...any time we speak there is an inherent ethic in the particular language used? — Merkwurdichliebe

It seems so. After Lyotard, all language is political; and hence ethical. @Joshs?:

Does "whether or not stuff depends on what we think" depend on what we think? If it does, you're not really an anti-realist, as you admit realism is just as valid. If it doesn't you're a realist about something. — khaled

I was thinking more of different approaches in different situations; that the quest is not for either realism or antirealism, so much as which, when?

Are you saying even the "raw material of perception" is created? What's so raw about it then? — khaled

What I'm saying is that you never see outside of the mind-created world within which all the
objects of perception exist.

Realism is not the view that X exists regardless of what we say about it. It's the view that something exists regardless of what we say about it — khaled

If it's something that nobody ever knows anything about, then it's not anything. Realism, as spelled out 'roughly' in the OP, is that stuff exists whether anyone knows about it or not.

An ant-realist may in contrast hold — Banno

Come now, we all know ants aren't real...

It's self-evident that all we have that can be talked about is the way things seem to us, it is both phenomenologically and biologically, from that 'pool' of beliefs that we draw the things we are to say. So if we're to talk about the difference between the way things seem to us and the way things 'actually are', we must first allow for the fact that 'the way things actually are' is still some way things seem to us. Indeed the very idea that there's a way things actually are is just a way things seem to us to be.

I think a lot of the talk about realism and anti-realism gets stuck on this, but unhelpfully so. There's little point in getting hung up on that problem because it cannot be surmounted. The solution is to accept that state of affairs and move on. We're talking about the way things seem to us to be.

For some of us, things seem to be such that there's an external cause of our internal representations, something we cannot alter in real time (we can, of course, alter it after the perception, interact with it's construction - @Joshs). I'd hazard a guess that for any who think there's not an external cause of our representation, the argument rests not on some way things seem to them to be, but rather on the above meta argument (that everything is ultimately some way things seem to us to be) and we should discard discussion of that meta argument as unhelpful.

So the issue really is in what things seem to have an external cause and why they seem that way.

This is where I think modern cognitive science can help.

I'd hazard a guess that for any who think there's not an external cause of our representation, the argument rests not on some way things seem to them to be, but rather on the above meta argument (that everything is ultimately some way things seem to us to be) — Isaac

Oh, and here it is...

What I'm saying is that you never see outside of the mind-created world within which all the objects of perception exist. — Wayfarer

What I'm saying is that you never see outside of the mind-created world within which all the — Wayfarer

Ok. This is not a problem for realism. This a problem for someone who is convinced that “what we see is exactly as it is” but that’s not realism as said in the OP.

If it's something that nobody ever knows anything about, then it's not anything. — Wayfarer

Where did you get that? The “raw material of perception” is a cause of our perceptions. So we know it exists. In the same way we know electromagnetic waves exist without being able to see them. Because of their effects.

Apples don’t taste exactly how I want them to taste sometimes. If I was the ONLY source of my perceptions, I’d make them taste exactly how I want them to taste. But I can’t do that. So there must be SOMETHING that determines what an apple tastes like that is independent of me. That’s enough for realism.

Realism, as spelled out 'roughly' in the OP, is that stuff exists whether anyone knows about it or not. — Wayfarer

Yes. So to be fair, to assume the OP makes sense, this implies that something is something even if no one knows about it. Which contradicts the above quote.

Why shouldn't M be dependent on M? that's just recursion, and there's n[ot]hing inherently wrong with that - it's not contradictory...? — Banno

That's repetition, not "recursion". Dependency presupposes a comparatively independent ground upon which to depend – otherwise, one should be able to lift oneself off one's feet by one's own hair (or collar). And saying 'M is "constructed" by "M saying 'M'" is nonsense.

It's self-evident that all we have that can be talked about is the way things seem to us — Isaac

Yep; and I'd add that it is telling that you must use the plural - "we" not "I", "Us" not "me".

There is a way things seem to us, at least as much as a way things seem to me. When cognitive science can explain the social aspects of how things are, , it'll have reached maturity.

A cognitive scientists makes use of other folk's brains.

one should be able to lift oneself off one's feet by one's own hair — 180 Proof

But this happens all the time. Bootstrapping.

So if we're to talk about the difference between the way things seem to us and the way things 'actually are', we must first allow for the fact that 'the way things actually are' is still some way things seem to us. — Isaac

I’d say that any talk of the way things are is talk of the way they seem to be. Not that “the way things are is what they seem to be”. Though pragmatically that’s the same thing.

Problem is, both positions are convinced that they’re “actually” talking about the way things are, not just what they seem to be. No realist will say “it seems to me realism is the case”.

Indeed the very idea that there's a way things actually are is just a way things seem to us to be. — Isaac

Tell that to a corpse (or the bereaved). Or to a quadriplegic. Or to an overheating planet. Or ...

Nothing changes whether or not something 'seems real to me' if that something is actually real.

Figuratively. :smirk:

it is telling that you must use the plural - "we" not "I", "Us" not "me". — Banno

Exactly. It's a pre-requisite for the use of 'talk about'. There must be someone else to talk to.

When cognitive science can explain the social aspects of how things are, , it'll have reached maturity. — Banno

We're trying... It's been my research field for the past 20 years at least (the social construction of beliefs). I'm not sure we managed maturity though - as in 'beyond adolescence', maybe - as in whiskey, no.

A cognitive scientists makes use of other folk's brains. — Banno

Ha! That might well have gone on the office door.

Problem is, both positions are convinced that they’re “actually” talking about the way things are, not just what they seem to be. No realist will say “it seems to me realism is the case”. — khaled

Yeah, that's rather the problem I was trying to highlight, but from the other side of the coin. The anti-realist says "things are only as they seem to us to be", but that 'things are only as they seem to us to be' is itself a way things seem to them to be. We just don't seem to get anywhere using that line of thought.

What progresses us is accepting that we usually have reasons why things seem to us to be some way or another and that we can discuss those reasons. Hence the science. Science generally gives us reasons to believe something is the case that might well be novel, or unintuitive and so may be worth discussing. I suppose it's plausible that 'deep' thought might do the same. But superficial intuitions are rarely going to give anything more than a kind of Gallup poll of how people see things. Of interest to the social scientist, maybe, but not really to any individual wanting to improve their reasoning.

Indeed the very idea that there's a way things actually are is just a way things seem to us to be. — Isaac

Tell that to a corpse. Or to a quadriplegic. Or to an overheating planet. Or ... — 180 Proof

But all of those things (and states) are still unarguabley some way things seem to us to be. We have no other source of things to say other than our beliefs about the way things are. As @khaled is arguing, that doesn't have any bearing on our ability to alter that which seems to us to be the causes of our representations. Accepting that it seems to us that the planet is overheating may or may not mean we can make it not overheat by thinking about it differently (clue - we can't). It simply has no bearing on the matter. They are two different questions. One addresses the role social construction has in forming our representations, the other in sorting those representations into those which are caused by what we deem to be immutable external causes and those which are less concrete.

Yeah, that's rather the problem I was trying to highlight, but from the other side of the coin. The anti-realist says "things are only as they seem to us to be", but that 'things are only as they seem to us to be' is itself a way things seem to them to be. We just don't seem to get anywhere using that line of thought. — Isaac

Yup. If I had to pick one it would be realism.

Does "whether or not stuff depends on what we think" depend on what we think? If it does, you're not really an anti-realist, as you admit realism is just as valid. If it doesn't you're a realist about something. — khaled

But all of those things (and states) are still unarguabley some way things seem to us to be. — Isaac

I just wonder what you're supposed to say to someone who replies "no" to this. Whether it be by saying:

Tell that to a corpse. Or to a quadriplegic. Or to an overheating planet. Or ... — 180 Proof

Or "go stand in front of a train" etc.

That X is invariant with respect to interpretation / social construction indicates something objective about X. That X is ineluctable as a constraint, boundary, limit, hazard, etc – not "for us" but "against us" – indicates the reality of X. It makes no sense to say "I was born before my parents were born" or "I do not exist" or "Earth is flat" because these statements are objectively inconsistent with premised or ostensible facts of the matter. 'Social constructivity' cannot in any significant way exhaust (totalize) a reality.

Or "go stand in front of a train" etc. — khaled

:up:

@Isaac

Evan if all we see is the way things seem to be to us, there may still be the way things are.

Changing this to a linguistic argument, realism entails that there are still true statements; while an anti-realist would not make that commitment.

So a realist says the ball has a mass of 1kg; the anti-realist might say that saying that it has a mass of 1kg is useful, or fits their perceptions, but will not commit to it being true.

I would say that human enjoy generating jargon and classification systems way beyond a any practical needs, leading to futile arguing. :)

In my view 'scientific truth' is real in terms that it can be measured, while moral truth is relative and should come with a caveat at the end ", if we assume such and such to be true".

Noting that at times it might be beneficial to act as if moral values are not relative, as it leads to better social cohesion.

I just wonder what you're supposed to say to someone who replies "no" to this. Whether it be by saying:

Tell that to a corpse. Or to a quadriplegic. Or to an overheating planet. Or ... — 180 Proof


Or "go stand in front of a train" etc. — khaled

I can't think of anything either. It seems a dead end.

Of course, there do seem to be causes of our representations for which no amount of re-thinking seems to be able to alter them much, but there also seem to be representations which seemed concrete at the time only to later turn out to be almost entirely malleable constructs without much by way of immutable external cause. It's not like we've finished the project of sorting one from t'other, so the certainty seems often misplaced.

That X is invariant... — 180 Proof

X seems invariant. It might later turn out not to be.

Evan if all we see is the way things seem to be to us, there may still be the way things are. — Banno

Yes, definitely.

a realist says the ball has a mass of 1kg; the anti-realist might say that saying that it has a mass of 1kg is useful, or fits their perceptions, but will not commit to it being true. — Banno

Yes, but the entire scenario - ball, cause of mass, gravity etc - contains a mix of socially constructed representations and immutable external causes. The realist and the anti-realists aren't arguing about the truth of that state of affairs (the mix), they're arguing about which elements are the social construct and which are the immutable external causes. Or at least they should be. That they often aren't is rather the point I'm lamenting.

And then the thatness of that (conditional) occurrence, or fact, would be invariant. :wink:

It helps to think about this in terms of Markov blankets. A little diagram...

External cause > sensory receiver > sensation > representation.

The representation is what we use. The external cause is outside our Markov blanket, we cannot access it directly. We must accept that the origin of our representations is our immediate sensory data (and often other internal data streams), not the theorised external causes (that's the anti-realist bit). But we also must accept that we, regardless, act on those representations as if they had a less proximate cause than just our internal sensory data. So the question seems moot.

What's not moot is the question of fidelity. How faithful to the external causes is any given representation?

Evan if all we see is the way things seem to be to us, there may still be the way things are. — Banno

Sure. But it can't enter the conversation, and it can't be found out. Maybe the way things seem to us IS the way they are, but that just means we got lucky. We don't know when this is the case. So what difference does it make?

So a realist says the ball has a mass of 1kg; the anti-realist might say that saying that it has a mass of 1kg is useful, or fits their perceptions, but will not commit to it being true. — Banno

And both can work together in construction for decades, each harboring a seething hatred for the opposing position, and being the best of friends because neither knows the other's position.

They'll understand each other when they say "the ball is of mass 1kg".

The realist and the anti-realists aren't arguing about the truth of that state of affairs (the mix), they're arguing about which elements are the social construct and which are the immutable external causes. — Isaac

Well, indeed - that's what ought be happening. The realist says the ball is 1kg; the anti-realist says that "the ball" is 1 "kg", but refuses to commit.

The anti-realists failure to commit amounts to a failure to understand how language functions; "the ball" is the ball.

Hence the use of the T=sentence: for the realist, "The ball has a mass of 1kg" is true IFF The ball has a mass of 1k; for the anti-realist the expression on the right is never allowed to reach out to the world. Failure to commit.

If it's something that nobody ever knows anything about, then it's not anything.
— Wayfarer

Where did you get that? The “raw material of perception” is a cause of our perceptions. — khaled

'Where I got it' is from what you said. The 'raw material of perception' is not anything - not until you make something from it, which is the procees of apperception. Then, it's no longer 'raw material' - which, anyway, is a figure of speech.

As for 'correspondence'

According to correspondence theory, truth consists in the agreement of our thought with reality. This view ... seems to conform rather closely to our ordinary common sense usage when we speak of truth. The flaws in the definition arise when we ask what is meant by "agreement" or "correspondence" of ideas and objects, beliefs and facts, thought and reality. In order to test the truth of an idea or belief we must presumably compare it with the reality in some sense.

1- In order to make the comparison, we must know what it is that we are comparing, namely, the belief on the one hand and the reality on the other. But if we already know the reality, why do we need to make a comparison? And if we don't know the reality, how can we make a comparison?

2- The making of the comparison is itself a fact about which we have a belief. We have to believe that the belief about the comparison is true. How do we know that our belief in this agreement is "true"? This leads to an infinite regress, leaving us with no assurance of true belief. — Randall, J. & Buchler, J. - Philosophy An Introduction p133

Anti-realism seems to have skepticism as a starting point:

Assume nothing, question everything. — James Patterson, Cat & Mouse (Alex Cross, #4)

What's the assumption made by realism? That there's an objective, mind-independent world out there to which what we say corresponds to i.e. realism is, inter alia, about the correspondence theory of truth.

Anti-realism then needs another theory of truth: truth is that which is logically proven.

The anti-realists failure to commit amounts to a failure to understand how language functions; "the ball" is the ball. — Banno

Yes, but I don't think that means there's no issue. It's just that the anti-realist is wrong about where. That you (and sufficient others in your language community) use "ball" that way doesn't answer any dispute about the ball. Of course, there rarely are disputes about balls, we have a remarkable agreement on the matter, but "I'm just angry, I can't help it" does depend entirely on the reality of 'angry'. Is it, like 'ball', just the same justified commitment to 'reaching out to the world', or is it a fabrication, eliciting agreement only from co-conspirators to act as a ready excuse for poor behaviour?

We use words for all sorts of reasons, not all of then reach out into the already existing world. Some build it.

While the notion has general use, it's metaphysics that is my main interest here. Stealing blatantly from my Rutledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, a realist may hold to things like that correspondence to the facts is what makes a statement true; that there may be truths we do not recognise as such, do not believe and do not know; that the Law of excluded middle holds for things in the world; and that the meaning of a sentence may be found by specifying it's truth-conditions. An ant-realist may in contrast hold that truth is to be understood in sophisticated epistemic terms, perhaps as what a "well-conducted investigation" might lead us to believe; that there can be no unknown truths; that we need include "unknown" as well as true and false in our logical systems; and that the meaning of a sentence is to be found in what it might assert. — Banno

The reason why this is a difficult subject, with a lack of consensus as to the nature of reality, is because we have a very deficient understanding of the nature of time. Time is the central issue here. If we view future events as having no determinate reality, they are merely possibilities, Then there is a difficulty in reconciling the future with the three fundamental laws of logic. Aristotle recommended that we suspend the law of excluded middle for future (undecided) events, but that's not the only possible proposal. One might say that the law of non-contradiction does not apply to future (non-existent) things, or even that the law of identity could not apply. The different ways of violating the three laws to allow for the appearance of an indeterminate future produces completely different metaphysics.

The form of metaphysics depends upon one's approach to this issue. In relation to events of the past, we find strong justification for the three fundamental laws, and this supports realism. So the realist wants to take the reality of the past, and extend it into the future (like the block universe for example), and to apply the three laws equally to the whole universe of past and future. The anti-realist sees this as wrong, and in a sort of overreaction, takes the indeterminateness of the future and argues this as a feature of the whole. As you can see, what is left out here is a description of the way that we relate to the present, and this is why there is a problem. Our descriptions of our own positions, at the present, are productions, artful creations, derived from the metaphysics of how we view the past and future. And since we have no way of describing the present which is consistent with either the realist or anti-realist perspective, we might produce an endless number of such descriptions, not one ever being completely acceptable..

As for 'correspondence'

According to correspondence theory, truth consists in the agreement of our thought with reality. This view ... seems to conform rather closely to our ordinary common sense usage when we speak of truth. The flaws in the definition arise when we ask what is meant by "agreement" or "correspondence" of ideas and objects, beliefs and facts, thought and reality. In order to test the truth of an idea or belief we must presumably compare it with the reality in some sense.

1- In order to make the comparison, we must know what it is that we are comparing, namely, the belief on the one hand and the reality on the other. But if we already know the reality, why do we need to make a comparison? And if we don't know the reality, how can we make a comparison?

2- The making of the comparison is itself a fact about which we have a belief. We have to believe that the belief about the comparison is true. How do we know that our belief in this agreement is "true"? This leads to an infinite regress, leaving us with no assurance of true belief.
— Randall, J. & Buchler, J. - Philosophy An Introduction p133 — Wayfarer

I think point 1 is easy to deal with: we don't already know reality (or not all of the things we want to know about reality) before we aquire some data or empirical evidence about it. Getting and analysing data takes efforts and resources. So making the comparison between belief and reality is not something that magically gives you full knowledge of reality (and then why do you need belief?). Instead, it takes an effort, and illuminates only a little part of reality. Doing so allows you to test your beliefs.

Not sure I understand point 2. Assuming it means: you have to start from the fundamental belief that human experience is 'true', I agree with it.