women generally do not have as developed faculties of reason as men do. This isn't an insult, it's just a fact. If you want more details, just read the two texts I suggested. — Agustino

I know both essays, it was jamalrob here who a year or two ago encouraged me to read Schopenhauer because of Sch's great feeling for music, and I'm glad I followed his advice. It seems to me that for its time 'Metaphysics of love' is trail-blazing and interesting. I'm amazed you think you can endorse 'On women', though, which I find extremely misogynistic. it argues, for example, that married women should be entirely deprived of property, as well as its various ill-founded remarks about people's 'nature'. If you think the present-day evidence supports as a 'fact' the notion that 'women generally do not have as developed faculties of reason as men do' then you are looking at different evidence from what I see.

The OP made me have a look at the material by and about Amanda Baggs. She certainly performs as an autisticc; there seems some legitimate doubt about her own credentials and accordingly whether self-defining yourself thus is to be thus.

Even if it's just performance, though, it works as a way of expressing the notions that gesture, movement, sound are all of a piece, and might make sense in a way that is often disregarded.

What is odd though is that in the video only an indifferent dog is visibly in 'the audience'. Language as communication with the environment strikes me as having its narcissistic side. I didn't see a claim in her video that her non-verbal 'language' communicated to or with her fellow-autistics.

People are always going on about speaker-meaning and much more rarely about hearer-meaning. For me language makes sense in that it's understood by someone other than the speaker. Otherwise it would be making a 'private language' claim, wouldn't it?

Women are directly adapted to act as the nurses and educators of our early childhood, for the simple reason that they themselves are childish, foolish, and short-sighted—in a word, are big children all their lives, something intermediate between the child and the man, who is a man in the strict sense of the word. Consider how a young girl will toy day after day with a child, dance with it and sing to it; and then consider what a man, with the very best intentions in the world, could do in her place. — Schopenhauer

That's surely seductive talk to any woman. Or how about...?

The nobler and more perfect a thing is, the later and slower is it in reaching maturity. Man reaches the maturity of his reasoning and mental faculties scarcely before he is eight-and-twenty; woman when she is eighteen; but hers is reason of very narrow limitations. This is why women remain children all their lives, for they always see only what is near at hand, cling to the present, take the appearance of a thing for reality, and prefer trifling matters to the most important. — Schopenhauer

After several unsuccessful attempts to weld my results together into...a whole, I realized that I should never succeed. — Wittgenstein's preface to Philosophical Investigations

Clearly Ludwig needed a welder.

Here also is a gratuitous photo of Tuesday Weld from two years ago, when she was 70.

A word about normativity: the notion that language-use (and even perception) has a normative dimension doesn't seem to be too popular on this forum, but I can't see how it can be avoided. To make a claim is to implicitly have a stake in the specification of how things "ought" to be done. Not only can we make claims, but we can make claims (argue) about claiming (arguing) itself - that is, about how we "ought" to argue or make claims. So why does this matter? It matters because, in accordance with Hume's law, I don't think that the normative dimension of language-use can be naturalized, ever. If this is correct, then language (syntax, semantics, prgamatics) cannot be fully naturalized, ever. And that's where I tend to think that we simply cannot avoid developing something like a transcendental account of thought/language, as much as we might wish to avoid it. — Aaron R

If I've understood this right, I agree with it: there is a constant dialectic between language that seems to flow through us, and a felt need to make rules and say we derived them naturally then try to force them on our young. Language is partly a Bakhtinian flow, dialogue that we delight in and can be traced back to the dawn of language (it's interesting how there is a growing archeology of language itself), and partly made and remade every time we speak, claim to correct each other, invent something new or bat theories back and forth.

To me though there's certainly fun to be had - and maybe stuff to be learnt - in contextualising, as SX did earlier in the thread, language alongside gesture, movement, dance, song, music. A linguistic turn to thinking can be a prison. I loved the basic idea of 'The primacy of movement' by Sheets-Johnstone, a dancer-turned-philosopher. Why don't we sing all the time? is one of my questions, as an old arty-fart. There's a great range of unexploited potential ways of expression and communication in music and movement, and indeed some lost ways - as our use of written language gets more and more sophisticated in some sort of correlation or correspondence (sic) with the growing sophistication of our ideas.

Sorry for the delayed reply. — Aaron R

I too am busy, Aaron, thanks for engaging me in a reply.

I confess I'm confused, if W-dale is into a sort of process-based metaphysics, why he's focusing so heavily on 'objects', damned elusive things, 'just bloody slow events' as one engineer told me he called them, presumably a process-minded sort of a bloke.

McDowell does work his own way carefully and painfully from his thin version of reality to a different route to 'objectivity', and before a reread which I don't have time for now, I found his struggle appealing.

For the present I can see I'm deep-rooted in some sort of pluralist view of the real. I don't know why you think 'pluralist' needs some sort of unpicking, but that's where I'm stuck, till I read or think more about it.

Why not go a day without it [truth-telling], or assuming anyone does, and see how far you get?

Also, it does no good to claim that truth conditional things are often prone to exaggeration, lie, custom, and so on. Insofar as these deviate from truth-telling, their effect only makes sense against the assumption that one isn't lying (in fact, it seems a convention where lying is the default doesn't make sense, since it would become the new truth). Everything you talk about is truth-conditional in the relevant sense, and that includes fictional statements as well, though of course they have a funny sort of internal logic.

One also wonders what to make of everything you just said to me...or whether in your daily routines, you're never struck by the desire or need to tell anybody anything, or ask anybody to tell you anything. Very odd perspective. — The Great Whatever

Sorry for slow response, I'm really busy on a course.

This is not a sphere I'm well-read in, but there certainly is a big thread of modern-day semantics on my personal to-read list - Sellars, Horwich and Brandom - who are arguing, as I understand it, against a truth-theoretic semantics, and for one form or another of what's known as 'inferential' or 'conceptual role semantics'.

Your reply moves very quickly to speaking about 'everything' and 'never'. I'm perfectly clear that we're often trying to exchange honestly something-or-other (it might be knowledge, ways of understanding), and I didn't mean to claim otherwise. That's quite different from claiming it's a general rule and that it's about 'truth'.

Part of what I'm busy studying is the implications of truth-theoretic work - the various forms of logic - so it's not that I'm dismissive of that side of things, I'm keen to learn it, but I'm also keen to understand what if anything underpins it. There is some sort of rule-following in making and then in interpreting assertions or propositions, and it minimally requires plausibility. But what is there beyond that, and a lot of philosophers insisting that well, it just is so? 'Truth matters'?

Are truth-conditional propositions a significant part of the everyday use of language? I don't think they are but I'm game to be dissuaded. — Me

???

Yes, of course they are, they're a huge part. I'm not sure why you would think otherwise? — The Great Whatever

Well, as I said, I've been a fiction writer most of my life, listening to then constructing dialogue. I feel speakers and hearers agree on the need for plausibility, much of the time, but truth-conditions rarely obtain. Truth-to-the-world-around-us is often in the background of talk, in my understanding, but is rarely a foreground matter. The sorts of condescending sentences that philosophers often quote are usually what one would say to a child, or to a foreigner learning the language. In life the redness of the door or the greenness of the grass are just assumed, while my wife tells me about her journey, with the little exaggerations that I know to disregard, because the essence of our talk is emotional and active. How shall I react? How shall I speak in reply? What does she want of me? How shall we move on? Whose wants will be satisfied, who will compromise?

Drama is what language is a part of. In my experience truth-telling or speaking with truth conditions has little role in drama. We make moves, tell each other stories, play games with each other, follow rituals then subvert them. I don't mean that we don't tell the truth sometimes, but that truth-telling isn't important. Is there empirical evidence that it is? Or is it just what people of a philosophical bent assume?

In institutional settings like work or study or the dole office or friendship settings like the bar or the bus, in all of them I don't see that people are bothered about truth-conditions except very occasionally. We're all dealing with accepted/received wisdom, the conventions of friends/work, the boundaries of the acceptable, what we want and what they want.

Well, that's how I see it. perhaps I seem very jaundiced or something! Anyway, I must to bed. I found this interesting Scott Soames anti-Davidson paper if anyone's interested, legit as it's on Soames's own institutional website: http://dornsife.usc.edu/assets/sites/678/docs/Selected_Publication/Truth_and_Meaning.pdf

In short, no. Most of the things he mentions are areas for future research using the same sort of theory, which have been studied extensively by truth-conditional semanticists. It's work to be done in the program, not things that fall outside the scope of the program (and that work has been more or less underway for decades with significant progress).

As for the things that aren't truth-conditional, he's not offering a full account of meaning, but of the truth predicate. There's nothing stopping this account from being embedded in a larger one. — The Great Whatever

I don't understand. The Davidsonian theory is about assertions/propositions, right?

Are truth-conditional propositions a significant part of the everyday use of language? I don't think they are but I'm game to be dissuaded.

I don't understand how 'the same sort of theory' extends beyond assertions to language that is not assertion-like. If a speaker is not making truth-conditional remarks, in what way have truth-conditions anything to do with it?

If we were to listen in to tapes of people talking to each other on buses, in bars and on park benches, would we mostly be able to analyse their talk in a Davidsonian way?

Pardon me if my questions are naive: I find this whole area of thought a stumbling block. I'm busy learning logic as we speak, but the relation between logic and natural language is a different question altogether.

That's why he says 'whatever else it embraces.' There is more to a theory of meaning than a theory of truth, but clearly the latter is an essential part of it. In the 70's philosophers were generally sensitive to the fact that more than this was needed. But the traditional focus has always been on truth conditions. — The Great Whatever

To me 'Truth and meaning' is a better-written essay. Certainly I got to grips with it more easily. There are pdfs scattered all over the Web, I found mine here: http://www.oswego.edu/~delancey/313_DIR/TM.pdf . That essay ends:

Since I think there is no alternative, I have taken an optimistic and programmatic view of the possibilities for a formal characterization of a truth predicate for a natural language. But it must be allowed that a staggering list of difficulties and conundrums remains.To name a few: we do not know the logical form of counterfactual or subjunctive sentences, nor of sentences about probabilities and about causal relations; we have no good idea what the logical role of adverbs is, nor the role of attributive adjectives; we have no theory for mass terms like "fire," "water," and"snow," nor for sentences about belief, perception, and intention, nor for verbs of action that imply purpose. And finally, there are all the sentences that seem not to have truth values at all: the imperatives, optatives, interrogatives, and a host more. A comprehensive theory of meaning for a natural language must cope successfully with each of these problems. — Davidson

This is indeed a staggering list. For me it means the exceptions are greater in number than the matters covered by the theory. I hope this isn't too much of a diversion from the problem of reference to say, doesn't this list of exceptions imply there's something wanting in the overall theory?

Do you believe that the chemical composition of your rug is dependent upon your attitudes toward it? Are you claiming that when you and the kids treat the rug as if it were a cashmere magic carpet that it literally becomes a cashmere magic carpet, and ceases to be the polyester rug that it previously was? If you answered "no" to either of these questions then I believe you are leveraging the very distinction that Wolfendale is trying to describe. — Aaron R

Having recently read 'Mind and World', though I confess I think I now need to reread it to get a proper grip, I think I am agreeing with the McDowell position mentioned in the paper, eventually to be disagreed with:

A property is real iff we take some ascriptions of it to entities to be true. — Wolfenden, explaining McDowell

So I take the ascription of chemical properties to the rug to be real, because I trust chemists' descriptions of it insofar as they're vouchsafed to me, and I take the ascription of magical properties to it to be, well, magical. In different contexts different properties matter to the participants in talk. When the children play using the rug and it very visibly and plausibly becomes a magic carpet, especially if I get swept up in the game of make-believe, nevertheless in my heart I know it's 'really' just a rug. When physicists explain to me that it's composed of minuscule fields of stuff that are unobservable, I call their descriptions 'real' on trust, knowing that another generation of physicists will probably revise how physicists describe it. I don't regard the descriptions derived from the physics and the chemistry as 'more real' than 'the rug we bought in Turkey'. They're plural ways of describing real properties in different contexts.

I'm interested in how your narrowing down of the 'real' to a 'set of objects' deals with the notion of facts as events that 'really' happened. Take a detective's investigation or a statement in a court of law, for instance, where 'real' might be used. How is that to do with objects? (I think the 'entities' in Wolfenden's terse summary of McDowell's position is an attempt to summarise some ideas that also include events)

Part of eudaimonia, living well, is to learn to think well, and then to go on and think well. I regard philosophy at its best as both an activity and a learning that clarifies good or right thinking.

In the debate about science, for me it's mainly through the arts that the world becomes less shadowy and more clearly formed for me personally. Science, perhaps because I'm not a practitioner, seems like a marvellous spectacle which has, as an earlier poster put it, embedded into it many of the fruits of past philosophising. See that! The amazing sight of the double helix! (with all those Mendels and Darwins and geologists and Poppers built into its very shape)

I think it's possible by developing a historical imagination of one's own to have two points of view which may or may not coincide: one, what seems reasonable for the actors to have done at the time, given the pressures on them; two, how does it look in retrospect.

An odd sidebar of learning I've only just added to my pile is the stand that G E M Anscombe - translator of Wittgenstein and philosopher of 'Intentions' - took against Harry Truman when he was given an honorary Oxford degree, because of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Her powerful little polemic is online in various places, e.g. here: https://www.law.upenn.edu/live/files/3032-anscombe-mr-trumans-degreepdf

Thanks TGW

I think I understand what you're getting at, but I still think your criticisms are a bit off the mark. Wolfendale is specifically concerned with discourses that revolve around the making and justifying of claims. So Wolfendale's argument does not apply to any discourse that does not purport to make claims about anything. Of course, Wolfendale would say that the upshot is that those discourses are not rational, strictly speaking. Insofar as artistic, spiritual, ordinary, and public informational discourses purport to make claims about anything, they have entered into the "space of reasons" and fall somewhere within the architectonic of rational discourse based on their justificatory structure. — Aaron R

I don't understand how the rational sphere of discourse, as so defined, is somehow superior to other forms. I know you say in your next paragraph that you and Wolfenden don't claim this; nevertheless you seem to be saying that the nature of 'reality' can somehow be decided upon in the space of reasons and the news of that decision brought back to the other spheres - say to theatre, where the nature of 'reality' is constantly being brought into question but which can't be called upon because it doesn't make rational claims. That just isn't how I think about the world.

That aside, I am still thinking about the basic ideas, and remain puzzled by the notion of a set of objects that are real without attitude. To me the 'real' is often an event, something that 'really' happened, in a way that can't be translated or reduced to talking about an object. When I think of objects I think of who talks about them where, in considering their 'reality'. My living-room rug for instance, is a real rug, really described by chemistry and physics, also used by children as a magic carpet in a game where one of them wears a sheet which becomes a royal cape and a crown made of cardboard. It is real when described in certain ways but a prop in make-believe games at other times. In this way the object is made real or otherwise *by* attitude, not made real by being attitude-free.

I really don't like the writing style of analytic philosophers during this period. It's bizarrely elliptical, and makes casual reference to a whole web of formal and technical literature while at the same time never bothering to give examples or spell anything out formally in the paper itself. It's sometimes difficult even to locate the main points they say they're going to make in the abstract, in the paper itself. — The Great Whatever

Thanks for saying this, TGW. I've never studied Davidson nor been taught about him. So I find essays like this a near-hopeless struggle. And yet other essays I've found by him like 'A nice derangement of epitaphs' flow and are highly readable.

Could you or someone who feels they understand what he's saying summarise his argument here? I confess I'm baffled. Elsewhere, as in 'Derangement' for instance, he seems to argue for a near-Wittgensteinian position, that generalised rule-making about the way people use language is a hopeless and foolhardy task, that largely what people have to do is theorise on the fly, based on mutual understanding. What work, then, is all this intricate business about truth doing in this essay?

Whatever else it embraces, a theory of meaning must include an account of truth—a statement of the conditions under which an arbitrary sentence of the language is true — Davidson

I've been a creative writer most of my life, thinking a lot about the meaning of language, and I don't understand this truth-oriented notion of a 'theory of meaning' (which in itself, as he acknowledges, is a very vague notion). If someone says 'Hello you!' or 'I wish I hadn't gone out in the rain' or 'How many times do I have to ask you not to smoke in here?' or 'Socrates flies' (a bizarre example of a sentence, but one favoured by Davidson) - I can't see what 'truth' has to do with it. Communication is about many things, of which truth-telling, or at least plausibility-while-communicating, is one element. How is truth all-embracing? In what way?

I'd be glad of advice and exchange of views :)

The elimination of human suffering caused by material scarcity and inequality requires the development of science and technology and an anticapitalist vision of economic growth. Many progressive activists today are skeptical of material growth, for ecological reasons and a concern with consumerism. But this often confuses consumption for its own sake and as a status symbol with the legitimate popular desire to live a better material life, and wasteful and ecologically damaging economic growth with economic growth as such.

For decades social democrats allied with left-leaning conservatives in a consensus that with growth, everyone wins. But this obscured the fact that the fundamental problem within an advanced Western economy is one of distribution. This is distribution of power and wealth as much as income: our businesses are as dictatorial as North Korea, our unions are hobbled and disempowered,
At the same time, the ecological argument against overall economic growth is becoming more and more compelling. Fossil fuels can't supply the energy of the future; climate change demands a dramatic shift to sustainability straight away. Steady-state economics is feasible and manageable, but it does take away the cover story that a rising tide lifts all ships. That doesn't work any longer. The rich get richer while the rest stagnate or get worse off.
Steady-state economics doesn't stop there being 'progress'. There has to be technological change and enterpreneurial innovation. Nil economic growth isn't stagnation, it's just a decision that we can't, as a rich country, keep on exploiting the planet and its people - ourselves - as we have done.

whereas you seem to be saying that the fact that the content of "reality" varies by discursive context precludes the possibility of there being anything like a "formal structure of reality", I would argue that it is actually a condition for its possibility. Discursive contexts are not hermetically sealed with respect to one another, anyone can come along at any time and challenge the shared assumptions undergirding any given context, and that is part of what makes the debate over the content of those underlying assumptions possible.

If you're interested and have the time, check out Peter Wolfendale's "Essay On Transcendental Realism". It situates the argument that I have presented here in a broader dialectical context, which may (or may not) help clarify it. — Aaron R

I have retraced my steps with Wolfenden, and then skip-read onwards.

One core difficulty for me is that this entire strand of analytical thinking has a narrow view of 'discourses'. My account of discourses would included the artistic, the spiritual, the ordinary conversational, public information exchange (media), the historical and the social-scientific. I don't feel these are represented in Wolfenden's account of 'All discourses': no disrespect to him, it's what a lot of analytic philosophy focusses on too. Philosophy merges into philosophy of science.

That means that I can only follow the argument up to a point.

But it does also mean that I have a more-or-less opposite view: that scientific understanding is about intellectuals having attitude, not about not-having-attitude. Objectification requires determinedly riding roughshod over what makes the particular particular, and special, and requires a determined refusal of God-claims about explanations of experience and how we analyse that experience into perception and conception.

Back at the op, I don't think that your/Wolfenden's view exhausts 'the real' as compared to its supposed opposites, in all sorts of discourse. I don't fully understand how this self-confessedly idealised view of particular discourses enables you to propose, say, that there is a certain set of 'real objects'. How do you make the connection from there to here, the ordinary world of language?

I hope I'm making sense and not just sounding ornery.

"transcendental psychology". What good is that? Well, it's an attempt to work out what we ought to be committed to solely in virtue of being rational subjects. To be a rational subject is to occupy a place within the "space of reasons", or to be the type of subject that intrinsically makes a claim about something. As such we have a set of responsibilities that we are bound to, regardless of whether or not we actually fulfill those responsibilities or even fully understand them. His goal is therefore to work out the implications of claiming itself, to explicitly identify what it means to make a claim, and what it means to be the type of subject that makes claims. — Aaron R

I will stick with it, though I'm afraid I only have time to pop in today. I am familiar with this sort of argument from McDowell. I try to go with it, but I can't. In a sense it becomes trivial: 'All discourse aims for truth because all the discourse I'm talking about aims for truth.' I don't feel that's so, even in the area of the philosophy of science where it might be most applicable: any given student essay, for instance, and its mark, is a ritual exchange based on currently approved wisdom, nothing to do with truth. So are many routine papers. Such an approach does seem to end up claiming that the philosophy of a certain sort of science is philosophy itself, because it demarcates the rest of thinking acting and feeling into another non-philosophical zone. But as I said, I'll stick with it!

So whereas you seem to be saying that the fact that the content of "reality" varies by discursive context precludes the possibility of there being anything like a "formal structure of reality", I would argue that it is actually a condition for its possibility. Discursive contexts are not hermetically sealed with respect to one another, anyone can come along at any time and challenge the shared assumptions undergirding any given context, and that is part of what makes the debate over the content of those underlying assumptions possible.

If you're interested and have the time, check out Peter Wolfendale's "Essay On Transcendental Realism". It situates the argument that I have presented here in a broader dialectical context, which may (or may not) help clarify it. — Aaron R

Thanks Aaron. Your position seems related to 'ontic structural realism', insofar as I understand that, which is not an awful lot.

I realise I am very minimalist in these debates. I am halfway through a first quick reading of the Wolfendale article - for which my thanks - and come up against fundamental statements where I know I will get stuck. I think it's because I've been a struggling dramatist most of my life, and drama is how the world(s) seem(s) to me. So I don't think that 'All discourse aims at truth', indeed I eschew absolute remarks like that as much as possible (but sometimes find I've made them!). Likely most discourse aims at communication of understanding, perhaps, though some of it is communication about and of power-relations, some about profound feelings, and some like the best art is not very definable in what it's about.

I've grappled lately with McDowell and Haugeland in an effort to find a friendly way in which objectivity can make sense to me in the way, I feel, it does for you and Wolfendale. But I can't seem to get there. So much of this theorising seems, underneath, to be deeply in love with an idea of science and therefore blind to how people mostly talk. For me the empirical in the ordinarily real way of things is soaked in attitudes, and we have to drain events and objects of what they most importantly mean to us - my mother's jewel-box, the hill I look up at from my window every morning where I've walked countless hours, my friends and lovers and all our associations and memories - in order to arrive at this stripped-down attitude-free version of the 'real'.

Anyway I'll carry on with the article when I have a bit of time over the weekend, but that's my first reaction, I hope it makes sense.

Doxastic determinism claims the reverse: we do not possess the freedom to choose what we believe in. Before I go on, it's interesting to note that if actions follow from beliefs, and doxastic determinism is true, then determinism more generally is true. — Thorongil

Coming late to this...just to point out, as I'm late to this party, that the supposed relationship between belief and action is not straightforward. I'm deeply into Aristotle at the moment and he thinks they are altogether different: that we choose actions based on deliberation, founded in our characters; that our beliefs are quite another thing, mere 'opinion', though they will of course contribute to deliberation. We choose what we think is 'good', as action, whatever our 'opinion'. A person has a certain character, on a common-sense basis, otherwise we wouldn't talk of people acting 'out of character', or 'characteristically'. Their subsequent rationalisation may sound like a an action-impelling belief, but...?

Your initial post on this thread argued that the word "real" has various meanings depending on what it is being contrasted against. You mentioned real/unreal, real/illusory real/imaginary and real/abstract. My initial thought in response is to deny that these truly designate different senses of the word "real" by claiming that the illusory, imaginary and abstract are simply different categories of the unreal. Claims about the illusory, the imaginary and the abstract all inevitably bottom out into claims about people's attitudes, though they will each do so in different ways. Or least, that's what seems prima facie reasonable to me at this point, without having devoted much serious thought to the matter. Perhaps you could comment on whether or not you agree before I spend more time thinking about it. — Aaron R

Sorry to take so long to reply, I'm doing a course and it leaves little time for reflection. I'm sorry too that I was rather slapdash with words and I quite accept your correction about 'claims' (which I think is in a later para than quoted but I didn't want to make the quote unmanageably long!).

I don't feel these different alternatives to 'real' all bottom out as 'different categories of the unreal'. I think that's to assume your univocal, as it were, answer. I am thinking of Nelson Goodman's 'many worlds', each of which can be rigorously delimited. I think the boundaries of the 'real' overlap but are different, depending on the shared assumptions of the people communicating.

Perception is the most 'scientific' example. My moment-to-moment experience I take for 'real'. But I accept that on closer scrutiny the world I inhabited at that moment had other features that I missed, and they are 'real' too. My 'old gits' philosophy group used to watch videos by Steven Novella in which one of his catch phrases was 'Whereas in reality' - which he would use to show you how things 'really' are compared to the 'illusion' of your perception, e.g. of everyone's blindspot. I regard both understandings as 'real' and reject his formulation, although he regards his formulation, as I understand it, as empirically-based, and I regard it as based on his attitude.

Where biology and chemistry, say, don't coincide, or where physics and chemistry don't coincide, I take both formulations as 'real'.

I take 'Don Juan' to be a fictional character but 'He's a Don Juan' to be an ok description of a person who seems real enough to me. Here I don't think the 'set of real objects' idea works: objects can be in a real set and an alternative set depending on context and attitudes.

I hope this is a reasonable basis for response. Thanks for your thoughts.

I went to a talk the other day about Social Choice Theory that used the identical graph to your p. 19. For some reason the guy presenting it didn't mention chickens once, though. Probably so no one would spot the plagiarism.

I for one hope you come back. I'll miss what you have to say.

So what I'm proposing is that we understand real objects to be the set of objects that are referred to by the set of claims over which we do not have such authority (i.e. that are not ultimately justified by appeal to anyone's attitudes). Thoughts? — Aaron R

I don't think this gets over my objection, that the real is understood by contraries or contradictories, implying there is no real-in-itself. What is the negation of this set of real objects? (I'm temporarily hooked on logical words) Or, to put it another way, I can't imagine a set of objects that is not ultimately justified by appeal to someone's attitudes.

I take as locally real what I and my fellow adjacent humans accept as best current approximations. The landscape seen from my window is really there, and yet there is a well-known blind-spot in it, quite apart from the fact that a different sets of lenses with a different optical range would see more (which leads some of a scientific persuasion to argue that it's only the microscope that sees what is really there). But put us in the dark then give one of us night-vision glasses and they will be able to tell the others what's really around us.

And then, put me in a laboratory and I will be altogether more particular and fine-grained about what's real.

And then, take me to an evangelical church another Sunday and we will debate quite other reals.

And thence to the illusionist's show, and on to the opera where I will unexpectedly find my real feelings (concealed during all these other realities) overflow into tears when a woman sings of her lost child, as she did yesterday at a stunning performance of Janacek's 'Jenufa' that I went to!

History of Irretrievably Forgotten Events.
History of The Year After Next.
History of The Only Unique Electron
:)

I will take fdrake's ideas for when I create my ideal logic, and meanwhile accept the brute truth of TGW.
It feels intuitively weird though that propositional logic is not, in effect, shaped for evaluation.

Confucius

I think the question assumes we have a choice in being moral or not. Morality as a term just cordons off a certain sphere of human activity for study, which is real enough, but concerning which we might not and probably do not have any control over. I tend to side with Plato, that the good attracts the good. We cannot help but be moral once in contact with it, so there is no "choice" to be so or not. — Thorongil

I agree. My basis is a Witty-type one: we find the language contains 'should', and other people say it, and I find myself saying it too. As pattern-seeking animals, it makes sense for us to try to systematise these uses.
I think empirical testing of the question in the op is theoretically possible. But I wouldn't fancy formulating the study guidelines :)

I think the various meanings of 'real' only have a family resemblance, often involving contrast to their contraries or contradictions. The 'real' that opposes 'unreal' has a different meaning to the 'real' that opposes 'illusion', and different again to the 'real' that opposes 'imaginary', and different again when we attach it to 'number'.

As I have the strange feeling I was saying somewhere else...(maybe it's just deja vu)...

I feel I've come to philosophy relatively late in life to clarify matters, especially fundamentals, even if I only eventually ask different questions.

Are there authorities? The Epicurean model is very much one of master-pupil, something akin to the idea of 'professional-layperson', and the medical model in general implies a healer and one seeking healing. Can one find the healer, the master, the authority in oneself? Or are they more likely to be another? Nussbaum, Wittgenstein (who of course had therapy in mind, though his patient was philosophy itself?

In the Lyceum you can at least not feel obliged to adhere to one school or another, and move between different discourses. With Hippocrates or Epicurus, you have to kneel at their particular feet.

Can one generalise about what makes philosophy philosophy? An enjoyable aspect of these forums has been that some people seem to recognise others as on some similar quest to their own, even if it would be hard to put your finger on how they resemble each other.

I don't know what makes good philosophy good. I was chatting to someone yesterday about their interest in Kierkegaard - about subjectivity - and had a moment of 'Ah, yes!' in my mind. Those moments seem good.

Sorry that my response may seem awfully vague. But I'm very interested in the questions.

Thanks and hello all :)