What I do deny is that it is real apart from nature, because that makes no sense. — Janus

Right. But you don't see numbers in nature, do you? I mean, there are books about the mathematical regularities found in nature, the fibonacci sequence, and so on - which are very interesting, to be sure. But numbers aren't found in nature, as such. They're not 'out there somewhere' - they're only perceptible to the kind of intelligence which is capable of counting. But for any such intelligence, they're the same (speaking of integers, anyway).

And the point that strikes me, is that through mathematical reasoning, through being able to count, abstract and reason, we're able to find out many things about nature that we otherwise couldn't know; the whole history of science is evidence for that. But I don't think that is explained by naturalism (well, not easily anyway). I think it is often assumed that we understand reason and the nature of abstraction and representation, but actually we don't. We see them as adaptions, as 'something the brain does', but I am questioning that. I think they are real in a different way to phenomenal objects. But modern philosophy has no provision for something being real 'in a different way'; things are either real or they're not. And what is fundamental is, it is said, matter~energy - not numbers, which don't come into the picture until right at the very end of the evolutionary story.

My developing view is that universals and the like exist in the structure of our experience of the world. They are intrinsic to the way we interpret experience and construe meaning. So they're elements or aspects of reality, but they're neither subjective nor objective. They're neither 'out there' in the world, nor 'in here' in our minds, but are part of the structure of mind; but prior to any sense of 'mind' in a naturalistic sense, as the whole notion of what constitutes 'naturalism' relies on that structure. That is why nature exists in mind, more than vice versa. That's not necessarily idealistic, either - it is quite in keeping with a lot of the thinking of biosemioticians.

What's challenging about that, is that it undermines the near universal assumption that there's a causal sequence which can be understood in evolutionary terms, that accounts for the emergence of reason. Whereas:

The vast flow of perceptions, ideas, and emotions that arise in each human mind is something that, in Thomas Nagel's view, actually exists as something other than merely the electrical firings in the brain that gives rise to them—and exists as surely as a brain, a chair, an atom, or a gamma ray.

In other words, even if it were possible to map out the exact pattern of brain waves that give rise to a person’s momentary complex of awareness, that mapping would only explain the physical correlate of these experiences, but it wouldn’t be them. A person doesn’t experience patterns, and her experiences are as irreducibly real as her brain waves are, and different from them.

Nagel offers mental activity as a special realm of being and life as a special condition—in the same way that biology is a special realm of science, distinct from physics. His argument is that, if the mental things arising from the minds of living things are a distinct realm of existence, then strictly physical theories about the origins of life, such as Darwinian theory, cannot be entirely correct. Life cannot have arisen solely from a primordial chemical reaction, and the process of natural selection cannot account for the creation of the realm of mind. Biology, in his view, becomes a variety of science that is radically distinct from physics—it deals with a vast and crucial realm of phenomena that physics doesn’t and can’t encompass, precisely because they’re aspects of living things that are not physical:

subjective consciousness, if it is not reducible to something physical, … would be left completely unexplained by physical evolution—even if the physical evolution of such organisms is in fact a causally necessary and sufficient condition for consciousness.

Since neither physics nor Darwinian biology—the concept of evolution—can account for the emergence of a mental world from a physical one, Nagel contends that the mental side of existence must somehow have been present in creation from the very start. But then he goes further, into strange and visionary territory. He argues that the faculty of reason is different from perception and, in effect, prior to it—“an irreducible faculty.” He suggests that any theory of the universe, any comprehensive mesh of physics and biology, will need to succeed in “showing how the natural order is disposed to generate beings capable of comprehending it.”

Thomas Nagel: Thoughts are Real

So, this 'continuum' - whatever it is - is of a much greater extent than nature. (Nagel, mind you, goes to great lengths to deny being religious - his understanding is much more in keeping, I think, with elements in Greek philosophy, which were later incorporated into theology.)

My view is that universals and the like exist in the structure of our experience of the world. They are intrinsic to the way we interpret experience and construe meaning. So they're elements or aspects of reality, but they're neither subjective nor objective. They're neither 'out there' in the world, nor 'in here' in our minds, but are part of the structure of mind; but prior to any sense of 'mind' in a naturalistic sense, as the whole notion of what constitutes 'naturalism' relies on that structure. That is why nature exists in mind, more than vice versa. — Wayfarer

So basically Kantian? Did Kant think that on Hume's account, knowledge was impossible? That these categories of thought have to already be there because they can't come from the senses. The senses are just blobs of color, random noises, smells, etc that need to be categorized, fit into a conceptual framework or what have you.

Did Kant think that on Hume's account, knowledge was impossible? — Marchesk

No, not at all, never. He was 'woken from his dogmatic slumbers' to answer Hume's 'sceptical challenge'. Which he did, in my view. But, I'm definitely on board with some form of 'transcendental idealism', although from experience it's a devilishly hard thing to explain.

Can you imagine a unicorn? Yes? But unicorns don't exist, so how is it you can imagine one? Maybe everything you image actually exist in some form, but that rather does away with the point of distinguishing that which exists from that which does not.

So let's presume you can imagine things which don't exist. You can imagine an ideal dog. The ideal dog doesn't exist, but that doesn't prevent you from imagining it as above. Your ideal dog wont be the same as my ideal dog, so it's definitely not an object of objective existence. They'll be very similar, because they serve similar purposes and have been learnt similar ways, but not the same.

So now all the functions you ascribe to universals can be satisfactorily ascribed to a comparison to your ideal dog, which we've just established does not exist.

Is there any feature of our universalism in language that you're having trouble ascribing to an imagined ideal?

So now all the functions you ascribe to universals can be satisfactorily ascribed to a comparison to your ideal dog, which we've just established does not exist.

Is there any feature of our universalism in language that you're having trouble ascribing to an imagined ideal? — Pseudonym

That sounds like conceptualism, which is one answer to the problem of universals. It doesn't really matter for this discussion if universals exist. It's whether the debate is meaningful.

Yes, I thought I'd answered that one already. The question may be meaningful in an aesthetic sense, the answers might be meaningful to those who adopt them in an axiological sense, but the debate, the presumption that some sentences can demonstrate the value of one answer above another, is meaningless. It's not the value of my conceptualism that matters here, it's the fact that I can easily and coherently express it, no less than any other theory can be easily and coherently expressed by any competent language user. So what do we do now? Continue to express them at each other ad infinitum?

Sections 3 through 7 of chapter two details the positions of others that Chalmer's disagrees with. This is after having spent some time arguing that consciousness does not supervene on the physical, first by explaining exactly what that means, and then providing a series of 5 arguments for his position.

Google books actually has the relevant section open for viewing! Shwew. I was hoping I wouldn't have to type it all out.

Now I take it that if we can detail not just our own beliefs but the beliefs of others, and others can do the same for us, then that demonstrates that what people are saying is meaningful -- it's not just a nonsense that an individual has come up with.

Now I take it that if we can detail not just our own beliefs but the beliefs of others, and others can do the same for us, then that demonstrates that what people are saying is meaningful -- it's not just a nonsense that an individual has come up with. — Moliere

Exactly.

Now I take it that if we can detail not just our own beliefs but the beliefs of others, and others can do the same for us, then that demonstrates that what people are saying is meaningful -- it's not just a nonsense that an individual has come up with. — Moliere

I'll tackle this first. This falls into the same error I've tried to explain to Marchesk, but it just gets ignored. Proving that people can make coherent sense, and derive meaning from, the question, or an answer offered is not sufficient to make the debate meaningful. To make the debate meaningful it is also necessary that some methods can demonstrably determine which of the competing answers has the greater merit by some metric agreed on by the contributors. Now since the contributors to the broader metaphysical debate include almost everyone, then almost everyone must agree on the metric in order for the debate to be meaningful held in that way.

Consider a discussion about the technicalities of the eucharist. Within the Christian Church, it would be a meaningful discussion because all agree that the coherence with the words in the bible is the metric by which ideas are measured. But include a Muslim, or an atheist in the debate and it becomes meaningless, how are the Christian and the atheist going to analyse the ideas in any joint way?

So it is with metaphysics, there is no agreement among the participants in the discussion about what it is that measures 'rightness'. Even attempts to do so like coherence, consistency, simplicity are all far too vague to achieve anything. Virtually every metaphysical proposition ever written is thought by some to be coherent, consistent and simple (enough). It's just too easy to meet these criteria and most philosophers are clever enough to do so.

So before I actually look at Chalmers' arguments in detail (which I will try to get round to, but I was expecting a paragraph, not few chapters!), I'd like to ask what metric you'd measure sucess by. If I were to present a killer argument which defeated everything Chalmers had to say, how would you know I'd done so?

I'll tackle this first. This falls into the same error I've tried to explain to Marchesk, but it just gets ignored. Proving that people can make coherent sense, and derive meaning from, the question, or an answer offered is not sufficient to make the debate meaningful. To make the debate meaningful it is also necessary that some methods can demonstrably determine which of the competing answers has the greater merit by some metric agreed on by the contributors. — Pseudonym

Sounds good. Looks like this is where we disagree anyways, so there is no need to read it at this point (unless you just feel like it, of course). I fully expect Chalmer's interlocutor's to not change their position based upon his arguments -- and in fact that is often the case, though not always -- but I don't think that makes his statements nonsense -- though it's worth noting that you're not making that claim as much as you are saying that the debate itself is not meaningful, which I take to be very different from claiming that a statement is nonsense.

I don't think you'll find your standard of meaningful debate outside of philosophy, though. It's just how human beings are -- they become attached to certain positions and argue for them. Scientific theory changes not so much because of pure rational debate, though that is a part of science, but also because stubborn old codgers who love their ideas die, and the young aren't attached to them. That doesn't mean that the old codger was senseless or speaking nonsense though -- we can come to understand what he meant by, say, phlogiston even if we don't believe as he does.

So what is it to have a meaningful debate, then? And by "meaning" are you talking about linguistic meaning (which the use of "nonsense" or "senseless", two terms that I think are different, seems to imply) or are you talking about meaning in the sense of the point of it all, the reason why a debate would take place?

I'll tackle this first. This falls into the same error I've tried to explain to Marchesk, but it just gets ignored. Proving that people can make coherent sense, and derive meaning from, the question, or an answer offered is not sufficient to make the debate meaningful. To make the debate meaningful it is also necessary that some methods can demonstrably determine which of the competing answers has the greater merit by some metric agreed on by the contributors. — Pseudonym

The thing is you can accuse political debates of having this problem. Does that mean the issues being debated lack meaning?

From my experience of also being involved in political, religious, sports and true crime debates, people often don't agree as to what would count as settling the debate. Each side has their own criteria.

Take the Dyatlov Pass Incident for example. 9 Russian Hikers were found dead in 1959. According to investigators, they cut their way out of the tent at night in the middle of the Siberian winter, hiked down to the tree line poorly dressed, and attempted to survive the night there unsuccessfully. The head investigator concluded that some "unknown compelling force" caused them to do this.

There are many theories as to what happened. Several books have been written in recent years, each with their own conclusion. Some say they were forced out of their tent by other humans on the mountain that night, and their injuries revealed in the autopsies are consistent with this being attacked and killed. Others will say that no, their injuries are consistent with natural causes that happened to them after leaving the tent, such as a snow den collapse, and falling out of a tree, the broken limbs of which were used in a small fire, or falling face first on the rocky terrain in the deep snow.

So what would count as settling which theory is true in a case like this, if no new evidence comes to light? But they did abandon their campsite without proper clothing for some reason. One of the theories is probably close to the truth.

Looks like this is where we disagree anyways, — Moliere

Firstly, I don't quite get from the rest of what you've written exactly where we do disagree. Are you saying that you do find the debate meaningful for some reason that does not require a shared metric, or that my conclusion that there's no shared metric is mistaken?

I don't think you'll find your standard of meaningful debate outside of philosophy, though. It's just how human beings are -- they become attached to certain positions and argue for them. Scientific theory changes not so much because of pure rational debate, though that is a part of science, but also because stubborn old codgers who love their ideas die, and the young aren't attached to them. — Moliere

So this comes back to what I think I've mentioned before, but I'll repeat for clarity. The point Quine was making in Two Dogmas was not that Carnap was wrong (despite this being the common lay interpretation), only that he drew a sharp dividing line where Quine saw a gradation. So with science, you may say that there's no definitive shared metric, and you'd be right, but the correlation of some theoretical proposition with empirical measurements is sufficiently shared and just specific enough to allow meaningful debate. It's not so shared that people like Kuhn can't highlight its reliance on paradigm, but they're shared enough.

So what is it to have a meaningful debate, then? And by "meaning" are you talking about linguistic meaning (which the use of "nonsense" or "senseless", two terms that I think are different, seems to imply) or are you talking about meaning in the sense of the point of it all, the reason why a debate would take place? — Moliere

I think both definitions share the same features. There is meaning to a proposition of the type "phenomenon X is caused by/explained by Y for reasons a, b and c". The meaning is the story such a proposition tells for one looking for just such a story. But propositions of the sort "proposition X is wrong because a, b and c" is meaningless because there is no accompanying definition of wrong which the reader is bound to agree with. I might as well say proposition X is 'vgarstenfad' because a, b and c". That would also be nonsense because you'd have no idea what 'vgarstenfad' means nor any reason to accept any definition of the word I might give.

So in that sense I do think there's an argument for saying that such propositions are meaningless in your first sense, but it is in the second sense that my interest lies.

The thing is you can accuse political debates of having this problem. Does that mean the issues being debated lack meaning? — Marchesk

To the extent that you can accuse political debates of having the same problem then, yes, I would say they were meaningless, but to save me writing the whole thing out again, would you mind me referring you to my answer to the Moliere with respect to the sciences. It covers exactly the pint you're making here about areas other than metaphysics which may suffer from this problem. I would argue in both the cases that you highlight there is sufficient shared metric to make the debate meaningful - ecomonic stability, GDP, international security in the case of politics. Correspondence with the evidence in the second case.

So with science, you may say that there's no definitive shared metric, and you'd be right, but the correlation of some theoretical proposition with empirical measurements is sufficiently shared and just specific enough to allow meaningful debate. It's not so shared that people like Kuhn can't highlight its reliance on paradigm, but they're shared enough. — Pseudonym

At least until you get deep in the theoretical physics weeds. Does superstring theory, or colliding 11 dimension branes in the multiverse count as a meaningful scientific debate? I think so, on a theoretical grounds, but some have said it's pure metaphysics and shouldn't be in science.

Let's take a sports example. Is athlete A greater than athlete B in a sport?

Is Lebron James better than Michael Jordan? (pick your athletes and sport)

There is a consensus that both players are all-time greats at basketball, but there isn't a consensus as what counts as being greater between the two (which often means the best ever).

And yet there are many discussions on this. What happens is that the Lebron James supporters will list criteria that supports their claim that Lebron is better, and reasons why Jordan is not. And the Jordan supporters will do the same.

This isn't because they don't understand each other, it's because they don't agree. Similar to political debates where a conservative and a liberal will base their arguments on their political persuasion. They can usually understand each other, but they don't agree on the politics of the other side's position.

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. — Marchesk

Well, no, not unless you believe that metaphysical questions are necessarily as vague and pointless as the one I was criticizing. My most charitable take on metaphysics is that it is a search for and a critical analysis of framing - and that is not meaningless.

what motivates the questioning — SophistiCat

The difference between the individual things we perceive, and our universal talk about them. — Marchesk

That makes no sense, no matter how many times you say this. Come on, Marchesk, you are not even trying.

(2) what it is that you actually want explained, and (3) what kind of an explanation you require. — SophistiCat

(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. — Marchesk

That is still much too vague. There are many ways in which such a question could be cached out: we could analyze our language, starting with universal talk and perhaps going on to causal talk (which is one of the directions this conversation has taken). We could analyze our psychology/cognition - and here there is also a variety of approaches. We could talk about "the world" (i.e. the intended objects of our universal talk) - and here the possibilities are too many to number. We could also talk about the interrelationship between all these spheres, which broadens the scope to a truly unmanageable size.

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

There are so, so many more ways to address the general topic "universals" - at least until you frame the question better than you have done so far. But in any case, to paraphrase Crispin Wright, identifying your position with one of the above labels accomplishes about as much as clearing one's throat.


I was wondering, by the way, what it is that you were trying for with your programming analogy. A class in object-oriented programming (OOP) is not a good analogy for the general idea of universals. In OOP two objects with the same functional properties are not necessarily instances of the same class. Indeed, being an instance of a particular class is itself a property, which can be directly queried in languages that support reflection. That would not make sense with universals: being a member of a class is not a property that is distinct from the sum of properties that defines that class. Being a member of the class of blue things is exactly the same as being blue (which is the point that @Snakes Alive already made).

I guess you were looking for some causal, generative account of differences and similarities between things. But I am afraid that such an overly general approach is not going to be a productive direction for inquiry; you need to bring more focus to it. (And turning back to OOP for a moment, a slightly better but still imperfect analogy for universals would be an interface or a completely abstract class, which defines "phenomenal" properties of objects. But interfaces are not generative: conceptually, they are used to abstract properties from existing things or describe hypothetical properties that may or may not exist.)

Right. But you don't see numbers in nature, do you? I mean, there are books about the mathematical regularities found in nature, the fibonacci sequence, and so on - which are very interesting, to be sure. But numbers aren't found in nature, as such. They're not 'out there somewhere' - they're only perceptible to the kind of intelligence which is capable of counting. But for any such intelligence, they're the same (speaking of integers, anyway). — Wayfarer

The way I see it this passage exemplifies the very category error I spoke of in previous posts. You demand that for something to be thought of as part of nature it must be an object of the senses.

Then you claim that because we cannot find numbers "out there" they must be transcendent entities that are "real" in some mysterious unspecifiable way.

The problem is you can't say what sense "real" could have in what you are trying to articulate, and you fall into the error that Wittgenstein warns against of trying to say what cannot be said.

I think we can say that number is real as 'multiplicity', as different quantities of objects. We can directly perceive the difference between quantities of perceptible things, for example, and some animals even seem to display this ability. Number is also to be considered a real part of nature because humans, who are part of nature, have developed a science of number, which has untold practical applications.

Also, when you say "nature exists in mind" there seems to be no coherent idea of what mind could be in this context. Are you trying to draw an analogy to the way thought can seem to be in our minds? But why think of thoughts as being in minds rather than thinking of them as being mind? Why think of mind as 'container' rather than 'process'? So, why not think that nature seems more mindlike than matter-like? Perhaps matter is more mindlike than the 17th Century conception allows, and then the emergence of animal minds ceases to be an irresolvable conundrum.

Then you claim that because we cannot find numbers "out there" they must be transcendent entities that are "real" in some mysterious unspecifiable way. — Janus

Real but immaterial.
Not reducible to neurobiology.
Demonstrates the falsehood of philosophical materialism.

Sure numbers are "immaterial" if this term is defined to mean 'not material objects'. But this does not justify reifying immateriality as a substance, which is what you are doing. Why repeat Descartes' error?

The problem is you can't say what sense "real" could have in what you are trying to articulate, and you fall into the error that Wittgenstein warns against of trying to say what cannot be said. — Janus

Real in these discussions means mind-independent. Objects of perception are generally taken to be mind-independent things that exist without humans perceiving them, unless one is a subjective idealist.

An abstraction like universals, numbers, or possible worlds would be real if they aren't created by the mind. It's true that we don't perceive abstract forms, but if argument showed that they have to come from somewhere other than our minds, then they would be real.

But this does not justify reifying immateriality as a substance, which is what you are doing. Why repeat Descartes' error? — Janus

It has nothing to do with either Descartes or with reification. I am not saying that either numbers, or mind, are 'substances' in the sense that Descartes uses. I favour the model of hylomorphic dualism. The problem is, when the word 'intelligible object' is used, it sounds like a reification, but in this case the use of the word is allegorical, to convey that a number is something the mind grasps or sees, 'analogous to the way a hand grasps a pencil', to use Frege's analogy.

An abstraction like universals, numbers, or possible worlds would be real if they aren't created by the mind. — Marchesk

The point is, universals and numbers can only be apprehended by the mind, but they're the same for any mind that apprehends them. That is the basis of 'objective idealism' and is also the point of the two passages in this post by Bertrand Russell (from his chapter on The Problem of Universals) and Ed Feser (from a blog post on 'arguments for dualism'.)

"Thus universals are not thoughts, though when known they are the objects of thoughts."

"A mental image is something private and subjective, while the concept of triangularity is objective and grasped by many minds at once."

Also, when you say "nature exists in mind" there seems to be no coherent idea of what mind could be in this context. — Janus

The kind of idea of mind that is used in the title of Gregory Bateson's book Steps to an Ecology of Mind. It's not about 'mind' as 'a disembodied substance' but as being a collective name for the operations of mind in any kind of sentient being. It is through the mind that nature is disclosed to sentient beings, and the nature of their cognitive processes determines a great deal about the nature of their world. All of these discussions are debates, are taking place in the mind - comparing, reflecting, criticizing, and so on.

Naive and even a lot of scientific realism assumes that the world or nature is 'there anyway', it is simply given, and that we as subjects find ourselves in that world. But that forgets the way that the mind constructs or construes the world on the basis of experience and judgement. Wittgenstein: 'I am my world' (from the Notebooks).

Consider a discussion about the technicalities of the eucharist. Within the Christian Church, it would be a meaningful discussion because all agree that the coherence with the words in the bible is the metric by which ideas are measured. But include a Muslim, or an atheist in the debate and it becomes meaningless, how are the Christian and the atheist going to analyse the ideas in any joint way?

So it is with metaphysics, there is no agreement among the participants in the discussion about what it is that measures 'rightness'. Even attempts to do so like coherence, consistency, simplicity are all far too vague to achieve anything. Virtually every metaphysical proposition ever written is thought by some to be coherent, consistent and simple (enough). It's just too easy to meet these criteria and most philosophers are clever enough to do so. — Pseudonym

The first paragraph is a comment on 'domains of discourse'. It rightly points out that different things have meaning in different domains of discourse; these are similar to what Wittgenstein means with 'language games'.

However this doesn't directly validate the leap to metaphysics generally. It seems to be arguing something like 'religion relies on faith, metaphysics is like religion, therefore we can't say anything objective about metaphysics'. But by concentrating on particular aspects of the Aristotelian tradition of metaphysics - and, after all, the term 'metaphysics' was invented specifically in relation to Aristotle's works - it is possible to at least converse meaningfully about specific metaphysical ideas and doctrines, as I am attempting to do with the discussion about the ontological status of numbers and universals. I think there is a central theme in that discussion, about metaphysics generally, which has considerable consequences for culture and philosophy.

Note this paragraph from the useful SEP article on mathematical platonism:

1.2 The philosophical significance of mathematical platonism
Mathematical platonism has considerable philosophical significance. If the view is true, it will put great pressure on the physicalist idea that reality is exhausted by the physical. For platonism entails that reality extends far beyond the physical world and includes objects which aren’t part of the causal and spatiotemporal order studied by the physical sciences.[1] Mathematical platonism, if true, will also put great pressure on many naturalistic theories of knowledge. For there is little doubt that we possess mathematical knowledge. The truth of mathematical platonism would therefore establish that we have knowledge of abstract (and thus causally inefficacious) objects. This would be an important discovery, which many naturalistic theories of knowledge would struggle to accommodate.

The reason many positivists have such an aversion to metaphysics, is because if mathematical platonism is true, then their preferred philosophical model of naturalism and/or materialism is not.

Why, if the mind is a real aspect of nature, must something be mind-independent to be counted as real?

Bateson, unless I am mistaken, argues precisely against the kind of container model of mind that you are presenting.

I never used the word 'container'. What I'm saying much nearer to Husserl's critique of naturalism:

In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense—this would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effect—but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness.

Routledge Intro to Phenomenology, p144

That's exactly what I meant by saying:

It is through the mind that nature is disclosed to sentient beings, and the nature of their cognitive processes determines a great deal about the nature of their world. — Wayfarer

You may not have use the word 'container', but when you speak about "taking place in the mind' that is exactly the model you are assuming. If you are going to cite philosophers please quote directly from them, not from someone else's interpretation of them. In any case for Husserl nature is real insofar as it is represented in consciousness, so he also assumes the transcendental container model. It is this Cartesian dualism in Husserl that Heidegger thought against.

Why, if the mind is a real aspect of nature, must something be mind-independent to be counted as real? — Janus

Good question. It's the contents of the mind which are not always real. We can both perceive a tree, which means there is a tree independent of your mind and mine. But if you dream, imagine or hallucinate a tree, that's your mind generating it. You can also lie or be mistaken about seeing a tree.

When we say that Harry Potter isn't real, we don't mean the literature, which is obviously real, we mean the character and the story is fictional.

This might lead to thinking that only the perceive is real, but then we do make both everyday and scientific inferences to things unperceived, such as the tree falling when nobody is around, or the majority of the EM spectrum we can't see.

That is still much too vague. — SophistiCat

Well then:

Universals are a class of mind-independent entities, usually contrasted with individuals (or so-called "particulars"), postulated to ground and explain relations of qualitative identity and resemblance among individuals. Individuals are said to be similar in virtue of sharing universals. An apple and a ruby are both red, for example, and their common redness results from sharing a universal. If they are both red at the same time, the universal, red, must be in two places at once. This makes universals quite different from individuals; and it makes them controversial.

Whether universals are in fact required to explain relations of qualitative identity and resemblance among individuals has engaged metaphysicians for two thousand years. Disputants fall into one of three broad camps. Realists endorse universals. Conceptualists and Nominalists, on the other hand, refuse to accept universals and deny that they are needed. Conceptualists explain similarity among individuals by appealing to general concepts or ideas, things that exist only in minds. Nominalists, in contrast, are content to leave relations of qualitative resemblance brute and ungrounded. — Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Do you find that also too vague?

. But in any case, to paraphrase Crispin Wright, identifying your position with one of the above labels accomplishes about as much as clearing one's throat. — SophistiCat

I listed the well established positions in the debate, about which much has been said. My argument is that the problem of universals is an example of a meaningful debate, not that universals are necessarily real (I don't know).

A class in object-oriented programming (OOP) is not a good analogy for the general idea of universals. In OOP two objects with the same functional properties are not necessarily instances of the same class. — SophistiCat

I wasn't demonstrating polymorphism with the simple example. The general idea of class-based OOP languages is that the class defines the complex data type for any instances of that class. The data type has bundled with it the methods which can operate on any instance. The properties available are defined in the class along with the methods.

This serves as a good example for universals, and indeed introductions to OOP often use the example of an Animal, Shape or Person class, claiming that it's modeled after the world. The class defines the type of object for a bunch of instances.

Now it's true that you can create a hierarchy of Shape classes and treat them the same when you want to perform the same kind of geometric function on them, or have them draw to the screen (the actual implementation might differ form class to class). That doesn't mean that the Triangle or Circle class are somehow less universal to their instances.

It's also true that some languages let you mutate individuals and change the inheritance relationships at runtime, and other wild stuff. Some languages don't really care about the class of an object, only if it behaves like a type it expects.

And similarly, the real world is more complicated than simple examples of universals. That doesn't change the question of how individual things can be similar. But it does illustrate the concept in a simple manner.

Are you saying that you do find the debate meaningful for some reason that does not require a shared metric, or that my conclusion that there's no shared metric is mistaken? — Pseudonym

I don't think that a shared metric for deciding what answer is superior is required for a meaningful debate. That would make a debate end, but many debates do not end and yet are still meaningful. Agreement is not the basis of meaning, nor does there need to be some metric for statements to be meaningful.

So with science, you may say that there's no definitive shared metric, and you'd be right, but the correlation of some theoretical proposition with empirical measurements is sufficiently shared and just specific enough to allow meaningful debate. It's not so shared that people like Kuhn can't highlight its reliance on paradigm, but they're shared enough. — Pseudonym

I'd say this notion of "shared enough" is mostly just a matter of taste. Some people like vanilla ice cream, and some people like chocolate -- and some people like a higher degree of decidability, and some people don't care either way.

I think both definitions share the same features. There is meaning to a proposition of the type "phenomenon X is caused by/explained by Y for reasons a, b and c". The meaning is the story such a proposition tells for one looking for just such a story. But propositions of the sort "proposition X is wrong because a, b and c" is meaningless because there is no accompanying definition of wrong which the reader is bound to agree with. I might as well say proposition X is 'vgarstenfad' because a, b and c". That would also be nonsense because you'd have no idea what 'vgarstenfad' means nor any reason to accept any definition of the word I might give.

So in that sense I do think there's an argument for saying that such propositions are meaningless in your first sense, but it is in the second sense that my interest lies. — Pseudonym

In the debate on consciousness it is understood what it means to be wrong. Further, "consciousness" is clearly defined.

But if the latter sense is what interests you it is the former sense that I've been arguing against. "The point of it all" is something that either makes sense or it doesn't. We all have different interests, after all. So the problem of universals, for instance, is something I just don't care too much about -- though it seems to make sense when I read an SEP article referring to the relationship between universals and particulars, I don't really care about the point of it all. I'd say "the point of it all" is something which is a function of taste and interests, and sometimes a topic will interest someone and sometimes it won't.

But just because I'm not interested in some debate that does not then mean that everyone over there interested in it is speaking gobbledeegoop.

OK, but generalities or universals or whatever you want to call them are abstracted from real aspects of perception and are essential in order to be able to see anything as anything. So, they are no like fictional characters or hallucinations but a real essential part of our experience. But this doesn't mean they must have some kind of 'reality' beyond their instantiations as objects of our experience, beyond the the part they play for our experience itself.

I don't believe we could coherently imagine what such a reality could be except that it consists in some kind of timelessly existing Idea (Platonism). But the notion that there is a timeless somehow independently existent idea for every generality (and there would need to be a unique idea for every individual similarity and difference) leads to absurdity. It's a really overloaded, top-heavy, cumbersome and in the final analysis, incoherent, ontology, so why should we adopt it or even bother with it?