 So, thank you all for being here. We have a pleasure to welcome Professor Suen Baar Carrier from Nottingham University to give a talk for the 7th session of the Meta-Metaphysics and Science in now. Oh, yeah, sorry. So he will give us talk today about global expressivism and seventh order nihilism. So thank you, Stephen, and Floridius. OK, thank you very much. Thanks for inviting me. Great pleasure. So what am I going to do today is I've been thinking about global expressivism for quite a while, trying to formulate how to formulate it, and its metaphysical implications. So that's what I want to talk about. I will try and keep the, sorry, I've got to get this. Try your spacebar. Let's see if they're not even there. Sorry, we have a technical problem. OK, so here's my talk outline. So first I'm going to talk about, and I'm going to try and get through this as quickly as possible. How long can we maybe interject at any moment you want to interject? I don't want to go on too long, but this material might. You're up to an hour. OK, so I'm going to talk about ontology to begin with as a way of investigating reality. And I'm going to indicate why I don't like it. I think there's something wrong with the whole ontological orientation. So I'm really looking for a sort of beyond ontology way of thinking about reality. And to get to that point, I'm going to have to tell you what I think the origin of ontological thinking is. So I'm going to do a bit of reconstruction of what's motivating it, what's informing it, what's under the skin, what is under the bullet, as we say in Australian English, what kind of engine is driving your ontology car? Why do you do what you're doing? And I'm going to say it's got to do with certain views about, unsurprisingly, how thought relates to the world. So there's underlying ideas about or a picture about how thought relates to the world. And then this relates to this thing called the mirror, mirror view of language, and a kind of way of thinking about the mind and reality, which is a sort of separation between mind and reality. So I'm going to talk about that. And that's going to help us see what we have to tweak, get rid of, abandon if we want to get rid of ontology. That's what happens here. Then we're going to look at a false dawn, a sort of the wrong way to do it from my point of view. And that's more or less what I would call an internalist constructivist approach. So the metaphor is, so here, sort of ontology is broadly speaking the idea of reality in itself that we investigate. We want to, and that's inherently problematic, I'm going to suggest. And the way out of that is to say, well, let's deny this idea of reality in itself. And we think rather that in some sense, the mind constructs reality to put it in somewhat crude terms. And you can see maybe some of that in Kant transcendental idealism, and in later views like Kanap, and probably also in Buddhist philosophy in various forms. But we can't cover the whole terrain. And I'm going to indicate, well, I don't think this is the way out. It's not going to be where it. I don't want to be a constructivist. Rather, there's going to be another way, which I hope to get onto as soon as possible, which is this. We've got to change our view about how we think about language. And the way to do that is something called global expressivism, which I'm going to talk about. And it's associated with this, call it, non-mirror way of thinking about language. And I'll sketch that out and then show that it has metaphysical implication, or sort of negative metaphysical implication. The view of reality that you should accept, if you accept this view about the nature of language and thought and its relation to the world, is that you should accept second-order nihilism. And second-order nihilism, I always like to play to the camera in some way. I don't know who I'm talking to, but that's fine. Second-order nihilism is, well, what is it? I'm going to briefly say what it is. So first-order nihilism is like this. I'm in the metaphysics room. And I'm going, what is this material thing, this plastic water-containing vessel? And I theorize about its composition and makeup and so forth. And at some point I do this. I don't think this exists. Why? Oh, well, because, for example, problem of special composition, is everyone familiar with that sort of problem? You go, I don't know what ultimately the composition relation is, so I can't think that this really exists. It's conditions for object or they're not present, so it doesn't exist. That's a first-order nihilism. In other words, ordinary chairs, tables, human bodies, et cetera, don't exist despite appearances. First-order nihilism. I'm not interested in that view. I think that's deluded. The view I think is right is the following. Yeah, this thing exists, but it has no metaphysical nature. There is nothing which ultimately constitutes it. There is no real definition of what material things are. They exist happily without having any, call it, metaphysical nature. In other words, you're a nihilist about the very thing that metaphysicians are trying to, as a word described, when they do metaphysics. Second-order nihilism. And that's what I want to get to. So there's the structure of the talk. So very quickly, I'm going to, well, let's see if I can actually progress this thing on. Let's see. So let's get to part one, which is more or less, it's thinking. Yeah, it's a, try that it's, usually I use the left-hand button, but you may have to be clicking it more than once for some reason. Oh, well done. Taking multiple clicks. OK, good. OK, so very quickly, here's the view, which I'd like to get to in the end. It's called almost pragmatism. And it's roughly something like this. We talk about all sorts of things with all sorts of discourse. In literature, in ethics, in the sciences, et cetera. And we talk about, we quantify over things like atoms, electrons, chairs, trees, animals, moral facts, et cetera, et cetera. Mythological beings, you name it, we talk about all this stuff in various discourses. We judge that some of these things exist. Some are real, we say. Like, I don't know, atoms are real. And we judge that others are not real. We don't think witches are real, or we don't think Pegasus is the flying horse is real. Good, we do that. Here's the thought. There is no theory of the ultimate nature of things or of reality that should inform these judgments about what's real or not real. In other words, we think that witches don't exist. Why? Well, because, you know, we realize that there is no spell casting going on, et cetera, but the witches that we thought were witches are just women who are herbalists, et cetera, et cetera. So there's all sorts of good reasoning to say that witches don't exist and Pegasus doesn't exist, et cetera. But none of that should have anything to do with a theory about the nature of reality. So in other words, I'm an almost pragmatist in the following sense that I think clearly we make these distinctions between what's real and it's not real. And that's fine. That should continue to go on. But it shouldn't be on the basis of any theory of what the nature of reality is. In other words, a theory of existence or a theory of reality. That's what I'm against. So that's what I want to talk about. That's what ontology is. Ontology is a theory of reality. OK, so a theory of reality. What is that? So in other words, the picture of ontology typically is this. The ontologist is a person who will go to the ontologist with all your opinions about what is the case and what is not and how you talk. You like to do science or you like to do mathematics. So you seem to be talking about numbers or atoms, et cetera, et cetera. And you go to the ontologist and the ontologist will say to you, those things exist. Let's say the atoms, that's OK. But those things, the numbers, they don't exist. And you ask why and the ontologist will tell you, well, according to my theory of the nature of reality, numbers can't possibly be things that exist. And they will give you their theory about the nature of reality. OK, that's the job of ontologists. And here's my claim. That's not a job we should take seriously at all. We should get rid of that job description. That's what I want to get rid of. What is ontology? Well, here's my rough take on it. It's the search for the ultimate reality of things. What reality consists in? Consists in its constitution, its makeup. In other words, it's real definition. That's what ontology is doing. As Kwan says at various places, no entity without identity. Whenever you talk about things about entities, et cetera, you've got to find the identity of those things. You need to formulate a kind of definition of what they are before you can say they really exist. You're allowed to quantify it. So if you ask what is this thing called ontology, like a science of being, qua being, it is nothing else than the search for real definitions or ultimate analyses of being or reality, in general. And the principle that guides it is the following. If we quantify over x, then x must have a real definition and ultimate nature as to what it is. Nominal definitions are things where you just define the meanings of words. Real definitions are where you go and define the nature of things. So that's principle I call real. It's not the principle of sufficient reason. That's another principle, but we could talk about that. Just saying it's not the same principle. OK, let's see if I can get to the next slide. I need a principle of progression from you. Now I've got to find out who. So what are the sorts of questions? So here's sort of, we could spend quite a bit of time in this. That would be a disaster. What are the sorts of questions? What's a key question that guides ontological thinking? It's questions like this. So you take something like properties. We seem to talk about properties. And you go, here's the ontologist. What is a property? What is a property ultimately? What does being a property consist in? What constitutes being a property, et cetera? These questions that guide ontology. It's not so much what exists. And it's not really what grounds what. It's rather a question of real definition. What does this thing consist in? What is it ultimately? So we ask, what is it to be a property? And we can come up with theories or answers. We say, well, properties are ultimately what, sets or functions or tropes or maybe they're even primitive, metaphysically primitive. That is an answer as well. So these are the sorts of things that we do when we do ontology. We come up with answers to these questions. I don't know. It's like a kaskusekasa question, whatever. What is it? What does it consist in? Similarly, what is a material thing? People sit around the ontology classroom and say, well, what are material things like plastic bottles? And you can give answers. Like, well, they're ultimately bundles of properties or primitive substances or chunks of space time, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And they involve, let's say, a mode of composition in some cases and so on. And then you have to define what those things are. You have to answer, well, what is space time? Those questions continue. Or what is causation? Being in causation class where we sit down and we analyze causation. Is it constant conjunction? Is it counterfactual dependency? Is it primitive necessitation, et cetera? These are the questions that guide ontology and they are attempts to provide real definitions. And here's the thing. If you can't provide a satisfying definition of something, it doesn't exist. You can't allow it into your ontology in the sense of the things that you think are things that exist according to you. So here we go again. Just very quickly. So it's not to spend too much time on this. What's real definition? I think it's following the identity class. So here's my claim. All ontological theories, all theories about, call it an ultimate theory of reality, is going to comprise a whole bunch of statements like this with variations. You can do it with necessary insufficient conditions for things and so forth. Don't worry about those variations. But at the heart of it, it's going to be things like O is ultimately X. And what are those statements? Well, they're statements that are identities, but they're not just identities because identity is symmetric. These have an asymmetric component, and it's the following. O's phenomenal features, or surface features, manifest features, are explained by O's deep features, these inner features. So if I'm worried about numbers, and I say, well, what are numbers? Numbers are X's. Numbers are sets, some kinds of sets. So sets are going to be used to explain the features of the manifest features of natural numbers, for example, and so on. So the picture that captures it, that everything we talk about is going to have this sort of structure. It's going to have the deep features and the phenomenal or relatively surface features, and it's going to have a kind of explanatory structure to it. You could say, if you believe this, that water is H2O, right? So you've got the water, phenomenal features of water. You've got the composed of H2O nature, and that explains the manifest features. It's the source of origin of the manifest features. And that X could be intrinsic, could be extrinsic. You can give structures, the kinds of numbers, you can give intrinsic views of numbers as some kinds of sets, et cetera. So that's it. David, I'll go to the front. Is that my next slide? I suppose it is. Yeah, it is my next slide. So yeah, it depends. If you're comfortable to continue, no problem. But you're going to have embarrassing breaks. But if you want to change computer, we can provide another one. Yeah, how about I get to the end of this section and then maybe we could. As you wish. Yeah, it might go a bit more smoothly. As you wish. Zap in between. OK, so if you've got this sort of basic picture of ontology, it's this attempt to find the real definition of reality. Hi there, you just dropped in. Ontology is this attempt to find out real definition, the ultimate nature of reality. And that's not too controversial. Then here are your choices. You can say that there are going to be metaphysical primitives. So that's called foundationalism. And that's how people typically talk about it. Yeah, there's going to be some bunch of ultimate primitives through which we explain everything, the building blocks of reality. Maybe there are many such primitives or maybe there's one. In some sense, if you're a priori monist or something like that, that's one way of doing it. The other end, this is often thought of as not a good idea. There will be infinite descent. That is, there will be no as a word primitives at any level. There's a sort of infinite or fractal-like constitutional reality that will go on forever. Or another is a looping. And this is often called coherentism, where your attempt to as a word define what a chair is ultimately loops around. You get down to, let's say, properties and bundling. But then you're led back through a chain of dependency back to a chair. You can look at that in terms of grounding. Sorry, here's a little footnote. Or you can look at it in terms of real definition. I think real definition is the way to think about it. That's a little footnote there. There's a distinction of thinking about this in terms of grounding. A lot of people talking about that at the moment. Or real definition, which I think is where the action is. But there are the sort of options structurally speaking for where you can go in an ontological theory. Hang on. Let's do it. So here's the thing. Ontology is very hard to do. And there are all sorts of problems that arise. First off, note, we apply our thumbs razor to reality, right? When we do ontology. I'm surrounded by people at Nottingham. We're always applying, ah, I've got fewer things in my, fewer bits of reality in my world, or fewer kinds of realities in my world. Or I've got fewer ideological primitives in my world view versus yours. And that's meant to be a way of arguing why one view is better than another. Why are you applying Orkham's razor to questions of reality, right? It's because you've got an explanatory project on board. And that explanatory project is real definition of things. We go on about dubious entities. Quine, right? Quine is meant to be concerned with existence. But he's very sort of sensorious about dubious entities. He doesn't like meanings, for example. Why doesn't he like meanings? Because you can't define them. Think of two documents of one person. We don't like metaphysical, we don't like dualities because they become dualisms. I'm not, I won't go through each one, but we've got problems of unity. We've got this sort of threat of reductionism. We've got knowledge problems because we give ontological theories about what knowledge is. So how do we explain our knowledge of mathematical entities, et cetera, et cetera? That's all a big pain. That's part of the struggles of ontology. Ways out. How do we get out of it? Well, first-order nihilism is one way that people in trying to get unified pictures of the real definition of reality, they say, well, I'm going to be a fictionalist about numbers or about chairs or about people or about moral facts or you name it. That's called first-order nihilism is frequently what people do in response to ontological problems. And there are other kinds of ways out, deflationism and so forth. Okay. So my question is, is there any way out of it? Because some people look at ontology and go, wow, you can frolic in this wonderful field or ocean of questions and get caught up with all sorts of delicate distinctions and so forth. It's great. Or you might, other reactions are, it's just going to end in dead ends. There's something wrong here. Could we have a gone on to ontological view of reality? That's the question. And the answer to do that is, well, we've got to get rid of real, this principle of real. Real is the principle, the background principle that says, look, if I quantify over it, you've got to tell me what it is. What the hell are you quantifying over? Give me an account of its nature. Give me a logo, some account, what it is, ultimately, define it. Otherwise, what is it? Right? It's that principle that's saying, unless you can give me a proper, ultimate identity of what it is, you have nothing that you should be talking about, right? It's that principle, which I call real, we've got to get rid of it, right? It's called an explanatory view of reality. We've got to get rid of that principle if you want to get rid of ontology because it's the central assumption of ontological thinking according to this take. So, and my answer, sorry, this is where I want to get to, is this, yeah, it's completely wrong. Sorry, as a matter of fact, maybe even necessarily, it's completely wrong. That principle, real, to be quantified over, you've got to have a real definition, an account of what you are. You've got to shape up and go, yes, sir, give me an account of what you are, right? That principle couldn't be more wrong. In fact, all things are without ultimate nature. All things are without real definition. They can't possibly have real definitions. There's something delusional about the ontological orientation. That's second order nihilism. So second order nihilism is things are real and exist according to our best, according to maths, right? The reals exist or according to physics, hey, there are atoms out there, et cetera. According to our moral understanding of the world, there are moral facts, but there's no ultimate nature to any of those things. So you don't go to the ontologist and say, ontologist, am I allowed to quantify a hook of these things? Give me your theory or your criterion of existence. There is no such thing. So non-real is the principle I like. Instead of real or non-real, and that says, for all though, it's false that O is ultimately X. For whatever X you like, so take properties, oh, sorry. I'm gonna jump to my next quantum leap. See, it's a bit like the boar atom. It'll only do certain kinds of jumps. Or you've got to hit it with the right amount of quantum of energy for it to. Okay. What are properties? Sorry, I'm just too loud. I'm used to, I lecture to like 100 people in the class to jump around like, this is more chamber music intimate. Okay, what are properties? What are properties, right? I know people writing theses on what properties are. Well, they're not sets. They're not functions. This is the negative, this is the sec, this is the second order analysis. They're not tropes. They're not universals. They're not even primitive. Like simply, metaphysically simple things. So what are they? Well, they have no ultimate nature. Relax. Is the world ultimately physical or mental or dualism or physical or mental? You know, should we be pan-psychists? Should we be physicalists? Should we be Cartesian dualists or neutral, monist, double aspect, whatever? Well, none of the world doesn't have an ultimate nature. It's not ultimately physical. It's not ultimately mental, et cetera. That might seem like giving up. No, I wanna get to this through hard work as a word. But that's the view. Is the world ultimately a plurality or a single thing? So at the moment, people are arguing about priority monism versus priority pluralism, right? Different views about reality. And then it says, what is the world ultimately? Well, neither, it has no ultimate nature. It's got physical characteristics, right? So in other words, yes, there are chairs, tables, people, quarks, physical fields, et cetera. Yeah, cool. Yeah, but is there an ultimate real definition of all of that? Packaging it all into one total reality, which is the ultimate reality. No. But it doesn't mean it's just, as Hume would say, separate things loosely bundled with each other. Somehow, with these contingent relations with each other. It's not that either, because that's another view about what ultimate reality is. Strange. Okay. I'm gonna get there. All right. So, okay, so second odd analysis, which I hope to put forward placed before you, it's not a metaphysical foundation. It's not one of these ontological views, not like infinitism or coheritism, et cetera. But it's not the standard reaction to the metaphysical realist position. It's not constructivism. Because the constructivist, people like Karl Karlapp, part of them to some degree, and others. They still want to define reality in some general sense. They'll say everything we talk about is a construction, right? What we talk about is a kind of simulation in a conceptual, map-like system or something like that. Well, everything is reality, the empirical world is somehow made up of the numinal world and the numinal mind getting together to make up, which is what the transcendental idea says. Or the ontological deflationist says, oh, ontology is easy, right? To exist is just to satisfy predicates. No. I think that's too far, that's an ontological view and it's going to be problematic. That's Amy Thompson's view. No, second-order nihilism. No questions about the nature of things in general. Play any role in judgments about what's real. There simply isn't any ontology. I know in a sense. A bit cranky or something. Okay, so I think that with some mentalities of some forms of taste that they would like that idea, others would think it's going to be wrong. Okay, so very quickly, without, so that's End of Part One. We could try changing the computer at this point, or it might just go a bit... Five minutes, or please give me a minute. Yeah, I'll just talk. Sorry, we've got a pit stop here. We're going to change the computer. Now you can ask a question. I think we will need someone to ask a question first of all. Just ask a question, so far. Just to sum it up, so far. I know this is fairly metaphysical, it's going to be metasomatic as well. But, so the core idea is, ontology is a discipline, the science of being, qua-being, that seeks, I claim. I don't think hugely controversially. I think other people would claim this. An ultimate definition of reality. And what drives it? And I think it's not implausible, it's quite intuitive in some sense. Are these questions where we say, what is that ultimately that you're talking about? So when we're in, I grew up in a philosophy, tradition, analytic I suppose, where we ask questions like the following. What is a proposition? No, when you do semantics, you sit around and you say, at some point you can say, what's a proposition? As a metaphysical question, that question is, what does a thought that can be true or false, that can be an object of belief, let's say, that can be asserted, et cetera, what does it consist in? And you can offer theories like, oh, it's a set of possible worlds, or it's a pregay and sense, zin, it's, Can I borrow your key while you're talking? It's one that says, you've got it. And people write, people offer their theories about what propositions are ultimately are. That's an ontological mode of investigation. Technology, right? People say, well, that's epistemology when you think about knowledge. Well, yeah, but it's metaphysical thinking applied to certain kinds of mental states, or certain kinds of... ...liver in this one. Yeah. Which of me, 11, sort of brought my mind. Do I? You like to... I like to, yeah, it's the first, teaching first year in this. Yeah, technology. People say, yeah, well, give me an analysis, right? So, analytic philosophy discovered the idea of, rediscovered the idea of analysis. Um... Lobton. Cool. Ah, great. Oh, look at that. It's so snappy. That's snappy. Someone should best produce this. Make a lot of money if you did that. Yeah. Anyway, technology. Because we have what is knowledge. You offer necessary insufficient conditions for it, right? And that's, say, knowledge is ultimately justified to a belief, or safe... What is it? Count of actually safe belief, or it's primitive. It's another option. It's ontological thinking. In other words, you offer theoretical identities about things in order to capture our intuitions about them. So we've got intuitions about knowledge. So we go, I want to sort of provide this theoretical identification of knowledge from which the intuitive features will then be explained. That project, which I think permeates a lot of how we think, is... I would argue is an ontological... Sorry, is a cognitive illusion. It's based on a cognitive illusion about reality. It's the claim. If I had more time and I tried to write a popular book, which I probably never would do, I'd call it the re-act, the metaphysics delusion, or something like that. Sorry, just to try and sell. Of course, it wouldn't sell. Anyway, so very quickly, without... I don't want to drag us through too much of this. The question is, here's the claim. We really are inclined, then I too, I'm a metaphysician, this is a metaphysician's anonymous meeting. It's like alcoholics anonymous. Sorry, I do want to make jokes about addiction. But it's kind of like addiction where you go, well, oh, I really get it. I really get into metaphysics. I was there busily. I can really understand wanting to analyze things in this way. And we should only allow quantification over things that we can so analyze. Why am I being driven? What are the mechanisms that drive me to want to do that? What's the theoretical... Is there are presuppositions behind it that drive that tendency? So we want to think that way. And I think there is. So there's a kind of genealogy of metaphysics. And here's sort of the basic idea. And so I don't... I'm going to sort of jump over this a bit. I think we've got, here's the basic idea. We've got this idea of mind-world separation. I probably won't go through the slides to do this. I'll just, in fact, I'll just jump along here. Here we go. Here's the intuitive idea. There's my mind here somehow. And there's reality out there, the external world. So when philosophers do metaphysics, they often use a term. They say, oh, the external world. We're concerned with the external world. The world out there. The world of things in itself, or things in themselves. Chos-en-sois. You see? Right. Right? You think, ah, the things out there in themselves, et cetera. So implicit in that thinking is this idea, oh, mind is here. My mind, my connotations, my thought. The world is out there. And once you think in those terms, very roughly, you go, yeah, mind is out there. Things are out there. Things can live happily without language, without being named, et cetera. The mind is the naming. Mind brings names into the world. How do you get the names to hook onto, or to hook onto the things? If there's a separation. And the answer is, oh, causation. Very roughly. In other words, causation links things to the mind. And that's, in effect, the causal theory of perception and the causal theory of reference. And that's the idea that mind is functioning like a mirror. So basically, a mirror, if the banana is being mirrored in the mirror, there's a reflection in the mirror of the banana. Here's the thought, the image of the banana, not only resembles the banana, but is also caused by the banana. In other words, the banana out there causes its own image in the mirror. OK, the mirror view about the mind is, the mind's like that. So this isn't, as Richard Roddy would say, the mirror view is not just that there is representation. It's rather the following idea. It's more subtle. My representations are about things. And the things that my representations are about, more or less, roughly speaking, cause these representations that I have in the simplest cases. For the simplest. I mean, there's the descriptive theory of reference. Don't worry about that. So in the case of perception, that's causal theory of perception. I've got to represent, in other words, I see a room, the room, I've got a representation of a room. And this perception is really going on because the room itself is causing this representation of the room. Causal theory of reference, of perception. Causal theory of reference says something like this. A linguistic expression or concept, sort of more or less, put them, used by a certain agent, can refer to a particular kind, particular or a kind. Only if that agent is causally connected to that particular or kind. Or to other particulars and kinds that could be used to descriptively refer to or represent the relevant particular or kind. In other words, in the end, your called mental representations have to be causally glued onto bits of the world, the domain, things in the domain. So there's an explanatory view about perception and reference. Okay. I call that the mirror view, it's fairly straightforward. So here's the plan. This idea of separation, in some sense, minds here, the world's out there, the external world, in order to, as it were, bridge the gap between mind and world, we bring in causation, that's the cause of theory of perception and cause of theory of reference, okay? That's the mirror view, my mind works like a mirror. Okay. That view, my mind works like a mirror, is deeply connected to the principle real that says all things have an ultimate nature, a real definition. If you're thinking implicitly that your mind is, things are out there in the external world, so those things out there have to cause my mental representations, et cetera, right? My mind functions like a mirror, I'm also going to think that the world has a real definition, that everything I refer to or quantify over has a real definition. So that's the next bit. Why is that? Why? So what I want to do now, very quickly, is explain mirror, the principle mirror, my mind functions like a mirror, cause of theory of reference and perception, implies real, given uncontroversial background ideas, and if I accept real, I shouldn't accept mirror. In other words, there are package, so conceptual package. And you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to say, we shouldn't accept this idea of external world, right? And thus we shouldn't accept mirror, and so we shouldn't accept real. That's where I'm going to get to. Sorry, does everyone get that? I'm genealogically, I'm going to do a switch of rule on the genealogy and say, look, you don't want to accept mirror, so you shouldn't accept real, okay? And there's reasons why you don't want to accept mirror. We'll, they're more or less the huge problems we have with meta-semantics at the moment. Okay, so I want a non-mirror view of language that will give us a non-real view of reality. Okay, here's very quickly, it's a bit of a pain to get through this. Certainly I'll scratch my head about it quite a bit. Hope people are still there, and I should have warmed up my voice. So if you, so here's from mirror to real. Here's the rough idea one could spend time on, but if any thought about a thing O is presented, so any thought about a thing O, in any thought about a thing O, O is presented to thought as a unity, as a sort of, what we know about every object is this. It's a one thing, it's got many characteristics and they're bound together as one thing. Think of anything, think of the number two, think of whatever, think of a property. A property is one thing and it's got characteristics. It's like, it's a monadic property and it's natural or not natural, et cetera, et cetera. It's always a thing with characteristics. It's a very, very, very general thing to say, right? So everything in thought presented like that and it's necessary to, you couldn't possibly have a thing without characteristics. Even a so-called substratum has characteristics, namely can instantiate properties or something like that. So everything is like that. Given mirror, the perceived necessity of O's property unity, everything has a property unity necessarily. It's got properties and it's a one. Must be caused by O itself, the thing that ultimately out there that's causing your knowledge, perceptions and representations of it. Otherwise, how would this perceptional reference be? I thought somehow a knowing of that thing out there that you're actually referring to, the number two or the person you just saw, et cetera, et cetera. So O must have a real definition, a deeper being X through which its property unity is grounded, something in it securing this necessity. It's gotta be in that thing. In other words, you inherit that property unity of everything that you think about from the thing itself. So that thing must, as it was, secure this necessity. It must have a real definition about what it is, kind of like an essence of what it is. So that means mirror gives you real claim. I won't go through another way. There's several ways you can think about this. Here is real to mirror. You go in, you judge that O is ultimately X. Numbers, natural numbers are ultimately sets. That's what they are, they're sets. Right. Leave aside the natural, the natural worry about many ways of doing set theory than others, forget it. Okay. Ah, okay. So O is ultimately X, that means the features of O are explained by X. Yeah? Explanatory notion of reality or reference, et cetera. These features include all your intuitions about X, because that's part of, as were X's appearance. So these should be ultimately explained by, sorry, include all the intuitions about O. Sorry, that should be O. Sorry. They should, so X must be explanatory, the explanatory source for those features included these as a word intuitive judgments you make about O, about the sets. So fun, if I really say numbers are sets, yeah, the numbers can explain the manifest features, sorry, the sets can explain the manifest features of the numbers, including all my intuitions about numbers. Like the fact that I can, the successor of any any natural number, positive natural number will be a positive natural number, et cetera, et cetera, must be explained by the thing itself. So mirror must hold. In other words, I'm sort of inheriting the knowledge of the, all my intuitions come from the thing out there which is ultimately causing, the must is it out there causing my intuitions. Mirror must hold. I probably garbled that a bit, but that was my attempt to roughly get the idea. So here's the thought, mirror goes with real, real goes with mirror. They're two sides of the same idea. And that goes with the idea that when we think about reality, we always place our mind in relation to reality. You can't just say, well, I'm gonna talk about reality. You've got to, insofar as you're gonna talk about reality as something, reality in itself, et cetera, the external world. You've brought in your mind is a way of characterizing this very general feature of reality and made the mirror, this mirror real nexus here. It's just as we're pointing out that if, given that you think that things ultimately have to cause your representations and thus cause your intuitions about those things, right? The things out there have to, as it were, organize themselves, you might say. They must have real definitions to them which, so the, in other words, since your intuitions have to be explained about from the things themselves, those things too must have an explanatory structure to them. That's sort of the basic idea. So, if we reject real, we must reject mirror. And if we reject mirror, we have to reject real. So in other words, you could reject these principles. Question is, would we want to reject causal theory of reference or the explanatory theory of reference, et cetera, et cetera? And I think here's a problem. We have no idea how it actually works. There's no good causal theory of reference out there at the moment. I don't know any of you. So think about Wittgenstein's problem of what constitutes the fact that my mind grasps a certain function like the extension of the predicate red, for example, or the plus. Has anyone read Kripke's Wittgenstein and Private Language sort of considerations? Yeah, there's no good theory about what constitutes the mind's grasp of somatic entities like extensions and so forth. And that means the called mirror view of language is quite problematic for metasymmatic problems, would it? Well, we know that mirror not only gives us this problem of metasymmatics, it also gives us Rio, which gives us ontology and all the headaches of ontology is the claim. And you might go, well, hang on, you're inferring something from the nature of language to how reality is, right? Like for example, supposed to be rejected mirror, but how my mind relates to the world draws some conclusion about the general nature of reality and isn't that illegitimate, some people would say. And the answer is no, is it? Because our view of our reality is always a relational one. We always talk about, again, take the idea of reality in itself, right? It's defined by external to our mind, right? That's what it means. So in other words, we are begging in the mind, right? Already, so it's perfectly legitimate to say, well, if the mind relates to the world in a different way, then reality must be different. And that's what I want to get to in the end. I want to say second order analysis is gonna follow if we take a certain non-mirror view. But before we get to that, okay, I'm gonna just leap ahead because I'm conscious of time. Okay, so how do we get rid of the mirror view of the causal, sort of the idea that reality is external, the mind is somehow internal, and there's gotta be a causal relationship between reference and the representations and so on. Do we, how do we respond to that? One way, Richard Rawley way, I don't know, is to sort of get rid of reference in some sense. I think that's a very bad idea. I think there's a reference. One could debate that. Here's another way, and I think it's common one. And that's, we get rid of the idea of the external world by saying everything is internal. That's more or less the constructive idea. So by external world, we mean mind-independent world. So here's the position, right? What do you mean by external world? And here's, there's misunderstandings about this, but here's one take. By external world, I mean mind-independent world. Okay, let's get rid of that. Everything's mind-independent. We'll be anti-realists. Okay, so we propose we should look at reality in general as internal, as a mind-independent thing. Who takes that position? Well, Kant does, I think. I'm not, I've read the critique of pure reason. Got very much fascinated by it for a while. And that's kind of what Kant does, right? In relation to the problems of metaphysics. He thought metaphysics leads to paradoxes, yes. Maybe not quite the ones that Kant thought were the paradoxes, maybe, maybe not. But he definitely thought that. What was the cure to the paradoxes of metaphysics, of the idea of reality in itself being an sich? It's go-internal, man. He didn't quite put that with the t-shirt, but if he was Californian, if you can imagine, Kant is a Californian, sorry, deferring to American history. It would have been, you know, go-internal, dude, or something like that. What's the zandmere? It means you don't have to, and you can see this sort of argumentation in Publum, you don't have to think of the causal relation securing your reference, because your reference goes right out to reality itself, that doesn't fall short of the world itself. Why? Because, more or less, the numeral mind and reality can get together to make up the empirical mind and empirical reality. So, you know, my psychological states and also the plastic things in room, et cetera, are constituted by transcendental synthesis involving the numeral mind and numeral reality, et cetera. As Publum says at the end of Reason Truth and History, it's this idea that mind and reality get together to make up mind and reality. Second work, I don't think so. I think that there are serious problems with the constructivist approach. I mean, ultimately, we have to tell a story about what this transcendental synthesis is, and then I think we get problems. Kant says, for example, the causation should not apply to reality in itself, but it has to apply to reality in itself. And so on. I don't think it works. Here's another way that another thing that people say, say a lot of my students sort of often say it, they say, well, your mind fabricates the world in some sense. Sepia Warf hypothesis, conceptual scheme, somehow organize or construct the world. The world is a construction in that sense. I'm speaking very, very generally here. Okay, I don't think that's gonna work. Here's one reason why. It's still a metaphysical view. It's still saying that the world is made up of ingredients, a mind, and something that's non-mind, and then one thing, the mind, does a sort of construction involving the other. And then as soon we get caught up in metaphysical questions again, well, what is that? We say, what is that construction? And does the mind itself, construct itself, for example, is a question? So I think we get sucked back into metaphysical questions. In other words, I could say the same thing about Kant, and I think this was the reaction to Kant when the critique came out a few years, within 10 years, people were saying, Kant, back to doing metaphysics, right? You were meant to seal off metaphysics and metaphysics and stop it. But actually, you get sucked back into it. As soon as we ask, well, how does the construction work? I don't know, some people here might be more better at Karnat than me. Karnat interestingly says, look, we should think of everything we talk about as internal to a language conceptual scheme. And as for these questions of its external reality, its external reality of anything we talk about, it's somehow confused. We shouldn't talk about that. Okay, I don't want to let it go for that either. Here's some reasons. Are languages themselves internal things? I mean, does do languages themselves have a reality in itself status or not? Isn't linguistic, isn't it just a form of idealism? Constructive idealism, after all. Won't you get caught back into those metaphysical questions again? Because idealism is a form of metaphysics. Thomson does interesting things. I don't know who were enough, but she's a kind of deflationist and she wants to say, yeah, by existence we mean nothing more than satisfied by predicates. That's an interesting thing, way to go. I'm worried that you can't allow quantification over non-existent things on a perspective, but we do quantify over things that don't exist. And what's satisfaction, right? In other words, yeah. So I think in totalism, very, very large big picture things going on here at this point, it's still going to be an ontological view. It's still telling us what reality ultimately consists in, namely it's ultimately constructed, right? So it doesn't escape questions of ultimate nature, but questions of ultimate nature are the ones that we want to escape according to my diagnosis. And I think some of the things, pan-psychism, for example, is very popular to women. Everyone's been pan-psychist or cosmopsychist, et cetera. These are forms of non-constructive idealism. I think we're just stuck back in metaphysics and they have their problems, like the combination problem or the decombination problem. I don't know if you're familiar with any of these problems, but they look like run-of-the-mill metaphysical problems. Same old ones. Okay, so, can you take more? I knew it. Okay, so in 15 minutes, I just want to sketch up what I think is the right way to go. So, part four, the dawning light glimmering, sorry, according to this narrative. Is there another way of escaping metaphysics that might be better, assuming it doesn't work than constructivist approaches? And I'm gonna say, yeah, it's this killing off mirror, killing off the causal, quasi-causal, explanatory ideas of reference, et cetera. How can we do that? We've got to get rid of the mirror. And the answer is, we should accept global expressivism. So, roughly, I'm even gonna jump over that. Roughly, I'm gonna say something like this, that the facts we begin with, when we try and think about language and reality, are not as the kind of mind is internal, reality external, picture suggests. It's not like that. We should begin with facts of reference, facts of minds referring to things. In fact, I think, following Barclay, there's no such thing as something that's not being referred to. Sorry, we could go on about that. In other words, reference and reality arise together. That doesn't mean you're an idealist. It's just noting that, in fact, you can't think of anything that's not being referred to, as Barclay said. It's a kind of contradiction to think of something you're not quantifying over. And that relates to these puzzles that people have about an unrestricted domain of quantification. They go, well, is it possible that I can't refer to everything? Is there something out there that I'm not quantifying over? Well, you just quantified over it, in stating the fact that you can't quantify over it. So the answer is no, there isn't. So to cut a long story short, maybe it's a long story, we should just begin with these facts of reference. And here's the claim I wanna put forward. Non-mirror, the non-mirror conception. So this is really how to think about the relation between or how to think of how reference and perception arises. It's the point. For any talk or thought about or perception of those, owes themselves, and this is the denial of mirror. The thing you're referring to or perceiving has no explanatory role in the account of how you get to refer to it or perceive it. There is no explanatory, fundamental explanatory relation going on as in the causal theory of reference. Refer to something, so that means that thing, in some way, is ultimately a causal origin of my representations. That's his role. In other words, the reference never has an explanatory role in the account. Of how? You get to refer to it. Right, it might sound a bit crazy, but that's going to be the view. It's worth just pausing that, right? I'm gonna illustrate what I mean by that in a moment, but so, that's clear. So, owes, the things you refer to, the reference are not a part of the explanatory grounding base. For facts of the form, this mind refers to or perceives owe. How would we understand that idea? And the answer is through global expressive result, because that's exactly what it says. So, I'm gonna illustrate what that is. So, here's the thought. In fact, I'll link, because this may be more familiar. I don't know, is everyone sort of thought, encountered expressivism about moral? Morals? Is there anyone? Started off as a motivism, became in the 20s or whatever, probably with Wittgenstein number one, tractators Wittgenstein, sort of ended it, sort of evolved to the view that saying that when I say something is good, I go, oh, that's good, that's bad. What I'm doing is expressing emotion. Not. My mind is not as we're beaming out to intuit goodness or beaming out to insured badness. It's rather expressing some motivational response to the world. You get that more sophisticated version of that idea, with other bits. So, I don't want to add those bits, because that becomes a long business of explaining machinery, it's a bit boring. So, but here's the intuitive idea. When I say something is good, little beam for the goodness of something out there, I am expressing output from an effective response to the world. So, in other words, something in the world is causing this effective response. But the thing in the world causing this effective response isn't goodness, right? Goodness doesn't have some explanatory role at this point. Well, what's causing that effective response? Well, I don't know, just some features of things. You taste something, you have a Greek lunch, and you go, hmm, almost good, you know? So, you've got an effective response to some feature of the world, but good. And that's how you get to talk about goodness. Strange, this is a long mirror of you. It's not that the goodness caused, right? The reference to itself. No, it's something else that's natural. We're like the people I'd say who have natural features of the world. Of course, the causation is going here, going hmm, good, and reference to goodness. So, goodness, the goodness in the world, the goodness of the hummus, or the goodness of the act by the person, isn't the explanatory origin of the talk about it, right? Unlike the mirror of you, the causal theory of reference says. Okay, and you go, well, what about this relationship? And the answer is, yeah, well, it turns out that tastiness or goodness in things does have a relationship to certain features of the world. Yeah, but that's not part of the explanation of how the reference works. It's rather that once that system is up in place, you go around and go, oh, as a matter of fact, certain features of food, for example, you know, we respond to those, they're saying good, right? And certain features of acts, et cetera, we respond to that with good act, et cetera. Okay, cut the, a long story short. Ooh, sorry, you're no longer working. We'll say that about everything. Oh, sorry, is that, yeah. Good, I think we should think of perceptions like that as good. Give up the causal theory of perception, sorry. In other words, when I perceive a banana, what's the causation that's happening at some micro-physical level doesn't involve the banana, right, because at the relevant micro-physical level, you won't find a banana. There is no as a world, well-defined, beginning or end of the banana. You can't define a banana at the micro-physical level. Yet, there you are, perceiving a banana. Okay, reject the causal theory of perception. This is very broad and can for stuff. It's just wrong to say that the intentional object, the object can go, oh, that banana is causing your perception of it. Rather, you've got some micro-physical stuff happening. And later on, with that system in operation, you can go, oh, actually, when you tweak the micro-physics, you can see that there's an interesting relationship between the micro-physics and the banana appearance, but that's not. That's after the system is in operation. Reject the causal theory of perception. Okay, so, this is how I'm gonna do in about five minutes. We're just gonna generalize that story. In other words, for every bit of discourse, or talking about, for all your assertions, judgments, and your beliefs, every domain where you have assertions or beliefs, or judgments, right, judgments about goodness, judgments about bananas, judgments about, you name it, numbers, references to numbers, references to bananas, reference to goodness, et cetera, et cetera. And all those very different domains of talk. We're gonna give the same sort of story. In which, just as in the case of morals, right, the systems that underpin your judgments don't involve causal response to the reference. The reference don't have an explanatory role in the account of how you get to talk about them, or to make judgments about them, et cetera. May seem a bit strange, but that's what generalizing expressivism from the moral case across the board works. So how does that work? Well, something like this, sort of, here's a rough schematic thing. So we've got all these assertions, et cetera, with different topics, different areas. And the systems, we're gonna be a bit speculative about the machinery that drives speech acts. There is that machinery. But it works by interaction with the world. Yeah, you've got to interact with the world. But in these all sorts of different ways, one way is by motivational, something, preceding it really, but motivational, effective response to bits of reality. That's the moral stuff coming out. Or you can have things preceding perceptual systems. Okay, that's gonna be the talk of bananas, or et cetera. Manipulation is an interesting one. Manipulate things. That's gonna be fed into judgments about causation. In other words, your judgments about causation doesn't work by your mind beaming in on causation. It rather works by you banging things when, as we were saying in lunch, you know, you bang things when you're a kid. You manipulate it, you intervene manipulatively in the world. And that's what's underlying judgments about causation. So causation itself has no explanatory role in the account of how you get to talk about causation. And so on. So talk of bananas, talk of causation, the picture for causation is like this. So you've got this interesting mental state, someone thinking about causation, saying some of the scissors cause the hole in the banana. Okay, sorry, you saw the scissors go into the banana or something like that. I don't know if I'm thinking that, because I had pictures of bananas, but. Okay, one of the lies of those judgments is not that your mind beams in on that mysterious thing called causation. As the mirror view would say, right, you sort of hook onto causation at there in the world to refer to it. No, it's rather the outputs of this system of manipulation that's ultimately you're expressing when you go, oh, that thing falling down caused the banana to have a hole in it, et cetera. Non-mirror. Supervenues, the male image supervenes on the pixels, right? You go, oh, where did that male image come from? Various different kinds of pixels, et cetera, et cetera. And you go, oh, that's all, you know, famous image. Everyone recognizes that as a famous, you could see Andy Warhol's pictures of Mao, et cetera, and so on. How does that work? Does your mind glue onto, or as it were, beam in, or does the grounding cause your mind to refer to the grounding? No, it's rather a manipulation of pixels. If you learn how to paint, you know how to manipulate pixels to get images, right? So, non-mirror, again. Oh, here's the really interesting one, or maybe not an interesting one. Meaning, right? One of the things you can do automatically is you understand perceived meanings. And in fact, you can't turn off your meaning perceiving system. Later tonight, you're trying to get to sleep, but you can hear a conversation in the yard across from your place. If you live in London, everything's sort of very squashed together. You just perceive the meanings, you can't turn it off. Okay, what's going on? Is it that your mind locks, that the meanings themselves, or the meaningful sentences themselves, are causing your representations of meaning? That's the mirror view? No. It's rather your mind has a subsystem processing system, that reacts to work patterns in context, et cetera. Spontaneously generates outputs, which you express by going, well, that means I sold, you know, I went to Turkey to get new teeth or something like that. Sorry, I forgot to give someone another conversation. Meaningful sentences. So your reference to meaning doesn't operate as mirror suggests. It's non-mirror. The reference, the meanings, have no explanatory role in account of how you get to refer to the meanings. It's kind of weird, but there it is. Okay, and it goes on. A few minor points here about trying to generalize that, et cetera, that kind of account. Issues of reflexivity. Yeah, the very concepts you use in the account of how you get, in other words, you're gonna talk about a causal system underlying the mind. You're gonna expressively analyze that as well. No problem, I see no contradiction with that. And you've gotta worry about things like objectivity. Instead of giving a theory of objectivity, give a theory of how we talk about the objective, right? Actually, I wrote a paper on this in the Aristotelian Society from 2011. It was about faultless disagreement. Expressive treatment of objective. Okay, and the same with truth, et cetera. So you completely refuse, in some sense, to do a definition, you don't offer a definition of truth, for example. You don't do semantics, really. You just tell the story about what goes on in the production of utterances and referential states, et cetera, et cetera. But in non-mirror terms. Okay, so that's the view. So in the last five minutes, we're in a home stretch, everyone. Thank you for bearing with me. I don't know how long this is taking. Is the second order nihilism. So, here's the condition. If, just to try to give you the idea of non-mirror, okay? You accept non-mirror. You've already shown the relationship, I hope, between mirror and real. If you go for non-mirror, you're gonna have non-mirror. Non-real meaning. Got no real definitions for things. That's the thing, right? So, all theoretical identities owes, everything you're talking about, whatever it is, owes what's goodness, properties, truth, you name it. Cause it's all, it told the story about how you get to revert to these things, right? It's in this non-mirror account. Consumers of that is that you can't have any true theoretical identities of this form. The owes are ultimately what are X's? What is goodness, right? What is goodness? G.E. Moore said, goodness is this non-natural primitive property in things. Is he right? Why? Cause if non-mirror is correct, that can't be right. Why? Sort of roughly like this. My talk of G.E. Moore was right that goodness is a non-natural property of things. Then it would have to have been the case as we're all along. But when I was using the word good, right? My mind was being beaming in on this non-natural property so as to get to refer to goodness. But it didn't. My mind, according by hypothesis, is partly empirical. My mind was working in terms of motivational response to the world. Non-natural primitive properties of goodness had nothing to do with that. If that's right, then you can't say, oh, you've discovered what goodness is. Right, it's this non-natural property. Okay. What are the properties? So I'm using, sorry, properties. I'm using predicates all the time, right? Every predicate I use, you know, use the word predate and red or, if I'm trying to speak French, I say, ça c'est moche. So moche is a predicate, is that? Sorry, is that, can you say that in public? You know, moche. Et cetera, any predicate I use, you can convert it and say, oh, moche-ness or goodness or redness or too-ness if you're talking about numbers, right? You can convert them into things that apparently refer to properties, okay? We do that all the time. Yeah, what are properties? If non-mirror is right, there's no answer to that question. Not in the sense that, oh, it transcends my mind. Oh, I'll just have to be humble and say, I can't say. No, I think you can be quite robustly non-humble and say, there's no answer to that question because there's nothing that it consists in. Why? Because take anything you have about what properties are. Oh, properties are sets, okay? So there are elite sets or special, natural, definable in terms of natural properties, sets, and those natural properties are ultimately sets or functions across possible worlds, right? You could come up with that answer, Lucy and Ty Baton. You could say, well, yeah, if that was right, then my talk all along when I've been using predicates, et cetera, must have involved my mind beaming into these things, but it never was. My mind's actually been reacting in these sort of ways to different things, et cetera. That does not involve me grasping extensions of predicates, thank God. So if that's right, no theoretical identity of the four properties are ultimately sets of such and such description can be right. So what are properties? And the right answer is second-order nihilism. Just can't say. There are properties, you know? It's a useful way of talking, right? Here's the pragmatism. Can't stop talking that way. I can say people, they exhibit the great qualities of generals, you know, both with, et cetera. Yeah, but what are properties? Nothing. Sorry, ultimately nothing. Sorry, ultimately not anything. It would be a better way to put it. So here's the question. What gets expressed when I say, oh, is real or oh, really exists, right? Like what's the non-mirror account of what goes on when I say, oh, that exists, et cetera? And the answer is not because my mind is being caused, developing that concept, that representational existence, by beaming in on existence itself or something like that. I had no intuitions about existence. No intellectual, intellectual, unshowable. Is that what I can't talk about? Intellectual intuitions, right? What are you doing? What are you expressing? And it's sort of a bit of a technical answer. When I say that's real, that's really exists. I'm expressing a pre-doxastic state, a functional state, where the ohs file, we could talk about files, but without thinking of them as inherently representational things, has been activated through certain canonical pathways. So if I use the word oh, that ship really exists, it's because it's a kind of long story short, me or others, et cetera, have used the relevant predicates and gone and they've had an activation of perceptional encounter, let's say, where you go, ship, right? And that's what in the end complicated story you're expressing. It might involve other people through testimony chains. Don't have to worry about that. Okay, so use of exists or real involves no grasping of existence or reality. So if not, and that's a non-mirror. So that means if non-mirror implies, non-mirror implies non-real, that principle of reality, then that applies to existence. So there is no ultimate account of what reality is. So that implies no ontology, rather second-order nihilism. What's the interest of second-order nihilism? I'm gonna, this is like last few slides. So take problems of ontology. Take problems of ontology, like that cup. Sorry, you've been sipping coffee and you're going, what are you, cup? Account for yourself. Are you a composite thing, yes? Are you a, what is this mode of composition? Tell me what that is. Oh, long story short, you go, well you must be a sort of special, kind of brute composition, but that's impossible. I can't give any good theory about what constitutes this compositional relationship between all your parts, so I doubt if you exist. Or maybe I go another way, I say, every myriological fusion of things exists, et cetera. Something like that, in which case I'm stuck with lots of weird things. What's the answer to second-order nihilism is to say, well they're cup. First off, it's vague what parts are parts of the cup. But secondly, the cup has no ultimate nature, because when you get the non-mirror account of how you get to talk about cups, as it were, your mind's not beaming into some prefabricated structure and reality such that by beaming into that, you get to talk about cups. Rather, all theoretical identities about what the cup is are void and null and void. And the same thing also holds for the mind and its relationship to reality. So here's one thing people worry about. They worry about dualism. What is the mind? The physicalist says the mind is ultimately a physical thing. Idealist typically says no, that's false. Physical things are ultimately bits of mind. The Cartesian dualist or some other form of dualist says, ah, there's ultimately this mind stuff and there's this physical stuff and they kind of get together and somehow relate to each other. How do they relate to each other? What does the second ordinalist say? Says, oh, there's mind, there are thoughts, there are feelings, et cetera. There are qualia, you name it, feels. And there's a physical world too, and there's a brain. In fact, there's, the brain is in this sort of interesting relations that can be explored. But guess what? On the non-mirror view, the mental states have no ultimate nature. The relationship between them has no ultimate nature. And the physical things, non-mind things, have no ultimate nature. So when you say you're worried about the relationship between these things, it's not that you've got two fundamental metaphysical building blocks that somehow have to be glued together to make up the world. There are no metaphysical building blocks here. They have no ultimate nature to them. So you can't really pose the problem of the hard problem of consciousness, let's say, which is really a problem about how could something in its nature so utterly alien to the nature of the physical somehow be correlated with the physical or arise out of the physical? And the right answer for the second ordinalist says, well, they don't have any ultimate nature. So rather, we observe or we know, as a matter of fact, by interacting with things that when you tweet brain states, you can get certain kinds of things going on, just in the same way as you look at mal images, you tweet the pixels and you get a mal image, or you don't get a mal image, right? So you could talk about the hard problem. I don't think mal images can be reduced to actual pixelations. Some definite set of pixelations, they can't. So you can't, there's no reduction here. But we're not worried about some dualism, metaphysical dualism of mal images and pixels, right? The right thing to say here is that's all based on the assumption of inherent nature or ultimate nature of being the side to things. That's what's causing the problems. So if you give up the real world in that sense, you're home. I'm going to stop there and say, well, linear, actually, what you end up with is a view, which I even know, and then I think it's related to what Trotin was trying to get at in his book on what is life. But here I'm going to hand wave a bit. But it's more like this. Instead of giving a theory of what constitutes things such that we justify our intuitions about them, that's what ontology does. You've got, rather, a theory that's going to be more like a kind of cognitive science. It's going to say, look, given these pathways, non-mirror pathways, we can explain why we have the intuitions that we have about things. But that's part of our sort of project in some extended non-representational mode of coaxing in some sense. But that's it. So what I tried to do is look at what the problems of ontology are. I'm going to stop now. Ooh, I've got through a lot of slides. I tried to say ontology is caught up with these ideas of real definition. I tried to argue that it's sort of related to a certain view about the mind's relation to reality. I looked at how we could get rid of that view about how we think of the mind's relation to reality. And I looked at global expressivism as an answer to that and in global expressivist non-mirror framework, real, the idea that reality has an ultimate definition just simply doesn't hold. The opposite holds. We can only have reality because it's empty, empty of ultimate nature, which is, according to me, and here I have a disagreement with Jan Westerhoff, but he's not here, and he knows more about Buddhism than me. I can't have a feeling it's what the Buddhists are talking about, at least Mahayana Buddhists, when they say, from the heart sutra, don't you know Sariputa, the Buddha talking to someone, this body is void. You look into the body, and there ain't nothing there defining the body. And this voidness is body, right? That's could be what they're talking about. Second order, Niles. Thank you. Sorry for going on too long. Thank you very much. Do you want a portion? Do you want a bit of break to go on? No. So maybe you can question the line first. Yeah, two from the internet. So one, Michael Thomas has a question on the social ontologies, is while the ontologist practice in theorizing about tables and chairs may have little ethical weight, the social kinds seem to have irreducibly ethical content. Social ontology might also go beyond purely descriptive analysis for a million analysis. This being so, in social ontology, as a vehicle of addressing social justice, Rahmaheddin. Hi, Michael. Thanks for the question. Good question. I suppose because I'm not against some explication. I can surely re-explicate concepts all the time. We say, can we refine a certain concept to some degree for a certain job? I think we can do that. And if that, what an ameliorative approach to social questions or, sorry, ameliorative, I wish I could say that, ameliorative concept would do, would involve improving it a bit. For certain purposes, I have no problem with that. That would go in with an almost pragmatism orientation, which is what I like. I'm just against bringing into heavy duty metaphysics and trying to define social kinds, et cetera, as an extension of ontological methods. And I think I get a feeling that many people do this in social ontology. They're into questions of grounding and so forth. And that's where I will get off the bus. But I'm not, I can't be against improving concepts for certain purposes and ditching others, which we don't want to use anymore. And I'm happy that concepts change over time. So in other words, there's no sort of essential core to concepts such that we can't talk about the same concept changing. I mean, that's just as we, the way we say English has evolved, let's say I'm talking English at the moment, but say about any natural language, they change the time. Things that are analytics seem to be analytic and so forth. So I think that fits in with a non-ontological orientation. So maybe I would want to say, I'm sort of a second order now is that it would fit better with an ameliorative sort of an idea, an ameliorative project, maybe. I don't know if that's answering your question. OK. And the second one, this came in actually before you talked about it a little more, so you may have already said what you have to say about this, but I'll pose it anyway just to be safe. Simon Sipalski asked, you say more about the differences between your account and Thomason's view. It seems that she and Price could be classified as proponents of exactly what you're calling second order analysis. Is it Thomason saying that we can talk about existing things, that existence is understood in a deflationary way, so it seems very close to me? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I assume people that I put myself in such august company. No, no, but I mean, so their view is quite well known. So I think there's fellow travelers in the sense that we don't like metaphysics in the sense of what I would call positive metaphysics. But I see, so Tech Thomason, I find him views much clearer in some ways, clearer, maybe in some respects, than Price's. Maybe he's a bit more complex. So deflationism, and this is in Price as well, I think. Deflationism is a way of doing ontology, but with a small footprint. So in other words, you want to minimize ontological impact. And I think that goes back to, let's say, the way Horwich sold his view about truth. In other words, you're actually still offering definitions, right? You're saying truth doesn't have a deep problematic definition, like correspondence or coherence, et cetera. It's got a shallow definition in terms of t-schema, sentences, maybe infinitistic, whatever. But there it is. I'm already against that. I think that it is problematic ontologically. So yeah, I understand why you want to minimize the impact of your definitions by going deflationally, but you're still going to encounter the problems of definition from my point of view. So this is where where I differ. So Thomson, from my understanding, and I don't know who worked well, but I kind of know a bit, she wants to say something like this that exists should be understood purely in this deflationary terms, as in something exists because it satisfies a bunch of predicates. That's it. You've got no further ontological criteria to meet to, as will be said, to exist or not. And that I kind of like the spirit of that. But I have problems, two kinds of problems. The first kind of problem is, well, what do you mean by satisfies predicates? Secondly, I'm worried that things like this happen. King Arthur satisfies predicates like King Arthur. Everyone knows the fictional character or whatever, or mythological character. So King Arthur was a king to pull out the sword, have the knights of the round table, et cetera. Right? But you're going to say, oh, yeah, but that didn't really satisfy those predicates. So it seems to me, I'm worried, her view implies that we can't talk about non-existent things because in some sense, the non-existence things, the quantification of the non-existence is going to be problematic from her point of view because we still have predicate satisfaction. Now, she may deal with that problem by saying, well, they don't really satisfy the predicates. But then I think you're going to be sucked back into a view about what do you mean by really satisfied predicates, as opposed to not really satisfied predicates? And that's why we're going to get sucked back into a theory of existence in a more substantial sense. That's my current way of thinking about her view. But that may turn out to be wrong. But that's where I am. And for Price's view, Price is a kind of, I think, quietest who just doesn't want to talk about metaphysics anymore. So he's a bit like Rawty used to be. Like Rawty would just say, look, sorry, guys. You can play that language game if you want, but I'm not interested. I don't think I have that view. I think that this is partly because Price thinks, I believe, that there is no, as it were, specifically metaphysical criterion that ontologists are using to make their judgments about what exists or doesn't exist. Somehow they're just a bit confused. They're called up in external questions, et cetera, which have no real content to them. I think that's false. I think that they're concerned with questions of real definition. It's perfectly sensible. In fact, I think it's intuitive to do that. It just turns out to be false and probably necessarily false. That's where the question ends. Anton? OK. Just to be sure that I understand, because what I thought I understood, and now with your answer, I'm less sure. So you're trying to aim to really for a position just between the constrictivist and the real, let's accept the mirror position makes no sense. I agree with you. I won't discuss that. But the constrictivist, like your cabinet, would say, yeah, but you're still two feet in the metaphysics in your middle of the road position, because you presume a lot of stuff about practice, brains, action. And he would say, maybe he would say, I don't know. He would say, yeah, I don't do that. That's OK. Linguistic framework, not any linguistic framework. It's practice saying that this linguistic framework is interesting, mathematics, science, art, whatever. It's coming from practice. But I don't say anything about their relation to stuff and how I just take their authority. They come from, they are successful. We think they are interesting. And even maybe King Archer in certain circumstance and certain linguistic framework, I could do some existing judgment about King Archer in this framework, because it's accepted by this community and this practice. So am I understanding clearly that you dislike some aspect of the constructivist, so you try to have this position between the two? Or that's always uncomfortable when you try to be between. Yeah. Yeah, I like to think not between them. So in the following sense, so first off, this metaphor in between or whatever, I still think constructivists are, they're caught up in, they're still caught up in ontology. They're almost getting out the door as a word, but the ontologist, their coat, the tails of their coat still inside and they're dragging them in. So I think that there are traces of ontological thinking still in their view, and that's why they're a problem. Whereas I'm trying to completely sort of remove it. So you may know more, I'm sure you know more about Khanat than I, so what I'm saying may not be right to injustice to Khanat. But when I talk about, so there's my picture of a talk about stuff, right? So I talk about a system, which is, I think, a natural system. So here I agree with Price. The explanation of what's going on in language is naturalistic, it's going to talk about underlying functional states, et cetera. But I'm not a functionalist, I'm not saying mental states are functional or something like that. It's not a bit of metaphysics in the sense it's not an attempt to talk about the nature of reality in general, it's not saying this is reality in itself, it's no commitment to that, it's just saying things happen. Just as we say, oh look, there's a cup on the table or there's a tree outside, et cetera. It's just, so I'm not a first-order analyst. I say, yeah, of course there are people. Well, I'm a bit doubtful about people, but that's for other reasons. No, but there are things in the world, et cetera, going on. I just think it's that natural approach given non-mirror which has, if you accept it, has these consequences. Though I do admit, this is not physicalistic. I mean, what's down here is called a non-mental. What's up here is mental, right? But that looks like a dualism, but later on I want to show actually it's not a problematic metaphysical dualism. Carnap, however, I feel that when Carnap introduces his idea of linguistic frameworks, he wants them to, the way he speaks about it is it to say. And I think this is what Thomason is being helpful and helping us understand Carnap better, I think. But the answer is, well, how is it that by introducing a language, I introduce a domain of reality, right? I mean, the language in one sense is just, right, some strings, some syntax. But the language for Carnap is more than that. It involves quantification and reference. And for me, Carnap doesn't explain where that comes from. It's just rather, you know, he doesn't, in any way. So I kind of agree with Carnap. There are just facts of reference out there, but I then try and show you why that's not metaphysically loaded in any problematic way. That's my intent, believe it or not. The second order nihilism says, don't be worried, I'm not a metaphysical jeweler for these reasons. Whereas with Carnap, I'm going, well, you've just introduced reference and you're not explaining it, you're not showing why, well, where did that come from? How do I get to really talk about numbers, not as themselves just marks on a page, like a formalist might want to say, but as literally things I'm referring to, right, which are distinct from the marks, how, where does that happen? And not our ideas, et cetera. I don't see, he's like, he's sweeping those questions under the carpet from my mind. Because he's a constructivist, so. Well, fine, but then that means to me, constructivism is just an attempt by fear to avoid metaphysical problems, which can happen. And secondly, his language systems are not themselves constructions, right? So they have reality in itself. So that's what I'm worried about. They come from practice. Right, but good, but then what is practice? Because this is one of the problems I have with random, and maybe with some of QPrice's, practice on one level is non-intentional. Just people causally moving marks around, or causally interacting with the world. But then you could say, well, yeah, but how does that give rise to meaning? And they go, well, that's the very problem my puzzled by. Or it already incorporates meaning and normativity, in which case I say, well, you're just asking me not to worry about that. That is an approach to metaphysics. So for example, that's what Lewis used to do when metaphysical things got too difficult. Sorry, this is a negative characterization of Lewis, but it's the following. When problems get too difficult, you just don't go there. So for example, the debate you had with David Armstrong about universals, I don't know, does any, they got to the problem of primitive predication. What constitutes the fact that a thing has a universal in the case of Armstrong, or what is it for an object to be a member of a set? Lewis says, treat that as ideology. It's just part of we won't investigate it metaphysically. Fine, but that's just saying, I can't do metaphysics anymore. That ideology, ontology distinction is itself a distinction that it's just sort of saying, look, there are limits to doing metaphysics. You just can't investigate these questions. You get it's too difficult or just too paradoxical. It's a bit, because for example, predication is really problematic. Think of the third man problem. I don't know what Fray is, concept of a Hall's problem. It's really a bit of a nightmare. So people close that down. I think, if you just say, well, we'll allow meaningful practice already, don't investigate it. To me, it's, you're just saying it's too difficult. That's true. But you see if the question is, or we continue to do metaphysics for mirror, blah, blah, or we don't do it at all. We say it's not legitimate at all. And the discussion is between the people that are trying to do neither. So I can't, I would say, maybe we'd say, but point already our view against this position quite firmly, but would say, yeah, okay, yeah. Or I don't ask question of ontology and language like Wittgenstein, they are there, they are a language game. I can study them as something as complicated as the living world. So I cannot have a position, ontological position of language, I just studied it. Yeah. Or I said, okay, I want to save some part of the practice of metaphysics, which I think was what Karnab wanted to do. So I want still to be able to say there exists, and I can have a judgment about existence. But I have to get rid of all the mirror stuff. So I have to, so it was maybe stuck with, okay, I can only work in language training because I don't want to talk about the real thing outside because that's illegitimate. So maybe you wanted to have the butter and the, what's the word? It's the butter and, no, the butter and the money of the butter. The butter and the butter. Oh yeah, the butter. The butter and the money of the butter. The cake and the eat it. Oh, the cake and eat it. Yeah. The cake and eat it. Don't mention to me that to me as a survivor of Brexit. So maybe that was a point. Well, hang on. Yeah, so here you go. So I think Karnab would sign up to sort of almost pragmatism. Right. We've got all these different ways of speaking, different languages, sorry, different sub languages, different vocabulary, and we talk about different things. And we don't want to then go into some investigation about which one really corresponds to reality, which one's real, et cetera, et cetera. So agree with that. The only issue is how do we get to that almost pragmatist view? The only... So I identify it as, so what... Here are people arguing about what exists. People say, well, a certain prime number doesn't exist or does or certain kinds of human beings exist or don't exist, like witches don't exist or certain kinds of particles in this exist or don't exist. Okay, good. They're the good things. They're the good questions of existence. So we should continue with those. But then we got this sort of bad one where we go, oh, that doesn't exist for such and such reasons. Okay. And then we want to sort of exclude those cases. Right. So there's a certain kind of practice... In the pragmatism approach. Yeah, there's a certain kind of practice, certain kind of activity going on, intellectual, where people go, oh, that doesn't exist. Like those cups don't exist. Why? Oh, because of the problem of... special problem of composition. And we want to exclude those. I want to criteria for excluding them. And I think what's common to them all is that they're all questions about ultimate definition. Ultimate questions are reality. That's definition. That's not the first time that you come back with where you really dislike this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Identity and criteria. Yeah, yeah, because I think people go, what's ontology about? It's about what exists. Yeah, but it's about coming up with a criteria for what exists and then applying it. You know, the normalist says the only criterion of existence is must be causally, you know, reactive to the world or must be in space and time or something like that. So, but I think in the end, it's really about this thing about ultimate definition, ultimate constitution. And feel the... So here's one difference with Karnat. I feel that Karnat isn't relieving me from the problem of, let's say, to take one example, special composition. Right? I go, well, what do you view? And he allows quantification over like cups or whatever you have cup talk. Yeah, but what's its relation? And I think this in the end is, what's the relationship with the language game that talks about ordinary objects, cups and stuff, and the language that talks about micro-physical things? You know, like, how do they relate? Yeah, that's the objection of Quine to Karnat. Good. So then I'm with Quine on that one. You know, you... Yeah. How do you do that, this distinction? Yeah. So I think I can answer that. It's as an aside, it was just a random comment that was thrown in online. David Fisher said, for what's worth Quine, he probably definitely didn't believe in real definition. Right? So... Oh, good. Okay. So that's interesting. So, but here's the thing. I think, methodologically, I kind of disagree with that to some extent. I think that Quine says, I've forgotten which, maybe it's in one of his... Maybe it's in two dogmas of empiricism, or maybe it's in on what exists. He says, no identity without... Sorry. No entity without identity. Right. So he's against essences. He says something like, what is it? This is a great quote from two dogmas of empiricism, where he talks about the museum of meaning, is the museum of essences. He's against essence. Yeah. He's against essence, and he's against intentional entities, etc. Why? Because he doesn't think that they have respectable identity conditions. He doesn't think they're like sets. He likes sets. They have respectable identity conditions, namely a set's identity conditions given by its members, etc. So he loves this extensionality. That is, to me, kind of a real definition methodology in operation. It's this distinguishing between ontologically dubious things and ontologically acceptable things. Right. Not on the basis of pragmatic reasons, but on the basis of, well, they're just dodgy. We can't define their identity conditions, propositions, for example. Or he doesn't think we should quantify over non-existent things. Why? Well, there's no identity that you can define for, you know. So that, to me, is the methodology of that. Fisher, Mark? Data decision. Yeah, data decision. That's my response to that. That's a very interesting question. So I think he's sort of, with one hand, he is appealing to real definition instincts. In fact, to get rid of certain ideas that are related to real definitions, namely essence, etc. That's what I think I'd say. A lot of questions? I mean, I made a joke about writing a popular book. So I was just wondering, when you thought this was a joke, why don't you write an HRC case about impact? Just to get along what can be done for us? Okay, right. What would I do? That's a good question. Yeah, what do you know about impact? Oh, okay, yeah, impact. Well, I mean, you've got to be good at coming up with fictions about impact. But I mean, this is what I would say, maybe overblowing the, exaggerating a bit. But I think that this cognitive illusion, here's the claim, there's a kind of cognitive illusion about metaphysics. It's kind of, we're a bit addicted to it. We want to find, we take seriously these questions, even in popular media, they talk about, what is it to be British, in the modern world, or what is it to be straight, or a woman, or you name it, or a man, or in other words, we get caught up with definition, and we want to draw lines of division. And in fact, we get very worried about these points of division, who goes in, who goes out, et cetera. And I think that reflects this implicit subscription signing up to these ideas of kind of ultimate reality. In other words, the ontologist is actually caught up in the same mechanisms of mind that in the more popular discourse we get caught up with when we start saying, look, this is what's to be a real French, right? We don't want, sorry, I don't know if that sort of, but certainly that discourse happens politically all the time. And that's particularly so with readiness and slippery slope arguments and things like that. So, and also, in other words, some deeper reflections maybe on that mechanism, if it is indeed one, would kind of release some of that addiction to identification, right? And I think maybe that's what Buddhists are talking about when they talk about identity being a kind of addiction. We want to define what we are, right? And here's the thought, where we're not, there's no ultimate reality to being French, being English, being gay, being straight, being one, you name it. And yet there are these distinctions. It's not like nothing. And I think that gives you a different perspective, which I think might be socially interesting if we have a society perhaps that kind of brought into that in some way. I don't know, would you give me the funding? Other questions? I don't know, but it's kind of long, it might be better over a beer from now on. I wish. It's a 5x4. I think we can take that question. Sure, okay. So, okay. When you've got your back up to the big slide with the dotted line in the middle, you know the one. Yes. There we go. I used to call that. Yeah, yeah. So, if I didn't, so this is, basically what I'm doing is I want to pose an objection that I know you have answers to, but then I want you to talk about what your two answers are, because I see two ways out. So if I were really committed to, here, let me make this, if I were really committed to the banana, then one thing that I could say in response to this is, well sure, so you put stuff between, so now draw another arrow to the banana off the bottom of the diagram. That's a pretty natural objection. Now I see two ways for you to respond that, and you gestured at both of them during the talk. So what I want you to do is tell me what you think about them and what you think their relative priority is and how you understand them, right? So one thing that you said or that you gestured at more than once with the sort of stronger current in the talk was, yeah, but down there there won't be anything that looks like a banana. There won't be a banana down there. There's another thing that you could do that you almost also did a couple of times that I've also heard some, you know, sort of arched out money in comparative theorists type people who make this move too, right? They just say, yeah, but what matters is that all the stuff in the black letters there just screens off the banana. So maybe sometimes the banana triggers the stuff in black, right? But what you'll find when you look at the world is that what matters to whether or not I say there's a banana has nothing to do with whether or not there's a banana. It has to do with whether or not my banana system's activated. Right? That's what counts. And so in some sense, I mean, yeah, maybe there's a banana, maybe there's not a banana, but the story about the story about me, my utterance of banana is a lot more about that that collection of words in black than it is about the external world. And I wonder what you mean, I feel like both of those kinds of ideas are sort of flowing in the background and so I wonder what you think about them both and I just wanted to invite you to say a little bit more about them. Good. Okay, very good question or set of questions which is quite big issue. Yeah, that's what I said. Is this a question or is this like a drinking topic? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, okay. Okay, so various things. The language so this bit of production here asks or if it's referring to I just got the sentences here. It does in this technical sense express things here which have inputs. Okay, so for the one that is about banana so on a folk level so this up here is the representational here is pre-representational no representation here and secondly s is definitely not about this right whatever is moving my my speech now just happens in my case I don't know if you have insight into the inner workings of your speech but I don't. Whatever that magnificent system is doing, my talk is not about it it's about the bananas or about the speech or about whatever. This is like the engine okay all the action is understanding the engine as it were on this view and that engine in the case of the banana talk gets hooked up to but they're not bananas as it were when I say intentionally oh look at the banana as it were the story that's going to be told about how that works is a non-mirror story it's going to be there's some really interesting theoretical thing going on involving electromagnetic radiation in some field of intensity in a certain region in space etc etc and there's an interesting correlation which you can discover later on you go oh tweak that region and you get people reacting in different ways that relationship between the banana actually in the electromagnetic field features out there isn't built into the explanation that's something discovered later so this isn't about that it's about whatever folk judgment puzzles it's about and we're just talking about what's in the engine but what you said interestingly I think well maybe for this so take causation right so one of this is you know talk of stuff causing that you know this caused that striking a match caused it to light or whatever it had this pathway ultimately linked to manipulation causation causation isn't here in that position it's not that your mind latches on to cause no it has kind of there's a pathway involving manipulations leading to these expressions of that you know when the kid says I made I made the cat squeak right when the kid grabs the cat's tail and goes poo right and these manipulations create something and it likes that and that's the beginning of the judgments of causation sure but this whole thing uses causation so actually causation is appearing all through here but you're not and when you tell the story about causal judgments right manipulation you're using causation but you're not defining causation with causation there's nothing circular about it you're using in other words causal facts to explain talk about causation but not in a sense of trying to define causation by appeal to causation because it would be circular rather you're saying what are the systems that underlie judgments of causation of course we tell that story using causation but we're not defining it so we don't think it's circular there's no way we can that because if you're a constructivist you say well so the mind constructs reality or these language systems as we're involved constructing worlds yeah well but what constructs the mind as it were and you could say well we've got another you know maybe a language system for psychological terms etc but still you've got that whole reality there its status is problematic right so when you apply the theory to itself to it's the various systems that uses to explain things you get a problem right so I think that I call that reflexive problem I don't think it applies in other words we've got causation here but that's fine we're not trying to define causation by appeal to causation bananas don't you talk about bananas and so the inputs here are going to be some interesting features in the world but not bananas but bananas might appeal some might appear elsewhere you know I don't know I'm not against that it's just there's one appeal to in the story of how you get to talk about bananas which is the core idea I think that's and as for how we talk about social holes etc or even how do we talk about language English for example okay so I'll have to go in in cut so one of the aspects of the talk and I'm quite agreement with and that's a very explicit in Rothschild as well is that question about fair of knowledge but I think they all relate to some at some point to cognitive science and the idea about its mind and one of the issues I have with the constructivism of the program or price is that again everything is reduced to mental states and it was never beyond mental states right and I was wondering how what's your future of mind again because the parts of the bananas and the specific stuff sit very close to an activism or this kind of future of mind that where the mental states are always for action and are always involved with material actions that are not just mental states right so I was wondering what your exact position is regarding future of mind and what did mind say about that well do you want to go behind the constructivism or what is yeah so okay so I don't know if it's going to help but take meaning so one aspect of mental states is take meaning representation we use words they have meanings they have representational features and mental states are representational is there any theory of representation in the sense of science representation is going to like photo or what you used to want to talk about and that's why because that's assuming there's going to be some true theoretical identification like meanings are representational states are for example interesting relations of causal co-variation with environmental features or given environmental niches or something like that and reject that right so because of the emptiness view so it's a bit like steven stitch so steven stitch I believe used to have the view he used to say look a mature cognitive science isn't going to deal with folks it's not going to reduce any folk psychological categories we're not going to find some theoretical essence of what they are so he concludes so there's no folk psychology with one day we'll replace it all with some future in fact royalty is the thing that way in some way it's going to be replaced so it's got because it has no ultimate or at least theoretical or respectable reduction it doesn't exist I can never that's the part I reject so I kind of agree with stitch that actually when you look at the mechanisms in no means here buddy where I differ is I think so that's why I think the theoretical interest is but it's not going to be a theory of meaning or representation in the sense that people look for the inner representations of the brain they aren't in that sense theoretically speaking in the inner representations of the brain but there are representational states in other words representational states are kind of irreducibly folk it's like we we talk about the representation we can give an account when I talk about meaning something meaning you etc etc but that's when they are going to as a way be able to provide some science of what the subject letter of that talk is rather in other words are semantics it's going to be no semantics it's just going to be a meta semantics of what drives the system so in that sense there's no science of states same with the belief state like what is a belief state we're going to discover the essence of belief is inside it no but we can't even talk about what goes on when we say oh you believe this and that's where the action is on this framework it seems to be very close to ideas of activism the idea is that you're always pre-representational there are a lot of states under the these are actions but they want to say mental states are actions I want to say mental states are representation I want to say they are representation it's just that we tell the the actions so the inactivists want to say Lord there's some interesting feedback systems acting in anticipations of whatever going on here fine by me I just don't think we should therefore say oh beliefs aren't really representation they're kind of anticipations or actions whatever I think they're confused levels if you take global expressivism seriously any more than you should say oh moral beliefs are motivational states that's just like complete confusion it's what you express okay that's a bit of thank you questions? no? thank you very much thank you