Yes, I know.

I assumed for the discussion context you we relating "see" in the context of realising a casual relationship from our observations of the world. My point I don't see a conflict between this sort of "sight" (or smell, sound, etc.) and Hume's observation that causality isn't an empirical thing in front of us.

But Hume says we don't see causality — Janus

Change it to "sense". Are you certain proprioception bypasses Hume?

You don't feel the impact of forces on your body, the wind or sun on your face? Or the power of your own body to move things around, and the resistance things have to being moved? Is there a good reason to think that such experiences do not refute Hume's claim?

and Hume's observation that causality isn't an empirical thing in front of us. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Right, causation isn't seen as something "in front of us" it is felt in us, in our bodies.

If proprioception is good enough to establish the experience of causality, why isn't visual perception?

The answer to that seems quite simple; we feel forces that impact our own bodies, but we do not see them. So, when a billiard ball strikes another we do not feel the force of the strike, but if the billiard ball is thrown and strikes my face I certainly do feel the force of the strike. BTW, that we feel causal forces does not support a claim that we must always feel causal forces, so that aspect of the problem of induction is a separate issue.

What does my version of the argument look like with a specific example?

(1A) We can only think about apples if we have experience of apples.
(2A) We only have experience of particular apples.
Therefore (3A) We can only think about particular apples.

What does (2A) mean exactly? It looks like the apple class is already here. We can experience particular objects as apples, but we cannot experience a generic apple? But apples are apples. Experiencing something as an apple is also always experiencing an apple, a generic one.

(1A) now looks like a claim that to use the concept [apple], you must be familiar with members of the class it picks out, and that's at least prima facie unobjectionable.

And (3A) looks like a non sequitur, and a comment about how our visual imagination works. (Imagining an apple is imagining a particular apple. On the other hand, if the analysis of (2A) is right, that's exactly what imagining a generic apple is.)

(2A) is certainly the interesting bit. I don't have it quite right yet.

We don't need to conceptualize an apple as an apple to see it as something that we have encountered before. Animals do that all the time.

The answer to that seems quite simple; we feel forces, but we do not see them — Janus

You feel the actual electromagnetic force itself, rather than its effects on you? That is a surprising claim. (So far as effects on you go, seeing is just as good.)

So you deny that you feel bodily impacts, and the power of your own body to affect other things? Really?

You feel the actual electromagnetic force itself, rather than its effects on you? — Srap Tasmaner

It's not experienced as "an electromagnetic force" but as a push or a strike or whatever. It seems obvious to me that this is where the very concept of force has its genesis. Where else could such a concept come from?

I can experience the effect a baseball has on me when it hits me in the face. I can experience the effect a baseball has on me when it's flying through the air at my face. Both, as I understand it, are the effects of electromagnetic forces, but one I experience as feeling the impact of the ball, and one I experience as seeing the ball.

Yes, but the point you are missing is that the first one is directly experienced as a force. Don't worry about whether it is "in itself" an electromagnetic force or whatever, the point is a phenomenological one. So, for example, say you are watching a movie of a ball flying through the air, or even a movie of yourself being pushed over by someone; there will be no bodily involvement, no force will be felt; no impact on your body.

Going back to your example, when you are hit in the face with a baseball bat you do not experience the effect as something separate or inferred, you experience the force of the blow, you experience your face being forced backwards. You can say that is an effect of the blow; but in the immediacy of the experience there is no separation between the force and the effect of your head flying back; they are felt as one.

It doesn't matter whether there "really" are forces; this is an 'after the fact' question that might arise, but whatever your answer might be it does not change the fact that when struck you feel it directly. By contrast you don't directly feel the billiard ball striking another billiard ball or even striking another person, although of course you may feel it 'sympathetically'.

That there is a force operating in those cases is an extrapolated inference from your own lived experience of being affected by, and affecting other physical bodies. Imagine if you had no experience of your own body being affected and affecting; if say you were suspended in an anti-gravity chamber, and your only experience had been watching movies of physical events. Do you think in that case you would arrive at an inference to causation, to physical forces?

People will often say, in response to realism about universals, "You say that numbers, universals, and so on are real? Well, where are they? Where is this supposed 'ghostly, ethereal realm' in which numbers and universals and the like exist?" (Triumphant crossing of arms.) And it makes a good point, because things that exist - phenomena - exist in a location, they're 'out there somewhere'.

Whereas, universals, numbers, grammar, and so on, don't exist anywhere 'out there'; they're not in the phenomenal domain. So it’s natural to assume that they're instead 'in the mind' - but that still implicitly locates them, in the neural space; they're the kinds of things that neuroscience can understand, being activities of the brain (as touched upon here.) After all, the implicit viewpoint of naturalism is that everything that exists is either 'out there' in the phenomenal domain, or internal to the (evolved) brain. There's no other conceptual space in which to locate them.

But what a (traditional) realist argues, is that universals are precisely 'transcendent' insofar that they transcend any descriptive attempt to locate them in phenomenal terms. They’re not phenomenal at all; their nature is purely intellectual; they are internal to the architecture of thought; they are relations of ideas. But at the same time, they are the building blocks of the descriptive and predictive power that can be harnessed through the rational operations of the intellect, and so to both philosophy and science.

Not everything that is real must have a location in space and time. What we call universals are abstractions from real differences and relations in nature. I see no problem with that; the question as to "where they are" is simply a category error.

The wrongheadedness of that category error is shown when you say that they "transcend any descriptive attempt to locate them in phenomenal terms". I think it's misleading to say they "transcend" any such attempt, rather, they bypass it; because such an attempt is not required, the question has no sense.

The question and proposed answers can be boiled down to this observation:

We perceive a world of individuals, yet our language is full of universal categories of properties and relations. So how do we reconcile the two? — Marchesk

See, right away you show me right. What you came up with is a pseudo-question: although it has the grammatical form of a question, it is actually quite senseless. It is not clear what motivates the questioning, what it is that you actually want explained, and what kind of an explanation you require. And of course there is no answer either, despite your insistence otherwise - and how could there be when there is no real question?

In the subsequent discussion @Srap Tasmaner has to do all the work for you so as to come up with some more sensible questions to ask. But are the questions of psychology, cognition and causality that @Janus then picks up upon what you had in mind for this discussion?

How our language comes to have universal concepts when the world is full of individuals. What is it about the individual things that leads us to form universal properties and relations such that we can group them into categories?

One possible answer is that universal properties and relations exist in the world in some manner. — Marchesk

Such fragmentary thoughts dispersed throughout your posts hint at other kinds of questions, but they are too undeveloped to make much sense of.

See, right away you show me right. What you came up with is a pseudo-question: although it has the grammatical form of a question, it is actually quite senseless. — SophistiCat

Can you explain in what way it's senseless? Because I'm failing to see how it is.

The only sense I can make of the claim that it's senseless is a preexisting commitment to the argument that metaphysics is senseless.

If by definition all such statements are without sense, then of course no example will convince you otherwise. If only everyone would agree to that definition, then we could be done with wasting time on metaphysics!

That we can directly experience/feel/perceive causation is one of the positions that has been staked and defended by philosophers such as Ducasse, Armstrong, Anscombe among others - but it is by no means uncontroversial. However, I think that disagreements here are more about the conceptualization of causality in general than about empirical facts of cognition.

You might be interested in this article though: The Psychology of Causal Perception and Reasoning (PDF) by David Danks from Oxford Handbook of Causation.

Well, I explained why your question makes no sense, but alas, all you can think of is poisoning the well. Never mind, I think others here make a much better job of making this discussion substantive and interesting than you do.

I think it's misleading to say they "transcend" any such attempt, rather, they bypass it; because such an attempt is not required, the question has no sense. — Janus

The ontological status of universals, numbers, and other abstract objects, is what is at issue. The realist view is that such entities are real but not physical and that there are, therefore, real things that are immaterial, which shows that materialism is false. Conversely, materialists must insist that universals can’t be real [which is closely related to why Carnap must insist that metaphysics is empty. D M Armstrong is a materialist who claims that he accepts that universals are real, but he equates them with the fundamental particles of physics. And considering what is happening in physics - well, good luck with that.]

Again :

We can think of a universal, and our thinking then exists in a perfectly ordinary sense, like any other mental act. Suppose, for example, that we are thinking of whiteness. Then in one sense it may be said that whiteness is 'in our mind'. ...In the strict sense, it is not ‘whiteness’ that is in our mind, but the act of thinking of whiteness. The connected ambiguity in the word 'idea', which we noted at the same time, also causes confusion here. In one sense of this word, namely the sense in which it denotes the object of an act of thought, whiteness is an 'idea'. Hence, if the ambiguity is not guarded against, we may come to think that whiteness is an 'idea' in the other sense, i.e. an act of thought; and thus we come to think that whiteness is mental. But in so thinking, we rob it of its essential quality of universality . One man's act of thought is necessarily a different thing from another man's; one man's act of thought at one time is necessarily a different thing from the same man's act of thought at another time. Hence, if whiteness were the thought as opposed to its object, no two different men could think of it, and no one man could think of it twice. That which many different thoughts of whiteness have in common is their object, and this object is different from all of them. Thus universals are not thoughts, though when known they are the objects of thoughts. — Betrand Russell

Consider that when you think about triangularity, as you might when proving a geometrical theorem, it is necessarily perfect triangularity that you are contemplating, not some mere approximation of it. ‘Triangularity’ as your intellect grasps it is entirely determinate or exact; for example, what you grasp is the notion of a closed plane figure with three perfectly straight sides, rather than that of something which may or may not have straight sides or which may or may not be closed. Of course, your mental image of a triangle might not be exact, but rather indeterminate and fuzzy. But to grasp something with the intellect is not the same as to form a mental image of it. For any mental image of a triangle is necessarily going to be of an isosceles triangle specifically, or of a scalene one, or an equilateral one; but the concept of triangularity that your intellect grasps applies to all triangles alike. Any mental image of a triangle is going to have certain features, such as a particular color, that are no part of the concept of triangularity in general. A mental image is something private and subjective, while the concept of triangularity is objective and grasped by many minds at once.

Feser, Some Brief Arguments for Dualism

I'm not convinced, but I'll think about it.

While I'm thinking, I'd ask that you think about your use of words like "direct", "directly experienced", "immediacy". I think you're making a mistake, imagining that here at last, when something out there whacks me or I whack it, there is actual, unmediated contact with, well, something.

Well, I explained why your question makes no sense — SophistiCat

You did so on the grounds that anti-metaphysical statements are meaningless. You even stated as much in the first sentence of the previous post.

See, right away you show me right. What you came up with is a pseudo-question: although it has the grammatical form of a question, it is actually quite senseless — SophistiCat

That's exactly the sort of starting point Carnap wanted to argue from.

(1) It is not clear what motivates the questioning, (2) what it is that you actually want explained, and (3) what kind of an explanation you require. (4) And of course there is no answer either, despite your insistence otherwise - and (5) how could there be when there is no real question? — SophistiCat

I'll go ahead and answer these directly (numbers my addition):

(1) The difference between the individual things we perceive, and our universal talk about them.

(2) Whether there is something in the world which matches or supports our universal talk.

(3) An argument for something in the world or in our concepts that explain the universal talk.

(4) There have been at least 4 possible answers given to this question: nominalism, conceptualism, moderate realism (Aristotle), and realism (Platonism).

(5) No real question if one agrees with Carnap, Hume or Witty on this. But if not, then there is a real question.

The question of whether there can be meaningful metaphysical statements is essentially a debate over meaning.

We "see" the casualty of a ball breaking a window because the causality of interested is of those things-- the causality of a ball braking a window (if someone is present), involves the sight of the ball and window in a certain reaction/relationship. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Right, but we go one step further and assume there is something necessitating the relationship, such that any future ball will break any future window, all else being equal (same glass strength, same speed and weight of the ball, etc).

I wouldn't go so far as to say that there is unmediated contact with anything, but merely that there certainly seems to be. The question then becomes "what could it mean to say that that seeming is mistaken, that we are not "really" experiencing a force even though we seem to be?'

Well, that's where Hume diverges, and correctly so.

There is nothing necessitatng any ball or window will have the same strength, etc. and form the given causal relationship. We don't get a causal relationship from the form of window or ball. They can have different strengths, momentums, etc.

States with those forms have to do the work. We might always encounter a window/ball without that causal relationship.

So no, we don't need to assume any future instance will behave that way. In fact, that's bad reasoning (and science! ) since it assumes future states can only be like ones we have seen before.

I would say the line of questioning is off. What's the difference between "universal talk of something" and just regular talk of something? They would appear to be the same. If I speak about something, I invoke its meaning concept, a logical necessity expressed by that which I speak. I'm using the idea/name of what I refer to.

And, obviously, this is always whole different to the thing being spoken about. My talk about eating breakfast yesterday is a different thing that the event. One is my speech, the other is what my speech is about.

By this both (2) and (3) amount to a category error. Since our speech is a different thing than what we speak about, we are not going to get an explanation of either by the other-- I cannot account for a car by pointing out a tree.

(5) also leads to a similar collapse. Meaning is a given with statements. All statements mean something, even "meaningless" ontological questions; they have people floundering over in all directions all the time. The debate isn't over "meaning." Meaning is necessary and is unremarkable in that even nonsense has meaning. It's not a measure of logical judgement.

Carnap has something far more specific in mind when taking issue with these ontological questions. The challenge is formed on the basis of meaning, but rather the coherency of their meaning. He's asking as to pay a critical eye to the questions we are asking, to check them (their meaning) for logical coherency.

The question of whether there can be meaningful metaphysical statements is essentially a debate over meaning. — Marchesk

This, for example, is a "meaningless"-- i.e. not coherent-- question. It doesn't actually identify anything about metaphysics and statements. All it does is vaguely allude to people having some disagreement.

In this sense, yes, there is a "debate": people are arguing over whether these sort of ontological questions make sense, but this fact has no relevance to questions of whether they have any force. The fact people disagree or are talking about something doesn't identify any said ontological questions and reasons why we might approach them one way or another. It just useless noise.

If our question is about the coherence of ontological questions, we don't need to know people debate it. We need to understand what ontological questions are and how they relate to our points of interest. Our goal is to understand them and what the logical response to them would be. Anything less than that, you are just speaking rhetoric or giving out ad hoc notions of an unknown.

I don't deny that number, multiplicity, is real; you'd be a fool to deny that; I don't even know what it could mean to deny it. What i do deny is that it is real apart from nature, because that makes no sense.

. What's the difference between "universal talk of something" and just regular talk of something? — TheWillowOfDarkness

So I can talk about a particular dog, call him Beast, who happens to be bigger than most dogs. Notice that Beast is grouped into the category dog. All dogs are unique individuals, but there is something about dogs that motivates us to put them into the dog category. Now beast is taller and weighs more than most dogs. Notice how we can compare across the class of individuals.

We can also use the dog category to talk about a generic dog, or draw the shape of a dog. So a no dogs allowed sign has an outline representing any dog.

Now the question becomes how we're able to do all this if we all perceive are individual dogs. We never do experience the dog category, the average dog, the image of a generic dog, etc. It's a concept we form related to all dogs.