Of course you can say that the truth does not depend on there being a true statement, but then the idealist can say the same. — Michael

I see myself as suggesting that certain theses aren't sufficiently meaningful to be worth taking a position on. In the usual practical sense, the world is as it is whether I'm aware of it or not. Cells existed before microscopes, and earth was here before carbon dating. An idealist can 'abuse' (or play upon the flexibility of) ordinary language and say otherwise. To me it's not so much that they are wrong or right. It's just not that exciting. It's something like a tautology presented as an empirical discovery.

I'm not so familiar with Derrida. There's something to be said for viewing Wittgenstein as seeking to break logocentrism, despite what a cursory reading of the Tractatus might suggest. That is, he takes showing as more important than saying.

What I like about Derrida is his direct attack on the idea that 'meaning stuff' is 'directly present' to (or for, or identical with ) some immaterial 'mind-stuff.'

That is, he takes showing as more important than saying. — Banno

I guess I'm not clear on the showing/saying distinction. I relate more easily to the later work, tho I like the TLP.

It seems to me to be a bit of a sideshow, but doubtless that's because I haven't been exposed to it in sufficient detail. If one drops notions of meaning, looking instead to use, to the task in hand, then any mooted dichotomy of "meaning-stuff" and "mind-stuff" dissolves. Meaning is not a thing, but what one does. Mind is also what one does (Gilbert Ryle)...

SO not sure where such an argument as you say Derrida proposes fits.

Oh yes, we agree about where the path leads (mind is what we do.) As I see it, lots of paths are equally good, and I tend to find them complementary. Understanding one makes it easy to understand the next.

Derrida quotes Aristotle.

Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words. Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images.

Ryle doesn't name his targets, but here's a terse version of the ghost theory, way before Descartes.

Have you looked into Sellars' idea of the genius Jones ? Pretty clever, and I just bumped into it recently. In short, we can imagine a theory of 'thoughts' as if a theory of electrons or other invisible, counterintuitive entities. (All this in a society with speech but not yet a concept of unspoken thoughts.) Such a theory might explain why a person silently moves to a shorter checkout line at the grocery store.

A more direct attack on solipsism is found in Sartre's gaze of the other.

You are acutely aware of the reality of other minds when seen doing something embarrassing. Feeling embarrassed requires other minds.

And much the same goes for other emotive relations - love, envy...

Have you looked into Sellars' idea of the genius Jones ? — Pie

No - have you a link? You choice should be preferable to Google's.

Sample and link:

Sellars begins the myth by having us imagine a group of beings who can talk and act just like we do, but who lack any vocabulary of the inner. They have no concepts or notions of thoughts, sensations, feelings, wants, desires, though their language is otherwise rich and complete, even having the resources for (proto)scientific theorizing. We now introduce the hero of the story, Jones, who himself proposes a theory. Importantly, like many theories designed to explain, this one posits the existence of a new class of entities. In this instance, Jones seeks to explain some of the behavior of his peers, and relying on an analogy with the method of postulation in physics (from our perspective), the entities Jones’ theory postulates of are, initially, unobservable. (To anticipate the end of the story, the entities Jones introduces, first thoughts, then sensations, are not in principle unobservable. His peers will eventually be able to have direct, non-inferential knowledge of many of them).

What behavior, then, is Jones seeking to explain by the postulation of something he calls, “thoughts” and “thinking”? Namely that people sometimes engage in purposive, intelligent behavior when silent. Sometimes, that is, people engage in what we call, “thinking out loud,” where they speak about the intelligent behavior they are engaged in. But sometimes the behavior itself is present, with no accompanying verbal commentary, as it were. (Imagine someone changing the faucet in their kitchen, with instructions before them, sometimes reading aloud the instructions, sometimes declaring an intention to do something next, followed by periods of silence). What exactly, Jones wonders, is going on when people engage in such intelligent behavior when they are completely silent?

According to his theory, during all these occasions of intelligent behavior there is something going on “inside” people, in their heads if you like, some of which gets verbalized, some of which doesn’t. The way to explain such intelligent behavior is to see it as the culmination of a silent, inner type of reasoning, an “inner speaking” going on inside of people. Jones reasons that this intelligent behavior involves the occurrence of hidden episodes which are similar to the activity of talking. Jones says, in essence, “Let’s call it ‘thinking,’ and though it is like talking, it is silent, or covert inner speech. Thinking is what is going on in us, which lies behind and explains our intelligent behavior and our intelligent talking.”

Importantly, the episodes Jones postulates may turn out to be neuro-physiological events, but Jones’ theory is noncommittal on this point, and doesn’t require a specification of their intrinsic nature. The salient point is that episodes of thinking are modeled on a public language, and an understanding of these inner episodes will involve the use of categories that are in the first instance applicable to a public language.

https://iep.utm.edu/sellars/#H4

I'll add a Derrrida quote here (from Of Grammatology) that complements the point by Sellars.

If, for Aristotle, for example, "spoken words are the symbols of mental experience, and written words are the symbols of spoken words," it is because the voice, producer of the first symbols, has a relationship of essential and immediate proximity with the mind...

The feelings of the mind, expressing things naturally, constitute a sort of universal language which can then efface itself. It is the stage of transparence. ... In every case, the voice is closest to the signified, whether it is determined strictly as sense ( thought or lived ) or more loosely as thing. All signifiers, and first and foremost the written signifier, are derivative with regard to what would wed the voice indissolubly to the mind or to the thought of the signified sense, indeed to the thing itself ( whether it is done in the Aristotelian manner that we have just indicated or in the manner of medieval theology, determining the res as a thing created from its eidos, from its sense thought in the logos or in the infinite understanding of God) . The written signifier is always technical and representative. It has no constitutive meaning. This derivation is the very origin of the notion of the "signifier."...
...
But to these metaphysico-theological roots many other hidden sediments cling. The semiological or, more specifically, linguistic "science" cannot therefore hold on to the difference between signifier and signified-the very idea of the sign-without the difference between sensible and intelligible, certainly, but also not without retaining, more profoundly and more implicitly, and by the same token the reference to a signified able to "take place" in its intelligibility, before its "fall," before any expulsion into the exteriority of the sensible here below. As the face of pure intelligibility, it refers to an absolute logos to which it is immediately united. This absolute logos was an infinite creative subjectivity in medieval theology : the intelligible face of the sign remains turned toward the word and the face of God. Of course, it is not a question of "rejecting" these notions; they are necessary and, at least at present, nothing is conceivable for us without them. — Derrida

It seems to me that our theory of the 'internal' (of mindstuff) (along with the 'seems operator') developed historically as a technology useful to groups for coordinating their behavior. But certain philosophers would like to construct the world from this quasi-fictional or at least arguably secondary mindstuff. Kant even claimed that time and space were unreal, if I understand him correctly. (I suspect that he was trying to say that Newtonian physics was just the laws of dreaming, but that's less clear. )

You mentioned the 'many worlds' interpretation. To me there's a semantic gap between the math of physics and the norms for using concepts within the 'system' of physics and what I'm supposed to make of them in ordinary life. I understand spacetime as a mathematical system. No problem. But I live in stupid people's time. Anyway, I feel bound to acknowledge evidence-supported regularities, expressed perhaps in exotic mathematical syntax, but not to adopt metaphysical baggage that physicists may like to drag along with such models. I agree with Popper that such 'prescience' can ripen into science, and maybe the boundary is not exact...but the distinction is useful nevertheless.

Also I've found this book good so far : https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/wilfrid-sellars-naturalism-with-a-normative-turn/

This exactly how I felt my first and second time going through philosophy studies. I'm trying to define "absurd" because both special relativity and quantum mechanics were called absurd...in fact why not go back to that absurd "round earth" theory Galileo was trying to foist on us???

Logically impossible is a different thing - but nothing is logically impossible about it, is there? Any minute now Mark Zuckerberg could appear before me as a hologram. like the "man behind the curtain.", and congratulate me for doing a double-blind test of Meta Virtual World #398. (Actually him choosing me to be the test subject WOULD be absurd)

Silly analogy, but my point is an imagined world is not logical impossible. — GLEN willows

I see! There's a logical impossibility at the heart of solipsism & idealism. To disprove them we havta, in a sense, look without looking.

There's a logical impossibility at the heart of solipsism & idealism. — Agent Smith

:up:

No self without other nor illusion without the real.

thanks - will have a read. You are not the first to commend Sellars, but I have not so far found anything sufficiently riveting to encourage deeper reading. Will reconsider.

:up:
The thing that made me care about Sellars was the idea of the space of reasons. We don't reason from sense-data. We reason from less controversial statements to more controversial statements. But it's all 'in' language.

Popper makes similar points maybe about basic/observation statements. I guess the idea is to correct/fix an empiricism that got a little tripped on up on the sense-data idea and its idealistic-solipsistic implications, though their hearts were in the right place.

No self without other nor illusion without the real. — Pie

Aye! I never understood dualism!

Aye! I never understood dualism! — Agent Smith

My theory is that it was an attempt to protect God from Newton (free will from a world that began to look determined.) Kant also hid his own magic stuff in the thing-in-itself.

It seems to be trying to solve problems that are no longer problematic. Hence, not high on my reading list.

It seems to be trying to solve problems that are no longer problematic. Hence, not high on my reading list. — Banno

Sure. I can relate. It might be better to read Dostoevsky or Darwin. I liked Ryle, but I had the gist from Wittgenstein already. Diminishing returns.

In one of Rorty's last interviews, he seemed to regret spending so much time on rather 'fussy' issues.

My theory is that it was an attempt to protect God from Newton (free will from a world that began to look determined.) Kant also hid his own magic stuff in the thing-in-itself. — Pie

Most interesting. — Ms. Marple

Last I checked, Newton was a very religious person. Kant was too; after all we're talking about the 17^th & 18^th centuries, the hey days of faith.

Perhaps you're talking about something else.

I'm talking about the perceived Newtonian physics. According to my reading, folks tended to understand it deterministically, including Kant. But how then could our wills be free, if our bodies were part of that same nature governed by Newton's laws?

How could a God cast some into Hell, unless they had a genuine choice? And even without God, some might find it challenging to synthesize traditions of praise and blame (and prison systems) with a relatively new thinking that understood human actions as determined by initial conditions for which they could not reasonably be held responsible. (I think we have no choice but to use praise and blame and the notion of responsibility while knowing on some other level that people are basically determined by their environments.)

Another place in which we might disagree is Davidson's conclusion, in On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme, that

In giving up the dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the world, but reestablish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false.

This, so far as it goes, is the basis of my preference for talking in terms of direct realism when discussing things in the world.

Actually I share that preference. I just understand it (as you seem to ) as a preference. To say that I see the tree and not an image of the tree is (to me) mostly a statement about how we do or ought to talk. I think we agree that it's not a 'deep' theory. "Really, we grasp reality directly."

I only know Davidson indirectly (Rorty uses him often enough.) I'll add the disclaimer that I don't follow Rorty on everything, but he's got some good lines.

Oh!

Idealism & Solipsism were then, inter alia, reactions to Newtonian determinism which Kant had endorsed.

The mind could still be deterministic though, with its own set of laws, oui?

Now I'm beginning to think you are a rendering of LaMDA... Perhaps seeded from my posts.

The mind could still be deterministic though, with its own set of laws, oui? — Agent Smith

Hobbes and Spinoza (as I understand it) didn't run away from those implications. For Hobbes, the mind was subject to the same laws (was ultimately material, or determined by its material substrate.) (I'm fuzzy on some of this and open to correction. )

Cool link.

I recently read books by Peter Gay and Ernst Cassirer on the philosophy of the Enlightenment, and it became clear to me that that was the breakthrough (or the revival of the Greek breakthrough, if you like.) This is maybe why pragmatism appealed to me in its tendency to diminish the aura of metaphysics. I also relate to Popper's annoyance with (merely) verbal problems. And Wittgenstein's demolition of Cantor's paradise.

"I see! There's a logical impossibility at the heart of solipsism & idealism. To disprove them we havta, in a sense, look without looking."

Since you're being facetious....Looking at what, with what? I think you're finding humourus the idea of a complete solipsist world. If it's all in your mind, there's no eyes, ears, other minds, cheese curls, Netflix...nada. Cheese curls and Netflix still go together nicely. But the flavours and tv images are all imagined.

As for causation - Isn't it possible the universe did NOT have a cause? Why not? Similarly a solipsistic fever dream could have no cause, or none that we can imagine.