(1) entails (3). (2) entails (3). — Banno

So you have:

P1. If (1) then (3)
P2. If (2) then (3)

And then you seem to go:

C1. If not (2) then not (3).

That's denying the antecedent.

It would still really help if you explain what (3) means, and how it differs from (1) and (2).

And then you seem to go: — Michael

No. Rather, you wish that "all truths are justifiable" while maintaining that there can be truths that do not have a justification. I can't see how to make that work.

You want (1) not to entail (3).

You want (1) not to entail (3). — Banno

I don't even know what (3) is. You won't explain it.

Again, I suspect you are equivocating. First you treat (2) and (3) as meaning different things, allowing you to say that (3) follows from (1) without saying that (2) follows from (1), and then you treat (2) and (3) as meaning the same thing, allowing you to say that if (2) is false then (3) is false.

So spell it out for me. What does (3) mean? How does it differ from (1) and (2)?

As it stands, anti-realism simply says that (1) is always true and (2) is sometimes false. And that's it. There is no additional proposition (3).

I don't even know what (3) is. You won't explain it. — Michael

Did you ask? Seems pretty straight forward. It just says that something is the justification for P. If P is justified, then something is the justification for P.

As it stands, my position is simple: (1) is true and (2) is false. And that's it. — Michael

Sure, something might be (as yet) unjustified and yet could be justified. In which case, since it could be justified, there is something which counts as it's justification.

It woudl help considerably if you explained what you think a justification might be. I've already pointed out that mere logical entailment will not do.

As I recall, you avoid solipsism by partially adopting realism. Roughly, everything is mind-dependent except other people.

Indeed, the mind is not yours or mine. We are all part of a community of minds - biological, cultural and linguistic. Consciousness in that sense is collective. But whatever is real, is real for some mind, it has no stand-alone or intrinsic reality independently of mind - that's what I mean by anti-realism, i.e., no material particular possesses inherent reality. And I think modern physics has confirmed that intuition.

That's why I keep stressing the point that one can be an empirical realist but also an idealist. I'm not saying the world is 'all in the mind' that idealism is often taken to entail.

the mind is not yours or mine. We are all part of a community of minds - biological, cultural and linguistic. Consciousness in that sense is collective. — Wayfarer

So far so good. Then you go off on a mystical tangent, and try to drag physics along with you. For me that's an unjustified overextension.

Consciousness in that sense is collective. — Wayfarer

To be conscious is to be aware. So we can say that if anything is conscious it must be aware. Individuals are aware and are hence counted as conscious. How can there be a collective consciousness unless there is a collective entity that is aware. Its awareness would have to encompass not only human but all animal consciousness. You are talking about an omni-aware god. I see no reason to believe there is a such an entity.

The fourth thing, albeit directed at Janus, is that it is not obviously wrong. — Michael

There are obviously questions which cannot even in principle be answered. So we do know there are unknowable truths. Your strategy is to tendentiously define truth such that to be true is to be knowable, thus ruling out the possibility of unknowable truths. This is an eccentric notion of truth and therefore not to be taken seriously.

Then you go off on a mystical tangent, and try to drag physics along with you. For me that's an unjustified overextension. — Banno

Nowadays it's common knowledge, there are many reputable popular books on the subject (e.g.). I'm arguing that there are powerful trends within both physics and cognitive science that undermine scientific realism (and by implication, materialism and scientism.) You will often agree with me on the evils of those attitudes, but when it gets down to the philosophical analysis of them we seem to part company.

reputable popular books on the subject — Wayfarer

there are powerful trends within both physics and cognitive science that undermine scientific realism — Wayfarer

Why must you always argue from authority?

A limping authority that derives from pop physics.

Nowadays it's common knowledge... — Wayfarer

Not a proud phrase.

I do get that I'm a bit of a radical, but I try not to be too strident about it. Anyway, bear in mind, you can only successfully condescend down, and I don't think you're at sufficient altitude.

A limping authority that derives from pop physics. — Banno

I tend to agree. I see no reason to think that the apparent paradoxes in QM, which I believe come from attempting to understand it in terms of macro-world concepts, have any metaphysical implications, other than that the micro nature of things is not what we might intuitively expect it to be.

You'd do well not to be too proud of it as well. That a view is radical (in your case I would rather say "eccentric" since your views are quite conventional in the ancient context) is not necessarily a point in its favour.

And I missed this:

But one may be an empirical, without being a metaphysical, realist. — Wayfarer

I used to accept that distinction, but when I came to question what it really means I realized I could not see any cogent sense in which it is coherent and valid.

I try not to be too strident about it. — Wayfarer

'Everything exists within experience' ~ Wayfarer

...this is where we came in.

'Everything exists within experience' ~ Wayfarer

...this is where we came in. — Banno

Can't really prove that he's wrong, though. We might just be dreams of the Great All.

OK if you want to have another go... you said:

I maintain that there is stuff that is true even if we don't know, believe, or whatever, that it is true. — Banno

But the instant I ask the question 'what stuff do you mean?' or 'what do you have in mind?' then your argument is lost, because you've already begun to name it, indicate it, bring it within the ambit of experience. Which is why I've said 'neither exists nor does not exist', both of those being judgements.

You really don't believe there are uncountable things happening in other galaxies despite our knowing and being able to know nothing about them?

But the instant I ask the question 'what stuff do you mean?' or 'what do you have in mind?' then your argument is lost... — Wayfarer

But you already agreed that there is stuff you don't know:

Plainly - I don't even know most of the people in my street. — Wayfarer

There's a difference between it being true and being able to "name it, indicate it, bring it within the ambit of experience".

You've agreed with this.

you already agreed that there is stuff you don't know — Banno

I am not arguing that it means that ‘the world is all in the mind’. It’s rather that, whatever judgements are made about the world, the mind provides the framework within which such judgements are meaningful. So though we know that prior to the evolution of life there must have been a Universe with no intelligent beings in it, or that there are empty rooms with no inhabitants, or objects unseen by any eye — the existence of all such supposedly unseen realities still relies on an implicit perspective. What their existence might be outside of any perspective is meaningless and unintelligible, as a matter of both fact and principle. — Wayfarer

Those are the ground on which I'm arguing against so-called mind-independent facts. Epochē, refraining from judgement about non-evident facts.

Can't really prove that he's wrong, though. — frank

And by the same argument he can't prove he is right.

What we have is a choice between ways of speaking, and hence between ways of understanding.

the existence of all such supposedly unseen realities still relies on an implicit perspective. — Wayfarer

Remember when we went for a walk?

It's not the existence of such "unseen realities" that relies on a perspective. That's your step too far.
Yes, "whatever judgements are made about the world, the mind provides the framework within which such judgements are meaningful" - All you can conclude here is that the judgements are mind-dependent. I agree.

What we have is a choice between ways of speaking, and hence between ways of understanding. — Banno

You don't have to pick, though. You can have as many theories as there are cards in a deck. They're all myths.

It's not the existence of such "unseen realities" that relies on a perspective. — Banno

Epochē is withholding of judgement concerning that which is not evident. All of your supposed 'unseen realities' are the subject of conjecture and included in that category.

And here is, again, where I appeal to both physics and cognitive science. Physics has demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that the purported fundamental constituents of material reality do not have a meaningful existence outside the act of measurement which specifies them.

Cognitive science understands that what we construe as objects comprise a synthesis of sensory data and judgement (per Kant), and we can't say anything about what they are outside that.

What their existence might be outside of any perspective is meaningless and unintelligible, as a matter of both fact and principle. — Wayfarer

Of course, but the same applies to the things of this world. If the "in itself" is "meaningless and unintelligible, as a matter of both fact and principle", that fact does not give any grounds for thinking it is mind-dependent.

So you have experience which can be said to be mind-dependent, and you have all that lies beyond possible experience about which we can know and say nothing at all based on anything other than what we are capable of imagining.

All that said, if we know nothing at all about the in itself then we don't know that it is not spatiotemporal or that it is not differentiated in ways isomorphic with our experience. We ourselves are after all, on that view, as noumenal as the rest of reality.

Physics has demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that the purported fundamental constituents of material reality do not have a meaningful existence outside the act of measurement which specifies them. — Wayfarer

How can you justifiably claim this when you also claim that the in itself is "meaningless and unintelligible, as a matter of both fact and principle"? Physics itself is a part of human experience and by your own argument could only tell us how things are for us. So, if that is true it is by definition and thus trivially true that for us "the purported material constituents of material reality do not have a meaningful existence outside the act of measurement which specifies them". But it certainly does not follow that they have no existence outside of our measurements. and in any case to say that would be to contradict yourself.

it certainly does not follow that they have no existence outside of our measurements — Janus

That's precisely the point! Whatever 'particles' are, they are not defineable until they are measured. This is the whole conundrum of modern physics, in a nutshell. It's why Bohr said 'if you're not shocked by quantum mechanics, you can't have understood it.'

As it happens, I've written an essay on that. It is based on critiquing Penrose's realist objections to quantum mechanics.

when it comes to the existence of any object, we will intuitively say, “well, the object is there, but we can’t know where it is, until we locate it or measure it. Isn’t that obvious?” But this is precisely what the pioneers of quantum physics called into question. And bear in mind, the objects in question had, up until then, been presumed to be the “fundamental building blocks of reality”! But in quantum physics, the answer to the question, “where is the object?” can only be given as an approximation, described by the wavefunction equation, ψ. There is no definite thing at a definite location until it hits the screen and leaves a mark —until that point, there is only a hazy range of possibilities. But as noted above, the act of observation seems to condense the hazy wave into a definite entity. This is the mysterious “wavefunction collapse”. What exists before, or apart from, that observation is the central mystery. It’s like Lewis Carroll’s Chesire Cat, which vanishes leaving only its grin.

Whatever 'particles' are, they are not defineable until they are measured. — Wayfarer

You mean they are not defined until they are measured, which is tautologically true. We can only define them by measuring them, (or their effects, since we cannot see them). They must be definable else they could never be measured in the first place.

In any case our inability to intuitively grasp what is going on in the microworld lends no credence to mysticism or spiritualism, which seems to be what you and many others seem to want to find there.

~

Physics has demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that the purported fundamental constituents of material reality do not have a meaningful existence outside the act of measurement which specifies them. — Wayfarer

A little ambitious. You jump from that to there being a mind to do the "measurement", which is not justified. "Measurement" is a loaded term.

Cognitive science understands that what we construe as objects comprise a synthesis of sensory data and judgement — Wayfarer

And yet they do not doubt that there are things that provide that data.

You presume spirit and then see it everywhere. But if one does not presume spirit, the evidence is less convincing.

You don't have to pick, though. — frank

Yep. As I said ways back, it's about choosing how best to talk about medium-sized small goods. Better to supose that they do not cease to exist when you forget about them.

As I said ways back, it's about choosing how best to talk about medium-sized small goods. Better to supose that they do not cease to exist when you forget about them. — Banno

Very true.

And yet they do not doubt that there are things that provide that data. — Banno

No doubt. But they're not things until they're cognised.

You presume spirit and then see it everywhere — Banno

I never use the word.