There's a touching passage in Tarski's little Introduction to Logic that I'll quote in full here — Srap Tasmaner

Very interesting. Thanks for sharing. :up:

I think Tarski is right that logic pulls more weight than it appears to at first glance, and it is for this reason that I think varieties of logical pluralism are especially problematic.

First order predicate calculus does not render ontological conclusions.

Be charitable here.

I'm trying, lol, maybe I missed the point. Well, you can see the direction I was thinking in anyhow.

On the account you gave, it would be best to remove the inconsistencies

I don't see it that way. For an example of my thinking on this, some Hindu philosophy seems to embrace
the excluded middle. I don't think it would be charitable to try to iron this out in translation, because it wouldn't be taking the ideas seriously. I guess in some cases it seems more charitable to just say, "I hear you but I think you're wrong."

As already noted, if logic had no ontological implications then there could be no historical progression in logic vis-a-vis ontology, there could be no better or worse logics vis-a-vis ontology, and Wittgenstein's logic could not have excluded dynamism from his ontology, <which it did>. — Leontiskos

Does any one else see this as a bad argument? Count Timothy von Icarus? @Srap Tasmaner?

If logic does not have ontological implications, then there are no better or worse logics regarding ontology.

But it remains that there may be better or worse uses of logic in ontological arguments.

Or is there a more charitable way to read this than as a transcendental argument with a false conclusion? — Banno

I think this is a good example of the standard sort of strawman that you engage in. You took "vis-a-vis ontology" and replaced it with "regarding ontology," and then pretended that I was referring to ontological arguments like Anselm's. The context about Wittgenstein should have been enough to preclude such a strawman, for obviously I have not claimed that Wittgenstein gave a bad "ontological argument." But even if it wasn't, the context of this debate that has already taken place earlier in the thread is obviously about the topic you raised: ontological implications of different logics, not ontological conclusions arrived at from pure logic.

This is bad-faith argumentation, and it's no secret you are engaged in it all the time.

(I suppose it is worth pointing out here that those who struggle with intellectual vices could use a "principle of charity" as a medicine, whether that vice stems from old age, pride, or other such things. Again, this is a practical consideration, but on point.)

This is bad-faith argumentation... — Leontiskos

You'd know. I'll leave you to it then.

Edit: "vis-a-vis" and "regarding" are not so dissimilar. Nor does anything in what I have said reference Anselm or the other ontological arguments. Leontiskos is not responding to what I said.

These are examples of the sort of "bad faith" that Leontiskos has displayed both here and in other threads, where he has relied on perfidious reinterpretation.

The mention of age is simply puerile.

The thread has gone in other directions. Enjoy.

- Cop out, as usual. :roll:
It's high time you started taking responsibility for what you say.

I had a similar discussion with Joshs re truth being true withing a given metaphysics versus being true universally. It seems to me that if you tell a lot of people, "yes, what you're saying is true...but only in your context," you're actually telling them that what they think is false, because they don't think the truth is context dependent in this way. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well. Several things going on here.

It's an interesting point, but how broadly it applies isn't clear.

I'm desperately trying not to become an expert on QV, but I want to start by pointing out something a little odd about Hirsch's formulation of charity that I posted before:

A charity-based metasemantics assigns L the interpretation that, when all is said-and-done, when every disposition to correct and revise is accounted for, makes the best sense of the linguistic behavior of L-speakers by making their considered utterances come out true in actual and possible circumstances, ceteris paribus. — Hirsch & Warren

Surely "true" here is short for "true in L, under I", but I find it odd they didn't just say that, since all the model-theoretic machinery seems ready to hand.

So that's caveat number 1 to your point: truth is always truth in a language, under a particular interpretation. It doesn't even make sense -- heh, in this theoretical context -- to say otherwise, to say "just plain true, dammit!"

Caveat number 2: it's widely understood that even statements of fact -- observations and such -- in the context of science are relative to a given theoretical framework. There's no pure non-theory-laden observation to be had, and no one pretends otherwise; rather, it's the theory that enables the observations to be made at all. (More Kant, etc. And absolutely every philosopher of science.)

Caveat number 3: Goodman, in Ways of Worldmaking, makes the point that reduction is essentially a myth in science, and if that's so, he can claim for his relativism that rather than it being anti-science, it empowers him to take each science at "full force", to endorse the work of biologists and chemists, for instance, without treating them as second-class citizens whose science isn't quite as true as physics. That's appealing.

Caveat number 4: one of your interlocutors is claiming to have the regular old absolute truth, not truth relative to anything, and it's only because of that claim that contextualizing their substantive claim is either necessary (for the listening relativist) or offensive (to them making the claim).

Well, what do you intend to do about that? Goodman's line is to say that their being right -- assuming they are right -- doesn't preclude there being other perspectives that are also right. (A picture doesn't invalidate a verbal description of the same scene -- just different versions, doing different things.)

I think you want to give them the respect of telling them they're wrong when you think they are, and that's fine. Pluralism doesn't have to mean everyone's always right. It just means understanding something about how you're right, and that there may be other ways to be right. (Note that I am not here addressing charity and Hirsch's use of it.)

In short, you can separate their claim into two: the substantive claim, and an additional claim that all other versions are wrong. You can take both claims quite seriously, accepting one and denying the other. If they want to fight about it, you're not fighting about the substantive claim, but about their claimed monopoly on the truth, which you have taken just as seriously and denied.

That's enough "How To Be a Relativist."

I am reluctantly going to take a stab at a real paper by Hirsch. I'll get back to y'all on his particular take on charity.

Surely "true" here is short for "true in L, under I", but I find it odd they didn't just say that, since all the model-theoretic machinery seems ready to hand.

So that's caveat number 1 to your point: truth is always truth in a language, under a particular interpretation. It doesn't even make sense -- heh, in this theoretical context -- to say otherwise, to say "just plain true, dammit!" — Srap Tasmaner

It seems to me that this is already duplex veritas; it is already a premise of quantifier variance. Hence it is part of the controversy, and someone like Sider (and me!) would already disagree with you here. Sider's (really Aristotle's) notion of "carving reality at the joints" is presupposing contextless truth, as does the idea of "ontological structure." Sider partitions out that argument and distinguishes the variety of QV that denies this notion of carving from the variety of QV that does not deny it—and his distinction is what sparked some of @Count Timothy von Icarus' musings in the first place—but this is surely one of the very things that is at stake, and is not a common presupposition.

Edit: But I think the question here needs to be refined. It is the question about whether language can speak about something beyond itself:

The first kind of ideology is, after all, not ideology but just another name for thinking. Edge describes it as the fact that we have no access to a world independent of our senses and judgments. Indeed. No one can think without thinking and, since we are sensing creatures, without sensing either. But Edge then immediately slides into a suggestio falsi by glossing what he said as that we always think, when we think, with an inherited language-picture of the world. He then gives a further gloss that the drive to get beyond such a picture to ‘the resplendent and glorious room of objectivity’ is ‘fruitless’ because we cannot get to a place ‘independent of human thought, talk, language and belief’. Of course not. But whoever thought one had to in order to get to objectivity, to truth, to the way things are? One gets to objectivity by thinking. — Peter L. P. Simpson, A Response to Edge

Pluralism doesn't have to mean everyone's always right. It just means understanding something about how you're right, and that there may be other ways to be right. — Srap Tasmaner

Along the same lines of what @Count Timothy von Icarus has already alluded to, to say that some are equally right (and others could be wrong) would seem to imply that there is a standard of rightness that measures both equally-right views simultaneously. So if I say that a claim made in context X and a claim made in context Y are both equally right, then I have already implicitly appealed to a super-context that is capable of measuring both contexts, X and Y.

truth is always truth in a language, under a particular interpretation. It doesn't even make sense -- heh, in this theoretical context -- to say otherwise, to say "just plain true, dammit!" — Srap Tasmaner

It seems to me that this is already duplex veritas; it is already a premise of quantifier variance. Hence it is part of the controversy, and someone like Sider (and me!) would already disagree with you here. Sider's (really Aristotle's) notion of "carving reality at the joints" is presupposing contextless truth, as does the idea of "ontological structure." — Leontiskos

I guess I had that coming, but it puts me in an awkward position.

I'm already on record, in this very thread, dismissing much of contemporary mainstream Anglo-American philosophy. Easy enough for me, dilettante that I am, but I've given my reasons: science stumbles merrily ahead, leaving the philosophers to argue amongst themselves. If there is something left for philosophy to do, I haven't been able to figure out what that is, and god knows I've tried. (There are people here, @Joshs and @180 Proof and god help me @apokrisis come to mind, who have a program philosophy plays a vital part in. I envy them their conviction, but I'm just a guy who thinks about stuff.)

But I can still play at philosophy, and it's an old habit. Even though the content of philosophy mostly leaves me cold now, I still enjoy the practice of philosophy, the challenge of understanding and evaluating arguments, all that.

So I could do that here, and we could play at arguing about the nature of truth, but my heart's not in it. I don't have a horse in this race; I'm just a guy who's spent an unhealthy amount of time around the track.

I could argue against "contextless truth" and "carving nature at the joints" but I wouldn't be arguing for an alternative philosophical position. And I'd spend a lot of time arguing against misunderstanding positions I don't even hold, just out of scrupulousness I guess. Trying to think well is about as much of a program as I have.

TL;DR. Bait not taken. If you want to opine on Absolute Truth, I won't get in your way.

But I can still play at philosophy, and it's an old habit. — Srap Tasmaner

Lol, okay.

I could argue against "contextless truth" and "carving nature at the joints" but I wouldn't be arguing for an alternative philosophical position. And I'd spend a lot of time arguing against misunderstanding positions I don't even hold, just out of scrupulousness I guess. Trying to think well is about as much of a program as I have. — Srap Tasmaner

Well, you've already argued against contextless truth, so I don't know what to make of this. I am the one who took your bait, and now it seems that you were engaged in "catch and release." :grin:

I would make the point with Plato that what you have said already commits you to contextless truth. If that is right, then it's not some abstruse academic argument, but rather an entailment of your own thought that hasn't been seen through to the end (unless you were stating something you do not believe for the sake of argument, to bolster QV). There is nothing less programmatic than the simple idea that truth exists and can be known. That's the presupposition for any thought and any program, good or bad. And this isn't off-topic or far away. It is the very topic of the OP. Is it the very thing Sider is arguing for. In a nutshell: if truth exists then quantifier variance and logical pluralism don't.

But I can still play at philosophy, and it's an old habit. Even though the content of philosophy mostly leaves me cold now, I still enjoy the practice of philosophy, the challenge of understanding and evaluating arguments, all that. — Srap Tasmaner

It might be off the track, but do you enjoy its applications in other disciplines? I'm reading a Deleuze inspired social science book on addiction at the minute.

you've already argued against contextless truth — Leontiskos

Did I? Are you sure?

I would make the point with Aristotle that what you have said already commits you to contextless truth. — Leontiskos

There's no need to be insulting.

There is nothing less programmatic than the simple idea that truth exists and can be known. — Leontiskos

I mean, it's tempting just to let that stand without commentary.

Are you standing up for common sense here, Leontiskos? Against what? Against me? Against a damnable relativism? Has common sense ever needed defending against philosophers?

What common sense usually needs defending against is science. I just heard on the radio an interview with a UCLA anthropoligist who's spent time along the migration trails from Central America to the US. He said his new book was intended just to add some nuance to the public conversation about migration, because nothing in life is black and white, and smugglers aren't just good or bad.

Which way do you want to go here? If this guy is good at his job, and it sounded to me like he is, then we might agree to say he is pursuing the truth, and is in a position to tell us truths we were unaware of. Fine.

But does that mean the statement "Smugglers are bad" must be true or false? Why would it? And what do we say about Jason De León's book? That it's the truth? The whole truth and nothing but the truth? A version of the truth? A part of the truth? But a partial truth can be misleading, so the understanding of truth is not monotonic even if the acquisition of truth is. How do we judge his work? None of us saw what he saw; we can't go back in time and skulk behind a tree to see if his reporting is accurate. We could interview his informants, if we could find them, but even the people that were there might not have noticed something that he did, and anyway some of them are dead now.

What does common sense say here? What does the political or moral philosopher say about human smuggling? What is the truth and how do you propose to get it?

I just heard on the radio an interview with a UCLA anthropoligist who's spent time along the migration trails from Central America to the US. He said his new book was intended just to add some nuance to the public conversation about migration, because nothing in life is black and white, and smugglers aren't just good or bad.

Which way do you want to go here? If this guy is good at his job, and it sounded to me like he is, then we might agree to say he is pursuing the truth, and is in a position to tell us truths we were unaware of. Fine.

But does that mean the statement "Smugglers are bad" must be true or false? — Srap Tasmaner

If De León is right then "Smugglers are just bad" is false and "Smugglers aren't just good or bad" is true. That's what he's doing, he's arguing for a truth.

Unless I'm mistaken, your post seems to be a roundabout way of arguing that truth doesn't exist or isn't knowable. I know philosophers have "seen it all," and arguments about performative contradiction now come across as passé. What I would say is that they might be age-old, but the are also, well, true.

But does that mean the statement "Smugglers are bad" must be true or false? Why would it? And what do we say about Jason De León's book? That it's the truth? The whole truth and nothing but the truth? A version of the truth? A part of the truth? But a partial truth can be misleading, so the understanding of truth is not monotonic even if the acquisition of truth is. How do we judge his work? None of us saw what he saw; we can't go back in time and skulk behind a tree to see if his reporting is accurate. We could interview his informants, if we could find them, but even the people that were there might not have noticed something that he did, and anyway some of them are dead now. — Srap Tasmaner

I would say that the commitment to truth is behind us, not in front of us. We can churn up the water and get it as muddy as we like, but we have presupposed truth the whole while. And if there is a question that is too complex to answer, then it is to that extent not truth-apt. But other questions surely are.

do you enjoy its applications in other disciplines? I'm reading a Deleuze inspired social science book on addiction at the minute. — fdrake

Desiring-machines run amok?

What I most enjoy, honestly, is everyday reasoning. I eavesdrop a lot -- the rednecks across the street talking about Vietnam, the guy lecturing his buddy on the phone about friendship, etc. One of my first posts at the new site was about my youngest son and I playing catch and, when I sailed one over his head, by way of excusing me, he said, "If I were taller I could have caught it." That strikes as obviously true, but I immediately thought, "But if you were taller, you wouldn't be Michael." What to do, what to do.

My indolent studies over the years (philosophy, cognitive science, evolutionary biology, statistics, linguistics, economics, anthropology, sociology, blah blah blah) have all been guided by trying to understand how people make sense of things, and in particular how they share the sense they've made with each other. Why do you believe what you do? Do you know? Can you know? When people demand or give reasons for beliefs, how does that work, and why do they do it the way they do?

So rather than applied philosophy, I'm interested in what you might call philosophy found in the wild.

Vaguely on topic, I argued somewhere a long time ago, that ontology is peculiar in this respect. People -- by which I mean, you know, people -- talk and argue about how to live, about how government should work, about how they know what they claim to know, about what makes a book or a movie or a piece of music good or bad, about what the right thing to do is in all kinds of situations. You can see the sort of raw material for whole branches of philosophy just laying around in the street. Except for ontology. The only everyday arguments about ontology I could come up with are things like Bigfoot and other cryptids, the Bermuda Triangle, today I might add the secret adrenochrome-sipping cabal of satanist liberals, and usual troubles over Sherlock Holmes and the sense in which Santa Claus and unicorns "aren't real." Philosophers argue about whether there are chairs or numbers or natural kinds, but people don't. (Scientists are likely to say, there are, kinda, for some of those, but not in the way you think, and then we all just need to deal with that.) But there is quite definitely no great body of everyday discussion of whether certain kinds of things exist, nothing anywhere approaching the discussions of right & wrong, of politics, of aesthetics, even of whether you have enough evidence to conclude that your boyfriend is cheating on you. (Austin was fond of reading legal opinions, and thought philosophers were ignoring a great body of practical reasoning.) Ontology, as we here think of it, is a game that only philosophers play. I've seen it argued that physicists, some of them, are now doing metaphysics, and if so, good for them.

Desiring-machines run amok? — Srap Tasmaner

Aye. The body without organs concept is pretty natural there. Ironically it is not talking much about chemicals and demographic risk factors for addiction.

Ontology, as we here think of it, is a game that only philosophers play. — Srap Tasmaner

I think that's broadly true. Though I do think how people relate the concepts and things in their world counts as an examinable ontology. In that respect, "out in the wild" it isn't sharply distinguished from how people think of institutions, nature, their own bodies, culture and themselves. But it's definitely never thought about as its own thing, I agree with you there.

of aesthetics — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, and this is even avoided in my book group. Who enjoy analysing literature.

discussions of right & wrong, of politics, — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, broadly speaking these are also avoided in the activist circle I'm part of. Since most of the theory is irrelevant to tangible goals, and the tangible goals are clearly worth fighting for (eg taking a landlord to court for allowing raw sewage to pour into an immunocompromised person's kitchen for months on end).

But there is quite definitely no great body of everyday discussion of whether certain kinds of things exist — Srap Tasmaner

This is interesting. On many forms of realism predication is an attribution of existence, and if this is right then all discussions involve existence claims (Sider basically defines quantifiers in relation to sentences and truth). Or as says, "how people relate concepts and things."

And there are also claims about primary substances, i.e. hypotheses. "It's cold in this building, therefore the furnace must be out" (i.e. there exists no fire in the furnace). "The crops are dry; there must be a lack of rain." "My car won't start; the (proximity) key must be somewhere else."

Philosophers and scientists often take hypothesis to the next level, where they construct mental entities that may or may not exist in the world, and then go about arguing over them. Then there are the table arguments. But I do wonder what percentage of philosophers in the history of the world spent appreciable time arguing whether tables exist.

I would say that the commitment to truth is behind us, not in front of us. We can churn up the water and get it as muddy as we like, but we have presupposed truth the whole while. And if there is a question that is too complex to answer, then it is to that extent not truth-apt. But other questions surely are. — Leontiskos

I'm more inclined -- you'll be shocked to hear -- to say the opposite.

There is behavior, such as De León's, that we can recognize as "truth seeking". This project started, he relates, by accident. He had finished a project on migration and intended to move on to something else, but he took one last trip down to Mexico, where he spent some time talking to a bunch of young men hanging around the railroad tracks. He told them about his work, and they said, "Why didn't you talk to us?" They were all smugglers. So he took Herodotus's advice, and rather than just talk to them, which we can all see would be a useful step, he went to see for himself.

There is, I submit, no correlate to this, behavior we can recognize as "truth getting".

You're inclined to say there has to be a truth out there to seek, like it's just sitting there, to be found or overlooked or deliberately hidden. Unfortunately for you, "seeking" is an intensional verb, so as Quine patiently explained, just because you're looking for a spy, that doesn't mean there's a spy for you to find.

Of course, if I wanted to make that argument, it would only get me that maybe there's a spy and maybe there isn't, maybe truth exists and maybe it doesn't. I could say that, but what would I have achieved? And, more importantly, what would I say next? Shall we talk some more about the thing that maybe exists and maybe doesn't, which by definition we have no way to determine?

Instead, the behavior, where we started, is a rich territory, with lots to learn, and lots to say. There may or may not be a truth out there, but how people comport themselves toward it is endlessly fascinating.

(I was just yesterday going to look at Hobbes, but I got distracted by the introduction by "the late W. G. Pogson Smith", who must have been an old Oxford don. A couple choice moments:

He offers us a theory of man's nature that is at once consistent, fascinating, and outrageously false.

Ah, they don't write like that anymore. And this:

Truth is a necessity; but necessary truth is a will-o'-the-wisp. Seekers after truth --- how Hobbes despised them, all that deluded race who dreamt of a law whose seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world: all things in heaven and earth doing her homage! Rather, boldly conclude that truth is not to be sought, but made. Let men agree what is to be truth, and truth it shall be.

Marvelous. No wonder, as the other introduction notes, the English Parliament "even claimed that the theories found in Leviathan were a likely cause of the Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666."

There's your enemy, the damnable atheist Hobbes. It's all his fault.)

Sigh. Look at what you quoted:

But there is quite definitely no great body of everyday discussion of whether certain kinds of things exist — Srap Tasmaner

People might talk about whether there's money in the bank or beer in the fridge, but they don't talk about whether money or banks or beer or refrigerators exist.

And even for particular cases, you're far more likely to find someone saying "It hasn't rained for a while" than someone who says "There is a lack of rain." What's a lack when it's at home? Always something going on out in the fields -- sometimes it's rain and sometimes it's lacks.

there exists no fire in the furnace — Leontiskos

Uh huh. What if there does but it's out?

If there is something left for philosophy to do, I haven't been able to figure out what that is, and god knows I've tried. — Srap Tasmaner

Idling semantic quibbles aside, do you mean "academic philosophy" or "amateur philosophy" or "way of life philosophy"?

Consider this: these variations of philosophy each "do" different things with, at minimum, the same praxis: reflective inquiry – problematizing aporias, or what we do not / cannot know or understand about what we think we know or what we misunderstand – that reasons towards more probative questions we still do not know how to answer (i.e. philosophical truthes (?)). So, IMO, it does not make sense to apply the notion of "something left to do" to philosophy any more than it does to apply it to other interminable practices (which resemble J. Carse's "infinite games") like martial arts, public health & sanitation, natural sciences, history & politics, personal hygiene, logic & mathematics, fine arts, etc.

Sigh. Look at what you quoted: — Srap Tasmaner

If you follow my reply a bit closer, I built up to what you were talking about and implied that the lesser forms are related to inquiries about "secondary substances." The distinction that must be made is between the facticity of something whose mode of existence is not in dispute (e.g. extraterrestrials), and the mode of existence of something like a table. The former is sometimes found in ordinary reasoning, and one could recast disputes over the latter as predication disputes (even though this move will in some cases fall into what Sider calls "hostile translation").

I do grant your point that ontological disputes of the latter kind are more common in philosophy than in everyday speech, but I am wondering if this has more to do with recent philosophy than historical philosophy, at least after the presocratics.

(Sorry, I realize I am posting a bit too fast. I will try to rectify that.)

@Srap Tasmaner - I think the only application of ontology in everyday life I've had recently was a spirited mereological discussion over whether every man was gay if their butt counted as part of, and was thus in, their own butt.

- If it could be sufficiently proved that such a sentence follows upon embracing Wittgenstein's philosophy, then the title of schopenhauer1's recent thread would take on a whole new meaning.

Caveat number 3: Goodman, in Ways of Worldmaking, makes the point that reduction is essentially a myth in science, and if that's so, he can claim for his relativism that rather than it being anti-science, it empowers him to take each science at "full force", to endorse the work of biologists and chemists, for instance, without treating them as second-class citizens whose science isn't quite as true as physics. That's appealing.

I'll have to check that out. It seems to me that the track record for reduction is quite weak, and that the empirical support for it is not particularly strong. It's a bit bizarre that it still has the status of "assumed true until convincingly proven otherwise," (especially since what would constitute such proof seems hard to imagine, you can always posit smaller building blocks). I think this is just from inertia and that fact that there are multiple ideas competing to replace it, not just one replacement paradigm.

In particular, I think the arguments in Jaegwon Kim's monographs are air tight (as do a lot of people). If superveniance physicalism works the way it is normally posited, then we have causal closure (and thus epiphenomenalism) but we also absolutely cannot have strong emergence. That brings us to a weird place where:

A. There can be no emergence vis-á-vis first person subjective experience so we seem stuck with panpsychism, denying we exist, occasionalism, etc.; and

B. Natural selection can never select on "what experience is like," because experience never affects behavior (causal closure), which both seems implausible due to how good evolutionary arguments are for "why what feels good feels good" (and the inverse), and causes a host of profound epistemic issues (highlighted by Plantinga and David Hoffman).

Kim points out that this only works for substance metaphysics (i.e. objects properties inhere in their constituents), and IMO this is just another piece of evidence against that sort of thinking (suggesting relational metaphysics à la scholasticism or process metaphysics).

But this is all veering off topic.

In short, you can separate their claim into two: the substantive claim, and an additional claim that all other versions are wrong. * You can take both claims quite seriously, accepting one and denying the other. If they want to fight about it, you're not fighting about the substantive claim, but about their claimed monopoly on the truth, which you have taken just as seriously and denied.

Well here, I think the metaphysics of truth come into play. I can see many great arguments for types of relativism. Plenty of thinkers who have a strong conception of an absolute morality still allow for cultural relativity. You can have "the Good," and still have it filtered through social context such that "being a good priest," differs from "being a good soldier," which differs from "being a good king." And culture can obviously affect how things are best explained.

Plus, you can make a case for pragmatic relativism, which addresses caveat 3. I don't think you have to default on the possibility of a language(s) that carve the world at the joints to say "we clearly don't have that, and so different languages are more appropriate for different contexts." After all, the absolute is not reality with appearances removed, but reality + all appearances.

So I agree with you. I don't see anything wrong with pragmatic cases for pluralism, and they don't need to entail that "everyone is always right." But I would not support the notion that "being right," simply has to do with game rules. For one, you can't ever get to an explanation for why games have the rules they do if you don't look outside of them.

People might talk about whether there's money in the bank or beer in the fridge, but they don't talk about whether money or banks or beer or refrigerators exist.

Wouldn't discussions of God fall into this category? That seems like a question of existence that is the organizing principle around which a great many people base their entire lives, and one with huge social and political implications.

The existence of "objective" moral standards would be another one that seems to be apparent in everyday life, often taking center stage. The same goes for the "meaning" and "purpose" of human life or humanity's telos.

The status of universals and numbers doesn't play nearly the same role that the aforementioned do, but people definetly seem interested in it. These creep into politics when we talk about education policy vis-á-vis mathematics. There are similar questions that have become quite politically relevant, i.e., "is gender or sex real?" or "is race real?"

And then you have the adoption of, at the very least, the post-modern lexicon by modern political movements. These days everything is about "deconstructing narratives," and there is "living your own truth," etc. The famous Giuliani retort: "truth isn't truth," appeals to "various ways of knowing," etc. suggest to me that pluralism is definitely relevant outside the context of the academy. I don't think this should be surprising, while most people in Scholasticism's heyday knew little of it, it had a major impact on the Church, education, and devotional life. Likewise, given the role "scientism" has as the dominant world view, it can't help but shape everyday experiences.

There may or may not be a truth out there, but how people comport themselves toward it is endlessly fascinating.

The idea of truth sitting "out there," also ends up presupposing some things if the view is that it lies outside us, existing "in-itself," waiting to be uncovered. In a mindless world, it seems to me that the truth/falsity distinction could have no content. Truth cannot be equivalent with being, since we can say truth things about what is not, e.g., "there is no planet between Earth and Mars." This is why Aquinas has truth inheritly bound up with a knower; "everything is known in the mode of the knower." The crucial distinction is that signs are always "how we know," whereas more pernicious forms of pluralism often seems to rely on the claim that "signs are what we know." But if everything is signs, "appearance," then there can be no real reality/appearance distinction.

This is why I like Robert Sokolowski's concept of "grasping the intelligibility of things," when it comes to epistemology. We cannot grasp a thing's intelligibility in every context, but this doesn't mean we cannot grasp their intelligibility at all.

The modern preference for potency over act comes up here too. Arguments for pluralism often focus on things like: "we could shift the pronunciation of every English word, or change this formal system in infinite ways, etc." Yet, in actuality, we don't have infinite systems, we actually have a fairly limited number of popular ones. But then I think there are reasons that explain actuality.

there is quite definitely no great body of everyday discussion of whether certain kinds of things exist, nothing anywhere approaching the discussions of right & wrong, of politics, of aesthetics, even of whether you have enough evidence to conclude that your boyfriend is cheating on you. (Austin was fond of reading legal opinions, and thought philosophers were ignoring a great body of practical reasoning.) Ontology, as we here think of it, is a game that only philosophers play. — Srap Tasmaner

Sartre asserts that our everyday decisions sustain a two-level ontology. On the lower level, there is a domain of personal matters and choices, so that we ensure particular parcels of social reality. On the upper level, a personal intention resonates with the existence of a global aspects of collective projects. So, people regularly affirm that certain kinds of things and states of things exist. Some portions of the real world become objective facts that are only facts based on human decision and agreement. This kind of reality comes into existence in the performance of intentionality by humans, and it continues to exist only as far as the intentionality maintains it.

"If, moreover, existence precedes essence and we will to exist at the same time as we fashion our image, that image is valid for all and for the entire epoch in which we find ourselves. Our responsibility is thus much greater than we had supposed, for it concerns mankind as a whole. If I am a worker, for instance, I may choose to join a Christian rather than a Communist trade union. And if, by that membership, I choose to signify that resignation is, after all, the attitude that best becomes a man, that man’s kingdom is not upon this earth, I do not commit myself alone to that view. Resignation is my will for everyone, and my action is, in consequence, a commitment on behalf of all mankind. Or if, to take a more personal case, I decide to marry and to have children, even though this decision proceeds simply from my situation, from my passion or my desire, I am thereby committing not only myself, but humanity as a whole, to the practice of monogamy. I am thus responsible for myself and for all men, and I am creating a certain image of man as I would have him to be. In fashioning myself I fashion man."
(Sartre, ' Existentialism and Humanism')

Well, here's an absurdly long post I didn't mean to write. @fdrake I don't think you're quoted in here but now you've been mentioned, in case you want to slog through this. It's probably not worth it, but I've written it now, so what the hell.

reduction — Count Timothy von Icarus

I was referring to the reduction of one science to another, and all of them eventually to physics.

Wouldn't discussions of God fall into this category? That seems like a question of existence — Count Timothy von Icarus

Now and then. I think it usually presents somewhat differently than a philosopher's question like "Do sets exist?" When a believer asks "Do you believe in God?" or "Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?" they're not talking about whether God exists -- that goes without saying; they're talking about you, the state of your soul, your openness to receiving His grace, and so on. We could talk about that more, especially since the non-believer's side is a bit different.

But what's the idea here? I made an observation about how prevalent certain sorts of discussions are among ordinary people, with the suggestion that particular branches of philosophy represent a more systematic treatment of issues people find of concern in their daily lives, and which they often discuss, sometimes with considerable subtlety. And I suggested that the sort of discussions philosophers have about ontology are rarely about the sorts of questions ordinary people have and already discuss.

Is that sort of thing open to a counterexample? Not unless that counterexample is extremely widespread. You noted that belief in God is quite widespread; but that's not quite the same as saying lots of people on a daily basis discuss and disagree about His existence. If I had made a similar suggestion about ethics, for instance, I'd obviously be wrong; people talk about right and wrong all the time. The drunken rednecks across the street are arguing about it right now.

Now let's take a step back. Why did it occur to you to raise a counterexample to my observation? There wasn't much riding on my being right. I hadn't used the claim as a lemma in an argument. If you show that I was wrong, how do you expect that to affect whatever position you think I hold?

There were other arguments offered, which follow a different pattern, but also, I believe, in furtherance of the same goal you had:

On many forms of realism predication is an attribution of existence, and if this is right then all discussions involve existence claims — Leontiskos

Sartre asserts that our everyday decisions sustain a two-level ontology. — Number2018

The argument form here is "There's another way to look at this that I like better."

And I think that other way is captured, in part, in your usual suggestion that everything we do and say involves a metaphysics, generally unacknowledged and unexamined, and thus properly called our "metaphysical assumptions."

And basically I think that's false, but it's understandable that philosophers are inclined to think so. This is not the same thing as saying that metaphysics is nonsense, or impossible, or any such thing. Different issue.

Here's a sketch of an argument, with a short preamble.

A couple years ago @Manuel started a thread on Hume. I'm grateful to him for getting me to go back to Hume because I've been referring to that discussion ever since.

Hume tried to find some rational justification for our quite evident belief in object permanence, but could find none, and so concluded that Nature deems some matters too important to be left to our fallible reason.

And he's right. Infants acquire the idea of object permanence even before the idea of object identity. They're not born with it, so far as we can tell, but it develops predictably, and so that pattern of development is more or less "built in." And it comes before language, and evidently would have to come before anything like rational thought, so it's not like you could reason your way there anyway.

Permanent objects, in other words, are not a conclusion of ours. From just a few months old, we seem to experience the world as full of distinct and permanent objects. It is something a bit like an assumption, from then on, but an assumption, as Hume notes, we cannot choose to drop.

You could here point to Kant, Peter Strawson, Collingwood, and many others as engaging in a "desriptive metaphysics" (Strawson's phrase) that would catalog these sorts of basic assumptions. (Space and time, for a couple of gigantic examples.)

But I don't look at it quite that way, and that's why I don't buy the "implicit metaphysics" approach.

What we might be inclined to call "assumptions" like this are, I would suggest, our attempts to understand the structure of our brain's modeling of the world -- really of our experience, since our brains could give a shit about the world, and really just of that experience as it affects our bodies and their functioning. There might be something like "permanent objects" in those predictive models, or there might not be, even if it seems that way to us upon introspection; there are some things we can learn about those models, but there's probably a limit. Doesn't matter. Our awareness, much less our understanding, isn't necessary for some basic parts of the model to work. (Why we have any kind of awareness is a very interesting question, but to one side of my "argument" here.)

Now, how does all of this predictive modeling the brain does show up in how we talk about things? I think it mostly doesn't: the two are largely unrelated, and that's why I don't think it's helpful to talk about metaphysical assumptions in our discussions, even if by that you mean beliefs acquired from the models our brains build, below the level of our awareness.

I can be clearer, I hope, about what I mean by "largely unrelated". Of course, the systems that produce and consume communicative speech are dependent on the systems that model your physical environment and your body, and what you say is ultimately dependent on the state of those systems, what you experience more or less as "beliefs" about yourself and the world, although "beliefs" is a pretty clumsy description of what your brain is up to.

And speech is behavior, of course, so your brain is busy predicting the effect of your speech, just as it does for the rest of your behavior -- and those predictions guide the behavior you engage in. But speech in particular involves predicting the behavior of other minded beings like yourself. --- This is another capacity humans develop pretty early, perhaps even as early as six months!

These interactions -- with other minded beings -- have a different character from our interactions with much of our environment. We've built up enormously complex forms of interaction, especially with language, and that requires a very different sort of management than, say, walking about, picking berries, steering clear of snakes, etc.

And it's around here that I would place reason. I don't believe the modeling our brain spends most of its time doing looks much like a logical system, but when we communicate with each other, particularly when using language, there are standards of consistency, and expectations that we can, upon demand, support many of the things we say with reasons. The reasons we offer for our beliefs probably bear little resemblance much less connection to how our brains settle on their current favored predictions; reasons are rationalizations, but they meet the standards of discussion, not of "belief formation." which is a completely different thing.

So that's what I mean by "largely unrelated". Our brains, like the brains of many other animals, are busy keeping us alive by running predictive models of the state of our body and our environment as it might impact that. But we're not privy to much of any of that, and what we are aware of is something cast in a form usable for communication with other minded beings like ourselves. Made to order reasons designed to convince others our beliefs are reasonable for us and for them to hold together, as members of a social group. And so far as that goes, it's clear there's a different system at work here, because if you convince someone to hold a similar belief, they'll get there not by somehow (psychically?) sharing in whatever experience you had, but just by listening to you talk. That's pretty weird, but the main thing is that it suggests there's an entirely separate route to belief available: you saw the car accident happen, I only heard you talk about seeing it, and we both hold beliefs that it happened.

Another way I could put it is this: if there are invariants in the models our brains use, something we might call artifacts of those models, then those would in some sense be our "metaphysical assumptions." But I think there's a whole separate set of invariants at work in our linguistic communication with one another, and they need not be based on how our brains are modeling our bodies and environments; they are what we've landed on as the structure of our communication, and I think by and large the structure of our introspective thought reflects that structure, not the modeling our brains are doing below the level of our awareness. Our metaphysical assumptions, if there are such things, are probably no more accessible to us than they are to non-linguistic beings. There do seem to be a whole host of assumptions underlying our speech and our conscious thought, but no reason to think they are the "assumptions" of our unconscious modeling.

There may be a giant hole in this argument. I gestured at the evidence that infants have a concept of object permanence, later acquire object identity, later still recognize other minds, and so on. That's all infra-linguistic, so aren't these very studies evidence that we have such concepts and that they are among the metaphysical assumptions I would place in our unconscious brains?

Maybe, but the tricky part here is that we're interpreting the (mostly attentive) behavior of infants, and then talking about it, so what can we do? We're going to describe it in the terms we have, even though the infants in question don't. So I think here we're seeing something very similar to introspection. We know that infants behave in certain ways, and it's consistent so there's something going on; to describe what's going on we reach for the concepts we relied upon when setting up the experiments, and describe the behavior of the infants in those terms. Doesn't mean the infant's brain is actually modeling "object permanence," but it's doing something we all talk about that way.

I suppose I'm suggesting that thinking a concept like "object permanence" is actually instantiated in the infant brain might be a sort of category mistake. The whole system will behave in a way that we recognize or categorize as embodying such a conception, but that doesn't mean it's "in there" somewhere.

Now, how does all of this predictive modeling the brain does show up in how we talk about things? I think it mostly doesn't: the two are largely unrelated, and that's why I don't think it's helpful to talk about metaphysical assumptions in our discussions, even if by that you mean beliefs acquired from the models our brains build, below the level of our awareness. — Srap Tasmaner

Thanks for the tag. I agree with this. Two anecdotal bits of evidence: it takes a lot of effort to parse everyday stuff in terms of brain and body stuff. And also when you do get some way toward doing that, it comes off as horrifying alien poetry or cosmic horror. Example of the latter, parsed in terms of the every day: you'll have different thoughts motivations and reasons, in an unpredictable fashion, if you sleep well on a night versus if you don't. You have no choice over this. There's all kinds of terror in the subpersonal.

not of "belief formation." which is a completely different thing. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes. You're forming beliefs "between thoughts", so to speak, they (eg) parse your chaotic sea of retinal images and individuate objects in them. Propositions/statements - declarative language that ascribes statements and intentions to people - at best serves as a summary of the aggregate "output" of this continual filtering and chunking in terms of current task relevance and task reevaluation.

My impression is that when you do philosophy, you take this capacity for aggregation as a given. And form something like a folklore out of it. Which is fine, and as you're saying (I'm reading you say) you can reverse engineer out some of the True Music (tm) our agenthood dances to.

Edit: I wanted to edit to highlight that we do have the capacity to take the folklore and act upon it, without treating it as fundamental. And also without treating the body+brain as fundamental too. Statements like "oxytocin potentiates pair bonding and also jingoism" need to make sense.

I suppose I'm suggesting that thinking a concept like "object permanence" is actually instantiated in the infant brain might be a sort of category mistake. The whole system will behave in a way that we recognize or categorize as embodying such a conception, but that doesn't mean it's "in there" somewhere. — Srap Tasmaner

I agree with that too. Though I think there's also a critical (as in criticising) role for philosophy in that. I've in mind people like Matthew Ratcliffe (one of @Joshs 's reading recommendations), who do their best to survey the ground of how we live our lives, and use that greater survey to undermine and expand false preconceptions we may tend to have about it.

I don't mean to make that a "handmaiden of the sciences" comment, I also think meticulously categorising the nonsense of our everyday lives is valuable for its own sake.

Yeah. That entire section is just amazing, so powerful and disturbing (in the good sense of the word).

Glad you like it too.

The reasons we offer for our beliefs probably bear little resemblance much less connection to how our brains settle on their current favored predictions; reasons are rationalizations, but they meet the standards of discussion, not of "belief formation." which is a completely different thing.
Our brains, like the brains of many other animals, are busy keeping us alive by running predictive models of the state of our body and our environment as it might impact that. But we're not privy to much of any of that, and what we are aware of is something cast in a form usable for communication with other minded beings like ourselves. — Srap Tasmaner

You’re relying on a particular neuro-cognitive approach , predictive processing, to ground your understanding of such social processes as logic, reason and belief. According to that model, we are indeed not privy to the ‘subpersonal’ processes which underlie conscious behaviors like rational argumentation. But a different approach, neurophenomenology, arising out of the enactivist tradition, while agreeing with predictive processing that there is no homuncular self to be found among all of the bits of interacting brain elements, produces a more functionally integral picture of how neural assemblies are formed and interact within the brain. It doesn’t separate an internal realm of representational, computational processing from an outside world but sees brain, body and world as mutually enacted through sensory motor coupling. This allows enactivism to embrace what Buddhist traditions already understood, that cognition is fundamentally the exercise of skillful know-how in situated and embodied action rather than the kind of abstract belief-based reasoning you have been talking about.

This allows enactivism to embrace what Buddhist traditions already understood, that cognition is fundamentally the exercise of skillful know-how in situated and embodied action rather than the kind of abstract belief-based reasoning you have been talking about. — Joshs

You still can have predictive processing in situated and embodied cognition. Friston and Barrett's collaboration in active perception is all that.

You still can have predictive processing in situated and embodied cognition. Friston and Barrett's collaboration in active perception is all that. — fdrake

The ‘how' of finding oneself in the world that enactivists talk about depends on their viewing a cognitive-environmental system as normative in character, that is, as functioning as an autonomous whole in a certain reciprocal causal exchange with its world. This normativity creates the criteria for what perturbs it , not discrete packets of environmental information that it has to match itself to. And this normativity allows us to talk of emotions as just special versions of an affective attunement toward the world which is always present in cognitive functioning, indicating how interactions with the world either facilitate or degrade the system's autonomy. I could be wrong, but I don't see how one could call a cognitive system's attempt to match external input with internally generated representations fully normative. Friston's free energy model posits minimization of surprise(disorder) in pursuit of homeostasis as the normative aim of a living system in a non-equilibrium steady state, and defines autonomy on the basis of a markov blanket distinguishing between internal and external states, but these are weak notions of autonomy and normativity, in contrast to many enactivist versions. It's not surprising, then, that Friston chooses Freud's realist model ( Friston's characterization of schizophrenic disturbance as ‘false belief' indicates his realist bent) as a good realization of his neuroscientific project, given that Freud, like Friston, turns autonomy and normativity into a conglomeration of external pushes and internal pulls on a weakly integrated system. This is posited as an ‘internal' environment indirectly exposed to an outside, in classic Cartesian fashion, as Barrett express here:

“ Like those ancient, mummified Egyptian pharaohs, the brain spends eternity entombed in a dark, silent box. It cannot get out and enjoy the world's marvels directly; it learns what is going on in the world only indirectly via scraps of information from the light, vibrations, and chemicals that become sights, sounds, smells, and so on.”” From your brain's point of view, locked inside the skull, your body is just another part of the world that it must explain.”

By contrast , autonomy for the enactivist isnt the property of a brain box hidden behind a markov blanket, distinguishable not only from the world but from its own body, but the autonomy of a brain-body system, whose elements cannot be separated out and for whom interaction with a world is direct rather than. indirect.

“One of the basic propositions of the enactive approach is that being autonomous is a necessary condition for a system to embody original intentionality and normativity. Sense-making is the interactional and relational side of autonomy. An autonomous system produces and sustains its own identity in precarious conditions and thereby establishes a perspective from which interactions with the world acquire a normative status. Certain interactions facilitate autonomy and other interactions degrade it. Information-processing models of the mind leave unexplained the autonomous organization proper to cognitive beings because they treat cognitive systems as heteronomous systems. These models characterize cognitive systems in terms of informational inputs and outputs instead of the operational closure of their constituent processes. As a result, they do not explain how certain processes actively generate and sustain an identity that also constitutes an intrinsically normative way of being in the world.”(Thompson)

By contrast , autonomy for the enactivist isnt the property of a brain box hidden behind a markov blanket, distinguishable not only from the world but from its own body, but the autonomy of a brain-body system, whose elements cannot be separated out and for whom interaction with a world is direct rather than. indirect. — Joshs

I could be wrong, but I don't see how one could call a cognitive system's attempt to match external input with internally generated representations fully normative. — Joshs

The different states have different markov blankets. Eg the ones corresponding to touch have objects' topographies as direct relations. As far as I'm aware it's a common misconception that "the" markov blanket of an embodied perceptual system is exactly the same thing as the distinction between representation and represented, or the "transparent veil" the transcendental structure of judgement synthesises over and within the empirical.

Moreover, one might be committed to the idea that some states are principally representational, and some are principally action promoting, so that the entire ensemble of states is simultaneously both and neither.

The ensemble of states, even when construed in a representational manner, are not representations in the Cartesian sense. eg Friston's on record being a huge fan of the extended mind and ecological theory of perception. Hierarchcal signal passing in their model lets you represent nonperceptual, nonsensory and even nonconceptual data through how data is passed through our states as a simultaneous modelling and control structure. You could read that in terms of a state level plurality in representational type (what does each state represent? lots of different things in principle!), an indifference to type (throw everything in lol, it isn't even a thing or type yet)... And also on a broader functional level of embodied agent level patterns representing+(in)en/acting the world.

In that, deviation from a norm can very well be construed as a source of surprise. Paradigmatically so, norms act as a form of perceptual prior. Norms even thus have that antecedent flavour of temporality you would expect from the Husserl-Heidegger heritage in their work.

Moreover, Barrett's work explicitly construes normativity as a site of constraint and novelty in the landscape of emotion - like you would not expect to see a smile on a disgusted face, but you might see a smile as condescending depending on the context. They see their projects as compatible.

I didn't want to get into the specifics of it, just provide a note that the literature there wasn't as clear cut as you presented it. Though I'm sure you can get a lot of mileage criticising any model of human agency, insofar as it is mathematical, under the aspect that it is a mathematical representation of its intended object. And moreover you get similar mileage criticising the endeavour in principle, that such science always already thematises human agency representationally rather than in a situated/attuned/embodied-enactive/rhizomatic/tinkering/co-becoming etc manner.