I think there is some kind of distinction to be made between problems that can be solved by finding prettier names for this or that and other kinds of problems — Pie

We can't resist, can we? Inside everyone is an artist, ready to reveal themselves, oui?

Just in case you haven't seen this.

In this connection, in the Logic of Scientific Discovery Popper introduces the technical concept of a “basic statement” or “basic proposition”, which he defines as a statement which can serve as a premise in an empirical falsification and which takes the singular existential form “There is an X at Y”. Basic statements are important because they can formally contradict universal statements, and accordingly play the role of potential falsifiers. To take an example, the (putative) basic statement “In space-time region k there is an apparatus which is a perpetual motion machine” contradicts the law of the conservation of energy, and would, if true, falsify it (2002: 48). Accordingly, Popper holds that basic statements are objective and are governed by two requirements: (a) the formal, that they must be both singular and existential and (b) the material, that they must be intersubjectively testable.

In essence, basic statements are for Popper logical constructs which embrace and include ‘observation statements’, but for methodological reasons he seeks to avoid that terminology, as it suggests that they are derived directly from, and known by, experience (2002: 12, footnote 2), which would conflate them with the “protocol” statements of logical positivism and reintroduce the empiricist idea that certain kinds of experiential reports are incorrigible. The “objectivity” requirement in Popper’s account of basic statements, by contrast, amounts to a rejection of the view that the truth of scientific statements can ever be reduced to individual or collective human experience. (2002: 25).

Popper therefore argues that there are no statements in science which cannot be interrogated: basic statements, which are used to test the universal theories of science, must themselves be inter-subjectively testable and are therefore open to the possibility of refutation. He acknowledges that this seems to present a practical difficulty, in that it appears to suggest that testability must occur ad infinitum, which he acknowledges is an operational absurdity: sooner or later all testing must come to an end. Where testing ends, he argues, is in a convention-based decision to accept a basic statement or statements; it is at that point that convention and intersubjective human agreement play an indispensable role in science:

Every test of a theory, whether resulting in its corroboration or falsification, must stop at some basic statement or other which we decide to accept. If we do not come to any decision, and do not accept some basic statement or other, then the test will have led nowhere. (2002: 86)

However, Popper contends that while such a decision is usually causally related to perceptual experience, it is not and cannot be justified by such experience; basic statements are experientially underdetermined.

Experiences can motivate a decision, and hence an acceptance or a rejection of a statement, but a basic statement cannot be justified by them—no more than by thumping the table. (2002: 87–88)

Statements can be justified only by other statements, and therefore testing comes to an end, not in the establishment of a correlation between propositional content and observable reality, as empiricism would hold, but by means of the conventional, inter-subjective acceptance of the truth of certain basic statements by the research community.

The acceptance of basic statements is compared by Popper to trial by jury: the verdict of the jury will be an agreement in accordance with the prevailing legal code and on the basis of the evidence presented, and is analogous to the acceptance of a basic statement by the research community:

By its decision, the jury accepts, by agreement, a statement about a factual occurrence—a basic statement, as it were. (2002: 92)

The jury’s verdict is conventional in arising out of a procedure governed by clear rules, and is an application of the legal system as a whole as it applies to the case in question. The verdict is accordingly represented as a true statement of fact, but, as miscarriages of justice demonstrate all too clearly,

the statement need not be true merely because the jury has accepted it. This … is acknowledged in the rule allowing a verdict to be quashed or revised. (2002: 92)
This is comparable, he argues, to the case of basic statements: their acceptance-as-true is also by agreement and, as such, it also constitutes an application of a theoretical system, and

it is only this application which makes any further applications of the theoretical system possible. (2002: 93)

However, the agreed acceptance of basic statements, like that of judicial verdicts, remain perennially susceptible to the requirement for further interrogation. Popper terms this “the relativity of basic statements” (2002: 86), which is reflective of the provisional nature of the entire corpus of scientific knowledge itself. Science does not, he maintains, rest upon any foundational bedrock. Rather, the theoretical systems of science are akin to buildings in swampy ground constructed with the support of piles:

The piles are driven down from above into the swamp, but not down to any natural or “given” base; and if we stop driving the piles deeper, it is not because we have reached firm ground. We simply stop when we are satisfied that the piles are firm enough to carry the structure, at least for the time being. (2002: 94)

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/#BasiStatFalsConv

This connects to Sellars 'myth of the given' as well. To me it's not about denying sense-data but going around their uselessness in rational inquiry. To be clear, reports of sense experience play an important role. 'The computer flashed a measurement of 3.24313.' 'The litmus paper turned red.' The main idea is that we deal always with statements. Note also that we probably want to know who claims to have seen grandma's ghost or an alien mothership.

We can't resist, can we? Inside everyone is an artist, ready to reveal themselves, oui? — Agent Smith

Oh yes, and even anti-metaphysicians are having their fun. Such as "lipstick on a tautology." Sit-down comedians.

A nice companion to Popper's theory of us having only a swamp for a foundation :

Sellars’s treatment of semantics essentially constitutes a denial of what can be called a semantic given—the idea that some of our terms or concepts, independently of their occurrence in formal and material inferences, derive their meaning directly from confrontation with a particular (kind of) object or experience. Sellars is anti-foundationalist in his theories of concepts, knowledge, and truth.

Traditional epistemology assumed that knowledge is hierarchically structured. There must, it was believed, be some cognitive states in direct contact with reality that serve as a firm foundation on which the rest of our knowledge is built by various inferential methods. This foundationalist picture of knowledge imposes two requirements on knowledge: (1) There must be cognitive states that are basic in the sense that they possess some positive epistemic status independently of their epistemic relations to any other cognitive states. I call this the Epistemic Independence Requirement [EIR]. Positive epistemic statuses include being knowledge, being justified, or just having some presumption in its favor. (It was popular to claim that basic cognitions must possess an unassailable epistemic warrant — certainty, incorrigibility, or even infallibility — but this is not as common today.) Epistemic relations include deductive and inductive implication. (2) Every nonbasic cognitive state can possess positive epistemic status only because of the epistemic relations it bears, directly or indirectly, to basic cognitive states. Thus the basic states must provide the ultimate support for the rest of our knowledge, which I call the Epistemic Efficacy Requirement [EER]. Such basic, independent and efficacious, cognitive states would be the given. Many philosophers have believed that there has to be such a given, if there is to be any knowledge at all.

Rejecting the myth of the given is not yet a positive epistemology. Sellars can abandon the myth of the given only if he gives us a positive theory of non-inferential knowledge to replace it. (There must be non-inferential knowledge, that is, knowledge that is not acquired by inference, even if its epistemic status depends on its inferential connections to other knowledge.)

The paradigm cases of non-inferential knowledge are introspection, perception, and memory [IPM] beliefs (see MGEC). According to Sellars, such beliefs have epistemic status because, given the processes by which language and beliefs are acquired, they are likely to be true. IPM beliefs are reliable indicators, like the temperature readings on a thermometer. This is a reliablist or externalist condition on such knowledge. A chain of empirical justification can properly start with IPM beliefs because they are noninferential reliable indicators of the truth of their contents. Thus, their occurrence licenses an inference to the likely truth of their contents, and thence to other consequences by formal or material rules of inference.

But Sellars is not, in the end, a reliablist. Thermometers may be highly reliable, but they have no knowledge. Sellars adds another condition: the subject must know that her IPM belief is reliable. This imposes a reflexivity requirement on knowledge.

The point is not simply that knowers are capable of metajudgments. Sellars has a larger condition in mind: “The essential point is that in characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says” (EPM: §36, in SPR: 169; in KMG: 248). This dictum needs to be combined with another well-known Sellarsian pronouncement: “Now the idea that epistemic facts can be analysed without remainder—even ‘in principle’—into non-epistemic facts, whether phenomenal or behavioural, public or private, with no matter how lavish a sprinkling of subjunctives and hypotheticals is, I believe, a radical mistake—a mistake of a piece with the so-called ‘naturalistic fallacy’ in ethics” (EPM: §5, in SPR: 131; in KMG: 209).
...
In order to operate within “the logical space of reasons,” one must be at home with normative discourse, responsive to reasons as such, sensitive to standards of correctness and appropriateness. This requirement imposes a coherentist/holist condition that precludes the possibility of atomistically isolable cognitive states: any cognitive state, including bottom-level, non-inferential IPM beliefs, can be cognitive only as one element in a complex, reflexively structured system of such states responsive to epistemic norms and goals.
...
Such a holism of cognitive states raises an obvious problem: how could one start acquiring cognitive states without falling into circularity or regress? The normativity of the cognitive is crucial to Sellars’s answer: we can acquire piecemeal by natural, causal pathways the individual habits and dispositions that, when present in sufficient numbers and appropriately interrelated, warrant the application of the normative language of cognition.
...
Even so, Sellars rejects the traditional forms of both foundationalism and coherentism.

One seems forced to choose between the picture of an elephant which rests on a tortoise (What supports the tortoise?) and the picture of a great Hegelian serpent of knowledge with its tail in its mouth (Where does it begin?). Neither will do. For empirical knowledge, like its sophisticated extension, science, is rational, not because it has a foundation but because it is a self-correcting enterprise which can put any claim in jeopardy, though not all at once (EPM §38, in SPR: 170; in KMG: 250).

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sellars/#Epis

FWIW, I think you find something similar in early Derrida's critique of phonocentrism and the transcendental signified (which is largely just taken from Saussure? )

Oh yes, and even anti-metaphysicians are having their fun. Such as "lipstick on a tautology." Sit-down comedians. — Pie

When we do something, ensure the highest quality in your work, but that means one's gotta be an all-rounder, a polymath!

Objective: Arête
Qualifiaction: Omniscience
Ergo...

I'm thinking maybe there's no rule. Sometimes the fanatic who does one thing gets good. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Tal

This dude amuses me, and I play a madly aggressive style myself, which is surprisingly effective at times. But I get smashed by opponents who keep their cool and look for the openings I leave in my reckless attacks. Of course this is just bullet chess on lichess.org.

Tal loved the game in itself and considered that "chess, first of all, is art." He was known to play numerous blitz games against unknown or relatively weak players purely for the joy of playing.

Known as "The Magician from Riga", Tal was the archetype of the attacking player, developing an extremely powerful and imaginative style of play. His approach over the board was very pragmatic—in that respect, he is one of the heirs of ex-world champion Emanuel Lasker. He often sacrificed material in search of the initiative,[19] which is defined as the ability to make threats to which the opponent must respond. With such intuitive sacrifices, he created vast complications, and many masters found it impossible to solve all the problems he created over the board, though deeper post-game analysis found flaws in some of his conceptions.

It's joy on the chessboard to answer a threat with an even greater threat.

If we wait for omniscience, we'll wait forever....

The OP asks us to consider the relation between idealism and solipsism. So it is worth considering how an idealist reaches the conclusion that other minds exist. — Banno

Let's get it over with. Object permanence. Your turn.

Well, idealism is a chess game where your opponent is you, yourself. Both players are fully aware of each's strategy/game plan (relative, mutual omniscience :chin: ). Such a game should always result in a draw, but from my own experiences, there usually is a winning move with a checkmate that both gladdens & saddens for reasons that are obvious.

Great is he who conquers himself — Laozi

Omnipotence stone paradox? Nah, no paradox!

I think Saussure is basically right — Pie

I'm not so sure he is

Object permanence. — bert1

Go on...

Go on... — Isaac

It's Banno's turn. He'll say realism is much better for explaining object permanence than idealism. Then I'll say the next bit.

No, he won't.

He'll say realism is much better for explaining object permanence than idealism. — bert1

Well then he's 8 words ahead of you and he's not even started.

No, he won't — Banno

11

No, he won't. — Banno

Oh, what will he say?

EDIT: Perhaps it's this one:

"The same logic that leads to skepticism about objects existing independently of my mind can be applied also to other minds. So if we have no reason to believe in mind-independent objects, we also have no reason to believe in other minds, therefore solipsism. "

Is that it?

In particular, I'd emphasize this element in Saussure, especially given the original purpose to emphasizing the need for contrastive force. (If everything is X, then we might as well say nothing is, for nothing is picked out.)

Value is the sign as it is determined by the other signs in a semiotic system. For linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, for example, the content of a sign in linguistics is ultimately determined and delimited not by its internal content, but by what surrounds it: the synonyms redouter ("to dread"), craindre ("to fear"), and avoir peur ("to be afraid") have their particular values because they exist in opposition to one another. If two of the terms disappeared, then the remaining sign would take on their roles, become vaguer, less articulate, and lose its "extra something" because it would have nothing to distinguish itself from.

For de Saussure, this suggests that thought is a chaotic nebula until linguistic structure dissects it and holds its divisions in equilibriums.

His conception of meaning was purely structural and relational rather than referential: primacy is given to relationships rather than to things (the meaning of signs was seen as lying in their systematic relation to each other rather than deriving from any inherent features of signifiers or any reference to material things).

If everything is X, then we might as well say nothing is, for nothing is picked out. — Pie

Yeah, it's just he's so sure about that.

If everything is X, then we might as well say nothing is, for nothing is picked out — Pie

So you’re opposed to every monism and would suggest instead some kind of dualism or pluralism?

Bert, the Mod comment in the OP asked for answers only. But if you wish, start a new thread, or even a debate - I'm fond of debates. I'm happy for you to show me the errors of my ways.

the Mod comment in the OP asked for answers only. But if you wish, start a new thread, or even a debate - I'm fond of debates. — Banno

:up:

The short, rough answer is that both solipsists and idealists hold that mind alone exists; idealists claim there is more than one mind, solipsists don't.

One problem for those idealists who hold their view because they claim we cannot know about anything "outside" our own minds - roughly, phenomenalism - is how they can know about other minds, which are also "outside" their own mind.

:grin:

:up:
:up:

One problem for those idealists who hold their view because they claim we cannot know about anything "outside" our own minds - roughly, phenomenalism - is how they can know about other minds, which are also "outside" their own mind. — Banno

Nice. One question I often ponder - is idealism largely sustained by intrinsic flaws in old-school materialist arguments and misunderstandings about realism, or does it stand alone as a reasonable hypotheses in its own right? I suspect the former.

The short, rough answer is that both solipsists and idealists hold that mind alone exists; idealists claim there is more than one mind, solipsists don't — Banno

Yes. They both posit that the universe is alive and conscious. Solipsism denies anything beyond the content of a single mind. In other words, there is nothing but "me" and the Other is an illusion.

There are many types of idealism, but generally the universe is made up of more than just the content of my consciousness.

"Idealism" begins with reifying abstract objects / ideas (i.e. misplaced concreteness / reification fallacies at the level of assumptions) perhaps due to developmental vestiges of magical thinking (i.e. what I/god(s) say / believe is reality ~ "Adamic speech"), that is, a self-serving/flattering bias (e.g. "Credo ut intelligam."). Platonism, etc are, IMO, brilliant rationalizations of such atavistic, cognitive biases, which are endemic to all metacognitive practices, including philosophy.

The kernel of truth in idealism is that we construct our world. The flaw is that we construct it from other stuff.

This, from a long-ago debate with Landru Guide Us, of loving memory.

So, apparently a kettle is not a kettle, but is experiences-of-kettle. We might talk of kettles as if they are things, but the more sophisticated of us ought understand that what we call a kettle is no more than one’s experiences. Although we pretend that the thing is a kettle, one cannot separate the kettle from the self that is doing the experiencing. What there is, is the experience of kettle.

What happens here is that the individual kettle dissipates, becoming instead a relation between experience and the self. The boiling kettle becomes my experience of the kettle, my experience of hot water; So the self becomes central to every such account. All I can know is the experience, never the really, really kettle. For all that I might infer or induce about the kettle, all there is, is my experiences.

What bothers me is that having placed the experiences had by the self at the centre of the universe, how does one avoid there only being one’s self?

What about you? There is my experience-of-you. If I am to be consistent in applying this ideal approach, what more is there of you than my experiences of you? That’s what you are. You become my experience of you.

All I can know is the experience of the kettle. There is no kettle apart from these experiences. For all that I might infer or induce about the kettle, all there is, is my experiences.

But if this is so, then surely all I can know is the experience of you. There is no you apart from these experiences. For all that I might infer or induce about you, all there is, is my experiences.

Hence, if one is consistent, one must accept some form of solipsism.

It will not do to claim that other people are also selves. One cannot experience the self of another, just as one cannot experience the “transcendent reality’ of a kettle. If one is entitled to induce that other people have a reality beyond one’s experience, one is also surly entitle to induce that kettles have a reality beyond experience. If one denies reality beyond experience, then one denies it for both people and kettles.

So demanding a reality beyond experience for other people, but not for the objects of the world in which we find both them and ourselves embedded, would appear to be no more than special pleading.

How does idealism avoid solipsism?

:clap: :fire:
Ah yes, Landru Guide Us – Wayfarer's kissing cousin! – I remember his many p0m0, woo-of-the-gaps well. :smirk:

That just sounds like indirect realism with a little skepticism sprinkled on top.

That's a limited view of idealism.

That's a limited view of idealism. — Tate

Well, as I said to @Michael,

I could do so myself, but folk will quickly claim that whatever i propose is a homo paleas. — Banno

(Thanks for allowing me to use "homo paleas" again. )

Landru Guide Us — 180 Proof

One of the contributors who forced me to really work at my arguments. A very astute defender of post modernism.