That's the problem. We have many definitions, sometimes incompatible with each other, so we have to choose one. Or leave the topic ambiguous.

I think that if we want to keep the spirit of Aristotle's "being qua being", metaphysics has to be reinterpreted epistemologically. Our physics would today, be Aristotle's metaphysics back then.

The goal of metaphysics was to explain the world. Now we know that we can say less about the world than was thought in antiquity. Aristotle wanted to (for example) show what a house was. Today we'd say that a house is mind-dependent not a aspect of the world.

If we want to talk about houses, or statues or clocks or people, we have to elucidate how these things appear to us, how do we think about them (is a cave a house?) and what can we say about the world for people (are colours a property of the world?, is our ordinary picture of the world misleading?, etc.).

That's what I concluded after looking at this for some time, but, like anything else in philosophy people are going to disagree.

"They say that the name metaphysics is almost accidental, it was just the book by Aristotle that came after the book called ‘Physics’, so it doesn’t really have a meaning, but it’s not very difficult to say what it is, it’s just the attempt to study the most general characteristic of what is or may be and what must be”

- Galen Strawson

"Metaphysics... business is to study the most general features of reality and real objects.... Here let us set down almost at random a small specimen of the questions of metaphysics which press, not for hasty answers, but for industrious and solid investigation:... Whether there is any distinction between, other than more or less. between fact and fancy? Or between the external and internal worlds?... What external reality do the qualities of sense represent in general?

- C.S. Peirce

"I take metaphysics to be about the world, not just about our concepts, conceptual schemes, or languages; and to depend on experience—not, however, on the kind of specialized, recherché experience on which the empirical sciences call, but on close attention to familiar, everyday experience."

- Susan Haack

"Metaphysical enquiry employs the same cognitive power as is employed in commonsense and scientific judgements about the world of experience: the very same principles of reasoning as are employed in empirical judgements about tables and atoms, are employed in a purified form, in metaphysical judgements about God and the soul.”

- Sebastian Gardner

Well, I suppose this is why we are in philosophy forum, to argue till' we're blue in the face.

It only gets bad when we start arguing about trees existing or not. We're not there yet.

It's all good. I see you are busy here. Chomsky is a personal issue to me, so I couldn't resist a comment.

You have plenty to argue here anyway.

Saying something like that about Chomsky is quite remarkable...

They respected him deeply.

I suppose the appeal here is that the idea of one-ness is simple and difficult to argue against. Like if someone says there are many. Yeah, ok, but what about them? We look for similarities.

Do you think that it's possible to argue against the idea of "the one" as presented by Parmenides?

Funny that I saw your reply as I was typing, otherwise I would keep postponing.

By this point, it's impossible not to have our ideas contaminated by modern theories and other philosophers. I think that what can help with this distinction of time being an illusion vs time feeling very real to us, is that one is how time is independent of us (in some respects) and the other is time, as we experience it.

We obviously add much to time, that is not found in the universe. Ideas of "slow", "fast", "before" and "after" are meaningless to the universe. But not to us.

Well I'll start by saying something, otherwise it's easy to get intimidated and not say anything. Because this text is really dense and difficult. I've read a part of it, maybe a third or so, and highlighted some passages (copy pasted them actually) so that I could have something to build on.

As I read more and finish, and re-read, this may all radically change.

A lot of it is made more difficult due to the fact that we are in very different intellectual/cultural climates, so it's hard to understand why there should only "the one":

"if, on the other hand, one were in itself, it would also be contained by nothing else but itself; that is to say, if it were really in itself; for nothing can be in anything which does not contain it."

that which contains must be other than that which is contained? for the same whole cannot do and suffer both at once; and if so, one will be no longer one, but two?

It seems to me as if "the one" postulated here is rather rigid concept, such that anything which could possibly show a flaw in the concept of the one would be taken as part of the one, but the one cannot have parts.

Then we have the problem that a subject can think of the one, while being of the one, so the person cannot escape being part of the one.

I'd say the subject is one thing, the thought of the one is a different thing, while admitting that, in some very obscure sense, everything is part of a single "thing".

This thing could be the universe, or quantum fields or even the-thing-in-itself.

So initially, it looks like whatever this one is, for it to be rendered intelligible, must be the kind of thing which appears as many. And as appearances, they are different and multitudinous. So in this sense one could say that there are many things which at bottom belong to one.

These are my initial thoughts anyway.

It's "built in" to the way we experience the world. We just can't enter into the head of another person, we can only see bodies.

The closest analogy of getting inside someone else's head is to read a high-quality novel, which may give a rough impression of what you are pointing out. But even in this case it's only a distant approximation of actual experience.

Or so it seems to me.

"While we can isolate the element of the given by these criteria of its unalterability and its character as sensuous feel or quality, we cannot describe any particular given as such, because in describing it, in whatever fashion, we qualify it by bringing it under some category or other, select from it, emphasize aspects of it, and relate it in particular and avoidable ways."

- C.I. Lewis

We can't say what aspects of our own thought are futile. Maybe we realize that thinking about X was a waste of time or, one becomes aware that what one thought was misleading turns out to be correct.

What's more likely still is that we were wrong all the time and never found out. Might be the case given the history of thought.

What's a waste of time for one person, is the lifeblood for another.

And, we all die in the end. So futility is kind of built-in anyway. So... who knows?

There's all kinds of traditions, views and personal quirks. So I assume there are some who think so.

Like solipsism, it's not a question that can be refuted by arguments.

Welcome to my world. :naughty: :halo:

Never mind, poor attempt at mock surprise

Sure.

Here a link to the dialogue:

http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/parmenides.html

Hell....there might not even be an “external to this world” to contain things, — Mww

:scream:

I don't know about Eastern Traditions to be able to say much about that, if that's what you have in mind when speaking of having no self. Though galaxies and/or quarks still are representations, that can't be done away with. And we have good reasons for thinking these things belong to the world.

I think you are both a subject and on object. You are a subject so long as you have experience and are an object so far as you have a body.

In any case, both are required to do science as we now do it and philosophy too.

The world is related to how we think about ourselves and not necessarily an aspect of the world independent of us. — T Clark

I'm not sure I understand. If you were to say the world is related to how we think about it, then that's fine. If we are thinking about ourselves the world is of secondary importance at best.

That's a tough one. That would be the case if the self "T Clark" is a metaphysical entity.

It seems to me that selves are epistemological entities related to how we think about ourselves and not necessarily an aspect of the world.

However, we are part of the world too. So it's nebulous. There is a sense in which, narrowly defined, you can use metaphysics to refer to the world and epistemology to people. But, complex.

Capital punishment still exists in Japan and South Korea, not only the US. Of course, this doesn't make it right, but other "developed countries" have it as well.

And I can understand wanting to kill someone who murdered a family member or raped a loved one. But to give that power to the state, is problematic.

Reply 2/2

What does the term "construct" mean in this context? I might prefer to say we notice and observe similarities in the look and feel of the wall's straight surface, in the sounds of two horses, and so on. — Cabbage Farmer

We take the sense data from the world and represent it as a wall. We don't experience how we do this, we automatically do so. It's after this process that we can speak about noticing similarities and differences.

I'd prefer to say: The objects affect us the way they do in virtue of our disposition to be affected by such objects thus. It seems an empirical question, which of our perceptual dispositions are innate and which are acquired -- or perhaps it's better to ask, in what respect is a perceptual disposition innate and in what respect is it acquired. — Cabbage Farmer

That's a good formulation.

I'm no more inclined to say that music is "mere sound" than to say that speech is "mere sound", writing is "mere ink", or animals are "mere molecules" — Cabbage Farmer

This is the difference between what science says about "sounds" and "molecules" vs our experience of them as intelligent, sentient creatures. If we describe the phenomenon of music such as Beethoven's 9th, then we speak about sound waves and amplitudes. The property "sublime", "creative", "moving" and so forth, should not figure in a scientific description of facts, I think.

I suspect that humans learned to recognize, construct, and speak about triangular things before they arrived at that mathematical idealization; and it seems the precise geometrical concepts were designed to help us measure, describe, and construct the real things, not to replace them. I'm inclined to say it's the original, rough and practical, concept of triangle, not the mathematically precise concept of triangle, that's ordinarily applied in perceptual judgment. I see no reason to declare that the shape of a real thing must be perfectly similar to an ideal shape in order to count as triangular -- for instance, a triangular plot of land, a triangular altar, a triangular plow. — Cabbage Farmer

We may say the word "triangle" before we have a clear conception of what it is. But if we did not have an innate concept of triangle, we would see three lines connecting and often not very well. We could call it that a "triangle", but I think that wouldn't tell us anything about them any more than calling a group of people a "nation" tells us about people.

I see no reason to suppose that "empirical concepts" like "horse" and "star" are likewise "innate and implicit". To the contrary, it seems clear that we acquire such concepts only through acquaintance with instances of the corresponding objects in experience; and empirical sciences like biology and astronomy depend on the investigation of those particulars. — Cabbage Farmer

This is an extremely difficult topic to talk sensibly about, in my opinion, one that could very well lead to an entire different thread. The best way I can talk about this topic briefly would be to ask you to consider at an early age, when you found out what a "horse" and a "star" was, how many times did you have to see it and for how long did you have to be experiencing such objects such that you could see another one of its kind and call that other thing a "horse" and a "star"?

I think that if we attach "learning" or acquaintance with experience, it would take us forever to walk through a hallway, much less a beach or a forest.

The things science studies are postulated as being mind-independent. Our ordinary notion of "star" and "horse" do not apply to the science. I think this video explain the outline rather well, you may want to see all of it on 2x speed, but the relevant idea begins at minute 4:38:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ozZdrFQfTU&t=127s

He seems to suggest that a "mind" must be "one with that which it perceives" in order to "know or comprehend it". That mysterious criterion is fleshed out by the accompanying claim that a mind cannot "know or comprehend" anything "at a distance". This sounds way off the rails to me. Perhaps the passage puts egregiously unwarranted spin on the term "comprehension". I'm tempted to conclude that these extraordinary formulas are signs of Cudworth's ignorance of the integrity of the physical connections, revealed by empirical investigation since Cudworth's time, which link perceivers to distant objects in exteroception. — Cabbage Farmer

He's very wordy and can often be obscure. What I think he says is that by just sensing the object, we don't get any ideas from them. It's only when we think about the phenomenon carefully, that we're surprised to discover things about them. We see apples falling down, we use to believe that this meant "apples going to there natural place". But when Newton became puzzled by this and started thinking "why do apples fall instead of going up" he discovered important things about the world, through his experiments and calculations.

We can only experiment on what we have available to us as inquiring creatures, for instance, we could not do physics if we had no mathematical capacity, which is innate. That's the rough idea.

And our culturally mediated conceptual capacities play an extremely important role in determining the character of the perceptual judgments we're disposed to make on the basis of perception. — Cabbage Farmer

They certainly do to an extent, especially in folk psychological explanations of the world. It's quite interesting.

It seems to me that I say all this on purely phenomenological grounds, without extraneous "metaphysical" commitments or implications. — Cabbage Farmer

Yes. We can do most things in philosophy without metaphysical commitments. We can put that aside for these discussions.

Wow. That's some reply. I currently don't have the puzzlement that caused me to create this over a week ago, nevertheless I have to answer some of the things you bring up. :cool:

Reply 1/2

It's hard for me to understand what it could mean to claim that "there's absolutely no resemblance" between the subjective character of an exteroceptive experience, and the objective features of that experience. That there is some such resemblance seems perhaps most evident when considering changes, variations, and other differences that appear in the course of experience. — Cabbage Farmer

Though Reid was generally critiquing Hume, in this area I think he has in mind Locke, but I'm not certain. Locke's primary qualities suggested that these properties belonged to the object, that is, they were essential to the objects existence. Secondary qualities are inessential to the object existence.

Odor would be an inessential property of an object, not existing if we did not exist to smell them. The only reply I can come up is what I've said before, beforehand, it would not be evident that grass would smell the way it does when one looks at grass. When we look at grass, I can't imagine another way it could look, other than what appears to me. It could smell like bacon for all I know, but it couldn't look like a pig.

On the other hand, if I only smelled grass, having my eyes closed, and not having seen it before, I might be surprised it looks as it does, though perhaps I would associate that smell with some kind of plant.

there's "something it's like" for the look of an apple to change as ambient light gets bright or dim; and "something it's like" to behold variations in color along the surface of an apple, or to note changes in the look of the apple as I rotate it in my hand. — Cabbage Farmer

Yes, absolutely. Our sight of the colour will depend on lighting conditions, seasons, etc.

However, it's no easy matter to articulate the claim in question, as it's notoriously difficult to say anything informative about such "sensory qualities" without thereby implicating objective features of the experience in which these sensory qualities appear. — Cabbage Farmer

Most of the times, yes. How about hallucinations or dreams though? In these cases there's literally nothing external in the world to point to and say "this tree is the cause of my seeing it as brown and green."

Nevertheless, it will be pointed out, that dreams take stuff from the world, so we are reproducing it without extraneous help in these instances.

Then again, I suppose any two things in the world may be called similar in some respects and different in other respects. What should we make of the claim that there are some respects in which the "sensory qualities" of an experience do not "resemble" the objective features of the same experience? What's at stake in this claim for us, or for philosophers in the bygone days of Reid? — Cabbage Farmer

What's at stake? Not much by the way of practical affairs. For me it's more about being quite puzzled as to why we interpret the objects the way we do. We take our "world-building" as a given. It's only when we are puzzled that we got into modern science. Once you notice that what seems evident is problematic, then everything can be quite surprising. Which is an appropriate philosophical attitude to have, at times.

It seems to me that we learn far more about phenomena, including those "sensory qualities", by investigating all the ways in which they appear to be "connected", than we do by merely noting their "resemblances". — Cabbage Farmer

Absolutely.

It's C.I. Lewis I have in mind, not Kant.

Good post. I’d like to read you when you’re a lot better, rather than a bit. I’m sure I’ll learn something. — Mww

Sounds fair. :up:

Perhaps, psychology broadly considered, yes. It's a massive topic and not our most developed science by any means.

"Physics" has overwhelmed "Metaphysics" and no human intuition can add any value to the understanding of reality without a good understanding of present physics.
Epistemology is still interesting as much as it connects with philosophy of language and cognitivism... — Raul

In terms of Aristotle's original conception of metaphysics, absolutely no doubt about that.

Which is why many "metaphysical questions" like, "what is the self", "how can we best consider causation", "are events more primary than objects", "is free will impossible" are actually questions about how we interpret the world and not about the world itself. With a few exceptions.

But QM is obviously way to complicated for us to understand too well, at the moment anyway.

Philosophically relevant, but try telling Mr. or Mrs. Suburbia that thing just put on the curb isn’t actually a trash can. Even his media-crazed Gen Z offspring isn’t likely to put out the lawnmower when coerced into the minor chore of putting the trash can on the curb. ‘Course, he’d probably put it out too late for pickup, but still..... — Mww

It is a trashcan, but a trashcan is a concept imposed on the thing, it's also a human concept "trashcan", not a natural kind, which exist mind independently.

It sounds like you’re saying we reduce sensations, but I don’t think we actually do that. Whatever the sensation is, is what we use in determining an object, so it would seem we need the entire sensation, and I’m not even sure how our physiology, that upon which impressions are made, would simplify sensation anyway. Our eyes don’t tell us we didn’t see green when perceiving the blue sky. — Mww

Let's say, we order the given. But there are different ways this sense data can be ordered, it's not necessary that our way of constructing the world is the only way there is, in terms of our common sense understanding of it.

There's a bunch of stimulus "out there" for us, we form it into a certain picture. But not all the sense data is tended to.

I'm a bit better today. Then again, we are arguing over which version of "transcendental philosophy" we prefer version 1.1 or version 1.12. :grimace:

Confessions of a Philosopher by Bryan Magee

Ah, always with the easy questions with you eh? :sweat:

It's difficult to pin down. We may have similar epistemological concerns in terms of truth, reliability, fallibilism, etc. But we radically disagree on what this knowledge amounts to. Is this knowledge only ideal, that is, does information we get from the world solely mental? If so, how do mental things relate to non-mental things? If science tells us about the mind-independent world, where does that leave our "folk psychological" "manifest image"?

If only people who actually do quantum physics understand it in any detail at all, should we even be able to talk about it at all, being that most of us aren't experts? How can human centric-knowledge be capable of applying to the world at all? Is there any evolutionary advantage to being able to do science as opposed to not?

And on and on and on.

Thanks.

*The author accepts no liability from the comments and corrections that henceforth will come from Unenlightened and Banno"

Well, they are pretty related, even though people specialize in one field or another. You can't do epistemology without a world, and a world makes no sense without epistemology.

Another question altogether is if "metaphysics" is even possible without a heavy epistemological component. I don't think it is anymore.

Not sure what you mean by apprehended here. That something can even be perceived requires that thing to be of such a nature we can perceive it, sure, but that’s bordering on the tautological, isn’t it? But that something is of such a nature to facilitate its perception says absolutely nothing whatsoever with respect to understanding what that thing is. — Mww

It's attempting to elucidate what is given descriptively, maybe it's a bad formulation. I'm assuming that when analyzing something given, what we capture through sense data and then proceed to conceptualize is only part of the totality of what is given.

What is given is the sense data, which, depending on the uses you have in mind for said object, we categorize it as something, in this instance, say, a "pen". For someone else, the same given can be thought of as a "weapon" or a "plastic stick".

Nevertheless, we simplify sense data into something intelligible, in effect taking away "noise" from our interpretation of things. We recognize specific objects such as as pens, but a "pen-desk" is not something we tend to isolate as an object, but it could be so thought as by a different species.

It is not an assumption: there are no empirical objects of perception in my head. How that downstream something relates to that which it stands in for, is a logical postulate. — Mww

Correct. The objects are outside my head. We perceive what our experience picks out from the objects. We postulate that these effects come from the object, this needn't be the case. It could all be a brain in a vat. What's relevant is the sensory impressions we transform, more so than the object itself.

I don't think we reach the actual objects. We approximate them through scientific investigation.

Ehhh, I'm feeling kind of stupid today so, have a bit of mercy...

Susan Haack (a prominent philosopher of science) suggests strongly that there is no scientific method as such. — Tom Storm

She calls science "a loose federations of interrelated kinds of inquiry."

Thing is, even if the given is already shaped by us, say, by imagination for some other internal use downstream, that in itself doesn’t say what the other use is, nor that such shaping is sufficient for specific so-and-so’s. Even while the grounds for them lay in imagination, the specifics cannot be so lawless. But you knew that. — Mww

Whatever is given to creatures like us (which is very difficult to tease out), must be of a nature that it can partly be apprehended by us in perception.

So far as we are able to discern, the given for experience cannot be seen from a neutral perspective, that is, involving no perception at all.

So the given is of the kind which we already shape automatically, we can't help it. We assume that "downstream" something "stands in" for what we perceive, but that's a logical postulate, not an empirically verifiable claim.

I have to leave room for that aspect of giveness that one must assume exists independent of mind.

Of course, the specifics are lawful in so far as we have to deal with them as creatures. That's how we interact with nature.

Pardon any obscurities here, I've begun studying this seriously, so I'm not as fluent as I would like to be.

:up:

Yep. We can't get out of our bodies to see how things might look like absent our specific perspective. There's always a pragmatic element to enquiry, otherwise we wouldn't bother.



True. That phrase was not accurate enough. It's quite a nuanced process because saying that that which gives rise to our considerations already makes the process seem more intellect or reason-involving than is meant.

I'd say that there is the given, which we then interpret according to our imagination, which we then call a specific so and so "a rock", "a blade of grass", "the sun".

The given is already shaped by us, but I want to say that there is an element there which doesn't depend on us. Otherwise it seems to me that we could will ourselves into thinking anything could be anything else just by thinking about, such as willing to change a cloud to a hill and so forth.

As noted by you, both try to make sense of the world. The difference is that some aspects of philosophy have an empirical basis, whereas Religion use of empirical phenomena is weaker. And there's also conceptual analysis which is a crucial component of modern philosophy.

Religion evidently seeks to provide meaning and purpose explicitly by invoking God (or Gods) and thus all phenomena are ultimately explained by ending up relating back to a supreme being. This can happen in philosophy too, so there's no escape from some kind of intuition or basic idea of which we have an intuition is correct.

Religion tends to provide an answer, whereas in philosophy issues can be clarified, minimized or left behind and often more questions result for pursuing the issue at hand.

A professor I had once joked that philosophers have a question for every answer. Susan Haack pointed out that if two people are in a room and always disagree, they are usually philosophers, which is correct, to a point.

The spiritual element (or mystical or numinous) is not as easy topic for philosophy to deal with, whereas in religion it is taken as a given or an evident phenomenon.

I suppose the key difference, in my mind, is that one field keeps asking and debating age old questions whereas the other often has the answers "ready made", though interpretive issues do arise. Descartes had a point that at least once in our life, when appropriate, we should question everything, and see what follows form this.

It's a good exercise for thinking a bit more clearly about how we interpret and relate to the world.

I'd say our considerations do (obviously) depend on us, but that which gives rise to the considerations does not. — Janus

Put in that way, it is true. The issue is articulating what is that "which gives rise to these considerations".

Sense data? I don't know.

Sure, you cannot will the movements of planets or galaxies, in that sense reality is certainly independent of us. There is "world-making", to use Goodman's idea, to consider however. What we consider galaxies and stars and planets do depend, in part, by how we categorize these things.

For instance, not until long ago was Pluto considered a planet, before it's downgrade. So there is also a sense in which the universe we experience is shaped by us, which shouldn't be overlooked completely.

Systematic racism exists everywhere. There's even racism here (Dominican Republic) by brown people towards more darkly toned brown people. Not to mention the hate Hatians get - it's a complex history, but very ugly.

The point is to undergo a continuos transformation in which we shed our biases and prejudices. There's plenty of things to do in regard to improving race relations, same with women's rights.

The issue is how to address them. Some tactics employed by university students, while well intentioned, backfire, like having, I don't know, 30 or 50 pronouns or whatever. Most people don't care about that to that extent at all.

If we still have serious problems addressing literally half the world's population still, we will have issues to deal with regarding race.

If not, then how do you make sense of anything? We can't simply guess at everything the other person is saying, we wouldn't know what to do.

The problem, as I see it, is trying to articulate what common sense is. It's not hard to point out thought experiments or even real life news events, in which most of us would say "yeah, she was wrong" or "he's guilty" or whatever. But when you try and say what this consists of, we end up appealing to our intuitions, which we can't really go behind.

So, in saying that in interpreting others we need common sense, we are actually saying a lot, in terms of all that goes into common sense.

Heh.

That's true. Nature is powerful enough that in thousands of years, we should predict for some kind of intelligent life to return.

Of course, since I have some doubts as to my longevity and that of my family and friends, I'd prefer if it weren't that long...

Well, you could be a "libertarian" and want the ice to melt, better for shipping and commerce and stuff.

I'm not finding a place where to complain about stuff only philosophers or philosophically inclined people could ever conceive of complaining. Absent that, I'll post here just to get it out.

Whatever the heck are colours? They make no sense. They're not in objects, they're in minds, but they seem to be in objects.

They're caused by photons hitting the eye, which have no colour incidentally. Yet I am seeing a blue box right now, and cannot doubt that the damn box is blue, but it isn't blue, because if I close my eyes, the box has no colours. So why does it look like it's in the object, if it's not?

They're extremely vivid properties, we are delighted by them and horrified too, the same colour can induce feelings of joy or depression (blue as in the sky, or blue as in feeling blue). Do they even matter to us? Plenty of red things can be eaten, others kill you.

Let's not even talk about the ocean, that blue thing that is transparent in a cup and look black at night. How about a damn rainbow? You see many colours, but they're not in the world, somehow.

Why do colours produce emotional reactions? How can photons turn into any colour. Why would the brain do this?

I don't get it.

Fuck this.