Carnap and the Meaninglessness of Metaphysics
Rudolf Carnap wrote several papers in which he argued along a similar vein of Hume and Wittgenstein that ontological questions are devoid of meaning. This is because in his view, questions of fact only have meaning inside the framework the terms of the question originated. So it's perfectly reasonable to ask whether real numbers exist in mathematics, but it's meaningless to ask if they exist in the world, since the world is external to the framework of math. He also argued that questions of existence regarding the world must be empirically verifiable to be meaningful, with logic providing the tools for analyzing meaning.
I have always found such arguments to be prima facie absurd when applied to all metaphysical questions. So let's see if Carnap's critique can hold up to a few examples that come to mind.
1. Say you're a kid and you start reading stories about dragons such as Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, and Lord of The Rings. You become obsessed with dragons. You ask someone older if dragons exist. On the internal framework of the stories, dragons do indeed exist. Aliens don't exist, but dragons do.
What about the external question? Is it meaningful to ask whether dragons exist in the real world? Yes of course, and everyone will say they don't exist.
2. Astronomers tell us that the universe is bigger than the observable universe, which is determined by our light cone. We can ask whether an alien civilization lives outside our light cone in the larger universe. Is this a meaningful question? We have no means of verifying the answer. But why would the meaningfulness of this question change just because it refers to life beyond our light cone? What if the aliens (potentially) came into view, would that make it all of a sudden meaningful? Of course not, not unless we want to disagree with astronomers about inferring a larger universe.
3. Does the world have a causal structure? Hume noted that we don't observe causality, and it's not dictated by logic. Can we make sense of this question? Well, causality means that one thing or event, call it A, necessarily determines the occurrence of another thing or event, call it B. By necessarily, it means B cannot fail to happen if A (excluding other causes at play).
How do we distinguish this from an alternative view where there is no causal structure to the world? The regularity view is that B just happens to follow A for no reason, and as such, B might not follow A tomorrow. This is a meaningful distinction.
4. Can the world of appearance be an illusion? The Matrix shows us how this could meaningfully be so, but we already had Plato's cave, Descartes' demon, and BIVs. We also have stories with protagonists being inside a dream or a mental institution the entire time. So yes, quite clearly the question is meaningful. The world we experience can be an illusion under certain scenarios, and the ancient skeptics showed us how it's possible to doubt the empirical world. This is probably what gave rise to many different metaphysical questions, which is the appearance/reality distinction people in ancient India, China and Greece noted.
I submit that we can make sense of many ontological questions, such that they can be meaningfully debated. Universals, consciousness, whether the wave-function or collapse are real, idealism, etc are all meaningful, whatever position one takes when arguing for or against their existence. Some questions might be diffused by Carnap's attack, but not most of the ones which have survived the gauntlet of hundreds of years of philosophical inquiry.
I have always found such arguments to be prima facie absurd when applied to all metaphysical questions. So let's see if Carnap's critique can hold up to a few examples that come to mind.
1. Say you're a kid and you start reading stories about dragons such as Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, and Lord of The Rings. You become obsessed with dragons. You ask someone older if dragons exist. On the internal framework of the stories, dragons do indeed exist. Aliens don't exist, but dragons do.
What about the external question? Is it meaningful to ask whether dragons exist in the real world? Yes of course, and everyone will say they don't exist.
2. Astronomers tell us that the universe is bigger than the observable universe, which is determined by our light cone. We can ask whether an alien civilization lives outside our light cone in the larger universe. Is this a meaningful question? We have no means of verifying the answer. But why would the meaningfulness of this question change just because it refers to life beyond our light cone? What if the aliens (potentially) came into view, would that make it all of a sudden meaningful? Of course not, not unless we want to disagree with astronomers about inferring a larger universe.
3. Does the world have a causal structure? Hume noted that we don't observe causality, and it's not dictated by logic. Can we make sense of this question? Well, causality means that one thing or event, call it A, necessarily determines the occurrence of another thing or event, call it B. By necessarily, it means B cannot fail to happen if A (excluding other causes at play).
How do we distinguish this from an alternative view where there is no causal structure to the world? The regularity view is that B just happens to follow A for no reason, and as such, B might not follow A tomorrow. This is a meaningful distinction.
4. Can the world of appearance be an illusion? The Matrix shows us how this could meaningfully be so, but we already had Plato's cave, Descartes' demon, and BIVs. We also have stories with protagonists being inside a dream or a mental institution the entire time. So yes, quite clearly the question is meaningful. The world we experience can be an illusion under certain scenarios, and the ancient skeptics showed us how it's possible to doubt the empirical world. This is probably what gave rise to many different metaphysical questions, which is the appearance/reality distinction people in ancient India, China and Greece noted.
I submit that we can make sense of many ontological questions, such that they can be meaningfully debated. Universals, consciousness, whether the wave-function or collapse are real, idealism, etc are all meaningful, whatever position one takes when arguing for or against their existence. Some questions might be diffused by Carnap's attack, but not most of the ones which have survived the gauntlet of hundreds of years of philosophical inquiry.
Comments (469)
I'm a positivist at heart, but it seems fine to pick and choose here. Whether consciousness exists seems to me a meaningful question, and the answer is obviously yes. Whether dragons exist likewise, and the answer is very probably no.
But as to the existence of universals, I can't make any sense of the question. When I exercise my powers as an English speaker, I don't know what's being asked. And since I know of no other criterion by which to make a question framed in English sensible, I conclude that it's nonsense.
But those questions, especially the second one, are very emotionally meaningful to many people. The fact that something cannot be defined, proved or a test devised for it does not mean that one will not be emotionally attached to one belief or another about it.
That's one reason I like Hume. Some see him as arguing for something like logical positivism, because he demolishes popular arguments in favour of certain metaphysical positions. But I see him as upholding emotions by arguing that they are the only things that matter and that determine what we do. He frees us from the perceived need to rationally our justify dearly-held metaphysical commitments, by demonstrating that such rational justification is impossible. But I don't think he's telling us to discard the commitments.
As I understand it, universals come about by observing two aspects of the world we perceive:
1. The distinctiveness of things, thus particulars.
2. The similarities between particulars allowing us to categorize the world.
The question that arise is by virtue of what do individual things have the same properties? Sharing a universal object that has those properties is one possible answer. The realists would say that is by universals that we're able to categorize the world. Apples all share the same apple universal, thus making them apples. Otherwise, how would we put a bunch of individuals into the apple category?
It is a problematic concept, and it's easy to think that our minds are creating those universal categories, as opposed to them existing in nature. But that still leaves the matter of similarity.
At any rate, this isn't an argument for universals, only that I think it's meaningful one. Can you explain how you can't make sense of it.
But only if you limit the discussion to your 'experience of'.
Quoting andrewk
I don't see how this is possible since many people have made rational arguments for various metaphysical positions.
Quoting andrewk
I'm not emotionally attached to every metaphysical argument, but I can make sense of some of the ones I don't particularly care about. It doesn't really matter to my life whether universals are real, but it's interesting to think about sometimes, just like it's interesting to wonder whether the laws of physics really 'break down' inside a black hole, which is just as meaningful, except for the difficult math.
But this is begging the question. Carnap proposes that arguments for various metaphysical positions are irrational and you respond by saying that they aren't . What Carnap is really pointing to is how can you prove that they are? How can you demonstrate that the feeling you have when an argument seems to make logical sense had any meaning in the world at large. You certainly can't do it by inter-subjective agreement, 2000 years of philosophy has pretty conclusively shown there isn't any, you can't do it by objective measurement (that's Carnap's point) so how do you propose to do it?
The form and validity of each step in an argument, I suppose? Don't we have a criteria for what structure a logical argument takes? It's true that often arguments are presented in ordinary language without the rigid logical structure, or to elaborate on the premises and steps in the argument.
But let's say for sake of argument that we can't tell what a logical argument is. What makes Carnap's argument logical and not irrational? How can we prove that Carnap is right?
I simply don't understand the question. I know what it means for a dragon to exist (or not); I don't know what it means for a universal to exist (or not).
We perceive individual things.
These individual things have similarities.
The similarities allow us to categorize the individuals.
Categorization is evidence of something the individuals within a category share.
This something explains how individuals have similarities.
This is called a universal.
You don't have to agree with the above pseudo-argument. This is a question fo whether it's meaningful (intelligible).
Well, I've tried to provide a pseudo-argument for what a universal means.
I can try other sentences like, "Do some things have properties in common?" Sure.
But when you ask, "In virtue of what do they have properties in common? Is in in virtue of some other thing existing in nature?" I don't know what that means, because I don't know what it means for two things to have something in common "in virtue of" some third thing (or not).
By that do you mean you don't know what natural mechanism would allow for such a thing, or do you mean the concept really doesn't make sense?
If it doesn't make sense, then what do you think it means for individuals to have properties "in common"? Are they the same properties?
I also couldn't understand, for example, if you said "There are tigers. A flyger is that which explains this fact. Are there flygers?" The question simply makes no sense to me.
In the case of universals, I understand that there are things that share properties. I don't know what there is to say beyond this, and the questions about universals don't make any sense to me.
But flygers hasn't been defined. So what makes an individual tiger a member of the tiger group? If it's not a universal, then what is it? I'm asking because if universals don't make sense to you, then how do you make sense of individuals having the same properties? Is it just a brute fact of existence?
If it's a tiger, it's a tiger. What's meant by "being a member of the tiger group" other than being a tiger? Are you asking me what makes it so that if something is a tiger, it's a tiger?
But I really don't know what else you could be asking.
Quoting Marchesk
The parallel was intentional: you said a universal was that which explained some fact. But simply introducing something as that which explains something else makes no sense, because introduced ex nihilo in this way it does no actual explaining, and so I don't know what it is I'm supposed to be arguing about.
How is it that we have the concept of categories when the world we perceive is individual? Nobody ever perceives a tiger in the categorical sense. They perceive animals that are similar. What is it about the similarities that allows us to categorize?
A universal is meant to explain the discrepancy between a world of individuals, and the huge amount of categorization we perform.
It could be psychological, and that would be conceptualism. But now you've taken a step toward the debate being meaningful.
The realist would ask how individuals have the same properties. Unless this can be answered by some other means, the realist can just say that universals have to exist to explain that fact. But if you answer the realist, then you've conceded that the debate is meaningful.
Carnap would say that realists, conceptualists and nominalists are wasting their time trying to answer a question without meaning. But shouldn't Carnap have to account for similarity?
If nobody knows what a universal is, then it can't explain this fact.
Quoting Marchesk
If you can't articulate the question meaningfully, then Carnap (and anyone else) is licensed to ignore it. It's your job to frame a question meaningfully: otherwise, the demand that others answer it doesn't make sense either.
No, at least not one that can be demonstrated to correspond to anything externally meaningful. I'm no high level logician, but I'm aware of at least four different forms of logic all of which would disagree with each other as to the structure of a 'logical argument'.
Quoting Marchesk
Nothing. We can't. It's just one way of looking at things.
But what gave rise to the question of universals remains. Carnap and others might take issue with the meaningfulness of the universal concept, but there is still a matter of how particulars can have the same properties such that we can categorize them.
Then I'll assume Carnap's argument is itself meaningless. Isn't it a metaphysical argument?
You could do, but you have three options;
1. All metaphysical statements are thus rendered meaningless (which is self-referential, this being a metaphysical statement).
2. All metaphysical statements are meaningful. In which case the statement "all metaphysical statements are meaningless" must, by definition, be meaningful itself (and so cannot be dismissed).
Or
3. Some metaphysical statements are meaningful whilst others are meaningless. In which case there is nothing to prevent the statement "all metaphysical statements are meaningless (apart from this one)" from being the only meaningful metaphysical statement.
I'm asking what allows for individual things in the world to have the same properties. How is that not meaningful?
In fact, the behavior (the functions each object can perform) lives in the class. All objects share the same behavior by virtue of the class.
And indeed, introductions to this kind of programming often use Dog and Cat as two different classes, and go on by saying that this style of programming models the real world. This kind of programming came into existence with a language focused on simulation.
What this shows is that at the very least, the concept of a universal is meaningful and coherent. Whether it is when applied to the world is the question. But certainly we possess universal concepts.
Second, it's not clear in what sense you want an explanation for why different things can share properties. If you ask me why two things can be tigers, I could give you a causal, biological explanation; but this is apparently not what you want.
A useful discussion of the problem of Universals can be found in The Problems of Philosophy, Bertrand Russell. I tend towards realism with respect to universals, i.e. they are real. But I distinguish [as does Russell] the sense in which universals are real from the sense in which sensible particulars exist.
'Where does the relation 'north of' exist?' is just an abuse of the English language. This is not a "difficulty," but some sort of lapse in English competence. To know what it means for one thing to be north of another is to know that this question makes no sense.
We have the concept of universals in our language and thought. Tiger is an abstract concept for the individual members having similar characteristics. Even better, E=MC^2 is a universal law applying to all matter and energy in the universe.
So do we have these abstract concepts because of something in the world which isn't particular? Well yes, the similarities between things. So what is this similarity? Are the abstract concepts of our language mirroring the similarities in nature?
You certainly can, but you're going to have to invoke universal processes like evolution and natural selection to do so. Also genes. What is a gene? It's a mechanism for passing information for how to build organisms along. All of that involves universalist language.
I know what the word 'tiger' means, and I know what a tiger is. Something is a tiger in virtue of being a certain way, exemplified by certain members of the species you could point me to, or descriptions you could give of them.
If something is a member of the species pointed to, or has these described properties, it's a tiger.
Do I 'have the concept of' tiger? Well, what does that mean? Can I tell when something is a tiger? Usually. Do I know what the word 'tiger' means? Yes.
The question you asked was ‘what are universals?’ The chapter is called ‘the problem of universals’. The fact that you can’t make sense of it, is not necessarily a comment on what is being said.
The programming language above employs the concept of a universal in the form of the class Dog. Two particulars (objects) are created with unique names and weight. They share the same behavior of barking their name, weight and color. The color is also the same between them.
However, the code actually shares the bark function in virtue of the class. But the color property exists for both objects, it just happens to be the same.
This is clearly meaningful in a programming language, and examples are often taken to be modeling how we think about the world, with it's individuals and categories.
Russell is pointing out that "north of" is a universal relation that doesn't apply to any particular situation, but rather every situation in which one thing is north of another.
If you ask someone whether Edinburgh or London exists, the obvious answer is yes. If you ask them if Edinburgh is north of London, the obvious answer is yes. If you ask them whether the relation 'north of' exists, or where it is, the only appropriate answer, it seems to me, is to ask what they mean, or to comment that they are deeply confused.
Questions like this demand not answers but therapy. That you're asking such a question shows that you're very, very confused about something, and we need to figure out what.
Some have made arguments that they thought were rational. I don't agree with them on that. If they were rational they would be conclusively persuasive to anybody that understands logic, regardless of that person's prior opinion on the conclusion. Yet they are not.
Doesn't that rule out any argument that people disagree on? It would certainly rule out Carnap's, since not everyone agreed with his anti-metaphysical arguments.
This question, again, strikes me as confused, like asking 'what is the mortgage of jam?' How am I supposed to answer?
The only way I can construe a halfway plausible answer is: in the sense that some things are north of other things.
The difference between these two is that it is hard to imagine any experience that would answer the question about whether universals are real, but one can easily imagine one that would answer the question about physics inside a black hole. All one need do is sail one's spaceship inside the event horizon of a black hole and look around. Contrary to popular belief there's a long way between the event horizon and the point at which you get pulled apart by gravity ('spaghettified'). So there's plenty of time to observe.
Of course, one could never report back, but that doesn't matter. The doomed person's experience (and remember, we're all doomed - it's just a question of when) would differ according to whether the answer was yes or no.
The problem is accounting for how we can use north of in a universal manner when talking about the world. As Wayfarer asked, what makes north or the natural numbers so useful when dealing with the world? Is there something about the world that makes this so?
I fail to see how that question is meaningless.
And why do we need to be able to experience something in order for it to be a meaningful statement? Does all of physics include only events or things which can in principle be experienced by us? What about outside or light cone or other universes?
Are you asking how people tell when one thing is to the north of another?
Yes, where that one thing is any thing that can have another thing north of it. That's what makes the relation universal.
I would say yes, or at least all of physics that can be considered as science. In my lexicon other universes or events outside the light cone are metaphysics.
Does that mean you think it's meaningless to ask if an alien civilization exists one light year outside our light cone?
So by "do universals exist" do you mean "can more than one thing have the same property, or be in the same relation to something else?" Then the answer is yes. The way you know this is that many things are to the north of many other things.
All due respect, SA, this is possibly because you haven’t actually given much thought to the question. I think the question of the nature of the existence of universals, logical laws, abstractions, and so on, are interesting and also genuine questions. And questions that haven’t been resolved, so much as simply forgotten. So that you’re finding the question meaningless or absurd is a reflection of the fact that the way of thinking associated with universals has fallen completely out of favour - mainly due to the cultural influence of empiricism.
That chapter I referred to is not ‘bad philosophy’ - it’s philosophy. Betrand Russell’s exposition of such topics is as close as philosophy can come to being canonical. So, by all means, argue the case that universals are not real. But first understand what is at issue.
Asking "where the relation of 'north of' exists" is bad philosophy.
Russell was also a top notch logician, not that it makes his argument right. But he would likely have been aware of the critiques of metaphysics.
Right, so this leads to the question of what makes it so. Universals are one possible answer to that. Tropes are another. It doesn't really matter what the answer is for this discussion (I have no idea). Only whether it's meaningful.
To say that "the relation 'north of' has no location" is again deeply confused. Such a proposal ought to be bet not with refutation or argument, but therapy. If you say something like this, you are deeply confused in some way, and we need to take a step back and figure out how.
Bolds added.
You do know what a category is, and you admit that particulars can have the same properties and relations. So a universal would be applying the category to the world to explain sameness.
Here's the main competitor to universals. Let me know if tropes sound any more meaningful to you:
[quote=SEP]Trope theory is the view that reality is (wholly or partly) made up from tropes. Tropes are things like the particular shape, weight, and texture of an individual object. Because tropes are particular, for two objects to ‘share’ a property (for them both to exemplify, say, a particular shade of green) is for each to contain (instantiate, exemplify) a greenness-trope, where those greenness-tropes, although numerically distinct, nevertheless exactly resemble each other.[/quote]
Clever. I'll opt for option 3, where some metaphysical statements are meaningful. That means Carnap's might be meaningful, with the qualification that it's the only exception to it's own rule.
Now is there a way to determine which metaphysical statements are meaningful and which ones aren't? Carnap argues that meaning is determined by verification and internality to a framework. But those like me who think some metaphysical statements are meaningful will disagree with his definition of meaning.
So basically, I disagree with his starting premises.
It depends what you mean by 'meaningful'. In Carnap's sense it means 'has some inter-subjective sense'. By that definition then yes there is a test and every metaphysical statement made so far (apart from Carnap's) has failed that test, the test being that there is inter-subjective agreement about the statement, which there clearly isn't. The problem is, as Wittgenstein arrives at, the reason that Carnap's statement is the only exception is entirely because of the way he defined 'meaningful'. Everyone who disagrees with Carnap's statement does not disagree with it internal to its own framework (ie make the claim that there exists some metaphysical statement with which everyone agrees). They disagree with him because they dispute his definition of the word 'meaningful'. But Wittgenstein tries to show how it is not possible to accurately derive the 'right' definition for a word like 'meaningful' and so disagreements are dissolved.
And where exactly does that leave us? Because it doesn't leave me agreeing with Carnap. I still find metaphysical statements to be meaningful, at least some of them.
A professor I studied philosophy under, said of positivism that it was like the fabled Uroboros, the snake that eats itself. ‘The hardest part’, he would say, ‘is the last bite’.
While I largely agree that the question of universals is more or less rubbish, it seems to me that its no less a jumping of the gun to say that the question is psychological. Could similarities and the classifications thereof not have something to do with 'the things themselves', as it were? [I]Prima facie[/i] this does not seem an unintelligible path of inquiry. Perhaps the fact that we discern similarities between things and categorize them accordiningly also has something to do with our phisiologies, or our uses of language, or a mix of the above, which might also include psychology. Surely, one of the tasks of philosophy is to 'get the mix right', as it were. But to conclude at the outset that the type of question is psychological just is it's own kind of philosophical position, surely?
What is a psychological question is how people come to recognize that two things have the same property. Obviously you can't recognize what isn't so, and so trivially in order to recognize that two things have the same property, they must actually share that property.
For something to have some property, say P, is just for it to be P. This exhausts the notion. For x and y to share P just means that x is P and y is P.
Sometimes it's necessary for technical disciplines to invent new words ad hoc, but then after the introduction of the coinage, the environment of professional use generally grants it some intelligible meaning (or does so mediately in terms of previously understood notions). In philosophy, this often fails to happen with coinages, since the words aren't employed in any capacity other than the arguments in which people use them. In other words, they exist only to allow people to argue.
Though I don't know what is objectionable about talking about properties, and I have a hard time understanding what it would mean to say that things are similar, but don't share properties, or share properties, but aren't similar (in the relevant respect). To that extent I take there to be no theory, but just a banal rearranging of commonsense notions.
So if I said, I have a theory: things are similar in virtue of sharing properties, this would be very strange, because it seems that I've advanced not theory at all, but just sort of repeated myself.
As for the deadly intellectual minefield that are 'properties': https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties/
Quoting StreetlightX
The point isn't that similarity is a psychological issue – I don't think that makes any sense. But the question of how people come to recognize similarities surely is.
Oh?
You do realize that many of the concepts from ordinary, pre-philosophical language have their issues upon closer inspection, right?
Or should philosophers just respect what the common man means by free will, for example, and not try to do any further inquiry?
I'm not sure Carnap says what you seem to believe he says about metaphysics. Obviously, the questions of metaphysics have been debated for centuries, and those debating them have seemingly understood what each other were saying. And people can talk of dragons all they like, and know what is being referred to as dragons.
Carnap's criticism is a specific one regarding the misuse of language to make statements in metaphysics. That may be gleaned from the title of his essay "The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language." He says:
A language consists of a vocabulary and a syntax, i.e. a set of words which have meanings and rules of sentence formation. These rules indicate how sentences may be formed out of the various sorts of words. Accordingly, there are two kinds of pseudo-statements: either they contain a word which is erroneously believed to have meaning, or the constituent words are meaningful, yet are put together in a counter-syntactical way, so that they do not yield a meaningful statement.
Carnap believes that metaphysics consists of pseudo-statements:
We do not regard metaphysics as "mere speculation" or "fairy tales." The statements of a fairy tale do not conflict with logic, but only with experience; they are perfectly meaningful, although false. Metaphysics is not "superstition "; it is possible to believe true and false propositions, but not to believe meaningless sequences of words. Metaphysical statements are not even acceptable as "working hypotheses"; for an hypothesis must be capable of entering into relations of deducibility with (true or false) empirical statements, which is just what pseudo-statements cannot do.
I've done my best to explain why it's not. Universals might be rubbish on closer inspection, but they're intelligible. If not universals, then something else is needed to explain similarity.
Part of what is striking about metaphysics, to me, is that this isn't so: those debating it do not seem to understand what they are saying, or what the other is saying. Hence the sympathy for the positivist position that metaphysics is not an area of inquiry so much as a sort of linguistic hitch, to be studied anthropologically as to its sources, but not really possible to be taken seriously on its own terms (and indeed, those who debate it seem not to take it seriously on its own terms either – it's a kind of game whose playing has other edifying effects).
Right, and he provides the criteria for what makes a statement meaningful. In that paper, it's anything which is logical or can be verified by experience. It's an empirical grounding of meaning.
Is that because you refuse to acknowledge hat what they're saying is meaningful? Because I find it meaningful.
Quoting Snakes Alive
I don't agree with this. Most metaphysics might not have implications for daily life anymore than a math or physics problem. But that doesn't mean it isn't taken seriously by those who engage in it.
Yet you cannot explain what it means. Shouldn't that give you pause?
Quoting Marchesk
People take their paychecks seriously. Metaphysics, not so much – even professional philosophers can shout at each other during the day and go home at night to sleep, knowing that nothing whatsoever is affected by their colleague ostensibly holding a different opinion on some ostensibly deep matter.
I did explain it. Also, SEP has an in-depth article on the universals debate. Russell devoted a chapter to it. Plenty of people have found it intelligible. If you don't, then I don't know what to say.
Honestly, I feel like people are being disingenuous when they use this tactic in a discussion. Not saying Carnap was being disingenuous, because he provides an argument for his position, although I think his premises are wrong.
And a good reason for thinking Carnap's premises are wrong is precisely because plenty of people find arguments such as universals to be intelligible.
That's hardly surprising, though, is it? What else could it be grounded on but us, our experience and our use of language as living creatures that are part of the world? Language is an empirical phenomenon, its existence and its use are verifiable; why should its meaning be otherwise?
I think it's more a question of misuse of language and the resulting bewitchment of our intelligence as Wittgenstein said. So, for example, as Carnap spoke of, the use of "nothing" as if it's a noun and the resulting confusion. It can involve the creation of new meanings for common words.
I think Carnap's claim is that metaphysics can be "meaningful" in the sense that poetry, art and music can be, but not otherwise.
Language use is empirical. Language understanding is cognitive. We can form concepts which are not empirical. Some of these can be applied to the world in order to explain the observable.
A metaphysical question is meaningful if it's content is intelligible. I'm convinced that universals, as an example, are intelligible. They may not exist, but they are a concept with cognitive content that doesn't involve contradiction.
Since we're part of the world, I think everything we do is part of the world as well and is a function of what we are and our interrelation with everything else in the world. That includes thinking, What happens when we read, see, speak, hear, etc. can be considered cognitive in certain respects, but is nonetheless a phenomenon existing in the world like anything else. Concepts are such phenomena; we form them, communicate them and discuss them as organisms in an environment.
However, certain of those concepts, ideas, thoughts, whatever you wish to call them, are not empirically verifiable as others are. They serve a different purpose, It's merely that we should distinguish one kind from another, and not treat them as the same or having the same function.
Sure, but say we wanted to know whether dragons could exist on some other planet. The first line of inquiry would be whether there is a reasonable path evolution could take to produce a creature we would consider a dragon (large reptile that can spit fire and fly at a minimum). If not, then the second line would be whether a dragon could be bioengineered within what we know of chemistry and biology.
We don't have any empirical evidence for dragons, nor do we possess the means to check for them on extrasolar planets, but we might be able to conceive of them coming to exist within known science. If so, the existence of dragons somewhere in the cosmos would be a possibility.
The point here is that dragons existing somewhere else is an intelligible proposition despite our inability to verify it (at least currently). Similarly, the number of hairs on Julius Caesar's head the moment before he died is intelligible, even though we lack the ability to extract that information from the past.
Nobody thinks that's a criterion for meaningfulness. Anyone who goes down the verificationist road will say, x is a meaningless proposition if it cannot in principle be verified.
Okay, so dragons on planets too far away for us to ever visit or resolve the image to tell. For Caesar, we have no means for recovering the number of hairs on his head. Of course we can invent hypothetical ways to verify both involving time machines and warp drive, but then the verification turns into a theoretical exercise, which is not empirical.
We could start there. "In principle" is up for negotiation.
Can you come up with a hypothetical way to verify that there really are entities you'd call universals?
I'm not a verificationist, so I'd say an argument could in principle settle the manner. According to the SEP entry, hard realism and trope nominalism are the only two candidates left standing in the debate, as all others have been shown to be untenable.
Street or Apo might have a different approach to the question that avoids the typical answers in the universals debate. My contention is that it's intelligible because we can meaningfully debate the issue (regardless of how it's approached), with the in principle possibility of resolving it in favor of some theory one day.
Actually, I don't think we have to be able to in principle determine the truth of a proposition to say it's meaningful. Universals are meaningful because the issue that gives rise to them is the discrepancy between our perceptions of particulars and the use of universals in language. How is it that we come to think and speak of the world in abstract terms? Does this say something about the nature of the world, or just our cognition or linguistic practices?
That's a meaningful question.
And that just looks like choosing not to engage with the verificationist position at all. (I would add a caveat about "determining" the truth: a verificationist would at least like to know what would count as evidence, whether obtainable or not, whether dispositive or not.)
You assert that Carnap is wrong, and give what you consider counterexamples.
You assert that these counterexamples have a property M that Carnap says they don't.
Carnap asks how you know your examples have the property M?
What's your next move?
I think people are being disingenuous when they say they understand what the universals debate is about. My evidence for this is that when asked what it is about, they can't explain it. Ho hum.
One sign that someone understands what they're talking about is that they can paraphrase it, or put it in other words, or find different angles to come at it from. A universal, we've learned in this thread, is simply that which explains that different things have the same property. This is not a sensical way to introduce something or make it intelligible, and misunderstands how explanations work. Some other angle would be necessary to make the notion intelligible, and none is forthcoming.
Did you find the programming example lacking in explanation where you can create a class for objects which share behavior and types of properties in virtue of the class? You can also create class-level properties that all objects of that class have access to.
Classes are the role universals would play in the real world if they exist. The idea of classes and objects is inspired by our conceptualization of the world.
But as I said then, this is silly: to ask why a tiger is a member of the tiger-class is to ask why a tiger is a tiger. If this is the "problem," then it's not a very difficult one.
The simplest way to put it is that if the world consists of individuals, then how can there be a tiger class? Your answer is that they share properties. Okay, how do they share properties? What do you mean by "share"?
Because classes aren't individuals.
(1) Classes aren't individuals
(2) Therefore, there can't be classes, if there are individuals?
Compare:
(1) Teams aren't individuals
(2) Therefore, there can't be teams, if there are individuals
???
Quoting Snakes Alive
No, there can't only be individuals. Classes are a universal concept.
I have no notion of a class except a group of individuals, or a criterion for sorting individuals into groups. Obviously, from the fact that multiple individuals exists, it follows that groups of individusls, and therefore classes, do.
What else do you mean by "class?"
I believe I only need to provide the truth condition for a non-verificationaist account of meaning. What would it mean for a verification-transcendant statement to be true?
In the case of universals, truth would be that particulars have the same properties because of universals. It could be possible to determine this truth if an argument showed that universals were necessary for particulars to have the same properties.
So hard core nominalism. Are your groupings completely arbitrary? You mentioned before that individuals can share the same properties. I assume you group based on shared or similar properties. The class is what is common to the particulars in your group.
There is no "nominalism." These positions are all non-positions.
Quoting Marchesk
???
You can group things together however you want. It can be by a shared property, or not. It makes no sense to ask "how you group."
If the class is what is common to the particulars in the group, then you seem to be talking about a property. If so, why not speak ordinary English and refer to it as a property?
Sure, but we do in fact group things in non-arbitrary manner most of the time, and it's based on properties in common.
Quoting Snakes Alive
A class isn't one property, it's all the properties shared by a group. But okay, we can focus on one property. How is it that particulars can have the same property?
There is no one answer to this question. For example, tigers have a bunch of properties in common because they sexually reproduce according to a biological template. Nuts and bolts made from a factory have a lot of properties in common because they're cut according to a mold. Jokes by comedians can have properties in common because comedians have similar sense of humor, etc.
Alright, here is the thing. If there are properties that are the same across particulars, then there are universal properties. That means in addition to particulars, there are properties. However, we only ever perceive the individual properties. You still end up with this dichotomy between the particular perception, and the generality of properties. So you've replaced the problem of universal categories with the problem of universal properties.
So you're saying that things in the world don't actually have the same properties, we just think they do.
In mathematics properties are sometimes defined as the equivalence class of all objects possessing that property. For instance, once can define the class 'three' as the collection of all sets that have two elements.
This raises an interesting question: If the only green things in the universe were also glossy (as opposed to matt), and no non-green things were glossy, would we be able to develop separate concepts of green and of glossy? I suspect we would not.
The way we learn properties when we are learning language as children is by looking at examples with and without the property, and being told words for them, until we get the idea that the word for all the things with the property relates to that shared property. That learning technique (and I can't imagine any other) would not be available in a world where green <--> glossy.
It seems reasonable to me to say that in the real world as well as in maths, a universal is the set of all objects that have the relevant property.
Because our world is so richly diverse, we can always find examples where two commonly-associated properties are not shared by an object, to allow us to distinguish between the two.
The examples you use don't involve statements, though, and statements (actually, psuedo-statements) are what Carnap is addressing. Statements may be prompted by questions, of course,but are purported to be answers to them. A statement using the dragon motif would be something like "There are dragons on Neptune." We know what that means, but absent some proof, have no reason to think it's true, and good reason to believe it's not true." The result is the same with the statement "Caesar had X hairs on his head" or "No more than 278 angels may dance on the head of a pin."
It's clearly pointless to debate these statements, though not because they're meaningless. They're preposterous.
The examples used by Carnap are statements unlike those, made by a philosopher I will not name and involve what the nameless one called "the Nothing." Carnap claims statements such as those regarding "the Nothing" are meaningless, and in support notes that, first, "the Nothing" is used as a name for something, But, the one who cannot be named seems to understand that it can't be so used. His association of "the Nothing" with anxiety suggests he's using "nothing" in his own peculiar, uncustomary fashion. However, it turns out he's using it in a customary way, and that he acknowledges its use in the form of "the Nothing" is contrary to logic. He then dismisses logic and science, and states in a conclusory fashion that the superiority of science becomes ridiculous it does not take "the Nothing" seriously. "Thus we find here a good confirmation of our thesis; a metaphysician himself here states that his questions and answers are irreconcilable with logic and the scientific way of thinking."
Carnap is addressing pseudo-statements which purport to expressly say something "true" or correct, i.e. assertions, claims. It seems he's quite willing to acknowledge that statements of the kind he believes are meaningless as such may have other uses and purposes, though.
And it may very well be that Carnap is right in this case. I'm not arguing that all metaphysical statements are meaningful. However, I'm not well versed on Heidegger, so I don't know what he was trying to say there. Maybe it was like poetry.
We can in principle, and there are real-life examples of this. One of them is ancient: a human is not [just] a featherless biped. The words we use to predicate don't just have extensions determining the individuals to which they apply. They also have intensions, mapping to extensions based on the way the world is. Coextensive terms are not necessarily cointensive, and we learn the difference based on their application, even when we have no examples of them coming apart in the actual world.
Right, so we at least recognize that the world and math have a structure such that we can classify based on relevant properties. And yeah it makes sense that we know about properties by the fact that there are different properties to distinguish between. The world appears to be both particular and universal.
We can take a feather that has fallen off a bird, and use it, in the absence of any legs, to establish the concept of a feather. Then we can develop the concept of a featherless being as one that has no feathers. Thus we have separated the notion of feather from that of number of legs. That's what I was referring to when I mentioned the diversity of examples in our world.
If it were not possible to do that, 'featherless biped' would be a perfectly correct definition of a human.
In the hypothetical world I was describing, we can't separate the notion of green from glossy if everything that is green is glossy and everything that is glossy is green.
...especially since "existence" isn't metaphysically-defined.
Whatever that means.
Empirically, there are abstract facts and abstract objects, in the sense that we can discuss them.
Unicorns and Flying pigs? Sure, as discussable, nameable abstract objects in a story or a hypothetical discussion. (...but not if you mean "...as part of our physical world".)
Empiricism? All that we know about our physical world is from our experience. There's no reason to believe that our experience isn't primary.
There are abstract implication-facts, in the sense that they can be stated and discussed. What more "existence" should they have?
Some paradoxes and hard questions vanish when you leave-out the meaningless talk about what "exists" or "is real".
There's no need to claim existence or reality for this physical world, or for the infiniely-many abstract implication-facts, including the complex inter-referring systems of them that are experience-stories, one of which has the events and relations of your experience.
Michael Ossipoff
There are many reasons to think experience is not primary.
1. We have bodies upon which our experiences depend.
2. Our bodies were born.
3. Human bodies evolved.
4. The universe existed prior to human experience. It's also much larger than our experience.
And so on.
My personal feeling is that Carnap goes too far in his critique. Nonetheless I think he and others like Wittgenstein and J.L. Austin, and certain analytic and ordinary language philosophers did good work identifying problems resulting from misuse of language in philosophy.
...and you know about those things...how?
Through experience? :D
Of course. Our experience is that of being a physical organism. ...yes, a body.
That doesn't make the body metaphysically prior to the experience. Everything that you know about the physical world is via your experience.
You know that because your mother &/or father told it to you, and your school science teachers later confirmed it. You experienced being told those things, and it makes perfect sense in terms of what you know, from experience, about the physical world. ...even though you don't remember being born.
Yes, of course that birth is a fact in the physical story that is your experience, even if you don't have a memory of directly experiencing it.
Your birth is a physical event implied by the physical world that you experience, including what you've been reliably told by people who actually saw the birth (and people who certified it on paper), and what you know (from experience of one kind or another) about biology and the physical world. It's part of your experience, even if you don't remember it.
Certainly, and like the other events and scientific facts of this physical world, you know about that from your experience of being told it, and from the fact that it can be reasonably inferred from the evidence that you experience around you. It's a physical fact that is part of your experience of your world. You haven't actually seen the evolution of humans, but you've been reliably told about it, and it's convincingly-implied by what you've observed around you.. Thereby, it's part of your experience.
Yes, and you know that from your experience. You have and have had the experience of scientists telling you that, and they have a nearly unanimous consensus about that. Also, maybe your own direct experience of the physical evidence you've seen confirms that conclusion.
You could have added that this physical world was there before you were here to observe it and directly experience it. You've known that ever since your parents told it to you. That, and subsequent confirmatory experiences support that conclusion.
Scientists know that from their astronomical observations and from physics. You know it because you've experienced them telling you so.
I don't doubt that it's true, because what I've heard about that makes sense and sounds convincing.
As with all of the other things in your list, you know it from experience., In that way, it's part of your experience.
Basically, your argument consists of saying, "What you say can't be so because it conflicts with the doctrine that I believe. ...in which the physical world is primary.
We all, including Idealists, agree with the physical facts in your list. We just don't agree with your conclusions from them, your explanation for them, your Materialist belief in the primacy of the physical world. As I've been saying, everything that you know about the physical world, you know from your experience.
Your experience is what's basic to all of those facts that you've listed, and to this whole physical universe, its history, its extent (what's known about those things).
Presumably the universe might eventually be found to be infinite or finite. As of now that isn't known. And, If it's finite, it isn't known what its finite size is, or even what its geometry is.
That information, so far, isn't part of your experience-story.
Suppose that the universe is going to be later determined to be infinite. If so, is it infinite now, even though you haven't experienced being told it by scientists yet? Sure, in the sense that, when you're later told that the universe is infinite, then that will strongly imply that it was also infinite in 2018.
But obviously, right now, the infinite-ness of the universe isn't an experiential fact for you, because the cosmologists don't know, and can't give you the experience of being told that the universe is infinite (even if they're later going to find that out and tell you).
The argument expressed in your posting is just an expression of a belief in Materialism, a belief that the physical world is metaphysically primary.
As I've often said:
I can't prove that there isn't the objectively, fundamentally existent concrete, objectively-real physical world that Materialists believe in (whatever you mean by "objectively real" or "objectively-existent")...I can't prove that it doesn't superflously exist as an unverifiable, unfalsifiable brute-fact, alongside of, and duplicating the events and relations of, the uncontroversially inevitable complex system of abstract implication facts that I've been mentioning.
(I'm the first to admit that I don't claim to know what "objectively-real" or "exist" mean. Those words aren't part of my metaphysics, which doesn't claim or assume anything about the objective reality or existence of this physical world, or of the system of inter-referring abstract implication-facts that has the events and relations of your experience.)
Michael Ossipoff
I agree with this; although I would say some people do take it seriously, in the sense that they are emotionally invested in reality being one imagined way or another, even though those imagined ways are not really clear conceptions of anything substantive. I made a somewhat related point in another thread;
"We don't even need to have a preferred metaphysic, we could remain sceptical about all metaphysical systems and yet nonetheless be interested in them purely as conceptual schemas that allow us to look at the world in different ways."
What I probably should have said is that they allow us to feel the world in different ways, because the often vague terms of metaphysics, although not objectively determinable, are rich in emotional and aesthetic associations, and evocative of a superabundance of colour and tone. Also the ways in which they are combined together in metaphysical constructions can be in accordance with logic, complex yet internally coherent, and hence dazzlingly beautiful, and yet in the sense that they have no actual referent, ultimately meaningless.
So, I would say that in the sense with which Carnap was concerned he was right; but this fact does not entail that metaphysical speculation has no value. In fact, as Kant pointed out, the "transcendental illusion" it is an inevitable aspect of rationality itself. We can enjoy the game without having any emotional investment in the idea that there must be one metaphysical Truth, an absolutely ultimate reality that our investigations could ever lead us to.
I'm also sympathetic to the position that even ordinary empirical inquiry is the result of transcendental illusion, but that it, unlike metaphysics, has practical effects and so can be worth engaging in to some end.
I agree that there are no universal emotional effects of different metaphysical systems, Just as is the case with the arts, but I think there are certainly consistencies across populations of like-minded individuals.
I agree to an extent with your point about empirical enquiry, but i wouldn't say it is wholly the result of transcendental illusion. The entities that are investigated in (most of at least) the sciences are phenomenally real enough for us; we don't have to think they are also transcendentally real in order to investigate them, even though it might be a psychological fact that most people who do investigate them do think they are transcendentally real.
The other point is that we can think that the entities and indeed we ourselves do emerge from a transcendental reality, that is from real transcendental conditions, without being naive realists and imagining that the transcendental reality is 'just the same' as the empirical reality, without imagining that the empirical reality is a kind of 'mirror image' in other words.
I wouldn't say so in the sciences, soft or hard; we don't have 'intuitions' of things like populations, physical forces, and so on.
What we come closest to having 'intuitions' of are tangible ordinary objects, but even these are thought of transcendentally: we project them as seen from 'infinite sides,' and we never have an intuition of their totality. So, treating things as 'objects' is itself just a regulative idea. Unlike with metaphysics, though, it's a practice of using regulative ideas that tends to do useful work in daily life, likely because our language and cognitive faculties are adapted to do so, whereas the kind of metaphysics philosophers do was invented a couple thousand years ago, as the result of leisure time leading to funny linguistic puzzles (essentially, philosophy proper begins in sophism), with no native practical application.
The sciences are therefore almost entirely hail marys linked to employing these transcendental illusions, but even there, we do get some effects out of them (mostly technological, though we have no way of really controlling or even understanding its effects). Ordinary life is a bit closer to home, but even there, we have to act as if we cognize things we don't to get by, and life is basically a bunch of regulative pretenses that justify what we do.
Of course science provides enormous utilitarian and practical power; arguably that's all that it does. And the assumed worldview of secular culture is based on scientific disciplines such as biology and physics, there is no provision for a shared ethos beyond the utilitarian. 'What secular reason is missing is self-awareness. It is “unenlightened about itself” in the sense that it has within itself no mechanism for questioning the products and conclusions of its formal, procedural entailments and experiments.' (Stanley Fish)
So what interests me, is the prospect of a domain of real values. I don't say 'objective', because the domain of value does indeed transcend the objective domain. And this is where I think Wittgenstein was much misunderstood by the Vienna Circle; his 'that of which we cannot speak' was apophatic, not a 'prohibition against the transcendental', as is evident from such aphorisms as:
[quote=6.522] There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical.[/quote]
And
[quote=6.41]
The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value -- and if there were, it would be of no value.
If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental.
What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental.
It must lie outside the world.[/quote]
[quote=6.421]
It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed.
Ethics is transcendental.
(Ethics and æsthetics are one.)[/quote]
All of which I take to mean, not the denial of the 'domain of the transcendent', but the denial that this can be made the subject of propositions. But then to say that only propositions are meaningful, is to actually deny the suggestion of the transcendent origin of ethics. Wittgenstein was not an obviously religious philosopher, but Nagel says in Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament, that 'the religious temperament is not common among analytic philosophers, but it is not absent. A number of prominent analytic philosophers are Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish, and others, such as Wittgenstein and Rawls, clearly had a religious attitude to life without adhering to a particular religion.' Which I think is quite an accurate assessment and one which I share.
Ray Monk, who wrote a well-regarded biography of Wittgenstein, says that Wittgenstein was at odds with the scientism of our day.
So - the 'silence' of Wittgenstien is not merely the want of something to say; it is recognising the limits of language, in respect of the really very important questions that philosophy is concerned with in the living of life.
Somewhat tangentially, it would be similar to devising a perfect utilitarian calculus. We might come close but never hit that limit.
It's interesting that appeals are made to emotion to explain away the existence of arguments for metaphysical positions. As if a philosopher's motivation has anything to do with the soundness of the arguments they produce. And if it does, then all argument is impugned, since humans make arguments, and humans possess emotions.
But that's a logical fallacy. It really doesn't matter what sort of emotional investment someone has in an argument, when it comes to analyzing the argument itself. The only thing that matters is wether the argument is valid, and whether it's premises are true.
The point is that metaphysical arguments can't be valid, since their premises and conclusions typically don't have truth conditions.
The thing with metaphysical arguments is that they can of course be valid, and indeed must be if they are to be good arguments. The problem is that even if it is accept that their premises are not nonsense.their soundness cannot ever, even in principle, be established,
In any case if you had read what I said carefully you would have seen that I wasn't citing the emotional value of metaphysical systems as a reason for thinking they are therefore sound, and therefore for believing in them. Of course it is possible to argue for believing in metaphysical propositions; for example freedom, God and immortality, as Kant famously does, for practical reasons, but that would be another story; I was merely thinking of metaphysical systems as forms of art that we might enjoy for their conceptual richness.
I can make intelligible sense of the question "why is there something rather than nothing?", I can make intelligible sense of the answer "some ineffable thing created it all for an equally ineffable purpose". What I can't make sense of (which is what metaphysics claims to be) is the statement "some ineffable thing must have created it all for an equally ineffable purpose because...".
With the idea that there can be a 'must have... because' without any reference to consequence (which would make the proposition falsifiable), I don't see where the 'must have' comes from. What is doing the restricting? In the physical, empirical world, we do not need to know what is doing the restricting because all the while our reactions are thus constrained it remains true. The theory of gravity remains meaningful all the while the movement of bodies continues to be constrained in a manner consistent with it, but the ontological argument, for example, is constrained by nothing, so on what grounds can we argue for or against it?
The thing about the universals debate that always strikes me as a little odd is how hard it seems to be to show that any theory on offer (I guess we should really be comparing posits) is even sufficient.
So much for the benefits of theft over honest toil.
Yes, if I understand what you're saying correctly, then one could relate Quine's perspective (Duhem was very much more restricted in his scope, of course) to Carnap by saying that we are already immersed in such a large chunk of the 'bundle' that supports theories confirmed by empirical evidence (trusting our sensory inputs to some extent, agreeing with logic, mathematics of some variety etc...) that it makes sense to continue with falsifying theories reliant on that particular bundle. The trouble with something like universals (or competing theories) is that no one is particularly immersed in the bundles that go along with them (our language has intrinsic meaning, that which makes sense to us is also intelligible to the world at large, our apparent a priori knowledge is meaningful etc...), so all they end up offering is alternative possibilities with no feasible way of choosing between them unless you are already committed to the entire bundle which precedes them.
Just because I cannot make sense of some question that does not then mean that the question is nonsense. There are many technical questions that I cannot make sense of. Or, perhaps I have been knocked across the head a few too many times and I just cannot grasp some questions anymore due to injury.
It could just be the case that I am ignorant. And however many times I may read a book on the topic I may remain ignorant because of an inability on my part. Such has been the case, many a time, with math for me. It's only through the patience of a mentor that I've been able to learn the math I have -- on my own? Forget it. It's not one of my natural talents.
I think that's highly questionable. We feel the impact of physical forces bodily. We feel our own bodies' powers to affect other things. We perceive multitudes of like entities, for example, we see a forest of trees, or a group of animals and from that we abstract the notion of "populations'.
That's maybe more or less true, but I don't really see the point, because we can move around many objects or rotate some others and, in principle at least, see the whole surface of many objects, so it's not merely an exercise of the imagination, but of perception and living memory. Treating things as objects may be a 'regulative idea" but is not an arbitrary idea. It captures the way we experience the world as a series of gestalts, things that stand out for us, and also invokes the pragmatic sense of the word 'object' as meaning something like 'intention'. We can also think of things as interrelated processes. All our ways of thinking about things have their applications, and none of them are merely arbitrary or trivial, as the dismissive way you are treating 2500 years of philosophy seems to imply.
You mean many reasons to think that human experience is not primary?
There is no "must have" except in purely deductive arguments. But purely deductive arguments do not prove the soundness of their premises; they are merely formal, not substantive arguments, so the "must have" is always going to be a relative, not an absolute, one.
Inductive arguments give us reasons to think that something might be the case given what has been observed; so there is no "must have" there, either. As I said before, the soundness of any argument, other than the empty soundness of a tautology cannot ever be proven.
So I don't see metaphysical arguments and systems as fulfilling the role of a search for truth at all, but rather as a search for beauty, in the form of understanding.
LOL! That's just the very, very beginning of the discussion, and people are going to want to know what you mean by a human being conscious. It can mean more than one thing. A little bit more discussion, and you'll find out that people don't always agree on what it means for a human to be conscious.
That's the thing with ordinary language. Everyone can agree when the term is sufficiently vague. But once you start discussing it in any depth, differences emerge, along with difficulties raised by what everyone thought was simple concept on the face of it.
And then lo and behold, you find out some people think that plants are actually conscious (along with rocks and everything else).
This is better than the situation in philosophy; vague terms are meaningful, but meaningless ones are not.
Yes,that's exactly the point I'm making. Metaphysical arguments cannot say anything meaningful about the soundness of their premises. They may well make valid logical inferences (or deductions) from the connections between the terms they've defined, but they cannot demonstrate even the inductive soundness of the definitions of those terms because the entities they're defining do not have any inter-subjective agreement, we cannot collectively agree on our experience of them to any extent.
You may or may not be aware of Quine's 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism', but this is the point he's making in the second Dogma. Whilst we cannot make a clear an objective dividing line between that which is empirical (science) and that which is metaphysical, we definitely can say that with decreasing empirical basis propositions become more and more vague until they eventually become meaningless.
We can meaningfully discuss gravity because we all agree on our experience of it, we can quite meaningfully discuss conciousness or free will in a limited sense because there is widespread agreement that we at least have such an experience (limited in that we do not all agree on the nature of that experience), but we can have virtually no meaningful discussion about something like universals or tropes because we do not even begin to agree on the nature of the experience that they are attempting to define.
Quoting Janus
That's a very reasonable and consistent way to look at it, I'm much inclined that way myself, but that it most definitely not the way metaphysics is actually treated, particularly in lay discussions.
You're begging the question. How do you propose to demonstrate that the disagreements are 'understood'?
And again, you're just talking about the question. Of course the question is more complicated than that, of course people want to know what you mean by 'concious' and different opinions emerge, but that is not the claim that a serious debate in metaphysics is making. The claim that a serious debate metaphysics is making is that there is some means of determining the answer to that question, determining what conciousness actually is, determining which of the differences is actually correct (or even closer to it). It's that assertion that you've failed to provide any justification for.
What possible reason do I have for thinking that an analysis of the sentences used in an argument about those terms will actually yield some information about the way the world actually is?
Well hopefully one isn't just talking about linguistic analysis when asking questions about the world. Seems like that's what the anti-metaphysical crowd would prefer to do. But when someone like David Chalmers is talking about consciousness, he's not interested in only the words being used, but rather whether subjectivity can be accounted for by an objective view of the world (whether it be physicalism, functionalism, behaviorism, etc).
This is a silly game to play. How could they not be understood once one is well enough versed in the debate?
Actually, we can do so by noting that while we perceive individual things, our language is full of universal talk. This is at least partly based on the further perception that some universals have the same property values. This leads to the question of what is it about the world or ourselves which results in creating universal concepts.
The SEP entry spells this out in detail. There's nothing so incredibly esoteric or mystical about the debate that any person of average intelligence sufficiently motivated can't understand.
Some aspects of the various positions and disputes might be technical enough to present difficulties in understanding for non-philosophers, but that would likely be the case for any long standing philosophical discussion.
Any dispute on any topic will require moving beyond vague terms. If I ask whether Thor is more powerful than the Hulk in the Marvel Universe (comics or movies), then this is going to lead to a discussion of who's physically stronger versus who has access to what powers in various incarnations of both characters such that you won't end up with a simple answer.
Firstly, Chalmers himself admits that "in talking about conscious experience, it is notoriously difficult to pin down the subject matter.", but more importantly, you're still talking about the question. Chalmers may well be "interested in ... whether subjectivity can be accounted for by an objective view of the world", but the claim of his (or any other metaphysics of conciousness) is not to demonstrate interest in the subject, but to provide objective (or at least inter-subjective) insights into it. It is not whether he can ask the question that's being disputed, it whether he can answer it. In order to do so, he would first have to define specifically what it is he's investigating and there is no objective answer to that question so the project falls flat before it has even started.
Quoting Marchesk
Very easily, I'd say it's self-evident. If a proposition is testable by rational analysis then no two people with equal capacity for rational analysis could arrive at a different conclusion to that test. Yet thousands of people with equal capacity for rational analysis have arrived at different conclusions to that test. It follows then that either rational analysis is not universal, or that those doing the testing have misunderstood each others arguments. How else do you account for differences of opinion on metaphysical matters?
Quoting Marchesk
Is it? How do you propose to prove that? Maybe it's due to the fact that we find talk of universals to be useful despite knowing that their definition is vague and not at all existent in the world as it actually is. We find the term 'quite' and 'lots' useful too despite the fact that neither refer to a value in the real world which can be identified specifically.
Quoting Marchesk
And so it seems we're back to where we started. Yes, it may lead to "the question", but none of this shows any reason to believe we can provide a meaningfulanswer to it.
The same way I account of differences of opinions on anything. It doesn't make the disagreements meaningless, the questions that led to the disputes, or the potential answers provided.
Quoting Pseudonym
The answers provided are meaningful, but it's not a settled manner which one, if any, are true.
Oh but we all know that gravity is so much more than our experience of it, from bending spacetime to relativistic frames. And before Newton, there was no concept of gravity, despite our experiences in common of falling things.
What is that way?
Quoting Marchesk
I thought that was the proposition we were debating, you're referencing it as if it were a brute fact. I'm asking to you provide an account of the way in which they are meaningful. In what way does the argument about universals, including any proposed solution, carry meaning?
Quoting Marchesk
Yes, but the point is all these theories have to ultimately account for something which we widely share, or agree on - the experience of objects subject to gravity. All of these theories can be accepted or dismissed on the basis of their ability to account for something we widely agree on.
This is not the case with much of metaphysics where we do not have a phenomenon we widely agree on, the nature of which the theory is attempting to explain. This means that any such metaphysical theory can be refuted either with a flaw in its logic, or with a denial that the phenomenon has the properties ascribed to it, and there's no way of deciding that latter dispute. We widely agree on the properties of the experience of gravity, we do not widely agree on the properties of the experience of consciousness, so any theory to account for those properties is only going to be meaningful to those who agree that those are indeed the properties of the experience, not meaningful sensu lato.
How about time? You have the A and B theories of time. This is metaphysics. I understand both. They are clear and easy to understand. We can meaningfully disagree on them.
Does the question of time also arise prior to metaphysics?
I've not read the book, but I've read some papers based on it so I'm moderately familiar with the propositions in it, but rather than put the discussion on hold until I've read the whole thing, perhaps you could paraphrase a proposition from it that you think is particularly well reasoned and I'll attempt to use it to explain what I mean (or fail to and have to eat my hat).
How is it that the dispute doesn't make sense to you?
I'm arguing against the claim that what philosophers say, in respect of metaphysics, is nonsense. My strategy is to use examples -- but thus far it seems to me that examples, for you, are either clearly philosophical and clearly nonsense, or clearly not-philosophical and clearly not interesting with respect to whatever it is that philosophers say.
Now, if philosophy is defined as that which is nonsensical of course that would follow just by definition. But it'd be a rather uninteresting theory of philosophy, given what you claim. So how do you sort what counts as philosophy?
Also, are you claiming simply that what philosophers say is uninteresting or not worth your time, or are you claiming that what philosophers say is strictly nonsense (with respect to metaphysics, of course)?
It's not a matter of definition. We can just look at what philosophy actually does. In fact, the Socratic method literally originated in a series of linguistic confusions. In their leisure some rich Greeks figured out that you could ask, out of context, "What is X?" and tie yourself in knots trying to answer. This was an amusing game, and easily mistakable for inquiry. This technique itself was born out of the influence of the sophists, who made a living doing rhetoric, i.e. teaching wealthy young men how to trip up their opponents by making use of specious fallacies they had discovered, i.e. linguistic tricks.
I'd like to post a briefer answer to this:
Quoting Marchesk
I've been saying that your experience is a life-experience possibility-story, consisting of a complex system of inter-referring abstract implication-facts.
There's no such thing as mutually-inconsistent facts.
So, experience must be self-consistent.
Your experience is an experience of being a physical being in a physical world.
...an experience that, for consistency, would have to include a body. Evidence of previous evolution of that body is consistent with that experience, Not having a body, or evidence of no evolution would be inconsistent with your experience. ...as would evidence that there was no physical universe before you were born.
With your experience of being a physical being in a physical world, your experience of having a body, and of that body having evolved, and of there having been a physical universe before that...All those things are part of a consistence-necessitated physical mechanism consistent with there being you, a physical being in a physical universe.
By the protagonist of a life-experience story, of course a physical world is perceived. Your experience is of being a physical being in a physical world. So, what else would you expect, than to experience a physical world that produced you, and is consistent with you.
That necessity is a truism.
Michael Ossipoff
Right, so from that I infer that I'm a physical being. However, the mental is not so easily subsumed under the physical, so maybe I'm not entirely physical.
At any rate, a question does arise as to whether the world is physical, a combination of physical and mental, mental, or something else. This is a metaphysical question, and it's easy enough to see how it came about. It was being debated in one form or another in the ancient philosophical world of several independent cultures.
...such as the thread in which Janus objected that I was disregarding the necessary distinction between "substantive" and "logical". I asked Janus what he meant by "substantive". Janus didn't have an answer, because he didn't know what he meant by "substantive".
So, let me help Janus out, by suggesting a few things that he might mean by "substantive":
1. "Substantive" means "Physical" or "Perceived as physical".
Then the physical world is "substantive" by definition, I don't deny that there's (in some way) a physical world. I merely point out that there's no reason to believe that it's other than a complex system of inter-referring abstract implication-facts.
2, "Substantive" means "More than, or other than, a system of inter-referring abstract implication-facts".
In that case, it isn't that I don't recognize or accept the distinction It's just that I don't agree that anything describable, arguable, or completely discussable in metaphysics is "substantive".
In fact, long before Janus made his "substantive vs logical" objection, I'd been saying the whole of the elements of metaphysics, the whole of what is describable, arguable and completely discussable is insubstantial (...in this 2nd sense.)
And, in fact, contrary to what Janus implies, there is significant disagreement among philosophers, regarding the matter of whether there's anything "substantial" among the elements of metaphysics, the metaphysically describable and arguable things.
Michael Ossipoff
"Substantive" appllies to propositions which refer to, or have implications for, actual experience, which merely logical propositions do not.
I find nothing to disagree with here!
Quoting Pseudonym
I think that's true; but I would then say that if so, then the discussants do not properly understand what they are trying to do, or they are trying to do something which is not possible.
I’d said:
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Of course.
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The animal that each of us experiences being, is entirely physical.
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I agree that there’s more to it than that. Of course there is. You know there is.
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Experience is primary.
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Each of us is the protagonist who is complementarily-implied in a life-experience story about our experience.
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That story is for you and about your experience.
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That there are infinitely-many such stories, among the infinity of abstract facts, and inter-referring systems of them, is uncontroversially-inevitable.
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No need to ask why there’s us, why you’re in a life, or why metaphysically there’s something instead of nothing.
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In that experiencer/experienced-world complementarity, the protagonist, the experiencer, is, we’d surely agree, the more fundamental and primary part of that complementarity.
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There’s one of you, and innumerable things in your experienced-world.
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So, there’s metaphysical support for the notion that Consciousness is primary and fundamental, even at the metaphysical level.
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That’s the choice that the academic philosophers offer to us, but I wouldn’t word the possibilities in that way.
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First, it depends on what is meant by “the world”.
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If it refers to this physical universe, then of course it’s undeniably physical. …even if this physical universe is quite insubstantial (in the sense of not being other than the logical system that I’ve described).
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If it refers to the metaphysical world, all that metaphysically is, all that describably, completely discussably arguably and assertably is, then there’s no reason to believe that it or its things are other than the insubstantial-ness that I’ve described.
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If it refers to Reality itself, all that is, in and beyond metaphysics, then little if anything can be said about it, but it most surely isn’t physical.
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Isn’t there a good case for saying that Consciousness, instead of just being part of (even if the main part of) a logical system about an experience of life in a physical universe, is also complementary with that larger collection of all of the (mostly unrelated and not inter-referring) abstract facts, and primary in that complentarity too? (That possible suggestion isn’t part of my metaphysics).
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Someone could say that it’s arbitrary what you call fundamental and primary, but not only our experienced-world, but also all that we know and can describe, discuss, argue and assert, is centered around us. So could we be excused for calling Consciousness fundamental in metaphysics as a whole, and not just in each person’s experience-story and the physical universe that is its setting?
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(That possible suggestion in the two previous paragraphs isn’t part of my metaphysics).
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As I’ve been saying, I make no claim that this physical world or the abstract facts I speak of are real or existent, whatever that would mean. I don’t claim that any of the antecedents of any of the abstract implication-facts that I speak of are true.
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I define “insubstantial” as not consisting of other than the complex system of abstract implication facts that I’ve spoken of. There’s no reason to believe that this physical world isn’t insubstantial.
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If anyone wants to say that this physical world is other than what I’ve described, then they should say exactly what else they’re saying that it is, and what they mean by “real”, “objectively-existent”, “substantive”, etc., if they use such a word.
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I can’t prove that the Materialist’s world, whatever exactly he means by it, doesn’t “exist” (whatever he means by that) in some unspecified way, as an unverifiable and unfalsifiable brute-fact, alongside of, and duplicating the events and relations of, the uncontroversially-inevitable logical-system that I’ve described.
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So I’m not saying that one particular metaphysics is right and all the others are wrong. …I’m saying only that there’s no reason to believe that our physical world is other than what I’ve described.
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I don’t think that metaphysics can be more certain or definite than that.
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There’s no physics experiment that could make that determination.
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But there are definite things that can be uncontroversially-said about metaphysics. …such as things that I’ve been saying.
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And some standards that apply to science apply to metaphysics too. Brute-facts, assumptions, and unverifiable, unfalsifiable propositions are suspect.
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…like those of Materialism.
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Michael Ossipoff
Quoting Janus
The complex system of inter-referring abstract implication-facts that is your life-experience possibility-story is all about your experience..
So, by your definition, it's substantive.
It's about your actual experience. In fact, it is your actual experience.
It is events and things of your physical world, in your experience, as experienced by you. It's that experience.
It goes without saying that that experience story is about your own body, as well as your surroundings as you encounter them and experience them.
"But the physical world seems so physical !"
What else would you expect, of the setting of an experience-story about the experience of being a physical being in a physical world?
As I said, there's no physics experiment that can demonstrate or suggest that your experience is other than the hypothetical experience-story that I've described.
As I always say, I can't prove that this physical world isn't, additionally, something else (whatever else you claim it is) other than the hypothetical system that I've described. ...something else that superflously, as an unverifiable & unfalsifiable brute-fact, duplicates the events and relations of the uncontroversially-inevitable hypothetical system that I describe.
Michael Ossipoff
There's nothing 'if-then' about my experience. You're conflating experience with possibility.
Every "fact" in your experience corresponds to, implies, and can be said as, an if-then fact.
"There's a traffic roundabout at the corner of 34th & Vine."
"If you go to the corner of 34th & Vine, you'll encounter a traffic roundabout."
Additionally, any "fact" about your experience corresponds to a proposition that is (at least part of) the antecedent of some implication-facts, and is the consequent of other implication-facts.
Conditional grammar describes the events of your experience as well as declarative indicative grammar.
What we call "facts" in our experience, correspond to hypothetical propositions that are part of the abstract implication-facts that I've mentioned.
A set of hypothetical physical quantity values, and a hypothetical relation among them (called a physical law), together comprise the antecedent of an implication fact. ....except that one of those hypothetical physical quantity-values can be taken as the consequent of that implication.
A proved mathematical theorem is an implication fact whose antecedent includes at least a system of mathematical axioms.
It's not my experience, but an arbitrary add-on., an ad hoc, an 'after the fact'. There is no such thing as an "if-then fact"; there are if-then propositions. propositions are not facts. I'm amazed you're still going on about this, after I and many others have corrected you many times about it. What's the point of coming on here and just repeating the same nonsense over and over? Why not find something new, interesting and productive to exercise your mind?
Quoting Snakes Alive
The point, I think, is that any good, meaningful question already presupposes, if not a particular answer, then a particular kind of answer. Simply asking "Why this?" makes as much sense as the babbling of a baby. Snakes Alive is right in that a psychological question would be a suitable question to ask, but StreetlightX is right in that this is a question, not the one and only question - at least we should not assume that it is without some reflection. And that is what philosophy is good for: looking for good questions to ask and dissolving bad, pseudo-question. (Of course, most often good questions occur to us as a matter of course, as we learn new facts and develop our conceptual tools, e.g. via scientific theories.)
And that is the root of @Marchesk's problem: after so many pages of discussion, not only can he not explain the answer and how it actually answers the question, he cannot even explain what the question is and why it needs to be answered.
Incorrect.
There's such a thing as a propositions whose truth implies another proposition. When it's shown that the truth of one proposition implies the truth of another.proposition, then that implication has been shown to be a fact.
The obvious tautological syllogisms that I've posted (about Slitheytoves, etc.) here are implication-facts. They don't convey any new information, but they're nonetheless factual, even if trivially so.
A mathematical theorem that has been established to be true, has thereby been established to be an implication-fact. ...as I explained in a previous post.
Of course. An implication-proposition is a proposition about an implication.
Of course they aren't. They're just propositions.
I take "implication" to refer to a kind of fact. ...a fact that the truth of one proposition implies the truth of another proposition
Of course there can be a proposition about an implication. That would be an implication-proposition.
But, just in case someone here feels that "implication" means "implication-proposition", I say "implication-fact" to clarify that I'm referring to a fact. ...a fact that the truth of one particular proposition implies the truth another proposition.
Quoting Janus
...because you've been experiencing things before this discussion started?
In an experience-story, of course you experience that story's propositions as "facts". what else would you expect?
As Faraday pointed out, all that physics experiments measure is relation.
But I haven't convincingly worded an answer to your objection, which is the same as T. Clark's initial objection. I iike my metaphysics because of its simplicity and assumption-less-ness. I posted my metaphysics here to find out what the arguments against it would be, and how they can be convincingly answered. ...and if they can.
It's true that I haven't convincingly answered your objection about your experiences not seeming "if-then".
Michael Ossipoff
I have it explained it. But some of the posters pretend that they can't understand it to support the verificationist argument against metaphysics.
The question and proposed answers can be boiled down to this observation:
We perceive a world of individuals, yet our language is full of universal categories of properties and relations. So how do we reconcile the two?
As for the verification argument against metaphysics being meaningful, it falls prey to the same objection, since it's neither analytic nor verifiable.
1. How does the human brain from the abstract concept of number?
2. Is there something interesting about the world that lets us do this?
Question two is best exemplified by asking why math has been so useful for the sciences. Does that imply a mathematical structure for the world?
The third question isn't empirical, it's an ontological question.
You need to spell out why these two conditions give rise to a problem. What problem?
How our language comes to have universal concepts when the world is full of individuals. What is it about the individual things that leads us to form universal properties and relations such that we can group them into categories?
One possible answer is that universal properties and relations exist in the world in some manner.
Take E=MC^2. This is a universal relation between mass and energy that science has discovered. One interpretation of this is that science was able to discover this equation because there is a law of nature forming a causal relationship such that matter always converts to the energy in the same manner.
Now if the world was made up of individual bits of matter and packets of energy (both matter and energy are also universal concepts), then how is it we can formulate an equation across all of them?
A different interpretation would be that all the bits of matter just so happen to form a regularity whereby they always convert to the same amount of energy given their mass. This regularity becomes it's own universal pattern that we notice and form an equation from. So the world has at least universal patterns to it, even if they're just regularities.
Ray Kurzweil has called himself a "patternist", which I suppose is an alternative to universal categories (or classes). This is probably similar to Dennett's use of the Game of Life whereby the starting conditions and a few simple rules can generate complex patterns, or Wolfram's cellular automata.
What's still missing is something like this:
(1) We can only think about what we have experience of.
(2) We only have experience of particulars.
? (3) We can only think about particulars.
You want to argue that (3) is false, therefore one of (1) and (2) is false. Either we also have experience of non-particulars -- they are really out there in the world -- or we have the capacity to form non-particulars to think about all on our own. If it turns out (1) is false, then you are inclined to ask further why we resort to thinking about non-particulars, and how exactly we do that.
I submit this is impossible, unless the particulars have similar properties and relations, which then requires inquiry into what it means for individuals to be similar.
I think what has happened is that the understanding of the role and nature of universals has been long forgotten. If you go back to the origin of the idea in Plato and Aristotle, it is closely related to the other fundamental elements of their epistemology. This is because to recognise something we have to understand its type, and in fact it derives its identity from the type of thing that it is (this is the 'essence before existence' that was criticized by Sartre.) So recognising its type is, in a sense, perceiving its form, in the Platonic sense, which is what imparts its identity, and also its purpose, under the 'four causes' epistemology of Aristotle.
Where this became disputed in Western history was with the nominalists. 'Nominalism' means literally 'name only'. So it was precisely the reality of universals that nominalists disputed; recall that in those disputes, 'realists' were those who accepted the reality of universals, very unlike today's 'scientific realists'. They clearly were still operating under the rubric of the Platonic-Aristotelian epistemology.
The perceived motivation was that, at the time of these debates, medieval Aristotelianism had become bogged down in interminable arguments about final causes and the like. In fact the meme of 'how many angels could dance on the head of a pin' hails from these disputes. So the nominalism of Ockham and Bacon wanted to clear the decks of all of this pointless metaphysical verbiage and get back to the nitty-gritty of actual observed particulars. As they're very much the forefathers of modern empiricism, so mainstream philosophy was very much influenced by nominalism, to the extent that the traditional attitude of 'realism' is barely encountered in analytic philosophy (and we've seen in this thread how alien the notion of universals is for many people.)
What's Wrong with Ockham: Reassessing nominalism in the dissolution of the West, J P Hothschild provides an analysis. It's a longish read, but well worth the effort.
This piece discusses the metaphysical consequences of nominalism. It also mentions a book called Ideas Have Consequences, by a Chicago Professor of English, Richard Weaver, which was a surprise best-seller in the post-war years, on this theme (which has since become a staple of the American conservative movement.)
Practically the only philosophers that nowadays support traditional realism are (neo)Thomists. A useful neo-Thomist summary can be found in this blog post by Feser.
When I perceive anything I can compare it to memories that I have of perceiving other things and recognize similarities and differences between the two things perceived. It is the fact that there are never sheer perceptions of 'bare' particulars, but always simultaneous affective and cognitive processes of comparison and re-cognition that explains how generalities are generated. Generalities then become reified as universals.
What sorts of claims are (1) and (2)? Are they empirical? If empirical, is one or both a question a question for psychology? What exactly do we mean by "experience" here? Does "experience" mean the same thing in (1) and (2)?
Setting aside what I said in my previous post, does (2) mean that we can only experience one particular at a time? Say, I'm looking at two faces; what precludes me from noticing differences and similarities between them? The similarities and differences between two objects are themselves, as well as being types of similarities and differences, also particular similarities and differences, unique to those two objects. We never directly see the type of the similarity or difference, we see the particular, and think the type. I'd say this is really a question for phenomenology, not for psychology, or at least, only secondarily for psychology.
Good question. Revisiting:
I would say they are claims about epistemology. Can epistemological claims be settled by psychology (or neuroscience)? I don't know. Not yet, anyway.
Hume provides an example of a concept that is neither in experience nor from logic: causality. Psychology might someday explain how we came to form that concept. I don't know what implication that will have for philosophy. There might be a good reason we formed the concept.
I don't think it can reasonably be disputed that we experience causality directly in the form of forces acting on our bodies and our bodies acting on other things. Hume was wrong; he was tricked by his tendency to reduce perception to the visual; of course it's true that we don't actually see causality.
That's an interesting thought. Philosophers do seem rather focused on the visual. Makes me wonder what would happen if we met aliens whose primary sense was smell. How would their philosophical views differ from ours?
I find it hard to imagine any embodied being whose primary sense would not be its own embodied-ness. So, just as we don't see causality, we don't hear, smell, taste or touch it either. Touch is the closest to the kind of feeling I am thinking of. If you run your fingers along the skin of your forearm you can feel the textures of skin and hair, as well as seeing your fingers moving up and down your arm and perhaps hearing the sound made by the rubbing of the surfaces of your fingers and your forearm.
You can also feel the heat generated by the friction of the rubbing, but most importantly you can feel the force of your fingers against you arm in the form of pressure, and of your arm against your fingers in the form of resistance. Our bodies are constantly, mostly not reflectively consciously, feeling the forces of the surrounding environment as well as the organic processes within.
Whitehead made just this point with his two modes of perception: "presentational immediacy" and "causal efficacy". A lot of philosophical problems arise from thinking about ourselves as disembodied minds or subjects.
All these terms have their genesis in the proprioceptive experiences of the body: as abstractions they are just that; mere abstractions from a more fundamental experience. I'm probably wasting my breath, because I suspect that you really don't want to get that point, though. :wink:
Or someone will cry out that it's meaningless to point this out, because metaphysics.
Quoting Janus
Quoting Marchesk
How would you go about establishing that (1) is true or false, or convincing someone to assent to (1) or its negation? On its face, (1) has kind of an empirical look to it. You can imagine falsifying it by producing a counterexample. But I think it's far too vague, or at least underdetermined, to do much with.
How would you go about establishing that (2) is true or false, or convincing someone to assent to (2) or its negation? Is this the same? Maybe we can imagine falsifying this with a counterexample -- I'll bet Wayfarer thinks it can be. But it doesn't feel empirical to me. It feels more like a metaphysical claim, in which case the connecting concept here, experience, probably means something quite different from what it means in (1).
That's my gut, anyway. Anyone else feel the same? (Gut feelings all I have time fit at the moment, sadly.)
That's an utterly pointless point. Obviously dogs don't possess symbolic language ability, so they could hardly be expected to be able to abstract generalities from their experience, and reify them as universals, in the way humans can. But they can certainly recognize different faces, which obviously entails recognizing facial differences; otherwise all faces would look the same to them, wouldn't they?
:up:
That's funny! I do think it is a kind of metaphysical, but really more of a phenomenological, point. In any case, even if it is not meaningless, it is certainly a matter of interpretation and attendant presuppositions, as to just what it does mean, in the sense of what the metaphysical implications are. I think it's quite laughable that some people assume, or at least resort to claiming, that if you don't agree with their interpretation, then you just don't get it. :lol:
Hume's identification is of logic, causality is a meaning/concept, but one which is about things that exist, experiences and whats they encounter. (as contrasted to the oft imagined notion of logic as a pure abstraction defined solely in timeless a priori).
The reason he says we "see causality" or rather experience casualty is an awareness of its relation to the things we encounter. We "see" the casualty of a ball breaking a window because the causality of interested is of those things-- the causality of a ball braking a window (if someone is present), involves the sight of the ball and window in a certain reaction/relationship.
The trouble with this account is it is rectifying abstraction as creative. Supposedly, if someone was to take the step of rejecting the primacy of universal abstraction, things could not be, as if the universal abstraction were a filling to a foundation of the world which was otherwise missing.
So called universals do not have this power. The world is never an empty set which gets filled by the action of a universal. Meanings of things, which are then abstracted, have always been. There is not an empty void filled by the action of a rescuing universal. Things have always been (and will always be) themselves in their infinite meanings.
In this respect, they do not need our judgements to be. Meaning was always present and far more powerful than our particular whims of abstract judgment.
But Hume says we don't see causality.
Yes, I know.
I assumed for the discussion context you we relating "see" in the context of realising a casual relationship from our observations of the world. My point I don't see a conflict between this sort of "sight" (or smell, sound, etc.) and Hume's observation that causality isn't an empirical thing in front of us.
Change it to "sense". Are you certain proprioception bypasses Hume?
You don't feel the impact of forces on your body, the wind or sun on your face? Or the power of your own body to move things around, and the resistance things have to being moved? Is there a good reason to think that such experiences do not refute Hume's claim?
Right, causation isn't seen as something "in front of us" it is felt in us, in our bodies.
If proprioception is good enough to establish the experience of causality, why isn't visual perception?
The answer to that seems quite simple; we feel forces that impact our own bodies, but we do not see them. So, when a billiard ball strikes another we do not feel the force of the strike, but if the billiard ball is thrown and strikes my face I certainly do feel the force of the strike. BTW, that we feel causal forces does not support a claim that we must always feel causal forces, so that aspect of the problem of induction is a separate issue.
(1A) We can only think about apples if we have experience of apples.
(2A) We only have experience of particular apples.
Therefore (3A) We can only think about particular apples.
What does (2A) mean exactly? It looks like the apple class is already here. We can experience particular objects as apples, but we cannot experience a generic apple? But apples are apples. Experiencing something as an apple is also always experiencing an apple, a generic one.
(1A) now looks like a claim that to use the concept [apple], you must be familiar with members of the class it picks out, and that's at least prima facie unobjectionable.
And (3A) looks like a non sequitur, and a comment about how our visual imagination works. (Imagining an apple is imagining a particular apple. On the other hand, if the analysis of (2A) is right, that's exactly what imagining a generic apple is.)
(2A) is certainly the interesting bit. I don't have it quite right yet.
We don't need to conceptualize an apple as an apple to see it as something that we have encountered before. Animals do that all the time.
You feel the actual electromagnetic force itself, rather than its effects on you? That is a surprising claim. (So far as effects on you go, seeing is just as good.)
So you deny that you feel bodily impacts, and the power of your own body to affect other things? Really?
It's not experienced as "an electromagnetic force" but as a push or a strike or whatever. It seems obvious to me that this is where the very concept of force has its genesis. Where else could such a concept come from?
I can experience the effect a baseball has on me when it hits me in the face. I can experience the effect a baseball has on me when it's flying through the air at my face. Both, as I understand it, are the effects of electromagnetic forces, but one I experience as feeling the impact of the ball, and one I experience as seeing the ball.
Yes, but the point you are missing is that the first one is directly experienced as a force. Don't worry about whether it is "in itself" an electromagnetic force or whatever, the point is a phenomenological one. So, for example, say you are watching a movie of a ball flying through the air, or even a movie of yourself being pushed over by someone; there will be no bodily involvement, no force will be felt; no impact on your body.
Going back to your example, when you are hit in the face with a baseball bat you do not experience the effect as something separate or inferred, you experience the force of the blow, you experience your face being forced backwards. You can say that is an effect of the blow; but in the immediacy of the experience there is no separation between the force and the effect of your head flying back; they are felt as one.
It doesn't matter whether there "really" are forces; this is an 'after the fact' question that might arise, but whatever your answer might be it does not change the fact that when struck you feel it directly. By contrast you don't directly feel the billiard ball striking another billiard ball or even striking another person, although of course you may feel it 'sympathetically'.
That there is a force operating in those cases is an extrapolated inference from your own lived experience of being affected by, and affecting other physical bodies. Imagine if you had no experience of your own body being affected and affecting; if say you were suspended in an anti-gravity chamber, and your only experience had been watching movies of physical events. Do you think in that case you would arrive at an inference to causation, to physical forces?
Whereas, universals, numbers, grammar, and so on, don't exist anywhere 'out there'; they're not in the phenomenal domain. So it’s natural to assume that they're instead 'in the mind' - but that still implicitly locates them, in the neural space; they're the kinds of things that neuroscience can understand, being activities of the brain (as touched upon here.) After all, the implicit viewpoint of naturalism is that everything that exists is either 'out there' in the phenomenal domain, or internal to the (evolved) brain. There's no other conceptual space in which to locate them.
But what a (traditional) realist argues, is that universals are precisely 'transcendent' insofar that they transcend any descriptive attempt to locate them in phenomenal terms. They’re not phenomenal at all; their nature is purely intellectual; they are internal to the architecture of thought; they are relations of ideas. But at the same time, they are the building blocks of the descriptive and predictive power that can be harnessed through the rational operations of the intellect, and so to both philosophy and science.
Not everything that is real must have a location in space and time. What we call universals are abstractions from real differences and relations in nature. I see no problem with that; the question as to "where they are" is simply a category error.
The wrongheadedness of that category error is shown when you say that they "transcend any descriptive attempt to locate them in phenomenal terms". I think it's misleading to say they "transcend" any such attempt, rather, they bypass it; because such an attempt is not required, the question has no sense.
See, right away you show me right. What you came up with is a pseudo-question: although it has the grammatical form of a question, it is actually quite senseless. It is not clear what motivates the questioning, what it is that you actually want explained, and what kind of an explanation you require. And of course there is no answer either, despite your insistence otherwise - and how could there be when there is no real question?
In the subsequent discussion @Srap Tasmaner has to do all the work for you so as to come up with some more sensible questions to ask. But are the questions of psychology, cognition and causality that @Janus then picks up upon what you had in mind for this discussion?
Quoting Marchesk
Such fragmentary thoughts dispersed throughout your posts hint at other kinds of questions, but they are too undeveloped to make much sense of.
Can you explain in what way it's senseless? Because I'm failing to see how it is.
The only sense I can make of the claim that it's senseless is a preexisting commitment to the argument that metaphysics is senseless.
If by definition all such statements are without sense, then of course no example will convince you otherwise. If only everyone would agree to that definition, then we could be done with wasting time on metaphysics!
You might be interested in this article though: The Psychology of Causal Perception and Reasoning (PDF) by David Danks from Oxford Handbook of Causation.
The ontological status of universals, numbers, and other abstract objects, is what is at issue. The realist view is that such entities are real but not physical and that there are, therefore, real things that are immaterial, which shows that materialism is false. Conversely, materialists must insist that universals can’t be real [which is closely related to why Carnap must insist that metaphysics is empty. D M Armstrong is a materialist who claims that he accepts that universals are real, but he equates them with the fundamental particles of physics. And considering what is happening in physics - well, good luck with that.]
Feser, Some Brief Arguments for Dualism
I'm not convinced, but I'll think about it.
While I'm thinking, I'd ask that you think about your use of words like "direct", "directly experienced", "immediacy". I think you're making a mistake, imagining that here at last, when something out there whacks me or I whack it, there is actual, unmediated contact with, well, something.
You did so on the grounds that anti-metaphysical statements are meaningless. You even stated as much in the first sentence of the previous post.
That's exactly the sort of starting point Carnap wanted to argue from.
I'll go ahead and answer these directly (numbers my addition):
(1) The difference between the individual things we perceive, and our universal talk about them.
(2) Whether there is something in the world which matches or supports our universal talk.
(3) An argument for something in the world or in our concepts that explain the universal talk.
(4) There have been at least 4 possible answers given to this question: nominalism, conceptualism, moderate realism (Aristotle), and realism (Platonism).
(5) No real question if one agrees with Carnap, Hume or Witty on this. But if not, then there is a real question.
The question of whether there can be meaningful metaphysical statements is essentially a debate over meaning.
Right, but we go one step further and assume there is something necessitating the relationship, such that any future ball will break any future window, all else being equal (same glass strength, same speed and weight of the ball, etc).
I wouldn't go so far as to say that there is unmediated contact with anything, but merely that there certainly seems to be. The question then becomes "what could it mean to say that that seeming is mistaken, that we are not "really" experiencing a force even though we seem to be?'
Well, that's where Hume diverges, and correctly so.
There is nothing necessitatng any ball or window will have the same strength, etc. and form the given causal relationship. We don't get a causal relationship from the form of window or ball. They can have different strengths, momentums, etc.
States with those forms have to do the work. We might always encounter a window/ball without that causal relationship.
So no, we don't need to assume any future instance will behave that way. In fact, that's bad reasoning (and science! ) since it assumes future states can only be like ones we have seen before.
I would say the line of questioning is off. What's the difference between "universal talk of something" and just regular talk of something? They would appear to be the same. If I speak about something, I invoke its meaning concept, a logical necessity expressed by that which I speak. I'm using the idea/name of what I refer to.
And, obviously, this is always whole different to the thing being spoken about. My talk about eating breakfast yesterday is a different thing that the event. One is my speech, the other is what my speech is about.
By this both (2) and (3) amount to a category error. Since our speech is a different thing than what we speak about, we are not going to get an explanation of either by the other-- I cannot account for a car by pointing out a tree.
(5) also leads to a similar collapse. Meaning is a given with statements. All statements mean something, even "meaningless" ontological questions; they have people floundering over in all directions all the time. The debate isn't over "meaning." Meaning is necessary and is unremarkable in that even nonsense has meaning. It's not a measure of logical judgement.
Carnap has something far more specific in mind when taking issue with these ontological questions. The challenge is formed on the basis of meaning, but rather the coherency of their meaning. He's asking as to pay a critical eye to the questions we are asking, to check them (their meaning) for logical coherency.
This, for example, is a "meaningless"-- i.e. not coherent-- question. It doesn't actually identify anything about metaphysics and statements. All it does is vaguely allude to people having some disagreement.
In this sense, yes, there is a "debate": people are arguing over whether these sort of ontological questions make sense, but this fact has no relevance to questions of whether they have any force. The fact people disagree or are talking about something doesn't identify any said ontological questions and reasons why we might approach them one way or another. It just useless noise.
If our question is about the coherence of ontological questions, we don't need to know people debate it. We need to understand what ontological questions are and how they relate to our points of interest. Our goal is to understand them and what the logical response to them would be. Anything less than that, you are just speaking rhetoric or giving out ad hoc notions of an unknown.
I don't deny that number, multiplicity, is real; you'd be a fool to deny that; I don't even know what it could mean to deny it. What i do deny is that it is real apart from nature, because that makes no sense.
So I can talk about a particular dog, call him Beast, who happens to be bigger than most dogs. Notice that Beast is grouped into the category dog. All dogs are unique individuals, but there is something about dogs that motivates us to put them into the dog category. Now beast is taller and weighs more than most dogs. Notice how we can compare across the class of individuals.
We can also use the dog category to talk about a generic dog, or draw the shape of a dog. So a no dogs allowed sign has an outline representing any dog.
Now the question becomes how we're able to do all this if we all perceive are individual dogs. We never do experience the dog category, the average dog, the image of a generic dog, etc. It's a concept we form related to all dogs.
Right. But you don't see numbers in nature, do you? I mean, there are books about the mathematical regularities found in nature, the fibonacci sequence, and so on - which are very interesting, to be sure. But numbers aren't found in nature, as such. They're not 'out there somewhere' - they're only perceptible to the kind of intelligence which is capable of counting. But for any such intelligence, they're the same (speaking of integers, anyway).
And the point that strikes me, is that through mathematical reasoning, through being able to count, abstract and reason, we're able to find out many things about nature that we otherwise couldn't know; the whole history of science is evidence for that. But I don't think that is explained by naturalism (well, not easily anyway). I think it is often assumed that we understand reason and the nature of abstraction and representation, but actually we don't. We see them as adaptions, as 'something the brain does', but I am questioning that. I think they are real in a different way to phenomenal objects. But modern philosophy has no provision for something being real 'in a different way'; things are either real or they're not. And what is fundamental is, it is said, matter~energy - not numbers, which don't come into the picture until right at the very end of the evolutionary story.
My developing view is that universals and the like exist in the structure of our experience of the world. They are intrinsic to the way we interpret experience and construe meaning. So they're elements or aspects of reality, but they're neither subjective nor objective. They're neither 'out there' in the world, nor 'in here' in our minds, but are part of the structure of mind; but prior to any sense of 'mind' in a naturalistic sense, as the whole notion of what constitutes 'naturalism' relies on that structure. That is why nature exists in mind, more than vice versa. That's not necessarily idealistic, either - it is quite in keeping with a lot of the thinking of biosemioticians.
What's challenging about that, is that it undermines the near universal assumption that there's a causal sequence which can be understood in evolutionary terms, that accounts for the emergence of reason. Whereas:
Thomas Nagel: Thoughts are Real
So, this 'continuum' - whatever it is - is of a much greater extent than nature. (Nagel, mind you, goes to great lengths to deny being religious - his understanding is much more in keeping, I think, with elements in Greek philosophy, which were later incorporated into theology.)
So basically Kantian? Did Kant think that on Hume's account, knowledge was impossible? That these categories of thought have to already be there because they can't come from the senses. The senses are just blobs of color, random noises, smells, etc that need to be categorized, fit into a conceptual framework or what have you.
No, not at all, never. He was 'woken from his dogmatic slumbers' to answer Hume's 'sceptical challenge'. Which he did, in my view. But, I'm definitely on board with some form of 'transcendental idealism', although from experience it's a devilishly hard thing to explain.
Can you imagine a unicorn? Yes? But unicorns don't exist, so how is it you can imagine one? Maybe everything you image actually exist in some form, but that rather does away with the point of distinguishing that which exists from that which does not.
So let's presume you can imagine things which don't exist. You can imagine an ideal dog. The ideal dog doesn't exist, but that doesn't prevent you from imagining it as above. Your ideal dog wont be the same as my ideal dog, so it's definitely not an object of objective existence. They'll be very similar, because they serve similar purposes and have been learnt similar ways, but not the same.
So now all the functions you ascribe to universals can be satisfactorily ascribed to a comparison to your ideal dog, which we've just established does not exist.
Is there any feature of our universalism in language that you're having trouble ascribing to an imagined ideal?
That sounds like conceptualism, which is one answer to the problem of universals. It doesn't really matter for this discussion if universals exist. It's whether the debate is meaningful.
Yes, I thought I'd answered that one already. The question may be meaningful in an aesthetic sense, the answers might be meaningful to those who adopt them in an axiological sense, but the debate, the presumption that some sentences can demonstrate the value of one answer above another, is meaningless. It's not the value of my conceptualism that matters here, it's the fact that I can easily and coherently express it, no less than any other theory can be easily and coherently expressed by any competent language user. So what do we do now? Continue to express them at each other ad infinitum?
Google books actually has the relevant section open for viewing! Shwew. I was hoping I wouldn't have to type it all out.
Now I take it that if we can detail not just our own beliefs but the beliefs of others, and others can do the same for us, then that demonstrates that what people are saying is meaningful -- it's not just a nonsense that an individual has come up with.
Exactly.
I'll tackle this first. This falls into the same error I've tried to explain to Marchesk, but it just gets ignored. Proving that people can make coherent sense, and derive meaning from, the question, or an answer offered is not sufficient to make the debate meaningful. To make the debate meaningful it is also necessary that some methods can demonstrably determine which of the competing answers has the greater merit by some metric agreed on by the contributors. Now since the contributors to the broader metaphysical debate include almost everyone, then almost everyone must agree on the metric in order for the debate to be meaningful held in that way.
Consider a discussion about the technicalities of the eucharist. Within the Christian Church, it would be a meaningful discussion because all agree that the coherence with the words in the bible is the metric by which ideas are measured. But include a Muslim, or an atheist in the debate and it becomes meaningless, how are the Christian and the atheist going to analyse the ideas in any joint way?
So it is with metaphysics, there is no agreement among the participants in the discussion about what it is that measures 'rightness'. Even attempts to do so like coherence, consistency, simplicity are all far too vague to achieve anything. Virtually every metaphysical proposition ever written is thought by some to be coherent, consistent and simple (enough). It's just too easy to meet these criteria and most philosophers are clever enough to do so.
So before I actually look at Chalmers' arguments in detail (which I will try to get round to, but I was expecting a paragraph, not few chapters!), I'd like to ask what metric you'd measure sucess by. If I were to present a killer argument which defeated everything Chalmers had to say, how would you know I'd done so?
Sounds good. Looks like this is where we disagree anyways, so there is no need to read it at this point (unless you just feel like it, of course). I fully expect Chalmer's interlocutor's to not change their position based upon his arguments -- and in fact that is often the case, though not always -- but I don't think that makes his statements nonsense -- though it's worth noting that you're not making that claim as much as you are saying that the debate itself is not meaningful, which I take to be very different from claiming that a statement is nonsense.
I don't think you'll find your standard of meaningful debate outside of philosophy, though. It's just how human beings are -- they become attached to certain positions and argue for them. Scientific theory changes not so much because of pure rational debate, though that is a part of science, but also because stubborn old codgers who love their ideas die, and the young aren't attached to them. That doesn't mean that the old codger was senseless or speaking nonsense though -- we can come to understand what he meant by, say, phlogiston even if we don't believe as he does.
So what is it to have a meaningful debate, then? And by "meaning" are you talking about linguistic meaning (which the use of "nonsense" or "senseless", two terms that I think are different, seems to imply) or are you talking about meaning in the sense of the point of it all, the reason why a debate would take place?
The thing is you can accuse political debates of having this problem. Does that mean the issues being debated lack meaning?
From my experience of also being involved in political, religious, sports and true crime debates, people often don't agree as to what would count as settling the debate. Each side has their own criteria.
Take the Dyatlov Pass Incident for example. 9 Russian Hikers were found dead in 1959. According to investigators, they cut their way out of the tent at night in the middle of the Siberian winter, hiked down to the tree line poorly dressed, and attempted to survive the night there unsuccessfully. The head investigator concluded that some "unknown compelling force" caused them to do this.
There are many theories as to what happened. Several books have been written in recent years, each with their own conclusion. Some say they were forced out of their tent by other humans on the mountain that night, and their injuries revealed in the autopsies are consistent with this being attacked and killed. Others will say that no, their injuries are consistent with natural causes that happened to them after leaving the tent, such as a snow den collapse, and falling out of a tree, the broken limbs of which were used in a small fire, or falling face first on the rocky terrain in the deep snow.
So what would count as settling which theory is true in a case like this, if no new evidence comes to light? But they did abandon their campsite without proper clothing for some reason. One of the theories is probably close to the truth.
Firstly, I don't quite get from the rest of what you've written exactly where we do disagree. Are you saying that you do find the debate meaningful for some reason that does not require a shared metric, or that my conclusion that there's no shared metric is mistaken?
Quoting Moliere
So this comes back to what I think I've mentioned before, but I'll repeat for clarity. The point Quine was making in Two Dogmas was not that Carnap was wrong (despite this being the common lay interpretation), only that he drew a sharp dividing line where Quine saw a gradation. So with science, you may say that there's no definitive shared metric, and you'd be right, but the correlation of some theoretical proposition with empirical measurements is sufficiently shared and just specific enough to allow meaningful debate. It's not so shared that people like Kuhn can't highlight its reliance on paradigm, but they're shared enough.
Quoting Moliere
I think both definitions share the same features. There is meaning to a proposition of the type "phenomenon X is caused by/explained by Y for reasons a, b and c". The meaning is the story such a proposition tells for one looking for just such a story. But propositions of the sort "proposition X is wrong because a, b and c" is meaningless because there is no accompanying definition of wrong which the reader is bound to agree with. I might as well say proposition X is 'vgarstenfad' because a, b and c". That would also be nonsense because you'd have no idea what 'vgarstenfad' means nor any reason to accept any definition of the word I might give.
So in that sense I do think there's an argument for saying that such propositions are meaningless in your first sense, but it is in the second sense that my interest lies.
To the extent that you can accuse political debates of having the same problem then, yes, I would say they were meaningless, but to save me writing the whole thing out again, would you mind me referring you to my answer to the Moliere with respect to the sciences. It covers exactly the pint you're making here about areas other than metaphysics which may suffer from this problem. I would argue in both the cases that you highlight there is sufficient shared metric to make the debate meaningful - ecomonic stability, GDP, international security in the case of politics. Correspondence with the evidence in the second case.
At least until you get deep in the theoretical physics weeds. Does superstring theory, or colliding 11 dimension branes in the multiverse count as a meaningful scientific debate? I think so, on a theoretical grounds, but some have said it's pure metaphysics and shouldn't be in science.
Is Lebron James better than Michael Jordan? (pick your athletes and sport)
There is a consensus that both players are all-time greats at basketball, but there isn't a consensus as what counts as being greater between the two (which often means the best ever).
And yet there are many discussions on this. What happens is that the Lebron James supporters will list criteria that supports their claim that Lebron is better, and reasons why Jordan is not. And the Jordan supporters will do the same.
This isn't because they don't understand each other, it's because they don't agree. Similar to political debates where a conservative and a liberal will base their arguments on their political persuasion. They can usually understand each other, but they don't agree on the politics of the other side's position.
Well, no, not unless you believe that metaphysical questions are necessarily as vague and pointless as the one I was criticizing. My most charitable take on metaphysics is that it is a search for and a critical analysis of framing - and that is not meaningless.
Quoting SophistiCat
Quoting Marchesk
That makes no sense, no matter how many times you say this. Come on, Marchesk, you are not even trying.
Quoting SophistiCat
Quoting Marchesk
That is still much too vague. There are many ways in which such a question could be cached out: we could analyze our language, starting with universal talk and perhaps going on to causal talk (which is one of the directions this conversation has taken). We could analyze our psychology/cognition - and here there is also a variety of approaches. We could talk about "the world" (i.e. the intended objects of our universal talk) - and here the possibilities are too many to number. We could also talk about the interrelationship between all these spheres, which broadens the scope to a truly unmanageable size.
Quoting Marchesk
There are so, so many more ways to address the general topic "universals" - at least until you frame the question better than you have done so far. But in any case, to paraphrase Crispin Wright, identifying your position with one of the above labels accomplishes about as much as clearing one's throat.
I was wondering, by the way, what it is that you were trying for with your programming analogy. A class in object-oriented programming (OOP) is not a good analogy for the general idea of universals. In OOP two objects with the same functional properties are not necessarily instances of the same class. Indeed, being an instance of a particular class is itself a property, which can be directly queried in languages that support reflection. That would not make sense with universals: being a member of a class is not a property that is distinct from the sum of properties that defines that class. Being a member of the class of blue things is exactly the same as being blue (which is the point that @Snakes Alive already made).
I guess you were looking for some causal, generative account of differences and similarities between things. But I am afraid that such an overly general approach is not going to be a productive direction for inquiry; you need to bring more focus to it. (And turning back to OOP for a moment, a slightly better but still imperfect analogy for universals would be an interface or a completely abstract class, which defines "phenomenal" properties of objects. But interfaces are not generative: conceptually, they are used to abstract properties from existing things or describe hypothetical properties that may or may not exist.)
The way I see it this passage exemplifies the very category error I spoke of in previous posts. You demand that for something to be thought of as part of nature it must be an object of the senses.
Then you claim that because we cannot find numbers "out there" they must be transcendent entities that are "real" in some mysterious unspecifiable way.
The problem is you can't say what sense "real" could have in what you are trying to articulate, and you fall into the error that Wittgenstein warns against of trying to say what cannot be said.
I think we can say that number is real as 'multiplicity', as different quantities of objects. We can directly perceive the difference between quantities of perceptible things, for example, and some animals even seem to display this ability. Number is also to be considered a real part of nature because humans, who are part of nature, have developed a science of number, which has untold practical applications.
Also, when you say "nature exists in mind" there seems to be no coherent idea of what mind could be in this context. Are you trying to draw an analogy to the way thought can seem to be in our minds? But why think of thoughts as being in minds rather than thinking of them as being mind? Why think of mind as 'container' rather than 'process'? So, why not think that nature seems more mindlike than matter-like? Perhaps matter is more mindlike than the 17th Century conception allows, and then the emergence of animal minds ceases to be an irresolvable conundrum.
Real but immaterial.
Not reducible to neurobiology.
Demonstrates the falsehood of philosophical materialism.
Sure numbers are "immaterial" if this term is defined to mean 'not material objects'. But this does not justify reifying immateriality as a substance, which is what you are doing. Why repeat Descartes' error?
Real in these discussions means mind-independent. Objects of perception are generally taken to be mind-independent things that exist without humans perceiving them, unless one is a subjective idealist.
An abstraction like universals, numbers, or possible worlds would be real if they aren't created by the mind. It's true that we don't perceive abstract forms, but if argument showed that they have to come from somewhere other than our minds, then they would be real.
It has nothing to do with either Descartes or with reification. I am not saying that either numbers, or mind, are 'substances' in the sense that Descartes uses. I favour the model of hylomorphic dualism. The problem is, when the word 'intelligible object' is used, it sounds like a reification, but in this case the use of the word is allegorical, to convey that a number is something the mind grasps or sees, 'analogous to the way a hand grasps a pencil', to use Frege's analogy.
Quoting Marchesk
The point is, universals and numbers can only be apprehended by the mind, but they're the same for any mind that apprehends them. That is the basis of 'objective idealism' and is also the point of the two passages in this post by Bertrand Russell (from his chapter on The Problem of Universals) and Ed Feser (from a blog post on 'arguments for dualism'.)
"Thus universals are not thoughts, though when known they are the objects of thoughts."
"A mental image is something private and subjective, while the concept of triangularity is objective and grasped by many minds at once."
The kind of idea of mind that is used in the title of Gregory Bateson's book Steps to an Ecology of Mind. It's not about 'mind' as 'a disembodied substance' but as being a collective name for the operations of mind in any kind of sentient being. It is through the mind that nature is disclosed to sentient beings, and the nature of their cognitive processes determines a great deal about the nature of their world. All of these discussions are debates, are taking place in the mind - comparing, reflecting, criticizing, and so on.
Naive and even a lot of scientific realism assumes that the world or nature is 'there anyway', it is simply given, and that we as subjects find ourselves in that world. But that forgets the way that the mind constructs or construes the world on the basis of experience and judgement. Wittgenstein: 'I am my world' (from the Notebooks).
Quoting Pseudonym
The first paragraph is a comment on 'domains of discourse'. It rightly points out that different things have meaning in different domains of discourse; these are similar to what Wittgenstein means with 'language games'.
However this doesn't directly validate the leap to metaphysics generally. It seems to be arguing something like 'religion relies on faith, metaphysics is like religion, therefore we can't say anything objective about metaphysics'. But by concentrating on particular aspects of the Aristotelian tradition of metaphysics - and, after all, the term 'metaphysics' was invented specifically in relation to Aristotle's works - it is possible to at least converse meaningfully about specific metaphysical ideas and doctrines, as I am attempting to do with the discussion about the ontological status of numbers and universals. I think there is a central theme in that discussion, about metaphysics generally, which has considerable consequences for culture and philosophy.
Note this paragraph from the useful SEP article on mathematical platonism:
The reason many positivists have such an aversion to metaphysics, is because if mathematical platonism is true, then their preferred philosophical model of naturalism and/or materialism is not.
Routledge Intro to Phenomenology, p144
That's exactly what I meant by saying:
Quoting Wayfarer
Good question. It's the contents of the mind which are not always real. We can both perceive a tree, which means there is a tree independent of your mind and mine. But if you dream, imagine or hallucinate a tree, that's your mind generating it. You can also lie or be mistaken about seeing a tree.
When we say that Harry Potter isn't real, we don't mean the literature, which is obviously real, we mean the character and the story is fictional.
This might lead to thinking that only the perceive is real, but then we do make both everyday and scientific inferences to things unperceived, such as the tree falling when nobody is around, or the majority of the EM spectrum we can't see.
Well then:
[quote=Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]Universals are a class of mind-independent entities, usually contrasted with individuals (or so-called "particulars"), postulated to ground and explain relations of qualitative identity and resemblance among individuals. Individuals are said to be similar in virtue of sharing universals. An apple and a ruby are both red, for example, and their common redness results from sharing a universal. If they are both red at the same time, the universal, red, must be in two places at once. This makes universals quite different from individuals; and it makes them controversial.
Whether universals are in fact required to explain relations of qualitative identity and resemblance among individuals has engaged metaphysicians for two thousand years. Disputants fall into one of three broad camps. Realists endorse universals. Conceptualists and Nominalists, on the other hand, refuse to accept universals and deny that they are needed. Conceptualists explain similarity among individuals by appealing to general concepts or ideas, things that exist only in minds. Nominalists, in contrast, are content to leave relations of qualitative resemblance brute and ungrounded.[/quote]
Do you find that also too vague?
Quoting SophistiCat
I listed the well established positions in the debate, about which much has been said. My argument is that the problem of universals is an example of a meaningful debate, not that universals are necessarily real (I don't know).
Quoting SophistiCat
I wasn't demonstrating polymorphism with the simple example. The general idea of class-based OOP languages is that the class defines the complex data type for any instances of that class. The data type has bundled with it the methods which can operate on any instance. The properties available are defined in the class along with the methods.
This serves as a good example for universals, and indeed introductions to OOP often use the example of an Animal, Shape or Person class, claiming that it's modeled after the world. The class defines the type of object for a bunch of instances.
Now it's true that you can create a hierarchy of Shape classes and treat them the same when you want to perform the same kind of geometric function on them, or have them draw to the screen (the actual implementation might differ form class to class). That doesn't mean that the Triangle or Circle class are somehow less universal to their instances.
It's also true that some languages let you mutate individuals and change the inheritance relationships at runtime, and other wild stuff. Some languages don't really care about the class of an object, only if it behaves like a type it expects.
And similarly, the real world is more complicated than simple examples of universals. That doesn't change the question of how individual things can be similar. But it does illustrate the concept in a simple manner.
I don't think that a shared metric for deciding what answer is superior is required for a meaningful debate. That would make a debate end, but many debates do not end and yet are still meaningful. Agreement is not the basis of meaning, nor does there need to be some metric for statements to be meaningful.
Quoting Pseudonym
I'd say this notion of "shared enough" is mostly just a matter of taste. Some people like vanilla ice cream, and some people like chocolate -- and some people like a higher degree of decidability, and some people don't care either way.
Quoting Pseudonym
In the debate on consciousness it is understood what it means to be wrong. Further, "consciousness" is clearly defined.
But if the latter sense is what interests you it is the former sense that I've been arguing against. "The point of it all" is something that either makes sense or it doesn't. We all have different interests, after all. So the problem of universals, for instance, is something I just don't care too much about -- though it seems to make sense when I read an SEP article referring to the relationship between universals and particulars, I don't really care about the point of it all. I'd say "the point of it all" is something which is a function of taste and interests, and sometimes a topic will interest someone and sometimes it won't.
But just because I'm not interested in some debate that does not then mean that everyone over there interested in it is speaking gobbledeegoop.
OK, but generalities or universals or whatever you want to call them are abstracted from real aspects of perception and are essential in order to be able to see anything as anything. So, they are no like fictional characters or hallucinations but a real essential part of our experience. But this doesn't mean they must have some kind of 'reality' beyond their instantiations as objects of our experience, beyond the the part they play for our experience itself.
I don't believe we could coherently imagine what such a reality could be except that it consists in some kind of timelessly existing Idea (Platonism). But the notion that there is a timeless somehow independently existent idea for every generality (and there would need to be a unique idea for every individual similarity and difference) leads to absurdity. It's a really overloaded, top-heavy, cumbersome and in the final analysis, incoherent, ontology, so why should we adopt it or even bother with it?
So you think the mind is something other than the body/ brain? If you do think so then you are a dualist, and not merely a hylomorphic dualist either. If, instead you merely want to say that 'brain' and 'mind' are two different kinds of description of the one thing, descriptions that are not reducible to one another, then you'll get no argument from me.
As I said, I agree with Quine that it is not a simple case of things being either meaningful or not, some are more meaningful than others depending largely on the extent of agreement about metrics and terms. In Physics, there is widespread agreement on metrics (correspondence with empirical evidence, or with mathematical axioms) and widespread agreement on the meaning of terms, so most discussion in that field are meaningful, even though, with a current lack of empirical evidence or even falsifiability, they may well be metaphysical.
Quoting Marchesk
Yes, and such debates are meaningless. If the two sides do not agree on the meaning of the term 'better', then how is it different to debating which player is the most 'flibertyjibit' - another term which neither side agree the meaning of, yet we would easily see the sentence Michael Jordan is the most flibertijibit player as being nonsense.
I honestly haven't a clue what this means, with my Christianity example I quite clearly stated that it is meaningful to the Christian because of the shared metric of correspondence with the words in the bible. It has nothing whatsoever to do with faith. It might well have been a discussion among Civil War re-enactors, whose metric is whether the idea corresponds with what actually happened in the Civil War.
But now I'm starting to see your position relying on a mystical faith after all. "...by concentrating on particular aspects of the Aristotelian tradition of metaphysics...it is possible to at least converse meaningfully about specific metaphysical ideas and doctrines" - All we have to do is 'concentrate' on them and their truth will be revealed to us? Sounds more like divine revelation than discourse.
Quoting Wayfarer
Aside from your unwarranted denigration of the motives of positivists (maybe they're just trying to find the truth like everyone else?), mathematical platonism in some form has been investigated for more than 2000 years, even in specific modern form for several decades, and no one has managed to prove it true yet, I don't think they're exactly quaking in their boots about the prospect.
So what is the basis then. What makes a debate about the colour of unicorn's tails meaningless, but a debate about universals meaningful?
Quoting Moliere
Again, I'm not talking about preferences, people can debate whatever they want, but in order to follow through your argument about preferences you'd have to sacrifice the use of the term meaningful altogether, after all, what could possibly qualify as meaningless if it's all just preference about decidability. Are you saying there's no such thing as a meaningless debate?
Quoting Moliere
Really, so what is it to be wrong in such a debate and what is the definition of conciousness which is universally agreed on?
Quoting Moliere
No, but if you want to reserve the ability to define some conversations as meaningless (gobbledegook), then you need some measure of meaningfulness, so what is your measure if it's not shared agreement on terms?
no, that’s not it. I’m referring to the fact that the term ‘metaphysics’ has a distinct meaning, starting from its coining by one of the editors of Aristotle’s works - the ‘meta-physica’ referred to the works ‘after physics’. But ‘metaphysics’ is also used in relation to many ideas that are generally spiritual. So what I’m saying is that by concentrating on the aspects of metaphysics that recognisably relate to the Aristotelian tradition, then you do have at least a ‘domain of discourse’ within which their might be rational discussion.
And, again, metaphysical ideas such as mathematical platonism cannot be proven - well, not to the satisfaction of the empiricist. And why, is a metaphysical issue.
Better already exists as a comparison in language. There's no problem saying that MJ or LJ are better than the average player. You will get consensus on that. And better here means superior statistics, MVP awards and all-star selections, championships, and a general recognition of rare ability while watching a player play the game.
So better is not like the made up word flibertijibit. The problem with better is that it's not precise enough when you have two players close enough in career achievements to fix the criteria for determining who is better. And so then people are free to choose what criteria they wish to use.
This isn't a matter of better being meaningless, it's rather imprecise and opinionated.
I think essences in the things themselves would be an alternative to Platonism, but it's not without it's own difficulties. So sure, what you said is a standard criticism of realism about universals.
As on poster in this thread pointed out, the odd thing about this debate is that none of the positions is without problems. I don't think this is because of lack of meaning in the dispute.
There are ongoing debates in matters like unsolved crimes where there isn't a question about meaning. What's questioned is the interpretation of the known or alleged facts and related matters for the case.
Is that really so odd? I'd say it's the rule rather than the exception!
Sure, and no doubt that is ammo for the anti-metaphyics side. Questions raised about meaningfulness in this thread:
Can a debate be meaningful if the different sides can't agree on what constitutes an acceptable answer?
Can a statement be meaningful if it's imprecise?
Is meaning grounded in the empirical and analytical such that you can't make meaningful claims about that which is beyond experience?
Is meaning a precise term or is it fuzzy?
Is a statement claiming that all statements of type X are meaningless a member of X?
I'd say as long as both sides can articulate the other's then the propositions that two people are using to debate have meaning. So in the case of consciousness I can say what it would mean to believe in property dualism, eliminative materialism, epiphenomenalism, and panpsychism -- I know what the propositions are, and I know why I would argue for or against each of these.
Not having an interest in the problem of universals I couldn't tell you -- it's not something I've read much about other than the occasional SEP article. But if two people can understand one another then I don't see why I'd call it meaningless.
Also, I wouldn't say that a debate about the unicorn's tails is meaningless. I understand those words well enough. Worth my time? Not so much. It's not something I'm interested in.
Quoting Pseudonym
A meaningless debate might go something like this
"of shcrik in the water too"
"gavagai"
I have no idea what those terms mean. It is purely nonsense.
So given that standard I'd likely say there isn't such a thing, insofar that the words have meaning. I'm not attached to trying to sort out debates that are good from debates that are bad. There are things that interest me, and things that don't. All the same if I understand the words -- if two people arguing understand one another, and can articulate eachother's position -- then it's just true that the debate is not nonsense.
Quoting Pseudonym
Universal agreement? I'm sure you can find someone out there who will say "But that's not what it is!" -- but within the debate on consciousness it's very well defined, and takes some time to define -- but in shorthand consciousness is the fact that the world feels like something. Pizza tastes like pizza, and not nothing, or carrots. Brahms has a certain quality of sound. We experience the world and experiences feels like something.
To be wrong in the debate would be to take a false position. So an eliminative materialist will commonly say that such feeling is an illusion of the mind, or some such. If consciousness is an illusion of the mind, has no reality outside of this, then we'd say that all the sorts of beliefs that attempt to explain consciousness are false.
Quoting Pseudonym
This is a different standard than the one you previously proposed. You said there needed to be a metric for deciding correctness. Agreement on terms is exactly what I'm saying is needed. If two people can disagree while being able to explicate the position of who they disagree with then that's a good indicator that the terms are being used the same.
That's what makes sense to me.
Quoting Moliere
I suppose a third person could come along and claim the disagreement is meaningless, as what happens in this thread. But then how do you decide whether the third person is right, or the other two are right that it's meaningful?
If one group claims a statement is meaningful, and another claims it is not, then what determines who's right? An argument about the definition of meaning? And what if there is no consensus on meaning?
It seems to me that the claim to meaninglessness tends to undermine itself.
My mistake, I misinterpreted your use of the term 'concentrate'.
So, would it not then be true to say that the discourse is only rational to those who agree with the terminology and metric of sucess within that field? So, stating that universals have such and such properties would be meaningful to someone invested in the argument, but saying to a materialist that an Aristotlean metaphysical proposition "proves" that materialism is wrong must be meaningless, because the Aristotlean and the materialist do not agree on the meaning of the terms 'prove' and 'wrong' so how can they have meaningful discussion using them?
To the left of this cup isn’t another identical cup. Now I can consider that the identical cup, by hypothesis matches exactly the nature of the first cup I described in all ways Nothing is different save that the second cup does not exist.
Carnap’s thought, and it’s decendents are absurd. (Consider Donald for example and his relationship with his suicidal brother, and unloving father, his interpretation that he has superior genetics)
Statements like Carnap’s are not as innocent as they seem for our biologies are possessed by powerful survival instincts. In fact there is a struggle between those who experience existence, and awareness of it, as itself the core value of a person, and those like Nietszhe, that attempt to define the good of a person by considering the nature of the person. There are very deep insights that are lost, and the loss was demonstrated in the attempt to suppress metaphysics. You can hear it even now at places like MIT. One must be “suspicious” of metaphysics. No my engineering friends, one must be suspicious, very suspicious, of the lack of metaphysics.
The idea that metaphysics is suspect is involved in religious issues like Maya, or the Catholic doctrine of original sin, the fallen-ness of man, or the forgetfulness of being described by Heidegger. It is not just a bad or incorrect idea - it is a kind of sickness of the mind and of the culture and ultimately of our biology.
So too satori, the sudden awakening of a person into awareness of existence, the attainment of enlightened awareness and associated ecstasy, the opposite of Carnap’s thinking in a sense, belies any claim to lack of meaningfulness.
Poor Wittgenstein! A monk trapped! The only things saving him his honesty, his art, his urge to poverty- “Tell them I had a wonderful life” to paraphrase his final words! Wonderful? If only that damn British dismissal had not taken root!
They have eyes but they do not see. You might say that of Carnap but not Wittgenstein, yet he remained trapped never realizing his potential! All because he lived before we realized the disaster of that thought!
Janus must be referring to the fact that, Propositional Logic is (unsurprisingly) about propositions.
Propositional logic is about the relations among propositions. It speaks of (A --> B) as a proposition that is true unless A is true and B is false.
Of course there are. And Propositional Logic discusses them, because propositions and their inter-relations are what Propositional Logic is about.
But Janus is confusing that topic with what "implication" means.
An implication is an implying. ...an implying of one proposition by another.
That's different from a proposition about an implying of one proposition by another.
If there's an implying of B by A, that's the same as saying that A implies B, and that there's a fact that A implies B.
Depending on how someone insists on definitional-quibbling, an implication of B by A is a fact (...in keeping with a definition of a fact as relation among things (like propositions), or as the possession of a property by one or more things). ...or someone could quibblingly say that the only fact there is the fact that A implies B (...instead of calling the implication of B by A a fact).
In case someone takes the latter interpretation, I often say "implication-fact" instead of "implication.+
I say that also to distinguish what I'm referring to from an implication-proposition, in case someone thinks that's what "implication" means.
But I've clarified that by "an implication of B by A", I mean also a fact that A implies B. ...and certainly not a proposition that A implies B.
Indeed they aren't.
Yes, you brought this up some time ago, and I answered it then. You should be amazed that you're re-cycling the same already-answered objection again.
Michael Ossipoff
I like now & then to quote Ramsey:
"Essences in the things themselves" is basically Aristotle's alternative to Plato. I think the problem is that this idea tries to circumvent the relational nature of perception. It is again a thought-child of Aristotle's (understandably) naive realism. Generality is undeniably an element of perception; without generality we would not be able to perceive any particular as the the kind of thing it is, but the idea of essences wants to locate universals 'in' the naively real objects themselves, rather than in every part of the relationally real process of perception.
The process of perception presents a world of things and events, and this process is at once material, embodied and abstract; generality and particularity belong to every phase of the process. The process is a real process, a wholistic process, and it does not involve a disembodied mind trying to interact with or understand a separate world of physical objects.
I think this is the situation phenomenologically speaking. Metaphysical speculation as to what ultimately "lies behind" or provides the conditions of the possibility or, more importantly, the actuality, of this situation is not empirically decidable. I think that is really the issue; not that such speculation is meaningless, because it is obviously meaningful in that it involves using words and phrases that mean something to us; the issue is that it is undecidable. The mistake of the Logical Positivists was to conflate 'undecidable' with 'meaningful'.
That might be so. Colin McGinn postulated this is because we lack the cognitive makeup to answer such questions, although we can ask them somehow.
Right, so there's no debate, the one with the most of those things is better.
Quoting Marchesk
That's fine where there's some fuzzy, vague definition, almost all words are a bit fuzzy around the edges when you examine them. But in your example here your talking about real things (awards, championships etc). As I mentioned before, from Quine, it's the degree of fuzziness which makes propositions increasingly meaningless. There's no cut off point we can point to in the same way as no one can say how many grains of sand make a 'pile', but at some point the words become too vaguely defined for sentences containing them to carry any meaning.
I don't think your analysis really comes to terms with Aristotle. The fact that you designate him a 'naive realist' speaks volumes. In fact, his analysis of the 'four causes' is precisely what has fallen out of modern epistemology, and, you will note, has had to be re-imported back into biosemiotics, because of the necessity of allowing for telos in the way organisms operate (which is why Apokrisis keeps saying that he allows for 'four causes' even if one of them just turns out to be thermodynamic necessity.)
So by all means, criticize hylomorphic dualism, but on the basis of what it actually is. I think trying to reconstruct the meaning of universals in the basis of sensations is never going to get there.
I'd argue that you don't. Being able to repeat the propositions and deriving any meaning from them are not the same thing.
Quoting Moliere
Again, I'd ask what measure you're using to determine that the two people actually understand each other. Presumably, there has to be some metric, otherwise it would not be possible to misunderstand. The whole system of university education in philosophy would be pointless (a conclusion I'm inclined to agree with), there would be no sense to the term "you haven't understood X's position", and yet these are the mainstay of philosophical debate.
Quoting Moliere
Except for those who don't agree, like Churchland, Dennett, Rosenburg for whom conciousness is not that and we a re deluded into thinking that the world feels like something.
Quoting Moliere
I'm not getting from this what you think 'wrong' is. You've just given a synonym 'false'. What actually is 'wrong/false'?
Quoting Moliere
I can disagree with your statement that "Unicorns have pink tails" by simply stating that "Unicorns have blue tails". At no point does my ability to do this indicate anything about my understanding of you use of the term 'Unicorn', all I did was construct a grammatically correct sentence with the term in it. All I needed to do that was to understand if the term was a noun or a verb, I don't need to understand anything of what you actually meant by it.
That one is going on my list, thanks. Note (as I suspect you already have) that that quote comes not only from Ramsey talking about what isn't a discussion (presumably why you felt it pertinent), but also from talking about how most discussions claiming to be about Philosophy (in this case Ethics) are actually about psychology, which I think is also pertinent to the discussion about what has meaning...but then I would, wouldn't I?
Just noticed this comment. Actually, that is pretty close to the mark. And that's why I am increasingly finding that more and more of the discussions I'm having are not about philosophy as such, so much as about the history of ideas (or even just history.) A lot of modern materialism has lost sight of why metaphysics was rejected or what it really meant to begin with. So concentrating on some themes in the metaphysics that originated with Aristotle, allows for, let's say, a meaningful discussion of metaphysics, rather than simply declaring that it's all so vague, the meaning so imponderable, that it simply can't be discussed. Although that does seem fairly close to what we might term your 'master thesis', does it not?
Quoting Pseudonym
Going back to this comment - there was a lot of interaction between Islamic and Christian philosophers in the middle ages, and there are names, like Averroes and Avicenna, that are Muslim philosophers and commentators on Aristotle, whose influence is visible in Western thought (remembering that it was the Muslims who preserved Aristotle in the so-called Dark Ages). But introducing modern atheism does queer the pitch somewhat, as it is to all intents incommensurable as the underlying assumptions are so profoundly different to traditional metaphysics. But even so, understanding the history of the ideas, and how modern materialism developed historically from the earlier metaphysics, does help to clarify the philosophical issues.
[incidentally I have noticed an external course being run by Oxford on this very topic, which I am considering enrolling in for the next session.]
Islamic, Christian, and Hindu philosophers or teachers, might profoundly disagree about many points of doctrine, even on what is the 'nature of the divine' - whether to conceive of it as the divine person, or the Trinity, or the impersonal Brahman of the Hindus, and so on. But they agree that there is something corresponding to what is designated 'divine', about which they disagree. Whereas for atheism generally, there is nothing whatever that corresponds to that designation. It's an empty set. So whatever their disagreements are with the others, in their view, they're not even agreeing about what it is that they disagree about. Which is pretty close to where this thread started.
Is that somehow different from saying that consciousness is an illusion? And don't they understand the meaning of the word in responding like this?
Quoting Pseudonym
What metric do you use to determine that a child has learned how to speak? Is there really some set of criteria you apply, or do you just understand the words being said?
Surely it's possible to be misunderstood. If you said consciousness was awareness, for instance, then in the debate on conscioussness you'd be using the term incorrectly.
Quoting Pseudonym
"Consciousness is an illusion" is true
Then the eliminative materialist is right.
"Consciousness is real" is true
Then the eliminative materialist is wrong.
Quoting Pseudonym
So what?
This seems to be asking for some kind of apodeictic certainty in communication. Just because there is the possibility that someone doesn't understand a term, but only the grammar, doesn't mean that everyone using said term is in the same situation.
Consider the 5th postulate of geometry. The same would hold there. All that one would have to do is append a "not" in the appropriate place, and yet could get by without understanding the 5th postulate of geometry.
But surely the possibility of petulant students doesn't invalidate a field.
Come on! Unicorns aren't hard to understand, anymore than drgaons or wizards are. They're just fictional creations. That doesn't make them meaningless.
Now an Invisible Pink Unicorn has an inherent contradiction in what sort of thing it's supposed to be, so that falls under the umbrella of incoherency, which was the point of the term (to parody incoherent religious concepts). Just like a four sided triangle is an incoherent concept. But a triangle in a time travel story isn't incoherent, it's just part of a fictional story.
It is true that accusations of "meaninglessness" (as well as some others, such as "incoherency") are often thrown around rather loosely. But, returning to the topic of the thread, you need to remember that Carnap was a positivist, and so he had stringent and, perhaps to our ear, rather idiosyncratic criteria of meaningfulness.
But let's not nitpick vocabulary. I think the idea in this particular instance is that some debates just lack substance and worth. Some - in fact, probably many - questions that have been mainstays of philosophy, and metaphysics in particular, are pseudo-questions.
My own approach when it comes to questions of ontology, debates over realism vs. nominalism, etc. is to ask, What is at stake? Why is this important? What difference in our worldview would one position make vs. the other? If it seems to me that nothing substantial is at stake, except perhaps minor differences in language, then I judge such questions to be - let's say "worthless," if you don't like "meaningless."
I think it's fair to say that all of the ancients were naive realists insofar as they considered things to be substances; substantive entities that in their own independent being possessed qualities including what were later called 'secondary qualities".
I can't see how Aristotle's idea of four causes is relevant to the point I was making? Could you explain? Perhaps reference the "volumes" you say my imputation of naive realism to Aristotle "speaks". :wink:
Quoting Wayfarer
Where in the post you were responding to, or elsewhere, have I presented a criticism of hylomorphic dualism?
And where have I claimed that the meaning of universals could be reconstructed (whatever that means) from sensation?
What I have said is that generalities have their genesis in pattern recognition, in difference, similarity and repetition, and that at their most abstract generalities become universals, which may then be reified as "somethings" which exist independently of the experienced world. What you might think that has to do with "reconstructing the meaning of universals on the basis of sensation", I am left wondering.
Seriously Wayfarer, you need to engage with the points I am actually making, otherwise no meaningful discussion will be possible.
This is exactly what happens in the arts, and all the other disciplines and religions and sciences as well, each of which have their own languages; so it is not just philosophy that benefits from this human capacity. Blessed be the semantics!
Are you a physical being, book-ended by birth and death - or something other than that? It might turn out to be important. That is why one of the influential books on this very topic is Richard Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences. Our metaphysical theories deeply influence the way we live.
Quoting Janus
The Platonic tradition (of which Aristotle was a part, even if dissident) was by no stretch 'naive realism'. It was a critical tradition through and through. The foundational texts such as The Parmenides, and the other metaphysical dialogues of Plato, and the other philosophers even including the Sceptics, were critical philosophies that considered very deep questions of the nature of being and existence.
The origin of the term 'substance' in Aristotle was the Latin translation of the term 'ouisia', which is nearer in meaning to 'being'. It is understood as the subject of which the particular qualities are attributes. So the 'substance' is in a sense the genus, or generic type, of which this particular individual (i.e. Socrates) is an instance. And that is nothing like 'substance' in the sense that I think you're thinking.
One of the driving forces of the Enlightenment was just the rejection of classical metaphysics - positivism, generally, and the Vienna Circle were obviously a manifestation of that. And positivism is much nearer to 'naive realism' than was Greek philosophy. Why? Because it accepts 'the sensible realm' as being real in its own right and then tries to work backwards from there to first principles on the basis of scientific empiricism. But it's turned out that metaphysics dies hard; philosophy, as Etienne Gilson remarked, always ends up burying its undertakers.
Quoting Janus
Here, in the discussion about the sensation of being struck. Here, in the discussion about causality.
And here:
Quoting Janus
Quoting Janus
That is exactly what you appear to be doing.
Quoting Janus
No kidding.
Quoting Janus
Thanks for the lesson on Plato and Aristotle. I've actually read them, and about them, extensively. have you read them yourself? A lot of what you say makes me wonder! At least you know how to be condescending...
I explained why I said the Ancients were naive realists; because they didn't not have the benefit of a scientific understanding of the complexities of perception which leads to a more nuanced process realism. I obviously didn't make the claim based on the their total lack of thought about the nature of being. Talk about strawmanning!
Quoting Wayfarer
That has nothing to do with universals, but with the argument as to whether we experience causation.
Quoting Wayfarer
Again, it's a discussion about causality not about universals. Are you serious?
Note, I have explicitly acknowledged that both generality and particularity are intrinsic to our sense-making. Our most basic pre-conceptual embodied experience cannot be, in any determinate sense, either; it is something like Peirce's 'firstness'; pure affect or feeling.
You really haven't addressed anything that I wrote at all. So why should I respond further?
I prefer that way of saying things, though I'd still insist on saying that it is only worthless to someone -- that this is a matter of preference more than a matter of the value of the philosophical debate.
Usually philosophical puzzles are things found after having developed a worldview -- so given such and such beliefs, attitudes, arguments, and so forth that form a worldview we come across some element that is paradoxical, puzzling, difficult to reconcile, self-defeating, or simply problematic to everything that came before. So if we are Platonists, for instance, the problem of universals has more at stake than if we are nominalists. If we are scientific realists then the problem of demarcation has more at stake than if we are spiritualists, who have some view of the world that incorporates religion into its ontology. If we are apatheists, as I really am anymore, the question of the existence of God doesn't hold much interest to me because of my commitments, but if I were a Christian then there would be something at stake.
That is, what's at stake is relative to a point of view. And if that's the case I suppose I really prefer people to just say, "I am not interested in that" to "That problem is worthless" or "That problem is nonsensical" (Which, yes, I believe do get thrown about all too often)
The problem is that Carnap, and positivism generally, both tend towards 'scientism'. Even sophisticated neuroscientists who write on philosophy often fall into that. For sure the ancients didn't have much of a grasp of cognitive science or neuro-science, but the basic task of philosophy is not dependent on them.
//and I don't know if Carnap and the Vienna Circle had anything to say about Whitehead, but I daresay that if they did, it would hardly be positive.//
//Quoting Janus
You said, 'generalities become reified as universals'.
OK, well that still seems irrelevant to recent discussion, but at least it's back to the OP. I agree that people succumb to, or opt for, scientism. But you already should know from long experience, that I have no truck with that. I even think @apo, despite all his brilliance, tends to be unnecessarily reductionist in the scientistic (but not the mechanist) sense, and I have said that many times. For me, philosophy is certainly not totally dependent on science; but since science is a huge part of human experience, cannot afford to ignore it, either.
As I've also said earlier in this thread, I agree, and I think Wittgenstein would also, with the positivists insofar as saying that metaphysical claims are not decidable; but I think they go too far in saying they are meaningless. Wittgenstein does say that such claims have no sense, but I take that to mean "no empirical sense" which is to say they are not 'of the senses', not decidable, not to say they have no meaning. Of course they have meaning, just as poetry does, which is to say that they are more or less rich in conceptual and perceptual associations. It's a question of aesthetics, not of truth.
Not sure I agree with that last part. Just because metaphysics might be undecidable for us doesn't mean there isn't truth. It's undecidable whether alien civilizations exist beyond our light cone, but I see no reason to say it isn't a matter of truth whether they do. Either they do or don't exist. We have reasons to believe the universe is bigger than our light cone, and so they might exist.
My view is that truth can be verification-transcendent There are some things we just don't have the means to find out, but that doesn't mean there isn't a truth. It could be mathematical, physical, metaphysical, whatever.
Otherwise, we limit truth to what human beings can know, despite all the evidence that humans aren't the center of existence.
Whether or not there are aliens is not a metaphysical question, though, is it?
No, but whether or not there are aliens too far away for us to know about it is unverifiable.
What is the relevance of such a question? In effect, it ignoring it's own insight. It takes an instance we know to be unverifiable... then supposes to address the question of whether it's veritable or not. The supposed "metaphysical" condrum being tackled, to have some verfied account of what is true or not, is directly obliterated by its definition.
If a claim is unverifiable, a challenge to verify it does not make sense.
Beyond our light cone, or even a few billion light years away is probably not ever going to be verifiable for us. But I don't know what advanced technology or new discoveries in physics might yield someday.
Quoting Janus
Depends on the past claim, doesn't it? Some past events have tons of evidence, even video. Some things, like the exact number of T-Rex in the year 69,335,678 BC, are not knowable, short of a time machine. (And even then, counting all the T-Rex would be a challenge, despite their size).
No, I was giving an example of a situation where we have good reason to suppose that the truth is verification-transcendent. You can't verify whether there exists aliens too far away for us to ever detect. However, the universe appears to be fairly similar overall as far as we can see, with the same physics and distribution of matter, stars and most likely planets.
Yet we have every scientific reason to think that the following proposition is true or false:
There is an intelligent civilization in the Andromeda galaxy.
But the 2 million light year distance might be too far in space and time-delay to ever detect such a civilization. For that matter, we may never verify whether we're alone. But even if we fail to find evidence, the following proposition would also be true or false:
We are alone (as a technological civilization) in the cosmos.
Unless one thinks the light from space is all just an appearance (maybe fed to us from the aliens to fool us into thinking the cosmos is empty!)
My point is we cannot tell.
The question of trying to verify such a claim is meaningless. It not longer makes sense to ask: "What is the verified answer to this question?" or "What is the verified answer to this question/how do we know this is true or not?"
This takes out the sort of questions you are asking with respect to metaphysics and knowledge. There is nothing to say on the level of verification.
If you want to talk about what is true of a distant galaxy or some other unknown space and an instance of knowledge about it, you have to use a different account of knowledge, such as expected behaviour based on (an assumed) likely similar form (i.e. the space is like the rest of the universe) or outright conceptual grasping itself (i.e. like a prophetic vision: "I'm aware that an inhabitant of Earth will have toast for breakfast tomorrow" ).
I think I see the point - but not persuaded by it. But on the other hand, right now debate is raging in physics about the so-called multiverse - the debate being whether this is even a scientific theory, or if it's 'just metaphysics'. My two cents is, it's bad metaphysics, but obviously there's a lot of heavyweights involved, so my two cents is probably not worth two cents. :sad:
But I've argued against verification being a requirement for statements being meaningful. Metaphysical statements can't be verified. They go beyond the empirical domain. But they can be argued for. And they can be true, if there is some real state of affairs the metaphysical argument is about.
That's a realist take on truth and metaphysics, anyway.
For sure, but I don't think anyone was arguing statements weren't meaningful without verification. Carnap certainly isn't trying to make that point in his accusations against metaphysics. The point is, rather, to avoid making errors in our thinking, tricking ourselves into asking questions that are "meaningless" and don't have an answer. (as the oppose a logical incoherence own the premise of their query).
With respect to empirical claims, for example, that means them being verifiable in principle. That's to say, the posing of some state of affairs such that if someone encountered them, the claim would be verified by their observation/perception of the world.
So in the case of the distant galaxy, to form a coherent empirical claim, one would have to pose something which, if encounter in observation, would be verified-- e.g. the alien planets orbiting each other, the, lifeforms with three heads, etc. One couldn't just allude to some undefined, unknowable mystery and make a coherent empirical claim. (e.g. in the distant galaxy, there is creator God who is beyond description).
1. isn't a metaphysical question. You are asking whether dragons and aliens exist in Middle Earth. It's an empirical question of an imaginary world.
2. is an empirical question. The site is just beyond our observation range. Inside or outside our light cone doesn't matter to this one. "Out in the larger universe" is just a red-herring. Other places are still exits in the same reality no matter which universe we are identifying them with.
3. is a metaphysical question... but it doesn't off up any contingent alternatives. There is no alternative structure because a world in which A follows B form necessary causality is identical to a world in which the randomly follow each other. We have A followed by B. This presents the same whether B is necessarily caused by A or if it just randomly follows A.
Thus, we have no metaphysical question of whether there is casual stature or not.
(at this point, we need to reconsider causality and what it means, since there is literally no difference in the world between our supposed opposition of causal structure vs no causal structure).
4. That's an empirical/phenomenological question. Whether an "illusion" is present is down to if the appropriate experiences exists, ones which show the relevant states or not.
In your examples, you haven't got one coherent ontological question. They all involve some sort of confusion formed out of putting speculation before knowledge.
I guess so, but documentary evidence, even video is not the same as witnessing it yourself. Anyway the point of distinction is between verifiable at least in principle and not verifiable even in principle, whatever you might want to say about individual cases.
Not very different, no, but that's the point. They think they understand the 'meaning' of the word, but others disagree. Conciousness is a noun, its meaning is its correct referent (in some form), so how can a debate have meaning when one side is using the word 'conciousness' to refer to a thing the properties of which the other side do not agree with. It's like changing the atheist/theist debate from "does God exist or not?" to "what are the properties of God?" by saying that both sides know the meaning of the word 'God' and can therefore have a meaningful conversation about the properties of the thing. It's perfectly possible - we could say that one of the properties of God is non-existence - but that's just not how normal people talk and I don't see how it gets us anywhere to set up this artificial manner of discourse without good reason. The normal way for atheists to talk about God is to say that no such thing exists, not to discuss its properties (one of which is non-existence). So there are these two groups with conciousness, those who believe that conciousness is just an illusion, nothing more than an artefact of mental processes, and those who think explaining its properties is the most important question of humanity. To say that the one group can have a meaningful conversation with the other simply on the grounds that they both make grammatically correct use of the word 'conciousness' is stretching normal discourse really far for no good reason.
Quoting Moliere
Whether their use of words communicates the message they intended. The words have a purpose, they must communicate some message to other language users otherwise they fail. This is not the case with the interpretation of philosophical propositions. One cannot say that my interpretation of some proposition is wrong, because the interpreting a proposition never had a stated purpose by which mine could be measured. That's the point. Philosophy is constantly trying to have its cake and eat it. It wants to be as vague and aesthetic as possible when people like Carnap try to attack it for lacking verification, but then when it comes down to preserving the hierarchy of the 'big' philosophers, the professors and the students, it clams up again into pretending that there's definitely something solid and verifiable, something one can definitely be 'wrong' about.
Quoting Moliere
In what way? If I made the claim that conciousness was awareness, maybe on the basis that I'm claiming that an awareness of awareness is indistinguishable in neurological terms from an awareness of anything else and I'm an eliminative materialist about the mind, then how could I be using the term 'incorrectly'
Quoting Moliere
Yes, but if one were to refute the fifth postulate just by saying "no it doesn't", everyone would disagree with them. That's the difference. The fifth postulate has consequences, claiming it to be false simply by restating it with the word 'doesn't' instead of 'does' would mean that all of geometry would have to change because I can draw two straight lines crossing another and they will meet on the side with the smaller angles. I've no doubt there are clever mathematical constructs and ways out of this (perhaps non-eucledean geometry?) but there is sufficient widespread agreement to make the terms meaningful. This is not the case with most metaphysical propositions.
I didn't say Unicorns are meaningless. We're going round in circles here. It is the debate about them that is meaningless. Not the question, not the answers to the question, not the terms themselves, the debate (in the form that metaphysical debates are currently held).
The thing that is meaningless is the statement "the claim that unicorns have pink tails is wrong". We can all understand what unicorns are - they are fictional beasts a bit like a horse with a single horn. We can all understand what the question "what colour are unicorn's tails?" means - it means, if I were to look at a unicorn's tail, what sensation of colour would I experience". We can all understand what the answer "Unicorn's tails are pink" means - we can conjure up an image of a unicorn with a pink tail and your image would not be too dissimilar from mine. What we can't make sense of is what the word 'wrong' means in that proposition.
What does it mean to be 'wrong' about the tail colour of a fictional beast whose tail colour is not specified in any of the mythological traditions which gave rise to the widespread agreement about it's horse-likeness and its single horn?
Quoting Marchesk
An invisible pink unicorn is not incoherent at all. It could be invisible to most people, therefore justifying the adjective, but to those to whom it is visible, it appears pink. Or maybe it thinks it's pink and we're going to define the colour of a thing by what it thinks it is because we're being solopsistic about it. It might be that it is pink in the sense of the the 'thing-as-it-is', but we can only ever perceive it as invisible because of the limits of our senses. Maybe it's pink in some light conditions that do not currently exist and so we could never falsify it.... I could go on. Metaphysics is easy.
Your four-sided triangle might be incoherent, but that's because the properties of a triangle are widely agreed upon, and one of them it that it doesn't have four sides. There's no-one in the world seriously claiming that triangles have four sides, for that very reason.
The idea that some metaphysical propositions can be rejected because they are incoherent, or inconsistent, or self-contradictory, is just a lack of lateral thinking on the part of the proponent. Give it enough time and someone will be able to find a way to make it coherent again. Have they achieved anything by doing this? yes, I think they probably have, they've made their story more valuable to themselves because it is more robust. That's the value of such discussions. We're they wrong in the first place because they were incoherent? well obviously not, minor tweak in expression and they're back to being coherent again, nothing about the fundamental truth value of the proposition changes.
I would say that they understand the meaning of the word just fine. What other's disagree with is not the meaning of "consciousness" -- it's well explicated -- but on whether or not what is being said is true. And that this is the sort of thing which debates consist in anyways. It's possible to misunderstand, but with enough time we come to understand exactly what we mean and the disagreement hinges on something other than what a word means.
Quoting Pseudonym
I would say that you can say an interpretation is wrong. There are multiple interpretations of philosophers, but there are also incorrect interpretations. To say "Nietzsche believed that the height of humanity was achieved through socialism" is just plainly false. Or to say, "Plato argued that the mind is a blank slate upon which our empirical senses impinges" is also plainly false.
I don't think you need metrics to understand these things. And I'd argue that a language-user still uses meaningful words regardless of whether their message they intended is communicated. Plus I'm not sure that's really a metric anyways -- intent seems an odd sort of thing to provide as a metric.
I'd just say there's a difference between verification and meaning, as well as verification and falsehood -- so there is no conflict in saying that certain statements are not verifiable yet are either meaningful, or true, or false.
And that it's actually quite common for people to believe more than what they can verify, and to do so because of [various reasons] -- so engaging in what people believe, and for what reasons, makes sense. How many people do you think are strict verificationists, both in terms of meaning and in terms of what they believe?
Why is verification important?
Quoting Pseudonym
Because consciousness is the feeliness of the world -- that it feels like something. Awareness is another aspect of the mind people tend to use "conscious" for, but it's not what's being talked about.
Quoting Pseudonym
In order for agreement to take place we must understand what we mean by some statement. Else, prior to there being agreement, we'd be talking nonsense until we all finally decided to say "I agree!" -- and does the statement somehow magically gain meaning at that point, due to this intonation?
So as you note there is non-Euclidean geometry. I chose the 5th postulate for this reason. There was a point in time when the 5th postulate was widely agreed upon as simply true, or derivable from the other postulates -- until it was demonstrated that appending that "not" could actually hold, we'd just be dealing with another sort of geometry that behaves differently.
Before people agreed with them what they said still meant something. It wasn't because the mathematical community at large said "I agree!" that the terms used in their papers suddenly gained meaning -- the meaning was well understood, and what was argued over was the truth or falsity of said meaning.
The debate really was only a meaningful debate insofar that there was disagreement -- if, today, you were to try to rehash the debate, claiming that the 5th postulate was true simpliciter, no one would take you very seriously.
Now, as to most metaphysical propositions -- on that I think we'd need a heartier notion of metaphysics in order to begin counting what counts. My suspicion is that the words will mean -- they are not nonsense -- and that the meaningfulness of the debate will be similar to the 5th postulate: It will be relative to a philosophical attitude, a community, a set of beliefs, or some such. So what is important to some is not important to others, and vice versa, primarily because of other beliefs that are being held as true or at least viewed as desirable to retain.
Which seems to indicate, as far as I can tell, that it would depend upon preference. So a verificationist, for instance, probably cares about verification and what that means. I, on the other hand, don't see much value in verification as a principle of meaning, so it really doesn't interest me all that much.
I can't speak for speak for Pseudonym, but the point I have been emphasizing is the undecidability, as opposed to the meaninglessness, of metaphysical disagreements. If we disagree over some empirical claim, the issue as to who is correct can be decided, by checking; by observation in some cases, referencing documented information in others, asking the experts and so on. Of course, no scientific hypothesis is ever proven, either, but there are at least accepted ways to corroborate opinion. I think this kind of corroboration just does not exist when it comes to metaphysical views.
So, I said I have not been emphasizing the meaninglessness of metaphysical disagreements, but actually because of the undecidability of the truth of competing views (which are themselves not meaningless, obviously, or else they could not qualify as views at all) and the presupposed premises upon which they rest, disagreement would seem to be, if not meaningless, then at least pointless.
For example, suppose that there's a metaphysics that doesn't need any assumptions or brute-facts, and that what it says there metaphysically is, is something that's uncontroversially inevitable. And say that there's another metaphysics that has a brute-fact. Suppose both metaphysicses predict our physical world, as we find it.
It's undecidable whether there is what the 2nd metaphysics says there is, but what can be said is that there's no doubt about there being what the 1st one says there metaphysically is. It can also be said that the 2nd one is superfluous, and that it doesn't do well by the Principle of Parsimony, or the customary discrediting of unverifiable, unfalsifiable theories.
So there are definite things that can be uncontroversially-said about metaphysics.
I suggest that, in metaphysics, there's no place for speculation or matters-of-opinion.
For example, I don't go so far as to speculate about whether this physical universe is more than my metaphysics says it is (or whether there additionally is what Materialism says there is (whatever that is) ). I don't go so far as to express an opinion on that matter.. My metaphysics is only about what there metaphysically at least is.
Michael Ossipoff
There is no such metaphysics, since any consistent metaphysics is merely a valid elaboration of premises which cannot be demonstrated from within the system (if at all). This is analogous to the way the axioms of geometry cannot be proven geometrically except that metaphysical premises are not self-evident.
Interesting thread. After a few hours of careful reading, and in line with the current vein of thinking here, I'd like to address two things.
First, the assertion that metaphysical debates are meaningless. In particular, I'm addressing the discussion between Moilere and Pseudonym and the consciousness debate...
The examples provided to bolster this claim that such debates are meaningless are inadequate. They do not offer an example of a meaningless debate. Rather, they offer an example of two sides working from different frameworks(talking past one another). It does not follow that such a debate is meaningless. When it is the case that two are arguing from different frameworks, then it is the case that both sides are employing meaningful, but different linguistic frameworks. They very well could be said to be arguing about different things despite using the same name. The frameworks are nevertheless meaningful. So, it is not the case that the debate is meaningless. It is the case that they do not have agreed upon(shared) meaning about the key terms. Such a debate is fruitless unless one side or the other accepts the opposing framework, and proceeds to show how it leads to problems. Otherwise, it is a semantic argument of the worst kind, but clearly meaningful.
Secondly, the assertion that metaphysical debates are pointless as a result of their being undecidable( not verifiable/falsifiable), at least in principle. While I would definitely agree here with some kinds of metaphysical debates, I am quite hesitant to agree with all kinds.
Doesn't explanatory power hold value equal to verification/falsification?
Kudos to the spirit of this thread!
:up:
Oh, and Carnap was wrong as a result of working from an utterly impoverished criterion for being meaningful...
Agreed. It's similar to the claim that religious believers don't really believe in their theology, when it's making claims about God or the afterlife, but are rather animated by it.
But I know that's simply not true. Some of them really do believe that way, in addition to being animated by it. Their worldview is just very different from some intellectual making a claim about what sort of statements can be believed (only the empirically grounded ones I take it).
From the SEP;
We could go on like this forever, but I'm fairly certain that the meaning of the term consciousness is not agreed on, that's the point. Nagel thinks there's something it's "like" to be us and calls this consciousness, others disagree that there is something it is 'like' to experience being us and equate consciousness directly with awareness. In what way could one of these definitions possibly be wrong? Yet they can't both be right.
Quoting Moliere
These are not interpretations of propositions, these are historical facts about the positions broadly held. As I said, I'm not suggesting that nothing outside of hard science has any vague truth value, I'm saying there is a gradation at one end of which is empirical science and at the other some of the more obscure metaphysics and religion. At some point on this gradation it becomes meaningless to debate the matters (and by debate, I mean attempt to show your interlocutor is wrong). I cannot even pinpoint exactly where that line is, but then I cannot pinpoint exactly how many grains of sand are required for it to be a 'pile'. So, the fact that saying "Plato argued that the mind is a blank slate upon which our empirical senses impinges" would be wrong, does not undermine the assertion that any individual propositions of Plato's could be interpreted in any grammatically correct way and no-one could say which interpretation was more 'right', by any measure.
Quoting Moliere
Again, you seem to be missing the point, perhaps my writing is not as clear as I'd like to think, but I did write it in a single bolded sentence so I'm not sure why the message isn't getting home - I'm not saying that the beliefs themselves are meaningless, I'm saying that debating them is.. A non-verifiable statement could be packed with meaning, it could be the most meaningful thing ever said, but if it is non-verifiable, then to say it is right or wrong is meaningless, to say it is better or worse is meaningless, without first agreeing what 'better' would consist of. Using a word in a sentence your meaning of which is not the same as the meaning for the person to whom you are communicating is almost literally meaningless. It's practically the definition of the word.
Quoting Moliere
It's not waht's being talked about by those who think that's what conciousness is. It is what's being talked about by those who don't. Read a few passages about conciousness by Paul Churchland and see how many times he mentions the 'feeliness' of the world. I guarantee it will be none (unless to dismiss it), because that's not what conciousness is for him.
Quoting Moliere
Basically I take a kind of Ramsey-Quine synthesis, which I think answers this point. All scientific theories are in the form of Ramsey sentences. "There are things called electrons which...[the rest of particle physics]", or "There is a relation between humans and their environment which...[the rest of human ecology" etc. Quine then goes on to say that metaphysics is like a science, in that it uses the same techniques on less empirical problems, but to a gradually decreasing degree until it starts becoming meaningless. The sentences become more and more fantastical and relate less and less to the real world, until they are nothing but stories. again, just to drive this point home, that doesn't make them meaningless. In fact I think stories to explain how we exist in the world are of absolutely vital importance and meaning. But it does make trying to argue that one story is better than another meaningless, it does mean that slavishly following someone else's story on the presumption that you can't develop your own meaningless. In short it makes most of the activity of modern metaphysics meaningless.
I'm not seeing the link you're making here. You seem to jump from saying the frameworks are meaningful (which I can agree with) to saying that the debates are therefore meaningful, and I don't see any argument which got you from the one proposition to the other. How are you reaching the conclusion that because the frameworks are meaningful, debating between two different ones must also be meaningful?
Quoting creativesoul
Absolutely, I'd venture to say that for most people it holds more value, since most people leave the verification to professional scientists. But almost anything can be explained in almost any way, given sufficient imagination. I could quite easily construct a coherent explanation for all events in the world using an imaginary pantheon of Gods I just made up. Or I could come up with some New Age woo to explain everything, use quantum physics to construct some weird reality (god knows it's weird enough to allow almost anything). Any of these might have enormous value to me, but it would be meaningless to try and convince you they were right, or that yours was wrong. What measure would I use to do so?
In the empirical arena the explanatory power of a hypothesis or theory is gauged according to the success of its predictions of observable phenomena. So, given that is right, I am left wondering how we would go about gauging the explanatory power of metaphysical theories.
Yes, but it's hard to believe them when they say there's nothing it's 'like' to experience being us, unless they are philosophical zombies.
I think it's far more likely they know what it's "like", but they're convinced it has to be an illusion on other grounds, so they argue that there is no actual subjective experience. That's been part of Dennett's career.
At any rate, the philosophical discussion on consciousness centers around the hard problem and subjectivity, not other areas which are more amenable to science. Dennett understands what Chalmers is saying and vice versa. They just don't agree.
Metaphysical theories are explanatory on conceptual grounds. You argue for or against the ideas. How well they hold together, what their flaws are, whether there is anything contradictory or confusing, etc.
Of course, and the exact same argument has been used against atheists. "I can't believe they don't really feel the presence of God, they're convinced it's just their conscience or something but they do really feel it"
Quoting Marchesk
I might just get this available as a keyboard short-cut to save time... I'm not suggesting that the arguments in either camp are impossible to understand, or meaningless in themselves. I'm suggesting that the sentence "argument X is wrong" is meaningless because of the failure to agree on the meaning of 'wrong' in this context.
I'm more amenable to this view -- especially because you're explicitly stating that there is a difference between meaning and decidability.
I'd say that decidability is still a possible feature of metaphhysical debate, though -- but only under certain conditions. And I'd also say that metaphysical debate can still have a point, even if it is not decidable.
On conditions of decidability: If two persons have a shared tradition, then metaphysical debate is (possibly) decidable. There are a set of propositions held T, and the arguments for or against some view from those propositions gives a kind of ground upon which disagreement can take place. (Propositions don't have to be what is shared -- it can be attitudes, goals, or whatever else might serve as the bed of agreement upon which disagreement rests)
On "the point of it all": Even if there is not a bed of agreement upon which disagreement can take place in order that some disagreement may be decidable, then debate can take place to clarify and elucidate. Sometimes I'd rather debate with my polar opposite for this purpose, because I know that they, at least, will be motivated to pick apart what I'm saying in order that I may further refine my own thinking.
Well, they can both be right, insofar that we are clear on what we're saying. So if we're talking about "what it is like", then it does no service to a discussion to argue over what consciousness means -- it is, in that context, wrong to say that consciousness is something else.
Quoting Pseudonym
Is the assertion I provided not grammatically correct?
I can agree with the notion that there are multiple interpretations. But I can't agree that there's no point, or that all one needs is grammar to make an assertion. Interpretative arguments are full of examples from some author -- usually you have to look at the corpus as a whole.
I think maybe this is where we keep talking past one another. In part I think I agree with you, but I don't agree with your conclusions. But more on that in the next paragraph.
Quoting Pseudonym
I disagree. :D
I think where I'm becoming confused is from the first part of your paragraph to your second part. Where we agree is with your bolded sentence. But where we disagree is on verifiability, worth, and agreement.
Let's say consciousness is not verifiable. There is nothing we could point to to decide whether or not consciousness is an illusion or whether it is as real as anything else. In fact we might even be able to say that the debate on conciousness is really like this -- that there is no agreement on, at least, what view is better. (I think that the reductive materlialist understands what Nagel means well enough, they just deny that the existence of consciousness is true -- in a similar manner that someone might say of any entity, like a hole, or a God, or whatever).
Yet, in spite of this, the debate is interesting to myself. It provides a challenge to certain of my views, and forces me to reconcile -- one way or another, though it doesn't have to be the same as those who publish -- my beliefs with the arguments put forth. I think through them and wonder if they are right or wrong, and try to provide reasons for that.
Without the debate then my thoughts would have continued along another trajectory. But I value a challenge to my beliefs, and consciousness was one of those arguments that did challenge my beliefs at one point.
It was the disagreement that was valuable. Not the agreement. And insofar that we at least understand what we mean by terms then we can actually disagree with one another without talking past one another. Of course we can use the same locution to mean different things -- that's true of any word, and why we specify exactly what we mean within the context of a conversation .
So basically if we agree on the one -- that metaphysical statements have meaning, in the sense that they are both syntactical and semantic, and it also seems we agree that two speakers need to be clear about what they mean about a term (to change meanings mid-conversation would be wrong, given what's already set up) -- then where we really disagree is on the value of metaphysical debate. I'd say that the value is relative to whatever beliefs, arguments, attitudes, or whtaever a reader or thinker or interlocutor or whatever currently holds -- call this philosophical preference.
Quoting Pseudonym
Cool. I don't think of metaphysics quite like that. I think of it as the study of what exists, how we come to have beliefs about the nature of things, as well as the study of synthesizing all that comes before -- not that these are all the same, but that's how I group it together in my mind and try to figure out what someone is doing specifically when they say they are doing metaphysics. I think there comes a time when reason no longer can justify beliefs (I have in mind here something like proving that I have a hand, or whatnot), but I'd say even this is fluid and changing with person, time, and place.
So from my perspective, at least, I don't see science as somehow better than metaphysics in its decidability. It's just one tradition of metaphysics in which people are able to disagree and have a measure of decidability -- but I don't think that makes it more purposeful or meaningful in terms of deciding what is the case.
Exactly, now imagine this process like a decision tree (I wish I could draw in these posts, it would be so much easier). First fork in the tree is "what do we mean by conciousness?" and there's Nagel on one branch and Churchland on the other. And you're saying that once you've chosen Nagel's path, there's no meaningful discussion using Churchland's definition, because we're in a completely different framework. We're not going to decide between them "they can both be right" you say.
So now we're committed to Nagel's branch and he makes a proposition of the form "conciousness does not superveniene on the physical". Now we have exactly the same problem with 'superveniene on the physical'. One interpreter might think he means literally neuron/thought reduction, another might be more inclined to weak supervenience. We cannot say which is right. In fact, no differently to the first branch about what conciousness means, we must conclude that they are both right.
So now we commit ourselves to the "conciousness is like something which doesn't strongly superveniene on the physical" branch. Then we encounter some proposition of the form "conciousness, in not superveniening on the physical, must also be timeless". The third fork. What do we mean by timeless? Outside of time, without time, is it just metaphorical? Again we can't say that any one interpretation is right, indeed just like the two forks before us, they must both be right.
And so it goes on. The route you take through the decision tree is what became known as a Ramsey sentence (apologies if I'm teaching you to suck eggs, it's just that Ramsey's not all that well known so I don't presume people are aware of him) . You can't meaningfully criticise another branch from the context of your own branch because the other branch is derived from all the one before it, not all the ones that you have committed yourself to.
But if, at each fork, we can only say "they are both right" then any discussion about which branch is most 'right' is meaningless. It a nonsensical contradiction as we cannot possibly determine the 'rightness' of the final result having determined each stage is indeterminable.
I can completely sympathise with your finding some value in 'testing' your beliefs against those of others, you might find another position more satisfying, or more robust, and we do seem to like our beliefs to be robust (well, some of us anyway) but that's a one way passive event. The philosopher only needs to 'present' you with their proposition, for you to do with what you will. But then there's no sense in which you're "studying" anything, there's no body of knowledge to learn (other than the entirely historical facts of who said what). No one is 'better' than anyone else, there's no sense in which some grammatically correct interpretation could be 'wrong' (again, other than in a purely historical sense that such an interpretation is unlikely to be what the author intended to say. Because what the author intended to say is a fact of history, not metaphysics).
As I say, I have a lot of sympathy for the value in the more mystical metaphysical propositions. I think I would even go as far as to say it would be virtually impossible for a person to go through life without taking a position on some of the most important metaphysical questions,and I'd love to be involved in discussing them as such, but that, sadly, is just not how it's done.
Good one, but having God experiences is not universally reported, unlike dreams, imagination, feeling pain, etc.
Subjectivity is universal. But when the nature of subjective experience is argued about it, some are convinced that it's an illusion and not something fundamentally hard to explain in objective terms.
Or they pretend they don't understand what having your own individual experiences means, and they argue about something else related that's third person, such as being awake and responsive, or reports.
Some of these arguments involve a degree of sophistry. Talk of subjectivity is granting ground to the hard problem, so it's easier to argue about something else.
Is our debate here meaningless?
:worry:
I think there's a difference between "They can both be right" and "They are both right" -- so when I say that it is wrong to say that consciousness is awareness, I'm talking about in the context of the hard problem of consciousness. And by wrong I don't mean false, only that if one were to mean what "awareness" means then they'd be talking about something else. I'd call this phenomena talking past one another, sometimes just because of the locutions involved are the same but also sometimes because there are some unstated beliefs that haven't be explicated yet causing confusion.
This would hold true further down the tree you describe. So supervenience is easily explained in a single sentence, but takes a long time to develop exactly what that sentence means (just like consciousness) because it is complicated. So we can make a distinction between weak and strong supervenience, and clarify what each means then ask, "What are you committed to?" -- this is just laying the groundwork for understanding someone.
Now I would agree that you can't criticize another branch of the tree merely be asserting your own branch of the tree. That would be thoroughly uninteresting, and amount to about the same thing as saying "P" "~P". But I would say that there's more to critique than simply taking a route down a tree of possible decisions -- and that we can be right or wrong in using a word in such and such a way only because of the context of the conversation, but that this does not mean the same thing as being true or false. We're just hammering down terms to begin to understand each other.
Quoting Pseudonym
Here again I don't think we can see eye to eye. :D Though I'll try and state why. (After all, it's disagreement that I think is valuable, at least at times)
What is a one way passive event? What is a two-way active event that makes it more valuable?
Is philosophy really just a collection of propositions? It seems to me that philosophy is bound up with reasoning and reflection, and not mere assertion. There are also traditions within which philosophy takes place. So, for instance, physics is a body of knowledge, and physics is just another tradition of metaphysics. It was born out of wholly metaphysical speculations about the nature of the cosmos. I would caution, here, to say that metaphysics is not a wholly a priori discipline -- like all of philosophy it's more like by hook and by crook (to steal something from Searle). There is an art to it, and sometimes you use examples, sometimes you use empirical methods, sometimes you use thought experiments, and sometimes you use arguments.
Science is a lot like this. The only difference is that science is institutionalized to be a certain way, whereas philosophy is broader and able to change traditional assumptions -- to make new traditions, if it happens to bear fruit.
And if metaphysics is the study of what exists, then it seems to me that science is either metaphysics in that sense, or just something which doesn't deal in existence, contrary to what it appears to do. While I'm not a scientific realist, in the sense that I think science spells out all of that which exists, or all knowledge, I do think that it deals in existence -- it makes claims about what exists and why such and such exists by using reasons, broadly construed. The only reason it's more decidable than all of philosophy is because it is a tradition, which holds certain things as true, wherein many people believe such and such and so are able to appeal to that bed of agreement to decide upon what is being disagreed with.
It is philosophy, and it is metaphysics.
So I'm uncertain I'd say there is no knowledge in philosophy, either, beyond historical facts. Maybe so. I just wouldn't state it so strongly as that. (Because surely there is a kind of difference between philosophy and science, I just don't find it to be all that strong -- the difference is just in what is being held T, what is the space of reasoning that's allowable, the traditions that are important to thinking)
Quoting Pseudonym
Often times I think you're right. But I'd still insist that within the context of a tradition that a metaphysical belief can be decidable based upon what is being held T -- such as the belief that the universe is coherent, or the belief that we live in the best possible world, or something. Also, I think I'd maintain the distinction between wrong/false, or the distinction between avoiding talking past one another, and making an argument for something being false. I think we both value not talking past one another.
I think perhaps where we are in disagreement is in how metaphysics can be done, as well as in how open "falsity" might be -- like, I can hear the reasons from someone I disagree with for why they think I'm false, and I'd like to hear it, but even if I don't find the reasons persuasive I still find the reasoning valuable.
Funnily enough I don't think I'm very sympathetic to mystical metaphysical propositions. :D But that's OK. I'm open to them being discussed meaningfully all the same -- though perhaps those sorts of statements really do need a high degree of agreement before discussions can feel like they were worthwhile.
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Sure, it would be circular if a premise for an argument for a metaphysics depended on something in the metaphysics that was being argued for.
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Typically not at all, with nearly all metaphysicses.
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Nearly all metaphysicses depend on a brute-fact. Materialism is the familiar example of that.
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The metaphysics suggested by Michael Faraday’s comments, and which I’ve been advocating, from the subjective point-of-view, and with emphasis on its uncontroversial-ness, doesn’t have a brute-fact, or depend on any assumptions.
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The premises of my metaphysics are self-evident.
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1. There are abstract implications (implyings of one proposition by another—“If A were true, then B would be true.”), and complex systems of inter-referring abstract implications (at least there are those in the sense that we can speak of them). They relate hypothetical propositions about hypothetical things.
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There are infinitely-many such systems, each with many combinations of hypothetical truth values for their antecedents and consequents. Because an antecedent of one implication can be the consequent of other implications, of course many combinations of truth-values are impermissible due to inconsistency, because there’s no such thing as inconsistent facts
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2. We have the experience of being a physical biological organism in a physical world, a world that produced that organism via its physical events.
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Conclusion:
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There’s no reason to believe that the experience named in 2) is other than a system such as described in 1)
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Argument:
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Because there are infinitely-many systems such as described in 1), an infinite subset of them model an organism’s life-experience. Inevitably, among those infinitely-many systems, one of those models the events and relations of your experience, with no reason to believe that your experience is other than that.
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(But, when dealing with objections, the argument can become extended to larger discussion.)
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Michael Ossipoff
If by "brute-fact" you mean "unsupported axiom" that would apply to all metaphysics. The aim of any metaphysical theory is to postulate the fundamental nature of being or reality.
Explain clearly for once just how your "Faraday" metaphysics doesn't depend on any assumptions. (If this was actually true, everyone of sound mind would become your follower; you might want to take a 'reality-check' on that :wink: ).
What you are referring to here is consistency and coherency, not explanatory power. Consistency and coherency can be assessed 'internally'. Explanatory power cannot; it needs to reference something which can actually be observed. An empirically-based theory explains what we would expect to observe if it was correct.
At a minimum, metaphysical theories must be internally consistent and coherent but they also must be, if they are to be any good (which means to be comprehensive), consistent with, and explanatory of, all of human experience. Really there are just a handful of competing metaphysical theories that succeed in that; and there is nothing per se to choose between them, otherwise the most successful one would be accepted by all thinking people as the correct one.
I agree with you that metaphysical debates could be decidable in the sense that like-minded people within a certain language game could come to agree with one another, once they had ironed out their differences,confusions, or mutual misunderstandings. I think that is a more relative kind of decidability than the decidability of empirical propositions and theories, though. But it is worth noting that there is no ultimate decidability in any domain of inquiry. Mathematics probably comes closest to complete decidability and metaphysics remains the most distant, with ethics and aesthetics and the human and natural sciences located at various imprecise points along the continuum.
I also take your point about the point of metaphysical discussions. We can appreciate a discussion, and thus find a point in it, just for its conceptual richness and elaboration and clarification of concpets, and I already acknowledged this earlier.
Arguably scientific method itself originated in the attempt to ameliorate or overcome this issue (as argued in an interesting and insightful book called The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science, Harrison.) However, along the way, the possibility of arriving at a 'unitive vision' of the nature of things seems to have become impossible, as the amount of data and information, and the number of disciplines that science embraces, makes it impossible for any individual to understand the whole picture. Maybe that's why metaphysics has indeed become meaningless.
Most of metaphysics, yes. But not to the metaphysics that I propose.
You're kidding, right?
That's a bit over-ambitious for metaphysics, a topic of discussion, description, debate, assertion..
You really believe that that covers all of reality?
That words don't describe Realiity is easily shown by the fact that no finite dictionary can non-circularly define any of its words.
What assumption(s) do you think it depends on?
The logical-mathematical relational-structure that Faraday referred to is just uncontroversially "there", In other words, there is it (...as I said, in the sense that we can speak of it).
In particular, the infinity of complex systems of abstract implications, with their hypothetical propositions, with their hypothetical truth-values. ...many configurations of mutually-consistent truth-values.
There's no need for an "assumption" that there are those things. There's no need for an assumption that there's one such that models the events of your experience. Uncontroversially, there is, and there is.
Maybe you believe in a brute-fact rule that says that our experience can't have that as its basis. But there's no physics experiment that says our experience is other than that relational structure that Faraday spoke of.
I can't prove that our physical world isn't more than the hypothetical setting for that hypothetical story. I only say that there' sno reason to believe that it's more than that.
Michael Ossipoff
You have an argument to support that claim?
Quoting Michael Ossipoff
I don't know. I have no idea what you are trying to say in your post after the sentence quoted above. If it is a claim you are trying to make, though, it must rest on some premise in order to count as a claim at all, and no premises are true by definition. Definition is a slippery thing, in any case; which your dictionary example above does show, and which your definition of events as "if-then propositions" also demonstrates.
I would agree that probably no one can master every one of today's many intellectual disciplines, but I don't think that one has to master them all in order to get a sense for what they all share in common. Metaphysics, after all, is nothing more than a general conceptual framework that describes the most general structure of reality. That's how I have come to think of it, at least. This doesn't require comprehensive mastery of all disciplines, though it probably does require adequate familiarity with many or most of them.
He's not kidding - he's giving you the definition.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
That’s not quite the point, though. I think the ‘unitive vision’ of the ‘cosmos as an ordered whole’ (bearing in mind, that is the meaning of the word 'cosmos') is more characteristic of mysticism and the original Greek rationalists, than it is of today’s scientific empiricism. What today's disciplines all share in common nowadays is a methodology, and a large part of that methodology is to set aside just such ideas as whether the cosmos is indeed an ordered whole. (I'm sure it's no coincidence that controversy is raging about the 'multiverse'.) And also, there's the fact of the tremendous fragmentation of worldviews that we see today, which is one of the reasons, if not the reason, that Carnap et al will declare that metaphysics is meaningless. It seems impossible to arrive at consensus, and empiricism by definition is not able to adjudicate the question. Welcome to post-modernity.
That's not what 'they'd' say though is it? They'd say that every tingling of conscience is God, every feeling of mystical beauty is God, every time you feel the warmth of the sun etc. I refer you back to @Srap Tasmaner's apposite Ramsey quote;
"I think we realize too little how often our arguments are of the form:-- A.: "I went to Grantchester this afternoon." B: "No I didn't."
We're forever presuming that the way we feel about something simply must have some deep significance, simply must say something meaningful about the world, but really I think its just the latest story we came up with to explain the chaos of our senses, and there's no sense in saying my story is better than yours because it 'feels' right. There's no sense in telling someone else their story is 'wrong' because it doesn't 'feel' right to you.
Quoting Marchesk
So how do you determine whether someone is "pretending" to not understand. Is this not just narcissism?, Failure of a theory of mind? "how could anyone possibly think differently to me?"
It's been skirted around without specifically mentioning it, but a some point a huge chunk of the idea that metaphysics is decidable come down to a belief in the truth of one's own a priori intuitions, and this is just vanity.
By one way and passive I mean that the philosopher holding the proposition plays no invested part in the process (one way) and that there's no competing, no right and wrong (passive). A two way, active event is one where the proposing party has a justified interest in changing the view of the receiving party, and vice versa (two way) and that each will consider the other to be wrong until they agree (active, or aggressive). I'm actually making the claim that the former is more valuable where the consequences would be irrelevant to each, the latter is more valuable where there will be consequences. Now, in order to engage in the latter (a fairly unpleasant and confrontational approach) I think ethically one should have a fairly good cause to believe the consequences will be manifest.
So, consider the latter first. I think gravity acts on objects to cause them to move toward the earth, and I build a bridge with that in mind. A fellow engineer thinks that gravity does not work that way, rather that it propagates like a wave and can be disrupted like one too. He intends to build a bridge with that in mind. There will clearly be manifest consequences if one or other of us is 'wrong', by which I mean 'does not correspond with our shared experience of the world'. The bridge based on the 'wrong' theory will fall down.
Now consider the former. Is a broadly Buddhist conception of the nature of reality more 'right' than a materialist one? Well, it doesn't seem to matter. There are happy Buddhists, there are unhappy Buddhists. There are happy materialists, there are unhappy materialists. It may make a difference in the real world (I'm not saying that they're equal), but that difference is certainly not demonstrable, and so I don't think the second techniques (two-way aggressive) is justified in these instances.
By 'aggressive' I don't mean only tone and language (although that's a big problem in places like this, it's much less so in academic philosophy), but I mean to include all forms of aggression such as hierarchy, idolatry, dominance, etc. The very notion of marking a philosophy essay is an act of aggression, in this sense, of dominance.
(and I've spent more of my life as the marker of essays than I have as the writer of them, by the way, just in case you might be tempted to think this position arises out of the bitterness of having just been given and 'F' for what I considered my magnum opus)
Quoting Moliere
The important question is whether this is a meaningful art or a rhetorical one. A politician uses exactly the same mix to get elected.
Quoting Moliere
Quoting Moliere
No, I don't think so, the other difference is that science affects us all in a shared experience. Electricity is electricity. It works your computer and mine in a shared and entirely predictable way. To the extent that science speculates on matters that do not affect anyone in a shared and predictable way (like Multi-verses), then it is metaphysics. As I mentioned to Marchesk, I think we too often presume that our internal understandings must have some universality to them, but there's no evidence that that is the case.
Quoting Moliere
So, back to my branching tree example, all the forks (decisions about competing possibilities) up to now represent "the tradition", where that tradition is at now is just one fork (the current question within that tradition that you're trying to decide). Only one of three possibilities exist as far as I can see.
1. All such forks are decidable - but then all the forks prior to it must have been decidable too and so whole traditions can be 'wrong' right from the first fork. This seems impossible since thousands of years worth of thought has not yielded such a conclusive answer. Either we're wrong here, or we're right but clearly do not have any mechanism whereby we can make such decisions.
2. No such forks are decidable - This allows all the different traditions to be equally 'right', or at least not 'wrong', but accepting it necessarily entails that the fork currently being debated within that tradition must also be un-decidable, making the two way aggressive debate (as defined above) pointless.
3. Some such forks are decidable, while others aren't - A classic have your cake and eat it position, but not one we can rule out only on its remarkable convenience for the status quo. The problem here is that, in order to justify an aggressive, two-way debate about a particular fork in this scenario, we'd need some agreed method of determining which type of fork this is, a decidable one, or an un-decidable one. This is exactly what Carnap was trying to do. I'm not saying he succeeded, but you can see from the range of possibilities and their consequences why he felt it necessary to try.
Quoting Janus
Explanatory power is one way to 'gauge' or measure the power of a metaphysical theory. Coherency(lack of self contradiction) is yet another. Given multiple competing theories with equal coherency and explanatory power there needs to be another means for further discrimination between them. Logical possibility alone does not warrant belief. I'm reminded here of the Scopes Monkey Trials. There are several. We can assess which one works from the fewest number of unprovable assumptions, we can also assess which posits the fewest amount of entities. We can also follow the logical consequences. Then there's always the verifiability/falsifiability aspect. In addition to all this, we can use our best judgment to winnow out clearly unbelievable theories(The Flying Spaghetti Monster kind).
That's a quick and dirty run-down off the top of my head while sitting here. In particular though, just to be clear, I'm not arguing in favor of just any metaphysical theory. To quite the contrary, I'm arguing about how to assess the quality of a very specific subject matter. Theories of thought and belief.
There's a bit of irony here however with Pseudonym, in that the subject of contention is what it takes to be meaningful. As far as I know, meaning is itself a metaphysical matter, at least in part. The case at hand has opposing sides. The one is arguing that if there is no agreed upon sense of the term "meaningful", and each side argues from their own sense, then the debate itself is meaningless.
That's exactly what's going on here. So, does Pseudo think that s/he is involved in a meaningless discussion/debate?
So the argument is that when two opposing/contradictory metaphysical camps have contradictory criteria for what counts as wrong, when either calls the others' argument "wrong" the calling itself is meaningless as a result of the lack of agreement regarding what counts as "wrong"?
I don't experience "chaos of the senses". I experience an intelligible world. This is something Heidegger pointed out. The chaos of the sense which the mind has to make sense of to form an intelligible world is something we infer after the fact. It's not something primary in our experience.
Quoting Pseudonym
Because they're refusing to acknowledge points made in a straight forward argument. I've seen and done this myself in dumb arguments about sports or movies before, where metaphysics or the "chaos of the senses" isn't a point of contention.
People want to win arguments and confirm their biases. This is well known.
But lack of self-contradiction is easy. Name me an argument in metaphysics that is self-contradictory. Anyone who understands basic grammar can construct one, this leaves virtually all metaphysical theories still in play.
Quoting creativesoul
Can we? How would we go about enumerating the assumptions? Again, do you have an example from metaphysics where a theory has been discarded because it has one more assumption that a competing theory?
Quoting creativesoul
And then do what with them?
Quoting creativesoul
As I've said in my responses (possibly mostly to Moliere), there are three factors I think are relevant.
1. I'm not arguing that there is a sharp dividing line between meaningless metaphysical statements and meaningful scientific ones. I'm arguing (from Quine) that there is a gradation, and somewhere along that line statements become so vague that debating them is meaningless. Arguing about arguing, I think, is sufficiently empirical to be (just) on the right side of that line. We have empirical evidence of the way debates actually go and the consequences they have for the direction of philosophical thought. After all, It's a fairly simple empirical matter to point in the direction of a metaphysical debate where one theory was widely determined to be 'better' than another without any intelligent and well-educated detractors.
2. I think that the problem with arguing over matters that cannot be resolved by demonstration is a psychological one, it simply has a cost, that's all. If it's worth that cost, then maybe it's worth doing, if there's something at stake. I think there's something at stake here.
3. Maybe I just like arguing.
I'm not sure I see the relevance of this. I'm quite happy with the fact that we infer the chaos of the senses. What I'm saying is that the intelligent sense we make of them does not have and objective value. Just because you interpret your senses one way, it does not mean that any other way is less right.
Quoting Marchesk
So this goes back to Van Inwagen, whom I've mentioned before, but not in this context I think. If a view contrary to mine is held by one of my epistemic peers (someone of equal intellect and knowledge to me), then one of us must be wrong about the way things are. Yet if one of us is wrong about the way things are, then that proves someone of my intellect and knowledge can be wrong about the way things are despite feeling that one is right. If it is possible for someone of my intellect and knowledge to be wrong about the way things are, how do I know that it is not me?
Yes, but it's not just 'when' they have contradictory criteria for what counts as 'wrong', it is virtually inevitable that they will (if only in some small way). These are relatively clever people, they're not gong to present an argument they can see is wrong. It's most likely that they have a different idea of what constitutes wrong. It's the default position rather than an occasion misfortune.
Quoting Pseudonym
It wouldn't be an argument that is self-contradictory. It would be the inevitable result of holding a position.
Heraclitus' position is untenable. The God of Abraham and Epicurus' fatal observation of the problem of evil shows inherent self-contradiction.
Quoting Pseudonym
Those arguing for a position enumerate their assumptions.
Do I have an example from metaphysics where a theory has been discarded because it has one more assumption than a competing theory?
Methodological naturalism.
I'm suspicious of your sincerity.
Quoting Pseudonym
Lots of things. I'm wondering if you're just probing at the moment. I'm hoping. It's better than being insincere...
Establish what one must also hold in order to remain coherent, and whether or not one is willing to do so. The skirting around Heraclitus earlier, for example...
Many folk who believe in some form of cosmic justice or another will be forced to conclude that bad/good things happened to someone or another, and so they must have somehow 'deserved' it.
I'm reminded that if one holds to the historically conventional epistemological conception of belief that s/he must deny that non-linguistic animals have thought and belief.
It can also be the case that the logical consequence conflicts with knowledge.
Quoting Pseudonym
Maybe you're avoiding my initial charge. You are involved in precisely what you've called a meaningless debate. That seems incoherent, at best. I'll let it go though.
One thing to note. An entire generation of well-educated intelligent people can be wrong, and history shows that they have been any number of times. We seem to share an interest in the direction of current and future philosophical discourse. These are typically determined by paradigm shifts. Interestingly enough, those who are responsible for such a shift posited theories that were not necessarily accepted by their well-educated intelligent peers.
I’d said:
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You replied:
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No.
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I sometimes comment on the limitations of words, description, debate, assertion and proof, but I don’t debate it.
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If you believe and argue that words describe all of Reality, then you can win that argument without opposition.
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…even if one might wonder how words, none of which can even be noncircularly defined, can accurately describe Reality.
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I’d said:
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You replied:
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On the previous occasion when you said that, I invited you to specify a particular claim, conclusion, statement, sentence, phrase, word or term that you didn’t understand the meaning of, and said that, if you did so, I’d be glad to clarify it.
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But, if you don’t, or if you say that you just don’t understand anything that I say, then obviously there’s no point in my saying anything to you, and you’ve concluded this conversation.
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…and that’s why, in a recent reply, one or two posts ago, I repeated the two premises of my argument for my metaphysics.
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But I repeat that I don’t assert that this physical world isn’t more than what I’ve described. I merely point out that there’s no reason to believe that it’s more than, or other than, that.
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Mine were things that we agree on, from our experience.
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It’s good for the premise(s) of an argument to be things that are agreed-on.
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I don’t have time to correct mis-quotes. Usually I won’t copy or mention them.
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I realize that it can be difficult to even consider anything different from what we’ve been taught, starting in primary-school. I just want you to know that I understand about that.
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But Empiricism and Subjective-Idealism have been expressed by a number of highly-respected classic-philosophers.
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In fact, even today, there are Idealists and Non-Substantialists.
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So, let’s not try to claim that such proposals are philosophically beyond-the-pale.
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In particular, physicist Michael Faraday was and is highly-respected, with full credibility.
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Frank Tippler and Max Tegmark, too, are well-established physicists.
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(…but they’re mistaken when they say that this physical universe is or might be someone’s computer-simulation).
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…but, speaking of the “Simulation-Theory”, lots of people here believe it, advocate it, or at least consider it a possibility. It isn’t. But if you believe it or consider it, then you’re closer than you think to Faraday’s metaphysics.
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Michael Ossipoff
I don't think @Pseudonym has been arguing that the content being argued over in metaphysical debates is meaningless, but that the idea that one or other competing metaphysical system is the "right" one, and hence the "disagreement" itself, is meaningless, because of the general undecidability of metaphysical arguments. I have agreed with what @Pseudonym has been arguing in this thread, and I have been arguing the same point, according to my understanding. Pseudonym will no doubt correct me if I have misunderstood.
You not going to pull the old "If all metaphysical arguments are meaningless, then yours is too" card are you? Firstly the argument that metaphysical theories are undecidable is not a metaphysical argument, but a logical and phenomenological one. If you think you can logically demonstrate that metaphysical arguments are decidable then I'd be happy to hear what you have to say. The phenomenological point is that if they were decidable we would all have long since agreed on the one true metaphysics, just as we are all in general agreement over empirical matters.
The only things we generally agree on "from our experience" are empirical matters.
...like the ones that I named as premises.
Michael Ossipoff
Empirical beliefs cannot be premises for metaphysical arguments.
Anything that we agree on can be used as a premise.
And no, my metaphysical proposal didn't include speculation. As I said, there's no place for speculation in metaphysics (...but I admit that (as Wayfarer pointed out) my meaning for "metaphysicss" is less broad than the usual one.)
Michael Ossipoff
What's the point of discussing it if you make up your own meaning for the term 'metaphysics"?
Now that Wayfarer mentioned it, I did once notice a dictionary definition of metaphysics as the discussion of Ultimate Reality. ...much more ambitious a topic than what I discuss.
You're right, that I shouldn't use a word with a definition different from its standard meaning.
So instead of "metaphysics", maybe i should say "describable, assertable, debatable metaphysics".
(...or replace that with an abbreviation of some kind).
Michael Ossipoff
I can't see how your metaphysics could be both free of speculation, and "debatable". If it were totally unreliant on speculation, then it would self-evident to everyone and simply undebatable.
I can think of "hinge propositions" (to use Wittgenstein's term) or "background understandings", which might qualify, but such things tell us nothing about metaphysics.
Something can be valid, non-speculative, and still debatable--if someone wants to make a losing debate by taking an incorrect position.
"Debatabe" needn't mean "speculative", "undecidable" or "indeterminate". The square root of 31 is debatable by two students, one of whom is doing the problem wrong.
Not necessarily. In various areas (but maybe especially in philosophy), people have prejudices and prior positions that they don't easily reconsider. That makes plenty of opportunity for debates. Something can be correct, without being self-evident to people who are (maybe subconsciously) prejudicially attached to their position.
It happens all the time here, doesn't it?
Michael Ossipoff
In my view, you're just making a case for sophistry in this thread.
So, if no one else on here agrees with your "one true self-evident metaphysical system" (which is not a metaphysical system at all in any conventional sense since it relies on no speculative premises) they are all wrong? Jesus, man, time for a reality check!
This is a legitimate criticism of Carnap's position on metaphysics and verificationsim in general.
[quote=SEP]We need to address another issue in considering verificationism, the persistent criticism that it is self-undercutting. The argument for this claim goes like this: The principle claims that every meaningful sentence is either analytic or verifiable. Well, the principle itself is surely not analytic; we understand the meanings of the words in it perfectly well because we understand our own language. And we still do not think it true, so it cannot be true in virtue of meaning. And it is not verifiable either (whatever we choose ‘verifiable’ to mean).
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logical-empiricism/#EmpVerAntMet[/quote]
However, and this ties back to the OP, I do see from that article Carnap came up with the idea of "Tolerance" in response to the criticism the verficationism and metaphysics being meaningless undercuts itself. Under tolerance, verificationism is a practical consideration, because the alternative is endless debates that can't be resolved. So although metaphysicians are capable of proposing grammars and inferences for metaphysical positions that are meaningful, it doesn't resolve the debates.
[quote=SEP]
Correspondingly, what Carnap called metaphysics is then treated as though it is, as a matter of brute fact, unintelligible. But what is announced thus dogmatically can be rejected equally dogmatically. Once tolerance is in place, alternative philosophic positions, including metaphysical ones, are construed as alternative proposals for structuring the language of science.
~ a couple paragraphs down[/quote]
Maybe, but it's not relevant to what is being argued by those to whom it is directed.
Well, almost the entire thread is a disagreement over whether metaphysical statements can be meaningful which boils down to:
Pro: Example provided.
Anti: Not meaningful.
Pro: Yes it is.
Anti: No it's not
Both: discussion of why it is, or is not meaningful.
So on the anti side, how can this debate be any more meaningful than debates over examples given?
Yes, but the issue is decidability not meaningfulness. I for one, already said the LPs went too far in saying that metaphysical statements are meaningless. Decidability is not all or nothing either; as I said earlier it is on a continuum. Statements have to be decidable enough, that disagreement over them (not the statements themselves, mind) can be meaningful.
1. Strictly speaking, even by the less-broad way I've been using the word "metaphysics", what I've been proposing isn't really a true metaphysics, because I'm not asserting how things are. I'm merely saying that there's no reason to believe that this physical world is more than I've described.
What I've been saying could better be called a metaphysical statement, rather than a metaphysics.
I agree with those here who say that it's impossible to reliably say that things are a certain particular way, that a particular metaphysical description is the correct one. The matter is undecidable.
That's why I don't assert that it isn't true that, superflously, unparsimoniously, unverifable and unfalsifiably, your experience is (in some way) more than the hypothetical experience-story that I've described.
And likewise I don't assert that this physical world isn't more than the hypothetical setting in that hypothetical story.
I merely say that there's no reason to believe that your experience is more than that, or that this physical world is more than that.
2. Instead of calling someone "wrong" if he doesn't agree with my statement in the paragraph directly above this one, I merely invite him to share with us what's wrong with my argument for that statement. ...or why the statement is incorrect.
Isn't that better than assertions about "wrong"?
3, We often hear mutually-contradictory theories here. Can they all be right?
Michael Ossipoff
Yes, you did. I tend to agree with you. But doesn't that make the dispute in this thread undecidable, if meaningful?
IOW, these kinds of disputes have a difficulty escaping the same critique that they put forth.
From listening to the Partially Examined Podcast on Carnap, he seems to have been a rather tolerant and pragmatic fellow, saying that he had no trouble conversing in different metaphysical talk with people holding those views, while remaining unattached to any of them.
It would seem his argument that metaphysics is meaningless was based more for pragmatic (scientific, empirical) reasons than strictly logical ones.
Carnap was at heart a pragmatist.
But Michael Faraday did.
And Frank Tippler and Max Tegmark partly agree.
And the many people here who believe in, or at least consider possible, the Simulation-Theory, agree with me to a greater degree than you might think.
Michael Ossipoff
There is a considerable difference between acknowledging that something is logically possible, that it might be physically possible, considering it to be plausible, thinking it is likely and actually believing in it.
And I'm thinking here of empirical scenarios. The "simulation theory" is an empirical, not a metaphysical scenario.
Metaphysical pictures involve infinity and the eternity, even if it is only to entertain the possibility that there might be no infinity and eternity.
I think I have read Pseudo correctly. Here's where I asked and s/he answered that very question in the affirmative...
Quoting Pseudonym
Quoting Janus
That's not the argument s/he made, so that sort of reply wouldn't be appropriate for me. However, if s/he had made such an argument, then that response would certainly be warranted. In such a situation, someone like yourself, judging from the sidelines, would be poisoning the well solely by virtue of putting such a question to me. It would succeed only if the reader weren't well-versed in spotting fallacy in the wild, because there's not a thing wrong with the response you're aiming to discredit if it follows the claim that all metaphysical arguments are meaningless.
No, I'm thinking that Psuedo's position is quite a bit more nuanced than that. However, as s/he indicated earlier, I've grasped it well enough to at least begin further parsing. Speaking of which, there are quite a few dubious presuppositions underwriting Psuedo's contributions here. I've yet to have gotten to them, for keeping the discussion in line with or directly about the quality of metaphysical arguments is important. It's difficult to do both at once, but that seems necessary to retain the spirit of the thread while simultaneously pointing out error in his/her contributions.
For example, it is clear that s/he is working from a questionable conception of thought and/or belief. The evidence for that is in the paragraph above when s/he confirmed that I had understood the argument s/he was making. There also seems a bit of ignorance is at work. It's the same bit of ignorance that was at work with Carnap. Ignorance about how meaning emerges onto the world stage. Both, s/he and Carnap, conflate what it takes to be meaningful with what it takes to be verifiable/falsifiable. The current terminological choice is "undecidable". All of that demonstrates an elementary mistake in understanding. I suspect that that is nothing more and nothing less that the logical consequence of a few different utterly inadequate(mis)conceptions.
Quoting Janus
Well no, I'll have to offer a slight but crucial correction. First, the thread began by asserting that all metaphysical debates were meaningless. Carnap's position was originally put forth in support of that charge as the OP shows. Since then Psuedo has taken the reigns from Carnap and argued that all metaphysical debates were meaningless as a result of being unverifiable/unfalsifiable, and most currently undecidable. Now, secondly, what counts as being meaningful is itself a metaphysical position/argument. The evidence offered in support of this claim consisted of metaphysical debates where the opposing camps were working from seemingly incommensurate terminological frameworks(notions, conceptions, frames of reference, criteria, etc.) Psuedo seems to hold that the purported meaninglessness inherent to metaphysical debates is a direct result from the opposing camps working from different senses of key words.
Now... Zoom out from the focus upon the historical metaphysical positions and zoom in on this discussion.
It is still the case that our discussion here consists of arguing over what counts as being meaningful. My position on that has been neither elucidated nor changed during the course of this thread. It seems that Psuedo's has. It looks like a clear cut case of Psuedo's moving the goalposts. That is, in the beginning s/he worked from a criterion for what counts as being meaningful that required the candidate(a metaphysical debate in this case) to be verifiable/falsifiable. Since then, the criterion for what counts as being meaningful has been expanded to include being decidable.
So the conflation between what counts as being meaningful and what counts as being verifiable/falsifiable continues unabated.
The operative underlying general problem is the conflation of truth and meaning.
Quoting Janus
Logically demonstrate that a metaphysical debate is decidable? Surely you are not doubting the ability for any one of us to come up with such a simple syllogism? One could be offered in support of either camp. I suspect by either side. Logical argument presupposes both truth and meaning. Seeing how the debate is about what counts as being meaningful, logical argument alone proves an inadequate method. That's the whole getting 'beneath' language issue...
I'll do one better...
What counts as being meaningful is a metaphysical consideration. That is exactly what is currently in contention between Psuedo, yourself, and myself. When two opposing camps have conflicting criteria for what counts as being meaningful, which one or possibly if both is/are correct, right, and true can most certainly be decided.
The community of speakers will confirm or deny whether or not something is meaningful. Some things have more than one meaning. That's perfectly acceptable and well understood. Some of those things are words. Also nothing wrong with that. Some use this sense of a word, and others use that one. Again, nothing wrong here. Some argue from this sense with others who are arguing from that one. It does not follow that the debate itself is meaningless. Rather, it would be much better said that there were too much meaning...
:wink:
Quoting Janus
This argument doesn't hold either. Being decidable and/or verifiable/falsifiable doesn't guarantee agreement. Have you looked towards the outside world lately?
I don't think it does; because the question as to whether the truth of metaphysical conjectures of statements is undecidable is itself decidable on both logical and empirical grounds. It can be demonstrated by logical analysis that the premises of metaphysical argument cannot be confirmed or dis-confirmed in any way analogous to the way empirical propositions can. It can also be empirically established that there has been no consensus about metaphysical "theories"; whereas there has been plenty of consensus about empirical propositions. For example no one disagrees with you when you say it is raining, if it is raining, or if you say the Sun rises in the East, Paris is the capital of France, and so on and on for countless other examples.
Quoting creativesoul
Firstly it was I who first introduced the idea of "undecidability" into this thread, unless I am mistaken on account of not having read through the thread carefully enough. I don't want to answer for @Pseudonym, but only for my interpretation of what Pseudonym appears to be arguing.
I think Pseudonym is arguing that because the truth of metaphysical conjectures is undecidable, the notion that one position is the correct one and the other is the mistaken one is without sense, in other words incoherent and meaningless, and not arguing that the exchange of metaphysical ideas is meaningless per se. In any case this is what I have been arguing.
The question of meaning is a semantic, not a metaphysical matter. So your invocation of the usual argument against LP is inapt.
We cannot check to see if a metaphysical position is true, therefore they are without meaning?
:worry:
C'mon Janus. You know better.
Furthermore, how can something be both incoherent and meaningless? Being incoherent means containing self-contradiction. Self contradiction requires meaning.
This is the kind of response that leaves me unimpressed.
The question at hand is what counts as being meaningful. That is, what is the criterion - which when met by a candidate - counts as that candidate being meaningful?
This shows the inherent untenability and covert self-contradiction(incoherence) of the position that being unverifiable/unfalsifiable equates to being meaningless. This is a very generous reading.
Your first response is again inapt because I haven't denied the meaningfulness of metaphysical statements. How many times are you going to need this pointed out to you?
Your second response is irrelevant too. I have nowhere equated meaning or meaningfulness with decidablilty. Of course you have to know what something means in order to know whether it is decidable (let's stick to the terms already in use otherwise you will become even more confused). Do you know what the usual metaphysical positions are claiming?
When you say something cogent that actually relates to anything I've said, I'll respond.
And it is the painstaking task of setting out the opposing criterion for what counts as being wrong that helps guide understanding and many times will also settle the score...
I've directly addressed the argument you presented. Do you not understand? I'll be glad to help.
OK, great, give a brief but concise summary of my argument and then show how you have addressed it.
Quoting Janus
Quoting Janus
I've bracketed my own presumptive portion(that you believe what you write)...
Is that a true account? I would venture to say yes, for it is copied verbatim minus the presupposition of sincerity in speech granted to you by me.
So, regarding the relevancy of my comments. First, your argument presupposes a criterion for what counts as being meaningful, what counts as having sense(being sensible), what counts as being correct, what counts as being mistaken, and what counts as being incoherent. The issue is that you've conflated what counts as being undecidable with what counts as being meaningful and what counts as being coherent. As you've clearly noted by using the "in other words" qualification....
On your view, because of the fact that two opposing camps are working from positions which are undecidable(unfalsifiable/unverifiable), then all charges of being correct or mistaken are based upon incoherent and meaningless usage of the terms "correct" and "mistaken". I'm further supposing that you hold that being correct or mistaken requires being amenable to being decidable.
How is that so far?
I guess where we differ then is on this notion of empirical propositions. Or maybe possibly differ.
We are communicating in English. I am typing on a computer. My calendar hangs upon the wall.
God exists. I am praying to him. The holy ghost watches over us.
I write these as a kind of parallel. Communicating in English isn't exactly empirical, but it is certain. God is similar, for a particular community. Praying is something we do, as is typing. Not hard to decide. You can see the calendar, and the believer can feel the holy ghost. Quite decidable for a community.
Empirical propositions are decidable. But so are the metaphysical ones. And empirical propositions require concepts to understand, prior beliefs to make sense of, and a web of beliefs to decide the judgements of truth or falsity. Just like metaphysical propositions -- and insofar that we are in agreement with certain beliefs, then they are just as decidable and certain as empirical propositions.
Sure. I don't think I'd argue for ultimate decidability. Though there is a kind of regulative belief at play, I'd think, in arguing over what is true -- like, we seem to believe that there is some ultimate answer in arguing over what is better when we believe very differently, even though we would say, upon reflection, that it doesn't seem that there is an ultimate answer.
I'd just say this is relative to the person or community in question. Consider the Pythagoreans, who believed that all numbers could be expressed in ratios of whole numbers. It was something of an a priori belief, completely decidable -- even though wrong (maybe false?) by our current understanding of mathematics. I'd say that what you propose is something which is relative to a particular background of beliefs -- that decidability is relative to our beliefs, or community, rather than it being a feature of the subject matter.
I can't examine it if you don't tell me which of Heraclitus's positions you are referring to.
Quoting creativesoul
Are you seriously suggesting that there are no responses to the problem of evil? There's the idea that evil is necessary for the growth of the soul, that evil doesn't even exist, that evil is there to prevent a greater evil, that God only created the universe but them 'became' it and so had his original omnipotence constrained, that evil is the work of humans as a result of being given free will...etc. The argument from evil is a strawman, knocking down a simplistic view of God that no Theologian actually holds. And why does no theologian actually hold such a simplistic view? Because they're not stupid and its not a difficult job to see obvious logical flaws. As I said. I'm not claiming that it is impossible to come up with a metaphysical theory which has the flaws you mention. What I'm claiming is that none of the currently existing metaphysical theories (nor any future ones written by intelligent people) can be decided on this basis.
Quoting creativesoul
Methodological naturalism is not a metaphysical theory, it's a pragmatic approach to scientific investigation. It's not claiming that there are no supernatural causes, only that investigation of them is fruitless.This is an empirical claim - investigation of supernatural causes has so far yielded no concrete results.
But let's, for the sake of argument, presume someone put forward such a claim as a theory of The way things are' - that there are no supernatural causes (causes beyond the ability of science to investigate). I take that to be a single assumption, since it cannot be proven. So what is it's opposite? That there may be supernatural causes. That is still a single assumption. The assumption that it is possible for causes to be somehow permanently beyond out ability to detect them. I'm not seeing the alternative theory with fewer assumptions here.
Quoting creativesoul
No, as I mentioned before, they could also conclude that God is bound in some way by his own choices (say by his preference for free will), that god is 'testing' them to see if they deserve to get in to heaven where they will be rewarded for their perseverance, that God is forced to allow the harm in order to prevent a greater harm, that God is allowing the harm not as a form of punishment, but as a method of spiritual growth...etc. The responses are limited only by the imagination of the responder.
Quoting creativesoul
Again, this is trivially surmounted. One could hold that our language use supplanted a previous form of belief which animals have, that animals have an internal language which carries their belief propositions, that animals in fact have a language, just one that we can't understand...etc, as earlier, it's really only limited by the imagination of the responder.
Quoting creativesoul
Then it would cease to be a metaphysical claim and become a scientific one.
Quoting creativesoul
I don't see how I haven't directly answered your charge. I submit that this debate is not meaningless because empirical evidence can be drawn into it (such as the complete lack of agreement on metaphysical matters despite 2000 years of debate), that many of the terms used and logic employed are so widely agreed upon that most people involved will agree on what they mean, and that even if there is some difficulty in producing an entirely decidable answer, the effort of using rhetoric to argue the case is worth it because of the consequences. I've also suggested that, even if the debate were completely meaningless, that doesn't in any way preclude me from taking part in it. Why should I restrict my activities only to those which are meaningful?
Quoting creativesoul
Yes, that's the point. If well-educated intelligent people can be wrong en masse, then in what way does the logical conclusion of an intelligent well-educated person on the question of coherency, self-consistency, enumerating assumptions, and calculating logical consequences have any bearing on how 'right' an argument is. We've just determined that the conclusions of intelligent, well-educated people on such matter can be, and regularly are, wrong. So when you (presumably an intelligent, well-educated person) have finished your analysis of an argument, how do you then know you're right?
Yes, although I probably should have been clearer and written: "the notion that it could be established that one position is the correct one and the other is the mistaken one". On the other hand perhaps I am being too generous; perhaps the very idea that metaphysical conjectures could be true or false is a kind of category error; I am undecided on that, since that would itself seem to be undecidable. It would certainly seem to be the case that nothing we could ever observe would strictly entail, for example, that idealism, materialism or nominalism is true; I certainly cannot think of any observation that would do the trick.
This is quite possibly true. But I imagine ancient tribes were not in the habit of being involved in complex, logic-based metaphysical arguments. I see no reason to doubt that when it came to ordinary empirical matters of fact observation was relied on just as with us.The decidability of metaphysical beliefs in ancient and premodern cultures would seem to have largely fallen to authority, whether in the form of priestly elites or canonical revelatory texts.
But their decidability is not our decidability, because for us decidability is decided by logical analysis of the arguments and the situation to establish whether there is any possibility of corroborative evidence. I see no reason to belief that the ancients and the pre-moderns were in general sufficiently detached form tradition to undertake such comprehensive logical analyses. I am not denying that there might have been exceptions.
Anway I will put it in the form of a question: How do you imagine we could ever go about establishing that idealism, materialism or nominalism is really the case? I mean we could do a Kantian analysis and establish that it is beyond reasonable doubt that the objects of perception must be mediated by the perceiver, but that doesn't tell us anything about the extent of the mind's role in constructing objects of perception, and it doesn't tell us anything about what mind could be in any "ultimate' sense beyond our ordinary conception of mind in the context that we understand humans and animals to have minds.
The same kind of thing could be said, for other examples, about matter, and about the idea of the reality of universals. When we try to impute ultimacy to mind, matter or universals, do we really have any idea what we are talking about? Is it really legitimate to extrapolate our everyday working concepts into the context of the absolute? Does even the notion of the absolute make authentic sense to us? I think these questions are also undecidable. How could we possibly definitively answer them?
You seem prepared to offer alternative accounts and/or apologetics for historical issues raised across the spectrum here. That's good, and you'll get no argument from me regarding the sheer quantity of such ad hoc alternative arguments and/or corrective measures that produce a more nuanced viewpoint along with avoiding the typical objections. I mean written history shows all of this.
However, the discussion between us involved you asking me what sorts of measures were available to further discriminate between competing metaphysical positions when and if those positions made or worked from claims that were unverifiable/unfalsifiable. I offered a list of those. I want only to remark here that you've done a magnificent job of putting some of those to use individually, but have neglected to put them all to use at once. There has also been no argument asked for and/or offered for why and/or how those measures ought be used.
As you've noted in the last paragraph of your reply above, we're painfully aware of our own fallibility. Isn't that the very point underwriting this discussion? How can we reduce the sheer likelihood of being mistaken? How can we avoid forming and/or holding false belief?
(Just for ease of future writing, I'm a 'he'. It's slightly painful to see it laboured over, I really wouldn't have minded being wrongly assigned, but I know others do so I appreciate the extra effort.)
The claim that all metaphysical statements are meaningless is an entirely falsifiable empirical claim. One only need produce a metaphysical statement which has meaning. If one disputes the meaning of 'meaning', then the alternative claim is also verifiability false, it cannot be the case that all metaphysical statements are meaningful since we do not know what 'meaningful' means. It can only be the case that metaphysical statements may or may not be meaningful, pending our discovery of what 'meaningful' actually means. Either way, the claim that all metaphysical statements are meaningless is either meaningless itself because of the ambiguity over term 'meaningless' (but that in turn would render it true, since all metaphysical statements suffer from the same problem of ambiguity over terms), or its is not a metaphysical statement at all since we can resolve what the term 'meaningful' means and at that point it becomes and entirely falsifiable empirical claim.
Quoting creativesoul
You'll need to expand on this, I don't see either the link you're making, nor the relevance I'm afraid.
Quoting creativesoul
I'm pretty sure I've said probability a dozen times now that I do not consider all unverifiable statements to be meaningless, only those statements containing a word which the party the statement is aimed at does not agree on the meaning of. A statement relying on a word which, for the recipient, does not have the meaning the speaker intended, might as well be meaningless. It would be pointless to apply one's own definition of the term since that would not carry the meaning the speaker intended (you might as talk to yourself). It would be pointless to apply the speaker's own definition because, you have already rejected that and so would gain no meaning from the sentence in your own mind. The only alternative I can see is that the sentence be regarded as meaningless.
Quoting creativesoul
No, again I have specifically said, in direct communication with you, as well as others, that I consider there to be a gradation from meaningful debates where the metric of decidability is widely agreed on, to meaningless ones where it is not. At no point have I said that all metaphysical debates are meaningless (unless by rhetorical accident, in which case I have made it abundantly clear since that that is not my position).
Quoting creativesoul
Decidability and verifiability are relatively closely related. What difference do you see between the two which significantly moves the goalposts? @Janus's introduction of the term was, quite rightly, to show that it is the lack of any method of decidability that renders such debates meaningless (one where one side is trying to 'prove' the other wrong). The only widely agreed on method of decidability I know of is empirical falsifiability, but that's not necessary for the argument. If it is true that metaphysical debates (of the particular sort Janus and I are referring to) are meaningless because they cannot be decided by any agreed means, then it is also true that such arguments over statements which are not falsifiable are probably meaningless, that being the only method of decidability we currently all agree on. We could argue over the minutiae, but I really don't see how it massively moves the goalposts.
Quoting creativesoul
You'll need to expand on this, I don't see how the notion of truth enters into it, both Janus and myself have consistently (I think) been careful to talk about that which is widely agreed upon. Truth hasn't entered into it.
Just to let you know, for what it's worth, that your interpretation of my position is pretty much bang on, so feel free to carry on as if it were, without need for further caveats, if you wish.
Fair enough Pseudo. Clearly there is distinction between holding that all unverifiable statements are meaningless and holding that charges of unverifiable statements containing a word which the party the statement is aimed at does not agree on the meaning of are meaningless.
While I may have first conflated the two, I think that I've since corrected that.
I would still object to calling such a debate meaningless, for it is most certainly not without meaning. Rather, as mentioned heretofore, it would better put as having too much meaning. Pointless perhaps. I mean in order to understand another's argument, one must first grant the terms. That's a primary rule of valid objection is it not? All that said, those kinds of arguments are semantic pedantics in the worst kind of way...
Well, verifiability/falsifiability works from observation and repeatability. We're checking to see if what's claimed corresponds to actual events. The events are what makes the claim true/false. Decidability is remarkably different in that we are the ones who decide. We decide whether or not it makes sense to use words in certain ways and not others.
Here again though, even after claiming that you do not equate being unverifiable with being meaningful, you've just called debates over unverifiable statements meaningless. If they are not meaningless as a result of being unverifiable, then what is it that makes them so?
Quoting Pseudonym
We're getting there. In due time. We've been skirting around it the entire time. The presupposition of truth has been at work the entire time as well my friend. That's how thought and belief work.
Oh really? So you think if one of us made a thread on meaning that we would have agreement? There's been an ongoing debate in philosophy over meaning, so I doubt you're going to have your agreement. There are different positions on the meaning of meaning.
But just for sake of argument, let's say we all agreed on the definition of meaning. That doesn't therefore mean that we're going to all agree on which statements are meaningful, because all one has to do is claim that a statement isn't meaningful and that it hasn't been explained satisfactorily.
This thread is evidence of that.
:cool:
New discussion incoming. This one is probably too far along for others to want to join in, so might as well start fresh.
If this is decidability then no metaphysical arguments are decidable because "We" evidently haven't decided. and if "we" do decide, then a comparison of the sense the author imputes with the sense that "we" have decided becomes an entirely verifiable proposition.
Quoting creativesoul
They are meaningless as a result of their undecidablility, and their unfalsifiability is the reason why they are undecidable. That does not mean that unfalsifiablity is the only reason why a pair of propositions might be undecidable, nor does it mean that all unfalsifiable statements are meaningless.
I'm claiming that statements of the form "Your unfalsifiable metaphysical proposition X is wrong" are meaningless. No other statements, no other debates, just those.
@Marchesk has opened a thread on this, but whilst fascinating, I don't see how it gains its importance here. As @Janus has pointed out, it just becomes a matter of semantics. There is some property of a sentence with a disputed term in it which causes it to have a significantly different utility to a sentence containing only widely agreed on terms. If I say "go to the door", the verb 'to go' is widely understood and the noun 'door' is also The effect on the willing listener will be that they will go to the door. The sentence has the same utility no matter which competent English speaker is hearing it. This is significantly different to my saying "God will guide you on the right path". Depending on whom you are speaking to, this could have any number of effects. There is not a widely agreed upon response to 'God', 'guide', or 'right'. Whether you call this difference a difference in meaning or not is irrelevant, you can call it what you like, but the difference is evidently there, and my contention is that sentences of the form "Your unfalsifiable metaphysical proposition X is wrong" are of the latter sort, so much so that the effect they have is completely unpredictable to the speaker and so of very low utility.
Indeed. However, you've neglected the point being made. Let's see if it can be made clearer.
We can verify that different senses of the same term are being used as a means to measure the truth of the opposing argument. That's easy. One side can call the other "wrong" and it would be in line with their own framework, and vice-versa. Hence, the debate consists of two conflicting notions of what counts as being wrong. Both are meaningful. Neither are verifiable. All charges are based upon meaningful constructs. The debate is meaningful, albeit not always reconcilable. In other words, your claim regarding these sorts of debates is false. They are not meaningless.
Yes.
Quoting creativesoul
Yes.
Quoting creativesoul
This just seems like bare assertion. How did you arrive at this conclusion from the statements above? What definition of meaningful are you using? What would be an example of a statement which was not meaningful?
Well this is just specious on it's face, my friend. It quite simply does not follow from the fact that the same sentence has different and wide ranging meaning to different listeners that it has very low utility even if the speaker may not be able to predict exactly what the sentence means to all listeners.
Make America Great Again.
So if I were to speak in German to a non-German speaker, my action would still be of high utility?
It wasn't a conclusion, although it could be easily rendered as one. There are no meaningless statements.
So what does the word 'meaningless' do if there are no statements for it to be used on. Why do we even have the word?
An appropriate response would be of higher utility. This one is irrelevant.
We were discussing an example of a speaker and a listener who share common language.
Words don't do things all by themselves. Rather, we do things with words. We use the word "meaningless" to identify that which is without meaning.
Care to get into this?
What is the criterion which - when met by a candidate - counts as that candidate being meaningful.
Just randomly:
"The water of green flies into vacuum's innocence, giving us a Trump's tweet of hope."
Pomo Generator:
"The primary theme of the works of Smith is a self-justifying reality. It
could be said that the premise of capitalist discourse states that the purpose
of the participant is deconstruction. Derrida uses the term ‘subcapitalist
deappropriation’ to denote not dematerialism, but subdematerialism."
Clinton:
"Depends on what the definition of is is."
Trump:
Take your pick, but Banno posted a good example today.
Movie:
Starlord: "Where is Gamora?"
Iron Man: "What is Gamora?"
Drax: "Why is Gamora?"
The last one is humorous because it doesn't make a lot of sense to ask why is a person, but it was in response to Iron Man not knowing that Gamora was a person.
There's no such thing as a common language when using ambiguous terms. The commonality of language is based entirely on mutual agreement. Where there's no mutual agreement, there's no commonality. I can honestly say that at times I have no idea what some young people are saying, they're speaking English, but the terms don't mean to them what they mean to me, so they've communicated nothing of any use to me.
Again, this is just plain false on it's face. Almost every word has multiple accepted uses. Each different in it's own way. That is precisely what makes terms ambiguous, and it is also exactly why a listener who doesn't understand ask for clarification from the speaker.
I hear ya, but that does not support the claim that there is no such thing as common language when using ambiguous words. It can be both, that a listener doesn't grasp the meaning of the speaker and the speaker's words be meaningful.
But I can understand and find meaning in all of those statements;
The first one is metaphorical and describes the draining of pond likening it the draining of hope in Trump's America.
The second one is talking about how capitalism seems to demand that literary works be analysed for their meaning to promote a move away from the a focus on purely material gains.
The third means that the use of the term 'is' is not clearly defined (ie, what it is for something to be.
I mean, I'm well aware that it's all just computer generated garbage, but I think most of Heidegger is just garbage too. What is it about those statements which makes them meaningless? I can find some meaning in them. No less than I can find meaning in Derrida or something.
It seems like we're getting back to the semantic issue again, we're going round in circles. If you want to define 'meaningful' in such a way as to include sentences which, by virtue of their disagreement over terms, actually communicates no information to the listener, then that's fine, but there is some difference in utility between these kinds of sentences and those which are well understood. What you want to call that difference is irrelevant, it's the fact that they're different that means they need to be treated differently.
The interesting thing here is that what we call such debates is not irrelevant. Rather, I've been objecting to calling them "meaningless" and I've more than justified my objections. That said, I tend to agree with the useless sentiment regarding some kinds of metaphysical debates. Just not all metaphysical positions resting on unverifiable claims.
Listener B doesn't understand "X".
Therefore, "X" is meaningless.
That is the argument underwriting your contributions here. It's wrong as a result of being based upon an ill-conceived notion of what it takes for "X" to be meaningful. It doesn't require that everyone understand.
Running out of battery on my phone so only time for one more comment, so I'd just like to agree that not all metaphysical positions resting on unverifiable claims are meaningless.
Kudos. Catch you later.
I'll also just try to quickly refer you back to my previous comments. I'm not saying that all propositions of that form are meaningless, it is specifically the ambiguity about the term 'wrong' and what saying someone's position is 'wrong' implies that underlies my position. Phone's literally going to switch itself off now.
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To repeat:
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1, There’s rampant disagreement here. How many people here agree with eachother about metaphysics?
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2. You’re evidently very socially-oriented, placing social-support over discussion of the topic itself. I don’t agree with those priorities.
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3. My topic (though philosophical and a subset of metaphysics) isn’t what most people here are talking about. You’re mistaking that difference with disagreement with what I’m saying. I’m not tackling the ambitious ultimate-reality topic, but have been limiting my discussion to a much more modest topic of what can be uncontroversially-said.
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2. As I’ve been saying:
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I’m not the only proponent of what I’ve been saying. I’ve named some people who agree. You’re disregarding that, when you say that there’s no agreement. There is, and it goes back at least to 1844 in Euro-American culture. (…and long before that in India.)
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As for people on this forum, litewave has said things that agree with what I’ve been saying. In fact, when I first visited this forum, I was dismayed to find that he’d posted some of it here before I did.
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Just today I ran across this quote from Jim Holt, who wrote a book of his interviews on the subject of why there’s something instead of nothing:
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I avoid the subject of Reality, and limit my discussion to describable metaphysics, and things uncontroversiallly-say-able. What Holt is quoted saying, above, agrees with what I’ve been saying about physical “reality”.
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Instead of emphasizing a supposed lack of agreement, more meaningful criticism and objection would require addressing the topic itself.
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Of course it isn’t, and I’ve admitted that.
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1. As Wayfarer pointed out, metaphysics is often or usually defined much more broadly than my more modest topic. I’ve already discussed and admitted that in previous posts.
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2. Strictly-speaking, I haven’t really been proposing a way that I claim things are (even at the describable-level).
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I’ve been repeatedly admitting that I can’t prove that the physical world doesn’t additionally, superfluously, unparsimoniously, unverifiably and unfalsifiably consist of more than what I’ve described it as.
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Wanting to avoid controversial statements, I’ve merely said that there’s no reason to believe that it does.
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Saying that doesn’t amount to proposing a metaphysics. It’s a more modest metaphysical statement.
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Exactly! And that’s been the stated purpose of what I’ve been saying. Avoidance of assumptions, brute-facts, unsupported premises, and speculation.
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…an intention to say only uncontroversial things.
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Earlier, when I told you that I don’t want to say things that anyone would disagree with, you said that that’s because I’m not saying anything.
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What I’m saying is so modest that you said that I’m not saying anything.
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Sure. Here’s a brief summary of what I’m saying:
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There are abstract implications, and complex systems of inter-referring abstract implications about hypothetical propositions about hypothetical things.
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For these systems of implications, there are various mutually-consistent configurations of truth-values for their antecedent propositions. (Of course, in many instances, an antecedent of one implication is the consequent of another implication.)
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Among the infinity of such hypothetical systems and their mutually-consistent configurations of hypothetical proposition-truth-values, there inevitably is one that models your experience. There’s no reason to believe that your experience is other than that.
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As Faraday pointed out in 1844, there’s no physics experiment that can show, suggest or imply that the physical world is other than such a hypothetical logical system. (Holt said the same in the above quote).
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What’s that you say? That sounds like an “unfalsifiable theory”? No, we apply that criticism only to unverified theories. We don’t apply it to uncontroversially-inevitable things, that aren’t theories at all.
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My emphasis is maybe different, because I speak of that system as an experience-story, with experience primary to it, and with the physical-world being only the setting in that story. …whereas the physicists I refer to have spoken of the system from an objective point-of-view, with the physical world primary in it…as is the natural and customary point-of-view for physicists.
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Anyway, the apparent “disagreement” here, with what I’m saying amounts only to a difference in topics. I’m purposely talking about a much more modest and less broad topic, so as to not say things that someone would disagree with.
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Of course most other participants in these forums aren’t “wrong” to discuss topics different from mine. But when someone objects to what I say, then, instead of calling him “wrong”, I merely invite him to support his objection with specifics about mis-statements, wrong premises, conclusions that don’t follow, etc.
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Anyway, litewave, and various people outside this forum, have said things that agree with what I’ve been saying.
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Michael Ossipoff
Problems surely arise when there are incommensurate notions of what counts as being "wrong". If we have a debate where what counts as being "wrong" is determined by an unverifiable metaphysical conception, then it is precisely the difference in the conceptions that are used as the measure of being wrong.
If we place irrevocable importance upon the verifiability of such a conception, then we're placing importance upon our being able to determine the truth of such a conception by virtue of observation. We want to be able to check and see if what's said is true. Verification/falsification works from and looks for correspondence between what's being stated and the way things are and/or will be. We look to see if what's said matches up to the way things are. This, in and of itself, presupposes meaning. We must know what we're looking for, in order to look for it. We must know what's being said, in order to look to see if what's being said is the case.
The more important point here is that we must also know what is meant in order to know that it is unverifiable. Thus, being unverifiable does not render a claim meaningless. As a matter of fact, it must be meaningful in order for it to be knowingly and sensibly called "unverifiable". Otherwise, it is a nonsensical use of the term "unverifiable". How would one know that a claim is unverifiable if one does not know what the claim is saying?
To be clear, I'm not charging you with anything here. I'm just further clarifying what we've already agreed upon thus far. What's below is an example of the type of argument that you're talking about, to the best that I've understood you.
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There are certain things which exist in their entirety prior to our becoming aware of them, and prior to language itself. Truth(as correspondence to the way things were and/or are), meaning, and rudimentary thought and belief are such things. Because these things exist in their entirety prior to language, any and all arguments and/or statements which conclude and/or assume otherwise are wrong, by virtue of not corresponding to the way things are and were.
Let's begin there and perhaps this will remain interesting. This set of claims seems to bear all the hallmarks of the kind you're attempting to discredit.
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You’re making an un-acknowledged and unsupported assumption of an objective physical reality in addition to and different from the hypothetical logical system that I speak of. My statements assume no such thing, or anything else.
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As I’ve said, there’s no physics experiment that shows, implies or suggests that this physical world is other than a hypothetical setting in an experience-story, a hypothetical logical system such as I’ve been describing.
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What, it wouldn’t be real? I didn’t claim that it is.
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You choose to believe in it (your objectively existent physical world additional to and different from what I’ve described).
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The “Simulation-Theory” is based on metaphysical assumptions.
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…but at least it acknowledges a questioning of the objective fundamental and primary existence of our physical world.
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If you can consider the Simulation-Theory, then you won’t have any objection to my statement that there’s no reason to believe that this physical world other than the setting in an experience-story consisting of the hypothetical logical system that I’ve described.
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But the story was/is there without a computer to simulate, portray, illustrate, duplicate it. The only thing that the simulating-computer and its running accomplish is the display of the simulated story for its audience.
Someone's computer, and its running of a program, can't "make" something that there already is.
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Michael Ossipoff
This suffers the same fatal flaw that the argument from illusion suffers.
A simulation is of something other than itself. The word is nonsensical if not used in a comparative sort of way. An illusion of an oasis necessarily presupposes that there is an actual oasis. A simulation of a universe presupposes an actual universe.
That alone is reason to reject any such argument...
I’d said:
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…because what’s the simulation supposed to be a mock-up of, if not a real physical world? Sure, and it’s assumed that there’s a genuinely objectively existent world in which the computer is running…or maybe an infinite regress of them, with each one turning out to be a simulation being run in the next one….
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But that objection doesn’t apply to the hypothetical life-experience story that I suggest. The fact that the experiencer often takes his/her experience to happen in an objectively, fundamentally, primarily, existent physical world doesn’t mean that there is such a world….or any physical world other than the hypothetical story-setting that’s part of that hypothetical experience-story, a complex system of inter-referring abstract implications and some mutually-consistent configuration of the truth-values of their propositions.
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Michael Ossipoff
I'll get to your main point next, but I just wanted to explain my position on this one first. I don't think we do need to know what a proposition means in order to induce that it is not verifiable. We can induce that it is not verifiable simply by the fact that it has not been verified, in the time it's been around and no-one can conceive of a method by which it could be verified to the broad satisfaction of the community of speakers.
I infer that the multi-verse theory is not verifiable. I haven't the faintest idea what all the words 'mean' I'm not a physicist and most of them are gobbledegook to me, but I've read that it has not yet been verified, and I've read that there are no experiments anyone can think of that would verify it. Those two empirical facts are enough for me to reach a strong inductive conclusion that the theory cannot be verified without having to understand what a single word of it actually 'means'.
This is very much the case with most metaphysical claims. None have yet been verified (to the satisfaction of the community they are aimed at), and no one has yet proposed a means by which they could be verified (again, to the satisfaction of the community they are aimed at). Therefore, it is entirely reasonable of me to inductively conclude that such statements are unverifiable without my having to understand what they 'mean'.
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To your paragraph. It's a good enough choice because it does indeed represent the sort of statement I'm talking about, but what I'd need also to demonstrate my point, is an example of the statement that the proposer is considering to be 'wrong'. The reason I'd need this, is because what I'm saying hangs on the fact that when meanings of terms become sufficiently vague as to be widely interpretable (as they do in metaphysics) virtually any statement can be interpreted in such a way as to make it fit virtually any criteria. It is for this reason, that 'wrong' becomes meaningless, by presuming that 'the meaning of the statement' and 'the way things are' can be conceived of with such accuracy that they can be seen to have no overlap (ie the statement is 'wrong'). But I don't see any evidence that this is the case. If 2000 years of philosophy has shown us anything, it is that 'the way things are' is very difficult to clearly conceive and that statements about 'the way things are' are very difficult to interpret.
Not for the first time, I'm wishing I could draw on these posts, it would be so much easier to explain what I'm thinking, but I will have, instead, to describe the diagram I want to draw. Imagine a Venn diagram. One circle is 'the way things seem to be'. The centre of that circle is 'the way things actually are', the size of the circle represents the vagueness of any conception we might be able to have of it with our limited brains. The other circle is a statement about 'the way things are'. Again, the centre is the actual meaning of the statement as the author intended (the content of their thought), and the size of the circle represents the vagueness of the terms used, the extent of possible interpretation.
So, with simple empirical facts and treatments of objects we treat as if they were real, the circle of 'the way things seem to be' is quite small. To understand this, I need you not to think in terms of how different theories sound (like Solipsism and Realism, which sound radically different), but how different they are in effect, they way we treat the material universe. The circle representing 'the way things seem to be' in this example is the circle of the way things are treated as if they were. In effect, both the Solipsists and the Realist are going to respond to the material world similarly, so their treatment of it is never far from some central point. With empirical facts, the size of the circle representing a statement about the way things are, is also quite small. "The door is over there", can be interpreted in a variety of ways, but none of them too far from what I intended to mean by it. This is my description of we call science, and the small size of both circles is the reason why its theories are so widely agreed on.
The definition of 'wrong' here is when the two circles either do not overlap, or barely overlap (I pretty much think everything in the world is fuzzy around the edges, so you won't get a sharp definition out of me of anything). Not overlapping means that the statement about 'the way things are' does not correspond at all (or not enough) with any widely held conception of 'the way things seem to be'. If I say "the door is over there" and all you see (and all anyone else sees) is a wall where I'm pointing, then I am wrong to say "the door is over there", at least, that's how we commonly use the word 'wrong'. The circle of reasonable interpretation of my statement, does not overlap with the circle of reasonable responses to the empirical evidence of our eyes (we don't see a door).
Just want to interject at this point to emphasise the fuzziness that is in this description even of empirical science. The circles might be small, but they are of some size and so there is room for a degree of overlap. even at this stage it's not really 'right/wrong' sharply divided like that, but it's close enough to make the terms useful in communication.
Now to metaphysical propositions. Here, both circles are very large. 'The way things seem to be' circle when we're talking about metaphysical concepts is very large, Our conception of 'the way things seem to us (the size of the circle), is vague and varies widely. Our experience of the metaphysical world depends a lot on how we think about it, and our own disposition. Some may 'feel' the hand of God as clear as day, others may feel nothing of the sort, and so have no such feeling to explain.
Also, with metaphysical propositions, the circle representing the reasonable interpretations of the meaning of a sentence is very large. The terms are vague, easily misinterpreted or re-interpreted and do not directly refer to objects that the reader necessarily treats as real at all. All this is empirical fact borne out by the acres of scholastic work trying to interpret what philosophers have said, and the continued disagreement over that project.
So, finally (if you're still awake), the word 'wrong', for me, is used to mean that the two circles don't overlap. The statement circle does not, under any interpretation, overlap enough with the 'way things seem to be' circle. For example, I claim an object is there, it doesn't seem to be there, I'm wrong to make that claim.
What I'm saying, is that with metaphysical conceptions of the way things seem to be, and possible interpretations of statements about metaphysical concepts, the circles are so large that they will always overlap to a substantial extent within the logical space of all that is possible. If we define 'wrong' as meaning that the circles don't overlap (and I think we do), then it is simply nonsensical, or meaningless, to use the term in a situation where we know that the circles are so large that they will inevitably overlap to some substantial extent.
As a personal thought, it maybe is appropriate to think a proposition is wrong, after all, your personal thought represents pretty much the centre of those circles. The way the world actually is for you, and what the statement actually means to you, might be quite small circles (though still not actual points I think). In this sense, and this sense only, I think I would concede that "proposition X is 'wrong'" has meaning, in that it contains psychological information about the speaker. But in public discourse (which all written and spoken language surely is), the circles are too large to allow 'wrong' to mean anything.
But this can't be it. You'd accept something short of a Vulcan mind-meld as communication, yes?
Here's a couple thoughts.
Suppose you're a lifelong faithful Christian, a deacon in your church, you volunteer your time in your church's charities and so on, and some 19-year-old comes up to you on the sidewalk and offers to tell you about Jesus Christ. The right reaction here is "Fuck off!" It has nothing to do with whether you might agree with the kid's likely limited understanding of the gospel. The problem here is that he's broadcasting rather than communicating. You're just a pair of ears for him to talk into.
What's admirable about verificationism was never that it might stamp these words "meaningful" and those words "meaningless", or these propositions "good" and those "bad". It's that verificationism engages. It recognizes that talking is only part of the story and that it can be part of the story of how we learn things and share what we learn. It assumes there might be some practical point to the things we say to each other, and that those connections to our wider cognitive lives might actually inform how we talk.
I was speaking loosely. Too much so, apparently.
By "you" and "we" I mean someone has to know what the claims mean in order to know that they are unverifiable. Be careful which source you place your trust in.
Quoting Pseudonym
Reread the claims. The criterion for what counts as being wrong is clear. Pick one that meets the criterion.
Yes, I've not been clear enough in that comment because, I didn't think it necessary in the context of what CS was saying, but as a statement out on it's own, it should read more like mutual 'proximate' agreement. I don't need a Vulcan mind-meld, but, that's not the point I was trying to make. The point is really contained in the second half of my post above, but broadly, It follows the Venn diagram description there.
The meaning of a word as intended by the language user (the point of saying it) might be the centre of a circle, not a point, because I don't think we're always clear on what it is we mean, but a small circle representing what it is we might mean. The size of the circles represents all the things we could mean within the language game. "Dog" can mean anything from a four-legged furry animal, to a not very nice person, but it virtually never mean a tall square pink box. It has quite a small circle. The boundary of the circle is not clearly defined, it simply gets more transparent until it fades out. The rough position of this boundary is set by common agreement among language users. If what I tend to mean by a word is somewhere in that circle I'm using the term correctly, if it's way out, I might fairly be told I'm using the term wrongly.
So, where, the circle of possible meanings is so large (which is what I mean by no mutual agreement) that the range of possible meanings is not much smaller than the range of "all things its possible to say on the matter" then the word hasn't really done anything, and as you rightly say, there must be some purpose.
So, if I could borrow your Jesus-expounding youth. Notwithstanding his intention, even if he and the deacon had some mutual interest, there is a limited range of things a speaker could possibly (or is likely) to believe about Jesus. The language game they're playing constrains the range of possible beliefs that either is likely to express. If the terms used are so vague as to do virtually nothing to narrow down that range, then the youth's actually saying them has served no purpose, the deacon is no clearer about what the youth believes than he would have been by simply thinking about the constraints of all the things the youth might conceivably believe.
As I'm sure you will have encountered, even such a bold statement as "I don't believe Jesus exists" does not tell you much compared to "I believe Jesus exists". The concept of what Jesus is and what it is for something to exist are so vague that either statement could be interpreted as resulting in almost any state of intentionality. Now consider two statements closer than the polemic example I just gave and you hopefully will have an idea what I meant.
I'm not sure I see what difference this makes. Even if no one knew what the claim meant it's still inductively true that if it has not been verified despite 2000 years of trying, it is probably unverifiable. The claim doesn't rest on the reason why it's unverifiable. It could be because of the nature of the claim (and you're right to say that you'd have to understand what it means in order for you to know this), or it could be because no one understands what it means. Either way the empirical evidence points to the fact that it's unverifiable.
It's not so much that I'm trying to show a difference. Rather, I'm attempting to ensure where the agreement is so that we can further progress the discussion.
If no one knows what "X" means, let X be a metaphysical claim, then no one can know that it is unable to be checked, for no one would have a clue what they would be looking for. That's the point I'm making, and it seems you've agreed, but I'd like to be sure.
In order to be verifiable, a statement must be meaningful. The same is true with being unverifiable. Thus, in order to know whether or not a statement is verifiable or not, the judge must know what the statement is saying(what it means), for that is precisely what determines what to look for.
Agree?
I think this is nonsense. We can know that ambiguous statements are not verifiable or falsifiable, just on the basis that there is nothing determinable there to begin going about trying to verify or falsify. It is arguable that metaphysical statements are always ambiguous, because they do not refer to determinable empirical processes or entities.
It seems we disagree about whether or not knowledge about the determinability of a meaningful statement can be acquired without knowing what is meant by that statement. I am strongly asserting that when there is no knowledge of what "X" is saying about the world and/or ourselves, it is impossible to know what to look for. One must first know what they're looking for in order to know whether or not what we're looking for is something that can be observed/found. This all requires knowing what is meant by the statement.
Are you objecting?
If a statement is ambiguous, as I think most metaphysical statements are, in the sense that they equivocate between ordinary empirical concepts, and the extrapolation of such concepts into an imagined absolute 'context', then we know that the statement cannot be subject to verification, since the meaning of the statement cannot be precisely determined, or the determinate empirical meanings of the terms cannot be established to be rightly extended beyond the empirical domain..
Obviously that does not entail that such a statement is meaningless, in the sense of being without any meaning at all. The problem is the opposite; the statement is perfectly meaningful, but the meaning is being presumed to carry into an indeterminate context, a context outside the one wherein the meaning finds it origin and determinacy.
No, but @Janus has already replied with pretty much what I was going to say. Basically, not being able to understand what a statement means is a cause of unfalsifiability. A statement which is too vague for it's meaning to be agreed on is unfalsifiable for that reason alone.
If you object to the pragmatic definition of 'unfalsifiable' (something which, in practical terms, does not seem possible to falsify), and would rather have a theoretical definition (something which logically cannot be falsified), then we can use another term. It doesn't alter the argument. There is something about these types of statement which prevents them from actually being falsified which is not so present in more scientific statements, we can call that something whatever you want to call it.
A few more comments about this quote from Jim Holt:
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I agree with that, in the sense that Consciousness, we the experiencer, the implied experiencer of an experience possibility-story, are the most real and existent part of what I’ve described as what describably is.
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(…but I’d stop short of saying what Reality is.)
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Even without invoking meta-metaphysics (the matter of indescribable what-is), we’re fundamental and primary in the describable realm.
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You know what I mean. If, in the describable realm, there’s anything, there’s us.
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The quote continues with a re-wording:
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We feel as if we, Consciousness, the hypothetical story’s implied experiencer, are metaphysically prior to the hypothetical logical experience-story. And it’s true, isn’t it?
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So I should say that, instead that story implying us, we imply it.
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(Alright, I guess I’ve now just crossed the boundary from assertable certainty, to the matter of mention of impressions.)
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So a lot of Vedantists, including at least one that I talked with at these forums, want to say that we’re more than the animal that we are. …that we’re really something more general.
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I don’t think so. We’re the animal, period (full-stop), and there’s no reason to believe otherwise.
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But we the animal are central, primary, fundamental and metaphysically prior to our describable world.
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…as Holt implies or says.
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Michael Ossipoff
Too much unnecessary language use only results in adding nothing more than unnecessary confusion to the discussion. There's no need for all this talk of "the determinate empirical meanings of the terms cannot be established"...
Jeez. It's not that hard a subject matter to understand.
There's a bit of irony at hand. You levied a charge of 'nonsense' while simultaneously arguing that you can know that "X" is unverifiable despite your not knowing what "X" is claiming, and hence despite your having no clue what to look for.
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Quoting Pseudonym
Well. Now you're both wrong.
This is so wrong in so many ways...
If a person does not understand what a statement means, then that person cannot check to see of it's true. It does not follow from that that the statement itself is unverifiable/unfalsifiable.
Do you follow me? I mean, do you understand this?
:death:
Well you haven't actually argued against anything I've said and the "confusion" is yours and not mine, or, I think, Pseudonym's, so I can't see any avenue to direct a response beyond addressing this delightful little strawman:
Quoting creativesoul
As I've explained a few times, I don't see it as matter of "knowing what "X" is claiming", but rather a matter of knowing that it is not, and could not be, claiming anything empirically determinable, and that this fact is enough to know that no determination of 'X's" truth could decided upon.
Please read more closely, and/ or try to avoid distorting what you have read, so that your interlocutors don't have to repeat the same corrections ad nauseum.
Quoting creativesoul
This honestly appears to me to be gibberish. I have tried a few times to read some sense into it and failed. Perhaps our ways of thinking, our presuppositions, are so remote from each other as to preclude the possibility of any meaningful discussion between us. I suspect this is so also based on past experiences with you. Happy thinkin' dude....
So now your argument is that you can know that "X" is not and could not be claiming anything empirically determinable without ever knowing what "X" means?
Ok.
How would you know that again without knowing what "X" means? Explain that to me....
I have never said that I don't know what "X" means; that is your own distorted version. Stop wasting my time.
Ah. So you jumped into a discussion that you should not have...
See ya.
Well, then what's the point of presenting gibberish? Are you just a troll, after all?
I'm not interested. Make an argument. I can and have without subsequent valid objection or refutation.
Actually I was involved in the discussion before you jumped in with comments directed at, and based upon misunderstandings and/or distortions of, what both Pseudonym and I had written. Stop being a clown and acquire a little good faith if you honestly want to engage in some intelligent discussion. I'm tired of your empty posturing. On the other hand if you just want to be a troll, you are succeeding mightily well...
I've presented arguments for my position. Address those in an acceptable manner, or present your own, and I'll gladly critique those as I expect another to critique my own. None of us are capable of recognizing our own mistakes all by ourselves. I mean, it is humanly impossible to knowingly believe a falsehood. So...
Your move, I've explained what I'm interested in...
There are simple techniques for building bridges of mutual understanding, even when two people hold opposing views. I mean, it's no secret that some folk are capable of understanding positions that are contrary to their own.
It does not follow from the fact that a reader does not understand an author's argument that the argument is meaningless(gibberish).
Honest folk do not usually edit posts in such a way as to completely change the context from which the reader draws some important aspects of understanding. For whatever reason, that has been done here. The part above beginning with "this honestly" and ending with "happy thinkin' dude" was put into place after I had resigned from the thread.
That said, it warranted response...
And yet, this thread shows otherwise.
That's not true. You quoted what I had said, this exact text:
Quoting Janus
and responded with "We agree". I have not altered that post at all before or since your response, and this would have been easy enough to prove if you hadn't deleted the evidence. Your response (now deleted) was posted at 13:31:33. I responded immediately with this:
Quoting Janus
This was posted at 13:33;03, exactly 90 seconds later and clearly shows that I thought you had agreed that what you had written was gibberish.
I was surprised that you would say 'we agree" to that post and I now believe you didn't read it carefully, and realizing that, you wanted to save face, and came up with this bullshit claim that I altered the text, and deliberately deleted the evidence so that I could not definitively expose your lie. The nerve you have to speak of "honest folk"! So, now you've gone down considerably further in my estimation.
So you're proposing something of an ethic -- two approaches towards argument depending upon the consequences of said decision. There's a lot after that which I spent some time writing out and subsequently deleting to attempt focusing more in my response.
To attempt a rephrase: your ethic is considering another wrong is only important (meaningful?) in instances where our shared world of experience is effected by whatever it is we are arguing over.
Were I a practicing Christian then it would seem that a broadly Buddhist conception of the world is pretty important to me in the sense that it is wrong and Christianity is right, where bridges can be built by a multiplicity of concepts (consider how long bridges have been around in relation to the theory of gravity). Whether bridges stand or fall is important to the extent that we desire a bridge -- but the theory we use to get there doesn't matter insofar that the end-goal is achieved. The salvation of another's soul is of utmost importance. So hierarchy is justified on the basis of this greater good. (FWIW, I do not subscribe to Christian beliefs, so I do not feel this way towards Christianity at all -- but it's a common enough stance to take that this should make sense)
That is merely factual. Perhaps it is factual and the Christian is wrong in the ethical sense to consider their worldview as something which must be aggressively defended and propogated, but should be presented in a passive one-way manner without investment to people who follow along some other tree-line.
For myself I have a hard time believing in hierarchy at all -- but I don't think that dispassionate discussion amounts to much either. So I don't know which of the two options I should pick. Something should be at stake in a debate whether that "at stake" is relative to our shared world of experience or not -- that doesn't seem so important to me as a rule for how we ought to approach debates. Further I'd say that decidability doesn't seem to relate to this "at stake", though maybe decidability is something we can put to the wayside now as it seems like something of an after effect in your proposed ethic -- you're concerned with the shared world of experience, and not whether some debate is decidable or not.
To you an aggressive, two way exchange where we consider another person wrong and utilize hierarchy to maintain agreement is justified in the case where our shared world of experience is going to be the same. If our shared world of experience is the same regardless of which branch we happen to believe in making a distinction then it is better to have a one-way, passive approach to a debate. Only in this way can a debate between two positions be meaningful -- meaningfulness is dependent upon approach, which is appropriate or not depending upon whether or not what we are talking about makes a difference in our shared world of experience.
To me I'm uncertain that the aggressive two-way exchange is justified, nor is the one-way justified. Surely we care about what we talk about. I care about philosophy, so Italk about it. But am I demanding of you agreement with me? I'm presenting reasons to you to explain myself, and persuasion is a part of that. But I've also edited a great deal and cut out a great deal upon re-reading it and reflecting -- so a part of this debate is also self reflecting, it is asking questions about myself. It's not purely an act of certainty from myself to make you conform with myself. It's an exploration, a play -- a play I am not disinterested in at all. A play which has stakes (though are the stakes of our shared world of experience? Maybe, maybe not).
Is that a third way? Or is that passive, merely because it is not authoritarian? If that be the case, then I don't know if I'd consider bridges to be the basis for authoritarianism either. If we care about a bridge standing then we can build the bridge and see if it stands -- but the ideas we use to get there, like gravity, aren't part of that end-goal so much. They are just as undecidible as other things, because they are interpretations, and not the shared world of experience. In fact "shared world" is itself just a metaphysical belief (one which I happen to share a belief in).
If the bridge stands then we're done. But to get there play is more important than hierarchy, experiment is what allows for discovery. Maybe there will be better bridges in the future for such play. In which case even the undecidable, that which is beyond our immediate world of experience, should be debated about -- because that's how we got gravity, after all. Newton didn't just say "well I don't see it, so I should propose this in a dispassionate manner for consideration" -- he thought he was right.
So,
Yes, I think I am proposing something of an ethic, but that's more to do with my approach to philosophy, than something specific to this topic. I think that there is really no other sensible question than "what should I do next?" which is ultimately (I think) an ethical one. I wouldn't characterise it quite the way you have though.
It's not so much about our shared world as about my personal future. If you hold a view which I think might impact negatively on me and my interests, then I will use whatever technique available to change your view. That might be rational argument, but that rarely works and it's more likely to be rhetoric, or even outright deception if necessary. The ethical component here is that I'm presuming an ethical person, and what I consider to be 'my interests' are derived from ethics, not hedonism (although I think the two are closer than most, but that's another discussion). So basically, argument (no matter what form it takes) in order to bring about some ethical goal seems justified by the ends, since the means are relatively harmless.
This is where what you go on to say about the vast quantity of subject matters which do have some investment in our shared experience diverges from the approach I'm trying to argue for. Simply being invested in our shared experience is not enough. There has to be some ethical goal in order to justify the aggressive approach. It seems legitimate, to take your example, for a committed Christian to argue with some fervor against abortion, or the sins of others, since they might reasonably consider that they're achieving some ethical goal (the saving of souls). It seems far less justifiable for that same Christian to argue with fervor over, say the cosmological argument (I'm presuming here that no one's soul is going to be saved by reluctantly admitting that there must be a god on logical grounds!). That seems far more about suppressing inconvenient arguments against a passionately held belief than about convincing others of anything at all.
My only interest is in philosophy as therapy. As I've said many times, I see little evidence of any progress being made on any argument about 'the way the world is' to the extent that those who passionately believe it is one way are forced to concede that it is, in fact, another, outside of science. And science holds this unique position not because of the magic of its method, but because it deals in things described by their effects. So, from a therapeutic point of view, I only see it as harmful to persist in the notion that some metaphysical positions can be demonstrated to be incontrovertibly 'right' in the face of the overwhelming evidence that it cannot.
It's all good. I take breaks too. :D
I think that your response gets to the heart of the matter better anyways. Where you state:
Quoting Pseudonym
I was able to reread your previous post and see a different emphasis.
Where I got "shared world of experience" from was when you were talking about the effects of electricity in a computer, and your example of two engineers where one believed in gravity and the other did not yet both wanted to build a bridge. My strategy was two-fold: to demonstrate that we can accomplish goals, such as bridge building, with competing and contradictory beliefs about the world. So bridge building has been around a very long time, well before the theory of gravity and Newton and all that. And then also to point out that we have better bridges now specifically because of what I would term metaphysical speculation which was two-way and aggressive. Newton is a great example of this because in his time metaphysics and science weren't separate fields of study as they are now, and he was extremely aggressive on such points -- yet that sort of passion and vigor is what allows us to build more complicated bridges now, since it laid the conceptual groundwork that would be necessary to build more impressive bridges.
Also, I'm perplexed by the two-fold categorization of approach when it comes to myself. I feel passionate about philosophy, I can be aggressive, but I don't think I'd endorse all forms of aggressiveness. Further, I don't think I'd say my interest is dispassionate, one way, passive, or something along those lines.
But now I would say that it seems to me that your approach to philosophy as therapy is consistent, except for the exception you give science. You say science is unique...
Quoting Pseudonym
Ancient skepticism is a hallmark case of therapeutic philosophy. They even go so far as to say that arguments are literal medicine, so we need not feel attached to any argument but rather should view them as a way of persuading people of the virtues of skepticism. Those who deviate from the skeptical path are ill, and those who take their medicine are cured.
But for you you're talking about your interests, from an ethical point of view. So an aggressive argument is justified only if there are souls to be saved (in the Christian case) or your personal ethical ends are being served (close to but not the same as hedonism) - so not the same as skepticism in that the end goals differ (or the set of possible end goals are wider than what the ancient skeptic would say).
But if therapy be the guide then the end-goal is what justifies the approach, up to an including non-rational means. At least that's what I get from you saying:
Quoting Pseudonym
But how does that square away with the unique place of science? What gives it a pass, from a therapeutic perspective? And if the goal is what justifies any means, be they rational or not, why would science get a pass on this?
Science is interested in making claims on what is the case. At least, on its face. I suspect, given the unique position you've given science, that we agree on this much. To me that means that we would care about things like truth, evidence, inference, and knowledge. But truth, evidence, inference, and knowledge are not grounded in ethical goals, in what we ought to do next. From the perspective of the question "What should I do next?" they are only worthwhile if what we should do is generate knowledge in a specific way, a scientific way. And the history of science shows how this knowledge is ethically neutral -- it can be used for great harm or great benefit. It can threaten the world with nuclear holocaust, and it can cure polio. Knowledge of the world brings about power. It doesn't bring about the wisdom required to wield such power.
I'd say it does this specifically because it's merely concerned with truth about what is the case. But this is not moored to any ethical consideration about what we should do next.
If that be the case it seems to me that you believe in more than philosophy as therapy -- you must also believe that science tells us what is the case in order to give it a unique place among fields of knowledge. You'd have to give favor to things like current evidence, and causal frameworks -- a bare minimum epistemology and metaphysic, but they still count as more than "what should I do next?" none-the-less. Unless you can somehow link this approach to your therapy, it seems to me that this is just a case of special pleading.
I bring up the ancient skeptic for that reason -- to highlight how this is special pleading in light of a therapeutic philosophy. For the skeptic any claims on knowledge, be they evidential and based on cause or otherwise, were secondary to the goal. Arguments were medicine to bring someone to the perspective that they withhold judgment. (of course this is a general treatment. Specific skeptics differ, and it's a richer tradition than a few sentences gives credit)
Or, at least, why it seems to me that this is special pleading. How do you reconcile these commitments, to the only sensible question you introduce, evidentialism, and a belief in cause?
I hope this will explain, though I'm not entirely sure what you're asking.
I'm vaguely in agreement with Quine with regards to the lack of a distinction between science and metaphysics but with a very clear idea that there is a grade from the very metaphysical to the very scientific. So when I say 'science' it is usually out of laziness, referring to the end of that scale which is sufficiently 'sciency' to be worth engaging in the process of getting it 'right'.
I see philosophy (from a therapeutic point of view) as dealing with varying degrees of uncertainty. So to use your bridge example, there is very little uncertainty about the fact that the bridge stays up, so very little work for philosophy there, mostly engineering. There's a small degree of uncertainty about why the bridge stays up, but by comparing theories to other things we know (as well as the fact that the bridge stays up), we can be fairly sure. It's probably gravity, and nuclear forces. It might be kind fairies, but that doesn't seem to be consistent with other things we're even more certain about. The question of whether we should have a bridge at all is, by comparison, a sea of uncertainty, a lot of work for philosophy to do, some work for science providing the sorts of facts we all agree on, but mostly philosophy providing possible explanations for people to try on, see if they like them.
So, yes, there's a lot of science where therapeutic philosophy comes in. The line is not clear, but I think two things are clear. 1) there is some progression from the very poorly agreeable metaphysics to the very widely agreeable science and 2) it gets less and less possible to come to any meaningful agreement and as to what is 'right' the further along that scale one goes in the direction of metaphysics.
To answer your question as straightforwardly as possible (though missing a good deal of subtlety in doing so), it's not that science gets a unique pass, it's that the more 'sciency' a matter gets, the less need there is for any therapeutic philosophy to help us cope with uncertainty because we all find it very easy to agree and to feel certain about that agreement.
Eh, not entirely unusual there. I always wish I was more clear, and upon rereading what I write some time later wish I had said it better. I guess I'm just expressing what appears to me to be a conflict in your thinking -- one which, on one side, makes sense of all you say, but on the other side, seems like you'd be more liable to agree with me in saying that metaphysical disagreement is meaningful in the way that it is productive. In particular I have in mind science, which to me isn't all that different from metaphysics though a distinction can be drawn (and is, though I think that it's more an accident of our particular moment in history).
I suppose I don't see a very reasonable distinction between the two. There are degrees of uncertainty even in very well rooted empirical matters. Uncertainty, from my perspective, doesn't come to define metaphysics. And if metaphysics is the study of what is the case then science is a part of all that -- and, depending on how we might feel about certain forms of argument, it can be a large or a small part (or the entirety or completely separate from, at the extremes of commitment).
From my experience with science agreement is not easy, nor is it even common. So disagreement in science is something that seems very normal to me. Science is uncertain and rife with disagreement. It's almost the engine of science. The products of science are just accidents of history, things we have garnered thus far and are always up for reinterpretation or experiment. To me it does not seem so easy to find agreement and feel certain about it from the scientific perspective. And that becomes more apparent in the details, rather than in the textbooks. Even in cases of engineering, which rely upon the highly specific circumstances and empirical testing.
To me, at least, there is no certainty in science any more than there is certainty in the ambiguity of what I ought to do. So therapy seems equally applicable in both cases.
Maybe I just feel more affinity for Quine's thoughts on the lack of a distinction. Or, better to say, on the lack of a distinction with rigor -- I can get a feel for what people mean, but I can't see the difference really. So we either reject science as an arbiter of truth, if we are thorough-going and oddly consistent therapeuticians, or we somehow reconcile the notion that philosophy is therapeutic and we still care about truth in spite of what therapeutic value it might bring.
It seems to me perhaps that the key issue around the extent to which science and metaphysics differ is the extent to which agreement can, or should, be found. Afterall, my opposition to much argumentative debate in metaphysics is that its pointless. If argument might reasonably yield agreement on some matter which requires it, then it's worth going through the process.
So the scale I see with pure science at one end, metaphysics at the other (and perhaps the 'softer' sciences in the middle) is one that measures the extent to which agreement is readily achievable. This is largely a psychological issue. There may be deep metaphysical reasons for it, but it's sufficient for me that for some reason we seem to readily agree on the things we see, hear or measure, whereas we tend to disagree interminably on things we think and feel.
Another, completely separate scale measures the extent to which agreement is important to one's ethical objectives. Here we might have fundamental ethics at one end (it's really important that everyone agrees murder is wrong), and the density of a black hole at the other (everyone in the world could quite feasibly have a different opinion about that and everything would still be basically fine).
Where an issue is located on the two scales determines whether it is better to argue the point rationally, argue the point rhetorically, or not argue the point at all but maybe just listen and talk openly to others.
Having laid that out, if you don't mind putting up with my framework for a moment, it seems like you're saying that some science is actually quite far along the 'difficult to get agreement on' part of scale 1, and plenty of the sort of metaphysics I might dismiss as pointless is actually quite far along the 'really important to get agreement on' end of scale 2. Is that a fair translation of your view into my framework?
Yeah, I think that's fair. And I'm glad you set out the framework because it helps me to disentangle the argument better -- I can see clearly where our disagreements over the point of arguing metaphysics seem to lie. Or, at least, where we have been having a back and forth and now why I've been a bit confused at times in our conversation.
Yeah, I think it's at least half to do with definitions. Taking Quine's scale of metaphysical enquiry, I'm simply defining an enquiry as 'science' by it's place on the scale, so the question of some science being difficult to ever agree on doesn't arise for me. If it's the sort of thing that's unlikely to ever yield agreement, no matter what sense-based evidence we use, then it isn't 'science' for me, simply by definition. To be clear, there's a very important distinction between 'agreed on' and 'agreeable on'. Some scientific theories might be very widely dis-agreed on, but they're still science because they are widely agreeable on, even if such agreement is not yet forthcoming. Metaphysical theories I'm defining as those which are not widely agreeable on even though some of them might be very widely agreed on.
I let this sit for a bit because my immediate thoughts were repetitions of things I had already said. Nothing new has come over the past few days so I think we might have just reached that point where this is where we disagree, but I'm not certain what else could be said to elucidate our persuade one way or the other.