Michael

We can't, hence skepticism. Knowledge of private matters is impossible. I don't know how it does. How does the word "future" refer to something that i...

The realist will say that there is more to the world than just statements. There is the statement "the cat is on the mat" and there is the cat being o...

Moral realists claim that moral facts are objective in the sense that the speed of light and the existence of Mercury are objective. They don't claim ...

That has no bearing on what moral realists mean.

Moral realists claim that there are objective moral facts. Your account makes for morality to be a linguistic convention which would be a kind of mora...

This wouldn’t be moral realism though.

Incidentally, for a similar reason I think there’s a fundamental problem with Putnam’s brain-in-a-vat hypothesis and his causal theory of reference. I...

Given that you seem to understand what I mean when I say “no, because I think and feel and see things that I never talk about or act on. I dream, I im...

No, because I think and feel and see things that I never talk about or act on. I dream, I imagine, I lie, I ignore, etc. And I assume that there are o...

And by an exception you mean a coherent example of there being a private mind behind the public expression that cannot be known? Then what left is the...

I believe he’s saying that if you can’t prove that aliens exist then you don’t know that aliens exist, even if you believe that aliens exist and even ...

The private thoughts and feelings and perceptual sensations that might go unexpressed, or that can be contrary to the expression (i.e in the case of l...

The point is that the thinking, feeling part is private. Such thoughts and feelings might be expressed, but the private thoughts and feelings nonethel...

So whether or not someone is lying or being honest isn't important? It doesn't matter what they think or feel, only what they say and do? That seems q...

I asked you because the inner workings of your mind are private and I need to you publicly express them. So why did you ask me? I don't quite know wha...

If that were the case then we wouldn't have to ask people what they mean. We wouldn't have to ask them to clarify their position. There wouldn't be mi...

Anyway, all I have been trying to do here is explain that the claim "it is impossible to know that other minds and mind-independent objects exist" is ...

The non-solipsist says "it is possible to know that other minds and mind-independent objects exist". The solipsist replies with "it is impossible to k...

I doubt that. If we look to non-human animals, and perhaps babies and people with certain developmental disabilities like autism, I suspect that they ...

You can share an understanding and not know that you share an understanding. And at least on the non-solipsist's end he must admit to a known shared u...

If the non-solipsist claims that other minds and mind-independent objects can be known to exist and the solipsist claims that they can’t be known to e...

The key part is that it’s about what exists. We can be wrong about maths and trees, but unlike mathematical entities (at least according to the antire...

Again, it doesn’t say that we shouldn’t assume that there are other minds. It says that we cannot know that there are other minds. If you accept that ...

As I keep saying, we can make claims about things that don’t exist, and about things that do exist but that cannot be known to exist. Your arguments j...

I don’t know what you mean by asking who it’s true for. It’s just either true or false. And then, as a separate matter, there may exist one or more co...

I think there’s a difference between saying that something has an independent existence and saying that the truth of something is independent of what ...

And root 2 is irrational even if I’m the only man alive. It’s even irrational even if nobody is alive. I don’t think “external” is the right word. It’...

That's a false dichotomy. It's not a case of either a) mathematical realism is true or b) I am maths.

Not it doesn't. It says that knowledge of other minds (and an external world) is impossible.

And, again, nobody is making such a claim.

Maths and logic are something "other" than the subject, but I don't think it right to think of them as being "external" (in the sense that the materia...

It doesn't. It just claims that knowledge of other minds is impossible. I honestly don't know how you keep inferring the above from that. The "externa...

Well, not everybody buys into such a Wittgensteinian interpretation of language. Many philosophers think that there is some greater substance to the m...

Not really. The solipsist can claim to know that he exists, that he is happy, that he sees a tree, that the square root of four is two, that modus pon...

It's different in that it doesn't make such a claim? I don't understand your question. If I claim that knowledge of the distant future is impossible a...

He's saying that knowledge of other minds is impossible. Therefore, he cannot know that there are other minds, and if there are other minds then these...

This is a non sequitur. Even if the solipsist's "reliance" on logic presupposes others (which you have yet to explain), this "perfomative contradition...

The epistemological solipsist says that one cannot know that there are other minds, he doesn't say anything about what one should or should not assume...

It's not supposed to be a sound argument. It's supposed to show that the claim "only one mind exists" is coherent. I don't understand this. Classical ...

Regardless of what brings about the situation where only one mind exists (it could be that there were other minds but they died, or it could be that o...

I’ll make another argument. It is possible that the number of minds is finite and it is possible that every mind is mortal. It is possible that every ...

You seem to be saying that if p ? q is true then p is true, but that's an invalid inference. p ? q is true even if p is false. In this case, p is "the...

And? If there is the Christian God then he is a dick. The statement is about the very God that might not exist. What's the problem? The existence of s...

Yes. What's wrong with that? Just as there can be an agnostic theist there can be an epistemological solipsist who isn't an ontological solipsist. The...

Then I think you're drawing an invalid conclusion and so your reductio ad absurdum is a non sequitur, because nothing about saying that only one's min...

Solipsists don't make such a claim though. Epistemological solipsists only say that we can't know that there are other minds and ontological solipsist...

Who makes such a claim?

Given that the solipsist says that solipsism is right and non-solipsism wrong, and that the idealist says that idealism is right and materialism/duali...

Yes. And that something can be the existence of other minds, or an external material world, or God, or the soul, or mind-independent mathematical enti...