”Materialism", as I understand it, is not intuitive at all. I'm hesitant to guess anymore, but if I had to guess I'd say that "Dualism" is the "default" position of most people, if pressed; but mostly philosophy isn't interesting enough for people to define their categories that cleanly. — Moliere

I would have thought that scientific materialism is the default for the secular mainstream, even for those not familiar with the term, and who wouldn’t necessarily have thought it through. But the mainstream account of life’s origins, planetary formation, and so on, generally assumes that all of the underlying factors can be understood in physical or naturalistic terms (even given there is an allowance for a spectrum of belief.) In discussions on this and other fora, I’ve found many people assume that living beings can be understood in molecular or physical terms even if they haven’t given a lot of thought to it. (Also should be noted that there's confusion between scientific materialism and social materialism, as inordinate attachment to money and material possessions.)

And at the academic level, at least here in Australia, the scientific account of the origins of the Universe and living beings is presumptively materialist. Being a liberal culture, it is of course true that individual beliefs across the spectrum are expected. Belief in the soul, for instance, while not having any basis in science, is understood as being an individual prerogative, a belief one is entitled to hold. But it would generally be assumed that this has no basis in science.

(I might see if I can get one of the bots to find some polling data on the question.)

//In my view, something about Western culture forces this dilemma, or choice, on you. The religious account is anchored to the Biblical account, while the scientific worldview is explicitly defined in opposition to or the exclusion of it. That is writ large in the 'culture wars' over evolution and creation especially in America.//

Makes a lot of sense. I suppose it’s just a sense of dread on my part. As each day passes you wonder if Putin really has the means to launch a large-scale attack aside from the scattered missile and drone attacks they’re already doing.

what did Gödel believe in? The combined rules of reason, logic, and maths. Particular beliefs being consequences of applications of those rules. — tim wood

That is your description, written so as to support the point you're making. But it was not how Gödel understood it himself.

Gödel was a mathematical realist, a Platonist. He believed that what makes mathematics true is that it's descriptive—not of empirical reality, of course, but of an abstract reality. Mathematical intuition is something analogous to a kind of sense perception. — Rebecca Goldstein

Gödel’s view of mathematical intuition as a kind of perception echoes Plato’s claim that the soul has an eye suited to grasping the intelligible - the ‘eye of reason’. In the Republic, mathematics belongs to the level of dianoia—a faculty higher than belief, yet still dependent on symbols and hypotheses. Plato insists that geometrical and arithmetical truths do not belong to the world of becoming, but to a higher, stable, unchanging realm. Hence Gödel’s Platonism is not modern nostalgia, but a precise continuation of that classical outlook: mathematics is not invented, but discovered—seen by a faculty suited to such realities. And not a matter of belief, doxa or pistis, but insight into what is.

I expect their daily bombing will continue, but I fear Putin is planning something spectacularly awful by way of responding to Spiderweb. An obvious tactic would be deployment of a nuclear warhead, although I hope it doesn't come to that, but I fear something on a much larger scale to the day-to-day missile attacks might be in the works.

(It is true that physics constrains chemistry, which constrains biology, which constrains ethology, which constrains anthropology, but no one really thinks ― and there's no reason to think ― you could "explain" traditional religious practices in West Africa in terms of physics.) — Srap Tasmaner

But physicalism will nevertheless insist that traditional religious practices, whether African or other, will depend on causes which ultimately supervene on the physical. A physicalist might agree that the anthropological description of the culture is true on a different level to the physical, while still insisting that all of the factors are still ultimately physical or reducible to the physical. In fact, physicalism is obliged to believe that.

The Stanford entry on physicalism has it that 'the general idea is that the nature of the actual world (i.e. the universe and everything in it) conforms to a certain condition, the condition of being physical. Of course, physicalists don’t deny that the world might contain many items that at first glance don’t seem physical — items of a biological, or psychological, or moral, or social, or mathematical nature. But they insist nevertheless that at the end of the day such items are physical, or at least bear an important relation to the physical.'

As to why physics, in particular, is paradigmatic for the other sciences, and philosophy generally. Physics, historically, became paradigmatic not because it was declared so a priori, but because it achieved an extraordinary degree of mathematical formalism, predictive power, and empirical confirmation. From Newton to quantum mechanics, physics has yielded universal laws, often with breathtaking precision, and this led to the belief that any successful science should strive for the same kind of mathematical rigor and explanatory depth. This was not merely an aesthetic preference; it was assumed that to really know something was to be able to describe it in physical terms.

Allied with this development were the ontological implications of Cartesian dualism, which sharply distinguished between res extensa—matter, extended in space and measurable—and res cogitans—mind, the domain of thought and subjectivity. The success of science in predicting and manipulating the physical world proceeded without any clear account of how mind could interact with matter. As technology advanced without reference to mental causes, it became increasingly natural to treat mind as a kind of epiphenomenon, a “ghost in the machine.”

None of this is meant as an apology for physicalism, but it does help explain why it became so dominant in contemporary intellectual culture. The extraordinary effectiveness of physical science cast a long shadow, and many came to believe that anything real must ultimately be physical—or reducible to the physical.

My own tentative view is that we do not access reality directly, nor can we claim any definitive knowledge of what reality ultimately is. — Tom Storm

I would make the claim that philosophy is concerned with the nature of being, rather than reality in the scientific or objective sense, which is nowadays such a vast subject that nobody can possibly know more than one or two aspects of it. And also that this is a philosophically meaningful distinction although not often mentioned in Anglo philosophy (while it's fundamental to Heidegger, as I understand it.)

Given that perspective, the question is, how to come to have insight into the nature of being - not how to understand how the strong force is or why it works.

I’m pretty worried about what Putin is going to do to avenge the Spiderweb attacks. It is going to have to be something spectacularly awful. Let’s hope it’s not a mass casualty event.

Straw man description of idealism. Idealists don’t believe the world is all in the mind.

There is no metaphysical claim to be made. Truth (in- and by-itself) does not exist. — tim wood

Doesn't the second claim contradict the first? How is the statement 'truth (in- and by-itself) does not exist' not a metaphysical claim?

Now separate the true from the proposition as something separate from and not a part of the proposition. You cannot do it. And that which you might try to separate is usually called truth. So what is it? What is truth - beyond being just a general idea? All day long people may argue that truth is a something. They don't have to argue, all they have to do is demonstrate it - show it. But that never has and never will happen. — tim wood

I see the logic of your position — you're treating truth as nothing over and above the attribution of a property to a proposition, and I understand the deflationary intuition behind that. But the issue at stake, especially given the original context (Wittgenstein and Gödel), isn’t just about semantics. I'm saying, that the issue is really about whether there is a domain of what we might call the unconditionally true — truths not simply constructed or declared within discourse, but which ground discourse itself. That’s a metaphysical and ontological question, not simply a linguistic one.

Gödel, for example, was a mathematical Platonist. He believed that mathematical truths exist independently of our capacity to prove them — that they are so, whether we grasp them or not. Wittgenstein’s hinges aren’t proven either, but they’re not arbitrary. They are ‘taken to be true’ not because we say so, but because they constitute the background against which the very act of saying something becomes intelligible.

To deny that there is such a thing as truth ‘beyond being just a general idea’ risks collapsing this structural distinction. If truth is only ever the local property of propositions as we use them, then you effectively deny the possibility of truths that are not contingent on our grasp or declaration. But isn’t that exactly what Gödel’s theorems reveal? That some truths outstrip the systems we build?

This is just the kind of question Plato’s dialogues return to again and again — what it means for something to be true or to be good in itself. The dialogues often end in aporia, yes — but not as dismissals. Rather, they preserve the seriousness of the inquiry by refusing to reduce these questions to mere convention or definition or to provide a dogmatic solution. And we can’t define truth in some final way, that may be a sign of its depth, not its non-existence. Likewise, Socrates' consistent refusal to declare that he knows any kind of final truth - he's not denying that there is, but inviting deep contemplation of the question. (Is this why Socrates was said to have sometimes fallen into a kind of trance, standing rooted to the spot for hours or days? That stillness might itself be a kind of answer: a living witness to the fact that some truths are not merely stated, but must be grappled with through a deep questioning.)

To consider whether anything is unconditionally true — not merely 'true for us' — we have to ask questions beyond usage and attribution. We’re talking about the architecture of thought and language, of being itself. Those aren’t things you can ‘show’ in an empirical way — but neither are they merely artifacts of language. They belong to the domain of what Kant might call the (transcendental) conditions for the possibility of experience and understanding. And that’s a philosophical question, not a semantic one.

So there’s a deeper question here about the nature of truth — and it’s one that can’t be settled by appeal to semantics or usage alone. Certainly, truth doesn't exist as some abstract 'thing' out there in the world, waiting to be pointed to or depicted. But that doesn’t mean it’s not real.

Classical philosophy speaks of 'intelligible objects' — principles or forms that do not exist qua phenomena, but which nonetheless structure intelligibility (ref). Think, for instance, of the law of the excluded middle. Does it 'exist'? Not in the empirical sense. But is it real? It seems inescapably so — not because we invented it, but because rational discourse depends on it.

So in that sense, the truths of reason — logical principles, mathematical axioms, moral intelligibilities — don’t so much describe what exists as disclose the structure of intelligibility itself. They are not things among things, but conditions for thought, and for discourse.

This is why the denial of truth as a real — though not empirical — dimension is so radical. It’s not just a semantic revision. It amounts to a dismantling of the very architecture of meaning. And that’s why thinkers from Plato to Augustine (and indeed, Gödel and Wittgenstein in their own ways) were so attentive to this domain of the intelligible — not as 'objects' in the modern sense, but as realities grasped by the intellect.

I believe it was the philosopher Simon Blackburn who said that even the idealist philosophy professor adopts realism the moment they leave home in the morning. — Tom Storm

Once, in Karl Popper's living-room, I asked him why he rejected it (Kant's idealism), whereupon he banged his hand against the radiator by which we were standing and said: 'When I come downstairs in the morning I take it for granted that this radiator has been here all night' - a reaction not above the level of Dr Johnson to Berkeley ('kicking the stone'). — Bryan Magee, Schopenhauer's Philosophy

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t’s not clear to me that the discontinuity between the classical and quantum worlds is as profound as you, and I assume most others, think it is. — T Clark

The point I was making is that, during the heyday of modern physics, it was widely believed that the methods of the new sciences—which, of course, are no longer new to us—offered a universal framework for natural philosophy. This framework rested on the precise mathematical description of physical bodies, grounded in the laws of motion and Cartesian coordinate geometry.

As an historical heuristic, I would mark this era as spanning from the publication of Newton's Principia in 1687 to the Fifth Solvay Conference in 1927. That conference, in many ways, pulled the rug out from under the feet of the scientific realism that had been assumed in the modern perspective. The Solvay Conference is the line between the modern period proper, and the beginning of post-modernism in philosophy and culture. It’s a large claim, I know, but one that can be supported with ample documentation—both from within the scientific tradition and from philosophy of science.

During the modern period, physics was regarded as paradigmatic for science generally, indeed even for philosophy, hence physicalism and all that it entails. Postmodernism blurs all the boundaries considerably.

I think that the use of mathematics in physics actually undermines the materialist project. — boundless

As do I. Hence the interminable wrangling in academic philosophy over the reality of number.

Sure, a cockroach will flee when a light comes on suddenly; so clearly it has a degree of apperception, but is this knowledge? I don't think so. — karl stone

Which was my point. Adaptive ability is not an argument for the veracity of judgement.

Yet all this is missing the point that human beings survived, and evolved in relation to a physical reality - of which, we must be able to establish valid knowledge, or would have become extinct. — karl stone

Cockroaches have survived a lot longer than h. sapiens. Does that mean they have valid knowledge?

hence the ascendancy of biosemiotics, something I’ve learned a lot about here.

I thought you would pick it up, but I’m referring to the famous Fifth Solvay Conference, 1927, which introduced quantum physics to the world, and undermined the pristine certainty of classical physics as a truly universal science.

Why has physics become paradigmatic for science, generally? Isn’t it because of the universal scope and unerring accuracy of its predictions and calculations? If you can imaginatively cast your mind back a few hundred years, how intoxicating the discoveries of the Laws of Motion, and then the heliocentric solar system, must have seemed! So many things fell into place, so much begins to make sense where previously there was a patchwork of ancient philosophies and myths. It promised to encompass everything known, and all written in the language of mathematics and algebraic geometry, with its objective clarity and certainty. Or so it seemed, at least until 1927.

I was taking issue with meaning as the ‘creation of conscious beings’ if by that you mean something invented or projected by us onto the world as a kind of blank canvas. I’m pointing out that meaning can be understood as intrinsically connected to organic existence at a fundamental level - not simply as the product of our imaginative acts. At the same time I'm trying to avoid the two extremes of 'intelligent design' vs 'fortuitous origins'.

By true I mean a property, call it T of P, such that for proposition P, P is T, if in fact it is. Sometimes I might refer to it as the "truth" of P, by which I mean just another way to say that P is T. And if there is a bunch of different Ps, all with the property T, I might use "truth" to refer collectively to those Ts. And this exercise to clarify between us whether or not you attach any further meaning to "truth." As in, there is such a thing as truth. I hold there is not. I hold there is no such thing as truth, and the word is properly understood as an abstract general collective noun referring only to the property T which is only a property of individual Ps. If you disagree, please define "truth." — tim wood

Redefining it in semantic terms is a deflationary or minimalist move. This aligns with the disquotational theory of truth (e.g. “’Snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white”), which claims that truth is not a substantive property, but merely a linguistic device for generalizing over propositions.

However, this doesn’t rebut the charge of relativism — it obscures it. If you say that no proposition is true in itself but only because we say it is T, then we’re right back to Protagoras:

"What is true is what we decide is true."

The sleight of hand here is that he avoids making a metaphysical claim about truth by shifting into a formal, semantic register — but this move itself carries a metaphysical implication, namely that truth has no independent reality beyond the operation of language and consensus.

You ask for a definition of "truth" as though it's a settled term — but even among philosophers, it remains contested. Some adopt deflationary or minimalist theories (like yours), others argue for correspondence, coherence, or pragmatic theories, and still others defend truth as a transcendental condition for meaning or knowledge. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy lists over a dozen major theories. So we can't assume it's a straightforward term reducible to a single semantic function.

If we reduce 'truth' to nothing but the property T of a proposition P — and then define T solely in terms of human stipulation — then we haven't solved anything; we've just defined truth out of existence, and replaced it with consensus or coherence within some human framework. But that doesn’t answer the philosophical question. It dodges it.

The absence of inherent purpose doesn’t necessarily imply arbitrariness; it simply means that meaning is not built into the fabric of reality, but must be created by conscious beings. This distinction often gets lost in emotional reactions to, shall we call them 'naturalistic' worldviews. — Tom Storm

I think it's indubitably true that the apparent conflict between the idea of ‘grand design’, on the one hand, and the meme of fortuitous origins, on the other, is a major cultural fault-line—no matter where one stands on the spectrum of views.

Consider the famous 'foundation statement' by Richard Dawkins:

An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: ‘I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.’ I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

I certainly don’t want to defend Dawkins’ Intelligent Design opponents. But many—myself included—have observed that Dawkins makes a kind of category error here. The God whose existence he sets out to refute is framed as a superhuman technician, a cosmic engineer meticulously assembling wings, flagella, and other biological contraptions. But this is far removed from the God of classical theism, who is not a being within the order of things at all, but the necessary ground of being itself. Creation, in this tradition, is not the manual assembly of parts, but the ongoing act of sustaining the whole of existence (per the Ever-Present Origin of Jean Gebser.)

But the thing is, as soon as the most rudimentary organisms begin to form, something else appears with them: the rudimentary emergence of meaning. How so? Because the very hallmark of an organism is that it maintains itself in distinction from its environment. It enacts a boundary—not merely spatial, but functional and existential. It resists entropy, resists the universal drift toward dissolution, by preserving internal order and homeostasis. In doing so, it expresses negentropy: it is for itself, in a basic but decisive sense. This is the first flicker of seity—the incipient sense of a self. Not yet a mind, not yet a subject in the rich psychological sense, but already more than mere matter. Already something that matters to itself.

So even if it's true, as some argue, that meaning is “created by conscious beings,” we ought to recognize that this act of creation is not simply a matter of conscious intention. It arises from a much deeper orientation—one that begins, however humbly, with life itself. That, I think, is the current framework for the debate.

My question then would be: what makes materialism so appealing and intuitive? Why is the idea that 'everything is collocations of atoms, ensembles of balls of stuff,' or that 'things are what they are made of,' intuitive? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Situated historically, modern materialism arose as a consequence of, and part of, Rennaissance humanism, allied with intellectual movements such as the emerging nominalism and the proto-empiricism of Francis Bacon and other early modern scientists. So much of early modern science defined itself in opposition to 'the Schoolmen' and scholastic realism. Recall Hume's closing words in his Treatise: 'Take any book of scholastic philosophy....and burn it.' The emphasis became the physical world, the world knowable by the senses, to hell with metaphysics. And looking at the material consequences of those shifts, its proponents may well feel vindicated.

Hence, the common sensibles of size, shape, quantity, etc. get considered "most real." We can see this in Galileo, Locke, etc. with the demotion of color to a "less real" (merely mental) "secondary quality," while shape and motion, etc. remain fully real "primary quantities." In scholastic terminology, we might say this is because color is only the formal object of sight, and can be confirmed and experienced by no other faculty. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Absolutely central. The division of primary and secondary attributes, allied with Descartes' division of extended matter and incorporeal mind, lays the foundation of modernity proper.

The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. — Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, Pp35-36

Next, we get smallism, the idea that all facts about large things are reducible to facts about smaller parts. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What we got was atomism, as originally propounded by the Greek atomists Leucippus and Democritus. The etymology of 'atom' is 'uncuttable' or 'undivisible'. Atomism provided a means by which the One, which is similarly not composed of parts or division, was able to account for the manifold world of change and decay. The Atom was the eternal and imperishable, but now at the very heart of matter itself. This was the subject of the classical prose poem De Rerum Natura, Lucretius, which is still on curricula to this day (indeed subject of an undergraduate unit that I took.) Lucretius work was seized on by the Enlightenment philosophes - Baron D'Holbach 'all I see is bodies in motion'.

The issue for me is the claim that there are so-called absolute truths, that there are propositions that are true without reference to some, or any, criteria or standard that gives the proposition its truth. And it's turtles.... That is, in any final analysis, what is true is what we decide is true. — tim wood

That's close to the Protagorean view — that truth is always relative to the perceiver or to the community's standards of justification ('man is the measure of all things"). There are only truths for us. But this view has profound implications, not least of which is that it undermines the possibility of truth as something we discover rather than merely decide. But If all truth is decided rather than discovered, then the proposition “truth is what we decide” must also be just a decision, not a truth, and one that we're under no rational obligation to accept. And if it’s presented as a universal fact, that stands in contradiction to relativism, as we're obliged to accept it.

Furthermore the whimsical example of the six-pack of beer made no reference to the absolute, but only to necessary facts - that given six of something, the subtraction of one will invariably leave five. I can't see how that can be a matter of controversy.

in the accretion of truths some are buried so deeply they are no longer candidates for debate or even consciously made; they're simply presupposed, becoming buried foundations for thinking. Which is a difference from axioms because axioms usually made explicit. — tim wood

And this cuts against your earlier claim - If some truths are so deeply embedded that they’re not decided but rather constitutive of meaning, then they’re not “true because we say so.” They’re true as conditions of intelligibility - already a step away from relativism (and near in meaning to the 'hinge propositions' we're discussing.)

Modern discourse often shies away from talk of ‘absolute truth’ — it’s seen as naïve, dogmatic, or even authoritarian. But that taboo has become a dogma in its own right! It is true that articulating any notion of the absolute is difficult — perhaps even impossible in a fully transparent or complete way — but it is part of what philosophy is about.

By contrast, the idea that truth is what we decide it is, sounds superficially tolerant but collapses into incoherence if pushed. If we genuinely believe that all truths are relative to individual or social standards, we lose traction in anything beyond personal preference. Disagreement becomes either a clash of taste or a power struggle, not a pursuit of understanding.

So I think we have to ask ourselves — not just in epistemology but across our culture — what’s lost when we treat truth as if it were merely a social construct. At the very least, philosophy ought to keep open the question of whether some truths are not of our own making, even if they are hard to articulate.

That is very much the thrust of Thomas Nagel’s The Last Word, where he defends the idea that reason has a kind of intrinsic authority that transcends subjective or cultural standpoints. He takes aim at the creeping relativism in contemporary thought that treats logic, objectivity, and justification as mere social conventions or evolutionary adaptations or instruments of power. Nagel argues that this position ends up undermining itself, because the relativist must rely on the very norms of truth and logic that they’re trying to dismiss. His point isn’t that everything is absolutely true in some metaphysical sense, but that there are certain truths — logical, mathematical, even ethical — which are binding not because we agree on them, but because they compel assent through reason itself. Facts that reason compels us to accept.

What stayed with me was the depth of humility and kindness which I had witnessed. — Punshhh

It's very interesting, isn't it, that a meeting with the Guru is called 'darshan', meaning 'auspicious vision'. It is exactly that sense which can be conveyed by a glance or a single word. It's the all-important sense of actual presence. And also that all of the principle schools of Hindu philosophy are called 'darshana'.

Thankyou Tom :pray:

I'd be interested in seeing someone try to crystallize what this looks like in practice — Tom Storm

During my mis-spent youth, I blundered into a menial job at Sydney’s Mater Misericordiae hospital as ‘causality wardsman’. (I say ‘blundered’ because I had approached the dole office in hope of receiving unemployment benefits and was instead sent to work there - a salutary lesson.) A Catholic teaching hospital, it was staffed in part by fully-costumed Catholic nuns in their wimples and polished black work shoes. The Matron was the formidable Sister Mary, a stern superior, overseeing a busy emergency department, where you never know what the next ambulance would disgorge.

One morning’s ambulance was an aged couple in a very poor state. Apparently the lady had been sitting near a radiator, when a gust blew a sheet of paper onto it, catching fire. She was wearing a rayon nightie which immediately exploded into flames. Her husband, still in his dressing gown, had burns to his hands and neck from trying to extinguish the flames. She was immediately sent to theatres in a very grave condition, he stayed in the Ward while his burns were being treated by casualty staff. The old fellow was in a state of profound distress, needless to say. After some time, word came back from theatres - the poor old dear had not made it (I’m guessing the shock killed her.) The old fellow just dissolved into sobs. And Sister Mary put her arms around him, held him and (I’m sure) wept with him. And that, I felt, was ‘how it would look in practice’.

For me, this both was and wasn’t a conversion experience. It made me very aware of that Catholic sense of healing mission - Mater Misericordiae means ‘Mother of Mercy’, and it’s an historical fact that the Church was deeply involved in the formation of the whole idea of hospitals. I also became very much aware of the serenity and selflessness of many of those sisters, it was practically palpable. It didn’t draw me to the institution of Catholicism (I had been born into a post-Christian Anglican family but am estranged from some major doctrinal aspects of Christianity.) But it did instill in me a deep respect. Decades later, someone very near and dear to me underwent major cancer surgery at that Hospital, and that same feeling was still there.

A fitting epilogue for this blackest of episodes in official malfeasance.

Example of such a "necessary truth," please — tim wood

That if I have six beers in the fridge, and you come and drink one, there will be five remaining, everything else being equal. But to provide more context for Thomas Nagel's expression, in particular, the paragraph from which it is taken was:

The only form that genuine reasoning can take consists in seeing the validity of the arguments, in virtue of what they say. As soon as one tries to step outside of such thoughts, one loses contact with their true content. And one cannot be outside and inside them at the same time: If one thinks in logic, one cannot simultaneously regard those thoughts as mere psychological dispositions, however caused or however biologically grounded. If one decides that some of one's psychological dispositions are, as a contingent matter of fact, reliable methods of reaching the truth (as one may with perception, for example), then in doing so one must rely on other thoughts that one actually thinks, without regarding them as mere dispositions. One cannot embed all one's reasoning in a psychological theory, including the reasonings that have led to that psychological theory. The epistemological buck must stop somewhere. By this I mean not that there must be some premises that are forever unrevisable but, rather, that in any process of reasoning or argument there must be some thoughts that one simply thinks from the inside--rather than thinking of them as biologically programmed dispositions. — Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p 137

So he's saying that the attempt to rationalise what I think are being described as 'hinge propositions' is to view them from the outside - to evaluate them in some other terms, such as biologically-programmed dispositions. (We see a lot of that here.)

This is a rich and dense essay with many profound insights, and elaborates on a theme I've been exploring albeit with considerably greater erudition than I am able to bring to bear.

Truth is primarily “in the intellect” for medieval thinkers.(12) Hence, truth is not primarily a property of “propositions” if this is to mean “abstract objects existing outside the mind.” Nor is truth primarily about language. Linguistic utterances are signs of truth in the intellect. Utterances are acts, yet it is substances—things—that primarily possess being, and so it is people (and God) who primarily possess truth. Since the human intellect is “moved by things,” it is “measured by them.” (13) There is an ontological truth in things (their correspondence to the divine intellect). — Moliere

This 'union of knower and known' is a theme which is found across many classical forms of philosophical spirituality. The way I've been seeking to frame it is in terms of union in the sense implied in the etymology of 'yoga', 'harnessing of the soul to the One.' So it's a state of being, participatory rather than propositional, and for that reason, also a radical shift in perspective.

I'm cautious about 'things possessing being', bearing in mind the term given here as 'thing' was originally 'ouisia', which is nearer in meaning to 'being' that what we think of as 'substance'. The expression in medieval philosophy was 'creatures' i.e. 'created beings', hardly synonymous with 'things'.

The goal of Dante’s pilgrimage, and of all mankind, is ultimately to know God, which is also to love and be in union with God. — Moliere

Suggestive of Diotoma's ladder of divine ascent in the Symposium. But doesn't a distinction need to be made between the erotic and the (merely) carnal? After all, in Plato, reason is the faculty of the soul which harnesses and subordinates the appetites and spiritedness. While I appreciate the deployment of the term ‘carnal knowledge’ to highlight the intimate, transformative aspect of knowing in Dante, in our cultural climate, the word 'carnal' carries associations that are far removed from Dante’s theologically infused vision of eros.

So again, here is the vision of the older conception of knowledge as participation, being-with or being-in, rather than knowing about or representing. It is presented as a transformation, not an acquisition (a Taoist saying comes to mind, 'in learning the arts and sciences, every day something is acquired; in learning the Great Way, every day something is lost.' Oh, and that reference to transcendent apriorism is especially appreciated - it's something I've been intuitively groping for without knowing how to describe it. I've found the original PhD online.)

The problem I have with the essay is that it fails to distinguish between a notion of necessary truth as a relative, contingently stable structure of meaning (Wittgenstein’s hinges, forms of life and language games) and a notion of necessary truth as a platonic transcendental, which is how Godel views the necessary ground of mathematical axioms. — Joshs

I see your point. So could you say that Wittgenstein's hinges can in some sense be situated, or understood in terms of lived existence and 'language games' whereas Godel's platonic transcendentals simply are, without any reference to context or situatedness?

I’ve been reviewing YouTube documentaries on current Chinese technology and architecture and it seems to me they’re streaking ahead. Of course some of them might be CCP made or backed, it’s often hard to tell nowadays, as the voiceovers and probably the script are AI generated. But there is a huge amount happening. I’m sure Chinese EVs, BYD in particular, are going to eat Tesla’s breakfast any day now.

I have the depressing thought that if China does decide to move on Taiwan, what will happen is, the Internet and most of the public utilities in many countries will suddenly go dark. Electronic payment gateways and so on. Social paralysis and anarchy would quickly ensue. The invasion, or re-absorption, of Taiwan would be done and dusted before anyone could know about it. Then it would be, ‘hey let’s negotiate and we might turn the lights back on.’ As for military action, I think Trump and his dim witted anchor man will have very little traction against any such hostile action from the Chinese side, they’re too preoccupied with infighting and culture wars.

The parallel between these seemingly distinct philosophical insights suggests that the limits of internal justification are not accidental features of particular systems but necessary conditions for systematic thought. — Moliere

Splendid composition.

Isn't this rather a long-winded way of saying that there are indeed necessary truths? That necessary truths can't be, and don't need to be, justified in other terms - that's what makes them necessary. As Thomas Nagel remarks on an essay on the sovereignty of reason, 'the epistemic buck must stop somewhere'; there are thoughts we can't 'get outside of', or judge according to some other criterion, without thereby undermining their necessity ('contingent cultural and biological practices').

I think what's interesting about this whole line of thought is why it's interesting. Why is it we presume that foundational ('hinge') propositions can be or need to be justified by further analysis, and what are the implications of their not being so justified?

'You got no cards, Zelenskyy' ~ Donald Trump, Oval Office, April.

...assessing the engineering feasibility... — karl stone

So, do you have any information on the results of that assessment?

“Hey boss we’ve melted another drill head!”

“Don’t tell me that, that’s five in the last three months! And they’re $13 million a piece. You gotta do better!”

“Look it’s hot down there even without the gas explosions and plate fractures. It's like trying to tap into hell."

there are multiple deterministic interpretations of qm too so we can keep the beauty of determinism anyway. — flannel jesus

As a matter of free choice!

I didn't say them. — flannel jesus

That was what I took this to mean:

I think a surprising amount of physics is based on abstract, apparently-subjective judgements of physicists. — flannel jesus

In a deterministic system, every event has its place in the system, every event has a clear explanation and follows from the way the system is. In an indeterministic system, there's chaos because "stuff just happens". — flannel jesus

But as I’ve said, it’s not an all-or-nothing proposition. As I said already, if the PSR says that everything happens for a reason, that reason might be something like the boundary conditions of a system, or the lawful structure that constrains the range of outcomes—not necessarily a single, fully specified event that had to happen and no other. Like, something will fall down, not up, but where it falls might still contain an all-important element of chance.

In other words, the reason why something happens might be that even though a system is lawful, it might still be open-ended, rather than strictly deterministic. There is sufficient reason why some outcomes are possible and others are not, but that doesn't mean every outcome is rigidly predetermined. Otherwise how could novelty ever enter the picture? How could anything happen?

I read it decades ago but I’ve only recently come to see what it’s about

You might find a schoolbook example of a platonic riddle relevant in the context:

A man (not a man)
Throws a stone (not a stone)
At a bird (not a bird)
On a tree (not a tree)

And the answer to the ride is that a eunuch throws a piece of pumice at a bat hanging on to a reed - everything in it is not as it appears.

That was given in Russell’s HWP as example of Socratic essentialism and not being taken in by appearances.

I’m quite familiar with Freudian terminology. It’s simply that it’s misplaced in the context. The paper you cite states or implies that it’s a ‘feasibility study’ into magma energy. Presumably subsequent papers might have shown that despite the abundance of that energy, the cost of converting it, storing it and transmitting made it unviable. I often read that enough solar energy falls on the earth every day to meet all possible power needs, but likewise the cost of converting and storing it have to be taken into account (although obviously considerable progress has been made.) But overall, can’t see the point of the op - if it is that geothermal energy is an abundant energy source that could solve the entire world’s energy problems, but hasn’t, because of our collective ‘death wish’ - then sorry, not buying. I’d pick another topic.

My question is why? — karl stone

Well I’m not sure but pretty certain it ain’t due to Freudian repression. Probably more to do with cold hard economics.

If you google ‘geothermal energy’ there is plenty of information around, with live projects in many countries. On cursory reading, the main obstacle is, as always, cost per unit of useable energy. As for the NASA/Sandia Labs instance, the oracle saith: ‘Geothermal energy is a proven source of constant, clean, and potentially very large-scale energy. Sandia National Laboratories and other institutions, including those with NASA collaborations, have been at the forefront of geothermal research and development for decades. However, the idea of "demonstrating the feasibility of practically limitless quantities" in 1982 as a single event by NASA/Sandia is an oversimplification. The feasibility of geothermal power had already been established, and the ongoing research was focused on advancing the technology and expanding its reach. What was being explored and advanced by institutions like Sandia and the Department of Energy (DOE) in the 1980s was improving the efficiency, expanding the types of geothermal resources that could be exploited (e.g., Enhanced Geothermal Systems - EGS), and reducing costs.‘ And that work is ongoing but all indications are geothermal is by no means a silver-bullet solution to energy requirements.

What any of this has to do with either Freud or Schopenhauer is beyond me, though.

I think the key is, that it has to mean something. We have to have some skin in the game otherwise what does it matter? Who prevails in an internet debate?

Your suggestion to redefine knowledge as simply “true information” is understandable—it sidesteps Gettier problems by removing belief and justification from the equation. But I think the cost of doing so is too high. What we lose is the whole human dimension of knowing.

To know something, in any meaningful sense, is not merely to possess a piece of information that happens to be true. It’s to grasp it, to stand behind it, and if needs be to to act on it. That’s why belief and justification were part of the traditional definition: not because they’re philosophically tidy, but because they reflected what it means to know in actual life. We’re not passive containers of truths—we’re engaged agents who must assess, trust, challenge, and risk loss in the pursuit of knowledge.

That’s why Gettier cases are troubling. They show that something can check the boxes—justified, true, believed—and still feel wrong. The problem isn’t just with the definition; it’s with how knowledge is entangled with our perspective, our stakes, and our vulnerability to error. You can’t just treat it like a Boolean switch.

Consider real cases, like the Boston Globe’s investigation of abuse in the Catholic Church (Spotlight, 2015), or the exposure of toxic chemicals by whistleblowers (Dark Waters, 2019). These were not about sorting information into “true” or “false” categories. They were prolonged struggles against doubt, suppression, and institutional deception with large likelihoods of failure. In these cases, the truth mattered because the truth had been hidden, and people had to believe in it, justify it, and fight for it. That’s not just “true information” but also deeply meaningful (indeed, we’re learning we’re all likely to have PFAS chemicals in our bloodstream as a consequence of the latter.)

So yes, your revised definition may dodge Gettier problems. But it does so by eliminating the very thing that gives knowledge its urgency and its value. It’s like solving a paradox in ethics by redefining “good” to mean “pleasurable”—it may simplify the problem, but it abandons what was at stake.

there are multiple deterministic interpretations of qm too so we can keep the beauty of determinism anyway. — flannel jesus

I'm flummoxed as to why you or anyone would find deteminism beautiful. But then, you just said that physics is 'determined by subjective requirements'.....

Philosophy is limited to discourse, and so must be the subjects of its questions. Yet a third version would insist on a distinction between "answer" and "subject": thus, we can answer a philosophical question within the realm of philosophical discourse, but that doesn't mean that the subject of such discourse is also necessarily linguistic. — J

The most direct way of responding would be that truth can be distinguished from delusion or falsehood. That truth is what remains when delusion is overcome.

I don't know how many persons of Indian descent you know, but a common name in India is 'Satya' (I worked for one as a tech writer for a few years. I suppose Latin equivalents for such a name might be 'Felicity' and 'Verity'.) Of course many individuals thus named do not therefore exemplify or embody 'truth' but what the name denotes or conveys is the lived quality of truth, 'one in whom delusion no longer holds sway'. It conveys something of the virtuous quality of truth, which is hard to discern, not because it is a difficult concept, but because of the all-pervading and taken-for-granted existence of delusion. According to ancient philosophy, delusion is kind of the default for the human condition, and philosophy the pursuit of the antidote.

Those were the days.

most people can count up to ten, but only a few can deal with infinities & differentials. — Gnomon

But any normal human can converse in rational language, which relies on abstractions.

as you implied, Universals may be an overarching third class of knowables, and yet we only know them via rational extrapolation from objective observation. They are not obvious, but must be discovered (revealed) by means of rational work. — Gnomon

I've quoted this previously but it bears repeating:

Forms...are radically distinct, and in that sense ‘apart,’ in that they are not themselves sensible things. With our eyes we can see large things, but not largeness itself; healthy things, but not health itself. The latter, in each case, is an idea, an intelligible content, something to be apprehended by thought rather than sense, a ‘look’ not for the eyes but for the mind. This is precisely the point Plato is making when he characterizes forms as the reality of all things. “Have you ever seen any of these with your eyes?—In no way … Or by any other sense, through the body, have you grasped them? I am speaking about all things such as largeness, health, strength, and, in one word, the reality [οὐσίας, ouisia] of all other things, what each thing is” (Phd. 65d4–e1). Is there such a thing as health? Of course there is. Can you see it? Of course not. This does not mean that the forms are occult entities floating ‘somewhere else’ in ‘another world,’ a ‘Platonic heaven.’ It simply says that the intelligible identities which are the reality, the whatness, of things are not themselves physical things to be perceived by the senses, but must be grasped by reason. — Eric D Perl, Thinking Being, p28

So much of this has actually filtered through to the way we understand the world today - after all the Greek philosophers are foundational to Western culture. So to understand principles, to see why things are the way they are, is to see a 'higher reality' in the sense that it gives you a firmer grasp of reality than those who merely see particular circumstances. Indeed the scientific attitude is grounded in it, with the caveat that all of Plato's writings convey a qualitative dimension generally absent from post-Galilean science.