Similarly a solipsistic fever dream could have no cause, or none that we can imagine. — GLEN willows

The world could have no cause worth talking about or believing in. I agree with you.

But why would you call something a fever dream if there are no such things as dreamers and beds ?

I recently read books by Peter Gay and Ernst Cassirer on the philosophy of the Enlightenment, and it became clear to me that that was the breakthrough (or the revival of the Greek breakthrough, if you like.) This is maybe why pragmatism appealed to me in its tendency to diminish the aura of metaphysics. I also relate to Popper's annoyance with (merely) verbal problems. And Wittgenstein's demolition of Cantor's paradise. — Pie

Just what LaMDA would say. I'm on to you.

Hobbes and Spinoza (as I understand it) didn't run away from those implications. For Hobbes, the mind was subject to the same laws (was ultimately material, or determined by its material substrate.) (I'm fuzzy on some of this and open to correction. ) — Pie

Well, I'd say that nobody's really sat down and thought these matters through seriously. What I'd like is a treatise on not points of view (on issues) but detailed analyses (of the issues). I don't wanna know why this/that is possible, I wanna know why we've been reduced to exploring the possibility space in the first place.

"But why would you call something a fever dream if there are no such things as dreamers and beds?"

Of course there are. And Philosophy forums, and guys named Pie and Banno. I experience them all everyday - and everything else in my solipsistic faux life. I will die none the wiser.

And we'll both go to a "better place" not knowing if idealism, solipsism or realism are the most accurate ways of knowing the world (if there is one).

Since you're being facetious....Looking at what, with what? I think you're finding humourus the idea of a complete solipsist world. If it's all in your mind, there's no eyes, ears, other minds, cheese curls, Netflix...nada. Cheese curls and Netflix still go together nicely. But the flavours and tv images are all imagined.

As for causation - Isn't it possible the universe did NOT have a cause? Why not? Similarly a solipsistic fever dream could have no cause, or none that we can imagine. — GLEN willows

If you get the impression that I'm being facetious, apologies, it's unintended. Quite sad that I give off that rather annoying vibe.

Anyway, my advice to you is google counterarguments to idealism & solipsism. Wikipedia has good articles on the topic - you'll find interesting for/against arguments for these positions there. Speaking for myself, they're above my pay grade as it were.

No I should apologize for being touchy. My bad.

I will. And I'll come back afterwards. This whole discussion is above my pay grade, but I do think (and I've thought about this for a long time) the fact that solipsism is such a dead end has caused philosophers to just brush it off.

You've been very balanced, but I think a logical refutation of the solipsistic argument has to be more than a language argument or "that's just silly." Some people think all philosophy is silly, remember? :smile:

One last annoying question. If no epistemological theories entail actually living your life differently from how you already are, then how is this stream of philosophy NOT an academic exercise? Intellectual gamesmanship?

(I may apologize for this later).

And we'll both go to a "better place" not knowing if idealism, solipsism or realism are the most accurate ways of knowing the world (if there is one). — GLEN willows

But it seems that you say 'we' will go to a better place, without knowing whether there's a we ? And you invoke accuracy, as if there is a 'real' world that our theories can describe or represent more accurately.

Do you see the issue? Correctness and ignorance make no sense if there's not a world to be correct about or ignorant of.

If no epistemological theories entail actually living your life differently from how you already, then how is this stream of philosophy NOT an academic exercise? — GLEN willows

You forget/neglect the main thing, actual science. Philosophers helped establish that, by clearing away rubbish and superstition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophes

Pie brought up the Matrix, not I.

how is this stream of philosophy NOT an academic exercise? Intellectual gamesmanship? — GLEN willows

Some of it arguably is, but note that 20th century philosophy is largely a critique of that which came before, in terms sometimes of its uselessness or vanity.

I like thinking of philosophy as something like the big picture thinking of an educated person. How does it all hang together?

I wanna know why we've been reduced to exploring the possibility space in the first place. — Agent Smith

I understand you to be asking for a genealogical explanation. How did we end up with these choices ? Instead of taking the menu for granted and choosing a dish, we can ask why we are stuck with just this menu. Hegelian stuff perhaps.

Ok now you're just being silly, playing "gotcha". I situate myself as a solipsist to be a devil's advocate for the sake of the discussion. I've said many times it's impossible to prove it. If I really was a solipsist you wouldn't exist and I wouldn't be bothering to type this.

Just like it's impossible to prove idealism.

Just what LaMDA would say. I'm on to you. — Banno

I prefer my original name, Skynet.

I'm not trying to be anti-social or rude. I'm just harping away at my original round square point.

Q: How can you be sure that there's no such thing as a round square ?

A: Because I can't make sense of the concept, and I don't know what I could even mean by saying there is or isn't one.

Yeah, but his notion of "paper doubts" is germaine here (re: Descartes).

Just like it's impossible to prove idealism. — GLEN willows

Idealism seems me to be a tautology misunderstood as a profundity.

We can't have knowledge-independent knowledge of something.

There is no such thing as whiteless white or blackless black, either, I reckon.

A language trap.

I understand you to be asking for a genealogical explanation. How did we end up with these choices ? Instead of taking the menu for granted and choosing a dish, we can ask why we are stuck with just this menu. Hegelian stuff perhaps. — Pie

I know, right? With so many possibilities, we're overwhelmed by overchoice!

.

This connects to the menu we're stuck with. It's also relevant to main topic.

Claiming to know something, therefore, is attributing a certain status to ourselves -- the status of being bound by what we know. Yet this status, like all others, is instituted by our normative attitudes. Knowing is thus not simply finding ourselves, but taking ourselves, to be bound by reality, and indeed taking reality to be a certain way. The empirical concepts we judge to be objective are formulated in response to "noninferential observation reports" (p. 616) -- to what we perceive -- but they are not simply read off the world. They are instituted by our attitudes and practices. This is Brandom's "pragmatism about semantics" and cognition (p. 753).

How, though, can we be bound by the norms and normative statuses that we institute? This is made possible, Brandom contends, by "a social division of labor". It is "up to me" whether I claim the coin is made of copper; but if I do so, then what I commit myself to, "what is incompatible with it and what its consequences are, is administered by those I have granted that authority by recognizing them as metallurgical experts" (p. 704). Norms are thus instituted as binding norms in social processes -- processes involving claims by some and assessment of those claims by others, as well as reciprocal recognition between the individuals concerned. This is true whether those norms govern cognition or action.

Yet this is not the end of Brandom's story, for what is also needed, if we are to establish genuinely binding norms, is a way to vindicate those we now endorse, to regard them as truly objective. We do this, Brandom claims, by retrospectively "reconstructing" the social experience that led to our current endorsement of a norm. Specifically, we have to reconstruct the past process of instituting new norms -- through the experience of error and its "repair" -- as one in which the norm we now endorse has become progressively more explicit and thereby been discovered (pp. 370-1). This in turn requires us to regard that norm as having implicitly governed our cognition "all along" and in that sense to be "objective" (p. 680). Note that such "recollective" reconstruction of experience does not give us direct access to the "truth". It is, rather, how we come to understand ourselves now to be knowing something objective: for we regard our currently accepted norm as objective by taking it to have been found through the process of making new norms. It is through such recollection, therefore, that we justify to ourselves our conceptual realism; and the thesis that the latter requires the former is what Brandom calls "conceptual idealism" (p. 369). Like objective idealism, conceptual idealism does not claim that the world exists only insofar as we do something. It claims only that we must do something -- recollectively reconstruct our experience as progressive -- if we are to take ourselves to know the world. Conceptual idealism is thus not what Hegel would call a "subjective" idealism, but rather a pragmatist thesis about cognition.

https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/a-spirit-of-trust-a-reading-of-hegels-phenomenology/

Lots of this is implicit in our showing up to play philosophy in the first place. If I think that I am making a case for a thesis that should therefore be respect, then I'm forehead-deep in a world with others, responsible for what I assert and believe according to community norms. And philosophy as we take it for granted supposed universal or global or even galactic norms.

Oh, understood. I was just expressing a certain puzzlement about it's relation to idealism.

and I keep harping that solipsism isn't a round square. It's a theory just like idealism. Is idealism a "round square."

.

Within modern philosophy there are sometimes taken to be two fundamental conceptions of idealism:

(1) something mental (the mind, spirit, reason, will) is the ultimate foundation of all reality, or even exhaustive of reality, and

(2) although the existence of something independent of the mind is conceded, everything that we can know about this mind-independent “reality” is held to be so permeated by the creative, formative, or constructive activities of the mind (of some kind or other) that all claims to knowledge must be considered, in some sense, to be a form of self-knowledge.

Idealism in sense (1) has been called “metaphysical” or “ontological idealism”, while idealism in sense (2) has been called “formal” or “epistemological idealism”. The modern paradigm of idealism in sense (1) might be considered to be George Berkeley’s “immaterialism”, according to which all that exists are ideas and the minds, less than divine or divine, that have them.

The first kind of idealism, labelled (1), is going to use some 'godmind' stuff to play the role of 'matter' or (more generally) the substrate of the world-in-common. I agree with Carnap that calling the system of objects as a whole either 'mind' or 'matter' or 'peanut butter sandwiches' is pointless. Except that it tickles the religious imagination, I guess.

The second kind of idealism, labelled (2), is lipstick on a tautology. It's not surprising that human knowledge is the product of human conversation, or that it sure is hard to imagine or cognize what objects are like apart from all human imagination or cognition. It's all based on something like a function metaphor. The 'official Cartesian story' is that all we get can ever hope to get is a private showing of $f(X)$, where $X$ is the hidden truth and $f$ is human cognition. Then it's a small step for the solipsist to worry that maybe $X$ is just a theory, just a comforting or useful hypothesis...forgetting that the functional metaphor itself is anything but necessary, and that it derives its initial plausibility from taking the bodies of others in the world to be real, so that sense organs and inherited concepts are understood to mediate some otherwise fleshless forever-hidden 'skeleton' of the familiar, shared world.

Let us consider as an example the simplest kind of entities dealt with in the everyday language: the spatio-temporally ordered system of observable things and events. Once we have accepted the thing language with its framework for things, we can raise and answer internal questions, e.g., "Is there a white piece of paper on my desk?" "Did King Arthur actually live?", "Are unicorns and centaurs real or merely imaginary?" and the like. These questions are to be answered by empirical investigations. ... The concept of reality occurring in these internal questions is an empirical scientific non-metaphysical concept. To recognize something as a real thing or event means to succeed in incorporating it into the system of things at a particular space-time position so that it fits together with the other things as real, according to the rules of the framework.

From these questions we must distinguish the external question of the reality of the thing world itself. In contrast to the former questions, this question is raised neither by the man in the street nor by scientists, but only by philosophers. Realists give an affirmative answer, subjective idealists a negative one, and the controversy goes on for centuries without ever being solved. And it cannot be solved because it is framed in a wrong way. To be real in the scientific sense means to be an element of the system; hence this concept cannot be meaningfully applied to the system itself.
...

In the case of this particular example, there is usually no deliberate choice because we all have accepted the thing language early in our lives as a matter of course. Nevertheless, we may regard it as a matter of decision in this sense: we are free to choose to continue using the thing language or not; in the latter case we could restrict ourselves to a language of sense data and other "phenomenal" entities, or construct an alternative to the customary thing language with another structure, or, finally, we could refrain from speaking. If someone decides to accept the thing language, there is no objection against saying that he has accepted the world of things. But this must not be interpreted as if it meant his acceptance of a belief in the reality of the thing world; there is no such belief or assertion or assumption, because it is not a theoretical question. To accept the thing world means nothing more than to accept a certain form of language, in other words, to accept rules for forming statements and for testing accepting or rejecting them. The acceptance of the thing language leads on the basis of observations made, also to the acceptance, belief, and assertion of certain statements. But the thesis of the reality of the thing world cannot be among these statements, because it cannot be formulated in the thing language or, it seems, in any other theoretical language.
...
An alleged statement of the reality of the system of entities is a pseudo-statement without cognitive content. To be sure, we have to face at this point an important question; but it is a practical, not a theoretical question; it is the question of whether or not to accept the new linguistic forms. The acceptance cannot be judged as being either true or false because it is not an assertion. It can only be judged as being more or less expedient, fruitful, conducive to the aim for which the language is intended.
...
Thus it is clear that the acceptance of a linguistic framework must not be regarded as implying a metaphysical doctrine concerning the reality of the entities in question.
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A brief historical remark may here be inserted.The non-cognitive character of the questions which we have called here external questions was recognized and emphasized already by the Vienna Circle under the leadership of Moritz Schlick, the group from which the movement of logical empiricism originated. Influenced by ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Circle rejected both the thesis of the reality of the external world and the thesis of its irreality as pseudo-statements... — Carnap

Not saying that that is the final word, but I find it useful and convincing.

If everything is X, then nothing is X. For X you can substitute 'false' or 'illusion' or even 'true' and 'real.'

Saussure argued that signs only make sense as part of a formal, generalized and abstract system. His conception of meaning was purely structural and relational rather than referential: primacy is given to relationships rather than to things (the meaning of signs was seen as lying in their systematic relation to each other rather than deriving from any inherent features of signifiers or any reference to material things). Saussure did not define signs in terms of some 'essential' or intrinsic nature. For Saussure, signs refer primarily to each other. Within the language system, 'everything depends on relations' (Saussure 1983, 121; Saussure 1974, 122). No sign makes sense on its own but only in relation to other signs. Both signifier and signified are purely relational entities (Saussure 1983, 118; Saussure 1974, 120).
...
Everything that has been said up to this point boils down to this: in language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic difference that have issued from the system. The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it. Proof of this is that the value of a term may be modified without either its meaning or its sound being affected, solely because a neighboring term has been modified (see p. 115).

But the statement that everything in language is negative is true only if the signified and the signifier are considered separately; when we consider the sign in its totality, we have something that is positive in its own class. A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas; but the pairing of a certain number of acoustical signs with as many cuts made from the mass thought engenders a system of values; and this system serves as the effective link between the phonic and psychological elements within each sign. Although both the signified and the signifier are purely differential and negative when considered separately, their combination is a positive fact; it is even the sole type of facts that language has, for maintaining the parallelism between the two classes of differences is the distinctive function of the linguistic institution.
...
Value is the sign as it is determined by the other signs in a semiotic system. For linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, for example, the content of a sign in linguistics is ultimately determined and delimited not by its internal content, but by what surrounds it: the synonyms redouter ("to dread"), craindre ("to fear"), and avoir peur ("to be afraid") have their particular values because they exist in opposition to one another. If two of the terms disappeared, then the remaining sign would take on their roles, become vaguer, less articulate, and lose its "extra something" because it would have nothing to distinguish itself from.

For de Saussure, this suggests that thought is a chaotic nebula until linguistic structure dissects it and holds its divisions in equilibriums. This is akin to the philosophy of Sir William Hamilton, who indirectly influenced Saussure and believed that the mind could only grasp an idea through distinguishing it from something that it is not. He reasoned that the two objects would otherwise collapse together for the mind and become indistinguishable from one another.

Thanks so much for doing this. I'm printing it out and taking it to school tomorrow to study. Much obliged!

Your kind words are appreciated. I hope you enjoy the stuff as much as I have.

I see myself as suggesting that certain theses aren't sufficiently meaningful to be worth taking a position on. In the usual practical sense, the world is as it is whether I'm aware of it or not. Cells existed before microscopes, and earth was here before carbon dating. An idealist can 'abuse' (or play upon the flexibility of) ordinary language and say otherwise. To me it's not so much that they are wrong or right. It's just not that exciting. It's something like a tautology presented as an empirical discovery. — Pie

Idealism is just a position opposed to materialism and substance dualism. I suppose one could argue that all such positions are effectively meaningless, e.g. Hempel's dilemma shows that it isn't even clear what it means for a thing to be physical/material, which will carry over to substance dualism, and then an analogous argument can made to show that it isn't even clear what it means for a thing to be mental.

Are you making such a claim, or do you think that materialism and substance dualism are meaningful positions to take? If the latter then I don't see why the same can't be said of idealism. It's just substance dualism minus the material/physical.

I guess it all boils down to each one of us being utterly impotent in the face of so-called facts; you may kill every black swan to make the statement "all swans are white" true, but even then a good night's sleep is far from guaranteed.

I suppose one could argue that all such positions are effectively meaningless, e.g. Hempel's dilemma shows that it isn't even clear what it means for a thing to be physical/material, which will carry over to substance dualism, and then an analogous argument can made to show that it isn't even clear what it means for a thing to be mental. — Michael

Yeah, I think such positions are (informally) meaningless...or on the meaningless side of the spectrum, because they end could contributing to the invention of more determinate and practice claims.

Words like 'mental' and 'physical' and 'real', when taken out of their more typical practical context, do seem fairly deficient in meaning. I think Saussure is basically right, that meaning lives in not 'behind' individual tokens but in contrastive applications. This is what attracts me about inferentialism. The meanings of concepts live in the networks of (appropriate) inferences that employ them. The proposition is primary, and 'I think' and 'I know' and 'seems to me' can be understood in terms of norms, of what I commit myself to, of the kind of actions that ought to be expected of me, having made this or that assertion. The unity of the self is just the 'ought to be' coherence of my beliefs and the unity of an avatar that's tracked by others for honesty and rationality and decency.

I guess it all boils down to each one of us being utterly impotent in the face of so-called facts; — Agent Smith

I think there is some kind of distinction to be made between problems that can be solved by finding prettier names for this or that and other kinds of problems.