Unless there is something real to connect universal ideas/concepts to their instances, there is no reason not to call anything by any universal name. For example, I can decide to call my dog a cat, while I call yours a turtle. — Dfpolis

This would be a major problem with nominalism if that's the case, because clearly there are differences between dogs and cats, while there are similarities among dogs unique to dogs. That's why we have universal categories. Because we recognize that particulars have similarities and difference which allow for grouping/classifying them, and this is non-arbitrary. It's an empirical fact of dogs, cats, stones, stars, etc.

Nominalism says universals are only names, with no foundation in reality. Conceptualism says they are only concepts, with no foundation in reality. — Dfpolis

Right, but I'm unclear as to the difference between names and concepts in this debate.

If the only universal things are names, then they exist, but only as conventional signs -- as human inventions. — Dfpolis

Sure, but by that token, anything exists that's in language, including unicorns, present day bald kings of France, and the IPU.

The big question for nominalism is whether something other than universals can be used to explain the similarity between particulars.

Possibilities include tropes, properties and bruteness (sameness has no explanation, it just is).

Perhaps a less confusing way to put it is that nominalism doesn't necessarily have to be committed to the denial of universals as such. What it denies is rather the 'reality' of universals; it says that that universals only exist, insofar as they do exist, as names, as nominata, and not as something substantial - — StreetlightX

I'm confused as to the difference between nominalism and conceptualism. Also, saying that universals are just names is pretty much denying the existence of universals. The nominalist is basically pulling a Dennett and redefining the term to mean something else, while saying it still exists, in a fashion (to the extent Nominalists say they aren't committed to denying universals).

Isn't that cartoon a parody of your position that beliefs and justification are shortcuts for actions?

Have I misunderstood the OP? — Hanover

I think Apo's post captures my intuition that language can't be reduced to something as obvious as defining "X" as Y in order to arrive at truth.

Like this? — Andrew M

Certainly describes my attitude toward work some days.

So is there supposed to be an essence of snowness, had by, and only by, all snows? And the discussion here is to try to work out what that snow-essence is?

Or are you all just disagreeing about how to use the word "snow'? — Banno

Both. We want to be able to use the word "snow" in accordance with something that has snow-like properties. We might limit it by including the chemical composition found on Earth, or we might not.

Dismissing this view as behaviourism might appeal to some; including those who are more interested in winning than thinking. — Banno

A swampman, a philosophical zombie, and a BIV go into a bar ...

Are your beliefs to be found between your ears? — Banno

Take an atheist in a devout Christian society. Wanting to avoid certain undesirable consequences, they go to church, confess their sins, and stay within acceptable conversation. Where would you locate their disbelief?

thought and belief are not things, but shorthand in a word game about explaining our actions. — Banno

Surely they are more than just actions. The stuff between our ears is what is responsible for our actions. It sounds like another form of behaviorism.

That's good. One other possible distinction occurred to me. What about things like Humean causation or Kant's things in themselves? We can't help but talk of causation or think there is something out there responsible for our sense impressions, but neither are part of our empirical data, according to those skeptical accounts.

Yeah, they have a tendency to invade upon being the slightest bit provoked.

So conventionally we mean H2O. But there's nothing prohibiting a different usage. Is there a problem here? — Andrew M

Maybe not. It's a question of whether deflation needs to take into account meaning.

Ordinary language use is ambiguous and thrives on that fact. — apokrisis

But why is ordinary language ambiguous? Does that reflect something about the world, our perception of the world, or just the usefulness of ambiguity in natural language?

False. It's a snow-like substance, but not snow. — Sapientia

As usual it depends on what the statement means. — Andrew M

The snow is white is true iff the snow is white.

But then that depends on what we mean by snow, since snow-like stuff can have different chemical compositions.

Apparently so:

Nice fluffy 6 sided crystals of H2O = snow. What do the crystals on the south pole of Mars look like? Cubes. — Bitter Crank

Didn't know that. So would it be false to say that every snowflake on Mars is unique?

There are other kinds of beliefs that are pre-linguistic. — Sam26

Such as having two hands?

the scientific image of something can change depending on how you're capturing it in various descriptions, models, applications, theoretical explanations, etc. — John Doe

So you don't accept Nagel's view from nowhere as the scientific image?

But if we had snow of different origins here (and we probably have, but I have no idea of their kinds), the word would be "naturally ambiguous" (like sand) rather than just, er, "philosophically ambiguous" :D. — Mariner

I was going to relate that Eskimos have 20 different words for snow, but now I see that's a controversial claim, involving a dispute over linguistic relativity.

But yeah I imagine that if we grew up on Mars and encountered both water and carbon dioxide snow, we might have two related but different words for snow.

Therefore we have two options:
a. Extend the pre-existing word-concept to cover all versions of the manifest image and restrict the use of differential vocabulary to distinguishing between the two scientific images which underlie the manifest image.
b. Use different word-concepts to distinguish between variations in the scientific images which underlie the two more subtle distinctions in the manifest image. — John Doe

There is the manifest difference in temperature ranges often found on Earth where C02 ice sublimates into a gas, while H20 turns into a liquid.

Why do you use the word "image" for the scientific understanding? I get the manifest image, because it captures the notion of appearance for humans, given how visually dominant most of us are. But science is more abstract. Is "image" another word for description or model?

Maybe I could word this a bit better. All propositional claims that something is or is not the case, i.e., that someone asserts as either being true or false, are beliefs. — Sam26

That's an interesting way to define propositions. I would have thought propositions were stating either the truth or a falsehood, and it was up to us to find reasons to believe, disbelieve or suspend judgement about any proposition.

So why make the content of propositions belief?

By the way all propositions are beliefs. — Sam26

There is intelligent life out there in the universe.

I neither believe nor disbelieve this as the evidence and arguments presented so far are equally good on both sides. Pyhrro and Sextus made this into a philosophy to live by where all belief was allegedly suspended

Carneides famously went to Rome to argue eloquently one day on behalf of Roman justice, just to turn around the next day and and refute everything he said.

I don't know about suspending judgment in everyday matters, but you certainly can in philosophy, or with statements that are unknown, such as the existence of life beyond Earth.

I just know that I dont get any enjoyment from philosophy anymore. It feels more like a very tense and nervous imperative to organize thought into some arrangement of leakproof compartments. — csalisbury

Well, there is the ancient skeptical approach. To paraphrase, the awareness of leaky compartments leads to ataraxia, in which one suspends work on leakproof compartments. After which, the leaks are no longer bothersome.

Do not confuse the idea of whether it is possible to doubt in some context, with what is sensible or rational to doubt, that is, because something is possible, this gives us no reason to believe it, or, it gives us no reason to doubt it. — Sam26

However, I just listened to a podcast on Parmenides, who provided a rational argument for disbelieving the empirical world in favor of the real world of the unchanging sphere.

It sounds silly, but what Parmenides did was build an argument based on the idea that all differentiation implies not-being, which doesn't exist. Red is not blue, cold is not hot, and so on. And since only being exists, there can be no actual differences, and as such, the world we experience is an illusion.

This in turn had a big influence on various ancient philosophers, including the Atomists, who said that it was atoms and not-being (the void) which are what really existed, and Plato, who said it was the eternal forms. And in Indian philosophy, you had the notion that only consciousness exists. So again, the idea that the empirical world is somehow an illusion.

Now we might very well take issue with those positions, but it does show how you can go about disputing the empirical, and thus the hinge propositions.

The reason for mentioning the above is that although Wittgenstein is pragmatically right in that the hinge propositions form the background for our understanding, they don't necessarily refute skeptical arguments, to the extent one is inclined to listen to skeptical reasoning.

In everyday life, they dissolve our skeptical worries, but that wouldn't sway someone like Parmenides. You would have to attack his argument directly, instead of pointing out that he's writing his poem with one of his hands.

One does not play the language-game of resolution (that is, resolving knowledge claims and doubts) with oneself. — Sam26

Does this mean that a human being raised by wolves couldn't come up with the game, or does it mean that the last survivor of an apocalypse couldn't play the game?

Because it seems like I can certainly play the game when I'm alone. I hear footsteps late at night in an old house by myself. I go investigate and realize it's just the house creaking along with my imagination.

My take is all thought and belief consists of drawing correlations between different things, visual memory could be one of those things... — creativesoul

Probably olfactory as well for many animals. Reading a little bit on how dog's experience the world of smell was rather mind blowing.

To be honest, I really don't know what's going on in the mind of a prelinguistic person or animal. My intuition and my metaphysics says there is much more going on than we realize. What that is, again, I don't know. You're going beyond my claims, and my claims are going beyond what Wittgenstein would say. — Sam26

Temple Grandin was of the opinion that animals thought in pictures instead of words, and that a lot of people have a hard time with this because they're thinking is so dominated by language. But she calls herself a visual thinker who has to translate pictures to words in order to communicate with others, being that she's a high functioning autist.

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We don't learn to use the word pain based on our private sensations, but we learn to use the word in association with others — Sam26

I'm saying it's necessarily both. Consider that humans wouldn't have developed pain talk if we didn't feel pain, just like we wouldn't have a color vocabulary without eyes.

I'm saying that how we talk about pain is necessarily social and not private. — Sam26

When I say I feel pain, I'm referring to my private sensation of pain. You might infer that I'm in pain because I'm jumping up and down and screaming. Or not, because I've mastered stoicism.

For example, getting back to religious examples, if I say in ordinary speech, "I know that God speaks to me," is this a correct use of what it means to know? — Sam26

The thing here is that people have often used subjective criteria for knowledge. The Christian will probably say they know because their experience of God gives them evidence just like perceiving seeing the sun lets us know the sun exists.

They will probably reject the idea that knowledge is limited to the empirical or the deductive. The gnostics explicitly advocated for a kind of subjective relavatory knowledge.

Ordinary use I believe refers to the ordinary way in which a word was developed. — Sam26

That makes sense. So going back to your previous posts on Moore's demonstration that he has hands as proof of a physical world, ordinary language supports naive realism. This was fine until people starting reflecting on all the ways our perception can either fool us or is relative. And also how perception is based on the kind of creatures we are.

That leads itself to the possibility of skepticism. So if I can have a hallucination of a tree, then questions rise about the nature of perception. On a totally naive view of vision, we're just looking out at the world as it is. The tree I see is the external world tree. But humans came to realize perception is a lot more complicated than just looking out at the world.

So then we see a potential problem with ordinary language. It can be based on naive intuitions. The sun rises and sets. The earth is stationary with four corners. I feel in my heart and courage arises in the intestines. Living things have an animating life force, which could be the blood or the breath. And so on.

Claiming that philosophy goes wrong by abusing the ordinary use of words is ignoring how the ordinary usage of words often enough starts out wrong.

We see others in pain and we learn to use the word in connection with the rules of the language-game. — Sam26

This leaves out the part where we also feel the pain and learn to associate our sensation with how other people are talking and behaving. Our ability to do this probably has something to do with being able to empathize with others and infer their mental states. Thus psychopaths exhibit a kind of deficit in not being able to understand why people feel certain ways, only that they can be fooled by faking the emotion.

There are some rare cases where individuals do lack an ability to feel pain. If you snuck up and pricked one of them with a pin, they wouldn't yell "Ouch, that hurt!". Nor would they go to a doctor to complain about some bodily pain.

Now imagine a world where we evolved without pain sensation. Harm would still exist as a word, but not pain. Similarly, if we were intelligent cave bats, visual concepts would not form part of our language.

How do I know when I'm in pain? Because I feel it. Not because I can speak it, but because it hurts.

And science is also about utility. It's about predictability, not truth. Any decent scientist will say that he is only trying to come up with models that can predict things, not models of how things really are — ChatteringMonkey

According to whom? Prediction is only one part of science. Understanding the way things are is another.

Yeah the thing in itself… nevermind that there is no way of going beyond our senses, of going beyond appearences. — ChatteringMonkey

But that isn't true. We have the ability to infer what we can't sense by how it interacts with what we can perceive. We can also figure out which properties are perceiver-independent, because they don't vary and are not contingent upon being perceived.

Science, math and technology take us way beyond the senses.

The problem is you're trying to get beyond perspective, and the utility truth has for us. Truth for truth sake... — ChatteringMonkey

What does truth have to do with utility or perspective?

I understand truth to be the way things are, regardless of whether it appears that way to us, we know it, or we care about it.

And that's how we typically use the word. He's not ready to face the truth, the other party is in denial about the environment, you're wrong about the distance Andromeda is from Earth.

Even if we did primarily mean utility or perspective for truth, we would need another word for the way things are.

I'm not entirely happy with my response.

It's true that pure snow looks white to humans. But is it true that snow is white in the same way that snow is made up of water crystals?

Some people might naively say "The sky is blue on a clear sunny day" is an unassailable truth, but upon thinking about it for a moment, we realize the sky looks blue to us because we only see visible light and not all the other radiation in the atmosphere.

So when we say it's true that snow is white or the sky is blue, do we mean it's true that's how it appears to us, or it's true that both are colored that way regardless of whether anyone is looking?

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Just what is an "ontological experience" — Ciceronianus the White

Would having an experience of "thinking, therefore I am" count? Or feeling existential dread?

Can you actually go any deeper, — Sapientia

We can and do go deeper with science, which is a combination of reason, observation and testing. We can't see subatomic particles or radio waves. But we can infer them from instruments that detect them, or theories which form the best explanations we have for explaining the world.

And as far as perceptual illusions go, we have our other senses to help us. If the stick looks bent, we can feel that it's straight. We can then figure out that light is being refracted by the water.

We can also make tools that aid our senses, like microscopes and radios.

With your colour picker results, you're also looking at something, except this time you're trusting your perception instead of subjecting it to the same level of doubt. — Sapientia

I trust the computer to give me accurate color information about what's displayed on the monitor as it's not subject to color illusions.

or is what seems to be a deeper layer actually just another illusion? How could you tell? — Sapientia

That's a possibility that's hard to entirely eliminate. Could we ever tell if we were inside a simulation? Maybe if we discovered some discrepancies, or the nature of simulations is structured in a way that physics tells us the universe is, or something.

But it doesn't even need to be simulation. If our best scientific theories tell us that time doesn't flow, and the universe is a hologram, then the world we perceive is to some extent an illusion. But we already knew that. A solid table isn't solid the way it looks or feels to us. This was a surprise, and there have been plenty of them.

The table is solid.

Is false under the old concept of solidness, in which tables weren't mostly empty space. It's false on the everyday notion of solidness the way "sunset" and "sunrise" are based on appearances and not the Earth's rotation.

And that's why saying that the truth is just a matter of looking when it comes to empirical claims is a bit suspect.

That is just a question of unwrapping the event and attributing truth to the proper parts of the statement. There is nothing false about it, simply misleading to an average perceiver with average expectations. — Akanthinos

Simply misleading could be simply deadly if one sees a mirage in the desert, mistaking it for an oasis. Anyway, my point is that there is a difference (at least sometimes) between how things appear and how they are. If the world looks colored, that doesn't mean it actually is colored, that's just how it appears to us.

If the white snow is actually something else made to look like snow in order to fool me, then "The snow is white" is a false statement.

Ultimately, it seems, that's a self-defeating position. If you can use illusions to doubt appearance, then why can't you use it to doubt your attempt at verification by colour picker. You've opened the floodgates, have you not? — Sapientia

My point was that we have a distinction between appearance and reality because sometimes they differer. Which means that just looking to see that the snow is white isn't always good enough to determine the truth of the matter.

Otherwise, "The sun rises and sets" would be true just because it appears like the sun is moving through the sky, when we now know it is the Earth turning. As such, sometimes investigation has to go a bit deeper than just looking and seeing that something is the case.