Realism
...and anti-realism.
I'm curious as to how these two approaches might be ...approached.
Speaking very roughly, just to get started, realism holds that ...stuff... is independent of what we say about it; anti-realism, that it isn't.
"Stuff", because the content makes a difference. For instance, if the content is aesthetic, then anti-realism is the view that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder; an aesthetic realist might hold that beauty and ugly are a part of whatever it is we are beholding; an anti-realist, that beauty and ugly are attitudes we adopt, or some such. An ethical realist might say god and bad are as much aspects of the world as matter and volume; and ethical anti-realist, that no observation of the world will reveal good or bad, because they are not 'out there' to be found.
My attention was drawn to the realist / anti-realist distinction by several recent discussions concerning epistemology, ontology and logic, especially @Sam26's most recent thread on Private Language and @Athena asking what a fact is, but also @stoicHoneyBadger's positing that religion need not be factually correct, @Jack Cummins asking about belief and @Cidat's wondering about what reality is. I also found curious relations to my own foray into Logical Nihilism. It seems a topic of general, timely relevance to the community.
While the notion has general use, it's metaphysics that is my main interest here. Stealing blatantly from my Rutledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, a realist may hold to things like that correspondence to the facts is what makes a statement true; that there may be truths we do not recognise as such, do not believe and do not know; that the Law of excluded middle holds for things in the world; and that the meaning of a sentence may be found by specifying it's truth-conditions. An ant-realist may in contrast hold that truth is to be understood in sophisticated epistemic terms, perhaps as what a "well-conducted investigation" might lead us to believe; that there can be no unknown truths; that we need include "unknown" as well as true and false in our logical systems; and that the meaning of a sentence is to be found in what it might assert.
I've previously characterised my own view as realist. I've argued against typical examples of anti-realism such as pragmatic theory, logical positivism, transcendental idealism and Berkeley's form of idealism. I have however also defended a constructivist view of mathematics, an anti-realist position; and off-handedly rejected realism in ethics and aesthetics.
I wonder also if Anscombe's direction of fit works here. It's the difference between the list you take with you to remind yourself of what you want to buy and the list the register produces listing the things you actually purchased. The intent of the first list is to collect the things listed; of the second, to list the things collected. The first seeks to make the world fit the list, the second, to make the list to fit the world. Is it that anti-realism applies to ethics and aesthetics because we seek to make the world as we say, while realism applies to ontology and epistemology because we seek to make what we say fit the world? Reply to Tom Storm, this is were I'm up to.
Thoughts?
I'm curious as to how these two approaches might be ...approached.
Speaking very roughly, just to get started, realism holds that ...stuff... is independent of what we say about it; anti-realism, that it isn't.
"Stuff", because the content makes a difference. For instance, if the content is aesthetic, then anti-realism is the view that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder; an aesthetic realist might hold that beauty and ugly are a part of whatever it is we are beholding; an anti-realist, that beauty and ugly are attitudes we adopt, or some such. An ethical realist might say god and bad are as much aspects of the world as matter and volume; and ethical anti-realist, that no observation of the world will reveal good or bad, because they are not 'out there' to be found.
My attention was drawn to the realist / anti-realist distinction by several recent discussions concerning epistemology, ontology and logic, especially @Sam26's most recent thread on Private Language and @Athena asking what a fact is, but also @stoicHoneyBadger's positing that religion need not be factually correct, @Jack Cummins asking about belief and @Cidat's wondering about what reality is. I also found curious relations to my own foray into Logical Nihilism. It seems a topic of general, timely relevance to the community.
While the notion has general use, it's metaphysics that is my main interest here. Stealing blatantly from my Rutledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, a realist may hold to things like that correspondence to the facts is what makes a statement true; that there may be truths we do not recognise as such, do not believe and do not know; that the Law of excluded middle holds for things in the world; and that the meaning of a sentence may be found by specifying it's truth-conditions. An ant-realist may in contrast hold that truth is to be understood in sophisticated epistemic terms, perhaps as what a "well-conducted investigation" might lead us to believe; that there can be no unknown truths; that we need include "unknown" as well as true and false in our logical systems; and that the meaning of a sentence is to be found in what it might assert.
I've previously characterised my own view as realist. I've argued against typical examples of anti-realism such as pragmatic theory, logical positivism, transcendental idealism and Berkeley's form of idealism. I have however also defended a constructivist view of mathematics, an anti-realist position; and off-handedly rejected realism in ethics and aesthetics.
I wonder also if Anscombe's direction of fit works here. It's the difference between the list you take with you to remind yourself of what you want to buy and the list the register produces listing the things you actually purchased. The intent of the first list is to collect the things listed; of the second, to list the things collected. The first seeks to make the world fit the list, the second, to make the list to fit the world. Is it that anti-realism applies to ethics and aesthetics because we seek to make the world as we say, while realism applies to ontology and epistemology because we seek to make what we say fit the world? Reply to Tom Storm, this is were I'm up to.
Thoughts?
Comments (494)
Same old chestnut. Same old answer.
Realism is wrong to the degree it neglects that all such speech acts have some pragmatic purpose. So the world isn’t understood in some mind-independent fashion. That wouldn’t even be useful.
And anti-realism is wrong to the degree it might pretend there is no world independent of this minding, or mindfulness, or however you choose to describe a semiotic modelling relation.
Very interesting, thanks.
Strange to posit a psychological basis, implying a subjectivity even in the theories we choose.
I'd say simply that we are ontological realists by default because it is intuitively obvious the stair we just tripped on is actually there independent of us. Only through (too) much thought will we question that.
As to why morality isn't the same, I'd say because we don't trip over good and evil and we realize we create all sorts of social norms. If the morally real is out there, where is it?
In so far as "the world" is real (i.e. mind/discourse-invariant), "anti-realism" as described here is incoherent (e.g. "maps = territory"). Otherwise, if "the world" is unreal, then "anti-realism" is an empty concept (e.g. "maps sans territory").
Quoting tim wood
Presupposes it, no? Otherwise, "anti-realism" is not [i]anti-[i] anything.
Quoting Hanover
Here, and wherever some one/thing suffers.
Quoting Banno
So, it's content that makes up stuff, yes? But, then we have facts and some kind of coherentism in how they can find their use in language, yes?
In my view, if not overly simplistic, it comes down to a pragmatic understanding of how epistemic criteria or even what you describe as content determine use. I think, that makes sense.
Quoting 180 Proof
I'm not following that. Anti-realism presupposes realism? Why? On one side we have that stuff is independent on what we say or think, on the other, that stuff is not dependent on what we say or think. How does stuff being dependent presuppose it not being dependent?
Austin, who developed the theory of speech acts, argued extensively for realism using speech act theory.
But is it right?
Well, there's subjective, and then there's subjectivity. Perhaps we might look for something more than your intuitions. I had assumed you would adopt an anti-realist approach, given you think Quoting Hanover
I wrote this on the old forum and you more or less harrumphed at it:
Maybe. If you are suggesting the anti-realist emphasises the content and the realist emphasises fact.
Is that what you think?
May I presume to harrumph again? I still do not see what, in the account you give, is supposed to be problematic for realism. Or is that not your point?
So, the role of the mind in creating the world should have some bearing on that, ought it not?
By way of bringing in the logical implications of the topic, and where chatting about Fitch's paradox. InPitzotl was using code to explain the relation between truth and propositions in a novel way - quite cute - and EricH joined in with a roughly constructivist - and hence anti-realist - account of mathematics.
On a constructivist account, a mathematical statement is true only if there exists a demonstration, a construction that shows that it is true. Until such a construction is produced the mathematical statement does not have a truth value.
On a realist account - mathematical Platonism - mathematical statement are true or false regardless of their having been proved.
There might be a space here to compare maths to Anscomb's shopping list. But what was interesting was how quickly the discussion of Fitch's paradox moved over to anti-realism.
Quoting Wayfarer
Is the mind creating it (like an artist), or is the mind discovering it (like an explorer)? We may never know the answer.
I can accept that. Then the question becomes, how much of reality is created, and how much is discovered? But the more important question is: how do we distinguish between the two?
Not really. Realism is the idea that there is stuff independent of what we say about it. It's not the idea that a specific object (say, the sky) is completely independent of our perceiving apparatus and that we are just passively receiving it.
You admit that there exists stuff independent of what we say about it here:
This "raw material of perception" exists regardless of what we say about it correct?
That we then add something to it to make a coherent world is not a problem for realism.
Can't you see how the account I gave of how 'mind constructs reality' conflicts with 'realism holds that ...stuff... is independent of what we say about it'? I can't see how you can't see that.
Quoting Merkwurdichliebe
It's not one or the other. Both come into play.
Emphatically not.
So, when you perceive X, X was in large part created by you. But X was created from a "raw material of perception" as well.
Are you saying even the "raw material of perception" is created? What's so raw about it then?
Realism is not the view that X exists regardless of what we say about it. It's the view that something exists regardless of what we say about it. You admit this when you say that X is created partly by us, and partly by a "raw material perception".
That you make a distinction necessarily means that the "raw material perception" was not created by us. Otherwise you wouldn't have mentioned it. You would have just said "When you perceive something, there is a considerable amount of work involved in making it up"
How do we distinguish between them? When I try to make sense of it, all I can think about is chicken and egg
SO science is discovers, ethics created? And we can work our way on from there.
But to make the job more interesting, language is created, yet is used to talk about what is discovered. I suspect that might have something to do with @Hanover's position.
No. I think answers that. And sets up some interesting questions I'd lie to see you answer.
Does "whether or not stuff depends on what we think" depend on what we think? If it does, you're not really an anti-realist, as you admit realism is just as valid. If it doesn't you're a realist about something.
I don't see why not - unless you want to add some arbitrary rule of exclusion. Why shouldn't M be dependent on M? that's just recursion, and there's ntohing inherently wrong with that - it's not contradictory...?
That makes sense. So then language and ethics being both created, does that mean that ethics is built into language, and that any time we speak there is an inherent ethic in the particular language used? Or that perhaps, various languages carry with them proclivities toward certain morals?
It seems so. After Lyotard, all language is political; and hence ethical. @Joshs?:
I was thinking more of different approaches in different situations; that the quest is not for either realism or antirealism, so much as which, when?
What I'm saying is that you never see outside of the mind-created world within which all the
objects of perception exist.
Quoting khaled
If it's something that nobody ever knows anything about, then it's not anything. Realism, as spelled out 'roughly' in the OP, is that stuff exists whether anyone knows about it or not.
Come now, we all know ants aren't real...
It's self-evident that all we have that can be talked about is the way things seem to us, it is both phenomenologically and biologically, from that 'pool' of beliefs that we draw the things we are to say. So if we're to talk about the difference between the way things seem to us and the way things 'actually are', we must first allow for the fact that 'the way things actually are' is still some way things seem to us. Indeed the very idea that there's a way things actually are is just a way things seem to us to be.
I think a lot of the talk about realism and anti-realism gets stuck on this, but unhelpfully so. There's little point in getting hung up on that problem because it cannot be surmounted. The solution is to accept that state of affairs and move on. We're talking about the way things seem to us to be.
For some of us, things seem to be such that there's an external cause of our internal representations, something we cannot alter in real time (we can, of course, alter it after the perception, interact with it's construction - @Joshs). I'd hazard a guess that for any who think there's not an external cause of our representation, the argument rests not on some way things seem to them to be, but rather on the above meta argument (that everything is ultimately some way things seem to us to be) and we should discard discussion of that meta argument as unhelpful.
So the issue really is in what things seem to have an external cause and why they seem that way.
This is where I think modern cognitive science can help.
Oh, and here it is...
Quoting Wayfarer
Ok. This is not a problem for realism. This a problem for someone who is convinced that “what we see is exactly as it is” but that’s not realism as said in the OP.
Quoting Wayfarer
Where did you get that? The “raw material of perception” is a cause of our perceptions. So we know it exists. In the same way we know electromagnetic waves exist without being able to see them. Because of their effects.
Apples don’t taste exactly how I want them to taste sometimes. If I was the ONLY source of my perceptions, I’d make them taste exactly how I want them to taste. But I can’t do that. So there must be SOMETHING that determines what an apple tastes like that is independent of me. That’s enough for realism.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes. So to be fair, to assume the OP makes sense, this implies that something is something even if no one knows about it. Which contradicts the above quote.
That's repetition, not "recursion". Dependency presupposes a comparatively independent ground upon which to depend – otherwise, one should be able to lift oneself off one's feet by one's own hair (or collar). And saying 'M is "constructed" by "M saying 'M'" is nonsense.
Yep; and I'd add that it is telling that you must use the plural - "we" not "I", "Us" not "me".
There is a way things seem to us, at least as much as a way things seem to me. When cognitive science can explain the social aspects of how things are, , it'll have reached maturity.
A cognitive scientists makes use of other folk's brains.
But this happens all the time. Bootstrapping.
I’d say that any talk of the way things are is talk of the way they seem to be. Not that “the way things are is what they seem to be”. Though pragmatically that’s the same thing.
Problem is, both positions are convinced that they’re “actually” talking about the way things are, not just what they seem to be. No realist will say “it seems to me realism is the case”.
Tell that to a corpse (or the bereaved). Or to a quadriplegic. Or to an overheating planet. Or ...
Nothing changes whether or not something 'seems real to me' if that something is actually real.
Figuratively. :smirk:
Exactly. It's a pre-requisite for the use of 'talk about'. There must be someone else to talk to.
Quoting Banno
We're trying... It's been my research field for the past 20 years at least (the social construction of beliefs). I'm not sure we managed maturity though - as in 'beyond adolescence', maybe - as in whiskey, no.
Quoting Banno
Ha! That might well have gone on the office door.
Yeah, that's rather the problem I was trying to highlight, but from the other side of the coin. The anti-realist says "things are only as they seem to us to be", but that 'things are only as they seem to us to be' is itself a way things seem to them to be. We just don't seem to get anywhere using that line of thought.
What progresses us is accepting that we usually have reasons why things seem to us to be some way or another and that we can discuss those reasons. Hence the science. Science generally gives us reasons to believe something is the case that might well be novel, or unintuitive and so may be worth discussing. I suppose it's plausible that 'deep' thought might do the same. But superficial intuitions are rarely going to give anything more than a kind of Gallup poll of how people see things. Of interest to the social scientist, maybe, but not really to any individual wanting to improve their reasoning.
But all of those things (and states) are still unarguabley some way things seem to us to be. We have no other source of things to say other than our beliefs about the way things are. As @khaled is arguing, that doesn't have any bearing on our ability to alter that which seems to us to be the causes of our representations. Accepting that it seems to us that the planet is overheating may or may not mean we can make it not overheat by thinking about it differently (clue - we can't). It simply has no bearing on the matter. They are two different questions. One addresses the role social construction has in forming our representations, the other in sorting those representations into those which are caused by what we deem to be immutable external causes and those which are less concrete.
Yup. If I had to pick one it would be realism.
Quoting khaled
Quoting Isaac
I just wonder what you're supposed to say to someone who replies "no" to this. Whether it be by saying:
Quoting 180 Proof
Or "go stand in front of a train" etc.
Quoting khaled
:up:
Evan if all we see is the way things seem to be to us, there may still be the way things are.
Changing this to a linguistic argument, realism entails that there are still true statements; while an anti-realist would not make that commitment.
So a realist says the ball has a mass of 1kg; the anti-realist might say that saying that it has a mass of 1kg is useful, or fits their perceptions, but will not commit to it being true.
In my view 'scientific truth' is real in terms that it can be measured, while moral truth is relative and should come with a caveat at the end ", if we assume such and such to be true".
Noting that at times it might be beneficial to act as if moral values are not relative, as it leads to better social cohesion.
I can't think of anything either. It seems a dead end.
Of course, there do seem to be causes of our representations for which no amount of re-thinking seems to be able to alter them much, but there also seem to be representations which seemed concrete at the time only to later turn out to be almost entirely malleable constructs without much by way of immutable external cause. It's not like we've finished the project of sorting one from t'other, so the certainty seems often misplaced.
X seems invariant. It might later turn out not to be.
Yes, definitely.
Quoting Banno
Yes, but the entire scenario - ball, cause of mass, gravity etc - contains a mix of socially constructed representations and immutable external causes. The realist and the anti-realists aren't arguing about the truth of that state of affairs (the mix), they're arguing about which elements are the social construct and which are the immutable external causes. Or at least they should be. That they often aren't is rather the point I'm lamenting.
External cause > sensory receiver > sensation > representation.
The representation is what we use. The external cause is outside our Markov blanket, we cannot access it directly. We must accept that the origin of our representations is our immediate sensory data (and often other internal data streams), not the theorised external causes (that's the anti-realist bit). But we also must accept that we, regardless, act on those representations as if they had a less proximate cause than just our internal sensory data. So the question seems moot.
What's not moot is the question of fidelity. How faithful to the external causes is any given representation?
Sure. But it can't enter the conversation, and it can't be found out. Maybe the way things seem to us IS the way they are, but that just means we got lucky. We don't know when this is the case. So what difference does it make?
Quoting Banno
And both can work together in construction for decades, each harboring a seething hatred for the opposing position, and being the best of friends because neither knows the other's position.
They'll understand each other when they say "the ball is of mass 1kg".
Well, indeed - that's what ought be happening. The realist says the ball is 1kg; the anti-realist says that "the ball" is 1 "kg", but refuses to commit.
The anti-realists failure to commit amounts to a failure to understand how language functions; "the ball" is the ball.
Hence the use of the T=sentence: for the realist, "The ball has a mass of 1kg" is true IFF The ball has a mass of 1k; for the anti-realist the expression on the right is never allowed to reach out to the world. Failure to commit.
'Where I got it' is from what you said. The 'raw material of perception' is not anything - not until you make something from it, which is the procees of apperception. Then, it's no longer 'raw material' - which, anyway, is a figure of speech.
As for 'correspondence'
[quote=Randall, J. & Buchler, J. - Philosophy An Introduction p133]According to correspondence theory, truth consists in the agreement of our thought with reality. This view ... seems to conform rather closely to our ordinary common sense usage when we speak of truth. The flaws in the definition arise when we ask what is meant by "agreement" or "correspondence" of ideas and objects, beliefs and facts, thought and reality. In order to test the truth of an idea or belief we must presumably compare it with the reality in some sense.
1- In order to make the comparison, we must know what it is that we are comparing, namely, the belief on the one hand and the reality on the other. But if we already know the reality, why do we need to make a comparison? And if we don't know the reality, how can we make a comparison?
2- The making of the comparison is itself a fact about which we have a belief. We have to believe that the belief about the comparison is true. How do we know that our belief in this agreement is "true"? This leads to an infinite regress, leaving us with no assurance of true belief.[/quote]
[quote=James Patterson, Cat & Mouse (Alex Cross, #4)] Assume nothing, question everything.[/quote]
What's the assumption made by realism? That there's an objective, mind-independent world out there to which what we say corresponds to i.e. realism is, inter alia, about the correspondence theory of truth.
Anti-realism then needs another theory of truth: truth is that which is logically proven.
Yes, but I don't think that means there's no issue. It's just that the anti-realist is wrong about where. That you (and sufficient others in your language community) use "ball" that way doesn't answer any dispute about the ball. Of course, there rarely are disputes about balls, we have a remarkable agreement on the matter, but "I'm just angry, I can't help it" does depend entirely on the reality of 'angry'. Is it, like 'ball', just the same justified commitment to 'reaching out to the world', or is it a fabrication, eliciting agreement only from co-conspirators to act as a ready excuse for poor behaviour?
We use words for all sorts of reasons, not all of then reach out into the already existing world. Some build it.
The reason why this is a difficult subject, with a lack of consensus as to the nature of reality, is because we have a very deficient understanding of the nature of time. Time is the central issue here. If we view future events as having no determinate reality, they are merely possibilities, Then there is a difficulty in reconciling the future with the three fundamental laws of logic. Aristotle recommended that we suspend the law of excluded middle for future (undecided) events, but that's not the only possible proposal. One might say that the law of non-contradiction does not apply to future (non-existent) things, or even that the law of identity could not apply. The different ways of violating the three laws to allow for the appearance of an indeterminate future produces completely different metaphysics.
The form of metaphysics depends upon one's approach to this issue. In relation to events of the past, we find strong justification for the three fundamental laws, and this supports realism. So the realist wants to take the reality of the past, and extend it into the future (like the block universe for example), and to apply the three laws equally to the whole universe of past and future. The anti-realist sees this as wrong, and in a sort of overreaction, takes the indeterminateness of the future and argues this as a feature of the whole. As you can see, what is left out here is a description of the way that we relate to the present, and this is why there is a problem. Our descriptions of our own positions, at the present, are productions, artful creations, derived from the metaphysics of how we view the past and future. And since we have no way of describing the present which is consistent with either the realist or anti-realist perspective, we might produce an endless number of such descriptions, not one ever being completely acceptable..
I think point 1 is easy to deal with: we don't already know reality (or not all of the things we want to know about reality) before we aquire some data or empirical evidence about it. Getting and analysing data takes efforts and resources. So making the comparison between belief and reality is not something that magically gives you full knowledge of reality (and then why do you need belief?). Instead, it takes an effort, and illuminates only a little part of reality. Doing so allows you to test your beliefs.
Not sure I understand point 2. Assuming it means: you have to start from the fundamental belief that human experience is 'true', I agree with it.
If Descartes' thought experiment were true and the world we see is an illusion created by some evil demon then even though something exists regardless of what we say about it (the evil demon), it would be wrong to be a realist about the world we see.
If we commit to something like Wittgenstein's theory of language – that meaning is use – then predicating truth of a statement is just another practice like any other speech act, with "correct" use being determined by public activity. The anti-realist can commit to statements being true well enough.
Who is a realist about the world we see anyways? No one has been like that since electromagnetic waves or even sound waves were discovered. We can’t see either.
That appears to be a contradiction. A common understanding of realism is that things are independent of one's perceptions, thoughts, etc. How can my thoughts be independent of my thoughts?
Same with the existence of your thoughts. Whether or not you think you think, you think :wink:.
I am not sure of your meaning, but we are programmed to see symmetry and patterns as beautiful. I think many think of math with dread, but math lovers are having an emotional experience when they discover the patterns or struggle to discover them. We all have that tendency but it is more awake in some. Unfortunately, the way we educate children can be very damaging to our natural curiosity and enjoyment of math.
I think my spiritual experiences are the same natural response to stimuli, and oddly most of us feel better when we do good things for others. This comes with being a social animal.
Our emotions are not material and I think there is more to life than matter.
Not if you are a ghost.
This seems to be the tree @Isaac is barking up too. I would find that a strange sort of realism. "I believe in somethings" -- but absolutely nothing you propose ever goes on the list of things I believe in, that is, things I'm a "realist about".
Here, look at the word "about", the word I'm tacking onto "realism". "About" takes an object. I quoted two sentences of yours, both ending with "what we say about it".
In the first, the antecedent of "it" is X, and the sentence could be rewritten: "Realism is not the view that X exists regardless of what we say about X."
What about the second? "It's the view that something exists regardless of what we say about ___." What on earth do we fill in the blank with? Were we talking about the something? Surely not, because then we'd be endorsing the first sentence's version of realism. Then what? "X"? "Realism is the view that something exists regardless of what we say about X." That's just non sequitur.
The only option I can see is to chop off the "about" phrase, but then the "regardless" clause has nothing to do. All you can really say is "Realism is the view that something exists." Is that realism? Realism about what? Something? That's not a view about anything.
I don't think we get to make this switch of "X" for "something". I think that's a misunderstanding of what "X" -- as a name or a label -- is doing in the first place. @Isaac and I went around and around about this before: it's no use saying "tables are only part of my model" as a way of saying "tables aren't real"; that's a category mistake. The whole point of modelling is that within the model, tables quite specifically count as real. Real is theory-relative.
(I think I'm saying exactly what Quine said, you know, "To be is to be a value of a bound variable." If you quantify over it, it's a posit of your theory, whether you like it or not.)
((I made exactly the same "argument" -- having forgotten about my old argument with Isaac -- in the "What is a fact?" thread. (That whether a statement is factual depends on the framework within which the statement is made.) It's starting to look like something I say out of habit, which bothers me.))
:grin: I am not sure I follow your reasoning but it is intriguing. It is kind of like are unicorns real? Who does not know what a unicorn is? We would not mistake a unicorn for a whale. On some level the unicorn is real but I don't expect to see one except in pictures. If I enter a haunted house and have an eerie feeling that triggers my imagination, I may think I have experienced a ghost but I am still not sure ghosts exist.
The “raw perceptual data” Isaac was talking about. It’s the view the raw perceptual data exists regardless of what we say about it.
Point is just this: We don’t determine ____. There is something external to us that determines it. That’s realism.
The blank could be for example: “the taste of apples”. Or “the color of the sky”. Or “ethics”. And that would make you a realist about blank.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
And a realist about tables would say that tables are “really real”. No models. The existence of tables is a direct reflection of reality. Our model is a perfect map of reality in this case. A non realist about tables would say that tables are purely constructed by us, they’re nothing more than the model. There is no independent existence to tables.
I don’t care too much. If the model is useful, I’ll use it. I don’t care if it is a “true reflection of reality” or a social construct or whatever. What difference does that make?
"...the cause of our representation of that something". Processes and objects are two different things, we can conceive of objects as being representations caused by hidden factors. We don't need to assign object status to those causes any more than gravity is an object, or my preferring vanilla is. There's a cause of my modelling the table as a table, reaching for the word "table", feeling inclined to put my cup on it...etc, I'm not giving that cause the status of an object, like a billiard ball in classical physics, I haven't gone that far yet, I've only gone so far as to say there's a cause, external to me.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I have a lot of sympathy for the linguistic problem here (as I hope we established last time), but it cuts both ways. So often in these conversations (mostly with @Banno, it seems) the use of common terms such as 'real' and, in the previous thread, 'pain', are cloistered for use in philosophy of language where they are used to manage these communal practices like talking about pain, and discussing tables. All very well and good, but the model I described (a few posts up) is nonetheless as good a fit for how things are as we've yet found. So what words are left to me to use when I want to talk about it? If the representations are 'real' because that's the way "table" is used normally, then what am I to use when I want to study the way those representations can be manipulated by altering the way the brain responds to exterior stimuli. If "table" is real by definition, then what are the hidden external causes relative to it? They can't just be more stuff that's also real, that doesn't say anything about their unique relation as the cause of the representation outside of the Markov Blanket (afterall, we just determined that only things inside the Markov Blanket are 'real').
I don't object to a natural language approach, but cognitive scientists are language users too, we want to talk (and talk to ordinary folk too sometimes), we can't be struck mute by an insistence that only matters of folk psychology can have common words attached to them.
Last ditch argument that I'll probably regret, but... When I say "Tables aren't real they're only representations caused by an external reality", do you have trouble understanding what I'm saying? I mean I talk this way to colleagues, friends...strangers in the pub sometimes too. In all it seems to bring to mind pretty much the exact relation to our external stimuli that I intended the expression to bring to mind - "Oh, so we just make up that it's a table, but what really causes that idea is something we can't know..." or something like that. People don't seem to be confused by the use. So, in a Wittgensteinean sense, I'm left wondering who's doing the philosophical muddle-making here and who's doing the banishing of it. 'Real' does seem to have a perfectly ordinary use which can be quite easily seconded to describe exactly the kind of active inference relationship to our external world that I'm looking to use it for.
Why seven, justice, God?
Seven is Heptad.
"The number seven occupies a critical place within the Dekad, where it acts as both a link and chasm. As a link between the first six and the last three terms, 1x2x3x5x6x7 equals 7x8x9x10 (equals 5040). As a chasm, with seven absent, 1x2x3x5x6 equals 8x9x10 (equals 720). Whether the value of seven is present or absent, its location serves as a pivot balancing ten. No other number or position within the Dekad does this."
"Whether the cosmos is represented as a musical scale in ancient times or as the modern sonic and electromagnetic spectrum, they both depict a universe based on vibration."
"Mythology, religion, science, mathematics, and art were once part of an integrated system of philosophy." Athena is associated with the number seven. My purpose is to express there is more than what appears. What started the vibration, what forms it into matter? I am not a materialist because without energy and forum there would be nothing. With math, we can see what is not visible to the eye.
Quotes are from "A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe" by Michael S Schneider.
But where is the moral judgment? I get that the suffering is occurring in the world as an objectively identifiable event, but where is the badness of it except in your opinion?
The apparent contradiction is clarified by pointing out that the literal proposition may be false but the principle elucidated true. If I spin a tale to teach a moral lesson, it doesn't make the moral lesson untrue just because the tale is. I see this as a literary device especially prevalent in religious, spiritual, moral, and wisdom writings, but not as a comment on whether morals exist separate from us. My point in other threads was that if you read those writings literally, you will reach absurd results of otherwise foundational writings and will see nonsense where others find wisdom.
As to whether there is an objectively dechiperable moral truth, I say there is, which entails there be a referent beyond intra-subjective agreement as to the metaphysical existence of "good" when I say it is good to care for others. This embodiment of the good is the god element. There is no other way around it, which is why those who contend objective moral truths without reference to any divine being ultimately are unable to support their position.
The fact that we can even ask the question "what if our ethical creation is unethical?" sensically proves this wrong. The ethical exists as it is regardless of what we wish to think might be ethical.
The "badness" IS the suffering. Not all suffering is bad, but when it comes to moral right and wrong, it's the objective harm done that gives it it's reality. This is true apart from any religious appeal.
But apples are not the raw perceptual data they cause us to have. And I don't see the point in preferring a locution like "whatever causes the raw perceptual data my model of the world identifies as a so-called 'apple'" rather than "apple".
@Isaac adds "cause" but withholds "object":
Quoting Isaac
My inclination here too is to say that my brain's model of the world, and I'm guessing everyone's, pretty clearly treats apples as objects, paradigmatic objects, if apples aren't objects then nothing is.
Its not exactly a question of language -- "object" as a noun isn't used that much by normies. It's a matter of accepting that the models in our heads are how we understand the world and knowing that they're models doesn't change that. The theories we work through consciously, we get a bit more say in, including how we theorize the models in our heads. But there's no coherent way to talk as if we're not modeling -- we know we can't but act as if enough caveats and scare quotes are almost like not modeling.
Quoting Isaac
And I actually agree with that. I think in some sense "tables aren't real" and "apples aren't objects" is exactly what you should say. But it doesn't mean that the ordinary way of talking is mistaken; it's a way of making it clear you're using these words in a theory-specific way. (Roughly, "tables are not posits in this theory".)
There's a lot more to talk about there.
I can't dictate whether your pain is real, but can I dictate whether your pain is morally bad? If I can't, how do I know?
It's not my opinion that the suffering is bad, my use of the word bad or immoral is directly connected to the objective truth of the statement that, "Bill is suffering," if he is indeed suffering. Are you trying to tell me that bad has no objective meaning in relation to what Bill is experiencing? What about my use of the word bad in relation to "That building is poorly built (as an engineer looks at the placement of beams)," is this an opinion? My use of the word bad, in both examples, connect to something objectively true, and is not based on some internal opinion.
And yet the stuff "out there" does enter into the conversation.
We (note the plural) talk in terms of mass and balls and so on. The direction of fit here is reversed, in that we intend these words to be about whatever it is that is "out there". And when we do this we find that we can construct coherent and useful accounts of what happens. It's not luck, it's a process of eradicating versions that are dysfunctional.
There's a mission to Mercury by the ESA and JAXA. Part of the mission is to decide if there is water at the poles - something hinted at by previous observations.
Both the realist and the anti-realist will agree that we do not know that there is water at the poles of Mercury.
A realist will say that either there is water at the poles, or there isn't - that either the statement or its negation is true.
An anti-realist may say that the statement "There is water at Mercury's poles" is neither true nor not true, until the observation is made.
Which is the better approach?
As to morality, are you claiming that bad buildings are akin to bad acts, and saying that rape (for example) is bad if it meets our criteria for badness based upon whatever social objectives we might have,? Or, do you subscribe to the position that rape is bad regardless of what I think, much like the building exists regardless of my opinion?
The anti-realist could say that the situation is such that if we were to observe Mercury's poles we would either find water there or not. The idea would be that water is a relational thing; it only exists when whatever is out there interacts with us such as to produce a perception of water. So water is not "out there" absent our perceptions, but whatever is out there is in either a condition such that a perception of water would be produced or not.The question then becomes: must the anti-realist non-committedly say there is no truth or falsity about there being water out there, or must she commit to saying that it is false that there is water out there since water is only relationally real? This seems to be a conceptual problem for the anti-realist.
On the other hand. if the realist says there is either water out there or not, she is not thereby committed to claiming that water, as such, has anything more than a relational reality, so I would say the realist locution is the less problematic.
Seems to me that the framework is both imposed and observed.
Quoting khaled
...and reality is such that it can be divided up into tables and not-tables.
As Davidson suggested, the world is always, already interpreted. I would add that the interpretation is put in place by our use of language.
I don't think we're going to make headway here. There's a sense where you are correct, viz., we do use the concept bad in a subjective sense, but we also use it to refer to objective reality, as I pointed out. Moreover, the statement that, "There are no objectively good or bad buildings" is or is not true depending on how we are using the concept (bad being of poor quality). There are obviously buildings, and from a structurally sound point of view, it can be said that they are poorly built, it's not a matter of opinion. On the other hand, one can use the word bad (obviously, not morally bad) in a subjective way, which would take into account its use as an opinion.
My point in bringing in the building example is to show the use of the word bad in reference to something objective, gives it an objective connection, which removes it from being purely subjective.
Quoting Hanover
No, I'm not saying that bad buildings are akin to bad acts. As I said above, I'm saying that the use of the word bad is not always subjective, it depends on what our point of reference is.
I do, believe rape is bad or morally wrong because of the objective nature of the harm done. It's just as objective, in my view, as the existence of the building. And ya, rape is bad regardless of what anyone thinks.
One day you might have to say what you think Davidson means by that.
I'd also like to hear something about what you think our use of language does exactly. Psychologists test how infralinguistic children model the world, and how crows do for that matter. Why language?
I think this is important, so I'll put my two cents worth into the mix. I believe there is something important to say about reality prior to language; and how children and animals model reality. This modeling (I talk about it in terms of pre-linguistic beliefs or states) is essential, and prior to the formation of language. In fact, it's hard to imagine how language would gain any kind of grounding without such a model (using your terminology). Language, it seems to me, builds a linguistic structure that allows us to structure reality in social ways, i.e., we can talk with others about epistemology, psychology, science, etc, which allows us to go beyond our pre-linguistic modeling.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Well, I have, repeatedly. It's from his critique of this idea: Quoting Srap Tasmaner
We need to put aside the notion of an uninterpreted reality - there is no alternative to imposing an interpretation. In admitting this we deny the dualism of framework versus reality. There are no alternate frameworks. That's a direct consequence of our living in the same world. What look like an alternate frameworks needs must be interpreted in such a way as to merge.
Animals participate in reality - they use it, in Wittgenstein's terms. Calling this a belief is surely a retrojection.
Quoting Sam26
It can "gain a grounding" by building on that use - the same process as we see in showing rather than stating. After all, there is a way of understanding a rule that is not an interpretation - not a belief - but which consists in enacting the rule: §201
All of us participate in reality. However, what that participation amounts to is where the disagreement occurs. My use of belief is no more a retrojection than your use of participate. All talk of pre-linguistic persons or animals is a retrojection, but this doesn't mean we can't describe what's happening in linguistic terms. All acts, whether pre-linguistic or not can be talked about. Why? Because of the acts themselves, be it non-linguistic or linguistic. Therefore, a belief for me is not just expressed in language, but is expressed in the way we act within the world. My beliefs are internal to me, just as my sensations are internal to me, so just as an expression of pain, which is something internal (the sensation) is expressed via ouch or a cry (external), so too, are our or my beliefs (internal) expressed via acts in the world (external), whether linguistic or not. So, just as we can have sensations apart from language, so too, can we have beliefs apart from language.
Quoting Banno
Reality has to be a certain way, i.e., objects, persons, thoughts, etc., in order for there to be a language at all. The foundation, viz., reality (where we act), gives us the grounding. These are the arational beliefs that arise quite apart from language. It's not just that these beliefs are pre-linguistic, we (the linguistic we) also show that we have such beliefs, i.e., we open the door, we sit down, we do a myriad of things that show that we believe certain things. Things which are not expressed in language, but nonetheless, demonstrate what we believe.
I'm not saying there isn't a kind of grounding that takes place in language, via what Wittgenstein is referring to in PI 201, but I'm not talking about a linguistic grounding, I'm talking about what necessarily comes before what Wittgenstein is talking about. Wittgenstein alludes to what I'm talking about in several places. Again (as I've mentioned in other posts), though, I'm not pretending this is a Wittgensteinian idea.
You are conflating two distinct forms of possibility, and misleading yourself.
How many planets are in our solar system?
Yeah, that's the way I see it. That why I opened my contribution here with an argument against idealism. We all assume there are external objects. Unless there is a serious group of language users who genuinely don't do that, then there's absolutely no need for any philosophical talk about how all reality is 'in our minds' It's a pointless and daft diversion.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I don't agree with this. Knowing they're models can change things massively. It's having a huge impact on the science of perception, understanding of schizophrenia, right through to political sciences and questions about the formation of beliefs. Maybe too academic... At a personal level, there's things like the real psychological changes that a realisation of the social construction of emotions can yield. It's been used therapeutically with some success. I think it's quite possible to alter your world view for the better by realising that 'its all models'. Which I guess is what you're getting at with...
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
...but the thing is, which theories we work through consciously is not a fixed parameter. We can learn to work through models consciously that were previously managed sub-consciously. The way we do this is by changing our concepts about how these models work, about the veracity of the results they produce. I think there's a strong effect on the way we think about our beliefs between "the table is real" and "the table isn't real". I don't think it's such a large step from "the table is real because it seems that way to me and mine and that's what 'real' is" to "foreigners are bad because it seems that way to me and mine and that's what 'bad' is". Calling thing to be exactly just how they seem to us to be has dangers which I don't think are worth the resolution of little philosophical muddle.
I do get the problem. Tables are our reality, if we say they're not what they seem to be we're just going to replace them with some atomic entity which will be no less a model and so no real improvement in ontology. But the process is the value, not the result. I'd rather err on the side of being too aware of the fallibility of the 'way things seem' than err on the side of overconfidence in it.
Yes, I think that's right. But as I said to Srap above (in other words), there's more to consider than either the shopping list or the grocery basket. They're just two results. They're not the process of making either.
This is an interesting take and well deserving of a mention.
I noticed that those you rejected, as a realist, are either abstract (mathematical stuff), or highly intangible (values and morality). And the one you embrace, as a realist, is reality itself -- which to me is a concrete stuff. Were in it.. We can't separate our selves or musings from reality. But somehow, morality and mathematics can be talked about as if they have a separate, permanent space somewhere that can be called into action at a moment's notice.
If a self-described realist claims to be making a metaphysical assertion founded upon reason, and if he accepts that the tribunal of reason are his experiences, then at the very least he is describable as being a methodological solipsist, even if he believes to have obtained conclusions that aren't reducible to personal experiential verification...
How should the claims of the realist be understood ? are realists really asserting metaphysical claims in spite of whatever they say, or are they at best making epistemological claims that every solipsist can agree with?
I expect that a realist might play down the importance of his personal experiences, saying that he accepts as a matter of pragmatism the judgements and reports he receives by trustworthy or authoritative third-parties, assuming the they cohere with his personal understanding of the world. But then the question remains; for isn't the realist still founding his claims upon[ i]his[/i] experiences, even if such experiences are "second-hand", so to speak?
If an exploration robot trained by machine learning, whose engineering was understood, started speaking about the it's discovery of a mind-independent reality, are there any conditions in which we would take it's claims seriously? I think definitely not. Under no circumstances would we interpret its stimulus-responses as being anything more than the result of it's internal state and present environmental interactions.
Maybe. That would make you an anti-realist about apples. But you admit the independent existence of something other than yourself, namely, the raw perceptual data that we interpret as apples. That makes you a realist about raw perceptual data.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I agree. Some people seem to not think so. Namely, some realists about apples will say that we're not modeling when we talk about apples, we're directly reflecting reality. Best you'll get out of them is "we are modelling but our model is a direct copy of the way things actually are and this is known... somehow".
What we think is out there is what enters the conversation. Unless you're saying they're the same thing?
Quoting Banno
Agreed, that is the intention. But we don't know when we have succeeded. All we know is that some models about what's out there work better than others.
We only know when our models have failed, not when they have exactly matched what's out there.
Quoting Banno
Who said it's luck?
I'm obviously on-board with this to some degree, but I'm not sure that what we clumsily call the "belief" that there are "external objects" is up to us, no matter how much physicists futz with the definition of "object". Ditto for space, time, who knows what else.
I can do a crappy version of this. Suppose, as we might be doing in this thread, we want to talk about which classes of objects are instantiated (or non-empty, if you think of sets) and which are not. Maybe there are some classes that are invalid and cannot be instantiated. If they're all empty or invalid, because there are no objects, we can go up a level and say the class of instantiated classes is not instantiated (or empty). (And if we want, we can make this "object classes" or something, classes for which the instance would be an object, not another class .)
What interests me about this is not that we might be able to generate a contradiction or a paradox by constructing some peculiar class, something you'd only think of when doing this kind of analysis; what interests me is that even if we agree that the whole idea of a class turns out to be kind of useless, since there aren't any objects for them to be classes of, we can keep talking in terms of classes, and apparently keep making sense. Whether we could give up classes -- I doubt that can be made sense of, but maybe there's a sort of Funes-the-Memorius way of individualizing absolutely everything. At any rate, it looks like no matter how we undermine them, classes will still hang around cheerfully offering their services. ("Won't be needing you today, or ever -- you're not real, you're just a manner of speaking." "I'll just wait over here, then, shall I? In case you change your mind.")
And it's no use worrying about the ascent, making a rule against treating classes as objects. The only one I made was another empty one. You could reasonably claim that I'm implicitly talking about the class of classes, and it's not empty, but that just puts them back to work, and the whole idea was to see if we could get rid of them. It looks like we can't.
All of that to say that there seem to be features of our modeling that are not up to us. We know what it's like to be looking at data without realizing it's been filtered, then remove the filter and see what we'd been leaving out. We have no idea what it's like not to think in terms of objects and classes. (And probably space, time, causality, all the usual Kantian business.)
Here's what bothers me about the "something" business. You're still classifying, but refusing to name the classes you're using. Making them anonymous is pointless, and a maybe little disingenuous. (You can kind of kid yourself that you're keeping the model you're using at arm's length.) On the one hand, it's as if it's only the name, not the classifying, that we're worried about; on the other, the name plays a role, and we ought to look at that.
Actually there's been some very interesting work by Susan Hespos on exactly what else. She's been trying to work out what laws of physics babies take to be innate and what they don't. Long story short, it's all about what fits in what... anyway, yes, I agree some models are probably out of reach. My objection to naïve realism is the spilling over into dogmatism about mattters over which there's insufficient ground for it.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Indeed, I think there's all sorts of mental furniture we can't function without, mainly because the mental furniture came first and the function after. Rather like if we set up a double pendulum paint drip, it may be chaotic, but it's nit going to paint the Mona Lisa. Our brains are set up to function a certain way, and that way requires objects, classes...it's just efficiency. If each exchange with our environment is with a new unique entity we're going to be constantly surprised, and surprise is the enemy of Bayesian inference.
Narratives (there, I used that word again, sorry) are likewise indispensable surprise reduction bits of mental furniture.
But there's a difference between accepting the class, and accepting the instantiation. We can accept that we will have classes without reifying what any of them currently happen to be.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I see what you mean, but doesn't the distinction between objects and causes subsume this. I can still name the class 'causes of my representations' within my model, but I've distinguished it still from the naive realist's class 'objects of reality'.
One thing I'm sure we agree about is that it's helpful in any number of ways to recognize that you can classify objects in different ways. (I don't know that refusing to reclassify is reifying, but it's at least ossifying.)
A person's socio-economic efforts would be thwarted if a person would consistently believe that one can never see outside of the mind-created world within which all the objects of perception exist.
In order to succeed in the world, or at the very least, in order to get by in the world, one has to believe "there is a real world out there" and "there is only one true, accurate, correct way to perceive this world".
Which is a view that can be held without negative consequences only by a Buddhist monk.
Yes, we (even the most implacable idealist) have no choice but to behave as though the real world is real. If we want to live. What we believe however is separate, isn't it?
How schizoid can one handle to be?
It seems to me that to most people, good and bad are as plainly obvious as tables and chairs. People typically don't lose sleep over right and wrong, good and bad, but are as certain of them as they are of the chair they're sitting on.
Quoting 180 Proof
Which is a morally vacant view as it does not address the cause of suffering and does not uproot the cause of suffering.
Says who?
"Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts." C S Peirce
It's not "a morally vacant view": the problem is that (some? many? most?) people do not embrace the view and act on it.
On this we agree.
Really? The final solution to the problem of suffering is widely known and readily available, it's just that people "do not embrace it and act on it"?
Simply pointing out that people quite merrily live by keeping two sets of books. Schizoid is the wrong word. Hypocritical or inconsistent may be closer.
The suffering inflicted on humans and animals by humans would be eliminated or at least diminished within the bounds of practical possibility if we could all embrace and act on the "morally vacant view" that @180 Proof set before us.
The whole project of the complete cessation of suffering as worked out by Early Buddhism is actionable only for people who can live in sufficient renunciation (which is, for all practical intents and purposes, reserved for monks).
It is often said that (Early) Buddhism has no metaphysics. Indeed, we can say that the Buddha was not interested in a doctrine of how _all_ things really are. But he was only interested in how things really are as they pertain to complete cessation of suffering (the analogy with the handful of leaves).
Hence the view that "you never see outside of the mind-created world within which all the objects of perception exist" is part of the project of the complete cessation of suffering (Sabba Sutta), but isn't intended as some disinterested, objective, metaphysical claim about "how things really are" (the way philosophers and psychologists tend to try to look at the matter).
Can you tell me what it is? I was away that day.
You deny the Buddha? You know better than the Buddha?
No, his proposal is not viable because it does not aim to uproot the cause of suffering. It only attempts to address some of the symptoms.
Quite merrily?
Well, as long as health and wealth last, one can do many things. But is keeping two sets of books a viable plan for happiness, regardless of external circumstances?
Yes, I think not living according to your beliefs is often an easier way of going about one's business. But sometimes the fault line's between belief and practice do rub up against each other and cause tremors and quakes.
Quoting baker
Facticity are not "symptoms". Suffering is not problem to be solved, or illness to be cured, (pace Buddha et al) but a happenstance hazard to be reduced or mitigated like e.g. hunger, bereavement, fear, etc (vide Epicurus or Spinoza).
Possibly I'm mistaken; you can prove this: do tell o sage – what is "the cause of suffering" and how ought we "uproot" it? :mask:
You're not reading carefully; I said there is no final solution to the problem of suffering,
I don't accept any man as a final authority on anything, Baker. If you do, that's your choice.
Quoting baker
At least one of the causes of suffering caused by human attitudes and actions has been identified. What possible solution could there be to suffering caused by natural events? Do you really believe that the behavior of the natural world is going to change, or that humans could cause it to change?
Gautama suffered old age and death just as we all will. Do you really believe he felt no pain whatsoever?
I asked you whether you knew better than than the Buddha. Do you?
If you had read what the Buddha said, you'd have some ideas.
Quoting baker
This could be an interesting thread.
I may or may not have a different opinion than Gautama. What do you think? Do you know exactly what he thought?
Quoting baker
I have read Buddhist works a fair bit. Works in Zen (Dogen, D T Suzuki, Shunryu Suzuki, Hui Hai, Kaplan (I think) Thich Nat Hanh, Tibetan Buddhist works by authors whose names I can't remember and I've read some of the sutras (the Diamond Sutra and the Heart Sutra are two I can remember the names of) I've read a little Vasubandhu, Nagarjuna and some early discourses of the Buddha, and lots of other stuff I can't remember the titles of. I'm familiar with the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path and the idea of interdependent origination and so on.
Obviously much of it is open to interpretation, and there are and have been many schools of Buddhism. I understand the idea of the truth of suffering, that it is caused by craving and attachment, the idea that suffering can be ended, and the proposed way of ending it.
The question is as to whether any of that is proposed as the way to end just individual suffering, or whether it is proposed as the way to the final end of all suffering. I have some sympathy for the former, as I think there is some truth in it, but the latter is an unattainable goal, unless you were to destroy the world entirely. To be born into this world is to be subject to inevitable suffering.
Quoting Janus
The 20th century Indian guru, Ramana Maharishi, died of a cancerous tumour on his upper arm which according to all accounts was extremely painful. But when asked, he said, 'I feel the pain, but it doesn't hurt.' Being able to rise above pain is not the same as being merely insensitive to it.
Actually, the very first 'spiritual book' I ever read was called Relief Without Drugs, by an Australian doctor by the name of Ainslie Meares, in about 1972. It was about that principle. There was a well-known speaker on the motivational circuit, Ian Gawler, who had suffered and recovered from bone cancer, who used to speak about those principles. (That said, I make no claim to have mastered those abilities myself, I'm as afraid of pain as the next man. )
According to Buddhist teachings, beings are born into the world that is to all intents created by their karmic proclivities. So a hell being's world is full of unending torment and pain, while a heaven-being's world is full of bliss and light. But in the end, none of them are truly existent, even though the beings that are subject to those states might dwell in them for 'aeons of kalpas'. This is actually conveyed in some Tibetan teaching through the 'meditation on peaceful and wrathful deities' which arise at the time of death, according to your karma. However, again, these are the same deities, but manifest according to the karma of the percipient.
Quoting Janus
[quote=The Buddha, Rohitassa Sutta; https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an04/an04.045.than.html ]...it is just within this fathom-long body, with its perception & intellect, that I declare that there is the cosmos, the origination of the cosmos, the cessation of the cosmos, and the path of practice leading to the cessation of the cosmos.[/quote]
Yes, I'm familiar with the idea that we can be detached from pain. When my mother gave birth to me she was 37 hours in labour and in the end I had to be dragged out with forceps, or so the story goes. (Apparently I didn't wish to enter this world :wink: ). My mother told me that she was in terrible pain (this was her first experience of giving birth) and she was given morphine. I asked her whether the morphine eliminated or reduced the pain, and she said that it didn't, the pain was still intense, but it didn't bother her at all. Perhaps whatever can be achieved using drugs can also be achieved by "natural" methods.
I have had what seemed like profound experiences when under the influence of hallucinogens, when listening to music, during sex and also when writing, when painting and when playing piano, both when under the influence of hallucinogens and when not under their influence. I've had even profounder experiences (although very brief in duration) when meditating. I draw no conclusions from those experiences.
I see Buddhism as presenting some useful ideas about the kinds of attitudes and dispositions, and techniques to achieve them, that could help us to accept the side of life that we are so afraid of, and perhaps even be able to detach form those fears and even pains entirely; but I don't imagine for a moment that my doing that would have any effect whatsoever on the suffering of other humans and animals, except insofar as it might stop me from being the cause of said sufferings.
As another example, apparently Hume, who died of stomach cancer was extremely kind, cheerful and apparently not bothered by the great pain involved in the process of his dying or by fear of death. And yet he rejected the very idea of anything transcendent. If we can achieve a good death and the ability to suffer pain and physical decline cheerfully, what more could we ask?
I imagine animals are naturally gifted with the ability not to be attached to their suffering.
I do. If I don't "know better" than an Iron Age philosopher, given all that humanity has learned in the interim, then God help me. Old Siddhartha believed in the "soul" and in reincarnation (and most certainly in the pantheon of Hindu gods to one or another extent), both obvious fallacies, and the latter an obviously ridiculous fallacy, to a logical positivist like me.
That brings back some memories. Digression. My father was able to switch pain off. He would have all dental work done without any anesthetic and this included drilling, extractions and a root canal work. He also at one point almost cut off two fingers with a chainsaw. He drove to the hospital with his fingers hanging off on one hand and was whistling in the Emergency Department when the doctors saw him. I asked him how he did it. "It only hurts if you let it," he explained unhelpfully.
Obviously asceticism has often fostered indifference to pain (and pleasure) as part of spiritual praxis. It is said the Buddha opposed asceticism, but Buddhist monks are still very ascetic by our standards. But then the whole aim of our lifestyle is to foster pleasure and dispell pain, there's no concept of the transcendence of it.
Having not studied or deeply investigated Buddhism, I have no knowledge of whether this belief was overtly stated, but it is certainly implied, in my view. I think that a belief in reincarnation must be preceded by a belief in some incorporeal aspect of the person ("soul"), which inhabits the various carnations, no? If not, then what can one given carnation possibly have to do with another; how can they be differing carnations of the same "being"? In this way, the idea of reincarnation seems dependent upon that of "soul". Note that I do not mean to insinuate that Gautama's conception of such a "soul" bears any resemblance to the Christian concept, but it appears equally fallacious, anyways.
I call them fallacies because there appears no evidence for them. The burden of providing evidence is an incumbency of the claimant of a supernatural claim. The indirect object of an act of supernatural claiming, the hearer of the claim, has no similar onus to provide evidence for his doubt. A supernatural claim unsupported by evidence has assumed the character of fallacy ab initio, and retains such until evidence is proffered.
Quoting Janus
That is precisely my stance regarding such claims (which, btw, include the claim that "there is s God"). I have no evidence > these are apparent/assumed fallacies > I remain, as you have well said, "uncommitted and unconcerned".
I know that such a stance takes a bit of the romance out of one's worldview, but I have learned that it is necessary in the evaluation of the multivarious supernatural claims with which we are bombarded even in our scientifically oriented age. To not maintain this stance appears to entail dangers to one's material and psychological welfare. I have personally seen people suffer psychic damage, greatly damaging disappointment, by involving and investing themselves in various types of Christian "charismata", for instance. Because of this, I feel it best that we retain a certain rigor in evaluating the claims that are thrust upon us.
All "external objects" are the products of experience based upon the shortcomings of our human sensibilities, and so lie within the realm of subjective reality. These "objects" have no "objective" reality as they appear to us. I would love to read the findings of Hespos' research...
I don't know much of anything about the history of architecture, but I suspect there were no "buildings" in ancient Athens, perhaps not even before the 20th century. Instead, there were temples, markets, homes, and so on. The idea of a "building" seems to be a function of our modern, industrial, impermanent man-made environment, in which buildings are easily repurposed or torn down and replaced. Many years ago, Stewart Brand wrote a book called How Buildings Learn; here's the first sentence of the Wikipedia summary:
Quoting W
He's offering a sort of "meta" definition of "best" as modifiable, not as fit for some purpose, but fit for, if not quite any, then certainly many purposes.
We have here an economic model that is agnostic about utilities and preferences, as it needs to be to accommodate the great variety of human beings. Our recognition of that variety does separate us from ancient cultures and from smaller, homogeneous societies. But at the same time, that model seems to leave utilities and preferences completely unmoored. That is, we are all expected to think of ourselves as the temporary vessel of some preferences, we are each of us an "anyone" of the model, and just happen to be this anyone. As any one person might have different preferences from any other, so we might have different preferences, and value utilities accordingly, from moment to moment.
We think of ourselves like the building, maybe a church today and condos tomorrow. Whatever we believe and whatever we care about, is only what we happen to believe and happen to care about at the moment. Is it any wonder that we require convoluted justifications for saying anything -- any belief or value, any utility or preference -- is better than anything else?
I don't think that quite addresses the anti-realist's position, though. Let's say that we in the UK abolish the monarchy. Does the Queen of England exist? Well, Elizabeth Windsor exists, but as there is no monarchy there is no Queen of England, and if there is no Queen of England then the Queen of England doesn't exist.
The existence of the Queen of England doesn't (just) depend on the existence of a particular material entity, but also on something more abstract than that – social customs/conventions/attitudes, or whatever you want to call it. The same might also be said of buildings. They might not be simply reducible to whatever mind-independent things exist without us (e.g. the fundamental particles of the Standard Model).
A bunch of sticks and leaves is just a bunch of sticks and leaves to us, but it's a house to a bird. In a world without birds we wouldn't (and shouldn't?) talk about houses of sticks and leaves. And perhaps in a world without humans we shouldn't talk about buildings of bricks and mortar. But then how far do we take this? Should we even talk about bricks and mortar in a world without humans? Perhaps it's just photons and electrons. Although if you're an instrumentalist about science then even that is a step too far. There's just some incomprehensible noumena – the stuff that explains why we see what we see, but that isn't really the stuff we see and talk about.
This just seems to be indirect realism, but maybe that's what's meant by anti-realism, I don't know. If you're committed to the idea that there is some underlying structure that makes it real (i.e. having some independence from the observer) then that is realism to me. I accept that everything is interpreted within a person's mind and don't believe there is some sort of raw feed of data into someone's consciousness. So, you can interpret Ms. Windsor as queen, as just a kind old lady, or as a pounds of flesh and bones for whatever your purposes you might have, but that's realism to me. It's not direct realism, but I wasn't arguing for that.
As to moral realism, I'd hold to the same rule, which is that there must be something separate from the observer for the moral to be real. If I say "there is a building" and all I mean is that I see what appears to me a building, which may or may not exist at all, I am not a realist. If I say "rape is wrong" and all I mean is that its wrongness is only what I feel and believe, then I'm not a moral realist.
As I said to @khaled earlier, if Descartes' thought experiment were true and the world we see is an illusion created by some evil demon then even though something exists regardless of what we say about it (the evil demon), it would be wrong to be a realist about the world we see. The same with something like the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis. In both cases some underlying structure exists that is responsible for triggering in us certain kinds of experiences. But should we think of this as realism (whether direct or indirect)?
We need to be more specific than that. We need to be a realist about something in particular. A moral realist believes that a statement like "it is wrong to murder" is true and made true by mind-independent features of the world. A bird-house realist believes that a statement like "those stick and leaves are a house" is true and made true by mind-independent features of the world. A Queen-realist believes that "there is a Queen of England" is true and made true by mind-independent features of the world.
This is moral relativism.
A building is "bad" if it does not fulfill its purpose, contextualized to the needs of the person building the building. The key here is that the "bad" judgment of the building is relative entirely upon human needs. A building designed to collapse under minimal strain for experimental purposes is a good building under that context, but if it fails to fail, it is bad. We can agree then, it's a matter of context when talking about good and bad buildings. We judge the building based upon pre-agreed criteria, and once those criteria are agreed upon, we can be objectively right or wrong in saying whether those criteria are met.
It's the criteria that aren't objective here, and that's the problem I'm pointing out. The criteria are relative to our needs and possibly arbitrary.
Turning to moral realism: Rape isn't bad relative to the needs of society. It's absolutely bad. It is bad not like the Leaning of Tower of Pisa is a bad building. It is bad like the Leaning Tower of Pisa is over 50 feet tall. It's just part of reality that rape is bad. That's what moral realism means. If you want to say that reality is entirely subjective, created by humans for humans, that's not realism, that's idealism. If you want to say that what we designate as morally bad is a human creation, that isn't moral realism either. That's subjectivism.
Even in ancient Athens, we might abstract over temples, markets, homes, and so on, to come up with something we call a "building". For all I know, there's a dialogue where Socrates does exactly this (right before showing that every proposed definition of "building" fails).
The world we live in now has buildings because we have made it so: we now deliberately make buildings suitable for a variety of purposes.
We could look at ancient Athens, employ our abstraction, and say that there are buildings there; but those are not buildings in the same way that our buildings are buildings, are they?
If you are a hobo, you might find a decrepit old barn and use it, temporarily, [I]as[/I] a house.
If you are a wealthy couple on This Old House, you might spend half a million dollars to turn an old barn [I] into[/I] a house.
Are those the same thing? Is one or the other "really" a house?
Hmm. Internal... you mean private? Something is amiss.
A neat case in point - thanks. The number of planets is both an observation and an imposition.
I'd say there are things and there are categories. Pluto was a planet, then it was not, but it was always there. All sorts of criteria must be met for us to call Pluto a planet and we can choose those criteria for whatever purposes we have, but Pluto remains regardless of what we call it and regardless of what category we assign it. That I take to be the fundamental tenant of realism. There is an independent substance sustaining the thing; otherwise the thing exists as a pure construct of our imagination.
Moral realism requires that good and bad exist, just as Pluto exists, but good and bad don't exist in just the form that planets exist. That is, I can decide if Pluto is a satellite or a planet, but I can't decide it's not there. Pluto exists whether there are people to categorize it or define it.
Moral realism posits goodness and badness at the ontological level. It claims that it is the moral that is real (ergo "moral realism"), not just what we happen to call it. So, rape is bad. It doesn't become bad depending upon our purposes. That goodness and badness exist outside of us, offering it a place in reality, apart from our imagination.
To state otherwise, I contend, leaves us in a subjective state of morality, which is what you either accept or you accept what I've stated above. Both are fairly difficult to swallow, to be sure, because moral relativism and subjectivism require an admission that abhorrent acts are bad until we decide they're not. Moral absolutism is bizarre in that it has concepts floating about, truly existing, seeking a god to hold them firmly in his bosom.
If nothing else, God's Bosom is a pretty good name for a punk rock band.
Cheers. Hence my puzzling about direction of fit. Consider Srap's planet example - what counts as a planet is imposed on the world, and yet restricted by the world. That same process is in place for maths. and perhaps for ethics.
Interesting.
Realism is embedded in a language and hence in a community. Solipsism doesn't get a foothold.
What part of the planet do you propose is restricted by the world?
Pretty much. Quoting khaled
Success doesn't enter into this. There's only consistency.
The world is not what we experience, it is what is the case. That's a difference that few here seem to have picked up on.
Oh, he believed those things? Then it shouldn't be difficult for you to provide some citations for your claim.
Compulsory reading fifty years ago. He and Ian Gawler were part of my early training in meditation. They did not invoke the bullshit found in Transcendental Meditation and Krishna Consciousness. I've used the technique for some simple dental procedures.
Curious, this shared background.
For all practical intents and purposes, we agree that the Pali Canon is "the word of the Buddha".
I'm not a Buddhist and my relationship with Buddhism is rather complicated. But when someone claims to know better than the Buddha (or better than the Pali Canon), this catches my attention and I am very curious as to whether the person can live up to their claim.
Your two paragraphs contradict eachother.
Quoting Janus
You said you read all those Buddhist sources, but you still have those questions??
Quoting Janus
A.k.a. "The Third and a half noble truth: Suffering is manageable".
No, this is not part of the Buddha's teaching.
I don't agree with that. Setting stuff out as the "product of experience" detracts from what actually occurs - as if we choose reality. No, we are embedded in the world, and the interaction is mutual.
Indeed, and the solution may well be to stop playing that game by rejecting the division between object and subject. Look for a formulation that is not exclusively one or the other.
The aim or purpose of looking for such a formulation being what?
That's an equivocation then.
Sure, and, as I said, it's a stance that is counterproductive for success in the world. People who think "it's all in their head" tend to end up in institutions with white padded cells.
Anyway, what prompted this detour into Buddhism is what Isaac said earlier:
Quoting Isaac
Distinguishing between subject and object, between the internal and the external is helpful for many purposes, notably, for successfully functioning in the socio-economic system.
Developing epistemological and ontological theories is a purposeful activity, and the purpose is more than just the ostensible "to get to the bottom of things, to figure out how things really are", but is purpose or goal oriented. In the case of the Buddha, the purpose was the complete cessation of suffering. For some others, it is power over other people. Etc.
It's not a matter of ought. You're free to suffer.
Yes, and like any text open to interpretation.
Quoting baker
I haven't said I know better than the Buddha. I said that I may disagree with aspects of what is taken to be his teaching.
Quoting baker
That statement is useless without accompanying explanation.
Quoting baker
Those questions are not directed at the Buddha's teaching. They are general questions. You seem to be stuck in your strawman view of me as thinking I know better than the Buddha. I don't accept that the Buddha was perfectly enlightened, so for me the Buddha is just another man that I might agree or disagree with, depending on interpretation; so it's not a question of knowing better or not knowing better.
Quoting baker
So explain what you think is meant by extinction of suffering, given that the pains and afflictions of the body cannot be extinguished without extinguishing the body, and that would mean its death.
Of course all of this is, at least in regard to the sense in which I think the OP intended to question the idea of Realism, way off topic. Perhaps it should be moved to a thread of its own.
You said:
Quoting Janus
The Buddha maintained that there is a final solution to the problem of suffering. So if you say that there is no "final" or complete solution to the problem of suffering, you are in direct opposition to the Buddha.
Quoting Janus
Indeed!
There's a thread elsewhere about this, but it's a dog's breakfast. Since the topic is directly relevant to anti-realism it is worth mentioning here.
Anti-realism holds that stuff is dependent in some way on us, that thinking makes it so. That is, some statement p is true only if it is believed or known to be true.
For anti-realism, something's being true is the same as it's being known to be true.
Now a direct implication of this is that if something is true, then it is known - that we know everything.
Anti-realism is apparently committed to omniscience.
The problem does not occur in realism, which happily admits to there being unknown truths.
That should be read, obviously, as "In my opinion there can be no final solution to the problem of suffering". So, as I have said, if Buddha says there can be a final solution to suffering then I disagree with him. If you agree with what you have imputed to Buddha and think there can be a final solution to the problem of suffering, a solution that would completely end all suffering for all time, a solution other than the total extinction of the world (which could not be effected anyway), then what do you think that solution could be?
Understanding.
I don't need to be a mathematical realist to claim that I don't know the square root of 123.
I have read a teaspoon's worth of text about Buddhism, not because of any of it's doctrines, but rather because I feel that the basic methodology involved therein violates basic human nature, and so involves a renunciation of human nature (I personally believe that aggression is the defining characteristic of maleness, and hold my animal nature dearly, even if it does cause me psychic pain and frustration). Even so, I do know that the achievement of moksha, which I believe to be the eschatological goal of Buddhist philosophy, is the release from samsara, the cycle of death and rebirth impelled by karmic law, and so the end of reincarnation. How, then, could the Buddha not have believed in reincarnation, and how can one accept reincarnation to be true without believing in the incorporeal self, aka "the soul"?
Then where does the argument supporting Fitch's paradox go astray?
Also, a verificationist need not claim that everything has been verified.
Let's consider Fitch's paradox in the case of aesthetics. The anti-realist claim is that beauty is in the eye of the beholder - for all (a), (a) is beautiful if and only if (a) is thought beautiful.
It follows, fairly innocuously, that everything that is beautiful is thought to be beautiful.
In Ethics, ethical anti-realism holds that what is good is exactly what we know is good.
It follows that we know everything that is good.
But verificationism holds that p is true if and only if it has been verified.
And it follows that everything that is true has been verified.
I would just say that verificationism holds that "true" and "verified" mean the same thing, and so the statement "p is true iff it is verified" is the tautology "p is verified iff it is verified". The same with the more general "to be true is to be known"; that all truths are known just is the tautology that everything that is known is known.
You can't go from either of these to "every p has been verified" or "every p is known" (i.e. omniscience).
1. a is true ? (a is true) has been verified
2. a is true ? (a is true) is verified & (a is true) is verified ? a is true (def ?)
3. a is true ? (a is true) is verified (remove conjunct)
All truths have been verified.
Yes, all verified propositions have been verified. That's a tautology.
They also believe that even though we don't remember our past lives, the karmic connection between them (the earlier flames lighting the later) means that there is a kind of continuity that does not require a souls, and that once enlightened we will be able to remember the past lives in the unique series that each of us belong to.
Even so, there doesn't seem to be any motivation for the individual to care more about his own future lives than he would about anyone else's. Although I suppose if the individual developed a sense of responsibility for the unique karmic series that he belonged to that might be an incentive. but a lot would need to be taken on faith. In general I don't like the idea of being concerned with any purported afterlife or future existence because it devalues the importance of the present life. and in any case there is no definitive evidence that any such afterlife is anything more than wishful thinking..
The obvious conclusion is that verificationism is wrong, and there are unverified truths.
Yes, and "true" and "verified" mean the same thing, therefore the statement that all truths have been verified is the statement that all verified propositions have been verified. It's a tautology.
If all you want to say that all verified statements have been verified, then go ahead. But if you claim that all that is true is what has been verified, you are obligated to say that all that is true has been verified.
That is, your answer is simply to deny that verification has anything to do with truth.
Which I will happily agree with.
The anti-realist thesis is that for a mathematical proposition to be true is for it to have been proved.
So it seems to follow that all true mathematical propositions have been proved.
If p is a true mathematical proposition, p has been proved.
The verificationist says both because "true" and "verified" mean the same thing to them.
No, it's to deny the realist's claim that "true" and "verified" mean different things.
Yes, because "true" and "proved" mean the same thing, and it's a tautology that all proved mathematical propositions have been proved.
SO there are no physical or mathematical truths.
Of course I can. That's how synonyms work.
Although I wouldn't as it's superfluous. I'd just say that some proposition either has been verified or hasn't been verified, or that its negative either has been verified or hasn't been verified. Nothing more needs to be said.
Quoting Michael
But the claim that 'true' and 'verified' means the same thing leads to absurdities. Say my wife is having an affair with someone, and then I catch them at it. I have verified that she is having an affair. It seems fine to say that prior to my having verified it it was not verified, but it seems absurd to say that prior to my having verified it, it was not true that she was having an affair.
Your very hypothetical scenario presupposes realism. Your wife is having an affair (unbeknownst to you), and then you find out. Obviously if you presuppose realism then you're going to find it absurd when you then consider anti-realism.
If you want to consider anti-realism then your hypothetical scenario is "I caught my wife having an affair and then saw evidence that this had been going on for a long time." Perfectly coherent scenario.
Yes, but that it had been going on for some time entails that it was true that it had been going on, and yet unverified; so the two terms cannot be synonymous, at least not according to ordinary usage. Sure, you can massage the terms to make them synonymous, but what have you really achieved by doing that other than establishing an eccentric usage of terms?
That is not how the rest of us use the word "truth". That's fine.
So verificationism is not a theory about truth. It is a theory about verification.
It's not even a theory; as Michael said, it's a tautology.
An alternate solution is to adopt a trinary logic.
For mathematics, we might borrow from Kripke, and suppose that there are three truth-values for mathematical propositions - true, false and otherwise.
We assign "true" to some set of tautologies, "False" to contradictions, and "other" to everything else. When a proof of a proposition is found - a deduction from other truths - we assign "true' to that proposition.
Only proven mathematical propositions get to be called "true" - the main point of constructivism.
But I'm guessing the more mathematically literat will find fault wiht this proposal.
the implication is that the conjecture that every prime greater that 2 is the sum of two primes is not true, and it is not false.
That is an extremely vulgar remark. This is a philosophy forum, it might do you some good to read some more about the subject before launching ad hominems. Objective idealism is a perfectly sound and sane philosophical outlook, even though it is a minority view.
Is this the same objective idealism of Peirce?
Not to drag this into anything too lengthy, but what would be the basic definition?
I know of "transcendental idealism", a bit of Berkley's idealism and finally Kastrup's idealism. These are rather different, and Peirce never seemed to express his view clearly. I mean no quarrel here, as you know of my strong sympathies with many aspects of what you believe.
:up:
So you’re saying what we think is out there is what out there?
Well that’s ridiculous. There were plenty of things people thought were out there that weren’t and vice versa. Both individually and as a society.
Quoting Banno
And now you’re saying that what we experience (what we think is out there?) is not what’s out there. I don’t get it.
Quoting Janus
Quoting Michael Zwingli
Start new threads, as the above is off-topic here. See you there.
To what end?
Merely to satisfy curiosity?
If we start from the position that humans act purposefully, oriented toward a goal, then understanding is merely a means to an end, not the end itself.
(People possibly do philosophy for the purpose of relieving that specific inner tension that they feel. So, philosophy as a means to find inner peace etc.)
Ooops, that hit a nerve.
I myself am actually in favor of idealism, my view is much in line with the Buddha's on this. But I am also painfully aware how alienating this view is, how counterproductive to fitting in in society. A person committed to exploring idealist views has a lot to contend with, going against the flow of society. Sadly, this can sometimes end very badly for them.
It's not uncommon that we develop a theory (based on some evidence) and then this theory allows us to see (further) evidence that supports it. It's why we have sayings like "Hindsight is 20/20".
That said, we cannot help viewing the world through a dichotic lens. Distinctions like these seem necessary to map out experience to some degree.
I'm fine, thanks all the same.
What an extraordinary reply!
Yes, and? That's a tautology as I've said.
Maybe not. I'm just addressing your accusation that it leads to omniscience. That all truths have been verified is that all verified propositions have been verified, but that isn't that all propositions (or their negation) have been verified, and so isn't omniscience.
A mathematical anti-realist can claim to not know the square root of 123 without contradicting himself.
You asked, and I answered. In fact, the instant conversation was entirely in response to a question that you yourself asked:
Quoting baker
...to which I, being in fact stringently anti-messianist in general (a certain result of my having been raised Christian), felt compelled to respond. I agree that it has strayed from @Banno's intent, though, so you are certainly right in suggesting that we drop it.
I think there is a concern remaining, even for so minimal a realism as this, that we are not justified in assuming that there are many things to classify. If we impose individuation just as we impose categories, then Pluto is not a thing at all, but part of a thing, the one thing. We split up the world into so-called objects, on such a view, and thus all statements that presuppose there being multiple objects are strictly false, just a manner of speaking.
What makes Pluto one thing, and not trillions of different things? What we call "Pluto" is "really" a mass of particles in close proximity. Which of those particles are part of Pluto, which are part of some separated rock, which are a passing photon from the Sun?
Perhaps those particles have an independent substance, but I don't think Pluto is reducible to those particles. Names/words aren't just pointers to mind-independent entities. Think of the Ship of Theseus.
Existence is not an attribute or property of an object.
To say an object exists is different from saying an object has certain properties. Pluto exists as a random allotment of particles (and the particles in themselves are also a random allotment of smaller particles, thus an infinite regress). Whether Pluto is a planet is a question about what specific properties we assign to the term "planet" and whether the object of Pluto has them.
Does it? As I brought up the Ship of Theseus then let's consider that. The ship that leaves is the ship that returns but the material that leaves isn't the material that returns, therefore the ship isn't the material.
Or would you commit to saying that the ship that leaves isn't the ship that returns, which it would appear the realist must? If so then how much of the material is the "true" substance of the thing? If only half the parts are replaced does it remain the same ship? A quarter? A tenth?
That we split the world into arbitrarily assigned objects doesn't challenge the fact that there is external existence. Any object and any particle theoretically can be subdivided and grouped with other objects, but there is something in existence and we can choose to grab an arbitrary bunch of that stuff and call it X.
X designates what is in existence, but assigns no particular property to that existnece.
Or to bring it back to the topic of truth conditions, "the ship that leaves is the ship that returns" isn't made true by objective features of the world but by our own perceptions/conceptions/attitudes/whatever. We're anti-realists about the Ship of Theseus (assuming you agree that the ship that leaves is the ship that returns).
Of course, that's not to say that there isn't also mind-independent material stuff. It's just that that stuff has nothing to do with whether or not the ship that leaves is the ship that returns.
Whatever of the same returns is what returns. If a single atom of the old boat returns, then we have a single atom of the old boat.
Whether you wish to call the boat Theseus isn't a metaphysical question. If I have a jar of 100 marbles that I call "Tommy" and I replace 99 of them with new marbles, whether I still have Tommy is a definitional question, not a metaphysical one. What I can say is that I have one original marble. If we decide I no longer have Tommy, we haven't defined that single marble out of existence to where we can now say since Tommy is dead there's nothing left of him.
Whether those marbles are Tommy isn't the question. Which marbles might exist is the question, and if you want to call them Tommy or not isn't part of that question.
It's not about whether or not we call the ship "Theseus". It's about whether or not "the ship that leaves is the ship that returns" is true, and what makes it true. There's the vacuous answer that "the ship that leaves is the ship that returns" is true iff the ship that leaves is the ship that returns, but that tells us nothing.
On the one hand we have the realist who says that statements are made true by objective features of the world, but what objective features of the world must obtain for the ship that leaves to be the ship that returns? Presumably that the mind-independent material stuff that leaves is the mind-independent material stuff that returns. Which in this case doesn't obtain, and so the realist must commit to "the ship that leaves is the ship that returns" being false. However that might not be a commitment the realist is willing to make, and so they must accept an anti-realist account of "the ship that leaves is the ship that returns" being true; that it's true because we think of the ship that leaves as being the ship that returns.
And what of truth? If realism is worth talking about, it's the idea that some of the things we say about some of the things in the world are true in virtue of those things being what they are. You have us
Quoting Hanover
and then assign X to categories (which aren't things in the world) based on some criteria, and we
Quoting Hanover
So truth is only --- not even "also" but "only" --- a matter of our choices.
That's not much of a realism. It looks like idealism + "Oh yeah, and there's some stuff, I guess."
The same problem applies to the material stuff. It's also an interpretation that implies the uninterpreted. What is the uninterpreted? That's a very old question that has no rational answer.
This is consistent with my comment to @Banno, which was was:
Quoting Hanover
Maybe my point was missed or not well stated, but it asks how does reality restrict anything we do, perceive, or believe? We can say it does, but exactly how? How does the noumenal affect the phenomenal? Maybe not at all, but somehow?
This is the quandary, and there isn't an adequate answer, thus leaving philosophers with plenty to talk about forever and ever.
Our choices: (1) idealism and just declare everything is just imagined, and then are left wondering what causes us to imagine in such a way, (2) direct realism and declare the world is just as we see it to be, ignoring the fact the different beings perceive in different ways, or (3) indirect realism, declaring we can interpret reality, but we have no idea how that interpretation is consistent with reality.
The other solution here is to ignore things as they are, admitting that such is an impossible inquiry and then to talk about word games, pretending that ignoring the problem resolves the problem. Or maybe pragmatism, which asks why even ask when we're going to do what we're going to do anyway.
The realist does commit as you've said they would (and as I've bolded). The realist defines the ship as the specific matter that was there originally because he's offering a metaphysical definition within the context of that conversation. That is, the ship is exactly what it is.
In the vernacular however, "the ship" is a social construct, subject to whatever definition the speakers want it to have. We call it the same boat because it maintained a sense of apparent identity through time and continued its same function. Regardless of why we keep calling it the same name has no metaphysical impact. We're just identifying something consistently because we happen not to care what its material composition is through time for our definitional purposes.
So, yes, the ship (defined as a ship of material composition X) that leaves is not the ship that returns, but the ship (defined as a boat that serves the same function through time) that leaves is the ship that returns.
As long as we know what we mean by "ship" and don't equivocate, this can remain clear.
"Our choices:" ... (4) objective realism and declare that the world consists of ineluctable, interpretation/perspective-invariant features (e.g. facts, structures, forces, events, things) which are, therefore, maladaptive to deny or ignore.
Reality obviously restricts what we can do. Maybe I'm misunderstanding you.
But talk is cheap, no question, and people can say anything they like.
There are two answers here: (1) it is righteous to intend that reality restrict what you say about it in just the way it restricts what you can do; (2) what we say we do not say in isolation, unconnected to what else we say and do, so if you claim your time at the gym has really been paying off and you could lift my car over your head with ease, it's natural for me to say, "Prove it." At that point, I let reality do the talking for me.
This "metaphysical definition" is useless then. The ship becomes a new ship every instant, atoms rubbing off in the wind or water, electrons absorbing photons from the Sun, etc. And it's still not entirely clear which material stuff is referred to when you talk about "the ship" in this metaphysical sense; there's no objective cut-off point that says that this particle is part of the ship and this particle is just passing by.
And the anti-realist will say that this is how our everyday conversions work. The anti-realist's position is an accurate representation of truth and statements as we ordinarily use them and the world as we ordinarily understand it.
It can't be completely private. What I mean by private is that it's me having the belief, just as I can have a private sensation. However, if we are to refer to beliefs or sensations as part of language, there must be something to refer to (something the community can get a hold of, which is not the internal private thing), and these can be linguistic, or just simple non-verbal acts (opening a door, building a hut, etc). We show (linguistic or otherwise) what we believe, or that we're in pain, i.e., there are outward signs. We don't believe a stone is conscious, because there is no sign of consciousness - there just isn't anything to latch onto. You seem to want to deny that there is or are private experiences (but I'm not sure). I think we both agree that we can't talk to each other in any meaningful way if meaning is dependent upon an internal thing or object - it has to have an external component for meaning to grab hold. That's my take. I think we're close, but there may be some differences. I think we can refer to the private, as long as we don't think meaning is solely derived from the private.
Do you guys think it would be possible to match your avatars even closer just to make this more confusing?
If the world is in the flux you suggest, then are you asserting a lack of identity of any object without a perceiver?
Lovely bit of research to muddy those waters.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1460-9568.2008.06344.x?deniedAccessCustomisedMessage=&userIsAuthenticated=false
@Hanover's belief about whether the time at the gym has paid off affects his car-lifting abilities. External reality's not so strict an arbiter as you might like it to be here.
My little car weighs about 1100 kg. The current world record for a clean and jerk is 166 kg.
Yes, there are limits, the point is reality still doesn't arbitrate in the way naive realists would like here. Note the current record. We know there's a limit, we don't know where it is, so we're no closer to objective reality, only the pragmatic assumption of limits so extreme that they rarely feature in any real world implication of realism/anti-realism. Hanover can't lift the moon or fly to the sun, but when people argue about objective realism they're not doing so to disabuse others of such notions. They do so to lend authority to the very mundane parameters, the concretising of which anchors their belief systems against change. To disabuse others of quite possible extensions of our current limits that conflict with their preferred narratives.
But I've made this point already, I just thought I'd do it with a citation this time.
I miss your point. I've not argued for naive realism. It was very far from it. I argued for reality mediated by perceptions, with an assertion there was an objective underlying reality that was dubiously knowable. To hold otherwise is anti-realism, which sounds like idealism of a sort. I also don't follow how the placebo effect disproves naive realism even if it were held. Typically the direct realists argue from a linguistic or pragmatic perspective and tend to be anti-metaphysical.
Anyway, maybe I misunderstood your post.
There is a belief among ultra-religious Jews that the name of a person defines the person in a particular way. I suppose this comes from the fact that within the Bible certain characters have their names changed when major events occur in their lives. Jacob, for example, became Israel when he wrestled with an angel. So in current day ultra-orthodoxy a treatment for the dying is to change their name as that will change the person.
Anyway, was Jacob the same person after he was named Israel or the sick person the same person after he was renamed if the community of meshuggenehs all think he's changed identities.
As an end in itself.
A what now?
But then there is also a sense of continuity, and a linguistic practice of referring to my old self as being my old self. Unless you want to argue for something like a persistent immaterial soul, you can’t make sense of the truth of this by referring to some alleged mind-independent state-of-affairs that such considerations and claims correspond to. It can only be understood according to an anti-realist account (of meaning and truth).
So to answer your question, Jacob both was and wasn’t the same person he was before being named Israel. There are different senses that we understand being the same person, and some of these (excluding the case of the impermanent material body) don’t have mind-independent truth conditions, and so can’t be understood according to realism (which as I’ve mentioned before doesn’t have anything useful to say about identity).
I mean, I'm going to say that this laptop isn't real or that the tree outside my window isn't real? This is crazy talk.
But then if you say is this laptop I see or the tree outside my window mind-independent, I'd say no and we'd agree. Which makes talk of "realism" a matter of semantics and not substantive.
Unless you want to talk about ghosts, then we have to clarify a little. :wink:
A conclusion, rather than an accusation.
What you haven't done is provided an account of truth; rather you are advocating a change in the way we use the word in order to avoid the difficulties found in Fitch.
And that's entirely reasonable.
But what I want is an account of truth. That is, your reply is unhelpful.
I don't see how that follows.
Is that so?
The ship leaves port. The mast is replaced, then the keel; the various planks of the hull are replaced. At each step something is taken and something replaced. Take out the word "objective" and it's clear that the ship that leaves is the ship that returns" is made true by features of the world.
A rope consisting of innumerable threads, none of which run from end to end, is nevertheless a rope.
These are the very same question, expressed differently.
That's a rather important lesson that came from linguistic philosophy. It needs to be understood, if the problem is to be dealt with.
Again, this does not seem to follow.
It's as much dependent on what happens to that stuff as what we say about it.
Which is the main point I'm making on this thread: that realism vs anti-realism is the same issue as direction of fit; and that consequently it's a question of monitoring direction of fit rather than ontology.
Nope. Everything is always interpreted. The question has been answered.
"Interpreted" implies the act of interpretation. The object of that action is assumed to be something not yet interpreted.
It's a logical consequence of the use of "interpreted" unless you stipulate some other meaning for the word.
Yep. Thanks for clarifying.
Quoting Hanover
The division between noumenal and phenomenal implies an uninterpreted world. There isn't an uninterpreted world. Or if you prefer, it's clearer if you adopt a grammar that does not rely on an uninterpreted world.
So the question of how the noumenal effects the phenomenal is dissipated by adopting an alternative picture. The world is all that is the case; what is the case can be stated, and hence is already part of our calculus of cause and effect.
This is a much better approach than asking questions of the noumenal - a something about which we can know nothing, and hence about which we can say nothing.
Drop that nonsense and things start to make sense.
There's your mistake.
T-sentences again, of course. But I might not go over that again here.
There's actually a proxy for The One Thing to hand: the unceasing flow of sensory data. And sure enough, people who start there, who in some sense consider that the realest of reals, are inclined to say that what you take to be an individual object is a fiction, that sentences like "My coffee cup is on the nightstand" aren't literally about coffee cups and nightstands but about artifacts of the model we build based on the flow of sensory data, and thus not literally true. Maybe it makes a difference that something is theorized to be "out there" causing the flow of data, but maybe it doesn't.
No mistake. Ask anyone competent in English.
Nuh. A realist is at liberty to use reference in any way they see fit. It's clear that the ship can be treated as the same, or as different, and that the distinction is of no consequence so long as one keeps track of which one is making use of. If you had contracted to buy the ship on it's return, then take up the discussion in the courts; but the issue is semantic, since the history of the ship is clear to all.
There is no argument as to the facts, only as to the suitability of an expression.
Then show me the supporting documentation.
Well we've established you aren't fluent in English. What language do you want it in?
Back to ad homs already.
Your thesis is that interpretation implies something uninterpreted. My contention is that everything is already interpreted. On my account there is only reinterpretation.
My argument would be that providing an interpretation is giving a meaning to something - that's the commones definition; but things already have a meaning, and hence an interpretation.
There's a good chance that we are talking at cross purposes, so if you want to proceed we might go into the common uses of the related terms.
Or if you prefer the ad hom approach, we can just cut the good bits and I'll tell you to fuck off.
Up to you.
This is perplexing, since I have the greatest respect for your understanding of the topic.
I do not deny that we have experiences. But I think the distinction between private and public experiences has been shown to be muddled. So I would deny that it is helpful to call an experience private.
If there is "something out there" that reliably results in every person who has adequate eyesight seeing a coffee cup on a nightstand, then there must be some independently real (of individual human minds, at least) existence or reality, no? Whether we call that (for parsimony's sake) "the coffee cup on the nightstand" or less parsimoniously "the unknowable X that reliably produces our perception of the coffee cup on the nightstand" wouldn't seem to make any significant difference to what we can claim to know (provided we are sophisticated and mindful enough not to fall into naive, as opposed to relational, realism).
Either way I think it seems obvious that there is something out there (meaning something independent of the individual mind) because it could not plausibly be thought to be a collective hallucination unless there is something different out than a substantial world ot there: a collective mind, or a connection between all minds that we don't know about. Even then it would not be definable as an hallucination because that is when one person sees something others don't. So it seems we are stuck with believing that something is out there and the issue just boils down to whether it makes a difference as to how we refer to that something.
That's actually not an ad hom. If you pretend not to understand a common English word, expect some joking.
Quoting Banno
So things are interpreted, but no one ever did any interpreting because it was already interpreted.
As I mentioned, the problem is ancient and unsolved. There's a reason for that.
Have a good day.
Re-read that with care. Have a little think about it.
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674576100
My suspicion is that there would be little disagreement between us here.
But I have to go fix a chook shed that is falling apart ofter recent rain, and already have a pretty full reading list.
Would you care to outline their argument?
At the moment suffice it to say that I think McDowell does a reasonable job of not falling into either naive realism or anti-realism. I'll leave Brandom out of it as I'm not quite as familiar with his ideas.
I actually stumbled into the same thing here:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
That's direction of fit, but it occurred to me in a slightly different form, our ability to intentionally realize abstractions. (It's almost too obvious that you could start here at architecture and proceed to an examination of constructivism.)
And again here:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
The two options are distinguished by direction of fit.
I've hardly talked about anything else. You're welcome.
SEP on Realism and Independence
Here is a bit @Janus might appreciate regarding quietism, Wittgenstein, and McDowell:
[quote=“SEP on Realism”]Quietism about the ‘debate’ between realists and their opponents can take a number of forms. One form might claim that the idea of a significant debate is generated by unsupported or unsupportable philosophical theses about the relationship of the experiencing and minded subject to their world, and that once these theses are exorcised the ‘debate’ will gradually wither away. This form of quietism is often associated with the work of the later Wittgenstein, and receives perhaps its most forceful development in the work of John McDowell (see in particular McDowell 1994 and 2007). [/quote]
Perhaps I will have to do more than wave in the general direction of SEP, but I doubt I will do a better job of getting at some of the tensions those articles are meant to highlight. What could realism be besides semantic realism? Why insist that such a realism could be intelligible (meaningfully talked about) if it requires semantic realism to discuss?
And for anyone that is interested - SEP on Challenges to Metaphysical Realism. Many good things in there that could be laid out in this discussion (and indeed, some of them hinted), but it would be nice if those nodding at the issues simply laid them out directly (e.g. references to competent speakers of English).
[quote=“SEP on Challenges to Realism”] 4.1 Language Use and Understanding
We now turn to some realist responses to these challenges. The Manifestation and Language Acquisition arguments allege there is nothing in an agent’s cognitive or linguistic behaviour that could provide evidence that s/he had grasped what it is for a sentence to be true in the realist’s sense of ‘true’. How can you manifest a grasp of a notion which can apply or fail to apply without you being able to tell which? How could you ever learn to use such a concept? . . .
Anti-realists follow verificationists in rejecting the intelligibility of such states of affairs and tend to base their rules for assertion on intuitionistic logic, which rejects the universal applicability of the Law of Bivalence (the principle that every statement is either true or false). This law is thought to be a foundational semantic principle for classical logic. However, some question whether classical logic requires bivalence [e.g. Sandqvist 2009]. Others dispute the idea that acceptance or rejection of bivalence has any metaphysical (rather than meaning-theoretic) consequences [Edgington, 1981; McDowell 1976; Pagin 1998; Gaiffman 1996]. There is, in addition, a question as to whether the anti-realist’s preferred substitute for realist truth-conditions in verification-conditions (or proof-conditions) satisfies the requirement of exhaustive manifestability [Pagin 2009]. . . .
An apparent consequence of their view is that reality is indeterminate in surprising ways—we have no grounds for asserting that Socrates did sneeze in his sleep the night before he took the hemlock and no grounds for asserting that he did not and no prospect of ever finding out which. Does this mean that for anti-realists the world contains no such fact as the fact that Socrates did one or the other of these two things? Not necessarily. For anti-realists who subscribe to intuitionistic principles of reasoning, the most that can be said is that there is no present warrant to assert
S?¬S: that Socrates either did or did not sneeze in his sleep the night before he took the hemlock.[/quote]
This raises an interesting point to @Michael's claim. If we replaced each plank one at a time, but with planks dissimilar enough from the original that the ship returned an airplane, we'd be hard pressed to call it the same boat. The material composition then matters, which means that external reality is critical for identity.
If we commit to the idea that the ship is the same ship even when it's a plane just because we continue to call it a ship, we are left with the odd result of an airplane being a ship.
But, consider the caterpillar. Is it now a butterfly or do the two not share any identity? Why do catterpillars maintain identity through their metamorphosis but not boats that turn into airplanes?
I do take Michael's position to be substance doesn't define an object but only words do, leaving the question of composition irrelevant. I'm still left with the question of what is the composition of this entire enterprise, as in what substance allows us to make these definitions in the first place.
Yes, architecture does provide a neat example fo the interplay of direction of fit.
If the "he" is Davidson or I, I don't think so.
Some digestion is needed.
I think this makes it clearer that the issue is not one as to what is the case, but as to the appropriate conventions to adopt when faced with such an issue. The direction of fit has been flipped; we are not sure how to proceed, and must re-establish our conventions.
Because organisms, as opposed to boats and planes, are self-regulating and self-transforming perhaps?
Leopards and spots OR are you too long in the tooth to care? :D
"S" is tru iff T
T is an interpretation of S.
Nothing to do with Quoting I like sushi
Right. So in what cases does the dubious know-ability of reality come in to play? Is it a model you often use to counter the argument of your fried Bob, that he can fly to the moon? I'd wager no. It's a model used to counter the argument of Bill that he can lift 170kg if he believes he can. "No, your belief doesn't make something real, you either can lift 170kg or you can't" Of course you may already know about the placebo effect and so not counter this way, but this is about the effects you don't know, not the ones you do.
The difference, as far as I can tell, between anti-realism and idealism is that anti-realism is anti-realist about something. That something might be objects, moral laws, numbers...etc. To be anti-realist about everything I admit probably would sound a bit like idealism. So the distinction between the anti-realist and the realist is over the matter of what exactly is objectively real, not the matter of whether anything is.
My point is that the 'what' in question is rarely some limit that neither side will ever encounter anyway (@Srap Tasmaner's car-lifting example). Our agreement or otherwise as to the extent to which these far-off limits are real rarely enters the picture. The 'what' is always some matter which...matters, and here it's the extent to which reality limits our representations that is in question. The anti-realist wants to remove the shackles they so dislike, the direct realist wants a stick with which to beat his opponent on some matter of dispute and "it's objectively the case that..." makes a great stick.
Take out the word "objective" and we're not talking about realism anymore.
Objective features of the world change, and yet the ship that returns is the ship that leaves. It's not the same physical stuff, but it's the same thing. That it's the the same thing is a conceptual/linguistic imposition, a way we view and talk about the world. That's anti-realism. There is no mind-independent fact that determines it to be the same ship. A realist is committed to say that it's a different ship, as the material that leaves isn't the material that returns.
Quoting Hanover
The material influences our perception and understanding, but it isn't what makes claims of "sameness" or "difference" true. If we don't see it as the same ship because it's now a plane then it's not the same ship because we don't view it that way. If we don't see it as the same ship because its parts have been replaced (even with similar parts) then it's not the same ship because we don't view it that way. If we see it as the same ship because its parts have been replaced (with similar parts) then it's the same ship because we view it that way.
And if some people consider it to be the same ship and others a different ship, then that's fine. Anti-realism isn't committed to bivalence. To say that either the people who say it's the same ship or the people who say it's a different ship are wrong is mistaken. It really is just a point of view. It's the same ship to the former, a different ship to the latter.
Interesting discussion. You may wish to consider the notion of system or structure as well. Structures have objective reality. It is the same ship because it is structurally the same ship, or close enough to the original structure. If Theseus had added hydrofoils and an engine, it would not be the same ship anymore.
If memory serve he was supposed to change the sail for a white one if he was alive, as a signal for his father Aegeus, King of Athens, but forgot and kept the black one up. As a result, the father threw himself in the sea now bearing his name, thinking his son dead. And so in the myth, the son coming back with recognizably the exact same boat (structurally) was fatal to the father. Structures matter.
How is it structurally the same ship? It's new material. Do you just mean that the shape and placement of the material is the same? Well, two different ships made from the same schematics would have the same shape and placement of their respective material, and yet they are different ships.
Challenges to Metaphysical Realism
Yes, but they are the same model of ship and one could be hard pressed to distinguish one from the other.
My point is that structures are something we recognize as real. Reality is not just matter, it is also in how this matter is bound together in a whole and how they function when thus binded, how the whole behaves as a whole.
Consider Theseus himself. During the trip, an estimated 90% of his own material constituants have changed. Water drunk and sweat, proteins eaten and used then decayed and excreted... Our body is always in flux. The boat of Theseus is us. And what Aegeus would have recognized as his son was not this or that set of molecules, but a structure binding them in a whole: his son's features, voice, manner of moving and speaking. Not his precise chemical composition.
Two different ships can have the same model, have material bound the same way, function the same way, and yet they are two different ships, not the same ship, so that doesn't work.
Yes, see here. The fact that the mind-independent matter isn't the same and yet the person is the same shows that the person isn't reducible to the mind-independent matter, and so can't be understood according to realism.
Although we should clarify one thing first; are you a Platonist about abstract entities? Your talk about structure (as separate from the actual matter, and as a defence of realism) seems to suggest that you are?
One version of the puzzle has another ship being built out of the original bits, the ones that have been replaced, so that you now have two, and the question is, which one is the "real" one?
Quoting Hanover
Quoting Michael
Quoting Hanover
Peter van Inwagen, if I recall correctly, proposed (in Material Beings) the idea that only living things have an identity. Since the ship has no identity, there's no right answer, just social convention or whatever. I am the same person who read the book years ago, despite few of its details remaining accessible to me in memory.
I disagree. People are real. If one is realist about structures, then people can realistically be understood as semi-permanent mind-independent structures... In short, it is not necessary to reduce realism to some odd concept of amorphous matter. Matter itself is always structured and cannot be understood otherwise. Matter is never amorphous. Even atoms have shapes and structures.
As I recall, @Banno won’t play nicely with me if I start going on about brains in vats and epistemological anti-realism. He may say something like, “But whatever we are or aren’t, doesn’t the brain in the vat suggest that there is a reality of what your are, whether or not we are capable of knowing it?”
P.S. This is to say that Banno seems interested in taking "recognition-transcendent truth-conditions" head on in his discussions about truth.
:up:
Why false?
Anti-realism isn't unrealism. Anti-realism doesn't argue that people aren't real. Anti-realism argues that truth isn't recognition-transcendent and/or truth isn't bivalent. Realism argues that truth is recognition-transcendent and bivalent.
Realism
Even if the metaphysical realist claims to not be arguing for semantic realism, semantic realism is entailed by metaphysical realism, and so showing semantic realism to be false is showing metaphysical realism to be false.
Quoting Olivier5
In what sense are structures, as distinct from matter, mind-independent? Are you a Platonist? And in what sense do two different sets of matter have the same structure? And not just the same type of structure, as in the case of the twin ships built to the same specification, but the same token structure, such that the ship that leaves is the same ship that returns (i.e. not just a copy of the original)?
In my example, the challenge is "try it and see", which still strikes me as an epistemically healthy attitude. Does saying that make me a realist? What if I say some magic word like "objective"? Or does the demand for verification make me an anti-realist?
Mathematics is really curious in this way. Mathematicians lean toward Platonism because of experience: it feels like you're discovering patterns and structures in something that is there; you invent tools to explore with, but you have to make them out of things that have already been found. On the other hand, "truth" in mathematics, as a practical matter, means "proven". Until there's a proof, all you have is a conjecture. Fermat's Last Theorem didn't count as true, despite most mathematicians' intuition that it was, until we got the proof.
Scientific sense? The fluid dynamics of Heraclitus' stream are discovered, not built as with a ship.
Poor me! I think it is recognition-transcendent but not bivalent. Am I a semi-realist?
Quoting Michael
Matter always takes a form, so structures are important characteristics of any material object. It's not independent of matter, it IS matter. The shapes that matter takes. In this sense, structures are objective realities, they exist whether you recognise them or not. A tiger does stop to be a tiger and morph into something else, like a pig or a tree, when you don't recognize it.
No.
Two atoms of hydrogen or two molecules of water have the same structure, isotopes aside. They are impossible to distinguish from one another and therefore they are functionally the same thing.
But even my six-year old knows when I've drunk from her glass of water instead of mine. Otherwise fungible things are rendered discrete from one another by virtue of context.
Just for the record I was merely describing this account of mathematics. I have no opinion/thoughts one way or the other - it's way above my pay scale. :razz:
If your point is that there is minimal practical import to the questions posed in this thread, I think it's obvious that most navigate the world successfully without philosophical contemplation at all, particularly without ever challenging fundamental assumptions about reality. What this means is that the answer to your specific question is that I would respond to Bob whether he could fly to the moon in the way we all would in the normal world, but if he were posing the question in this thread as it related to challenges to realism, I would point out that we must first establish the correlation between perceptions and reality before discussing the moon and the physical properties he believes he has deciphered from his perceptions.
In any event, your argument is the "appeal to the stone" fallacy which was named after the following event:
"After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, "I refute it thus."
—?James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_the_stone
Provide an example of a statement that is both true and false. Are you saying within exact contexts and with exact definitions the same statement can be both true and false?
The ship that leaves is the ship that returns.
Although my main support of anti-realism is in the rejection of recognition-transcendent truth conditions rather than the rejection of bivalence.
But that involves telling a story, it's not providing something simultaneously true and false.
Random article about the idea on a much smaller scale (who said philosophy is useless?). Giant Molecules Exist in Two Places at Once
Quoting Michael
I don't see why. There's this:
Quoting Banno
Nothing in there about the objective-subjective divide. A realist can agree that the ship's components have changed and maintain that we can use the same name for the ship. Indeed the whole ship of Theseus argument seems to me pretty irrelevant to the discussion at hand, for reasons given above.
Realists need not deny that there are social conventions. Nor that social conventions are all reducible to physical facts - that'd be physicalism.
Just my thinking through this - I may well be wrong. I thought we were looking for things that were true and false simultaneously. For your idea to be 'true and false' you require a narrative description because the departure and arrive are two separate events over time. Would this not be the same thing as saying a human being is both young and old? Age can be visualized as a journey similar to your ship idea.
I'm not saying that we use the same name for the ship. I'm saying that it's the same ship.
It has but one truth value unless you've got an equivocation fallacy. "Ship" must vary in meaning in order for "the Ship is X" to be true and false in differing contexts. Or, are you saying "X and not X" is not a contradiction?
It doesn't. If you say that it's the same ship and I say that it's not the same ship then it's not that one of us is right and one of us is wrong.
That means it has no truth value, not that it has a true and false value. Is it a non-propositional statement, like "Hello there!"
It doesn't require a narrative description, but your example of a person being both young and old is a good example. "Young" and "old" don't have a clearly defined age-range. Is someone who's 40 young or old? A 10 year old and an 80 year old will likely disagree, and as a young-at-heart 33 year old I'm on the fence. But it doesn't make sense to say that one of them must be wrong, or that I must commit to one side or the other (which would be the case if the principle of bivalence holds).
Yes. this is exactly the point I made in my last response to your question about the identity of the caterpillar and the butterfly..
I find Johnson's reply quite convincing. A showing rather than a stating.
Quoting Hanover
A better approach for @Michael might be to adopt a trinary logic; instead of claiming that it is the same boat is both true and false, claiming that it is unknown or undecided. Then at least there would be some formal logic for him to make use of. This might be what he has in mind.
What, specifically, is the difference between these?
it's not paraconsistent logic - which holds that A, ~A ? B is not a valid inference; this is the view usually associated with anti-realism.
it's not quite dialetheism, which holds that for some A both A and ~A can be assigned the value "true". - that there are true paradoxes.
It's something new, is seems - at least to me: that a statement can be assigned more than one truth value.
Are there precedents?
? ?
This isn't a rejection of bivalence. This is just pointing out certain words are vague. If the law were only old people are allowed to enter and old is defined as over 40, then that's just a clearer form of language.
What you're getting at is much more than this. You're claiming that what a 40 year old is cannot be determined because there is no single truth value to the statement "a 40 year old is X."
It's the difference between there being two ships with the same name and there being one ship (which maintains its name).
There are other people named Michael in the world, but they're not me. Whereas I'm the same person you've been speaking to for years.
Per Nagase, Davidson isn't inherently realist. It's compatible with both realism and anti-realism. The only advantage is that it allows you to avoid correspondence theory, which in turn allows you to avoid propositions.
It's both. Vague propositions often don't have a single truth value, precisely because they're vague.
I'm not saying that it can't be determined. I'm saying that it can be determined to be true and it can be determined to be false.
A statement with 2 truth values is 2 statements.
"The ship that left is the ship that returned" is true if we define "ship" in terms of functionality. It is false if "ship" is defined as that which contains all the same boards.
X=X always. As long as we maintain definitions, we don't have this absurd result of X=Y and X<>Y.
We don't start by defining "ship" according to some strict criteria and then use it in conversation. Rather we talk about a ship leaving, a ship returning, and then assess whether or not the two are the same (and then possibly derive the meaning of "ship").
Our assessment of whether or not the two are the same does not involve analyzing the meaning of the word "ship". We just consider the actual thing that leaves, the actual thing that returns, and the stuff that happens inbetween. And whether or not an identity persists doesn't have some single "correct" answer, as if it's a mind-independent fact that we either recognize or don't.
So to make it simpler, let’s say the ship that left was named the Theseus and that along with the part-replacements they adopted the name the Perseus.
Was the Perseus previously known as the Theseus?
Quoting Michael
That's specifically the issue - does it count as one ship or two?
And "count as..." is a lexical marker for issues of convention.
Quoting Michael
...seems you agree...?
Yes, I would have thought so. Hence my question - is any precedence for the view that one sentence can have two truth values?
Which makes the truth a matter of convention, or even personal opinion (as I don’t need other people to agree with me; I can decide for myself whether or not it counts as one ship or two). That’s decidedly not the realist account of truth but an anti-realist account.
If we can't agree as to what is a ship, why can we agree as to what is material and to what is functionality? Are holustic objects the only thing we can't agree upon, but we can agree upon their attributes?
Quoting Banno
We do have strict criteria, which is why we can use the term meaningfully. Only when we use the term in a way previously unintended do we run into these challenges.
And what we do for ships isn't what we do for everything. We define "firearms" in a fine tuned sort of way, especially where the law says "no firearms allowed." The specificity demanded is context dependent and not always the same.
Yep, you are. But you are making a conclusion about realism from that. What is your argument for that conclusion?
Trying to cut to the arguments here; it seems to me that you are working with a different account of realism to me.
There was the philosopher who came here and argued such a thing. Is this the guy? https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dialetheism/
So I wasn't going to comment, but then this article kept showing up in my suggested reading. I happen to be a fan of Graham Priest and once upon a time he briefly participated in the old forums as a guest philosopher. This particular article is super accessible.
Graham Priest on Beyond True and False
On a less approachable note, see paraconsistent logic and dialethia.
In short form, there are lots of truth values out there besides true and false (some of which are useful in specific applications such as data analysis). Here is a discussion of some of it SEP on Truth Values. A major issue with rejecting the LNC is something called explosion. This objection is as simple as "anything can be proven from a contradiction" and is demonstrated by "negation introduction" and similar forms of indirect proofs. Based on logic as traditionally conceived, permitting something to be both true and false at the same time is a major no no.
As a historical aside, the problem of future contingents has been around since Aristotle and serves as an easy demonstration that our thinking is impoverished by imagining that any proposition must be true or false, but not both, at every moment.
I can add more if anyone wants.
Thinking A neither true nor false would be paraconsistent.
But Michael would have it that A is both true and false. Which is... different.
Where now?
Sorry for being dense, what is the title of the article?
For the sake of expedience, I am just going to assume you mean the one on Fitch’s Paradox of Knowability.
To say someone middle-aged is young or old is not so much vague as it is senseless unless there is a context in which a comparison is being made. By contrast we can sensibly say a child is young because it is implicit in that, that compared to the larger demographic of adults a child is young. When it comes to saying a forty year old is young, it is meaningless unless some explicit or implicit (given by the context) comparison is included. So, for example, it can sensibly be said that a forty year old person is young compared to octagenarians, It can also be sensibly be said that a forty year old is middle-aged, although that would be somewhat vague, but not senseless.
The SEP Fitch article is here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fitch-paradox/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fitch-paradox/
ah - @EricH beat me to it.
In brief, people don’t like the idea of anti-realism in-so-far as it relates truth to knowledge because clearly there must be things that are true that we don’t know, yet anti-realism suggests that all truths are necessarily known, i.e. there is nothing that is true that we don’t know (Fitch’s Paradox). Your classic case of the height of Mt. Everest before it was surveyed (a discrete fact seemingly manifested in the “real” world) seems to embody this type of unknown truth for which anti-realism cannot account.
So how does paraconsitent logic help anti-realism? It pulls an interesting trick - rather than denying that Mt. Everest has a height if no one knows it, somehow it accepts that the height is both known and unknown. So we can satisfy both the intuition that not all truths are known and the requirement of anti-realism that all truth be known. This much I assume (or perhaps hope) we can more or less agree on.
My suspicion is that you would be amenable to anti-realism if the “middle way” was not absurd (e.g. leads to a contradiction either in logic or intuition). Given that paraconsistent logic seems to save the middle way in anti-realism, you are questioning what else you must commit to if you accept a type of this logic.
Are we on the same page as to where we are and the sort of response you are looking for to “where now?”
P.S. On pain of equivocation (and certainly not to agree with him) I am vaguely reminded of the great perceiver required by the idealism of Berkeley. If this were the case, that there were actually two categories of perceivers (humans as traditionally conceived and something transcendent), it could be analogous to how something could be both known and unknown in a meaningful way and not of necessity collapse the middle way into naive anti-realism. I think there is a little ambiguity in what qualifies as a “knower” for Fitch’s paradox to the extent that our intuition is that humanity (collectively) is not omniscient and yet there are truths that are unknown by us.
[quote=“SEP on Berkeley”]
Another strategy, however, is suggested by Berkeley’s reference in PHK 3 and 48 to “some other spirit,” a strategy summarized in a further limerick:
Dear Sir, your astonishment’s odd
I am always about in the Quad
And that’s why the tree
continues to be
since observed by, Yours faithfully, God
[/quote]
And in case you didn’t read the Priest article I linked, here is a quote that you may find interesting.
[quote=“Priest on Beyond True and False”]
At the core of the explanation, one has to grasp a very basic mathematical distinction. I speak of the difference between a relation and a function. A relation is something that relates a certain kind of object to some number of others (zero, one, two, etc). A function, on the other hand, is a special kind of relation that links each such object to exactly one thing. Suppose we are talking about people. Mother of and father of are functions, because every person has exactly one (biological) mother and exactly one father. But son of and daughter of are relations, because parents might have any number of sons and daughters. Functions give a unique output; relations can give any number of outputs. Keep that distinction in mind; we’ll come back to it a lot.
Now, in logic, one is generally interested in whether a given claim is true or false. Logicians call true and false truth values. Normally, and following Aristotle, it is assumed that ‘value of’ is a function: the value of any given assertion is exactly one of true (or T), and false (or F). In this way, the principles of excluded middle (PEM) and non-contradiction (PNC) are built into the mathematics from the start. But they needn’t be.
To get back to something that the Buddha might recognise, all we need to do is make value of into a relation instead of a function. Thus T might be a value of a sentence, as can F, both, or neither. We now have four possibilities: {T}, {F}, {T,F} and { }. The curly brackets, by the way, indicate that we are dealing with sets of truth values rather than individual ones, as befits a relation rather than a function. The last pair of brackets denotes what mathematicians call the empty set: it is a collection with no members, like the set of humans with 17 legs. It would be conventional in mathematics to represent our four values using something called a Hasse diagram, like so:
{T}
? ?
{T, F} { }
? ?
{F}
Thus the four kotis (corners) of the catuskoti appear before us.
In case this all sounds rather convenient for the purposes of Buddhist apologism, I should mention that the logic I have just described is called First Degree Entailment (FDE). It was originally constructed in the 1960s in an area called relevant logic. [/quote]
Quoting Ennui Elucidator
I don't think that quite right - rather it accepts that the height is neither known nor unknown; and hence paraconsistent.
Since Logical Nihilism I'm amenable to giving consideration to a paraconsistent anti-realism. So I don't think the “middle way” is absurd.
The question may be were it is appropriate to apply anti-realism rather than a blanket acceptance or denial.
The priest article also notes that "The notion that some things might be both true and false is much more unorthodox". Such a view cannot be part of a consistent system, for obvious reasons, without re-defining what it might be to be consistent.
Priest's treatment of the third value of a trinary logic as ineffable is tempting, but I'm struck by the possibility of a different interpretation - nonsense. The devil will be in the detail, but to use his own example, if p is nonsense, then ‘p and pigs can fly’ is nonsense too.
But that is indeed an interesting take. Please, where now? Is there something here that counts specifically against realism?
Oh, and I should add my appreciation for assisting digestion.
Not to dwell on the disagreement, but I think the motivation to paraconsistent logics is precisely about explosion rather than about propositions without a truth value. We may get off on the wrong foot if we think that Beall is not asking us to accept the contradiction implied by Fitch’s paradox, but to do so in a logical system where such contradiction doesn’t lead to “triviality”, i.e. adopt a paraconsistent logic.
[quote=“SEP on Paraconsitent Logics”]
In the literature, especially in the part of it that contains objections to paraconsistent logic, there has been some tendency to confuse paraconsistency with dialetheism, the view that there are true contradictions (see the entry on dialetheism). The view that a consequence relation should be paraconsistent does not entail the view that there are true contradictions. Paraconsistency is a property of a consequence relation whereas dialetheism is a view about truth. The fact that one can define a non-explosive consequence relation does not mean that some sentences are true. The fact that one can construct a model where a contradiction holds but not every sentence of the language holds (or where this is the case at some world) does not mean that the contradiction is true per se. Hence paraconsistency must be distinguished from dialetheism (though see Asmus 2012).
[/quote]
[quote=“SEP on Fitch’s Paradox”]
Beall suggests that the knower gives us some independent evidence for thinking Kp?¬Kp, for some
p, that the full description of human knowledge has the interesting feature of being inconsistent. With a paraconsistent logic, one may accept this without triviality. And so it is suggested that one go paraconsistent and embrace Kp?¬Kp as a true consequence of the knowability principle. Beall concludes that Fitch’s reasoning, without a proper reply to the knower, is ineffective against the knowability principle.
[/quote]
Quoting Banno
So paraconsistent logic denies explosion.
Dialetheism, quite distinctly, holds that there are cases in which a statement and it's contradiction can be true.
Do we agree?
(Michael's position seems to be a third alternative - that a statement can be both true and false.)
Yes, the double slit experiment works with macromolecules. Maybe it would work with human beings thrown to crash into a screen too, for all we know.
Then see the final two sentences here:
Quoting Michael
Quoting Michael
Quoting Michael
Then look to what you first said in this topic:
Quoting Banno
And what you said later:
Quoting Banno
You accept that whether or not there are two ships or is one ship is an issue of convention, i.e. not independent of how we talk (or think) about the ship(s).
If we talk about the Perseus and the Theseus as being the same ship then they're the same ship. If we talk about the Perseus and the Theseus as being different ships then they're different ships. A realist can't agree with this, as set out by you above; according to realism, either the Perseus and the Theseus are the same ship or they're not, whatever we say, and that we can be wrong if we talk about them as being the same (if they're really different) or different (if they're really the same).
This is in fact demonstrably not true.
There is a mind-independent feature of the boat that remains the same throughout the story: its structure. The boat is a boat of a certain type with certain characteristics and behaviors, and that is all what Theseus needs: a functional, predictable, recognizable boat. Presumably, nobody on that boat cared about the precise atoms or pieces of wood that happened to compose the boat at any given time; these components are expandable and replaceable and do NOT define the boat; not anymore than the water you drink in the morning and pee in the evening does defines who you are.
In other words, a thing is not defined by its components. That would be a reductionist view. A thing is generally best defined by its overall structure and function. So it seems to me that you limit realism to reductionism.
It doesn't actually matter, as long as it floats the same way it's functionally the same boat. You can call it a copy of the same structure if you want to, but I don't see what advantage that would bring as compared to calling it the same boat with quite a few pieces changed. And the "copy" wording doesn't really work for living creatures: a tree is not a copy of what it was last year, even though much of its constituents have changed over the year; a person is not a copy of her previous self even though much of her constituents are constantly changing.
The important point is that there are in fact objective features that remains constant in that ship: e.g. structure and functionality. And therefore you cannot say that "There is no mind-independent fact that determines it to be the same ship." It's not true.
Of course it matters. Imagine instead of discarding the replaced pieces they are used to build a second, identical boat. Which of the two boats is the original?
It doesn't really matter, other than in your mind experiment. They are the same model, bhave the same way; not distinguishable. Who cares which is which?
Philosophers discussing the metaphysics of identity, and whether or not "it's the same ship" is true and if so whether its truth should be understood according to realism or anti-realism, care.
You only care about these sorts of questions because you define reality and realism as premised on the 'stuff' objects are made of. But your definitions of realism or reality are arbitrary. They may well come from a certain philosophical tradition or another, but they are arbitrary nevertheless. I personally find your focus on the 'stuff' a bit bizarre and unpractical. In the end, nobody knows what this 'stuff' is... So I define reality and realism differently, it's not about stuffiness for me. I think of it as about mind-independent structure and behavior. That's more practical in my experience.
That still doesn't address the question though. Imagine instead of discarding the replaced pieces they are used to build a second, identical ship. Which of the two ships (if either) is the original?
Saying that both ships have a mind-independent structure (of the same type) doesn't help you get at whether one of the two ships is the same (token) ship that left.
To start, you should check out the type-token distinction.
I guess it all depends on what you would call the "same" ship. What does it take in your definition, for a ship to be "the same"? In my definition, structure has to remain similar if not absolutely identical. In your definition, the wood pieces the ship is made of define the ship "sameness".
As per your definition, note that you are not able to distinguish between a pile of wood pieces and a functional ship. You say: as long as the material stuff is the same, it's the same thing, but what if the structure has changed and the material hasn't? Is it still the same ship then? Is it the case that a pile of wood pieces taken of a ship are equal to a ship? No it ain't.
In the example of them using the replaced pieces to build a second ship there are two ships with a similar structure to the original. Are they both the same (token) ship that first left?
And if they start building another ship in the shipyard with the same structure as the ship that left, is this new ship also the same ship that had already left for voyage? "We just finished building it yesterday, and it left for Fiji last week". Sounds crazy.
We can say it's the same ship if we like. If I smash a mirror then the broken pieces are the mirror that I used to use to look at myself. If I smash a lamp then the broken pieces are the lamp I used to use to light up my room. The wreckage of the Titanic is the Titanic. The Romandisea Titanic (still being built) isn't (and will never be) the Titanic (that hit an iceberg and sank).
But it is not called a mirror or a lamp anymore, strangely enough... Things are not defined by their constituents, therefore, but by their structure and function.
If your ship is at the bottom of the ocean due to a hole in the hull, it's not a ship anymore, it's a wreck, and you are probably dead. Structures matter more than constituents.
Two ships can have the same structure and function, yet they're two ships, not one ship. Again, you're conflating the type-token distinction.
The ship that returns has the same type of structure as the ship that left. But is the ship that returns the same token ship that left? Concluding that it's the same token ship because it has the same type of structure is a non-sequitur, and leads to all sorts of crazy conclusions (e.g. the ship built in Liverpool yesterday being the ship that left for Fiji a week ago).
Only types are definable though, tokens are not. You cannot define THAT particular atom of hydrogen. For any practical intent and purpose, it is the exact same atom of hydrogen than any other atom of hydrogen.
Therefore things are not defined by the specific atoms they are made of. It's not the way we human beings define and recognize things, probably because we can't see atoms and if we could, there would be no way to differentiate one atom of carbon from another. So trying to define or recognize a thing or its 'sameness' by looking at which atoms compose it would be highly impractical.
You can identify ships of a same kind though, by their name. The ship that left last week bears a different name than the one built today. Ergo they are recognizably and functionally different.
There is more than one hydrogen atom in the universe. The existence of water depends on it. It's two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.
Quoting Olivier5
It might not. They might reuse the name. There are many Olivers and Michaels in the world. The Titanic that was built in Liverpool yesterday isn't the Titanic that sank in 1912, even though they share a name and have the same structure and function.
Indeed, but they are all identical (isotopes aside) in terms of structure.
Quoting Michael
My name is actually Olivier, not Oliver.
Quoting Michael
If they haven't improved on the design, I'm not setting foot on this boat, "different" as it may be. :-)
The same type, but different tokens. When you and I each drink a glass of water we're not drinking from the same glass of water. Even if the two glasses of water have the same structure, there are two different glasses of water. The same with the case of the ship that leaves and the ship that returns. They may have the same structure, but they may be different ships.
Having the same type of structure isn't sufficient to establish token-identity.
For instance, if you propose to me two identical glasses, asking me to chose one, I would say: give me whichever, it makes not difference, it's the same glass anyway (and by that I would mean: the same model of glass).
So, if you apply the word "same" at token level, Theseus left with a ship and came back with another, but if you apply the word at type level, he came back with the exact same ship that he left with. Since types are recognizable but tokens are not, people would generally not waste much breath on discussing token distinctions or token sameness... Distinctions at this level do not amount to any real difference (see the example above with the two identical glasses). So when people speak of sameness, they generally mean type sameness.
Of course they do. If you and I are at the pub each drinking a pint of beer it matters if I'm drinking from your glass or mine.
Quoting Olivier5
Whether or not he returns on the same token ship as opposed to the same type of ship is the very issue under discussion. There's a conceptual difference between him leaving on a ship, the ship being repaired over time, and returning, and him leaving on a ship, disembarking, embarking on a sister ship, and returning. In the case of the former we can question whether or not he returned on the same ship, whereas in the latter case we can unambiguously say that he returned on a different ship (even if this sister ship shares the name and the structure of the ship he left on).
Are you trying to be thick? If yes, you're doing well.
[I]Before[/i] they get assigned this glass and not another and started using it, they couldn't care less which (clean) glass they were given.
Quoting Michael
The answer is fairly obviously and objectively yes for type sameness, and I believe it is moot for token sameness. If Poseidon decided to substitute the ship of Theseus by another of the exact same type in one instant, who would have noticed?
Then you're not interested in the philosophical discussion we're having, which is very much about the token sameness.
Everyone who considers the ship of Theseus or grandfather's axe and others like it. It has a long tradition in philosophy, going back to Heraclitus and Plato. And in this discussion there's me and Hanover and Banno. We're interested because we're interested in the metaphysics of identity, and on what makes a proposition like "the ship that returned is the same (token) ship that left" either true or false.
Identity is a rather complex question and approaching it through reductionism is not useful, i believe. We living organisms are ships of Theseus, as already explained, and I don't think that we are our atoms because those keep changing all the time. Tokens are by definition replaceable.
And that's precisely why I believe that realism cannot account for token identity in cases like this. Token identity cannot be reduced to the mind-independent "stuff" that makes things up (or their structure). I addressed the issue about living organisms like us here:
My token identity is maintained, despite the flux of my physical body, by the way I think and talk about myself (and the way others think and talk about me). I'm the same person that was alive 20 years ago because that's how I think and talk about myself. That's anti-realism.
For one thing, you are a very complex and unique structure. I don't see you as a token at all, and I doubt that "token identity" is a useful concept to apply to yourself.
For another -- since one of my (self-allocated) roles here is to popularize biology as the most important science of all -- let me add that your identity is also maintained biologically by your immune system. That provides an objective, structural underpinning and a sine qua non condition for your continued existence as a mental construct, able to maintain some sense of mental identity and stability. Without this biological ID maintenance system (i.e. your immune system), you would die very soon.
Interestingly, this system is strongly connected to your mental life: it is depressed when you are psychologically depressed for instance. So if you really believe that your life is not worth living, your immune system may stop (or reduce) defending and maintaining your biological integrity.
I guess what I am saying here is: reality is multilayered; there are many many levels and interconnections, which tend to be bulldozed by simplistic metaphysics, in particular the kind of naïvely materialist, reductionist metaphysics often inspired from classic physics. Biologists and biology-inspired philosophers know better than that. And one of the concepts that biology brings forth (as opposed to physics) is that notion of structure and the related notion of function.
These notions of structure and function are fundamental to the questions of identity that you are trying to explore. There's more to our sense of reality and identity than just the material composition of stuff: there is structure, shape, utility, behavior...
A recently dead corpse and a living man are identical when you just look at their material composition... Yet there are important differences between being dead and being alive.
I believe this is where we diverge. Anti-realism isn't concerned with explosion as a logical matter, it (the middle-way anti-realism) is concerned with how all truths are known yet some truths are unknown (anti-realism plus non-omniscience) in a meaningful (non-incoherent/useful) way. I thought my quotes pointed strongly in the direction that paraconsistent logic is not, in and of itself, the issue, but the paradox:
I am not sure how anti-realism plus denying explosion would solve the knower's paradox as a philosophical matter, it would just say let anti-realists say, "Yes, there is a contradiction, but you can't prove anything else as a result." If the anti-realist does not want to permit contradictions in the first place (How absurd!), non-explosion doesn't do the necessary work. I grant I could be missing a nuance.
Michael's claim regarding multiple truth values was addressed by Priest in the article when he discussed "value of" as a relation rather than a function. So yes, what Michael suggests is not classical logic, but it is a possibility accounted for in paraconsistent logics which leads me to think that paraconsistent logics reject the principle of bivalence in-so-far as it requires a proposition have only one truth value. This is distinct, I believe, from having a third truth value, i.e. paraconsistent logics are not necessarily multi-valued logics, cf. multivalued paraconsistent logics .
There is no problem of omniscience. Using verificationism as an example, if one is omniscient then for every meaningful proposition p either p or ¬p has been verified. Verificationism doesn't argue that every p or ¬p has been verified. There are many classes of p where neither p nor ¬p have been verified.
I don't need to be a mathematical realist to claim to not know the square root of 123, and not knowing the square root of 123 shows me to not be omniscient.
It's not a theory of meaning or truth. It's definitely not anti-realism.
It differs from realism because realism argues for unknown truths.
Dummett style verificationism also allows us to talk about unknown truths. It just says it's meaningless to talk about truth regarding the unverifiable.
One is either a realist about a proposition P or one isn't. If one is an anti-realist about P, then to assert P is to know P, so an anti-realist cannot say P and ~Know P. This isn't a problem, provided the anti-realist gives an account of "false" assertions so as to eliminate the need for ~Know P, as i'll mention below.
Firstly, suppose a mathematician says "The Goldbach conjecture P might be provable in Peano Arithmetic, but we just don't know". What he means is something like " A well-formed formula named 'P' hasn't so far been obtained as the conclusion of a proof object of PA".
If the above example from classical logic is expressed by saying " P or ~P and ~Know P" then it should be understood that the sign "~" of logical negation indicates that "Know P" isn't a referring term because a proof-object of P doesn't presently exist. Consequently the proposition " P or ~P and ~Know P" can be deflated to "P or ~P" without loss of meaning, where "P or ~P" is trivially true as per the definition of PA. Also notice that "P or ~P" and "Know (P or ~P)" are identical propositions in referring to the axiom known as LOM.
Likewise, to take a non-mathematical example, consider this weekend's boxing match between Tyson Fury vs Deontay Wilder. To assert today, on Thursday the 7th October, that "Either Fury or Wilder will win, but nobody knows for certain" is merely to say "Fury or Wilder will win", which it should be noticed is a description of todays state of affairs, and not of a hypothetical future state of affairs that doesn't presently exist. Therefore, even if this weekend's fight ends in a draw, today's assertion should be seen to remain true, in so far as it is an accurate description of todays state of affairs.
How do you know that your memories and consciousness aren't also in flux? That you believe you have maintained a constant experience of your consciousness from childhood until today may or may not be objectively true, especially considering the many distractions and sleep states you've been in that have interrupted that consciousness. That is, it is no more a forced delusion for me to claim that I'm the same string of consciousness today than what I was since childhood as it is for me to say that I'm the same physical component today than what I was since childhood.
Whatever undefined thing that lingers in your brain that keeps your consciousness stable throughout life seems no more or less incorruptible and absolute than your DNA that keeps your corporeal composition stable.
It just seems like you've removed objective reality from the equation as the anchor for truth and replaced it with objective consciousness, but I don't see why the latter avoids the problems of the former.
If so, it's undercutting itself because that isn't verifiable.
A vague proposition that is so vague that it doesn't have a truth value isn't a proposition. A propositional statement is defined as a statement with a truth value that is either true or false. https://penandthepad.com/propositional-statement-6943651.html
If no statements, as you've argued, have single truth values, then no statements are propositional. That is the result of removing the truth component from the equation. If I say "The hat is green" and I cannot define what a hat is, what it is to exist, and what green is, then I've said nothing about the world and not asserted a propositional statement.
You mean this definition?
Quoting Banno
So Banno's verificationism says that everything that is true has been verified and you say that verificationism permits unknown truths. Please give an example of something that is verified true but is unknown. As of yet unverified propositions are necessarily not true according to Banno's account and, so far as I can tell, a not true thing is false on the typical account. So which P is unverified, true, and unknown to be true.
Everytime I read "verification" on this thread I replace it mentally by "falsification". Works better I think.
No I don’t. Verificationism doesn’t permit unknown truths. It permits unverified propositions.
So why do you say that verificationism doesn't require omniscience? All truths are known.
Because under verificationism that isn’t sufficient to be omniscient. Omniscience requires having verified every proposition or their negation.
A verificationist might not have verified the square root of 123. He doesn’t know the square root of 123 so he isn’t omniscient.
You keep saying this. Who says that verificationism doesn't require omniscience? If omniscience is knowing every true thing and every true thing is known....
Properly speaking it’s knowing the truth value of every proposition. In the case of verificationism that requires having verified every proposition (or their negative) which verificationists don’t claim to have done.
Yet again, if the verificationist hasn’t verified the square root of 123 then he isn’t omniscient. It’s that simple.
Pressure=volume x temperature
It's not verifiable because we would have to have a time machine to cruise through reality and check that it works every time.
So you could insist that it's either true or false, but what does that mean considering that we can't check?
If the verificationist hasn't verified it, it isn't true. The nice thing about being omniscient is that knowing everything that is true (i.e. every proposition that has been verified) neatly discloses everything that is false (every proposition that hasn't). It isn't like I'm the person that said that Fitch's paradox of knowability is a problem for verificationists. This type of omniscience is precisely the naive anti-realism that is required when the middle way gets hoisted on Fitch's petard.
[quote="SEP on Fitch's Paradox]The operative concept of “knowability” remains elusive but is meant to fall somewhere between equating truth uninformatively with what God would know and equating truth naively with what humans actually know. Equating truth with what God would know does not improve intelligibility, and equating it with what humans actually know fails to appreciate the objectivity and discoverability of truth. ...
The great problem for the middle way is Fitch’s paradox. It is the proof that shows (in a normal modal logic augmented with the knowledge operator) that “all truths are knowable” entails “all truths are known”...[/quote]
Like any general law, it is unverifiable, which is why logical positivism failed and gave way to Popper's formulation of the falsifiability principle, not as a demarcation between propositions with meaning and those without, but between scientific and non-scientific theories. For Popper, non-falsifiable propositions are not necessarily without meaning, just without possibility of empirical testing and thus not part of 'science' proper (specifically when this proposition is also not part of a broader theory which makes some testable predictions).
Precisely.
Quoting Ennui Elucidator
Not having verified p isn’t the same as having verified not-p. You need to verify not-p for p to be false.
I posted a video to the shoutbox a while back that showed a few physicists talking about Popper. The consensus seemed to be that, with all due respect to Popper, they do what they want.
Too big a jump - no, it's a conventional view of naming that has little to do with the substance of the ship.
Quoting Michael
Same point. For your argument to work you will need to show that realists can't employ coventional views of naming. Cleary, they do.
Same for the last quote.
What you haven't done is show that realists cannot engage conventions in naming. If you can do that you would have an argument. So for example Searle is a realist who gives an extensive account of the conventional aspect of naming. You would need to show how he is in error.
I think you are working with a somewhat reduced notion of naive realism. Given that realism is the default possition amongst philosophers, something with more grunt is going to be needed.
Do “the Perseus” and “the Theseus” have the same referent?
Again, you haven't shown this. It is open to a realist to say that we can give the same name to different things, as well as to things that change over time.
Indeed, this is what they do.
So you are abandoning the principle of bi-valance?
Also, I think you are about to engage in a dangerous game when you suggest that P can be true and ~P can be true because they are separate propositions. The tilda, which stands for "not", is a logical operator, not a feature of the proposition being negated (i.e. the tilda is the logical operator that means that the atomic or complex formula represented by P is not true).
The answer is that it is up to us to choose.
Is that picture a duck or a rabbit? It's a picture that can be seen either way. Neither is obligatory.
Further, and more importantly in this case, it is a real picture.
That’s why it’s antirealism. We decide if the Perseus is the Theseus. Unlike, for the sake of argument, whether or not Donald Trump is Joe Biden.
I know it’s real. Antirealism doesn’t say that things aren’t real. You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of antirealism if you think that this has any bearing on the discussion.
Bloody hell - look at tall the parentheses.
That's doing my head in, since it looks as if you are both disagreeing with and yet asserting the same thing.
So on the one hand you say anti-realism is not concerned with explosions.
And immediately you follow this by asserting the contradiction that all truths are known yet some are unknown.
I think that just blew up.
Priest waves at relations, but again it's not clear to me that this helps his case. Sure, knowledge and belief are relational, and we tend to ignore this part. But introducing it seems prima facie to run in the face of omniscience. If knowledge is to be parsed as a relation between a knower and a proposition, then we jet stuff like "Beth knows that p" and it becomes very apparent that there are things Beth does not know.
Well, yes, but not just that. There are innumerable facts that are unverifiable. Verificationism deals with them by extending the notion of verification beyond bounds.
If you read ~ as an intuitionist, as Dummett would, then ~p only says that you haven't demonstrated p, and ~~p only says that you haven't demonstrated that you haven't demonstrated p.
Enjoy.
Yep. Seems pretty clear.
I think Carnap walked it back from dogma to a just a proposal for shaping scientific language.
Popper had to conceded that falsificationsim requires verisimilitude. Much of a muchness, both debunked.
Quoting Michael
Then we are simply using the name "antirealism" in different fashions.
SO, what is antirealism?
I gave this:
Quoting Banno
I'll add that realism does permit us to say things about stuff. You seem to think it can't.
So give your account - what is antirealism?
IS it your plan to defend Carnap against Quine?
No.
I appreciate that, however I am not sure that Michael was saying that. And yes, I should have asked him if he is rejecting the law of the excluded middle rather than focusing on the principle of bivalance to be more to the point. I stand corrected.
Intuitionist Logic from SEP
The point about LEM is that you give it up as an introduction rule, as a 'syntactic' matter. Semantically it means you are not entitled to assert that p is either true or false, for any p, without having shown that p is true or that p is false. (Dummett for one has no truck with third truth values. Tertium non datur.) And honestly why should we get to deduce much of anything just from p being truth-apt?
I'll leave you all to it --- my Dummett has grown rusty...
What an incredibly ignorant thing to say.. You should study these matters before making a fool of yourself.
Of course they do, and with all due respect to ALL philosophers. Nevertheless Popper did nail the issue neatly, and understood the process of research better than any other philosopher or even scientist, to my knowledge.
I wrote a short thesis in my Honours year on this topic under the supervision of a chap who was a student of Watkins. I've read more since - that was a ways back.
See https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/#ProbKnowVeri
But please, explain my error.
Cheers.
From wiki's entry on verificationism:
The realist explanation is that you are a unique changing organism with a history that extends from your birth to your death. You also have a unique genetic signature (DNA).
Well then, you must conclude that no statements are propositional.... (says he, propositionally), because all statements in human language are ambiguous, to a small or large degree.
Depends on what you do with the 'see' bit. If I were unsure of the location of an oasis, would we verify it by looking down the road and 'seeing'? No, because we're used to mirages, they're part of our belief system already, so when we 'see' what looks like an oasis we automatically distrust that particular feedback from reality.
So when Hanover fails to lift the car, why trust that particular feedback from reality? It's not currently part of you system of beliefs that such feedbacks are unreliable - we know about mirages, we don't know about 'saw-a-man-fail-to-lift-a-car-but-really-he-did's.
The point I'm generally making here (and this goes for @Hanover as well) is that no-one assumes all of their models are exact representations of an external reality, and no-one assumes none of them are. The choice over which we behave as if were true and which we approach with uncertainty is a psychological issue, not a philosophical one.
I just don't see room for much discussion around this topic because the jargon involved is piled too high and it takes a long, long, long time to get anywhere with anyone ... and usually results in one or both parties involved realising they're been talking about completely different items all along.
In more simplistics terms Noumenon is a bit like Tao/Dao, in that 'speaking of it' clothes it as an entity of some sort. Noumenon is always absent from human life, and just because I say Noumenon doesn't mean I have privileged experience of it, because it literally cannot be experienced and therefore there is nothing here I am really talking about.
There is phenomenon (minus the 'there' and the 'is'). Asking about The Reality of such phenomenon is just to misunderstand the terms involved. In terms of Husserlian Phenomenology the point is not to concern ourselves with the idea of what is 'Real' but to simply explore the phenomenal experience of being a human being. To take note of what we can and cannot imagine (ie. a four cornered triangle, a sound without pitch, a box without depth or a speech without words).
In the above sense the Noumenal is instantly given thing-hood by naming it. Thing-hood is a phenomenological matter of some said item rather than some 'pointing to' an underlying nothing with no name completely outside of any possible/probably/imaginable human experience ... in that sense the Noumenon isn't anything, it is the LIMIT and we're in no position to posit that we can know something beyond our experience (direct or indirect) and such claims to do so are a pointless exercise of self-deceit.
That's the short answer off the top of my head. If it makes no sense don't worry about it :D
Like Michael said:
Quoting Michael
And Elster:
Quoting baker
Quoting Janus
Which you can only say in hindsight, after catching your wife cheating on you. And it is only in hidsight that you will see certain past events etc. as evidence of the cheating, while at the time, you didn't.
To put crudely, a realist would need to maintain that his wife coming home late on a Wednesday is proof that she's having an affair. (For practical reasons, this is generally not feasible.)
Is this universal, or does it differ from person to person?
I think some matters are set in stone and other vary. The very idea of an external reality I think is one such. For me, it's the difference between models within brain regions with high redundancy and models formed by the meta-structure of those regions. For example, one's model of the relationship between muscle movements and visuo-spatial awareness of limbs can be quite easily modified, but there's a structural relationship between the visual, spatial and proprioceptive areas and object vs spatial systems which I don't believe it's possible to modify.
Also, there's considerable evidence that models of things like basic physics develop in a relatively predictable order during cognitive development, so it seems likely that these are biologically driven (environmentally influenced) rather than the other way around. Whether that makes them impossible to genuinely doubt though is anyone's guess.
I mentioned the variety because I think talk of 'real' and 'not real' is just unhelpful here. We use models with differing degrees of certainty, that's all. There's no need for a binomial distinction.
It is what Dummett said it is when he coined the term.
https://iep.utm.edu/dummett/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/realism/
Quoting Banno
Not exactly. I'm saying realism cannot account for how the Perseus (the ship that returns) and the Theseus (the ship that leaves) can be the same ship, given that the mind-independent stuff (the physical material) isn't the same. The truth of "the Perseus was once known as the Theseus" is not determined by some mind-independent fact but by the way we think and talk about the ship(s) (i.e it doesn't have recognition-transcendent truth conditions) and also that there is no one correct way to think and talk about the ship(s) (i.e. the truth is not bivalent). This differs, assuming realism in one domain for the sake of argument, from a statement like "Joe Biden is Donald Trump" which does have recognition-transcendent truth conditions and is bivalent (whatever we think and say about them, Joe Biden isn't Donald Trump).
You say this as if your responding to something I've said.
An exact genetic clone is in principle possible so this isn’t sufficient.
Quoting Janus
That this physical process maintains token identity isn’t a mind-independent fact. It’s not unreasonable to say that given sufficient physical changes the object is no longer the same, e.g with the ship of Theseus or the grandfather’s axe it can be warranted to assert that the ship and axe at the end of the story are a different ship and axe from the start of the story. Neither conclusion is wrong.
Whether or not this history of changes maintains token identity is determined by us (the way we think and talk about the object(s)). That’s antirealism.
Oh, sorry. It was related to...
Quoting Hanover
...which I should have clarified. The appeal to the stone was (so far as I understand it) supposed to refute idealism by referencing the fact that we treat things like stones as immutable facts of reality regardless of Berkeley's proposition. I'm saying the opposite. The fact that we treat stones that way has no bearing at all on the matters at issue. We all (Berkeley aside), treat some representations as immutable and others as not. The matter at issue is in the grey area where some would like to treat some given representation as immutable and others would rather not. Here the former team appeal to the stone, the latter appeal to mirages. Both are wrong because the matter at hand is clearly unlike either otherwise it wouldn't be in dispute.
For example, if Alice and Bob are watching the sunset together and Alice falls asleep, Bob can verify "The sunset looks beautiful, while Alice cannot see the sun", but Alice cannot verify this. Furthermore, if Alice slipped into a coma and died of a drug-overdose, Bob could then assert "The sun still exists, but Alice does not".
In other words, Bob's anti-realism about the sun and it's relationship to himself does not extend to his understanding of the sun in relation to Alice. If Bob is to understand Alice's observations about the sun as being about his sun, then he must understand her remarks in the sense of correspondences between her perceptions of his sun and his experiences of his sun. In effect, he understands Alice as being a brain in the vat that he calls his world.
So, are you saying there is a noumenon? Or that there isn't?
Because we are wired to, yes? So it's all Kant by way of Darwin.
It boils down to whether you can accept 1) humanity having a central role in what we call real, and 2) your own perception having a creative role.
Accepting that would be like realizing you're in a dream.
Sometimes. But the point I'm making is really just that it's scalar, not binomial. At one end is something like the very concept of an external world (totally wired in), at the other, mirages (we all know that we've probably mistaken the perception)...
We recognise that our models are guesses, an amalgam of external causes and internal assumptions. The question is over the proportions of each in any given representation. At one end we act as if there are few assumptions and mostly external causes, at the other end we act as if our representations are mostly assumption with a sprinkling of external causes to pin it all on.
If the relative proportions of a matter are in dispute, it's almost certainly some matter which is at neither end, so arguments demonstrating that such ends exist are not really relevant to those matters which are in dispute.
So we do agree, at least on that definition. Then you are right, I have misunderstood Dummet; "Dummett is packing more into the notion of truth than the disquotational properties..."
I'll do some homework.
Edit: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/11929/devitt-dummetts-anti-realism
I think the philosophical question is not as to which of our "models" (beliefs, ideas) are "exact representations of an external reality" (whatever that could even mean), but as to whether our beliefs and ideas can more or less reflect an external reality.
I'm not following your objection. It doesn't matter what I only see in hindsight, that is it doesn't matter that I didn't know at the time whether it was true or false that my wife had been having an affair: it was nonetheless either true or false at the time despite my ignorance.Why should the truth depend on my knowing it?
That a copy of you can be (in principle) created using your unique genetic signature does nothing to deny the way that unique signature identifies you as the organism that bears a history from birth to death. A copy of you is not you, because it was not born when you were, or in the way you were,and had not lived the life you had lived up to the time it was created by copying your DNA.
Quoting Michael
After I have made the distinction between a self-regulating organism which, if parts are replaced, replaces them itself, and an artificial construction (where if all parts are replaced it is arguable as to whether the construction should be thought to have retained its identity) I don't know why you would return to the artificial examples as if you thought they have any bearing on my argument.
They do, some more than others. That's what I'm saying. We can't but believe in some external reality which our representations reflect, we also would be naïve in the extreme to not even believe we can be mistaken. So the question is already trivially answered.
Thus the only question of import is, given any particular belief, to what extent is is caused by an external reality and to what extent by internal assumptions. That it is, in some proportion, caused by both, is something we can't help but agree to, so it drops out of the conversation (or should). The actual proportions, in each case, are what matter.
I half agree. On the one hand I see no reason to limit realism to semantic realism. Realism is about the existence of a mind-independent reality, not about how we try to describe reality with the use of human language. Dummet's concepts do not reflect the actual, social meaning of the words he is using. All this talk of anti-realism appears to me as artificial and needlessly confusing. Your gradient or scale idea is far clearer and more convincing. We don't need to chose a side for or against realism as if this was some sort of fight with only one possible winner. We can combine realism with the understanding that we can't have a direct access to reality, that truth is often hidden, including by our very ideas and concepts. So I agree by and large on the 'scale' idea.
On the other hand, to me the relation between our sense of realities and our ideas is perhaps more like a dance performed by two dancers (where each of them stays separate from the other but tightly collaborates with the other) than like a mixture between two ingredients. In the latter metaphor, it's as you said a question of dose. "The only question of import is, given any particular belief, to what extent it is caused by an external reality and to what extent by internal assumptions." (how much realism do you take with your idealism, or vice versa?). With the metaphor of the dancers, it's a question of how well these two collaborated to produce or affirm a belief. A question of precision of fit between our sense of reality and our ideas.
I like this very much right up to the word "precision" in the last sentence. Science might be like a kind of competitive ballroom dancing, where you lose points for having your hand a few centimeters too high on your partner's back (I'm making this up, just by analogy to gymnastics scoring, which I used to have to try to understand), but in everyday life I'm with LW: "stand roughly there" is not by definition inexact given the circumstances.
Herbie Hancock used to tell a story about when he was playing with Miles: they were playing some tune and Herbie, as he puts it, played something that was just wrong, he knew it immediately and was mortified (he was after all pretty young) but, he goes on, Miles played something on top of it that made it work. His point was that Miles was missing some typical preconceptions and could allow almost anything to find its way into his music. That's also a kind of realism, right? Allowing the other to lead. Reality's going to do what it's going to do, so our dance cannot be completely choreographed but must also be at least partly improvised. @isaac points out that such surprise is expensive, so we try to make good predictions that will minimize the expense of revising our model. (And you get institutional momentum there that can lead you to throw out outliers in the data that you should have updated on -- you continue to follow the choreographed dance despite your partner's deviation.)
I have mixed feelings about the "separateness" of the dancers too. On the one hand, we have to distinguish between organism and environment; on the other, they are tightly, physically and chemically connected. When I eat part of my environment, I get raw material to maintain myself with, but also information that goes into the model. The relation between my environment and my model of it looks at least a little causal, it's just that the those causes hook into some pretty complex predicting machinery rather than doing something like knocking me down.
The word "representation" has to be handled really carefully if it's going to be anywhere close to adequate as a description of all of this.
This sounds so reasonable, but I'm not sure I understand how it's supposed to work. If we took this quite literally, is a judgment with a higher external-to-internal ratio supposed to be better? Then you might be saying something like Hume did, that a wise man proportions his belief to the evidence. (Which is helpful, because in my mind I immediately connected this to a Ramsey-ish partial-belief model.) In practical terms, we compare theories sometimes on how much of the evidence they account for, more being better. But we also have to measure the assumption side, and it's true we like theories that require fewer assumptions, but sometimes the key step in theory development is adding an assumption so that you can account for a whole lot more of the evidence, so it is indeed a question of bang for the buck, of the ratio.
That, again, all sounds very reasonable as a practical matter, but there is a problem if we follow Quine and do not expect to be able to separate the internal and external bits of a given proposition. If we can't even do that, we can't sort our propositions into observations and theory. If it's holism all the way down, we can't even sort internal-ish from external-ish based on ratios because we can't ever determine those ratios. I expect your answer here is that we really don't: the ones that we deem most internal-heavy are wired in, and next come those that align with convention, in some sense, with a script or a narrative. Then the measure (what places a proposition near the center of the web rather than on the periphery) is not the internal-to-external ratio but this other thing, conformance to our narratives (and below that, narratives we're born with).
Yeah, your guess is right. I don't think the fact that we can theorise a scale of increasing external causes and concomitant decreasing internal assumptions means that we necessarily judge beliefs by their position on that scale, though it may well be a factor. The problem is, all we have with which to judge a belief's position on that scale is verification, and peer agreement. If I believe the pub is at the end of the road, that may well be partly made up of external causes (pub>perception>memory>belief) and partly of internal assumptions (pubs are usually at the ends of roads>belief). When I get to the end of the road, I'll find the pub there, but all I've really got is one more belief about the pub being at the end of the road, I haven't somehow gathered something of a different kind to my untested belief, just more perception/expectation combinations.
So yes, we might want to judge our beliefs by such a position on the scale, but we can no more access that data directly than we can the original data that informed the belief in the first place. I don't know if you recall a conversation we had with phforrest a while back covering the same ground. He was sure there was some solid ground he could reach about theories being less 'clashy' than others and I was arguing that the extent to which a belief clashes with other beliefs is itself a belief, we don't get out of the rabbit hole that way.
We can, however, develop habits of thinking which tend to give less surprising results when followed as means of building and sorting beliefs. We can theorise that this might be because they are further toward the end of the scale with a higher proportion of external causes, but we can't test them by that measure - it's a post hoc theory as to why they yield less surprising results, not a means by which we find them in the first place.
But we need to take care when applying the principle of surprise, it's only (in this case) a measure of the match between our priors and the incoming data. It's not to be confused with a sort of correspondence theory, surprise is not generated by a lack of correspondence between belief and external word, it's caused by a mismatch between priors and input data - that input data might well be a perceptive feature which itself is the output from some other model whose degree of external causality is completely unknown to us. It links up to the external causes only on the assumption that the chain of models is more influenced by forward acting updates (of priors) than backward acting suppression of surprising data. Clearly with our interaction with the physical world, this is going to be the case, but the more complex the beliefs get, the less we can be sure of such a favourable balance, until, with our most conceptualised beliefs, the backward acting suppression of surprising data might rule the roost and surprise reduction is going to make matters worse, not better (if correspondence with some external reality is our goal).
I think this is where my kind of Ramsey-Quine-Friston monstrosity gets us. Our beliefs are models which produce tendencies to act, but those actions might be to update priors to better match the data, or to suppress the data to better match the priors, or to reach out to the external causes to make them yield less surprise-inducing data in the first place, and by and large, the choice of tactic in each individual case is a largely a psychological habit resulting from embedded narratives.
Yes of course, it's not perfect. Keeping up with the tempo is important, in real time. More important than perfection.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Deviation is also creative though, as in your jazz example. As is darwinism. By definition, all surprises are not bad. Some surprises are good so we need to keep our mind and our societies open to novelty and change. A balance between the expected, the classical, and the novel. Something like that.
I agree with this. I'm not sure we could work out "proportions" very definitely, but in principle I think it's a good way of looking at it. But it would seem to be incompatible with any form of anti-realism.
Realism is about there being stuff. Whether our statements about that stuff are true or false is incidental to realism. Whether we understand things about that stuff is also incidental to realism.
A realist might well adopt a three-valued logic with regard to statements. Nothing in realism locks the realist into a particular logical system.
That is, it seems what is loosely called semantic realism, the view that realism must make use of a correspondence theory of truth, is a bit of a straw man.
Or if you prefer, antirealism is a theory about belief, and has little to do with truth.
:up:
Dummett's antirealism is the position that truth isn't recognition-transcendent or bivalent. It's very much about truth.
Quoting Banno
It's about more than that. From Devitt's paper:
You tend to avoid committing to this "second dimension" of realism, despite the fact that it is central to the position. As I have repeatedly said, antirealism isn't unrealism. Antirealists accept that "there is stuff", and can even accept that "common-sense physical entities exist." What they deny is that "stuff" (or "common-sense physical entities") objectively exist independently of the mental.
Quoting Banno
As I mentioned in the other topic:
Then is seems we are both realists, except that you call yourself an antirealist.
Odd.
Good one.
Maybe antirealists are only realist about antimatter, but not about the other stuff? ;-)
Try addressing the actual points raised in my post instead of deflecting with a non sequitur.
Quoting Michael
Hmm. Let's check. Did I address your last post?
Quoting Michael
Sure, that's Dummet's anti realism. It takes realism to be the view that truth is recognition - transcendent. The Devitt article questions this, sets out realism Quoting Banno
That is, that realism is independent of theories of truth. Hence, Dummett is not criticising realism as it is generally understood - he is criticising a new invention of his own, semantic realism. So it is open for someone - you - to accept Dummett's argument and yet be a realist.
Quoting Michael
What more? Here's the stuff you bolded:
Quoting Michael
...all of which reinforces the point made above, that Dummett's antirealism is not addressing realism per se.
Quoting Michael
So both realists and what you call antirealists accept that there is stuff, and the difference comes down to the phrase: "objectively exist independently of the mental".
As argued previously, "objectively" is either a weasel word, or it adds nothing to the statement. So the difference comes down to antirealists accepting that there is stuff but that this stuff is not "independent of the mental". Hence the antirealist is in the contrary position of declaring that there is stuff while insisting that it is always part of our mental world, which is Berkeley's idealism, or declaring that there is stuff but it is not part of our mental word, which is transcendental idealism.
Hence the antirealist is an idealist. But then you write:
It may be that realism entails semantic realism. But as just argued, semantic realism is just idealism. So this would become the argument that realists are all idealists.
But realists are not idealists, hence not all realism is semantic realism.
But if you are not an idealist but an antirealist, and antirealism is realism, then is seems we are both realists, except that you call yourself an antirealist.
So we are left with this:
(my bolding)
...and with mind-independent entities that we supposedly talk about; my opinion on the issue is I hope clear, see the private language thread.
...and the substantive issue of how truth and realism relate. What I've long advocated is Tarski's analysis of true statements, together with a roughly deflationary view of truth; hence my approach does not depend on correspondence per se.
As for verificationism, is seems to me that it relies on an unsustainable differentiation between theory and observation - I've mentiond that a few times in this thread, it's a common criticism, and I think the answers that have been priovded are inadequate.
So I think Quoting Banno
...a cogent summation of our relative positions.
Why not if you don’t mind sharing? Healthy skepticism? Unreliably replicable? Since humans are able to have these “profound” experiences, do you think that says anything or holds any merit about human nature/purpose, removed from the actual substance of the experience itself?
There definitely is not one for the Advaitin, or a sternly committed monist.
I draw no conclusions from altered states, however profound they may seem, because I see no reason to. As for "purpose", I suppose the attractive nature of such states could lead me to seek them again. I certainly wouldn't want to infer any general human purpose on account of them, if that was what you were alluding to. What I've said is probably inadequate, but I hope it answers your question.
You and me both on the seeking them again part… :joke:
Quoting Janus
I didn’t mean like a universal purpose that you may come up with that seems to make sense within that experience, I meant the actual nature of such “profound” experiences being able to be had in the first place, do you think it says anything, or is it just a feature of consciousness in a way? (that’s what i meant by removed from the actual substance of the experience)
Quoting Banno
Those were Devitt's own words about what it means for him to be a realist. He clearly believes that it adds something to the statement. And it's not just him:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/realism/
On what it means to be a realist:
On what it means to be an anti-realist:
The notion of independence is very much central to the disagreement. You appear to have recognised as such here, where you admit to being a mathematical anti-realist. Numbers, although real, are not independent in the same way that you might say chairs are. That's why you're a realist about chairs but not about numbers.
Quoting Banno
This view is insufficient. Regarding the fact that "murder is a crime" is true iff murder is a crime, does murder being a crime satisfy the existence and independence conditions of realism as described above?
Tarski's analysis of true statements ("X" is true iff X) and the deflationary view of truth (to assert that "X" is true is to assert that X) are consistent with more substantive accounts of truth (or if you prefer, meaning), such as correspondence, coherence, or verificationism. What does it mean for murder to be a crime? Unless you're arguing for something like quietism, one of these more substantive accounts needs to be made.
According to realists, our assertions (attempt to) refer to things and properties that have an independent existence ("the cat is on the mat"), and these things and properties determine our assertions to be either true or false. How is this anything other than a correspondence theory of truth?
Anti-realism is more complex than that. Returning to the ship of Theseus, that the Theseus and the Perseus are the same ship is to be understood according to anti-realism (being the same ship isn't an independent property of some independent object but a way we think and talk about the ship). That's not the same as saying that the ship is made of some mental stuff. Related to this is the view of ontological reductionists, who might claim that something like the fundamental particles of the Standard Model have an independent existence, but something like being a chair "is an epistemological phenomenon that only exists through analysis or description of a system, and does not exist fundamentally,"[sup]1[/sup] which would be an anti-realist view of chairs although not necessarily idealist.
[sup]1[/sup] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionism#Ontological_reductionism
The T-sentence can be taken in different ways. It can represent truth deflation, which means the truth predicate has a social function, but no meaning beyond that.
For a deflationist, which Banno claims to be, it doesn't make sense to say there are unknown truths, because there can be no unstated truths. We may speak of unknown truths, but this kind of talk must be deflated.
So how can one be a realist without correspondence theory? With a large dose of Davidson, it's possible, but realism is just dogma added on at the end.
And of course: what is asserted dogmatically can be rejected dogmatically.
From The Structure and Content of Truth:
[quote=Davidson]The realist view of truth, if it has any content, must be based on the idea of correspondence, correspondence as applied to sentences or beliefs or utterances - entities that are propositional in character; and such correspondence cannot be made intelligible.[/quote]
He's talking about truth realism.
Which, as Dummett would argue, is what metaphysical realism amounts to in the end.
I used to think that as well. Nagase explained why Davidson offers a way out. The cost, as I've tried to explain, is that realism becomes just another dogma.
Although now that I sat that, i think I should add a grain of salt to it.
@Nagase. Hi! If an advocate of Davidson is a realist, isn't that realism dogmatic?
I feel like I'm praying to a philosophy professor.
I'm not sure what your question is. Are you asking whether our ability to have such experiences points to the existence of a spiritual realm or something like that? It's easy to imagine that they do, and probably humans have always imagined such things. Does that make those kinds of things we (necessarily vaguely) imagine anything more than things imagined? How could we ever know?
If you are keen on Davidson, see Truth, Predication, and Realism/Anti-Realism
I'm not. He's just another American oddity.
From a bit further down the very same paragraph:
@frank suggested that realists could use Davidson to support their position. I showed that Davidson rejected realism. He might also reject anti-realism, but that’s besides the point.
You were saying that truth realism is the same as physical realism (per Dummett). That's an intuitive position, but Davidson's ideas about translation allow us to think of meaning in the context of truth anti-realism in a way that is compatible with (not supports) realism.
That is too simple. What he rejects is the realism/antirealism distinction.
Quoting Michael
It is exactly the point. Davidson maintained that "Given a correct epistemology, we can be realists in all departments" (A coherence theory of truth and knowledge).
Quoting frank
It's not so much that he makes realism and antirealism compatible as that he renders them irrelevant.
He doesn’t deny the distinction, he offers an alternative.
Quoting Banno
He wrote that in 1986. 4 years later in The Structure and Content of Truth he explained why he was too hasty in using the term “realist” as his position isn’t actually realist.
Davidson allows us to separate truth realism from physical realism. His own stance on physical realism doesn't alter that.
To "true" in "false" I would not add "unknown", but rather the entire spectrum of degrees of truth and falsity in between. Not one of the oppositions you cite sits exactly on one end of that spectrum or the other. Every domain posses independent reality of some sort or another, and every one is apprehended by a subjective being that necessarily perceives, and/or constructs, everything from its own perspective. Objectivity is a concept that cannot be instantiated in a mind.