It was a poorly thought out and poorly worded thread. — I like sushi

List the threads here that are not.

lol re not taking responsibility for posting vacuous responses in a thread like this.

Is there some reason we're so tight on space that we can't leave however many kilobytes of text intact?

You'd need to delete the vast majority of threads and posts here on the criteria you mention. But it seems like a problem with this board is that it's relatively inactive--not that many different threads or posts per day, and that's probably one reason we have problems attracting and retaining new people who post regularly.

Maybe have jamalrob speak for himself if he's doing the deleting? At least that way one can get a more substantial answer.

I don't 'see' a load of photons, I 'see' a dog, because I'm expecting a dog to be there. — Isaac

Your expectations can have an impact on what you see, where you might even misidentify what you see (which we can only know if we can rather identify it correctly, too), but much of the time we see things not because we expect to see them but simply because they're there and we have eyes, etc.

What the Davidsonian account of knowledge and interpretation demonstrates, however, is that no such distinction can be drawn. — ZzzoneiroCosm

We'd need to go over the Davidsonian account of knowledge and interpretation for that. It seems ridiculous to me to say that "no such distinction can be drawn." But show the work and we'll see if the argument is ridiculous or not.

Attitudes are already interconnected – causally, semantically and epistemically – with objects and events in the world; — ZzzoneiroCosm

Attitudes certainly can be part of a causal chain, but being part of a causal chain doesn't dismantle distinctions. Setting a ball in a cup might be the way to start a Rube Goldberg contraption that eventually causes an egg to be fried, so there's a causal connection, but that doesn't imply that we can't make a distinction between a ball, a cup, a pan, an egg, a fried egg, and the other one hundred or so things in the contraption between the ball and the fried egg.

Objects and events in the world, outside of minds, do not have attitudes, meaning or an epistemology.

But what is his account that demonstrates that no such distinction can be drawn?

Hang on, weren't you quite vociferously arguing against model dependant realism only a few days ago, the idea that people don't objectively exist being nonsense? Now you're saying the opposite, that grouping some particular set of entities into a containing class is just a matter of how we conceptualise things. — Isaac

Particulars are real. Properties are particulars. So there are real things, and they necessarily have real properties. It's just that those real things are particulars.

Types/classes/kinds are not real (read "not objective"). They're conceptual ways of thinking about particulars. It's an issue of mentally abstracting over a number of particulars to simplify, because that simplification has many different practical benefits (for survival, communication, etc.)

This is why I kept telling you that you're doing the old conflation of concepts and what concepts are about or what they're in response to.

What I'm saying is really simple (at least it seems so to me), but your response suggests that you can't even grasp it.

Maybe, as the collection of everything that exists includes everything that exists, but does that help? As to classes and types, do you really have a problem having a class of sand that includes as members all the individual grains of sand? Of course, if you insist that it is all just how we want to conceptualize, that puts it "all" into the category of ideas. — tim wood

I'm just stressing that the categorization for something like this would ultimately be arbitrary. Particulars aren't just ideas, but types/classes are.

So you could just make the top-level class "stuff" and leave it at that.

Or in other words, classes/kinds/types are simply a matter of how we want to conceptualize things, how we want to divide them up.

Well, to start with, there's the tile in the southwest corner of my bathroom, and then the tile just to the east of that, and then the tile just to the east of that, and so on, until about 50 tiles later we get to the southeast corner of the bathroom. And then we move a row north and do it all again, and so on.

Or is that not the sort of thing you have in mind?

I'll leave it to someone else to list each grain of sand.

"We may now seem to have a formula for generating distinct conceptual schemes. We get a new out of an old scheme when the speakers of a language come to accept as true an important range of sentences they previously took to be false (and, of course, vice versa). We must not describe this change simply as a matter of their coming to view old falsehoods as truths, for a truth is a proposition, and what they come to accept, in accepting a sentence as true, is not the same thing that they rejected when formerly they held the sentence to be false. A change has come over the meaning of the sentence because it now belongs to a new language."

----This is treating meaning as something necessarily communal and behavioral, and it's ignoring the fact that we're talking about individuals doing things, so that it's ambiguous whether, if it doesn't outright suggest that, we're talking about the very same individuals now accepting as true something they previously took to be false.

On my view, concepts and meaning are things that individuals do in their minds. They're not at all the same thing as third-person observable behavior.

Reading through this more slowly now. One big problem with it is that Davidson seems to be just assuming an objectivist, and specifically what amounts to a behaviorist, account of what concepts (and meaning in general) are.

He also seems to introduce a lot of ideas that he doesn't bother to argue for. He's just kind of rambling on about assumptions he makes.

Yes, but it doesn't 'strive to appeal' in my view. It latches onto base fears, exploits and manipulates them with half-truths and lies; and its aim is to benefit the egos and megalomania of its leaders rather than the ordinary people. — Tim3003

So something couldn't be populism if it didn't introduce half-truths and lies?

One definition of populism is this:

a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.

Is that what we're talking about?

Do video games have the potential to becoming an acceptable enough outlet for maladaptive behaviours? If they are of a successful quality of emulating more realism and injecting more stimulation to our senses that even the most sadistic and prolific killer prefers that to the real thing? — Mark Dennis

They'd probably need to be more or less indistinguishable from reality for that. But we have a long way to go to get to that point.

I don't know. That doesn't really seem like an interpretation of Genesis to me.

Especially since you didn't even mention Phil Collins.

Re the Davidson paper, I'll have to read it more carefully later, but for one, I didn't notice anywhere that he actually argued for this:

Different points of view make sense, but only if there is a common coordinate system on which to plot them; — ZzzoneiroCosm

On the face of it, that claim seems absurd. Why would the possibility of different points of view hinge on their being a common coordinate system on which to plot them?

Say that only two sentient creatures existed, where they arose independently of each other, a billion light years apart. Surely they'd have different points of view (although we'd probably need to well-define just what "different points of view" amounts to in this argument), but how wouild it make sense to say that there's a "common coordinate system on which to plot" those different points of view?

So logically, one doesn't seem to hinge on the other. Davidson would have to present some sort of argument for the claim.

"The dominant metaphor of conceptual relativism, that of differing points of view, — ZzzoneiroCosm

I don't know it this was sparked by my comments and the responses to it, but I wasn't saying something about conceptual relativism in my comments. I was saying something about ontic relativism.

The physical example, relativistic theory, is very clear. Given your predilection and understanding of physics, Terrapin Station, I'm puzzled at your resistance here. — Banno

I don't really understand this comment.

So first, what I was talking about was spatiotemporal situatedness.

And if some spatiotemporal situatedness is excluded, we wouldn't be dealing with "everywhere," every unique spatiotemporal location.

Unless we accept that "you and I and the humans are 'embedded in language'". That is, all the humans, all embedded. Banno's view-from-everywhere requires universal participation. — ZzzoneiroCosm

How would "being embedded in language" aid us in having a view from the spatiotemporal location of, say a particular quark near a particular star in the Andromeda Galaxy?

The "view from everywhere" is available if we accept that you and I and the humans are "embedded in language" - that is, if you accept that we (not 'you' or 'I' in isolation, but we) are making determinations regarding the nature of the real via "a conversation with other folk." A shared language (including shared notions and behaviors, e.g., trusting a map made by a stranger; performing and receiving appendectomies) provides the "view from everywhere." — ZzzoneiroCosm

That would just be a view from a lot of different places (and only if we assume that somehow the language has the views packaged into it and it's not just sounds, text marks, etc., or just meanings for that matter (not that I think that language has meaning objectively embedded into it somehow)).

It's such a common way of thinking, — Banno

It is? Usually no one quite understands what I'm saying.

We do see the same things from different perspectives — Banno

I don't know if you're saying that

"غ sees @ from perspective y (and it's like α) and ظ sees @ from perspective x (and it's like β)--so @ is the same thing," which I'd agree with,

OR

"غ and ظ both experience @ in β way, just from different perspectives (a la different spatiotemporal locations, say)," which I'd not agree with.

because we are embedded in language — Banno

There must be a better way to say that (that maybe I'd agree with)?

we can understand how they look from the perspective of other folk. — Banno

We can do this on my account of what understanding is, sure. But my account of what understanding is is probably very different from how you'd describe it.

This is not the view from nowhere. It's more like the view from everywhere. — Banno

That's not available either.

What we'd agree on is that you can have spatiotemporal perspectives that are combinations of various other spatiotemporal perspectives. No two are going to be identical, though.

You seem to think that you are alone in the world, and can't decide if the camera is telling you what is real and what isn't. — Banno

But I'm not saying anything at all like that.

The perimeter is always from some (set of) spatiotemporal location(s), per some concept of what it is to "measure the perimeter" (since especially for something like coral a number of decisions are going to have to be made about what counts as measuring it versus what details can be ignored).

The spatiotemporal location of the surface of the coral isn't an objectively preferred spatiotemporal location. There are no objectively preferred spatiotemporal locations (or objectively preferred anythings for that matter).

From what I remember, you don't have any prescriptive ethics. — schopenhauer1

I definitely have preferences about what people should or shouldn't do. So in that sense, my ethics is partially prescriptive.

if someone was to steal someone's property and find out that they were happy about this later on, you would be ok with the fact that the thief stole someone else's property. — schopenhauer1

Aside from the fact that it's not stealing if the person is given consent to take the property, it's the height of moralizing in the negative sense (the sense of haughtily, self-righteously telling people what they should be doing) to say that something is a problem when the people involved in the action in question don't have a problem with it.

What makes happiness an automatic justification for procreation of another person? — schopenhauer1

You know this already. These things are about one's preferences, one's dispositions, and that's all they can be about. So what makes happiness an automatic justification for someone is that that's their disposition. It's how they feel about happiness versus other emotional (or situational) modalities.

It depends on the context of our discussion. As I have said countless times, I hold that beliefs are dispositions to act as if, I can therefore hold different beliefs in different contexts, there's no reason why the model I use in one context (where I assume there are such things as Friston and amoebae) should in any way cohere with the model I might use when discussing the way things 'really are'. You're acting like the nerdy child who says in the middle of an game of Star Wars "you're not really Han Solo though are you?". — Isaac

Regardless, you're ALWAYS talking about models that you have, and not observations of the way the world really is, because you do not think you can access the latter. So there's no Friston or amoeba in your view outside of it being a model you have.

Or is this not the case?

We're talking here (using models which we all share) — Isaac

How is there a "we" beyond your personal model?

If you're going to endorse this sort of nonsense, don't expect to not be constantly called out on it.

Yes. Friston has demonstrated active variance reduction in sensory inputs of amoeba, — Isaac

First, there's no Friston or amoeba in the real world in your view, is there?

The looking doesn't come first, the model of comes first, the looking is just to check. — Isaac

I have no idea what you even think you are, exactly. Presumably your model there isn't anything like the standard account of evolution. Unless you think that life had the capacity to create models prior to being able to obtain any sensory data.

is not 'seen' at all, it does not 'look like' anything from any perspective — Isaac

Wrong and wrong. Your model is wrong.

A and B can agree as to the facts, by considering what looks like from the other's point of view. — Banno

Sure, they can, but those facts won't be the same at the same spatiotemporal location, and their agreement is still something nonidentical, at different spatiotemporal locations.

It does leave itself open to skepticism.

What if we said that we directly perceive some aspects of an object, like it's shape and location, but other aspects. such as its reflectivity to visible light are indirect?

We can see this with eating shrimp. We can know things about the shrimp from putting it in our mouth, like size and solidity and that it's an animal, but we don't know about its chemical makeup from the taste, without developing a science of chemistry first. — Marchesk

Well, direct realism isn't saying that you directly access "the complete set of details" of anything (as if "the complete set of details" isn't a ridiculous idea in the first place).

And as I've pointed out a number of times, you can only access what the world is like at a particular spatiotemporal location, where there is no reality for anything "at no particular spatiotemporal location(s)." (Or as it's sometimes more commonly put, there is no "view from nowhere.")

You seem to think that you are alone in the world, and can't decide if the camera is telling you what is real and what isn't. — Banno

I'm saying the exact opposite of that.

I don't know why it's so difficult to communicate that.

Direct realism does not at all posit that we're infallible.

Re fallibility, it posits that we can know that we're fallible when we get things wrong. We can know what's going wrong (because we can know what's right), and we can develop scientific accounts of what's going wrong.

Representationalism can't do this, because per its claims, we can never directly access the world. The best we can ever do is conjecture.

The issue then is whether we can know this or not. — Terrapin Station


We don't just have the photo. — Banno — Banno

There's no us in the analogy.

as opposed to... indirectly taking the picture? — Banno

As opposed to (as I've just explained a couple times) presenting images that are of/generated by the camera itself, where we have no idea how it connects to the outside world.

This definitely has a lot to do with physiology. It's philosophy of perception after all. That's going to involve studying how perception works/being aware of the scientific study of that, etc. You can't do philosophy of x where you simply ignore the study of x by other fields, especially when the target is just as much something that another field studies.

To further your analogy in context of my replies to Banno, if your camera then adds a filter along with some metadata to the picture, then that extra stuff are properties not from the object itself. That information is generated by the camera. — Marchesk

The camera is coloring it, sure. The issue then is whether we can know this or not. Direct realists say we can. Representationalists say we can't know it.

Adding the camera puts me in mind of homunculi. — Banno

Why would you think of homunculi with cameras? You think there are little people inside of cameras or something?

There's not a little person in the camera taking a picture of a tree. The camera takes a picture of the tree.

So per the analogy, the difference we're talking about is whether the camera is directly taking a picture of the tree, or whether (at least we can only know that) the camera is producing an image that's the camera itself, where we have no idea how it connects with other stuff.

Has nothing to do with homunculi.

I understand it to be that since direct realists deny the contention that we're aware of some mental idea or representation when perceiving (instead of the physical object itself), then there isn't some inaccessible mental content that can't be shared. Instead, we're just talking about the objects themselves. — Marchesk

It's important to understand that direct realists are not saying that we're not dealing with perception. Direct realism is a stance in philosophy of perception after all. It's not a stance that essentially says "there is no perception." So we're not actually just talking about the objects themselves. We're still talking about perception, about mental phenomena.

What makes the difference is the character of perception, not whether there's perception or not.

An analogy that's useful is that of a camera. No one is going to say that the camera isn't involved in the camera taking photos, or that the photos aren't a product of the camera. The issue is whether the photo "directly captures" the subject matter, and whether we can know this, in addition to being able to know when something is going wrong because the camera isn't capturing something right, versus whether we're going to claim that all we can know is the camera qua the camera, so that it's presenting images of the camera itself somehow, and we don't know what those images' relationship is with the external world, presuming there is one.

For Terrapin, but for others, too. Einstein developed a set of transformations that allowed the laws of physics to be the same for all observers. — Banno

I'm not a realist on physical laws, but aside from that, the fact that the laws of physics would be the same for all observers is different than the properties that something has relative to a particular spatiotemporal location. For example, something might be round from one spatiotemporal location but oblong from another spatiotemporal location.