John Stuart Mill - one minor mistake
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- čas přidán 9. 06. 2024
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This is the first in a series of video lectures built for my college course in the philosophy of language.
John Stuart Mill lived in England from 1806 to 1873. He was a philosopher and also a Member of Parliament. Much of his philosophical work is in moral and political philosophy. He was the student of Jeremy Bentham and, like Bentham, an advocate of Utilitarianism. He was the second Member of Parliament to argue that women should be granted the right to vote. Mill also wrote one of the early and central works in the philosophy of language, 'Of Names,' which is what we are reading for this course.
This video lecture discusses several distinctions among types of names that Mill introduces:
General Names vs. Singular Names
Collective Names vs. Non-Collective Names
Connotative Names vs. Non-Connotative Names
But it important to note that Mill's term "names" doesn't just include proper names, like “Susan” or “Frederick” or “Dartmouth” or “North Carolina.” The term also encompasses, for example, definite descriptions, like “the tallest human on Earth,” “the cat,” and “the teacher of Plato.”
My day is made when this man post a video
I know, right? All his time wasted teaching actual classrooms
My satisfaction is immeasurable and my day is made !
@@IHaveaPinkBeard I wish this was sarcastic. There are specific things at specific times. Think again.
@dddmemaybe what are you talking about with this specific things at specific times?
I was joking about his time wasted. It kills a joke to have to explain what is meant though.
I’m still catching up on all of your content. Thanks for making these videos for public consumption you are truly a gold nugget in a pile of slag.
Too often, the ability to teach well is overlooked and undervalued. I appreciate your skill and passion. Keep it up, homie.
I never took any philosophy courses when I was in college some 40+ years ago. I truly love seeing a bit of what I missed by watching these videos. My sincere thanks for taking the effort to pull these off!
New Kaplan video day is a good day.
Mate, you're my number one go-to teacher to fire me up when I get bogged down in my PhD candidature. I'm halfway through, and I'm going to have to include you in my dedications because you've been with me from the start and are honestly right up there among the most influential professors in my life. I link my undergrads up to your channel and on occasion I've let your videos do some of the heavy lifting in the classroom, because the students consistently respond positively to the material discussions afterwards.
Keep doing what you are doing. You're a fantastic professor. You present important topics in an interesting and engaging way. Among my favorite philosophy CZcams channels.
I love that I get to see you today. It's actually crazy that you would post a video on Mill right now because I just finished reading "The Subjection of Women."
@@fukpoeslaw3613 where is the connection/proof to jesus?
Your videos give a deeper understanding of the everyday world we live in. They provoke a person think about and analyze their surroundings using critical judgment of the issue.
He died in 1873, but wrote this essay in 1881? Pretty impressive. I forgive him his mistake.
By 1881 he was a bit past his prime, to be sure.
I love how the first 2 names that immediately came to Jeffrey's mind to give examples of proper names were "Abraham" and "Sally"
your skill to write backwards is impressive. i would never know it was backwards if seen on its own.
Great video, just went through this material in Principles of Logic at university, it was a great class, I loved it. Great video as always!!!
Oh, man, don't leave me hangin' Dr. Kaplan! I'm not used to watching these as they are produced. I've been spoiled by such a rich back catalog to explore. Please, keep 'em coming.
Great video- I tried reading Mill's paper in advance and had real difficulty visualizing his meaning on regiments, which you explain so clearly!
How long have I been missing out on these videos? My goodness, what a wonderful professor he is. I’m now going to lose hours of my life watching all his videos.
I'm not going to lie, this is your only video as of yet that I cannot fully grasp... but I'm always impressed by your content!
This dude videos lowkey entertaining and educational as fuck bro top class frfr
this is the best channel i've ever come across. please please do wittgenstein and maybe some CS Pierce.
Great stuff as usual
Looking forward to the next lecture, because clearly there's still *some* attribute about Frank which we're identifying with. We're not just applying labels to empty vessels with no informational content, or we wouldn't be able to preserve the meaning of what we're labeling.
Please keep on going man
I really appreciate it when a short talk like this gives me some insight into how my own mind works. My memory for names is just terrible. I will generally say that it;s the fault of them being proper nouns and just leave it at that. But to learn that it's due to the connotative vs non-connotative distinction which lets me easily retain the link & association of what someone does to their identity. e.g. the actor that played Dr. David Banner in "The Incredible Hulk" and played the father in "The Courtship of Eddie's Father", yet I cannot *instantly* recall his character name, or the name of the actor, even though I know it's Bill Bixby.
Awesome presentation style.
waiting for your next class
Brilliant and informative video, excellent Job
your videos are crazy good. pls never stop doing youtube
Thank you for this informative video. I was struggling with the mathematical theory of categories and why it was replacing the set theory through excluding the notion of element. I feel Stuart Mill ideas provide some light as for why it was necessary.
5:05 "Now is when things get interesting." Except they don't. I watched to the end, just because Prof Kaplan has such an engaging style. Must I watch the next video, or more, to find out why this matters? Will I? Not likely.
I'm looking forward to the lecture(s) about adjectives & adverbs, to see if Kaplan recognizes that nearly all of them are vague shorthands that actually allude to a relative comparison to an unstated alternative. For example, the relative comparison in "X is bigger than a breadbox" isn't vague because the alternative (breadbox) is stated, but the adjective in "X is big" is vague because the compared alternative is unstated. (Breadbox? Trolleycar? Mountain? Planet? Galaxy?) In the game Twenty Questions, the classic question "is it bigger than a breadbox" is very useful, but the answer to "is it big" would have no clear meaning.
The general problem is that adjectives, adverbs, and many other kind of words create false dichotomies when there's more than one possible (unstated) alternative... and usually there is more than one possible alternative. Consider an "approval" poll in which 60% say they "disapprove of" Joe Biden, or consider a "right track / wrong track" poll in which 80% say "we're on the wrong track." Those options are false dichotomies, and such polls misleadingly lump together people who have opposite preferences. Someone who says he "disapproves" of Biden could mean he prefers Trump over Biden, or it could mean he prefers Bernie Sanders over Biden, or it could signal disappointment that Merrick Garland hasn't yet indicted Trump, etc. Someone who says "wrong track" could mean he prefers a track further to the left, or it could mean he prefers a track further to the right. Suppose 45% prefer a track further to the left and 35% prefer a track further to the right... that would lead to 80% saying "wrong track," which would create the false impression that the current track is unpopular. But that's a faux majority, because 65% (45%+20%) prefer the current track over a track further right and 55% (35%+20%) prefer the current track over a track further left. These two head-to-head majorities mean the current track is actually the most popular. Head-to-head majorities when pairs of alternatives are compared are the meaningful majorities (and all of the head-to-head majorities can be counted by a single round of voting or by a poll in which each voter expresses his/her order of preference).
This is the second of your videos that I watch (actually I haven't yet finished the first one, about numbers). It seems to me you really like Le Bron!
And I thought his only mistake, all be it of his own free will, of drinking half a pint of cider. And subsequently being particularly ill.
I think you will find it was half a pint of shandy.
@@Canalcoholic My copy of Matching Tie and Handkerchief is as worn and crackly as my memory, it would appear.🤕
After this lecture I'd love to hear you discuss Baudrillard
The collective thing is an important distinction because the head of the regiment can leave the regiment and the regiment will still be the regiment, bit (a) the head of the cat cannot decide to leave the cat, and (b) it it does it will not be a cat any more. So there is a difference. Mill was not confused, he was trying to prevent confusions for people thinking of collectives as if they are cats :-)
Bits of the cat are constantly leaving the cat and being replaced with new bits of cat. Anyone with a cat will know this and regularly have to vacuum up the bits that are collecting in the corners of their home. 😉
@@dogcarman The bits constantly leaving the cat, are not deciding to leave the cat. And of course they cannot join back the cat that dropped them or some other cat. That is, the cat is dropping them, or they are are dropped off from the cat. Their 'cat-ness' is an attribute of the singular cat which is why you recognize them as having been part of a cat at an earlier time.
I thought so too - glad someone agrees. I think that if we start thinking of singular things as 'really' just collectives of smaller things then we will run into a regress of atomising parts of wholes into their own wholes and then atomising those wholes ad infinitum.
@@dimitristsagdis7340 What about getting a haircut? If you think of a human being as one singular thing, and you agree that my hair is a part of me, what does the fact that I regularly choose to get rid of parts of myself mean for this distinction between collective and non-collective?
If the two criteria for collectivity are like you say A) a part can decide to leave the whole and B) the whole will remain intact if a part leaves, then getting a haircut definitely fulfils B, and may not fulfil A. But if there was a rule in all regiments where someone who leaves can't ever come back, would regiments no longer be collectives?
@@patrickbyrne9509 the hair parts or other bits of you cannot get together and reconstitute you. The members of a collective can. The members of a regiment can decide to leave and form a new regiment. There are unique properties in collectives and that's why they need to be a separate category otherwise if one treats them as a cat they will run into difficulties of logic, language, ontology.... Feel free to try.
Oh you don't believe in John Stuart Mill's theory of names? Name every single cat
Really interesting!
These videos are great. So well explained. I hope your boss is happy with your description of him.
BTW, your spelling (admittedly while writing backwards) is a bit off, e.g., "Chanellor".
The world doesn't know it yet, but your're one of the greats, you'll live atop the mount Rushmore of education alongside Bill Nye, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Vsauce, Veritasium, Mark Rober. I genuinely really love and appreciate your content an enjoy it, though I am a new subscriber.
I learned all this in language class in elementary school. (Not English-English is not my native language. But these concepts-common nouns, proper nouns etc.-exist in all languages.) I, however, had no idea it had so much 19th century philosophy behind it. I also had no idea that language creators had put so much thought into it. I assumed that languages, you know, just evolved, based on needs.
BTW, in high school physics, I learned that certain so-called "fundamental" particles-such as photons, quarks, leptons etc.-are not composed of anything smaller. So JS Mill might've been right about the "non-collective" after all, even though he didn't know about the Standard Model back then.
Earned all of this language in LATIN and that Latin, Greek and other ancient languages are this way . Most schools ,especially in the USA haven't caught up to this or the physics.
Looking forward to the Kripke one! :D
Skip Kripke. And Davidson. And Quine. And Montague. And Lewis, etc. It's all not worth your time.
Start learning about cognition & cognitive science, and skip the talking heads.
Just an advice from an old guy who spent way too much time (many years) on trying to understand the word flood of these self-satisfied word producers.
Where is this topic continued? He says "we will get to it next week in this course". Is there anyway I can gain access to this course?
Excellent beginning about Names.
I'm really looking forward to this.
Can't wait for the planet Venus and the present king of France to show up.
I wish that you Professor made lectures about heidegger, thanks for this❤
Then my doubt Is:
Electron are the fundamental particles it does not made up of anything, if we name a electron as 'AK' the it is "Non Collective" I think.
Could you please make videos on George Santayana?
will you post the conclusion to this lecture?
Waiting for Frege Russel to Kripke video
Great videos you covered the "Jr" part of Frank Gillian's name, but his name also tells us he is a gent, is being a man in a society an attribute?
I think I get the gist. That if Frank Gillian Jr. was a meter stick named jones gardening , holding a glass of wine, then in all possible worlds hesperus is necessarily phosphorus (I might have read ahead)
If those markers are fluorescent then maybe getting a black light to shine on your board will make the writing pop out. That would be cool.
That should be in a fundamentals for progamming class
Just watched your Russell Paradox video. I have a question….
The sets you described (cats, dogs, LeBron) are all positive integers. There are a real number of cats, dogs, and one LeBron. You also said there can be a null set, equivalent to zero. So my question is…. Can you extend the math into negative numbers? You have positive numbers and zero. Can you have a negative set? And what would a negative set look like? If you have a set that says, “Anything that is NOT in a set is in this set,” would that be a negative set? And, if something is not in a set, but now becomes part of this set, must it now be tossed out because it has become part of a set? Is that another paradox? If “everything in the Universe” is a set, can anything be “not part of a set.” Should another rule of sets be:
Sets may only consist of positive integers
9:25 in the context of this argument by John Stuart Mill, would the proper name “Superman“ be considered a connotative name?
Frank Gilliam, JR is connotative. It tells me he has a father named Frank. It tells me he looks up when someone yells out "Frank".
I hope and predict that you'll be getting more into Russell and Wittgenstein with this philosophy of language series.😛
I was surprised that with all this there has been nothing about the distinction between substantive (or concrete) nouns like "staple" versus reifications (or abstract nouns) like "system". There obviously is an overlap with the non-collective versus collective distinction, and even "suffers" from a similar gray area problem, but I think it is not completely the same. It may be seen as a different axis where for some reason a certain type of terms seems to happen to line up on both these axes ("city"), but there are other terms that don't ("bicycle", "surprise").
I sort of realized this when I decided not to change my name.
This a long topic on language but if just philosophy still a ling topic ...and added to my playlist on ego and language
Can connotative names contain non-connotative? ‘The artist formerly known as Prince’ for instance
Awesome.
Didn't Aristotle spend some time with names and subjects etc.?
Does anybody know where I can find JS Mill's Of Names online? thanks
3:27
FELIX !!
What about "former chancellor"? In that case a connotative name would be immutable?
I need friends that would watch this channel too 😂
I conculde from the video that Jeffrey wants to be named not only by the non-connotatibe name "Jeffrey Kaplan", but also by the Connotative name "The Chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro".
But, of which Jeffrey am I talking about, asks Frege? Well, I'll have to watch the next video
I always wondered what Philosophy of Language was. It is . . . difficult.
Surely Mill is right about collective names. The subject of a proper name, say Garfield, may be assembled from cells, or strokes of the pen, or whatever; but having been assembled into a 'whole system', an entity with its own logic, it has an identity (a cat), different from that of a bunch of cells (or strokes of the pen) which might be arranged to form a dog, and (being a complex entity, a cat, rather than a simple entity like an atom) having in addition an individual identity denoted by 'Garfield'. A thing, an entity, will always be composed of parts but these parts have a governing system logic which makes that entity what it is. And that is what we give the name to, surely? We can't go around referring to things as 'bunches of cells'. It fails to communicate what is most important, identity.
I also think, mill was wrong with connotative names being tossed away for an individual (or a collective) right as the description no longer applies to them.
For example if I say: "Barack Obama, the president of the US..." I don't think that many people will look confused even though it's (technically) wrong and no longer a description of him.
Of course it can be argued, that connotative names can become non-connotative names over time, but then it muddies the whole thing, mill wanted to show imo.
Other examples: People might refer to someone who retired still by their job-title (similar to obama). Or if a sports team wins a championship and then loses it, they might still be referred to as "the champions".
When you say _"Barack Obama, _*_the_*_ president of the US,"_ it's pretty obvious to most people that you mean _"Barack Obama, _*_a former_*_ president of the US."_ However, if someone says _"Donald Trump, the president of the US,"_ what do you think they mean? 😜
Can't help wondering how Frank responded to this video!
What's your problem with Frank Gilliam Jr?
Why no comments for the Peter Singer video.
“Tired of those damn meetings” 😂
I guess Mills never considered that Augustus and Caesar became connotative proper names by the significance of their attribution. Emperors of Rome would adopt those names to the rest of their name and change other parts of their original name to reflect the prestige of their stature. The names and the title/job converged. The arbitrary label became a specific description to denote the most powerful men of the Roman Empire at given time after the deaths of Caesar and Augustus.
Kaplan definitely had a bet with Frank Gilliam Jr. about how many times he could put his photo up in this video 😂
Or to put it in other way: Connotative includes metadata, Non-Connotative does not.
So he writes everything backwards on the glass so it’s forwards for the audience?
A collective can have properties at the collective level like the flag of a regiment, or at the member level, like the color of the uniforms. If the properties at the collective level are more important, we can think of it as a non-collective thing, e,g. a cat. If the properties at the member level seem more important we can think of it as a collective thing, e.g. a regiment,
14:49 This is not just "some guy + information", it's neither the guy, nor information. The connotative name is non-connotative when referred not to the guy but to a position, so "The Chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro" is a title to a position, not to a concrete guy + some info. If you seek the guy because, you owe him money personally and you need to return it, you seek his name, if you have to resolve some matters that only the Chancellor will resolve, you'll seek ANYONE who is in this position.
Are we to believe that others hadn't distinguished a proper name from a title ?
Both Frank Gilliam Jr. and North Carolina imply attributes. Mr. Gilliam Jr. has or had a father with the same name. North Carolina is above South Carolina on a map.
Spent the entire video after 3:30 thinking of famous cat names other than Garfield
Wait. Based on quantum mechanics there are things are not collections of things. They are the base. That was the original meaning for the word atom. I mean yeah sure that means that there are a specified amount of stuff that this applies to but there are so we must include them. So maybe Mill wasn't wrong on that regard. They are just really limited.
You said that Mill was wrong about non-collective names, that actually all things are collections of other things. Philosophically speaking, is it possible for something to be irreducible? Say a quark, for instance? Can anything be singular?
Anything that can function as the subject of ones focus must have a name. So can we have a name for that which does not exist, for that which we have no awareness of, have no knowledge of? If that be not so we must question what is possible with the word “exist”, which of a necessity cannot be limited to that which is physical, that which is only perceived by the five senses. For we also perceive with the mind’s imagination, the mental faculty of conceptualization, the sixth sense as it were that which is not tangible yet is of Reality.
Hey, I am new to your channel just watched your Peter Singer video. I have always been interested in philosophy and theology but never had a chance to go to study so I am sort of self tought. I have also never heard of Peter Singer. However I have start thinking about what you described in that video about 10 years ago. But more in terms of whealth distribution and our moral and socio-economical progress as species. I am pleased to know there is a philosophy paper like this and I will 100% read it. I was trying to find something like this in das kapital but socialism while coming close is not the answer. I believe that in therm to evolve as species higher morals and innite willingness to accept responsibility for our species as whole are the key. I would like to know what are your thoughts on the description of morals and society build on them as put in by R.A. Heinlein in his Starship troopers book.
Anyway great video I am looking forward to exploring the rest of them.
I have to take several philosophy courses at college back in the seventies. I found them to be the most boring hours! I wish I had Dr. Kaplan as I would have gotten much more out of them.
general vs singular names
....the ability to broadly generalize experiences & objects appears to be a somewhat uniquely humans trait.
dogs seems to generally stop developing at our toddler level...my dog sniffs before he licks the front of the gravy covered spoon; i flip it over and he sniffs the back first again as if it is a new object. it blew my mind.
Why not just can it "name" or "descriptive name"?
Oh no, a cliffhanger.
Set, subset, identity: number, real number, 5. There is a difference between generic definitions of subsets, where the name/ definition can identify multiple sets containing different members, and specific subsets that always contain the same members. They're important distinctions for making sense of logical statements about metadata like axioms and for defining rules about symbolic systems.
The "set of all sets" contains everything except itself by definition, because without that distinction it would be a circular reference and a contradiction, which would nullify its meaning.
"In the same sense" = "with respect to" = "observers reference frame" it's all relative with respect to the set identified with respect to the set referenced.
Yes turtles, turtles all the way down. :D
5:51 A cat is not a 'collective thing' in quite the same way as a regiment is though. A cat is not just a collection of molecules but a collection of molecules arranged in a very specific way. A random arrangement of those molecules would not generally be in the form of a cat. A regiment, on the other hand, is a collection of soldiers regardless of how they are physically arranged.
well, no, the soldiers can't be arranged any arbitrary way, can they? If one soldier is on the moon, another dead, and a third at the bottom of the ocean, how could you call them a regiment? Hell, how do you even know they're "soldiers"? That's just yet another collective thing.
I think the real counter argument would be to say "but why do I have to accept your reductive move?" In other words, we're not obligated to define a cat in ways of its molecules if we don't want to. And no conclusions drawn from doing that have to be accepted.
@@Google_Censored_Commenter I don't think Kaplan was defining a cat as a collection of molecules. It's something that is true of a cat, but it's not a definition.
Also, I think if a collection of soldiers that are widely dispersed in the way you mention had all been assigned to a particular named regiment (an institutional fact), I would still be happy to call it a 'regiment', even if some were dead. Why not?
@@cavalrycome Well it just doesn't suit the common definition of a regiment. No one speaks of dead members of a set as still being part of it. You might as well just define them as having human dna, if you don't care about any other physical facts. But guess what, human dna is still organized a particular way we can identify. Here's another way of thinking about it, every collective thing, is just multiple instances of individual things, which you already agree are defined by some arrangement of molecules, or whatever other physical facts we identify them by. So to say the collective thing doesn't care about the details of the individual things inside the collective, doesn't work, because it's those details that made us group them together in the collective to begin with.
@@Google_Censored_Commenter In some cases, people do still refer to dead soldiers as members of a regiment. For example, I can imagine it being quite natural for a soldier in the immediate aftermath of a disastrous battle saying something like "Half of our regiment is dead!" Some time later, those soldiers who have been registered as dead with the relevant institutions will more naturally be referred to as former members of the regiment. But even if we accept your notion that they immediately cease to be members of the regiment at the point of death, I actually don't see how that supports your initial point. Dead people can't be members of regiments so a soldier being dead isn't a fact about the physical arrangement of soldiers in a regiment.
To use the terminology of sets, I regard a regiment as a set where the elements are restricted to a particular type of thing, namely soldiers. Sets are unordered so {A, B, C} and {A, C, B} are exactly the same set. Cats are more akin to tuples, which do have an ordering so (A, B, C) and (A, C, B) are two distinct tuples. A DNA sequence is also like a tuple because the order matters and because the same gene will often appear more than once on the same chromosome.
@@cavalrycome all you're doing is kicking the can down the road. Definition of a soldier is no different than that of a cat. They have traits that define them. So to say a collection of soldiers somehow isn't similar to the cat, is incoherent.
Is not the idea of the sun made with electricity and hormone?
There is/was a British character actor who is/was the spitting image of Mill but I can't remember his name and google has an acquired brain injury these days and isn't what it used to be.
How about the name, “The Supreme Court?” “The War of 1812?” Nicknames like Freckles? I’m not convinced of the lack of descriptive information in every case even though the categories make sense. The Boston Redsocks. Oklahoma University.
l've always thought fiction & nonfiction were backwards. It just seemed like nonfiction would be non-true.
Does the name “woman” connote an attribute?
9:31 North Carolina is actually a pretty bad example for this argument right? Since it indicates it being North of something. In this case South Carolina.
Hmm should've watched further before commenting. Still not exactly sure of that explanation though. North Carolina without South would just be Carolina, but it would still be Northern. Maybe the North Pole? It's still the North Pole with or without the existence of the South Pole.
Sylvester (Tweety's pal)
Are you a Stand-up Philosopher?
Maybe collectives are subsets of non-collectives, just one of the many different types of non-collectives?