It seems reasonable to me to say that in the real world as well as in maths, a universal is the set of all objects that have the relevant property. — andrewk

Right, so we at least recognize that the world and math have a structure such that we can classify based on relevant properties. And yeah it makes sense that we know about properties by the fact that there are different properties to distinguish between. The world appears to be both particular and universal.

We can in principle, and there are real-life examples of this. One of them is ancient: a human is not [just] a featherless biped. — Snakes Alive

We can take a feather that has fallen off a bird, and use it, in the absence of any legs, to establish the concept of a feather. Then we can develop the concept of a featherless being as one that has no feathers. Thus we have separated the notion of feather from that of number of legs. That's what I was referring to when I mentioned the diversity of examples in our world.

If it were not possible to do that, 'featherless biped' would be a perfectly correct definition of a human.

In the hypothetical world I was describing, we can't separate the notion of green from glossy if everything that is green is glossy and everything that is glossy is green.

Rudolf Carnap wrote several papers in which he argued along a similar vein of Hume and Wittgenstein that ontological questions are devoid of meaning. This is because in his view, questions of fact only have meaning inside the framework the terms of the question originated. So it's perfectly reasonable to ask whether real numbers exist in mathematics, but it's meaningless to ask if they exist in the world, since the world is external to the framework of math. — Marchesk

...especially since "existence" isn't metaphysically-defined.

He also argued that questions of existence regarding the world must be empirically verifiable to be meaningful, with logic providing the tools for analyzing meaning.

Whatever that means.

Empirically, there are abstract facts and abstract objects, in the sense that we can discuss them.

Unicorns and Flying pigs? Sure, as discussable, nameable abstract objects in a story or a hypothetical discussion. (...but not if you mean "...as part of our physical world".)

Empiricism? All that we know about our physical world is from our experience. There's no reason to believe that our experience isn't primary.

There are abstract implication-facts, in the sense that they can be stated and discussed. What more "existence" should they have?

Some paradoxes and hard questions vanish when you leave-out the meaningless talk about what "exists" or "is real".

There's no need to claim existence or reality for this physical world, or for the infiniely-many abstract implication-facts, including the complex inter-referring systems of them that are experience-stories, one of which has the events and relations of your experience.

Michael Ossipoff

There are abstract implication-facts, in the sense that they can be stated and discussed. What more "existence" should they have? — Michael Ossipoff

There are many reasons to think experience is not primary.

1. We have bodies upon which our experiences depend.

2. Our bodies were born.

3. Human bodies evolved.

4. The universe existed prior to human experience. It's also much larger than our experience.

And so on.

My personal feeling is that Carnap goes too far in his critique. Nonetheless I think he and others like Wittgenstein and J.L. Austin, and certain analytic and ordinary language philosophers did good work identifying problems resulting from misuse of language in philosophy.

There are many reasons to think experience is not primary.

1. We have bodies upon which our experiences depend.

2. Our bodies were born.

3. Human bodies evolved.

4. The universe existed prior to human experience. It's also much larger than our experience.

And so on. — Marchesk

...and you know about those things...how?

Through experience? :D

1. We have bodies upon which our experiences depend.

Of course. Our experience is that of being a physical organism. ...yes, a body.

That doesn't make the body metaphysically prior to the experience. Everything that you know about the physical world is via your experience.

2. Our bodies were born.

You know that because your mother &/or father told it to you, and your school science teachers later confirmed it. You experienced being told those things, and it makes perfect sense in terms of what you know, from experience, about the physical world. ...even though you don't remember being born.

Yes, of course that birth is a fact in the physical story that is your experience, even if you don't have a memory of directly experiencing it.

Your birth is a physical event implied by the physical world that you experience, including what you've been reliably told by people who actually saw the birth (and people who certified it on paper), and what you know (from experience of one kind or another) about biology and the physical world. It's part of your experience, even if you don't remember it.

3. Human bodies evolved.

Certainly, and like the other events and scientific facts of this physical world, you know about that from your experience of being told it, and from the fact that it can be reasonably inferred from the evidence that you experience around you. It's a physical fact that is part of your experience of your world. You haven't actually seen the evolution of humans, but you've been reliably told about it, and it's convincingly-implied by what you've observed around you.. Thereby, it's part of your experience.

4. The universe existed prior to human experience.

Yes, and you know that from your experience. You have and have had the experience of scientists telling you that, and they have a nearly unanimous consensus about that. Also, maybe your own direct experience of the physical evidence you've seen confirms that conclusion.

You could have added that this physical world was there before you were here to observe it and directly experience it. You've known that ever since your parents told it to you. That, and subsequent confirmatory experiences support that conclusion.

It's [this physical universe] also much larger than our experience.

Scientists know that from their astronomical observations and from physics. You know it because you've experienced them telling you so.

I don't doubt that it's true, because what I've heard about that makes sense and sounds convincing.

As with all of the other things in your list, you know it from experience., In that way, it's part of your experience.

Basically, your argument consists of saying, "What you say can't be so because it conflicts with the doctrine that I believe. ...in which the physical world is primary.

We all, including Idealists, agree with the physical facts in your list. We just don't agree with your conclusions from them, your explanation for them, your Materialist belief in the primacy of the physical world. As I've been saying, everything that you know about the physical world, you know from your experience.

Your experience is what's basic to all of those facts that you've listed, and to this whole physical universe, its history, its extent (what's known about those things).

Presumably the universe might eventually be found to be infinite or finite. As of now that isn't known. And, If it's finite, it isn't known what its finite size is, or even what its geometry is.

That information, so far, isn't part of your experience-story.

Suppose that the universe is going to be later determined to be infinite. If so, is it infinite now, even though you haven't experienced being told it by scientists yet? Sure, in the sense that, when you're later told that the universe is infinite, then that will strongly imply that it was also infinite in 2018.

But obviously, right now, the infinite-ness of the universe isn't an experiential fact for you, because the cosmologists don't know, and can't give you the experience of being told that the universe is infinite (even if they're later going to find that out and tell you).

The argument expressed in your posting is just an expression of a belief in Materialism, a belief that the physical world is metaphysically primary.

As I've often said:

I can't prove that there isn't the objectively, fundamentally existent concrete, objectively-real physical world that Materialists believe in (whatever you mean by "objectively real" or "objectively-existent")...I can't prove that it doesn't superflously exist as an unverifiable, unfalsifiable brute-fact, alongside of, and duplicating the events and relations of, the uncontroversially inevitable complex system of abstract implication facts that I've been mentioning.

(I'm the first to admit that I don't claim to know what "objectively-real" or "exist" mean. Those words aren't part of my metaphysics, which doesn't claim or assume anything about the objective reality or existence of this physical world, or of the system of inter-referring abstract implication-facts that has the events and relations of your experience.)

Michael Ossipoff

but not really possible to be taken seriously on its own terms (and indeed, those who debate it seem not to take it seriously on its own terms either – it's a kind of game whose playing has other edifying effects). — Snakes Alive

I agree with this; although I would say some people do take it seriously, in the sense that they are emotionally invested in reality being one imagined way or another, even though those imagined ways are not really clear conceptions of anything substantive. I made a somewhat related point in another thread;

"We don't even need to have a preferred metaphysic, we could remain sceptical about all metaphysical systems and yet nonetheless be interested in them purely as conceptual schemas that allow us to look at the world in different ways."

What I probably should have said is that they allow us to feel the world in different ways, because the often vague terms of metaphysics, although not objectively determinable, are rich in emotional and aesthetic associations, and evocative of a superabundance of colour and tone. Also the ways in which they are combined together in metaphysical constructions can be in accordance with logic, complex yet internally coherent, and hence dazzlingly beautiful, and yet in the sense that they have no actual referent, ultimately meaningless.

So, I would say that in the sense with which Carnap was concerned he was right; but this fact does not entail that metaphysical speculation has no value. In fact, as Kant pointed out, the "transcendental illusion" it is an inevitable aspect of rationality itself. We can enjoy the game without having any emotional investment in the idea that there must be one metaphysical Truth, an absolutely ultimate reality that our investigations could ever lead us to.

I can agree to this, except I think that metaphysical statements or systems don't have any consistent emotional effects either, so it's difficult to employ them even to this end. What tends to happen instead is that people are affected personally by reading something and so become emotionally invested in whatever they took from it.

I'm also sympathetic to the position that even ordinary empirical inquiry is the result of transcendental illusion, but that it, unlike metaphysics, has practical effects and so can be worth engaging in to some end.

I agree that there are no universal emotional effects of different metaphysical systems, Just as is the case with the arts, but I think there are certainly consistencies across populations of like-minded individuals.

I agree to an extent with your point about empirical enquiry, but i wouldn't say it is wholly the result of transcendental illusion. The entities that are investigated in (most of at least) the sciences are phenomenally real enough for us; we don't have to think they are also transcendentally real in order to investigate them, even though it might be a psychological fact that most people who do investigate them do think they are transcendentally real.

The other point is that we can think that the entities and indeed we ourselves do emerge from a transcendental reality, that is from real transcendental conditions, without being naive realists and imagining that the transcendental reality is 'just the same' as the empirical reality, without imagining that the empirical reality is a kind of 'mirror image' in other words.

The entities that are investigated in (most of at least) the sciences are phenomenally real enough for us — Janus

I wouldn't say so in the sciences, soft or hard; we don't have 'intuitions' of things like populations, physical forces, and so on.

What we come closest to having 'intuitions' of are tangible ordinary objects, but even these are thought of transcendentally: we project them as seen from 'infinite sides,' and we never have an intuition of their totality. So, treating things as 'objects' is itself just a regulative idea. Unlike with metaphysics, though, it's a practice of using regulative ideas that tends to do useful work in daily life, likely because our language and cognitive faculties are adapted to do so, whereas the kind of metaphysics philosophers do was invented a couple thousand years ago, as the result of leisure time leading to funny linguistic puzzles (essentially, philosophy proper begins in sophism), with no native practical application.

The sciences are therefore almost entirely hail marys linked to employing these transcendental illusions, but even there, we do get some effects out of them (mostly technological, though we have no way of really controlling or even understanding its effects). Ordinary life is a bit closer to home, but even there, we have to act as if we cognize things we don't to get by, and life is basically a bunch of regulative pretenses that justify what we do.

The classic difficulty with science as a mode of enquiry is that its methods are by necessity quantitative. Whereas, metaphysics has a qualitative aspect, in the sense of asking questions about meaning and purpose which are bracketed out by empiricism and generally rejected by positivism. This is the basis of the well-known and much discussed 'is-ought' problem first articulated by David Hume but still a very current issue in ethical philosophy.

Of course science provides enormous utilitarian and practical power; arguably that's all that it does. And the assumed worldview of secular culture is based on scientific disciplines such as biology and physics, there is no provision for a shared ethos beyond the utilitarian. 'What secular reason is missing is self-awareness. It is “unenlightened about itself” in the sense that it has within itself no mechanism for questioning the products and conclusions of its formal, procedural entailments and experiments.' (Stanley Fish)

So what interests me, is the prospect of a domain of real values. I don't say 'objective', because the domain of value does indeed transcend the objective domain. And this is where I think Wittgenstein was much misunderstood by the Vienna Circle; his 'that of which we cannot speak' was apophatic, not a 'prohibition against the transcendental', as is evident from such aphorisms as:

There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical. — 6.522

And

The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value -- and if there were, it would be of no value.
If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental.

What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental.

It must lie outside the world. — 6.41

It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed.
Ethics is transcendental.

(Ethics and æsthetics are one.) — 6.421

All of which I take to mean, not the denial of the 'domain of the transcendent', but the denial that this can be made the subject of propositions. But then to say that only propositions are meaningful, is to actually deny the suggestion of the transcendent origin of ethics. Wittgenstein was not an obviously religious philosopher, but Nagel says in Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament, that 'the religious temperament is not common among analytic philosophers, but it is not absent. A number of prominent analytic philosophers are Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish, and others, such as Wittgenstein and Rawls, clearly had a religious attitude to life without adhering to a particular religion.' Which I think is quite an accurate assessment and one which I share.

Ray Monk, who wrote a well-regarded biography of Wittgenstein, says that Wittgenstein was at odds with the scientism of our day.

One of the crucial differences between the method of science and the non-theoretical understanding that is exemplified in music, art, philosophy and ordinary life, is that science aims at a level of generality which necessarily eludes these other forms of understanding. This is why the understanding of people can never be a science. To understand a person is to be able to tell, for example, whether he means what he says or not, whether his expressions of feeling are genuine or feigned. And how does one acquire this sort of understanding? Wittgenstein raises this question at the end of Philosophical Investigations. “Is there,” he asks, “such a thing as ‘expert judgment’ about the genuineness of expressions of feeling?” Yes, he answers, there is.

But the evidence upon which such expert judgments about people are based is “imponderable,” resistant to the general formulation characteristic of science. “Imponderable evidence,” Wittgenstein writes, “includes subtleties of glance, of gesture, of tone. I may recognise a genuine loving look, distinguish it from a pretended one… But I may be quite incapable of describing the difference… If I were a very talented painter I might conceivably represent the genuine and simulated glance in pictures.”

So - the 'silence' of Wittgenstien is not merely the want of something to say; it is recognising the limits of language, in respect of the really very important questions that philosophy is concerned with in the living of life.

Somewhat tangentially, it would be similar to devising a perfect utilitarian calculus. We might come close but never hit that limit.

I agree with this; although I would say some people do take it seriously, in the sense that they are emotionally invested in reality being one imagined way or another, even though those imagined ways are not really clear conceptions of anything substantive. — Janus

It's interesting that appeals are made to emotion to explain away the existence of arguments for metaphysical positions. As if a philosopher's motivation has anything to do with the soundness of the arguments they produce. And if it does, then all argument is impugned, since humans make arguments, and humans possess emotions.

But that's a logical fallacy. It really doesn't matter what sort of emotional investment someone has in an argument, when it comes to analyzing the argument itself. The only thing that matters is wether the argument is valid, and whether it's premises are true.

The only thing that matters is wether the argument is valid, and whether it's premises are true. — Marchesk

The point is that metaphysical arguments can't be valid, since their premises and conclusions typically don't have truth conditions.

Aren't all your examples meaningful only through comparison - the unreal (meaningless) is grasped only when weighed against the real (meaningful). Plus, the meaning that we derive from such juxtaposition seems to be that of meaninglessness of the thing being compared.

The only thing that matters is wether the argument is valid, and whether it's premises are true. — Marchesk

The thing with metaphysical arguments is that they can of course be valid, and indeed must be if they are to be good arguments. The problem is that even if it is accept that their premises are not nonsense.their soundness cannot ever, even in principle, be established,

In any case if you had read what I said carefully you would have seen that I wasn't citing the emotional value of metaphysical systems as a reason for thinking they are therefore sound, and therefore for believing in them. Of course it is possible to argue for believing in metaphysical propositions; for example freedom, God and immortality, as Kant famously does, for practical reasons, but that would be another story; I was merely thinking of metaphysical systems as forms of art that we might enjoy for their conceptual richness.

I'm going to echo what Srap and Ciceronianus have said because I think it's really important but keeps getting passed by in these types of discussion. When people argue about the importance of certain metaphysics they say that the question is meaningful, we want to know "why?". But then the majority of what's being defended is not the question, it's the answer, and it's an entirely different argument to say that any answer is meaningful.

I can make intelligible sense of the question "why is there something rather than nothing?", I can make intelligible sense of the answer "some ineffable thing created it all for an equally ineffable purpose". What I can't make sense of (which is what metaphysics claims to be) is the statement "some ineffable thing must have created it all for an equally ineffable purpose because...".

With the idea that there can be a 'must have... because' without any reference to consequence (which would make the proposition falsifiable), I don't see where the 'must have' comes from. What is doing the restricting? In the physical, empirical world, we do not need to know what is doing the restricting because all the while our reactions are thus constrained it remains true. The theory of gravity remains meaningful all the while the movement of bodies continues to be constrained in a manner consistent with it, but the ontological argument, for example, is constrained by nothing, so on what grounds can we argue for or against it?

Do we think the Quine-Duhem thesis shows that no particular theoretical entity is "absolutely" necessary? (I.e., necessity is theory relative.)

The thing about the universals debate that always strikes me as a little odd is how hard it seems to be to show that any theory on offer (I guess we should really be comparing posits) is even sufficient.

So much for the benefits of theft over honest toil.

Do we think the Quine-Duhem thesis shows that no particular theoretical entity is "absolutely" necessary? (I.e., necessity is theory relative.) — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, if I understand what you're saying correctly, then one could relate Quine's perspective (Duhem was very much more restricted in his scope, of course) to Carnap by saying that we are already immersed in such a large chunk of the 'bundle' that supports theories confirmed by empirical evidence (trusting our sensory inputs to some extent, agreeing with logic, mathematics of some variety etc...) that it makes sense to continue with falsifying theories reliant on that particular bundle. The trouble with something like universals (or competing theories) is that no one is particularly immersed in the bundles that go along with them (our language has intrinsic meaning, that which makes sense to us is also intelligible to the world at large, our apparent a priori knowledge is meaningful etc...), so all they end up offering is alternative possibilities with no feasible way of choosing between them unless you are already committed to the entire bundle which precedes them.

But as to the existence of universals, I can't make any sense of the question. When I exercise my powers as an English speaker, I don't know what's being asked. And since I know of no other criterion by which to make a question framed in English sensible, I conclude that it's nonsense. — Snakes Alive

Just because I cannot make sense of some question that does not then mean that the question is nonsense. There are many technical questions that I cannot make sense of. Or, perhaps I have been knocked across the head a few too many times and I just cannot grasp some questions anymore due to injury.

It could just be the case that I am ignorant. And however many times I may read a book on the topic I may remain ignorant because of an inability on my part. Such has been the case, many a time, with math for me. It's only through the patience of a mentor that I've been able to learn the math I have -- on my own? Forget it. It's not one of my natural talents.

I wouldn't say so in the sciences, soft or hard; we don't have 'intuitions' of things like populations, physical forces, and so on. — Snakes Alive

I think that's highly questionable. We feel the impact of physical forces bodily. We feel our own bodies' powers to affect other things. We perceive multitudes of like entities, for example, we see a forest of trees, or a group of animals and from that we abstract the notion of "populations'.

What we come closest to having 'intuitions' of are tangible ordinary objects, but even these are thought of transcendentally: we project them as seen from 'infinite sides,' and we never have an intuition of their totality. So, treating things as 'objects' is itself just a regulative idea.

That's maybe more or less true, but I don't really see the point, because we can move around many objects or rotate some others and, in principle at least, see the whole surface of many objects, so it's not merely an exercise of the imagination, but of perception and living memory. Treating things as objects may be a 'regulative idea" but is not an arbitrary idea. It captures the way we experience the world as a series of gestalts, things that stand out for us, and also invokes the pragmatic sense of the word 'object' as meaning something like 'intention'. We can also think of things as interrelated processes. All our ways of thinking about things have their applications, and none of them are merely arbitrary or trivial, as the dismissive way you are treating 2500 years of philosophy seems to imply.

There are many reasons to think experience is not primary. — Marchesk

You mean many reasons to think that human experience is not primary?

There is no "must have" except in purely deductive arguments. But purely deductive arguments do not prove the soundness of their premises; they are merely formal, not substantive arguments, so the "must have" is always going to be a relative, not an absolute, one.

Inductive arguments give us reasons to think that something might be the case given what has been observed; so there is no "must have" there, either. As I said before, the soundness of any argument, other than the empty soundness of a tautology cannot ever be proven.

So I don't see metaphysical arguments and systems as fulfilling the role of a search for truth at all, but rather as a search for beauty, in the form of understanding.

The difference is that with non-philosophical questions, one can come to understand by being versed in the relevant discipline. There is no such no such pathway for metaphysics. This is evidenced by the fact that philosophers themselves, who are the ones that invent the terms and the debate, do not agree on what the debate even is, and a good number of them disagree that the debate even ought to be had, or the terms applied.

I’m confident users of this forum are capable of understanding metaphysical questions.

That is not my experience. Talking to people about such questions generally leaves me with the impression that they do not know what they are talking about. Evidence that they did know would come from being able to explain themselves, paraphrase problems in multiple ways using their own words, etc.

I'd say that this is inconsistent with your position that the question about consciousness is a meaningful question with an obvious answer. One can become versed in, say, the debate about consciousness. And the problem is clear enough that disagreement can take place. Yet, since this is a question about the nature of reality -- about what exists in reality -- it's also a case of metaphysics. So some philosophical questions either are not nonsense, or it does not count as a philosophical question.

What is the inconsistency? Is the idea that I'm not allowed to treat different purported questions differently? But this is exactly what I said right from the start. Some questions are meaningful, some not.

Well, in the post I responded to you said there was no way to become versed in the discipline of metaphysics. But with the problem of consciousness, which is metaphysics, there is a way to become versed to a point where at least the disagreements can be understood. So you must hold that not all metaphysics is nonsense, when that seems to be what you were denying in the post I responded to -- you said you thought some questions were meaningful, but you haven't said that some of those that are meaningful are also metaphysical questions.

I think that the question of consciousness is one that arises in people prior to metaphysics, and I doubt that metaphysics, or philosophers generally, have had anything much interesting to say about it. It's a perfectly ordinary question with a perfectly ordinary answer – anyone will tell you that a human is conscious much of the time, but a plant never is.