To say of some normative statement, that it is true, is itself to make a normative statement, isn't it? — Banno

Glad my post was helpful. Yes, I think you’re on the right track, and let me say again that I am not Prof. Logic and can easily get muddled up myself.

The two ranges of possible variables aren’t mutually exclusive in any deep sense. We just have to specify them. I think there used to be an idea of a “universal class” which was supposed to mean “everything,” but that’s no help. We need to know, in any given formula, what the existential quantifier is quantifying over. (I’m going to use capital E rather than the reversed E cos it’s easier.) ‛Ex’ is paraphrased as ‛There exists an x such that . . .” or words to that effect. But absent an agreement on what “existence” is going to cover, we’re left with all sorts of ambiguities and puzzles. Quine said, famously, “To be is to be the value of a bound variable.” This way of stating it shows, I think, that what counts as “being” or “existing,” for logical purposes, is up to us. There’s no prior, obvious, “right” definition of what “exist” means – and that’s certainly been historically true in philosophy.

And yes, valid propositions can be constructed using either or both of the suggested quantifier ranges – you can say true things about both states of affairs and statements.

Now here is where you’re off track a bit: You say, “ ‛T is a normative fact’ is not itself referencing a statement – it is, rather, referencing a fact.” But the viewpoint I’m advocating makes a sharp distinction between “facts” and “states of affairs.” The rain outside isn’t a fact, it’s a state of affairs. The proposition “It is raining”, if true, is a fact. (See Wittgenstein: “The world is the sum of facts, not of things.” I think this is wrong – and so did he, eventually – but he’s using the distinction in the same way.) So, when you reference a statement, you’re also referencing a (potential) fact, but not a state of affairs. And this is exactly where we’ve all been debating. Let’s substitute “true statement” for “fact.” We get ‛T is a normative true statement’, and what we want to know is whether asserting this is equivalent to asserting the truth of T.

If we’re allowed to use statements as bound variables – that is, if Ex can quantify over “facts” and “statements”, not just “objects” or “states of affairs” -- then it looks like we can quote the statement without committing ourselves to its truth, or even to whether it’s true-or-false. But if only states of affairs can count as existing, then we have to make what is (to me) an awkward translation – and the exact way to do this is, again, what we’re kicking around. Should we say ‛(Ex) n(x)’, with ‛n’ meaning normative? But if x can’t be a statement or a fact, how do we translate this? What would it mean for a state of affairs to be normative? What are we predicating normativity of?

Lastly, yes, the “refurbishment” you suggest makes the question even sharper – but of course it firmly commits us to quantifying over statements.

Where I would like some help is in understanding whether Banno's objection, quoted above, must be correct. Are we making a normative statement in the sense that we're talking about truth, or in the sense that we're talking about whatever the normative behavior is? Does it require both truth and normativity to create a normative statement? Have I even made a meaningful distinction? I think so, but . . . see above re my logical competence.

Moliere, I echo Banno's appreciation for your careful reading.

As Banno says, there’s a lot in your post to think about, so just a couple of initial reactions.

The question for me would be whether this still counts as a conceptual relativism, or not? — Moliere

I agree, you’ve managed to (in a good way) blur the distinctions sufficiently that this question is now key. My response is: I’m not sure, and I’m beginning to worry that this could lead to a merely verbal/historical dispute about how we ought to divvy up our terms.

The consideration of poetry translation is very good. I’d love to know what Davidson’s reply would be.

About “phlogiston” and meaning change: Really? This is a rather eccentric use of “meaning,” isn’t it? I’ll grant you that phlogiston now has vastly different connotations and employments than it originally did, but has the meaning actually changed? Or perhaps I’m not understanding you deeply enough.

On the Wang paper, you’ve succeeded in highlighting passages that do seem to further the conversation, for which I’m grateful. The point about the difference between truth-values and truth-value status still eludes me, though – I’d asked into it earlier in the thread, I think. Why would different assignments of “either-true-or-false”, rather than different assignments of “true” and “false”, make any difference to the question of scheme-content dualism? I don’t see why the one is more alien or difficult to translate than the other.

This is pretty similar to my objection to the WMT vs. CMT section. You write that the “difference of meaning isn't one of distributing ‛...is true’ across sentences, but rather is a different kind of difference.” And then you say, “Whether we ought to call this a radical or incommensurable difference I'm still on the fence about.” Exactly – Wang hasn’t convinced me. I’m off the fence, on the side of “no.”

I think Kuhn -- perhaps sensing the possibility of Davidson-style objections about translatability -- preferred to compare the concepts rather than the language. Davidson's reply is that "the mind's ordinary categories" contain a structure which would then have to be paired somehow with the organizing structure of the language, hence "doubling the work." But if conceptual scheme and language do co-vary, then there's no need to say everything twice, so to speak.

BTW, thanks for all your interesting thoughts on this topic.

. . . and I'm probably missing some.

To be sure, a ritual for American vegans on Thanksgiving! Free the turkeys . . .

While I slept my tofu-heavy sleep, this discussion has done really well for itself. I am no longer sure of my position here. “Legitimate ambiguity,” as Leontiskos puts it, now seems about right to me on the entailment question. So just one more comment: Could the ambiguity lie in the fact that we haven’t specified the universe of discourse – the objects over which we want our predicates to range?

Let me explain (coughs nervously and consults his old logic notes). Statements are perhaps best understood, for logical purposes, as not existing in the world of space and time – the old logical distinction was “subsistent” vs. “existent”. So we could, following this idea, quantify either over the universe of space/time objects, or over a different set, in this case the set of statements, or facts. My original reading of Bob Ross’s syllogism was that it quantified over both things and statements, whereas Banno’s objection is that we have to take it as referring only to things or states of affairs -- the subjects of facts, rather than the facts themselves, which are of course statements. There is a vast literature on quantifier variance which I’m only casually familiar with, but here is the difference, as I understand it, for our purposes:

If we exclude statements as bound variables in themselves, then “X is a normative fact” and “It is true that X is a normative fact” are equivalent. This is Banno’s position, if I’m understanding him correctly. But if we allow statements into our universe of discourse, we get a different interpretation. “X is a normative fact” and “The statement ‛X is a normative fact’ claims to state a truth” now say two different things, because they quantify over different ranges, in the first case a state of affairs, and in the second case a statement. I don’t think we’d need to know, or claim, anything about the truth of the statement in order to talk about it, provided we allowed ourselves to talk about statements at all as a separate class.

I think the example often given of this (I’m taking it from Copi & Gould’s Readings on Logic) is: “Sentences having ‛ghosts’ as a subject-term are not really about ghosts . . . but about some people’s statements about ghosts, or perhaps certain ideas about ghosts.” Substitute “normative fact” for “ghost” and this makes the case pretty well, though C&G say (or said, in 1972) that this interpretation can lead to several “odd consequences.” And, thinking it through, I'm unsure whether it requires the presumption that the subject-term doesn't exist, which moral realists would deny.

That said, I am an indifferent logician at best, and I’m open to correction here by my betters.

As for moral facts, I also think there are such things, but emphatically disagree that demonstrating their existence is as easy as Banno says:

That one ought not kick puppies for fun is a moral statement.
It is a true statement that one ought not kick puppies for fun.
Facts are true statements.

Therefore there are moral facts. 

The second premise merely imports the conclusion, thus begging the question. If there were no moral facts, then premise 2 couldn’t be true. But if it is “a true statement” that we shouldn’t kick the puppies, then this true statement is a moral fact. Circular, no? How have we established that premise 2 is a true statement? Is it meant to be obvious? But if it were, then we’d already know there are moral facts, and thus no proof would be required.

Very helpful analysis. A lot of people do seem to overlook or forget that Davidson doesn’t dispute conceptual relativism on the grounds that conceptual schemes can’t be relative, but rather on the grounds that the “very idea” can be shown to be either incoherent or contradictory. He’s not trying to fall back on some traditional/foundationalist One True scheme/content distinction.

I’m not sure I’m with you on the T-sentence interpretation. Why does the translation have to be “IFF”? Wouldn’t a more modal understanding be closer to what Davidson means?: “s can be true if p” We arrive at the same conclusion – that it’s incoherent – but without claiming that only being p renders s true.

The section in Wang on WMT vs CMT is by far the weakest in the paper. We could exercise charity ourselves here and agree to ignore it!

So incommensurable schema would be incommensurable sorting of the same stuff. They must be about the very same stuff. — Banno

Yes, that’s the key issue. Davidson says it very simply and effectively: “Strawson’s many imagined worlds [the first, relatively harmless metaphor] are seen or heard or described from the same point of view; Kuhn’s one world is seen from different points of view.” And the argument is that you literally can’t conceptualize “one world,” aka the very same stuff, in this way.

I think Kuhn means more like establishing a one-to-one correspondence between concepts. — Apustimelogist

This would indeed be the best way to salvage Kuhn’s argument. I’m sure Davidson’s insistence on the co-variance of concepts and language was, in part, meant to moot the point. But do you agree with this statement from Davidson?: “If conceptual schemes aren’t associated with languages in this way [that is, strict co-variance], the original problem is needlessly doubled, for then we would have to imagine the mind, with its ordinary categories, operating with a language with its ordinary structure.” What do you think Kuhn might reply to this?

if someone says, "X faith-proposition is false, and here is a proof for why," Aquinas thinks the proof can be addressed and refuted, even though no contrary proof for the faith-proposition is possible. — Leontiskos

Ahah, I see. Thanks for the clarification. Argumentation is possible within the "world" made possible by articles of faith, but the articles themselves, and that world, can't be demonstrated, only defended from (necessarily false) refutations. Is this closer?

I agree, it's tricky. I think the question is whether adding "It is true that . . . " to a statement adds or changes anything of substance. In a non-normative context, would we say that "It is raining" and "It is true that it is raining" express two different propositions? I don't think so. But including normativity seems to genuinely add something. "You shouldn't pick your nose" and "It is true that you shouldn't pick your nose" arguably do say two different things. The one is normative, in that it's telling you what (not) to do. The other doesn't adjure or command or affirm an obligation or anything like that; it only reports on the truth of the first statement. Or so it appears . . . . and hopefully Bob Ross will tell us if this is what he meant. Maybe I'm too full of tofu turkey to think clearly about it tonight! I'll see how it looks in the morning.

No, it makes sense. The claim would be that the statement "T is a normative fact" states something non-normative, something factual, because it's a claim about a statement, not the reality the statement refers to. It's about normativity, not itself normative. I'm not sure I agree, but I think it can be said coherently.

Oh, OK, so you meant that "T is a normative fact" is a non-normative fact. Got it.

Yes, I figured you didn't mean the scientists themselves thought this way. But it still remains important, I think, not to separate self-understanding from an allegedly more accurate account, here or anywhere else. Wouldn't that be a too-firm dualism of the sort that a lot of postmodernism rejects?

As for Husserl, we'd need a new thread! What you say about his project isn't wrong, but the distinction between what is external and what is phenomenologically present preoccupied him throughout his writings. I don't think he doubted for a moment that an external world was there to be encountered. What was important was the bracketing process, the epoche, without which the questions can't be meaningfully posed. But no one will ever have the last word on Husserl! :wink:

If this appears as a solipsistic rejection of an authentically external world, then perhaps it was never such a world we were concerned with in constructing our sciences. — Joshs

Interesting thought. But it depends on who the “we” is here. I think the evidence is overwhelming that scientists have always – until very recently – understood their project as trying to understand the authentically external world. They may have been wrong to do so, but let’s be careful not to read back into their projects a (post)modern view of science. For me, a more convincing challenge to the traditional idea that science constructs a picture of an external world is the actual work of physicists today. Someone who understands quantum physics better than I do, please correct me, but it seems to be the case that, while an independent external world remain ontologically likely, it’s no longer believed possible, on epistemological grounds, to know anything about it that isn’t observer-dependent. I guess Kant would be happy!

Shouldn't the first P2 be "normative fact" rather than "non-normative fact"?

We might be on the same page here, pretty much. Like you, I’m not sure we can maintain physical/causal closure, in our current understanding of what this means, and also give a convincing account of emergence. Yet that’s what many philosophers seem to require. Instead, we may need to rethink whether a commitment to the fundamentality of physics really precludes strong emergence. You know all the problems with trying to do this, I’m sure. I think so-called top-down causation is the biggest roadblock. But I’ll say it again – we need a lot of help from neuroscientists here, who are surely still decades away from even a good theory-based hypothesis about how all this works.

The allegory of the riverbank and the text thereabouts seem to say that there is an interchange between scheme and content, whereas to carry their case Wang must show a separation. — Banno

Right.

I don't see how there could be any scheme-neutral content, any more than there could be a thing-in-itself; for no sooner do we start to talk about it than we place it within a scheme. — Banno

You find many of the same problems as I do in Wang, concerning scheme-content dualism. I don’t think the arguments are there – on that front. Earlier in the paper, though, he discusses the question you mention concerning alternate truth-values and/or truth-value status in a given language. I didn’t address that section at all in my OP, but it’s very interesting. Maybe someone would like to take it on . . .

In setting out the argument Davidson sets out a position on the nature of language. — Banno

I think it’s right on target to see Davidson in the context of defending (or assuming) a particular view of language. Indeed, this is one point where Wang seems to misunderstand him, or make too-hasty equations of terminology. For instance, he attributes to Davidson “the identification of conceptual schemes with sentential languages.” But Davidson explicitly does not do this. He uses words like “association” and “relation” rather than identification, and says that language and scheme will “co-vary,” but the thrust of his argument relies on clear differences among language, concept, and scheme.

That said, Davidson upholds Tarski-truth as the model of how propositions work. He also believes language must refer. Is it all we can say about language? The cetaceans are a good counter-example. So is human music. Musicians generally don’t think that abstract music either states propositions or refers, but it seems impossible to get rid of the idea that music is nonetheless a language. Or, if that’s questionable, that it communicates. What, then, does it communicate? What are dolphins “talking” about?

I think you’re offering the cetaceans as an example of a genuinely incommensurable conceptual scheme – if they can be said to have a language. And your guess is that Davidson would simply deny them that designation. Or perhaps we could convince him that here is a case of partial translation. Might this not be closer to what’s going on with the cetaceans? You say we haven’t been able to make progress in the direction of translating dolphin sounds. I’m sure you’re right; I don’t know much about it. But don’t we treat all animals, even much less intelligent ones, as if they are “saying something” when they make their various noises? And it isn’t just fanciful. I certainly can tell the difference between when my cat is “saying” Please Feed Me and when she’s saying Eff Off, I’m Sleeping.

So here’s what we would need to ask Davidson: Do you require mental propositional content [or fill in whatever term you like for subjectivity] in order to constitute a language? Does the dolphin have to have the idea of Look, A Tasty Fish? Or are we willing to accept a functional/behavioral sense of what it means to communicate through language? I think we non-philosophical humans have already settled that for ourselves: We don’t require that our pets know what they’re talking about -- quite literally. What they know, if anything, is mysterious. But what they mean to tell us is often something even a child can quickly pick up. So: partial translatability? We get some, but not most, of what they say. And the scheme-content dualism remains in place, since whatever translatability is possible is down to the sharing of concepts between two languages – provided you give “concept” a free pass as a mental entity.

I think there’s a third possibility why we tend to “default” against strong emergence. This ties to your point that a good model for strong emergence is usually taken to be “one that works with supervenience.” What we’re really wanting is a model that works with scientific understanding in general, that respects the successes of similar inquiries in chemistry and biology. Supervenience may be the ticket, or it may not, but we need something that doesn’t invoke new processes or entities that violate physical and causal closure. I’m not sure this is possible. Consciousness, if and when it reveals its secrets, may turn out to involve concepts that make “physical” and “mental” ludicrous, and “physical closure” a profound misunderstanding. But “popular metaphysical assumptions” seems a bit brusque to describe the bind we’re in. They’re popular largely because up till now they’ve done such a good job.

Thanks for the reference to Searle on this. The distinction he makes between internal and external understandings of promising is valid and useful, but I don’t think it gets him out of trouble here. Let’s grant that, from the internal, institutional viewpoint, “Ought I to keep my promise?” is tautologous, more or less equivalent to “Are triangles three-sided?”. The person I’m imagining – the deceptive promise-giver – is presumably going to say something like, “Fine, but my promise was not a ‛promise’ in your sense. I said some words to deceive, well aware that my listeners would assume I was speaking from within the institution of promising. But I was not.”

So – was he? We’d have to agree with Searle that the “full force” of the expression “I hereby promise” excludes any reference to a description of mental states. But then how shall we describe the difference between the sincere and the deceptive promise-maker? The performative expression is identical, the intention (if I’m allowed that word) is not. Searle says that this makes “the relation between promising and obligation . . . very mysterious,” but I don’t see why. Insincere, deceptive people are common. What sets them apart from genuine folk are their intentions or mental states. Are they “really” promising? Yes, no, and maybe all seem like possible answers.

In a way, though, none of this is central to the ought-is problem, which, if we follow Hume, is strictly a logical one. It is also much deeper than a simple question about entailment. The more closely we look, the more we realize that we’re interrogating the very meaning of “ought.” Does a true “ought” have to be categorical, in Kant’s sense – that is, without any “if” premise? To my mind, Kant’s thoughts about this are still the gold standard, but that’s enough for now.

I love the Searle example, and how much good philosophical conversation it has provoked. But . . . . it is sleight of hand. The missing "if" premise is: "If you believe you ought to keep your promises (or fulfill your obligations)." Sadly, it's perfectly possible to engage in the speech-act of making a promise without having or feeling the slightest sense of obligation to follow through. The sense in which making a promise "puts you under an obligation" may not apply to you at all, in your opinion. Others will disagree, of course, and call you names, but oh well. There's still no logical entailment.

The world speaks back to us through the apparatuses, language and practices we use to make sense of it. — Joshs

Interesting. I like the metaphor. Can you expand on this a little bit? It seems really important to get a precise sense of what "the world" would have to consist of, in order for us to understand how it's separable from apparatuses, language, etc., and how it can have the kind of agency that could "speak back."

Are you sure Rouse is arguing here for the impossibility of pre-linguistic or pre-theoretical experience? I read him as saying two related but different things. First, he says that once we arrive at Wang’s “common-sense experience,” it’s an experience of something that is no longer “innocent” but inculcated with theory, the web of belief, and all the other familiar metaphors. That's true, given how Wang defines common-sense experience. But does Rouse claim there is no possibility of an experience prior to this? I couldn't find a passage that argues for this.

The second thing I see Rouse doing is questioning what he calls the “near side” of the scheme-content duality. That is, our schemes and theories are no more innocent of empirical input than our experiences are of conceptual input. But again, this wouldn’t necessarily show that the empirical input has no theory-independent existence.

I'm fine with considering this an "ought" statement in the same way that a moral one is. I also agree that the colloquial, illocutionary nature of the statement is confusing, though I think we could sharpen it up if we needed to.

But the problem is the same old one: There's an implied hypothetical between "I command you to" and "you ought to," namely "You ought to do this IF you want to keep your kneecaps intact" or some such. It's perfectly possible, though unlikely, that the hitman could reply, "I'm OK with broken kneecaps," in which case we haven't managed to derive a pure "ought" from an "is." This example certainly clarifies that the ought-is problem is logical, not psychological. Since just about no one wants to be injured in this way, the command has a lot of psychological force -- but no logical entailment without the "if" premise,

Thanks!

I would also consider the philosophical problems in defining superveniance to be evidence against reductive physicalism, even if they are not arguments in favor of strong emergence. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think this is exactly right, and a good reminder not to confuse the two issues. Reductive physicalism can probably be defeated, or at least made implausible, by several strategies. Even Jaegwon Kim acknowledged that psychophysical supervenience is “not in itself an explanatory account of the mind-body relation; rather, it reports the data that such an account must make sense of.” But strong emergence remains such a poorly understood concept that, IMO, it’s hard to even know whether it’s a genuine biological phenomenon, or could play an explanatory role. It’s too easy to kinda wave our hands and say, of consciousness, “Well, it just emerges!” But what does, exactly, and how? I think we’re waiting on the science.

There is widespread agreement on many of the properties of water, its identity as H2O, its boiling point, etc. But there is also widespread disagreement about many of its properties on some levels. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Definitely. I didn't mean that there were no further questions about the nature of water -- or of objectivity. I just picked the chemical composition as a good example of an objective property, using "objective" in its most uncontroversial sense.

I'm glad the analogy with moral objectivity makes sense to you. I actually think "moral facts" are a tall order! But those who regard moral judgments as being about something other than personal or group preferences, or evolutionary equipment, probably need them in order to have a subject matter. Very broadly, I'm with Nagel on this -- moral thinking is sui generis, contentful, and argues from reasons rather than "desires" in the Humean sense. By appealing to reasons, it situates itself in the objective world, or perhaps something a bit more Peircean and intersubjective. Beyond that, we still have a lot of filling-in to do.

It's also interesting to see the distinction Aquinas makes between "faith" and "articles of faith." If I'm reading him rightly, he says that objections to faith itself can be replied to argumentatively -- they are "difficulties that can be answered." Whereas any particular article of faith is precisely that -- a belief held on faith -- and the only way to reply to the doubter here relies on first finding an agreement that faith is even possible, and then pointing out inconsistencies in the doubter's position using other articles of faith. This is quite subtle. Does it generalize to other overarching world-views? I think it might, though Aquinas seems to be saying that "metaphysics" is in a unique position in this regard. But wouldn't scientism, for instance, also be able to speak about a similar distinction between "whether scientific knowledge is possible" and "the truths of science"? No one who denied the former could be convinced by the latter. But once scientific knowledge is granted, the specific truths -- the articles of faith, by analogy -- can be argued pro and con, using some truths to demonstrate or refute others.

But isn’t this a contradiction? In the first quote, Wang describes conceptual relativism as “confrontations between two languages,” but then you say (and the second quote seems to bear this out) that “a conceptual scheme cannot be reduced to a sentential language.” (For what it’s worth, Davidson didn’t think it could be, though Quine did.) I would agree with this, in the sense that Wang means it: “Accordingly, a conceptual scheme cannot be said to be true or largely true. Only the assertions made in a language and a theory couched in the language can be true or largely true.” That’s why I was hoping for clarification about why the range of T-or-F evaluation sentences within a particular language would make any difference.

These are difficult issues to take piecemeal, and I didn’t mean to put you on the spot. I’ll read Wang and we can discuss further.

Thank you for the reference to the Wang paper, which I will read with interest. For now, though, you quote him as saying that conceptual relativism does not involve “confrontations between two conceptual schemes with different distributions of truth-values over their assertions, but rather confrontations between two languages with different distributions of truth-value status over their sentences due to incompatible metaphysical presuppositions.” I understand the distinction – language A may countenance T-or-F evaluations over a different set of sentences than language B – but why would this make them distinct conceptual schemes?

If there’s no short answer to this, no worries, you’ve referred me to Wang and I’ll see what he has to say.

I've read Kuhn but not Rouse. I think Kuhn is wrong in his understanding of the scientific project -- see Donald Davidson, "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme".

I take it Rouse concurs with what he calls the postmodernist view (different from Kuhn, of course)? If we can "never get outside of language," this presumably includes that very statement. So what would make it true (or false)?

In any case, the point was really about bias, and I think this usage is eccentric. I may want to claim that water is H2O, but this doesn't mean I'm biased in favor of this belief. It only means that I hold it.

Why not say that ‘objective’ is the view with biases more or less shared among a normative community? — Joshs

Because this won’t work for almost all of our uses of “objective”. It’s objectively true, I presume, that water is composed of H2O. Do we want to describe this statement as a “bias shared among a normative community” -- of scientists, presumably? What would motivate us to call this a bias?

What we want in moral realism, then, is a sense of “objective” that at least resembles what we find in science – or daily life, for that matter. And those who deny moral facts are indeed saying that the best we can do is “biases more or less shared.” But I don’t think that’s a reasonable synonym for “objective.”

T. M. Scanlon is good on this:

"Accepting science as a way of understanding the natural world entails rejecting claims about this world that are incompatible with science, such as claims about witches and spirits. But accepting a scientific view of the natural world does not mean accepting the view that the only meaningful statements with determinate truth values are statements about the natural world." (from Being Realistic About Reasons, 2011)

Also this, from Thomas Nagel:

"It is not one of the claims of natural science that natural science contains all the truths there are." (from Analytic Philosophy and Human Life, 2023)

These philosophers are drawing attention to one of the most common misunderstandings of what science does. There is no "completeness theorem" for truths either entailed or revealed by science -- only scientism would try to make such a claim.

I wonder if a fundamental cause of the controversies is that the concept of free will is poorly defined — Art48

I’ve been following this discussion with some bemusement. Would one of you be willing to put forward a target definition of “free will” -- one that makes sense to them – so that we can have some idea what we’re debating, and all focus on the same concept?

Science is implicitly understood as the arbiter of what should be taken seriously — Wayfarer

I don’t know if you’ve read Walker Percy. He makes an interesting distinction between “knowledge” and “news.” Knowledge would be the sort of thing that, broadly, science investigates. News, on the other hand, is information that you can’t deduce or discover for yourself; someone has to tell you. This would include religious revelation, for Percy. And he says that the “credentials of the news-bearer” are important evidence for whether to trust the news.

This may be too black-and-white, but I see what he’s getting at and I think it’s a valuable insight. I wonder what Aquinas would say, getting back to the OP. He made a distinction between natural and revealed religion, didn’t he? And I'm sure Kierkegaard, that champion of subjectivity, would agree.

Maybe a "Personal Spiritual Experiences" category could be added to the Forum. I don't want to derail this interesting thread by going on about my own. I appreciate everyone's open-mindedness, though.

Have you ever tried LSD? — wonderer1

Have I ever! Don't get me started . . . :starstruck:

I don't mean to make this just about me, but the (non-LSD) experience I had, some 35 years ago now, has stubbornly resisted being reduced to psychological categories. I certainly tried, as did most of my concerned friends. The main reason I call it strong evidence is that it changed my life in a way that was immediate, profound, and long-lasting, and made sense of all the previously senseless God-talk I'd heard. I think William James has the best descriptions of this sort of thing in Varieties of Religious Experience, but there are many Eastern accounts as well.

Could I be wrong? Sure -- no certainty, as I said. But I'm satisfied to have found the most likely explanation.

That leads to the dessicated social religion that Christianity has become - 'belief without evidence' as it's usually described here. — Wayfarer

I think the "dessicated social religion" part is very true, provided you're talking about mainstream U.S. Christian denominations -- perhaps not the best sample.

"Belief without evidence" is trickier. There's all kinds of evidence for the existence of God and even the divinity of Jesus, but none of it is rock solid. As in so many areas, we're left with beliefs that fall far short of certainty, but are hardly as bereft as "belief without evidence" sounds. In my opinion (and experience), a direct encounter with the mystical is extremely powerful evidence in support of theism. It isn't self-validating, but the "God hypothesis" can be compared critically with other explanations for the experience, and I can decide that the other explanations aren't as plausible -- as indeed I have.

I'm not sure where this leaves us. — Banno

As I read him, James isn’t saying that the “simples” -- of whatever level of simplicity -- are objects of perception at all. Certainly it’s a question for physiologists to decide at what point something is in fact perceivable, but James (and Flanagan, who has updated a lot of James in his own accounts of consciousness) is concerned with something a bit different. His point is that a constitutive or foundational or quiddity-ish description of object X is unlikely to coincide with what we can perceive. Mind you, this is using “perceive” in the way I suggested, as a term for phenomenal experience. There are certainly ways you could use it that would allow for “perceiving” atoms, I guess, but that’s hardly common. What J & F & I find interesting here is the disconnect between “what is X” understood as an ontological question, and “what is X” understood as a question about what I’m perceiving. Just for funsies, I ran this by a physicist friend of mine. He didn’t understand how there could even be a debate here. “The fundamental entities of existence don't look anything like what we perceive with our senses,” was the gist of his reaction. I think that’s what James meant.

As for the question about Jupiter: We don’t do either of the things you’re asking about, it seems to me. We can’t build up Jupiter as such, unless we know its name. What we can build up is a description of what we see, and perhaps get to “an object with characteristics A, B, C...” but a name isn’t perceivable. Upon being told that our object is called Jupiter, we can add that info to our knowledge, and refer to it by name, but no one thinks we can see Jupiter in the same way we see a color. Otherwise, we would have known the name from the beginning. “Jupiter” isn’t a raw feel, an element of (sorry) sense data. The analysis is the same working in the other direction, from Jupiter to the bands and patches.

Not to be repetitive, but this all seems to hinge on disambiguation of what we mean when we say things like “I see Jupiter.” Are we naming a sensible object, or the using the name of a sensible object? Funnily enough, in a way that Austin might well appreciate, the “common man” has no trouble making this distinction whenever it’s needed; we philosophers seem to get in a muddle about it and insist that there’s only one right way to speak.

6. What, exactly, a "perception" consists in remains obscure. — Banno

I agree with Austin that using veridical vs. illusory as way into the question isn’t promising. The insight from James that I quoted earlier seems much more on target. There are phenomenal experiences – let’s call them perceptions – and these same experiences can refer to, or be of, objects in the world which have names and, often, are constituted in interesting ways by smaller, more fundamental components.

James wants to say that neither names nor fundamental components are perceived, in the sense given above. So it’s a handy and reasonable distinction to make: We can give the term “perception” a job to do by letting it refer to the phenomenological experiences, but not the names or the components. If we want to refer to them, it’s easy: The direct object in the sentence “I see the red patch on Jupiter” is “the red patch on Jupiter,” a name which clarifies our perceptual experience of “I see red,” but isn’t synonymous with it. The direct object in “I see red” is the color red. Since we don’t see names, the distinction must be a valid one. And surely it conforms with our ordinary talk about these things? We know the difference between “I see a tree” and “I see a tree which I also happen to know is called an elm”. Indeed, James would say that we could take it all the way back, and say, "I see 3-dimensional colored object of a certain shape which I happen to know is called a tree."

This might help, from William James via Owen Flanagan: "the idea that our simple perceptions are in fact generated by the binding of even simpler units is compatible with these simpler units making no phenomenological appearance whatsoever. We need to beware of imposing our views about how experiences are generated onto the phenomenological surface."

In other words, what something is, in terms of its deep structure or physical reduction, isn't necessarily perceptible at the phenomenological level. The church looks like a barn. My group-of-molecules looks like a bottle. Wouldn't Austin agree that this is just common sense? The confusion, if there is any, stems from the fact that we often fail to disambiguate perception-words like "see"; sometimes we want "see" to refer to the phenomenology, other times to the "simpler units" that create the phenomenology and, often, provide a reductive description. This latter use often gets combined with a view of how object X "really" is, scientifically.

I dunno. This doesn’t strike me as one of Austin’s better points. Suppose I said, “I see a collection of 7 to the 112th power molecules that looks like a bottle.” Am I being accurate? In a way: This is (let’s say) the exact number of molecules it takes to form the bottle. And go ahead and specify something about shape if that helps. But in another way it’s wildly inaccurate: I don’t, I can’t, see those molecules. So surely the right answer is, “I see a bottle, not a collection of invisible particles.” The bottle is constituted by the particles but we’re talking about perception here, not quiddity or whatever.

So with the barn and the church. What I see is a barn. You’d have to tell me about the church disguise before I could even loosely claim to “see” it, just as I need to be told about molecular structure before I could, loosely, claim to see it. And in both cases, it's a use of "seeing" divorced from ordinary perception.

I don’t think there’s a right or wrong way to talk about this, necessarily, but I do think a defender of the value of ordinary language is going pretty far out on a limb here.