Is it possible to disprove idealism? — Agent Smith

"Idealism" (like materialism, etc) is neither a formal theorem nor a factual truth-claim so the question is incoherent.

"Idealism" isn't a formal theorem or factual truth-claim so the question is incoherent. — 180 Proof

It is a claim, oui? The question of its decidability arises quite naturally as far as I can tell. Why would we argue the point otherwise?

It is a claim, oui? — Agent Smith

No. It's a speculative supposition (or avowal), not propositional statement / thesis.

This is the basis of all evolved cognitive systems including h. Sapiens. You could say that our cognitive systems designate what ‘things’ are. — Wayfarer

It's an intriguing idea. Do you believe that ideas like 'goodness' and 'beauty' are part of our cognitive heritage and how would this differ to them being instantiations of Platonic forms?

No. It's a speculative supposition (or avowal), not propositional statement / thesis — 180 Proof

I see. Idealism = Everything is mind-dependent. Is this not a proposition? It feels like one to me. Prove to me that idealism is nonpropositional.

It's an intriguing idea. Do you believe that ideas like 'goodness' and 'beauty' are part of our cognitive heritage and how would this differ to them being instantiations of Platonic forms? — Tom Storm

Again, Pinter's book is not a philosophy book as such. So he himself doesn't go into that. But I have a strong interest in Platonic idealism, and I think you can map it against his model. I see h. sapiens rational and linguistic abilities as developing out of, or evolving from, the simpler cognitive forms present in earlier species. H. Sapiens crossed a developmental threshold with the development of reason, story-telling, speech and self-awareness. Within that model, such notions Plato's universal ideas are like consistent structures within a rational intelligence. (That's more the subject of Kelly Ross' article Meaning and the Problem of Universals.)

The basic takeway from Pinter's book, is that ideas, and indeed all qualia (qualitative mental states) are not objectively real i.e. they don't exist in a way which is discernable to objective measurement (which of course is the hard problem, which he mentions). But they're real, in that they comprise the foundational elements of our own experience of the world. You can see how that fits into a kind of dualist theory but he supports it with many references from cognitive science.

I would say instead that the mind is infinite intelligence and that Hoffman is coming from this from a materialist scientific frame of mind instead of with philosophy. Science can continue to find aspects of an object that we can't ordinarily sense but what we sense is real. Color tests are tricky but in the real lived world apart from electronics someone with good eyesight can tell what a true color is. Finally, you do need a definition of real and true if you set out to deny them.

Hoffman is coming from this from a materialist scientific frame of mind instead of with philosophy. — Gregory

Hoffman rejects physicalism/materialism. In his view consciousness is fundamental. His wiki entry is here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_D._Hoffman

(That's more the subject of Kelly Ross' article Meaning and the Problem of Universals.) — Wayfarer

Nice primer. Thanks.

Prove to me that idealism is nonpropositional. — Agent Smith

My "proof" is that there is no truth-maker for "idealism" (e.g. reality is mind-dependent).

How would you separate the aspects of human thought which are innate and eternal, as platonic realism dictates, from the aspects which are constructed by the human mind, and are "evolving"? Is this an example of the distinction between content and form? Would you propose that the content, being some fundamental platonic forms, which constitutes the subject matter of thinking, is distinguishable from the formal structures which the mind creates, as a "world-picture" for example.

The reason I ask this, is that you seem to adhere strongly to platonic realism, which would understand "ideas" or "Forms" as eternal unchanging, innate features of our intelligible universe, yet you also allow features which are constructions of the mind when you want to discredit naive realism. The following is a quote from a few posts back.

But it is interesting how both support the model of the mind as a constructive process that creates, generates or builds our world-picture, which seems to me to irrevocably disrupt the view of naive realism. — Wayfarer

The issue here, is the nominalist/realist debate which you often refer to. You seem to employ nominalist principles when you are arguing against some forms of realism, But then when it comes to supporting platonic realism, you appear to be anti-nominalist.

Would you be proposing some sort of hylomorphism of intelligible objects? In this case, a conceptual structure would consist of some parts which are eternal unchanging platonic ideals (the subject-matter or content of the intelligible object), and some parts would be constructs, produced or created by the human mind (the formal aspect of the intelligible object).

From this perspective, would we as human beings, have a vantage point, toward understanding the nature of true, pure, separate, independent, and immaterial Forms? If this form of dualism which you seem to be proposing places the innate, eternal Ideas, of platonic realism, as the subject matter, being the material content of the intelligible object, how can we turn this around to give true separate, existence to the independent Forms, as immaterial?

Do you see the point I'm making? This type of thinking, which gives priority to platonic realism, instead of denying all forms of realism, as a first principle of Socratic skepticism, gives us an upside down, or backward starting point. If instead, we assign "intelligibility" only to what is created by the mind, under Plato's principle of "the good", then we have a true starting point, to see that anything intelligible is necessarily created by a mind. And the idea of eternal, unchanging intelligible objects, as platonic forms, must be dismissed as incoherent.

In the wiki reference, there’s a citation, #9. Did you investigate?

If not, check out the 40 minute mark, and thereafter.

In the wiki reference, there’s a citation, #9. — Mww

No, didn't notice that one.

How would you separate the aspects of human thought which are innate and eternal, as platonic realism dictates, from the aspects which are constructed by the human mind, and are "evolving"? — Metaphysician Undercover

There's an entire essay in this question, but to answer very briefly - I think 'eternal' is oversold for Platonic ideas and the like. It's more that they're non-temporal - that they don't come into or go out of existence - they're not temporally delimited or composed of parts.

Neoplatonic mathematics is governed by a fundamental distiction which is indeed inherent in Greek science in general, but is here most strongly formulated. According to this distinction, one branch of mathematics participates in the contemplation of that which is in no way subject to change, or to becoming and passing away. This branch contemplates that which is always such as it is and which alone is capable of being known: for that which is known in the act of knowing, being a communicable and teachable possession, must be something that is once and for all fixed. — Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra

The evolution of h. sapiens is fairly well understood. But I share with Alfred Russel Wallace scepticism that the intellectual, artistic and creative faculties can be understood solely through the lens of evolutionary biology. That we evolved, just as the science says, but we 'passed a threshhold' when we learned reason and speech. I think the Greek philosophers literally discovered and articulated the power of reason, the Logos. And I think Western culture, on the whole, has since forgotten it again.

you also allow features which are constructions of the mind when you want to discredit naive realism. — Metaphysician Undercover

Insightful observation. Naive realism and empiricist philosophy, as you know, rejects 'innate ideas'. That is what practically defines them. So I believe that the intelligence has some innate capacities. (Heaven knows, the mind might even have memories or insights from previous lives, as Plato seemed to accept. Perhaps that is passed on through something like morphic resonance.) In any case, there are universal ideas, and they're bigger than any individual or any specific culture. Even many of the principles discovered by science can be included in that.

From this perspective, would we as human beings, have a vantage point, toward understanding the nature of true, pure, separate, independent, and immaterial Forms? If this form of dualism which you seem to be proposing places the innate, eternal Ideas, of platonic realism, as the subject matter, being the material content of the intelligible object, how can we turn this around to give true separate, existence to the independent Forms, as immaterial? — Metaphysician Undercover

Dualism - partially physical and partially intellectual (noetic in the traditional sense). One foot in each world. Look at what humans have been capable of. I don't think physical evolution alone accounts for that. The pre-modern intuition was that 'nous', the power of reason, provided insight into the causal realm. That has also largely been lost (as per Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason, amongst other sources.)

And the idea of eternal, unchanging intelligible objects, as platonic forms, must be dismissed as incoherent. — Metaphysician Undercover

That's because it's not what I mean, you continually misconstrue it whenever it's discussed, from my point of view.

Not that big’a deal; support for your.....

Plainly an idealist philosophy in my reckoning. — Wayfarer

....is all.

In addition to what you’ve been saying, Hoffman says, “space, time, causality are fictions.....useful fictions”, and the proper idealist against which at least some if not most modern idealists are judged, says, “....the construction of our fictions, which are not the less fictions on that account....”, in speaking of just those notions.

Well there is such a thing as'scientific idealism'. We're seeing it emerge.

https://www.philosophy-of-education.org/consciousness-scientific-materialism-and-the-new-idealism/

https://blog.apaonline.org/2018/12/03/dusting-off-dualism/

He starts with physicalism

I would also add that Hoffman rejects our natural sense of shape of body. For him everything spatial is an illusion, as with Kant. If science says something that is obviously wrong philosophically, follow philosophy because it can define what truth is and science can't. Hoffman even admits that they don't know everything about the brain. This means he hasn't proven anything

As food for thought. Bernardo Kastrup writes:

...as I’ve elaborated upon more extensively in a Scientific American essay, our sensory apparatus has evolved to present our environment to us not as it is in itself, but instead in a coded and truncated form as a ‘dashboard of dials.’ The physical world is the dials.

Once this is clarified, analytic idealism is entirely consistent with the observations of neuroscience: brain function is part of what our conscious inner life looks like when observed from across a dissociative boundary. Therefore, there must be tight correlations between patterns of brain activity and conscious inner life, for the former is simply the extrinsic appearance of the latter; a pixelated appearance. — Tom Storm

That very much echos Wittgenstein's commentary in The Blue Book that briefly touched upon the logic and sense-making of neuroscience. Wittgenstein's entire 'Ordinary Language philosophy' that came after the Blue Book can almost be described as elaborating 'analytic solipsism' , e.g in PI

295. "I know .... only from my own case"—what kind of proposition
is this meant to be at all? An experiential one? No.—A grammatical
one?

I say "almost", due to the fact that if realism, idealism and solipsism are understood to refer to grammatical stances, and if one is free to choose one's grammatical stance in accordance with one's circumstances, then the so-called "ontological commitments" that are entailed by these contrary positions can only refer to the state of mind and intentions of their asserters, in which case the public debate between realism and idealism amounts to psychological differences among the public that have no relevance to the empirical sciences at large.

Because it's not possible for there to be a truthmaker or because it's not possible verify the existence of said truthmaker?

It seems to me like there is no logical reason a truthmaker for physicalism cannot exist. A physical thing existing in the absence of mind does not seem necessarily impossible. Likewise, idealism is the claim that what people call physical things don't exist without minds. There appears to be a possible falsemaker for this negative claim.

It seems like for this:

Idealism" (like materialism, etc) is neither a formal theorem nor a factual truth-claim so the question is incoherent.

to hold you need some other premises such as: "only knowable factual truth-claims have meaning," i.e. something like verificationism. Logic doesn't necessitate that the truthmaker for physicalism cannot exist, it only entails that it cannot be known. But unknowable truths seem like they might be around anyhow (e.g. Fitch's Unknowability Paradox).

The other problem in that case is that the limits of knowabilty seem to move around quite a bit on us.



I don't think he has rejected the idealist label, but I also don't think idealism = anti-realism. I agree with the SEP article that idealism is more often defined by "what it is not," and that seems to hold Hoffman's model. But it's also possible the he puts forth a quote different model in other places, people's ontology changes.


But maybe the issue here is that we're not clear on terms.

By realism I mean simply the idea that there is something "out there" which has a casual role in perceptions. I put Hoffman in this bucket because he repeatedly stresses that he does believe there is a "something" outside the mind. It's also the case that his entire argument makes very little sense if you hold that there is no reality outside the mind. What then would be the point of references to evolution, apparent illusions, etc.? A core premise of his fitness versus truth theorem is that there exists a tradeoff between more and less faithful representations of "things," and this is true regardless of whether fully faithful representations are actually possible (his claim is that they are not, in part because the entire question is framed wrong).

I would place him with Schelling and Hegel in this respect. For them, nature was an actual entity, it was merely the objective/subjective dichotomy that was false (somewhat similarly to Shankara, but without the problems of seemingly falling into an excluded middle).

Hoffman, like Hegel, would be a fallibleist, in that we, as individuals, can never come to know a "thing-in-itself." The entire idea of the noumena becomes nonsense because "things-in-themselves" don't actually exist. The discrete objects the idea entails are an illusion foisted on us by our evolutionary heritage. Hoffman seems to embrace models of a participatory universe, which entail that what we think of as things only exist as sets of relationships, i.e. what "things" are in terms of something else.

This might fit certain definitions of anti-realism because it makes our propositions not references to actual entities. But in another sense it is realist because it definitely posits a "something else," outside perception. This is like the difference between Advaita Vendanta and Absolute idealism. Everything experienced isn't falsity as in Advaita, you don't have this reduction where Brahman is the sole ontic entity, the "something else," has an ontic status. Indeed, Hoffman's whole goal per the introduction is to help us move past misconceptions and gain better understanding of that something.

Since the book isn't centered around philosophy, I can't really say if there is a contradiction here. It seems like he might be falling into the same sorts of trouble Kant had with his unresolved semi-dualism. It might also be that he played down a more anti-realist position in the book to make it more accessible, or that he developed those positions later. That would certainly make sense if he looked at his model and said "damn, I recreated Kant's incoherence."

Finally, you do need a definition of real and true if you set out to deny them

I covered that in the post with -X * -X <> any positive number. He includes the formal logical proof for FvT Theorem. You don't need a definition of something to say what it cannot be given simple premises, otherwise formal logic would be useless.

Color tests are tricky but in the real lived world apart from electronics someone with good eyesight can tell what a true color is.

But this is not what we see in experiments on color discrimination. The ability to discriminate between colors changes with age, varies by person, varies by gender, and crucially for the argument, varies significantly with context and exposure to other colors. In terms of remembering color, the native language of a subject and how said language categorizes colors effects how well they can remember color differences.

Truthmakers are components of the correspondence theory of truth. A truthmaker is not evidence. It's a state of affairs.

The proposition that idealism is the case would be true if that state of affairs obtains. This implies the dubiousness of correspondence theory, and why it's not a popular theory of truth.

Well there is such a thing as'scientific idealism'. We're seeing it emerge. — Wayfarer

For my sake....what is scientific idealism? Single sentence kinda thing?

A truthmaker is not evidence. It's a state of affairs.

Exactly. And physicalism could indeed be a state of affairs even if solid "evidence" for it cannot exist due to the fact that all such evidence comes in the form of first person experiences.

This implies the dubiousness of correspondence theory, and why it's not a popular theory of truth.

It's not? It seems to me like the most common theory I've seen. It's either in its pure form or wrapped up as pragmatism. A paragraph or two is spared to identify that the author is aware of issues with the correspondence theory, they invoke pragmatism, and then promptly carry on using what is essentially the correspondence definition for the rest of their work.

And I can't totally blame them because for many topics it is the most straightforward definition to use.



The more I think about it, most versions seem to be evolutionary epistemology plus reinventing Kant's problem of a noumena that we can never know. Same problems, different environment lol.

We'll need to wait for scientific Hegelianism to emerge to rectify this.

A paragraph or two is spared to identify that the author is aware of issues with the correspondence theory, they invoke pragmatism, and then promptly carry on using what is essentially the correspondence definition for the rest of their work.

And I can't totally blame them because for many topics it is the most straightforward definition to use. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That seems like a recipe for suspect metaphysical shenanigans, though. Do they faithfully adhere to the limits of pragmatism?

At the heart of the problem is the logic underlying the evidence/fact distinction.

In saying for instance, that the redness of a strawberry isn't semantically reducible to a perception of the strawberry, one is pointing out that the meaning of 'red' is predictive and refers to the conditional expectation of seeing other phenomena in relation to the strawberry if committing hypothetical courses of action, such as performing a chemical or spectroscopic analysis of the strawberry under laboratory conditions.

For the idealist, a conditional expectation is by definition part of the present that includes the state of the observer and his environment. This implies that if the observer who previously judged the strawberry to be red decides upon further investigation that the strawberry is in fact grey, that his previous judgement that the strawberry is red isn't falsified by his later change of mind. For the idealist, the observer's judgements changed because his situation changed, and so he hasn't committed a 'real' epistemic error. So for the idealist, perceptual errors and failed predictions aren't the result of failing to predict perception transcendent 'truth' but instead merely refer to classes of changing circumstance. This viewpoint has the physical advantage of interpreting human perception no differently to other physical measurement apparatus such as geiger-counters that are never said to be 'wrong', but only faulty under conditions in which where their desired or expected responses are unexpected or misunderstood.

The grey strawberry illusion for reference:. :grin:

I've not said or implied anything about "meaning" so referring to "verificationism" is a non sequitur. Also, if you think "idealism" (e.g. reality is mind-dependent) is a truth-claim then propose its truth-maker. IME, Count, philosophy consists (mostly) of pre/suppositions (i.e. interpretations, meta-expressions, aporia), not propositions.

Formal logic is a part of philosophy, which defines truth. You couldn't think at all without the concept of truth. As for colors, they change is relationship to each other but they are objective. All these science people have preconceived notions they don't question

plus reinventing Kant's noumena that we can never know. — Count Timothy von Icarus

As in....reinventing them so they can be known? Then they wouldn’t be Kant’s noumena, then, right? So it isn’t so much reinventing as re-defining. Which is fine; happens all the time. Historical precedent and all that.

Even so, if “scientific idealism” is a version of “evolutionary epistemology”, I’m no better off then when I started. From this armchair, both look like a subject with a qualifier, that is, idealism as a doctrine grounded by scientific conditions, and, epistemology as a doctrine grounded in human evolution. I find it more productive to ask folks what they mean by these phrases, or, ask how they wish me to understand what they mean.

Anyway....thanks.

Rarely. But it can work well enough for cross disciplinary analysis of scientific findings. You can still see how different models fit together and what their implications are even if you're working with faulty premises. That said, handwaving these epistemologicaly issues aside also does lead to bad reasoning in many cases.

Wilczek's "The Lightness of Being," is a good example of when this works well. He notes that quarks only exist as a mathematical structure. "The bit is the it," as he puts it. However, he explains quantum chromodynamics using analogies to objects that do occupy space in our perceptions (colored triangles, etc.) The goal is to give readers an understanding of QCD and local vs global symmetries without them having to understand the complex mathematics undergirding the theory. I think this is a fine aim. I think I might still have been lost if I hadn't already taken a course on the topic, but I feel less lost than I did then because he's presenting the information in a way that is more accessible even if the examples contradict the metaphysical position he's also asking us to take re: abstract objects being the foundation for physical "stuff."

I've not said or implied anything about "meaning" so referring to "verificationism" is a non sequitur.

I am referring to:

"Idealism" (like materialism, etc) is neither a formal theorem nor a factual truth-claim so the question is incoherent.

Physicalism is a factual truth-claim. It's the claim that the physical, which is mind independent, is ontologically more primitive than experience; that the physical supervenes on everything that is. Arguably this definition is too broad to be particularly meaningful, but generally physicalism also entails the claim that physics (once completed) provides a full description of "what is," and that this description holds regardless of whether there is anything around to observer said being.

Idealism has a more squishy definition. We could say it is the claim that: "things do not exist outside the experience of them." This doesn't cover all forms of idealism but works well enough for showing it is a factual claim.

The truthmaker for physicalism would be the existence of the universe described by physics in the absence of experience. This seems to me like a truthmaker that is possible (I suppose many idealists would say it is not), but not observable. Is your argument that claims about "what being is like" outside of experience are incoherent?

I'll allow I do find those arguments somewhat convincing.

Most common versions of physicalism would agree that a truthmaker for their claim would be that, long before any experiencing thing had time to develop, stars were doing what physics describes them as doing, fusing hydrogen into helium and giving off light.

Idealism is harder to pin down, but the version put forth above is a negative claim. If nothing exists outside experience, then idealism would have a correspondence with facts of the world.

IME, Count, philosophy consists (mostly) of pre/suppositions (i.e. interpretations, meta-expressions, aporia), not propositions

Maybe it should, but I'm not at all certain it does. Philosophers seem to make plenty of propositions. They make whole books of nothing but numbered propositions.

As in....reinventing them so they can be known? Then they wouldn’t be Kant’s noumena, then, right? So it isn’t so much reinventing as re-defining. Which is fine; happens all the time. Historical precedent and all that.

No, I say "reinventing," because it is the same paradoxical issue. Our perceptions are about the noumenal world, but we can never know the noumenal world as it is, full stop. Seems like the same problem to me.

Most common versions of physicalism would agree that a truthmaker for their claim would be that, long before any experiencing thing had time to develop, stars were doing what physics describes — Count Timothy von Icarus

The truthmaker for physicalism (as a proposition) would be physicalism (as a state of affairs). Same with idealism.