Objective Truth?
Terrapin recently included this sentence in a post:
Are there different sorts of truth? Is "objective truth" meaningful?
Terrapin Station: Not to mention that you'd need truth to be something objective.
Are there different sorts of truth? Is "objective truth" meaningful?
Comments (215)
I don't know what it could mean to say that truth is objective. The idea of truth seems to be the idea of something really being the case; the idea of an objective state of affairs or actuality. So, truth is the idea of the objective, it is of the objective, but is not itself objective, it is of actuality, but is not itself actual.
You really are missing Banno! But anyway, my starting point would be that arriving at truth would have to be the result of a process - an epistemic process. So that would normally imply already that "subjectivity" lurks in there somewhere.
And then for "objective" to be meaningful as a qualifier, that would have to be so in the usual fashion of being held up against its intelligible opposite, its "other", which again is usually regarded as "subjective".
And if subjective means fundamentally epistemic, then objective implies in contrary fashion that something is fundamentally ontic.
From there, we can talk at cross-purposes forever. To talk of objective truth is naive realism if it ignores its own epistemic conditions by which it came to be - the process that was followed such that it might be held separable from the ontically subjective!
8-)
So you see truth as a destination, as opposed to a property of statements?
There are different uses of "truth." Maybe the unit of meaning is not the sentence or the paragraph but all of human history. Maybe zooming in on individual words as if they are legos can only take us so far (not worthless, but not enough). In life as we live it, we deal with personalities as a whole. To mock objective truth is just humility about our own beliefs in one scenario and irresponsibility in another. We want to know if we can count on someone. We want them to know that they can count on us. Take language out of the context of meaningful action, and it becomes fuzzy.
You're talking about meaning holism. I see it's advantages, but I think it also has its weaknesses. Maybe meaning partakes of both holism and atomism (I don't mean molecularism... I don't see that working.)
Yes, meaning holism and a shift toward worldly context. I'm not saying concept clarification is never worthwhile. I like analyzing "explanation," for instance. But there's also the issue of meaning-by-fiat. No matter what consensus philosophers achieve (which probably won't be much), we all have to get out and the world in the jungle of varying uses and mostly live there. Moreover, it's unlikely that philosophers are going to tame this varying use with their expertly determined 'correct' use. So to me there's a certain futility in the enterprise.
How do you see this tying into issues to do with truth? What is your theory of truth, btw?
Do you think it is objectively true that the sun rises and sets each day, we experience it that way, but then when we ask what does it mean to say the sun rises/sets the explanation suggests that we are in apparent error and the truth is that the earth revolves around the sun... that what we experience is an appearance and not the truth, but then if all we experience are appearances, what does that mean for the truth of the things we experience.
Hanover did his Banno impression. That was mine. :)
Quoting Mongrel
I guess I'd try to paraphrase any statement by looking at it in as large a context as is reasonable. I think it's safe to assume that assertions are offered (in a polite conversation) as potentially valuable strings of marks and noises.
I don't know I have what would be called a theory of truth. I like to emphasize strings of marks and noises as tools in the hand of beings with "irrational" purposes. So my criterion is a generalized utility. I think the correspondence theory of truth is great for less abstract propositions. On this less, truth and utility are just about the same. I don't want to deny common sense objective reality or ordinary language. But I think we drag the correspondence theory's massive utility away from its strong intersection with utility into the abstract realm (along with PSR and LEM). But for me this abstract realm is ambiguous. It's hard to make PSR and LEM look necessary. That's when we look at strings and marks of noises in the context of the entire personality. How do they live? Are they happy? What do they deduce from ambiguous/abstract beliefs in terms of actions and less ambiguous propositions?
Truth corresponds to experience, and the translation of that correspondence is based on the perspective of some observer?
Doesn't that make truth relative to the observer, unless we assume that all observers must share some specific perspectives in order to claim to know the truth. We all share the perspective of the apparent, and we can all reason our way from what is apparent to what it conceals by reason, so reason is necessarily one of our shared perspectives.
My diagnosis is borderline truth skepticism. Particularly suitable for LSD excursions... but it's probably multi-functional.
Quoting Hoo
Frege demolished correspondence theory. That's what a fair amount of 20th Century AP is about... trying to come up with a response. I see it being tied to some fairly seismic issues related to disintegration of religion and the rise of materialism. It's not about philosophers trying to take over the role of the dictionary.
Yes. Reason is the bones of objectivity.
A statement has to be interpreted. It doesn't understand itself. So yes. True or false are semantic judgments. A proposition is merely a sign awaiting interpretation.
It implies publicly demonstrable. So a collective subjective agreement. ;)
'One fine bright Sunday morning, a Catholic priest decided to sneak out and hit a few rounds of golf between services. St Peter happened to notice this, and called God over to see. 'Look, God. That wicked priest, instead of tending to his flock on the Sabbath, is out there playing golf! He surely deserves punishment for that!'
Just then the priest teed off. The ball sailed hundreds of meters through the air, bounced once, and then dropped neatly in the hole.
St Peter was gobsmacked. 'I said, "punish him". But you've given him a hole-in-one'.
'Yes', said God, sauntering off. 'But who can he tell?'
Did you have an example in mind? Aesthetics for instance? And would it be a problem for you if that were contrastingly qualified as subjective truth?
Or if you meant Platonic or rational truth, or even deductive logical truth, then that becomes another discussion again.
So truth may have many modalities or multiple methods of inquiry. Truth really just describes our willingness to ascribe a state of certainty due to an act of interpretation properly carried out.
It is in the end is a state of mind, even when that state of mind is collective, as I said.
Quoting Mongrel
Sure, the correspondence theory falls apart as the air gets thin. But in the ordinary world of ordinary objects, that's how we talk and live. We're only philosophers part-time. I agree that at high altitudes it is largely about religion, materialism, and various 'concept religions' clashing, most of them assuming that they are representing something accurately. Also, sometimes as philosophers we are just working out our own worldviews with a purpose. We think in terms of the claims that deserve and do not deserve our respect. We refine our positions according to some image of wisdom and style.
For me it was quite a head change to abandon the notion that truth was singular. We inherit a physical world that we mostly agree on (beds, food, cars, faces) and then construct a layer on top of this world that is under-determined by practical life. It's OK to believe in God or pure reason or not, as long as one stops at red nights, pays taxes, doesn't commit murder. In a pluralistic culture that largely assumes the singularity of abstract truth (someone must be right and others wrong), we're smacked constantly with incompatible claims about unseen entities, including gods, quarks, sin, duties, etc. This is not exactly innocent, since it's largely about justifying and attaining power. We can look at such belief systems (for belief is largely systematic) as individual adaptations --largely used for solidarity. To abandon the notion of the "correct" system of abstract thought for the notion of continual improvement in terms of pain/pleasure (high and low) rather than accuracy is to welcome the partial assimilation of otherwise opposed belief systems. Rather than "X is true," we have "you might find a use for X."
I still think that (on forums at least) there is a fair share of writing the 'official' dictionary.
I get that. I was reading some Jung a while back and he was going on and on about some crap. As I read, it occurred to me that he was a product of his times. And then somewhat abruptly, Jung dropped out of his philosophizing and basically stated that he was a product of his times. Holy shit. He knew.
My fascination with culture and history is related to that... wanting to see myself by seeing how I'm a product of my time. Maybe you and I are fundamentally doing the same thing, just in different ways.
What's a "red night"? Sounds intriguing...or wicked...
>:)
You are being very confrontational given that I was obviously being ironic.
My point was that in being "a public demonstration", this means that even empirically "objective" is really "subjective", the only difference being that the agreement expressed is collective.
This is of course standard pragmatism. But whatever.
Yes, this is quite consonant with the pragmatist accounts of truth endorsed by Putnam or Wiggins (See David Wiggins, (2013) Truth, Pragmatism and Morality. Philosophy 88 (3) for a recent statement of this view by way of a commentary on Putnam's account of the objectivity of ethical judgments)
It is important, though, to stress that the concept of truth entails that the act of interpretation has indeed been properly carried out by the judging agent according to a standard that is immanent to the practice of the community of thinkers who share into her practical/rational form of life.
I got some mileage out of Jung back in the day. His ambivalent criticism of Ulysses definitely gave me the impression that he was of a different time than mine. I loved "whatever is unconscious is projected." So self-knowledge is a 'harmonic' assimilation of the "shadow" and the "anima," etc. Even alchemy can be read as an unwittingly coded fantasy of the self's drama. Feuerbach and Hegel come to mind. Anyway, I like that Jung confessed that he too sees through borrowed eyes.
I like the idea of looking into how one is a product of one's times. Yes, this and the way we are a product of our direct influences, aesthetic and intellectual. There's also the past personalities we've worn or were and still remember in a sort of Russian-doll gallery. I guess self-enlargement is a goal, too, so that one's history is a story of progress. (I like to study the unstable heroic dramas the self casts itself in, as an inescapable structure or archetype.)
Freudian typo. In the old days some especially wicked nights were lit by red bulbs.
I think such pragmatist accounts often encounter much resistance owing to the widespread tendency to understand "subjective" and "objective" to express contrary notions. See also David Wiggins, A Sensible Subjectivism? reprinted in his Needs, Value, Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value, Third Edition OUP, 1998, for the argument that those two concepts register independent features of classes of human judgments.
Inasmuch as judgments of truth refer back to intersubjectively shared standards of assessment, and de facto grounds of agreement in human sensibility, they are subjective. Inasmuch as they issue from a fallible capacity to judge, and can be shown to be in error by those very same standards of assessment, they are objective.
I like that story. If he tells others, they might not exactly disbelieve him (though most would). There's also the problem of not being able to make use of it. We primarily want to control or benefit from things. If the hole-in-one cannot be achieved on demand on at least with regularity (every month, say), then it's going to be neglected for other options. It wins us or not as a tool.
Yeah, I'm old enough to remember those... or should I have said "old enough to have experienced and young enough to remember'?
I learned a thing or two then that wasn't on any page. I'm guessing you can relate. Yes, young enough to still remember. Life is more refined and predictable these days, which I suppose I must prefer. A dose of soma and a stop by the feelies would be fun though, once a week.
If only the neurophysiology could still handle it! :’(
I think my system could handle it, but what about this nicely organized life? You get a marriage organized, a career on track, and then the two key features of red nights are threats as much as promises. If I tumble out of grad school, I'm going to find me a red night. But I'd rather not tumble. "Lord, please let me conquer mathematics at the baller level. "
Perhaps to distinguish between something like "light is faster than sound" and "liquorice is tasty". The former is said to be objectively true and the latter is said to be subjectively true.
It's important to distinguish this from truth-values. We only need to know, on the truth-conditional theory, the conditions under which it would be 'true'.
Nevertheless, to a man (like me) who's spent most of a lifetime writing dialogue and fictional and factual prose, it seems profoundly mistaken. Its examples always stem from some attempted exchange of information, as if this were typical use of language, and whenever difficulties arise they are sloughed off from semantics to (linguistic) pragmatics. It exaggerates written as against spoken language. It lacks a coherent relation to the philosophy of action. It seems as if Wittgenstein and 'use as meaning' had never happened.
(The substantial other options for semantics as I read them are proof-theoretic semantics, i.e. inference as the basis of meaning, championed by Dummett...or to abandon the analytic approach and accept a form of Bakhtinian dialogism, i.e. all is dialogue and 'true' would be just one of many markers that interlocutors would have some sort of agreement or score-keeping about)
Be glad of comments.
Truth and falsity are just values distinct from one another, that can be represented however you like: classically, 1/0 or T/F. They have no significance beyond the fact that they are distinct from one another. Using this binary distinction, you can build a truth-conditional semantics (bracketing issues of non-classical truth values, truth value gaps, truth value gluts, fuzzy truth values, and so on).
A semantics for a language is just an abstract set of ideal rules that can be mathematically modeled for interpretation, much in the way that an artificial language can be semantically parsed or interpreted. In this state, it has no real-world application, but nevertheless various real world linguistic practices can be seen as implementing this abstract structure for certain ends, just as when one plays a game like chess, one employs a mathematically describable set of rules, but these rules themselves are not tied to the playing of any particular game, or the employment of any particular strategy. (And the semantics of natural language are far, far, far more complicated than any deliberately constructed game, just as a fact of nature and because, well, it's natural, not artificial, and so the rules manifest without stipulation, and so are never completely precise and never set in stone, always eluding complete formulation).
Truth and falsity simply function as binary values within this abstract set of rules. They do not have any pragmatic significance. Where they gain their significance is when you plug them into some linguistic practice that makes use of these binary values for various ends. So, for example, there is a presumption that one tells the truth, and so an assertive speech act in some sense privileges one value of this binary over the other, and makes it the goal of assertion. Within this pragmatic framework, these mere abstract binary values are imbued with useful sense inside of a linguistic community, and we allow ourselves to conduct our behavior meaningfully and systematically in such a way that the 'yes'/'no' difference gets involved in all sorts of intersecting conventional practices.
Semantically, truth is nothing but this binary opposition to falsity; in actual practice, it is nothing but what this binary opposition is put to use for in the employment of the language's abstract mechanics according to a certain way of speaking (just as two people can play chess with the same abstract rule set, but with different meta-game strategies, and even with entirely different goals in mind: one can still be playing a legal game of chess while trying to lose, for example, instead of trying to win; and trying to win is something like trying to tell the truth in this analogy).
In real life the abstract semantic system that governs linguistic usage doesn't float freely of course, but is always embedded in some pragmatic use of language. The point is, though, that any such use emergently manifests a regularity in semantic behavior that is in turn describable by such an abstract set of rules, and in particular making important use of a certain binary attaching to the semantic valuation of a privileged syntactic class of linguistic vehicles used for utterance: sentences. Thus, sentences have a truth value, they are either true or false (or rather, utterances of these given a context and appropriate parameters of evaluation are). And then we can imagine this abstract set of rules being applied to foreign uses, if we please.
Therefore to ask what truth and falsity are is just to ask for a description of the semantics of the language as a whole. When we do the work of semantics, we are already describing truth and falsity in so doing: there is nothing else to do once this work is finished. It is a semantic question, for linguistics, and not for philosophy (although what I have just told you is a philosophical, and not a linguistic, position). So to see how truth and falsity function in a current semantic theory, one need only learn that theory. In classical Montagovian semantics, they act as binary values that exhaust the domain of a fundamental semantic type: so-called type t. And semantically meaningful bits of languages are in turn compounded to create syntactic objects of a certain type, viz. sentences, which in turn have a truth value as their denotation. The theory shows how truth and falsity function, and is implemented once a pragmatics is given. To the extent that such a pragmatics combined with our semantics results in a realistic model of linguistic behavior, we have explained what it is that truth and falsity are.
Hence the charge that the Wittgensteinian maxim is ignored is misplaced: truth-conditional semantics does not in principle divorce meaning from use, in describing meanings as certain mathematical objects, because the whole point is that the use of language can be mathematically described in conjunction with a pragmatics. Semantics should no more be a philosophy of action, or provide one, than a rule book of chess should explain the optimal way for white to open. And to complain that a rule book of chess only mathematically defines well-formed games of chess according to legal moves of pieces, to say that it was inappropriate or mistaken because it did not tell you how the player is to supposed to win, or what strategies people typically use, is equally absurd.
Also, there is definitely, definitely truth in fiction; and aside from that, massive amounts of everyday use do deal with the exchange of information,and to pretend otherwise seems disingenuous. And finally, even where it does not, the purposes of the conversation use truth-conditional vehicles to make their point, and the point they are trying to make would not make sense if this were not so. If I don't understand the conditions under which 'you look nice today' is literally true, I cannot make sense of how a sarcastic utterance of this same sentence intends to subvert those conditions.
I think truth-conditional semantics exhibit some of the flaws that you notice owing possibly to misguided attempts by their advocates to construe them a means to factor apart purely semantic representational functions from the pragmatic features of language. Truth-conditional theories of meaning need not be construed in this peculiar reductive analytic way, and, I think, some deflationary theories of truth such as the so called identity theory of truth espoused by John McDowell and Jennifer Hornsby, and relied on by Sebastian Rödl (in his Categories of the Temporal: An Inquiry into the Forms of the Finite Intellect) are consistent (as they are intended to be) with Davidson's original programme provided that it is interpreted in a deflationary manner, and also that it is not divorced from Davidson's mature conception of radical interpretation as providing the basis for assignments of meanings to terms of a language used by a community of speakers where the goal of the interpretation is to rationalise their behaviors and not merely to interpret the utterances that they blurt out passively in specific perceptual contexts. (Sorry for the long sentence!) This approach, which relies on the more mature Davidson (who has distanced himself more from Quine), I think, combines artfully Wittgensteinian pragmatism with the theoretical resources that formal semantic theories make available for displaying the generative/combinatorial structure of language from within its embedded functioning in the life of embodied agents.
It is no accident that the three authors mentioned above have worked extensively in the philosophy of action and have been much influenced by Aristotle, Wittgenstein and Anscombe.
(See also Michael Luntley, Contemporary Philosophy of Thought: Truth, World and Context, Blackwell, 1999, for a useful guide to such "embodied" and deflationary approaches to truth-conditional theories of meaning)
Kant's view is that there are certain processes that need to happen in order to get knowledge of objects.
There are a bunch of theories about what kind of argument he's actually trying to make in the TD. Whether he's making a regressive argument that if you are having everyday normal experience then the 'categories' must be in place. There is also the progressive argument which reads Kant as saying, since the categories are in place, we can know things a priori about the world.
There are some passages in Kant which state something along the lines of - the categories gives us objective knowledge of the world. This can be read as the categories gives us knowledge which is immune from skepticism, something we can know about the world which doesn't depend on us. Or it can be that the categories give us the ability to pick out objects, so the objective knowledge is literally knowledge of objects.
I suppose another way to look at it is that with a subjective truth the obtaining of the predicate is subject-dependent, whereas with an objective truth the obtaining of the predicate is subject-independent.
That's why I think my second formulation is clearer: "with a subjective truth the obtaining of the predicate is subject-dependent, whereas with an objective truth the obtaining of the predicate is subject-independent."
Being visually inclined, I notice that there's something vaguely circular about this utterance. It's an assertion about the genesis of signficance. You're telling how the significance of "true" emerges from the act of assertion. On the one hand, it appears that you're inviting us to stand and witness the kindling of Pinocchio taking on life, but Pinocchio must already be a real boy before, or at least at in the midst of his transformation.
This is vaguely along the lines of what Frege pointed out about any attempt to tell a story about truth. Frege concluded that truth is an unanalyzable concept. It's too basic to figure as a character in a story. It's part of the very mechanics of story-tellling and rule-making.
It occurs to me that time is the stumbling block about this... that utterances are events that take place in time and space, but the content of an utterance can be about time and space themselves and can have an eternal character. You don't understand P unless you understand that if it's true, it's eternally true. Where this is denied, there's some equivocation going on.
Thinking more about this. If reason/rationality is a necessary part of "the bones" of what it takes to make a good, charitable, say objective interpretation, I don't think that entails that the perspective itself needs to be rational, good or charitable since I think all perspectives are normative and norms are not necessarily rational, good or charitable. Interpretation is methodological, not epistemic (perhaps).
If 'objectively true' means true without a doubt, then I don't think that anything can be known in its entirety. Change is unavoidable and the number of possible perspectives is not limited. I think the analysis of what is true is based on the presumptions of the perspective(s) that is/are chosen, and how well these perspectives enable meaningful interpenetration of what is being considered.
So perhaps truth is one, but that can't be proven on the basis of multiple perspectives, since while translations between perspectives, may possible, they do may not necessarily convey with the same meaning, since they are interpreted using different presuppositions.
I mean, I don't, but y'know.
Also I have nothing at stake here I'm just being a Socratic dick.
Yes, but "I like liquorice" and "liquorice is tasty" are not the same proposition. The former says something about you and the latter says something about liquorice.
So "I like liquorice" is true for everyone (and can't be true for some but not for others) but "liquorice is tasty" can be (and is) true for some but not for others.
If a thing can be true for me but not for you then it is a subjective truth. Liquorice being tasty can be true for me but not for you. Therefore liquorice being tasty is a subjective truth.
If a thing can't be true for me but not for you then it is an objective truth. Light being faster than sound can't be true for me but not for you. Therefore light being faster than sound is an objective truth.
This could get messy now.
But, yes, this could get us sidetracked into arguing over the nature of perception, which I don't have the stamina for at the moment. ;)
I agree. I don't think "objective" means good or charitable.
It was a dark and stormy night.
This, coming without quotes at the beginning of a story, is an expression of objectivity. The narrator seems to see the whole world as if from floating on high. An image that comes to mind is a map. A map is the world with an x-y axis laid over it. The mind rambles through this artificial landscape in a way flesh and blood can't. At the moment true statements made from this vantage point are identified as the standard of reality.... a little Nietzsche has entered the scene. A metaphor has been presented as Truth, and somehow that switcheroo is escaping awareness.
Quoting Cavacava
My thoughts about this are a little like a cat round-up because of an issue having to do with Slavic languages and Homeric Greek. In both cases, there something that comes into relief when a comparison is made to a contemporary western outlook. Sort of like... what we call the psyche is turned inside out. The concept of motive is backward. The world animates the individual. The world is responsible and the protagonist is a marshmallow in a stream.
I'm not sure if a story told in one mode is translatable into the other, exactly. Maybe the reader never is neutral. Translation is actually a matter of metamorphosis of the reader, not the content. To understand you is to become you.
It seems like you're using "objective" to refer to what a statement is about. When I say "there is no objective truth," I'm using "objective" to refer to properties of truth itself.
Thus truth is parsed as a property of propositions, as is falsehood. Truth and falsehood are a relational property between propositions and something else (again, like facts in the case of correspondence theory).Quoting StreetlightXIt claims a property that's a category error in this case. ;-)
(If you're wondering "what property," the answer to that is "mind-independence.")
There's an ambiguity here that needs to be clarified. "What is the case" here refers to the form of truth as a concept or an idea governing discursive practice, not as some specific content or "thing" in the world.
Okay, but then there's a problem with the idea of natural language somehow being either the same or at least mappable to facts aside from judgments that we make about that relationship.
Is "I find liquorice tastes good", given that is true, an objective or a subjective truth?
Would it be publicly verifiable?
Edit: subsequently reading back over the thread I see the first question, or similar questions, had already been somewhat addressed.
The distinction doesn't have anything to do with whether something is publicly verifiable. It has to do with location--where truths obtain.
Okay, but then there's a problem with the idea of natural language somehow being either the same or at least mappable to facts aside from judgments that we make about that relationship[/quote]
Right, so that's where you have guys like McDowell, Brandom and Haugeland arguing that the world itself is "in conceptual shape". I think it was McDowell who said "there is no 'outside' the concept", or something to that effect. See also the notion of "pansemiosis" that has become in-vogue among some of Peirce's successors in contemporary semiotic theory. The story being told in both cases goes something like this: there's no problem of how thought maps to the world because the structure of the world matches the structure of thought.
Yes, the very notion that the world could somehow not be conceptually articulated is, when you look at it closely, utterly unintelligible.
But more importantly than that, what are they taking to be evidence that "the structure of the world" in general matches "the structure of thought"?
Obviously "the structure of thought" would match "the structure of the world" insofar as we're talking about that part of the world that consists of thought--since they're identical in that case, but re the world outside of thought, what's the evidence or argument for that?
I think pansemiosis has to be more subtle than that. It says instead that the structure of thought and the structure of the world both share the deeper structure that is the structure of semiosis, or the sign relation.
So in practice, existence is still divided into thinking creatures and thoughtless world (by the epistemic cut of a modelling relation). Otherwise pansemiosis starts to become indistinguishable from panpsychism.
I wonder where the heck that "deeper structure of semiosis" is supposed to be located in that case.
Right, but the "thoughtless world", although it doesn't 'possess thoughts' is always already in the form of thought. To put it another way, 'anything' that is not in the form of thought is as nothing.
Just what is the "form of thought" first off? We'd need to know that to know whether it's the case that the world is always already in the form of thought.
Perhaps it would be more fruitful to wonder where the deeper structure is exhibited? (The answer being in both the world and the mind.)
The use of psychological terminology here is to risk blurring pansemiosis with panpsychism. So it has to be done carefully.
But I would point out that thought for humans is both thoughtful (that is articulate and attentional) and thoughtless (that is automatic or habitual).
So you could say - as Peirce did - that the world is inveterate habit. It has the character of thought turned thoughtless and completely fixed in its ways.
So there is a common form in play - the triadic structure of a sign relation. But even in ourselves. there is a sharp contrast between the freshly thought, the creatively free thought, and the thoughts which have long fossilised into stable pragmatic habits, the reactions or relations "we" no longer have to think about, and so which in fact now constitute us psychologicallly as this "we".
Applying this to the Universe, you can say then that all its spontaneity has been pretty much spend. There is only a Planck scale uncertainty that remains at base. The Universe is not thinking actively anymore. It has no "we" separate from the inveterate physical habits which pretty much completely constitute it now.
Again, this is all a very psychological kind of description of the metaphysics. Pansemiosis as a putative scientific project would want to tie in with physical science more than psychological science (while also insisting that the two are structurally "the same").
And this is what looks to be happening because fundamental physics has taken its decisive turn towards an information theoretic and thermodynamic formulation. What could be more perfectly poised as a balancing of the mental and the physical than to render a description of reality in terms of "information"?
Information means both at the same time the quantification of mental uncertainty and material certainty. It measures both sides of the equation the same way, and allows their exact conversion.
This is why pansemiosis is now something worth talking about. Physics is already there (even if it wouldn't describe itself in those terms just yet).
You are trying to fit things into a view of existence that lacks spatiotemporal scale. You are imagining reality as an atomistic state of affairs in which "everything that is" is crammed into the one place at the one time. You are adopting a synchronic or present tense view of existence when its reality is integrated across a hierarchy of "cogent moments" or spatiotemporal scales.
This is a really fundamental ontological difference here. And until you can understand what it would mean to take a holistic point of view on the issue, you are just going to keep talking past any post I might make.
You mean like....? http://www.nbi.dk/natphil/salthe/NatPhil_of_entropy.pdf
I was being serious above, by the way. I can't recall the example now, but one time you had referenced some paper relevant to your post, and when I read it, it made a lot more sense to me because of the way it was written.
Even in this last post, I just can't make sense of "You are trying to fit things into a view of existence that lacks spatiotemporal scale" and I have no idea what you'd be referring to exactly with "You are imagining reality as an atomistic state of affairs in which "everything that is" is crammed into the one place at the one time." I have no idea what "cogent moments" is supposed to refer to, etc. If you tried to explain your usage of those phrases, terms, etc., undoubtedly you'd simply say more things where I'd not have the faintest idea what you're referring to really.
A lot of it sounds interesting, but if I can't parse numerous things per sentence, I can't do much with it.
I'm not meaning any of that as a knock against you, by the way. It's just that we apparently think about things so differently that I just can't make sense of what you write when you get more verbose about your views.
If you like that, then I would highly recommend Salthe's two books on hierarchy theory - Evolving Hierarchical Systems and Development and Evolution.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Again, Salthe's books explain this in detail. He coined the term cogent moment.
http://projects.isss.org/doku.php?id=principle_of_scalar_levels
I hadn't meant to use terminology in a psychological mode there. What I was trying to get at it is that since the mind-conceived 'mind-independent world' is always, obviously, conceived; then it is always conceptually articulated. We cannot have any idea what it could mean for something to be actual and yet not be in conceptualized form; any such thing would thus be "as nothing".
Of course there is, we must imagine, 'something' independently of human being. But this 'something' is only something insofar as we can think it, however minimal its form. It just seems we are committed to thinking that something independent of us, for instance something that existed long before humans existed, must have been, to be in any shape at all, in some kind of conceptualizable shape. If something is conceptualizable, then it is articulated in the same, or an isomorphic, manner as concepts are, i.e. logically. So, it seems that we are committed to thinking there is a logos in nature independently of human being. "In the beginning was the Word", in other words, semiosis, or some Form without which matter cannot be anything.
Yes, or so the argument goes. Not everyone agrees, of course. My understanding is that Ray Brassier, for instance, would consider such a view to be nothing more than a thinly veiled anthropomorphism, and of course many post-Heideggerian phenomenologists would take issue with the notion that reality is exhausted by the conceptual.
Yes, indeed. I think it's the collision of common sense (bumping into objects) with a more rigorous abstract thought. Logically, there is no thing outside the thing-system = concept-system. But this is such a violation of sanity that we just drag it in, since it involves less cognitive dissonance.
Yep, that’s usually where appeals are made to second-order perceptual capacities and/or defeasible/non-monotonic reasoning processes. “Error” is what occurs when the content of one perception/belief contradicts another, and the agent has to make a choice between designating one belief as true and another as false. The content of a false belief is then flagged as “subjective” insofar as the justification for it’s contradiction is considered to be decisive.
[quote=Terrapin]
But more importantly than that, what are they taking to be evidence that "the structure of the world" in general matches "the structure of thought"?[/quote]
The arguments are not based on empirical evidence, but on a priori reasoning (purportedly) demonstrating the incoherence, absurdity or undesirability of alternative theories.
[quote=Terrapin]Obviously "the structure of thought" would match "the structure of the world" insofar as we're talking about that part of the world that consists of thought--since they're identical in that case, but re the world outside of thought, what's the evidence or argument for that?[/quote]
The argument is basically this: if the “outside” world is not in conceptual shape (or equivalent) then it is literally unintelligible and knowledge of it is impossible. Why choose an epistemology that makes knowledge of the world impossible from the outset? Because of science? Usually these folks are not convinced by the claim that science supports skeptical epistemologies.
I think pansemiosis has to be more subtle than that.[/quote]
It is, generally speaking, I was just simplifying for the sake of discussion.
On the first point, I'm skeptical about an escape from an anthropomorphism-- and about the need to escape, which is human, all too human.
On the second point, I think we can easily assert that emotion and sensation exceed the concepts we need to point at them. So reality is more than concept, but does it make sense to posit a thing, an intelligible unity, beyond this system of tings? It looks like the natures or essences of things are interdependent/systematic. "No finite thing has genuine being." And pointing outside of this system looks like an empty negation or the sort of thing addressed by Parmenides, though I'm not sure he had this in mind.
In regard to Heidegger; I think any apparent disagreement from him or from those whose philosophies are famed in his terms, about the conceptually formed nature of the world, would be more due to terminology than anything substantive.
For Heidegger, as you probably are aware, Dasein is being-in-the-world, and there is no world for Heidgger absent being-in-the-world; and this is the primordial and archetypal conceptually or logically articulated mode of being; not in an explicit, but rather in an implicit, sense. Perhaps, it is a bit misleading when I use the word "articulated", because that term is commonly taken to suggest explicitation: but I think there are two senses at play here. For example, we can say that the 'machinery' of the world just is the way it is articulated; the way in which its part relate to one another and the whole; whatever we might think those parts to be.
Well that is different in focusing on the epistemic angle rather than the ontic. And pansemiosis is an ontic claim in saying, essentially, that epistemology becomes ontology here. The structure of the modelling relation we have with the world (what you are talking about) is in fact the structure by which the Universe also "knows things" - that is knows things like what its laws say about how its parts ought to be behaving in conformance with developed habit.
So what I would say in reply here is that while we need - epistemically - to be aware that the "mind-independent world" is in fact a free creation of the mind, just an idea, it is also true that the "mind" is also a construction of this kind. It is also "just an idea" we hold to explain things.
So both the world and the self that is imagined as its observer are articulated concepts. Together they form the very epistemic relation, the sign relation, which is what "we" then claim to believe in as our "objective truth".
What we can't get beyond is the need for a conceptually articulated view in general. And talk about the mind vs the world is what that articulation looks like.
Quoting John
But strictly, we consider reality to start exactly where imagination fails. Imagination makes experience depend on "us". We can imagine flying for instance. So it is when experience comes to depend on something other than "us" that we can experientially say, well this is not "us" now. And let's call this other thing mind-independent reality.
Quoting John
Now we are back to ontic commitments. And the question is whether the structure of thought and world are the same in some way that is exactly as we conceive it, or whether - because we know we are manifesting an image - in fact it still remains likely that we are just projecting our articulate concepts.
And my own point about self and world as equally conceptual at root, should point towards the latter, in fact. There is now even less reason for the workings of our minds to be true to the thing-in-itself.
This is probably surprising, but it is already basic to psychological science. The brain is not there to re-present reality but to ignore it as much as possible. Attention and habit are filters set up to limit our physical connection to the world (so as to achieve the separation which constitutes the modelling relation's epistemic cut). Being a mind is all about constructing some minimal symbolic encoding that simply has the job of leaving us effective physical actors. Like DNA's relation to the metabolism it models, the contents of experience must be essentially unrealistic to be effective as semiosis.
If you want people to stop at road junctions, you put the stop sign to one side rather than erecting a physical barrier in the middle of the road. Or at least that is the simple and cost-effective way to co-ordinate driving behaviour. The stop sign looks nothing like a physical barrier. It doesn't represent the world. Yet as a symbol, it articulates a concept about how the world "ought to be".
So this is very tricky stuff. We have every reason to be suspicious of every articulate conception as their whole point is not to be true in some veridical "thing-in-itself" sense. That is not even the ambition. The ambition is to be pragmatically effective. And that is achieved by a capacity to leave just about everything material out of the concepts. Classic reductionism to theory and measurement in other words.
However then - having properly understood this psychological apparatus, this epistemic truth - that is the structure of the modelling relation which pansemiosis would project onto our imaginings of reality. The thing-in-itself has the form of wanting to self-simplify in terms of concepts like particles or waves ruled by dynamical laws of motion, for instance.
People always complain that we look at reality but then talk about the abstracta that aren't really there. We end up treating a logos as the essence of the real (while the actual physical stuff is reduced to mere appearance).
Pansemiosis - in transferring the psychological account into the space of cosmological accounts - gives us a formal way of accounting for just this. It says, nope, logos really is what is most real here. The thing-in-itself is not just some bunch of stuff, a state of affairs. It does boil down to an encoding relation where there is a cosmic purpose expressing the desire to produce the simplest definite actions.
Anything might be quantumly possible. But semiotically, existence arises due to the collapse of all this potential being to some historic collection of binary-framed choices. Was the electron spin-up or spin-down all along? Who can know. But history remembers some now fixed answer.
I appreciate that you even mentioned it. Treat my post as mostly a trigger for my own self-clarification.
For example, "the earth revolves around the sun" is true by referring to what is the case, and objective by being true independently of whether anyone says or believes it.
Except it isn't the case, and so isn't true. The planets and the Sun all revolve around the Solar System's barycenter (which, incidentally, sometimes lies outside the Sun):
There's a difference between truth and the idea of truth, isn't there? You start off by speaking about what the idea of truth seems to be, yet your conclusion is regarding truth itself, and consists of conflating the two. The [i]idea of truth[/I] vs. [i]truth[/I], and also [i]seems to be[/I] vs. [i]is[/I]. Your reasoning is invalid.
Edit
Correction: given that gravity propagates at the speed of light, the Earth revolves around where the Solar System's barycenter was ~8 minutes ago.
"The Earth revolves around the Sun" is as false as "The Earth revolves around Venus".
Asimov's article does nothing to dissuade me from those beliefs.
I did hear Graham Priest speak about paraconsistent logic. It is intriguing.
Well, it could be that we never talk about the objective world; only the world as we experience and understand it.
Yeah but since we all seem to be referring to the same world in our conversations,etc, is it unreasonable to assume that there exists an "objective" world which is independent of each of us?
Would you say that it is probable that a world exists; one that is independent of us?
By considering all possible arguments one can think of, for and against the idea of an objective world, and inspecting whether the greater weight of arguments lies for or against the said hypothesis
I still wonder about what I can be sure of, though. Because I'm a fallibilist.
I usually side with internal realism, which accepts a causally independent world, rather than idealism proper, but I'm unsure if this is because there are good reasons to believe in such a thing or because of a hard-to-shake dogmatism.
Can someone prove that that prinicple is false?
I prefer this definition:
"Fallibilism, the recognition that there are no authoritative sources of knowledge, nor any reliable means of justifying knowledge as true or probable."
Fallibilists accept even their best and most fundamental explanations to contain misconceptions in addition to truth, and so are predisposed to try and change them for the better.
What's the pretty good evidence you have?
When the scientists experienced superluminal neutrinos recently, was that a fact?
Sure. I don't deny that.
I'll try explain what my thoughts were and see if that helps to clarify whether what I wrote is invalid.
"I don't know what it could mean to say that truth is objective".
In other words, rocks, trees, mountains and rivers are objective, meaning that they exist, they are actualities; but, it seems incoherent to say of truth that it is an actuality in this sense.
"The idea of truth seems to be the idea of something really being the case; the idea of an objective state of affairs or actuality."
This is expressed a wee bit wrong, although I think a charitable reading should still have got the gist of it. The last sentence should have been something more like: "the idea of the obtaining of an objective state of affairs or actuality".
" So, truth is the idea of the objective, it is of the objective, but is not itself objective, it is of actuality, but is not itself actual."
Truth is propositional, or ideal, isn't it? So, when I say it is the idea of the objective, this would be equivalent to talking about the "obtaining" of the actual, or the fact that the actual is the case. Language is an imperfect medium, with its own inherent inconsistencies; the best we can do is to try to skirt around those inconsistencies in order to get a sense of just what our idea of truth really is. Truth, I would say, cannot be analyzed in terms of something more basic or primary, and because of that it cannot be precisely analyzed at all.
It's true that it is common to speak about the truth being actuality, and looked at another way this also rings true, but it is also true that there is a true distinction between truth and actuality; because actuality cannot be about the truth, whereas the truth is always about actuality. Don't be too anal(ytic) retentive or too incontinent(al) about it, I say. These are the two modern over-reactive philosophical extremes; steer a virtuous middle path. ;) :)
I wish I felt this way. But I read Vance Packard's 'The hidden persuaders' at a formative age and I've never been the same since.
So, "experiences are facts" but they need "interpretation"?
You claim to be able to see light "as it really is". What is it, and how do you do that?
Why would experiences "need interpretation"? Seeing light is a 'basic action' by way of which anything visible is seen, but one does not need to interpret, nor see something else, in order to see light.
Seeing light "as it really is" is to see light without an assumed intermediate representation.
In the same way "objective truth" is meaningful. I usually get the gist of what someone means when they use the term.
Merely at the level of meaning, then, yes I can go with both phrases. I don't consider them as somehow forbidden to speak of -- but I would note that it could become very easy to get tripped up on this kind of vernacular when we might ask after a more rigorous expression of truth or objectivity.
Which of course is completely impossible. You don't see light. You respond to an electrical signal transmitted from a receptor in your eye which obviously isn't light at all. If you believe that that is 'seeing light' as you describe it then a television screen sees light, an oscilloscope sees light, heck, even a loudspeaker attached to a detector 'sees' light. We do not ever see 'what is there'. We only ever see the translation made by the particular receptor and 'display' combination it affects. This should be apparent the first time you realise that everything we see that's not a light source in itself is effectively a negative, translated from the light rejected by an object, and a wholly incomplete one at that since we have no power to at all to 'see' but a tiny proportion of the wavelengths arriving.
There is a very real sense in which human vision is not seeing at all! Everything you see 'out there' is actually entirely 'in here' (he says pointing to his brain)!
Which part of receptor (eye) in combination with signal interpreter (in this case the cerebrum) did I fail to clarify? You would be just as blind if the connection of two perfectly functional eyes to the brain was severed as you would if somebody glued those eyes shut.
The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality in Quanta
Quite! I was hoping for at least an answer to the wave/particle question. Although that is already answered, it would be reassuring to discover what the real experience really tells us.
I think people who claim they don't exist should be taken seriously.
Do you think that a robot, programmed with all kinds of image recognition algorithms, sees anything?
Depends what you mean by 'see', doesn't it? In so far as it receives enough information via computational analysis of the input to make informed decisions or direct action towards an object, you'd have to say yes. If seeing involves aesthetic evaluation and emotional effect then probably not.
Quoting Barry Etheridge
(..and obviously no-one claimed that light would somehow occur inside the nervous system.)
One photon is sufficient to cause a detectable signal and response, but without photons you'd see nothing. Instead you assume a "signal interpreter" fabricating mental "movies" with lights etc., of a world in the dark, which is as absurd as solipsism.
I didn't. You apparently have. I'll let you sort it out.
We do of course know that the visual cortex can and does operate without photons because we have visual dreams and hallucinations. We can also see pure black even though it releases no photons in our direction at all. What you seem reluctant to admit is that what we see is a construct bearing little or no resemblance to what is actually sending photons toward us. Why you should be so reluctant to accept what every neuro-scientist accepts as a matter of course, I have no idea.
It most certainly does. The earth revolves around its axis. It orbits the sun!
If Hoffman has arrived at his theory that reality is nothing like what we perceive, then upon what does he base this theory? It cannot be based on studies of the brain because that is only possible via the very perception that he claims does not show things to be anything like what "they really are". If this were true, then the brain he is studying could not be anything like the "real brain", and his theory refutes itself by undermining its own premise.
Not at all; it just means his theory is mistaken. I mean, it's not as if it follows logically that, if empirical studies are reliable, any theoretical conclusions about them must be correct. His theory must be wrong since it invalidly relies upon the very thing it purports to refute.
No, they are just two different aspects, in two different contexts, of what you see. Why must one be 'correct' and the other 'incorrect'?
I don't know what you mean by "perception independent"; do you?
I consider myself a realist but I wouldn't claim that colours exist apart from perception; only that (some of) the conditions for perceiving are not themselves perceived, but thought in different ways. But I don't think this translates as 'reality is different to what we perceive', either. There is no reality apart from what we perceive and think about what we perceive. The very idea is incoherent.
There is a rational argument at the base of this. The brain evolves to represent the world in terms of our interests. And so our own interests get baked into our states of perception. We are not in the business of seeing things as they really are, but only as they really matter.
Without photons your visual cortex "operates" only hallucinations, in which nothing is seen. That's why they are called 'hallucinations'.
Quoting Barry Etheridge
And how could you see that it has a different construction than what we actually see? Divine vision? Or is it somehow implied by the trivial fact that we sometimes mistake the things we see for something else?
I think it is obviously true that what causes an object to appear rectangular is its real construction. The brain does not fabricate a rectangular picture of an object explained away as invisible.
"The world presented to us by our perceptions is nothing like reality".
This what Hoffman claims. But if our perceptions of the brain are nothing like the real brain, then we cannot base any theories about what reality is like or not like on them.
That is the only point I was making. Personally I don't think the notion of 'things as they really are' is intelligible in anything more than an empty formal sense, as a logical distinction from the idea of 'how things are for us'.
Idealism (subjective at least) proposes that reality is exhaustively constituted by ideas. I haven't said that, nor does anything I have said entail that. So my position is certainly not subjective idealism; although it's not too far from objective or absolute idealism. But that position is indistinguishable from realism.
And my position is not phenomenalism because i allow for real causation and conditions for the possibility of experience that are not themselves directly experienced.
As to anti-realism; I don't think that is even a coherently definable position; other than being a negatively reactive rejection of what all realists are (incorrectly) purported to be necessarily claiming.
Realism, as explained here, specifically in the context of naïve realism, is the theory that the objects we see exist and retain the properties we perceive them to have even when they're not being perceived.
As explained here, realism is the theory that "a, b, and c and so on exist, and the fact that they exist and have properties such as F-ness, G-ness, and H-ness is (apart from mundane empirical dependencies of the sort sometimes encountered in everyday life [e.g. tables are man-made]) independent of anyone's beliefs, linguistic practices, conceptual schemes, and so on."
You don't seem to be arguing for any of this, which is why I don't see what's realist about your position. And regarding anti-realism, it is by-and-large simply a rejection of the above. If you agree that the above doesn't make sense then you're agreeing with anti-realism.
Well, objective idealism "is an idealistic metaphysics that postulates that there is in an important sense only one perceiver, and that this perceiver is one with that which is perceived"[sup]1[/sup] and absolute idealism "can generally be characterized as including the following principles: (1) the common everyday world of things and embodied minds is not the world as it really is [my emphasis] but merely as it appears in terms of uncriticized categories; (2) the best reflection of the world is not found in physical and mathematical categories but in terms of a self-conscious mind; and (3) thought is the relation of each particular experience with the infinite whole of which it is an expression, rather than the imposition of ready-made forms upon given material."[sup]2[/sup]
Which is your view closest to? The second certainly doesn't sound anything like realism (well, maybe indirect realism), and quite explicitly supports Hoffman's (and apokrisis') claim, contra your own.
[sup]1[/sup] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective_idealism
[sup]1[/sup] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Absolute-Idealism
Except that is exactly what happens in one of the most famous optical illusions. We simply do not see an exact map of the photons received at the retina. Apart from the fact that the very structure of the eye makes that impossible (not least because there's a hole in the retina) we know that the information sent to the visual cortex is heavily manipulated, most obviously in the resolving of two different images into a single one (you seem to have conveniently forgotten that we have two eyes in conflict at the reception end).
The famous yellow cast problem faced by photographers gives more than adequate evidence that the colours we see are adjusted constantly by the brain according to the time of day. We know that people whose languages do not distinguish particular colours cannot see those colours as distinct without considerable effort. Again from photography we know that parallax issues are straightened out. From the famous shrinking room illusion which is just as effective in 3D as in 2D we know that the apparent size of objects is often completely a matter of cognitive process.
The evidence is overwhelming that what we see is a heavily edited version of the images falling on our retinas and that our vision is impressionistic at best. It bears as much relation to reality as it needs to allow us to move around and manipulate objects without falling over too often and no more. The brain is always the dominant partner in the sensor, signal, display loop to the extent that it can literally make us see things that are not there. That is the inescapable conclusion of a vast wealth of experimental evidence, believe it or not!
Only if you are a frog. Humans require several photons to stimulate a rod/cone. Have seen estimates from 3 to 7. But anyway, one is not enough.
We certainly don't! This is my favourite optical illusion:
So here's another usage of "objective," and I think it's a fairly common one: people can be objective. What exactly does it mean for a person to be objective?
Is it really possible for a person to overcome, transcend, negate... whatever you'd call it.. their own biases?
Don't you get it yet? There is no need for an exact map when we see objects directly. From illusions it does not follow that all we see would be illusions.
I don't need to know what you look like to know that a caricature of you isn't what you look like.
Quoting Barry Etheridge Also in the case of illusions we see things directly: e.g. optical effects such as refraction, or two lines whose ends make their lengths appear different and so on. Without seeing these things directly there would be no illusion.
Quoting Barry Etheridge In optical illusions it is always the case that something is seen, hence 'optical'. Yet you omit optics and instead pass a figment of brain and expectations for vision. You're on your own.
I think you identify as a realist, so tell me what kind of reality you think is there apart from the kind we can perceive and think about.
Sure. And this caricature is what you look like, as you really are, when drawn by a caricaturist. Or this is what a table looks like, as it really is, when your eyes are closed. Or this is what a stick looks like, as it really is, when half submerged in water. Or this is what a photo of a dress looks like, as it really is, to someone who sees it as white and gold.
It's a pretty vacuous account of perception, really.
Quoting jkop
If you want to say that how things really are is how they are when we're not looking – i.e. their perception-independent nature – then to see a thing as it really is is to see a thing as it is when we're not looking – i.e. to see its independent nature. This is the notion that people like Hoffman are addressing; namely to point out that this doesn't ever happen. The independent nature of a thing is nothing like its look (or its smell or its taste, and so on).
And? You obtain that information using standard research methods other than sight. In the most basic line length illusions for example you simply get out a ruler and measure the lines or in the case of false convergence you measure the angles. But the really significant thing is that armed with the knowledge of the equal length of the lines you still cannot unsee the illusion. You cannot see equal lines even when you know that they are equal.
"There is no reality apart from what we perceive and think about what we perceive"
is different than
"There is no reality apart from what we perceive and think about what we CAN perceive."
Also, I'd want to clarify if you're including things we can know indirectly, for example, via scientific instruments, in "what we can perceive."
Oooh, sneaky! Liking your work!
But actually, probably not if we're being that analytical about it. For pragmatic purposes, however, one has to assume that the brain's distortion of reality is at least consistent to the point that the same degree of modulation is in operation on every line measured by the same ruler.
If you're actually asking the deeper question "Is there any such thing as accurate measurement?" then it's going to be a long night!
I would say that what we perceive and think about it just is what we can perceive and think about.
And of course scientific instrumemts are either direct augmenters of our senses (telescopes, microscopes) and /or things that are believed to be such (spectroscopes, cloudchambers, electron microscopes and so on).
You're believing that the ruler tells you what the material creating the illusion is really like. You're assuming that the ruler isn't itself an illusion, etc.
This is a problem with representationalism and like theories in a nutshell: they typically rely on a belief that perception doesn't tell us what the world is really like, because of, for example, scientific knowledge of how our perceptual mechanisms work (and trick us and so on in the case of illusions). But to come to that belief in the first place, we have to believe that we can know what our perceptual mechanisms are really like via scientific research, but if we can know that, then the theory is wrong, because we can know something about what the world is really like independently of our perception after all.
But, you were claiming earlier that I had changed what I was saying.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Of course, since we have come, historically to perceive and think about more and more, then it would seem that what we currently perceive and think about may not be all there is.
This also answers your next point; we may come to perceive and think about more in the future. Alternatively there is also the possibility that in regards to some dimensions of reality we have come historically to perceive and think less, or even not at all.
But, in any case you have not answered my question which challenged you to identify in what sense I am not an ordinary realist, since you asserted that. I asked you, since the implication seemed to be that you are an ordinary realist, what kind of reality could exist that we cannot (now or could not ever come to, just to be clear) perceive and/ or think about.
The first in my last series of posts on this thread was a statement contra Hoffmans so-called 'theory' that reality is nothing like what we perceive it to be. I didn't really want to become embroiled in silly arguments about realism vs anti-realism; I don't think those arguments are of any philosophical importance; they are the archetypal red herrings.
Your conclusion it seems to me holds good only for the most extreme version of representational theories, ie. those which posit that our perceptions are totally unrelated to what's out there. I have never proposed any such thing. Indeed I'm not sure how anyone could realistically hold such a view and not go bonkers!
(A) "There is no reality apart from what we perceive and think about what we perceive."
(B) "There is no reality apart from what we perceive and think about what we can perceive."
(C) "What we perceive and think about it just is what we can perceive and think about."
Those are three different claims. I only agree with (C).Quoting JohnSure:
(A) and (B) are basically George Berkeley's position--"esse est percipi." He's an iconic example of an idealist. It's just that one--(A)--would be saying that reality is only what we think/perceive at the moment, whereas the other--(B)--is noting that reality can change with what we might differently think/perceive in the future.
(B) could also be seen as saying that reality consists for some reason ONLY in things that we can at least potentially think perceive, but not that it's identical with what we think/perceive at the moment, but that's not clear from just the statement of (B). That's one reason why I had asked you this: (D) "Also, I'd want to clarify if you're including things we can know indirectly, for example, via scientific instruments, in 'what we can perceive.'" That was the attempted beginning of trying to clear that up.
(C) on the other hand is noncommital about the realism/idealism issue. It merely states a tautology, namely, that we can't think and perceive something that we can't think and perceive. That doesn't tell us anything about, for example, whethere there exist things that we can't think and perceive.
Quoting John
Again, to be able to answer this, I need to know your answer to (D) above. Your answer on that will prompt different answers from me to the question you're asking.
If you're assuming that sometimes we can get external facts right via our perception, then it would turn out that you're making an argument for realism. (Not that that argument is necessary for realism, by the way, but it would be sufficient for it.)
But that is not the point. I don't care whether you agree with claims A and B. You claimed that they were not the same, i.e. that claim C is not correct and now you say you agree with it. I wanted you to clarify that apparent contradiction in your position.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Apparently then, you missed this:
Quoting John
Now you should be able to answer.
These are complicate issues and I recognize my own faults, so I implore you to point faults in my assertions.
If neither A nor B nor C are the same, then how would giving an opinion on A or B imply something about C? (At least in lieu of any other connecting claims, which we didn't have.)
Because C is the claim that A and B are equivalent, and although you now say you agree with it, earlier you claimed that when I expressed myself first in terms of A then in terms of B, that I had changed what I was claiming. It seems you don't want to admit you were wrong and are now becoming slippery and trying to wriggle out by deflecting the argument.
In any case, I don't really care about that. I asked you whether you think there is any reality apart from what we perceive and think and/or can perceive and think. It is on the basis that I asserted that there cannot be such that you stated that I am not "a realist in the conventional sense of the term". Given that I allow for the sake of argument that there is such a conventional sense and that you know precisely what that is, and given that you seem to think you are a realist in such a sense ( which I have already noted and you have not denied) then I am asking you to answer the question in the second sentence of this paragraph. Answer it or be ignored; your choice.
No, C is the claim that what we perceive and think about it is equivalent to what we can perceive and think about it.
This, if true, (which you have now accepted) entails that A and B are equivalent claims.
I have asked whether you accept the claim made in different words by A and B or not, and you won't answer.