There's a difference between the allusive, indeterminate kind of sharing of the arts, which speaks to the reality that we do not all see the same way, (that's why we can be so surprised by art works) and the analytic formal way of empirical sharing that says we all see the same things. What can shared in the latter way can be precisely identified. If someone can't see that difference then there's not much to say about it.

But let's go back to the topic of this thread. Suppose I allow that there are things that cannot be said, that are properly the domain of a subjective world.

Then how could that stuff become inter-subjective? By definition, it cannot move between subjects. Only the public, non-subjecitve stuff can do that.

So if we allow for a private subjective world, the notion of inter-subjective becomes a nonsense.

Hnece,

Oh, all the time. I don't like to talk about it, though. — Banno

Strangely enough, that makes for good conversations. :chin:

There's a difference between the allusive, indeterminate kind of sharing of the arts, which speaks to the reality that we do not all see the same way, (that's why we can be so surprised by art works) and the analytic formal way of empirical sharing that says we all see the same things. What can shared in the latter way can be precisely identified. If someone can't see that difference then there's not much to say about it. — Janus

Of course there is! Adding "intersubjectivity" only serves to confuse the two, making a nonsense of the whole.

Ah, Frank - I love you more than words can say.

As I said private responses may only be alluded to, evoked, there is nothing determinable shared by the artist with the viewer or audience. The artwork allows a glimpse is all.

Of course there is! Adding "intersubjectivity" only serves to confuse the two, making a nonsense of the whole. — Banno

Nonsense! There is private subjectivity and there are various kinds and degrees of inter-subjective sharing. There will always be things which cannot be shared.To deny that seems absurd to me.

I'm not playing a game, much less anyone else's. I had thought you were saying that claims are not fallible; if you were not saying that then I was correcting a mistake you didn't make.

There is private subjectivity and there are various kinds and degrees of inter-subjective sharing. — Janus

That's the erroneous model, yes. What has happened is that as soon as philosophers admitted the ineffably sibjective into their menagerie of concepts, they found that they could talk about it after all, and had to pretend that it admitted of degrees - hence the oxymoron "intersubjective"!

The artwork allows a glimpse is all. — Janus

A glimpse? So art is ineffective? It tries to show stuff, but never properly succeeds? I think you are opening up a space for a contempt for art that you would not share.

A glimpse is rich enough; and may be rich indeed. What can be determinably shared is the prosaic; and that is what diminishes art, and subjective experience.

Ah, Frank - I love you more than words can say. — Banno

Aw shucks. :blush:

In a recent thread I started arguing that solipsism is incompatible with ontic materialism. My interlocutor described solipsistic materialism to me as the existence of solitary subject in a material environment. This transitioned into an argument, where I was claiming that the materialist position can only hypothesize the existence of objectively correct perception, not inanimate ontology. I argued that aside from the experience with the perception of the environment, this environment cannot even be conceptualized. Therefore, I argued, that solipsistic materialism would be indistinguishable from intersubjective materialism (edit: more properly, from solipsistic idealism, because the emphasis is the presence of just one subject, not the definition of the external world - I got confused while ranting again). (I agree with the term "intersubjective", because "shared" impresses me as a term involving the use of communication, interaction or some other form of disclosure, whereas intersubjective does not.)

Materialism to me has only one consequence, objective reality, meaning agreement between subjects about the nature of compelling external forces. There can be nothing to agree upon, if there is only one subject. The notion of objectivity becomes meaningless to me, if there are not multiple subjects. — simeonz

"Exist" is just another word for having a form. But the only way we define the idea of form is through the account of our interactions, through phenomenology. How can we talk about objectivity vs subjectivity of the form we perceive when there is only one subject. The two ideas are indistinguishable even conceptually to me. But I must say, I see where you are coming from. You are not asking the question epistemically at all it appears and to you the ontic difference is evident. — simeonz

Consequently, I reviewed my earlier responses in the same thread, particularly concerning which theories I would consider meaningful (conceptually), and started to doubt myself. Namely, I claimed before:

Some variants of dualism might be ontically distinguishable, albeit not in a way that can be corroborated. The differences might not be detectable on earth or might be perceivable only through the lenses of hypothetical psychic observer. I accept such notions, because like with solipsism, there is difference between the version of the proposed reality therein and the conventional ones, even if it fails to project into sensory experience. Such description is still irrefutable. I insisted originally that there are different categories of questions that we could ask to distinguish one theory from the rest - ontic, epistemic, ethical and antropological. Some are distinguishable only through some of these questions, but to me, all should be distinguishable in an unambiguous manner as ontic descriptions or they are synonyms to another theory. — simeonz

I argued here that if a theory made distinct claim about the world, in a logically consistent manner, it is deserving of its title. Even if it is epistemically indistinguishable to other proposals.

What did I mean by epistemic and ontic? The epistemic aspect is what the subject can experience. Even if they can't corroborate their accounts to others, I consider their experiences sufficient epistemic justification. For example, theories with afterlife hypotheses may not be verifiable scientifically, but are observable, at least privately. Such ideas are outside the scope of the scientific convention, but these are antropological conventionalist facets, not ontic and epistemic. This obviousness of epistemics stops when probability becomes involved. The underlying propensities can be described as ontic or epistemic in character. I wont go there. But the compatibility of those cases can be argued with combination of many ideas like ethical utilitarism (we are interested only in the overall effect for humanity), evolutionary Darwinism (we have acquired statistical inferences as innate trait), the laws of large numbers (classical and frequentist probability are compatible), etc.

What about the ontic aspect of a theory? Is it about the subjective experience?

When I argued against the possibility of solipsistic materialism, I implied that the only source of ontology is in the experience of the subject. But is there room for it there if the private experience is also the reason for the epistemic definiteness of a theory? I claim, for example, that while solipsism and intersubjective idealism can not be discerned from one subject's private observations, they differ by the quantity of private vantage points available. Therefore, while their distinctive features can not be given account by any one individual, they are experienced collectively. Like a person with disassociative disorder, neither one of their identities can directly attest to the existence of the rest, but the collective experience of those identities is distinct from that of a person without the disorder. In this metaphor, the multiplicity does not appear evident, but it is a fact. The subjects don't have to confer their existence to others or to witness the existence of other subjects for separation of intersubjective idealism and solipsism.

Do I oppose solipsistic materialism, because I oppose external inanimate world of its own substance? I am not sure. I doubt the intelligibility of separate inanimate state. We have no notion of existence outside of the ourselves. Thinking about it, I think that we project being extent to the forms we contemplate, because we personify them. I am not sure if such mechanical transfer of our own qualities from the subject to the object when making a statement about the world corresponds to a meaningful proposition. Pantheism and solipsism at least construct the reality of mental fabric and the subject-object distinction is lost. I have been advertising them way too often, but I don't see enough discussions about them in the forum and their argument for the existence of the external world is supported by the subjective nature in all of the environment's constituents.

An argument against my doubts is that reality manifests beyond the scope of our prior experience with it. For this reason, we can infer that it is separate, possibly existing in its own timeline that protrudes beyond our cognition. Both materialism and solipsism can admit that mental events can be compelled by involuntary factors. But I am not sure that we can qualify such factors as externally existing. The independence itself here is not more then epistemic. Even though the experiences we have with the world cannot be attributed to recollection or volition, they are still merely independent from our knowledge and will, and not our existence. For example, walking into a room, the influx of information and our interactions cannot be extrapolated from our encounters with different rooms, but this does not demonstrate that the room exists without our account of it.

I think that these reflections raise some methodological questions. We can arrange notions in various combinations, project them, adulterate them, and presume that they constitute in meaningful statements. We cannot distinguish what is a proper and improper statement automatically. We have to admit all statements that might eventually have the potential to be intelligible, even if they turn out not to, because we cannot always check their intelligibility outright.

Edit -> Style changes
Edit -> intersubjective materialism -> solipsistic idealism.

I was taking 'fallible' as meaning "capable of making mistakes". Defined as such, it does not apply to statements and claims, for which the correct adjective would be 'false'.

More importantly, the point I was making was about fallible observers.

That's the erroneous model, yes. What has happened is that as soon as philosophers admitted the ineffably sibjective into their menagerie of concepts, they found that they could talk about it after all, and had to pretend that it admitted of degrees - hence the oxymoron "intersubjective"! — Banno

Sure you can refer with an umbrella term to that which can only be indeterminably shared, to that which is private. It's the fact that we all have our private worlds which is the basis of commonality. Language and culture enable this, but there are obviously different degrees to which different aspects of individual experience can be shared.

Think of social animals: they can participate in communal life by responding to body language; the incarnate language of pleasure and pain, of friendliness and anger. But none of this that is shared among them is determinable; animals probably have no idea about, much less what, their fellows or themselves are feeling. We can do that by reflexive self-awareness and linguistically mediated memory.

I was taking fallible as meaning "capable of making mistakes". Defined as such, it does not apply to statements and claims. — Olivier5

OK, sure "capable of making mistakes" has a different sense than "capable of being mistaken"; the latter could apply to people or claims, whereas the former would seem a bit odd if you tried to apply it to claims. Language is not as tidy as we might like it to be.

Even if we allow that everyone has the same type of experience - which is very much in question here - by virtue of being human, it is still obviously a fact that each of us (each human subject) has a different token of experience.

Furthermore, there has been no support given for the apparent assumption of the OP that human experience is equivalent to, or can be completely defined by, language, or how the two are at all related.

Ah, Frank - I love you more than words can say. — Banno

But...you just did. :)

I ranted a lot in my previous post. My written English is not great, so it came out a little confused. I have edited it, but I'll summarize. We suppose that the material world can exist without us, and that this can account for the time before consciousness existed in the universe. But we have no concept of what existence is outside of ourselves, and the idea may be unintelligible. We may just be extrapolating our present experience with form, which we consider to exist through personification, whilst in actuality we don't have any idea of what existence for anything outside of the subject is conceptually. Pantheism and solipsism don't have that problem, because their subject nature is omnipresent.

I am not trolling, but you might want to read the mess again. Sorry, but my flow needs refinement.

That's what those slew of reasons are there to do. Help you work that out. — Isaac

The scenario in question is one where they have failed to do so, and we're looking for a way to move forward despite that impasse. Saying that what we're usually inclined to do is all we possibly can do is just to deny that any resolution to such an impasse is impossible, which is just to not try to resolve it.

Why would the only point in arguing be for me to change you from something right to something wrong? — Isaac

Did you mean this the other way around? Or are you suggesting I think that you're basically trying to lie to me? I don't think you're trying to change my views from right ones to wrong ones: I think you're misunderstanding what my views even are, possibly intentionally to create an argument for the sake of argument, but if not, that you're trying to change my views from ones you think are wrong to ones you think are right.

I could, for example, offer alternatives. I could help you strengthen your argument so you feel more confident about it. I could resolve internal contradictions which would otherwise cause cognitive dissonance. — Isaac

None of those things are arguments. Those are other kinds of responses I would find positive; and also things I would like to help other people do too. But none of them seem to be anything like you do around here. If you're aiming to do any of those things, it's coming off all wrong.

I could enjoy the game (like chess, which is equally combative, but both parties benefit). I could have a passionate academic interest in how people defend their beliefs and how that approach has been changed by online social media... — Isaac

Playing a competitive game with someone who's not trying to play that game with you, or using someone as a lab rat without their consent, are both trollish things to do, and in line with the "poking an anthill" metaphor anyway.

where does that leave us? — Pfhorrest

Pretty much the place human(-like) social relations have been for the past few million years. — Isaac

So you think progress beyond the impasses we've been stuck at is impossible, then?

Imagine if that view had prevailed during the transition from the Dark Ages to the dawn of the scientific revolution."There's nothing to be done about disagreements on what is real, as taught by the infallible church, other than try to kill the people who disagree."? That's pretty much the state of moral discourse still, except with the state in place of the church, in places where those aren't still the same thing.

The kind of responses I would find most pleasant to get would be "oh hey that's a neat similarity you've observed there, never noticed that before" or "huh that's an interesting approach to that problem I've not heard of before". I'm not looking for people to tell me that I'm right, like you always seem to suggest, but just for people to find the approaches I mention curious, interesting, and worth further consideration — Pfhorrest

So "well done you" then? — Isaac

Not in the sense of "you are correct! what a brilliant genius!" that you seem to impute. But also not "let's see how I can interpret you in a way that you're clearly wrong" either. Just "oh hmm curious" is the most I really hope for.

that thread you started on epistemology had Janus, Banno, Srap and a few others all take your comments in this supposedly 'strange' way — Isaac

We actually figured out the source of the misunderstanding in that thread: there are (at least) two different things meant by "confirmationism", one of them that I was arguing against, and another championed by someone (Hempel) who also argued against what I was arguing against. Janus et al thought I was arguing against Hempel's view, when I was actually arguing against the same view Hempel argued against. That explains why everyone kept saying things I already agreed with as though they were refutations of my position.

Again, if you're simply assuming that my reading of background assumptions and the wrong conclusions they would lead to are erroneous, then you've just assumed you're flawless from the outset. — Isaac

I don't have to assume I'm flawless to see that you clearly think I mean something other than I do. You're not bringing to light background assumptions that I actually hold, but taking what I say in a way that clearly takes me to think something other than I do, leaving me to figure out what it is that you must think that I think in order to misunderstand me in that way. I'm having to figure out what weird assumptions you're making about me, rather than you showing me what weird assumptions I'm actually making.

If you did actually understand what I was saying, and pointed out things that must be true in order for the things I think to be true, that would actually be helpful and welcome. But that's not what's happening. I'm just spending all my time clearing up your misunderstandings about what I think in the first place.

Why would you be perplexed. It's obvious what's happening there. One of us has made a mistake identifying apples. — Isaac

The perplexing thing is why that's happening. Do you just call the thing that I call an "apple" an "eggplant", and you hate the things that I call "apples"? If that's the problem, we're just using different words for the same thing, and deciding ad hoc to agree on terminology would clear everything up, aside from the mystery of how we ended up using words so differently and how do other people normally use them. Or else, do you perceive the thing that I'm offering you as the kind of thing that I call an "eggplant", even though I perceive it as the thing that I call an "apple"? In that case there's a much deeper mystery. Which of us is perceiving it incorrectly, and why?

My suspicion about our arguments is that I am offering you the thing I call an "apple" and you are perceiving it as an offer for the thing that I call an "eggplant" because you somehow use the word "apple" for the thing that I call an "eggplant".

OK, sure "capable of making mistakes" has a different sense than "capable of being mistaken"; the latter could apply to people or claims, whereas the former would seem a bit odd if you tried to apply it to claims. Language is not as tidy as we might like it to be. — Janus

Still, I believe the sentence "claim X is false" is clearer and more appropriate than "claim X is fallible".

If the word 'fallible' introduces confusion, the same idea can be stated without it: the value of intersubjectivity has a lot to do with the assumption that each individual observer may report incorrect observations, or be biased in a way that other observers may not be. In such an epistemology, having one's observations checked by others brings value, especially if the different observers are independent from one another and hence can be assumed to have different biases.

Language is not as tidy as we might like it to be. — Janus

Pretty much, yeah. Nothing inherently wrong with our conceptual model, nor the representational expressions for it. All language is ever meant to do is translate subjective activity into exchangeable representations. The problem only occurs for those suffering from the notion that the human system primarily operates on representations, and then operates on representations of representations iff the objects of the system given fait accompli, are then communicated. And we all know, don’t we?...that if we don’t like something, it must be wrong, right?

Agreed on your aesthetic response. That which we consider intrinsically private is thereby ineffable, but the representations of it, constructed a priori, as the only possible human means for creating objects which subsequently become perceptions to others, can be shared in a mutual exchange. But the one is not the other, nor can it ever be, for if such were the case, it would be impossible to explain why we are not immediately equipped with language, rather than merely the innate capacity to create and use it.

Which brings us to the cradle. There is nothing about the cradle, as a stand-alone empirical object or as an accurate depiction thereof, that cannot be perceived, and that which can be perceived can be named, and anything that is named can be shared by language. What cannot be shared amongst individual members using some common cognitive system, is the operation of the procedural components of that system which each member uses to relate his perception of some object to the name he gives to it, and by which his knowledge of it is possible.

I mean....how obvious can it be, that we never cognize or know our own thinking as it operates, but only cognize and know what is thought about. I can tell you all about that which I understanding, that of which I may or may not judge, and even what form the judgement takes, but I don’t even know how my faculties arise, where they came from, or even if they are in fact necessarily the case, so I’m not going to be able to communicate anything about them as they are in themselves, but only as I think them to be.

So....you’re correct, in that language is not as tidy as we might like it to be, but I would add it is our own fault that it isn’t, and for that, I would say it is our aesthetic response alone, that is sufficient causality. And that, for the simple reason that aesthetic response, in its common and ordinary iteration, is not predicated solely on logic, as are, theoretically, the remaining cognitive components.

Nice.

Now, what about

But let's go back to the topic of this thread. Suppose I allow that there are things that cannot be said, that are properly he domain of a subjective world.

Then how could that stuff become inter-subjective? By definition, it cannot move between subjects. Only the public, non-subjecitve stuff can do that.

So if we allow for a private subjective world, the notion of inter-subjective becomes a nonsense. — Banno

In a recent thread I started arguing that solipsism is incompatible with ontic materialism. — simeonz

Not sure of the relevance of this - but it seems to me that solipsism, in saying that I alone exist, simply rules out any other thing existing, including matter. SO yes, it is incompatible with materialism.

I was claiming that the materialist position can only hypothesize the existence of objectively correct perception, not inanimate ontology. — simeonz

The view that there is only perception, with nothing behind it, is one of the strange garden paths that Kant found. It's a misreading, from what I understand, but @Mww would be able to tell us more.

Materialism to me has only one consequence, objective reality, meaning agreement between subjects about the nature of compelling external forces. There can be nothing to agree upon, if there is only one subject. The notion of objectivity becomes meaningless to me, if there are not multiple subjects. — simeonz

One might swing this to a more direct argument against intersubjectivity as a suitable term:

If we suppose an objective reality, then we might suppose that what is true is what is the case in that reality. But intersubjectivity supposes that what is true is what is intersubjectively verified. Hence intersubjectivity is incorrect.

This is crude, and I won't defend it far. But it serves to bring the notion of truth into the discussion. One of the things that counts against talk of intersubjectivity is that it renders our propositions neither true nor false, only agreed on or disagrees on. Some would consider that a benefit - those under the spell of various forms of relativism, for example, or pragmatism.

But I am of the opinion that we can make true statements about how things are in the world around us. My coffee cup is nearly empty. That statement is true, and I do not need others to provide intersubjective verification of it in order that I believe it, or act on it by obtaining more coffee.

It's the fact that we all have our private worlds which is the basis of commonality. — Janus

Well, no. It's the fact that we can all talk about the same thing. It's the fact that we all share a public world which is the basis of commonality.

animals probably have no idea about, much less what, their fellows or themselves are feeling. — Janus

It seems you do not have a pet.

Even if we allow that everyone has the same type of experience - which is very much in question here - by virtue of being human, it is still obviously a fact that each of us (each human subject) has a different token of experience. — Luke

Types and tokens - here's a can of worms.

I like worms.

When you and I look tot he Newton's Cradle before us, do we see a type or a token? Is your claim that I see my token, you see yours, and together we make a type?

You see, I can't reconcile what you have said with how I understand types and tokens.

Yep. Strange, ain't it?

...we have no concept of what existence is outside of ourselves, and the idea may be unintelligible. — simeonz

Yeah, we do. I have a clear notion of my coffee cup, and it is not inside me.

Notions aren't the sorts of things that have locations.

All language is ever meant to do is translate subjective activity into exchangeable representations. — Mww

A neat statement of the myth.

Translation occurs between languages, so if translation is the correct model, then there must be a subjective language to be translated into English.

There's a homunculus lurking here: it speaks in its own language, which is translated into English. But this has not explained how it comes about that the homunculi's private musing have meaning. Does this homunculus translate its language from yet another, deeper homunculus? Is it homunculi all the way down?

The supposition that our words gain their meaning by translating private meanings is fraught.

A better picture is to see that we do things with word as we use them; the meaning is not private, but constructed and shared in that very use. Instead of looking for the source of the meanings of our words in a hidden world in one's mind, look at what we are doing with words as we use them.