R. Scott Bakker has a neat paper on this question.

Given a sufficiently convergent cognitive biology, we might suppose that aliens would likely find themselves perplexed by many of the same kinds of problems that inform our traditional and contemporary philosophical debates. In particular, we can presume that ‘humanoid’ aliens would be profoundly stumped by themselves, and that they would possess a philosophical tradition organized around ‘hard problems’ falling out of their inability to square their scientificself-understanding with their traditional and/or intuitive self-understanding. As speculative as any such consideration of ‘alien philosophy’ must be, it provides a striking, and perhaps important, way to recontextualize contemporary human debates regarding cognition and consciousness.

I rarely agree with Bakker on philosophy, but he is normally thought provoking

Do we experience the cat or the concept?

A good question.

If sensation were not any different from imagination, and if belief, memory, etc. were dominant, it would be hard to explain why people often listen to songs they know by heart, watch their favorite movies very many times, or how cooks, prostitutes, theme parks, etc. all stay in business (since presumably visiting them multiple times doesn't do much to affect our beliefs about them, or perhaps even our memories). Likewise, there are all sorts of neurological disorders whose affects seem largely contained to concept recollection or word recall. Yet such disorders are not the same thing as being deaf or blind. As far as can be ascertained, it seems possible for the visual field to be largely unaffected (e.g. people can draw what they see, and navigate the world) even as a person losses the ability to attach concepts (e.g. "what a thing is and is used for") to what they experience.

Sometimes it is argued that such disorders show that the all external objects must be "constructed," or must be "representations" of some sort. I don't find this conclusive at all. To the contrary, I think the most obvious reason to suppose that man has the capacity for picking out plants from rocks, a branch above from the sky, or a tiger from the jungle background, is that these things exist, and that it is very important for us to recognize them directly in sensation. So, while "what is experienced" might be, in some sense, the interaction of the sense organ and ambient environment (that latter of which mediates through its interactions with the objects sensed), this does not preclude a strong "sense realism," since this sort of mediation is hardly unique in physical interactions. Indeed, all physical interactions might be said to involve some sort of mediation, yet "everything is received in the manner of the receiver," does not presuppose "everything is received as representation."

On a related note, I've come to have the opinion that a great many "escapes from representationalism" are just replacing one form of representationalism (normally a caricature of early modern versions) with some alternative form.

Enter science proper, and stuff gets real interesting.

What is "science proper?"

To me, it's always seemed a bitter irony that just as there is an explosion in scientific progress (helping to drive the "Great Divergence" of the 19th century whereby Europe became much wealthier and militarily stronger than Asia), much philosophy of science seems to become incredibly dismal, consumed with skepticism. Even today, "philosophy of physics," "philosophy of biology," "philosophy of complexity," or "philosophy of economics," are filled with interesting ideas, whereas "philosophy of science" often takes the form of dull reductions of science to "observation + modeling," scientific understanding to "prediction," and knowledge of causes to "more prediction."

In my understanding "matter" is a concept employed by Aristotle to underpin the observed temporal continuity of bodies, allowing for a body to have an identity.

While it's true that for Aristotle "matter is what stays the same," when there is change, the "matter" and "substance" of Berkeley's era had changed dramatically from their ancient or medieval usages. The entire idea of "materialism" makes no sense from an Aristotelian framework. It would amount to claiming the whole world is just potency, with no actuality, and so nothing at all. But the term "matter" by Berkeley's era is more often conceived as a sort of subsistent substrate (often atomic) of which spatial, corporeal bodies are composed, such that their properties are a function of their matter (which would make no sense under the older conception of matter as potential). By way of contrast, Aristotelians would speak of the "material intellect" of the soul, the matter of abstract mathematical objects, the form of a logical argument (from whence we get "formal logic") versus its matter, the phrase "subject matter," etc.

"Idealism" ("eidos-ism") would also make no sense in the Aristotelian frame. Saying "everything is idea" would be to declare that everything is act, which would preclude change, essentially putting you back with Parmenides. This is why "idealism versus materialism" is a modern debate (although it has some loosely analogous precursors). Aristotle might be close to Berkeley in some sense, in that the world is intellect, but this is taken in a very different (and IMO far more developed) way. The redefinition of substance also looms large here, since materialism versus idealism can be framed as "everything is material versus mental substance," a distinction which required the radically different early modern notion of substance to make much sense.

Locke's matter, for instance, is closer to ancient elements than Aristotle's matter.

Ah, but when it comes to dealing with fascists, cannons have generally proved more effective than sticks of butter.

The current far-right's obsession with fighting seems to me to be well explained by Francis Fukuyama's employment of Nietzsche's "Last Man." In a society where everyone is given the same basic level of recognition, and where their basic biological needs are met by the welfare state, the individual loses any particular recognition (thumos). Your typical alt-right member is faced with the prospect of degenerating into Nietzsche's "Last Man." Their culture sees them primarily as consumers, and even in their own eyes they see themselves degraded into bovine consumers (perhaps a result of trends in modern education that, as C.S. Lewis put it, "produce men without chests.")

This phenomena isn't unique to the far-right. I think it explains the widespread popularity of post-apocalyptic media. The basic idea is "if everything falls apart I can actually become a hero, actually have a meaningful life," or even "war or crisis will help make me into something more heroic." And this also helps explain the phenomena of the "Manosphere," and other changes in patterns of consumption (e.g. "tactical" everything flying off the shelves, people driving off-road vehicles for their suburban commutes, etc.).

It's particularly strong in the sphere of gender politics because sex is one of the last things to be wholly commodified. Hence, sex remains a strong source of validation. And yet, as de Beauvoir points out, Hegel's lord-bondsman dialectic ends up playing out between men and woman, because the misogynist, having denigrated woman, can no longer receive meaningful recognition from her.

You also see this in complaints of the "HRification" of the workplace and schools, or "longhousing."

This search for meaning helps explain why far right circles have also surprisingly become enclaves of the humanities. From an apologetic perspective, the entire "movement's" interest in tradition and the classics would seem to offer a promising avenue for rebutting its more toxic ideas, but I think the dominant philosophy of the academy closes off such an avenue. The trend has been more to "decolonize" syllabi. Required courses might focus on social justice, but the idea that all college graduates would be at least somewhat familiar with a "canon" seems to be increasingly a dead letter.

The call to a "collective greatness" is a particularly powerful siren song if the alternative is largely a pluralistic hedonism.

I think Nietzsche's "Overman," so very popular in these circles, is itself a sort of the fever dream of the Last Man. It is to the Last Man that the goal of becoming an Overman seems so alluring.

Klima's target is how Anselm's ontological argument has been received and analyzed in contemporary thought, and he's referring to reference as it has affected ontology. Try to make it past the first sentence before finding an offending whole two words that "render the paper obsolete."

First, even if one supposes that Klima, being a medieval specialist, absolutely cannot be well acquainted with modern philosophy of language (dubious), he would no doubt be familiar with how St. Anslem's theory in particular is critiqued in terms of contemporary thought. And the critiques he is pointing to have their genesis in Russell and Frege.

Second, "paradigmatic" does not mean "popular." No interpretation of quantum mechanics is subject to more regular criticism than the original "two worlds" formulation of the Copenhagen Interpretation, yet it remains the paradigm in that it is the last theory to hold wide sway and remains the jumping off point for a wide range of alternative theories, none of which has become hegemonic. The Routledge Contemporary Introductions to Philosophy of Language (a popular survey text) and Oxford's alternative both dedicate the most time to Russell and Frege, because they are the foundation from which critiques and alternatives (e.g. Grice, etc.) start from. But also because they had a major affect on other areas of philosophy, of relevance ontology, which is the place where theories of reference intersect with Anselm's argument. Reference here is referred to (lol) in terms of how it led to Quine's formulation, which renewed interest in ontology/metaontology, and continues to be popular there.

Yes, but Aristotle's Prime Mover, which is pure form, is arguably not alive, at least not in the sense that trees, dogs, and people are.

Maybe in some limited sense of "alive" as in necessarily mobile/mutable biological life. But per Book XII of the Metaphysics:

Such, then, is the first principle upon which depend the sensible universe and the world of nature. And its life is like the best which we temporarily enjoy. It must be in that state always (which for us is impossible), since its actuality is also pleasure.54(And for this reason waking, sensation and thinking are most pleasant, and hopes and memories are pleasant because of them.) Now thinking in itself is concerned with that which is in itself best, and thinking in the highest sense with that which is in the highest sense best.55 [20] And thought thinks itself through participation in the object of thought; for it becomes an object of thought by the act of apprehension and thinking, so that thought and the object of thought are the same, because that which is receptive of the object of thought, i.e. essence, is thought. And it actually functions when it possesses this object.56 Hence it is actuality rather than potentiality that is held to be the divine possession of rational thought, and its active contemplation is that which is most pleasant and best. If, then, the happiness which God always enjoys is as great as that which we enjoy sometimes, it is marvellous; and if it is greater, this is still more marvellous. Nevertheless it is so. Moreover, life belongs to God. For the actuality of thought is life, and God is that actuality; and the essential actuality of God is life most good and eternal. We hold, then, that God is a living being, eternal, most good; and therefore life and a continuous eternal existence belong to God; for that is what God is.

Are you familiar with his distinction between "corpse concurrentism" and "corpse creationism"? He discusses this topic in his article The Person and The Corpse.

Vaguely. Or there is a similar typology for the question of "do persons cease to exist at their death?" (e.g. "the terminators," etc.)

I want to be able to say, at the same time, that a person just is a living brain in a body, and at the same time I want to say that a recently deceased human being is still a human being, not merely a corpse. When a deceased person "rests" in a coffin, and the person's loved ones attend the corresponding funeral, it seems to me that the deceased person is still there, right where the corpse is.

Perhaps personal identity outlasts biological life? After terrorist attacks we still speak of dead Christians, dead communists, etc. One can still refer to "George Washington" or to "medieval Muslims," yet surely they are not still around. Perhaps in some cases, properly prepared, parts of the deceaseds' bodies still remain somewhat intact, but in many cases their body has ceased to exist as anything remotely distinct. It has already decomposed and become parts of many other fungi, plant, and animal bodies, perhaps even human bodies. Yet where is the dividing line where the corpse ceases to be? Or are there corpses of man and beast scattered throughout all of our bodies, and dinosaur corpses in my soup and in the tree outside?

Hence, I find good reason to identify the person with the soul, i.e., with a certain actuality (as process), since, for instance, 98% of the atoms in the human body are replaced each year. What you identify is just one of the difficulties of identifying people and personal identity with bodies. The fact that the decay of the body, and when it ceases to exist is ambiguous is no real problem once one accepts that the dead body is essentially just a heap. It no longer has any unifying aims through which it is made an organic whole.

A relevant, helpful article on some of the terms: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/medieval-terms/#Sign

I might skip past the historical overview because it is very heavy on terminology, but then the full explanations come later.

Useful context:

[On signification]

A twelfth-century commentary on the Perihermeneias reports Porphyry as saying that at the time of Aristotle, there was a great debate over the principal signification of utterances: was it ‘res’ (things) or incorporeal natures (Plato) or sensus (sensations) or imaginationes (representations) or intellectus (concepts)?[9] In fact, medieval philosophers of language were heir to two conflicting semantic theories. According to Aristotle, the greatest authority from the ancient world, words name things by signifying concepts in the mind (Boethius translated Aristotle’s term as passiones animae – affections of the soul) which are likenesses abstracted from them. But Augustine, the greatest of the Church fathers, had held that words signify things by means of those concepts.[10] This led the medievals to the question: do words signify concepts or things? The question had already been asked by Alexander of Aphrodisias and his answer was transmitted to the medievals in Boethius’ second commentary on Aristotle’s Perihermeneias (De Interpretatione): “Alexander asks, if they are the names of things, why has Aristotle said that spoken sounds are in the first place signs of thoughts … But perhaps, he says, he puts it this way because although spoken sounds are the names of things we do not use spoken sounds to signify things, but [to signify] affections of the soul that are produced in us by the things. Then in view of what spoken sounds themselves are used to signify he was right to say they are primarily signs of them” (tr. Smith, pp. 36–37).[11] So words primarily signify concepts.

But the matter was not settled, other than that whatever view a medieval philosopher took, it had to be made to accord with the authority of Aristotle, perhaps in extremis by reinterpreting Aristotle’s words. Abelard refers to a distinction between significatio intellectuum (signification of concepts) and significatio rei (signification of the thing), more properly called nomination or appellation (see De Rijk, Logica Modernorum, vol. II(1), pp. 192–5). Similarly, the Tractatus de proprietatibus sermonum asks whether words signify concepts or things, and responds: both (intellectum et rem), but primarily a thing via a concept as medium (op.cit . II (2), p. 707)...

...Just as signification corresponds most closely – though not exactly – to contemporary ideas of meaning or sense, so supposition corresponds in some ways to modern notions of reference, denotation and extension. The comparison is far from exact, however. One major difference is that the medievals distinguished many different modes (modi) of supposition. Despite the difference between different authors’ semantic theories, particularly as they developed over the centuries, there is a remarkable consistency in the terminology and interrelation of the different modes.

[For example:]

Man is the worthiest of creatures
Socrates is a man
So Socrates is the worthiest of creatures

The premises are true and the conclusion false, so wherein lies the fallacy? It is one of equivocation or “four terms”: ‘homo’ (‘man’) has simple supposition in the first premise and personal supposition in the second, so there is no unambiguous middle term to unite the premises.

I think that's a bit of a stretch in interpretative terms, but it's something to consider.

There is a lot of strong support for the view that organisms and the ordered cosmos as a whole are most properly beings. However, this distinction respects which things have an essence, their being "a being," or possessing a substantial form. It's important to recall that anything that is anything at all has some form/act. Even accidents have to be act/form in order to be at all. The terminology gets confusing because terms like "Aristotelian form" might refer to form/actuality in general, substantial form (the form by which something is a certain type of thing), or even essence (the "what it is to be" of a certain type of thing). .

Aristotle distinguishes between things that exist "by nature" (i.e. possessing a nature), those that exist "by causes" (heaps of external causes), and those that exist "by craft" in the Physics, Metaphysics, and Ethics. In the Metaphysics he explicitly calls into question the idea that a cloak might have an essence. "Substance" (i.e. thinghood) is indeed said of things that are more or less heaps (e.g. rocks) or artifacts, but they do not have the same unity one finds in self-determining wholes. I think Aristotle does in fact refer to a wheel as potentially an example of secondary substance in the Categories but this is: A. thought to be an earlier work, B. just a passing example where the simpleness of a wheel is useful.

One misses what Aristotle is really getting at, the way in which aims unify things, if one sticks to rigid categorization however.

From my notes on the Physics:

At the outset of Book II of the Physics, Aristotle identifies proper beings as those things that are the source of their own production.1 Beings make up a whole—a whole which is oriented towards some end. This definition would seem to exclude mere parts of an animal. For example, a red blood cell is not the source of its own production, nor is it a self-governing whole. Lymphocytes, for example, can be seen as being generated and destroyed in accordance with a higher-level aims-based "parallel-terraced scan," despite being in some sense relatively self-governing.

On this view, living things would most fully represent “beings.” By contrast, something like a rock is not a proper being. A rock is a mere bundle of external causes. Moreover, if one breaks a rock in half, one simply has two smaller rocks (an accidental change). Whereas if one breaks a tree in half, the tree—as a being—will lose its unity and cease to exist (i.e. death, a substantial change).

Aristotle’s mention of Empedocles' elements early in Book II might suggest that all “natural kinds” possess a nature (e.g. carbon atoms as much as men). Yet a lump of carbon or volume of hydrogen gas are both in many ways similar to a rock in that they are mere “bundles of external causes. ”Yet there is also a clear sense in which something like an water molecule is a more unified than a volume of water in a container, the latter of which is easily divided. Hence, we might suppose that unity exists in gradations.2 We can also think of the living organism as achieving a higher sort of unity, such that its diverse multitude of parts come to be truly unified into a whole through an aim.

Now, if we step back and try to consider our original question: if being is “many” or “one,” it seems to me that the most readily apparent example of the multiplicity of beings and of their unity is the human mind itself. We have our own thoughts, experiences, memories, and desires, not other people’s. The multiplicity of other things, particularly other people, and the unity of our own phenomenal awareness is something that is given.3


1 i.e. “possessing a nature.” Actually, at the very start of Book II, Aristotle gives us a brief list of things that might constitute proper beings possessing their own nature, namely animals and their parts, as well as simple elements (i.e., Empedocles’ five elements). However, Aristotle revises this estimation in the second paragraph.

2 Very large objects like stars, nebulae, planets, and galaxies are an excellent example here. These are so large that the relatively weak force of gravity allows them to possess a sort of unity. Even if a planet is hit by another planet (our best hypothesis for how our moon formed), it will reform due to the attractive power of gravity. Likewise, stars, galaxies, etc. have definable “life cycles,” and represent a sort of “self-organizing system,” even though they are far less self-organizing than organisms. By contrast, a rock has a sort of arbitrary unity (although it does not lack all unity! We can clearly distinguish discrete rocks in a non-arbitrary fashion).

3 Hume, Nietzche, and many Buddhist thinkers have challenged the notion of a unified self. I don’t think we have to entirely disagree with their intuitions here. Following Plato, we might acknowledge that a person can be more or less unified. Indeed, we can agree with Nietzsche’s description of himself—that in his soul he might indeed find a “congress of souls” each vying for power, trying to dominate the others. But on Plato’s view (and many others) this would simply be emblematic of a sort of spiritual sickness. This is precisely how the soul is when it is not flourishing, i.e. the “civil war within the soul” of Plato’s Republic, or being “dead in sin” (i.e. a death of autonomy and an ability to do what one truly thinks is best) as described in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (Romans 7).

If Truman has an Aristotelian form, and if an Aristotelian form is essentially a life, then Truman's formal cause is his life. We would not say that Truman himself is identical to his life, rather we would say that Truman is alive. He has the property of being alive.

The form involved in Truman's life is the soul. Klima has a pretty good article on this, although IRCC I didn't agree with all of it (https://faculty.fordham.edu/klima/bodysoul.htm).

It's an open question what happens when Truman dies. Is he still Truman, but dead? If so, then his form wasn't his life, after all.

Well, for Aristotle death is a substantial change. A corpse is not a man. Yet death does not involve instantly transforming into an ooze of prime matter. There are levels of form/matter, and sometimes the flesh, bones, wood, rock, etc. that some thing is made of is referred to as its matter because it is its substrate, the substrate on which the substantial form is actualized. So, the underlying wood of a table, or flesh of a man while being the material substrate of either, nonetheless involves some actual form, since it isn't just sheer potency.

Contemporary Aristotelians and Thomists don't really shy away from looking at how hylomorphism can be applied to contemporary natural science because it tends to layer on quite well. Previously, the big difference was in the claim that there were fundamental subsistent building blocks that made up matter, but that isn't even popular in physics any more.

Or, one could instead say that it was, and that when Truman dies, what remains is no longer Truman. Instead, what remains is merely Truman's body. For someone like me, who claims that every human is identical to a living brain in a body, this is problematic.

How so? A corpse doesn't consist of "a living brain in a body," so it need not be Truman, although surely it is Truman's body.

I think the critique simply misunderstands Berkeley, as does Johnson's reply. The argument from the stone isn't really an informal fallacy so much as a "common misunderstanding of idealism."

People misread Berkeley and fail to see that his ontology predicts everything to be observably identical to a physicalist ontology.

IMO, the more appropriate criticism of Berkeley is that his philosophy is shallow. It's more an elaborate critique than an actual philosophy. Sure, it's a fine critique of the absolute necessity of the materialism of his day. The reigning philosophy wasn't conclusive. But in this, it shares a lot in common with arguments from underdetermination. Merely showing that your theory covers as much if the evidence as alternatives doesn't do all that much to move the needle; good philosophy explains the world. Berkeley's idealism cannot be ruled out, but it also doesn't do much to rule itself in. It seems very ad hoc.

Now granted, the critique of subsistent "matter" taken alone is stronger, but I feel like there are a lot of people who do this better.



Lots of philosophy involves God. The problem with Berkeley's invocation of God is that it seems much like Anaxagoras' invocation of Nous, an ad hoc way to plug holes.

I'll just stick to the opening section for now.

First, I will point out that the distinction between ens reale and ens rationis probably is more important in a realist context. If we're actually capable of abstraction, then it's important to note that composing and dividing in the human intellect doesn't result in a vast multiplicity of new entities.


From the paper:

At this point, however, anyone having qualms about “multiplying entities”, indeed, “obscure entities”, should be reminded that the distinction between objects, or beings (entia) simpliciter, and objects of thought, or beings of reason (entia rationis) is not a division of a given class (say the class of objects, or beings, or entities) into two mutually exclusive subclasses. The class of beings or objects is just the class of beings or objects simpliciter, that is, beings without any qualification, of which beings of reason or objects of thought do not form a subclass. Mere beings of reason, therefore, are not beings, and mere objects of thought are not a kind of objects, indeed, not any more than fictitious detectives are a kind of detectives, or fake diamonds are a kind of diamonds.

Qualifications of this kind are what medieval logicians called determinatio diminuens, which cannot be removed from their determinabile on pain of fallacia secundum quid et simpliciter.11 Accordingly, admitting objects of thought, or beings of reason, as possible objects of reference, does not imply admitting any new objects, or any new kind of beings, so this does not enlarge our ontology.

At the outset, I will just note that it will probably be unhelpful to think of the ens reale/ens rationis or relationes secundum dici (relations according to speech) / relationes secundum esse (relations according to being), etc. as directly translatable into the terms of the modern mental/physical dualism. This is what I had initially thought on my exposure to these terms, and it led to some confusion.

Such a framing might suggest a straightforward solution (at least on the ontology side of things) along the lines of: "mental entities can just be reduced to brain states, and so they exist as physical ens reale, just not fundamentally or descriptively." This will not do for capturing how thought is itself related to eidos (form/act) or the phenomenological whatness (quiddity) of things in medieval thought. And it misses the way in which what constitutes being a proper being (as opposed to a heap) is conceived of due to the legacy of Plato, Aristotle, and Neoplatonism.

I will just note that such an understanding of beings is more convincing than might be supposed, but it'd lead way off topic to discuss it. It will suffice to say that it's probably best to bracket such a reduction as a consideration, because it remains problematic even in systems that have been constructed precisely to try to make such a reduction plausible. The problem that mere mechanism does not seem to capture "how things can be false" is at least as old as Aristotle and still seems to be a great difficulty.

In logic, we have to work with clear terms and distinct categories, and a binary of ens reale and ens rationis works well enough, but there is often a graduation of being assumed (i.e., e.g. in this thread or in the "Great Chain of Being," although the latter notion is rarely presented well, generally being reduced into a caricature of monarchical propaganda or some such straw man).

So on this conception Quine’s answer to “the ontological problem”: “What is there?”, namely, “Everything” is true. For on this conception the claim: “Everything exists” (or its stylistic variants: “Everything is” or “Everything is a being” or “Everything is an existent” or “There is/exists everything”) is true.12 Still, “Something that does not exist can be thought of” is also true, where, the subject being ampliated in the context of the intentional predicate, “Something” binds a variable that ranges over mere objects of thought that do not exist.13

There is an interesting connection here to the idea of the "mind being potentially all things," as well as prime matter being sheer potency, and so in a sense nothing. The mind is a true "microcosm" in this respect, i.e., that it shares a likeness with prime matter while also being act to the greatest degree. To be anything at all is to be something, to have some intelligible whatness, which ties back to Parmenides "the same is for thinking as for being." But this last one can be taken in several senses. "All that is can be thought," does not imply "all that is thought is."

Modern thought sometimes has more difficulty with this to the extent that it has eliminated a solid understanding of, or ground for, the distinction between act and potency by declaring potency to be suspect due to being "unobservable." The older tradition certainly agrees in some sense, since to be observable is to be something, to have quiddity, and so to be actual, but it maintains the distinction because potency is required to explain change.

The contrasting options are either to make no distinction between the actual and potential (or hypothetical), leading to an inflated ontology and cosmology (i.e., everything thinkable is), or to go in the opposite direction and declare that only the actual (often as "physical") is. But then there is also the move to declaring that unintelligible being lacking in any whatness can exist (a view made possible if one conceives of consciousness as primarily an accidental representation of being). Sometimes we see these together, for instance, an inflated nominalist ontology combined with the assertion that the completely unintelligible/unthinkable also exists.

I think qualia cause more problems than they solve.

Perhaps. Robots might make better citizens.

Unless you mean their inclusion? In which case, excluding qualia from your philosophy to "avoid problems" is a bit like removing the possibility of false statements or false beliefs from your theory of language or epistemology in order to make things easier. Sure, it makes an explanation easier, but then it isn't an explanation of what actually exists. And indeed, some physicalist theories seem to go as far as attempting just this.

Quine's thesis is not merely skeptical, that we "cannot be certain." It's that there is no reference going on. That's a big difference.

But in any case, we can be quite certain. Said in a room where there is but one rabbit, the English phrase "the rabbit in this room," refers to the one rabbit. If someone intends to refer to a rake instead, they have misspoken (hence, the distinction of intended reference/intentions is important). Reference can be ambiguous and indeterminate, and it can be more or less so.

BTW, one can make something like Quine's argument from inverted/jumbled qualia as well. "Every mind constructs reality differently, thus we don't refer to the same things." Or one could make it from cognitive relativism. But if you accept the limits of evidence in play and arguments from underdetermination, then you can just as well argue to solipsism or being the lone conscious human in an advanced alien zoo filled with androids.

You don't need these extraneous interpretations for people to communicate or use words, and the idea that you can coherently assign divergent meanings is something like a reductio to the thought that verbal behavior, language and understanding is anything above the physical events responsible for word-use.

It seems to me that there is a more effective reductio pointing in the opposite direction. For what could be more obvious then that we do refer to things with our words and mean things by them? And if the reductio is not so obvious, one need only consider that the same sort of arguments are leveled against the existence of qualia and first-person experience. "What need have we for your 'experiencing' pain? Stimuli and response covers all the observations just as well."

Yet what is said to constitute "all the observations," is doing all the lifting here, since clearly the person in pain observes this fact easily enough. Of course it is true that if one disallows all the evidence for something one will not be able to point to any evidence for it.

The lable is very diffuse and is applied in different ways by different people. It tends to be self-consciously adopted most in continental philosophy and unfortunately this sometimes leads to be it being defined in a waterfall of confusing continental speak. 's citation is a good effort, but it makes the definition appear to be in terms of Whiteheadian terminology, but then massively expands it with applications to other, earlier areas of thought. This is not the fault of the author, the term is used equivocally, sometimes mostly for the descendents of Whitehead and a few others, sometimes encompassing Hegel, Hume, or even Aristotle and some of the Scholastics and some of the Islamic thinkers.

There is "process theology," "process metaphysics," etc. The term is most used to apply to metaphysics. Nicholas Rescher's introductory book is the best text I've found introducing it because it explains the benefits and aims of the process view without doing injustice to contrary views, making clear arguments, and most importantly, not using a ton of foreign terminology. Rescher also takes a broad view, so he looks back to process views in Aristotle, Neoplatonism (e.g. exitus and redditus), Hegel, etc. instead of just 20th+ century continental philosophy and its main precursors.

Mark Bickhard has a really neat paper on process and systems philosophy in the North Holland Handbook for philosophy of complexity. It is a bit naive, and mislabels historical thinkers with process elements to their thought as squarely "substance metaphysics," but he does show a good job showing how process philosophy gets around problems related to emergence that have been identified in reductionist accounts, particularly in Jaegwon Kim's influential monograms.

I've quoted some of these sources in some places if it's helpful:


https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/826619 -Bickhard
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/885631 - Rescher and Aquinas
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/837241 - Deacon

There are, of course, difficulties with "everything is changing," and "everything is mutable." For one, if this was true, then even these statements are subject to change, implying things will become immutable. Moreover, if everything is changing, even the meanings of our words and change itself, how shall we ever say anything true about anything? How does this affect our intuition that certain things won't change (e.g. Napoleon will never become the first president of the USA)?

One can posit "stabilities" in change, but this does not do much good if such stabilities are themselves subject to unrestricted flux, as well as what it even means to be stable or enduring itself subject to change. This is why Heraclitus has the Logos to invoke as the stability within change.

Edit: I also want to add that earlier, when I pointed out someone who is devoted to a very narrow tradition in a very narrow slice of history, I was accused of doing the same thing in terms of the medieval period. The difference is the difference between two decades of a narrow tradition and two millennia of a broad tradition. Medievals engaged and incorporated everyone, including Christian, Jewish, Islamic, and pagan thinkers. The continuity beginning with Plato and ending in the 15th century is quite remarkable. "Antiquated" was not a slur that had much power. Everything was fair game, and this led to an increasingly robust tradition. What we now find in the English-speaking world is the opposite: the yellow "do not cross" line is erected behind Descartes if not Russell, and you end up with a lot of relatively isolated thinkers who simply cannot cope with the perennial questions of philosophy, such as the perennial task of doing more than simply ignoring common language use.

There is an irony in the general analytic tendency to ignore medieval thought (continentals do too, but less). No other period reflects the rigor and professionalization that analytic thought praises, nor the emphasis on logic, semantics, and signification, more than (particularly late) medieval thought. The early modern period has an explosion of creativity in part because philosophy was radically democratized and deprofessionalized (leading to both creativity of a good sort and some of a very stupid sort).

It's unfortunate because so many debates are just rehashes that could benefit from past work, whereas contemporary thought also has a strong nominalist bias that even effects how realism might be envisaged or advocated for, and the earlier period does not have these same blinders.

It would be quite difficult for them to misunderstand each other since I think misunderstanding generally happens when people use words in ways you don't expect, or you have no experience (and therefore expectations) of how words should be used.

True, in a sense. In another though, if there is no fact of the matter as to reference, and one takes another's "that rake right there," to be definitive, one has misunderstood, no? If not the persons intent, then at least the reference.

Its hard to envision that in the example passage assuming that each man is cognizant of their own dispositions for using words.

Ah, but therein lies the counterintuitive part. If one takes themselves to be making definitive references, or, through one's understanding of one's own sense of making definitive references, takes others to be doing the same, one is mistaken about what is truly going on.

I mentioned earlier in the thread that we could always reject Quine's perhaps overly constricted epistemic standards and particular notion of what is "observable," but if we stick with them this will be strange outcome. That people "get on" does not negate the fact that "rabbit" and "New York City," or "Donald Trump" are not determinant references referring to a particular species, municipality, or person. Our once and current Augustus is never present without his trademark hair, benevolent orange glow, etc. after all, so we might be referring to them, or Trumpian time-like slices, etc.

This is probably the Eleatics. The big dialectic that drives Plato's Parmenides is trying find a via media between the silence of a single, undifferentiated "ohm" (Parmenides, there is just one thing) and inchoate, meaningless noise (Heraclitus, everything is always changing, including the meanings of our words, and so it is impossible to say anything true about anything).*

*Note: Heraclitus arguably avoids this charge through the role of the Logos, but in what comes down to us its role is extremely unclear and seems rather ad hoc.

I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on how we might reconcile the importance of the actor with the need for clear moral standards in evaluating actions.

I suppose the question here is "what is the primary purpose of ethics?" In Plato, Aristotle's Ethics, St. Augustine, Boethius, St. Thomas, Dante, etc. the key focus tends to be something like:

• How do we attain the summum bonum, what is truly best?
• How do we achieve the bonum vitae, living "the good life?"
• How exactly, practically, do we become good people and live good lives?
• And then: what do we need to achieve these (i.e. theoretical knowledge of goodness, practical knowledge/skills, self-development, training, education, and habituation in the virtues, the development of freedom, particularly reflexive "inner" freedom, etc.)

A lot of modern ethics tends to start instead from "what is right or wrong?" and I cannot help but see the influence of Reformation era theology here (even in atheist thought). "Law" comes to dominated as opposed to "desire." This is a broader trend, as one can see in the old science which spoke of non-living things "inclinations" or "drives," whereas the modern frame speaks in terms of "laws" and "obedience" (both are anthropomorphisms, just of different sorts—a cosmos driven and ordered by desire, chiefly love, versus one ordered by-often inscrutable-law.).

I find the former framing more useful, both practically and theoretically, although I do find great value in some later thinkers (e.g. Hegel, even though his approach is descriptive). I can think of many justifications here, but the biggest are:

A. "How do I live the best I can and be the best I can?" seems more straightforward and practical than "why should I be morally good or do what is right?" particuarly when moral good and rightness don't seem to necessarily be "what I will truly enjoy and benefit from most."

B. To get back to your main point, it seems to me that to be morally responsible for something one needs some degree of freedom. Someone who has been thoroughly manipulated, acts from extreme ignorance that they did not have any real chance to overcome, or who has received a terrible upbringing/education and acts from dire circumstances, seems less culpable for their acts. But defining freedom in terms of acts instead of persons seems particularly problematic. Not least because:

• We have control over our habits in the long term, but not the short term.
• We have control over our reflexive and unconscious responses in the long term, but not the short term.
• We exercise far greater control over our environment in the long term, and we shape our environment to help us enforce our moral preferences.
• We (hopefully) gain knowledge of what is choiceworthy over time and a capacity for self-control and self-determination. Children are less culpable for their acts for instance.
• We can change our own desires in the long term, and others can also shape our desires (e.g. through education). Virtue and vice are habits, and they can be trained or educated to some degree, but looking at isolated acts will tend to exclude this in an analysis of freedom.

Which is not to say we don't look at which acts are choiceworthy in the aggregate. But questions of law and custom seem to be of a different order. "What should out laws be?" is a policy discussion, but "how do we get people to obey them (and to want to obey them)?" seems to require a look at persons.

Clear moral standards are important, but it's as important to see how and why persons should agree to them. And you can also have moral standards that apply to whole persons, that's the entire idea of the virtues (e.g., prudence, fortitude, justice, and temperance). There is no less clarity in the cardinal virtues, indeed sometimes there is more.

For me, a thought or desire becomes harmful only when it is acted upon, or when resisting it causes harm to the individual. For example, in the case of a desire to rape, it sounds callous, but what goes on inside someone's head is simply a reflection of their internal processes—it’s not inherently moral or immoral

Yet they cannot be unrelated, right? What people actually do is a function of what they desire. And I'd argue that an important element of freedom is our ability to shape our desires (Harry Frankfurt's "second order volitions"). Likewise, what people want to do is shaped by their education, knowledge, habits, and personal development. Desire is not a black box, but something we can have more or less control over, at both the individual level and the social level.

The key, in my view, is how we manage our desires, not their mere existence

Right, but if one does not accept that any desire can be good or bad, then how does one decide which desires should be fostered and which we should attempt to drain of their power (if possible)? It seems to me that when people talk about being freed from various addictive behaviors, what improves people's lives is not solely that they come to drink less, or to eat a healthier diet, etc., but that they overcome and no longer have the intemperate desires that made excessive drinking, eating, etc. so hard to resist in the first place.

Anyhow, such a distinction has major implications for education. An older view of education saw education's highest aim as teaching people: "what is best and choiceworthy," "what we ought to desire," and "helping to orient people towards those things." Now it seems more common to drill younger children in mere obedience and then, if ethics is addressed at all, it is only in a highly politicized form. The entire idea that education can be primarily vetted in terms of how it improves future earnings (and thus future freedom to consume) is grounded in this sort of notion.

To be sure, you mention an important problem, people responding inappropriately to their natural desires. Yet it has always been strange to me how we moved from "people should not put effort into suppressing," say, "homosexual romantic desire," i.e., "this is not unchoiceworthy" to "no desire at all can be unchoiceworthy," and thus "we need an ethics centered around the maximum fulfillment of desire" (making allowance for equity and the maximization of efficiency, etc.).

I suppose here is a fine example of the difference. In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis writes:

Let us suppose for a moment that the harder virtues could really be theoretically justified with no
appeal to objective value. It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite sceptical about ethics, but bred to believe that 'a gentleman does not cheat', than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up
among sharpers. In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment. The crudest sentimentalism (such as Gaius and Titius would wince at) about a flag or a country or a regiment will be of more use.

We were told it all long ago by Plato. As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the 'spirited element'.20 The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity,21 of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.

The operation of The Green Book and its kind is to produce what may be called Men without Chests. It is an outrage that they should be commonly spoken of as Intellectuals. This gives them the chance to say that he who attacks them attacks Intelligence. It is not so. They are not distinguished from other men by any unusual skill in finding truth nor any virginal ardour to pursue her. Indeed it would be strange if they were: a persevering devotion to truth, a nice sense of intellectual honour, cannot be long maintained without the aid of a sentiment which Gaius and Titius could debunk as easily as any other. It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.

Charlotte Mason would be another big voice in this direction. Children are "whole persons," and must be oriented towards the good as such. Simply affirming proper propositional moral attitudes is not enough.

I long accepted the idea that morality should be about actions. I now think it's a poor assumption. Actions are not discrete wholes and their boundaries often will seem quite arbitrary. When we discuss free or good actions, we will always face challenges in the appeal to broader or narrower contexts. This is not to say an analysis of actions is never useful. They can be useful, particularly from an abstract, ceteris paribus perspective.

However, it seems to me that good and free will be said primarily of people (or of other things). The being of a person's act, and its relative goodness (or freeness), is parasitic on the being of the person, who is a self-determining, self-governing organic whole. Just as we do not have a "fast movement" with "nothing moving," we do not ever have a "good action" without an "actor." A dog can be blind; a person can be good. "Nothing in particular" can be neither."

This resolves some issues. For instance, from a consequentialist perspective, we have acts that appear to be good when the context is limited, but perhaps result in some plausible counterfactual where they can be shown result in catastrophic results in a broader perspective. For deontological morality, the same problems will exist in the form of perverse counterexamples that can be dreamed up for any rules that involve shifting the context (unless the rules are made so broad as to reduce to "always do what is better," which is unhelpful).

This also allows us to focus on the traits that make people good regardless of which context they are forced into (something we often have limited control over). By contrast, things like negligence are particularly difficult to account for if we focus on isolated acts and are looking solely at intent.

Thoughts, on their own, are rarely if ever, actions, what we imagine or consider isn’t inherently moral or immoral without action to give it weight.

Lastly, I am not sure of this. Can't desires be good or bad? Isn't the desire to rape or steal evil? Isn't an important part of freedom and "becoming a better person" about identifying which desires are truly choiceworthy and fostering those, while working to uproot the others?

From the perspective of the "good life" and "flourishing," it seems far better to want to do what is good and just, and to do it, and so to enjoy oneself, rather than to be merely continent, doing what is good and just, but hating it. The more perfected state, the better one, would seem to be the state of virtue in which one loves the good.

Elsewise, I fear we may have to affirm that it is not, strictly speaking "good for us" to "be good." We'll end up with multiple, unrelated "goods." Plus, it seems that having certain desires and lacking others would preclude us our being wholly involved in many important sorts of "common goods," such as patriotic citizenship, marriage, fatherhood, etc. Can someone with a serial killer's desires and an entirely transactional view of human relations who just happens to have decided that acting decently works best to get what they want, and has the will power to follow this course, able to fully participate in the good of a good, truly loving marriage?

This seems more ancillary to the question of it not being "good to be good" however.

When you say that my modest proposal entails "kicking existence out to predication," that doesn't capture the emphasis I'm placing on language. I'm not saying that the word "existence" be used to cover one sense of existence but not another; I'm recommending we drop the word entirely. (And as I've probably said before, I know this will never happen; but a fellow can dream!). The various grounding and entailment relations that legitimately exist among the various types of being will remain unchanged. A traditional, metaphysically conservative philosopher has nothing to fear here.

They don't? This sounds like the anti-metaphysical movement redux.

Unless the notion is that existence/being should just mean "every possible thing that has or can ever be quantified, for all philosophers, everywhere," which now looking back seems to be how you are both using this?

But I think that is decidedly not how Quine intended it or how the idea has been used at all. It's not: "all thinkers should be uncontroversially committed to the idea that 'existence' is just 'whatever anyone can quantify over.'"

This would either be a barely supported sort of question begging on an extremely broad notion of existence, one with a scope to match Meinongians (who were instead critics of Quine), or it would be merely saying: "whatever anyone can or does quantify over can be quantified over," which makes the thesis look trivial and vacuous. Of course we can speak of whatever we have spoken of or will potentially speak of.

The idea of existence as quantification is rather, wherever I have seen it presented, that people come with their ontologies, and we can now examine them in terms of quantification (rather than say entailment) in order to determine what their ontological commitments are—not "all philosophers should accept the same set of universal ontological commitments, which include anything we can possibly speak of (but don't worry about this being too broad because ontological commitments now carry no weight at all)". This makes the whole notion of Quine's approach as a "test" between theories meaningless.

And this is why I was baffled about how this could be a response to Arcane Sandwich's post on Korman's argument:

(DK1) There is no explanatory connection between how we believe the world to be divided up into objects the how the world actually is divided up into objects.

(DK2) If so, then it would be a coincidence if our object beliefs turned out to be correct.

(DK3) If it would be a coincidence if our object beliefs turned out to be correct, then we shouldn’t believe that there are trees.

(DK4) So, we shouldn’t believe that there are trees

Quantification might do some work here (all the standing criticisms of it versus entailment notwithstanding) if one comes with their ontology and shows how one is not committed to some sort of bizarre pleroma of arbitrary objects, or the idea that there are no objects at all. But on the idea that what is meant by "existence" is just "whatever anyone can ever quantify," I don't see how it answers such questions except as a sort of confused equivocation or dodge.

This goes back to "no one denies tigers exist." But they do, or they make them ens rationis, somehow the creations of language, or their being tigers is "co-constituted" by language. Coastlines do not exist before they are mapped, etc.

This seems like a counterintuitive thesis or implication, but counterintuitive doesn't mean wrong. However, it's unclear to me how existence as quantification responds to this at all, unless the intent is to dismiss "did ants exist before humans knew them" as some sort of pseudoproblem.

The terminological problem raises its head again, in different guise. Let's say we answer, Yes, they should include such a commitment. What, then, are we committed to? How are we using "being" in a way that clarifies, rather than merely reveals our preferred usage?

I think this difference/critique is not much of a mystery if the context is the way quantification is usually employed in metaontology. Not all philosophers have the same ontological commitments. The approach locates and defines such commitments in a manner that seems biased in favor of nominalism, in such a way that using it to adjudicate claims of commitment "impartially" is compromised (or so the critique says).

Quine's idea that we have independent access to the meta-language and the object-language is absurd, and it underlies all of this. There is no objective-quantification apart from subjective-quantification. We do not possess the language of God, which would overcome all individual disagreements and force existence into our personal, solipsistic horizon

Well, at least for Quine there is only one logic (justifying that is another thing.) "When a pluralist challenges the law of noncontradiction they simply change the subject" (or something like that). It's even less clear how this idea is supposed to work given commitments to an extremely permissive sort of logical pluralism or logical nihilism. "Existence is quantification, and quantification varies according to an innumerable number of different logics which we should select based on 'what is useful.''

I think the approach makes more sense within the context of a narrow sort of philosophy, particularly given the view of scientific theories dominant at the time, and ideas about how their commitments could be tested. Of course, that view of theories has since been essentially abandoned.

You're backing the wrong horse then. This is our manifest destiny!



You are correct though, many of the executive orders are nothing special. When the Presidency changes changes parties there is always a flurry of executive orders, many meaningless (recall Obama signed an order to close Guantanamo Bay on his first day 16 years ago).

The DEI stuff Trump suspended he could suspend because it was created by executive orders, some being Biden's immediate orders upon taking office. What is exceptional in the immigration orders is the language, not the orders. Biden himself oversaw a flurry of orders on migration which is what led to net migration in his four years significantly eclipsing that of the entire Obama or Bush eras.

The stand out order is the pardons for the January 6th rioters, some of whom were obviously guilty of major offenses. The practice of shoveling out a bevy of odious pardons as a President leaves office is now well established, but it seems we might be facing a new norm of waves of odious pardons upon any new party taking control as well. And, as norms are destroyed and both parties rail about "corruption," neither is at all willing to actually place any restrictions in place to stop this sort of thing.

For instance, the scandals over the Clintons' speaking fees or the gifts received by Supreme Court justices would both be obvious felony offenses for the vast majority of public officials, even volunteers on a small town licensing commission. The most powerful officials in the government have, however, doggedly kept themselves exempt from all the anti-corruption measures in place for state and local or lower level federal officials.

Yes, we have many different concepts surrounding existence. Ens vs esse, various uses of "is," "being is said many ways," ens rationis vs ens reale, existence vs subsistence, relationes secundum dici vs relationes secundum esse, real versus virtual, appearance vs reality, abstract vs physical, the inclusion of possibilia, impossibilia for Meinongians and in Hindu thought, "existence is not a predicte," etc., etc.

It would be nice to have an easy catch all solution that deals with them, but I am not seeing how this "solution" resolves any of them. None of those difficulties surrounding existence involve people being confused over whether or not it is possible for someone to say "there is at least one of...(insert anything utterable)." But there does seem to be an issue in kicking existence out to predication in that a diverse group of thinkers from Kant to St. Thomas have rejected being as a predicate.

I think where the solution may have value is vis-á-vis metaontology and mapping ontological commitments. But these are not the contexts where it is being introduced.

On topic, this reminds me of one of the most infamous and consequential strawmen of all time, Ockham's claim that the via antiqua claims that:

a column is to the right by to-the-rightness, God is creating by creation, is good by goodness, just by justice, mighty by might, an accident inheres by inherence, a subject is subjected by subjection, the apt is apt by aptitude, a chimera is nothing by nothingness, someone blind is blind by blindness, a body is mobile by mobility, and so on for other, innumerable cases.

William of Ockham - Summa Logicae, part 1, c. 51

But this solution seems like it will be of little help here in this, one of the most famous and long running debates on ontological commitments (one you'll still find in contemporary surveys of metaphysics), because it is about disagreements over implicit commitments. E.g., does quantifying over employers commit us to employees? Does "I have at least one wife," imply "there is at least one marriage?" Should predicates not include an ontological commitment, and if not aren't we biased against realism (for the realist often wants to show that opponents are ontologically committed to universals)?

Likewise, "if you claim 2 and 3 are prime then you are committed to numbers," is only informative in a conversation about platonism vs immanent realism vs ens rationis, etc. if there is someone actually claiming that numbers don't exist tout court (which I imagine is exceedingly rare).

Arcane Sandwich's point re permissivism and eliminativism is about what we ought to be ontologically committed to more than what we are committed to.

And IIRC, Quine himself was willing to grant that his metaontological approach wouldn't cover "existence" and punted on that whole aspect.

I think you are getting at something important, however I might quibble with the use of the term "essence" in these cases because it will lead to confusion as respects the employment of essences in metaphysics and the philosophy of nature (your sleet/snow example being a fine one). If everything has an essence/nature, then there can be nothing like Aristotle's distinction early in the Physics of:

A. "Those things that exist by causes," (e.g. a rock or volume of water, a bundle of external causes with a very weak principle of unity as compared to water molecules themselves, hydrogen and oxygen atoms, or especially living organisms), and;

B. "Those things that exist by nature," which are those things that possess an essence and are (more) self-determining, self-organizing, self-governing wholes, that are (more) intelligible in themselves; and we might add,

C. The random stipulated "wholes" dreamed up by later philosophers, such as the pairing of non-continuous different halves of foxes and halves of trout, or the "whole" made up by a person's feet and the ground they are standing on extending in a 8 foot cube beneath.

I add "more" to B because no finite being is wholly intelligible in itself. For instance, one cannot explain what a horse is without reference to any other thing. But one can also avoid the slide in multiplicity/smallism/reductionism or absolute unity/bigism so common in both ancient and contemporary metaphysics and philosophy of physics. We avoid either an infinite regress of smaller parts or atomism, on the one hand, and a bigism where things are only intelligible in terms of their role in the entire universe. A via media is needed, and essence/natures help here.

Holism, in many forms, is itself a sort of bigism as applied to epistemology. Perhaps no knowledge of any thing is entirely intelligible in isolation from other knowledge, but neither must we call in all belief and knowledge to explain any individual instance of knowing or believing.

This is why stipulated games like chess are not great examples for essences. They are by no means arbitrary (i.e., if you create a game with random rules, it will likely suck and lack strategic depth and never catch on) but neither are they akin to carbon, stars, or cats.

But, to your point, language absolutely requires universals which are closely related. Likewise, the things we speak of have a certain quiddity, whatness, in phenomenological awareness, that is essential to language.

It seems to me that the concern that the things of phenomenological awareness might have nothing to do with "real things," only creeps in with the presupposition that what we experience and sense are mental representations, not things—that the "mental" consists in accidental representations of the physical. There is a sort of iron clad dualism at the heart of most modern philosophy in this form, and it leads to the objects of all knowledge being either out own ideas, or in later forms, language.

But then these skeptical explanations are often wildly counter intuitive. I tend to agree with Domingo Soto that, while nominalism is easier to understand, it is much harder to believe.

My preferred solution, as many of you know. I've seen you refer to this as Quine's "joke" about being, but it's about time we took him seriously

Well, I'll reuse a prior post on this issue. Consider:

Brutus: Wow Cassius. I saw your results to my survey. I had always thought you were an atheist and a materialist, but I see here that you marked down that you think that both God and ghosts exist.

Cassius: Well of course they do Brutus. Both can be the subjects of existential quantification! But no, I am an atheist and I don't believe in ghosts.

Well, does Brutus have a right to be miffed over what seems to be sophistic equivocation here?

But moreover, the presumption that there is a "way the world is divided up" that is distinct from our conventions concerning rabbits and legs looks very much like "the myth of the given".

Sellar's myth of the given argument, even if one accepts it, respects epistemology. It doesn't imply that the existence of a rabbit as a whole/organism cannot be distinct from our conventions.

We moved to essences when ↪Count Timothy von Icarus made the suggestion that to "grasp the intelligibility of things" - gavagai, perhaps - we needed first intelligible essences... or something like that. There was an odd circularity here, in that we need essences to understand what something is, but when pressed it seems Tim thinks an essence is exactly what it is to understand what something is... we understand what something is by understanding what it is. Now circularity is not strictly invalid, but it is far from convincing. And there's the rejection of logical atoms, together with the analysis around family resemblance, amongst other things, for advocates of essence to deal with.

I have no idea how you came to this take. Essence has to do with what something is, it is not dependent on a human's understanding it. If it was, then what things are would fundamentally change when we came to understand them, or came to understand them more fully. I am not sure of any thinker who puts forth an idea of essences as "what it is to understand something." Rather, essences would be what is understood.

The pattern is "rabbits exist as a distinct whole outside and prior to human understanding" followed by "the senses communicate such wholes to us," followed by "through sense experience, imagination, and reason, we can gain a grasp on what things are" (the last of course, is not a binary, one can understand something better or worse).

↪Count Timothy von Icarus seems now to be ascribing some form of cognitive relativism to someone - not sure if it's Quine, or @frank, or me, or all of us

No clue where you're getting that either. I brought up Grayling's quote because it is an example of problematic theses that can follow from linguistic turn era philosophy. This is very obvious in how the quotation is introduced. I point out specifically that few want to be led to these conclusions, but then the question becomes "how exactly shall they be avoided?"

Things are not words, and words are not things

:up: Right, words as a means of knowing versus what is (primarily) known.

Plus, the claim that mass and energy are "unobservable" needs to be qualified. On the view that all that exists is physical, and that what is physical consists entirely of these two (some add information as a third, or even as a more ontologically basic prior of course), to claim that matter and energy are unobservable would be to claim that nothing is observable. Although, I'm sure there is someone who, via IIT or computational theory of mind, has come to the conclusion that only information is observable.

You'd have to qualify it. There is a sense in which anytime you see something fall to the ground you are observing mass, and whenever you see anything (which of course involves light rather directly) you are obviously observing energy.

At any rate, what constitutes the center of a star system or galaxy is not arbitrary.

Two things affect humans, reason or feeling. These two are fundamental. Conscience for example is a sort of feeling. Belief is based on reason and feeling. You have certain beliefs because of the reason of the afterlife. You worry about entering Hell and prefer Heaven.

And here is the objectional premise driving the slide to moral nihilism in much thought. "If something has to do with desirability or choiceworthyness it always has to do with feelings (i.e., the passions and the appetites) and never involves reason directly."

Is this so? Why can't the desire to know the truth, or the desire to know what is truly best, be ascribed to reason? To claim that reason only deals with facts, and that facts exclude values, or that all questions of value are based on desire, and that reason is never involved in desire, might prop up nihilism, but it seems much harder to justify in itself.

Does the fact that a minority of people also reject that the Earth is round, the germ theory of disease, or that the Holocaust happened also demonstrate that there is no fact of the matter on these questions? Why must knowledge of moral facts be universal and infallible?

Historically, sentimentalist approaches to ethics, those which attempt to ground ethics in universal or common "feeling," already assumed that there were no moral facts in the way there were "descriptive facts" (and the dichotomy already assumes a difference). So, if we take them as paradigmatic ethical theories we run the risk of slipping into accidental begging the question.

I would argue there are clearly facts related to values. Consider:

It is bad for children to be exposed to high levels of lead.

It is bad for a bear to get its leg stuck in a bear trap.

Michael Jordan is a better basketball player than my toddler son.

Garry Kasparov is a better chess player than all the kids at the local kindergarten.

Plowing your life savings into Enron stock in 2001 or Bear Sterns stock in 2008 would have been a bad investment.

Throwing a dart at a list of explanations for a given phenomena and deciding that whatever the dart has landed on is the correct explanation is a bad way to do science.

The person committed to the idea that there are no facts about values is committed to the implausible position that the statements above lack any truth value, that they are, in a sense, undecidable.

Likewise, there will be no fact of the matter about what constitutes good or bad argument, good or bad evidence, or good or bad faith vis-á-vis arguments, and no fact of the matter as to whether truth is truly preferable than falsity.

I'd argue that moral anti-realism and nihilism only seem as plausible as they do because people try to scope it down to "moral values," making "moral good" a sort of sui generis good that is divorced from all other notions of goodness, choiceworthyness, desirability, etc. But is this a proper distinction? I don't think it is, since it is unclear what such a distinct "moral good" is supposed to consist in once it has been isolated from all other questions of value.

No, that's not what I stated. I noted that cause can be in terms of composition, time, and scope. It is only after establishing what cause is, that I increase the scope of time and composition to everything that encompasses the universe. Re-read up through causal chains again and see if you have any questions.

I agree with Bob that you appear to be equivocating here, hence my confusion.

Right, I answer both. There is no reason for the universe's existence. It is the way that it is, simply because it is.

Right, that's exactly what I mean by "arbitrary."

Now, like I said, the argument is stronger if it anticipates the counterarguments likely to be levied against it. Saying "there is no Fine Tuning Problem for me because I just posit that everything just is, for no reason at all," isn't a response to the Fine Tuning Problem, it's just ignoring it.

The part on God seems ancillary, but there the assumption seems to be: "if God exists God will "be" like everything else, a very powerful entity that exists within the universe, a part of the universe, an entity that can sit on a Porphyrian tree next to other beings. But this is precisely what much theology and philosophy, e.g. Neoplatonism, the Islamic philosophers, much Jewish thought, and the dominant Orthodox and Catholic theology, explicitly deny. In particular, many of these are going to deny the univocity of being, and they will claim that "meaning and purpose" relate to Goodness, Beauty, and Truth as transcendentals.

This is probably ancillary, as I said though.

The description is relative to choices we make, not truth. No one says that the expression of truth isn't relative in this way, and people don't tend to use SR/GR as an example of deflationism or all-embracing relativism because it isn't. One can describe things more or less accurately in different ways, and different languages. The Ptolemaic model is not entirely inaccurate, but it is certainly wrong in many key respects. And in the Newtonian model we are already focused on a center of mass, not "the sun," although the sun is so much more massive that a statement of heliocentrism is not wholly false either.

Einstein famously regretted the moniker precisely because of this sort of confusion, and thought "theory of invariants," would be a better name. The whole edifice aims at clarifying invariance and constancy.

Physics, not philosophy, suggests nothing is really true?

Not everyone. Some, certainly. Some (mis)readings of Wittgenstein, or other appeals to underdetermination, seem to result in very wild theses.

Just for one example of a thesis derived from Wittgenstein that seems troubling (from A.C. Grayling's book on him):

Cognitive relativism is a troubling thesis. Consider the point that it makes the concepts of truth, reality, and value a matter of what sharers in a form of life happen to make of them at a particular time and place, with other forms of life at other times and places giving rise to different, perhaps utterly different or even contrary, conceptions of them. In effect this means that the concepts in question are not concepts of truth and the rest, as we usually wish to understand them, but concepts of opinion and belief. We are, if cognitive relativism is true (but what does true now mean?), in error if we think that truth and knowledge have the meanings we standardly attach to them, for there is only relative truth, there is only reality as we, in this conceptual community at this period in its history, conceive it.

The reading of Wittgenstein which suggests that he takes such a view is consistent with much of what he otherwise says. For Wittgenstein the meaning of expressions consists in the use we make of them, that use being governed by the rules agreed among the sharers of a form of life. This presumably applies to expressions like true and real themselves and indeed, it is precisely Wittgenstein's point that such expressions cease to be philosophically significant once we remind ourselves of their ordinary employments. It follows that the possibility of there being other forms of life, even just one other, with different agreements and rules means therefore that each form of life confers its own meaning on true and real and therefore truth and reality are relative not absolute conceptions. This is a highly consequential claim.

Wittgenstein sometimes appears to be committed to cognitive relativism as just described. He says: "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him" (P II p.223); "We don't understand Chinese gestures any more than Chinese sentences" (Z 219). These remarks suggest relativism across "forms of life"; Wittgenstein may be saying that because meaning and understanding are based upon participation in a form of life, and because the forms of life in which, in their different ways, lions and Chinese engage are quite different from ours, it follows that we cannot understand them their view of things is inaccessible to us and vice versa. In On Certainty Wittgenstein appears to commit himself to relativism in a single form of life across time, by saying that our own language-games and beliefs change (C 65, 96#7, 256), which entails that the outlook of our forebears might be as inaccessible to us cognitively as is that of the lions or, differently again, the Chinese.

One need not take as one's target so radical a form of the thesis to show that cognitive relativism is unacceptable, however. This can be demonstrated as follows. Suppose that cognitive relativism is the case. How then do we recognize another form of life as another form of life? The ability to detect that something is a form of life and that it differs from our own surely demands that there be a means for us to identify its presence and to specify what distinguishes it from ours. But such means are unavailable if the other form of life is impenetrable to us, that is, if it is closed against our attempts to interpret it enough to say that it is a form of life. This means that if we are to talk of other forms of life at all we must be able to recognize them as such; we must be able to recognize the existence of behaviour and patterns of practices which go to make up a form of life in which there is agreement among the participants by reference to which their practices can go on. Moreover, if we are to see that the form of life is different from our own we have to be able to recognize the differences; this is possible only if we can interpret enough of the other form of life to make those differences apparent. And therefore there has to be sufficient common ground between the two forms of life to permit such interpretation.

This common ground has to involve two related matters: first, we have to share with the aliens some natural capacities and responses of a perceptual and cognitive type, giving rise to at least some similar beliefs about the world; and secondly we have to be able to share with them certain principles governing those beliefs; for one important example, that what is believed and therefore acted upon is held to be true. This has to be so because, as remarked, detecting differences is only possible against a shared background; if everything were different participants in one form of life could not even begin to surmise the existence of the other.

But this requirement for mutual accessibility between forms of life gives the lie to cognitive relativism. This is because the respects in which different forms of life share an experiential and conceptual basis which permits mutual accessibility between them are precisely the respects in which those forms of life are not cognitively relative at all. Indeed, cultural relativism, which is not just an unexceptionable but an important thesis, itself only makes sense if there is mutual accessibility between cultures at the cognitive level. Hence it would appear that the only intelligible kind of relativism there can be is cultural relativism.

Now, few want to tread down these paths. However, some do it quite eagerly, in part because "there is no truth," is—like "there is no truth about what is good or bad"—seen as "liberating" (a "freedom from reality" perhaps). This is hardly unique to Wittgenstein, some embrace the critique of holism, which most holists want to fix, that it implies that no one who doesn't already share the same beliefs ever truly communicates. Or there are related paths to the resurrection of Latin Averroism and the idea that the truths of each "field" can contradict each other because they are each "hermetically sealed magisterium." (Of course, this very doctrine implies that it itself may only be true in some fields, and that what constitutes a proper hermetically sealed field will also itself vary by field).

Crucially, on that last one, there often seems to be nothing other than bare stipulated fiat that stops the hermetically sealed magisterium from shrinking down to just each individual's beliefs, such that we reach a Protagotean relativism of "whatever one thinks is true is true (for that person)."

What claim could be more straightforwardly self-refuting than "nothing is really true or false?" Yet people make it. And if I recall, you were of the opinion that this is in fact the overwhelming consensus amongst all current logicians. Sad it would be if it were truly so.

But most people don't want to reach these sorts of conclusions. They try to work their way back. Fair enough. Can they? Wanting to fix your own philosophical problems is not the same thing as fixing them. Kant surely didn't want his system to imply dualism, but plenty of Kant scholars think it essentially does. Likewise, the trick is in avoiding a slide into a sort of extreme relativism and deflationism in a coherent manner. Which is where people can be more or less successful. Less successful, I would say, are solutions that just involve invoking "pragmatism! It is not helpful to me to believe this level of relativism" But of course the radicals do think it is helpful, and the so this is hardly much of a philosophical answer.

Whereas, when people do "work their way back" to common sense, they often end up saying things that sound very similar, about rabbits and such existing as a certain sort of actuality in the world that cannot be collapsed with that actuality of their being known by the human mind, and so on. Terms will vary because the detours through skepticism create a vast jungle of terms.

Just as an example, I’ve never been too impressed by intelligence as I am with other forms of natural ability, and I suspect that this paradox helps to illustrate why. I have an instinctual aversion to analytic philosophy and the general notion that a man who stares at words and symbols all day can afford me a higher value to my education or the pursuit of wisdom than, say, an athlete or shop teacher, or anyone else who prefers to deal with things outside of themselves. I prefer common sense to the rational, the body to the mind, the objective to the subjective, and tend to defend one from the encroachment of the other. Does anyone else feel this way? Have we glorified intelligence at the expense of the other abilities?

Or perhaps we have too narrowly defined the intellect? Hence we rail against so many smart people acting so stupidly.

We might consider here Plato's claim that no one knows what is truly choiceworthy and chooses otherwise, and that such knowledge requires "turning the whole person" (body, appetites, passion, and reason) towards the Good.

Can generative AI pen a great epic? It seems to me more like a search algorithm for finding interesting bits of random text in Borges' Library of Babel (the unimaginably large library of all possible 500 page books, with every possible arrangement of symbols.) An interesting thing about the Library is that it contains many translation guides that will tell you how to read any of the random gibberish you find as a code for some coherent meaning. So, each bit of gibberish has some book that deciphers it and makes it intelligible, or even edifying! What then is the true meaning of the gibberish (which massively outweighs anything in a real language)?

I considered this thread closely and went for a walk today to ponder it. I've detailed the first part of the walk here: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15728/the-dark-wood-where-there-is-no-error/p1

Of course, I am once again able to speak, but I shall have to pen the further cantos to discuss how I made it back to this state of speech. :nerd:

There is no prior cause, so there is no reason. To posit a reason is to imply, "There is something else which exists which caused universe A to exist. That's a misunderstanding of the issue. U is the entire universe. You're asking, "What caused U?" Nothing caused U. U simply is

Yes, this is helpful. So the argument boils down to something like: "to have a reason or explanation is to have a cause and cause just means 'some prior state in time that determines some future state.'"

But that definition of cause is precisely what people will reject, either the that all explanations and elucidations of "because" involve "causes," or that causes just involve temporal ordering (or both).

Why can we only fully tile certain surfaces with certain equilateral shapes in certain patterns? Well, there seems to be a "because" here, and perhaps formal cause, but absolutely no notion of time is required. And some physicists like to explain physics in this sort of way. Time is just another dimension in a mathematical object.

Likewise, whether a statue is a statue of our newly returned Augustus does not seem to be a relationship that is explained in terms of time, even if the causes of the actual physical statue involve time.

Plus, many argue that time is just the dimension in which change occurs. No change, no time. But to then say that changes require time to exist is backwards. Time only exists because their are changes, and causes must explain change, which is at best simultaneous with time. That is, time is not a "container" that must first exist to contain changes.

Then, on the eliminitivist side, they will say your notion of cause doesn't actually entail any sort of "because" at all. All you have is Humean constant conjunction. Yet if all explanations involve causes, and causes are just constant conjunction, then nothing is really explainable at all.

Which maybe is where you might head anyhow, because there are two questions in play here. Why does the universe exist? A question of existence. And why is the universe the way it is? A question of essence or quiddity. It's the second question where problems like the Fine Tuning Problem(s) show up. A brute fact explanation for existence is one thing, but if it includes quiddity as well, then the ultimate explanation for everything, the Holocaust, baseballs, why anyone gets cancer, etc. is "it just is," plus or minus some potential quantum indeterminism. Everything is ultimately arbitrary. A problem? Perhaps.

Part of it is the idea that if Hume has a long string of (sophistical) arguments, and I have only the (illative) belief that causes exist, then the long string of arguments must win on account of quantity.

This could also deserve its own thread. I find this problem constantly, particularly where science intersects with philosophy, even with people I wholeheartedly agree with. People pile up citations and technical terminology as if by sheer weight these will prove the point in question. "Look at these 118 studies (that I can read to be) consistent with my theory of consciousness, free will, perception, etc." Ok, but your opponents are going to cite largely the same studies and claim to show it supports their case. Racking up citations is useless here. Less is more if you can show just a few instances where your explanation fits well and others do not.

For example, Sapolsky's Determined, which claims to be a decisive case against all notions of free will, even compatibilist ones, spends a ton of time exploring areas of science and piling up studies (some of which have been rigorously falsified), and very little time clarifying what compatibilists argue, at times still seeming to conflate compatibalism with claims of indeterminism.

We probably need to do this to grow - to transcend the dogmatic assumptions of upbringing and culture. In your case, would it not be fair to say that a skepticism about the mainstream and its platitudes drew you towards a countercultural orientation and by extension into traditions of higher consciousness

Charles Taylor has a pretty good typology on this question. He discusses the "immanent" versus "transcendent" frames. The first considers that all possible questions of goodness and the human good are strictly limited to the finite, sensible, immanent world. The transcendent frame denies this.

But then he has the idea of "spin." A person in either "frame" can be more or less "spun" open or closed to the opposing frame. If one is spun hard to the "closed" orientation, then anyone in the other frame appears deluded, and cannot possibly be making good use of rational argument, reasoning, etc. That is, the other frame is indefensible.

Partisans of either frame have their reasons for seeing the other as dangerous. Partisans of the immanent frame see any notion of transcendence as at best a dangerous distraction from real goods, at worst the specter of fanaticism (Taylor does note that communists squarely in the immanent frame have been plenty fanatical however). On the other side, there is the fear that those in the immanent frame have reduced the human good to mere consumption, the specter of consumerism and spiritual emptiness, or on the far side the fall into grave sin.

On Taylor's view, almost everyone will be some degree of closed or open towards either frame, but radical closure on either side suggests a sort of dogmatism, particularly if one has never "stood in the middle" or traversed from one side to the other.

We will act, and do act, regardless of the knowledge we have. Therefore the primary criteria for wisdom is not the capacity to enable acts with truth (acts are enabled regardless of truth), but to avoid mistakes caused by falsehood.

We will? We're never paralyzed by doubt? What of Hamlet? It seems to me like we are often paralyzed by doubts, and that this is particularly a problem for academics, public health officials, etc. who have come to doubt all their moral convictions. In The Moral Landscape, Sam Harris gives the example of a doctor he spoke with who was unwilling to pass any judgement on a hypothetical culture that tears the eyes out of every third born baby due to superstition. Likewise, in the policy world, bad policy often carries on due to inertia because people doubt plausible better alternatives, and do not want to take on the risk of having been in error.

I don't understand the relevance of this.

Well, if one thinks more in terms of knowing/understanding better or worse, more or less, instead of a binary, it seems to me that fears of error will loom less large. Afterall, we face both ignorance and error, and it does not seem possible to reduce ignorance without taking on a greater risk of error. For instance, if one never implements an education reform because one doubts one's knowledge of what would truly be best, one will never learn from the implementation.

You'd have to do a lot of unpacking there. It's an operationalization. It's not unlike how entropy is a very deep concept, but we certainly have useful ways to operationalize it. Is it a good move?

English uses "know" in many senses, and then knowing is historically formulated as a type of believing in Anglo-American philosophy. Other languages have many words to cover what English does with two. It seems easy to argue that not all knowledge is propositional, but what about belief?

For instance, an experienced CEO and a business student might both "know what it is like to be a CEO" in terms of affirming similar sentences, but there is a sense of "know" in which only the experienced CEO really knows. Likewise, everyone knows what it is like to lose a parent young or to fast in terms of affirming sentences about one's parents' deaths or eschewing food and drink, but many are not orphans and have never gone a day without eating, and so in another sense, they do not know what they are like.

The gap becomes more obvious in the realm of practical truths. A social sciences student who has never been in any romantic relationship might affirm that "stable marriages are good," but we might take this belief to be quite different than that of the woman who has been in a happy, fulfilling marriage for 25 years, or even the priest who has never married, but has acted as spiritual guide for many couples, both happy and unhappy.

There is a wealth of interesting findings on how affirmation of belief is "squishy," for lack of a better term. Experts panicked that so many US citizens were affirming beliefs like "Trump won the popular vote in 2016 and 2020 in a landslide and the CCP helped overthrow our government," or "COVID-19 is a hoax." One might think that if the type of people who claimed to believe the former "really" believed it, they would take up arms.

But it certainly isn't that they are just lying, at least not as best researchers can tell. And they have their justifications and appeal to them. There is a question of "conviction" around belief, and this does not reduce neatly to mere assumed probability that the belief is true. Journalists might well have believed with near 100% certainty things like: "Stalin is carrying out an industrial scale genocide of Ukrainians," but it was not until they directly experienced it that they began to be willing to risk absolutely everything to bring it to the world's attention.

Which might suggest that even in Quine's own terms of what constitutes valid evidence vis-a-vis "our factual interest in what some speaker of English believes," while it might be "fully satisfied by finding out what sentences he believes to be true," it will not be sufficient to merely observe which sentences he sincerely affirms. We might need to look at all their behaviors to gauge this, and assigned truth values might be inadequate to fully capture belief. And we might suppose that we also might need to appeal to their experiences to explain how they believe this.

A lot of philosophy has a special role for sense knowledge and understanding, and this is captured in analytic philosophy by arguments such as Jackson's "Mary's Room," Searl's "Chinese Room," etc. The web of belief gets at this too. It's one of the places where holism is attacked. If two people disagree about dogs, do they both "have different dogs?"

But surely the web gets something right, beliefs, like things, are not self-subsistent. This is an issue later synthesizers of Aristotle and Plato grappled with. It's impossible to describe what a horse is without appeal to other things. For the scholastics, everything existed in a "web of relations." Yet here, some sort of qualification is required, even if it isn't a formal operationalization, because we will be in a pickle if we "must know everything to know anything" in any context, including "what people believe."

What's the underlying assumption? All facts about anything can be wholly explained by facts about smaller composite parts? Prima facie, one could also assume that all facts about parts can only be wholly explained in terms of the whole. Physicists do indeed make this claim, with some claiming that "fundamental" particles are only explainable in terms of wholly universal fields. Claims about information being ontologically basic often slide off in either direction, with either (q)bits themselves being "fundamental," or else only being information at all in virtue of a relation to the whole universe.

Obviously, we might hope for a via media here as well, to avoid sliding to either extreme.

Are you claiming that intention is somehow separate? That intention cannot be explained over time and through the composition of the intelligent creature's state at those moments? If so can you explain how it does not fit in?

"Cannot be explained" or perhaps "is not best explained" or maybe "is not wholly explained." We might suppose that more general principles explain things more fully than a reductionist appeal to composition. For instance, flight in flying machines and animals is well understood through the principle of lift and related principles. Flight is not best understood through a chemical analysis of the cells in flying animals' wings, though no doubt such cells are a prerequisite for animal flight. The same might be said for intentional aims. To be sure, we need neurons to think, but it hardly seems that "goodness," "justice," "love," etc. shall be best known through a study of neurons.

Indeed, in physics at least, most of our best explanations involve "top-down" sorts of explanations. Because we lack a compelling "top-down" explanation for consciousness and intentional aims, fields such as neuroscience tend to default to "bottom-up" explanations. I believe this is why a commitment to reductionism tends to be stronger in some of the special sciences than in either they physical sciences or some of the social sciences.

Anyhow, I think the most likely counter to is going to be that it relies on an impoverished notion of causation. You seem to dance between efficient and material causes, while even touching on formal causes, but then the notion of causality here also seems somewhat ambiguous. Some physicists hope to ground everything in formal causes, and this shows up the strongest in forms of ontic structural realism, where all efficient, material, and final causes are subsumed in the mathematical structure of what the universe (normally considered as a single object) is. But here too, questions of essence verses existence remain. Why does one universe exist and not others? Or do they all exist necessarily (e.g. the "Mathematical Universe Hypothesis")? This answer brings up all sorts of Boltzmann Brain type problems and problems of underdetermination.

Weak notions of cause will be the target of causal eliminitivists, and those with a broader notion of causation alike.

The other issue is that some will no doubt object to the use of "logical" in the OP. I don't, I get what you mean. It is in some sense not only pedantic but question begging to assume that "logical" must apply to some system of formal logic.

Yes, or the idea that whenever there is one cat on a mat there are actually trillions of cats on a mat (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/problem-of-many/). To me, many of these conclusions seem like the conclusions of a reductio argument.



The section in the link provided on eliminativism and permissivism covers some of the theories I am talking about. One way to solve these issues is to say that apparent proper wholes are just the result of either the mind or language.

Which philosopher thinks that affirming language games means that nothing existed before humans?

Few I'd imagine. But that also is not what we were discussing, which is not "nothing existed prior to humans" but "no discrete, proper wholes exist outside of either human conventions or the mind" These are very distinct theses, and the latter are much more popular than the former.

And you can subdivide these into positive and skeptical theses. So, mereological nihilism is not a super uncommon position. This is the position that, at the metaphysical or physical level, there are no proper wholes, no substances/things. Certainly "something exists" prior to humans, but it isn't inclusive of organic wholes that one can be right or wrong about delimiting.

Second, there is the skeptical theses. "Maybe there are organic wholes out there in the noumena, but since the mind and/or language shapes everything we experience, we cannot be sure."

And there are many forms of mereological nihilism that don't run through language at all. E.g. "there are only fundamental particles, which might be arranged cat-wise or tree-wise, but those aren't discrete things, they are heaps," or "there are only universal fields and activity in them." This is in line with the idea that all sciences are reducible to physics.

I don't think anyone thinks that.

It's not hard to find this idea on this very forum. Sometimes it isn't the language community, sometimes things don't exist prior to the mind judging them as such. Or sometimes it's just skepticism as to whether things like animals exist outside our judgements.

Broadly, perhaps in spirit. I mean, is it a philosophy of common sense? Of iterative development? I hardly think so, it's often self-consciously radical.

Post-modernism if often attacked by the common sense view. When it is, it seems like the most common defense is to appeal to the work of the skeptics.

The idea is that we don't passively engage our world like blank slates upon which the world faithfully writes. It's more that we deal with one another in activities which feature linguistic rules we've agreed upon, much like we've agreed upon the rules of chess

But "either the world faithfully writes on us a blank slates or tigers and ants did not exist as discrete organic wholes until a language community decided to count them as such," is not a true dichotomy.

In other words, language doesn't come from isolated individuals treating the world out on the range like Teddy Roosevelt. Language arises from interaction with one another, much like a community of birds squawking at one another.

Agreed. I don't think this implies that there is no fact about any distinct things existing in the world prior to the act of some language community. For one, this would entail that man, individual men, and language communities themselves did not exist until until after some language community came to count them as such.

Anyhow, I would just appeal to an abductive explanation. Disparate isolated cultures recognize individual animals and different species in similar ways, and toddlers easily pick up the idea of animals as wholes, because they exist in some sense as wholes. If you make up some arbitrary collection of things and try to force a child to recall it, they're going to have trouble. Half a tiger, plus some air and dirt, is not a thing in the way a whole tiger is. This is why phenomenal awareness is full of things, not indistinct sense data. When we walk around we experience trees and ants.

Even the metaphysical skeptic should be able to allow the last point. But then language is not unrelated to how things are phenomenologically present to us. An analysis that forces us to chop of the phenomenological (e.g. removing intended reference, our experiencing discrete things, etc.) is only "empiricism" in an extremely restrictive sense.

If what things are is primarily a question of language than agnosia would be a sort of aphasia, and the uncannyness of AI imagery that lacks any things should simply be an inability to put words to combinations of sense data.