I mean Banno does exist, surely he must. — Corvus

No I don't. I'm just your imagination, tormenting you. Jamal and Colo don't exist, either. You imagined their replies, as you did the writings of Hume and Kant.

If you have more than your imagination and irrational belief on the external word, then you are pretending. It is not a philosophical account. — Corvus

But I don't exist, so I don't have an irrational belief in the external world. You are typing as if I exist, but of course I might be just your imagination. It's not me doing the pretending - you are the only one here. If my account is not a philosophical account, that's because that is what you imagined.

Or I am here, pointing to the errors in your account.

I never said the post doesn't exist. — Corvus

You said:

All reality is subjective private mental state. — Corvus

Then

...the external world and other minds are just figment of your imagination. — Corvus

The post you read, and this post, are your own private mental state, on your own account. I've got nothing to do with this, being just part of your own imaginings. You are addressing your posts to yourself. You did not read my post, you imagined it. My post doesn't exist, separately to your imaginings. Nor do I. You don't see the post, you just imagine that you see it. You are responding to your own imaginations, not to me. You are inflicting this thread on yourself. I am not the author of this post - your imagined that , too. You only imagined a difference between your solipsism and the "perceptions" you imagine that you have.

Either that, or your account is absurd.

So Russell is suggesting that we might take the lesson of her formal approach and apply it back to natural languages.

So in Definition 27 she defines a particular sentence, not as being about some particular individual, but as not changing when further individuals are added to the situation. Her example is "Aristotle is a philosopher". This is about a particular individual, and so particular in a naive sense, but also, adding more individuals, philosophers or otherwise, will not change it, so it's particular in the way Russell would have us speak. But "Aristotle is the only philosopher" would become false were we to add Plato. So it is universal - a universal sentence being one that can be made false. by adding new individuals (Definition 28).

Banno read both Hume and Kant, then read a bit more. Yet neither Hume nor Kant would agree with you.

If I am but a figment of your imagination, then why am I so aggravating? Some sort of self-loathing on your part?

If this post does not exist, then what is it you are now reading?

There's something quite mad in your solipsism.

All reality is subjective private mental state. — Corvus

...conflates reality and private mental states. The very fact that you are posting on this forum shows that you do not agree with this. Moreover, that you are trying to communicate, to use language, demonstrates that there is more than your private mental state. You want a reply such as this.

But on it goes, around and around, Corvus trying to prove to everyone else that there is only Corvus.

That doesn't seem to me to be addressing Fitch, nor antirealism, which is the epistemic position that if something is true, then it is knowable. You use ◇~Kp, where Fitch uses ~◇Kp.

This is all part of the interplay between formal and natural languages, in which each is used to shed light on the other. Russell continues this with a brief discussion of an area of natural language that is difficult to formalise - using propositional attitudes as the example. She then looks at an example in which formalisation has moved to natural languages. Kripke developed his model theory for modal logic by having the individual constants keep their referent across possible worlds, which become the now familiar process of rigid designation used in natural languages. The point here is simply that formal logic can inform our usages in natural languages, and that natural language informs formal logic.

That's not the issue.

What this shows is that being true and being known are not the same.

That this is resisted hereabouts is a bit sad.

That these truths may be known at some other time is not particularly interesting. — Ludwig V

The argument is not tensed. It is not based on "Not known now, but could be known later."

It begins with Up(p⊃◇Kp), which is not temporally dependent. It is modal. the supposition is the antirealist one that if something is true, it is possible to know it is true. The direct conclusion is that there is no p such that p is true and not known. This follows without reference to any time or duration. There cannot be any unknown truths if every truth is knowable.

If we are to hold that we do not know everything, then there are things we cannot know.

If we do not know everything, then antirealism is not an option.

And therefore you know everything that is true.

Righto.

...transmigration... — javi2541997

Metempsychosis?

Not seeing how that helps you. Have another look at Fitch.

...upvotes... — Jamal

@180 Proof will be very happy!

, The Oldies have been there before - My count was over twenty thousand in the previous incarnation.

Actually if you'd bothered reading anything I've said in this particular thread, you would see I've said nothing of the kind — Wayfarer

I see your "bothered to read" and raise you Fitch's paradox of knowability.

So yes, you did say something of that kind.

Anti-realism says: every truth must be knowable.
But you also say: there are truths we don’t and maybe can’t know.
Fitch shows you can’t have both.
If there are unknown truths, then not every truth is knowable, which just is the denial of anti-realism.

Nice. Thanks for the heads up, and the forward planning. Very much appreciated.

so you know everything there is to know. Ok. Here we go again.

Well I think it's implicit that we're talking about known reality. — Mijin

Yes, there are things we don't know. That is, there are true statements of which we do not have any knowledge. The person that realism should bother most is @Wayfarer, but he has convinced himself that he can have both antirealism and unknown truths.

Identities between Names

In the discussion of tense fragility, the definition of stuff that was fragile and stuff that was past was the same. The difficulty with this is made evident in the section "Identities between Names" . That a=b should be true in both the past and the future, but appears to be true only in the past.

Russell makes the variations she does in order to formalise what in a natural language we might call an eternal temporal status. The structure she creates can accomodate a wider variety of tensed sentences, including those that survive both past and future switching, (eternal), those that survive past switching ("it will rain"), and those that survive future switching ("it rained").

That enables eternal truths that are not tautologies, such as a=b.

Yes, yet through all that, my initial comments stand. Reality is what there is, hence to posit something "beyond reality" is to posit more of what there is, and "beyond reality" is a grammatical error. And what I experience is not the very same as what is real, what we know is not the very same as what I experience.

I agree with you. But see below. — Ludwig V

We can be more specific. We can't assess physical theories without doing the maths.

And there is no maths here.

Your replies read like a word game. — Punshhh

Let's be clear: I'm pointing out that the OP isa a word game.

And "No".

So the black hole cosmology theory isn't outside GR. — frank

Yeah it is - it's an extension of GR to another universe.

I'll leave you to it. :roll:

In GR time begins at the singularity and the question of a time before the singularity is without a sense.

Outside of GR, anything goes, so again the idea of a time outside the universe is undefined.

Either way, such speculation is a waste of time.

...go back in time to a few moments before the Big Bang — Outlander

There's no such time. Time came into existence along with the universe; the Big Bang is not an event in time but a boundary of time.

This sort of speculative physics makes for poor threads.

But time is a conceptual scheme embedded in our total belief network, hence asking about “time before time” is a misuse of those concepts, a confusion generated by stretching the scheme beyond its application to the world’s causal structure. The physics describes causal structure; those structures fix what makes sense to call “earlier” or “later.” If the causal structure doesn’t extend, neither does the temporal vocabulary.

What's south of the South Pole?

So Pauline Hanson is now setting Liberal Party policy.

This should work out well, with the conservative vote split between One Nation, the Nationals, and the now mostly irrelevant Liberal Party, the Teals taking on even more mid city electorates, and the Greens becoming the de facto opposition.

An analogy. Any integer can be named in a finite number of words. Yet a list of all the integers is not finite. Analogicaly, perhaps anything true can be said, but not everything that is true.

(All sorts of implications here, making it an interesting area of logic. Like that we can write down the set of all the integers in a finite set of words - I just did; but by stepping outside the rules for writing down the integers and using sets instead.)

Again, the payoff is that there is always more to be said.

Why should we think that humans represent some sort of pinnacle of what can be thought or said? — J

Indeed - notice that my objection is to the way the issue is phrased. As "there is stuff beyond our reality" when it should be "there is stuff that is true but unknown". (It's actually positing realism, or at least showing up some of the limitations of idealism.)

The big bang is as an explanation for, and from, what we see around us; the very opposite of what you are suggesting.

Assuming the alien got here by traveling faster than the speed of light... — javra

...and this and the rest is comprehensible - since you are here comprehending it.

Are we to understand you reject the Big Bang hypothesis, then? — Outlander

What?

Why would you suppose that? Do you think the big bang is beyond comprehension?

:angry:

glad to see you differentiate between economics and reality.

in that we have senators instead of lords. Profound stuff.

somewhat off the track here. I’ll try again. If an alien says something that is utterly incomprehensible, what grounds could you have to think it had said something rather than just grunted?

we might have such warrant. I think we need to introduce Davidson here. If it can’t be said by a human, then what reason could you have to think that it could be said?

...idealist... — Tobias

How rude. :wink:

The set of true sentences is never complete, if that helps. I suspect that is what and are trying to capture - that there is always more to be said.

Could there be anything that humans will never be able to know or experience? — J

Not that we know of.

:wink:

How do we know there isn’t anything beyond our reality?

Because reality is what there is.

To posit something "beyond reality" is to posit more of what there is. It is to extend reality.

This is why the extent of our language is the extent of our world.

Hopefully, replacing "limit" with "extent" will head off some of the misplaced criticism of that phrase.

The other mistake here is to equate what we experience with what is real, and so to conflate "How do we know there isn’t anything beyond our experience" with "How do we know there isn’t anything beyond our reality".

"Beyond reality" is not a region; it is a grammatical error.

I promise I'm not anti-American, but this habit of Americans of assuming everyone is American is infuriating. — Jamal

And sadly parochial.

I had a laugh at the idea that the USA doesn't have a king. Those countries with titular kings managed to build limitations in to their political systems, usually for the king to act only on the advice of the parliament. The USA apparently thought that since their king was elected, they could give them more power. It's their undoing. European, and other monarchies, kept the king in a box; the USA actually removed restraint on the executive.

That other nations might find the American system admirable is risible.

"Girls, you head out first - it'll go down so well with the doctor's wives..."

So to theorem 18. A given set of particular sentences cannot imply a sentence that is not particular relative to that given set.

In this version, a consequent of some set of particular sentences inherits particularity from that set. So this new version bypasses Vranas' objection that the Barrier says nothing about the particularity of the mixed conditional - it says that they can be derived only if the consequent is particular.