Its not a question of 'belief'. Its a fundamental later phenomenological pov which follows Kant's non accessibility of noumena and therefore discards 'noumena' as vacuous, and which accepts Nietsche's rejection of any difference between 'description' and 'reality'. It is also supported by Maturana's argument that all we call 'observation' essentially involves 'languaging'.

Then the mistake, imo, is that we can escape from the domain of 'language' at all.
As 'thinkers' all we have is 'language', whose nonrepresentational nature has become a prevalent view.
And although you have registered your objections to them, both Heidegger and Derrida undescored that point.
Heidegger:"Language speaks the Man"
Derrida: "There is nothing beyond context".

Thankyou for enlightening me about the contextual usage of the word 'splonk' which I thought I had invented !

(Actually, many verbal jokes rely on sudden 'switched' contexts.
...Foreign official going round inspecting native village....everywhere he goes the natives enthusiastically greet him with shouts of 'ngombo ! ngombo !...he comes to the last hut and asks what's inside...his guide advises him 'Don't go in there - its just full of ngombo !' )

Thankyou all for many examples of what I think Witt might call 'language on holiday' !
The central point which I think is being missed is how is the word 'existence' used in non philosophical contexts.
We do not normally going around asking whether 'trees exist'. In fact to do so might imply a social interaction within a 'mental health' context. (or parochially, in the UK at least, 'existence of trees' can be a problem for building permissions).
I suggest, on the basis of Witt's meaning is use, that all normal utterances of the word 'exist' arise in contexts where mutual action is being negotiated...e.g. 'existence of human causes of global warming'...'existence of God as a valid subject in education'...'existence of sub-atomic particles in social paradigms we call 'science' '
I assert that all those usages make 'existence' inextricable from the social contexts in which they are embedded, and in that sense 'existence', like all concepts acquired via mutual language, is relative to human projects, never absolute. Those who would put 'existence' on an absolutist pedestal are playing the game of 'ultimate axiom chasing', which I suggest is futile.

I understand 'antirealism' to mean that it useless to talk about the term 'reality' except in cases where consensenus is being sought as to 'what is the case'. Scientific paradigms are examples of where that consensus operates regarding successful prediction and control of events, and it is 'experienced events' which replace 'physical reality' for the antirealist. The traditional dichotomies like subjective/objective or mental/physical are misleading in understanding 'antirealism' because they are predicated on lay concepts of an observer independent reality. Such dichotomies are considered futile by philosophical pragmatists.

Of course ! The concept of the 'Big Bang' immediately raises my potential interaction with at least the literature on the subject, and related concepts like 'time'.
Compare your question with : 'Do you expect a potential interaction with 'splonk'?...the point being that 'the Big Bang' is already in the social domain of shared projects, whereas 'splonk' is not (until now maybe !:wink: )

I did answer your point by asserting that only 'philosophers' tend to talk about 'a tree's existence' (period).
Merdwurdichliebe is correct in saying disputes about 'existence' have important psychological implications with respect to 'social norms of thinking', but IMO, philosophers are producing word salad unless they recognize that 'trees exist' is either a tautology in the sense that all concepts 'exist', or that the word 'tree', implies a contextual expectancy of potential interaction for the user.

To Terrapin,

All CONVERSATION is by definition, is not solipsistic, and involves the needs of language users (aka 'us')
The fact that humans can operate verbally (=think) on the basis of a mental 'map' of what they consider to be a representation of 'the world' tends to gloss over the selective map making and map reading processes. Most of the time we do not verbalise/map read and proceed with life on the basis of 'seamless coping' (which is Dreyfus's term to describe Heidegger's observation that 'things' tend to be verbalized on;y when that coping is interrupted. You weren't verbalizing (conscious) of 'chair',were you even though you might be reported to be sitting on one!)

But you are missing the point..we DONT NORMALLY talk about 'the existence of trees'!
Thats what I call 'seminaritis' or what Wittgenstein might have called Geschwatz.

'Existence' is a word we use in social contexts where utility of concept,like God,is being negotiated but where participants are unaware of the social construction of 'thinghood'. We don't normally (non philosophically) apply the word to agreed utilities like 'tree'. Using the word 'existence' as a noun, mistakenly in my view, implies 'a state of being' or 'reality' independent of contextual social utility. The concept 'tree' is useful by virtue of its agreed potential 'properties' as expected by humans which the word 'tree' triggers. Properties are merely potential interaction events, like 'shade', 'solidity', 'root damage', etc, according to context. The problem with concepts like 'God', is that there is no agreement about its utility, since its 'properties' are nebulous and parochial....hence believers argue for the existence of God as though it implied a 'state of being' beyond its social utility....they want 'existence' to be a noun whose 'thinghood' is beyond utility considerations, and most atheists who argue to the contrary are also unaware of the of those utility considerations applying to all humans call 'things'.

The problem for me here is that you keep refering to 'existence' as a noun. The observer does not 'recognize existence'....it expects/predicts the nature of its interactions with its environment. Those expectancies we might call 'functional knowledge of the world' in the sense that relative to human lifespans many of those expectancies tend to persist. So 'existence' boils down that network of focal nodes, coined by a socially acquired language,about what we can successfully predict (or retrodict). But the whole scenario is transient with respect to what we call 'history'. All is in flux and it is only by virtue of those structures we call 'memory' can functional persistence be utilised.

Good !
I have found that most mainstream philosophers haven't got a clue.about this stuff
Regarding 'fundamental ontic reality' bear in mind that 'the observer' is not a fixed entity but may be multifaceted and transient.

...so what I 'mean' by "existence' depends on the communicative context in which it occurs. Philosophical 'discussions' which remove a word from normal contexts do not qualify unless we admit to trying.to influence each others 'behavior' by doing so.

What do I mean by normal contexts?...
..does God exist...do ghosts exist....do electrons exist...etc.
...all of which I claim can be answered by examining the utility of the 'thing deemed to exist' ...and that utility will differ for different users.
Note we do NOT normally ask ...do trees exist (or other humanly agreed 'things' which we don't need to 'deem') except when considering the behavior of other species.
NB. This is a useful reference.

http://www.oikos.org/vonobserv.htm

The difficulty in understanding Maturana stems from his deflation of "thinking' as an epiphenomenon of " behavior'. Thus the very usage of any 'word' (including 'existence') amounts to no more than its function in facilitating a behavioral coordination between cognitive systems...you and me, or two or more subsystems of 'you' (aka 'thinking' at the neural level).
I consider this to be a biological counterpart to Wittgenstein's 'meaning is usage'.

Something
Thankyou for that thoughtful post.exposing potential flaws.
The psychological game we seem to play regarding the word 'existence' is that we are always drawn to an absolute 'something' but my thesis is that 'thinghood' itself is relative to the needs of human observers. But to escape the 'thinghood of observers' I argue that they are a transient pole of one side of an interaction event we call 'observer-observed'.
Now it may be that those 'interactions' require a transcendent vantage point sometime called 'a God's eye view' but far from evoking deism, I am alluding to timeless metaviews of space-time implied by frontier physics.

I'm on vacation and have just scanned the recent exchanges.

You appear to know where I'm coming from with the language focus, but in order to avoid being caught in a word regress, I turn to Maturana's view of 'languaging' as a form of behavior which enables 'structural coupling'. This avoids representational issues by taking a 'systems view' of cognition.

You are asking for speculation on the evolutionary origins of 'languaging' as a co-ordinating behavior. Being 'thrown' means we are molded by human languaging from birth.
(...or maybe you are just stringing me along. It's getting hard to tell )

Read Heidegger on 'being thrown' ! :cool:

Concepts are not about anything. They are focal nodes which facilitate human mutual communicative projects.
Your 'question' is merely an example of naive realism. (...turtles all the way down. )

Okay. So our different allegiances mean we are going to continue to talk past each other.
But thankyou for trying.

By 'focal concept' I mean the cognitive focussing on one part of an interaction and assigniing 'thinghood' to it, aka 'naming'. Perception is active not passive and our receptive states are in continuous transition, and influenced by 'pay off' factors.
The well known 'ambiguous picture' which is interpreted as either 'two profiles' or 'one candlestick' exemplifies an extreme of the potential shifting of 'focal concepts'. More gradual transitions seem to be the norm are the interaction progresses, sometimes analysed using 'fuzzy logic'. Derrida's term 'privileging' is perhaps illustrative of this process at a more abstract level.

These points also indirectly refer to the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, ....'that thinking is determined by language'.....(Whorf was originally an insurance assessor who noticed that explosions kept occurring at 'empty gasoline drum' dumps. It turned out that the drums were empty of liquid, but not of vapour. i.e. the expectancies associated with the focal concept 'empty' were ill founded)

NB. This article containing an account of Heidegger's Dasein gives a backgound to my view of 'existence' being a function of human activity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heideggerian_terminology

Since what we call epistemology and ontology are well known to be inextricably linked, I can't see the problem.

Are you claiming that nothing existed prior to language? Are you claiming that nothing exists prior to our reporting upon it?

No, I am saying that 'things existing',only has meaning in the context of language users. Scenarios 'prior to human observers' is an oxymoron because you the current speaker are the observer of such a scenario in 'your minds eye' as we speak. The fact that we can visualize such scenarios which have explanatory utility for current events is an entirely human activity.

But it is the assumption of no context which fuels the idea that the concept of 'existence' implies 'an absolute state of being',
Are you following me ?

Do we ever, in real life, utter a single word without a contextual scenario ?

Does a stranger suddenly stick his head round your door and say 'dog' ? ...Okay, lets say that happened...if you actually heard the word 'dog' (and even that might not happen if you weren't expecting it)...would you not immediately embellish that word with a scenario ...has he lost his dog ?....has he found a dog and think its mine?....is he being abusive?...etc

IMO discussion the word 'dog' in the abstract is an example of what I have called 'seminaritis', and such seminars operate on a 'representalist' view of language which I have already discounted.

It includes experiencing a projected context in which 'others or 'selves' might do the uttering.

If a Brit hears a report that "a football player kicked the ball" his experience ( mental imagary) will be different to that of an American hearing the same sentence. In neither case of 'the report' need there be an actual situation involving a 'physical ball in itself referred to in order to understand that 'conceptualization' is transcendent of of the time\place\identity requirements normally attached to a lay idea of 'thing in itself'. Concptualization always involves a behavioral contextual social backcloth against which 'things' denote significant focal events.

Yes they are expecting potential 'experiencies'.

Concepts are 'expectancies of potential events involving the conceiver'. The concept 'dog' (represented by that word ) brings to kind either a general or detailed expectancy which differs from that of say 'horse'. Other cultures may not have expectancy boundaries like ours. The Zulu word luhlaza for example can mean what we call either 'blue' or 'green'.

The term "existence" has meaning attributed to it that is relative to the users.

Things existed prior to language, and thus prior to the term.

Your second sentence does not follow from the first. 'Things' are focal interaction events (or predicted interactions) by current users. And the concept of 'prior' may also be contingent on current user's concept of 'time' . These points illustrate what I mean by 'the relativity of existence'.

As a matter of interest, of your 9000 or so posts here, how many of them are negative ?:smile:

Anyone arguing from the pov of traditional dichotomies such as 'realism - idealism', 'subjective -objective', 'fact - conjecture' etc.

Wide reading which includes related subjects like psychology and anthrooology, and of course, a beard !

I've just come across this thread and entirely agree with you.

The substantive issue to me is that no metaphysical debate can rely on classical (binary) logic, because set membership (properties) of 'focal concepts' is contextually transient. That point is of course highlighted by the pragmatists and the post modernists, and receives a hostile reception from traditionalists who are the target of such iconoclasm.

Instead of talking about 'exhibiting' why not talk about 'expectancy of physicality' or otherwise...'physicality' being merely one form of relationship users ascribe to a concept. (Santa Claus is a concept with differential physical expectancies for children and adults). I don't think you need evoke 'different universes' on the basis that all concepts 'exist' on the basis of 'functionality for the user'.

Sorry if I missed your Q about 'fact' vs truth'. My own position is that all words, including 'fact' 'truth, and 'existence' denote concepts , not 'things in themselves' which I take to be a meaningless concept.
Words are the 'currency' of thinking and I am arguing that 'existence of X' implies only the 'utility' of the concept X, for human purposes. It does not imply that 'X hs a state of being' independent of human utility.
As for 'facts' (from the Latin facere to construct) I take these to denote 'agreement as to what is the constructed case'. 'Is-ness' is a construction.
I take 'truth' to be a word denoting 'confidence about what is the case'.

Well...its a comforting assertion, especially when I bring to mind that crazy 'I' from last night's dream, which was pewrfectly happy with itself at the time !

Ah...maybe you have not spotted that even the thing you are calling 'I' has 'existence' evoked by this transient communicative context. Like the 'tree' that 'I' is a word implying multiple transient functions.
I am making the point here that no 'thing' has permanence even though 'words' are suggestive of that.
Next time you have an internal debate with yourself, you might reconsider what 'I' means !

Interesting but perhaps blinkered discussion above.
Surely you guys are missing the point that human word 'existence' implies 'functional for human purposes'. The 'tree' is changing biologically in a continuous manner, but it functionally persists and that persistence is coined by the abstract persistence of the word 'tree'. And in what sense is the functional 'thing' we call 'tree' still a unified entity for other species like birds ? Maybe for a hypthetically 'speaking' bird it's a 'perch' or 'a bunch of perches'.
So IMO, a 'thing-In-itself' is meaningless, because 'thinghood' already implies species respecific functional persistence relative to its lifespan needs.

Okay. He is not going to announce the thesis directly. His reinforcement of the Nietzchseian view of ' description' versus 'realism', and his dismissal of science as a 'general pursuit of truth' in favor of a 'paradigmatic functionality operation which defines its local evidence' can both be taken as supportive of the thesis. More specifically, I take dismissal of 'evidence for God' in favour of acknowlegement of the 'emotional functionality of religious belief', is supportive of my 'futility' point which follows from the thesis.

At the end of the day, Rorty's iconoclastic attack on 'epistemology', has inevitable repercussions on its bed fellow 'ontology'. My assertion about the word 'existence' could be taken as an expression of that.