This is why I think that solipsism and external world scepticism should be seen as important ideas in intellectual history rather than challenges to face on their own terms. — Jamal

Moral realism (also ethical realism) is the position that ethical sentences express propositions that refer to objective features of the world (that is, features independent of subjective opinion), some of which may be true to the extent that they report those features accurately.

Are you saying that my original question (what does it mean when realists use normative/moral terms?) is loaded? — Cartesian trigger-puppets

but the better to evaluate, test, and improve the theories.

Hence Pie's interest in "fixing the cogito", probably. — bongo fury

For me, these kind of constructions raise a lot of questions about the sort of ontology of mathematical objects — Jerry

Had Euler really never heard of debt before? And would our examples of holes and sea level and temperature convince him otherwise? — Jerry

Autonomy is self-government, self-determination. I think the Kantian conception of
autonomy can be summarized like this: one is self-determining when one’s thinking and
acting are determined by reasons that one recognizes as such. We can think of
“autonomy” as labelling a capacity, the capacity to appreciate the force of reasons and
respond to it. But determining oneself is actually exercising that capacity. That is what it
is to be in control of one’s own life.

Kant made the autonomy of reason — its non-subordination to anything else — an explicit theme. Rhetorically, of course, he also famously talks about limits on reason, but really what he wants to limit are extra-rational accretions woven into Cartesian and Wolffian rationalisms — various received truths, and so on. Descartes had quickly moved from hyperbolic doubt to question-begging acceptance of many received truths as intuitively reasonable. Wolff and his followers, to whom Kant was primarily reacting, did not even pretend to doubt.

If reason is to be truly autonomous, it cannot start from received truths. Kant himself was sympathetic to some of these received truths, but too honest to pretend they were self-evident or derivable from reason alone. Kant is often misunderstood as mainly a critic of reason, and certainly not its unconditional defender, but he is actually clear that the autonomy of reason is unconditional. Too often, readers of Kant focus too much on autonomy of a subject rather than autonomy of reason, but the practical autonomy attributable to a so-called subject in Kant is actually derivative, based on the putative subject’s participation in the autonomy of reason. In Making It Explicit, Brandom says where Descartes had focused on our grip on concepts, Kant focused instead on their grip on us (p. 9). (See also Kant’s Groundwork.)

Hegel has been widely misunderstood as an example of the autonomy of reason gone mad. Brandom, Pippin, and Pinkard have performed an invaluable service in clarifying what Hegel was really trying to do, which was in part to sincerely take up Kant’s honesty about received truths and to push it even further.

Aristotle said that of all things, reason most deserves to be called divine. He does not use a word like autonomy, but the effect is the same. Nothing is higher. (See also Interpretation; Brandom on Truth.)

I think of the Kantian autonomy of reason as necessarily involving something like the free play of the Critique of Judgment. The Reason that is truly autonomous in the Kantian sense will be a hermeneutical Reason (see Brandom and Hermeneutics).

Inferentialism is the conviction that to be meaningful in the distinctively human way, or to have a 'conceptual content', is to be governed by a certain kind of inferential rules. The term was coined by Robert Brandom as a label for his theory of language; however, it is also naturally applicable (and is growing increasingly common) within the philosophy of logic.

The rationale for articulating inferentialism as a fully-fledged standpoint is to emphasize its distinctness from the more traditional representationalism.

Do you have a point of view? Or is it just the bewitchment of language that makes it seem so? — Tate

Hegel fully appreciated, as many of Kant’s readers have not, that one of the axial innovations orienting Kant’s thought is his reconceptualization of selves, consciousness, and self consciousness in normative terms. Selves are in the first instance normative subjects: subjects of normative statuses and attitudes. They are what can undertake responsibilities, in the form of duties and obligations, and exercise authority in committing themselves by endorsing epistemic claims and practical maxims. Being conscious in the sense of apperceiving—being sapient, a condition of our kind of sentience—is exercising those normative capacities. It is committing oneself, exercising one’s authority to make oneself responsible by judging. Judgment is the minimal form of apperceptive awareness because judgments are the smallest units one can commit oneself to, make oneself responsible for. What Kant calls the “objective form of judgment”, the “object=X” is the formal mark of what is represented in a judgment: what one makes oneself responsible to for the correctness of one’s judgmental act.1 What he calls the “subjective form of judgment”, the “‘I think’ that can accompany all judgments” and hence is “the emptiest of all representations” is the formal mark of the self who is responsible for the judging. What one is responsible for doing in judging is integrating one’s commitment into a whole exhibiting the rational unity distinctive of apperception. Synthesizing such an apperceptively unified constellation of commitments is extracting and endorsing inferential consequences of one’s commitments, offering some of them as justifications of others, and extruding incompatible commitments. Those unities are conscious selves as normative subjects, and the rational process of producing and maintaining them subject to the rules governing the rational relations articulating the conceptual contents of the various commitments is for Kant the the process of self-consciousness.

Hegel takes over and transforms this normative understanding of self-conscious selves by offering a novel social metaphysics of normativity. The process of synthesizing self-conscious normative subjects, which Kant had understood as an individual affair, Hegel reconstrues as a social practice of mutual recognition that essentially requires the participation of different interacting individuals. Normative statuses are understood as essentially social statuses, instituted by social recognitive practices and practical recognitive attitudes. Individual self-conscious selves and recognitive communities are jointly synthesized by practices of recognizing each other as normative subjects in the sense of having the authority to make themselves and hold others responsible, to acknowledge and attribute commitments and obligations.

Another performative paradox - you request, even demand, answers from folk whose existence you claim to need proof of. — Banno

Psychologists always know what they're talking about! — Isaac

I claim that the minimum rational intelligible epistemic situation is a plurality of persons subject to the same logic and together in a world that they can be right or wrong about. — Pie

One of Hegel’s big ideas is that creatures with a self-conception are the subjects of developmental processes that exhibit a distinctive structure. Call a creature ‘essentially self-conscious’ if what it is for itself, its self-conception, is an essential element of what it is in itself. How something that is essentially self-conscious appears to itself is part of what it really is. This is not to say that it really is just however it appears to itself to be. For all that the definition of an essentially self-conscious being say what such a one is in itself may diverge radically from what it is for itself. It may not in fact be what it takes itself to be. But if it does mistake itself, if its self-conception is in error, that mistake is still an essential feature of what it really is. In this sense, essentially self-conscious creatures are (partially) self-constituting creatures. Their self-regarding attitudes are efficacious in a distinctive way.

For such a being can change what it is in itself by changing what it is for itself. To say of an essentially self-conscious being that what it is for itself is an essential element of what it is in itself entails that an alteration in self-conception carries with it an alteration in the self of which it is a conception. Essentially self-conscious creatures accordingly enjoy the possibility of a distinctive kind of self-transformation: making themselves be different by taking themselves to be different. Insofar as such a difference in what the essentially self-conscious creature is in itself is then reflected in a further difference in what it is for itself – perhaps just by in some way acknowledging that it has changed – the original change in self-conception can trigger a cascade. That process whereby what the thing is in itself and what it is for itself reciprocally and sequentially influence one another might or might not converge to a stable equilibrium of self and conception of self.

Because what they are in themselves is at any point the outcome of such a developmental process depending on their attitudes, essentially self-conscious beings do not have natures, they have histories. Or, put differently, it is their nature to have not just a past, but a history: a sequence of partially self-constituting self-transformations, mediated at every stage by their self-conceptions, and culminating in their being what they currently are. The only unchanging essence they exhibit is to have what they are in themselves partly determined at every stage by what they are for themselves. Understanding what they are requires looking retrospectively at the process of sequential reciprocal influences of what they at each stage were for themselves and what they at each stage were in themselves, by which they came to be what they now are.

Rehearsing such a historical narrative (Hegel’s ‘Wiederholung’) is a distinctive way of understanding oneself as an essentially historical, because essentially self-conscious, sort of being. To be for oneself a historical being is to constitute oneself as in oneself a special kind of being: a self-consciously historical being. Making explicit to oneself this crucial structural aspect of the metaphysical kind of being one always implicitly has been as essentially self-conscious is itself a structural self-transformation: the achievement of a new kind of self-consciousness. — Brandom

It is an empirical fact that knowledge of other minds is impossible, in the same way that it is an empirical fact that knowledge of events outside our light cone is impossible. — Michael

Only certain types of life forms have ideas, I think... So the answer may lie in the study of biology and in a philosophy of biological life, its origin and evolution. — Olivier5

If you ask me "what does the space above Glen's head contain?" Am I equally likely to say "Nothing", "A hat", or "a carnivorous butterfly called Ned"? — Isaac

This topic always gives me a headache. — Darkneos

If a language less creature is capable of forming meaningful true belief, then meaning and truth are prior to language, and not all belief is equivalent to a propositional attitude. — creativesoul

Again, this leads to saying that there is no meaning prior to language, that meaning is a language construct, that language is necessary for meaning, and/or that meaning is existentially dependent upon language.

Some language less creatures are capable of forming, having, and/or holding belief that is meaningful as well as true or false. — creativesoul

Been enjoying it, but... why cling to the mentalist talk in a "manner of speaking"? Why not be literal? And eliminativist? — bongo fury

That is to say -1 isn't 1 with - sign, -1 is a completely distinct entity from +1. — Jerry

My claim is that when we do ordinary math like counting, we aren't actually operating on "positive" numbers per se, but rather unsigned numbers — Jerry

It's impossible in principle to discover what it happening beyond our light cone, but (at least according to the realist) stuff is happening beyond our light cone. — Michael

this doesn't refute the claim that you, right now, cannot know what number I am thinking of, or that I am thinking of a number at all. — Michael

This really is a self-evident fact. If your understanding of language denies this very fact then your understanding of language is wrong. — Michael

I can think of a number and not tell you or anyone about it. It is impossible for you to know what number I am thinking of. — Michael

.....would seem to follow from your individual intelligence. Conditioned by others, maybe, but the thinking, as such, must be your own else in saying “my thinking”, you contradict yourself. — Mww

I don't know, hence the hard problem of consciousness. — Michael

Such is your prerogative. So what are they a product of, or, from where do they originate? — Mww

Is the writer using an intelligence that does not belong to him alone? — Mww

Relatively exact. Can’t be both simultaneously. Up is relative to down, but up and down are each exactly representative of their part in a logical relation. — Mww

In mathematics, logic and philosophy of mathematics, something that is impredicative is a self-referencing definition. Roughly speaking, a definition is impredicative if it invokes (mentions or quantifies over) the set being defined, or (more commonly) another set that contains the thing being defined. There is no generally accepted precise definition of what it means to be predicative or impredicative. ...
...
The greatest lower bound of a set X, glb(X), also has an impredicative definition: y = glb(X) if and only if for all elements x of X, y is less than or equal to x, and any z less than or equal to all elements of X is less than or equal to y. This definition quantifies over the set (potentially infinite, depending on the order in question) whose members are the lower bounds of X, one of which being the glb itself. Hence predicativism would reject this definition.[1]

Metaphysics carries a less pejorative implication, but, suit yourself. — Mww

The difference is that the p-zombie doesn't have the private thoughts. You keep switching between accepting that there are such things to then not? I don't understand it. — Michael

The phrases "the future" and "your private thoughts" each refer to something that is necessarily inaccessible to me. What's the problem? — Michael

So, again, what's the problem? — Michael

The phrases "the future" and "your private thoughts" each refer to something that is necessarily inaccessible to me. — Michael