About a year ago, there was a magazine article on global warming that scared the bejesus out of me. Still can't shake the graphic. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html — Wayfarer

That article is a perfect example of environmental "alarmism". I'm not saying it's necessarily wrong. I don't know the future. But I have heard this sort of thing for the past 30 years, and the doomsday scenarios haven't come about, at least not yet.

But when I hear other things like the CO2 was six times what it is now 240 mya, but life still flourished, it makes me wonder. Granted, life had millions of years to adapt to a very hot and tumultuous climate, and we'd only have decades. And yes, a large methane release would have worrisome short term effects.

But is this sort of possibility likely, and is it something we should avoid at all costs? Is it something that should require the governments of the world to strongly curb economic activity, enact population controls, or whatever extreme measure is needed? Or is it something we will naturally adapt to as the technology becomes available in the market place?

For the many unfortunates who are already climate-change refugees or fleeing over-populated regions - the Rohingya come to mind - environment catastrophe and overpopulation are already catastrophes. — Wayfarer

Yes, but the number living in abject poverty is falling, and the main issue is resource access, which is more of a political and economic problem than it is environmental. But it's also true the largest population growth is taking place in countries with the least infrastructure to handle it. So that's a big concern.

As Kelly Ross puts it 'Universals exist precisely where possibilities exist'. So the rational mind is able to infer the nature of mathematical and ideal possibilities, — Wayfarer

This sounds like a form of modal realism.

From the science articles I have read, it seems clear that the rainforests have been diminished by human agency. The Amazon rainforest isn't in danger of disappearing, but it is shrinking at a time when the more forest we have, the better. — Bitter Crank

Right, so there's a difference between being concerned about deforestation and helping people understand the value the Amazon has for a healthy planet, and saying OMG, in 30 years, less than 10% of the Amazon will be left. We're screwed.

Popular fiction often takes its clues from public perception. So in Avatar, which was a wonderful movie, you have the main character telling the Gaia of Pandora how humanity had killed it's Earth-mother, and nothing green grows there any longer. Granted, it's fiction and taking liberties with projections of human impact into the future.

But why does it feel the need to paint a doomsday picture of the future, where nothing green grows on Earth? Because that idea has been in the air the past several decades. You hear how we're in the 6th mass global extinction, half of all species will be gone by 2101, bee colony collapse could effect crop production in a major way, the frog disappearances and lack of insect splatter being canaries in the coal mine. EO Wilson has warned that the Earth could be on life support by the end of the 21st, and that we cant' support 10 billion plus people modernizing to match Western consumption.

But there's another view that isn't quite so popular. It's that human ingenuity overcomes problems, and that we can and will support that many people without turning Earth into a hell hole.

So, you have on reaction to the possibility of future environmental collapse being that we need to curb economic and population growth, and change consumption habits in a major way to avoid the worst. The other view is that growth is what fuels technology and funds science, so we shouldn't be curbing growth, because that's what will get us through. Humans will adapt their consumption as more efficient means of consumption become available.

It's more a commentary on public perception and media repointing, which can influence policy. We're currently on our way to around 11 billion people by the end of the century, so there's a question of what the Earth's carrying capacity is, whether technology changes that, how resilient various ecosystems are to continued human pressure, and so on.

If this was just a science question, I wouldn't post it in a philosophy forum. But it's a question about perception regarding environmental concerns.

How does a necessary being become necessary and what warrants that? — GreyScorpio

Necessary means it's impossible for the being to not be necessary, so there is no becoming. By definition, it can't be the case that God wasn't necessary.

But only if you accept the definition. One could also say that God's existence is brute. Something has to be either necessary, brute, or have an infinite past.

The physics of what led to the Big Bang could be necessary if they were self-explanatory such that it was illogical and impossible for there not to be such physics. Or they could be brute, or there could have been an infinite number of big bangs in an infinite multiverse, or infinite cycle of bangs and collapses.

I don't think you can get around running into one of those options when talking about how anything exists. So criticizing the idea of God on those grounds doesn't really accomplish anything.

Most definitely the designer needs a designer. — GreyScorpio

Sophisticated notions have God as the necessary being for existence, and not some additional thing of complexity that needs explaining.

Of course one is free to disbelieve that there is any such thing as a necessary being. But then one can also turn around and say that the complexity of QM in the vacuum necessarily existed to get the universe going, or whatever it was.

The explanation for why anything exists is going to run into an infinite regress, brute existence, or unknowns.

The only truly godless idealism that I'm familiar with tends to talk about permanent possibilities of perception being what underlies claims to the effect that unperceived/unknown facts/object etc exist. — MetaphysicsNow

People on here who towed the hardcore idealist line sans God or some universal consciousness would say that perception is brute, and there's no explanation to be had for why perception has the structure it does. Or at least we can't know why.

Yes, with God in the picture, Berkeley's idealism becomes a kind of realism, at least insofar as bivalence can hold of propositions that human beings could not even in principle come to know the truth of. — MetaphysicsNow

I just read that Dummett held a similar position:

By means of science, we have made some progress towards understanding the world as it is in itself—we can point to ways in which scientific descriptions of the world are improvements on the description based on our bare perceptions, so our aspiration to know the world as it is in itself cannot be dismissed as an incoherent longing. But insofar as this aspiration is coherent, "in itself" cannot mean "without reference to the perceptions of any being."
https://www.iep.utm.edu/dummett/ — IEP

He then continues on to make a case for a universal perceiver who holds on things together, which would be God. That surprised me.

IBerkeley tried to deny that his idealism ran counter to common sense, but was way off target if you ask me. — MetaphysicsNow

He at least had God keeping things in the quad when nobody was around. Some of the idealist/realist debates on the old forum which didn't typically rely on God got pretty far out there, with talk of post-apocalyptic chairs at the end of the universe and what not.

How does an anti-realist account for this fact? I guess the response will be that it has meaning because we at least have some idea (perhaps many) of what would count as providing evidence for accepting it to be true. — MetaphysicsNow

I understand, but certain kinds of idealists are going to deny there is anything to Mars beyond our perceptions of it. And that definitely came up with the old debates around here. You had some idealists taking a hardline stance against anything existing that's not perceived by us.

I'm not sure the anti-realist can say there is anything determinate that hasn't been verified without committing themselves to realism of some form. Just being able to give an account of how it could be verified is not enough to say that a statement has a truth value, because then you're agreeing with the realist that bivalence is the case.

An anti-realist theory of truth as justification would seem to be offering rather more to say about what truth is than a deflationist would be comfortable with — MetaphysicsNow

I see. So then on Dummett's account, the anti-realist qua truth rejects bivalence across the board. A statement only has a truth value if you can provide justification for it (as you stated previously).

Does that mean there's (1) no such thing as a proposition whose truth is unknown? Or just propositions where (2) we don't know how to figure out whether they're true or false?

Based on his intuitionist vs platonist example, it would seem it's the first, since the intuitionist denies that any mathematical truth exists beyond constructing it (providing a proof). But that runs strongly counter to common sense (when it comes to ordinary objects at any rate), and ordinary use of language.

Example 1: It's raining outside (where nobody has checked and there is no weather report).

Example 2. The MWI of QM is the correct one.

We know how to verify 1, but nobody has done so yet, so we don't know. Does that mean the truth is indeterminate until somebody looks outside?

For example 2, we don't know how to construct an experiment that would tell us which (if any) interpretation of QM is true.

I suppose if you take the Wittgensteinian approach to language and argue that meaning is use and then look to how the word "true" is used you'll see that it's used to refer to sentences that satisfy some standard of justification. — Michael

While Dummett agrees with Witty on meaning being use, he disagrees that this makes metaphysical statements meaningless. Thus, his argument for realizing that metaphysical disputes are about the kind of logic one prefers. As such, the way forward for resolving these disputes is finding a way to justify the logic of the realist or anti-realist for a given domain.

As far as I'm aware anti-realism about truth boils down to the idea that the truth of a statement consists in its justification (where what counts as justification will vary from domain to domain). — MetaphysicsNow

Isn't that the same as deflationist? Which might be anti-realist, however, "the snow is white", isn't denying a state of affairs, it's just saying that this particular statement is made true by whether the snow is white, and nothing else more needs to be said.

Isn't it more along the lines that whilst both the anti-realist and realist can accept that weather reports/general facts about tree stability in the face of high winds etc can justify the claim that the tree fell over during the night, for the anti-realist the truth of that claim actually consists in those justifications whilst for the realist, those justifications allow one to infer the existence of a state of affairs that makes the claim true regardless of those justifications? — MetaphysicsNow

Maybe so for trees. A better one might be:

Realist: Life exists on Mars.
Idealist (anti-realist stripe): There is no truth to this statement until we observe evidence for or against life on the red planet.

However, the idealist might grant that life could have it's own perceptions, depending on the kind of life, and depending on the kind of idealist (whether they are strictly anti-realist about such claims).

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Incidently, if one is an anti-realist about truth in general, wouldn't that entail anti-realism for all domains about which true statements can be made? — MetaphysicsNow

Yes, but is that a coherent position to take? Or is it just ancient skepticism? Actually, I'm not sure whether skeptics denied that claims could be true, only that we could know whether they were true or false.

An example that comes to mind:

A realist states that the tree blew over in a high wind the night before while nobody was around. The anti-realist will say it is neither true or false that the tree blew over, absent observational justification.

The realist thinks there is a state of affairs in which the tree did or did not blow over while nobody was observing it, while the anti-realist about physical objects does not accept this, since physical objects are what appears in perception, and nothing more.

The realist believes they can use inferences from other observed physical events, such as trees blowing over in high winds, and the weather report from last night, to justify the truthiness of the statement about an unobserved tree falling in the woods. The anti-realist won't accept those inferences.

An ontological existence assertion has an objective truth-value if its truth-value does
not depend on a context of utterance or a context of assessment: that is, if every ontological utterance of the same sentence has the same truth-value, and if the truth-value of these utterances do not vary with different ontological contexts of assessment.

Can you unpack this for me?

What would be an example of a statement which was not meaningful? — Pseudonym

Just randomly:

"The water of green flies into vacuum's innocence, giving us a Trump's tweet of hope."

Pomo Generator:

"The primary theme of the works of Smith is a self-justifying reality. It
could be said that the premise of capitalist discourse states that the purpose
of the participant is deconstruction. Derrida uses the term ‘subcapitalist
deappropriation’ to denote not dematerialism, but subdematerialism."

Clinton:

"Depends on what the definition of is is."

Trump:

Take your pick, but Banno posted a good example today.

Movie:

Starlord: "Where is Gamora?"

Iron Man: "What is Gamora?"

Drax: "Why is Gamora?"

The last one is humorous because it doesn't make a lot of sense to ask why is a person, but it was in response to Iron Man not knowing that Gamora was a person.

I think ‘a domain of discourse’ is a better expression than ‘language game’. Words are used in domains of discourse in which they have shared meaning/s which the participants understand even if they disagree about their meaning. In fact in order to disagree, the discussion needs to be confined to a domain of discourse or ‘language game’. Otherwise you end up with incommensurability [which is frequently encountered in current culture.] — Wayfarer

Which raises the question of whether words can be lifted outside of their domain of discourse and retain their meaning. That's the charge against philosophers, right?

I'm waiting for an elucidation upon the criterion for what counts as being meaningful. — creativesoul

New discussion incoming. This one is probably too far along for others to want to join in, so might as well start fresh.

or its is not a metaphysical statement at all since we can resolve what the term 'meaningful' means and at that point it becomes and entirely falsifiable empirical claim. — Pseudonym

Oh really? So you think if one of us made a thread on meaning that we would have agreement? There's been an ongoing debate in philosophy over meaning, so I doubt you're going to have your agreement. There are different positions on the meaning of meaning.

But just for sake of argument, let's say we all agreed on the definition of meaning. That doesn't therefore mean that we're going to all agree on which statements are meaningful, because all one has to do is claim that a statement isn't meaningful and that it hasn't been explained satisfactorily.

This thread is evidence of that.

Yes, but the issue is decidability not meaningfulness. I for one, already said the LPs went too far in saying that metaphysical statements are meaningless. Decidability is not all or nothing either; as I said earlier it is on a continuum. Statements have to be decidable enough, that disagreement over them (not the statements themselves, mind) can be meaningful. — Janus

Yes, you did. I tend to agree with you. But doesn't that make the dispute in this thread undecidable, if meaningful?

IOW, these kinds of disputes have a difficulty escaping the same critique that they put forth.

From listening to the Partially Examined Podcast on Carnap, he seems to have been a rather tolerant and pragmatic fellow, saying that he had no trouble conversing in different metaphysical talk with people holding those views, while remaining unattached to any of them.

It would seem his argument that metaphysics is meaningless was based more for pragmatic (scientific, empirical) reasons than strictly logical ones.

Carnap was at heart a pragmatist.

Maybe, but it's not relevant to what is being argued by those to whom it is directed. — Janus

Well, almost the entire thread is a disagreement over whether metaphysical statements can be meaningful which boils down to:

Pro: Example provided.
Anti: Not meaningful.
Pro: Yes it is.
Anti: No it's not
Both: discussion of why it is, or is not meaningful.

So on the anti side, how can this debate be any more meaningful than debates over examples given?

You not going to pull the old "If all metaphysical arguments are meaningless, then yours is too" card are you? — Janus

This is a legitimate criticism of Carnap's position on metaphysics and verificationsim in general.

We need to address another issue in considering verificationism, the persistent criticism that it is self-undercutting. The argument for this claim goes like this: The principle claims that every meaningful sentence is either analytic or verifiable. Well, the principle itself is surely not analytic; we understand the meanings of the words in it perfectly well because we understand our own language. And we still do not think it true, so it cannot be true in virtue of meaning. And it is not verifiable either (whatever we choose ‘verifiable’ to mean).

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logical-empiricism/#EmpVerAntMet — SEP

However, and this ties back to the OP, I do see from that article Carnap came up with the idea of "Tolerance" in response to the criticism the verficationism and metaphysics being meaningless undercuts itself. Under tolerance, verificationism is a practical consideration, because the alternative is endless debates that can't be resolved. So although metaphysicians are capable of proposing grammars and inferences for metaphysical positions that are meaningful, it doesn't resolve the debates.

Correspondingly, what Carnap called metaphysics is then treated as though it is, as a matter of brute fact, unintelligible. But what is announced thus dogmatically can be rejected equally dogmatically. Once tolerance is in place, alternative philosophic positions, including metaphysical ones, are construed as alternative proposals for structuring the language of science.

~ a couple paragraphs down — SEP

If it is possible for someone of my intellect and knowledge to be wrong about the way things are, how do I know that it is not me? — Pseudonym

In my view, you're just making a case for sophistry in this thread.

but really I think its just the latest story we came up with to explain the chaos of our senses, and there's no sense in saying my story is better than yours because it 'feels' right. There's no sense in telling someone else their story is 'wrong' because it doesn't 'feel' right to you. — Pseudonym

I don't experience "chaos of the senses". I experience an intelligible world. This is something Heidegger pointed out. The chaos of the sense which the mind has to make sense of to form an intelligible world is something we infer after the fact. It's not something primary in our experience.

So how do you determine whether someone is "pretending" to not understand. Is this not just narcissism?, Failure of a theory of mind? "how could anyone possibly think differently to me?" — Pseudonym

Because they're refusing to acknowledge points made in a straight forward argument. I've seen and done this myself in dumb arguments about sports or movies before, where metaphysics or the "chaos of the senses" isn't a point of contention.

People want to win arguments and confirm their biases. This is well known.

Of course, and the exact same argument has been used against atheists. "I can't believe they don't really feel the presence of God, they're convinced it's just their conscience or something but they do really feel it" — Pseudonym

Good one, but having God experiences is not universally reported, unlike dreams, imagination, feeling pain, etc.

Subjectivity is universal. But when the nature of subjective experience is argued about it, some are convinced that it's an illusion and not something fundamentally hard to explain in objective terms.

Or they pretend they don't understand what having your own individual experiences means, and they argue about something else related that's third person, such as being awake and responsive, or reports.

Some of these arguments involve a degree of sophistry. Talk of subjectivity is granting ground to the hard problem, so it's easier to argue about something else.

So, given that is right, I am left wondering how we would go about gauging the explanatory power of metaphysical theories. — Janus

Metaphysical theories are explanatory on conceptual grounds. You argue for or against the ideas. How well they hold together, what their flaws are, whether there is anything contradictory or confusing, etc.

Nagel thinks there's something it's "like" to be us and calls this consciousness, others disagree that there is something it is 'like' to experience being us and equate consciousness directly with awareness. — Pseudonym

Yes, but it's hard to believe them when they say there's nothing it's 'like' to experience being us, unless they are philosophical zombies.

I think it's far more likely they know what it's "like", but they're convinced it has to be an illusion on other grounds, so they argue that there is no actual subjective experience. That's been part of Dennett's career.

At any rate, the philosophical discussion on consciousness centers around the hard problem and subjectivity, not other areas which are more amenable to science. Dennett understands what Chalmers is saying and vice versa. They just don't agree.

Oh, and Carnap was wrong as a result of working from an utterly impoverished criterion for being meaningful... — creativesoul

Agreed. It's similar to the claim that religious believers don't really believe in their theology, when it's making claims about God or the afterlife, but are rather animated by it.

But I know that's simply not true. Some of them really do believe that way, in addition to being animated by it. Their worldview is just very different from some intellectual making a claim about what sort of statements can be believed (only the empirically grounded ones I take it).

This takes out the sort of questions you are asking with respect to metaphysics and knowledge. There is nothing to say on the level of verification. — TheWillowOfDarkness

But I've argued against verification being a requirement for statements being meaningful. Metaphysical statements can't be verified. They go beyond the empirical domain. But they can be argued for. And they can be true, if there is some real state of affairs the metaphysical argument is about.

That's a realist take on truth and metaphysics, anyway.

Right, but verification-transcendent propositions support the meaningfulness of metaphysics. I believe this is a Michael Dummett distinction for settling such disputes.

The Andromeda Galaxy is probably far enough away that we'll never know whether an intelligent civilization exists there.

Yet we have every scientific reason to think that the following proposition is true or false:

There is an intelligent civilization in the Andromeda galaxy.

But the 2 million light year distance might be too far in space and time-delay to ever detect such a civilization. For that matter, we may never verify whether we're alone. But even if we fail to find evidence, the following proposition would also be true or false:

We are alone (as a technological civilization) in the cosmos.

Unless one thinks the light from space is all just an appearance (maybe fed to us from the aliens to fool us into thinking the cosmos is empty!)

takes an instance we know to be unverifiable... then supposes to address the question of whether it's veritable or not. The supposed "metaphysical" condrum being tackled, to have some verfied account of what is true or not, is directly obliterated by its definition. — TheWillowOfDarkness

No, I was giving an example of a situation where we have good reason to suppose that the truth is verification-transcendent. You can't verify whether there exists aliens too far away for us to ever detect. However, the universe appears to be fairly similar overall as far as we can see, with the same physics and distribution of matter, stars and most likely planets.

So it is verifiable in principle but not at the present time? — Janus

Beyond our light cone, or even a few billion light years away is probably not ever going to be verifiable for us. But I don't know what advanced technology or new discoveries in physics might yield someday.

Oddly enough there are mamy examples of what we count as knowledge which are not verifiable even in principle unless time travel were to turn out to be possible. Any claims concerning the past, for example. — Janus

Depends on the past claim, doesn't it? Some past events have tons of evidence, even video. Some things, like the exact number of T-Rex in the year 69,335,678 BC, are not knowable, short of a time machine. (And even then, counting all the T-Rex would be a challenge, despite their size).

Whether or not there are aliens is not a metaphysical question, though, is it? — Janus

No, but whether or not there are aliens too far away for us to know about it is unverifiable.

Of course they have meaning, just as poetry does, which is to say that they are more or less rich in conceptual and perceptual associations. It's a question of aesthetics, not of truth. — Janus

Not sure I agree with that last part. Just because metaphysics might be undecidable for us doesn't mean there isn't truth. It's undecidable whether alien civilizations exist beyond our light cone, but I see no reason to say it isn't a matter of truth whether they do. Either they do or don't exist. We have reasons to believe the universe is bigger than our light cone, and so they might exist.

My view is that truth can be verification-transcendent There are some things we just don't have the means to find out, but that doesn't mean there isn't a truth. It could be mathematical, physical, metaphysical, whatever.

Otherwise, we limit truth to what human beings can know, despite all the evidence that humans aren't the center of existence.

Christianity is a dead religion. It's a vestige of a world now gone. It's absurd stories and ridiculous requirements have been superseded by secular authority and science. Good riddance. — frank

For some people in the Western world, but it seems pretty vibrant in South American and Africa. I'm an atheist, but to call a religion with 2+ billion followers as dead seems kind of silly. A dead religion would be one without any followers, right? Or one that was dying off. Something like Zoroastrianism (325,000 followers according to Wiki which I guess is in perpetual decline).

Even in the west, there are still plenty of passionate followers. Maybe it's not so prominent in Europe, but in the US, you have a significant evangelical movement. It's not dead to them.

That is, if something I took for reality turns out, in the final analysis, to be 'just an appearence', doesn't this passage from one to the other already presuppose reality? Isn't the 'result' the same? i.e. appearence-talk is tributary to is-talk? Or put yet otherwise: the problem of appearance is that it is not-reality. Reality here wears the pants - there is no reification of appearance into a quasi-standalone-entity. — StreetlightX

Exactly. For example., It can't all just be a dream, because a dream implies a waking world. If I"m always in a dream, I can't fall asleep to dream or wake up to stop dreaming. So then dreaming collapses into what's real.

The only way around that is to propose that someone else (God I guess) is dreaming me, meaning that God must be able to wake up and realize she was dreaming. But that's just something we invent because we can distinguish between being awake and dreaming.

Similarly, it it were all just appearance, then appearance stops being an appearance. But we already have an appearance/reality distinction because there are appearances to contrast with what's real, just like we awake from the dream realizing it was a dream.

Reality is necessarily primary. All skepticism is parasitic upon it.

We're accustomed to think our experiences are "of" things, but there's no reason to think that's so. — Snakes Alive

This is confused. Our perceptual experiences are about things or events, but the experiences themselves are a mental activity. There is an important distinction to make between the activity of perceiving and what is being perceived.

I'm interacting with some legos, seeing them, feeling them, putting them together. The interaction is not the legos. That's what I'm doing. The legs are something else as evidence by the fact that other people can interact with them.

Right, and there was an analogous kind of self-awareness when the empiricists noticed that you could come to 'see' things as just rearranged as different sizes in the visual field, instead of representing objective distances. We just naturally see these things as distances, but we only do this by means of the visual field being stimulated in this way, and when one turns to epistemology one 'sees' this again. Usually one sees 'through' it. — Snakes Alive

But does that work as well with the other senses? Overly relying on vision can distort one's philosophical "picture".

Csalisbury brought up the sun as a counter example. One reason for thinking it's not just a small object in the visual field as opposed to far away is because the sun is a hot object that only manages not to burn (and irradiate us) because it's far away. An active volcano is not simply small in the visual field, it's at a distance or it would be burning us up.

The point here is that one's epistemology needs ot integrate information from all the senses across many different scenarios, and not just propose one possibility based on how vision works. Otherwise, you end up with a "distorted view" of how we experience and know about the world.