I disagree, unless you think that existence involves intelligibility (which is something that classical metaphysics asserts but I'm not sure physicalists generally would say). In any case, if you assume that the world is intelligible and its existence must be intelligible too, then it would be meaningful to ask if the world is contingent or not contingent and discuss the consequences of such statements. — boundless

This is just going in loops I can't follow
A physicalist would say that you can describe how a brain does what it does in understanding the world virtue of physical processes by which it works and interacts with other physical processes.

This is also because it includes things that I would never classify under the term 'prediction'. — boundless

Don't think about it as prediction then. Its just about models or maps that tells you where things are in relation to others. My use of the word "predict" is clearly an idiosyncracy that comes from its appearance in neuroscience where I would give it a slighlty more general meaning.

Well, I believe that it's simply becuase for you it is a fact that needs no explanation. So, you don't see a problem (perhaps I am the one that sees a problem where there is none. But I am not persuaded by that). — boundless

I don't understand what you mean by the idea that structure of the world needs explaining. Its like asking why there is anything at all, which is a question not resolved by any perspective.

Not sure about this. Let's say you encounter the words "one way" in a traffic sign. How is that 'prediction'? It seems to me that here meaning is not predictive. — boundless

Its entirely prediction. You see the words, you infer the kinds of behaviors you expect to see in that context and act appropriately. Words and meaning is about association which is just what anticipates a word, what comes after a word, what juxtaposes words - that is all I mean by prediction. prediction is just having a model of associations or relations between different things. Like a map that tells you how to get between any two points. Fictional stories are included. Everything we do is included.

Ok. The problem for me, however, is to explain from a purely physicalist point of view why there are these 'structures' in the first place. — boundless

I suspect that I don't understand what you mean.

It also means that the 'stuff' behaves in a certain manner and so on. — boundless

Sure, but I don't think that is any novel step from what I just said. To understand that behavior is then effectively just to be able to predict what happens next in some context. There's nothing special about that. A brain can do that in virtur of its physical properties regarding neurons.

Furthermore, it seems to me that intelligibility also conveys meaning. — boundless

Yes, meaning is just more prediction. Nothing different, nothing special.

For instance, the meaning of the word 'word' is difficult to explain just in physical terms. — boundless

The meaning of 'word' just comes from its associations with other aspects of our experiences which become apparent in how we use the word 'word'. Nothing more than prediction.

I guess that the negation of this isn't 'impossible' but it doesn't seem plausible. — boundless

What do you mean?

More or less. My point is that in order to even think to follow and catch a ball, you need some interpretative mental faculties. Same goes for some basic innate concepts (like a basic notion of 'thing', 'change' and so on). — boundless

Alright, sure. I just think those things come from a brain that has evolved able to infer abstract structure in the information it gets from the environment. There is a kind of pluralism in the sense that depending on how the brain relates to the environment, different information appears on its sensory boundary and so different structures are inferred. Like say if you are looking at an object from different angles and it looks different.

Well, yes, but my question is how to understand why the physical world is intelligible in the first place. A physcialist might well aswer as you do. It is just a 'brute fact'. But IMO it would be ironic. The very intelligibility of the world is left unexplained (and perhaps unexplainable). — boundless

For the world to intelligible imo just means that it has structure. To say the world has structureis just to say something like: there is stuff in it and it is different in different places, which is kind of trivial.

that is, we get incredibly good predictions in the absence of an intelligible structure of reality. Weird. — boundless

Yes, this doesn't make sense to me. If we can fit coherent models to reality, even if they turn out to be erroneous after some limit, it would suggest they capture some subset of the intelligible structure (at the very least intelligible empirical structure) of reality. This just happens to be embedded in a model whose wider structure is erroneous.

Aha, no that was a mistaken phrase; I did not mean to imply essentialism for myself!

And yet, on the other hand, probably even in order to 'see' the trajectory, you need to have already some kind of interpretative structure — boundless

I am not sure what this means: the interpretative structure of following a ball and catching it?

And BTW, you are assuming that the 'world' to be structured but you are not explaining how it can be. — boundless

What kind of answer you want? I don't understand why you want me to explain how the world can be structured. It seems self-evident to most people.

So, where 'more or less' comes from? Isn't that evidence, then, that concepts do map 'reality' in some way? How is that so? — boundless

Actually, the history of physics clearly showed us how some 'obscure' mathematical concepts have been used in physical theories. Moreover, I do believe that this property of math as being 'more' than what is actually employed in physics gives more credence to platonism. If math wasn't so 'broad', its truths would be accidental. And, frankly, I am not even sure in a purely physicalist perspective how can we even conceive something that has no relation to '(experienced) reality'. What would even the point of that? — boundless

We have a brain that receives sensory input and abstracts structure that maps onto structure in the world. I can then manipulate that inferred structure. I can then construct a system that describes abstract stuff and discover new implications from it. But this isn't really more interesting than brains doing stuff. I don't need a platonic realm to do this, I just need a brain that can infer quantity in the sensory world and extrapolate.

Not sure how can you understand something without being 'right'. — boundless

You can have an intelligible model that is incorrect. Like people used to have models of the solar system that were intelligible, gave correct predictions and turned out to be completely wrong.

Yes, I think for me this is the kind of view of language that should go there. Itsthe kind of view that speaks to my inclinations and provides important nuances that seem to often be missed by various other essentialists on the philosophy forum.

I was searching for any context where 2+2 might be equal to something other than 4, any reason to not accept 2+2=4 as an absolute truth. — noAxioms

This is the same as what the bit you quoted was describing.

But I say that concepts are not physical - they're the relations of ideas. — Wayfarer

You could say that but then again, many of our concepts are about physical things, many of our abstract concepts are about things that "supervene" on physical stuff, and concepts themselves can be explained in terms of what we do or think which can be explained in terms of a physical brain. The entire universe and everything in it is a physical system.

we must rely on concepts — Wayfarer

But again, concepts can be explained in terms of brains. Now, just because I think the universe is just a physical system doesn't mean I need to explain everything going on all the time in terms of particles or physical stuff. I can still talk about art, literature, aesthetics, anthropology, psychology without mentioning physics or chemistry.

Perhaps more importantly, I don't think one must "know everything in order to know anything." The continued existence of some mystery vis-á-vis a phenomenon does not preclude us having any knowledge about it. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sure, but if you can't articulate what you mean, then you are just effectively circularly re-asserting how you use words and behaving in response to something you can't elaborate on.

I don't know what you mean by reductionist account or what the alternative is.

But why appeal to the complexity of the brain in particular? Sight also involves light, and the light wave/photon have more than enough mystery to make the same sort of argument. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Its all included.

Anyhow, this still seems to be misunderstanding the concept of form. The form is, in part, the actuality in things that is responsible for their appearance. Being is prior to interaction. Something needs to first exist in order interact so as to appear a certain way. Appearance—perception—is also prior to the development of language. Form is not primarily about explaining language, although it might do that to. It's about what must lie prior to language and perception (else our determinant perceptions would be caused by "nothing in particular," in which case they essentially wouldn't have causes at all). The form of things isn't just their appearances though (which you seem to be suggesting), nor what is said of them, but rather is upstream of each of those, because being (existing) is a prerequisite for interaction and being known. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well, I think what I am mainly resisting is the notion of inflating this stuff beyond me saying something like "I see stuff"or "I see a 'round' thing".

In the broadest sense, a thing's form is what makes anything any thing at all, it's particular actuality or "act of existence" by which it is some thing and not "nothing in particular." — Count Timothy von Icarus

I mean, why do I have to unnecessarily flower up the fact that I can see 'round' things like this? I don't even really understand ehat this sentencr is saying.

"what brains perceive and talk about," then "brains" themselves would have no true existence as anything distinct, and so would have no determinant powers, ruling out the very possibility of a "science of brains." Brains themselves would be merely "something brains perceive and talk about." This appears to me to be a rather vicious circle. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well I think there is always going to be a circularity of some sort imo, like my own quote here:

I actually haven't! I just like the phrase in order to describe the inability to get out of a perspectival context - this constant tension between trying to give descriptions of what is the case and the fact that this can effectively be deflated in terms of word-use and enactive cognition, which itself is a description of what is the case, which brings us back to the beginning (in the sense that describing or giving a story about what is the case regarding how cognition works is itself word-use and enactive cognition).

And our conceptual networks all run i to places wherr we can't articulate things so well. There are always limits to what we can explain or describe. The biggest tension is that stuff exists in the world clearly independently of us, yet we can only engage with stuff from within a perspective through what a brain does in terms of predictions, word-use, etc. And its the same for the study of our own brains.

But we're not required to know that — Wayfarer

Yes, my point is just that if we don't know that then we are just re-asserting the way we use words in response to what we see without any deeper explanation. If that's all you're saying, fine. My point was more aimed at kinds of inflations of concepts to platonic realms.

Here, you're simply projecting the inherent limitations of materialist philosophy of mind onto the whole issue — Wayfarer

Not at all, and whatever limits there may be here are not transcended by any other purported view.

That's the empiricist argument in a nutshell. The problem is, many animals other than h.sapiens see round things, but they never form a concept of 'round'. LIkewise with my quoted example of 'equals'. 'Equals' is obviously fundamental to rational argument, symbollically denoting 'the same as'. But how is equality discerned? When we say that two objects are of equal weight or length, we must already possess the concept 'equals' to make that judgement. And no amount of sensory experience will convey that to a subject incapable of grasping the concept. Hence the argument that 'equals' (and other universals') are discerned by reason and cannot be derived from experience alone (a point which Kant elaborated at tiresome length in his master work.) — Wayfarer

Well, seeing 'round' things and inferring things about them is mediated by your brain. All concepts are to some extent abstract. A 'stone' or a 'particle' is an abstract concept as much as 'money' or 'health', all inferred through how the brain interacts with the world, but at the very core and central place that makes this universe of stuff tick is physical concepts.

Indeed, that was precisely my point. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sure, and I think part of my point is that this kind of thing is already inside the kind of perspectivr related to word-use. So invoking forms doesn't add anything.

"none of us actually know how or why we personally are able to perceive and point out 'roundness' in the world," is simply not one many people — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well, I think my claim is not quite what you had in mind. What I was thinking of is more along the lines of how someone performs a skill but the performance is automatic. People very skilled at playing the piano and sight-reading can just play the notes straight off the sheet music of a very complicated song. They will then memorize thr song as second nature and br able to play it almost without thought. I don't think anyone in these moments has conscious understanding or insight into what they are actually doing. They have just learned to do it and do so automatically. Do you think Novak Djokovic actually knoes why he was such a good tennis player? Do you thi k these tennis players actually have a strong understanding of why they were just able to beat all the other kids growing up? Not long ago I saw a video of Magnus Carlson beat someone at chess while blindfolded; do you think he really knows how he is able to do this? I think we can say similar for all skills - reading, facial recognition, any kind of knowledge. Sometimes I recall facts or events in memory and I don't even know how I learned them. They just come.

I think you know about as much about why you can perceive roundness as how much an agnosiac with brain damage would know about why they couldn't perceive or distinguish certain shapes. Sure, a scientist can explain to an agnosiac some information about brains, cognition, the psychology of perception. But at some point, from your first person perspective it boils down to just - you can do some stuff, you can't do some other stuff; you aren't exactly sure why in terms of your own personal insight.

What I am saying here is not a scientific claim about facts related to the brain or cognition. Its a claim about people's personal insight into their own behavior and cognition, which I think most people don't even realize much of the time.

There is no skepticism about science here, just that we cannot realistically get a precise explanation of how these things work without presuming our own use of words. For instance, how a neuroscientist or psychologist cannot study how people see color without relying on people's self-report about color. If you aren't building these things from the ground up, you are to some extent relying on how scientific, empirical facts and models are related to your use of words or perceptual abilities that you may not quite understand. So my point is that if I invoke "forms", I am just re-asserting that fact that I can see stuff without actually explaining what that means. So to me, that's not really interesting, and I know what is happening when my brain perceives stuff is probably a bit more interesting and informative.

These theories might be misguided, but they are not reducible to "word use." — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think they are when you view word-use as not in a vacuum. We use words in response to things that are happening in the world, coming from what we see and hear, including from inanimate objects and other people that shape eachother's use of words.

One might indeed criticize a metaphysics of form in any number of ways, but to say that such a broad and well-developed area of philosophy is contentless would seem to simply demonstrate a total lack of familiarity with it ... ... There can be no "neuroscience" if there is nothing determinant that can be said about brains. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This whole section was informative, which just leads me to re-assert the next quote you take from my original post:

Is there actually much difference between my 'structure' and your 'forms' (in the most generic sense of structure)? Maybe I just prefer the former word without the connotations of the latter... other similar words might be 'patterns', 'regularities', etc, etc.

So I guess my conclusion is that appealing to forms and word-use is not meaningfully different. They are only different when trying to inflate stuff unnecessarily — Apustimelogist

Interesting that you mention strange loops. You've read Hofstadter, I presume? — Banno

I actually haven't! I just like the phrase in order to describe the inability to get out of a perspectival context - this constant tension between trying to give descriptions of what is the case and the fact that this can effectively be deflated in terms of word-use and enactive cognition, which itself is a description of what is the case, which brings us back to the beginning (in the sense that describing or giving a story about what is the case regarding how cognition works is itself word-use and enactive cognition).

Anyhow, how does one figure out how to "apply a rule for the word round," if there are not first round things? The form is, first and foremost, called in to explain the existence of round things, second our perceptions of them, and then language. It is not primarily about language because language was never considered "first philosophy" before the advent of analytic philosophy (i.e., "being and thought are prior to speaking.") People must be able to identify roundness to use to words to refer to — Count Timothy von Icarus

But anyone using the word 'round' is using it because they are engaging with the world around them and they see 'round' things.

Imo, if we want to explain the actual reasons why we use the word 'round', you have to talk about an immensely complicated brain and how it interacts with the rest of a very complicated world in an intractable manner - from the perspective of our own intelligibility - to infer something about how it represents or embodies structure out in the world.

We can't actually do that, and for any intelligible investigation of that we must presuppose our own concepts to know what we are looking for.

So when someone says that you need 'roundness' to explain why we use the word 'round'. What are you actually saying? Because none of us actually know how or why we personally are able to perceive and point out 'roundness' in the world, all you have really done is re-assert your own word use. You haven't actually explained anything and so your perspective ends up being vacuously the same as the word-use one which additionally wants us to say stuff like 'oranges are round iff oranges are round' which is asserting that 'roundness' is the case in conjunction with what is seen in the world - which we can point at, also communicating what we are pointing at to other people who use the word in the same way.

So by invoking forms have you meaningfully added anything? Not really - nothing that has not already been asserted by someone capable of using sentences like 'oranges are round iff oranges are round'. I can asser that round things exist without dressing it up in "forms" or "universals". Fine, we can call it that if you want, but I don't know if there is anything more interesting to say about that which wouldn't end up on someone falling back on and taking for granted their own exceptional abilities to make distinctions in the world and use words without really knowing how they do it.

And my own views - about what we might see as 'real' in the world or engagement with a world that 'real-ly' exists independent of us - fully acknowledges this, because the most generic way I think we can talk about the world is in terms of structure...
But what does that word actually mean? Because it is so generic, its very difficult to describe and elaborate on what that word actually means. Nonetheless, I have learned to use this word effectively in virtue of a brain that can make abstract inferences and predictions about my sensory world, and can use the word intelligibly to tell a story about the world which I think has less caveats than certain other stories. But in telling this story, I am still somewhat taking for granted the fact that I don't really know the specific details of how I am doing this. No matter how hard I try, I cannot elevate the kind of metaphysical meat of my word-use of 'structure' here into something which is actually explanatorily useful beyond being a kind of component of my story that relates to other parts of the story.

Neither can I elevate various other concepts like, say, "red" or "being", "same" or perhaps even something like "plus"... I am sure, many others. To me, simply re-asserting these latter examples as if there is something else additional to say isn't interesting (even if these are all useful words about stuff), especially when clearly what makes the world tick is to be found in our physical theories that predict what we see - and in theory, an understanding of brains that might give us some understanding into how we see those what we see, and make use of what we see in intelligent ways. Again, the useful way of talking about our theories of the world, with the least caveats, may be in terms of structure and brains' inferences about structure - useful words for my story without needing to elaborate those words in some additional, excessive way. Is there actually much difference between my 'structure' and your 'forms' (in the most generic sense of structure)? Maybe I just prefer the former word without the connotations of the latter... other similar words might be 'patterns', 'regularities', etc, etc.

There is necessarily a strange loop here of sorts in the sense that: understanding and using theories is also something we do. But I do not need to redundantly inflate ontologies that are explantorily useful beyond just how my brain works, resulting in word use. Sure, I will say there are 'round' things, but there are things much more interesting that make 'round' things and everything else tick. Again, even with "what makes the world tick" has limits in the sense that I cannot give you an interesting elaboration on what structure means. I don't need to arbitrarily and redundantly lay out a list of all the of these "forms" that "exist" and try to elevate them in some way, even though I don't really have anything interesting to say about them other than I see stuff with these properties. And because that is all I can say, I am effectively just re-asserting my own word use which renders any attempt to point out something salient about "forms" vacuous and effectively no different than re-asserting the notion that word-use is what is fundamental about concepts.

So I guess my conclusion is that appealing to forms and word-use is not meaningfully different. They are only different when trying to inflate stuff unnecessarily, which cannot be done in an interesting, intelligible way imo. The explanatory importance of concepts is how they relate to other concepts, and I think a theory of "forms" would place some overly abstract concepts or "universals" in a central role amongst our ontological concepts about the world where they have no business being. At the core and center is our best scientific theories, not the patterns that "supervene" at a higher level of description. "Roundness" exists, but lets not make it out to be something more important than it really is.

Apparently Apustimelogist finds your statement completely ambiguous. — noAxioms

Ironically, the original point I was making there is that you are the one finding such things ambiguous hence why you conflate 2+2 referring to completely different things.

Except it is 2+2 being discussed, and not the label nor any of the symbols or concepts of them, nor how anything is spelled. — noAxioms

So its like discussing spelling: m-i-n-u-t-e.

My point is that the 'story' you're telling presupposes intelligibility in order to be 'right'. If you admit that the physical world - at least in some features - is intelligible (apparently enought intelligible to be certain of these things), then, at least the most basic concepts that ground describe the order of the physical world, which seem to imply that they are actually also part of the order of physical reality itself. — boundless

I don't think so, because I don't explicitly need concepts for the world to be intelligible. I can see the trajectory of a thrown ball, predict where it will end up and catch it without overt need for any concepts. We apply concepts after the fact, mapping them to what we see. Much of the time they are wrong and make false predictions. The ones that happen to be empirically adequate may survive, generally.

On the otherhand, I have said all our concepts are anchored to some extent to sensory reality, just some are far more abstract than others. I think maybe then you could argue that math does capture something about the empirical structure of reality - quantity. It is self-evident quantities exist, and we can identify them; but this isn't really interesting like an independently existing platonic realm. Its almost trivial to observe the world around you and be able to identify that there can be more of something or less of something, bigger things and smaller things.

Also about predictions: unless one adopts a quite skeptical approach (for instance the one about 'perspective' I mentioned earlier), these extremely accurate predictions seem to imply that, indeed, mathematics does describe the 'structure' of reality. But if that is true, mathematics isn't invented (at least, the part that describes the structure of the world). — boundless

I am not presuming some exclusive dichotomy of invented or discovered. Something can be both. You can invent a system of rules and then discover implications of following those rules that you did not know before.

Again, you don't need any special explanation for the effectiveness of maths. It is just extremely flexible and broad. If math was an extremely small field that entirely described physics exclusively then I would say you have a point but math can describe thing that are physically impossible or physically don't make sense. It describes stuff that have nothing to do with the empirical, physical world. It just explores the logical limits of manipulating quantities, perhaps in some counterfactual sense.

No, the world is intelligible because it is intelligible (if it is indeed intelligible). — boundless

I don't think it contradict the idea that the world is intelligible to us because we have a brain that allows us to understand it - i.e. it captures the structure of the world in a way that we can predict what happens next.

On the other hand, I can't exclude the possibility that it isn't really intelligible, in which case we evolved in a quite 'lucky' way that enables us to make useful predictions by using models that are in fact wrong. — boundless

Even if your models are wrong beyond some limit, the fact that you can construct models that give correct predictions suggests that there is an intelligible structure to that part of reality which is being captured. If reality wasn't intelligible, you wouldn't be able to do that.

Intelligibility is about understanding and comprehension, it isn't about being right or wrong. I would say something is unintelligible when you cannot create any model that gives correct predictions; even then, I am skeptical that such a thing even exists except for say... complete randomness... even paradoxes and contradictions are intelligible and understandable... even the concept of randomness itself to some extent.

The very fact that we speak of evolution - which is indeed intelligible as a concept - to explain why we can have knowledge presupposes that the world is intelligible in some sense (unless, as I said, one wants to embrace skepticism). — boundless

I think the core issue here is that I just don't agree with how you think intelligibility has some kind of importance here. Like, intelligibility to me seems to just say that the world has structure and we have brains that can capture that. Neither do I need some platonic realm of maths to understand why math can be used to describe that structure. I guess at the most abstract level of description, anything we perceive through our senses can be related to quantities. But again, its just a trivial observation of the world that can be captured abstractly by a sophisticated brain. Why do I need aome special explanation for the fact that I can count things that I see in the world (under the assumption of identifying those counted things as the same)?

What is being given the same representation here? — noAxioms

Its all different things blanketly labelled as 2+2 when really that doesn't actually describe the specifics of each thing and why they are like that.

Its like taking the words minute (time) and minute (size) and trying to call them the same thing because they are spelt the same, and then doing an analysis showing that that isn't really the case and are subjective.

and a context requirement seems like an awful big asterisk to the claim of the objectiveness of its truth. — noAxioms

But this is just because you are giving completely differernt things the same representation.

In other words, physicalism would like to have a 'physical' explanation of everything and, yet, if it were true there would be no explanation that assumes the very thing it wants to explain as its starting point.

It's seems to me, then, that if one doesn't assume that logic and (at least some part of) math are irreducible, one can't assume that any kind of rational knowledge is possible. If they were simply 'inventions', nothing would be truly intelligible. So, instead of a 'physicalism' we would have an extreme form of skepticism of some sorts. — boundless

I don' really follow what you're saying. Knowledge is just predicting things that we see in the world. We then apply a self-consistent description that gives those predictions. We can then apply this to our own brains and minds (cognitive science, neuroscience) interacting with the world and in principle describe how we do this, how we come up with physical models, math and logic as a part of how we make inferences about sensory inputs.

From this standpoint, I don't really see the problem you raise. I don't need to assume rational knowledge for my brain to do stuff... it just does stuff in virtue of how it evolved and developed. And none of what the brain does os strictly arbitrary because it depends on its interactions with the outside world.

But note that basic notions like 'oneness', 'plurality', 'same', 'different' seem to be innate and do not seem to be 'fabricated' by us as mere abstractions. They do seem to mirror the 'structure' of the world 'external to us' as far as we can know. So, while we can't 'prove' it (and, therefore, we can't have certainty about it), the physical world seems to be (in part) intelligible and, therefore, knowable.
Furthermore, these 'basic concepts' seem to be the very categories that we use to interpret our perceptions even before we are aware of that. We distinguish different things, we distinguish change, we discern sameness, regularities and so on. If we had not these 'innate categories', how could we be able to make any sense of out experience at all? And, everything suggests that, while they maybe not 'without error', they still give us an approximate picture of reality. Which would then mean that the world is intelligible, which would mean that its structure is like that of our reasoning...

The antinomy I was talking about is this: while it does seem to us that the world is intelligible, we can't verify it from the 'outside' of our perspective. So, we might presume that the structure of our thought mirrors (in part) the structure of the 'external world' but we can't just prove that. — boundless

Look at it this way; our brain is just networks of neuronal connectivity and activity. All our knowledge comes about in the same way and we learn by calibraiting neural connectivity in response to sensory inputs that reverberate through the system. The system as a whole is performing inference on sensory states. Abstract concepts like "same" are just very abstract inferences about sensory information, and they seem trivial because it is an inevitable fact that percepts have overlaps of difference and similarity in how the brain reacts to them. All systems do this... arguably a thermometer does this... but then it takes a more omplicated system to have a higher order awareness of the similarities and differences in its percepts and utilize them to make more abstract predictions. One might call this innate in the sense that every human ends up having this ability. But these abilities come from the same reason we have any abilities, related to neuronal activity and learning.

Anyway, I am not sure I understand your point here. The world is intelligible to us because we have a brain that is designed to model the world.

Just because the numerical value is the same it doesn't at all imply that it's a tautology. — boundless

We are not interested in the overall concept of four, only the numerical values and operations on those values.

Two times two is two twos. Thats just two plus two. Its the same. If you are using the notion "equals", you are giving a numerical equivalence, a numerical tautology.

That's just geometry. — noAxioms

Yes, which causes changes to what clocks read in an unambiguous way!

But before that demonstration, the predicate was already there. Predication does not depend on it being observed. — noAxioms

Yes, exactly!

Outside the awareness and measurement of duration, there is no time. — Wayfarer

Strongly disagree.

The same goes for a theory of experience. — David Chalmers, Facing Up...

The problem is that there is no theory of experience; I believe its impossible and you can't access experience empirically. If there is no theory of experience and how it relates to other parts of the world, its propping up an ontology on nothing. That basically leaves it in the exact same place as any kind of framework like physicalism or naturalism or structuralism that doesn't explicitly incorporate phenomena.

indicate a kind of absence of curiosity or insight into specifically philosophical questions. Rather a kind of sanguine acceptance of the scientific worldview. Would that be fair? — Wayfarer

Not at all, its the conclusions I come ro exploring those questions.

In all cases the experimenter is providing the perspective within which the observations are meaningful. — Wayfarer

Sure, observations can be interpreted differently, but these are not intended as subjective interpretations, they are speculations about an actual event. You can perceive an observation event or measure it in different ways, but ultimately what you are latching on to is the fact that an event happened, that clocks can run differently due to time dilation. Even if you interpret the observation as having a different cause, you are postulating that you believe an objective event happened. Even if there are different ways of looking at an event, science wants those different ways to agree and be coherent; for instance, different methodlogies of measurement, different mathematical formulations that predict the same things. Obviously, things may not practically gel ideally or even very well, but imo, these kinds of things (e.g. arguments about the irreducibility of chemistry) don't point to some kind of conspiratorial aspect of reality that inherently prevents reducibility ontologically - its about the limits of us as human beings to observe and make sense of things.

Clocks don’t measure time; we do. — Bergson-Einstein Debate

Tell that to your gps.

That's because neuroscience is not philosophy. 'Facing up to the problem of consciousness' was about the fact that the neuroscientific accounts cannot, as a matter of principle, provide an account of the first-person nature of experience. That's where the explanatory gap is found. — Wayfarer

No, but I don't think an explanatory gap entails some kind of fundamental metaphysical dualism or revisionism. Imo, neuroscience and physics attests to that because there is no evidence for mental substance, afterlife, the supernatural, etc etc. And when people start offering a kind of non-physicalism without any scientific revisionism, its more-or-less like physicalism imo

Interesting; yes, I think this part:

Indirect realism says we see mental models assembled form sense data and that we don't see objects as they are. — Janus

Is where I get ambiguous or perhaps ambivalent over indirect or direct realism. I can see arguments in both directions. From my perspective which is less object-centered, I think the color thing you talk about would be less of an issue for direct realism if it still is mapping to actual physical behavior or structure in the world.

Maybe we don't experience the world "as it is", out of perspective, but I would say that all that characterizes a perspective is the incompleteness or partiality of the information that is being seen. So I would say we can keep Kant's phenomenal perspectives but that they don't have any interesting ontological meaning because from my perspective, what I see is just structural information in my sensory inputs that map to causes in the external world, a mapping that in principle can be probed in the functional structure of networks of neuronal activity. So to me the fact that we seee the world frok a perspective can be valid without implying anything fundamentslly mysterious.

Without a subject, there is no point of reference for spatial extension or temporal duration — Wayfarer

But what about relativity!? You can do experiments which show the effects of things like time dilation related to clocks without requiring observers or perspectives or anything like that.

without acknowledging that the meaning and coherence we attribute to neural data are not in the data; they are read into it by the observing scientist ('this means that', 'from this, we can infer that....'). In other words, it is the mind that interprets the brain, not the brain that explains the mind. — Wayfarer

Sure, but this is the natural foibles of science and difficulties studying a complex system. But nonetheless we might produce a coherent story and use models to reproduce the empirical behavior we see to gain some kind of understanding of what brains do. And ofcourse, its difficult to have anywhere near the desired amount of information from the brain to do thid, and people often have different, contrary ideas about how or why certain things happen or what they do.

This reveals a circularity at the heart of the physicalist account: it presumes that mind is reducible to brain, while relying on the mind’s interpretive capacities to make sense of the brain in the first place. — Wayfarer

But its not just interpretive because there is empirical data, whether neurobiological or behavioral you can compare models to. And the hard problem of consciousness doesn't factor into most neuroscience. You don't need to assume the mind is descriptively reducible to a brain - but what people have found is that there is an unmistakable causal relationship between experiences and behaviors, and brains - whether you infer that through brain injury, stimulation, neuroimaging, all sorts of things.

Can I ask what characterizes the difference between your direct realism, indirect realism and naive realism?

'2+2=4', however, IMO isn't a tautology — boundless

Count two fingers, then another two fingers.

Now count four fingers.

I actually believe that, often, physicalists equivocate the meaning of 'physical', in order to explain consciousness, abstract objects and so on. If by 'physicalism', we mean that the physical is fundamental and everything else is derived from it, we would like to find a reasonable definition of 'what is physical'. — boundless

Yes, physicalism is arguably vacuous as a metaphysical category precisely because all of these fundamental metaphysical categories are somewheat vacuous. All knowledge is functional and structural. Physics, chemistry, biology all effrctively are about describing behavior. Intrinsicness doesn't come into it.

Why is physicalism so intuitive to some? I have thought about this and I think when people are saying physicalist they are effectively upholding the scientific status quo in opposition to scientifically unsubstantiated ideas likethe supernatural, parapsychology, substance dualism, woo-ism and platonic realms. Maybe in some ways it is more of a reactive stance than a proactive stance.

we have to explain how the apparent eternity and necessity of mathematical and logical truth can be explained by such a system, without falling into equivocity. — boundless

From my perspective there is no prpblem because all knowledge is just applying labels and makimg predictions about what happens next. All labels are abstract, all knowledge is abstract; there are no concrete objects of knowledge, only abstract ones. A stone is an abstract object, a particle is an abstract object, a dinosaur is an abstract object, "two" is an abstract object, "truth" is an abstract object. They all share abstractness on some level and we all infer them in the same way from sensory inputs; however, labels can be so abstract they transcend typical "concrete" objects (e.g. "this rock"), but that doesn't mean that they aren't abstracted from the same sensory data. For instance, we might have the concept of identity or sameness coming from indistinguishable perceptual responses or experiences - we just have a label for that called "sameness". You can have multiple iterations of the "same" "thing (another abstract label about our ability to make distinctions)" which is pretty self-evident in the natural world with recurrent structure and where we have perceptual abilities that can pick out and distinguish those structures ... you have quantity... the rest is just tautology; math is talking about how different descriptions are equivalent extrapolating from the idea of identity and quantity. Logic seems actually very much the same but not talking about quantity - we are talking about in what sense different descriptions are equivalent to each other - the premises to the conclusions.

I have no problem with people being skeptical with this description because its obviously not rigorous and comes a lot from my intuition. But I don't feel the need for anything added to explain things about how math or logic works. Once we pre-stipulate conditions for things to be the same or different, we are just extrapolating those properties in tautologous ways. These things can be gotten straight out of reality, or describe reality very well in suspicious ways, purely because reality has structure in which different parts of the reality act in the same way! And so there is nothing special about maths relation to reality if these are just tautologies.

Now based on this, I suppose you could give ontological status to math and logic but not on any kind of mysterious way, *even though they aren't spatially and temporally constrained in our models of the world*, beyond how a sentence like "things exist" is a truth that uses abstract words but a physicalist wouldn't find problematic. I think though, ultimately in this kind of view one has to explicitly acknowledge the use of labels our cognitive apparatus in constructing knowledge - so it is thinner than a more naively realistic conception. At the same time, one could arguably still uphold a kind of realism in regard to the mapping of these constructs to reality in such a way that they can still affirm that "this is the case" in a way that describes what we see in reality in a consistent way. Importantly, none of our knowledge is something that *developed* independently of *our* sensory *history*. *Our sensory inputs* describe a reality that when you zoom in more and more you see is entirely built on microscopic particles (at least the stuff in everyday life we see) and when you unentangle its complicated knots, is ultimately scaffolded on and follows entirely by very general fundamental physical descriptions. *Logic and math imo are still outgrowths of, and play out, our models of the external world beyond our sensory inputs. Our models can just be highly abstract.*

Edited: **

And what makes you think that's a philosophical argument? :brow: Your philosophical position is so baked-in that you can't comprehend how it can be questioned. I mean, no offence intended, but that's how you come across. — Wayfarer

I mean, I offered a description of what happens. You haven't offered an argument for why that explanation isn't adequate.

But they're also simple, in that a single organism is a simple whole, which subordinates and synthesises all that complexity against the ends required to survive and procreate. — Wayfarer

So, what? None of this is threatening to someone who has a kind of physicalist world view or the notion that a brain can learn to do math just in virtue of its components behave.

The question is whether describing them physically is sufficient to explain how thought, reason, or consciousness arise. That’s not a scientific question—it’s a philosophical one. Which you continually assume has a physical answer, but for which you're presenting no argument whatever. — Wayfarer

Well we give computational descriptions of what neurons do that are nonetheless instantiated physically, its just that the physical functional structure happens to correspond to or be amenable to a computational description. There is no profound mystery.

but they instantiate principles which could never be predicted on the basis of physics alone — Wayfarer

But so what? This is an epistemic or explanatory point. Its just about complexity. No one you're arguing against finds this an interesting point, it doesn't conflict with anyone with a physicalist viewpoint. Why does it matter the level at whoch you choose to describe these things when at the end of the day they are all undergirded by the behavior of particles in physics. The fact that you need different explanations on different levels is due to human limitations, it doesn't change the fact that a brain which is basically a bunch of synchronous electro-chemical events can do math just in virtue of how its components.

When you study neuroscience, how much physics are you required to understand? — Wayfarer

Well a Hodgkin-Huxley neuron is basically just physics.


People make up new theories which often make predictions about things that haven't been observed yet. Many fail, some succeed. I don't understand what is special

I mean, weak realism just means a realism weaker than strong realism, and a naive realism would be a strong realism.

Do you think anyone who had done even a little intelligent reflection and critical thinking would hold such a view? There is a reason it is called naive realism. — Janus

Oh, so you are saying people tend to be weak realists instead? What a coincidence, chimes right in with my thoughts just there, thank you!

Because when people say realism they tend to mean a completely unique God's eye view of reality, which is a much stronger realism. Once you start to be able to view things in different perspectives then people start to use that as arguments against realism.

But then, what's your account of the 'unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences' (Eugene Wigner). If they were purely tautological, how could they be exploited to discover things that otherwise would never have been known? The example I often give is Dirac's discovery of anti-particles, which was predicted solely on the basis of mathematics, with no empirical evidence forthcoming till much later. How could tautological statements yield genuinely new observations? Not to forget the many predictions arising from Einstein's theories that took decades to empirically validate ('Einstein Proved Right Again'). — Wayfarer

Maths is like writing. Its a language that describes structure. The unreasonable effectiveness of writing is not magic, its that you can invent words to represent anything in the world, anything in imagination you want. Its the same with math. Math is a gigantic field with many many different topics where you can describe many different facets of structure and use math to invent structures that nicely fit things you observe. Its not miraculous at all.

I genuinely have never understood why people find it miraculous that people can invent a model that makes predictions, some of which havn't been observed yet, and they turn out to be the case. I don't understand why people find that miraculous or interesting. I don't need a special explanation of why that sometimes happens. All that maths does is describe structure in terms iof quantities. You observe stuff in the world with a structure and you fit math to it. Its very simple. What about maths that works well is it is flexible and diverse so you can invent math that describes a huge number of things completely disparate.

. Both structures can be accounted for wholly and solely in terms of physical and chemical principles. — Wayfarer

So is a brain.

But even very rudimentary organisms already instantiate order on a different level to that of the physical. — Wayfarer

Complexity doesn't make something not physical.

living tissue is 'nothing but' physical matter, but that is highly contested and besides not in itself an empirical argument. — Wayfarer

Outrageous statement.

I see no reason to believe that it can be described in terms of, or limited to, physical principles, nor to describe the brain as a physical object. — Wayfarer

Yes, we can describe it in terms of things like statistical inference and machine learning, neither of which assume anything other than the idea that learning is embodied by physicla stuff: i.e. cells, biochemistry, fundamental physics, all of which there is some substantial understanding.

It is an embodied organ, embedded in a body, culture and environment — Wayfarer

Yup, no conflict here.

For the nature of mathematics, there is no reason to believe that this is grounded in or determined by any physical laws or relationships. — Wayfarer

All I am assuming is that a physical structure called a brain or perhaps, another kind of machine, can learn to do math purely in virtue of its physical structure and the kind of learning or inference it can perform as describable via statistical inference and machine learning.

This is a good point that made me think and want to look up about how smell works more, but couldn't you also say we can distinguish our emotional reactions about something from our ability to identify it through the senses? Albeit, maybe they interfere.

I think color has good points too. Nervous system structure will affect how we detect color, albeit one might still say all the distinctions we make map to physical events in the world. Maybe this needs to be unique to be realist? Rather than a brain that may be structured in a way to do the job more efficiently, resulting in possibly more convoluted or context-dependent ways of mapping to the world. There is also the sense that if one identifies blue colors more similarly than yellow or red or whatever then this seems also some added kind of detection of similarity purely a byproduct of the cone system - but then again, greens will also be more similar than reds because they are mapping to physical structures that are more similar. I guess would need to explore what is going on more though maybe. I could make an argument that maybe the ways different cones affect perception just can be seen similarly to how we might bound the same events in the world in different ways. But then maybe to some this is quintessential antirealism.
Maybe one could say perceptual differences reflect the fact we see different parts of the same reality, obtaining different partial information about actual physical events, but animals with different cones or more resolution of vision are just detecting more stuff or different stuff than we are. I guess this again is a very weak realism still.

Ultimately there always does seem to be some kind of arbitrariness somewhere. For me its a question of whether that still preserves reliable information, which albeit is always depends on whether you happen to live in an environment where your senses are reliable. In other contexts they may not be (i.e. light [in the correct ambient environment reflecting off objects] is not the only thing that can stimulate a retina).

I have said in other threads I think indirect vs direct realism is actually arguably kind of ambiguous. And I feel comfortable with some kind of minimal realism I think because maybe I think a fundamental metaphysical characterization of intrinsic reality is unintelligible. The best imo we can do is some weak floppy notion of structure, perhaps informational structure. While intrinsicness isn't accessible at all, and perhaps fundamentally meaningless, I think structure is accessible by us, even if in a convoluted or perhaps idealized or compressed way. The issue is that no creatures have access to all the kind of structure in reality that one might be able to plausible detect.

But maybe reality "as it is" is nothing more than the structure of reality "as it is" which we can access to some extent because we can all navigate the world correctly - but maybe my ability to find my way home was in fact some kind of accidental heuristic - we just don't have access to all of the structure. My thoughts are that phenomenal experience is just informational structure (or isomorphic to it if you want to be more precise) which itself maps to the world structure at least partially. When we see the world "not as it is" we have different mappings that miss stuff out.

These are not “things” in the physical world, but they constrain what can be true of that world - hence their designation 'laws'/ The very framework of physics, for example, depends on mathematical structures that don't exist materially. — Wayfarer

But mathematical structures are effectively tautologies so I don't see any reason for them to be meaningfully instantiated in some realm of their own or something like that where they magically affect the rest of reality.

The only fallback against that is to try and show that ideas are somehow identical with neural structures - as indeed D M Armstrong and other materialists insist. — Wayfarer

But there is overwhelming evidence that physical structures like brains are sufficient for all our reasoning, including mathematical. Why do you need to invoke anything else?

Well, probably unlike most, I put some stock in spiritual insight. The archetypal sage - whom is most likely not an actual person - has the ability to see 'how things truly are', which exceeds the scope of mere objectivity. Again from the entry on Pierre Hadot: — Wayfarer

What's your point?

which says that, were reason to be understandable purely in naturalistic terms, as an adaptation to the environment, then how could we have confidence in reason? — Wayfarer

I've always found this point quite strange because from what I see, people reason "badly" and get things wrong literally all the time, including scientists and academics. I feel like, even though we are very smart, human progress in terms of knowledge is not some direct consequence solely of our ability to reason but this long process of trial and error where people throw stuff at the wall and get it wrong all the time, and some stuff just sticks for one reason or another and we remember it over the generations. Its like a another form of Darwinian selectionism.

Apologies, very long reply. Again, I don't expect any replies to these kinds of thoughts because when I come to these replies I am just ending up writing down going through my rambling thought process about how to produce a coherent view for these things, which goes way beyond being a self-contained reply. I am not restricting these thoughts as I would if expecting and requiring a reply to them. I am just going through my thought process.

I believe that realism is more like an epistemic position rather than an ontic one. — boundless

But realism is more a claim that we can have knowledge of that 'mind-independent reality' and it's where things get murkier. — boundless

Yes, very true. Its totally reasonable to have the thought process that: there is a reality out there independent of us even when we are not looking; when we do look, what we see is dependent entirely on out biology had how that biology relates to the world in a specific and non-unique perspectival way (based on the physical interactions mediating the relation between things in the outside world and our brains). It is then fair to say how we see reality and information we gain that can be put to use is dependent on a perspective of a mind.

For me, its acknowledging this fact but also arguing that this exact same situation can be also equally viewed as a brain receiving genuine information about the outside world which depends entirely on whats going on out in the world. I think there is wiggle room in deciding what constitutes mind-independent knowledge, or at the very least knowledge that is in some sense real.

Again, the motivation is that it seems paradoxical to say that all knowledge is false or not real, yet our mastery of the world is very good. And I think taking anti-realism to its logical conclusion, it makes sense to me to say that all knowledge, whether scientific or just your everyday knowledge, is not real in that anti-realist sense. That logical conclusion is why I tend toward a total deflationary attitude toward all knowledge and epistemic activities. However, apart from the fact that deflating knowledge and epistemic behavior actually requires a tentative story of what is objectively happening with regard to minds and brains and consciousness, I think just for the sake of a coherent story, there should be a kind of compromise position accounting for the fact that while knowledge and epistemic activities don't support the most extreme, almost ridiculously naive realist position, the aforementioned paradox makes the notion of anti-realism a bit misleading. The deflation of the anti-realism vs. realism dichotomy itself is part of a solution; we might even say that one can only view the construct of "real" perspectivally in a way that requires adding your own assumptions about what constitutes "real" that are not straightforwardly unambiguous. At the same time, the paradox can only be fully resolved imo by a story about some "real" engagement with the world. Often our engagement is completely erroneous; at the same time, such error is not dichotomous but a continuous, fuzzy gradation.

If I am not mistaken, ontic structural realism is the position that, while we can't know the intrinsic properties of mind-independent reality, we can, at least in principle, know some structural aspects of it. — boundless

That I believe is actually epistemic structural realism. Ontic structural realism is that there is nothing more than structural properties to reality. I think an ontic structural realist might say there is some objective, uniquely describable set of structures. My view would be considerably weaker than that.

I think part of my view is changing the standard of what constitutes "real" metaphysics and "real" knowledge.

Some say that what is "real" metaphysically is a world of objectively, uniquely defined stuff that kur words and sentences map to. For me, its sufficient just that our words consistently map to stuff in a self-consistent way. I don't need some notion of objective boundaries in the world beyond my senses, just that if I see stuff or say stuff, it always maps to the same part of the world with the same relations to other parts of the world.

Because what is knowledge but the ability to predict what happens next? In that sense, knowledge is entirely about structure. The idea of intelligible intrinsic properties separate from structure then doesn't make sense - there is simply nothing to know about that kind of thing and it doesn't even logically make sense unless it led to some perceptible structural distinguishability. Indistinguishable intrinsic properties are meaningless.

I would say it is this kind of argument which could be used to attack the idea that we cannot knoe about the intrinsic nature of the world mind-independently - it doean't really make any sense the idea that there is anything to know or anything intelligible about that. Everything that is meaningful and makes a difference in the world is about structure that makes a difference - a boulder is meaningful because it has structural relationships to everything else in the world and makes a difference to how things around it behave, whilst other things evince its existence by enacting change upon the boulder; when you push it it moves. If intrinsic properties cannot make a difference structurally then not only are they meaningless but they give no reason for us to even speculate on them. A Bayesian might say we should update out beliefs only as much as required by the evidence. If no difference is made, there is nothing to update.

There is then the possibility of knowledge being mediated by different structures that produce exactly the same predictions counterfactually. Like how Newtonian physics can be formulated dynamically or in terms of least action or complex Hilbert spaces. But then if there is no way of distinguishing what different models say about the world then how do they make a difference to our knowledge? How do they make a difference to our mastery? They don't. It then doesn't make much of a difference that we describe the same thing in different ways; we are still making a consistent mapping to the same world. Our conscious experiences are just that - informational structure about what is going on in the world, albeit form a specific persepctive limited by specific physical interactions with a small contained part of the world - nonetheless, when not going haywire they map to the world in a way that in principle would be vindicated by habitual engagement with the world. Sure we can be wrong or incorrect about how we see our mapping to the world but this is not so interesting if it is possible in principle for us to be errorless (albeit one could also be a radical skeptic about errors).

Ultimately, though we are often wrong and models often do make considerably different predictions. Even in something like quantum interpretations. Different interpretations make the same empirical predictions but clearly they do not make the same predictions, fullstop. Many worlds predicts a completely different universe to Bohmian mechanics or relational mechanica structurally; its just that physics so far has hidden the means from us to actually distinguish those different ontologies.

We are wrong all the time. We make idealizations that are often wrong in some parts, albeit vindicate the important predictions we are intetested in in other aspects.

I think many realists are not interested in the possibility that our theories are mistaken. For many realists, I think it is sufficient that it is in principle possible to have a model or maybe sets of many models that predict everything one could predict about the structure of the universe correctly. They would then say that many theories are wrong now, but the fact that they predict things correctly means some of the structure is correct and that those predictions will get better over time.

At the same time, I think most anti-realists would say this is nothing more than empirical adequacy, or empirical structure, especially if one ditched the idea that "real" requires unique, objective deacriptions.
I guess here it makes salient that my views about the issues of realism in regard to indeterminacy are no different to any anti-realist, and I embrace that anti-realism because I believe all knowledge and epistemic activities can be deflated, albeit deflated under a kind of scientific or scientifically-amenable description of how exactly we perform those activities.

But my concern I guess is that the upholding of predictions via empirical adequacy requires a form of real engagement with the world, albeit one that can be mistaken.
So in that sense many theories are just plain wrong on some level or some aspects; if they make acceptable predictions in some places, that needs elucidating about how it captures empirical structure or if it does so only by luck or too thinly to be interesting.
I guess it could be vacuous when one considers that structure must be scaffolded on other structures and that they could be plausibly scaffolded on many different incompatible ones.
I suspect many attempts at explanations are like this. Flat out wrong.
It is then valid to be truly skeptical of scientific theories that could be flat out wrong. But I think something like classical mechanics actually makes too little metaphysical assumptions to be vacuous in this way. In some ways, Newtonian mechanics is actually just a thin description of behavior we see in empirical structure. Its not like saying that the earth is flat and then finding out it is rouns - which invokes considerable extra metaphysical, structure depth beyond what we see in empirical behavior. Quantum thwory may be the same as Newtonian mechanica in that regard.... but quantum interpretations isn't as it goes metaphysically deeper.

I guess under my view is the idea that maybe there can be nothing more to say about reality than what could be perceived or distinguished in empirical structures counterfactually; albeit ones that can be mistaken and do scaffold on each other in some sense.

Again, I think because of the complicatedness it becomes difficult to unambiguously define real and not real in regard to descriptions and theories that themselves can be deflated in terns of physical activities. Nonetheless there is maybe a fuzzy gradation between consistent mappings, engagements with the world and ones that are erroneous, or at least our predictions of our own knowledge are erroneous

But then, if we accept that 'mind-independent reality' is intelligible, we might ask ourselves how is that possible. — boundless

And what is even more interesting is that if we do accept that we can know (part of) the mind-independent reality it is because it shares something with our own mental categories. So, it would imply that, say, mathematical platonists are in some sense right to say that mathematical truths are mind-independent, eternal and so on. — boundless

From my perspective, all it requires is a mapping so it is sufficient for a physical reality were things behave in consistent ways that structure of some parts of reality can be mapped to the behaviors of other parts (e.g. like say a mirror reflecting the image of the structure of a room). So I disagree about platonism.

The empirical knowledge that science gives us is undeniable. But, in a sense, we can't 'prove' in any way that this means that we do know the structure of 'reality as it is'. — boundless

On the other hand, basically everything seems to tell us that we can know something about a mind-independent reality. On the other hand, however, there is no logical compelling argument that we can. — boundless

Yes, I think skepticism is always real and healthy. Knowledge, or rather, beliefs can be and often are outright wrong. They cannot be compelled to be correct. I think maybe this though goes into a question of agnosticism about theories rather than anti-realism. If it were anti-realism then it would be: even if our predictions were correct would it be not real? Now, I have said that I believe all epistemic activities can be deflated as complicated, even instrumentalist, constructions, maybe they all are a bit erroneous too. But again, I have shifted my standard for realism - I think if one views realism in terms of unique mappings to reality then ofcourse there are always many possible descriptions of the world and none of them would be real. That is valid. But I think it is also valid to say that if our epistemic constructs are all deflations and all we have to go on is whether our predictions and mastery are correct, then there is in some sense a realism to it because it reflects some real engagement which - via the purview of the free energy principle - would reflect some genuine statistical coupling between us and reality; at least that is the story, and all we have are stories. But then again, those models can be wrong, they can only be valid in a small part of reality and turn out incorrect when we come across a novel context.

I think my main contention is the status of the connection between pluralism and realism or anti-realism; we may choose to construct different tools for describing reality, nonetheless they are describing or pointing at the same thing given that they are used appropriately. I think this is inherently ambiguous. Maybe this inclines to borderline paradoxical aspects about the relation of theories to reality. Maybe we can deflate all realism and truth but nonetheless still use those words meaningfully in a deflated context. But maybe we should all be scientific agnosticists though justified in choosing theories we believe are either the best of a bad bunch now or that we believe most likely to not become erroneous in the future.

Aha, I actually removed the reference to your post on purpose because what originally was going to be just a reply to your post ended up as just complicated train of thought that I couldn't be bothered to edit into something more comprehensible. Sometimes I like just posting those trains of thoughts about some complicated topic as they come to me but I don't expect them to be easily comprehensible for others so I decided to not ask for a reply, as it were, because I would need to excessively edit and re-think the post in order to do so. But I think one of the last quotes of that post gives a summary of my perspective:

I think my perspective is similarish too Otavio Bueno's structural empiricism masquerading as a very weak ontic structural realism... so weak that they are interchangeable. This comes from my anti-realist inclinations to deflate things but the desire to acknowledge a mind-independent reality in a way that is not totally divorced from what we do and think — Apustimelogist

Link to structural empiricism
e.g.
https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=14237184630099891718&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1

At the very least, when I create stories about the world - that may end up being erroneous - these stories are about real things, or supposed to be. That may be wrong.

I do uphold all of the anti-realist arguments against realism though regarding indeterminacy of our models - leading to the conclusion that models are nothing above how they are manifested or used within our own cognitive behaviors (e.g. a physics textbook is just squiggles on paper; it means nothing unless someone is engaging with it and comprehending it and then able to perform acts or calculations utilizing it - physical and cognitive events).

But then there is an interesting loophole in that this applies equally well to the use of words like "truth" or "real". They are indeterminate. They are manifest in use when I say things like "truth is what is the case; what is true is the case; that thing is true if and only if it is the case" and acts of identification of things "as the case", whether there is any deeper, profound, intrinsic, unique to that sense or reference - or not at all. And when the anti-realist says things are not real, that is equally indeterminate in the same sense which they use skeptical arguments to attack realism.

So then the question is: if truth and reality is in use, Why do I need to change my use of those words?

They work very well and coherently most of the time. I am sure almost every anti-realist maintains their use of those terms at least in some contexts within everyday life. I may want to change the use in some contexts, but not in any radical way - e.g. "the quantum wavefunction isn't real"; "I just discovered yesterday that ghosts are not real"; "Harry Potter isn't real".

Are scientific theories true?

Well, unlike some of the easier cases above I just gave, I think this is much more ambiguous and the answer appears different from different angles. Is Newtonian mechanics true as a unique metaphysical theory? No. Does Newtonian mechanics capture actual structure of the world in terms of empirical structure that satisfy predictions? I would say arguably yes. Is Newtonian physics as appears in those empirically verified events an idealization of fine-grained eventa? Arguably yes. Is that coarse-grained structure real though? Maybe, if you think of realism in terms of overlapping structure rather than unique objects. Are there many different formulations of classical physics with the same predictions? Yes. Are the differences non-trivial? Maybe, because some involve dynamical causality, some are about least action with fixed final boundary conditions, some describe classical mechanics as waves, some describe classical mechanics with complex numbers using a Hilbert space analogous to quantum theory.

We can say there are different ways of enacting the same empirical structures that we can distinguish non-uniquely through our sensory apparati but nonetheless map onto the world beyond those boundaries.

At least, that needs to be the story for my models about the universe to seem coherent.

I think there is a kind of Wittgensteinian aspect here in relation to his famous quote about "throwing away the ladder" or something like that. Once I have deflated all meaning to use, I can throw away the ladder and just use those words how I normally do, because my meaning of the words didn't depend on some kind of intrinsic magical ontology in the first place. There is nothing to be changed, just the acknowledgement of how meaning is nothing above use - and we cannot step outside of that as it were regardless of how much we try.

But in that use there is still some engagement with a real world, even if in a minimal sense. Something like active inference in the sense of Friston's free energy principle. To model the world entails a statistical coupling between the internal states of a system and some external states across its Markov Blanket from which there is a conditional independence. And from this perspective or story, any useful model implies some real meaningful interaction with the external world, even if in a limited, perspectival sense - even if I want to deflate representations, I could consider them in some sense real if there is a meaningful sense of a consistent statistical mapping (maybe only approximately, and idealized) in some context where information is being communicated between the external and internal states via the senses. This may not be unique, but then that would imply a very very thin kind of realism which is about empirical structure which anti-realists may not generally disagree with. Maybe they won't say what they see are real intrinsic objects of the world in a direct aquaintance; but maybe they would agree it is real information about the world that is consistent, albeit the plurality of ways we can extract consistent information is potentially huge.

Yes, I don't think a fundamental metaphysics of the universe is intelligible; but it doesn't mean the structures we perceive are not genuine information, even if there is always something a bit ineffable about that and we can artifically draw boundaries in various ways.

And there the tangent went, again!
But I think maybe that was describing how my position is kind of a structural empiricism masquerading as a weak ontic structural realism.... or rather maybe it is in fact a kind of very weak epistemic structural realism that I am espousing where I am embracing the kinds of trivialities you get from Newman's objection, whilst thinking about truth and realism and structure itself in this thin deflationary way related to use within a context, and perhaps ambiguous in a multi-scale reality within which our ability to engage with information is also intractable, convoluted (in the sense of a literal convolution), context-dependent and fuzzy (ambiguous even to ourselves often, think Quine jungle gavigai and Kripkenstein quus, but also very effective). Things can be the case in that their empirical consequences follow, counterfactually speaking. Things can also be the case even if "things" do not reflect rigid cookie-cutter boundaries. Even something like the self is like that - completely illusionary if we want to go down the road of deconstruction and deflation. Yet my holistic experiences must be an actual occuring structure of the universe (without implying anything deeper about what experience means - its just a thin word, a label).

I think I sit on the fence between preferring an epistemic or ontic structural view given that I would be more inclined to say that not just a notion of intrinsic fundamental reality is epistemically unintelligible but also that in some sense there is nothing more to know about reality than structure - an intrinsic aspect completely distinct and separate from structure seems kind of redundant, even nonsensical to me. The closest we could get to that is conscious experience. But the thing is that from my perspective, I am inclined to say that the only intelligible description of conscious experience is as informational structure. Like, without defining information in any kind of profound metaphysical or ontological way, it seems completely coherent to me to say that my visual experiences can be equated to some informational structure originating from my retina due to light hitting it. At the same time, the fact that all world structure we can engage with is contingent on a perspective is more in line with the epistemic view, even though I would say that this perspectival structure may have a consistent mapping to whatever is outside our sensory boundaries and so is veridical in some sense, albeit a weaker sense of veridical than someone who believes that perceptions have to capture some unique way the world purportedly is. Similar to as Banno sometimes says, I like conceptualizing our engagement with a real world in terms of kinds of "views from anywhere" as opposed to a kind of "view from nowhere" (god).

I think though that just because we do not have a unique, objective "god's eye view" though, doesn't mean that the information we obtained in any given perspective cannot reflect genuine information that consistently maps to the world with consistent relationships to other parts of the world. That is how perception works. And in some sense I think descriptions are second order - putting boundaries around "things" and giving them names is second order. If anything, pointing at and giving "things" names is more of a metacognitive description of my own perceptual abilities - I am describing or pointing out my own ability to make distinctions.

What is first order is perception itself, which reflects real information about the world directly in your perceptual experiences, without having to put a boundary around or label something. I don't need words to catch a ball, I don't necessarily need the concept of a ball to catch a ball; nonetheless, I am engaging with real information about and mapping to the world. It just happens to be information through a limited purview.

I would argue that a big reason why there are different purviews - that is not strictly about mind-dependence - is simply because we have physical structures that relate to other structures in the world in specific ways (e.g. the structure of our eyes and how they interact with light which interacts with other objects). Obviously though, even with physical similar capabilities, different animals may be better at abstracting patterns from sensory information. Is this a kind of mind-dependent confabulation or a detection of actual statistical structures in the world which are captured in our perceptual tools? Or some animals just cannot abstract certain kinds of relationships between percepts from the world.

Now, I would say that obviously, a brain dping statistics depends on the brain's capabilities, so it is mind-dependent in that sense. But, if there are some kind of criteria where one can evaluate through perception a correctness in detecting or mis-detecting higher-order patterns, and some kind of consistency in which one can react and behave and which they relate to other parts of the world, then surely these actually reflect some kind of meaningful structure out in the world that makes a difference, even if this structure is inherently fuzzy and perhaps convoluted.

What I would say is that we can make valid distinctions about the world which are meaningful in terms of consistent relational structures; but at the same time uphold a pluralism. There are many different ways we can partition the world statistically - infinitely many, perhaps. But surely, if one can engage with and distinguish these structures in a way that is consistent, then these cannot be arbitrary. The only reason I can make arbitrary boundaries around objects in my perception is because I can actually distinguish structural information about the world in my perception in order to draw those boundaries. And I don't think we even draw strong boundaries anyway really - the idea that we kind of have this rigid repertoire of concepts which we apply to the world is an idealization imo. Anyone tomorrow could invent an entirely new conceot or objects which is physically meaningful and catches on for one reason or another.

Yes, one could say conceptual pluralism is just anti-realism; at the same time, our engagement with the world is arguably real - or at least, if I were to tell a story about how we do that, it would have to be in some sense "real" - and putting into use these concepts may be enacted in some real engagement with the world, or the structure that comes at us directly in perception that maps to the world.

I guess question is about how apt a description being "mind-dependent" can be if it is clearly non-arbitrary. You could call the drawing of a boundary itself arbitrary, but if I can repeatedly identify this bounded "thing" in perception that comes up again and again due to information from the world at my sensory membranes, then is this really non-arbitrary?

If uniqueness of description is a criteria for realism then sure these things are very problematic. But why does uniqueness have to be a criteria for realism? You can say describe theories in multiple different ways or formulations which are deemed as equivalent in a way that people would just say its multiple descriptions of the same thing. Thats not to say that you couldn't argue there are non-trivial differences that distinguish them, but maybe there is no definite boundary of when different formulations are part of the same theory or different theories. Someone could arbitrarily decide formulations are different based on what others deem a small trivial difference. Like in the description of bounded objects then, perhaps the boundaries between saying "different" vs. "the same" are complicated graded structures of difference and similarity over different scales. Once there is this arbitrariness in saying some things are "different" or "the same", then its not clear there is a definitive way of sying whether a plurality of descriptions should be deemed indicativeness of real or non-realness. The whole issue might be deflated. "real" is a second-order description we apply to structures that we come across in percepts, make inferences about.

Yes, you could use indeterministic pluralities to say things are not real. Perfectly valid if you have your own criteria for saying something is real or not - i.e.it must be unique.

What is interesting to me though is why these arguments have little or no effect on realists often. It seems from reading that realists actually have moved their goalposts, based on anti-realist arguments like underdeterminacy and the potential prospect of things like scientific theories being wrong. But then you have to ask what it is that realists cling to - and I think it is this very fact that, regardless of the kinds of pluralities and indeterminacies and fuzziness, there is still this kind of non-arbitrary nature of our perceptions that map to some structure in the world and we engage with. You could say our descriptions are not real but it seems superficial when we can still engage with the world perfectly well. Obviously some descriptions are obviously wrong - which then occurs when our engagement with the world results in errors. But I would say errors is not so interesting to arguments on realism. Everyone can plausibly be wrong; anto-realists can probabilistocally be vindicated in the beliefs that there is more to learn, that theories are idealizations ans incomplete, that some past theories are outright wrong. Maybe some current theories too if we find new predictions. But then again, unless they make additional metaphysical claims someone can still claim a theory is still valid in some purview even if it does not capture the world uniquely - Classical physics is still widely used because it captures and describes relational structures we can engage with in the world without needing to make excess metaphysical assumptions. The question is whether it is impossible in principle to have a meaningful, consistent engagement with the external world, which we can do from various purviews without comong up with errors. If we have a plurality of ways of describing the world that don't come up with wrong predictions, does that mean none of these things capture real structure in the world?

But at the end of the day, from my perspective, yes this perceptual thing may be a bit too minimalist for realism from the perspective of anti-realists. But I think the issue of pluralities could come under attack for being weak by realists and at the same time if you are something like Van Fraasens form of anti-realism then this issue comes up for empirical perception not just theories - e.g. theory ladenness. But then, how can we engage with the world so well when even perceptual categories are idealizations and theory-dependent and even wrong.

I think the whole issue should be deflated maybe since the coarse distinction of real vs non-real doesn't adequately reflect the subtlety and nuance when it comes tothe balance between arbitrary boundaries and yet our very real, skillful engagement with the world regardless of such boundaries. Descriptions are red-herrings if we inflate them because really all there is is perceptual experiences in flux - we engage with structural information from the world in our senses constantly and we instrumentally, enactively use that information to guide our actions. Even a description may just be indicative of a metacognitive ability to make higher-order inferences about our own epistemic actions - the behaviors of thought and perception. We are extremely complicated machines that far outstrip literal words and descriptions in our epistemic activities and perceptual abilities. In some sense then all descriptions are "not real" because they can be deflated in this sense. Yet there is a mins-independent world and we engage with it to prosuce the useful behaviors that constitute knowledge, even when our abilities actually outstrip our descriptions. My ability for instance to distinguish different faces far outstrips any use of words I could make up to classify them - apart from the use of proper names which don't even have a description attached (i.e. they are effectively just pointing).

Maybe though the realist is just moving the goalposts for "intrinsicness" but then I guess the realist would also say that standards of intrinsicness that are too high are vacuous. We could plausibly say nothing is real because no descriptions, not even perceptions satisfy some ultimate criteria of intrinsicness (e.g. vision would have to be independent from any perspective, any brain, any intermediate physical process)

But then what is the outcome of saying nothing is real? The paradox that a world where nothing is real often seems perfectly coherent.

There is even a pragmatic limit to anti-realism in some sense.

But even then that depends on intuition since some people just don't have that intuition and they think some notion of anti-realism intuitive makes sense. The issue is we can gerrymander these borders of realism and anti-realism very easily without them having strong, consistent empirical consequences everyone can agree on like in everyday life or sciences or archaeology. And obviously this is graded. Maybe discussions about realism and anti-realism are just naturally inclined to kinds of contextual paradoxes almost - at least, if nothing is real, then "anti-realism" is also a false label. The problem is that usually when we sraw boundaries around objects, they aren't usually mutually inconsistent; but we have decided such for realism and anti-realism even though what is more apt may be some kind of gradation. Is "real" a label for a certain kind of abstract consistency in our experiences, in contrast to misapprehension? Its about intrinsicness? But maybe only kind of intrinsic things about fundamental reality that are intelligible are structures in some weak sense - and there is nothing more from the perspective of intelligibility or meaningfulness. But that is a significantly weaker sense of intrinsicness given the structure is weak and has a perspectival aspect. But neither would I say it is viewing the same thing from different ways (in a subjective sense). Rather we can view overlapping structures within reality on our sensory boundaries. Maybe those two statements can be seen as equivalent though.

Maybe what I have done is shifted something that an anti-realist would not view as intrinsic (i.e. perceptual, empirical observation - perceptual, empirical structure) and upgraded it to something that mediates intrinsic information.

I think my perspective is similarish too Otavio Bueno's structural empiricism masquerading as a very weak ontic structural realism... so weak that they are interchangeable. This comes from my anti-realist inclinations to deflate thingsbut the desire to acknowledge mind-independent reality in a way that is not divorced from what we do and think - realism should be in the story, at least for a person that wants to assert things about the world, or have theoretical preferences, even if they may be incorrect.