The Ontological Argument Fallacy
[B]The Ontological Argument (TOA)[/b]:
1. God is the greatest conceivable being
2. If God doesn't exist then God is not the greatest conceivable being
Therefore
3. God exists (by modus tollens)
The argument is sound.
My counter-argument is:
[B]Argument Y[/b]
1. Argument A is the greatest conceivable (ergo sound) atheistic argument
2. If argument A doesn't exist then argument A is not the greatest conceivable atheistic argument
Therefore
3. Argument A exists
Therefore
4. God doesn't exist
My questions are:
1. What is the flaw in the TOA?
2. What is the flaw in my argument Y?
Thanks
1. God is the greatest conceivable being
2. If God doesn't exist then God is not the greatest conceivable being
Therefore
3. God exists (by modus tollens)
The argument is sound.
My counter-argument is:
[B]Argument Y[/b]
1. Argument A is the greatest conceivable (ergo sound) atheistic argument
2. If argument A doesn't exist then argument A is not the greatest conceivable atheistic argument
Therefore
3. Argument A exists
Therefore
4. God doesn't exist
My questions are:
1. What is the flaw in the TOA?
2. What is the flaw in my argument Y?
Thanks
Comments (126)
The second error is to suppose that a non-existent God can't have contradictory properties. Anything we think of that is non-existent is imaginary (by which I mean that we can conceive of it but it doesn't exist), and imaginary things can have contradictory properties (e.g. Meinong's round square, which is imaginary and is both round and not round); it's only things that are existent (i.e. real) that can't.
Your argument Y fails for the same reasons. An existent argument A is not quantitatively greater than a non-existent (i.e. imaginary) argument A, and is therefore not greater at all; and a non-existent argument A, being imaginary and not real, can have contradictory properties, and therefore can be both the greatest conceivable argument and not the greatest conceivable argument.
Ehhh, unless you're a dialetheist like myself you cannot really run this sort of argument. Non-existent objects cannot be entertained unless you accept contradictory objects. But in doing so, I think you really have to accept that contradictory existent objects are possible as well, because in principle there doesn't seem to be a reason that the property of existence makes inconsistent properties unavailable. And that's a tougher thing to argue for, though there are arguments.
Could you explain that more?
Evidently I didn't make myself clear. To speak of a non-existent God is to pretend that there is a God when there isn't. Since it's a pretence, it's not bound by the laws of logic.
I'm not a dialetheist. I would need you to find me an existent object with inconsistent properties before I could contemplate becoming one.
I wouldn't say that you're necessarily "pretending that there is a God."
You could be referring to other folks' ideas and beliefs per se, or you could be thinking of God as a fictional character/something purely imaginary, etc.
No, that doesn't ring true. If I say "Sherlock Holmes is the most famous detective", no one thinks I'm pretending Holmes exists. The principles of logic (or more properly, the principles of the logic I happen to adopt) do not cease to apply when dealing with fictions. Otherwise authors would never structure their stories or try to retcon earlier mistakes.
Sure. Lots of objects do not exist. The planet Vulcan, unicorns, maybe God. But there are an even stranger class of non-existent objects, the contradictory ones. The square-circle is surely a non-existent object, but to accept this means to accept that there are objects with inconsistent properties. And there doesn't seem to be a principled (non-question-begging) distinction between the consistent and the inconsistent objects that don't exist, they play the same theoretical role: explain how we make true assertions about things which don't exist. The square-circle is surely circular, surely a shape, etc.
And so it seems if you accept that there are non-existent objects you're committed to quite the ontology. But obviously you cannot adopt the Law of Non-contradiction if you accept this because you're committed to things like the non-existent square-circle. But then it gets even weirder since it's unclear why, if you accept this, why the property of existence rules out contradictory existent objects as well for you.
Let me just start there for a moment. Why wouldn't consistent/inconsistent be a principled, non-question-begging distinction?
If the reason why adopting such a view is to serve the above then it applies just the same to inconsistent non-existent objects. In which case recourse to Non-contradiction is just irrelevant. You'd have to just insist on the principle for no reason (or beg the question for it), and there'd be no explanation for why you stop there.
Why would it hinge on whether they play the same theoretical role in some manner though?
If you don't accept that the purpose of this is to explain that then you can't really accept it to begin with (which is fine), at least unless you're willing to have a lot of ad hoc restrictions. Or as I said, unprincipled.
We don't "adopt" non-existent objects for fictions?
In other words, "the whole reason for adopting non-existent objects is to explain how we can say true things about objects that don't exist" is false.
Another reason we can adopt non-existent objects is for fictions.
That's not about whether you're pretending, it's about why you're pretending. There can be many reasons why you would do this. You could dress up as Holmes and pretend to be him for a fancy dress party, or you could pretend that he exists to fool a naive tourist to London, or, when you read a story about him, you pretend he exists while you're reading. That's exactly what fiction is - pretending that there are certain objects and writing stories about them. (I know about this, because I write novels, and that's exactly what I'm doing when I write them.)
It's true that fiction-writers usually follow the principles of logic, but that's merely because most of what fiction-writers want to do doesn't require them to depart from those rules. They can produce fiction that doesn't follow the rules of logic if they like: for example, there's a short story - I can't remember who by - in which the rules of mathematics are not determined until someone actually does the maths, and there are aliens who have done the maths on certain numbers before we have, and they have forced maths to work differently for those numbers from the way it works for the numbers we got to first; which, of course, is not logically possible. Existent objects, on the other hand, have to follow the rules of logic.
Incorrect because everyone knows that I'm not claiming nor at all pretending Holmes is real. It's simply true that he's more famous than any living detective despite being a fictional character. I am not saying (nor does anyone interpret me as saying) "Pretend Holmes exists and he his more famous than all other detectives". If you don't understand this that's because you don't think there are non-existent objects. Holmes is purely fictional and yet that fictional entity is in fact the most famous detective. It's a true statement.
Quoting Herg
This doesn't make sense. The reason most (really, all) fiction writers attempt to keep their stories consistent is because otherwise their story doesn't make sense, even to them. Doing otherwise results in triviality, wherein the world doesn't cohere. I'm not familiar with the story you mention.
False, since 'everyone' includes me, and I don't know that. I think you are pretending that he is real without realising that that's what you are doing. You know that he isn't real, and yet you speak of him as if he were; that's what we all do when we speak of fictional characters while knowing that they're fictional; and that's pretending. Of course, some people may think, mistakenly, that Holmes is real; when those people talk about Holmes, they are not pretending that he is real. But you and I know better than that. We know that there is no such person as Holmes, and yet we talk about him as living in Baker Street, smoking a pipe, etc, things which only a real person could do. Since we attribute to him properties that could only be possessed by a real person, and we do this knowing that he is not real, it follows that we must be pretending that he is real.
The story I'm referring to is not trivial. It's quite a good story. The point is that logical laws, just like physical laws, can be disobeyed in a work of fiction, as long as the resulting narrative makes sufficient sense for the reader to follow it.
No, you're not saying 'pretend'; you're simply pretending.
No, there are no non-existent objects. To say that an object is non-existent is the same as saying that there is no such object.
I am not pretending he is real, I don't know where you're getting that. He is a fictional character and nonetheless I can say true things about him. It is both the case the Holmes is fictional and he is more famous than any other detective. You haven't at all addressed this other than to say I'm unwittingly assuming he is real despite directly saying he isn't. Unreal things can have properties and relations with real things.
Quoting Herg
When I said "trivial" I was referring to the definition of trivial in formal logic: incoherency due to every sentence being a theorem. Fictions with contradictions are, in standard logic, reduced to triviality.
You can say I'm pretending but I'm not.Quoting Herg
Which makes it quite difficult to explain how one can truthfully speak about non existent objects. After all, for the sentences about them to be true there must be something making them true. But on your view "existence" and "being" are the same thing so you've no way of explaining truths of the sort I mentioned before.
The reason that people present fictional things is almost never "to explain how we can speak truthfully about such things." For example, A. Conan Doyle didn't invent Sherlock Holmes to explain how we can speak truthfully about Sherlock Holmes. He invented Sherlock Holmes because he enjoyed imagining a sublimely skilled but personally-flawed private detective. He enjoyed storytelling. He knew that good storytelling could help him earn a living. Etc.
Most non-existent things that people think about are in the guise of daydreaming/fantasizing, dreaming, creating fictions, etc. While maybe a very, very small minority of that is done "to explain how we can speak truthfully about such things," the vast majority of it isn't done for that reason. It's done because people enjoy daydreaming/fantasizing, they enjoy imagining things, they enjoy writing and reading made-up stories, and in the case of dreaming, it's simply a way that brains normally work.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I assume that MindForged means that the chief reason philosophers propose non-existent objects is to explain how we can speak truthfully about such things; it's clearly not why novelists present them.
The disagreement between MindForged and myself is about the status of non-existent objects as it is hypothesised by philosophers (not by novelists, who mostly probably don't think about it). MindForged holds that we need there to be non-existent objects to explain how we can speak truthfully about them; I disagree.
Quoting MindForged
It's easy to have the wrong idea about what you're doing when you think about non-existent objects. Both Meinong and Russell got it wrong. Russell thought that when he wrote 'the present King of France is bald', he was claiming, falsely, that there was a real present King of France. However, he was not; he was pretending that there was a real present King of France.
Quoting MindForged
If you say 'Sherlock Holmes is the world's greatest detective', this is not a true statement. We only pretend that it is true, just as we pretend that there is such an object as Sherlock Holmes.
I recommend that you read Nicholas Griffin's paper 'Rethinking Item Theory' in "Russell vs. Meinong: The Legacy of on Denoting" (though I'm afraid this book is rather expensive). Griffin nails non-existent objects. He explains that they exist, not in the real world, but only in what he calls 'contexts of supposition', i.e. we merely suppose that there are such objects. (I prefer the word 'pretence' to 'supposition', but really he and I mean the same thing.) In Griffin's scheme, 'Sherlock Holmes is the world's greatest detective' is true only in the context of supposition in which there is such an object as Sherlock Holmes. This amounts to the same thing as my claim that we only pretend that the statement is true.
What do you think about objects in dreams? If you dream about a horse, do you hold that there is a horse? I hold that there is not.
Quoting MindForged
I've addressed it now, by quoting Griffin's theory in my preceding post.
No. We can pretend or suppose that they do, but really they don't.
That could be, especially historically, but what philosophers have historically said about nonexistent things is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, because I'm of the opinion that historically, they've said mostly stupid things in this regard, where they would have been much better off if they'd understood fiction, daydreaming, etc. better, and had a semantics and philosophy of language that didn't foolishly try to avoid psychologism.
Quoting Herg
So the answer to something like that is very simple.
One major category of nonexistent objects (and actions, etc.) occur as something we imagine. The "nonexistent" adjective applies to the question of whether they also occur as something in the world external-to-minds. Speaking "truthfully" in this case is only a matter of (a) whether we're accurately reporting how someone was imagining whatever it is, or (b) whether we're getting right what would logically follow from what someone was imagining, per the ideas, concepts, they're employing, as they're employing them; however, when we're talking about someone's imaginings other than ourselves, qua their imaginings, they're always going to be the final arbiter.
So re (a), for example, we can say true or false things about Sherlock Holmes via looking at what Doyle wrote about Sherlock Holmes--it's something true or false about his imagining per se, and re (b), we can say something true or false about Sherlock Holmes a la, "About the Brown Lady of Raynham Hall, Sherlock Holmes would . . ." (keeping in mind that to my knowledge, no one has ever written a Holmes story about the Brown Lady of Raynham Hall) , via extrapolating from what Doyle and others (including ourselves) have imagined about Holmes, so that we're positing something consistent with that, though the imaginings of particular individuals will always be the final arbiter there. (As again, its simply true or false about their imagining.)
The other major category of nonexistent things, events, etc. is possible things and events, where "nonexistent" refers to the fact that they're possible but not actualized. The arbiter there is simply whether those things could happen given the facts of what the physical world is like, or what logic is like, etc. (There are different sorts of possibility--logical, metaphysical, practical/contingent-to-our-physical-universe, etc.)
There are also was-existent-but-no-longer-are-existent things, or historical things, and what makes a true statement there is, at least hypothetically, uncontroversial.
That would only settle the truthfulness of statements about the properties of Holmes within the stories. The issue MindForged and I are discussing is the truthfulness of statements about Holmes in relation to the real world. MindForged says that Holmes is more famous than any other detective, meaning that he's more famous than any real detective. This seems prima facie to be true, and yet if there is no such object as Holmes, as I claim, then it looks as if it can't be true, because if there is no object, then there can be no properties of the object such as being famous.
You can't settle this issue by appealing to Conan Doyle, for an obvious reason: if Conan Doyle does say that Holmes is the most famous detective in the world (I don't know if he ever says this), what is it that would make him right? Obviously not the fact that he says it: he could be wrong. What would make it right is if more people in the real world had heard of Holmes than of any other detective (which is very likely to be the case). And that just throws us back to the problem MindForged is charging me with: how can more people have heard of Holmes than of any other detective if there's no such object as Holmes?
My answer is that people can hear of, and know about, objects that only exist in Griffin's contexts of supposition (or, as I put it, objects that we pretend exist). The reason this is possible is that not only can authors imagine objects when there are no such objects, they can also communicate with us via their books in such a way that we can then imagine similar objects. All that exists here are the author, the readers, and the means of communication (physical books). That's all you need for Holmes to have become the most famous detective in the world. You don't need nonexistent objects.
As I noted earlier, I myself write books. Some of my books have dragons in them. While it would be delightful to think that my tapping away on a keyboard has called dragons into being somewhere, I don't believe it for a moment. Hundreds and thousands of new characters are added each year to the pantheon of nonexistent objects as more and more books of fiction are published; if there are nonexistent objects corresponding to these characters, there must now be millions and millions of them. Where are they all? Why can neither our senses nor our scientific instruments detect them? No, away with these shadowy nonexistents. There's no need for them, and no justification for them.
(a) Within the stories and (b) re how people think about him, catalyzed by the stories, for example. Again, (b) is about whether particular things follow from an imagining, consistent with the concepts employed, etc. (though this can always be overridden by a particular imaginer).
That's all there is to these things.
Quoting Herg
"X is more famous than y" is about whether more people are familiar with x than y. X can easily be something fictional. The mistake you'd be making is thinking that "X is more famous than y" has to imply that x is a real-world object that has real-world properties (such as being more famous than).
Even if we're talking about "The Beatles are more famous than King's X" we're not talking about a property that "The Beatles" have. We're merely saying that more people are familiar with the Beatles than they are King's X. That's a property of the people in question--namely it's about their mental activities (and even more specifically, simply the fact that far more people sometimes think about the Beatles (including simply being familiar with them, familiar with the name, etc.) than sometimes think about King's X).
Quoting Herg
How can that question seem difficult to anyone? We'd seriously be wondering how it can be that people are familiar with fictions? People read fiction, they watch fictional films, they hear others tell stories, they hear others talk about fictions, refer to them, allude to them, etc. How in the world would that be a mystery to anyone?
Quoting Herg
If he's positing nonexistent objects in a Meinongian sense, that's simply stemming from having a nonworkable philosophy of language/semantics that one doesn't want to abandon. So it leads to positing stupid things to save the theory. It's a form of what I call "theory worship."
If you posit a theory of language/meaning that claims that things work, in principle, by referring to some real-world (mind-independent) entity that you then attribute properties to, then you quickly run into problems as soon as you get to fictions. You don't fix that by saying, "Yeah, my theory was necessarily correct/I'm worshipping my theory. It's that fictions are referring to 'real-world nonexistent entities' blah blah blah." You fix it by saying, "Oops! I guess I screwed up. I need to revise my theory, because it's at least the case that not all language/meaning works by referring to real-world entities."
Part of the problem, I think, comes from supposing that there is identity between your Holmes and mine. Since there is no Holmes, there can't be; but it's very easy to write about Holmes as if he is a single object possessing self-identity, as you just did when you said, 'how people think about him'. There's actually no 'him'; there's just a bundle of concepts in my mind to which I attach the name 'Holmes', and a bundle of concepts in your mind to which you attach the name 'Holmes', and a mechanism (Conan Doyle's stories) that ensures that our bundles are similar enough to fool us into thinking there's a single, self-identical object.
I don't think you and I have any significant areas of disagreement on this issue. I will be interested to see what MindForged has to say.
I'd say there actually IS a him; it's actually just a bundle of concepts in your mind. That doesn't imply that "there isn't actually a him," unless one insists on reading language in a completely untenable way. That theory of language is WRONG. Language doesn't actually work so that we can only refer to real-world objects. (And so that we subsequently have to posit nonexistent real world objects).
Re identity, there's obviously not when we're talking about different persons' imaginings--and no one suggested an identity there. Re "him" in this context, yeah, it's obviously relative to who we're talking about (doing the imagining). I detailed all of that in my longer post above.
When we're talking about, say, what Doyle wrote, or what Guy Ritchie presented, etc. then of course there is an identity there when multiple people are talking about it.
Quoting Herg
Right
We still evidently have some disagreements on the detail (unless you are merely being a little loose in the way you express yourself). Viz:
I agree that language doesn't restrict us to real world objects; how could we refer to Holmes if it did? But I don't think we can say that what's referred to by 'him' is the bundle of concepts. A nonexistent object is not a bundle of concepts, any more than a real world object is: rather, it's what the concepts are instantiated or exemplified in as properties.
Nor do I agree that Holmes is 'in your mind'. He is not mental; he is nonexistent.
When I said "there's actually no 'him'", I meant what I said: in the actual world (which, not being a David Lewis-type modal realist, I take to be the same as the real world), there's no 'him'. In the case of Holmes, I think that 'him' only has reference in Griffin's context of supposition, in which Holmes exists; in the real world, 'him' in the case of Holmes has no reference, any more than 'Holmes' does.
Holmes is not in the actual or real world in any way whatsoever. He is only in the context of supposition, the context in which we suppose or pretend that there is such an object as him.
Apologies if I am labouring the point to the extent that I irritate you. Always a risk in these discussions.
That's not what I said. I said the proposal to believe non existent things (Meinongianism) have some sort of being is proposed to explain how we speak truthfully about fictional things. I did not say fictional things are created so that we can speak truthfully about them. In other words, tan explanation for why I can say true things about Sherlock Holmes is the theory that non-existent objects corresponding to these things exist.
Quoting Herg
This is correct.
Sure, but the theory of definite descriptions is on shakier grounds these days when compared to Meinongianism, which has had an unexpected resurgence. The proposal (whether you accept it or not) is that the best explanation for the truth-aptness the relevant sentences is an appeal to non-existent objects. When you phrase it as "pretending" is sounds like you're calling me deceptive rather than misguided. If that wasn't the implication my mistake.
Quoting Herg
I think the sentence was "Sherlock Holmes is more famous than any detective" or something like that, but disregard that. To say the sentence is false seems to require adopting something like Russell's theory of definite descriptions. After all, few would hear me say "Sherlock Holmes is the most famous detective" and interpret that as me saying Holmes exists. Because that's how Russell's theory would interpret that. And obviously that assumption is false and thus the sentence that assumes it.
If that's not how you are determining it isn't true, the only recourse that comes to mind is a restriction of either the Principle of Excluded Middle or of Bivalence. So we're either in many-valued logic or some kind of constructive logic. I'm not opposed to those (I'm a pluralist about logic) but I don't think it's the an easy bullet to bite. That said, I'll check out the paper you mention.
A non-existent horse, yes. An existent horse, no. If one holds to Meinongianism, "there is" is not the same thing as "exists". Being has been partitioned into different kinds so if I speak truthfully about the horse in my dream I'm not committing myself to the existence of the dream horse. It has enough being to predicate things of it but it's a thin sort of being, not physical.
As I explained above, we say true things about the way that people imagine fictional things, about the way they write about them, or create films about them, etc. As something imagined, they're not objective entities/phenomena but subjective entities/phenomena.
It's something that doesn't exist mind-independently. But it exists mind-dependently. And mind-dependently, it's a "bundle of concepts," and that's what we're referring to by "him."
The phrase "nonexistent object" is throwing things off.
Quoting Herg
What a ridiculous thing to say. Holmes is something we're imagining (aside from talking about Holmes as a character someone is playing, etc.) That means that Holmes is indeed in your mind. You're not being Aspie-ish about that, are you? Thinking that people are saying literally that some person is in your mind? Holmes is mental content--something imagined. You're imagining a person. It's not literally a person.
Quoting Herg
Minds are part of the actual world.Quoting Herg
Why would you think that, though? It's very simple. "Him" in most contexts here is going to refer to what individuals are thinking of.
Quoting Herg
False. Again, minds are part of the actual world.
Again, the terms are misleading you here. There's a historical way of using "real" that makes it effectively the same as mind-independent. But minds are part of the actual world. Minds are real in a more modern sense of that term.
Good lord. No, that was not my intention. What I was trying to suggest is that you and I, when we read a story about Sherlock Holmes, play along with Conan Doyle's game, which he indulged in himself when he wrote the stories, of pretending that there is a real Holmes in the real world. You and I (and everyone else who knows that Holmes is fictitious) at the same time know that this is not the case; and since behaving as if something were the case while knowing that it is not the case usually goes under the name 'pretending', that was the word I naturally chose. But given your reaction, maybe it would be safer if I used the word 'imagining' - or, as Griffin does, 'supposing'.
Quoting MindForged
I owe you an apology here, because I have not been explicit enough in saying what I think. Let me try again.
Holmes is an object only in a context of supposition, not in the real world; in the real world, Holmes is not an object but a fictional character. (Fictional characters are not strictly objects, they are complexes made up of words on the page and people's thoughts when they read those words.) Statements that refer to Holmes can be true only in the context in which Holmes has the status - object or fictional character - required for the statement to be true. In some cases the statement, in order to be true, may require him to be both a fictional character and an object in the real world; in such cases the statement 'reaches into' the context of supposition in order to access the properties Holmes has in that context.
Some examples:
'Holmes is a character in books by Conan Doyle' (true in the real world)
'Holmes lives in Baker Street' (true in a context of supposition)
'Holmes is the world's greatest detective' (true in a context of supposition)
'Holmes is a detective in stories by Conan Doyle' (true in the real world, but reaches into the context of supposition to access the property 'detective')
'Holmes is the most famous detective in the world' (true in the real world, because that is where he is famous; but again, reaches into the context of supposition to access the property 'detective')
I hope this clarifies my position.
Quoting MindForged
I take the same view of dream objects as I do of imaginary objects. I don't believe in different kinds of being. There is a horse in my dream, but in the real world, there is no horse at all, only me dreaming.
Evidently when I said we had no significant areas of disagreement, I was jumping the gun.
Holmes is not mental content. The mental content here is the thoughts someone has when they read a story about Holmes, or in some other situation imagines that there is such a person as Holmes.
Holmes can't be mental content, because he is a physical object. He is six feet tall, he lives in Baker Street, he injects himself with cocaine, he plays the violin, he is a member of the species homo sapiens. Mental content cannot have any of these properties, only a physical object can, and therefore Holmes is a physical object.
However, he is not a physical object in anyone's mind (which, as you rightly say, would mean that he is in the real world), because physical objects (as you again rightly observe) cannot be in people's minds. As an object (as opposed to as a fictional character - see my answer to MindForged above), he is not in the real world in any way whatsoever. He is - he exists - only in some context of supposition, which is just a way of saying that someone at some time supposes or imagines that there is such an object as Holmes.
All mental content is physical first off.
But there isn't a Holmes who is six feet tall. Someone imagines him to be six feet tall, someone has written him to be six feet tall, or an actor playing him may either actually be six feet tall or the actors (and scriptwriter etc.) might be pretending that he's six feet tall. When we say that Holmes is six feet tall, one of the above (or something similar) is all that it amounts to.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Not sure what you mean. If you mean that mental content is brain content and is therefore physical because the brain is physical, that may be so, but it has nothing to do with the way in which Holmes is physical; he is physical in his own right, as a human being, not as part of anyone's brain. But because he exists only in a context of supposition and not in the real world, he is physical only in the context of supposition, not in the real world.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Not in the real world, no. But there is in one of Griffin's contexts of supposition.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Of these alternatives, the first is closest to what Griffin is suggesting. To put it more precisely: someone imagines that there exists, in the real world, an object which is Holmes and which is six feet tall. That is all that Griffin means when he says that Holmes exists and is six feet tall in a context of supposition.
I agree that some kind of externality is at play, but maybe it's best frame as external to the individual imagination. Does the white house exist? If we strip away everything mental, piece by piece, then I think we are left with nothing. Anything you could say we were left with would still be intelligible or mental. Bunch of waves and particles? What are they but concepts and mathematics, very mental. 'External-to-minds' is parasitic upon the idea of junk in our absence which still has a shape, a boundary, some border that cuts it out from its background.
In short, 'external-to-mind' is sensible in its vagueness but breaks down as we really follow its logic. Saying that everything is in a particular mind also breaks down, so it's not about opposing one such position to another but lighting up the aporia that results from any sharp naming of our situation.
*I do agree that whatever we talk about exists in some sense, which I think you hint at in some of your posts above. In certain contexts people mean only physics junk or public junk 'exists.'
To me, stuff like this seems like philosophers obsessing over people qua people, so that they can't allow themselves to address anything other than people, people's perspectives, etc. I see it as a case of not being able to move past seeing oneself as the "center of the world," or thinking that the "world revolves around them."
I don't at all agree that if we strip away everything mental we are left with nothing. I think it's rather absurd to suggest that somehow the world didn't exist at all prior to us, and then we just popped into existence as whatever it might be that you think we are, exactly, and created the world wholesale simply because we popped into existence.. I don't think stuff like that is anything even remotely like a philosophical insight. I think it's more akin to being developmentally stuck at a stage that most people grow out of by the time they pass toddlerhood,or at best, it's rather sophomoric and/or off-the-charts self-centered.
I understand why one might say that. But a person might ask what the motive away from the human is really about. It is itself a typical human motive, the quest for a god's eye view. As I see it, there are two grounds of the prestige of science. The first is practical power in the 'manifest image' or everyday world. If science didn't give technology and accurate predictions, it would collapse into sci-fi or pure math. The second is the quasi-religious urge to grasp Reality. IMV the metaphysical addition to the pragmatic value of science is 'religious' in its motivations. The idea of getting beyond the human is like the idea of getting beyond experience.
Another issue for me is that science doesn't need philosophy. Science is not grounded by the quasi-theological musings of the philosophers. It is, IMV, palpably grounded in worldly power. And the man on the street might express this as science being 'real' and philosophy being 'just a bunch of opinions in fancy words.' How do scientists feel about philosophy? Here is one opinion.
[quote=Weinberg]
This is not to deny all value to philosophy, much of which has nothing to
do with science. I do not even mean to deny all value to the philosophy of science, which at its best
seems to me a pleasing gloss on the history and discoveries of science. But we should not expect it
to provide today's scientists with any useful guidance about how to go about their work or about
what they are likely to find.
[/quote]
http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Steven-Weinberg-%E2%80%9CAgainst-Philosophy%E2%80%9D.pdf
Quoting Terrapin Station
Of course such an idea is absurd, and it is not at all what I am saying. That you would think that indicates to me that maybe you really haven't grasped the 'aporia.' It's the old critique of Kant. I understand your view to be vaguely Kantian. Assuming that there is some kind of physics-stuff that precedes the emergence of human consciousness (which I indeed believe), we can't say anything about it. It has no conceptual content. Any concept it could have would be the addition of consciousness. So the vague sense that the non-mentally physically real is 'energy' or 'fields' is contradictory, ignoring as it does that our interpretation of the world in terms of physics is not essentially different than seeing it in terms of furniture and people. In short, you are ignoring the problem that Kant ran into of giving sense to 'things-in-themselves.'
Quoting Terrapin Station
Not to be insulting, but your readiness to think that that is what people are getting at is itself self-centered. I can't think of anyone who claims that, period. Things that sound that absurd are almost always being misinterpreted. Our readiness to take such misinterpretations as what is intended is self-flattering. 'Oh these fools,' we say, 'these children,' as we naively stop with lazy interpretation that ensures we never have to painfully absorb criticism. I'm no saint on these matters, btw.
Simply being interested in things other than ourselves.
Quoting macrosoft
Well, or it's just that you can observe a rock, or the ocean, or whatever, and be interested in it and talk about it instead of just talking about ourselves all the time.
Quoting macrosoft
Of course we can say things about it. Why on Earth would we believe that we are not able to?
I'm not at all a Kantian, by the way. By and large, I dislike Kant as much as I dislike Hegel, Heidegger, etc. I wouldn't say I don't agree with Kant on anything, but I'm probably close to disagreeing with him on everything. Plus he was an awful writer.
Quoting macrosoft
The stuff we're talking about doesn't "have concepts." Concepts are mental phenomena. That doesn't mean that we can't say anything about the stuff that's not us.
Quoting macrosoft
?? I didn't say anyone says that. I said it's what's going on in those situations. It's like a kind of developmental retardation, and I don't at all mind if anyone reads that as insulting.
If you are trying to talk about something beyond human conceptualization (mind-independent reality), then you would seem to have to strip all conceptual addition from experience. To think that talk about fields or electrons is talk about the mind-independent reality is IMV to make a mistake. Just as breaking the visual field into ordinary objects is a useful kind of modeling, so is finding patterns in measurements with the aid of intellectual objects like electrons. It's just more modelling 'within' the life-world. We know in a rough sense that our life-world has a foundation that precedes us. But whatever try and say about it already stuffs it with mind-dependence. We would believe we were not able to because we would see the problems or contradictions in our way of speaking.
Mathematics is not mental in the sense you mean. It is grasped by the mental, but it is not constituted by the mental, because it is external to us.
Mind independent reality isn't beyond human conceptualization in the slightest. Why would anyone believe that it is?
To say things about this stuff is just to 'project' concepts on it. Even if you don't agree, it would be good if you could grasp the idea that projecting a 'table' on some piece of mind-independent reality is arguably no different than projecting an arrangement of atoms. It's the same kind of shared meaning or conceptual interpretation. The 'atoms' story has an additional glamour that seems to derive from the worldly power of science.
That is an arguable position, but I'm not a default Platonist. The problem is just repeated here. What is this 'external' to us? IMV, we have unclarifed language here.
I think you are missing the fundamental difficultly in cashing out 'mind-independent.' Nobody doubts that there is mind-independent reality of 'some' kind. The problem is giving this phrase content.
For instance, tell me about mind-independent reality.
I think you're completely avoiding the need to support the notion that there is some fundamental difficulty to it.
It's very much your choice if you want to toss around 'development retardation.' But then some of the famous philosophers are developmentally retarded. I don't think that you are a crank, but this kind of attitude is common in cranks. We usually see it in anti-science cranks, but this isn't the only kind of crankiness. The general structure of the crank is seeing fools in high places --high places where the crank rightfully belongs.
I am willing to do so. I think the best way is to ask you to say something about mind-independent reality. Then I will try to point out the contradictions.
Lord yes.
I'm more of an iconoclast. Most philosophers have said some phenomenally stupid things. Some made doing that their bread and butter.
Quoting macrosoft
I'm not a Platonist either. And 'external to us' is perfectly comprehensible: I don't see your difficulty.
Are you trying to sell us idealism? Because idealism is hopeless. It's a philosophical dead end.
Nope. Not idealism. I agree it's a dead end. And so is its opposite. That kind of categorical thinking is naive, IMV. I have to disagree that 'external to us' is 'perfectly comprehensible.' If that were the case, we would not have centuries of argument about it. It's not like we just here and now wandered in to a new issue. This is old stuff.
Sure. Okay, here's something about it. "There are lots of rocks on the Appalachian Trail near the Pennsylvania-New Jersey border."
All of this is loaded with the mental. We have the idea of a rock. We have proper names that exist within an historical context. I'd call this public or non-controversial reality. In short, this is talk about the human world, intelligible to humans. Does New Jersey exist independently as New Jersey independently from us ?
We are probably bickering over terminology.
Quoting macrosoft
"The hydrogen atom has one proton and one electron."
Over to you.
There is a big statue of Lincoln in DC.
Both statements are the same kind of uncontroversial statement about our shared 'mind-dependent' world, one might say. Both have conceptual content. If we zoom on on what is 'meant' by hydrogen, we have to zoom back out to place 'hydrogen' in a wider context to give it sense. The world is a nexus of meaning, one might say. To ignore that physics is grounded in a wider context that makes it intelligible is tempting but misleading, I think.
IMV, I think a better take on 'mind-independent reality' is trans-individual reality, public or shared reality.
Even if you don't agree, try to grasp what is being said. Our language game as humans exists as a whole. These statements have no sense apart from a wider, embodied context. The talk about atoms is one more useful kind of talk. It helps us map measurements to measurements. It helps us make stuff. The leap from this to a metaphysics of atoms is not justified, IMV.
No one is saying that we don't have ideas, etc.
But that's exactly what I'm talking about re it being like some weird OCD/obsessiveness about talking about us qua us.
In other words, forget about us (or just assume that this is a description of some idealist phenomena or whatever--it doesn't matter for my purposes here) for a moment, and think about painting representational stuff from life. Say that someone has someone sit for a portrait. What you're doing is akin to having some weird OCD issue where no matter what, you can only talk about the painting as the painting--you can only talk about the canvas, the paints on the canvas, etc. per se, and you either have some mental block re talking about the fact that the painting is of the portrait subject who sat for it, or you're playing some kind of trollish game to that effect.
No one is denying that the painting uses paints, has brush strokes, etc. No one is denying that in order to do a painting of Mrs. Brown, we have to have a painting in the first place. When we say that "this is a painting of Mrs. Brown" we're not denying those facts about the painting. But we're not just talking about the painting qua the painting as if we're unable to talk about the fact that it's a painting of Mrs. Brown. What you're doing is akin to saying that there's no way to say that the painting is of Mrs. Brown, no way to say anything about Mrs. Brown at all, because the painting is on a canvas, it uses paints, etc.
So when we say something about the mind-independent world, we're not saying that we're not thinking about it, that we don't have concepts about it, that we're not using language, etc. But that's not what the claim is about. The claim is about the mind-independent world. Not about our concepts.
This is like another mental defect--an inability to understand the notion of aboutness, so that you conflate tools with what the tools are working on.
I agree with you on this point more than you might expect. As I've said, the real value of this is to reveal a certain aporia from taking either perspective as absolute. The issue is clarification in the pursuit of a less naive metaphysics. 'Aboutness' functions just fine when we don't try to make it explicit.
It's actually the pursuit of transpersonal reality that motivates the separation of what humans add on (their biases, historically limited pre-conceptions) the 'thing-in-itself' from this 'thing-in-itself.' Our discussion is itself part of this pursuit. I think it is closer to the experience to think in terms of finding the public in the private.
Let's recall that you yourself insist that meaning lives only in individual skulls. This approach especially suggests to me that all we can ever have is overlapping inter-subjectivity. The publicly real what be nothing, it seems, but the synchronized intersection of skull-trapped interpretations of the world. Personally I think there is a lot to recommend that approach, which is not to say that it is the last word. But it makes truth very human, bound to human purpose and human cognition. The quest then is (as I have said already) what is true-for-us and not just true-for-me. Making this true-for-us explicit tends to run into problems.
You're off the tracks here already. What in the world is this sentence even saying? What in the world does it have to do with anything we were just talking about?
If you keep persisting in responding like that, I'm just going to cut it short as soon as you say anything that's gobbledygooky, that's a big nonsequitur, etc., and ask you what the heck you're talking about and what it has to do with anything else.
The idea of the real world exists within an individual skull. And yet the idea of the real world is meant to include this skull and the meaning it contains. The 'real world' is an idea. Yet ideas are inside 'skulls' that are inside the 'real world.' What is really going on? I don't pick a side. It's like a mobius strip, a glitch in our human cognition. Kant examined similar glitches in CPR. We weren't necessarily evolved to revolve such issues. There are similar paradoxes in naive set theory.
All ideas exist within individual skulls, so this isn't saying anything. It's like saying, "patterns of paints exist on individual canvases." Yeah, obviously.
Why would you conflate the "idea of the real world" with the real world?
Quoting macrosoft
No, it isn't. And that's such a simple mistake that it's ridiculous. The IDEA of the real world is an idea. The real world isn't itself an idea.
The patterns of paints on a canvas are a pattern of paints. That doesn't mean that the patterns of paints are only OF a pattern of paints.
[quote= SEP]
The absolutely “unconditioned,” regardless of the fact that it presents to reason as objective, is not an object or state of affairs that could be captured in any possible human experience. In emphasizing this last point, Kant identifies metaphysics with an effort to acquire knowledge of “objects” conceived, but in no wise given (or giveable) to us in experience. In its efforts to bring knowledge to completion, that is, reason posits certain ideas, the “soul,” the “world” and “God.” Each of these ideas represents reason’s efforts to think the unconditioned in relation to various sets of objects that are experienced by us as conditioned.
It is this general theory of reason, as a capacity to think (by means of “ideas”) beyond all standards of sense, and as carrying with it a unique and unavoidable demand for the unconditioned, that frames the Kantian rejection of metaphysics. At the heart of that rejection is the view that although reason is unavoidably motivated to seek the unconditioned, its theoretical efforts to achieve it are inevitably sterile. The ideas which might secure such unconditioned knowledge lack objective reality (refer to no object), and our misguided efforts to acquire ultimate metaphysical knowledge are led astray by the illusion which, according to Kant, “unceasingly mocks and torments us”.
[/quote]
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-metaphysics/#TheReaTraIll
Quoting Terrapin Station
Is the real world there in your using of the phrase? What can you be referring to ? I'd say public reality, the intersection of air-gapped meanings. Of course there is a real world. The question is how this real world can exist in air-gapped skulls. Presumably you think that the brain synthesizes sensation into an indirect image of the world. Part of this image would be our philosophic examination of what is going on. The real world (which of course I believe in) is mediated by human cognition.
All we can meaningfully talk about is this mediated image of the world (from this perspective, anyway.)
If meaning lives only in the skull, then the intelligible structure of the world (meaning) is 'in' the skull --and yet this skull models its own environment. In short, we can indeed vaguely point outside of our modelling. But I think you are ignoring the tangles that occur when we try to specify exactly what we mean.
I agree. I think the problem here is that I see your point but you don't see mine.
So, aside from having some problems with the way that's phrased (for example, "presents to reason" seems extremely wonky), my immediate response to something like that is to go . . . "because?" As there is no "because" there. No argument for it. It's just a claim. (Maybe Kant presented an argument for it in the CPR or wherever, but I don't recall that if so. It's been a long time since I read much Kant . . I don't even recall what the heck the conditioned/unconditioned distinction is supposed to be)
Quoting macrosoft
You keep using the phrase "air-gapped"--what the heck is that supposed to be?
Quoting macrosoft
What? No. I'm a direct realist. You perceive the external world directly. I'm nothing like a representationalist. I think representationalism and similar stances are unsupportable.
As I understand it, conditioned is mind-dependent and unconditioned is 'pure' or mind-independent reality in this context.
Some kind of Kantian view is almost the natural outcome of adopting a science-dominated metaphysics. If we evolved as mainstream science has it (and I don't doubt that we did), then our cognition would be one more tool, shaped so that we perceive what is relevant to our survival and reproduction. Darwinism suggests (and largely inspired) a pragmatist epistemology. The kind of truth independent of human purposes looks theological and old-fashioned in this light, even counter to the insights of science.
I like the style of naive realism. I prefer to say that appearance is just the mediation of the real. We don't see our seeing of the tree. We just see the tree. Ultimately it's a matter of style. Each side is trying to emphasize something valuable.
I started using 'air gapped' in response to your insistence that meaning is trapped in the individual skull. I think this is initially plausible because we see the separation of brains. Then the marks and noises of language are objectively meaningless. Somehow actual meaning is encoded in dead material for decoding into meaning again at another site. From a third-person perspective, this makes sense. But it thrusts us right back into reality being mediated by private cognition. We don't see the tree. I see the tree. This Cartesian framework opens up the usual talk of solipsism. Does not this imply that we all see a different reality? Then we have to infer somehow that we are actually in the same reality. The other problem is of course individual bias. Why should anyone be seeing reality correctly? We'd each have a privately held idea of what things are really like 'next' to our current idea of what things are like, as the possibility of the revision of our beliefs.
IMV, this is all about looking at what we really intend by certain phrases. What is their conceptual content?
Quoting macrosoft
You seem to be reasoning as follows:
Premise: Physics is only intelligible in a wider context.
Inference: If the wider context is not present, what physics is describing cannot exist.
That is an invalid argument.
This, by contrast, would be a valid argument:
Premise: Physics is only intelligible in a wider context.
Inference: If the wider context is not present, physics is unintelligible.
You are also skating over the fact that 'intelligible' must mean 'intelligible to some person or persons'. If you remove the context in which we understand physics (i.e. our current civilisation and its scientific culture), that would make physics unintelligible to us, but it would not make it unintelligible to other civilisations who will have their own context in which to understand physics - and what they will understand, e.g. that a hydrogen atom has one proton and one electron, will be the same as what we understand, even though the context in which they understand it is different. Cultural relativism may have a place in ethics, but it has no place in science.
It's a common mistake to think of evolution as only allowing things that are geared towards survival/reproduction, by the way.
At any rate, why would this result in some Kantian view?
Just in case our cognition was shaped so that we perceive what is relevant to our survival and reproduction, then a Kantian view is implied because ?
Quoting macrosoft
Truth isn't independent of humans. Truth is a way of thinking about the relationship of propositions to other things (I gave you my definition of this awhile ago).
Facts, however, are independent of humans. You can easily perceive facts. Or at least you should be able to.
Quoting macrosoft
It's not just a matter of style to say that we're "seeing our seeing." That's a claim that would require some sort of support beyond simply making the claim.
Exactly. Again, it's a conflation of how we know about things, what we understand, etc. with what our knowing, etc. is about.
Yes.
And macrosoft's statement ("There is a big statue of Lincoln in DC") and mine ("The hydrogen atom has one proton and one electron") are not on a par. The statue, Lincoln, and DC are all external mind-independent objects, but describing them as a statue, Lincoln and DC requires knowledge of a particular culture and is therefore mind-dependent. My sentence about the hydrogen atom requires no knowledge of a particular culture, only knowledge of the structure of matter, which is not culture-dependent, and therefore not mind-dependent (unless one is an idealist, which macrosoft claims not to be).
This is where I think you are missing my point. You assume that the lingo of hydrogen is fundamentally different from the lingo of Lincoln and DC. And you make your argument in terms of aliens to dodge the problem. But here you assume that surely they must understand hydrogen the same way, despite it having a different position in their own wider context of interpreting the world. You also assume that they wouldn't understand a statue as a statue.
I'm not afraid of being labeled an idealist. But I don't embrace those kinds of categorizations. That you seek to place me under categories like that does humorlessly show some idealism on your part. All but the most extreme so-called idealisms (as far as can tell) boil down to emphasizing mediation --what the subject adds to the object and, finally, the entanglement of the subject and object.
That would be a quasi-Kantian view. Our cognition mediates or distorts the object. We never get the object prior to this mediation. I'm not saying that this view is without problems or even my own. I'd say that its hard not to be influenced by it.
Does a bat see the world as a human does? Does a 5 year old boy see the world as 50 year old man does? Of course not. And I can only ask this question because we have an initial sense that the same world is involved in all cases. On the other hand, we never get this world unmediated. Within our distorted conceptually-laced interpretations of the world there is also the sense or notion of this world apart from our distortions. I think this derives mostly from everyday life where we find that we were wrong about the situation. As this is puffed up into a metaphysical issue, certain problems arise.
It's like Kant's dove. It found that it flew faster in thinner air and assumed it could fly faster yet in a vacuum. Metaphysical theories are parasitic on the blurriness of ordinary language and embodied, ordinary life.
I do enjoy debating with you and trying to do math with words. My goal is to illuminate the complexity of the issue, point at an aporia. To do that I have to oppose your view, indicate why it doesn't seem to be exhaustive. But I don't think a quasi-Kantian view is exhaustive either. The wheel goes around and around. Centuries of this stuff. I suspect that thinkers like Pyrrho also wrestled in this kind of controversy and that this led to a detachment from it -grokking that it has no natural end. Explicit formulations fail. Consensus is not attained. The blind guy with the elephant's ear in his hand doesn't know what the blind guy with its tail in his hand is talking about. The words won't stay fixed. For me on the big issues is how one addresses this situation itself.
You haven't addressed what kind of thing you are fundamentally up to (which I did not ask directly.) What is philosophy for? Is it a kind of science that can be done with words alone? Is it part of a wider existential project of making sense of one's life?
I'd say just look at the well-worn pragmatist critique of differences that make no difference. I agree that 'just seeing the tree' and 'only seeing or seeing of the tree' do have different meaning-content in the heads of those debating, but these differences are trivial. They act pretty much the same in the real world that grounds all our talking.
These kinds of debates are one reason why a certain kind of philosophy is considered so dry and useless. (Feynmann's joke about rasiing the fork to his mouth. ) One reason why I embrace phenomenology (Heidegger's and Hegel's) is because it actually addresses the stuff people mostly care about. It isn't stuffed in a jar, talking endlessly about the right jargon for an epistemology no one asks for or lives by. If we want to be big worldly realists, I think we have the brute fact of technology that works. Painless dentistry obliterates the tiny persuasive force of a 50 page analysis of what truth 'really' is. And just as I forgot the details of your definition of truth, we all forget any individual's attempt to yank this token 'truth' out a living practice of action and conversation. We might say that a certain kind of philosophy is an endless game of 'if I could control how people talked, ....'
This obliteration is liberating though. Since philosophy as epistemology has no real persuasive force, we might as well stop pretending we are scientists of some kind and get back to existential and phenomenological issues, the 'literary' stuff that embarrasses those with a theological itch to find god-as-method in a dead set of propositions.
That obviousness is actually what deserves being challenged, and not from some notion of magical machinery but in terms of the phenomenon of being 'in' a language. Your approach seems to be (implicitly) building up the 'life-world' from a dead world of objects. This is indeed a natural approach. But its complementary approach is equally persuasive. We examine the life-world first and trace how the image of a dead world of whatever-stuff is built up within the meaningful discourse of this life-world. For me the stereoscopic view is more comprehensive. Especially since 'your' approach 'covers over' the phenomenon of 'world' explored by Heidegger and others. It simply ignores experience that doesn't fit its unconsidered present-to-hand approach. It applies an un-investigated contingent understanding of being as if this understanding were necessary. It understands clock time (ultimately spatial) as the only kind of time. Among other things this traps its theory of meaning in an instantaneous atomism.
And for what really? To understand itself as an armchair science, as far as I can tell, a 'neckbeard theology.' In its hard objectivity that ignores values as mere projections on dead stuff it fails to ask what its own investment in such a vision is. Pragmatism is far more worldly. Armchair science still understands Truth as something sacred or valuable in itself. Why does this vision stop half-way? What is this feeling it has for truth-apart-from-purpose? You mentioned a flight from anthropomorphism. To me this is almost the essence of the human, this desire to be trans-human. I think philosophy as the armchair science of words is 'religiously' charged. Else why not a post-Baconian epistemology of power-as-knowledge? The 'worldly' philosophy is just sophistry, speech as a hammer. As I see it, one grasps this and decides one wants to do 'existential' things with this hammer. Traditional epistemological concerns seem to be cashed out in politics and technology, relegating armchair science to the bleachers.
It's fine to challenge it, but the challenge had better be good/well-justified, and you'd better expect the challenge to be challenged.
A challenge from language fails from the get-go, because the topic isn't language. Language is simply the means via which we're communicating, but it's not the topic, and if you think it's the topic, you're supremely confused.
Thinking that we're talking about language per se is thinking that we're talking about the painting qua the painting when we're talking about the painting being a painting of Mrs. Brown That's the fundamental lack of understanding that I was referring to and that you didn't address very well.
The differences are trivial to whom? We need to ask individual people whether they matter to them, don't we? Importance, mattering, etc. are to individuals, and different individuals feel different ways.
That's a claim. What's the support for it?
Quoting macrosoft
How would you know this? (Note that I'm not suggesting an answer either way--that either they do or do not see the world "the same." I'm simply asking how we know such things. Our answer to whether they see the world the same and whether and how we know this has a bearing on whether the method via which we're claiming to know it is even workable)
Sorry re not answering this above. Re "What philosophy is for?" The answer to that is different for different people. There is no right or wrong answer (at least not in terms of anyone's motivation, the purpose they have in mind for it, etc., even if some of that might not be achievable).
For me, personally, there are many different attractions and uses for it, at least a la its analytic incarnation, including that it's simply how I naturally think, I find it entertaining--and partially because of the things that people say under its guise that I find utterly ridiculous, it provides a great set of critical thinking tools, it's given me another option re how to make a living, etc.
As for what I see philosophy as doing, yes, I basically see philosophy and science as doing the "same thing" via a different methodology. Here's something I wrote about this recently in another thread:
Quoting Terrapin Station
I'm not bringing this up to disagree with you, just to emphasize that one way they get misled is by noting that calling it "hydrogen" rather than "floopap" or whatever, calling it an "atom" rather than a "pleen" or whatever, and so on, does require cultural knowledge. In other words, if there's an OCD obsession to focus on us and the language we use (or how we know things, or whatever the particular obsession is), then they're going to see the Lincoln statue and the hydrogen atom similarly in that regard--they both have the part of the meat of the chicken that they're obsessed with, so they just chomp down on that--whether it's what you were pointing to or not, and they discard the rest.
And then since we can't talk about this stuff without using language for obvious reasons (or without involving knowing, etc.), the OCDs are perpetually fueled for their obsession, can perpetually chomp down on the meat they like and discard the rest, because we can't present anything without that meat being there.
It's akin to imagining someone obsessed with counting. You try to give them directions to the store to buy milk, but they can't do that, because all they can do is count how many miles it was to the store, how many light posts they passed, how many other cars were on the road, how many cartons of milk there were, etc.--all they can do is count things, all they can do is engage an obsession.
Indeed. And that is where the personal, 'existential' position shows its face. And I suggest this is all vaguely structured by an image of the ideal human being.
I don't drive without my contact lenses in. I'd be breaking the law. Or are the blurry signs not the same as the less blurry signs?
The supreme kind of mediation is happening right now as you interpret these marks on your screen.
And I think this is a questionable assumption. Language is something like the primary human phenomenon. Humans are radically social, palpably sharing a kind of 'meaning field.' If we build things up from the isolated subject (an 'I' which has 'meaning'), we rip this ego like an organ out of the larger organ-ism of the community. An isolated human being is not fully human in some sense. I do not mean an adult who lives on the moon for a year. I mean a child who is raised by wolves. For me this is the blind-spot of an analytic or atomic approach. It needs a atomic meanings, atomic subjects in skulls. It needs categories that are artificial and discrete. In short, it tries to model existence after mechanism as opposed to organism. I think the driving image is that of certainty and clarity, which are worth goals. But 'truncating' the object of investigation for these goals violates the primary goal of describing what is --in the name of what ought to be (oh, but existence should just fit my method of grasping it.). This means facing and tolerating that which will not come into perfect focus.
What you call confusion, I call neglect on your part of the very phenomenon that makes this accusation of confusion possible and meaningful.
The irony in Herg's anti-idealism is that s/he takes a model (the idea of hydrogen) for the thing itself. Science has evolved over the centuries. No doubt other unwitting idealists thought Newton's vision was the thing itself and not just another imperfect model at some point. In a certain sense all philosophy has been (shades of) idealism. It questions common sense and superstition by considering the subject's distortion of the object. The 'pure object' is itself an idea/ideal--along with the pure subject our fervid epistemologists just assume. A naive theory of reference ('it's not about the language') forgets that it can't give its elusive 'pure object' content that isn't 'stolen' from the impure object.
To me this is a good description of the atomic approach to meaning. It ignores the fluidity and complexity of actual life and gets caught up in differences that make no difference. It wants proofs of the same truths it lives by when not on a part-time quest for an life-divorced notion of certainty and clarity. It models its interactions with others (even the others most trusted and familiar) in terms of meanings trapped in skulls --never mind the palpable , pre-theoretical sense of sharing meaning with others.
It offers theses that are immediate consequences of the way the terms are initially interpreted as discoveries about our shared reality (idealism, realism, etc.). It concerns itself with an implicit ought (what we should mean by X) and neglects the is (what he, she, or we mostly mean by X).
Don't take the following sketch of a caricature personally, please. I'm trying to contextualize why I think a certain approach to philosophy is obsolete (for me anyway.)
William James talked about tough and tender minded philosophers. I get the sense that anti-idealism identifies with toughness of mind. It opposes itself to silliness, wishful thinking, exotic language. In the name of truth, right? It is maybe even an implicitly macho facing-of-the-truth that wipes the icing off the cake as sugary stuff for weakling who can't handle reality without the sweetener.
The problem with this position is that truth as Truth is pure icing. These anti-idealists still just want to talk about ideal truth, unworldly truth. The genuine tough-minded epistemology is power as knowledge. Those who simply ignore AP philosophy do so from the basic tough mindedness of practical life. As Hume pointed out long ago, induction in all its deductive groundlessness is our dominant epistemology. Whatever reliably gives us what we want is true. The talk of philosophers is less convincing than a working hair-dryer.
But 'tough minded' philosophers who obsess over idealized words yanked from the living language ignore their situation. They contrast themselves with 'idealists' who...obsess over language. Their 'discoveries' follow from their stipulated, artificial definitions of words used with staggering complexity and facility in that unknown (forgotten, neglect, ignored) frontier of ordinary life. They take this particular mindset as a paradigmatic of human existence itself. The subject is a disengaged starer-at (not user-of) objects. The subject is a lonely chap who needs proof that he exists, despite such a request being the affirmation of a shared reality in the first place. He consciousness is burdened also perhaps by the lack of a proof that there is such a thing as consciousness. He's not sure that it's just wrong to run down children in one's car. Most of us feel that it is wrong, but this isn't theologically certified proof. He's just not sure that anything that doesn't just sit their for his vision like a mountain actually exists. He's scientific, of course, but can't quite say how science exists. It can't be shared meaning, since that's a tender-minded superstition.
The above is a bit of a caricature, obviously, but I'm trying to deflate the notion that mere talk about objective truth is significantly (or even at all) less tender-minded than its perceived opposite. Compared the pragmatic sophists who long ago grasped power as truth and war as epistemology, Truth-seeking philosophers are all sentimentalists, talking, talking, talking as others run the world ---mostly by persuasion within the murk of living, ordinary language. For the sophist, 'proof' is just another name for persuasion, for manipulating social and physical reality with language as a hammer. Philosophy a priori sets itself against this vulgarity sentimentally, 'gripped by an attunement.' The big-boy talk of realism is once more theological spiderweb, trampled over or ignored by a vulgar but more genuine realism that scoffs at words that don't do anything. Hence theology of neckbeards, with unworldly Truth as its god and a hobbled notion of rationality as its Holy Ghost.
At some point there is always some grounding in the obvious --and this itself is obvious upon even a brief consideration. We are already in a shared language before we can even start to question one another about these things. Our lives indicate sufficient certainty in quite a few beliefs. If somehow a bat manifested a human-like consciousness, it would rattle our entire sense of things. The barest logical possibility is impotent, just as the notion of absolute certainty is a theological artificiality.
I'd say our true situation involves a groundless ground, an operating system we can't get behind and can only imperfectly grasp with that same operating system. When I step out of bed in the morning, I don't know that the floor is there -- I [s]know[/s] it. Our high level thinking depends on a massive foundation of inconspicuous, automatic 'backgrounding.' One 'proves' this via a 'formal indication,' a phenomenological pointing-out. Such phenomena are covered-up by a pre-interpretation of the situation that needs it to be a certain way more than it just wants to see what's there. Something like an honest memory comes into play. We reflect in a theoretical mindset on what occurred outside that theoretical mindset. For instance, we look at ordinary conversation about easy, worldly matters and realize that we shared a meaning space. We inconspicuously and automatically lived in the same room, [s]knowing[/s] that the same objects were visible to both of us and interpreted as a chair for sitting, a painting for looking at. The words of others weren't sounds to be translated into meanings. They were (shared) meaning itself (a direct realism, you might say.) We can of course call all of this an 'illusion' or 'projection of the subject.' That's a stereoscopic perspective. But we still do this in that same 'illusion.'
Quoting macrosoft
I have certainly never taken either a model of the hydrogen atom, or the idea of a hydrogen atom, to be the hydrogen atom itself. I never confuse a model or idea of a thing with the thing itself.
I hold to the working hypothesis that there is an externally existing world of objects that causes us to have perceptual and other experiences which in their turn cause us to evolve a model of said external world of objects. We can't be sure how fully or accurately we are modelling the external world of objects, partly because some of its properties may be causally inert in relation to our perceptions, and partly because a causal chain does not necessarily transfer information along its length with completeness or accuracy; but the working hypothesis that there is a world of objects that broadly matches our model of it is justified by the fact that it is by far the most economical explanation for our perceptions.
I don't believe it is obvious, though, and I wouldn't say it has anything to do with language.
Re your second paragraph, I have no idea what the topic even is.
When I was a kid, I was more or less sheltered from religious beliefs. My parents are atheists, my maternal grandfather was a Russell-like atheist, I didn't have any friends who were particularly religious, etc. I wasn't familiar with any religious beliefs in any detail until I was about fifteen years old. I also come from a family of practical jokers who will sometimes go to great lengths for a practical joke. April Fool's Day was probably my maternal grandfather's favorite holiday. So when I finally learned a bit about religious beliefs, I seriously thought that people were practical-joking. I said, "Wait a minute--you believe what?? :lol: "
The reason I'm not an idealist is very similar. It strikes me as a "Wait a minute--you believe what?? :lol:" thing, something for which there is no good reason to believe. ( Despite many requests to folks to attempt to provide what I'd consider a good reason to believe it.)
Re truth, I've already given you my truth theory. I see truth purely as a "technical issue," something where my truth theory won't make any sense to someone not familiar with the conventional way of looking at truth under analytic philosophy. They'd have to understand that first. The various colloquial senses of "truth" are a mess in my opinion.
I don't want to talk about epistemology all of the time. I don't want to do anthropology or psychology or sociology all the time. I don't only want to talk about humans. And I definitely don't want to talk about philosophy of language all of the time. If philosophy weren't capable of veering from philosophy of language I would have never pursued philosophy in any manner. When I'm doing ontology it's not at all about language/about words per se. I'm only also doing words/language because I can't do anything else on a message board. It's necessary to use language. That doesn't imply that language is the subject matter.
I'm in no way denying that people use objects, I just don't want to engage in something where my subject matter can only be people. People are self-centered enough.
And I have never been a fan of this particular ontological "proof of God" either.
There are stronger proofs of God. We do not need the ontological one.
What would you give as an example of a shared meaning?
Quoting hks
Give it your best shot.
Your support for "Our cognition mediates or distorts the object" is that you don't drive without your contact lenses in? How is that a support for "Our cognition mediates or distorts the object"?
Quoting macrosoft
If you think that I'm extolling the "atomic approach" (I wouldn't say that I am, though I'm not entirely sure what the "atomic approach" amounts to in your view), it would be wrong to suggest that my view/my account of how meaning, communication, etc. work can't account for any observable phenomena, including the "fluidity and complexity of actual life." You could suggest something observable that you feel I can't account for, though, and I'll explain how I do account for it.
Quoting macrosoft
I'm definitely not asking for "proofs" of anything, and as I explained, I have a subjectivist view of what truth is.
Quoting macrosoft
That part is accurate about my view, but that's why I asked you for an example of a shared meaning (in terms of something observable).
Quoting macrosoft
Does it? Did you ask Herg about that? Maybe it's that Herg sees models/ideas as different than what the model is a model of, or the idea is an idea about.
I've stressed many times that it's important not to conflate to ideas and what they're ideas of. Just like it's important to not conflate a painting and what it's a painting of. Ideas, concepts, etc. are like paintings. They're not identical to what they're a painting of. And visual artists can only make paintings, but it's not the case that they can only experience or know-by-acquaintance paintings. You should probably ask them if they're confusing their painting for the thing that they're painting.
Quoting macrosoft
In the sense of "Let's say things that are incorrect."
Quoting macrosoft
How about we take it a step further and question whether subjects necessarily "distort objects" and question how we could know that if we're going to claim it?
Quoting macrosoft
Or so one brand of philosophical "common sense" or superstition would have it. How about we question that?
Quoting macrosoft
A theory of reference is going to be a philosophy of languge topic. We can do things other than make theories of reference our topic, though.
Let me ask this. If we were going out to lunch together, and talking about menu items, would you insist on talking about how it is that language works, the relation of our ideas to the menu items, etc.? Or could we just think about food and what we're going to order?
Quoting macrosoft
The idea that objects are "elusive" is a claim you're making but not supporting..
Quoting macrosoft
Any kind of hierarchy like that is going to be dubious.
Quoting macrosoft
Radically social? What's the difference between being just-plain-old social and being "radically" social?
palpably sharing a kind of 'meaning field.'[/quote]
What observable do you take to amount to a "meaning field"?
Quoting macrosoft
You've used a "building" metaphor a number of times but I'm not sure why.
Quoting macrosoft
Why are you hyphenating "organism" and italicizing "ism"? No idea why you'd write that that way.
Quoting macrosoft
I wouldn't say I'm positing anyone being isolated, so you'd have to clarify what you're reading that way. Re whether whatever you're reading that way counts as "fully human" or not, wouldn't that simply be about the way you're using the term "fully human"?
Quoting macrosoft
I'm very confused about how you're using the term "atomic," too. I wouldn't say that I'm talking about "atomic" anything. You'd have to explain what you're reading that way/how you're using that term.
Quoting macrosoft
What would be an example of a category that's not artificial?
Quoting macrosoft
If we're talking about building models per se, it would just depend on what one is modeling. For example, if you're modeling the sun, you're not going to be concerned with modeling organisms, because there are no organisms on/in the sun. If you're modeling bacteria, most of your model is going to be focused on organisms. It's probably best to model what you're modeling, and not what you're not modeling. ;-)
Quoting macrosoft
Personally I think that philosophy has tended to make very stupid mistakes (including idealism), when it has concerned itself with certainty.
Quoting macrosoft
I think that describing, seen as something valuable in itself, is a misguided goal, too. As I said recently in a couple other threads: "NO description is like what it's describing. No description conveys an experience of what it's describing, conveys its qualities, etc. Descriptions are just sets of words, after all, and what they're describing isn't a set of words, or at least isn't the same set of words . . . Descriptions are sets of words that individuals take to tell something about, charactize in some way, etc. various things about something else. That's all they are."
So focusing on descriptions as if there's something special about them is pretty misguided I think, and that's probably part of where the misguided enchantment with language qua language is coming from.
Perhaps you could relate how you consider that proof to be superior to others. You, after all, are the one claiming such a superiority.
You express a lot contempt for certain ideas and people but I haven't seen you put much skin in the game yourself by defending your assertions. If you just want to stay on sidelines, perhaps you should adopt a less combative tone.
Er, you were the one saying one proof was better than another. Asking for a defense of that opinion offers you an opportunity to explain why.
Your reply to the request asserts other opinions that you are also not defending. You demur by claiming they are self evident. So far, you have not produced anything to shift in any direction.
The insulting tone could be seen as an ad hominem argument but that is not quite right because your claims are a not a rebuttal to anything I have claimed.
Nothing has happened yet.
Fair enough. That sketch was helpful.
When you typed this out to ask me the question, you expected with no genuine doubt that I could understand you and answer. When you got out of bed this morning, you didn't check to see if you had legs. Our sense of others is so 'primordial' or 'automatic' and our embeddedness in a language is so complete and natural that it just works automatically most of the time. That's all that 'pre-theoretical' really means. My gripe with certain epistemological concerns is that they aren't honest enough about these basic, dominant ways of just being in the world.
Another example would be the symbol on restrooms for men or women. Or road-signs as we drive. Or someone flipping the bird or the peace sign. We don't receive sense-data and then put it all together with difficult. It is there right away as a meaningful gesture. Sure, afterwards we can wonder how the brain makes all this happen. But we are always already in a field of this kind of meaning before we are sophisticated enough to start speculating about brains. And of course doing science already presupposes the idea of true-for-everyone. Our basic human situation is massively social, even if we hide away to commune with our own mind in a language we learned via practice and speech within a living community.
Quoting hks
Why not start a thread in which you present and defend Aristotle's and Aquinas' arguments? Then we would all have something to get our teeth into. More interesting for the rest of us than this bickering about off-stage arguments.
Yes. And my account of meaning, understanding, communication etc. does not at all have shared meaning, yet it very easily accounts for this. So that's not an example of shared meaning.
Quoting macrosoft
Again, none of these are examples, because it's very easy to account for this stuff under my version of what's going on.
I am trying to point at a primary sense we have in ordinary life of being intelligible to one another. Our language functions transparently for us most of the time. This general idea is discussed below. My claim is that while using language we experience a pre-theoretical sense of shared meaning. This include reading. I'm not saying your theory is wrong. This isn't about explicit theory versus explicit theory. It is perhaps about the dependence of explicit theory on an in-explicit primary situation. BTW, this is one of the ideas that made me realize that Heidegger wasn't just smoke in mirrors. To me it's 'obvious' in retrospect, but it never occurred to theoretical me that objects really do show themselves in different modes.
[quote=SEP]
Heidegger argues that we ordinarily encounter entities as (what he calls) equipment, that is, as being for certain sorts of tasks (cooking, writing, hair-care, and so on). Indeed we achieve our most primordial (closest) relationship with equipment not by looking at the entity in question, or by some detached intellectual or theoretical study of it, but rather by skillfully manipulating it in a hitch-free manner. Entities so encountered have their own distinctive kind of Being that Heidegger famously calls readiness-to-hand. Thus:
The less we just stare at the hammer-thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more unveiledly is it encountered as that which it is—as equipment. The hammering itself uncovers the specific ‘manipulability’ of the hammer. The kind of Being which equipment possesses—in which it manifests itself in its own right—we call ‘readiness-to-hand’. (Being and Time 15: 98)
Readiness-to-hand has a distinctive phenomenological signature. While engaged in hitch-free skilled activity, Dasein has no conscious experience of the items of equipment in use as independent objects (i.e., as the bearers of determinate properties that exist independently of the Dasein-centred context of action in which the equipmental entity is involved). Thus, while engaged in trouble-free hammering, the skilled carpenter has no conscious recognition of the hammer, the nails, or the work-bench, in the way that one would if one simply stood back and thought about them.
Tools-in-use become phenomenologically transparent. Moreover, Heidegger claims, not only are the hammer, nails, and work-bench in this way not part of the engaged carpenter's phenomenal world, neither, in a sense, is the carpenter. The carpenter becomes absorbed in his activity in such a way that he has no awareness of himself as a subject over and against a world of objects. Crucially, it does not follow from this analysis that Dasein's behaviour in such contexts is automatic, in the sense of there being no awareness present at all, but rather that the awareness that is present (what Heidegger calls circumspection) is non-subject-object in form. Phenomenologically speaking, then, there are no subjects and no objects; there is only the experience of the ongoing task (e.g., hammering).
[/quote]
Your theory is sophisticated. I have nothing against it. But it tries to capture something larger than itself, the very thing that makes it possible.
Okay, but I'm saying that the idea of shared meaning is wrong. It gets wrong what meaning is, and if the observable phenomena are posited as shared meaning, then it follows that when we set up, say, computer systems to mimic the observables, or set up robots to do something like the Chinese Room, we have to say that they are doing meaning. There's a problem with that, however. We're clearly doing things that computers and robots are not doing--which also goes into why they're not persons, why they're not due the same moral considerations as persons, and so on.
I can't read the road-signs without my corrective lenses. When I put them in, I can. Did the signs change? Or just my mediation? (I was trying to give you a break from my longwindedness.)
Quoting Terrapin Station
I've tried to raise the same point several times. It's an old point. The thing we talk about is so wrapped up in meaning that when we try to talk about the thing itself we are peeling an onion.
I agree that stuff is out there. My point is that a naive view ignores the problems with explicit accounts of the situation. It doesn't even see the problem. On the one hand it appeals to common sense, a basic sense of our shared reality. Only fools think everything is mind! Well, sure. But those 'fools' were motivated by equally naive versions of the thing in itself. All that such naive understandings of this thing in itself have on their side is common sense. But show me the idealists who didn't share this same common sense. Hence they were looking at the complexities of mediation, including the vanishing-for-explicit-theory of those mysterious noumena.
My position is aporia.
[quote=wiki]
'In philosophy, an aporia is a philosophical puzzle or a seemingly insoluble impasse in an inquiry, often arising as a result of equally plausible yet inconsistent premises (i.e. a paradox).'
...
In Pyrrhonism aporia is intentionally induced as a means of producing ataraxia.
[/quote]
Pyrrho fascinates me as a dialectician who (I speculate) was wily enough to work through all the usual moves and see the futility of explicit accounts. Who know? Maybe the brother was down with semantic holism.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I think semantic holism gets it right(-er). The 'atomic approach' understands words to be charged with significant independent meaning. In short, the atomic approach downplays context and ambiguity. The holistic approach emphasizes that language functions as a soft machine, a nexus of dynamic meanings. What's appealing about the atomic approach is that it makes arguments more possible, more believable. One can do 'word-math' with relatively stable meanings. Sans those atomic meanings, one is thrown into a bottomless pit of interpretation. But one is also able to let go of any particular jargon. (And maybe I'll change mine up soon, since 'shared meaning' blah blah isn't cutting through the noise.)
Quoting Terrapin Station
As I mentioned, what was being modeled was existence --human or 'first-person' existence as a whole. I like philosophy that aspires to make sense of all experience without remainder, which includes perhaps especially a making sense of its own sense-making. This part is maybe the hard and central part for philosophy --yet it all hangs together.
I'll meet you half-way here. A random sentence generator could send out an email to 6 billion human beings. Maybe some of those emails would be convincingly human. We can say that readers of such messages would not 'actually' be sharing meaning. But what I have in mind is the first-person sense of existing in a meaning field. As these random emails are being read, the reader is 'transparently' 'there' with what is being said.
Maybe this will help. In some sense, meaning is absolutely trapped in skulls. Perhaps I should have emphasized that I really do get that. But I take that from-the-outside-view for granted. I'm not attracted to the supernatural, etc. Never have been. And I'm a hard-core atheist in the ordinary sense of the word. I also was very steeped in pragmatism and instrumentalism. And I've studied the 'evil' thinkers, the egoists with seriousness. So, despite appearances, I am NOT (in my book) coming from some kind of New Age angle in the least. I am describing subjectivity. Part of this description involves the sense of not being merely subjective. From an atoms-and-void perspective (shorthand for whatever the latest physics is, as I vaguely understand it), this is an illusion thrown up by the brain. Sure. I agree. On the other hand (here comes the mobius strip), all of our mumbo jumbo is nevertheless occuring 'there' in that 'illusion' of shared meaning --hence the aporia. Would I not be actually crazy if I didn't think there was a real Mr. Station on the other side of this conversation? I suppose it's 'really' my brain controlling my fingers to send symbols for your eyes which take them to your brain. Of course. But all of this is so transparent for us. It disappears like the hammer in the hammering. My gripe is that the trapped-in-brains thing is not wrong but almost a place from which to start, not stop. Now that we are here in this illusion, I'm taking a look around.
[quote=SEP]
For instance, meaning holism seems to result from radical use-theories[4] that attempt to identify meaning with some aspects of our use. Examples of this could be:
Theories that identify a sentence's meaning with its method of verification. Verificationism, combined with some plausible assumptions about the holism of confirmation (Hempel 1950; Quine 1951), would seem to lead to meaning holism.
Theories that identify a word's meaning with its inferential role. Which inferences one endorses with a word depends on what one means by one's other words, and so (when combined with a rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction—see below) the web quickly spreads to the entire language. (Block 1986, 1995; Brandom 1994; Field 1977; Harman 1973, 1993; Sellars 1954, 1974)
Theories that take what a person means by a word to be a functional property of that person, and assume that functional properties are individuated holistically. (Block 1998; Churchland 1979, 1986)
Theories that identify what a person means by a word with all of the beliefs that they would express using that word. (Bilgrami 1992, 1998)
Identifying meaning with the beliefs associated with a word or its inferential/functional role leads quickly to a type of meaning holism because of the way that the connections between such beliefs and inferences spread through a language. For instance, a word like “squirrel” might be inferentially connected to, say, “animal” which is in turn connected to “Koala” which is connected to “Australia”, and through similar chains, every word will be related inferentially to (and thus semantically entangled with) every other term in the language (especially when one considers connections like that between, say, “is a squirrel” and “is not a building” or any other thing we take squirrels not to be). Changing the meaning of one word thus changes the content of at least some of the inferences and beliefs that constitute the meaning of other terms in the language, and so a change in the meaning of one term quickly leads to a change in the meaning of the rest.
[/quote]
[quote= internet...accidentally closed the window]
Semantic holism, simply put, is the idea that words have no meaning apart from the context, or sentences, in which they are used. This can, perhaps, be better understood by looking at the meaning of holism, and contrasting it with another view of meaning, atomism.
Holism is the idea that something can be more than the sum of its parts; more specifically holism usually refers to reality. It contends that one must understand reality as a whole; that one can't start by examining the parts of reality and end up with an accurate picture. This is more easily seen if we look at biological holism. For example, a duck is more than simply a collection of "duck parts", and thus we can not break a duck down into "duck parts" and end up with an accurate picture of a duck.
Holism can be contrasted with atomism, which is the idea that everything can be broken down into smaller parts. Applied to biology one would argue that one can obtain an accurate picture of a duck by breaking down the duck into fundamental "duck parts".
Apply holism to language and we get semantic holism. The idea behind semantic holism is that every word has meaning only in relation to other words, sentences, or the language (as a whole) in which it is used. For example, semantic holists would argue that the word "tree" does not always refer to the same object for everyone. More specifically, if I say "All trees have green leaves" and you say "No trees have green leaves", there is not necessarily a disagreement. Both of us could simply be referring to different concepts of a tree. Atomism, on the other hand, would claim that one of us is wrong. Either my statement "all trees have green leaves" is false, or your statement "No trees have green leaves" is false.
There are a few criticisms of holism, which may help shed light on exactly what it is. The first one being that there is no sentence which can be thrown out as incomprehensible or irrational, unless you are the speaker. This is a consequence of semantic holism because you, as a listener, most likely don't subscribe to every assumption that the speaker is making. This leads to a second criticisim; that is, since our concepts are in a constant state of flux, and since the meaning of every word is determined by its relation to every other belief you have, you can't "translate" what you meant by a previous statement. (See indeterminacy of translation).
[/quote]
I'd say that we have a slow semantic drift. Revolutionary philosophers shake the tree closer to the trunk.
In short, your 'reality' is just the virtual entities that are economical. And that also suggests (seems to me) some kind of Platonism. What are electromagnetic waves? Your models are equations structured or organized by virtual entities. I've taken a few physics classes. This came up:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger_equation
My point is that science to be experimental relies on publicly accepted measurements. Public measurements seem to depend on individual human sense organs, networked by language. We model our measurements, one might say, if trying to minimize addition to the facts. These are quantitative measurements. For falsifiable accuracy we need rational numbers. In practice, floating points numbers are used for speed --a finite set of numbers on a finite state machine. (Turing machines don't exist except in human intuition, seems to me.)
AFIK, numbers are just part of human cognition. They aren't 'out there.' You say that the world 'broadly' matches your economic models. I say very broadly. Those models in some strange way mediate what's out there. I agree. But so does my grokking of furniture, also economical, in that it keeps my ankles un-bruised.
Peel the onion. I do not in the least dispute modern science. I do think the metaphysical interpretation of that science is non-trivial. My gripe is that we don't have a non-controversial grasp on what numbers even are. And yet scoffing 'realists' just toss off the idea that the world is 'really' broadly like those dear, familiar ghosts--the real numbers. The dominant epistemology in human affairs as far as I can tell is practical power. Taking our models as more than implements is inherently 'theological' and 'metaphysical,' concerned as it is with a truth-beyond-economy. And it's even an old Greek theology of number, Pythogoreanism of some sort. I'm laying it on thick, I confess. Don't mean to be rude.
Quoting macrosoft
I'm not a Platonist, I'm a nominalist. Across the board, and to my bones.
You're still accusing me of confusing the model with the reality. And once again, I do not.
I'm sitting on a chair. It's a real chair, not a virtual chair. If it were a virtual chair, I would need some other explanation than the existence of the chair for the fact that I feel a chair under me. I don't.
Science tells me that the chair consists of a lot of rather extraordinary stuff that I can't see or feel. But science also tells me exactly how that stuff explains why I see and feel the chair. So it is rational to accept that the real external chair consists of this real external extraordinary stuff. Science's model is a model of reality. But the model is not the reality of which it is a model.
Quoting macrosoft
They're neither of those. They're an aspect of reality. There are no numbers but there are things that can be numbered, and that would be true even if there were no humans to number them.
Quoting macrosoft
The controversy is entirely the fault of meddling philosophers like Plato. "We have first raised a dust and then complain we cannot see." (Berkeley. Somewhat ironic, since he was one of the greatest dust-raisers of all.)
From your comments about this, we have to conclude that you believe that there are things external to yourself such as road signs, glasses, and so on. You believe that you can observe them, that you can know something about them, something about what they're really like, how they really "behave," where that can be contra to your experience of them. Why would you believe this, how could you possibly know any of it if you can't observe the world as it is, if you can only observe your own mind per se?
Or in other words, one's argument that everything is mentally mediated or that we can only know our minds a la some sort of representationalism can't be that there is some stuff in the world that's like x (there are road signs that are like such and such), but one experiences it differently than that (one sees the road signs in a blurry way), hence one mentally mediates everything.
Your argument can't be that because the conclusion doesn't allow the first step. You'd not be able to say that there's some stuff in the world that's like x. Per the conclusion, that first step is just as much only your mental content. You'd have no ground for saying that there are road signs external to yourself, that you can experience anything about them, etc.
Now, there's just as much a problem with saying that the stuff in the first step is just as much only your mental content, but I'll get to that later.
Of course I believe in the external world. As for the rest, I've already chanted aporia, aporia, aporia. This old subject-object realist-idealist game is a dead end. It is grounded in a false picture of language. As I've mentioned, all I've been trying to do is to pick the position on one side to bring out the complexity and futility of the language game. The phenomena of world and truth defy explicit capture. Indeed, explicit capture uses or even lives these phenomena without even realizing it. People debate endlessly in a performative contradiction. If they didn't already believe in one another and that there was some kind of shared truth (shared meaning), they wouldn't bother.
If you're claiming that everything is mentally mediated, it's a game you're playing, isn't it?
I said that that's what idealists have really meant.
You are missing the big picture. This game is endless and artificial. The pragmatist critique put it to bed long ago. I was arguing that everyone [s]knows[/s] very well in a mostly inexplicit way that we live in a shared world which is mediated by our body and personality. Because we don't really doubt this and because those with 'different' theories live the same way, this approach reduces philosophy to a shallow game, a sport of arguing about trivialities that grasps itself as a science of science.
Removed from the context of practice (or a world that resists and others who can literally bomb us into 'agreement') the whole endeavor has an unworldly pallor. I've been trying to unmask 'realist' talk as every bit as 'theological' and 'silly' as 'idealism.' The game itself is dust. This is why looking at ordinary and pre-theoretical life/consciousness is valuable. It makes the functioning, actual ground imperfectly but sufficiently visible to make a nit-picking theory of knowledge look like the construction of tiny ships in a bottle that will never sail.
God bless you, macrosoft. You said it, bub!
What would you say that you're trying to accomplish in all of that? What is/what are the end goal(s)?
For me the point is to move on to more exciting philosophy, more suspicious and literary stuff. I know I'm not doing science via philosophy. It's not that I'm not after truth of some kind. It's just that I don't think the kind of truth I'm after is the output of a traditional kind of argument. The philosophers I like offer visions of human existence as a whole. While these visions need some plausibility and coherence to have worth for me, their value is concentrated in this or that individual proposition. They have their power as entire personalities. Call it poetry, sophistry, religion, nonsense, dada, mysticism. Call it the genre of creative writing that is never done figuring out what it is. All of that's fine. But let it be (for me anyway) more life relevant. It doesn't have to change my flat tire, but it should make me feel something and inform my sense of who I want to be.
If you ask me why do I nevertheless argue the point? It give me an opportunity to find metaphors like little ships in a bottle. I get to elaborate and sharpen a critique of traditional epistemology learned from others. This critique is not on its own the point. It is integrated in wider visions (Hegelian dialectic, Nietzsche's portrait of Christ in the The Antichrist, Wittgenstein's grasp of the inexplicability of the world as a whole). I'd rather be talking about Hegel's big ideas , for instance. But the negative-critical mode (as I'm sure you can relate) has its charms. I do want to stress that no offense is intended.
Thanks!
Just quoting a bit of the first line there so that you know what post I'm referring to. I appreciate the answer there--that helps give some insight into differences. I was sincerely asking you, not in a critical way, because I was getting the impression that you want philosophy to more or less serve as a tool for some other end, but I wasn't sure what end.
As you know I see philosophy as somewhere between an alternate methodological approach to what the sciences are doing and a critical thiking tool (critical thinking being a large part of its methodological approach). I have a lot of interest in the sciences qua the sciences, and at various points when I was in high school, first at university, etc., I seriously considered majoring in astrophysics, archaeology, marine biology or earth sciences (the latter with at least one eye to possibly pursuing a career as a park ranger--I love hiking/backpacking, I love national parks, etc.--I would have enjoyed a career where I spent most of my time in national parks), so I definitely have a disposition towards that stuff (even though I'm also a musician and I do some other art, too).
In philosophy, ontology and philosophy of science were two of my big focuses. I did a lot of logic, too. On the other hand, I also put extra time into aesthetics--because of my music/art background, but probably unsurprisingly, an overarching philosophical obsession for me is a critical approach to logical argumentation, though moreso informal logical argumentation than formal.
Philosophically, I'm not really driven by a notion of any "big mysteries." G.E. Moore once said that a significant part of the attraction to philosophy for him was the "curious things" that philosophers tended to say--where the idea was more or less that they were saying things that seemed fit for a loony bin, and it piqued his curiosity why they'd say such things. I feel very much the same way. The "big mysteries" for me tend to be "What in the world is so and so talking about and why (is he/she saying it that way)?"
I certainly have plenty of interest in epistemology, too, and I have some interest in human behavior qua human behavior--particularly from anthropological and sociological angles (again, probably unsurprisingly enough), as well as a bit from historical angles, though historically moreso with respect to other stuff I'm interested in than something like political history.
In some ways, though, although I'm not at all a misanthrope, I'm not that philosophically interested in humanity qua humanity. I'm someone who finds the phrase "the human condition" annoying. I don't want artworks to be primarily about "the human condition" either. When it comes to fiction, I like fantastical stuff, humorous stuff, surreal stuff, etc. The more "straight drama"/realist drama and soap-opera like something is, usually the less interested I am in it. Outside of that, I also hate our politics (in terms of day to day politics, the sorts of political systems we've created, etc.). I hate people moralizing (in the negative sense a la being highly judgmental/self-righteous/etc.)--though also partially because I don't agree with a lot of conventional moral views. I typically get annoyed watching the news, because of the way it reflects the things that people care about and just how they care about it, both of which I often disagree with.
So that might give some insight into the different frameworks we're coming from, the different interests we have, etc.
I appreciate your answer, too. I just like to say that it's a personal tool. I'm an apolitical being, more or less. I take this world as it comes. Just sayin' that I'm aware that these matters are personal. At this moment we've actually switched into my mode of philosophy (offered as an example of what is not 'artificial.' We are looking at motives. We are clarifying what it all means to us.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I can relate to that. I like those open spaces, the animals, the green. Nothing like hiking up a trial.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Maybe I'm not as much into argumentation because I write/read proofs at work. And I'll be coding most of the next few days. That informs my sense of just how informal arguments in English are. I like philosophy of science, or at least I got drawn in by Popper for awhile. I'm also interested in the explication of explanation. I'd say that it's deduction from postulated necessity. We just project this necessity, sometimes mistakenly, and with no (deductive) proof of the uniformity nature. Fascinating.
Quoting Terrapin Station
That's probably why we've tended to clash. For me philosophy is conceptual rock'n'roll. Where we might agree is that philosophers say lots of ridiculous things. But for me (and to be clear this isn't my understanding of you) is a parody of strict logic. The terms are utterly vague. I think I have more tolerance of contextualized vagueness than you, given my theory of meaning. So what I have in mind is some of the weird posts that appear here from time to time. 5 line proofs of god or ultimate nihilism or whatever. It does strike me as word math that hasn't really bother to explore its mind for what it really means to say. The words are just grabbed like super-charged crystals.
As far as big mysteries go, I do have one I'm attached to. And that is the simple mystery that this world exists in the first place. But it's not exactly a mystery. I don't think it makes sense to seek a ground for the whole. Explanation relates objects (projected necessity). Any purported global explanation is itself one more part of the whole to be explained.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I think I get my formal or non-human aesthetic kicks from math. I love a good TV show. So maybe I'm a humanities guy who works with all the formalism I need in my diet. You seem more into nature and perhaps abstract art. I've read my share of art theory (manifesos of movements), and I very much like abstract art, experimental music, etc. Though I think it does have much of its force in its ideology. Nevertheless, I put the human face at the center of everything. That's my god, the lit up human face and what it says. Biology is the science I would now be most interested in --which never fit well with the math path and was therefore neglected. Cellular automata are a fascinating middle-ground between the mechanical and biological in terms of visual form. Wolfram's Rule 30. In one of my fantasy lives that I'll never get around to, I'd be an abstract artist heavy on the beauty of visualized math.
On politics I think we agree. Self-righteousness just turns me off. Only seeing one side, etc. I have my preferences, but I just see the terrible complexity of the human political situation. And then there's just something that bothers me about dissolving into chants.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Thanks. I enjoyed it.
Quoting hks
Quoting hks
These are good examples of employing references to a person in lieu of addressing their arguments or requests on their own grounds.
They are also examples of arguing on the basis of authority in so far as the removal of such authority from your interlocutor dispenses with their claims without having to do so oneself. This quality is exemplified by the following:
Quoting hks
Look, I don't want fill up these pages with meta-dialogue. I will say no more about this.
Have the last word, if it pleases you.
Peace out.