If you might stub your toe on it, then it's difficult to see how it isn't.
[quote=Wikipedia]Argumentum ad lapidem (English: "appeal to the stone") is a logical fallacy that consists in dismissing a statement as absurd, invalid, or incorrect, without giving proof of its absurdity.
Ad lapidem statements are fallacious because they fail to address the merits of the claim in dispute. The same applies to proof by assertion, where an unproved or disproved claim is asserted as true on no ground other than that of its truth having been asserted.
The name of this fallacy is derived from a famous incident in which Dr. Samuel Johnson claimed to disprove Bishop Berkeley's immaterialist philosophy (that there are no material objects, only minds and ideas in those minds) by kicking a large stone and asserting, "I refute it thus." This action, which is said to fail to prove the existence of the stone outside the ideas formed by perception, is said to fail to contradict Berkeley's argument, and has been seen as merely dismissing it.[/quote]
To add to which, the basic nature of ‘material things’, if that is presumed to be atomic matter, is itself unresolved at this point in history. The apparent solidity of the atom has dissolved into uncertainty and probability; Russell even observes this in his concluding chapter of HWP. Meanwhile the irreducible nature of mind has been restored to philosophy, in movements such as semiotics, quantum baysianism, and many other forms.
So I’m afraid your ‘argument ad lapidiem’ is not going to succeed.
PantagruelNovember 11, 2019 at 20:44#3513860 likes
I don't think we have to assume reductionism. Chemical properties emerge from physical systems which have evolved to a certain level of complexity, but chemical properties are not reducible to physical properties. They are undeniably real, and form the basis of further empirical inquiry. So why should consciousness be any different than that?
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It is exactly the point of what I wrote. Do you understand why Samuel Johnson said that of George Berkeley's philosophy, and why his response is regarded as fallacious?
Terrapin StationNovember 11, 2019 at 23:50#3514260 likes
Well, to start with, there's the tile in the southwest corner of my bathroom, and then the tile just to the east of that, and then the tile just to the east of that, and so on, until about 50 tiles later we get to the southeast corner of the bathroom. And then we move a row north and do it all again, and so on.
Or is that not the sort of thing you have in mind?
I'll leave it to someone else to list each grain of sand.
ZhouBoTongNovember 12, 2019 at 00:17#3514290 likes
I offer here what I think is an exhaustive listing (i.e., why it might be a short thread).
1) All material things.
2) All other things existing by reference, but not material, as ideas/mental constructs.
Just for fun, trying to think of some"thing" that falls outside these two categories...
What about the relationships between "things"? They can be physical or abstract, but either way, seem to be a different type of "thing"? Or maybe not...I am not entirely convincing myself either way, haha.
christian2017November 12, 2019 at 00:25#3514300 likes
This should be a short thread that generates little controversy. The idea is to list as many differing kinds of existing/existence/existing things as we can think of. Part of the goal is to identify which things/classes of things may be reasonably said to exist, and also both to weed out unsupportable claims and to rule out "things" for which there is no direct evidence.
Now for some guidelines, all of which are tentative and offered to facilitate reasonable colloquy, and that are amendable for cause.
1) We need a word of convenience to refer to the what it is we shall be listing. The word "thing" irresistibly suggests itself. Being mindful that our usage will inevitably include reference to things not usually either called things or regarded as things - understanding the ambiguity - we adopt "thing" as being merely a pointer word, itself agnostic as to the thing referred to.
1a) Material existence shall be an absolute qualification for existence - the materiality, obviously, being demonstrable. If you might stub your toe on it, then it's difficult to see how it isn't.
2) It must seem as if a lot of things will be almost automatically included into the list of things that exist. The earth, a pencil, brick, chair, airplane, & etc. There's no need to list multiple individuals if they may all be entered as a class. And in this there may quickly emerge a taxonomy of sorts, of existing things. Classes of things, then, supersede individuals, they being included mutatis mutandis in the class.
3) It's possible that some contention may arise as to whether a candidate thing exists, which may include reference to the how of the existence claimed. For example, two, the number, may be claimed to exist, the question of how or in what form then arising. Platonists may claim that two has some super-sensible existence as a Platonic form. For present purpose all such, for inclusion in a listing of existing things, must be listed as ideas/mental constructs - the existence of two as an idea being self-evident, and any claim beyond that being no more than a claim. The test here being demonstrability, and the further from being self-evident the candidate being, the more rigorous the demonstration ought to be. Or in short, the thing either exists self-evidently (which may be subject to challenge), or some demonstration proves its existence, the proof based in self-evident propositions. No Voodoo, no woowoo.
I offer here what I think is an exhaustive listing (i.e., why it might be a short thread).
1) All material things.
2) All other things existing by reference, but not material, as ideas/mental constructs.
thats fair. Pencils do in fact exist.
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Do you understand why Samuel Johnson said that of George Berkeley's philosophy, and why his response is regarded as fallacious?
— Wayfarer
Because Johnson did not understand that Berkeley was referring to the so-called "philosopher's substance" and thought instead that he was referring to the stone itself.
Material existence shall be an absolute qualification for existence - the materiality, obviously, being demonstrable. If you might stub your toe on it, then it's difficult to see how it isn't.
which is basically the claim that 'the existence of material objects is indubitable'. But it was just this claim which Berkeley calls into dispute. He does this by claiming that what we think to be stones and other external objects are really ideas and sensations in our own minds. He precisely denies that there are material substances at all.
Samuel Johnson claims to have refuted this by simply kicking against a large rock, exclaiming 'I refute it thus!' But his 'refutation' is said to be fallacious, insofar as it simply assumes that Berkeley's claim is wrong or nonsensical, without offering any real rebuttal of it. (Hence the designation of it as 'argumentum ad lapidiem', the argument from the stone.)
In a more general sense, you're simply assuming a position of common-sense realism, as if that is the sine qua non of philosophy, proper; and then venturing that anything we might care to claim exists, must meet the criterion of being either a material existent, or an idea in the mind.
What you don't see, is the sense in which this realist paradigm is itself a kind of construction, in the sense understood by critical philosophy (e.g. Schopenhauer's 'vorstellung', meaning 'representation' or 'idea'.) Critical philosophy does dare to call into question the existence of what we would normally assume to be real - that is its understanding of what philosophy does. Whereas, you're starting from a pre-critical, or non-critical, stance of naive realism, and challenging others to show what's wrong with it (which I am endeavouring to do).
For example, two, the number, may be claimed to exist, the question of how or in what form then arising. Platonists may claim that two has some super-sensible existence as a Platonic form. For present purpose all such, for inclusion in a listing of existing things, must be listed as ideas/mental constructs - the existence of two as an idea being self-evident, and any claim beyond that being no more than a claim.
I think the point here, is that natural numbers are the same for all who can count. So in that sense, they're not 'ideas' in the sense of being 'internal to the mind'; they're not dependent on my mind or yours. But at the same time, they are 'intelligible objects', in other words, any system of numbers or symbols we use, must have a constant referent, otherwise our maths will be wrong. And maths is predictive of reality, so it extends beyond what is simply in my mind or yours, but at the same time, the kind of reality it has is purely intelligible, i.e. can only be grasped by a rational mind.
So what you're really trying to wrestle with in this OP, is the whole question of ontology - of what is the nature of existing things. But you're starting from the unquestioning assumption that what we can sense to be real, is the sine qua non of what exists; whereas, once we begin to acknowledge the reality of such mental objects as numbers and logical laws, then it becomes clear that what we can encounter as an external object might only be one aspect of reality as such, and may not even comprise its fundamental constituents.
Terrapin StationNovember 12, 2019 at 01:21#3514410 likes
The key phrase is "no material substance." The ideas of stones & etc., are indeed ideas, but the underlying reality of them was not the target of Berkeley's attack
Of course it was. I have a BA including two years of undergraduate philosophy, I understand it perfectly clearly, thank you. It is the independent existence of the objects of perception which is precisely what is called into question by Berkeley. What you say is 'the underlying reality' is simply your realist assumption speaking - you haven't gotten to the point of what exactly is at issue, which is precisely the sense in which they have, or do not have, any underlying reality. And Berkeley claims they don't. If you don't find that shocking, or if you think that Berkeley is just playing with words, then you're not getting it.
Maybe I should offer a tentative definition of existence, or at least that which falls out of my two categories above: objects of thinking or sense or some combination, but in combination reducible to either object of thought or sense by parts.
Clearly that is what you think, but it is not informed by philosophical analysis.
Metaphysician UndercoverNovember 12, 2019 at 03:07#3514520 likes
Reply to tim wood
Don't we need a definition of what it means to "exist" before we can proceed with an inquiry like this? The difficult thing is to get a definition which we can all agree on. If you define "exist" as "being material" then you'll be accused of being a materialist begging the question. So I propose something like "being present' as defining what it means to exist.
Metaphysician UndercoverNovember 12, 2019 at 03:13#3514540 likes
There are two distinct ways of being present. One is to be at a certain place, and the other is to be at a certain time. Therefore I suggest that there are two different ways of existing.
Some of the typical categories that seems to come up regularly ...
real and fictional
maybe existentially mind-independent and mind-dependent (qualia?)
spatial (left to right, top to bottom, front to back) and process (starts and ends, comes and goes)
interactees and interaction (and transformation)
self (indexicals) and other
particulars (examples) and generals (abstractions)
maps and territories (models and evidence)
... or some such like.
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As this passage illustrates, Berkeley does not deny the existence of ordinary objects such as stones, trees, books, and apples. On the contrary, as was indicated above, he holds that only an immaterialist account of such objects can avoid skepticism about their existence and nature.
So do you accept his ‘immaterialist’ account? Because it certainly seems hard to reconcile with your 1(a).
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Or in other words, classes/kinds/types are simply a matter of how we want to conceptualize things, how we want to divide them up.
Hang on, weren't you quite vociferously arguing against model dependant realism only a few days ago, the idea that people don't objectively exist being nonsense? Now you're saying the opposite, that grouping some particular set of entities into a containing class is just a matter of how we conceptualise things. If grouping all lumps of quartz just because they the property {being a certain size range} and calling them 'sand' is just our conceptualising, then why is grouping certain collections of cells together just because they have they have the property {some specific type of connectivity} and calling them a 'person' somehow not just our conceptualising?
Samuel Johnson claims to have refuted this by simply kicking against a large rock, exclaiming 'I refute it thus!' But his 'refutation' is said to be fallacious, insofar as it simply assumes that Berkeley's claim is wrong or nonsensical, without offering any real rebuttal of it. (Hence the designation of it as 'argumentum ad lapidiem', the argument from the stone.)
Well, rebutted thus (e.g.) ...
"The world is the totality of facts, not of things." ~TLP
The idea is to list as many differing kinds of existing/existence/existing things as we can think of. Part of the goal is to identify which things/classes of things may be reasonably said to exist, and also both to weed out unsupportable claims and to rule out "things" for which there is no direct evidence.
"Certum est, quia impossibile" ~Tertullian :chin:
Consider:
1. impossible worlds: ways the world necessarily could not have been or cannot be described, mapped or modeled; what makes these ways 'impossible' is they contain contradictions or things/objects with inconsistent predicates (i.e. members ofthe empty set).
2. possible worlds: ways the world possibly could have been or can be described, mapped or modeled; what makes these ways 'possible' is they do not contain contradictions or things/objects with inconsistent predicates.
3. e.g. 'the world is not the world' (i.e. nothingness, absolute absence / nonexistence) is an impossible world, or a way the world necessarily could not have been ...
4. if (1), then (3); and if (3) then (2); therefore (2). if impossible worlds do not exist, then 'the world is not the world' does not exist; and if 'the world is not the world' does not exist, then possible worlds exist; therefore possible worlds necessarily exist.
5. if (2), and if (4), then the world necessarily exists; therefore the set of non-necessary facts = the actualworld (i.e. transfinite list - unbounded phase-space - of "things/classes that ... exist").
1) All material things.
2) All other things existing by reference, but not material, as ideas/mental constructs.
I don't think 'material' is a meaningful term. It changes over time and includes things that have qualities and lack qualities people a couple of hundred years ago would have considered material. It is an expanding set with shifting criteria. I think Terrapin's mock or perhaps serious suggestion 'stuff' works much better, since that rules out nothing and has no metaphysical baggage - that is obvious, at least.
My list
1) Things/processes we consider real - some of which we are likely incorrect about - some things simply don't exist, others did once, but no longer do.
2) Things/processes we consider possible and in fact are real. Some stuff that is possible might not exist yet and so it is non-existent, unless time is not what some of think it is.
3) Things/processes we consider not real/impossible - but which in fact are real
4) Stuff we haven't imagined that exists.
Metaphysician UndercoverNovember 12, 2019 at 12:40#3515540 likes
Two stones are near each other, and no others are close. That must be two, yes? No. the two is in the mind of the observer who associates the idea of two with the two stones.
The problem though is that there is something "real" to these relationships which is not simply made up by a mind. The closeness of the two stones to each other, in relation to other stones is something not created by a mind. We want to say that this relationship exists independently of all minds.
I offered this above as tentative:Maybe I should offer a tentative definition of existence, or at least that which falls out of my two categories above: objects of thinking or sense or some combination, but in combination reducible to either object of thought or sense by parts.
As Berkeley demonstrated, these two categories are reducible to one, being "perceived by a mind". Then we have no principle by which to justify the claim of anything outside of minds.
1a) Material existence shall be an absolute qualification for existence - the materiality, obviously, being demonstrable. If you might stub your toe on it, then it's difficult to see how it isn't.
Here is the heart of the difficulty. You take for granted that "materiality" is obviously demonstrable. But attempting a rigorous definition of "matter" will show that this is not the case. The premise, "if you stub your two on it, then it is material", does not capture "materiality", because there are many things which you wouldn't stub your two on which we would still say are material. Therefore we would need a more adept description of what it means to be material to include these other material things into that category.
So the difficulty is that some things which are material are easily demonstrable as such, when the materiality of rocks and things you might stub your two on, is taken for granted. But the material existence of other things, like fundamental particles for example, cannot be demonstrated in this way. So unless we have a rigorous definition of what it means to be material, this categorization doesn't help us in determining what type of existence things like fundamental particles have.
Will you accept an amendment to, "Having the capacity to be present in some sense or some way"? Meaning that lacking any such capacity means non-existence. Is that what you meant?
I don't understand the reason for such an amendment. It's like you're saying that if something has the capacity to exist, can we say it's existing. "Capacity" is just a judgement which we as human beings make. We say that a thing is X, but it has the capacity to be Y. If Y has no presence in space or time, yet we say that there is the capacity for X to be Y, how can we say that Y exists?
This is the problem which "the future" hands us. Y may or may not come to be in the future, when there is the capacity for Y to be. So we cannot say that Y has a presence in time (in some eternalist way) because Y may not ever come to be. It may be prevented from coming to be. And, having never existed in the past, Y has absolutely no spatial presence. Since the capacity for Y might not be actualized, we cannot assign to Y any temporal presence (in the future) either. So despite the fact that there is the capacity for Y, we cannot assign to Y any form of existence. This is why we do not assign "exists" to things like capacities, which are properties only of the mind. There are no principles by which such things can be said to "exist".
Terrapin StationNovember 12, 2019 at 14:02#3515690 likes
Maybe, as the collection of everything that exists includes everything that exists, but does that help? As to classes and types, do you really have a problem having a class of sand that includes as members all the individual grains of sand? Of course, if you insist that it is all just how we want to conceptualize, that puts it "all" into the category of ideas.
I'm just stressing that the categorization for something like this would ultimately be arbitrary. Particulars aren't just ideas, but types/classes are.
Terrapin StationNovember 12, 2019 at 14:11#3515720 likes
Hang on, weren't you quite vociferously arguing against model dependant realism only a few days ago, the idea that people don't objectively exist being nonsense? Now you're saying the opposite, that grouping some particular set of entities into a containing class is just a matter of how we conceptualise things.
Particulars are real. Properties are particulars. So there are real things, and they necessarily have real properties. It's just that those real things are particulars.
Types/classes/kinds are not real (read "not objective"). They're conceptual ways of thinking about particulars. It's an issue of mentally abstracting over a number of particulars to simplify, because that simplification has many different practical benefits (for survival, communication, etc.)
This is why I kept telling you that you're doing the old conflation of concepts and what concepts are about or what they're in response to.
What I'm saying is really simple (at least it seems so to me), but your response suggests that you can't even grasp it.
What I'm saying is really simple (at least it seems so to me), but your response suggests that you can't even grasp it.
I'm not having any trouble grasping what you're saying, but your opinion here did not first arise in answer to the question "what do you think", it arose as a critique (and quite a strong one) of alternative positions. It is in that context I'm confused.
As such, what would be required to alleviate my confusion is not simply a clear exposition of what you think, but an explanation of why you feel it is necessary to think that, why the alternatives are untenable.
All you've done here is made a series of bare assertions.
PantagruelNovember 12, 2019 at 17:06#3516510 likes
Typically, properties are considered to be examples of universals, not particulars.
No, many philosophers make use of the concept of Tropes, even pre Williams philosophers have Trope-like entities in their ontologies.
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PantagruelNovember 12, 2019 at 18:03#3516700 likes
Reply to Isaac Ok. New to me, however what I just read says that tropes can be viewed either as objects, or properties, but not both, so they cannot bridge the gap between the two.
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PantagruelNovember 12, 2019 at 18:12#3516750 likes
Reply to tim wood Yes, I just skimmed through the Stanford article on Tropes also.
Personally, I find metaphysical hairsplitting to be a little tedious. Invariably it seems we are either trying to graft the mental onto the physical or ungraft it. In the end, both are in play, so unless there is some really compelling practical consequence I can live with a little ambiguity.
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Yes, I just skimmed through the Stanford article on Tropes also.
Personally, I find metaphysical hairsplitting to be a little tedious. Invariably it seems we are either trying to graft the mental onto the physical or ungraft it. In the end, both are in play, so unless there is some really compelling practical consequence I can live with a little ambiguity.
:up:
Abstract objects are things like numbers and sets. They aren't considered to be mental objects for reasons pointed out by Frege.
I asked Nagase once about the ontology of abstract objects and he wasnt very interested in the question for reasons along the same lines as your view.
PantagruelNovember 12, 2019 at 18:40#3516850 likes
Reply to frank Yes, I came across the epistemological equivalent in a book by Kornblith many years ago on naturalistic epistemology. Kornblith describes "natural kinds" as homeostatic property clusters, physicalizing the mental.
Good. But maybe for different reasons. And from a human point of view only.....
The fundamental criterion for the existence of things, is the possibility of its negation. If its negation is impossible, it must exist, even if we have no idea what it is; if its negation is possible, its existence is not given, but is necessarily presupposed as existing, in order to have something to which the negation would apply.
I enjoyed reading all that. Well written and argued.
Just as a remark, it appears the word “thing” is the most common and general classification of existing objects used in this thread. The term is loosely applied to concrete objects, abstract concepts, numbers, words, feelings and sensations—basically any noun-phrase, whether they are physical or not.
So perhaps “object” would be a more precise term for existing things. “Object” also proves difficult to define but I think has at least these qualities:
Gilbert Ryle liked to ask if there are three things in the field: two cows and a pair of cows.
The problem with things, as I see it, is that they have much to do with how our minds carve up the world. If you ask most people if the local McDonald's really exists, they'd agree that it does. You can go away, come back, and it's still there. You can kick the building, read the sign, eat the food, and so on. But there is a sense in which this particular collection of matter and activity is only a McDonald's to human beings.
Consider something like a constellation in the night sky, say Orion. Does Orion exist, objectively? I'm not asking if the mythological character exists. I am asking about the constellation. I'd argue that it does not exist apart from the way humans carve up the night sky and draw imaginary connecting lines and add labels and meanings. But the stars making up the constellation are real, aren't they? Actually, I think stars are not objectively real for precisely the same reason. Any particular "thing" in the world is case of us drawing a boundary somewhere in the world and adding a label and a meaning, even of seeing things from a certain "angle".
You might say that there must be something there underpinning what we see in the world. Yes. But it is tricky. Even elementary particles involve human concepts being overlaid on the world, divisions being made, and so on. And there is an awful lot of reification going on in scientific thinking. Just start digging into the idea of virtual particles and you'll see what I mean. The very idea of particles is problematic.
Suppose I pour out a bag of Skittles and a bag of M&Ms on a table. You could come along and look at the mess I've created and carve it up in your mind all sorts of ways. You could draw mental lines around all the yellow things and consider them as one group, or one thing. Or you could see all triangular arrangements of candies, all triads, as each constituting a thing. Or you could say that the set of Skittles is one thing and the M&Ms another, even if they are mixed. But notice that some of your boundaries intersect. And notice that if you consider each combination of three candies to be a thing, every individual candy belongs to many, many triads. But these are collections of things, not things, you might protest! And a nation is not? A beehive is not? A human is not? A fire hydrant is not?
Consider shampoo. Does it exist? Suppose you define shampoo as a mixture of particular chemicals in certain proportions. Is diluted shampoo still shampoo? What if you dilute it a lot? What if you have one molecule on earth, another on another planet, and so on, but you ultimately draw a line that collects 10 fluid ounces of water, sodium laureth sulfate, fragrance, and so on, and all long before the arrival of humans? Is it shampoo?
Does the existence of shampoo depend on hair and certain social practices?
You might say that for a thing to be a thing or for it to exist, it must be physically contiguous, not spread out like that. What about pollution? Romantic couples? Political parties? Biological life itself?
What about sweet food? Does it exist? Without us? Without animals?
Notice that while it might be argued that the matter is really there, that the world is really there, it is clear that the lines we draw in it, dividing this thing from that thing, maybe a pillow from a couch, are not really there in the world. The boundaries are something extra, something not in the world in itself. The same applies to your concept of yourself. You don't exist in the world in itself in the way you think you do.
What about such things as money? Does it exist? Does the economy exist? What about newspaper articles? Insurance policies? College degrees? Speed limits? I think most people would agree that those are socially or mentally constructed. But I would argue that such things as rocks are also constructed by our minds in an important sense. There is no line out there in the world in itself separating this rock from the mountainside, saying that this collection of atoms is this particular thing we call a rock, which is good for throwing at birds, kicking, and so on.
A lot of this is a matter of how we humans are functionally related to our environments. What it is for something to be a chair is that it is something to sit on. Supposing all humans were to suddenly die, are there any chairs in the world? Are there any magazine articles?
The things I am talking about here are all real in an important sense, but also unreal in another important sense, much less real, I think, than most people suppose. The way we carve up and associate things and attach meanings to them is largely transparent to us. We mistake it for how things really are out there in the world beyond us. Mostly what we encounter in the world is how we experience it as modes of access, relating to human purposes. I'd suggest that in large part, what we see is really a projection of possibilities for future action, and all of this is tied up with biological functioning. This is why there can be such things as hiding places and forest paths.
Everything, or every thing, that we experience, is like this, and deeply so, much more deeply than we suppose. That isn't to say that there is nothing out there at all beyond our minds. Not at all. It's just that every way we have of thinking about it is inextricably bound up with our purposes. Some of this is obvious and right on the surface. Some of it recedes into the background and determines how we experience things without ever presenting itself to us consciously. And there are backgrounds behind backgrounds.
I wonder how it all relates to Kant. What about such categories as time and space, the very principles of individuation?
Metaphysician UndercoverNovember 13, 2019 at 02:32#3518550 likes
Perhaps this. Materiality just means encounterability (in some way or other), whether or not the the thing be encountered. I'm sure you will almost immediately again see circularity in this, in that presupposed is the thing encountered. But to go back, toe-stubbing was listed as "an" absolute qualification, not the only. So it seems difficult not to beg-the-question. But the way out of that is to acknowledge that things exist, and to try to identify sufficient conditions for existence. I nominate encounterability as a sufficient condition and an improvement over toe-stubbing and capacity-for. Yes? No? Improve?
No, I don't agree with "encounterability". First, because it restricts existence to the encountering capacities of the thing doing the encountering. I assume that the thing doing the encountering is supposed to be human. Now "existence" is limited to the encountering capacities of the human being. this appears as a form of Protagorean relativism, "man is the measure of all things". And I think that there may be some existents which the limitations of the physical composition of the human being prevent us from encountering.
Also, on the other side of the coin, human beings sometimes encounter things which are imaginary, like in the case of hallucinations. The person may not be able to distinguish a true encounter from a false encounter, so encounter cannot be used as a principle for judging existence, because it provides no principle to distinguish true encounter from false encounter, which is what we need, to be able to judge whether a thing exists or not. And if we want to restrict "encounterability" to true encounters, we would need some way of determining what makes an encounter true. So we're really not gaining anything with this term. We're back to a sort of Parmenidean position, existence is truth. But what does that mean?
So perhaps “object” would be a more precise term for existing things. “Object” also proves difficult to define but I think has at least these qualities:
it is finite
it moves as one
it is bounded by a surface
it has a position relative to other objects
it acts
I think in mathematics, an "object" may be infinite.
ZhouBoTongNovember 13, 2019 at 02:57#3518610 likes
I will get to the force stuff in this post, as that is clearly the part that you felt may be significant. However, I just have to try the relationship thing one more time.
Also, I think I read through most of the posts, but certainly feel free to point me at anything I may have missed.
The difficulty I have is that the relationship is no thing separate from the objects themselves. Two stones are near each other, and no others are close. That must be two, yes? No. the two is in the mind of the observer who associates the idea of two with the two stones.
Not quite what I was going for. Yes, the relationship between the 2 stones is in the observer's mind, but it is also a physical relationship. 2 stones in Florida are closer together than one in Florida and one in Russia. Whether we use human language to describe this or not, it is as true as the rock's physical existence is "true". How about "Earth is in the Milky Way galaxy"? While none of those words necessarily have any meaning, we have assigned them meanings and all together what they express is true, right? But earth being located in the Milky Way does not seem to be a 1. physical thing or 2. JUST an idea/mental construct...?
I'm looking on line for a definition of force , but haven't found a good one. How would you define "force?"
Wow, the dictionary definitions ARE rather inadequate aren't they?!? The physics definition from a textbook is more what I was thinking, something like: a force is any interaction that, when unopposed, will change the motion of an object
I was thinking that besides the 4 fundamental forces we would be able to point to some physical object as the origin of "force"...but I guess whatever its origin, force could still be something different than the 2 classifications of "things" you gave. interesting.
Deleted UserNovember 13, 2019 at 03:25#3518670 likes
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Don't we need a definition of what it means to "exist" before we can proceed with an inquiry like this?
I'm not sure that insisting on such a definition is fruitful (or feasible).
If you insist on defining the term "exist" by other terms, then you've just taken a step towards indefinite regress or you end up with circularities.
I mean, you can't really miss existents, and there's not much of a complement to contrast with.
"Exist" is fairly basic, and categorizing different sorts of "existents" seems more fruitful, like @tim wood has been doing.
For example, I'd say both reality and fictions exist, it's just that fictions aren't real.
Besides, we use such terms, and that use (in whatever context) gives them common meaning.
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3) Process. The question arises if things are existent that require a length of time, that in less than which time they do not exist. But processes clearly exist, so it would appear that things exist within some bounds that do not exist outside of those bounds. I think that's interesting.
Maybe this is a bit better, or at least closer to what I was on about ...
5) self and others. I think those have got to be ideas/mental constructs.
What I was thinking at the time was just the partitions rendered by (ontological) self-identity / individuation versus whatever else (other).
But maybe that's not so relevant here. Nevermind, "these are not the droids you're looking for".
ZhouBoTongNovember 13, 2019 at 04:42#3519070 likes
On yours, in the way of relationships, the number of such immediately explodes into an uncountable infinity of descriptions of relationshps, and of everything in every combination.
I would not use the word infinity, but I can certainly agree with uncountable. I don't see this as a problem.
And we have to consider that the existence of relationships, in this case, in as much as they do not depend on mind, must be real in virtue of something other than mind, and thus not necessarily accessible in any way by thee and me.
Well the existence of these relationships is no more dependent on mind than the existence of the objects...right? You conceded the physical objective existence of the objects early in the OP (I thought?). If the objects exist, the relationships equally must exist. Are you suggesting that everything that exists, exists entirely independently from everything else until a mind suggests otherwise? I didn't have you pegged as a religious fellow (notice any "evolution" of the universe prior to life would have only occurred because of physical relationships - along with wherever we decide "force" fits into this whole situation).
When we say "Earth is in the Milky Way galaxy", if we concede the physical existence of some thing we call "earth" and some thing we call a "galaxy" that we have further labeled the "Milky Way", then that statement is 100% true even with no mind right? Are you trying to say all these things exist, but the relationships do not? Earth is not in the Milky way? Why not? What makes that a more subjective statement than "earth exists"?
even if it destroys by explosion the concept of existence via the notion of relationship.
Dang, I suck at this stuff. That was not my intention at all. Relationships are just an addendum to existence. Once existence is established within a contained environment (the universe), then relationships are a tangible aspect of that existence.
But I invite you to consider whether relationships can be a different species of existence, or if instead they fall into ideas/mental constructs - that is, will you develop your thinking a bit more so that we might fall on one side or the other?
So this entire post is describing why I don't think relationships fit into the mental construct arena. They are mental in that we use words to describe them, but that equally applies to any physical object. They are not mental because they exist regardless of any mind. But surely the relationships are not physical things themselves. If the physical objects disappear we are left with nothing, not relationships.
So, for me, relationships do not fit into either category. We could call it a mix of the two if we are very opposed to a 3rd category, but I would struggle to accept just one.
What about such things as money? Does it exist? Does the economy exist? What about newspaper articles? Insurance policies? College degrees? Speed limits? I think most people would agree that those are socially or mentally constructed. But I would argue that such things as rocks are also constructed by our minds in an important sense. There is no line out there in the world in itself separating this rock from the mountainside, saying that this collection of atoms is this particular thing we call a rock, which is good for throwing at birds, kicking, and so on.
A lot of this is a matter of how we humans are functionally related to our environments. What it is for something to be a chair is that it is something to sit on. Supposing all humans were to suddenly die, are there any chairs in the world? Are there any magazine articles?
The way we carve up and associate things and attach meanings to them is largely transparent to us. We mistake it for how things really are out there in the world beyond us.
What can this world-beyond-all-carving be if not a kind of internal suspicion within our systematic carving-up of the world? The map is not the territory could be interpreted to mean only that we expect our map to change. Our map appears on itself as a changeable entity? And the world-beyond-the-map is the world-to-come is our map's knowledge of its own fragility?
Deleted UserNovember 13, 2019 at 10:34#3519860 likes
Clearly, of things that exist, a whole raft of them exist as ideas. I think material existence still stands, notwithstanding Berkeley, of which we discovered that while he could deny material - and what that means is another topic - he affirmed reality and the reality of things like stones. And it seems there are two to be added that don't fit in these: force, and process.
I wasn't questioning it along Berkleyian lines. I was saying it no longer means anything. It is a placeholder term for real. Or verified. It sounds like it is describing a certain substance type, but it isn't. It just means it exists.Quoting tim wood
The list, then, of classes of things that exist (as how they exist):
1) material things,
2) ideas/mental constructs,
3) forces,
4) processes.
Materialists consider forces real and material. As they do processes. And most would consider ideas merely a facet of certain kinds of (conscious) matter. Something like length or vibration. Not a new substance. Obviously you disagree, but you need to show how they are wrong because scientific materialism has swallowed everything. Even though it no longer means anything.
Metaphysician UndercoverNovember 13, 2019 at 13:01#3520090 likes
The truth of the matter is that the quality of encounterability is a quality of the object in question, not some individual or specific class of individuals that may or may not either encounter or be able to encounter the object.
Despite your assertion ("the truth of the matter is..."), that's not true at all. "Encounter" necessarily implies something encountered and something doing the encountering. It's a two part experience, a "meeting". So "encounterability" (my spell check thinks that's a nonsense word), depends as much on the capacities of the thing encountering as it depends on the thing being encountered. Consider for example, the term "edible".
This isn't about existence for, rather it's about criteria for existence qua.
I agree with this point, but that's exactly why "encounterability" will not suffice. It implies the necessity of assuming something which will act as the encounterer. Therefore "existence" will be defined in relation to that encounterer, "existence for" the encounterer. Why must "existence" be a relative term? You are insisting that in order to "exist", the existent must exist relative to something else, the thing which could encounter it.
Here's a suggestion for you categorization schema, absolute existents, and relative existents. The former are not related to encounters, the latter are.
I mean, you can't really miss existents, and there's not much of a complement to contrast with.
Yes you can miss existents, and that's the point of one of my objections. Fundamental particles are supposed to be existents, and I don't encounter them ever. There may also be all sorts of other existents which human beings haven't encountered, and may not even be encounterable to us. It is a mistake to define "existents", as things which are evident to me, or even to us.
"Exist" is fairly basic, and categorizing different sorts of "existents" seems more fruitful, like tim wood has been doing.
The process tim wood and the others are engaged in is absolutely fruitless, for the very reason that they express no idea of what it means to exist, and so have no principles for categorization. For example, they assume that a "force" exists. But "force" just represents a system we use to quantify an interaction between existent things.
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I wonder how it all relates to Kant. What about such categories as time and space, the very principles of individuation?
Almost everything humans talk about now can relate to what Kant has already said. Except of course, those particular things he and no one else at the time knew were even possible. Not so much space travel, for instance, but how to do space travel without killing the travelers.
Now I never knew the guy, but I’m willing to bet he would have looked at you funny for thinking space and time are categories. The very principles of empirical individuation, sure, but categories? Yeah, no.......
Minor point, and takes very little away from the well done.
If some things exist necessarily - if there are such things - then they have always existed and certainly did not spring fully-formed from the brow of logic/reason.
If some things exist necessarily, they do not so spring, agreed, but it does not follow that they always existed. To say they always existed mandates the timeframe of permanence, which cannot be given from existence alone. A thing that exists necessarily may exist only temporarily.
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And it may well be that the ability of language and thought to apprehend existence is, on the one hand, constrained, yet on the other hand, the constraint irrelevant.
The whole paragraph is very good, but this is the key. Whether we talk about an object that does exist, or merely think an object that might exist, “existence” the primordial conception, must already abide, otherwise “to exist” has no meaning, so our apprehension of it is not really necessary. Still, it doesn’t have to be inapprenhensible; we could just let it stand as a condition, in accordance with the way we think of anything at all.
I think in mathematics, an "object" may be infinite.
I'm not sure if that quality can apply to existing things, for infinite object would have no beginning or end and would take up the entirety of space and time.
Almost everything humans talk about now can relate to what Kant has already said.
Do you mean this in the same way that everything humans talk about now can relate to what Hegel, Nietzsche, Plato and Descartes said, that current knowledge sits on the foundation of previous thought? Or are you claiming that philosophy hasn't progressed much beyond Kant?
Mostly the first, in varying degrees. Progress, doncha know.
As far as I’m concerned, to wit: mere opinion, Kant was the paradigm shifter in epistemological philosophy, of which there has been no other since. But then, I’m not as acquainted with the moderns as I am with the Enlightenment, so......
Nevertheless, it’s pretty obvious what anybody said within this paradigm either supported or rejected Kant, until 20th Century theoretical physics cast a new light on the meaning of knowledge itself, re: Einstein on the con*, Schrödinger on the sorta-pro**, Gödel on the super-pro***.
*Einsteins, 1921 “Geometry and Experience”;
**Schrodinger, 1944, “What Is Life”
***Gödel, 1961, “The modern development of the foundations of mathematics in the light of philosophy”
Reply to Mww I read the figures in physics that you mention as residing within a philosophical space somewhere between Kant and Hegel. Nome have ventured into phenomenological philosophical territory as of yet(which I view as being as revolutionary in its own way as Kant was).
In this sense, enactivist psychology, having begun to assimilate ideas from Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, is anticipating where physics will go next.
There may also be all sorts of other existents which human beings haven't encountered, and may not even be encounterable to us. It is a mistake to define "existents", as things which are evident to me, or even to us.
Right, we don't just define the term "exist" by other terms (indefinite regress / circularity).
Whatever exists altogether has no complement anyway.
So, how's this for a provisional description then? Existence has no complement, and whatever exists is part thereof.
I like sushiNovember 14, 2019 at 07:04#3523480 likes
Reply to Joshs I actually came across Husserl’s name when reading textbooks on cognitive neuroscience - Varela’s ideas to be spceific.
I do agree that there was a paradigm shift for some created by not just Husserl - I’d argue that Nietzsche was an extremely fertile ground from which many ‘opposing’ philosophical and political views use as a prop.
That said Kant’s contribution was, and still is, monumental. I’d also say that many modern physicists are pretty much taken up the baton of ‘philosophy’ and doing more for philosophical ‘progress’ in many ways that many ‘philosophers’ are. I’m still astounded by how everyone harps on about Einstein as the last genius without bothering to mention the powerhouse that was/is Feynman.
As far as I know everyone learns about Einstein at an early age but unless you actually venture specifically into physics you don’t hear about Feyman - very sad :(
Metaphysician UndercoverNovember 14, 2019 at 11:46#3523790 likes
If "encounterability" is a noun, then it is used to refer to a thing, or class of things. So how do you propose to use this word such that it describes what all existent things have in common, existence?
The fundamental criterion for the existence of things, is the possibility of its negation.
Agreed.
[quote=Mww]If its negation is impossible, it must exist, ...[/quote]
Yes abstractions; not states of affairs.
[quote=Mww]if its negation is possible, its existence is not given, ...[/quote]
... then it is contingent, that is, it can always change (even if it hasn't yet). 'Necessary - impossible to negate - facts' are subsistent constructs like round squares, fish riding unicycles, ... paradoxical figures in Escher's gallery & inconsistent objects in Meinong's Jungle because facts are causally relational, thereby change with respect to other facts changing - in flux - anywhere anywhen, and so they're 'necessarily non-necessary'. Unless there aren't any changeable, or contingent, facts at all; but that is not the case. What's impossible is a fact - node of causal relations - which is 'impossible to negate', or change; factual existence presupposes contingency - possibility of negation - insofar as facts are - at least one fact is - causally relational, unlike abstract subsistents which are not causally relational. I can easily list necessary abstractions (e.g. numbers, equations, classes / categories) but not a single 'necessary fact' - not even Witty's "world is the totality of facts" because it's an abstraction, not a fact, like "set of all sets". Reply to 180 Proof
The map is not the territory could be interpreted to mean only that we expect our map to change. Our map appears on itself as a changeable entity? And the world-beyond-the-map is the world-to-come is our map's knowledge of its own fragility?
Yes, what you bring to mind here for me is that we, at the level of our human apprehension of things at least, are stuck with a map. We'll never know the territory directly. Our map can change to a degree, and it will. But it can never be altogether dissolved while leaving us intact. Its fragility is ours. But ultimately, what is is what is being humanity, and in its simple being-in-itself, it is beyond maps. And that level of things is unavoidably present even for us, insofar as we are inseparable from reality. While we stand here looking at our map, with its boundaries and labels, the situation of there being people looking at maps itself is the territory! But how to look at that without mobilizing a map of it?
I suppose that at the level of being, we are always directly in contact with, or rather are, the territory, while at the level of cognizing, we are always looking at a map. This could be tied to Zen meditation, where the injunction often amounts to something like, "Just be!" The comedy here is that you can't not do that! So it is silly to command it! But it seems to try to bring attention to the territory. Stop thinking! Things seen through the mind are at a remove and are representations. But to see the immediate situation of there being a mind making its representations is another matter! Watching through the mind and watching the mind are different! But one must be careful not to watch the mind through the mind!
Perhaps the way to avoid that is to just be! This seems to amount to sort of stepping back, returning to yourself, as if we are normally pressing out of ourselves and out of the world in order to turn around and look at ourselves, in which case, we encounter a surface through a membrane and are unable to directly touch what is being regarded. But if we only relax back into ourselves, we find the world in-itself. We never lost it! Internally, in our being, the territory is always already present. Externally, in our grasping, we lose it.
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First: That was hard to read.
Second: Cool. Somebody asked for my thoughts.
Finally......pretty good.
To respond:
.......All facts are contingent on the condition of the knowledge that generates them.
.......I would ask how “states of affairs” are not themselves abstractions, thus equally subject to necessary existence because their negation is impossible.
Our map can change to a degree, and it will. But it can never be altogether dissolved while leaving us intact.
Yes, because this 'us' is itself just a token on the map. 'Language speaks man.' Or the subject is a function of language. But what is language? It's a thing that's never done naming itself. What I mean by language is beyond the individual in the simple sense that we are here together part of its talking about itself. The same system of symbols has a distributed life in millions of brains. The fact that you said 'leaving us intact' is important here.
Metaphysician UndercoverNovember 15, 2019 at 03:06#3525890 likes
I am not looking for what existence is. I am satisfied that is a different question from what exists, and what exists seems to be a criteriological question.
But how can you expect to answer "what exists?" if you do not know what it means to exist? Knowing what it means to exist gives you the criteria required to accurately answer the question of does this or does this not exist.
Encounterability, then, is a criterion of existence.
"A criterion" doesn't give you the necessary conditions to make the affirmation. Being cold is "a criterion" of snow, but it doesn't mean that if it's cold, it's snow. Therefore there is no reason to believe that if it's encounterable it has existence, even if encounterability is a criterion of existence.
Furthermore, as I explained, it is quite possible that there are existing things which are unencounterable to us, as human beings. Therefore encounterability is unacceptable even as a simple criterion of existence. Perhaps the encounterable are one type of existent.
Is your objection that no reasonable discussion about existents can happen without first figuring out what existence is? Do you ever buy tomatoes?
Yes that's exactly my point, no reasonable discussion about existents qua existents can happen without defining what "existent" is. There's no point to defining, or categorizing subgroups of existents without first defining the principal category, because without such a definition, the things you'll be putting into the subgroups might not even belong in the principal group to begin with.
Say you bought some beefsteaks and some romas. How would you know that what you bought are tomatoes if you don't even know what a tomato is? Likewise, how would you know that the thing you encountered was an existent if you do not even know what an existent is?
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Metaphysician UndercoverNovember 15, 2019 at 04:34#3526270 likes
It's one thing to assert "I know..", but I'm asking how do you know that. That's the point. if you are creating subclasses of existents, and placing things into these categories, and you do not know what an existent is, then how do you know whether or not your proposed subclasses even contain existents?
You want to answer "how" with 'I know these things are existents because I've encountered them', but I've already explained why "encounterability" is insufficient.
Do you not think about what you write? Being cold is an encounterable. You encounter it, and you feel, think, maybe say, "That's cold." Being cold in itself means nothing more than that. Are you going to argue that because something has some characteristic it must be (or alternatively, cannot be) some particular thing?
Correct, that's exactly why "encounterability" is insufficient.
My problem? I'm waiting for you to do what you claim. I've already explained why I believe encounterability is insufficient. Now I'm waiting for you to attempt to demonstrate that it is sufficient.
And please identify something that exists that is not in some way encounterable.
I don't think I need to come up with these things to show the fault in your principle, I just need to demonstrate the possibility of these things. As I've explained, non-existent things are encountered through hallucinations and such. And, it is highly probable, due to the deficiencies and physical limitations of the human being, that there are existents which are not encounterable.
How will you demonstrate that all existents are encounterable, and all encounterable things are existents?
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Metaphysician UndercoverNovember 15, 2019 at 13:03#3527290 likes
Did you read the OP? Do you remember the category of ideas/mental constructs? A hallucination exists as an idea/mental construct, subspecies hallucination. You appear to be confused about all this.
That's one of the things I'm objecting to. By common usage of the word "exists", things created by the imagination, including ideas and mental constructs, do not exist. We say that they do not exist, because we cannot give them a spatial location. That's why I suggested location as a condition of "existence". The things within an imaginary scene, are clearly encountered, but they do not exist, and we do not call them existents.
Yes I am confused by all this. Your use of "exist" in a way which is inconsistent with common usage has left me confused. I do not know your intentions and can only assume that, as in other cases like this which I have encountered, your goal is to deceive by equivocation. Your misguided direction has left me incapable of following where you intend to be going with this unsupported principle. I see no reason for you to place non-existent things, such as things encountered in the imagination, into the category of "existents", and this move confuses me.
Not really. It would be my problem if I were to follow your misguided direction. But I choose not to follow you down this confusion filled pathway, so it remains your problem not mine.
If you wish to talk about unencounterable existents, go ahead, but I have to wonder just how you're going to go about that.
I've been talking about unencounterable existents for quite a few posts. Now I've succeeded in getting you to talk about them as well. What's the problem? I've explained that all I have to do is demonstrate that such a thing is logically possible and it makes sense to talk about them. What doesn't make sense is to exclude this possibility as "impossible" just because it is, by definition, beyond your capacity to encounter it.
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It can’t. That’s the same as saying how can it not ever be. That’s not the same as how can it always not be. Technically, “ever” is not a proper classification of time for particulars, of which there are only three: a singular instance of time, a succession of times or a permanence in all time. The first is all that is absolutely required of any necessary existence. No time, of course, is incomprehensible.
——————-
If its negation is impossible." Is this propositional negation? Or is it an existential impossibility to be?
I’m going with both. It is obviously a logical truism, and because of that, if the existence of a thing is necessary, say, because it is logically a cause of something else, but it it is thought to not exist anyway, or its existence is denied by some other means, a categorical error is committed, insofar as a logical truism is falsified, which is a self-contradiction.
——————
I guess two confuses you, and three - don't forget four and the rest of them. And love justice and The American Way. Superman, unicorns, dragons, all of the English and French kings - they do not exist, do they. These have no existence? Maybe we should pause here: answer: do these exist, yes or no?
No they do not exist. In the common usage of the word "exist", which I am familiar with, fictional things do not exist. Nor do love, justice, and other ideas exist. They are conceptual only, and therefore not existing things. Notice that love and justice refer to relations between things, while concepts and imaginary fictions are ways of thinking. None of these are themselves, things, and that's why we cannot class them as existents.
Is the problem "encounterable"? Let's consider that no one "encounters" anything at all, except mediately through perception and idea. And by that standard, unicorns and their like are more purely existent than any of the furniture of the "real" world, being pure idea undiluted by perception. You really are not making sense. Why is that?
It's you who's really not making any sense here. I simply rejected "encounterability" as the defining feature of existent, for very good reason which I explained. I don't know what you're trying to say.
If the existence that is necessary is particular to an instance of time is also saying that there are other instances when it's not, then it would seem to be contingent on the time
Short version.....
That which exists being contingent on time implies everything which exists is contingent on time. If everything is contingent on something, we say that something is the condition for all those things contingent on it. It is accordingly we say time is the condition of all that exists. All this does is relieve us of the need of a quantity of time for the existence of things in general, while requiring a certain time for things in their relations to other things.
Long version.....
Trouble is, the condition for a thing doesn’t tell us what we want to know, which is what the thing is. If the time is the condition that makes everything possible, all we need are the conditions that make everything describable. The only way for us to describe things is by means of the concepts that we can logically apply to them, and because we are not describing time, we don’t need to think of time as a concept.
But the things we wish to know about must first be determined as describable, in order to be certain any of our concepts can ever be applicable to them, which effectively grants the possibility of knowing what they are. It would be a major evolutionary disadvantage for us to have a describing system that cannot tell itself the thing attempted to be described never was describable in the first place. Enter the categories, those pure concepts arising spontaneously from the system itself, which serve as the criteria against which all the things we wish to know about, become describable. We find, in order to be described, a thing must exist, so existence is a category; a thing must be real, so quality is a category; a thing must consist of something, so quantity is a category, and finally, a thing must be either a cause or an effect, so relation is a category. To name four of the twelve.
From here it is a short hop to understanding why we don’t need the categories for what we think, because the thought is the description and is infallible, and why time is not a category because it doesn’t set the ground for describing by means of concepts. In addition, time is divisible but the categories are not, insofar as different quantities can be attributed to time, but i.e., necessity, cannot be quantified at all, which is sufficient in itself for claiming conditions for everything and the conditions for describing everything must be irreducibly distinct from each other.
——————-
Would you agree (with me) that this is grounded in contingency? Or at least there's some work to be done to either refine or qualify "necessary existence"?
Absolutely. There is nothing whatsoever that isn’t contingent, because the totality of our knowledge for everything is impossible. But, like I say, the human system is inherently circular, as what I just said, proves. I contradicted myself by stating a logical truth. That everything is contingent is necessarily true is self-contradictory.
(Oooooo....transcendental illusion!!! Now there’s a rabbit hole for ya!! (Grin))
Hey....we do the best we can, right?
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Of necessarily and ordinarily existing things several question arise. (...) Are they both sub-species of existing things? Is one included in the other? Or is necessary existence a separate genus?
I don’t know how we’d be able to tell the difference between an ordinarily existing thing and a necessarily existing thing. But then, we don’t say...that which exists, exists ordinarily. So maybe there is a difference, or, existing ordinarily doesn’t make any sense to begin with. Dunno.
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In different words, if existing, then existing necessarily.
That’s the entire logical argument in a nutshell. It makes no difference what the things are, but only if there are any, and how it is that the logical argument is true.
——————
That is, is the world altogether accessible to reason? I'm obliged to think it must be.
Science says it is. Or it used to, until it was proved there are things we are just not equipped to know. I’ll go with....of the sum of reality empirically accessible to us, it is equally accessible to our reason. I’m a YankeeVirgoBabyboomer, so not known for my optimism.
——————
I'm looking to ordinary language for guidance, and it strikes me that whatever the reality is, either it yield to language, or language to it, and with respect to reality and the real, the reality is prior.
Reality is prior, and language yields to it, or, which is the same thing, language yields to what we think reality is. The vast majority of human thought is by means of image, as should be quite obvious, language having no occassion but for subjective introspection and objective communication.
Metaphysician UndercoverNovember 17, 2019 at 14:35#3534070 likes
I've read the op, but as I've said, I don't agree with your principles of categorization. I think your expressed principles display a lack of understanding of what it means to exist. That's why I suggested that we ought to clear up the issue of what it means to exist before we attempt any such categorization.
But this is all useless. Clearly you are unable to take part in the general point of the thread, and you have nothing to offer but that "which I am familiar with."
How do you suppose that I could offer you something other than what I am familiar with?
I haven't yet been able to find "the general point of the thread". It appears like your intent is to define "exist" in some odd sort of way, and I can't understand why. Despite the fact that I've made some suggestions to help you to express yourself, you haven't been able to clarify at all, what you're trying to do. So I remain lost and confused. Now your argument has digressed to ad hominem premises drawn from my confused state. If you are completely disinterested in what I am familiar with, and your intent appears misleading to me, how can we find common ground?
No, you have clearly expressed that you are not looking to ordinary language for guidance. Your intent appears to be to offer guidance through an abnormal use of language, and this I class as misleading.
Comments (100)
[quote=Wikipedia]Argumentum ad lapidem (English: "appeal to the stone") is a logical fallacy that consists in dismissing a statement as absurd, invalid, or incorrect, without giving proof of its absurdity.
Ad lapidem statements are fallacious because they fail to address the merits of the claim in dispute. The same applies to proof by assertion, where an unproved or disproved claim is asserted as true on no ground other than that of its truth having been asserted.
The name of this fallacy is derived from a famous incident in which Dr. Samuel Johnson claimed to disprove Bishop Berkeley's immaterialist philosophy (that there are no material objects, only minds and ideas in those minds) by kicking a large stone and asserting, "I refute it thus." This action, which is said to fail to prove the existence of the stone outside the ideas formed by perception, is said to fail to contradict Berkeley's argument, and has been seen as merely dismissing it.[/quote]
To add to which, the basic nature of ‘material things’, if that is presumed to be atomic matter, is itself unresolved at this point in history. The apparent solidity of the atom has dissolved into uncertainty and probability; Russell even observes this in his concluding chapter of HWP. Meanwhile the irreducible nature of mind has been restored to philosophy, in movements such as semiotics, quantum baysianism, and many other forms.
So I’m afraid your ‘argument ad lapidiem’ is not going to succeed.
It is exactly the point of what I wrote. Do you understand why Samuel Johnson said that of George Berkeley's philosophy, and why his response is regarded as fallacious?
Or is that not the sort of thing you have in mind?
I'll leave it to someone else to list each grain of sand.
Just for fun, trying to think of some"thing" that falls outside these two categories...
What about the relationships between "things"? They can be physical or abstract, but either way, seem to be a different type of "thing"? Or maybe not...I am not entirely convincing myself either way, haha.
thats fair. Pencils do in fact exist.
No, I don't think that's it.
Your OP starts with:
Quoting tim wood
which is basically the claim that 'the existence of material objects is indubitable'. But it was just this claim which Berkeley calls into dispute. He does this by claiming that what we think to be stones and other external objects are really ideas and sensations in our own minds. He precisely denies that there are material substances at all.
Samuel Johnson claims to have refuted this by simply kicking against a large rock, exclaiming 'I refute it thus!' But his 'refutation' is said to be fallacious, insofar as it simply assumes that Berkeley's claim is wrong or nonsensical, without offering any real rebuttal of it. (Hence the designation of it as 'argumentum ad lapidiem', the argument from the stone.)
In a more general sense, you're simply assuming a position of common-sense realism, as if that is the sine qua non of philosophy, proper; and then venturing that anything we might care to claim exists, must meet the criterion of being either a material existent, or an idea in the mind.
What you don't see, is the sense in which this realist paradigm is itself a kind of construction, in the sense understood by critical philosophy (e.g. Schopenhauer's 'vorstellung', meaning 'representation' or 'idea'.) Critical philosophy does dare to call into question the existence of what we would normally assume to be real - that is its understanding of what philosophy does. Whereas, you're starting from a pre-critical, or non-critical, stance of naive realism, and challenging others to show what's wrong with it (which I am endeavouring to do).
Quoting tim wood
I think the point here, is that natural numbers are the same for all who can count. So in that sense, they're not 'ideas' in the sense of being 'internal to the mind'; they're not dependent on my mind or yours. But at the same time, they are 'intelligible objects', in other words, any system of numbers or symbols we use, must have a constant referent, otherwise our maths will be wrong. And maths is predictive of reality, so it extends beyond what is simply in my mind or yours, but at the same time, the kind of reality it has is purely intelligible, i.e. can only be grasped by a rational mind.
So what you're really trying to wrestle with in this OP, is the whole question of ontology - of what is the nature of existing things. But you're starting from the unquestioning assumption that what we can sense to be real, is the sine qua non of what exists; whereas, once we begin to acknowledge the reality of such mental objects as numbers and logical laws, then it becomes clear that what we can encounter as an external object might only be one aspect of reality as such, and may not even comprise its fundamental constituents.
So you could just make the top-level class "stuff" and leave it at that.
Or in other words, classes/kinds/types are simply a matter of how we want to conceptualize things, how we want to divide them up.
Block A is next to block B.
Rope C connects blocks A & B.
Force X effects object Y
Even if it takes language to express the relationship, it does physically exist (right?)...Am I making any sense?
Of course it was. I have a BA including two years of undergraduate philosophy, I understand it perfectly clearly, thank you. It is the independent existence of the objects of perception which is precisely what is called into question by Berkeley. What you say is 'the underlying reality' is simply your realist assumption speaking - you haven't gotten to the point of what exactly is at issue, which is precisely the sense in which they have, or do not have, any underlying reality. And Berkeley claims they don't. If you don't find that shocking, or if you think that Berkeley is just playing with words, then you're not getting it.
Quoting tim wood
Clearly that is what you think, but it is not informed by philosophical analysis.
Don't we need a definition of what it means to "exist" before we can proceed with an inquiry like this? The difficult thing is to get a definition which we can all agree on. If you define "exist" as "being material" then you'll be accused of being a materialist begging the question. So I propose something like "being present' as defining what it means to exist.
real and fictional
maybe existentially mind-independent and mind-dependent (qualia?)
spatial (left to right, top to bottom, front to back) and process (starts and ends, comes and goes)
interactees and interaction (and transformation)
self (indexicals) and other
particulars (examples) and generals (abstractions)
maps and territories (models and evidence)
... or some such like.
So do you accept his ‘immaterialist’ account? Because it certainly seems hard to reconcile with your 1(a).
Hang on, weren't you quite vociferously arguing against model dependant realism only a few days ago, the idea that people don't objectively exist being nonsense? Now you're saying the opposite, that grouping some particular set of entities into a containing class is just a matter of how we conceptualise things. If grouping all lumps of quartz just because they the property {being a certain size range} and calling them 'sand' is just our conceptualising, then why is grouping certain collections of cells together just because they have they have the property {some specific type of connectivity} and calling them a 'person' somehow not just our conceptualising?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
A stipulative one, no?
[quote=tim wood]No Voodoo, no woowoo.[/quote]
:up:
Quoting Wayfarer
Well, rebutted thus (e.g.) ...
"The world is the totality of facts, not of things." ~TLP
Quoting tim wood
"Certum est, quia impossibile" ~Tertullian :chin:
Consider:
1. impossible worlds: ways the world necessarily could not have been or cannot be described, mapped or modeled; what makes these ways 'impossible' is they contain contradictions or things/objects with inconsistent predicates (i.e. members of the empty set).
2. possible worlds: ways the world possibly could have been or can be described, mapped or modeled; what makes these ways 'possible' is they do not contain contradictions or things/objects with inconsistent predicates.
3. e.g. 'the world is not the world' (i.e. nothingness, absolute absence / nonexistence) is an impossible world, or a way the world necessarily could not have been ...
4. if (1), then (3); and if (3) then (2); therefore (2). if impossible worlds do not exist, then 'the world is not the world' does not exist; and if 'the world is not the world' does not exist, then possible worlds exist; therefore possible worlds necessarily exist.
5. if (2), and if (4), then the world necessarily exists; therefore the set of non-necessary facts = the actual world (i.e. transfinite list - unbounded phase-space - of "things/classes that ... exist").
Of course stones exist, but defining 'what it means to exist' in such terms is another matter altogether.
I don't think 'material' is a meaningful term. It changes over time and includes things that have qualities and lack qualities people a couple of hundred years ago would have considered material. It is an expanding set with shifting criteria. I think Terrapin's mock or perhaps serious suggestion 'stuff' works much better, since that rules out nothing and has no metaphysical baggage - that is obvious, at least.
My list
1) Things/processes we consider real - some of which we are likely incorrect about - some things simply don't exist, others did once, but no longer do.
2) Things/processes we consider possible and in fact are real. Some stuff that is possible might not exist yet and so it is non-existent, unless time is not what some of think it is.
3) Things/processes we consider not real/impossible - but which in fact are real
4) Stuff we haven't imagined that exists.
The problem though is that there is something "real" to these relationships which is not simply made up by a mind. The closeness of the two stones to each other, in relation to other stones is something not created by a mind. We want to say that this relationship exists independently of all minds.
Quoting tim wood
As Berkeley demonstrated, these two categories are reducible to one, being "perceived by a mind". Then we have no principle by which to justify the claim of anything outside of minds.
Quoting tim wood
Here is the heart of the difficulty. You take for granted that "materiality" is obviously demonstrable. But attempting a rigorous definition of "matter" will show that this is not the case. The premise, "if you stub your two on it, then it is material", does not capture "materiality", because there are many things which you wouldn't stub your two on which we would still say are material. Therefore we would need a more adept description of what it means to be material to include these other material things into that category.
So the difficulty is that some things which are material are easily demonstrable as such, when the materiality of rocks and things you might stub your two on, is taken for granted. But the material existence of other things, like fundamental particles for example, cannot be demonstrated in this way. So unless we have a rigorous definition of what it means to be material, this categorization doesn't help us in determining what type of existence things like fundamental particles have.
Quoting tim wood
I don't understand the reason for such an amendment. It's like you're saying that if something has the capacity to exist, can we say it's existing. "Capacity" is just a judgement which we as human beings make. We say that a thing is X, but it has the capacity to be Y. If Y has no presence in space or time, yet we say that there is the capacity for X to be Y, how can we say that Y exists?
This is the problem which "the future" hands us. Y may or may not come to be in the future, when there is the capacity for Y to be. So we cannot say that Y has a presence in time (in some eternalist way) because Y may not ever come to be. It may be prevented from coming to be. And, having never existed in the past, Y has absolutely no spatial presence. Since the capacity for Y might not be actualized, we cannot assign to Y any temporal presence (in the future) either. So despite the fact that there is the capacity for Y, we cannot assign to Y any form of existence. This is why we do not assign "exists" to things like capacities, which are properties only of the mind. There are no principles by which such things can be said to "exist".
I'm just stressing that the categorization for something like this would ultimately be arbitrary. Particulars aren't just ideas, but types/classes are.
Particulars are real. Properties are particulars. So there are real things, and they necessarily have real properties. It's just that those real things are particulars.
Types/classes/kinds are not real (read "not objective"). They're conceptual ways of thinking about particulars. It's an issue of mentally abstracting over a number of particulars to simplify, because that simplification has many different practical benefits (for survival, communication, etc.)
This is why I kept telling you that you're doing the old conflation of concepts and what concepts are about or what they're in response to.
What I'm saying is really simple (at least it seems so to me), but your response suggests that you can't even grasp it.
I'm not having any trouble grasping what you're saying, but your opinion here did not first arise in answer to the question "what do you think", it arose as a critique (and quite a strong one) of alternative positions. It is in that context I'm confused.
As such, what would be required to alleviate my confusion is not simply a clear exposition of what you think, but an explanation of why you feel it is necessary to think that, why the alternatives are untenable.
All you've done here is made a series of bare assertions.
Typically, properties are considered to be examples of universals, not particulars.
No, many philosophers make use of the concept of Tropes, even pre Williams philosophers have Trope-like entities in their ontologies.
Personally, I find metaphysical hairsplitting to be a little tedious. Invariably it seems we are either trying to graft the mental onto the physical or ungraft it. In the end, both are in play, so unless there is some really compelling practical consequence I can live with a little ambiguity.
:up:
Abstract objects are things like numbers and sets. They aren't considered to be mental objects for reasons pointed out by Frege.
I asked Nagase once about the ontology of abstract objects and he wasnt very interested in the question for reasons along the same lines as your view.
Good. But maybe for different reasons. And from a human point of view only.....
The fundamental criterion for the existence of things, is the possibility of its negation. If its negation is impossible, it must exist, even if we have no idea what it is; if its negation is possible, its existence is not given, but is necessarily presupposed as existing, in order to have something to which the negation would apply.
The proof is in the categories.
Have a glance at Frege on Knowing the Third Realm, Tyler Burge. Makes the case for Frege’s Platonism.
Quoting tim wood
Not really, too busy with mundane chores right at the moment. Other than recommending contemplation of the analogy of the divided line.
I enjoyed reading all that. Well written and argued.
Just as a remark, it appears the word “thing” is the most common and general classification of existing objects used in this thread. The term is loosely applied to concrete objects, abstract concepts, numbers, words, feelings and sensations—basically any noun-phrase, whether they are physical or not.
So perhaps “object” would be a more precise term for existing things. “Object” also proves difficult to define but I think has at least these qualities:
The problem with things, as I see it, is that they have much to do with how our minds carve up the world. If you ask most people if the local McDonald's really exists, they'd agree that it does. You can go away, come back, and it's still there. You can kick the building, read the sign, eat the food, and so on. But there is a sense in which this particular collection of matter and activity is only a McDonald's to human beings.
Consider something like a constellation in the night sky, say Orion. Does Orion exist, objectively? I'm not asking if the mythological character exists. I am asking about the constellation. I'd argue that it does not exist apart from the way humans carve up the night sky and draw imaginary connecting lines and add labels and meanings. But the stars making up the constellation are real, aren't they? Actually, I think stars are not objectively real for precisely the same reason. Any particular "thing" in the world is case of us drawing a boundary somewhere in the world and adding a label and a meaning, even of seeing things from a certain "angle".
You might say that there must be something there underpinning what we see in the world. Yes. But it is tricky. Even elementary particles involve human concepts being overlaid on the world, divisions being made, and so on. And there is an awful lot of reification going on in scientific thinking. Just start digging into the idea of virtual particles and you'll see what I mean. The very idea of particles is problematic.
Suppose I pour out a bag of Skittles and a bag of M&Ms on a table. You could come along and look at the mess I've created and carve it up in your mind all sorts of ways. You could draw mental lines around all the yellow things and consider them as one group, or one thing. Or you could see all triangular arrangements of candies, all triads, as each constituting a thing. Or you could say that the set of Skittles is one thing and the M&Ms another, even if they are mixed. But notice that some of your boundaries intersect. And notice that if you consider each combination of three candies to be a thing, every individual candy belongs to many, many triads. But these are collections of things, not things, you might protest! And a nation is not? A beehive is not? A human is not? A fire hydrant is not?
Consider shampoo. Does it exist? Suppose you define shampoo as a mixture of particular chemicals in certain proportions. Is diluted shampoo still shampoo? What if you dilute it a lot? What if you have one molecule on earth, another on another planet, and so on, but you ultimately draw a line that collects 10 fluid ounces of water, sodium laureth sulfate, fragrance, and so on, and all long before the arrival of humans? Is it shampoo?
Does the existence of shampoo depend on hair and certain social practices?
You might say that for a thing to be a thing or for it to exist, it must be physically contiguous, not spread out like that. What about pollution? Romantic couples? Political parties? Biological life itself?
What about sweet food? Does it exist? Without us? Without animals?
Notice that while it might be argued that the matter is really there, that the world is really there, it is clear that the lines we draw in it, dividing this thing from that thing, maybe a pillow from a couch, are not really there in the world. The boundaries are something extra, something not in the world in itself. The same applies to your concept of yourself. You don't exist in the world in itself in the way you think you do.
What about such things as money? Does it exist? Does the economy exist? What about newspaper articles? Insurance policies? College degrees? Speed limits? I think most people would agree that those are socially or mentally constructed. But I would argue that such things as rocks are also constructed by our minds in an important sense. There is no line out there in the world in itself separating this rock from the mountainside, saying that this collection of atoms is this particular thing we call a rock, which is good for throwing at birds, kicking, and so on.
A lot of this is a matter of how we humans are functionally related to our environments. What it is for something to be a chair is that it is something to sit on. Supposing all humans were to suddenly die, are there any chairs in the world? Are there any magazine articles?
The things I am talking about here are all real in an important sense, but also unreal in another important sense, much less real, I think, than most people suppose. The way we carve up and associate things and attach meanings to them is largely transparent to us. We mistake it for how things really are out there in the world beyond us. Mostly what we encounter in the world is how we experience it as modes of access, relating to human purposes. I'd suggest that in large part, what we see is really a projection of possibilities for future action, and all of this is tied up with biological functioning. This is why there can be such things as hiding places and forest paths.
Everything, or every thing, that we experience, is like this, and deeply so, much more deeply than we suppose. That isn't to say that there is nothing out there at all beyond our minds. Not at all. It's just that every way we have of thinking about it is inextricably bound up with our purposes. Some of this is obvious and right on the surface. Some of it recedes into the background and determines how we experience things without ever presenting itself to us consciously. And there are backgrounds behind backgrounds.
I wonder how it all relates to Kant. What about such categories as time and space, the very principles of individuation?
No, I don't agree with "encounterability". First, because it restricts existence to the encountering capacities of the thing doing the encountering. I assume that the thing doing the encountering is supposed to be human. Now "existence" is limited to the encountering capacities of the human being. this appears as a form of Protagorean relativism, "man is the measure of all things". And I think that there may be some existents which the limitations of the physical composition of the human being prevent us from encountering.
Also, on the other side of the coin, human beings sometimes encounter things which are imaginary, like in the case of hallucinations. The person may not be able to distinguish a true encounter from a false encounter, so encounter cannot be used as a principle for judging existence, because it provides no principle to distinguish true encounter from false encounter, which is what we need, to be able to judge whether a thing exists or not. And if we want to restrict "encounterability" to true encounters, we would need some way of determining what makes an encounter true. So we're really not gaining anything with this term. We're back to a sort of Parmenidean position, existence is truth. But what does that mean?
Quoting NOS4A2
I think in mathematics, an "object" may be infinite.
Also, I think I read through most of the posts, but certainly feel free to point me at anything I may have missed.
Quoting tim wood
Not quite what I was going for. Yes, the relationship between the 2 stones is in the observer's mind, but it is also a physical relationship. 2 stones in Florida are closer together than one in Florida and one in Russia. Whether we use human language to describe this or not, it is as true as the rock's physical existence is "true". How about "Earth is in the Milky Way galaxy"? While none of those words necessarily have any meaning, we have assigned them meanings and all together what they express is true, right? But earth being located in the Milky Way does not seem to be a 1. physical thing or 2. JUST an idea/mental construct...?
Quoting tim wood
Wow, the dictionary definitions ARE rather inadequate aren't they?!? The physics definition from a textbook is more what I was thinking, something like: a force is any interaction that, when unopposed, will change the motion of an object
I was thinking that besides the 4 fundamental forces we would be able to point to some physical object as the origin of "force"...but I guess whatever its origin, force could still be something different than the 2 classifications of "things" you gave. interesting.
I'm not sure that insisting on such a definition is fruitful (or feasible).
If you insist on defining the term "exist" by other terms, then you've just taken a step towards indefinite regress or you end up with circularities.
I mean, you can't really miss existents, and there's not much of a complement to contrast with.
"Exist" is fairly basic, and categorizing different sorts of "existents" seems more fruitful, like @tim wood has been doing.
For example, I'd say both reality and fictions exist, it's just that fictions aren't real.
Besides, we use such terms, and that use (in whatever context) gives them common meaning.
Maybe this is a bit better, or at least closer to what I was on about ...
Quoting tim wood
What I was thinking at the time was just the partitions rendered by (ontological) self-identity / individuation versus whatever else (other).
But maybe that's not so relevant here. Nevermind, "these are not the droids you're looking for".
I would not use the word infinity, but I can certainly agree with uncountable. I don't see this as a problem.
Quoting tim wood
Well the existence of these relationships is no more dependent on mind than the existence of the objects...right? You conceded the physical objective existence of the objects early in the OP (I thought?). If the objects exist, the relationships equally must exist. Are you suggesting that everything that exists, exists entirely independently from everything else until a mind suggests otherwise? I didn't have you pegged as a religious fellow (notice any "evolution" of the universe prior to life would have only occurred because of physical relationships - along with wherever we decide "force" fits into this whole situation).
When we say "Earth is in the Milky Way galaxy", if we concede the physical existence of some thing we call "earth" and some thing we call a "galaxy" that we have further labeled the "Milky Way", then that statement is 100% true even with no mind right? Are you trying to say all these things exist, but the relationships do not? Earth is not in the Milky way? Why not? What makes that a more subjective statement than "earth exists"?
Quoting tim wood
Dang, I suck at this stuff. That was not my intention at all. Relationships are just an addendum to existence. Once existence is established within a contained environment (the universe), then relationships are a tangible aspect of that existence.
Quoting tim wood
So this entire post is describing why I don't think relationships fit into the mental construct arena. They are mental in that we use words to describe them, but that equally applies to any physical object. They are not mental because they exist regardless of any mind. But surely the relationships are not physical things themselves. If the physical objects disappear we are left with nothing, not relationships.
So, for me, relationships do not fit into either category. We could call it a mix of the two if we are very opposed to a 3rd category, but I would struggle to accept just one.
Excellent post. The tricky part is
Quoting petrichor
What can this world-beyond-all-carving be if not a kind of internal suspicion within our systematic carving-up of the world? The map is not the territory could be interpreted to mean only that we expect our map to change. Our map appears on itself as a changeable entity? And the world-beyond-the-map is the world-to-come is our map's knowledge of its own fragility?
Despite your assertion ("the truth of the matter is..."), that's not true at all. "Encounter" necessarily implies something encountered and something doing the encountering. It's a two part experience, a "meeting". So "encounterability" (my spell check thinks that's a nonsense word), depends as much on the capacities of the thing encountering as it depends on the thing being encountered. Consider for example, the term "edible".
Quoting tim wood
I agree with this point, but that's exactly why "encounterability" will not suffice. It implies the necessity of assuming something which will act as the encounterer. Therefore "existence" will be defined in relation to that encounterer, "existence for" the encounterer. Why must "existence" be a relative term? You are insisting that in order to "exist", the existent must exist relative to something else, the thing which could encounter it.
Here's a suggestion for you categorization schema, absolute existents, and relative existents. The former are not related to encounters, the latter are.
Quoting jorndoe
Yes you can miss existents, and that's the point of one of my objections. Fundamental particles are supposed to be existents, and I don't encounter them ever. There may also be all sorts of other existents which human beings haven't encountered, and may not even be encounterable to us. It is a mistake to define "existents", as things which are evident to me, or even to us.
Quoting jorndoe
The process tim wood and the others are engaged in is absolutely fruitless, for the very reason that they express no idea of what it means to exist, and so have no principles for categorization. For example, they assume that a "force" exists. But "force" just represents a system we use to quantify an interaction between existent things.
Well done. A tip of the pointy hat.
Quoting petrichor
Almost everything humans talk about now can relate to what Kant has already said. Except of course, those particular things he and no one else at the time knew were even possible. Not so much space travel, for instance, but how to do space travel without killing the travelers.
Now I never knew the guy, but I’m willing to bet he would have looked at you funny for thinking space and time are categories. The very principles of empirical individuation, sure, but categories? Yeah, no.......
Minor point, and takes very little away from the well done.
Primordial meaning fundamental......agreed.
Quoting tim wood
If some things exist necessarily, they do not so spring, agreed, but it does not follow that they always existed. To say they always existed mandates the timeframe of permanence, which cannot be given from existence alone. A thing that exists necessarily may exist only temporarily.
——————-
Quoting tim wood
The whole paragraph is very good, but this is the key. Whether we talk about an object that does exist, or merely think an object that might exist, “existence” the primordial conception, must already abide, otherwise “to exist” has no meaning, so our apprehension of it is not really necessary. Still, it doesn’t have to be inapprenhensible; we could just let it stand as a condition, in accordance with the way we think of anything at all.
Good post.
I'm not sure if that quality can apply to existing things, for infinite object would have no beginning or end and would take up the entirety of space and time.
Do you mean this in the same way that everything humans talk about now can relate to what Hegel, Nietzsche, Plato and Descartes said, that current knowledge sits on the foundation of previous thought? Or are you claiming that philosophy hasn't progressed much beyond Kant?
Mostly the first, in varying degrees. Progress, doncha know.
As far as I’m concerned, to wit: mere opinion, Kant was the paradigm shifter in epistemological philosophy, of which there has been no other since. But then, I’m not as acquainted with the moderns as I am with the Enlightenment, so......
Nevertheless, it’s pretty obvious what anybody said within this paradigm either supported or rejected Kant, until 20th Century theoretical physics cast a new light on the meaning of knowledge itself, re: Einstein on the con*, Schrödinger on the sorta-pro**, Gödel on the super-pro***.
*Einsteins, 1921 “Geometry and Experience”;
**Schrodinger, 1944, “What Is Life”
***Gödel, 1961, “The modern development of the foundations of mathematics in the light of philosophy”
In this sense, enactivist psychology, having begun to assimilate ideas from Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, is anticipating where physics will go next.
Interesting. Thanks for the context.
Of course you will miss some, most actually, but not all.
You can't miss examples thereof.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So, that's moving into exactly what various things are, not merely that they are.
Different inquiries. Merely "exist" is the latter.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Right, we don't just define the term "exist" by other terms (indefinite regress / circularity).
Whatever exists altogether has no complement anyway.
So, how's this for a provisional description then? Existence has no complement, and whatever exists is part thereof.
I do agree that there was a paradigm shift for some created by not just Husserl - I’d argue that Nietzsche was an extremely fertile ground from which many ‘opposing’ philosophical and political views use as a prop.
That said Kant’s contribution was, and still is, monumental. I’d also say that many modern physicists are pretty much taken up the baton of ‘philosophy’ and doing more for philosophical ‘progress’ in many ways that many ‘philosophers’ are. I’m still astounded by how everyone harps on about Einstein as the last genius without bothering to mention the powerhouse that was/is Feynman.
As far as I know everyone learns about Einstein at an early age but unless you actually venture specifically into physics you don’t hear about Feyman - very sad :(
If "encounterability" is a noun, then it is used to refer to a thing, or class of things. So how do you propose to use this word such that it describes what all existent things have in common, existence?
Agreed.
[quote=Mww]If its negation is impossible, it must exist, ...[/quote]
Yes abstractions; not states of affairs.
[quote=Mww]if its negation is possible, its existence is not given, ...[/quote]
... then it is contingent, that is, it can always change (even if it hasn't yet). 'Necessary - impossible to negate - facts' are subsistent constructs like round squares, fish riding unicycles, ... paradoxical figures in Escher's gallery & inconsistent objects in Meinong's Jungle because facts are causally relational, thereby change with respect to other facts changing - in flux - anywhere anywhen, and so they're 'necessarily non-necessary'. Unless there aren't any changeable, or contingent, facts at all; but that is not the case. What's impossible is a fact - node of causal relations - which is 'impossible to negate', or change; factual existence presupposes contingency - possibility of negation - insofar as facts are - at least one fact is - causally relational, unlike abstract subsistents which are not causally relational. I can easily list necessary abstractions (e.g. numbers, equations, classes / categories) but not a single 'necessary fact' - not even Witty's "world is the totality of facts" because it's an abstraction, not a fact, like "set of all sets".
Your thoughts?
Good point!
Quoting Eee
Yes, what you bring to mind here for me is that we, at the level of our human apprehension of things at least, are stuck with a map. We'll never know the territory directly. Our map can change to a degree, and it will. But it can never be altogether dissolved while leaving us intact. Its fragility is ours. But ultimately, what is is what is being humanity, and in its simple being-in-itself, it is beyond maps. And that level of things is unavoidably present even for us, insofar as we are inseparable from reality. While we stand here looking at our map, with its boundaries and labels, the situation of there being people looking at maps itself is the territory! But how to look at that without mobilizing a map of it?
I suppose that at the level of being, we are always directly in contact with, or rather are, the territory, while at the level of cognizing, we are always looking at a map. This could be tied to Zen meditation, where the injunction often amounts to something like, "Just be!" The comedy here is that you can't not do that! So it is silly to command it! But it seems to try to bring attention to the territory. Stop thinking! Things seen through the mind are at a remove and are representations. But to see the immediate situation of there being a mind making its representations is another matter! Watching through the mind and watching the mind are different! But one must be careful not to watch the mind through the mind!
Perhaps the way to avoid that is to just be! This seems to amount to sort of stepping back, returning to yourself, as if we are normally pressing out of ourselves and out of the world in order to turn around and look at ourselves, in which case, we encounter a surface through a membrane and are unable to directly touch what is being regarded. But if we only relax back into ourselves, we find the world in-itself. We never lost it! Internally, in our being, the territory is always already present. Externally, in our grasping, we lose it.
First: That was hard to read.
Second: Cool. Somebody asked for my thoughts.
Finally......pretty good.
To respond:
.......All facts are contingent on the condition of the knowledge that generates them.
.......I would ask how “states of affairs” are not themselves abstractions, thus equally subject to necessary existence because their negation is impossible.
All in all.....a worth exercise.
Yes, because this 'us' is itself just a token on the map. 'Language speaks man.' Or the subject is a function of language. But what is language? It's a thing that's never done naming itself. What I mean by language is beyond the individual in the simple sense that we are here together part of its talking about itself. The same system of symbols has a distributed life in millions of brains. The fact that you said 'leaving us intact' is important here.
But how can you expect to answer "what exists?" if you do not know what it means to exist? Knowing what it means to exist gives you the criteria required to accurately answer the question of does this or does this not exist.
Quoting tim wood
"A criterion" doesn't give you the necessary conditions to make the affirmation. Being cold is "a criterion" of snow, but it doesn't mean that if it's cold, it's snow. Therefore there is no reason to believe that if it's encounterable it has existence, even if encounterability is a criterion of existence.
Furthermore, as I explained, it is quite possible that there are existing things which are unencounterable to us, as human beings. Therefore encounterability is unacceptable even as a simple criterion of existence. Perhaps the encounterable are one type of existent.
Quoting tim wood
Yes that's exactly my point, no reasonable discussion about existents qua existents can happen without defining what "existent" is. There's no point to defining, or categorizing subgroups of existents without first defining the principal category, because without such a definition, the things you'll be putting into the subgroups might not even belong in the principal group to begin with.
Say you bought some beefsteaks and some romas. How would you know that what you bought are tomatoes if you don't even know what a tomato is? Likewise, how would you know that the thing you encountered was an existent if you do not even know what an existent is?
It's one thing to assert "I know..", but I'm asking how do you know that. That's the point. if you are creating subclasses of existents, and placing things into these categories, and you do not know what an existent is, then how do you know whether or not your proposed subclasses even contain existents?
You want to answer "how" with 'I know these things are existents because I've encountered them', but I've already explained why "encounterability" is insufficient.
Quoting tim wood
Correct, that's exactly why "encounterability" is insufficient.
Quoting tim wood
My problem? I'm waiting for you to do what you claim. I've already explained why I believe encounterability is insufficient. Now I'm waiting for you to attempt to demonstrate that it is sufficient.
Quoting tim wood
I don't think I need to come up with these things to show the fault in your principle, I just need to demonstrate the possibility of these things. As I've explained, non-existent things are encountered through hallucinations and such. And, it is highly probable, due to the deficiencies and physical limitations of the human being, that there are existents which are not encounterable.
How will you demonstrate that all existents are encounterable, and all encounterable things are existents?
Uh huh, tell me another. A big, bright and bold, vicious circle justifies nothing.
Quoting tim wood
That's one of the things I'm objecting to. By common usage of the word "exists", things created by the imagination, including ideas and mental constructs, do not exist. We say that they do not exist, because we cannot give them a spatial location. That's why I suggested location as a condition of "existence". The things within an imaginary scene, are clearly encountered, but they do not exist, and we do not call them existents.
Yes I am confused by all this. Your use of "exist" in a way which is inconsistent with common usage has left me confused. I do not know your intentions and can only assume that, as in other cases like this which I have encountered, your goal is to deceive by equivocation. Your misguided direction has left me incapable of following where you intend to be going with this unsupported principle. I see no reason for you to place non-existent things, such as things encountered in the imagination, into the category of "existents", and this move confuses me.
Quoting tim wood
Not really. It would be my problem if I were to follow your misguided direction. But I choose not to follow you down this confusion filled pathway, so it remains your problem not mine.
Quoting tim wood
I've been talking about unencounterable existents for quite a few posts. Now I've succeeded in getting you to talk about them as well. What's the problem? I've explained that all I have to do is demonstrate that such a thing is logically possible and it makes sense to talk about them. What doesn't make sense is to exclude this possibility as "impossible" just because it is, by definition, beyond your capacity to encounter it.
Yes.
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Quoting tim wood
Yes again. Necessity always makes contingency logically impossible.
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Quoting tim wood
It can’t. That’s the same as saying how can it not ever be. That’s not the same as how can it always not be. Technically, “ever” is not a proper classification of time for particulars, of which there are only three: a singular instance of time, a succession of times or a permanence in all time. The first is all that is absolutely required of any necessary existence. No time, of course, is incomprehensible.
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Quoting tim wood
I’m going with both. It is obviously a logical truism, and because of that, if the existence of a thing is necessary, say, because it is logically a cause of something else, but it it is thought to not exist anyway, or its existence is denied by some other means, a categorical error is committed, insofar as a logical truism is falsified, which is a self-contradiction.
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Quoting tim wood
There is one and only one: the thinking subject. If there isn’t one, none of this could be happening, but it is, so.........
No they do not exist. In the common usage of the word "exist", which I am familiar with, fictional things do not exist. Nor do love, justice, and other ideas exist. They are conceptual only, and therefore not existing things. Notice that love and justice refer to relations between things, while concepts and imaginary fictions are ways of thinking. None of these are themselves, things, and that's why we cannot class them as existents.
Quoting tim wood
It's you who's really not making any sense here. I simply rejected "encounterability" as the defining feature of existent, for very good reason which I explained. I don't know what you're trying to say.
Short version.....
That which exists being contingent on time implies everything which exists is contingent on time. If everything is contingent on something, we say that something is the condition for all those things contingent on it. It is accordingly we say time is the condition of all that exists. All this does is relieve us of the need of a quantity of time for the existence of things in general, while requiring a certain time for things in their relations to other things.
Long version.....
Trouble is, the condition for a thing doesn’t tell us what we want to know, which is what the thing is. If the time is the condition that makes everything possible, all we need are the conditions that make everything describable. The only way for us to describe things is by means of the concepts that we can logically apply to them, and because we are not describing time, we don’t need to think of time as a concept.
But the things we wish to know about must first be determined as describable, in order to be certain any of our concepts can ever be applicable to them, which effectively grants the possibility of knowing what they are. It would be a major evolutionary disadvantage for us to have a describing system that cannot tell itself the thing attempted to be described never was describable in the first place. Enter the categories, those pure concepts arising spontaneously from the system itself, which serve as the criteria against which all the things we wish to know about, become describable. We find, in order to be described, a thing must exist, so existence is a category; a thing must be real, so quality is a category; a thing must consist of something, so quantity is a category, and finally, a thing must be either a cause or an effect, so relation is a category. To name four of the twelve.
From here it is a short hop to understanding why we don’t need the categories for what we think, because the thought is the description and is infallible, and why time is not a category because it doesn’t set the ground for describing by means of concepts. In addition, time is divisible but the categories are not, insofar as different quantities can be attributed to time, but i.e., necessity, cannot be quantified at all, which is sufficient in itself for claiming conditions for everything and the conditions for describing everything must be irreducibly distinct from each other.
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Quoting tim wood
Absolutely. There is nothing whatsoever that isn’t contingent, because the totality of our knowledge for everything is impossible. But, like I say, the human system is inherently circular, as what I just said, proves. I contradicted myself by stating a logical truth. That everything is contingent is necessarily true is self-contradictory.
(Oooooo....transcendental illusion!!! Now there’s a rabbit hole for ya!! (Grin))
Hey....we do the best we can, right?
I don’t know how we’d be able to tell the difference between an ordinarily existing thing and a necessarily existing thing. But then, we don’t say...that which exists, exists ordinarily. So maybe there is a difference, or, existing ordinarily doesn’t make any sense to begin with. Dunno.
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Quoting tim wood
That’s the entire logical argument in a nutshell. It makes no difference what the things are, but only if there are any, and how it is that the logical argument is true.
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Quoting tim wood
Science says it is. Or it used to, until it was proved there are things we are just not equipped to know. I’ll go with....of the sum of reality empirically accessible to us, it is equally accessible to our reason. I’m a YankeeVirgoBabyboomer, so not known for my optimism.
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Addendum:
Quoting tim wood
Reality is prior, and language yields to it, or, which is the same thing, language yields to what we think reality is. The vast majority of human thought is by means of image, as should be quite obvious, language having no occassion but for subjective introspection and objective communication.
I've read the op, but as I've said, I don't agree with your principles of categorization. I think your expressed principles display a lack of understanding of what it means to exist. That's why I suggested that we ought to clear up the issue of what it means to exist before we attempt any such categorization.
Quoting tim wood
How do you suppose that I could offer you something other than what I am familiar with?
I haven't yet been able to find "the general point of the thread". It appears like your intent is to define "exist" in some odd sort of way, and I can't understand why. Despite the fact that I've made some suggestions to help you to express yourself, you haven't been able to clarify at all, what you're trying to do. So I remain lost and confused. Now your argument has digressed to ad hominem premises drawn from my confused state. If you are completely disinterested in what I am familiar with, and your intent appears misleading to me, how can we find common ground?
Quoting tim wood
No, you have clearly expressed that you are not looking to ordinary language for guidance. Your intent appears to be to offer guidance through an abnormal use of language, and this I class as misleading.