To doubt is to doubt the truth of some proposition. But a proposition is an item of language. And there are good reasons to think that language must involve other folk - that there can be no private languages.

Hence in order to make use of propositions one must be part of a language community. The very doubting that Descartes made use of seem to already involve other people. — Banno

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Indeed. It's hard to make sense of what doubt or truth could mean apart from some community living in the same world. The solipsist can no more lie than he it can tell the truth.

Descartes was probably tempted into the private experience language trap by his excellent studies of vision, but (as Nietzsche saw) folks tend to forget that this makes the sense organs and the individual skull a product of the sense organs and the individual skull...so it becomes less intuitive as the thesis is developed. 'Idealism' seems to be parasitic on some notion of the real world (in which there is a vat of some kind) even as it attacks this notion. A round square, though not so obviously.

Well, you've identified the source of the problem. Cool. — Banno

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Descartes showed that there is ONE thinking thing, not multiple thinking things. — GLEN willows

But I challenge this thesis. That Descartes assumes the unity of the 'I' is one of my objections to his system. As I've argued recently, this unity is best understood in terms of social norms. The "transcendental unity of apperception" is best understood/demystified in terms of reputational scorekeeping, to pick just one example. (Another is as a character in the conversation of others, invoked in explanations.) It's because 'I' have to account for everything this body does, that 'I' exist as (take 'myself' for) an 'I' in the first place.

I do think we can 'fix' Descartes. Inquiry almost tautologically starts with language, but it need not start with Berkeley or Descrates. Investigating meaning reveals, I claim, the necessary sociality of semantics.

The phrase "atheistic faiths" is patently oxymoronic. Besides, a 'working assumption' (e.g. scientific materialism) is not synonymous with 'faith in mysteries' (or miracles or magic or supernatural entities). — 180 Proof

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Solipsism is described as a "dead end." It negates thousands of theories and the purpose of discussing epistemology, since I'd just be talking to myself. But that doesn't mean it's not a sound argument. — GLEN willows

I agree. Just because a conclusion is unpleasant doesn't make it false, but an incoherent thesis (claims of a rectangular circle) can safely be set aside.

I'm sorry to hear this idea of solipsism is tormenting or distressing you. I recommend reading Ryle's The Concept of Mind.

I ... think the word and concept of absurd is just as questionable and debatable as the word "self" or "reality." — GLEN willows

My underlining is intended to point out how implicitly social thinking is.

I agree, the meaning of 'absurd ' is questionable and debatable, just like all the other meanings we've made up or got in the habit of performing. If we debate about or question them, we are presumably forced to do so using such terms.

As a logical thinker (trying to be anyway) this seems far more absurd than that there could only be one mind, mine, and everything else could be an illusion. It's absolutely possible, as depressing as it may seem.

Why not? — GLEN willows

Is a round square possible ? Some stories are just incoherent, and I think the old yarn about being trapped in the Cartesian theater is a like a round square, but less obviously.

"Maybe all these people I'm talking about solipsism with are really just me, just my imagination playing tricks with me...so maybe I'm just crazy...but what can crazy mean if I'm the only one here ? If it's all just me, being right or wrong doesn't make any sense..."

assuming that we do indeed use the same words to refer to the same patterns in experience — Hello Human

As I see it, there's a sneaky piece of bad logic in here that Ryle and others have tried to point out. If you think (each) human experience is essentially private, then by this assumption alone all the datapoints we need are impossible to get, even in principle, forever and ever amend.

Do we attach the same words to the same private experiences? That's the issue. But what evidence could support such a thesis, except for the very stuff that's supposed to be so encrypted that not even the NSA could get it ( what red looks like to you, for instance.) The question seems so reasonable, and it's traditional, but it's bonkers.

The reason we assume that experiences are the 'same' iin the first place is probably the public norms for concept application and our conspicuous skill in applying them (when we aren't in a language trap that is.)

The idea that all we have access to is our perception of the tree, and not the tree("Stove's Gem", it is often called) pervades academia to this day. — creativesoul

It's strange.

For one thing, we could just grant that we don't know things as they are in themselves, adding also that we don't know what the hell it's supposed to mean to know something as it is itself. We understand (well enough) the idea of a warranted statement or a true statement. But knowledge of something as it is independent of knowledge is like the taste of ketchup without the flavor, or music that is 'better than it sounds.' What's the turn on ? The mirage of surprisingly easy eternal 'knowledge'?


Another thing, whether something is 'real' or an 'illusion' or 'true' is a fundamentally social issue. So there's something weird in reasoning about whether or not others exist in the first place.

We find ourselves in the midst of the world, and cannot understand it except from within. — Joshs

I like this theme, and I connect it to a inescapable ethnocentrism (having only our current norms for a not-so-final authority, the way we do things, what we take words to mean.) Yes, we can change them, but only from within, for what else could compel us?

philosophy must be done within the limits of our concepts and language, — Hello Human

One of my big philosophical realizations was that we often don't know what we are talking about. We can argue passionately about whether X is real...without noticing that we don't really know what we mean by 'real,' at least away from our ordinary, tacit skill with the word in practical life. And so on and so on.

Folks, that is what philosophy amounts to - finding a good way to say tricky things. — Banno

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When a community uses words in certain ways, it can be detrimental to the community knowledge base. It can lead to big problems. — creativesoul

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we should be arguing over whether or not drills have the auditory features that we hear them to have. — Michael

To me it's not simply true or false that drills do or do not have such features. The answer is not out there, waiting to be revealed. We can look at how we tend to talk about things while also discussing how we ought to talk about things.

Descartes already claimed that the same kind of pressure on the nerves could generate or cause (reports of) seeing and hearing. Dwelling on this fact, we are tempted to say that drills-in-themselves are soundless. But there's no reason to stop there. The idea of a drill, its shape, the number that represents its mass, maybe time and space themselves, are thrown up by the nervous system that is somehow paradoxically in this time and space, itself a mere piece of a dream that no longer makes sense as a dream.

I always return to us and practical, social beings, and insist that meaning is 'between' us in the norms that mostly implicitly govern our word-trading. And this is why a computer, presumable a ghostless machine, can be pretty good and translation. A loss function is minimized by gradient descent. The automaton is slapped around till it gets things less wrong.

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To deny that they did, because the term had not been coined, is to confuse our language use with what is being picked out. — creativesoul

I don't disagree, but it makes sense to me to understand this as a debate about which usage (both allowed by the apathetic gods) is preferable.

It'd be fine if we decided to say that cells didn't 'really' exist until we could talk about them. And it's fine to object to such a convention, calling it a confusion of name and object...or as just not very useful or graceful.

Words mean whatever a community takes them to mean, that's the gist.

How about you quote some respected collectivist or communitarian thinker instead of trying to maneuver respondents to defend Stalin? — Benkei

Well said. I grow tired. I think this troll is broken.

Humans are both strongly individualistic and also highly collectivistic. The point to this is rather simple - amplify the pros and dilute the cons of both. — Agent Smith

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I had some fun with Stirner once too, but the whole thing comes apart in the end, with the self just as much of a spook as 'the collective' (or, better, we recognize the interdependence of the concepts of self and community.)

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Without the Other, the "I" would... what? Disintegrate? — Tate

It's like bright without dim, left without right. If there was only one person, what need for saying 'I think X.' Or of saying 'it seems to me that X.'

As I see it, when I say 'as I see it,' I am politely acknowledging that I don't have to authority or certainty to grandly declare the way things simply are full stop. I offer a hypothesis that I am explicitly willing to revise as the conversation develops. If I say that I know something, that vaguely suggests my readiness to justify my authority to make such a claim according to the norms of the community we both belong to. For instance, mathematician might 'know' something is a theorem (is true) because he's familiar with the proof. Notice how we all know that we are all here together subject to various rules. From this perspective we can examine concepts like the self and knowledge in terms of moves in a social game.

The conceit is in the idea that so long as you can form a ruling class of your proles all will be right and well. Of course, this idea has ruined every society it has touched. So much for thriving together. — NOS4A2

Actually I'm strongly influenced by various conservative thinkers, and I don't expect Utopia to ever quite arrive, but we can and should try to do better. Tax the rich more. Invest in health care, education, infrastructure, dealing with the climate crisis. This is like a homeowner fixing things around the house, and some of us prefer to think of citizens owning the 'home' as opposed to a tiny segment of the population.

Since wealth makes it easier to gather and pass on the wealth (and because it's all of us who generate it together, despite uneven reward), there's a tendency for dangerous, anti-democratic accumulation that should be corrected for with tax laws. The point is to build a stable system, in which as many as possible are given a genuine chance at a happy life. This involves no illusions that life can ever be without struggle or competition.)

They’ll forever rail against unions and governments while keeping quiet about corporate power, for one reason: they prefer tyranny. — Xtrix

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This is a sticking point for me, too. They pretend to themselves to hate tyranny but have no problem with a tiny proportion of the population owning just about everything and all that entails.

A clown like Trump has the right populist enemies (regardless of his real status as a cunt). The cult of 'everything is fucked' is lubricant for demagogues. :wink: — Tom Storm

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What about the intellect, the ego (the "I"), and the self. Do you think they're explainable? — Tate

I think we can improve our grip on such concepts, and that one good approach to understanding the self or 'I' is to think of it as avatar on the 'stage' (sharing a public world) with other such avatars. For me, a key thing to note is that we are all keeping score. Those who 'cry wolf' become less trusted. We feel friendly toward and indebted to those who are kind to us. We don't pity as much the torturer on whom the tables have turned. This just scratches the surface. The point is that we are always tracking and scoring the avatars of one another. (I could more simply say that we are tracking one another, but the point is to shine a light on the self as a kind of central piece in a central human game.)

Collectivism in a nutshell. Make hasty generalizations and form a politics around it. — NOS4A2

Randianism in a nutshell ? Connect everything to the demon collectivism ? We are social animals trying to work out how to thrive together. A ruling class that gluts itself while the system rots is like a brain tumor. It's nothing but superstition to treat private property as eternally sacred.

I am not necessarily disagreeing, but currently this whole philosophical tradition is under attack. If I do take a marxist tack, the division of property rights is crucial to the way we think. So for a materialist this idealist tradition is an accomplice to a tradition of oppression. I am not saying they are necessarily right, but they are more en vogue than Hegelian idealism. — Tobias

OK. I can relate to that. Just to be clear, I see how dated Hegel is, and I like those who criticize or update him from a materialist perspective. Kojève happened to be the secondary source that got me excited about Hegel in the first place, so I was reading Hegel's original texts from a pragmatist/materialistic position from the beginning, looking for gold in the creek.

FWIW, I think the tradition is 'essentially' self-eating (second order) and that Hegel saw that. I doubt there's some definite source of the idea, but it's easy to credit Hegel as a popularizer of the notion of philosophy as a conversation that spans centuries, with finite individuals coming and going, downloading the progress so far on the way in and sometimes leaving a few new bricks behind on the way out. (Man is the 'time-binding animal,' etc.)

Bumped into this on Wiki:

Roger Scruton calls Kojève "a life-hating Russian at heart, a self-declared Stalinist, and a civil servant who played a leading behind-the-scenes role in establishing both the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the European Economic Community" and states his opinion that Kojève was "a dangerous psychopath".

Negative numbers, as some members have already realized, are simply extensions of numerical patterns, not forwards like how we're so habituated to doing but backwards. — Agent Smith

Yes, backwards is one metaphor, and another one if flipping. Consider $f^{-1}$ for the inverse of $f$, undoing it, like a 180 degree rotation (which is its own inverse). Math is surprisingly crammed with metaphors, poetry.

Thanks for the interesting passage, to refresh my memory. Hegel places "the Idea" as the fundamental principle, the basis or foundation of human existence in the social setting. — Metaphysician Undercover

That sounds right, and I think of him as emphasizing that we are fundamentally, profoundly social beings...that the self is unthinkable apart from the other, that we create and manifest ourselves as we modify our environment together.

you would have to hold that the western inddividualistic tradition in which freedom means individual freedom, is in fact universal and more collectivistic accounts inherently despotic. — Tobias

In my view, there's no need to cling to the sacredness of private property, for instance, if we want to maintain individual freedom. No particular, frozen understanding of freedom is sacred. I understand our current notions of freedom ( and of rationality) to allow for an internal critique that allows for their modification. We inherit the norms that govern our modification of them, and we pass those modified norms on, so our children can do the same. Note that this means 'Enlightenment rationality' is not static, and I refer to it as a handy starting point, a point of self-consciousness (Kant's definition, for instance.)

I agree with you but indeed you would have to place your bets on 'enlightenment rationality' which brings you into conflict with post colonial and feminist scholars who argue that enlightenment rationality is steeped in colonial history and its accomplice. — Tobias

No doubt there's entanglement, but I'm unaware of any replacement. To me we should distinguish carefully between calling out hypocrisy and attacking rationality and science itself (presumably in the name of something tribal or esoteric?).

I am hesitant to endorse Hegels writing on history. It is purely speculative in the sense that with Hegel's dialectic in hand I could write a completely different 'history', for instance the awakening of spirit as only currently upon us by the realization of minorities and marginalized communities how they have been subjugated and demanding their place in history... That such is possible though shows something about the nature of dialectic, something that is more idealistic than realistic. — Tobias

I understand your hesitation. These days Hegel seems a bit Panglossian. It's plausible that it'll end in a mushroom cloud or a boot stamping a human face forever. That said, I like Brandom's recent updated and filtered Hegel. There's also Kojève's, weird but great. And I personally find it easy to work the transcendence of racism and sexism (to name just two) into the Hegelian narrative. US history is like a miniature version that moves (ideally) from 'some are free and completely human' to all being so.

As Brandom might put it, how are we autonomous humans, who now live beyond God, supposed to have binding norms which we ourselves reserve the right to change ?

I think of us as having a second order tradition of stories, some of them about physics and biology and others about rights and beauty. Then there are philosophical stories that are largely about stories themselves and second order traditions and the dominant role they play for creatures like us. This tradition is second order to the degree that no story is sacred or final, excepting perhaps the meta-story or attitude toward stories that we might call Enlightenment rationality.

Is the disagreement between mathematical realism and mathematical nominalism, or between scientific realism and scientific instrumentalism, or between the various interpretations of quantum mechanics just a "language trap" despite there being no practical ramifications by any side of the debate? — Michael

If I agreed that your examples were situations with no practical ramifications, then I'd probably answer yes. But it occurs to me (thanks to your examples) that it's not trivial to decide in every case whether the issue touches practice.

For instance: on the QM issue, influenced by Popper's understanding of metaphysics as a kind of prescientific source of ideas that sometimes ripen into science, I can imagine different interpretations leading to the discovery of different (relatively) 'neutral' mathematical patterns in the measurements.

But neither is there any historical certainty about past usage, or even about uses of a word on particular occasions. — bongo fury

Good point. To me the point is something like current usage, and I see rationality as related to sociality, politeness, good sportsmanship. It's 'unreasonable' to apply concepts differently than others, at least without justification. The norms aren't generally explicit or exact, but computers can 'learn' them well enough to translate simpler texts.

Well said. I suppose they can be more or less objective, but surely they are often motivated, satirical, polemical.

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Usage is something, but not everything. — Cuthbert

I take you to be saying something like : just because we do talk this way doesn't mean we should.

"It's called a sandwich but it does not deserve the name." As if the so-called sandwich is descriptively or even morally defective. — Cuthbert

A valid move indeed, and maybe much of philosophy is just this kind of statement.

I recall critics of OLP worrying that it could be interpreted as one big naturalistic fallacy. Personally I don't think @hypericin intended such a thing.

Austin's 'first-water, ground floor' mistakes, which it's no disgrace to have made. — Cuthbert

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Agreed. This generation stands on those that came before, and it's not clear that such 'mistakes' or partial insights could or should have been avoided.

A perfect illusion of a material world which can't really be transcended except perhaps via glimmers during meditation, or perhaps at 'death', is functionally no different to an actual material world. — Tom Storm

Well put, Mr. Storm, and you touch on another pet issue of mine with the word 'actual' and its synonym 'real.' In practical life it's great. I want real money or real love or real science and not the counterfeit kind. But away from every familiar context the real/illusion dichotomy loses traction, fails to distinguish the better from the worse.

Is there an external material world?

If by "external" we mean not within the physical bounds of our skin, and by "material" we mean detectable stuff, then all we're asking is whether or not any detectable stuff not within the bounds of our skin exists.

Such questions are the bane of philosophy. — creativesoul

Here's my version. At some point in the philosophical tradition (Locke or Kant or implicitly in Democritus even), it made sense to think of human experience as $f(X)$ where $X$ is reality in the nude or raw or completely apart from us and $f$ is the universal structure or mediation of human cognition. The important bits of this insane but charming theory are that $X$ is impossible to access directly and that $f(X)$ is private experience (plausible initially because we each have our own sense organs and brain, according to our sense organs anyway, which are in that sense their own product ? And the brain is the dream of the brain is the dream of the brain ? But we must carry on...).

It's a small step to let $Y = f(X)$ and then wonder whether $f$ and $X$ aren't just unproven hypotheses, mere pieces of $Y'$, solipsism's divine blob. Yet this whole system seems to be a corruption of something far more reasonable and practical, which is simply a tracking of the reliability or authority of the claims of a member of a linguistic community as a function of that member's status and prior behavior, etc. For instance, 'it seems to me like X' is a mitigation of the responsibility for consequences implicit in 'I know that X.' But this 'seems operator' can inspire oceans of confusion.

Human experience is not the sort of thing that can be stepped into and/or out of to begin with, so it makes no sense at all to claim that doing so is needed for anything else at all. — creativesoul

I'd say it this way, to head off a tendency to think we're pointing our telescopes at curious entities:

Human experience is (contingently but significantly) not the sort of thing of concept that <is compatible with talk about > can be <being> stepped into and/or out of to begin with... <not when humans are doing the talking, anyway.>

...Idealism often has to make use of some kind of 'big mind' to prevent solipsism...
...
From Kastrup's blog:
...
I also do not deny that reality exists independent of personal psyches, like the human psyche. I maintain that empirical reality is an experience of an impersonal mind, which I like to call 'mind-at-large' in honor of Aldous Huxley. — Tom Storm

Interesting that merely renaming this independent reality (godmind or whatever) is felt to be worth the trouble. I browsed Kastrup once, and he does write well, but it's hard to see more than language traps and mystically/religiously tinged (albeit pessimistic) usage preferences once one has been corrupted or disillusioned by the usual suspects (those dreary buzzkill linguistic philosophers and pragmatists.) For context, I don't feel strongly about 'matter' and the 'physical' either when used metaphysically or 'transpractically.' Perhaps I'm missing out. Too late now.

As far as I can tell, idealism is either difficult or impossible to disprove. The same goes for solipsism. — Agent Smith

As I see it, some positions can be made to look incoherent or confused or indeterminate in the first place. I don't pretend that it's easy to get consensus on such matters, but I do think something outside the binary approaches of true/false and provable/unprovable deserves mention.

For instance, if the self is the only thing that can be verified, what are we to even make of the concept of self in play here ? How did the sense-data theory get invented or implanted in the first place? Why take it for granted, along with some unified entity, the self-world-blob ? It's like accepting $\sqrt{2}$ or even $\aleph_0$ without worries or objections but questioning the intelligibility of $-1$.