Descartes could have more accurately said cogitatio est, ergo esse est — 'thinking is, therefore being is.' What is indubitable is the occurrence of thought, not the existence of an enduring ego. — Wayfarer

This is good, and relates back to a discussion on Descartes I was having with @Ludwig V a while back, based on Bernard Williams' book about D. There's a middle-ground alternative too: We can posit a thinker as indubitable, along with the occurrence of thought, without having to characterize that thinker as "an enduring ego." If I'm not mistaken, Paul Ricoeur suggests something like this, connecting the "ego" in "cogito ergo sum" with the conscious "I" and pointing out that the unconscious or pre-conscious (or even cosmic consciousness) might be what truly endures.

pretty much all the discussion of mental to mental causality in that space that I have seen actually centers around mental to physical causation (generally on the idea that, if a mental state m1 brings about another, m2, such a change is thought to also necessarily involve a physical state transition from p1 to p2). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Exactly, and I find that unsatisfactory. Even if the m's and p's are correlated, it doesn't necessarily mean that "p1 causes p2" is a good explanation of my how my thought of Plato makes me think of Socrates. Indeed, it sounds like a terrible explanation. We can't even cash out "p1" as "Plato" without some theory of how mental and physical events supervene.

So yes, that's what I want to explore, once I pull enough material together. As @Leontiskos mentions, we could just rule out the physical entirely and claim that "mental to mental causation" is the same thing as propositional entailment, but I don't think that works, for a variety of reasons I'll go into eventually. Just with this example, it's clear that "Plato" doesn't entail "Socrates" in any logical way, yet surely we want to say that the one thought, as an event in my mind, not as a proposition, caused or influenced the second. How? It can't only be a matter of neurons, but nor does it really resemble the "causality" of entailment. That's just a sample of the headaches involved in this topic.

there are also formal signs (internal, like concepts or species intelligibiles) that generate interpretants, so mental causality isn't necessarily distinct from the physical. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sounds interesting, thanks. I'll check it out.

Now if you're focused more on discourse and demonstration, that's a whole different can of worms but there is a lot of interesting stuff there. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Right, that's different, though equally interesting. My problem is about how we can justify using "causality" talk -- as we do -- when discussing how one mental event leads to another. To highlight the problem, it's probably better to leave out questions of entailment or demonstration entirely, and focus on the much more ordinary linkages we discover between our thoughts.

Good, the Nietzsche passage is right on target, thanks.

The focus of the OP seems to be how one thought leads to a subsequent second thought. — Fire Ologist

Appreciate your response. What you describe would be the OP I want to write, but I need more background! This one was just a plea for help.

In a sense we're each our own little closed system capable of reconciliation with others to share understanding. — DifferentiatingEgg

Indeed. I'd like to understand how the closed system works, to begin with. But I'll lay out what I see as the problem in more depth, once I've found some good target literature.

Thanks for this clarification. (And yes, Owen Flanagan coined "New Mysterians" as a deliberate reference to the 60s band "? and the Mysterians".) If we agree that consciousness is, for now, a mystery, the question becomes, Are there structural or even transcendental arguments that show it must remain so? McGinn thinks so. Chalmers can be read either way, but I continue to see his description of the hard problem as meaning it can be solved, with important changes in scientific method.

Do you think consciousness has to remain a mystery in Marcel's sense -- that the presence of the inquirer makes the phenomenon irreducible to explanatory language, to "technique"?

Thanks, I'll check it out.

I'd settle for even an article, even a chapter, about mental-to-mental causation. Isn't it bizarre that the subject doesn't come up more often? We all know the experience of having a thought which then "makes us" think of something else. What's going on here? How should this be described? Simply to say "association" doesn't suffice, because what we want to know is, how can thoughts associate? Is it by virtue of their content? How does that work? And what is the relation between the "causality" of thoughts and the entailment of propositions?

you've restated a version of the well-known 'Mary's room' thought-experiment? — Wayfarer

Yes, I thought about referencing poor Mary! (Or is she poor? :wink:)

The blind spot is blind with respect to the subject to whom the data means something, the subject, the observer. — Wayfarer

Yes, at the moment. But I think you're suggesting that the blind spot is methodologically structural, that it can't be overcome in terms of objective science. I think this remains to be "seen" (sorry!). As Chalmers says at 2:20, "It may be that the methods of science have to be expanded." This is a recurring theme, for me: We understand consciousness so poorly that it makes anything we say about it, including how it can be studied, provisional at best. Must we assume that the phenomenon of subjectivity cannot be studied from the 3rd person? Must we assume that, because an investigative method depends upon consciousness, it cannot give a complete account of consciousness itself?

Again, as we've been saying, there's a fine, often indistinct, line between consciousness as phenomenon and consciousness as experience. If we take the question "What is it like to conscious?" as actually answerable, would the answer be phrased in terms that are opaque from the point of objective knowledge? Does the experience of consciousness -- the experience of being me, or you -- forever elude being known in terms other than descriptive?

I think both of us should be uncertain about this.

Does he talk about the problem of other minds? — frank

Can't remember. I took a quick look through the book but couldn't find anything. Not to say it isn't there -- the book has an unusual set-up -- a long target paper by Strawson, then replies by about 16 philosophers, then a long response to all of them from Strawson. So it's hard to find stuff, and the index didn't help. But an excellent book nonetheless.

@Wayfarer is mistaken. — frank

This is me speculating about his position. He may not think this at all.

Our worldview tends to say that intrinsic perspective (or subjective experience), is located in isolated pockets, inside skulls? Mine is separated from yours by a region of air. Could you see yourself questioning that assumption? — frank

Yes. Do you know Galen Strawson's book, Consciousness and Its Place in Nature? A very good argument for the plausibility of panpsychism.

We're talking about the most simple, center of everything sort of experience, like the ITT theory graphic:
check it out. — frank

This is a great graphic, thanks.

So right there, I'm not experiencing you as you. — frank

Yes, yet another aspect of the impossibility -- not only do we have our experiences, but we have our attitudes toward our experiences, our "experience of experience," and that would presumably be different for you and me, even if we somehow shared the 1st-level experiences.

I have more questions about how you think this relates to the hard problem. — frank

So do I! And if you've been following my discussion with @Wayfarer, you see that not everyone agrees on exactly how to characterize the hard problem. I read Chalmers as saying it's a scientific problem, hard but potentially solvable through scientific inquiry. Whereas I think Wayfarer sees Chalmers as being closer to the New Mysterian position of McGinn and others.

What are your questions about hard versus impossible?

I guess what I meant is that all explanations are reductive in that they tell one story, where others might also be told, analyze things in terms of their components (causal processes, reasons or rules) and none of them go anywhere near to capturing the whole picture or covering all the bases. — Janus

I'm fine with the "one story" aspect -- an explanation that allows for other explanations isn't complete. But we have to be careful with "components." If consciousness supervenes upon brain activity, rather than relates as an effect to a cause, then it's not clear if we should describe the physical strata as "components" or not. I guess, as long as components aren't understood to be necessarily both causal and completely explanatory, we can use that term, but then the associated explanation isn't reductive.

I cannot imagine what any other non-reductive kind of explanation could possibly look like. Could not a reductive explanation of consciousness possibly show why (if such were the case) it is not identical to its physical components. For that matter are there any explanations at all which are not given in terms of components? Would understanding consciousness even conceivably be possible if it could not be analyzed in terms of components? — Janus

The supervenience model is meant to address these concerns. And again, it depends on your understanding of "reductive." I would say that an explanation of consciousness that shows why it is the case that it is not identical to its physical components, is ergo non-reductive.

If we are undertaking a [scientific] investigation into consciousness, what could we be doing if not looking at behavior and neural activity (anything else you can think of?) using observation and reasoned analysis? — Janus

OK to add "scientific" above? I assume you don't mean a phenomenological or other 1st person investigation.

I think the answer to your question is, "Science doesn't know, at this point." Behavior and brain activity are certainly on the table as places to investigate, but the problem of consciousness is so poorly understood and apparently intransigent that I wouldn't be surprised if an entirely new area of inquiry opens up. Who know, maybe Penrose was right (in "The Emperor's New Mind") when he postulated quantum effects as responsible for consciousness.

I can see an image of the eye, but I cannot see the act of seeing the image. That is the whole point, which I can't help but feel you're missing. — Wayfarer

No, I think we both grasp the point, but are coming at it from different analyses. The "eye" metaphor arose from your quote, "The eye cannot see itself." I took this literally, and disputed it. But I think what you meant was, "The eye cannot see itself seeing itself," and this is a different matter, and quite true.

The difference is important, both philosophically and methodologically. We can investigate a subject using (roughly) scientific methods, and "see" (know) it in ways that are impossible to the naked eye of phenomenology. But by the same token, what phenomenology allows us is a way to understand experience that isn't available to science. I think we both agree with this. You encapsulate it nicely in the quote above.

When it comes to consciousness, we may have a special case -- and I think that's the deeper subject of this discussion. Is there something about consciousness, and about being conscious, that calls into question this division between knowing and experiencing? We need consciousness to do any sort of seeing or knowing, including the strictest of scientific projects. A blind person can understand how the eye works, because understanding is not a true visual seeing, but a way of grasping intellectually. But can the blind person (from birth, we'd have to stipulate) know what the experience of seeing is? Probably not.

So we might be in a similar position with regard to consciousness. Does consciousness always entail being conscious, such that it cannot become an object for the conscious subject? I don't think so, but it is certainly an open question.

We could also phrase it in terms of the "Blind Spot" quote:

We devise a powerful explanatory method that abstracts away consciousness while forgetting that the method remains fundamentally dependent on consciousness. — The Blind Spot - Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, Evan Thompson

Is this in fact a flaw? Does this dependence vitiate whatever explanation may result? Again, I don't think so, but my degree of confidence in this judgment isn't high, because many good philosophers see it differently.

Does any of this make sense so far?

Thanks, we always have to remember that animals belong within our circle of identification and compassion.

I have a friend who's coined the term "The Impossible Problem" to describe this wrinkle in the Hard Problem. (And yes, @Wayfarer, this is the very same question we're examining from different angles in the other thread.) My friend means the problem of actually experiencing another person's consciousness. Why does this seem impossible? It creates a dilemma: If I experience your consciousness as myself doing so, that is clearly not what it's like for you -- there's no observer or alien presence for you. But if I don't do this, and instead simply have your experience (how? but that's a different question), then I haven't experienced it -- my "I" is not present to do any experiencing. Either way, it doesn't seem possible that I can ever know what it is to be you (leaving aside the somewhat ambiguous "what it's like".)

This doesn't mean, of course, that it's unreasonable to suppose that being someone else resembles being me. The resemblance gets less and less close as we move through the animal kingdom.

The problem Chalmers describes is the relationship of third-person, objective descriptions of physical processes with first-person experience. — Wayfarer

Take a look at this video, especially starting at 3:40. Chalmers explains what the hard problem is. "What is the relationship" doesn't really get it -- Chalmers is asking why, not what.

I wear specs and of course the optometrist has instruments and expertise to examine my eyes and prescribe the necessary lenses. But she doesn’t see my seeing. — Wayfarer

This is exactly the point, and the difference. She can't see your seeing; that is a subjective experience. But you can also see what she sees, namely the eye itself. And thus for consciousness. I can't know what it's like to be someone else, but that is a different problem from what consciousness is.

I could put the question in terms of "life" rather than consciousness. Would you say that, because you are alive, you are unable to know what life is? That a biological study of life must always leave something out? If you say, "What it leaves out is the experience of being alive," then we agree. But if you say that we can never have a complete explanation of life because we ourselves are alive, I don't see it.

Now granted, this hinges on a particular understanding of what an explanation is, and what it must cover. I'm clear that a reductive physical explanation of consciousness is unlikely. But that is not the only possible way of explaining it. Part of what makes the hard problem so hard is that we don't yet understand the phenomenon of consciousness, so making a link with the "how and why" of it remains for the future. I think Chalmers makes all this pretty clear in the video. He says, "Ultimately it's a question for science, but it's a question which right now our scientific method doesn't have a very good handle on."

Are not all explanations reductive? — Janus

A deep question, certainly. I would say no. You say, "All explanations are given in causal terms," but you're thinking of a type of common physical/scientific explanation. Is the explanation of the Pythagorean theorem a causal one? Surely not. What about an explanation of how football is played? Does that reduce to an analysis of what the players do? A reductive explanation of consciousness would not only show how it comes to occur, but also why it is identical, in some significant sense, to its physical components, just as water reduces to H2O. I'm suggesting that explaining consciousness may not fit this model.

Consciousness is not trying to explain itself―it is reason, the discursive intellect, that is trying to explain consciousness. — Janus

That's an interesting move. Again, it seems to hinge on what the activity of explanation consists of.

It doesn't seem to be as simple as we are conscious when awake and unconscious when asleep, for example. — Janus

In a way, it is that simple -- for now. I suspect that when we get a biological explanation of consciousness, which I believe we will, in time, we'll discover that "conscious = awake" is too simple. But can we abandon, for purposes of investigation, the basic stance that to be conscious is to be awake and aware, and to be unconscious is to lack those attributes? I can't think of a better place to start, can you? I don't just mean scientifically -- when I discuss this subject with friends, that's certainly what they mean, and they understand quite well that some aspect of subjectivity or personhood can remain when the mind is asleep or sedated, so consciousness isn't the same as "being me" or "being alive."

No it isn’t. He quotes Nagel in support of his definition; — Wayfarer

He's giving a description of what he means by consciousness, not a definition of the hard problem. It is, in fact, a pretty good description of what subjective experience entails: "visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations. . . " etc. Being able to describe this is not a hard problem at all; the problem is why and how it is possible.

But perhaps we're just placing different emphases on aspects of the problem. Would you agree that the hard problem is also a problem of how consciousness emerges, and why it does so? That is the standard version.

why does that mean we can't seek an explanation for it?
— J

Because of recursion: you’re trying to explain that which is doing the explaining. ‘The eye cannot see itself’. — Wayfarer

I know this seems obvious to you, but I don't understand it. The eye can see itself, actually, by using scientific technology -- in fact, such technology allows us to see, and explain, the eye much better than we can do as mere experiencers and observers. And it still involves using our eyes. Why wouldn't the same be true for consciousness? Again, I think there are rebuttals to this question, but simple recursion isn't one of them.

As is well known, he says the really hard problem is 'what it is like to be...' By that he means the experiential dimension of life, the 'subjective aspect' as he calls it. — Wayfarer

No, that's not the hard problem. Chalmers says:

. . .even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience—perceptual discrimination, categorization, internal access, verbal report—there may still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience? — Chalmers, Facing Up . . .

This is a different problem from "What is it like to be conscious?" The latter problem is associated with Nagel, not Chalmers.

The hard problem is a why and how problem: Why does consciousness arise from physical experience, and how does it do so? These are completely within the scope of cognitive science. "What is it like" is a different animal, and probably not amenable to scientific response.

The SEP article on consciousness puts it this way:

"The so-called “hard problem” (Chalmers 1995) which is more or less that of giving an intelligible account that lets us see in an intuitively satisfying way how phenomenal or “what it's like” consciousness might arise from physical or neural processes in the brain."

Again, the problem is to say how "what it's like" consciousness arises from brain processes, not to give a description of consciousness itself.

The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness’s foundational, disclosive role.

Sure. But why does that mean we can't seek an explanation for it? (Not, of course, a reductive explanation; that would be to beg the question in favor of physicalism.)

I think many of the problems arise because of the tendency to try and treat consciousness - actually, I prefer 'mind' - as an object. It may be an object for the cognitive sciences. — Wayfarer

I suppose my 'bottom line' is the irreducibility of consciousness (or mind). If something is irreducible then it can't really be explained in other terms or derived from something else. My approach is Cartesian in that sense - that awareness of one's own being is an indubitable fact — Wayfarer

Like you (and I think @Pierre-Normand), I don't believe consciousness or mind can be reduced to the physical. But I'd like to see a clearer discussion of what's entailed in your statements above.

Two things:

1. If mind can be an object for the cognitive sciences, what does this mean? How does the attitude or program of cognitive science allow an escape from what you call "the indubitable fact that we are that which we seek to know"? Perhaps the answer lies in a discrimination between 1st and 3rd person perspectives, but what do you think? When a scientist studies consciousness, what are they doing differently from our everyday experience of being conscious?

2. That some awareness is an indubitable fact does not entail that it can't be explained in other terms. Yet you seem to imply that this must be so. Why? Aren't we confusing the experience, the phenomenology, with that which is experienced? My awareness of a drop of water is irreducible and, for some, indubitable, but we have the science of chemistry nonetheless. Why would the situation be different for consciousness? I can think of several candidate answers here, but tell me what you think.

The problem I see is that it's not clear what we mean by "mind" and even less clear what we might mean by "mind-independence". For example Wayfarer says that because it is us thinking about the time before we existed that the time before we existed must be mind-dependent. On that stipulation everything we think about must be mind-dependent, as opposed to merely the way we think about it. — Janus

I'll leave that to you and @Wayfarer, but my 2 cents is that Wayfarer is saying something a bit different. Your general point, however, is that "mind" and "mind-independence" are not terms with universal consensus, and that's quite true.

Pretty much all I see in Wayfarer's posts is the attempt to explain (away) modern philosophical positions and dispositions in psychological terms―the rise of science has caused us to become blind to something important in traditional "proper" philosophy, modernity has lost its way, "blind spot in science", physicalism could not possibly be a coherent position, blah.

I don't find any of that remotely convincing, worth taking seriously or even interesting, so you must be seeing something there I don't. — Janus

On this particular topic, what I find interesting is his use of "real" and "existent" to refer, respectively, to universals and physical stuff. I'm way oversimplying, but his idea is that we could therefore speak about numbers as being real, while not "existent" in the same way that a squirrel is. As you know, I'm not fond of those particular terms, but it shouldn't blind us to the distinction W wants to make, which I believe is a valuable one. There is a metaphysical or ontological difference between a number and a squirrel, and I understand why some philosophical traditions would want to characterize it as W does. But rather than bickering about the labels, let's say more about the details of that difference, the respective properties of numbers and squirrels, etc.

My point about the existence–reality distinction is very much in that spirit: we shouldn’t collapse reality into empirical existence, but we also shouldn’t reify reality as if it were some external substrate “out there". — Wayfarer

Yes. Again, I have issues with those particular terms but that's irrelevant to the point you're making, which I think is extremely important.

I read Rödl to not [be?] saying we could know the limits of "logical" principles. If we cannot know their limits as the basis of "experience", we cannot know their absence as a verification of fact. — Paine

I'd like to hear more on this. (Did I edit your 1st sentence correctly?) I'm not sure I understand the part about "we cannot know their absence as a verification of fact."

As usual, there's a lot to unpack in Rodl, but I've generally found it worthwhile. Let me start with a simple question (and I don't want to take us too far from the main thread of this conversation): Rodl's idealism would probably view talk of "reality" and "mind-independence" as sharing a fatal flaw, such that to say one is more or less useful, philosophically, hardly signifies. That flaw would be an assumed demarcation between what we can know as real/unreal, and mind-dependent/independent. A "judgment of experience," here, has nothing to do with logical principles; I think you're suggesting we interpret such principles as the mind-independent reality that we want to connect with experience. "The logical principle supplies no justification of any judgment of experience; no scientific principle can be derived from the principle of logic."

Is this on the right track?

My point about universals is that they are fundamental constituents of this ‘R’. I think Wheeler’s simile of ‘paper maché’ is a little misleading, as the tenets of physical theory are rather more ‘solid’ than this suggests. But regardless the elements of the theory are real in a different sense to its objects. They comprise theories and mathematical expressions of observed regularities. — Wayfarer

Works for me. What would be interesting, then, would be to investigate the ways in which the elements of the theory are different from its objects. If I understand Wheeler's conception, that can be done without further talk about "real."

the question as to what we might mean by "mind-independent'―a term that seems to be much more slippery than 'real'. — Janus

Yes, it's slippery, but it lends itself more easily to some kind of investigation than "real" does. I simply don't know how I could tell if a philosophical object is real or not. Depends what you mean! Whereas with "mind-independent," the ground is a bit firmer. If I claim that universals and abstracta have no existence apart from minds, I'm saying they lack the property of mind-independence. If I further claim that my thought of "If p, then q" is dependent on my thinking it, whereas the proposition "If p, then q" is not, that's another way of talking about mind-independence.

You may feel there's not much difference in clarity between "mind-independent" and "real," and I agree it's not a huge categorical difference; I just find myself knowing a little better what I'm thinking about, when I think about what "mind-independence" means. This could be because "real" has so many contexts and usages, whereas "mind-independence" is rather technical, and not as widely connotative.

I think the takeaway is that we cannot hope to get a "one-size-fits-all" definition of 'real', or 'existent'. It seems the best we can do is hone in on a somewhat fuzzy sense of the term and hopefully sharpen that sense up a bit. — Janus

Thanks for taking the time to parse my rather terse "which direction" question! I could try to say it again, better, but your takeaway is pretty much where I was going with it. We can either adopt a definition of "real" and go on to discover things that fit our definition, or we can take a look at what I've called the "conceptual landscape," see how the various denizens relate, and then decide that "real" would be a good term to use for one of the denizens, based on how it's been used in some respectable tradition. But either way, it's a pragmatic effort, in the best sense. As you say, we aren't likely to come up with a "one-size-fits-all" definition. But it may well be the case that something like @Wayfarer's schema, for instance, can do excellent philosophical work for us, without requiring us to pin "real" down to some fact of the matter or some correct usage.

Reading your response, I think I might not have been clear. I was saying that, if we talk about numbers as "real", we likely don't mean "as opposed to fake" or "genuine", or one of the other commonly useful construals of "real". That was what I called a "bad fit."

So if we don't use that construal, which one should we use? The schema you're laying out makes sense, and can clearly be useful in dividing up the conceptual territory, but would you want to argue that it's the correct use of "real" in metaphysics? That's what I'm questioning. I don't think metaphysics is the least bit archaic -- it's one of the most exciting areas of contemporary philosophy -- but I'm suggesting that we now have better terminology than an endless wrangle about what counts as "real."

And BTW, I think (most) universals are every bit as mind-independent as you do. But there we are: "mind-independent" is a property or characteristic we can get our teeth into. Adding ". . . and real" seems unnecessary.

Real" is perfectly clear and useful in most contexts, because we know how to use it.
— J

Real is authentic, not fake, the real deal. Reality is distinguished from delusion, illusion or duplicity. — Wayfarer

Well, yes, that works for many, perhaps most, contexts, as I was discussing with @Janus and @AmadeusD, above. But would you import it into a consideration of numbers, for instance? It seems like a bad fit. My contention is that, the more we enter metaphysics and epistemology, the less useful "real" is. I believe it's a placeholder or term of convenience for various other characteristics that can be more precisely stated. And to make matters worse, those other characteristics vary from tradition to tradition, while "real" remains constant, as if it could cover all of them.

But, as we've said, my view depends on there not being a story in which "real" did have a correct usage, which it lost. This is a specifically philosophical objection. Other uses of "real" observe different constraints.

to agree on the meaning of 'real' would be to agree on what is real. — Janus

And the question is, in what direction does the justification go? Do we discover a knowledge or nous of a certain sort of thing, and say, "This is real", based on what "real" means? Or do we have a term, "real", which we then attempt to match with certain sorts of things in order to discover what it does or could mean?

Some further reflections on keeping truth and justification separate. . .

When we say, “The world pushes back,” what are we describing?

"Truth remains a world-constraint (thin correspondence). If your model predicts rain and it doesn’t, the world corrects you.” — Sam

What if we changed the example from a prediction to an observation? I see a moist situation outside my window that appears to be rain; I offer genuine justifications for my belief, “It’s raining”; but when I go outside I discover that actually it had stopped raining quite a while ago, and what I saw from my window was the rainwater continuing to fall from the high trees in my yard.

What has happened here? Can I say that my belief in the rain was justified, but untrue? Shouldn’t I have taken into account the possibility of rainwater falling from the trees – a phenomenon I’ve seen many times before – when I provided my public-standard reasons for my belief? (the “defeater” criterion). That would make my belief unjustified; at best, I should have said that it was quite likely to be raining. But then again, my “JB” -- my assertion of belief plus justifications – was not offered as a piece of knowledge. Not if I believe in the JTB theory, anyway.

So -- at what point is justification only “genuine” if it indeed tracks the truth? You say, “I can be genuinely justified yet false,” and give the example of the cancelled train stop. Yes, it appears that you were justified in believing the train would come . . . but isn’t another analysis possible? Couldn’t we say, “We all know that train stops can be cancelled. You can affirm your belief that the train will come; you can give your genuine justifications for thinking so; but only the fact (truth) of the train’s arrival will turn this into a JTB, a piece of knowledge.”

I guess I’m asking how we should characterize a “JB” -- a belief that is genuinely justified, according to your criteria, but whose truth is still undetermined. Does a person who asserts a JB assert that they know it? Only the “know of conviction,” perhaps. If JTB is meant to be the definition of knowledge, we can’t say “I know X” until we discover whether X is true – we need all three legs of the tripod. So again, how should we describe “genuine justification” in a way that preserves some daylight between that concept and “true”? How carefully must we consider every conceivable defeater before saying that our justification is genuine?

These are reservations and puzzlements about the JTB concept in general, I think. I want to turn to your more focused version, with its use of Wittgensteinian hinge propositions, especially the idea that hinge propositions “stop the regress (and circularity) that would make any coupling [of methods for determining truth and justification] impossible.” But that will wait for a subsequent post.

BTW – I don’t think you and @Joshs have a serious disagreement about “creative, intuitive modification of norms.” Josh says:

I mean something more like Gadamer’s phronesis — a context-sensitive application of rules that inevitably alters their force. — Joshs

As a third party following along, this seems to me quite compatible with:

Yes, rules are “open-textured;" there is no decision-procedure that eliminates judgment. But that judgment is trained and answerable to public standards. If “creative” means improvisational within the practice (e.g., a physician integrating atypical signs without violating diagnostic criteria), I agree. If it means license to bend criteria ad hoc, I reject it. — Sam26

Gadamer’s phronesis is not at all ad hoc, and I’m pretty sure Josh wouldn’t recommend that.

Amusingly, this is a case of not having rules for knowing when and how to apply rules! And as we know, the lack of “rules for rules” doesn’t make everything ad hoc and chaotic.

Great, this is exactly the pressure point to push on, — Sam26

Glad you agree.

method-dependence of access does not entail identity of property. — Sam26

And this is the result we want. You make a strong case, which also has the advantage of replicating very closely what we actually do when trying to assess the validity of what we think we know.

I'll devote more time to this soon -- real life calls -- and focus on what may be the weak point: a somewhat cavalier acceptance of a "world" that is supposed to remain constant across multiple conceptions of justification. Is the "window/landscape" analogy good enough here? We can see the landscape, but not "the world" -- that might be an objection. But I need to think more about it. TBC.

What is 'real' is hotly debated socially (if you have a diverse social group, anyway). — AmadeusD

Clearly I need to improve my social group! :wink: It's been a long time since I've been part of a debate about "what is reality" that didn't involve green leafy substances. But I take your point. The usefulness of "real" waxes and wanes, but the idea that something is real if it's genuine and not real if it's a fake is robust. This idea will work fine in a lot of situations, and children learn it quickly.

on my view, truth and genuine justification are conceptually independent but methodologically coupled — Sam26

Good. So what we want to know is, does the coupling of the methodologies for determining what is true and what is genuinely justified result in a vicious circle?

That it is a circle seems clear, but that may not be a problem. We might start by asking, is it possible to determine what is true without using the methods that "lock justification onto truth-tracking"? -- that is, without engaging in justification?

I'm guessing not, but then how do we respond to the objection that we have "collapsed into each other" the criteria for truth and justification? Note that this objection doesn't depend on claiming that justification has been reduced to "social agreement," opening the door for some invidious form of relativism. The criteria for both truth and justification can be as "objective" as you please, but we still have the problem of whether they are indeed two separate legs of the tripod.

What do you think?

On this method, the verdict “S knows that P” states something robust: P is true; S believes P; S’s justification meets the public standards of the operative language-game — Sam26

I admire the clarity of this position -- many thanks.

As you no doubt know, there is a question about JTB concerning whether "true" and "(genuinely) justified" are independent criteria. How would your Wittgensteinian version of JTB respond to this?

Let’s go back to the starting point. . . — Wayfarer

What follows is an excellent summary of the epistemological story, and how it has changed over time. You really do have the gift of concision. And . . . not once did you use the terms "real" or "reality"! Was this deliberate? I rather hope not, because it demonstrates, better than any persuasion on my part, that those terms really aren't necessary in order to say what we want to say, philosophically.

I believe there’s validity in the concept of the philosophical ascent. — Wayfarer

I know you do. I was asking why -- and specifically, how we could determine whether the concept is valid or not.

In that allegory, the vision of the Sun as an allegory of the ascent from the cave symbolizes the noetic apprehension of ‘the real’ — Wayfarer

Again, how can we examine this idea? If you say, "What is real can be apprehended noetically," and I say, "What is real is strictly physical" (which I would not!), what are we disputing about? Are we disagreeing about how to use the word "real"? How does that sort of disagreement get resolved, philosophically? Or are we disagreeing about a fact of the matter, not just the terminology? In that case, don't we need to investigate and analyze the characteristics of (in this case) noetic apprehension and physical sensations, in order to learn how they differ, and whether one might indeed be more basic, or reliable, or grounded, etc.? Having done this, what additional work do we want the word "real" to do?

The fact that 'real' and 'reality' don't have 'agreed upon definitions' is actually symptomatic of the cultural problem which the OP is attempting, in its own way, to address. — Wayfarer

This is a very interesting point. The implication, I think, is that "real" could have a definition, in philosophy, that is just as solidly based as, say, "elephant". Indeed, such a definition was in place for the Classical philosophers, and its disappearance is a cultural problem. That makes sense, if we did indeed have a piece of knowledge that has been lost.

I wonder whether there's a way to describe what happened, culturally, that doesn't require this set-up. Another account might be something like: "The Greeks and Scholastics had a view of what constituted the 'real' or 'reality,' and this view was widely accepted, leading to a relatively unambiguous use of the term. But then challenges began to be posed to this view, with the result that, today, there are competing understandings of how to use and interpret 'real'."

On that account, what happened was not a "problem." Rather, it was found that the Classical view of reality could be questioned, and that rich philosophical questions and viewpoints resulted from this questioning. At a minimum, philosophers found themselves forced to do analysis, to discover what these competing versions of "reality" actually entailed. It could even be the case that this movement away from the agreed-upon definition of reality was an improvement, a benefit, freeing us from a frankly incorrect or inadequate understanding -- not so different from what happened in the physical sciences.

I don't exactly think this account is correct, because I think there are ways of knowing that are outside the scope of philosophy. I'm continuing to urge us, as philosophers, to think twice about "dying on the hill" of what is real and what isn't.

We can agree, and do, agree on what's real in most contexts of ordinary usage. When it comes to metaphysics it's a different matter. — Janus

This is important. "Real" is perfectly clear and useful in most contexts, because we know how to use it.

What can we do to encourage conversation about what might lie on either side of that line, without having to call the line "the boundary of reality" or some such?
— J

But it really is a debate about the nature of reality — Wayfarer

This exchange gives us a good view of the issue, I think. (And thanks for hosting the discussion, and being so willing to hear how it strikes others.)

My position is that there can't be a debate that "really is" about the nature of reality, because "reality" and "real," when used in this kind of philosophical context, don't have definitions or references that can be clearly agreed upon, outside of some specific tradition. Your position is (and of course correct me if this is wrong) that we do know what "reality" refers to, or at least we know what we mean when we use it in this context. This knowledge is tradition-independent. Thus, a philosopher can be right or wrong about what is real, and can be shown to be so.

I'm further saying that we can still talk about all the topics we want to talk about -- structure, grounding, primacy, causality, knowledge -- without insisting first on agreement about what is real, or how to use the terms "real" and "reality."

As a next step, I think that it's appropriate for me to ask you how you're using "reality" when you say that we can have a debate about the nature of reality. Is it something close to @Ludwig V's suggestion?: "'real' is the concept that enables us to distinguish between misleading and true appearances." Perhaps even more importantly, can you tell us why you believe that your use is correct?

I'm not at all clear what you mean by scholastic realism. Can you explain, please? — Ludwig V

I was picking up @Wayfarer's term -

You’re aware that scholastic realism was a very different animal from modern scientific realism. Scientific realism, as it’s commonly understood, is rooted in an exclusively objective and empirical framework that sidelines or brackets the subjective elements of judgement, reasoning, and conceptual insight. Scholastic realism, by contrast, affirmed the reality of universals—forms or structures apprehended by the intellect—and saw them as essential to the very architecture of reason. — Wayfarer

scholastic realism was a very different animal from modern scientific realism. . . . Scholastic realism, by contrast, affirmed the reality of universals—forms or structures apprehended by the intellect—and saw them as essential to the very architecture of reason. — Wayfarer

That's right, and the philosophical structure that results from this is intricate and, for me, often persuasive. My beef, if I have one, is with terminology. I'm looking for ways to talk about these things that promote mutual insight rather than disagreement over what words to use. The scientific realist and the scholastic realist disagree -- but about what, exactly? Is there a way to frame their disagreement without each insisting on one view about how to use the word "real"?

I'm trying to be careful, and not say ". . . about what is real." I'm arguing that there isn't a fact of the matter here; all we have is more or less useful ways of using the word. That doesn't cede any ground to either camp. Clearly there's something important that the scientific realist is pointing to, by drawing the line where they do. Equally clearly, that's the case for the scholastic realist as well. What can we do to encourage conversation about what might lie on either side of that line, without having to call the line "the boundary of reality" or some such?

One reservation I have is that this arrangement can be characterized in different ways. It can be characterized as "categories of being" or "modes of existence" or as "categories of objects" or categories of language. It may be that this is less important than the approach. — Ludwig V

Yes. Again, the wrangle over how to name the elements of the arrangement -- what counts is the approach, the arrangement itself.

The same word ["real"] is used, so there is a great temptation to give a general characterization of all the uses. There may not be one, in which case we simply designate the word as ambiguous. . . . However, in the case of real, I wondered whether we could say that "real" is the concept that enables us to distinguish between misleading and true appearances. — Ludwig V

That's a good way to use "real." And if we adopted it, notice what would follow: A disagreement about whether an appearance is misleading or true would be settled, if it can be settled at all, on the merits. We would not be looking in the Great Dictionary under "real" and saying, Ahah, this appearance over here is real, because it's true. Rather, we'd examine the conceptual territory of "misleading" and "true," make what determination we can, and then, having decided that "real" is a good word to use for the true appearances, we use it. If someone doesn't like that use of the word, no big deal: What we want to be talking about is misleading and true appearances, not "reality."

Good stuff. I'm going offline for a couple of days but I'll pick this back up soon.

Interesting response, thanks.

Here's a possible way to approach the problem: Is "real" more like a name, or more like a description?

Compare "donkey". We point to an individual and say, "This is a donkey," by which we mean that the word "donkey" names, but does not as a name further define or describe, that individual. If someone asked us, "But what does 'donkey' mean? By virtue of what property can we determine that the individual is a donkey?" we would explain how to do this. And if we were further asked, "But why 'donkey'? Why call it that?" we would be a bit puzzled, and reply that there is no particular reason.

I'm suggesting that "real" is more like "donkey". (The analogy isn't perfect, but bear with me.) We examine "conceptual space" and discover that, let's say, "Universals, numbers, and the like, are . . . relationships that can only be grasped by the rational mind." (Notice that for the time being I omitted your word "real".) If this is true, then we've learned something important about a category of being which we encounter.

My challenge is, What is added to our knowledge by describing this category as "real"? Is there any non-circular, non-question-begging way of teasing out more information from "real"? Moreover, what is lost by using "real" can be considerable -- we lose clarity and context, because of the enormously diverse history of that word's usage. We are pulled almost irresistibly into trying to justify our use of "real" to describe the ontological category we've discovered.

Suppose instead -- and this part is fantastical, I know -- we said that universals, numbers, and the like, are Shmonkeys. We can also point out, "In many cultures and traditions, Shmonkeys are equated with what is real, but it is unclear just what that means, apart from being a Shmonkey." And we can go on to give names to other elements of ontology -- perhaps including names for ways of existing. (Quantification!) We'd end up, ideally, with a clear and organized metaphysic that can still speak about grounding, structure, and epistemology, thus covering what most of us want from terms like "real" and "exist," but without the contentious, ambiguous baggage.

To anticipate your response, what this picture leaves out is the idea of "a fundamental distinction which is almost entirely forgotten." I think you're wanting to say that there used to be a correct way of talking about what is real, about what exists, but we no longer remember how to do this. Part of me is sympathetic with this, but not the philosophical part. I think our talk of Shmonkeys can be just as correct, and can reveal the same important properties that (some uses of) "real" is supposed to do, including, as it may be, a fundamental grounding function.

Thanks, I needed that! (something to smile about)

An attempt to coin technical terms for the purposes of philosophy. . . . [they] have a certain currency amongst philosophers, but I don't think they have penetrated ordinary language (yet). I don't find them particularly exciting, though. — Ludwig V

Well, that's right, technical terms are kind of a drag to use, especially when they don't originate in English. The Continental stream you point to is one example, but so is the analytic-phil tradition, actually. Or maybe I should back that up and say: The minute you place logic at the forefront of philosophical inquiry, you're going to get what amounts to technical, non-English terminology for a homely concept like "existence."

I frankly don't think my proposal to abandon terms like "existence" or "reality" will work, because thus far we don't have a ship to jump to. Unless you're in the Heideggerean tradition and are willing to adopt that very difficult vocabulary, or you want to do more with the Anglophone logical apparatus. (I've often said that Theodore Sider is really good on this.) For our purposes on TPF, I'd just like to see less contention about "the right definition" for a Large philosophical term, and more attention to the conceptual structure the term is meant to describe or fit into.

I'll be interested in your overnight thoughts!

you would want the new terms to capture it. But we would need to describe it accurately to do that. — Ludwig V

Yes. I'm not implying that this is some easy task that philosophers have inexplicably shirked!

They expect them to have a univocal meaning. ("Good" is another example, by the way.) — Ludwig V

It certainly is. I'm not sure how much "univocal" covers, but the problem is partially that these terms are thought of as natural kinds, somehow.

However, there is something fundamental about the idea of a concept being instantiated or a reference succeeding. Perhaps that's what we should look at — Ludwig V

Well, I thought that [Quine's] idea, together with the idea of domains of discourse, that would define what a formula quantified over, (numbers, rocks, sensations &c.), would work pretty well. — Ludwig V

Yeah, I think it's one of the most useful frameworks available. As long as we promise not to claim it's the right way to define "existence"! What quantification gives us is an ordinary, unglamorous way to capture a great deal of the structure of thought. This effort, I believe, is roughly the same project as trying to understand what exists.

The advantage of dropping words like "real" and "exist" is that it would allow us to replace them with more precise terms that might avoid equivocation and ambiguity. "The meaning of both "real" and "exists" depends on the context - on what is being said to be real or exist," as you say. So they are notoriously difficult to use precisely and consistently.

In practice, take the number example: Would you agree that there is an important ontological difference of some sort between a number and a rock (or the class "rock" too, perhaps, but let's not overcomplicate it)? Does it really matter whether we say, "Rocks are real, numbers exist," or "Numbers are real, rocks exist"? What is actually being claimed here? As far as I can tell, the purpose of such formulations is to highlight a distinction. And the distinction often seems to have something to do with what is basic, essential, grounding, etc. But which term is supposed to be "more basic", and why? How would we find out? Might it not be better to formulate the distinction precisely, say exactly what properties an item must have in order to belong to one or the other or both categories, and leave it at that? How does the choice of "real" vs. "existent" add anything, other than a muddle stretching back thousands of years?

In his own somewhat unsatisfactory way, I think this is what Quine was trying for by equating existence with what can be quantified over.

Very good. And an excellent demonstration of why I never dispute what the term "existence" means!

We have a number of candidate construals, including what you're calling "common speech." (Also Quine's "To be is to be the value of a bound variable."). Is there a way of determining which is correct?

I think not. An understanding of how to construe "existence" can be more or less helpful, more or less perspicuous to a given framework, more or less flexible as it may apply to different cases, but beyond that . . . we have yet to discover the Philosophical Dictionary in the Sky that can answer such questions.

I agree that, for instance, there are good reasons for sometimes distinguishing "exist" and "real," such the numbers example. But I'm sure you wouldn't maintain that it is true that numbers are real but not existent. We can go so far as to say that drawing such a distinction illuminates something interesting and important about numbers. But that something -- the distinction itself -- does not depend on our use of "real" and "existent" to describe it. Arguably, two invented technical terms would do even better.