community is as good a candidate as any for a criterion. It could very well be that the accuser's failure to grasp the meaning of a statement is just a matter of not belonging to the relevant linguistic community.
(edit: typo)
Name it "Making sense of making sense".
I guess "The Meaning of 'Meaning'" is already taken
Intelligibility for the two Purist painters, Cubism was pure decoration-"if a cubist painting is beautiful" they write, "it is in the same way a carpet is beautiful." Although Cubism made ample use of geometrical forms, Ozenfant and Jeannette claimed, it did so without recourse to any laws- its compositions were arbitrary, they were not controlled by any "standard". Pictorial representations as an arbitrary system so signs seemed to be unintelligible to the Purists. So from this the meta analysis is that the binary of intelligibility verses intelligibility is a in-group to out group phenomenology and has liminal zones where agents shift perspective based on self evaluation with intra group and inter group dynamics.
i love how kane b’s comments section is always full of such wholesome support for him 😆
Shmeaning:
1. I understand terms used
2. Phrased in grammatically correct way
3. Can make further inferences
In a sentence, do you care about knowing the intended meaning behind the entire sentence or just certain sections of the sentence?
"So I think it's very important, as you have heard from so many incredible leaders for us at every moment in time and certainly this one, to see the moment in time in which we exist and are present, and to be able to contextualize it, to understand where we exist in the history and in the moment as it relates not only to the past but the future." - Kamala Harris
With respect to the "why can't the world be unintelligible" argument:
Sentences and statements can be intelligible or unintelligible. An unintelligible sentence doesn't signify anything. I don't think the relevant question is "is the truth intelligible or not?", it's more like "can unintelligible statements have any truth value at all?". Imagine that the universe is fundamentally unintelligible. Does that make the sentences "hsbrjeosj jfieh ggghez" or "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" true? It's not that an unintelligible statement is [meaningful but corresponds to an unintelligible state of affairs], its that an unintelligible statement [doesn't correspond to any state of affairs at all] and therefore can't be more true or more false then the sentences above.
With respect to the quantum mechanics argument:
I think there's some ambiguity about how you're using the word "intelligible" here. QM itself is very intelligible (as a specific set of equations that provide accurate statistical predictions of observations). There is no real misunderstanding or ambiguity about them. The "theory of QM" is specifically math + associated predictions of observations, and the "meaning of QM" or the process of "getting QM" is just understanding how to calculate + predict. The point where QM becomes "unintelligible" is exactly the point where IMO there is no good reason to believe it (because the unintelligible parts are invariably interpretations decoupled from the actual calculations and aren't agreed upon by the scientific community).
With respect to the "Any statement is meaningful if you can make inferences from them":
Meaningfulness is relative to a context. Is the sentence "donde esta la biblioteca" meaningful? You can't actually say without assuming a language. How about "the square root of two"? That depends on if you're using the Rational numbers or the Reals. Your example of the square-circle window being covered + not-covered by the cardboard is implicitly assuming a set if rules where the square-circle cardboard would cover AND not-cover the window, but you sort of said that as if it was an obvious consequence. If I was going to answer the question "would a square piece of cardboard cover a square-circle window", I would have just said yes it would cover it because they're both squares, but it wouldn't not-cover it. ln your world where you have a "correct" answer, it might be intelligible. In normal speech, however, we have no way to adjudicate the question "does a square piece of cardboard not-cover a square circle window" (I have no idea how you would even theoretically judge that), so it would be unintelligible. IMO, claiming that "metaphysics is unintelligible" basically means that NOBODY can actually "talk the talk" in a satisfying way (if you keep making statements, youll quickly get to a point where people don't know what is implied by something else). The fact that meta-physicians write papers that resemble eachother doesn't make them automatically meaningful, surrealists paint similar pictures but it would be strange on that account to call them "meaningful" in a way that accords them a truth value.
Of course, you can define words however you want and create arbitrary contexts in which statements imply each other. If I play a social deduction game where "if you are blorp, then you're morp" then the sentence "are you blorp?" can be considered meaningful. IMO, It's mostly un-interesting to invent non-standard contexts if you want to understand language as it is usually practiced. It's more something you would do if you were trying to invent a game or a language like Klingon for fun.
I'm not sure how your first points address the first argument, though perhaps this is just because I didn't do a good job of explaining the argument. The idea is that the following scenario might occur: There is some set of propositions P, P* ... Pn. By whatever criteria we are using to judge intelligibility, P is intelligible, and moreover we think we have good reason to believe that P. P* is intelligible, and we think we have good reasons to believe that P*. And so on. But then it is noticed that P, P* ... Pn entails or supports Q, where Q is unintelligible per our criteria. That scenario strikes me as epistemically possible; I don't know how we could rule that out a priori. Perhaps there are some criteria for intelligibility on which we could rule this out a priori, but what exactly intelligibility is open to debate, so even if we do accept such criteria provisionally I think we should be open to the possibility that we might be wrong about this.
Now, if that scenario occurred, I think this would count as evidence that the universe is unintelligible. Or to put this in terms of statements, we should say that Q is true, even though Q is unintelligible. QM might be an actual example of this, though of course that's extremely controversial. Some people will take an instrumentalist interpretation, as you do (and as I do, actually; I'm not a scientific realist). Others will be realists but will insist that, contrary to the comments of folks like Feynman, we actually can form a robust conception of its picture of the world. Unfortunately, there are no non-controversial examples of this scenario. Still, I don't know how to rule out that scenario. With that in mind, I'm inclined to think that, if I give a compelling argument that some position is unintelligible, it is reasonable for defenders of that position to say that it is, in fact, an actual example of that scenario.
>> IMO, claiming that "metaphysics is unintelligible" basically means that NOBODY can actually "talk the talk" in a satisfying way
What counts as a "satisfying way", though? Metaphysicians seem to be fairly satisfied with the way that they talk. Even many of the people who are skeptical of metaphysics are satisfied with it -- their objections to metaphysics may not have appeal to concerns about meaningfulness. For instance, Ladyman & Ross in "Every Thing Must Go" present a vicious attack on contemporary metaphysics, but if I recall their arguments correctly, they do not claim that contemporary metaphysics is meaningless; their objections lie more in how metaphysicians regularly present theories that are inconsistent with our best physics.
@@KaneB Re-doing my reply to your reply because I misunderstood something you said initially:
I think the core of my first thought is that the word "unintelligibility" should be used to mean "does not interface nicely with the rules of the discourse" in some sense. It seems to me like if a set of premises (P ... Pn) can ever lead to / imply / exclude / sit in nice specific relationships with Q then that would definitionally make Q intelligible. If it doesn't, then Q is unintelligible. Because IMO this is what unintelligibility "really means", then it is basically a priori impossible for Q to be implied by proposition (P ... Pn) using any rules of discourse.
RE the second point: I myself wasn't saying that I think metaphysics is unintelligible. Unintelligibility to me is defined relative to a specific set of discourse rules [EX: sqrt(2) is unintelligible in the rationals but not the reals]. Someone who claims that metaphysics isn't intelligible might only include statements about theoretically observable entities as "legal" or "satisfying".
There is no such thing as a universally unintelligible statement, because given any proposition (for example "kfjeh jfig ops") I can invent a context / language in which that statement means "2+2=4" (like, I'm inventing a language for my sci-fi alien species).
I think this is a definitional point, but just because it's definitional doesn't mean it's arbitrary. I can use the word "apple" to mean "a fuzzy animal with two legs", and that definition is in some sense just as good as the usual definition but it's also (by reasonable metric) wrong and if a kindergartner was using it that way you would try to correct them. I don't think I understand what concept you mean by the word "unintelligible" which is maybe why I'm confused
On intentionalist theories of meaning + correspondence theories of truth; Correspondence relations aren’t necessarily truth-apt, but all truth-apt statements necessarily have correspondence relata.
On this view the essential condition for directives is satisfaction/frustration which corresponds to the intentional content of the expressor - no truth-aptness (even tho the content has secondary truth-apt content).
For assertives the essential condition is truth-aptness which corresponds to the facts in relation to the intentional content of the expressor.
The difference between the two is the direction-of-fit. The dof for directives is world-to-mind, whereas assertives the dof is mind-to-world.
"So what" seems like a somewhat hard objection to a lot of philosophy, at least in practical terms :)
(I do care about meaning and what it means for something to mean something, since it's pretty fundamental, but also, very hard to define without getting circular, at least from my very unschooled perspective.)
"So what?" is a great objection.
Meaning is an important psychological phenomenon which relates to much of our mental life and our behaviour. That is why it's (potentially) important
@@captainzork6109 'Meaning' is also rather ambiguous term that covers a lot of ground - 'means' a lot of things.
@@strangebird5974 Ah, true! So then I imagine some philosopher reading literature on the meaning of, for example human nature, notices how everyone uses the word "meaning" in slightly different ways. This makes it so the discussion stagnates, because everyone's conceptualization of the meaning of human nature is actually incomparable to one another's. One talks about how human nature is that thing which determines an organism to be part of the species "human", another talks about what humans tend to be like (good or evil; rational or irrational). And so a theory of meaning may be quite useful, so that people will start talking with and not past each other
I wonder what contemporary theories of meaning would entail, and if they relate to day-to-day or even academic use
@@captainzork6109 I left philosophy, fortunately or unfortunately, before I could properly look into theories of meaning - but I was meaning (!) to do that at one point. In formal logic, we were taught one proposed definition, namely, that meaning equals conditions for truth for some proposition. Rather reductive, and I remember having some issues with that definition, though I can't remember all of them in detail right now...
your last point on meaningfulness is something I've found a lot around nihilism recently. Perhaps you don't mean "meaning" in the same kind of existential sense but I think it still works here. A nihilist can claim that meaninglessness is ubiquitous in our universe, but that statement uses a narrow and pretty objectionable sense of "meaning" that there's no clear reason to endorse. I could, for example, say that "meaning" to me is what brings me fulfillment in life, and suddenly the nihilist's claims of universal meaninglessness seem unintelligible to me. I think the idea works with most philosophical positions. So communication is important to make sure the same words aren't being used differently.
Yep, the same kind of argument can be applied in lots of contexts. If you give an argument for the claim that x does not have some property P, your argument will appeal to some conception of what is for something to be P, and this is going to be open to dispute. There will probably be multiple different ways of thinking about what P is. So it's open to your opponent to grant that x does not have P in the sense that you mean P, but then say that your sense isn't the sense that matters to them.
This is like the Buddhist claim that 'all things are empty...' (which the nihilist would agree with) '..., and, since emptiness is a thing, emptiness is also empty' (which the nihilist would presumably object to, since it neuters their claim of meaninglessness)
(if that seems confusing, another way to put it is that meaning exists *only* by convention, and the definition of meaning itself is therefore necessarily a matter of convention too)
While I appreciate your insight, I don't really agree with the example you used. It's pretty much built into existential nihilism that only cosmic/"objective" meaning doesn't exist, with some leeway given to subjective applications of purpose. Even then, one could argue that the notion of personal fulfillment being the basis for meaning still doesn't exist,( appealing to the incoherence of the very notion itself.)
It's like, say, conflating childfree with antinatalism. As an antinatalist, I would view procreation as a universal harm to any sentient being born. You don't need to elaborate on that part if you're an antinatalist as opposed to just being childfree as the ethical weight of such action isn't intrinsically involved in the latter. Sure, there are some differences, but you don't need to specify anything as the ideas behind both already diverge.
Perhaps values come before truth, perception, and hence reality. This line of thinking points to the primacy of values
I can't imagine a situation where it's both the case that:
-I think X is unintelligible
-I think an argument for X is good
How am I going to make the link between the premises and the conclusion if the conclusion makes no sense?
You give the example of the square circle, the cardboard completely covers it and also it doesn't. But there's no situation that I'll recognize as fulfilling that contradictory criteria, so no matter what I find when I play with the cardboard, the window won't count as a square circle. Or maybe I do find myself in a situation where I go "wow, it does both fully cover it and not fully cover it". But then it's no longer unintelligible, I do understand the square circle now.
* I can't imagine a situation where I think there's a good argument for an unintelligible position, UNLESS I'm relying on someone else's judgement. Like, if god shows up and says square circles are real, then ok sure.
@@warptens5652 this thought cannot be proven.
Could you do a video on arguments for/against Longtermism (or Effective Altruism, or "Earning to Give")? Or on Global Priorities Research more generally? I'm asking this because lately I've been reading EA/Longtermism/80,000Hours stuff and I've been seriously philosophically persuaded by it, as counterintuitive and anti-commonsensical as they may be. So in the spirit of open-mindedness, I want to be exposed to more objections against it, and I feel that you, Kane B may be just the sort of philosopher I need on that score.
He did a video relatively recently on a related topic IIRC
@@Dere2727 which one?
@@jackeasling3294 My video on the hinge of history is related to some of that stuff: ruclips.net/video/DpckMBO0hHk/видео.html
Honestly though, I find most of the literature here very dull. It just isn't a topic that interests me much.
@@KaneB I watched your AMA responses where you talked briefly about EA and Singer's drowning child thought experiment. I honestly don't understand how you could be apathetic towards normative ethics and think It's okay to draw arbitrary lines in moral treatment! How could you live with yourself knowing that had you been timetravelled to the past, you would've condoned arbitrary discrimination by race, not helping Jews in Nazi Germany or Blacks in Early America "just because you don't feel like it" and instead fund weird art instead?
@@jackeasling3294 I'm not sure how to answer that question. First, I would be (and am) opposed to arbitrary discrimination by race, so I don't think it's fair to say that I would condone it in those circumstances. It's true that my opposition to it probably wouldn't manifest in any significant way in my actions; certainly, I would do everything I could to avoid fighting in WWII, for instance. Perhaps that counts as "condoning" it in your view. As for why I am the way I am, I don't know. I've never been inclined to reflect much on my motivations.
If any component of an argument is unintelligible, that renders the entire argument unintelligible, and thus I can't accept it. That doesn't prove the conclusion false, but I simply can't accept it.
I place many arguments for God in this category: any argument that includes free will and an omniscient being; any argument that includes an all-loving God and any suffering; etc.
Now I wonder what this means for continental philosophy - my intuition is that a great part of it is pure gibberish, but they seem to be capable to read each other and communicate, so maybe it's in fact meaningful. Maybe Jacques Derrida doesn't write complete nonsense.
I'm not sure what the last point is supposed to do - when "meaning" is used in a more general sense, it's a round-about way to point to how pragmatically significant something is. It can convey emotions, pictures, actions, values, descriptions, etc. When a sentence or word or theory conveys nothing, none of those things listed, it's meaningless.
So your response is essentially "I don't care that such and such conveys nothing pragmatically, I care that I can understand the terms used in such and such, and that it's gramatically correct". That's fine, but is that not talking past the matter at hand? You've used the term "meaning" in a way most people don't, so you're past talking about meaning - you're talking about shmeaning, your version of "meaning". You're just saying that you're fine with empty sentences (convey nothing) as long as they're gramatically correct. Most people don't use "meaning" in this way, and most care about a sentence or term conveying something, and hold it against a theory/sentence that it doesn't convey anything.
Example: My friend tells me "Close the door but don't close the door". To you that's meaningful and so valuable. But to anyone else that has no meaning and so no value - what am I even supposed to do?
Then, imagine my friend tells me "My favorite shape is the square-circle". What am I supposed to imagine? Have I gained any knowledge? Was that even an information?
Or imagine a politician who makes a policy he says will "Make the homeless prime numbers" - and he means that literally, like it's not a metaphore or whatever. What are people supposed to understand from that? Well they'd rightly call his policy "meaningless" right? They would say his policiy is empty, has no value, is unintelligible. They couldn't even say that it's good or bad, that can't even think it, let alone what it entails.
It's not because something is gramatically correct that it's enough to be valuable.
Also, if you're taking this path - why stop there? Why do you need a sentence to be gramatically correct? The sentence conveys nothing anyways. In this sense the bad sentence "Cesar is and" is as meaningful as "The square circle". Why make a difference at this point?
First, I don't accept that I'm using the term "meaning" in a way that most people don't. I doubt that most ordinary people have any particular view of meaning, and if there is any implicit theory of meaning that underlies our ordinary uses of terms such as "meaning", it's probably vague and incoherent.
Second, the deflationary view of meaning is not that a sentence P is meaningful just in case P is grammatical. There are two other conditions: (i) the person must know how to use the terms used in stating P and (ii) the person must be able to make inferences from P, or tell a further story about P, or something like that. Perhaps, on your view of meaning, there could be sentences that meet all these conditions but nevertheless are "empty" or "convey nothing". It seems to me that, if I can make inferences from P, it is rather odd to say that P "conveys nothing". But fair enough; presumably, if you are adopting a more robust view of meaning, you will say that there could be sentences that meet these conditions that do not convey any meaning, at least.
>> That's fine, but is that not talking past the matter at hand?
The context is this. I defend P. You have given an argument to the effect that P is meaningless. Your argument appeals to some conception of meaning with identifies it with some property M. Perhaps your conception of meaning just is the ordinary language conception; M is what most people have in mind when they talk about meaning. Let's also just grant that M is able to overcome all the technical objections that usually face theories of meaning. So we have a good argument for the claim that P is meaningless.
But I don't care about making claims that have property M. My favoured conception of meaning is something less stringent, M*. We need not even dispute whether this is "really" meaning; I'll give you the word "meaning" and talking about "schmeaning" instead. I want my claims to be schmeaningful, but it doesn't matter much to me if they are meaningful. I care about M*, not M.
At this point, I don't think we are talking past each other. I understand you perfectly well, and you understand me perfectly well, at least with respect to how we are each conceiving of meaning, and to the value we each place on it.
>> Well they'd rightly call his policy "meaningless" right? They would say his policiy is empty, has no value, is unintelligible.
It probably comes as no surprise that, in my view, his policy is totally meaningful. The problem with the policy is not that it is meaningless. It's that it can't be done. Indeed, part of what allows me to know that it can't be done is that I understand perfectly well what the policy is supposed to be. If the politician had said, "make the homeless diddle diddle doddle doddle," I would be confused and ask for clarification, because I don't know what "diddle" or "doddle" mean. I know what prime numbers are, and I know that people cannot become prime numbers. Moreover, I don't think this reaction to this case is all that counterintuitive. (I suspect that many people, if you were to describe this scenario to them, would agree with the judgment that the policy is meaningless. But I also suspect that many of them would agree with my judgment that the policy is meaningful but impossible to execute.)
>> Also, if you're taking this path - why stop there?
I agree. For any conception of meaning C that imposes any conditions whatsoever, we can always come up with some other conception, C*, on which some of those conditions are removed. If C* is what I care about, it's not going to concern me that something I say counts as meaningless under C.
I think the problem about meaningless expressions is that you can't use them, only mention them.
That’s a feature not a bug, man
@@dr.h8r how so, if we're always ever only talking about the words and not the things? Are our arguments really about words doing stuff that only things can do? Being unintelligible seems akin to comitting category errors.
My comment was tongue-in-cheek. The point was (on use/intentionalist theories of meaning) the expression “an unused expression is unintelligible” is basically a tautology.
I still think you can only accept quantum mechanics to the extent that it is intelligible. When physicists say things like that they don’t understand quantum mechanics, what they really mean is that they don’t have an intuitive grasp for it or that there are missing pieces in their understanding. But they do understand the mathematics behind it as well as the concrete predictions that the theory makes. I would say it’s the part that they understand that they accept.
Hum interesting, do you still believe that there are beliefs that are psychologically irresistible? How did this view evolve for you?
No, I no longer hold that view. There were certain forms of meditation that skepticism much more intuitively compelling.
👍 {}
Found this video to be very schmeaningful & highly schmintelligible.
Favorite video in a longtime. I hope Lance Bush watches this and feels like a cop. I actually think after this video he should start wearing a police uniform.
@@unknownknownsphilosophy7888 Wish granted!
I claim that "Ciz ocikh uco yuilwx prni ciz wmmu auni kmj;" is meaningless and unintelligible. I'm reasonably confident that there's no meaning there to make sense of, because I just hit arbitrary keys on the keyboard, other than spaces to break it up into segments of an appropriate length to be words. And I don't think that I need a fully-worked-out account of meaning in order to be able to make this claim. I can accept, for the sake of argument, any of a wide range of views on what intelligibility really is exactly and how meaning works, and still have good reason to say that the pseudo-random string doesn't have any.
You raise a good point! Sometimes we can justify unintelligibility in a purely *empirical* way! Like asking people to tell the difference between a Deepak Chopra quote and a randomly generated gibberish quote.
I think Feynman was joking. His point was that QM runs counter to our intuition. My personal view is that QM is intelligible, but the Copenhagen interpretation is not. What do we mean by "wave function collapse"? How does it happen? Where does the rest of the wave function go? How can we identify collapse when it happens?
Claims that some proposition is unintelligible or meaningless are themselves usually either false or pointless. In my experience one of the distinguishing features of philosophical newbs and wannabes is that they are very fond of throwing the word 'meaningless' about. I suspect it is an unfortunate hangover from the influence of Ayer's Language Truth and Logic.
To me it seems like I could understand quantum mechanics if I put sufficient time into figuring it out. But for categorical reasons it seems like no explanation would ever be produced because I maybe doubt the processes that led to this idea would have made its true description out of the things I want to explain everything in terms of. So I doubt it would have been made of actual stuff idk. But quantum mechanics theory seems like it would have been formulated in terms of actual stuff and I just havent learned it idk.
and for moral nonnaturalism i think that there cant be evidence for a statement that doesn't say any particular thing at all. Like how could there be evidence for a random string of letters being true? Iguess the only possibility is if the evidence refers to the statements directly, like if an omniscient being or trusted expert believed or agreed with the statement. But if that happened then it would probably require that the position does have a meaning in terms of actual stuff, since it has to have a meaning to be true. It wouldn't make me doubt the idea that unintelligibile means unacceptable. In an extreme case like an omniscient being saying that a random string of words is true, I might sooner doubt the being is actually omniscient, or if really pushed I might think we have different conceptions of truth or meaning, or I might doubt my logical faculties, because it doesnt seem possible to me for something that doesnt say any particular thing at all to be true.
For a square circle, it is made of 2 intelligible but contradictory statements about the shape, and is impossible to picture because every picture is wrong.
imagine 5 guys, starved for days end by some authority, put into a room together. a cake is thrown into the center. 4 of those guys are going to use their faculties to get as much of the cake as possible. the 5th guy, a classically trained philosopher, is gonna be like 'well hold on fellas, isn't anyone interested about where the cake came from? or what it's made of?' he surely will die first
Can’t we give some sufficient criteria for a notion of unintelligibility easily enough, so that we can use some versions of unintelligibility to unhesitatingly reject such unintelligible arguments or positions? For example, it seems to me to make sense to declare arguments purportedly presented in a language L that fail to actually meet the syntactic or grammatical requirements of the language as unintelligible. An example for me is in English, using the phrase “ain’t no sunshine when you’re gone” in a philosophical argument or debate is unintelligible in part because it’s grammatically incorrect; on the other hand it’s an entertaining song lyric.
Another reason to credibly deny the intelligibility of an argument can be based upon semantics of the language in which it is purportedly formulated. For example, the phrase “that limit doesn’t exist” violates the semantics of English because the phrase “that limit” means that we’re (verbally) pointing at a thing that we’re calling a limit, and “doesn’t exist” means there is no such limit, so where are we verbally pointing? At a blank region of space?
…
The second example reminds me of the cases discussed in Graham Priest's book "Beyond the Limits of Thought" -- there are lots of theories in philosophy that propose limits to what can be conceived, or thought, or expressed; but then stating these very theories involve operations that do in fact cross those limits. Take, for instance, the Kantian view that there is a distinction between phenomena and noumena, where only the phenomena can be known and we have no access to the noumena. In drawing this very boundary, we must say something about the noumena, and so if the theory can be known then something about the noumena can be known, after all. Priest takes at least some cases like this to be true contradictions: there are limits of thought which cannot be crossed, but which nevertheless are crossed.
@@KaneB
To me it’s interesting that your response references Kant, and doesn’t mention mathematics, because the cases in which I’m most annoyed with the phrase “doesn’t exist” showing it’s ugly has are in mathematics textbooks and on the papers I’ve graded, by students who’ve been brainwashed to think that it makes sense to use that phrase when tasked with “computing” limits in, for example, elementary analysis (calculus or real analysis, or their applications). Before I forced my current thoughts on this linguistic and semantic issue, my introduction to a way to make the intended information clear in a real analysis class, in which my professor just didn’t use that phrase. That is, rather than something like “the limit of that sequence doesn’t exist”, his notes read “that sequence has no limit”. I remember being struck by how much more compatible with the structure of predicate logic was this way of writing, philosophically and pedagogically. Eventually I learned a small amount of philosophy and the following quote, which I think was attributed to Kant, fits my understanding and intuition about this:
“Existence is not a predicate.”
This expresses it so nicely and succinctly.
Thanks for the videos and the interaction.
Meaningfullness is unintelligible :)
I'd like to know your opinion on Lance Bush's critiques of analytic philosophy
It depends on which critique you're talking about. Lance has lots of objections to analytic philosophy, some of which I'm inclined to agree with, many of which are derived from his pragmatist views which I don't get on board with at all.
@@KaneB I think the strongest one is that related to analytic philosophers' tendency to approach problems by thinking hard how English Speakers use words. I remember reading an article on philosophy of time, where the author was analysing time based on English grammar for past tenses. As a Romanian native speaker it seemed a bit odd, given that my language has different past tense structures :))
@@KaneB also, the appeal to intuitions when it is claimed that "X is intuitive", without saying for whom. It is an empirical claim to say that X is intuitive for everyone.
For some reason I always completely agree with Lance Bush.
@@lanceindependent does a dialetheist always agree with himself?
I'm not sure what to say about your second point about different senses of meaning. However, I think I see a problem with the first point about there potentially being compelling arguments for unintelligible positions.
I think you meant something along these lines. There is no reason to suppose that there could not be something that is unintelligible to us, so there is nothing in principle stopping us from making an argument that concludes with the existence of something unintelligible.
However, any argument for the conclusion of categorical reasons, for example, would require a premise that contains the term categorical reasons. But if we find this unintelligible we should not accept this premise because meaningless statements cannot be true or believed. I think this just follows from most theories about truth or belief.
For example, an unintelligible premise doesn't seem like it could be true given the correspondence theory of truth. The premise has no meaning so it cannot describe or represent something in the world for it to correspond to.
Even if you reject these conceptions of truth and meaning, how do we distinguish between beliefs about different unintelligible objects? We cannot distinguish between them on the basis of the difference in certain features or properties because we can't understand what features or properties they have.
My last paragraph seems kinda suspect actually. But this comment is already kinda long, so I'm just gonna leave it. Something along these lines might work though.
There isn’t anything problematic with that. You’ll hear the persons definition of meaning and agree whatever the subject was isn’t meaningful with their definition but is meaningful with yours. I guess the issue is if everyone has different definitions in their mind than the next person which is pretty likely. Maybe bordering on the “your red isn’t my red” territory
We can't see the quantum so all we have is data collected by sensors at certain intervals. The math explains what happens in a way that is useful to us but there is no way to observe what is actually happening with quanta using our eyes. Instead we get interpretations of a cause for effects that we observed with indirect methods.
You will find lots of useful fictions in physics. It really depends on what field you're in and what you've studied that drives one towards a particular interpretation.
Nice Shmhaircut
Funny the meaning of P actually is number 1, ha you said it.
do you consume your society with, or without the wrapping?
I'm not convinced "square circle" is meaningful even given the deflationary definition. While I do usually know what both "square" and "circle" mean, when applied to circles, I don't know what "square" means, and in the category of square things I don't know what "circle" means. So in the phrase "square circle" I understand at most one of the terms
The deflationary view does not require you to know what "square" means when applied to circles. It only requires you to know what "square" means, and that only requires that you be able to do things such as provide the dictionary definition of "square".
@@KaneB not having to know what it means in the relevant context seems problematic to me. Consider the meaning of "5 > -6", but let's say I have only thought about ">" in the context of positive numbers and therefore defines it as A > B iff the line from A to 0 passes through B. This definition works perfectly when A and B are both positive but gives the wrong meaning to "5 > -5" even though I know each term in a different context.
@@MsNikeNike I'm not sure what the issue is here. In the scenario you describe, it seems that you are assigning a meaning to ">", you're just using it in an unconventional way. Well, that does in fact happen. People do use symbols in unconventional ways. Any conception of meaning that approximates the ordinary understanding of the terms would need to accommodate cases like this.
Intelligibly based haircut.
intersting
Self evaluation seems unintelligible. How is it possible to verify that an evaluation of an instance of any given time slice of objective self is a kind of thing in the world that could be a subject of evaluation similar to say the intrinsic evaluation of pure gold? Easy pease, I ether downward evaluate or upward evaluate and this verifies I am relative to another persons logical domain or luminary properties or athletic olympian skills given I can jump over 2meters. This seems like a logical positivist stance pertaining to self evaluation based on observing the Olympic Games but makes no sense in the logical domain and even less so for luminary properties like believing so and so is charismatic so is my leader.
this is a very intelligible video
Every thing is impossible.
Comment for the algorithm 🤖
hmm, so everything is objectively subjective. fantastic.
i find existence unintelligible. Like one really can believe smth just exists? What’s that kind of ontological stuff? doesn’t make any sense
based & intelleged
Im not sure what the deflationary account is trying to do. To me meaningful sentences "make a difference" in some sense, I can imagine a state of affairs, make predictions, explain things, etc. But the deflationary account seems to be perfectly fine with saying "red prime numbers jump on the yard" is meaningful. I mean sure you can stipulate it so... but then why not just call the deflationary system "closed under grammar and implication" and not "meaningful"
Why does it have to do anything? In any case, per the deflationary account, meaningful sentences do need to "make a difference" -- they need to be such that you can elaborate on them, either by making inferences from them or by telling further stories about the scenarios.
"red prime numbers jump on the yard" is creatively meaningful for at least some subset of people.
Sure, it's not a coherent proposition per se, but it can prompt particular visualization or evoke certain themes that differ from other sentences, and if you then create something with those themes / ideas, surely some practical difference has arisen?
It's kind of hard to actually find uses of language that can be said to definitely lack meaning, because humans are so aggressively pattern-recognizing (even to the point of hallucination)
An idealist would object to the intelligibility of your concept of "making a difference".
Does the thought "red prime numbers jump on the yard" have _an effect_ on your mind? It certainly does.
And to an idealist, _there are no ways of making a difference other than _*_that_*_ one._
Cool 😎
Thanks. This vid is smeaningful
If we say that something is unintelligible even in principle, then aren’t we claiming that no higher intelligence than the current “smartest” human can ever exist in the universe?
And if we aren’t saying it’s unintelligible in principle, then like you said, perhaps it’s just circumstantially unintelligible at the moment, in this one location in the universe, to these specific entities.
What did he shmean by this?
I just can’t understand what you’re saying
Please dont be a Socialist.
Please dont be a Socialist.
Please dont be a Socialist.
Is this prayer
I mean for quantum mechanics I think it's more a problem of Representation breaking down at the most fundamental levels of reality & that Determinism as a premise was never actually experimentally verified
Lark and subscrimblement.
Charges of an argument being unintelligible just always struck me as a cheapshot, or a thinly veiled ad-hominen - I mean it basically amounts to just saying "you're talking nonsense, you have no idea what you're on about." But philosophers are generally not unintelligent people, and don't spend their careers advocating for positions they literally don't understand - that would be silly. It's why I always found the moral anti-realists supposed puzzlement or inability to make sense of categorical reasons to be largely performative, a rhetorical trick. Can you make sense of mathematical platonism? Can you make sense of colors existing out there, independent of your perception, can you make sense of any other realistic conceptions of objects, things, etc? Obviously yes. You don't have to accept it, but it's not unintelligible. Then why the big issue with moral realism?
Do you think that my puzzlement is a rhetorical trick? I find much talk of "reasons" in metaethics baffling, but as I explain in this video, I don't see this as a particularly compelling argument against any position. So what does the rhetoric achieve in my case?
>> Can you make sense of mathematical platonism? Can you make sense of colors existing out there, independent of your perception, can you make sense of any other realistic conceptions of objects, things, etc? Obviously yes.
I don't think this is obvious. There are plenty of philosophers who will challenge the intelligibility of all these things. Logical positivists, pragmatists, ordinary language philosophers, Wittgensteinians, etc... many of them target analytic metaphysics in general, and more.
>a thinly veiled ad-hominen - I mean it basically amounts to just saying "you're talking nonsense, you have no idea what you're on about."
What makes that an ad hominem? If that's what you think of what they say, I don't see why that would be any more of an ad hominem them telling what they said is false.
>But philosophers are generally not unintelligent people, and don't spend their careers advocating for positions they literally don't understand - that would be silly.
(1) Intelligence has nothing to do with it. The causal factors that would lead one to hold unintelligible views could be less transparent, less obvious, and more difficult to recognize than the factors that would cause one to recognize that a belief is false. If, for instance, a very smart philosopher is *not* saying anything unintelligible, and both they and their opponents share the same methods, tools, and read the same literature, and everything they're saying is meaningful, but they somehow still fail to arrive at the correct conclusion, and therefore endorse an intelligible but false view, one might regard that as even more of an ad hominem: It'd be like saying "Yes, you have everything you need to arrive at the right conclusion, but you fail to do so, anyway."
In other words: that someone endorses an unintelligible view is not necessarily an indication that they're less competent or intelligence than if they held a false view; in fact, the opposite might be true.
(2) I think philosophers do spend their careers advocating for positions they literally don't understand. What's silly about that?
> It's why I always found the moral anti-realists supposed puzzlement or inability to make sense of categorical reasons to be largely performative, a rhetorical trick.
I'm Lance Bush, the person mentioned at the start of the video. I am one of the most public proponents of the view that non-naturalist moral realism is unintelligible.
I'm not puzzled, and my belief that non-naturalist moral realist concepts are unintelligible is not performative and not a rhetorical trick.
It's ironic that you seem to object to the claim in part on the grounds that it's an ad hominem, yet here you are *publicly claiming that I am am lying and engaged in rhetorical tricks.* That is a far better candidate for an ad hominem than my own position.
It's incredible that people continue to make this claim. We're dishonest? Just engaged in performative tricks?
I talk about this topic day in and day out. I correspond about it with colleagues, and I speak about it with friends and family. I talk to my wife about it constantly. If I were lying and engaged in performative tricks, this would mean that I continue to keep up the charade and lie to my wife, my friends, and my family, constantly, for years on end, and never drop the act. They could readily inform you that I privately maintain that I think the concepts in question are unintelligible: if anything, with even more forcefulness than I do publicly!
To suggest I'm engaged in some kind of performative trick isn't just extremely insulting and rude, it's ridiculous and there's no good evidence to suggest that it's true.
> Can you make sense of mathematical platonism? Can you make sense of colors existing out there, independent of your perception, can you make sense of any other realistic conceptions of objects, things, etc? Obviously yes
Even if I could, that doesn't mean that irreducible normativity or categorical reasons are intelligible. What even is the reasoning here? Simply because other things may be intelligible doesn't mean non-naturalist realist concepts are.
>Then why the big issue with moral realism?
One difference with those positions is that they all involve descriptive claims. My specific issue with moral realism is the notion of irreducible normativity. On my view, there are only descriptive facts. If there were normative facts, they'd have to be a kind of descriptive fact. Insofar as some realists maintain that there are normative facts that cannot be reduced to descriptive facts, this strikes me, at least, as conceptually confused, as literal nonsense.
“I don’t understand the content of x” =/= “ur an idiot therefore ur wrong” 😑
@@dr.h8r Right. It certainly does not mean that and I find it really bizarre people see "I don't think what you said is meaningful" as some kind of insult or attack on the person making a claim.
For what it's worth, I rarely say "I don't understand the content of x" when suggesting that a given claim is unintelligible.
Doing so gives the misleading impression that you think there is or plausibly could be something to understand, but that you, personally, don't understand it.
I might say this about scientific terms I'm not familiar with, or if I'm struggling to understand a language I am learning. But I don't say this (at least not anymore) about philosophical positions I find unintelligible. I say that I don't think the terms or claims are meaningful. Technically speaking, if true this entails that I don't understand them, but it also entails that *nobody* understands them, including the people making them.
People do talk a lot of nonsense, and I don't see any reason to necessarily assume that intelligent people will talk *less* nonsense -- there is for example the quote "Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals can believe them", which IMO reflects that greater skill != greater wisdom.
As a general rule I think as the level of abstraction of the topic rises, people fail more and more to say things that could be even theoretically possible.
(there are computational reasons for this IMO)
The things you are asserting as 'obviously understandable' are precisely those things which seem to me to be, on reflection, failing to make any kind of coherent claim, and doing so in a way that is consistent with having considerable skill with language. One of the reasons that these seem that way to me is that there are identifiable patterns in constitutionally-incomplete claims -- never characterizing anything specifically enough, "non-explanations" that simply define one term within the theory in terms of another term within the theory (which itself is not adequately defined), the explanation being not obviously incompatible with any particular state of affairs we might potentially observe in the world, etc..
The perfect counter to unintelligibility arguments is "ur just too stoopid to get it".
This is not a good counter.