An Argument Against Realism
P1) The realist argues that “the being of X is independent of its being known.”
P2) In order to know whether or not "the being of X is independent of its being known," one must “know X when X is not being known.”
P3) In order to compare “the being of X as known” to “the being of X when it is not being known,” one must “know X” and “know X when it is not being known.”
P4) One cannot “know X when it is not being known” without performing a contradiction.
C) Therefore, the realist position is untenable.
How can the realist make a judgement about "the being of X when it is not being known" without comparing "the being of X when X is being known" to "the being of X when it is not being known?" In order to compare"the being of X when it is being known" to "the being of X when it is not being known," the realist must "know X when it is being known" and "know X when it is not being known." However, he can only compare things that he knows to other things that he knows. Any inference as to "the being of X when it is not being known" would be based on "the condition of X being known."
The burden of proof lies on the realist to demonstrate that he “knows” whether the being of X is independent (not in terms of relations (i.e. the being of X ceases to partake in the relation of being known to a knower")) of its being known.
In short, the realist must "know X when it is not being known" in order to make a claim about "the being of X when it is not being known." He cannot test his assertion (that X is indifferent to its being known) without performing a contradiction. Therefore, the realist position is groundless. This argument is based on a similar argument belonging to Robin George Collingwood.
P2) In order to know whether or not "the being of X is independent of its being known," one must “know X when X is not being known.”
P3) In order to compare “the being of X as known” to “the being of X when it is not being known,” one must “know X” and “know X when it is not being known.”
P4) One cannot “know X when it is not being known” without performing a contradiction.
C) Therefore, the realist position is untenable.
How can the realist make a judgement about "the being of X when it is not being known" without comparing "the being of X when X is being known" to "the being of X when it is not being known?" In order to compare"the being of X when it is being known" to "the being of X when it is not being known," the realist must "know X when it is being known" and "know X when it is not being known." However, he can only compare things that he knows to other things that he knows. Any inference as to "the being of X when it is not being known" would be based on "the condition of X being known."
The burden of proof lies on the realist to demonstrate that he “knows” whether the being of X is independent (not in terms of relations (i.e. the being of X ceases to partake in the relation of being known to a knower")) of its being known.
In short, the realist must "know X when it is not being known" in order to make a claim about "the being of X when it is not being known." He cannot test his assertion (that X is indifferent to its being known) without performing a contradiction. Therefore, the realist position is groundless. This argument is based on a similar argument belonging to Robin George Collingwood.
Comments (187)
It then becomes a practical question of which assumption is more useful, and I argue that if we cannot know whether or not anything is real, it is more useful to assume that something is real and then try to figure out what it is, than to assume the opposite; because if we assume the opposite then we will inhibit any possibility of ever figuring out what is real, if it should turn out that anything is; and although there might turn out not to be anything real even if we do assume there is, and so we might make no progress at figuring out what it is, we at least have a chance to do so if we try that, and in doing so, tacitly assume that there is something real to be figured out.
An even better example is that the ground continues to hold me up even when I'm not aware of it. I can continue to breathe air, and my heat continues to pump blood, and I only become aware of those things if something causes me to breathe irregularly, such as when encountering smoke, or exerting myself.
The best example is having a body. I'm not aware of most of it most of the time. Yet I keep on having experiences with eyes, ears, legs, arms, a back, etc. So the realist argument can be one of focusing on how all the things connect together such that they cannot cease to be what they are when we don't know, since our experiences continue on as if they were still what we know them to be.
On a cosmological level, take inertia. Inertia is the result of all the mass in the universe resisting your acceleration. So if the rest of the universe didn't exist when the car suddenly stops, then there's no reason for you to lurch forward. Similarly, before the germ theory of disease, there's no reason for people to get sick from viruses and bacteria if those didn't exist.
The notable difference between my argument and Pascal's is that Pascal concludes that therefore you should believe in some specific thing (the Christian God), when the same argument could be used equally well to argue that you should believe in different contrary things (e.g. other gods), whereas my argument only concludes that you should believe something or another is real, without any specificity as to what that is: just run with the assumption that there is some objective reality and then try to sort out the specifics about it, and maybe fail entirely if there actually is none, but also stand a chance of maybe succeeding at that, if such a thing as success at that is possible. I also apply the same argument to investigations of objective morality. And more generally to all practical endeavors in life: assume success is somehow or another possible and then try to figure out how; you might still fail anyway, but if you assume failure is a foregone conclusion and don't even try, you only guarantee it.
P1) The realist argues that “the being of the apple is independent of its being known.”
P2) In order to know whether or not "the being of the apple is independent of its being known," one must “know the apple when the apple is not being known.”
P3) In order to compare “the being of the apple as known” to “the being of the apple when it is not being known,” one must “know the apple” and “know the apple when it is not being known.”
P4) One cannot “know the apple when it is not being known” without performing a contradiction.
C) Therefore, the realist position is untenable.
P1 states a definition, i.e., what realism means, or how a realist uses their words. P2 says that to know whether or not that definition is true would entail knowing that the apple exists at those times that it is not known to exist - a contradiction.
So one counterargument is that a definition operates like an axiom in mathematics. An axiom is not something that is itself proven via a rule or process. Instead you either use it or not for pragmatic reasons.
This seems contentious. It seems to me that the realist claim would turn upon the limits of knowledge as such, and not knowledge about some thing or another (even when construed negatively). That is, I don't need to 'know X when X is not being known'; I simply need to know that knowledge is always finite in some manner.
It's like saying: 'in order to know that I can't see the back of this screen, I must know that I'm not looking at the back of this screen. But I can only know that if I know what it looks like. Therefore, I must be able to see the back of this screen in order to say that I can't see it'. Which is plainly ridiculous of course. The reason, of course, is that I understand not something about the object ('what it looks like'), but something about the nature of sight - it is perspectival. Mutatis mutandis, the same goes for your argument: I don't need to know X when X is not being known, I simply need to 'know' the limits of knowledge itself. Or to put it one last way: it's not 'knowledge about X' that's necessary, it's 'knowledge about (the limits of) knowledge)'.
This realist doesn't.
It's always easiest to argue against another when one misunderstands to begin with.
Wouldn't a realist have to make that argument? A galaxy millions of light years away or an evolutionary ancestor would exist as they are regardless of whether we ever know, if galaxies and ancestor organisms are real.
Otherwise, "realism" dissolves into man is the measure, which would some form of Kantianism or anti-realiism.
The entire point about something being real is that it exists independent of us, whether we know it or not.
Mt. Everest existed in it's entirety prior to it's discovery.
A galaxy millions of light years away would exist regardless of whether or not we know about if there were such a thing that we didn't know about.
What argument needs made here?
That realism requires things existing regardless of whether we know about them, which I understood OP's starting point to be.
"Mt Everest existed in it's entirety prior to it's discovery?
We certainly have had such arguments on the old forum regarding Everest, apples and chairs. They tended to go over a 100 pages.
But yes, for everyday object realists, the mountain existed prior to humanity.
Yup. It seems necessary to have them once again...
I'm a bit puzzled by the second part. If it is the case that Mt. Everest existed in it's entirety prior to it's discovery, then it does not matter what one's philosophical bent may be... Mt. Everest existed in it's entirety regardless of whether or not one believes that.
Agreed, but three possible objections:
1. How do we know that to be the case?
2. What if the concept of things existing independent of us (or perception) was incoherent?
3. What if mountains and everyday objects is just a human (or animal) carving up of the world?
All of these arguments have been made against mountain realism. I'm not saying they necessarily succeed, only that it can be a contentious topic in philosophy.
Regarding 1.
Please set out the referent of "that".
Regarding 2.
Discard such a concept.
Regarding 3.
Carving needs something to be carved.
How do we know "that" numbers exist? Morality, qualia, possible worlds?
Just because you can put a that in front doesn't mean it has a real referent, and we all will take issue with some class of things being considered real.
Whoa...
You asked, "How do we know that to be the case?"
Please set out the referent for the term "that". I'm trying to answer the question. I want to know that I understand what you're talking about. We've not been discussing any of those things you just mentioned. We could later, if it goes there... and it ought!
Oh okay, Cart, horse, idealists being trampled.
Mount Everest is the reference of "that". How do we know that Mt. Everest existed before we knew about it?
Quoting PessimisticIdealism
This seems to me a description of modern or scientific realism, which, arguably, is not a philosophical position at all, but a methodological constraint. In other words, this kind of realism seeks to understand the object of its analysis whilst bracketing out, as far as is possible, subjective factors which is sees as extraneous to the object of analysis. It is typical of post-Copernican science, and indeed is example of the so-called 'Copernican principle', which 'states that humans, on the Earth or in the Solar System, are not privileged observers of the universe.' However what this attitude occludes, is just what the argument throws into relief, namely, that even objective knowledge has a subjective pole or aspect, in that it is a cognitive act by a scientist or number of scientists. I think the reason this is most often overlooked, is because the subjective pole of knowledge is relegated by post-Copernican science to the domain of 'secondary qualities', i.e. derivative of the purported primary qualities.
Quoting Marchesk
'Before' implies duration, duration is predicated on there being time, and time is somehow dependent on the perspective of an observer.
If Mt Everest were endowed with sentience, he/she/it would probably be incapable of cognising h. sapiens, because we're so tiny, and our lives so ephemeral, that they wouldn't even register in his/her/its
consciousness. Glaciers and rivers, maybe, because they stick around long enough to (ahem) make an impression.
And yet we know about deep time, and we can measure how long Everest has been around.
Quoting Wayfarer
Probably, but we also know about picoseconds and nanometers, so it's not impossible for a society of sentient mountains to learn about life.
That doesn't work. Here's the question again...
Substitution leaves us with "How do we know Mt. Everest to be the case?"
That question doesn't make sense to me. Does it to you? Is that what you meant to ask?
No. No. No. No.
Of course. This is where, as I've often noted, Kant's notion of the compatibility of empirical realism and transcendental idealism. In other words, Kant did not deny the empirical reality of time and space (indeed Kant's 'nebular hypothesis' is still part of current science.) But he still maintained that in some fundamental sense, time itself was a 'primary intuition' of the observing intelligence, and denied that it had absolute or objective reality; that science itself is still dealing with the realm of phenomena.
Quoting creativesoul
You panic because your sense of the nature of reality is being called into question. Do not adjust your set, this is a philosophy forum and it's normal programming.
No, but I can substitute real in there: How dow we know Mt. Everest is real?
Cue ordinary language response.
Right, does Kant ever say positively what exists and how it relates to the phenomena? So if time is a mental category, then what does it relate to in the real world?
You notice the hidden assumption in your last question? The 'real world'? We need to see that we have a role in 'creating' that 'real world' - that's what your brain, the most complex known natural phenomena, devotes its energies to doing. And consumes a large amount of oxygen and nutrients to keep it going. Anyway I'm bowing out, I don't want to hijack the thread.
Wait, what? This is going to be the new 100 page idealism/realism death match. It's way too early to bow out.
Quoting Wayfarer
So are you saying Kant didn't think the noumena was real?
Some implies more than one. Somehow implies more than one way for time to be dependent upon an observer.
"No. No. No." applies to one kind of dependency. Care to readjust your set or are you in the mood to talk about something that's not on mine?
Time cannot be existentially dependent upon the perspective of an observer because all perspective is accrued and as such requires time in order to develop.
Check.
Mate.
That's a different question entirely.
Quoting Marchesk
A reductio ad absurdum is not about the person guilty of holding belief that leads to such. Rather, it's about offering strong ground for rejecting such belief(good reason to abandon it).
Quoting Marchesk
Please fill in the value of the term "that". To what are you referring?
It's one a major interpration of Kant, though significantly different than might Wayfarer suggest.
Under this account of Kant, noumena is just an empty notion of our critical metaphysical thought. We posit it to demonstrate the shortcomings accounts of things independent of how they appear and conceptually relate to us.
Kant was responding to accounts speaking of forces of our world, yet which would never appear to us, but would somehow affect us. In Kant's sights are the theists, the mystics, etc., who would try to suppose a transcendent force which explained us, but was inexplicable in our concepts.
In this respect, Kant has no problem with objects existing before or without us, he's only making the point things must be explicable in our concepts. Kant, as an emprical realist, has no problem with My Everest existing at a particular height before any humans measure it.
I don’t think your argument is synonymous with the original argument I present. I’ll put your argument in premise form:
P1) In order to know whether or not I can see the back of this screen, I must know that I'm not looking at the back of this screen.
P2) I can only know whether or not I’m looking at the back of this screen” if I know what the back of the screen looks like.
C) Therefore, I must be able to see the back of this screen in order to say that I can't see it.
I think this can be refuted in a way that my first argument cannot be (Or at least I don't think this particular refutation would apply to the argument I have given. I could very well be wrong; however, the only counterargument I've seen is simply to assign the realist position as a self-evident axiom). Let me know if I have created a straw man out of your argument:
P1) The phone is a three-dimensional object.
P2) The side of a phone that has a screen is the “front.”
P3) If an object has a “front,” it is entailed that the object also has a “back.”
P4) “Front” and “back” are meaningless concepts if they are isolated from one another; this is evidenced by the fact that the terms are correlatives. We also see this with terms like “up” and “down,” “near” and “far,” and “left” and “right.” (The former term is meaningless without reference to the latter term, and the latter term is meaningless without reference to the former term).
P5) If I identify an object as having a “front,” I simultaneously assign a “back” to that object.
P6) I know that I am seeing the “front” of the phone because (i) I have identified the “front” of the phone as being the side of the phone with the screen and (ii) I am currently perceiving a screen, so I must be perceiving the“front” of the phone.”
P7) I know that I am not looking at the“back” of the phone, because I am looking at a screen.
P8) The side of a phone with a screen is the“front” of the phone.
C) Therefore, I know that I am looking at the “front” of the phone and not the “back” of the phone.
Agreed. The relevant issues to my mind would be about what logical consequences follow from it (e.g., is it coherent or does it lead to inconsistency or absurdity?), what it is useful for (e.g., science, everyday communication), and also how alternative definitions fare (e.g., idealism).
I found an interesting statement by Einstein related to this:
Quoting Einstein, 1918
Glad I saw this. Last I looked it read differently.
"Mt. Everest" picks out a particular mountain. That mountain existed in it's entirety prior to being named.
That doesn't really answer @Marchesky's question. How do we know that that mountain existed before we knew about it?
Being the same ship, and even being a ship, depends in part on us; on our perception/conception of the (independent) material world. And that's an antirealist view.
"In order to know whether or not "the being of X is independent of its being known," one must “know X when X is not being known.”
They would instead say something like:
"In order to know whether or not "the being of X is independent of its being known," one must "know the limits and scope of knowledge".
The problem is the assumption that it is something about X that must be known in order to secure its being-independant. But this is not the case. 'What one must know' lies on the side of knowledge, not on the side of the thing.
I still find it strange that people think either this or that philosophical perspective is some in unbreakable unity of truth when it’s little more than a perspective tool. A so-called ‘realist’ must necessarily hold some inkling of opposing perspectives as functional, to some extent, or they wouldn’t lean toward ‘realism’ they’d just simply state their position without the inclination to name it.
Any profession toward ‘-ism’ means you hold the opposite perspective in view as a worthwhile perspective does it not?
I don't think you're defending what the OP is criticizing.
In the general view realism is just saying ‘When I walk out of a room I don’t believe the room ceases to exist, although in my immediate sensible experiencing it does - in some sense of the word - cease to be ‘appreciated’ as concretely there.
The OP had framed some extreme form of realism I doubt many would align to unless they were only using that definition within a specific context.
I think the idea the OP is making is that to believe that something continues to exist when it's not being seen we must have some idea of what it would mean for it to exist when it's not being seen. When we imagine a chair still existing when it's not being seen, what are we imagining? Presumably not nothing. Do we picture a chair in the room (and no person present)? But then that's just a counterfactual (disembodied) experience.
That would be naive realism. The chair exists pretty much as we perceive it when we're not around to perceive it. But that obviously has problems, which were noted a long time ago.
We could instead say the lump of matter we consider a chair continues to exist. That's more defensible. But what makes it a chair? Are chairs real? Not the matter itself but the object we call a chair? That's harder to defend, since chairs are a cultural artifact. If humans didn't exist, there would be no chairs to sit in.
But what about mountains? Here it gets murky, because humans don't make mountains. They're already there. But how do we categorize a mountain, single it out, and measure it? Was Everest the tallest mountain before anyone measured its height? What gives tallest its meaning in this case, since the measurement depends on the criteria for being tallest mountain?
We see this problem with whether Pluto should be considered a planet. Nature doesn't care. But we try to be precise with whatever classification scheme works best for orbiting bodies. But then again that implies there are joints to nature science tries to carve at. And on it goes.
I agree, but where does nature draw the line on what is Mt. Everest and what isn't?
As for the OP, how do we know it existed before we were around? I think there are good scientific realist reasons for saying so, but regardless a realist needs to defend the assertion that things can exist without us knowing and not just state it.
How would a solipsist mind come to imagine a realist world in which I need information from others to experience what they experienced?
Right, but then this leads to the Meillassoux critique that dinosaurs existed (not really). So we can empirically say humans evolved from earlier life forms, but since we weren't around, we can't assert this to be true. It only appears that way to us, because that's how human minds carve up the world. And thus we can't say anything true outside of ourselves. Science is only concerned with how the world correlates to us, and not how it is.
I find that hugely problematic. Anyway, it's certainly not a realist position.
Right, the argument shows that one can't know that realism is true (via contradiction).
Interestingly, we can see what is going on here via the earlier hypothetical of the apple. We can posit that no-one in Bob's world, including Bob, knows that the apple is there. That demonstrates the realist premise since, in the hypothetical, the apple exists independently of being known to exist. But it is also impossible for any actor in that world to know that the apple independently exists at precisely those times that they don't know it exists.
So my only disagreement is with your final conclusion. I think realism is the operating assumption for everyday communication and the growth of knowledge (and is therefore tenable) but is not, itself, something that is known to be true.
I should probably alter the conclusion to say something along the lines of: “The realist position is not self-evident because it is a synthetic proposition that requires experiential evidence that the realist cannot hope to provide without contradicting himself. Therefore, the realist must base this “axiom” on his faith in the continuity of nature alone.”
The initial argument is null and void because, as others have pointed out, the realist does not have to accept your burden of proof. All you did was formulate a basic skeptical argument, and most people, realists included, already accept that skepticism cannot be rigorously eliminated. But that doesn't make it the default position. Why should it be the default position?
P1) That which lies within my consciousness is what I have immediate certainty of. (i.e. I am certain that what is presented in my consciousness is present in my consciousness—a tautology, but nevertheless certain).
P2) The foundation of a philosophical system should be based on that which is self-evident or most certain, in order to ensure the stability of the system as it grows in size. If we start from uncertain premises, we cannot be certain as to the system’s structural soundness.
C1) Therefore, that which lies within consciousness is an appropriate starting point for philosophical inquiry.
P3) It is neither self-evident nor certain that “the being of X is independent of its being known.”
C2) Therefore, philosophy should not begin with the assumption that “the being of X is independent of its being known.”
Is there a correlation between us and the world? If so, then isn't science getting at what is?
If so, then we've narrowed it down to just possibilities.
If solipsism were the case, then why does it seem like realism is the case, and not solipsism? How can a solipsist mind arrive at the idea of there being a world outside of my experience of it? It seems to me that only if there really is a world that my experiences are about, would my solipsist, infant mind come to the realization that realism is the case.
We see just that occurring naturally. We are born solipsists and only through our trying to make some sense of our experiences do we come to realize object permanence - the idea that your mother still exists when she leaves the room.
So it seems that for solipsism to be the case, one would have to explain why it seems like there is an external world.
Yes, I'm a scientific realist. I was just repeating the correlationist argument Meillassoux critiques.
Add transcendental and Berkeley's idealism to the list. Skepticism is that we simply can't know, so that would be fifth one.
But I agree about solipsism, why does it appear as if a world and other people exist?
Do either of the first two that you mentioned hold a view other than there are things outside of our experiences, or that there aren't? For a transcendental or Berkeley idealist, are there things that exist independent of their mind, whether it be other minds, or other bodies? The point is that it doesn't matter whether the external stuff is other ideas, or material, or whatever - only that there is stuff that exists independent of your experience, or not at all - what that stuff is made of is irrelevant at this point.
As for the skeptical alternative, that would require a clear definition of what it means to know anything.
I'm saying it doesn't lead to that, at least under this account of Kant.
Kant isn't rejecting existence of things before humans here, just the existence of things which are beyond human concepts. All Kant is saying is the world before our existence must reflect our concepts, since it is in conceptual relationship with us. In this Kant agrees with what is thought of as a realist in this thread, out in the world, before humans exist, there is a dinosaur or mountain which we may be known, one reflected in our concepts when we are aware of it.
Meillassoux is right, but has placed the problem in the wrong spot. The correlationist problem is really in Kent's metaphysical account of how objects are themselves.
Kamt doesn't make the suggestion nothing exists before our experiences, but forms a correlate supposition it is concepts which make something so. Kant is missing the metaphysical account of self-identity. He tries to deny noumena, rather than recognise there is something independent of any phenomenal form which constitutes the being of objects. Kant is missing understanding of how there is a thing (noumena), the existence is not phenomenal concepts we experience, which defines the forms and object takes. His problem is not denying emprical objects exist before humans, but rather failing to understanding how things exist and take the form they do. (i.e. not by conceptual form, but by the independent being of an object, which we may be aware of).
Could you elaborate on this a bit? Does this imply that objects subsist in themselves, that they have existence independent of a subject experieincing them? Could you give examples of such objects?
Well yeah, they're realists about other minds. Which is open to the same sort of criticism of the OP.
Quoting Harry Hindu
That's true, there are different kinds of realisms. Most of us are realists about some things and not others.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Yes. Doesn't that tie into the OP's argument?
It does indeed. Examples are incredibly abundant: every single object subsists itself.
In being a distinct thing, each object cannot be granted by any particualr concept of form. No matter which form an object might take, the form cannot be exhaustive of it. There might always be more to the object. It is more than the concept of form in question.
Objects need more than an idea to make them so. I cannot just think of a concpet of an object and make the object so. If I am to speak about am existing or logical object, I need that being to be so, else I won't be speaking about am object which is there. I'll just have an idea of something I imagined. All object are given on themselves because they are not the existence of my experience. My thoughts cannot make them there, no matter how hard I try.
Exactly, which is why any given thought we might have cannot define an object.
Any object is more than our thought about it. There are relations between it and everyth i ng else which are no spoken at any point which we know about it. Even if our awareness of it is perfect, there is more to be spoken about it than the form we've identified.
With respect to our concepts, the answer is yes and no. Any object has more to it than just our concept of it. If we speak about it's form, we don't talks about it's self--defintion. If we speak about its self-defintion ( "there is an object here, disticnt form other things)" , we fail.to identify what form the object takes. Any object is more than a concept we have or it.
But it is also true anything about an object is explicable in a concept, one which we might come to have. There are no "inexplicable" objects of which no-one could know about. We can learn any concept.
There is a difference between arguing that there is more to an object than the form I give it, and arguing that it subsists in itself. One could say, for instance, that my sense of an object anticipates beyond itself , and meets up with that object In that way, I can determine an object to be a relation between what I already expeieince and what is new in that object with respect to my experiecne. Another way of putting it would be to say that all objects of my experience exist for me only in relation to a field. All objects for me are figures on a background which is intrinsic to their meaning for me. Thus no object is completely independent of my subjecdtivity in its meaning, and no object is merely co-opted into my subjectivity.
There is no object independent of the meaning of your subjectivity. All objects, whether you know about them or not, are in a conceptual relation to you, even before you exist-- one could speak, for example, of what Josh would experience once you came to exist. A dinousar could have told of you posting on this forum, if it had the concepts.
No difference exists between arguing an object is more than the form you give it and it existing in itself. If your concept is NOT making it so, something else is. What might this be? The only cohrent answer is itself, else we are saying it is something else entirely.
What it is in the objecgt taht is beyond my concept of it is beyond my concpet in a wasy that is uniue to my concept rather than being common to all subjectivities in the particular content of its beyondness/
I favor a linguistic approach to this issue. What exactly do we mean by 'being' and 'independent'? In my view we are never and even can never be done clarifying these kinds of metaphysical statements. If we consider various modes of being, some of them sub-theoretical or 'for the hand,' the naive, non-linguistic approach looks even more futile --except to the degree that it provides a kind of wholesome entertainment.
It simply means there is more to the world than humans. So evolution, stars, big bang, atoms, disease, animals in the deep sea, maybe alien life, etc. We may or may not come to know about all these things. We certainly won't know everything.
Otherwise, the entire universe collapses to just what humans know and experience. What makes us so special? Why does science tell us we're not?
It either did or it did not. I strongly believe that it did.
I know what naming practices require. I know what discovery requires. If things did not exist prior to our naming practices and/or discovery, then there could be no such things. There are countless historical records of things existing unbeknownst to humans that killed vary large numbers of them long before we gained enough knowledge of those things to name them and eradicate or treat them effectively. That's more than adequate ground for believing that some things(Mt. Everest included) exist in their entirety prior to our awareness of them.
It's also true. So...
While we cannot literally and physically "check to see for ourselves" if something exists before us, for that would require us to exist before we do, it is of no negative consequence whatsoever. What we can know about allows us to be completely justified in continuing to hold such belief. It is part of our default belief system.
The better questions are asked of those who doubt it.
I agree. I think a pre-theoretical version of realism is inescapable. It's how we ordinarily think and talk. At the same time, anti-realism makes some strong points against theoretical realism. So my 'linguistic approach' boils down to an awareness of the complexity of language. As I understand and agree with Derrida, the exact meaning of our sentences is not present to us. Nor is it fixed. Nevertheless a certain kind of metaphysical debate proceeds as if it could and ought to be a kind of mathematics of meta-cognition. (I suggest it's more like poetry.)
But the kind of realism that the OP is criticizing doesn't see it that way at all.
A case in point is Einstein's battles with Bohr and others about the meaning of uncertainty. Einstein was renowned for his defense of exactly the kind of realism that the OP is criticizing. From the Wheeler essay Law without Law:
Bolds added.
So it's not so much that the OP is a 'straw man argument', but that yours is a 'straw man defense'. In other words, you're not defending the type of realism that the OP is criticizing.
There has been a move in physics itself towards the kind of realism you're defending, such as Christian Fuchs' QBism, which 'is an interpretation of quantum mechanics that takes an agent's actions and experiences as the central concerns of the theory. This interpretation is distinguished by its use of a subjective Bayesian account of probabilities.' But then, you can ask whether this is a realist theory at all, and it's often criticized on just those grounds (see Is QBism too subjective?)
Quoting creativesoul
You probably won't get this, but the point of the anti-realist position is that your mind, or rather, human knowledge generally, is providing the background, as it were, against which all such judgements are made. Where, after all, does 'the historical record' reside?
Well, his critique was against transcendental truths, which he said realist statements had to assert.
It is literally his second proposition:
P2) In order to know whether or not "the being of X is independent of its being known," one must “know X when X is not being known.”
I mean, honestly, no one with an elementary sense of logic - let alone realism - would accede to this. It effectively says: one must X and not-X. This becomes super clear when you swap the words around: 'when X is not being known, one must know X'. It's absurd.
Have you by chance looked into A Thing of This World? It's quite a production. As impressed as I was by the gallery of anti-realists, I still had the sense that they were assuming some kind of a pre-theoretical realism in their attempt to provide knowledge and not just opinion.
Incidentally OP says it was based on an argument by Collingwood, it would be interesting to see the original.
Nature doesn't draw lines. We do, and we can be wrong sometimes, depending upon what we're delineating.
If you agree then what's the issue?
I'm a realist in the sense that I strongly believe that some things exist in their entirety prior to our awareness of them.
I agree with that. Our judgments are largely informed by our own thought and belief. Notta problem though, we can get stuff wrong in that we can most certainly be mistaken about all sorts of different stuff.
Alright, so do mountains exist? And by mountains, I don't mean the rocks, dirt, snow making them up. I mean do objects called mountains exist?
What's the issue here? It's an issue of whether nature is the way we conceptualize it to be. The problem with real mountains as objects is where to draw the line on what constitutes a mountain versus a hill or some other formation. It's also a question of where to delineate the end of a mountain versus the rest of the terrain. And a question of identity over time as the mountain gets worn down. At what point is it no longer a mountain? At what point does it become a mountain?
And it's also a question of whether the snow, rocks, dirt, trees, etc. really do combine together to make a singular object we call a mountain, or whether it's just a bunch of different stuff next to each other.
So yeah, I can agree that Everest existed as lump of different collection of matter prior to humans, but I'm not sure about whether it existed as an object we call a mountain, such that it had properties of being the tallest (from when the Indian tectonic plate pushed it up to the highest point until the present day, not counting underwater mountains).
(2) This impression cannot be the same as the thing itself, for no thing can occupy two spaces at the same time.
(3) There is a distance between the perceived object and one since the object and one cannot occupy the same space at the same time.
(4) An impression cannot exist without the object that causes it.
(5) For an impression of an object to appear in one's mind, the impression must reach one.
(6) For the impression to reach one, it must travel the distance that separates the object from one.
(7) It takes time for the impression to reach one.
(8) Thus, before being perceived, the object must exist.
If things did not exist before being perceived, it would be impossible to perceive anything. This is because before perceiving an object, an impression from such object must arise and reach one, which would not occur if the object did not exist before being perceived.
Well put. Elegant.
This realist's position most certainly does. After all, everything ever thought, believed, spoken, written, and/or otherwise uttered is existentially dependent upon our ability to do so. There is no stronger justificatory ground upon which to build one'e edifice than knowledge of what all human thought and belief consists of. It's even better when that knowledge is itself based upon statements of which there are no current examples to the contrary. That's the first goal.
You are exactly right, @Wayfarer.
I agree that that's the real problem. Where we will inevitably disagree is how to solve the problem.
What's the solution? Analysis of how the word mountain is used?
Given I've made so many different remarks here recently, I'd like to 'hear' what you find to be exactly right.
:smile:
Well, it's a problem with how we're talking about the world and/or ourselves. Typically, I fix such problems by changing how I talk.
Analysis of how use naming and descriptive practices as a means for talking about mountains would serve us better.
One way would be to stop using the word mountain. But that process might result in a radical revision of language.
Analysis of what it takes for "mountain" to represent serves us better.
Whoops, I apologize. That was meant for @Wayfarer.
You realise this is special pleading: the objects matter, rocks, snow and dirt are equally things we have named. If there is a problem with the things we call mountains existing before we name them, the same would be true of matter, rocks, snow and dirt.
Stop using it to do things we cannot do with it.
Yes, but I was focusing on mountains. We could just say only the fundamental physics stuff exists and the interesting patterns it makes. A chair is just a bunch of particles arranged chair-wise would be one way of saying that.
You mean don't use mountains when doing philosophy?
Gotcha. Notta problem. So, you are arguing against the historical archaic version of realism. Have fun, but just so ya know, there have been much better versions arise.
:wink:
Nope, that's also special pleading: fundamental particles and patterns are just as much things we name as mountains.
I'm a scientific realist, so I'm going to have to draw the line there. We don't understand electrons in terms of something more fundamental, unless string theory turns out to be true. That's not the case with ordinary objects.
Yes. Do we form, have, and/or hold true belief about nature? Are our beliefs about nature true?
"Nature" here - for me at least - refers to the universe and/or ourselves.
Quoting Marchesk
What counts as a mountain is wholly determined by us. The same is true of a hill. The problem above is the bit about "real mountains as objects"....
What are those again?
I don't care where you draw the line or not. Any fundamental particle is named just as much as a mountain. If we cannot speak of mountains before we name them, we cannot speak of fundamental particles before we name them.
Ordinary objects and fundamental particles are on the same level, each is a thing we may describe. Fundamental particles are really just another ordinary object. They never "explained " other objects themsleves-- to speak of atoms is not to speak of a house, for example.
No.
I mean stop using the subjective/objective dichotomy as a means to take account of experience. It cannot take proper account of our own thought and belief. All of our experience consists - in very large part - of our thought and belief throughout the duration thereof.
That doesn't follow unless everything we may describe counts too.
Correct. More than one substance is incoherent. :clap:
Not following this...
What counts as "substance" will determine whether or not there can a plurality. This seems irrelevant to the topic at hand.
Help?
My Spinozisic intentions must not have been clear enough...
Pluarity is impossible because we are dealing with explanation. One cannot have two forms of explanation. If something is explained, true, etc., it is so in the same sense: the thing in question has been accounted for.
Are you familiar with the Leibnizian notion of dual explanations, the realm of power (mechanism, e.g. "I see because I have eyes") and the realm of wisdom (teleology, e.g. "I have eyes so I can see")? These are two distinct, mutually-existing explanations, and both are useful in accounting for phenomena.
Ah.
I separate from certainty when it comes to the origen of everything. I also do not require omniscience for knowledge of X.
That said... Spinoza on "love"... brilliant and certain of it! Spinoza on monism... the same holds good.
Covered by what I said, both of those are, in the same sense, an explanation. (or in Leibnizian terms, both are true by PSR).
The problem has never been having multiple instances of explanation, just supposing there is a difference in what it means for something to be explained. (i.e. dualism, transcendent things, supernatural realms, etc.).
I'm not sure why anyone would need omniscience to simply know X. It seems strange to think they would need it to be certain about X either. In either case, one has knowledge of one particular thing. One does not need omniscience to know one thing.
Because if the world wasn't an appearance then we would always see things as they are, yet different people see things differently, believe differently, and so we cannot all be seeing things as they are. And there has to be something more fundamental because otherwise everything would be illusion and that's not possible, there has to be something real in order for there to be an illusion.
But I agree the world is a kind of appearance to us, different from what it is, to some extent, at least.
True explanations are often incomplete. Incomplete explanations are not complete accounts. If we make a true statement about a tree, the tree has not been accounted for - by any robust accounting practice.
Do we agree here?
And the world...
:brow:
The world, perhaps?
:meh:
It's obviously somewhat different than the appearance, or naive realism would have gone unquestioned. The "appearance" also includes our conceptualizations of the world.
It doesn't follow from the statement "We've been mistaken about some things" that we've been mistaken about everything. It does not follow from the statement "We do not see some things as they are" that we cannot see anything as it is.
Who's arguing for naive realism?
Explanation is always complete because it details some thing-- "It has been explained"-- but never exhaustive because there are things of which a given account does not speak.
So yes, the tree has been accounted for, insofar as it has been truthfully spoken about. Speak the shape.of it's leaves, you give a full account, insofar as you describe, the shape of the trees leaves. Do not be fooled by the fact there is much more to the tree, you have genuinely accounted for the tree. You just aren't accounting for the many other ways and relations this tree exists in.
Set it out... this difference between world and.... what, exactly are you claiming must be different than the world?
Our image... as retinal?
Seems to me like we do not subject accounts we know to be perception to a supposition of it being an illusion... so I suspect we might be closer to the naive realists than you might think.
Sometimes the ordinary language approach seems to be defending a version of naive realism. The point is that we can't just say the world is how we perceive and think it and leave it at that. It's certainly not enough to say that ordinary word usage captures reality.
Our experience of the world including perceptions and thoughts.
Quoting creativesoul
That wasn't my metaphor, but visual perception is part of it.
Not much to say aside from we're working from incommensurate notions of what counts as "complete". An incomplete account can be true. I agree. I do not ever call an incomplete account of X a full account of X.
So, there's clearly a difference between the world and our thought and belief about it?
I agree.
Well, with vision we see solid objects and not the mostly empty space they're made of, or all the EM radiation passing through them. We see them as colored. And we seem them from a certain location happening over a certain time interval we can experience (so not nanoseconds).
So that image (or sequence of images) is not exactly what an object is.
So, don't say that...
See how easy it is to solve some of these historical problems of language use? Language use is not the sort of thing that captures anything. Some things we talk about aren't even things that are capable of being "captured" to begin with... we talk about them nonetheless...
Also between our perception of the world and how it is. Science tells us this in a thousand ways.
Yes illusions can occur in all of perception, not just vision, by the word "see" I was referring to the whole of perception not just what we see when we open our eyes.
Terrapin Station (who is now banned, unfortunately, even though he was sometimes hard to discuss with I believe he has interesting things to say), considered that each individual perceives the world as it really is from their own point of view, from their own reference point, I believe that's true if properly interpreted, I wanted to discuss that more completely with him but I never got around to doing it.
That is, even if an individual doesn't perceive the world as it really is, what the individual perceives is influenced by some real things that influence his perception, so the individual perceives what the world really is like when these real influences are taken into account, but the thing is of course the individual doesn't perceive these real influences as long as they mess with his perception.
Again you are making the same mistake. That a proposition isn't certain is not a reason to assume its negation.
That's not what I said either, I said we cannot all be seeing things as they are (otherwise there would be no disagreement), and I also said we cannot be mistaken about everything, for instance we cannot be mistaken about the fact that "not everything can be an illusion, there has to be something real".
That makes sense. But then when the individual wants to know what the world's like independent of anyone perceiving it, questions about realism, epistemology and science come into play. And they might want to know this because they think there is a world that's more than just humans perceiving it.
So for example if the individual wishes to know how humans came to be, they have to go beyond human perception to an explanation that gives rise to our individual human perceptions.
Yes, but maybe the question "what the word really is independent of anyone perceiving it" is meaningless, maybe there has to be some being in order for there to be a world. I find it increasingly hard to conceive of a world devoid of beings from which beings arise. If there was a world that existed before beings and that behaved according to Laws, what made the things follow these Laws? The only evidence we have is that change occurs because of a will, when we will something we cause change to occur, we have no evidence that things change because they follow Laws independent of a will, that's an unsubstantiated postulate of modern science.
We're in agreement, it seems...
So you can talk about things like electrons and photons existing independently if you like, but as soon as you start talking about the macroscopic objects of everyday life then I think a realist analysis starts to fall apart as reductionism isn’t tenable.
Quoting Marchesk
Quoting Marchesk
Quoting PessimisticIdealism
I'm not quite clear on what the problem is. Don't we acquire knowledge from observations? We don't know anything until we observe it. So the answer is observe it and then you will know.
Are you asking how do we know things independent of knowing? That would be a silly question.
When you observe your experiences it seems pretty clear that there is an external world because it would be a different experience if there wasn't. You might say that there'd be no experience at all.
If there wasn't an external world, "knowing" wouldn't make any sense. "Mind" wouldn't make any sense. The existence of "words" wouldn't make any sense, nor would how they came to exist in the first place.
But that external world might be a brain in a vat, a simulation, a dream in God's mind, etc. if we take into account skeptical possibilities.
Quoting Harry Hindu
The problem is that our acquisition of knowledge doesn't lead to certainty. Which is usually fine for everyday living, but has issues when doing philosophical inquiry. If we want to know what's real, then we have to deal with skepticism.
But those are all external worlds. Is the argument "how do we know there is an external world", or "how do we know what the external world is like"? The latter assumes the prior is true.
Quoting Marchesk
Then the question is how can we be certain, not how do we know things?
How can you be certain that you will never be certain? If you can be certain that you aren't certain, then you're certain about something, right? So it seems that knowledge can lead to certainty?
Well, that depends on whether knowledge requires certainty.
We know what the external world is like by observing it. Asking what it looks like independent of observing it is silly. If you want to know what it looks like, look at it. If you want to know what it is, look at it.
Observing is a causal process. The perceived is one of the causes. Light is another. Your visual system is another cause that leads to the effect of it appearing in your working memory. If you want to know specifically about the thing and not about light or your visual system, then you parse that information in working memory to exclude those causes so that you can get the object being perceived. Your doctor gets at the state of your visual system by asking you to look at an eye chart.
The apple isn't red, that is a product of your visual system and light. What the object is is something that reflects certain wavelengths of light and absorbs others. It does so based on it's ripeness. Ripeness is a property of the apple, not the light or my visual system. I use the information in my working memory to get at the ripeness of the apple so that I may use that information when I am hungry.
It is indeed an absurd question; however, the question is simply a response the absurd statement “knowing makes no difference to what is known.” In order for the realist’s claim to have any meaning, he must know that which he defines as unknown. In other words, he claims to have knowledge about that which he cannot—by his own definition—have knowledge about. He can’t support his claim by relying on his experience of “knowing x” because said experience would fall under the condition of “x being known;” it is impossible for him to prove that “knowing makes no difference to what is known” unless he takes it as gratuitous. With the development of quantum mechanics, we know that observation or measurement does in fact alter the being of an object—take Schrödinger’s Cat as an example. Therefore, if the realist takes “the being of X is independent of its being known” or “knowing makes no difference to what is known” as simply a “given” on faith. With that being said, the realist’s position is undermined by groundbreaking discoveries in the field of quantum mechanics which subsequently serve as evidence that go against the realist’s assertion that “knowing makes no difference to what is known.”
Yeah, but that doesn't apply to the macroscale.
That's basically Kant's synthetic a priori (aka: all events must have a cause).
I wonder, what does the realist say about abstracts/mathematics; is it something human's created, or did it always exist and we just uncovered/discovered its truth... ?
You grandparent was born that year.
How does you knowing or not make any difference to that?
Got a reference for that? Would be quite interested in looking it up. Thanks.
If, in your reading, the 'standard realist position' turns upon nothing other than the contradictory dicate to both know and not know X at the same time, it's far more likely that you've simply vulgarized the 'standard realist position' beyond all sensible recognition.
The basic mistake of objections like yours is to think, mistakenly, that a claim about the mind-indepedence of things is about things, and not a claim about the mind. It's an easy enough mistake to make insofar the grammar of a statement like 'X is indepedent of the mind' puts 'X', the 'thing', in the position of the grammatical subject of the proposition. But such a claim is equally, if not entirely, about the 'mind' and not things.
You can bring this out if you swap subject and object: "Mind is entirely irrelevant to the being of things" (incidentally, the null hypothesis, the onus of which it is the idealist's to disprove). This is just as much the realist's claim, and it doesn't require one jump though the concocted logical hoops of the OP which simply builds contradiction into the premises in order to smuggle it into the conclusion.
You simply assume that it does. It would have been more open-minded to have written: "Mt. Everest existed in it's entiretyor not regardless of whether or not one believes that."
Some of the everyday things we talk about are those external things. I'm not even sure what you're trying to ask me here. Trees aren't reducible... are they?
If you re-read the entire post, you'd see that I said "if"...
C'mon Janus... you know better.
OK, fair point: I didn't read carefully enough and missed the "if".
I would laugh, elbow bump, and buy you a drink!
A realist about mathematics is a Platonist. You can be a nominalist or a quietest about such matters and still be a realist about the world. Realism about one domain doesn't entail you to be a realist about another.
Regarding the world, you can have color realists, ordinary object realists, scientific realists and what have you. It just depends on one's ontology.
You don’t have much to say about it because we’re - roughly speaking - on the same page, and/or because you don’t think it’s worth going down that road (I mentioned this because I view philosophy as tools of various perspectives rather than each category of philosophy as some godlike figure we should fawn over as an ‘absolute’).
Which domain clearly sets out what all human thought and belief consists of?
The mental?
As in... in the head?
It depends on the realist - what they think about concrete or physical things doesn't necessarily apply to abstract objects (or universals). For example, W.V.O. Quine was a nominalist while Bertrand Russell was a Platonic realist. Other options are also available such as Aristotle's immanent realism. Here's a useful taxonomy of the various alternatives.
So... the mental is the domain which clearly sets out what all human thought and belief consist of?
Are you talking about what thought and belief refer to? Or are you talking about the nature of thought and belief?
The latter.
Let me know when you can keep up. Until then, I suggest a careful re-reading...
Thanks
But we do understand electrons within an entire system of objects/concepts. To me that's a good anti-realist point (holism.)
What is the evidence, though, of this will? Of course we have some intuitive notion, but don't we have an equally good intuitive notion of law? The idea of nature includes necessity. To me it seems that something like law is fundamental to any kind of talk of nature of essence. Time is quietly involved in all of our thinking. What can knowledge be if we don't expect what we have knowledge about to continue acting as it has acted?
Good questions, thanks for asking.
We also have an intuitive notion of law, but isn’t it the case that it is will that creates law? The laws that society follows were created by people through their will, and other people follow them.
Whereas the laws of Nature would be an instance of laws that spontaneously appear without a will involved, and we don’t have an intuitive notion of that.
There is no reason that the laws of Nature should continue being the same in the future as they have been in the past, we cannot know that they will, that’s the problem of induction. Maybe it is a will that is keeping them constant through time?
When I think of that it leads me to the idea that our existence within this universe might be a test, as some religions have proposed. Maybe there is a will that runs the laws of Nature in this universe, a will that has given us freedom to act within these laws, and watches what we are going to do with that freedom.
I must confess that 'will' was a concept in Schopenhauer that I could never digest. I like many of his ideas, but 'will' struck me as too vague, and I'm still finding it vague here.
Quoting leo
Certainly human beings created laws, and certainly they had certain feelings tangled up in that. I can make sense of 'feelings' and 'actions.'
Quoting leo
I agree, and for this reason I expect the fact that we and the universe are here in the first place will remain mysterious. Or even unexplainable on principle, in that any explanatory principle would seem to have to be true for no reason.
Quoting leo
I agree about the problem of induction. But note that you suggest the will as an explanatory entity. This would be the law of the laws. Why should we expect to will to continue as it has? The will as intelligible entity (albeit vague) seems to be tangled up in time. It has a nature that can be leaned on as a source of hypotheses.
Quoting leo
As you mention, it's an old idea. It does sound like a story that would help human beings make peace with all that's difficult in existence. I grant that it's possible. I could die and find myself in some new realm with memories of this life (allowing for continuity of personality so that I could understand myself to have been resurrected.) I believed this kind of thing in my church-attending youth.
Personally I don't believe it, but I do have other narratives, such as the value of mortality for forcing ourselves outside of our vanities, into a realization of how distributed and networked human virtue and knowledge are. If we were individually immortal, we might remain little monsters. Only together are we semi-immortal. The same great ideas and feelings move from vessel to fragile vessel. It's a hall of mirrors. Our own good and evil is reflected in millions of faces around us. My will is not at all single. For me we're all terribly multiple.
Quoting leo
To me this sounds like God, which is fine. But I need a voice from the sky or a burning bush. And even then I'd look for hidden technology. Even if certain things are possible, I'm also keenly aware that human beings are masters of fantasy. As I see it, we are haunted by visions. Our big brains are like fun houses. Perhaps we only face reality, when we do, in order to arrange things so that we can go back to sleep for as long and often as possible. Even this philosophy forum and philosophy itself is a bit like a dream in the context of the rest of my life. And yet I love to dream philosophy.
Quoting Eee
There are things that make us want to act, and making that desire an action can be seen as actualizing a will. So the will can be seen as a desire, which itself can be seen as a feeling, as an experience. If you want yes we can simply talk of experiences and actions. Actions create change.
So what is the action that makes things in the universe follow apparent regularities or laws? There is an action behind that, either an outside action, or an action stemming from all elementary particles that act together, in both cases there is an action permeating the whole universe.
Quoting Eee
Why then not see this universe as having been created and being maintained, with us having the freedom to act within a range of actions that the outside entity allows us to have?
Then you may ask who created that outside entity, maybe it was created by others and so on and so forth, or maybe action is what existence is. Sometimes we ask why there is something rather than nothing, but aren’t we able to create things out of nothing? Sometimes we have ideas that do not seem to come from anywhere, to be caused by anything, as if they were free creations. It seems quite ungraspable to us how something can come out of nothing, but maybe ‘nothing’ is simply an idea, a creation of the ‘something’ that exists beyond space and time, like what we imagine sometimes doesn’t seem bounded by space or time.
Quoting Eee
We shouldn’t necessarily expect it to continue as it has, but for now it does, because that’s what it chooses. We too are able to imagine worlds in which we give some entities the freedom to act within certain constraints. Maybe this whole universe is one great imagination or dream of that entity, who has given us the freedom to act within certain constraints, and who would then have the ability to send us into other universes or planes of existence.
Quoting Eee
I wouldn’t say it’s the idea of mortality itself that forces us to not be little monsters, after all some people see mortality as implying fundamental pointlessness of everything and so that it doesn’t matter what we do, whether we spread happiness or suffering, whereas some other people want to spread happiness just for the sake of it, even if they believe they aren’t being tested and that there is no death.
I would rather say we ourselves ultimately choose how we act, whether we attempt to unite or separate, love or fear, understand or hate, within the constraints of the universe we have to work with.
Quoting Eee
Personally I see the regularities in this universe as evidence of a creator, not necessarily a creator who is testing us but simply a creator who has given us free will to shape the world we want within the constraints he set. Fundamentally these constraints are very basic, as I said in another thread I believe eventually we will be able to unify physics in two fundamental forces, one that attracts and one that repels, both propagating at the same velocity, and in that universe we and others, not just other humans but all living beings who have the ability to act, decide how they use these forces to shape the world they want.
A potential objection to that is to say that if these are the only two forces then everything is determined and we have no freedom to act, but these would be the only two forces within what we see with our eyes, which isn’t the whole of existence, we ourselves aren’t defined solely by the body we see with our eyes, by our appearance, we are more than that, our ability to act isn’t limited to changing what we see, it also includes changing how we feel and how others feel, which we have barely begun to explore, and maybe in the end we will realize that we have also the ability to change the apparent laws of the universe, and that these laws weren’t constraints imposed onto us, but tools that we had to learn how to use.
And I can’t believe that arrangements of atoms who arose out of some random primordial soup through laws that were there for no reason would be able to imagine such things, and feel such beauty.
Who made that absurd statement? That would be like saying "the apple makes no difference to what the apple is".
I don't think anyone is claiming that you can have knowledge of something for which you don't have knowledge for. That makes no sense, so your question is based on a misunderstanding of what knowledge is. When you can make statements like that, or like "I know that I don't know anything", then we have a problem with our understanding of what knowledge is.
Using my explanation, do you get those types of absurdities? It seems to me that there is no information lost in observing or in communicating. It just depends on where you look and when.
Quoting PessimisticIdealism
How does QM undermine realism if different scientists are coming to the same conclusion based on their observations of reality external to them? Who is it that agrees with them to form a consensus on QM if there is no external world? How can they share ideas via words on paper or sounds in the air if they only get at their own subjectivity, and not at the real actual paper with real ink scribbles and see, and interpret it, the same way?
I think Leo has done a somewhat convincing or otherwise eloquent job at making the case for the metaphysical will in nature.
Accordingly, and in more of a succinct fashion, indeed I think of it like Schopenhauer's metaphysical will in nature, along with combining it with Kant's concept of noumena/intuition, then finally with cognitive science's ontology (Maslowian constant state of human striving-Being).
In that way I think of it in a reductionist manner. Meaning if you consider lower life forms (cosmology), instinct, higher levels of intellect along with existing abstracts like math and music (higher consciousness), then how can you not infer a metaphysical Will as a driving force?
That is not to say human's don't have instincts as a shared feature of existence. Take procreation as an example. Is that instinct or the phenomena of Love? Is it a combination of the two (or something else)?
So the why's of existence, is another way of defining the meaning of a metaphysical Will in nature. It's the closest concept that we can grasp to existence [the nature of] or Being (higher consciousness).
I can understand vaguely what is meant. The will-to-live is like a demon at the heart of things. I find it metaphorically true in some sense.
We can do that. But I should mention that I don't think we're free. The responsible, free agent seems to me like an important fiction, but a fiction nevertheless. As I see it, we're all entangled in the causal nexus. Even if we're not exactly predictable, I think we all have a sense of human nature. To have a nature is to be caught in necessity.
Quoting leo
Our ideas appear in our 'minds' in languages that have evolved over centuries, though. And then physical creation depends on a transformation and arrangement of the given.
Quoting leo
Our situation is strange. I personally just don't know how we got here. Yes, science can tell a plausible story, but perhaps the ultimate origin that thinking craves is unknowable in principle (it being a kind of projection or impossible object.)
I wanted to redress this. My last comment came off as a bit too snarky for my own tastes. My apologies.
The latter...
Which domain sets out what all thought and belief consists of?
I’m not assuming its negation, rather I am saying it’s a meaningless proposition.
I don't really know what "consists of" means here. Do you mean the nature of thought and belief? Because I would say mental since it hasn't been successfully reduced to something else. Do you mean what thought and belief point to? Because then a lot of the time it will be the world. Do you mean the social aspect of it? Are you asking whether they are public? Some of the time, yes. But not always.
If you assume that our whole existence is a consequence of laws we have zero control over then you are led to that conclusion. However consider that so-called physical laws are only tested in situations where living beings are not present or have a negligible influence. It isn’t clear at all that our whole bodies or even our whole brains are subjected to these laws. It isn’t clear either that all our experiences reduce to brain states.
Quoting Eee
I said ideas, but not necessarily ideas expressed in a language, you might call it imagination or spiritual experiences, sometimes we experience things that are so different from anything else that we see it either as a connection to another dimension or plane of existence, or as us being able to freely create experiences that aren’t simply combinations of other experiences.
I'm reading Masks of God, so I'm not allergic to these other planes of existence. I do object, however, to presenting them as a kind of alternative physics. Joseph Campbell takes a good approach in my view. He tries to mediate these experiences without forgetting the demands of reason.
Of course you are free to argue a metaphysical position, but this argumentative approach pays a suspicious tribute to reason, as if you want to have your cake and eat it too. What does it mean that you want your theory recognized as rational?
What’s wrong with looking for a rational model of existence? The ideas I’m presenting offer an alternative to the materialist view that is itself metaphysical, why do you not react the same way to the metaphysical position of physicists and cosmologists regarding the nature of the universe, its future and our place within it? That seems to be a double standard.
Existence can be seen as change. What would it mean to model that change without reason, without looking for relationships or structure within that change? That’s what physicists do, however they limit themselves to a subset of all experiences, while I attempt to take into account all experiences, why would you find it suspicious for me to use reason and not them?
Maybe you simply do not recognize the metaphysical assumptions of mainstream science.
I was listening to the radio one morning about ten years ago. It was a discussion between Lawrence Krauss and the then-morning radio host, who was pretty scientifically literate. The question of dark matter came up. Brief discussion of dark matter. Then the host said, 'really it's possible we're completely sorrounded by dark matter and we wouldn't even know'. 'Could be', said Krauss.
The conversation moved on.
Quoting leo
Nothing. But what do we mean by 'rational'?
Quoting leo
Once a person starts talking about 'ideas' that aren't expressed in language, they seem to be leaving reason and logic behind. And that's fine. But it doesn't persuade those attached to clarity who therefore prefer to confess just not knowing where there is a here here and why it is the way it seems to be. And thinking about thinking suggests to me that perhaps it's a necessary blind spot, though obvious we act on useful hypotheses which themselves depend for their intelligibility on tacit know-how and being 'in' a language and a world. I'm quite fascinated by the lifeworld or groundless ground that makes science possible in the first place, which I don't expect science but rather philosophy to articulate.
Quoting leo
Fair enough, but I'm not defending the materialism.
Quoting leo
I recognize some of them. Maybe no one has articulated all of them. Lately I've been trying to articulate the notion of reason itself. That's why I asked you what it meant to you to seek recognition for your ideas as reasonable. I'm trying to point out the tension in your notion of private experience (ideas that aren't in language) and the claim on universal, human reason.
In contrast, technology just works. And (ideally if not actually) science is falsifiable. This does not, in my book, make it a replacement for philosophy. It's like the Cantor issue I've been discussing. A person can make use of Cantor's math without adopting his mysticism of the infinite. There are far more than two positions.
'Could be' applies to so many things. That's the 'problem.' While some skeptics may be so in the mode of scientism (and not so skeptical after all), others acknowledge various possibilities as possibilities and reason as well as they can about which they should take seriously.
Returning to the OP, I'm a big fan of anti-realism. A Thing of This World is a favorite text in its ability to organize anti-realism as a narrative from Kant to Derrida. Presumably Krauss would hate it. The identification of reason with natural science is problematic, especially since phenomenology (for instance) is reasonable and seeks to articulate what makes science possible in the first place.
[quote=Husserl]
First, let us elucidate the remarkable character of philosophy as it unfolds in ever-new special sciences. Let us contrast it with other forms of culture already present in prescientific man, in his artefacts, his agriculture, his architecture, etc. All manifest classes of cultural products along with the proper methods for insuring their successful production. Still, they have a transitory existence in their environing world. Scientific achievements, on the other hand, once the method of insuring their successful creation has been attained, have an entirely different mode of being, an entirely different temporality. They do not wear out, they are imperishable. Repeated creation does not produce something similar, at best something similarly useful. Rather, no matter how many times the same person or any number of persons repeat these achievements, they remain exactly identical, identical in sense and in value. Persons united together in actual mutual understanding can only experience what their respective fellows have produced in the same manner as identical with what they have produced themselves.24 In a word, what scientific activity achieves is not real but ideal.
What is more, however, whatever validity or truth has been gained in this way serves as material for the production of higher-level idealities; and this goes on and on. Now, in the developed theoretical interest, each interest receives ahead of time the sense of a merely relative goal; it becomes a transition to constantly new, higher-level goals in an infinity preindicated as science's universal field of endeavor, its 'domain'. Thus science designates the idea of an infinity of tasks, of which at any time a finite number have already been accomplished and are retained in their enduring validity. These constitute at the same time the fund of premises for an endless horizon of tasks united into one all-embracing task.
Here, however, an important supplementary remark should be made. In science the ideality of what is produced in any particular instance means more than the mere capacity for repetition based on a sense that has been guaranteed as identical; the idea of truth in the scientific sense is set apart (and of this we have still to speak) from the truth proper to pre-scientific life. Scientific truth claims to be unconditioned truth, which involves infinity, giving to each factually guaranteed truth a merely relative character, making it only an approach oriented, in fact, toward the infinite horizon, wherein the truth in itself is, so to speak, looked on as an infinitely distant point.25 By the same token this infinity belongs also to what in the scientific sense 'really is'. A fortiori, there is infinity involved in 'universal' validity for 'everyone', as the subject of whatever rational foundations are to be secured; nor is this any longer everyone in the finite sense the term has in prescientific life.26
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http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/husserl_philcris.html
I'm interested in that 'everyone,' not only in relation to physical science, but also in relation to philosophy and every 'reasonable' discourse. Far from just harping about 'reason, reason, reason,' it's the infinite clarification of what we even mean by 'reason' that fascinates me. As Husserl and others have noted, it involves time and it involves an 'infinite' subject. But such things can't be essentially hidden or private but mere unnoticed as too close to us and therefore potentially clarified as 'obvious.' While Heidegger is especially known for this, the idea is older than that, naturally.
We don't want to get stuck on anti-scientism, since scientism is not a sufficiently interesting philosophical position.
Here's another quote that applies.
[quote= Husserl]
There is a sharp cleavage, then, between the universal but mythico-practical attitude and the 'theoretical', which by every previous standard is unpractical, the attitude of thaumazein [Gr. = to wonder], to which the great men of Greek philosophy's first culminating period, Plato and Aristotle, trace the origin of philosophy. Men are gripped by a passion for observing and knowing the world, a passion that turns from all practical interests and in the closed circle of its own knowing activities, in the time devoted to this sort of investigation, accomplishes and wants to accomplish only pure theoria36. In other words, man becomes the disinterested spectator, overseer of the world, he becomes a philosopher. More than that, from this point forward his life gains a sensitivity for motives which are possible only to this attitude, for novel goals and methods of thought, in the framework of which philosophy finally comes into being and man becomes philosopher.
...
With an attitude such as this, man observes first of all the variety of nations, his own and others, each with its own environing world, which with its traditions, its gods and demigods, with its mythical powers, constitutes for each nation the self-evident, real world. In the face of this extraordinary contrast there arises the distinction between the represented and the real world, and a new question is raised concerning the truth - not everyday truth bound as it is to tradition but a truth that for all those who are not blinded by attachment to tradition is identical and universally valid, a truth in itself. Thus it is proper to the theoretical attitude of the philosopher that he is more and more predetermined to devote his whole future life, in the sense of a universal life, to the task of theoria, to build theoretical knowledge upon theoretical knowledge in infinitum.
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The open-ness toward infinity seems important here. And, perhaps more important, the distance that philosophy enjoys from local gods.
[quote=Husserl]
Only with the Greeks, however, do we find a universal ('cosmological') vital interest in the essentially new form of a purely 'theoretical' attitude.27 This is true, too, of the communal form in which the interest works itself out, the corresponding, essentially new attitude of the philosophers and the scientists (mathematicians, astronomers, etc.). These are the men who, not isolated but with each other and for each other, i.e., bound together in a common interpersonal endeavor, strive for and carry into effect theoria and only theoria. These are the ones whose growth and constant improvement ultimately, as the circle of cooperators extends and the generations of investigators succeed each other, become a will oriented in the direction of an infinite and completely universal task. The theoretical attitude has its historical origin in the Greeks.
[/quote]
It's the interpersonality that seems crucial here, along with a distance from immersion in the practical world.
[quote=Husserl]
How are we, then, to characterize the essentially primitive attitude, the fundamental historical mode of human existence?30 The answer: on the basis of generation men naturally live in communities - in a family, a race, a nation - and these communities are in themselves more or less abundantly subdivided into particular social units. Now, life on the level of nature is characterized as a naïvely direct living immersed in the world, in the world that in a certain sense is constantly there consciously as a universal horizon but is not, merely by that fact, thematic. Thematic is that toward which man's attention is turned. Being genuinely alive is always having one's attention turned to this or that, turned to something as to an end or a means, as relevant or irrelevant, interesting or indifferent, private or public, to something that is in daily demand or to something that is startlingly new. All this belongs to the world horizon, but there is need of special motives if the one who is caught up in such a life in the world is to transform himself and it to come to the point where he somehow makes this world itself his theme, where he conceives an enduring interest in it.
[/quote]
http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/husserl_philcris.html
No, that's not how your argument is structured. You don't argue that the proposition is meaningless.Your argument says that the realist proposition is impossible to justify, but in order to be able to determine the requirements for justification, a proposition has to be meaningful in the first place - otherwise all of your argument becomes meaningless.