Now, if philosophy is defined as that which is nonsensical of course that would follow just by definition. — Moliere

It's not a matter of definition. We can just look at what philosophy actually does. In fact, the Socratic method literally originated in a series of linguistic confusions. In their leisure some rich Greeks figured out that you could ask, out of context, "What is X?" and tie yourself in knots trying to answer. This was an amusing game, and easily mistakable for inquiry. This technique itself was born out of the influence of the sophists, who made a living doing rhetoric, i.e. teaching wealthy young men how to trip up their opponents by making use of specious fallacies they had discovered, i.e. linguistic tricks.

The dispute over the theories of time doesn't make sense to me, either, no, and I've never heard anyone talk about it without being introduced to it via McTaggart's legacy.

Such questions often have no answer, because fictional worlds are ill-defined as well – but even that question is more intelligible than the question of universals.

That's the thing with ordinary language. Everyone can agree when the term is sufficiently vague. But once you start discussing it in any depth, differences emerge, along with difficulties raised by what everyone thought was simple concept on the face of it. — Marchesk

This is better than the situation in philosophy; vague terms are meaningful, but meaningless ones are not.

I think that the question of consciousness is one that arises in people prior to metaphysics, and I doubt that metaphysics, or philosophers generally, have had anything much interesting to say about it. It's a perfectly ordinary question with a perfectly ordinary answer – anyone will tell you that a human is conscious much of the time, but a plant never is.

What is the inconsistency? Is the idea that I'm not allowed to treat different purported questions differently? But this is exactly what I said right from the start. Some questions are meaningful, some not.

That is not my experience. Talking to people about such questions generally leaves me with the impression that they do not know what they are talking about. Evidence that they did know would come from being able to explain themselves, paraphrase problems in multiple ways using their own words, etc.

The difference is that with non-philosophical questions, one can come to understand by being versed in the relevant discipline. There is no such no such pathway for metaphysics. This is evidenced by the fact that philosophers themselves, who are the ones that invent the terms and the debate, do not agree on what the debate even is, and a good number of them disagree that the debate even ought to be had, or the terms applied.

The only thing that matters is wether the argument is valid, and whether it's premises are true. — Marchesk

The point is that metaphysical arguments can't be valid, since their premises and conclusions typically don't have truth conditions.

The entities that are investigated in (most of at least) the sciences are phenomenally real enough for us — Janus

I wouldn't say so in the sciences, soft or hard; we don't have 'intuitions' of things like populations, physical forces, and so on.

What we come closest to having 'intuitions' of are tangible ordinary objects, but even these are thought of transcendentally: we project them as seen from 'infinite sides,' and we never have an intuition of their totality. So, treating things as 'objects' is itself just a regulative idea. Unlike with metaphysics, though, it's a practice of using regulative ideas that tends to do useful work in daily life, likely because our language and cognitive faculties are adapted to do so, whereas the kind of metaphysics philosophers do was invented a couple thousand years ago, as the result of leisure time leading to funny linguistic puzzles (essentially, philosophy proper begins in sophism), with no native practical application.

The sciences are therefore almost entirely hail marys linked to employing these transcendental illusions, but even there, we do get some effects out of them (mostly technological, though we have no way of really controlling or even understanding its effects). Ordinary life is a bit closer to home, but even there, we have to act as if we cognize things we don't to get by, and life is basically a bunch of regulative pretenses that justify what we do.

I can agree to this, except I think that metaphysical statements or systems don't have any consistent emotional effects either, so it's difficult to employ them even to this end. What tends to happen instead is that people are affected personally by reading something and so become emotionally invested in whatever they took from it.

I'm also sympathetic to the position that even ordinary empirical inquiry is the result of transcendental illusion, but that it, unlike metaphysics, has practical effects and so can be worth engaging in to some end.

This raises an interesting question: If the only green things in the universe were also glossy (as opposed to matt), and no non-green things were glossy, would we be able to develop separate concepts of green and of glossy? I suspect we would not. — andrewk

We can in principle, and there are real-life examples of this. One of them is ancient: a human is not [just] a featherless biped. The words we use to predicate don't just have extensions determining the individuals to which they apply. They also have intensions, mapping to extensions based on the way the world is. Coextensive terms are not necessarily cointensive, and we learn the difference based on their application, even when we have no examples of them coming apart in the actual world.

No.

Also, properties "in addition" to particulars is a misleading way of putting things. A property P is just that thing you have when you're P. This exhausts the notion of a property. So when we talk about the property of being blue, and say multiple things have that property, this is the same as saying that multiple things are blue.

If your question is about why, given that people perceive that something has a certain property, they conclude other things have it too, this is a psychological question.

How is it that particulars can have the same property? — Marchesk

There is no one answer to this question. For example, tigers have a bunch of properties in common because they sexually reproduce according to a biological template. Nuts and bolts made from a factory have a lot of properties in common because they're cut according to a mold. Jokes by comedians can have properties in common because comedians have similar sense of humor, etc.

So hard core nominalism. — Marchesk

There is no "nominalism." These positions are all non-positions.

You mentioned before that individuals can share the same properties. I assume you group based on shared or similar properties. The class is what is common to the particulars in your group. — Marchesk

???

You can group things together however you want. It can be by a shared property, or not. It makes no sense to ask "how you group."

If the class is what is common to the particulars in the group, then you seem to be talking about a property. If so, why not speak ordinary English and refer to it as a property?

No, there can't only be individuals. Classes are a universal concept. — Marchesk

I have no notion of a class except a group of individuals, or a criterion for sorting individuals into groups. Obviously, from the fact that multiple individuals exists, it follows that groups of individusls, and therefore classes, do.

What else do you mean by "class?"

So your argument is:

(1) Classes aren't individuals
(2) Therefore, there can't be classes, if there are individuals?

Compare:

(1) Teams aren't individuals
(2) Therefore, there can't be teams, if there are individuals

???

Why on Earth would the existence of individuals be in conflict with the existence of classes?

I never disagreed that there were groups of things that shared properties. Earlier you seemed to want something else, though, and asked the question, in virtue of what is a tiger a member of the tiger-group (presumably the desired answer is, "in virtue of a universal," though we aren't sure what's meant by that).

But as I said then, this is silly: to ask why a tiger is a member of the tiger-class is to ask why a tiger is a tiger. If this is the "problem," then it's not a very difficult one.

That people talk doesn't entail they're saying anything.

I think people are being disingenuous when they say they understand what the universals debate is about. My evidence for this is that when asked what it is about, they can't explain it. Ho hum.

One sign that someone understands what they're talking about is that they can paraphrase it, or put it in other words, or find different angles to come at it from. A universal, we've learned in this thread, is simply that which explains that different things have the same property. This is not a sensical way to introduce something or make it intelligible, and misunderstands how explanations work. Some other angle would be necessary to make the notion intelligible, and none is forthcoming.

Is that because you refuse to acknowledge hat what they're saying is meaningful? Because I find it meaningful. — Marchesk

Yet you cannot explain what it means. Shouldn't that give you pause?

I don't agree with this. Most metaphysics might not have implications for daily life anymore than a math or physics problem. But that doesn't mean it isn't taken seriously by those who engage in it. — Marchesk

People take their paychecks seriously. Metaphysics, not so much – even professional philosophers can shout at each other during the day and go home at night to sleep, knowing that nothing whatsoever is affected by their colleague ostensibly holding a different opinion on some ostensibly deep matter.

the questions of metaphysics have been debated for centuries, and those debating them have seemingly understood what each other were saying. — Ciceronianus the White

Part of what is striking about metaphysics, to me, is that this isn't so: those debating it do not seem to understand what they are saying, or what the other is saying. Hence the sympathy for the positivist position that metaphysics is not an area of inquiry so much as a sort of linguistic hitch, to be studied anthropologically as to its sources, but not really possible to be taken seriously on its own terms (and indeed, those who debate it seem not to take it seriously on its own terms either – it's a kind of game whose playing has other edifying effects).

I didn't say that. The point is that talk of universals does not merely "have issues" – there is no body there to have issues to begin with. It's just empty.

Talk of properties is part of our pre-philosophical heritage. I see no reason to think of properties as philosophers have. If philosophers want to talk about properties, it's their job to pay respect to the pre-philosophical usage, not vice-versa. For my part, talking about properties is perfectly intelligible and doesn't confuse me. If someone wants to show some problem with the notion, so be it.

All I'm saying is that to say talk of similarity and categorization boils down to psychology — StreetlightX

The point isn't that similarity is a psychological issue – I don't think that makes any sense. But the question of how people come to recognize similarities surely is.

I'm not claiming theory-neutrality. The choice here is between talking about something, and talking about nothing. If you have an alternate way to look at things that makes some sense, then by all means.

Though I don't know what is objectionable about talking about properties, and I have a hard time understanding what it would mean to say that things are similar, but don't share properties, or share properties, but aren't similar (in the relevant respect). To that extent I take there to be no theory, but just a banal rearranging of commonsense notions.

So if I said, I have a theory: things are similar in virtue of sharing properties, this would be very strange, because it seems that I've advanced not theory at all, but just sort of repeated myself.

Not at all. Language only becomes intelligible under conditions of use. Ordinary language has conditions of use, and so tends to be intelligible, although it might be vague or better-suited to some purposes than others. When you come up with novel uses of talk, you have no guarantee that said talk has any use conditions.

Sometimes it's necessary for technical disciplines to invent new words ad hoc, but then after the introduction of the coinage, the environment of professional use generally grants it some intelligible meaning (or does so mediately in terms of previously understood notions). In philosophy, this often fails to happen with coinages, since the words aren't employed in any capacity other than the arguments in which people use them. In other words, they exist only to allow people to argue.

Talk about properties is part of ordinary language, and questions about properties are to that extent intelligible. So far as I can see, talk about universals isn't intelligible at all.

For something to have some property, say P, is just for it to be P. This exhausts the notion. For x and y to share P just means that x is P and y is P.

This sounds like a labored and pointless way of saying that things can be similar to each other. Seeing as this vocabulary seems to offer no intelligibility over the ordinary way of speaking, I'm inclined to reject it too as meaningless. Talking about "greenness-tropes" would seem to be, at best, a confused way of saying that something is green. So why not just say that?

What is a psychological question is how people come to recognize that two things have the same property. Obviously you can't recognize what isn't so, and so trivially in order to recognize that two things have the same property, they must actually share that property.

I have heard people discuss the question before, and read people discussing it, but none of these discussions have ever made any sense to me.

No, because I still don't know what a universal is, and saying that it qualifies as a possible answer doesn't make it so, because I have no notion of what they are, and so no notion of what they are supposed to "answer," or how.

To say that "the relation 'north of' has no location" is again deeply confused. Such a proposal ought to be bet not with refutation or argument, but therapy. If you say something like this, you are deeply confused in some way, and we need to take a step back and figure out how.

That chapter I referred to is not ‘bad philosophy’ - it’s philosophy. Betrand Russell’s exposition of such topics is as close as philosophy can come to being canonical. — Wayfarer

Asking "where the relation of 'north of' exists" is bad philosophy.

So a relation is universal if more than one set of things can have it?

So by "do universals exist" do you mean "can more than one thing have the same property, or be in the same relation to something else?" Then the answer is yes. The way you know this is that many things are to the north of many other things.

What do you mean by using it in a universal manner?

Are you asking how people tell when one thing is to the north of another?

But in what sense do such relationships exist? — Wayfarer

This question, again, strikes me as confused, like asking 'what is the mortgage of jam?' How am I supposed to answer?

The only way I can construe a halfway plausible answer is: in the sense that some things are north of other things.

It strikes me that if someone asks "where is the relation 'north of' located?" the appropriate response is not to answer "nowhere," as Russell does, but to explain to them that they are confused, and there is something they don't understand about the way locations work.

If you ask someone whether Edinburgh or London exists, the obvious answer is yes. If you ask them if Edinburgh is north of London, the obvious answer is yes. If you ask them whether the relation 'north of' exists, or where it is, the only appropriate answer, it seems to me, is to ask what they mean, or to comment that they are deeply confused.

Questions like this demand not answers but therapy. That you're asking such a question shows that you're very, very confused about something, and we need to figure out what.

It reads to me as very bad philosophy. I'm not sure I would quote that passage in support of anything.

Tiger is an abstract concept for the individual members having similar characteristics. — Marchesk

I know what the word 'tiger' means, and I know what a tiger is. Something is a tiger in virtue of being a certain way, exemplified by certain members of the species you could point me to, or descriptions you could give of them.

If something is a member of the species pointed to, or has these described properties, it's a tiger.

Do I 'have the concept of' tiger? Well, what does that mean? Can I tell when something is a tiger? Usually. Do I know what the word 'tiger' means? Yes.

I'm sorry, this really doesn't help. I'm not sure Russell is talking about what you're talking about, and in any case the last bit of text strikes me as really confused.

'Where does the relation 'north of' exist?' is just an abuse of the English language. This is not a "difficulty," but some sort of lapse in English competence. To know what it means for one thing to be north of another is to know that this question makes no sense.