I would have thought that whether a sentence which could be said to be in the propositional mode is assertoric or not depends on whether the sentence is being or has been used or mentioned.

I don't see a problem with fictional characters asserting stuff—fictional character/ fictional assertion.

As Michael argues, color is not within the external object, but it is within brain. — Hanover

Of course the experience or the appearance of colour is not within the object. So it all comes down to what you mean by saying that colour is or is not in the object.

It's 'percepts not 'precepts'. Michael has been arguing that colour is nothing but "mental percepts". I formed the impression you were supporting this claim. If I am mistaken then my bad.

Then red is more than merely percepts.

How would you know the image contains no red if red were nothing more than a percept?

:up:

Red things are not in the head even if they do not look red unless their being viewed. — creativesoul

:up: Right, how could it be sensible to say anything looks like anything outside the context of being seen?

I'm amazed that some in this thread seem to think there is a fact of the matter concerning whether unseen things are coloured. Of course in ordinary parlance it is said they are, but that doesn't mean that what is being claimed is that unseen objects look red or any other colour.

An unseen tomato is not invisible per se. An unseen tomato does not look red it is red.

I have no doubt that with enough passion you will get there. I hope you have a speedy recovery from Covid.

That is only awareness of quantity. — Athena

Yes, it is only a basis, not linguistically elaborated obviously.

I agree that many dogs are very smart. It's hard for us, an animal capable of abstracting and reflecting on our experiences, an ability which seems to be reliant on symbolic language, to understand animal intelligence on its own terms, and not to underestimate it. No doubt we have it there somewhere.

:up: It is quite a few years since I read A Man Without Words. It seems reasonable to think people and some animals can conceptualize prelinguistically in the form of imagery.

So "apprehending forms", in the sense of prelinguistic recognition would amount to prelinguistic conceptualization.

:up:

The game of Twenty Questions is a good example. Ideally, every question cuts the number of remaining choices in half. And that way we cut through a world of possibilities with an exponentialised efficiency. — apokrisis

Nice ordinary example!

But that is not the same as counting. Just the reason why we struggle with holding number strings longer than seven in our working memories. — apokrisis

That makes sense to me. I have come across reports that suggest some animals can learn to do basic small number counting. They may be apocryphal.

I was addressing the quoted text from Perl. I haven't read his work but have received the impression that "apprehending form via the rational intellect" was the thought in play there. I guess it depends on whether you think "apprehending form" means recognizing it or reflecting on it. I would agree with you that the latter requires symbolic language and I don't think that is at all controversial.

Numbers are then just the form that information takes at the level of a complete semiotic abstraction in terms of the self that is aiming to regulate its world by the business of constructing states of constraint. — apokrisis

Yes, "numbers" are abstractions. But I think animals have a sense of number. The word "form" in information seems to reflect the relationship between information and form. Form and information and number all primordially rely on cognition and recognition of difference and sameness or similarity and pattern.

Forms are ideas, not in the sense of concepts or abstractions, but in that they are realities apprehended by thought rather than by sense. — Perl, Thinking Being

Rational thought or the cognition, the apprehension of pattern, it is grounded in? Animals obviously recognize forms. Should we say they are rational?

I meant more when the larger reality bites.

There is no "higher" reality in a spiritual sense, nor a "true" reality (in contrast to falsehood) in a logical sense, that exists "behind" or "beneath" my beliefs about reality. Belief is reality. There is no difference. — Noble Dust

What you believe may indeed be your reality, but it's possible to become unstuck.

So, you think this thread is about the distinction between appearance and existence? If so, I don't agree. It has mostly been argued by the antirealists that there is no sense in saying that objects are this or that colour, but that is a different and merely semantic issue, whereas there is a cogent distinction between objects and their appearances.

The word 'colour' is commonly used to refer to both objects and experiences of objects, and it is not a matter of it being appropriate to use the word only in one context or the other, but the word is appropriately used in both, although obviously in different senses.

but appearance still requires a viewer. — Wayfarer

Appearance of anything requires a viewer. So where is the distinction?

Primary qualities or attributes are just those which are measurable, and, crucially, those that are said to be mind-independent. A hue may look different to different observers - although that’s hard to tell - but any value that can be measured objectively is not subject to opinion. — Wayfarer

Colour is precisely measurable, so this criterion does not work. @Banno is correct that the 'primary/ secondary' distinction is outmoded.

No, the subtly denigrating term "moral crusade" --- implying a holy mission? --- characterization of ↪Wayfarer's posts, was yours, not mine. I said he was just doing Philosophy. — Gnomon

You said:

And you accuse ↪Wayfarer of ambiguity? Hasn't philosophy itself, from the beginning, been a moral/ethical crusade? :nerd: — Gnomon

I do see Wayfarer as prosecuting a moral crusade, so yeah, I did introduce the term. It was you that suggested that the whole of philosophy has been a moral crusade and I asked you for examples and to explain why you see the chosen example(s) as constituting a moral crusade.


Also it now, looking back, seems I did not misread you in saying that you suggested that all philosophy is ambiguous:

When was the last time you saw a philosopher present an idea that was not ambiguous to someone? — Gnomon

How do we use a basic intuition to avoid an infinite regress of rules? — Joshs

We simply "get it" without having to rely on a set of rules. Sets of rules are formalizations of "getting it".

I think the salient point is that there can be multiple reductive explanations from different perspectives. So, to say that I went to the shop because I was thirsty is a reductive explanation, as much as saying I went to the shop because of certain neural activity is. Such different explanations do not contradict, and should not exclude, one another.

So for example, the epiphenomenalist might say consciousness does no work, just "goes along for the ride", so to speak, but that would be an illegitimate elimination of one reasonable way of explaining human behavior. I think what puzzles people is that we cannot combine the two explanations or achieve any absolute perspective which would eliminate one and retain the other. 'Either/ or' thinking seems to generally dominate the human mind.

How exactly does Spinoza's conception demonstrate why the experiences produced by our bodies should synch up with the evolutionary history of our perceptual organs? If everything has an experiential/mental side to it, why is our phenomenological horizon rooted to our body in the way it seems to be? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sorry, I don't really understand the question. That said, even in the absence of understanding the question I can ask why they should not "sync up". Also, Spinoza as I read him does not claim that "everything has an experiential side to it". If you want to explore that thought take a look at Whitehead's Process and Reality.

:up:

I'm not sure what your reference to meaning and classification seeks to highlight, but my point is that intuition does matter when it comes to rule-following. If we had no basic intuitions, then each rule would require further rules setting out how it is to be followed—infinite regress follows.

Perhaps I'm in the wrong thread—what exactly do you think is the problem this thread has been trying to address?

Everything is determined by particles and how they interact, so no one ever goes and gets a drink "because they feel thirsty" (at least not in the causally efficacious sense of "cause.") — Count Timothy von Icarus

Feeling thirsty can be considered to be a purely physical process. It's not that mental processes are "along for the ride" if you think of the mental and physical accounts as two ways of looking at the one thing, as Spinoza did. On that account the idea of the mental causing the physical or the physical causing the mental is merely a category error.

Exactly...the reductionists seek to analyze the physical in terms of the mental (idealism) or the mental in terms of the physical (eliminative physicalism). Tendentious thinking prevails on both sides.

The point being that counting is intuitive...the act enacts a logic which is inherent to animal cognition, so no need to think of it as rule-following except in its more complex elaborations. But even there the foundational intuitive logic is the underpinning.

The logic of adding goes back to grouping objects, animals, people, together.

You might say rule-following has its genesis and foundation in pattern recognition and mimicry.

As far as I know science never purported to be able to directly study anyone's experiences. It generally acknowledges that its ambit of investigation, its whole data source, is restricted to what reliably appears to the human senses.

Right. When "science" undermines realism it undermines itself, and those who do not notice this live in an alternate reality where their perceptions are good enough when it comes to "science" and untrustworthy otherwise.* — Leontiskos

:up: 'Real' refers to whatever we all reliably experience in common ways via the senses. including (internal) bodily sensations. Hence colours, just as shapes and objects, are not imaginary, but real.

Whether the word 'colour' refers to experiences or to the dispositions of objects to cause more or less reliable colour experiences, is a matter of stipulation, Both usages are intelligible. And yet @Michael seems to believe that there is some determinate fact of the matter that could enable us to declare one usage "true" and the other "false".

Or fortunate... depending on perspective.

I don't see the point in examining our notions of identity under the light (or more aptly in the darkness) afforded by thought experiments which utilize scenarios that are most likely impossible.

The objection is presumably something like, "Oh, well the difference is her memory, and her memory is part of her brain, and her brain is part of her body. So it is a bodily change after all." But this is a strange and non-commonsensical way to talk. It is really an elaborate theory of the relation between grandma's lack of recognition and the putative underlying physical causes, and when we talk about "body" we aren't usually talking about such things. For example, you wouldn't go home to your family and tell them, "Grandma experienced a bodily change today." — Leontiskos

It is both commonsensical and commonplace to attribute memory loss to physical changes in the brain, so it's not clear what point you are trying to make. I would also point out that there would be differences in body language between the granny who recognizes me and the granny who doesn't.

"The human body is the best picture of the human soul"; and memories are embodied. — 180 Proof

Yes, the idea of the body being the best picture of the soul seems right to me. I am also reminded of Spinoza's "the soul is the idea of the body".

And what else can the idea of hylomorphism pertain to but the body?

the soul is the interconnectedness of those experiences, that gives rise to a sense of self which is the subject. — Lionino

Is this not just the continuity afforded by memory?

We can also say that, for instance, a tree has a persistent identity over time. I plant a tree when a child and then seventy years later I see the tree has grown into a mighty Eucalypt. The tree is a concatenation of self-regulating processes including metabolism. The material constituents are constantly changing, and the form is constantly morphing, but nonetheless it is distinct from all other trees. Shall we then say with Aristotle that trees and all other living things are, on account of hylomorphic perdurance, ensouled?

I'm not the one that raised the question of ambiguity in this thread. So, it should be incumbent upon the raiser to give examples. — Gnomon

I said that Wayfarer does not present an unambiguous position. It looks like I misread you to be suggesting philosophy is commonly ambiguous, whereas I now see you were suggesting it has largely been a moral crusade. So, my bad for hasty reading.

In any case I don't agree with the latter. Apart from moral philosophy, the focus has mostly been on ethics, in the sense of how best to live, with the focus not principally on relations with others, but on personal flourishing and/or getting it right epistemologically speaking.

And I didn't say Wayfarer's philosophy is "rife with them" (ambiguities) but rather that I didn't think philosophy generally is.

Firstly I haven't said there are no ambiguous claims from philosophers, but I don't believe philosophy in general is rife with them. So that said, how about you give a good example or two of what you take to be an ambiguous claim from a well-known philosopher.

Berkeley had a clear position. According to him the explanation for the persistence of things and the fact we all perceive the same things was that God has them in mind. If you want to participate in discussion and debate that purpose is defeated if you can't or won't declare and argue for a clear and consistent position. I'm not saying that discussion and debate is what philosophy is all about, just that it you want to do that, then have something unambiguous to present.

What @Wayfarer does on here seems to me to be more social commentary, a kind of moral crusade, than philosophy.

OK, I think what you say there is uncontroversial and perfectly compatible with realisms (other than naive realism).

The only ambiguity there is "a kind of inherent reality". I presume you are referring to a naive notion of reality, and if so I agree with you that thinking that the world is in itself just as we perceive it to be probably is the default, unexamined response. But I would suggest that anyone with a basic level of philosophical training or understanding would not fall for that one.

So, it seems that we have cycled around to the familiar point where it appears that we are not disagreeing about anything. But then I won't be surprised if the cycle repeats because you seem to vacillate as to whether you want to make an ontological claim or merely an epistemological one.

It is one thing to say that things unperceived are not the same as we perceive them to be and altogether another to claim that when unperceived they don't exist.