If we can identify and agree about the features of public entities (which we certainly seem able to do), what more is required for shared meaning? — Janus
And of course all of this is fine, but (from a philosophical angle) how does this unseen something exist? — macrosoft
Given that the question cannot by definition be answered the way you are wanting to ask it; is the question really of any use? — Janus
Is that so clear? — macrosoft
How does one distinguish between mental and non-mental in the first place? — macrosoft
What is sensation? How do we learn to distinguish between dreams and the rest of experience? — macrosoft
Mental phenomena are such as thoughts, ideas, concepts, etc. They're only first-person observable. — Terrapin Station
Ohhhkay . . . so maybe try to make clear the "non-everyday sense" you're asking about? Whatever that might be?Of course I know what you mean in the everyday sense. — macrosoft
Who doesn't? We start from this what-everybody-already-knows. — macrosoft
IMV, you are repeating this as if it's an insight or a kind of progress in the discussion. — macrosoft
I, on the other hand, am problematizing a distinction. — macrosoft
If you uncharitably read philosophy as insanity, this would only support my point (not really mine) that paradigm-shifts are unintelligible nonsense at first. — macrosoft
that paradigm-shifts are unintelligible nonsense at first. In this case, the paradigm-shift is mostly old news, since I am really just working through insights that are more than 100 years old. — macrosoft
So I'm crazy, Hegel is crazy, Heidegger is crazy. Everyone not immediately intelligible is crazy, because they try to extend and enrich 'common sense' by rooting out its blinding presuppositions. — macrosoft
Yeah, I don't believe there is any such thing per se.The space of shared meaning — macrosoft
It's been fun talking tonight. I finally have to go to bed. Hope there are no hard feelings despite our slightly combative discussion. — macrosoft
Does utility = truth? I have defended such a position before, but I no longer think it makes sense. Truth cannot be pinned down like that. Our sense of 'true-for-us' eludes exact conceptualization, it seems. Meaning is not atomic or explicit. — macrosoft
It has been fun! These kinds of subjects always offer a good bit of a mind workout. They can be somewhat frustrating though, due to the "ordinary language on holiday" syndrome they often embody! Certainly no hard feelings on my part, despite the fact that my tone can seem strident at times. — Janus
The word 'truth' is itself polysemous, so none of this is exactly apt when it comes to thinking about so-called poetic or religious truths. — Janus
But to return to the OP; when a question like "Is idealism irrefutable" is asked, then we are dealing with the kind of logic that strictly propositional notions of truth operate within, because there is really no sensible question at all of "refuting" poetic or religious truths. I believe this is a source of great confusion in philosophy; which is amply demonstrated on these forums by the proliferation of superficial religious topics and posts. — Janus
Why can't we focus on one thing at a time instead of flitting about from topic to topic like a squirrel with ADD? (And where the different topics are like nuts that we're desperately trying to build a huge store of prior to winter.) — Terrapin Station
Since the central theme is language/meaning in which all of these topics appear, we have really been talking about one thing, something like the being of meaning — macrosoft
It doesn't mean, as the quote I provided above says, that the Universe sprang into existence only when it became perceived; what I think it means is that, any coherent or meaningful statement about what is real, always must include or assume the existence of an observing mind, which synthesises all of the data and percepts into a meaningful whole within which the statement about the reality of anything is real. And this manifold of perceptions, judgements, and so on, is what constitutes 'the world'. But that is a philosophical, not a scientific, observation - science assumes the reality of a mind-independent world, which it can safely do. It's only when it then treats that as a metaphysical principle, and not a methodological assumption, that the problems begin! (And that is quite compatible with Kant's declaration that one can be both an empirical realist and a transcendental idealist, for which see this blog post.) — Wayfarer
We thereby grasp that what is at stake in a critique of the de-absolutizing
implication (viz., that if metaphysics is obsolete, so is every form
of absolute) goes beyond that of the legitimation of ancestral statements.
What is urgently required, in effect, is that we re-think what could be
called ‘the prejudices of critical-sense’; viz., critical potency is not necessarily
on the side of those who would undermine the validity of absolute
truths, but rather on the side of those who would succeed in criticizing
both ideological dogmatism and sceptical fanaticism. Against dogmatism,
it is important that we uphold the refusal of every metaphysical absolute,
but against the reasoned violence of various fanaticisms, it is important
that we re-discover in thought a modicum of absoluteness – enough of
it, in any case, to counter the pretensions of those who would present
themselves as its privileged trustees, solely by virtue of some revelation.
Meaning is the mental phenomenon of making what are basically conditional, implicational associations--in other words, both connotational and denotational assocations that mentally function in the manner of "if this <input>, then that <association>." It's important to keep in mind that meaning is not the associations themselves. Non-mentally, there isn't even any way to make an association. Simple correlations can't do it. Instead, meaning is the dynamic, inherently mental phenomenon that is the act of associating. The things associated can be any other mental content--perceptions with respect to any sense (sight, sound, etc.--or in other words re perceptions, we're assigning meanings to external objects and events etc. in the world ), concepts, words a la sounds or symbol/text strings, concepts, etc.
Meanings, as something inherently mental, the inherently mental act of associating, can't literally be made public. They're not identical to sounds we make, gestures we make, strings of letters or symbols, etc. And they can not literally be shared, either in the sense of display, or in the sense of two or more people possessing the same one. — Terrapin Station
macrosoft this is part of the response I'd give to you on the 'thread' you suggested, but tracing the reinvigoration of metaphysics by emphasising the autonomy of the real (viz; becoming) and our ability to track it with good concepts takes a lot more effort than this exegesis. — fdrake
(1) ontological materialism; paying attention to dynamism, becoming and individuation. A summary of this standpoint might be a focus on studying how systems become imposed on or emerge out of assemblages; genesis of structure and structure of genesis.
(2) a methodological rejection of idealism, foundationalism and correlationism; refused givens, thought is tailored through conceptual links which aim at and are embedded in a contextually circumscribed real indifferent to its conceptualisation
(3) methodological pluralism - anti-architectonic thought; the phenomena should dictate not just what we think but how we think; ontologies and epistemologies produced are always regional and topic specific respectively.
Wittgenstein's 'language on holiday' is a great insight, but perhaps one retort would be that it sometimes accomplishes something to experience a word present-to-hand. — macrosoft
But in my view we can only get this in mathematics. — macrosoft
I am trying to say something about the phenomenon of meaning, the way it exists for us in a kind of public way.
To exist in meaning is to exist in a language that is not completely or even mostly private. — macrosoft
Why would you believe that it exists in some public, not private way? — Terrapin Station
I think the notion of 'absolute' meaning is incoherent; — Janus
but I also think that meanings in everyday discourse including the empirical sciences are sharp enough that we get what is going on. — Janus
I'm not sure there is any meaning at all in mathematics, beyond our ordinary, empircally derived notions of number and the ways in which we can elaborate those. The rest would seem to consist in conventionally established formulaic operations, and the discovery of new formulaic operations that are implicit in the ones we are already familiar with. — Janus
I would be surprised if Street couldn't give you some nice input on the book! — fdrake
Hah, I actually never got round to reading GG, even though I thoroughly enjoyed Braver's A Thing of This World. Heard plenty of good things about it though. — StreetlightX
Are we not in some sense sharing a meaning space accessible in some sense also to everyone following our conversation right now? — macrosoft
Maybe one of my themes here is that we tend to deny or avoid issues of meaning where that meaning cannot be made sufficiently explicit. — macrosoft
I am all for "meaning(s) which cannot be made sufficiently explicit"; poetry, music, visual arts, the arts generally. I'm not sure there are such meanings in mathematics though; maybe in intuitive feelings some may entertain about mathematics and its relation to reality, I guess — Janus
For me those kinds of 'meanings" are purely affective and any attempt to derive something propositional from them is doomed to incoherence. — Janus
But there will always be those who believe in a pure intellectual enlightenment in some such manner as Plato is usually interpreted to hold, and mathematics often seems to be held as the exemplar of that. — Janus
Is it meaningless to you that a set of n elements has 2^n subsets? Would a proof of this just be a string of dead symbols for you? Or would something like 'getting it' occur? I am assuming that a set of n elements and its powerset also had some kind of intelligibility for you just then. — macrosoft
What the calculus student learns about continuous function remains true for the student of topology. — macrosoft
Such internal meanings are much like the meaning of everyday activities shorn of their concrete details so that only structure remains. — macrosoft
i imagine mathematics is an abolsutly rigid, crystalline formal structure, and so it would seem to be a very poor tool for capturing the dynamism of reality. It seems to me that in its applied dimension it renders the dynamic organic as static, mechanical for the purposes of measuring, calculation and prediction. Not denying that it might have a kind of fascinating, crystalline beauty for its disciples, though. — Janus
Sure, like any human generality it must have its affective dimension. It seems humans are often affected by particulars only insofar as they are generalized; 'it is normal to love one's parents' and so on, as we are conditioned; but I would say that the more potent affection is for the singularities of our experience; which cannot be generalized and may only be evoked by poetry and the arts. — Janus
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