Exactly…? That’s the point. If both premises are true, then thoughts are not physical.
Is this argument begging the question?
Premise 1. All men are mortal.
Premise 2. Socrates is a man.
Conclusion. Socrates is mortal.
If premise 1 is true, then premise 2 is true if and only if Socrates is mortal.
Thanks for explaining. The argument appears to be stronger than I had thought.
Okay, first of all, wow, congratulations - I think you are the first person in this discussion to actually resort to an insult. Good show. Bit rich too, considering…
That’s just not how begging the question works. By your lights, an argument is half way to begging the question just by being valid! If an argument has two premises and is logically valid, then of course assuming premise 1 entails that premise 2 entails the conclusion. So you can drop “only if” there.
As for the “if”, your assertion is false! Assuming the conclusion together with premise 1 of the argument does not demonstrate premise 2. (“Some thoughts are determinate” and “some thoughts are not physical” do not entail “nothing physical is determinate”.)
But even if it did, it’s fairly common that assuming the conclusion of an argument can yield one or more of the premises, especially if assumed in conjunction with some of the other premises. That is insufficient for an argument to beg the question. (For a trivial example, consider an argument where the conclusion is just the conjunction of the premises. If you have reason to believe A and you have independent reason to believe B, then surely you have reason to believe (A and B), even though B ↔ (A and B) whenever A is true. But by your lights, this is begging the question.)
No, an argument begs the question if the reason for believing one or more of the premises assumes that the conclusion is true. And my support for Premise 2 does not do that. (Although I already admitted that I did not word things quite as clearly as I could have originally, and I have tried to rectify that in more recent comments.)
Even given your wrong definition of begging the question, this is false! (Since premise 2 doesn’t actually beg the question even by your definition, and it doesn’t contradict premise 1, nor do premise 2 and the conclusion together entail premise 1, so premise 2 doesn’t imply that premise 1 begs the question by your definition either.)
More to the point, though, given the correct understanding of begging the question, what you say here doesn’t follow either.
This is once again false. An argument can be logically valid and have true premises and a true conclusion, so in no sense is it “incorrect”, while still begging the question. (“If the moon is not made of cheese, then it is made of rock” and “the moon is not made of cheese” are both true and entail the true conclusion “the moon is made of rock”, but would certainly be begging the question if the reason for believing the conditional premise was that the conclusion is true.)
In other words, nothing you said here was correct.
No, premise 2 there is only true if Socrates is a man. Premise 1 has no bearing on premise 2 there.
I really don’t understand what your objection is. Can you explain exactly why arguments of this form are, in your opinion, begging the question?
Premise 1. Some A are B.
Premise 2. All C are not B.
Conclusion. Some A are not C.
What if Socrates is a mortal hamster?
Oh, you’re right. Premise 2 (“Socrates is a man”) doesn’t follow from premise 1 (“all men are mortal”) and the conclusion (“Socrates is mortal”).
But the same is true of Feser’s argument. Premise 2 (“all physical things are indeterminate”) does not follow from premise 1 (“some thoughts are determinate”) and the conclusion (“some thoughts are not physical”). Nor do the arguments for premise 2 assume the conclusion. It’s still true that, given premise 1, premise 2 is true only if the conclusion is true. But that’s true of any logically valid argument with two premises (including the Socrates example).
I’m still not sure what to think of Feser’s argument (although it’s stronger than I initially thought), but it is logically valid.
No, the question is whether full determinacy in Feser’s sense is required for that.
The thought unambiguously has meaning A to you, That someone else might impose a different interpretation on it is irrelevant.
Apart from the context it is embedded in, of course. As I have already argued this is the case for colour concepts, Ignoring the issue of understanding, it is also the case for software and DNA - the imposition of alternate meanings on the code is irrelevant.
I don’t accept that semantic content is that different. In both those cases the indeterminacy of translation does not affect the use at all. Why should it be different for semantic content?
I’m talking about alternate interpretations of the machine-language instructions - and alternate interpretations there would likely prevent the program from running altogether.
Determinacy in Feser’s sense just is having an unambiguous meaning. I’ll requote him:
Something is “determinate” in the sense in question here if there is an objective fact of the matter about whether it has one rather than another of a possible range of meanings – that is to say, if it has a meaning or semantic content that is exact, precise, or unambiguous.
This is, again, from one of his posts that I linked earlier. For good measure, you can see one or two further posts to better understand the sense he is using for “determinate”.
Yes. If your thought unambiguously has some meaning to you, it unambiguously has that meaning full stop, and is determinate. The question, then, is how it is possible for your thought to be determinate - what feature of reality makes it the case that your thought has this determinate content.
As I’ve repeatedly said, the context in which the physical structure (be that sound waves, or ink marks, or neuron activation patterns) is embedded is part of the facts about that structure under consideration. It still is insufficient to determinately fix the semantic content. (Again, you can see Feser’s writings to get a better idea of why arguments for semantic indeterminacy come to this conclusion; I think he explains it better than I do. The third link in this comment, in particular, both adds some examples and discusses the generalization.)
I’ve already explained this. Any semantic content that a DNA sequence might have is irrelevant to reproduction, because the chemistry of nucleotides is what is doing all the work. Any semantic content you take a particular bitstring to have is irrelevant to the running of a computer program, because the physics of semiconductors and electrical circuits and such is what is doing all the work. But semantic content is not irrelevant to semantic content itself, so yeah, it is different. This is why your analogies were completely besides the point.
If by interpretation you mean how the program actually gets implemented (what circuits and logic gates and such get used), then that isn’t what I’m talking about, so this too is irrelevant.
You may maintain that. I think you’re wrong about that, but we can let anyone reading along come to their own conclusions.
As in reasons for believing that certain things are true, yes. (Sorry that wasn’t more clear.)
As for whether I am right that none of things (the use of deductive, inductive, or abductive reasoning; moral and ethical beliefs; high-level metaphysical conclusions that radically impact how any empirical evidence will be interpreted) can be justified purely empirically, I think that is getting beyond the scope of this discussion. (I had to raise it to explain my disagreement with your dismissal of the argument, but I’m trying not to get drawn into a whole new topic!) I have discussed the general idea on this forum before, at least somewhat.
I think I am getting near the point where I have said all I have to say in this thread, so this may be my last response (unless any of my interlocutors bring up something that I really want to address). I appreciate the discussion, everyone, thanks.
It is not that clear - and certainly can’t be summarised as merely “it has a meaning or semantic content that is exact, precise, or unambiguous.”
Feser’s arguments seem to deny that. There is no obvious difficulty in a physical state corresponding to a precise meaning to me - even if someone else might choose to take it as meaning something quite different. Even if I, were I to consciously examine it were to interpret it differently. There is no doubt that there are neural signals which my brain interprets as a “green” quale but do they objectively mean “green”?
In that case you couldn’t single out a thought at all. You would have to understand a very large part of the brain and how it functioned. And it is not at all clear that Feser’s examples take full awareness of the context, The skeptic arguing that you used “qaddition” cannot be aware that you didn’t have that in mind. Ignorance lf the meaning of “gavagai” is the point in that example.
Repeating a point that I have disagreed with, without further explanation is not helpful. I hold that the examples are analogous and close enough to make my point. These things are unambiguously interpreted - without being determinate. It is all in the interpretive apparatus. I do not see why the same could not apply to semantic meaning - but I am just repeating the point you replied to, but didn’t really answer.
(I’ll add that the idea of interpretation seems to me to put more of a distance between the physical process and the meaning than is really warranted - so to speak of interpretation may exaggerate the supposed difficulties)
The precise meaning that any physical state has for you cannot factor into the explanation of how your thoughts can have precise meanings in the first place - circular explanations are no explanations at all.
So yes, since our thoughts can have determinate meaning, we can associate determinate meanings to physical states (like the patterns of pixels forming the words we’re writing and reading here). But that way for a physical state to have meaning is not available for explaining what makes it the case that our thoughts have the meaning that they do, if our thoughts are constituted by some physical state.
(I hope that clarifies things a bit.)
I am not offering a circular explanation. My explanation is that the meaning is not determinate in Feser’s sense, but is fixed by the architecture of the brain.
If you ask for anything more than that we are back to the argument from ignorance.
I am coming in late to this discussion, but it seems to be that eliminative materialism may deal with this problem at a single stroke. Under that paradigm, as I understand it, all these concerns about “meaning” and such are just aspects of an extraneous folk psychology that only impedes our ability to fully understand what is actually going on when we think.
In that regard, then “adding” is simply a term we give for a particular category of neural functions, and “quadding” is not the same thing because it would involve different functions. If I understand correctly…
I think that’s true under pretty much any paradigm, isn’t it? One simply cannot reason from first principles, use abstractions piled upon abstractions (e.g., classifications of different sorts of meaning) and expect anything at all to emerge from that except nonsense. The suggestion that brains might be able to engage in thinking about some things through physical processes, but not about other things, is completely baseless until one knows how brains think about things.
Must… not… get… pulled… back… in… oh, too late. 
Eliminative materialism “deals with the problem” by denying Premise 1, so of course it is one way to deny the conclusion of the argument.
But in addition to having to go against the support for Premise 1, eliminative materialism is incoherent, so that’s not a great win. Consider your own statements here, suggesting it could represent an advance in our understanding of what is really going on when we think. But if eliminative materialism is true, there is no such thing as understanding at all - understanding inherently requires exactly the kind of intentionality (the “aboutness” of our thoughts) that eliminative materialism denies exists. If you ever find that you understand eliminative materialism, you have proven it false.
Since you’re denying that the sense of “determinate” in question is what Feser explicitly says he is talking about (i.e., having unambiguous semantic content), I have no idea what sense of “determinate” you are actually trying to deny.
Apparently I’m not allowed to ask “how” here, since that would be an “argument from ignorance”, according to you?
Anyways, I deny that charge - the argument isn’t “I don’t know how mere matter could have determinate meaning, therefore I believe it can’t.” The argument rather is more like “given what we do know about mere matter, there’s good reason to believe it cannot have determinate meaning” (reasons, by the way, which at least some materialist philosophers of mind accept - see the eliminative materialism Faizal mentioned).
I don’t think so. You would have simply demonstrated that the phenomenon EM attempts to describe and explain actually exists. Similarly, knowing that an optical illusion is an illusion doesn’t mean we don’t still see it.
Denial of Feser’s P1 may be, I admit, a hard pill to swallow. That does not mean the premise must be true.
I do deny that the meaning is unambiguous in the sense that an outsider could impose a different interpretation on it. Especially with incomplete information - as is the case in Feser’s examples.
If you are going to argue that the fact that we don’t know how meaning is generated, then yes. And I would suggest that that is implicit in the arguement.
I believe that I have given adequate reasons to disagree. Certainly it is possible to interpret information given in an ambiguous form in a fixed way. Which would sm adequate to show that determinacy is. It required.
Yes… you’ll have proved the existence of the phenomenon (intentionality) that EM attempts to “explain” by denying that it actually exists.
The analogy to an illusion fails, because the whole idea of an illusion presupposes intentionality, and so cannot explain it away. In order to be fooled by an illusion, our minds must represent the content of that experience to themselves as something it is not. And especially in the case of an “illusion of intentionality” (though arguably in all cases), that representation is intentional.
@Paul_King , some of what you wrote in your last post is not at all clear to me. (It looks like you might have some typos?)
As far as I can tell, you are saying you think you have given adequate reasons to disagree with Premise 2, summarizing:
But the only basis I can see for this claim is that we can impose a fixed meaning on something that doesn’t have it intrinsically (as we do when we use language). But that presupposes that our thoughts already have that meaning for us to impose. It isn’t an option for explaining how it is, or what makes it the case, that our thoughts have that meaning in the first place.
Actually I am disagreeing with Premise 1 as should be clear.
“Intrinsic meaning” has to be clearly recognisable and not susceptible to alternate interpretations. I have yet to see any reason why physical processes corresponding to our thoughts should meet those criteria. Why should they be any clearer than “gavagai”?
Which brings us to the question of how meaning arises, which is not answerable - at present, certainly.
I’m not sure you understood the analogy. As I intended it (unfortunate choice of words, there 
) , the perception that the horizontal bar varies in shade from left to right is analogous to our perception that intentionality exists.
Therefore, the fact that we continue to act and speak as if intentionality is real is no more an admission that it is real than the fact that we still perceive the bar as varying in shade is evidence that it does vary in shade.