Marchesk

I’m confident users of this forum are capable of understanding metaphysical questions.

It's interesting that appeals are made to emotion to explain away the existence of arguments for metaphysical positions. As if a philosopher's motivat...

There are many reasons to think experience is not primary. 1. We have bodies upon which our experiences depend. 2. Our bodies were born. 3. Human bodi...

Is Hawking some sort of universal expert such that he can make pronouncements on the status of entire domains and declare them "dead"? Or does he just...

Right, so we at least recognize that the world and math have a structure such that we can classify based on relevant properties. And yeah it makes sen...

And it may very well be that Carnap is right in this case. I'm not arguing that all metaphysical statements are meaningful. However, I'm not well vers...

So you're saying that things in the world don't actually have the same properties, we just think they do.

Alright, here is the thing. If there are properties that are the same across particulars, then there are universal properties. That means in addition ...

Sure, but we do in fact group things in non-arbitrary manner most of the time, and it's based on properties in common. A class isn't one property, it'...

So hard core nominalism. Are your groupings completely arbitrary? You mentioned before that individuals can share the same properties. I assume you gr...

I believe I only need to provide the truth condition for a non-verificationaist account of meaning. What would it mean for a verification-transcendant...

No, there can't only be individuals. Classes are a universal concept.

Because classes aren't individuals.

The simplest way to put it is that if the world consists of individuals, then how can there be a tiger class? Your answer is that they share propertie...

Did you find the programming example lacking in explanation where you can create a class for objects which share behavior and types of properties in v...

Actually, I don't think we have to be able to in principle determine the truth of a proposition to say it's meaningful. Universals are meaningful beca...

I'm not a verificationist, so I'd say an argument could in principle settle the manner. According to the SEP entry, hard realism and trope nominalism ...

Okay, so dragons on planets too far away for us to ever visit or resolve the image to tell. For Caesar, we have no means for recovering the number of ...

Sure, but say we wanted to know whether dragons could exist on some other planet. The first line of inquiry would be whether there is a reasonable pat...

Language use is empirical. Language understanding is cognitive. We can form concepts which are not empirical. Some of these can be applied to the worl...

I did explain it. Also, SEP has an in-depth article on the universals debate. Russell devoted a chapter to it. Plenty of people have found it intellig...

Is that because you refuse to acknowledge hat what they're saying is meaningful? Because I find it meaningful. I don't agree with this. Most metaphysi...

Right, and he provides the criteria for what makes a statement meaningful. In that paper, it's anything which is logical or can be verified by experie...

I've done my best to explain why it's not. Universals might be rubbish on closer inspection, but they're intelligible. If not universals, then somethi...

You do realize that many of the concepts from ordinary, pre-philosophical language have their issues upon closer inspection, right? Or should philosop...

And where exactly does that leave us? Because it doesn't leave me agreeing with Carnap. I still find metaphysical statements to be meaningful, at leas...

Clever. I'll opt for option 3, where some metaphysical statements are meaningful. That means Carnap's might be meaningful, with the qualification that...

Here's the main competitor to universals. Let me know if tropes sound any more meaningful to you:

You do know what a category is, and you admit that particulars can have the same properties and relations. So a universal would be applying the catego...

Right, so this leads to the question of what makes it so. Universals are one possible answer to that. Tropes are another. It doesn't really matter wha...

Russell was also a top notch logician, not that it makes his argument right. But he would likely have been aware of the critiques of metaphysics.

Does that mean you think it's meaningless to ask if an alien civilization exists one light year outside our light cone?

Yes, where that one thing is any thing that can have another thing north of it. That's what makes the relation universal.

And why do we need to be able to experience something in order for it to be a meaningful statement? Does all of physics include only events or things ...

The problem is accounting for how we can use north of in a universal manner when talking about the world. As Wayfarer asked, what makes north or the n...

Doesn't that rule out any argument that people disagree on? It would certainly rule out Carnap's, since not everyone agreed with his anti-metaphysical...

Russell is pointing out that "north of" is a universal relation that doesn't apply to any particular situation, but rather every situation in which on...

https://s33.postimg.cc/h4dw2si7j/dog-universal-class.png The programming language above employs the concept of a universal in the form of the class Do...

You certainly can, but you're going to have to invoke universal processes like evolution and natural selection to do so. Also genes. What is a gene? I...

We have the concept of universals in our language and thought. Tiger is an abstract concept for the individual members having similar characteristics....

I realized that some programming languages employ the concept of universals. A class is a universal definition for a group of objects that have the sa...

I'm asking what allows for individual things in the world to have the same properties. How is that not meaningful?

Then I'll assume Carnap's argument is itself meaningless. Isn't it a metaphysical argument?

But what gave rise to the question of universals remains. Carnap and others might take issue with the meaningfulness of the universal concept, but the...

It could be psychological, and that would be conceptualism. But now you've taken a step toward the debate being meaningful. The realist would ask how ...

A universal is meant to explain the discrepancy between a world of individuals, and the huge amount of categorization we perform.

How is it that we have the concept of categories when the world we perceive is individual? Nobody ever perceives a tiger in the categorical sense. The...

But flygers hasn't been defined. So what makes an individual tiger a member of the tiger group? If it's not a universal, then what is it? I'm asking b...

By that do you mean you don't know what natural mechanism would allow for such a thing, or do you mean the concept really doesn't make sense? If it do...

Well, I've tried to provide a pseudo-argument for what a universal means.