By gaining coherence, we hope to also gain correspondence between our theory and its referent extramental states of affairs, but we can't check that directly. So coherence is our only yardstick for truth: to seriously doubt its reliability is the road to madness and damnation! A little fly in the ointment here is that at bottom, coherence relies on logic and any formal system suffers Gödelian incompleteness. But if anyone judges coherence to be unreliable, just try incoherence! — Christopher Burke
I agree about the agreement. I hope that doesn't happen too often. There's no fun in that! But thankfully you've raised several interesting points.I think we mostly are in agreement — Janus
I know what you mean here. One can imagine that sensorium level representations (empirical ones) are 'sort of' veridical. Vision is almost ubiquitously used as the exemplar of this. It is highly implausible to assume that our extero-sensations and the percepts formed from them do not correspond with our environment, otherwise our ancestors and ourselves wouldn't have survived. But one still cannot check that directly of course. My view is that raw sensation is a priori biological, but thereafter (ie percepts to some extent, concepts, theories) our representations are shaped by a posteriori personal and cultural factors. Going up the cognitive hierarchy doesn't preclude a putative correspondence with extramental states of affairs, but does make that correspondence more fragile, ie defeasible.when it comes to simple empirical observations, the truth of statements is a matter of correspondence — Janus
Standard truth statements like you give ('p' is true iff p) always make me slightly uneasy.'it is raining' is true iff it is raining — Janus
I do hope you disagree with me. — Christopher Burke
I know what you mean here. One can imagine that sensorium level representations (empirical ones) are 'sort of' veridical. Vision is almost ubiquitously used as the exemplar of this. It is highly implausible to assume that our extero-sensations and the percepts formed from them do not correspond with our environment, otherwise our ancestors and ourselves wouldn't have survived. But one still cannot check that directly of course. — Christopher Burke
We are less beguiled with other senses. It is easier to accept that, for instance, sweetness is our reaction to something rather than being a quality of the sugar cube per se. — Christopher Burke
Standard truth statements like you give ('p' is true iff p) always make me slightly uneasy.
- 'p' is a representation (a linguistic statement) supposedly justified by p (its extramental representatum). But how do you know p? Well of course it's by having a another representation of p. For instance, the sentence 'there is a tree' is justified by simultaneously having a percept of a tree. All you have is parallel representations, one linguistic and the other iconic. Truth statements like those seem to me to pretend to have direct access to extramental reality per se as their justification.
- Mischievously: Is '('p' is true iff p)' only true iff ('p' is true iff p)? Representation is always a 'hall of mirrors'! — Christopher Burke
I'm afraid this "separate ontological being" makes no sense to me. If you do believe in such a realm, surely you are back to something like a Cartesian dualism
But that doesn't imply the former are physical or even that they are caused by or embedded in the physical.
But that doesn't mean that the emotional state is physical
You might say; "Ah ... but the physical observables are the real thing!" However if you did that, you would be denying your own subjective experience as real because it isn't observable (by any normative meaning of 'observable'), even by you.
For Physicalism to be up to the job ...
Expand it's conceptual repertoire to include psychical concepts ... but then it no longer falls under any normative definition of 'Physicalism'.
Hope that mind can eventually be explanatorily reduced to (not just mapped onto) physical concepts ... but you and I don't believe that's possible; a long history of scientific 'failure' casts a severe doubt about the possibility; and I think it is logically incoherent.
If one of these get-outs works for someone, fine. But the cognitive dissonance is not to my taste.
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