What's in dispute is what's perceived - the world itself or mental states — Clarendon

When you see a boat, it' a boat that you see. If what you see is not a boat - if it is an illusion of an hallucination - then by that very fact what you see is not a boat.

But when philosophers say "perceive" instead of "see" they quickly loose track of what is going on. "Perceive" tries to treat veridical vision, hallucinations and illusions as if they were the same; it often presumes that there is a "something" that is being perceived, even when this may not be so; and it tries its best to be a private inner process.

Picking up on these observations: By starting with the idea of "looking at a ship", we can be misled into believing that to perceive a ship is always to do so under that description.. A child has to learn, quite literally, to look at a ship -- to learn what to look for, how to recognize one, what the fuzzy cases are. Direct perception would instead be something like "bare colors and textures" -- a very unnatural thing for the human species to experience, past infancy. I think that to defend direct realism, you have to argue that those unmediated (?) experiences are what we perceive, full stop. — J

Why not just say that the babe has not yet learned to see the ship, and doesn't do so until they do so under a description? That "seeing a ship" just amounts to applying that set of games and rules. Before learning, the baby sees shapes, colours, textures — not “ships”. After learning, the baby sees ships, and not by constructing an internal model or representation, but by participating in a set of practices: naming, recognising, sorting, using ships.

Seeing the ship is unmediated... Seeing it through a telescope might be called unmediated. What we call a "ship" just is the sort of thing that we see. We don't see it "indirectly" in any ordinary sense.

So the claim is: when I see a ship, I am directly in contact with the ship itself, not with a representation, sense datum, or mental model of it. And what "the ship itself" is, is an aspect of the games we play with words and the world.

Summarising, when a babe learns to “see ships” it is learning to participate in the practice of identifying them. And seeing a ship is direct: you are in contact with the ship, not a mental model. What counts as a ship is socially and linguistically mediated, but that mediation does not make perception indirect. Direct realism = contact with objects; practice/learning = the conditions under which contact with conceptually-defined objects is possible.

I'm puzzled.

What you argued was that observational knowledge was true, but that theoretical knowledge might be dubious.

What you pointed out , in agreement with my post, is that our observations are justified by theory.

...a thermometer works reliably as attested by experience — Janus

Does it? Try setting that out. Sometimes it's 22ºC by the thermometer and feels cold; sometimes, too hot. The water freezes at about 0ºC, but only more or less - and boils at a bit under 100ºC....

And all these have theoretical explanations...

Are we to say the thermometer works because experience certifies it, or are we only interpreting our experience so as to show that the thermometer works?

:wink:

To perceive something is to be in unmediated contact with it. — Clarendon

There's a lot going on in that. Why should we accept it?

Isn't such statement ruling out representationalism, sense-data theories, intentionalist and inferential accounts by fiat?

And "unmediated" is doing a lot of work. I hope no one will deny that vision is mediated by light, hearing by sound.

And we know that perceptual content is structured, that we see a chair, not bare colours and textures.

And what is that relation, being in contact? spatial? causal? intentional? normative?

I think most contemporary philosophers will want to describe themselves as direct realists of one sort or another. — Clarendon

Maybe not in those terms: Survey Results: Metaontology: heavyweight realism, anti-realism, or deflationary realism?

The observational knowledge of science is of course true. The hypotheses and theories as to how the processes observed work are defeasible models. They cannot be definitively demonstrated to be true. — Janus

Ok. Good reply.

Of course it assumes that the observational knowledge is separable from the hypotheses and theories. But using a thermometer involves applying a theory of heat, and using a telescope involves applying a theory of light.

Hence the Duhem–Quine thesis, that "the physicist can never subject an isolated hypothesis to
experimental test, but only a whole group of hypotheses".

And the ensuing demise of naive scientific methodology to the myth of the given.

The pattern here should be familiar. There's the intuition that there must be something firm - absolute, necessary, unconditional - upon which we build whatever it is we are building. And then there's the inability to coherently set out what that foundation might be.

And what we have instead is small steps, ad hoc hypotheses, little critiques of piecemeal ideas.

Two ways to philosophise.



For @Esse Quam Videri there must be something that exists necessarily. But trouble is, it's very hard for such a view to survive critique. Every time the absolute is found, it turns out to be just another posit in the ongoing discussion. Every necessity on examination becomes contingent on it's context.

Perhaps this should not surprise us, since we know that at least for the case of a simple formal system that is capable of doing counting, it might be consistent but it can never be complete - that is, whatever foundation we build will never give us every truth. The best we can hope for is to add a little bit more truth to that consistent system.

And if that's the case for simple formal systems, why should we then expect our natural languages to be any less complicated?

So folk here would be happy to claim they know stuff that is not true...?

The move to the unconditioned is not made by upgrading epistemic necessity into modal necessity, It is made by reflecting on what judgment itself presupposes in order to be truth-apt at all. — Esse Quam Videri

So what I'm looking for in your response is "what judgment itself presupposes" so that a judgement can be true or false.

If our operating notion of reality were such that reality is conditioned all the way down, then for any claim, further conditions could always be demanded such that no fact, state of affairs or claim could ever be counted as truly settled. — Esse Quam Videri

Is this concerning the branch of Agrippa’s trilemma that results in an infinite regress? Ok.

This is not the same as saying merely that we are finite and fallible, or that inquiry is ongoing. It implies something much stronger - namely, that there is no fact of the matter that could ever settle a judgment as finally correct, because any purported settlement is always relative to a context, stage or set of conditions that could always, in principle, be revised. — Esse Quam Videri

So your trilemma is set up like this, using the language you are adopting: we suppose that if someone judges something to be true then they are able to state the conditions under which they so judge; but then they must either again explain their judgement as to the truth of those conditions; or they must take them as fundamental; or they must rely on circularity, where judgements form the conditions for themselves.

And the conclusion is that "...no fact of the matter... could ever settle a judgment as finally correct".

You then spend a few paragraphs explaining much the same thing for negation. If someone were to deny that water is H₂O, we would never be in a position to say in some absolute sense that they are wrong, because there would always remain some conditions that are not judged to be true... or something along those lines. We could never say their denial is wrong...

One might respond “Okay, maybe ‘final truth’ disappears, but why does ordinary truth go with it?”. The robust notion of truth implicit in every act of judgment is not just “what we currently accept”, “what fits in a framework” or “what is best so far”. Implicit within the robust notion of truth is the idea that “this is how things really are, and denying it misrepresents reality”. But if reality itself is understood to be such that it can never settle anything without remainder, then the very notion of “misrepresenting reality” has no determinate content, and the robust notion of truth itself becomes indistinguishable from provisional endorsement. — Esse Quam Videri

So now you have two notions of truth, ordinary and robust. Ordinary truth is "what's best so far" and robust truth is "how things really are". You worry is about losing the ability to tell which we have.

But this is not an apt characterization of what we are doing when we engage in authentic inquiry. The way we talk about such things betrays the fact that the very act of judging each other's claims to be true or false carries within it an implicit commitment to robust notions of truth and reality and, thus, to reality itself being unconditioned (and intelligible) without remainder. — Esse Quam Videri

So now you have along side the two notion of truth, two notions of explanation, one of which is "authentic" in that it commits one to saying how things are "unconditionally".



Now I think your have drawn yourself a nice picture here of how you think epistemology works, but that there are fundamental problems in the way that this picture has been set up that lead you to a sort of absolute conclusion that is erroneous.



Let's start with an example. I think that if I ask you if you are reading this post, here, and now, you would quite rightly judge that you are. Now on your account, since you so judge, there must be "conditions" for that judgement. And the condition for it being true that you are reading this post, here, and now is just that you are reading this post, here, and now. So here, the condition and the judgement are the very same.

I'm not suggesting that your judgement is based on some observation of yourself reading, but that what you are now doing counts as reading. It is what we mean when we say something like "EQV is reading". To deny that you are reading this, here, now, would be to deny the whole practice that underpins the use of sentences like "EQV is reading here, now".

If we go back to the Trilemma, the leg we are on now is in effect that of circularity: we judge that you are reading because we judge that you are reading.

It might help at this stage to review the fact that a circular argument is perfectly valid, just potentially unsatisfactory. So it is not an objection to point out that the justification is circular.

And this is part of the appeal of practice. The justification here is that this is just how we use the words "EQV is reading" and their correlates. To deny that you are reading is just to step away from that practice. So someone who denies that you are reading isn't mistaken as to the facts, but as to the words we use to set them out.



And here we have avoided the picture of "conditions all the way down". Our justification is this is just what we do.

Notice also that it's not some "fact of the matter" that settles the discussion. We've sidestepped that, too, by since we do not here point to a fact about the world, but to our practice within that world. In these sort of circumstances, we say things like "it is true that EQV is reading this post".

And we've dropped any need for splitting truth into absolute and relative truths. Our sentences are just true when the practice is coherent.


I'll stop there. That's enough for now.

:victory:

World-first as Australian donates organs after self-administering assisted dying medication

Out of interest.

So, by way of checking my understanding

• Modal semantics can only function as semantics if it is embedded in practices of judgment that distinguish getting things right from merely playing a consistent formal game.
• To say of some sentence, that it is true, is to make a commitment, to take responsibility.
• This commitment is to something's being the case, and not otherwise. That given what I take to be the relevant conditions, denying p would be an error?

But "Given the conditions, it cannot be otherwise" here is not modal, so much as epistemic. That is, the judgement that such-and-such is true commits one to denying that it is false; but it doens;t commit one to saying that it is true in all possible circumstances. Yet this is what would be required in order to move from "such and such is true" to "such and such is necessarily true".

That is , this "unconditional" truth is a step further than is justified by the commitment to such-and-such being true.

That is “If everything were conditioned, final truth is undermined” - perhaps; I'm not sure what final truth might be. but not truth per se.

If you have a theory of language which appears to break down as soon as you swap out a few simple nouns, then I'd say that's a pretty strong argument against your theory of how we should be approaching language. — BenMcLean

Ok.

Has someone done that?

Yeah, ok. I'll leave you to it.

I wondered how it happened - but was baffled.

I must have had two windows opened, unawares.

Once more unto the breach dear friends...

“Transwomen are women. Transmen are men. True or false?” isn’t something we can answer by grabbing a biology textbook and pointing at chromosomes. Words like woman and man aren’t fixed labels; their meanings come from how we use them in our lives, in law, in society, in everyday practice. Language isn’t a static system of definitions—it’s a web of practices, habits, and shared understandings.

So when someone says “transwomen are women,” that statement can be perfectly true in ordinary English, in legal contexts, and in social reality, because those uses of the word woman include gender identity and lived experience. To insist it’s false because of some narrow biological criterion is to pretend there’s only one correct meaning, which there isn’t. We can’t just ignore the ways language functions in the real world.

I’m not saying “woman” means whatever anyone wants it to mean. Context matters. Meaning is negotiated, shared, and socially embedded. You can’t pull an abstract definition out of thin air and pretend it’s universally authoritative. The truth of these statements depends on which meaning of woman and man is operative in the conversation you’re having. In some contexts, they’re true; in others, they might not be—but that’s a property of language, not a reflection of some underlying “essence.”

In short: the slogans are true in the contexts where language and social practice treat them as true, and the only reason people think they must be false is because they’re secretly privileging a single, rigid, biological definition without admitting it. Words don’t work that way.

• Language is polysemous: multiple legitimate uses exist for “man” and “woman”.
• Meaning is contextual: truth isn’t fixed by biology alone nor reducible to private claims.
• Statements like “transwomen are women” can be true in some contexts (social, legal, identity based), and false in others (strict biological categorisation) depending on which use of the term is salient.
• Attempts to privilege one use as “the only correct one” ignore the plurality of language functions and tacit prejudices about what counts as “rational” uses of terms.
  
  

More on this; Gabrielle Bychowski has done some interesting research. See Were there Transgender People in the Middle Ages?

Crossed two versions of that post... I'm baffled as to how.

...wonderment... — Wayfarer

...which I much prefer to bafflement... :confused:

wonderment — Wayfarer

Will bafflement suffice?

you're not answering my questions very often. — bert1

Yeah, I am. Maybe not in the way you expected.

A person needs support to achieve some outcome if, as things stand, they are unable to achieve the goal on their own.

No "can't".

I don’t think intelligibility is the sort of thing that calls for explanation in the way empirical relations do. — Wayfarer

Yep!

Good response.

And this is why, going back to the thread, answering "Is there anything that exists necessarily?" with "Yes - intelligibility" is disoriented.

The something in (2) is not a thing.

Thanks for the chat - it helped my articulate what we troubling me about the posts hereabouts.

I'll take some issue with

the mind can't see itself reason — Wayfarer

In so far as the mind is singular that might be so; but at least a part of discourse is one mind seeing the reasoning of another.

The transcendental answer to "Why are things so-and-so?" is "In order for things to be so-and-so, it must be the case that such-and-such".

The Wittgensteinian answer is more "Because that's how we do it"

I agree that the world (the sensory domain) is intelligible in some fundamental sense. — Wayfarer

Well, it's not unintelligible...

Let's set out a plausible argument so that we have it out were we can see it and talk about it.

1. The world is intelligible.
2. Hence something made it intelligible
3. And this we all call...

Now we agree as to (1), and I think we agree that (3) doesn't follow.

What of (2)? Why should we think of intelligibility as in need of explanation?

Yep.

Is there an argument here?

Do they need support?

↪Banno Something I've gone to write in this thread, but haven't, is that the very wording of 'necessary things' is a problem to begin with. In my understanding, things must always be contingent, as they are compounded and temporally bound. In the classical tradition, this is why the ideas (forms, principles, eidos) were said to possess a higher degree of reality than 'things'. Here in a secular context, the traditional understanding is deprecated, but it might be worth recalling what exactly has been deprecated. — Wayfarer

Yeah, I think I agree. the problem is common to the two threads. I can express it most clearly, at least for me, in terms of the difference between the formation rules and the domain of discourse in a formal language. In natural language that'd be the same as distinguishing what we say from how we say it. In Wittgenstein's language it might be the difference between playing the game and setting up the rules.

The problem is how we might deal with treating the formation rules as a part of the domain; treating how we talk as what we are talking about; mistaking putting the pieces on the board for playing the game.

You will recall the game I sometimes try to play in which players take turns to make up a new rule. That's a joke on the same theme. Playing the game involves changing the way the game is played.

And the answer, it seems to me, is that we are always playing the game, that putting the pieces on the board is as much a part of the game as is moving the pawn two squares forward.

@Esse Quam Videri would have us seperate out, as a preliminary, a prior, that the world is necessarily intelligible, before we can start to talk about the world. But does it work that way, or is part of talking about the world making it intelligible?

That characterization is neither an accurate representation of the argument I'm making, nor an apt framing of the state of the discussion in general. — Esse Quam Videri

Ok. Yet that is how your argument appears.

In my , I showed that requiring an individual to exist in all worlds is a stipulated metaphysical condition, not a logical or semantic consequence.

I take that as pretty much setting the OP.

There is a different question, concerning intelligibility, that you raised. It appears that you are making some sort of transcendental argument, along the lines that we have an ongoing discourse; that the only way in which we could have an ongoing discourse is if the world is intelligible; and that therefore intelligibility is necessary.

The following appears to be making exactly that argument:

In that light, my appeal to necessary existence isn’t meant as an extra metaphysical posit, but as a way of naming the fact that inquiry treats intelligibility as finally answerable to what is the case, not merely to the conditions under which reasons are exchanged. If that orientation is illusory, then truth itself becomes internal to practice; if it isn’t, then intelligibility points beyond practice, even while being exercised within it. — Esse Quam Videri

Being intelligible is not a feature of the world as such, but of our practices within the world. That's the point makes.

Interpretation depends on some sort of triangulation involving the speaker, the interpreter and a shared world against which the interpretation occurs. That shared world is a part of the practice and amounts to what is the case - what is true.

Perhaps this shows that there isn't any real tension between you and @Joshs. We should however recognise that talking of intelligibility in terms of necessity and existence risks conflating two very different language games, one concerns the semantic and pragmatic conditions for discourse (the shared world, interpretation, triangulation); the other concerns ontological or metaphysical necessity (existence in all possible worlds).

Yep.

Consider Sadie. What support does she need? — bert1

What does she want to do?

And that 's the question to ask first, not what she can't do.

It would be odd to put in place supports before one identified a need for them, no? — bert1

How do you identify the need without knowing what Sadie wants.

Hmm.

So if I've understood, the method you propose is that incapacity is identified first, then support is implemented, and capability appears only as a downstream effect.

A "deficit first" model.

If someone isn't disabled, they don't need help. — bert1

This is somewhat tone deaf. It depends on making a hard distinction between the disabled and abled.

Autonomy is not the absence of the need for support. This can be seen in the difference between supporting someone and doing stuff for them.

Again, what is more important: what they can't do; or what they might do?

Not how I would have phrased it, but your diagnosis of the problem here is spot on.

@Esse Quam Videri's account amounts to the argument that discourse requirers words.

The topic has moved from that there exists a necessary being to that discourse presupposes a world-structure in which claims can be true or false.

@Wayfarer, the issue is much the same as in 's Absolute Presuppositions of Science thread, in that it confuses the domain of discourse with the language being applied.

Davidson might point out that a discussion already supposes a shared world within which agreement is the constant that permits interpretation.

I heard an account from an academic that told of an AI, in response to a question, providing a factually wrong answer about Pindar; when questioned, it doubled down on its mistake by providing quotations to back up its claim. A long search through a lot of actual text in an actual library eventually proved that it was wrong. It had written the quotations itself. Many hallucinations will not be subjected to that level of examination. What earthly use is a machine like that? One might as well ask one's next-door neighbour. — Ludwig V

As with a human, if a quote is given, then a citation must be provided. A human, or an AI, that quotes Pindar without giving a citation that can be readily checked can be ignored.

No need to search. Ask the AI where the quote is from.

...autonomy is much more important than independence.. — bert1

Now go back to your definition:
Indeed.

P is disabled in relation to task x if and only if P cannot do x. — bert1

Does it help achieve autonomy? Hence, what is more important: what they can't do; or what they might do?

...and why is it so important to do whatever "P" is? And for whom is it important?

They're both the same. — bert1

Well, no. The list of things they can't do is not the same as the list of things they are capable of doing.

I work with autistic people all the time. — bert1

And is what more important: what they can't do; or what they might do?

I don't see how to help here. If you don't see what is remiss in delimiting people in this fashion, I doubt I can show you more.

...and x is a task most people can do most of the time. — bert1

...and there it is, again.

I'm pretty sure that's how Banno would see it. — Wayfarer

Yep.

"Close the door"
Is "Close the door" true? Upon what evidence is "Close the door" accepted? How can we demonstrate "Close the door"? What right have we to presuppose it if we can't?

These questions are infelicitous.

Same for "Construct explanations only in terms of matter and energy".

Thanks.