(Not sure what you're saying there) — Terrapin Station

That was my response to your message that materialists believe everything is material. I was making a giant diagram relating all ontological brands with their accompanying epistemology and you're like... "No. It has nothing to do with epistemology. They just think everything is material." :)

Realists argue for the independence of things. Materialists argue that all things are material. The latter might entail the former, but the former doesn't entail the latter. Objective idealists, for example, are realists but not materialists. And depending on what is meant by "matter", physicalists are another example of realists who aren't materialists. — Michael

OK. But if realists argue that things are independent, what is the opposing view? That things aren't independent? If things are dependent.. then on what?

I've been looking for how Nietzsche would have used the word. In the 19th Century, the most common meaning of realism had to do with painting, literature, and theater.

And others might reject the very notion of some fundamental substance (and so wouldn't be materialists, physicalists, or idealists), but nonetheless claim that things are independent (and so be realists). — Michael

Some just focus on causation. You're a physicalist if you believe all causes are physical.

but at least as expressed, my materialism doesn't amount to that. — Terrapin Station

I was having difficulty expressing the thought... different brands of ontology are basically different ways of picturing the relationship between ontology and epistemology. It's a simple thought that somehow gets complex when put into words.

I think materialism is like a musical strain (where cultures are symphonies over time.) But as a card-carrying materialist, what does it amount to.. to you?

Ontology is about how what is relates to what we know. The materialist is saying that what is stands independently of what we know. The materialist is basically saying "I don't know anything until the world tells me." For some strange reason somebody started calling that realism... I don't quite understand why.

The doctrine of the univocity of being implies the denial of any real distinction between essence and existence. Aquinas had argued that in all finite being (i.e. all except God) the essence of a thing is distinct from its existence. Scotus rejected the distinction. Scotus argued that we cannot conceive of what it is to be something, without conceiving it as existing. We should not make any distinction between whether a thing exists (si est) and what it is (quid est), for we never know whether something exists, unless we have some concept of what we know to exist.[24] — Wiki on Duns Scotus

But what I'm working on is retracing the thread back to the point where materialism became dominant. — Wayfarer

July 20, 1969.

And truth is mostly spin.

To the Realists:

Ye sober beings who feel yourselves armed against passion and fantasy,
and would gladly make a pride and an ornament out of your emptiness, you call yourselves realists, and give to understand that the world is actually constituted as it appears to you

before you alone reality stands unveiled, and you yourselves would perhaps be the best part of it, -oh, you dear images of Sais!

But are not you also in your unveiled condition still extremely passionate and dusky beings compared with the fish, and still all too like an enamoured artist ? *-and what is "reality" to an enamoured artist!
You still carry about with you the valuations of things which had their origin in the passions and infatuations of earlier centuries! There is still a secret and ineffaceable drunkenness embodied in your sobriety! Your love of "reality," for example

-oh, that is an old, primitive " love "! — Gay Science 57

It was previously explained that what is commonly called love is a state of reaching out for possession. It's a state of dissatisfaction. Possession has to do with identity and power.

Yea, I was self-employed for about 7 years. For the first few years I was basically working every waking minute (mostly marketing). I had to schedule everything down to lunch to get stuff done. Why don't you come to the US or Canada?

That's interesting. Russell denied that propositions necessarily have subject-predicate structure. He said "There are three men." doesn't. Plus he seemed to think that this insight demolished all of German Idealism. I'm not sure how. I never got past trying to figure out if it's true that "There are three men" has no subject (or not a single subject).

Anyway.. sounds like a fascinating read. Hope you'll keep us updated.

Do you folks have bankruptcy laws? You'll probably need that.

Is he proposing dualism? Is he defining world as the opposite of thought?

Perhaps he is saying something like 'no being without the quality of being'? Awesome line from K, by the way! — John

Sounds like a good sign for a protest march. Yea.. I think that line is from his journal. I don't remember now.

Therefore, the world is not ontologically dependent on thought — OP

But this sentence would be true even if one holds that the world is immaterial... for instance if I think the world is an abstract object because it's a set, it isn't thought dependent. I think that's right.

Maybe Nagase will zoom by again.

It is not that there are parts of the world that are 'beyond knowledge', as if a superior, non-human, or divine knowledge could grasp it, but that the very idea of knowledge is no longer applicable to certain aspects of the world, that is is a simple 'category error' to say we can know such and such beyond our experience of it. This is why Kant remained an empirical realist no less than he was a 'transcendental idealist'). — StreetlightX

You're saying there's no non-metaphoric knowledge. Knowledge is fundamentally metaphoric. Thing-in-itself is a logical entity that just falls out of any analysis of perception. We represent and we do it pervasively and profoundly... time, space, the very concept of nature.. all apriori.

Empirical realist? Yes. There is a structure to the world and knowledge of that structure is available to us.. partly empirically, partly innately.

Quine opts for deflationary realism he holds that there is nothing more to existence than existential quantification, — Cavacava

Or whatever entities are endorsed by our best scientific theories. I think of him as being pretty externalist, though.. which comes at a cost of a theory of meaning that slides toward behaviorism.. right?

The alternative is to be more internalist, which at first glance, a realist has to be.

I am more inclined towards Brandom's view, which I am still working on. — Cavacava

What draws you to his view?

Two things went through my mind while reading the OP:

1. It's something I experience from time to time at work (intensive care). A person appears to be staring at me and it turns out they aren't. It's in that split second that I become aware that their eyes aren't tracking that I realize the patient isn't "in there" as we say.

2. Heidegger's OWA where he talks about drawing sensory information in while the concept of the thing is pushed out into the world. Dynamic tension between the two.

People who are bound up in morality for whatever reason are the ones who can't deny the person who's "in there." Anybody can take a morality-break.. it just means looking at the world amorally.. realizing the forest fire isn't really evil.. that sort of thing. Then there are people who really fundamentally don't understand what morality is. There's something broken in their gourds. Oddly, people like that are sometimes the most self-righteous. Weird.

Perhaps Wayfarer is thinking along Buddhist lines, — John

I think it's more that he's using "being" where he means something like "qualia" (... that "quality of being that comes to rest in the sanctuary of the form" as Kierkegaard puts it.)

I think this is right; anti-realism and deflationary realism can readily be interpreted to be coterminous. — John

Makes sense to me.

But the concept "hammer" does not apply to something iff the concept "thought" applies, therefore "hammer" is not reference dependent on "thought". — Aaron R

Is this just gearing up to support ordinary existence claims? If so, there are no ontological issues on the table. I'm not quite sure how that escapes essentially being anti-realism. Why else would one ignore ontological existence claims unless it's because they aren't considered to be truth-apt?

It's full of impolite disinterest and poop. — Nils Loc

Strictly speaking, a human body is big tube and the poop is in the bottom of the tube. The whole digestive track is basically open to the outside world. So as you graze along, the tube gets thicker. If you're starving, the tube gets thinner. Many people long for a thin tube and so they restrict their grazing and run around meaninglessly.

I had two two-week prednisone bursts recently. It's magic. Unfortunately it won't do anything for Jackass Syndrome... obviously.

OK

I don't imagine I have anything to teach you about Descartes' scenario. If we differ in our take on it, maybe it's a difference in what we think the conclusion is? I take Descartes at his word (I'm always confused and astonished by people who don't). He was looking at what can be doubted and what can't be. The Dream argument is just part of the pondering.

I would say that it is because I can remember so much detail about the last couple hours — John

Do you really remember a lot of detail about the last couple of hours? I know people vary when it comes to that.

We must be able to make at least some meaningful distinction between waking and dreams, even to be able to ask the question — John

Right. My application of Leibniz Law was partly as a lark. The conclusion of the argument is not that there is no distinction (anymore than the one about the Evil Demon is concluding that there is an evil demon.)

Yes, do you mean that the existence of dreams, or dreams of saying things, would somehow show that we never know whether we dream or not? — jkop

I asked how you know you aren't dreaming right now. What does it suggest.. that you don't simply answer the question?

Normal is fiction. Nobody lives there full time.

Just 20 years ago, I'd say just about all the lesbians and bisexuals I knew were crazy in some way or another. If somebody had done some statistical analysis, the conclusion would probably have been some psychobabble. Of course they were crazy. They led crazy lives.

Now it's different. It's more normalized. Because it's easier to live a normal life, there are more homosexuals who aren't nuts. I don't see why the same wouldn't be true of trans people. Is there some stuff that still needs to be worked through? Sure. Why would anybody expect otherwise?

That's my expert opinion. :-}

You're not making sense. Would you care to explain? — jkop

Sorry... "In the dream, you asserted P." is true IFF in the dream, you asserted P.

Did I assert P in the dream? Yes, I did.

Problem?

Gay
Science

"You said that P in the dream" is true IFF you said that P in the dream.

I'm going to get some bacon and eggs.

How about that one?

PTSD sucks.

its present features in your visual field cause your visual experiences of it. — jkop

You'd say exactly the same thing in the dream if the question came up.

You can fly off the dream table, or it could turn into something else.

On the other hand you probably cannot choose to do a comprehensive spectroscopic and carbon dating analysis of the dream table or have it be reliably there for use for the next twenty years. — John

Among the table's properties is that you can fly off of it? But one can fly off a real table. A real table can change into something else. There may be in there some marks of distinction between dreaming and reality, but I don't think it has to do with the table's properties.

Dream tables can definitely be carbon dated and spectroanalyzed. If it's my dream, the analysis will inevitably yield some odd results like it spells the word "Fractured," or it's the name of a King, but I don't know which King and maybe it's a chess King.

A dreamworld is not a duplicate of the real world. It's usually pretty easy to tell them apart objectively.. But dreams do have quite a bit in common with the real, and the real has quite a bit in common with dreams.

If it's Descartes' dream argument we're talking about, it's not a side-by-side analysis we're doing anyway. It's a subjective thing. Are you dreaming now? If not, how do you know? What tells you that you're not?

But experiences are not objects of observation — jkop

Is there a difference between the dream table and the real table? What properties does one have that the other doesn't?

You even say it here yourself: in principle if not in practice. That "in principle" is thus a quite limited argument when it goes against practice. — ssu

"In principle" is enough for a hefty argument. If it's true that there's nothing I might observe (even in principle) that would tell me whether I'm dreaming, then per Leibniz's Law, there is no difference between this and a dream.

Leibniz's Law is a bi-conditional that claims the following: Necessarily, for anything, x, and anything, y, x is identical to y if and only if for any property x has, y has, and for any property y has, x has.

There's a "Get Creative" thread where you can put poems.

Well, anyway. I think Kant is a significant part of the conversation because AP is partly rooted in a reaction against Kant that flowed into an attempt to resurrect Correspondence. And so it is modern. It both celebrates and is afflicted by a modern theme: we can't go back. We can't return to the days when Correspondence was just obvious to everyone. We can't return to the ancient world when the external was alive and partly conscious such that it might hear your prayers if you spoke.

We're confused about what life and consciousness are in a way that people before us just couldn't be. We do have unique challenges.

Historical revisionism does you no credit. And it is General relativity that curves space-time to the extent that triangle (self-evidently or not) do not in general have internal angles totaling 180degrees, as demonstrated by Gauss in 1820s.

Thus Idealism is refuted. — tom

Maybe you could help me understand your argument a little better. Kant noted the intuitiveness of Euclidean geometry. What's the next step in the argument? And what is Kant's conclusion?

Which makes it difficult to explain how self-evidently true Euclidean space (as Kant thought) got overturned by General Relativity. — tom

Special Relativity is the one that does in absolute space. Kant beat Einstein to it (so did Leibniz, btw.. but that's beside the point.)

I believe that the difference comes down to one's notion of their place in the world. A realist sees him or herself as a (small) part of a wider existence. An idealist sees his or her own existence as primary. To the realist, we happen to the world. To the idealist, the world happens to us. — Real Gone Cat

I also think this is a significant feature of the question's landscape. But isn't it that the idealist believes we shape the world by what we think? That is the issue that buried structuralism. 20th Century people had to believe that the world can be different from what it has been... that the UN can work if we just believe in it, for instance.

Blessed are we who don't fully understand why they had to have faith in that.