• A quandary: How do we know there isn’t anything beyond our reality?
    Possible worlds consist of stipulations.
    The actual world does not consist of stipulations.
    Therefore the actual world is not a possible world.     — Metaphysician Undercover
    I did this the other day, but it's easy enough to do it again. A possible world does not consist of stipulations, so much as a complete description of a state of affairs - which statements are true and which are false. In an informal sense it is convenient to think of possible worlds as stipulated, by setting out how, if at all, a possible world differs form the actual world.

    The actual world can for logical purposes be set out in the same way, as statements setting out what is the case and what isn't. But of course the actual world doesn't consist of such statements, nor of stipulations.

    So both premises are muddled, and so is the conclusion.

    we can make the actual world one of the possible worlds — Metaphysician Undercover
    I will count that as progress. But your views on realism appear similarly confused. But by all means, set out the account clearly and I might address it.
  • A quandary: How do we know there isn’t anything beyond our reality?
    ↪Metaphysician Undercover


    Here's an AI generated summary:

    Banno argues that Metaphysician Undercover fundamentally misunderstands modal logic and conflates distinct concepts. The core errors are:

    **1. Conflating Truth with Necessity**
    Meta treats "p is true" as meaning "p cannot be false," but this confuses truth with necessity. Something can be actually true without being necessarily true. For example, it's true you read a post, but it's also possible you might not have read it.

    **2. Mixing Metaphysical and Epistemic Modality**
    Meta fails to distinguish epistemic possibility (what we know) from metaphysical possibility (what could have been). Using the Jindabyne snow example, after checking weather reports we know epistemically that it didn't snow, but we can still consider metaphysically what would have happened if it had snowed.

    **3. Reversing the Actuality-Possibility Relationship**
    Meta claims knowing something is actual excludes it being possible, violating 2300 years of logical tradition from Aristotle onward that "what is actual must be possible". If you know something, it's trivially possible to know it—the alternative would mean Meta "knows only things that are impossible to know."

    **4. Confusing Semantics with Metaphysics**
    Meta conflates semantic stipulations (how we talk about worlds in models) with metaphysical claims (what world we're actually in). Possible worlds are semantic devices for evaluating formulas, not claims about multiple concrete universes.

    **5. Misunderstanding Modal Operators**
    Meta treats "◊Kp" (it's possible to know p) as meaning "we don't know p," when it simply means "Kp is not impossible"—an error that would render all knowledge impossible.     — Claude
  • A quandary: How do we know there isn’t anything beyond our reality?
    Point me to one place where you showed error in my reasoning please. — Metaphysician Undercover

    Here.
  • Transwomen are women. Transmen are men. True or false?
    ↪I like sushi
    I wasn't able to follow most of that. I don't see why you think it not a fair analogy, unless you presuppose some form of essentialism. A chair must be wooden, plastic or made from a non-precious metal; a woman may be female or male or transexual or asexual. The material doesn't determine the classification, "chair"; and the biology doesn't determine the gender.
  • A quandary: How do we know there isn’t anything beyond our reality?
    For the reasons I explained in prior posts, this is contradictory. — Metaphysician Undercover
    And your reasoning has been repeatedly shown to be in error.
  • A quandary: How do we know there isn’t anything beyond our reality?
    You can't reduce modality to classical non-modal logic. — SophistiCat

    Yep. It's a curio.

    p→◇p is invalid without reflexivity.
  • First vs Third person: Where's the mystery?
    Not recognizing something and forgetting the word for something are entirely different. — hypericin
    You seem very confident about that. Fine. To me they are instances of the same sort of thing, and distinct from the sensation of that aroma. On the one hand is the sensation, on the other it's recognition. Go back to where this line of thought originated:
    But the quale plays no role. You want an explanation that goes odour→qual→table →coffee when one that goes odour→coffee will suffice. — Banno
    When someone smells coffee, it's coffee that I smell, recognised or not.

    Notice again that there is no public criteria here to help us decide who is correct.

    But you want to add, in addition to the smell of coffee, something more: the quale of coffee, here, now, perhaps. Something of that sort. And the simple request is, why?. To what end?

    Yes. This is really standard, and it is odd to me that you have read papers on qualia, hosted topics on qualia, opine frequently on qualia, without even knowing that. Qualia applies to anything that has a felt, subjective character. "Qualia" specifically picks out only that felt, subjective character, discarding everything else. There is no suitable word that can be used in it's place. — hypericin
    What a grand vision! Compounding error with illusion. Rhetoric dressed as precision. The raw sensation by itself doesn’t explain why you identify it as "coffee." Therefore, "qualia" does no explanatory work in the theory of perception or cognition. It’s a label, not a mechanism.
  • Transwomen are women. Transmen are men. True or false?
    SO you think
    if you ask a person "Imagine a woman in the woods" then after ask, "Did you envision an adult human female or an adult human male," they'll say, "Adult human female". — Philosophim
    demonstrates that it is more rational to think of "woman" as an adult human female rather than a transexual. What an odd argument.

    It might show that folk usually imagination a female. Fine. But some might indeed imagine a trans woman in the woods. Nothgn in the logic prevents this - so on what grounds would it be irrational?

    Further, to carry your conclusion, it must bring with it a normative evaluation - that one ought not imagine a transexual woman in the woods. But of course, that's down to you and your pre-judging.

    The argument is on a par with "Since most people imagine a chair as wooden, chairs must be wooden, ought be made of wood, and it is irrational to imagine a plastic chair".

    At least that bit was somewhat novel. The rest of your post has already been addressed.
  • Transwomen are women. Transmen are men. True or false?
    @Philosophim, put briefly, you have agreed that the OP is flawed, that there are indeed ways in which "A trans woman is a woman" is true, but insisted that one definition has primacy, because it is more "rational", without having given an adequate explanation of what that rationality amounts to.
  • First vs Third person: Where's the mystery?
    No, forgetting the word is a different case. I'm talking about the case where the smell is not recognized. — hypericin
    A trivial distinction. To not recognise the smell is to not be able to place it, especially in terms of language.

    (Added: but moreover, this shows the poverty of reliance on phenomenal investigations; there is no independent way to choose between your view and mine; no public criteria to which we might appeal. )

    "Sensation " is not good enough. It is almost completely specialized to bodily feelings. "Red sensation", "oboe sensation", "angry sensation", "imagining a green sensation". are awkwardly disconnected from established usage. — hypericin
    It's unclear to me what this is claiming. Are you now saying that anger and imaginings are also qualia? Odd. Perhaps the next question is, what for you isn't a quale?

    no one can look inside the box. — Banno
    Read Philosophical Investigations again.
  • Transwomen are women. Transmen are men. True or false?
    ↪Philosophim


    A.
    I never 'slipped' back into anything. — Philosophim
    See
    ↪here
    , were I show you agreeing with the line of discussion then insisting on the primacy of one definition.

    B. You seemed to think polysemous meant ambiguous. It doesn't. It remains for you to show the ambiguity of "woman" and it's relevance.

    C. I am not able to address your "points about it being ambiguous in regards to English phrasing and culture" until you present them. You change the phrasing not to be more clear, but in an ad hoc avoidance of its falsification. "Trans men are adult human females that take on the gender of adult human males" is also, in context, true, falsifying your original claim. It also in turn presumes that there is a single identifiable gender role adopted by adult human males.

    There's a rhetorical strategy here, repeated several times, of insisting that folk who critique you are being disrespectful. It failed when used towards @Jamal and it fails here.
  • A quandary: How do we know there isn’t anything beyond our reality?
    As a basically plain language person, the word metaphysically seems out of place. — EricH

    Yeah, I wasn't too happy with it either, but it's what is use din the literature when making this point, so I used it too. Go ahead and use your own terms.

    The SEP article The Epistemology of Modality goes in to this is great detail, if you have sufficient interest. The first part gives a prety straight forward account of distinctions between metaphysical modality, logical modality, conceptual modality, epistemic modality, physical modality, technological modality and practical modality...
  • A quandary: How do we know there isn’t anything beyond our reality?
    It seems natural to say that, in some circumstances, that there is no possibility that p is false — Ludwig V
    Seems to me that the notion of accessibility does just this.

    In a world in which p is false, not-p is indeed impossible. That is within the one world. In other worlds, not-p might be true.

    (That's why, as mentioned earlier, Meta's account can be made consistent if we presume that a world cannot access itself - if we reject reflexivity. But this is false in both S4 and S5.)

    Perhaps we need to say something like before the race is run, it is possible that my horse will win and possible that it will lose, but that after my horse has won, it was possible. — Ludwig V
    Yes: before the race is won, we can (epistemologically) access both the world in which the horse wins, and the world in which it doesn't. After the horse wins, it is no longer (epistemically) possible to access the world in which it lost. All of which is a fancy way of saying that once we know the horse wins, it is no longer possible for us to know it to have lost.

    But we can still access it metaphysically - "If it had lost, I would not have been able to make the rent!"
  • Compressed Language versus Mentalese
    Yes, tot he first paragraph of your reply.

    What is incoherent is how those pre-linguistic whatevers can "mean" something. — Hanover
    If, of course, we look not to meaning but to use, those neural weightings and whatever do stuff with hands and eyes and so on. Language develops as we do stuff together. Then we learn to talk to ourselves internally. A potted analysis, an outline, but it might be worthy of some consideration.
  • Compressed Language versus Mentalese
    Let's say it didn't, and we discovered the mind computed symbolically, why would that matter? — Hanover
    If the mind computes symbolically, we'd be heading in support of Fodor and Pinker, and we really would have to conclude that all thinking is symbolic, linguistic, and indeed, algorithmic.

    But it seems to me that such a view would be far too restrictive.
  • Compressed Language versus Mentalese
    ↪T Clark
    Furhter, ther eis plenty in @Hanover's OP that is philosophical - conceptual - rather than scientific. The nature of internal thought and language, the relation between compressed thought and propositional truth, the distinction between internal language and private language and mentalese...

    What is the minimal criterion for a thought to be considered “linguistic”? Does internal compression preserve the normativity and rule-following required for something to qualify as language? How can a single, highly elliptical internal expression maintain truth-conditions? What does it mean for a thought to be “true” if the content is context-dependent and underspecified? How do we rigorously distinguish between internalized forms of public language and a hypothetical private language? What guarantees that internal compression doesn’t slip into the incoherent private-language scenario that Wittgenstein critiques?

    These are not issues that can be decided by experimentation.
  • Compressed Language versus Mentalese
    I doubt anyone likely to participate in this discussion knows enough to have a credible opinion about this subject. — T Clark

    Then since you participated, we need not pay your opinion any attention. :wink:

    PI §329, in context, does not presume that all thought is linguistic. Rather it is giving consideration to linguist thought as a sample that is readily available for philosophical consideration. He's talking about linguistic thought for the same sort of methodological reason that a geneticist might study fruit fly rather than elephants - it's easier, and we can extrapolate later.
  • First vs Third person: Where's the mystery?
    This is demonstrably untrue. It doesn't allow for the common case where you smell something but cannot recall what it is. — hypericin

    Look again, with care. That is precisely what it does allow for - the smell is recognised, but the matching word is not:
    there is no gap between my smelling that and my smelling coffee. That's the point. What there might be is a gap between my smelling coffee and my choosing the word "coffee" for what I smell. — Banno

    So are qualia redundant? Incoherent? Or non-existent? Which is it, you have claimed each of these at various times. — hypericin
    All three, depending on which account of qualia is under consideration.

    Qualia is a generic term for the individual, subjective experience of smells and colors, and anything else we experience. — hypericin
    Then is it anything other than what is commonly called a "sensation"? If not, let us use that term rather than invent a new one. It will suffice.

    This does not respect the structure of qualia. The owner of the box may look inside, but no one else. — hypericin
    It is clear in the text that the owner can look inside the box. It might help if you studied what you a e attempting to critique.
  • Transwomen are women. Transmen are men. True or false?
    ↪I like sushi


    The critique of the OP I offered was neatly summed up by @Jamal.
    1. Assume the contested definition.
    2. Derive a conclusion that follows only under that definition.
    3. Present the conclusion as if it supports the definition.     — Jamal

    The OP preferenced one definition amongst many. Over a series of posts we saw that this was problematic, that language is better understood in terms of use than in terms of essential, stipulated and preferred definitions. @Philosophim agreed with all of this.

    Then, when the conclusion was reached that there are ways of understanding "Trans women are women" that are true, @Philosophim slipped back to insisting that there is a preferred definition of "woman", maintaining that the word is ambiguous rather than polysemous while refusing to justify that claim.

    That's a pattern that has been seen many times here - were a careful philosophical analysis is rejected because it doesn't fit a particular prejudice. It's a refusal to follow the argument where it leads, and accept the outcome. Sad, but ubiquitous.
  • First vs Third person: Where's the mystery?
    I think if someone was going to strip away your qualia... — Patterner
    Oddly irrelevant.

    It remains for advocates of qualia to explain what qualia add to the conversation that is not already found in our talk of sensations, colours, odours and sounds.
  • Compressed Language versus Mentalese
    ↪Hanover
    Quality OP


    To consider mentalese as a highly compressed language is to accept mentalese.

    The idea of a private mental language supposedly explains how pubic languages come about, emerging from some innate and private place. It's a supposed computational explanation for how language arrises.

    Private language was shown to be incoherent.

    And we increasingly understand how the brain is not computational. It uses neural nets, which do not code situations symbolically.

    So mentalese, if it is anything at all, must be a form of talking to oneself that is a back-construct from public language.

    So briefly and dogmatically, mentalese as an innate, computational system is incoherent. Internal thought may appear compressed or elliptical, but it is always derived from public, norm-governed language. Any “mental language” we experience is a back-constructed internalisation of public language, not a separate symbolic system. The brain’s architecture (neural nets, not symbolic computation) supports this derivative view.

    But that idea of thinking as a very compressed language still has merit.
  • A quandary: How do we know there isn’t anything beyond our reality?
    ↪EricH
    Yes, and
    This is because "p is true" means that it is not possible that p is false — Metaphysician Undercover
    is the source of Meta's confusion. If we apply Meta's logic to the example I just gave, then because it did not snow last night in Jindabyne, we cannot give any consideration to what may have been the case had it snowed in Jindabyne last night.

    But I hope this is obviously not true. We can talk about what it would be like in Jindabyne, had it snowed, even though it did not.
  • A quandary: How do we know there isn’t anything beyond our reality?
    ↪Metaphysician Undercover
    Your posts are becoming increasingly confused.

    The “actual world” is not a special kind of world. It is simply this world—the world we inhabit. Every world can call itself “actual” from its own viewpoint. No, it doesn't "consist" of verified statements.

    There's been a cold snap, and it might have snowed in Jindabyne overnight. I haven't checked the weather, so both "It snowed in Jindabyne overnight" and "It did not snow in Jindabyne overnight" are possible, so far as I know. Either is epistemically possible.

    Now I've just checked, and there was no precipitation in Jindabyne overnight. So it didn't snow. It is not epistemically possible that it did snow, since we now know it didn't.

    But we can consider what things would have been like had it snowed overnight in Jindabyne. The roads might be closed, the school shut, and so on. It remains metaphysically possible that it snoed there overnight.

    Notice the two differing modalities, metaphysical and epistemic. Your account, as I've said before, fails to differentiate these. It makes the error of thinking that because epistemically, we know it did not snow in the actual world, it is not metaphysically possible that it might have snowed.

    In more formal terms, consider to worlds w₁ and w₂ and "p"= "it snowed in Jindabyne last night", such that p is true in w₁ and false in w₂. Epistemically, prior to our checking the truth of p, we can access both w₁ and w₂ - either might be the case. After checking, we no longer have access to w₁.

    But metaphysically speaking, we continue to have access to both w₁ and w₂ even after checking.

    Note that in all cases the actual world is one of the possible worlds.

    On your account, Meta, because it did not snow, we could consider the possibility of what things would be like if it had snowed. But this is false. We can consider what things would have been like had it snowed.
  • Transwomen are women. Transmen are men. True or false?
    ↪Jamal
    Yeah. Nothing in that post deserved a reply. I was going to leave it.
  • Transwomen are women. Transmen are men. True or false?
    ↪I like sushi
    Ok, so if "incidental" is too weak, I'd say "constitutive" is too strong.
  • Transwomen are women. Transmen are men. True or false?
    I do not think there is a single viable reason to allow a trans gender person in cross sex spaces. — Philosophim
    If you insist that only sex counts, then of course only reasons grounded in sex will seem “viable.” But that is a choice of rule—part of how you are choosing to play the language-game.

    Cheers.
  • Transwomen are women. Transmen are men. True or false?
    What do you think I was saying here? — I like sushi
    I think you were saying what I said before:
    That appears to say that there are biological reasons that women do not fight. — Banno

    :brow:

    I fed your whole comment in to ChatGPT, and asked it what the paragraph in question said.

    When we observe that historically men have been the ones who fight (in war, combat, etc.) rather than women, this is not merely a social or gender role but is rooted in biological differences between males and females. Therefore, biological sex is constitutive—not incidental—to at least some social groupings and social roles (such as “fighters”). — ChatGPT

    So. If that was not what you were saying, I'm at a loss.
  • First vs Third person: Where's the mystery?
    And yet, keeping with the paint store for an example, we have no idea how we experience redness. We know about photons of certain wavelengths, the retina, cones, optic nerve, neurons in the brain, and more other things than I can guess. But we have no idea why all of that physical activity is accompanied by our experience of redness. No idea how to even beginning looking for the answer. — Patterner

    Sure, all that. But how do qualia help here? I think that they are a red herring...

    And I think I've made a good fist of showing that they are not well understood.
  • Transwomen are women. Transmen are men. True or false?
    ↪I like sushi
    You said women don't fight. That's not so.

    Here it is:
    Do you think men fighting rather than women is a 'gender role' that has nothing to do with biology? It is clearly a biological difference we are talking about here that groups men as fighters and women as non-fighters. — I like sushi

    That appears to say that there are biological reasons that women do not fight. But women do fight. If I've misunderstood, let me know how.
  • A quandary: How do we know there isn’t anything beyond our reality?
    I've laid bare your contradictions — Metaphysician Undercover
    You've laid bare your own confusion.

    The actual world is a possible world. The actual world is the one in which we may empirically verify statements as true, as opposed to other possible worlds, where we stipulating them to be true.
  • A quandary: How do we know there isn’t anything beyond our reality?
    What do you mean we don't get to stipulate that we are in the actual world? You personally, have stipulated that we are in the actual world, numerous times just today. — Metaphysician Undercover
    :rofl:

    Keep going.
  • Transwomen are women. Transmen are men. True or false?
    I just want to be clear the conversation has at no point involved trans sexuals or their particular considerations. — Philosophim
    Why not? Seems odd to exclude them. But whatever.

    No. — Philosophim
    Churlish. Ok.


    So maybe back to this:
    I don't understand. We agreed, I'd thought, that there need not be a single fundamental definition for a word, but that we might look to how a word is used in order to make sense of it's meaning. We'd agreed that "woman" might be considered to to mean "female adult human", or it might be "one who adopts a certain social role".
    — Banno

    Correct.

    In your OP you claimed that "a trans woman is a woman" is false, on the grounds that a trans woman is not an adult human female. But if we understand "woman" as being used as "one who adopts a certain social role", then "A trans woman is a woman" is equivalent to "A trans woman adopts a certain social role" and is true.
    — Banno

    Also correct.

    So contrary to the OP, there is an interpretation of "a trans woman is a woman" that is true.
    — Banno

    Not quite. Yes, there is an interpretation of 'a trans woman is a woman' that is true.     — Philosophim

    I take it that we've shown some difficulties with this paragraph:
    So are transwomen women? Are transwomen men? No. The terms man and woman indicate a person's age and sex, not gender. Are transwomen men who act with a female gender? Yes. Are transmen women who act with a male gender? Yes. — Philosophim
    That it's overly simplistic, if nothing else.

    That might be an end, then.
  • Transwomen are women. Transmen are men. True or false?
    You can be a trans sexual and decide to follow the gender of your natal sex. — Philosophim

    Ok, point taken.

    But it remains that a transgender person may change their physiology.

    Banno, go re-read as I noted, its already been said several times. I also never equated polysemous with ambiguous, please read my point again. — Philosophim
    At the very least, provide a link.
  • Transwomen are women. Transmen are men. True or false?
    There is no requirement that changing your biology means you are a trans gender individual. — Philosophim
    Sure. But transgender people do change their biology. All transsexual people are transgender. Not all transgender people are transsexual. Transgender includes transsexuality.
    So, no to
    They have been exclusive in the context of this entire conversation. — Philosophim

    If there is an ambiguity, set it out. Polysemous does not mean ambiguous.
  • First vs Third person: Where's the mystery?
    ↪Patterner
    So where do you think it makes a difference?
  • Australian politics
    ....in fact, far more young voters say the US cannot be trusted at all (39% of 18-29 year-olds) compared to China (26%)... — Crikey Daily
  • Transwomen are women. Transmen are men. True or false?
    I have. I'm not going to repeat myself unnecessarily. — Philosophim
    Ok. Then the point is rendered moot.


    No, physical characteristics are not involved. — Philosophim
    Of course they are. Beards, tats, body building, breast reduction...

    That would indicate a trans sexual who is attempting to change their biology, — Philosophim
    You might think of it that way. But eating is changing your biology.

    A trans gender individual requires no hormones or bodily alterations. — Philosophim
    Being transgender, perhaps, does not require it; but transgender folk do change their "biology" - your word.

    They are two separate terms. — Philosophim
    Indeed, and these are neither exclusive nor complete.

    ...the unambiguous version of the phrase... — Philosophim
    As I said, if you won't defend that usage, it doesn't do anything.

    Back to call-and-answer, so not expecting much now. A pity.
  • Transwomen are women. Transmen are men. True or false?
    I have not seen any argument here that indicates the phrase is not ambiguous — Philosophim
    Nor any that it is not a cat.

    If you think it ambiguous, set out the ambiguity.

    But if instead we can agree that trans men are (often) female adult humans who take on male social and physical characteristics, we might do better.

    And that, itself, only as an approximation to the degree to which such terms are flexible.
  • First vs Third person: Where's the mystery?
    I see you added a bit.

    I still don't know how the"game" functions without the "beetle" — hypericin

    The Beetle Game
    Materials / Setup:
    Each player has a small sealed box (their “beetle box”).
    Inside the box is an object known only to that player. It could be anything: a pebble, a coin, a crumpled note — the point is that no one else can see it.
    There is a shared score sheet or public ledger.

    Rules:
    Naming:
    Each player must choose a word for their private object. Let’s use “beetle.”
    Whenever a player’s beetle is referenced publicly, they use the word “beetle,” but no one can look inside the box.
    Public Tasks:
    Players take turns making statements about their beetle: “My beetle is shiny,” “My beetle is round,” “I will pass my beetle to the next player.”
    Others respond according to the rules of the game, not by inspecting the box, but based on the pattern of use of the word “beetle” in prior turns.

    Scoring / Action:
    If a player uses the word “beetle” consistently with prior uses (for example, always passing it when they say “pass my beetle”), they earn points.



    The content of the actual object is irrelevant; the game rewards coordination in public usage, not private inspection.

    The game works without anyone knowing or needing to know what a beetle actually is; all that matters is that the word is used consistently in public practices.The “private beetle” may exist or not, it may change from day to day, but the language-game continues unaffected.

    Specifically, how you are able to accurately utter "l smell coffee" without the involvement of qualia. — hypericin

    By uttering it when there is a smell of coffee.
  • Transwomen are women. Transmen are men. True or false?
    here can be ambiguity over polysemous words used in a phrase correct? — Philosophim

    The difference between woman and used as a gender term and as a sexed term is not that of ambiguity.

    Polysemous does not mean ambiguous.


    There is nothing wrong with clarifying the phrase "Trans men are men" to "Trans men are adult human females who exhibit the gender of adult human males." — Philosophim
    So long as you acknowledge that you are making a choice in doing so. It is not a correction dictated by the language itself; it is a stipulation about meaning that you are imposing. English already allows “trans men are men” to be understood clearly in the gendered/social sense of “man.” Choosing to redefine it biologically is a deliberate, prescriptive move — not a clarification required by ordinary usage.
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