If this is a paradox, I don't think it is a very complicated one.............Of course, it's impossible to talk about them yet here we are talking about them. — T Clark

Is there an uncomplicated explanation to the puzzle of how we can talk about things we cannot talk about?

I agree with Kant's Realism, in that a world independent of the mind does exist, but there is no reason to believe that what we imagine to exist in this world, such as tables and chairs, do actually exist in this world in the same way that we imagine them to be.

Who started saying that we cannot talk about things? I see no problem.

Who started saying that we cannot talk about things? T Clark is alone in this, I believe. — Carlo Roosen

Yes, I said it. He was responding to me. I don't know if I'm alone. Certainly not in general. Probably not on the forum. Perhaps in this discussion.

I modified the text, it was not fair

Is there an uncomplicated explanation to the puzzle of how we can talk about things we cannot talk about? — RussellA

As Lao Tzu wrote, "I know not its name, I give its alias, Tao."

I modified the text, it was not fair — Carlo Roosen

For what it's worth, I don't think you've been treated fairly in this discussion.

That is kind, but why do you think that? I am very happy with this conversation.

Please read my latest longer post, it is one page back ) I am curious if you see something illegal or contradictionary here.

why do you think that? — Carlo Roosen

There has been a lot of condescension directed at you.

For that reason we invent a term, I call it fundamental reality. It is about the things we don't understand. It is perfectly fine to have a term for the collection of things we have no name for — Carlo Roosen

As Lao Tzu noted, an alias. And as I indicated, I see that as a trick we use to say what can't be said. If you forget the irony while you're saying it, you've gotten lost. And again, it's not about things we don't understand, it's about things that can't be understood, that perhaps are not things at all. It's not for things we have no name for, it's for things that can't be named.

One of the things we can say about fundamental reality is that if you know what you are looking for, you can find conformation that it is there. And those conformations regularly do align. So there must be *something* out there, we cannot say everything is just an imagination. — Carlo Roosen

As I said previously, it is a defensible position that no fundamental reality exists. I started a discussion about it many years ago.

I believe what I say is obvious and simple — Carlo Roosen

It is not obvious to me. Actually, that's probably not true. I think I understand what you're saying, but it's different from my understanding of what Kant was saying.

For that reason we invent a term, I call it fundamental reality. It is about the things we don't understand. It is perfectly fine to have a term for the collection of things we have no name for, that happens all the time. Just like "future". We can say a few things in general about fundamental reality, in the same way we can have predictions about the future. Still, both the future and fundamental reality are fundamentally unknowable. (that is the only thing these two terms have in common, it is not a full analogy) — Carlo Roosen

That's the contradiction though.

There are two ways in which we could fail to understand something like fundamental reality, the first of which is the unknown which we could come to know, the second of which is the unknown which we could not come to know. The first unknown is like the future, like what will happen tomorrow. The second unknown is like... nothing clearly statable - it's the sound of one hand clapping.

The following two are aligned with the unknown which we could come to know.

At any given time of day, the next instant is not apprehended, and in that regard the next instant could be construed as fundamentally unknowable. Even though every particular instant could be known, just not now.

Contrast that to something commonplace which we interact with and judge. We know what it is and how it works, but only approximately. Our perceptions and judgements interface imperfectly with the nature of the thing, and it is full of hidden mysteries. That object, that register of reality, is fundamentally unknowable in the sense of being inexhaustible by representation. But not beyond representation's reach.

The last three are aligned with the unknown which we could not come to know.

Contrast that to something beyond the observable universe. We know that exists, but we can't ever observe it, so it's impossible to know about it with sensors and perceptions in the same way as we would the observable universe. That construes the non-observable universe as fundamentally unknowable in one sense of knowledge, but its properties can be inferred - grasped only rationally. This unknowability marks a practical exterior to one type representation, but not a theoretical impasse to all representation.

Contrast that again to the idea that no matter what you say, it will be about something we've perceived, judged, interpreted and so on. That's the noumenon in the negative sense that you were told about previously. It marks a fundamentally unknowable exterior without giving it any positive determination. In that regard "judgements" of such an entity are not contradictions in terms, since whenever they are articulated they are secretly determinations of the aggregate of our perceptions, judgements, interpretations and so on. That exterior is... unpredicable, but extant. Only its existence is entailed by the adequacy of any of our representations, but none of its content is.

Finally contrast that again to the uninterpreted reality that exists prior to all conceptions of it, a substantive which is unintelligible. Formless, unpredicable, but structured. The true alien nature of reality in which we're all hopelessly subsumed. That kind of fundamental reality is unknowable in virtue of the failure of all of our representations to grasp it, even as it effects our minds and bodies. It is the register of Lovecraftian horror. Of the cut between the soul and materiality, that which demarcates the concept of the mind from the body without demarcating the body from the mind. An analogue of it is something like radiation post Chernobyl, an incomprehensible reality that nevertheless saturates us and determines our lives - evinced through cancer and nonsensical death. It is the idea that we already live among the "things in themselves" and their unintelligible structures and causal whimsies.

An agglomeration of all these concepts is self contradictory. While the body - the content - of any "fundamental reality" is indeterminate in at least one sense, the concepts that vouchsafe that indeterminability can contradict each other and thus require separate accounts or contextualising factors.

Merkins.

One Simple Trick that Kantians hate!

Merkins — Banno

Cookies.

Without humans inventing the letters E and F, how can there be these letters in fundamental reality? — Carlo Roosen

The shapes, not the names.

Who started saying that we cannot talk about things? — Carlo Roosen

The discussion has been around since at least Aristotle, a good 2,000 years ago.

As all our information about any world outside the mind arrives through our five senses, we can only know about an outside world through our senses, which are representations of the outside world.

Therefore, we only directly know representations of any outside world, and therefore only indirectly know about any outside world. This is my position as an Indirect Realist.

If we can only know something indirectly, then that something must be fundamentally unknowable. We can never directly talk about the thing-in-itself, although we can indirectly make inferences about the thing-in-itself.

From the The New World Encyclopaedia on Representation

Indirect realists, unlike idealists, believe that our ideas come from sense data acquired through experiences of a real, material, external world. In any act of perception, the immediate (direct) object of perception is only a sense-datum that represents an external object.

The earliest reference to indirect realism is found in Aristotle’s description of how the eye is affected by changes in an intervening medium rather than by objects themselves. He reasoned that the sense of vision itself must be self-aware, and concluded by proposing that the mind consists of thoughts, and calls the images in the mind "ideas."

But still those indirect realists give it a name, according to the encyclopaedia:

a real, material, external world

external object

I just gave it another name, "fundamental reality" instead of "a real, material, external world". T Clark doesn't seem to like this. I don't understand, both are descriptions of the same.

Again, I just gave these two things different names. "a real, material, external world" is my fundamental reality, the "ideas" is my conceptual reality.

I believe my terms work better because they take away the unease of things not being real.

I believe my terms work better because they take away the unease of things not being real. — Carlo Roosen

As an Indirect Realist, I believe that there is "a real, material, external world", aka "fundamental reality", and I know that I have "ideas", aka "conceptual reality".

"Fundamental reality" and "conceptual reality" are good names, but names are not descriptions.

But it should be recognized that as names, they don't include the aspect that the Indirect Realist only has a belief in a "fundamental reality" yet has knowledge of a "conceptual reality".

I might repeat myself, but the discussion went all directions yesterday. So I repeat it just to capture the line of thought here.

Of course we don't capture fundamental reality with the term "fundamental reality". That is never the case, it is the luxery of language. When I talk about a duck here, without quotes, still there is no duck. Thus we can have a word "unknowable" or "afterlife" and use it like: Some people believe that in the afterlife we will know the unknowable. No logical problems here.

Also, I haven't heard anybody comment on this statement of mine, that with a concept in our mind we can do all kinds of tests to confirm that concept in fundamental reality. I called it a one way system. It is what science does all day. So the concepts still *apply* to fundamental reality. Don't say this is a contradiction, I say nothing more than what you can perceive directly. You expect your keys where you left them, or your wife took them. You rely on fundamental reality every moment.

I am curious, am I now crossing a border that Indirect Realists don't like?

shape is also a name, but a generic one.

I am curious, am I now crossing a border that Indirect Realists don't like? — Carlo Roosen

It's quite difficult to tell what your ideas' relationships are to ordinary philosophy positions.

When I talk about a duck here, without quotes, still there is no duck. — Carlo Roosen

Every variety of realist and anti-realist would agree with that, is the thing.

There are two ways in which we could fail to understand something like fundamental reality, the first of which is the unknown which we could come to know, the second of which is the unknown which we could not come to know. The first unknown is like the future, like what will happen tomorrow. — fdrake

The future is not one moment defined in time, but it moves with time progressing. So the future is as unknowable as fundamental reality. And just like the future is revealed bit by bit, without ever being known, so is fundamental reality.

This analogy breaks at some point ;)

An agglomeration of all these concepts is self contradictory — fdrake

Every contradiction finds its source in limitations of language. Reality does not contradict itself. So when some things contradict, search for a viewpoint where they don't. Just like your contradiction about future versus fundamental reality, it was caused by a different understanding of the term "future",

..............that with a concept in our mind we can do all kinds of tests to confirm that concept in fundamental reality........................So the concepts still *apply* to fundamental reality..............................You rely on fundamental reality every moment. — Carlo Roosen

As an Indirect Realist, I believe that my conceptual reality has been caused by a fundamental reality, even though I believe that I can never know this fundamental reality.

In my own words:

that with a concept in our mind we can do all kinds of tests to confirm that concept in fundamental reality

Suppose people observe that the Sun appears in the morning in the east and disappears in the evening in the west.

Person A hypothesises that the Earth rotates around the Sun. This hypothesis supports their observations, and leads them to think that they understand fundamental reality.

Person B hypothesises that the sun travels across the sky in a flying chariot driven by fiery horses and ridden by Zeus’s son, Apollo. This hypothesis supports their observations, and also leads them to think that they understand fundamental reality.

IE, the fact that an hypothesis may be justified by observations is no guarantee that the hypothesis describes fundamental reality.

So the concepts still *apply* to fundamental reality

My belief is there is only one fundamental reality, and therefore there is only one cause of our observations.

However, it does not logically follow that because a theory can explain a set of observations, the same theory of necessity also explains the ultimate cause of these observations.

For example, that I can observe a broken window tells me nothing about what caused the window to break.

Both Person A and B are able to predict that tomorrow the sun will rise in the morning in the east, but having a theory that allows them to make predictions about the future does not mean that the theory is describing fundamental reality. In fact, theories explain the immediate cause of observations, not the ultimate cause of such observations, not "fundamental reality".

IE, our concepts apply to our observations, from which we infer fundamental reality.

You rely on fundamental reality every moment.

Yes, on the one hand, without a fundamental reality there would be no observations, but on the other hand, there is no information within an observation as to the cause of such observation. For that, we have to infer the cause using reason, and if inferred, could be wrong.

IE, this is why we directly rely on theories and hypothesise, and only indirectly rely on fundamental reality.

I believe we fully understand each other... I like your example of the flying chariot.

There is also the reversed possibility that two people fully agree conceptually. If experiments can confirm these theory, even when the theory is wrong, it forms empirical evidence of the consistency of fundamental reality... I think...

, it forms empirical evidence of the consistency of fundamental reality.. — Carlo Roosen

:100: If fundamental reality wasn't inherently consistent, life couldn't exist.

If fundamental reality wasn't inherently consistent, life couldn't exist. — RussellA

Which means that life would exist, but it wouldn't.

No, 'shape' is the name of a discernible. 'E' is the name of a human sound.

:100: If fundamental reality wasn't inherently consistent, life couldn't exist. — RussellA

If fundamental reality wasn't consistent with what? Life? If fundamental reality wasn't consistent with life life couldnt exist? Profound!