Of course, all the non Euclidian spaces are mathematical constructions that can be thought, but cannot be perceived. Kant really only talks about our experience of space, and so long as no-one experiences a four-dimensional space, that still holds.

Actually, I wouldn't mind pursuing this a little further, i.e. Einstein versus Kant, it might help me get clearer on Kant.
As I understood Kant, we don't experience space at all, it is instead the framework that outer experience has to conform to. If that is right even three dimensional space cannot be perceived. Given that he did most of his serious work before Gauss and Reimmann were even born, the only model of geometry he had available to him would have been Euclid's. So, it is not surprising that where he does talk about geometry it is of the three dimensional kind. Would it really have made a difference to him had he been aware of the possibility of coherent geometries with more than three dimensions?

if only to save the scientific reputation of Einstein.

That's a bit pompous on my part. Einstein's scientific reputation does not need saving by me.

For Einstein something does not have a definite position and size

I think you might be confusing Einstein with Bohr, or some other early quantum mechanist. Let's have another stab at this, if only to save the scientific reputation of Einstein.

The idea of definite position and definite size in Einstein's theories of relativity make perfect sense. Given a coordinate system, you can pinpoint exactly where something is and you can state precisely what laws will determine the progress of that particle through space and time as measured from that coordinate system. What Einstein did say is that, in regards to those laws of physics, there is no preferred coordinate system: choose any coordinate system you like, the laws regarding what will happen to that partice will remain exactly the same. He also provided us with precise rules for translating positions and sizes and velocities from one coordinate system to any another.

For Einstein there is no overarching space or time for the relative to fit in.

The relative is not a thing that literally fits into anything at all, so I presume you are using the term metaphorically, but I'm not clear how I should understand the metaphor. Nevertheless, be clear about this: for Einstein there is precisely one spacetime, so if by "there is no overarching space time" you mean to say that for Einstein there were many spacetimes, you are just plain wrong. What there is not, for Einstein, is a preferred coordinate system for describing locations of the things that populate the one and only spacetime.

Some examples of who am I talking about: Grace and Theodore De Laguna. Grace even wrote the companion piece to Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism". Theodore was one of the most important philosophers in the USA at the begnning of the century, nobody gives a toss about him now, but he was saying "meaning is use" back in the 1920s.

:up:

Every philosopher who does not enter the Olympus of Anglo-Saxon philosophy.

Even some who found themselves on those peaks at the beginning of the 20th century ended up being thrown down the mountain. Something very sinister appears to have happened to so called analytic philosophy after WWII.

I'm no expert on Kantian exegesis, but I'm aware that some people understand Kant in ways that make his position coherent with General Relativity.

Special relativity: The laws of physics are the same for all inertial frames of reference. I.e. there is no difference in the laws of physics no matter how fast or in which direction you are travelling.
General relativity: The laws of physics are the same for all inertial and non inertial frames of reference. I.e it does not matter even how much you accelerate, the laws of physics are constant.
If by the phrase "what Einsten said" you mean "Special and General relativity" neither entail the world is relative to anything.

And Banno is correct, many people assume that General Relativity undermines Kant's conception that space is a form of intuition, since for Kant it seems the form of our space had to be Euclidean, whereas one result of General Relativity, and one which has been experimentally confirmed I believe, is that our space is non Euclidean.

Yes, I already allowed for our lives being more complex than a leaf's. Perhaps I am misinterpreting Wittgenstein, but I presumed his example is there to focus our thoughts on whether the following kind of statement expresses anything more than a commonplace:

The future may be predetermined, but it is that way partially due to choices I am making.

I don't understand people who think their identity is in flux. I am entwined with 7 year-old me as much as I am 39 year-old me. The identity that controls who I am becoming hasn't changed.

At least superficially there is a distinction to make between two questions: 1 What kind of person am I? 2 What makes the person I am now one and the same person I was yesterday, last year......? Both have some claim to be called a question about personal identity. However, in 2 the notion of identity in question is primarily numerical in nature. Question 1 is wrapped up with moral and social concerns, and perhaps only makes sense in conjunction with its companion question "What kind of life ought I to lead?" Question 2 was a popular topic for analytic philosophers about half a decade ago. Some of them believed that answers to it should also have consequences for how we ought to act, and so consequently how we ought to be able to respond to 1. Some of them just looked at it as a purely metaphysical issue with no consequences one way or another for ethics. If you want to understand an opinion that might differ from yours, particularly concerning 2, try reading "Personal Identity" by Derek Parfit, you can download it online for free I am sure. For something subtler, try some of the articles by Bernard Williams in Problems of the Self.

There are many things I cannot explain that are not nonsense and which do matter: why the Covid virus seems to have more of an impact on people with type 2 diabetes ,for just one example, the list is endless. The point I am trying to make is that you are not even being close to clear on what it is you think needs explaining.

Examples of sense:
"What causes measles?"
"What caused the Second World War?"
"What caused the dinosaurs to die out?"
"What caused the lights to go out?"

Examples of nonsense
"What causes sugar?"
"What causes table tennis?"
"What causes logic?"
"What causes identity?"

Edit: With apologies to Austin.

Wittgenstein had a nice example, I cannot remember where it is, perhaps the Philosophical Investigations, perhaps elsewhere. Imagine a leaf falling from a tall tree, gently tacking from side to side. Now personify that leaf as saying to itself "Now I'll go this way, now I'll go that way, now I'll go this way, now I'll go that way....". Our lives are of course more complicated than a leaf's, but does that make the situation regarding our choices any different from the leaf's?.

No one forces you to accept conventional definitions. But if you refuse conventional definitions in a philosophical discussion you need to justify your refusal or else it appears like you are simply refusing because conventional wisdom doesn't support your particular philosophy. Any philosophy not supported by conventional wisdom needs to be justified or else people just dismiss it as crackpottery.

Just a few final parting remarks.
First, I do not have a particular philosophy. I was trying to get clear about yours.

Second, what do you mean by "conventional definition". If you mean a definition you find in the dictionary, it is perfectly conventional to deny that vision always involves sensations. Sometimes it can, e.g. when seeing phosphenes and afterimages for instance, but that does not mean it always does. You would have to invoke some kind of argument from illusion or hallucination to get to the conclusion that all vision involves sensations, and I'm sure you are aware that arguments from illusion and hallucination are by no means generally accepted to be sound.

How can you suppose that we know the cause of pain when we do not even know what pain (as a type of feeling or sensation) is

Luke got there before me, but I thought we were agreed that we know that pain is a certain type of feeling. Now you are suggesting we do not even know that? I'm completely lost now. I think I'll have to retire from this thread and return to something simpler like the complete works of Hegel.

I would be hoping more for a virutous circle than an infinite regress :wink: Some people read Spinoza as using the principle of sufficient reason to justify the principle of sufficient reason, but the use to which it is put in doing so is different from the use it is put to when applied in some specific realm of knowledge.

There are circumstances where it does make sense to ask "why is this explanation the right one rather than that one?". There, perhaps, we would have to furnish an explanation for the explanation. However, the kind of examples I have in mind are quite specific, e.g. if we had competing explanations for a rise in crime in a certain city. But I'm way from convinced that it would make sense to ask of every explanation why it was the explanation.

I'm still trying to think about the idea of explanations of explanations, but am not getting very far. In the meantime:

Perhaps quantum fields are another book keeping trick.

I will be honest, I am tempted by a purely instrumentalist view of scientific theory. When conservation principles and their "parents" like the Noether theorem and the principle of least action start being taken as descriptions of reality and not just tools to model it and predict its evolution, questions like "what are these possible paths that Langragians integrate over?" seem to make sense, but then language goes on holiday and suddently I end up very, very confused.

By the way, that black cat ... do you think it's the one Schrodinger lost?

You asked me to prove #4, which makes a statement about the unknown. The fact that there is contention and disagreement on basic principles concerning this subject, is evidence which supports the truth of #4. Do you agree with this at least?

No I do not agree, not yet anyway. Premise 4 makes a general claim that the cause of no pain can be known. I have presented counterexamples of cases where I know what the cause of a pain is. You say I do not know in those cases, it seems because you have some commitment to the idea that claims to specific instances of knowledge have always to be backed up by the availability of some systematic theory. I find that stance more open to doubt than the stance that I know in some specific cases what the cause of my pain is. (Incidently, there are also cases where I do not have the faintest idea what is causing my pain.)

Sight is a sense. Seeing something is a sensation.

Again, why do I have to accept that just because there is a sense of sight that all sight involves sensations? It seems to me that I would have to buy in to a very specific account of what vision is in order to accept that inference.

Consider that each time you see a different scenario in front of you, this is a different sensation.

Is it? Why should I accept that seeing something is a sensation? Seeing something can cause me to have sensations, a tingle up my spine for instance, but that doesn't entail that seeing something is itself a sensation.

When there is similarity in the occurrence of complex events, it's not a matter of random chance or coincidence, and this allows us to produce scientific laws, and make predictions.

That there are scientific laws that are used to predict and model observable behaviour, no one would deny. Philosophical contention begins when one adopts more than an instrumentalist view of those laws and then, further, assumes that the same systematic approach works for all phenomena.

:lol:

edit: oh, and perhaps in

what about the explanations themselves? — jkg20

I get the point, which is why I hinted at the possibility of a category mistake. It's late where I am, after some sleep I will try to think of some circumstances where it might make sense to ask of an explanation why it is the explanation. If there are any, then there will be some sense to the idea that an explanation has an explanation. To be honest, though, I'm not entirely convinced I'll be able to come up with anything, and even if I did whether it will be useful in proving the principle of sufficient reason.

So the all-and-some logic above applies to "every event has an explanation".

Intellectual honesty requires that we admit that we do not know.

Yes, but my intellectual ambition requires that I stretch myself beyond my limits.

Hilarious, I'll be passing that joke off as my own very soon! I might get away with it too.

You can see this fumbling in this very thread,

Agreed. And not just this thread.

Not every event has a cause

That I am inclined to believe is the consensus amongst physicists, hidden variable theories having had their day. But I'm not sure it is causation that is really the heart of this issue for most people. In QM as well as classical physics, an event is an observable phenomenon. Events that can be explained using classical physics are usually taken to be those that have causes. Events that cannot be explained using classical physics, but which can be accounted for with quantum mechancial physics, are those which are deemed not to have causes. Nevertheless, even uncaused events have explanations. So, it looks like everything has an explanation. But what about the explanations themselves? Perhaps it is a category mistake to even pose the question whether an explanation has an explanation.

I have nothing in my pocket. It causes me to wonder where my handkerchief went.

Funny, but a bit flippant. The easy retort is that what causes you to wonder where your handkerchief went is your finding nothing in your pocket. But your finding nothing in your pocket is very definitely not nothing.

B: But here is a something out of nothing (virtual particles)

Claiming that virtual particles are a something out of nothing might be a bit of a metaphysical stretch. Please correct me if I am wrong, but virtual particles are considered to be short term perturbations in the quantum field, whereas as so called ordinary particles are long term perturbations. So, even virtual particles require the underlying quantum field. They may not have causes in a classical sense, whatever that might be, but they are not "somethings" from nothing.

I think part of the salience of virtual particles here is that they are offered as explanations for why events occur, but have no explanation for why they occur themselves. Hence at least the illusion of something from nothing.

a cause and its effect are related

That is a tautology.

I'd say causality is an event-relation

That needs an argument. What are your reasons for thinking that causality relates events rather than, for instance, facts?

If the principle of sufficient reason is true, it applies to all events, processes, facts or whatever you want to call them.
If you delineate the principle of sufficient reason, it does not apply to all events, processes, facts or whatever you want to call them.
So if you delineate the principle of sufficient reason, it is not true.
To say of some principle that it is not true is to jettison it.

You cannot eat your cake and have it rest on your plate.

As I suggested, we could turn to the fact that the act of pinching is damaging to your body, but damage to a body is not sufficient to account for the feeling of pain, because things can be damaged without causing that feeling.

In the particular instance of my pinching myself, why is it not a sufficient account of my feelingthat specific pain? I can strike a match and it produces a flame. Sometimes I can strike a match and the flame is not produced. But where I strike a match and the flame is produced, it would seem sufficient to account for that flames presence that I struck the match. Premise 4 is the claim that I cannot know the cause of pain. My claim is simply that sometimes I can.

To know the cause of "pain" in general, is to know what makes some feelings distinguishable from other feelings, and identifiable as pain

Are you suggesting that there is a general cause of pain? Why do you think that? From my own case, many different things cause me pain. There might be a general characteristic of pain, certainly, otherwise I would not be able to recognize the painful feelings. But why should all causes of pain share a general characteristic as well? Like effects must have like causes does not seem like a particularly tenable general principle. Perhaps, however, it is not that principle you are relying on. If you could give me the deductive argument for premise 4, perhaps I could see things more clearly.

Thank you. That has considerably cleared things up for me, and I feel a little more comfortable that I know what you are getting at.

So if we amalgamate the two arguments we have something like this I won't bother mentioning the actual rules of inference in use:
Premise 1. All things and processes that exist have a cause.
Premise 2. Pain is a thing that exists.
Lemma 1. From Premise 1 and 2, Pain has a cause.
Premise 3. Pain is an unpleasant feeling.
Premise 4. The cause of an unpleasant feeling is unknown.
Conclusion, From Lemma 1, Premise 3 and Premise 4, the cause of pain is unknown.

I think there are probably some people who will disagree with Premise 1, but there are already "something from nothing" discussions underway elsewhere on the forum, so I won't pick up on that here. Also, Premise 2 and Premise 3 seem true. I know that some people might try pointing out that masochists might enjoy pain and actually seek it out, so it is not unpleasant for everyone, but we could probably just replace "unpleasant" with "a certain kind of" in premise 3 and I think we will remain faithful to your argument as a whole. In any case, as you probably guessed, what I want to focus on is premise 4.

Let's take a particular case of pain, the one I have right now as I pinch myself pretty hard. It is pretty mild as pain goes, I'm not willing to go to extremes to make a philosophical point, but I am certainly feeling something unpleasant. Now I feel really tempted to say that I know what the cause of this unpleasant feeling is, it is me pinching myself, and if I am asked how I know that this is the cause I will say something along the lines "well, it started when I started pinching myself and it peters away when I stop pinching myself".

Now, this seems to be the kind of counterexample to premise 4 that you are trying to preempt in this paragraph.

At first glance, you might think ok, the cause of pain is some physiological processes, let's say it is damage to the living body which causes pain. But that description wouldn't account for the defining feature of pain which is that it is an unpleasant feeling, one we try to avoid. I can cause damage to all kinds of things, without causing that unpleasant feeling within myself, so the cause of pain cannot be described that way. Therefore, to account for the cause of pain, we need to account for what is essential to that feeling, according to accepted definition, and this is the unpleasantness of the feeling. What causes the unpleasantness of the feeling is unknown.

Is your claim then, that I cannot know that pinching myself is the cause of the pain because I cannot know how it causes the pain? That seems like quite an ask as a general principle for being able to know what a cause of an event is. After all, it seems reasonable to suppose that I can know that the cause of my car starting is my turning the ignition key, without my having to know the details of how internal combustion engines work. I can also know that my spilling a cup of coffee on my laptop caused it to stop working without knowing the first thing about computer hardware.

I think it is pretty clear that you will find something wrong headed in the examples I have just given, so I guess what I am asking from you now is something along the lines of turning that paragraph of yours I just quoted, into a deductively valid argument which has Premise 4 as its conclusion, so I can see precisely where you think I am going wrong.

If you could lay out your logic for us, we will be able to test it. I cannot speak for Banno, but I think I have sufficient knowlege of pure mathematics and the technical aspects of quantum mechanics to follow along and at least know at which points to start asking for clarifications.

Addendum to the above:
I should perhaps be precise in what I mean by a "deductively valid argument", since I am demanding precision from you. I mean an argument consisting of premises which, if all true, can be shown to lead (through the use of standard logical rules of inference such as modus tollens, modus ponens, contradiction, universal and existential substitution and so on) to the truth of the conclusion.

You seem to be changing the subject. Having a "representative function" implies being used for a representative purpose.

I'm really not trying intentionally to change the subject, I am just trying to get to an understanding of what you mean. The route might be meandering, but I retain a glimmer of hope of reaching the destination. In any case, it was you that introduced the idea of representation in relation to the whole "beetle" / "pain" discussion:

It can't be more than a representation of my beetle, which may or may not be an accurate representation.

Anyway, let us drop the subject of representation and representing and so on for the moment and let me try a different tack. What would help me understand your position would be a response to the following requests:

You seem to have reached the opinion that there is some third process involved in pain that most people are ignorant of. Would you be able to express that opinion as the conclusion of a deductively valid argument? If so, would you do me the favour of giving that deductively valid argument, with precisesly articulated and numbered premises and do so, if possible, without name dropping any philosophers or philosophical movements? If, on the other hand, the opinion is one that cannot be reached by the route of a deductively valid argument, why do you think that is so?

Please do not read into these requests a belief on my part of the sacrosanctity of deductive logic, it is one philsosophical tool amongst others. It is, however, a tool that I am thoroughly comfortable handling, and if you yourself can use that tool to show how you reached your conclusion, it would greatly help me understand what you are trying to say.

Sider is a new name to me, must look her or him up. Williamson and Lewis, particularly the latter, were influential even when I was mixed up in the business. There was even a danger of a Lewis cult growing up, which I heard gathered some speed after he died. The hositiliy to Wittgenstein from logic chopping analytic philosophers was always around, ironically in a particularly fierce and sometimes cruel manner in Cambridge, he seemed to be more palatable in Oxford. Even so, there were a number of genuine logic choppers around (at least in the UK) back then, Dummett, Champlin and Budd come to mind, who had a great deal of respect for the later Wittgenstein's work, so I never really understood the hostility to Wittgenstein himself, although I admit some people who claimed to be Wittgensteinians could come across a little like the philosophical equivalents of Jehova's Witnesses, or those Buddhists who want you to buy a rose.

I've been out of the academic philosophy cycle for nearly two decades now, but Wittgenstein's influence was still very strong some fifty years after the publication of the last thing he ever even came close to considering worth publishing. You may be in a better position than I am to know: has that influence evapourated over the last twenty years? Rorty's influence, minimal at best, probably has by now, but I find it less credible to think that Wittgenstein's has. Of course, I could be wrong. I guess I could always go to jstor and see how many articles are being written about Wittgenstein and compare them to how many Rorty has motivated.

because most forms of idealism represent ideas as static passive things.

That might be the case for the kind of idealism that Berkeley advocated, although even that is not certain: I would need to see a detailed argument to convince me, not just some name dropping of millenia dead Athenians. As for Absolute idealism, the situation is even more complex, after all, central to many versions of it is the dynamic of the dialectic. But that aside, let us at least try to get me to understand at least one thing about your position.

We need to be very clear here that saying that one thing represents another does not entail that it is a representation of it. My lawyer can represent me in court, but he is not a representation of me. The point I want to get clear on about your position is whether you consider that the sensations of pain an individual feels has a representative function for that person, not whether those feelings of pain are representations or not. My expression of point 1 explicity did not call feelings of pain representations, it just described them as having a representative function. With that disinction in mind, do you accept 1 as it was stated, i.e, with the use of "thing" dropped:

1: For the person feeling a pain, the pain sensation they have represents some other process.

Yes, and the problem is far deeper than that simple representation you offer.

I've not offered any representation, by which I presume you mean "analysis of representation", deep or shallow, I'm just trying to pin down what your position actually is. We can then discuss the intricacies of what representation is, and how the concepts of representing and representation come apart, later on.

I think some socalled Wittgensteinians can be dismissed out of hand, but I think the Philosophical Investigations is well worth reading.

My question is have there been substantial philosophical debates settled by demonstrating that the issue was a misuse of language?

Not to my knowledge. But I'm not sure that absence of evidence in this case can be taken to provide evidence of absence.

I agree with you that "lets look at how we use these words" should not be the be all and end all of philosophical analysis. Where I think we might disagree in indivdual cases is that some people, myself included by the way, would benefit from paying closer attention to how words are used, since sometimes they do misuse them, intentionally or otherwise and sometimes that misuse, if clarified, reveals errors.