When I dream of something that's happened before while the dream is real it makes sense to me to say that it's less real than the event I experienced. And the memory of the event could likewise be thought of as less real. — Moliere

I don't know if there is a True, or Prime, reality. If there is, I don't know if the event is in that category. But if we take it as the starting point, then would the dream or memory of the event be True-1? Actually, the dream of the event wouldn't exist if there wasn't a memory of it. So the memory is True-1, and the dream is -2.

And would my memory of the dream of the event be True-3?

If I tell you of my dream about an event, is your thought of the event True-4? Or only True-2, because your thougt is more about the event itself, rather than about my memory or dream of the event? And your thought about my dream is another True-2?

I suspect my scale is not valid. I suspect things are equally real, although in different categories. A table and thought of a table might be equally real, but one physical and the other mental. I don't see the logic of saying mental things are not real, since mental things, like meaning and intention, are the reason humans have shaped the world to the degree we have. Difficult for me to think the Empire State Building, Mona Lisa, Bach's unaccompanied violin music, War and Peace, and the internet exist because of things that are not real.

And therein lies a considerable proportion of semiotics, among other things. — Wayfarer

Could you spell this out a bit?

I can make no sense at all of "degrees of reality". Reality is not something that can be measured, the idea 'real' is the binary opposition to 'iimaginary' or 'artificial'. Something cannot be partly real and partly imaginary or artificial in its wholeness. — Janus

Same for truth, right? A statement is true or false. And yet, there's an idiom that rarely finds its way into philosophy: "There's some truth in what you say." I find it pretty interesting that people sometimes assign a degree of truth to what someone says, rather than following the binary, all-or-nothing model typical in philosophy.

Two readings of that idiom come to mind: (a) some of what you say is true, and some of it is false; (b) some of the truth is encompassed by what you say, but some of it isn't.

Most of the time, we're talking about an aggregate of statements, a whole story, for instance. We can go with (a) and count the individual statements that make up the story as true or false, and the 'degree of truth' would be something like a ratio. I just want to note, first, that there's a pronounced atomism to this approach, so if you have any objection to atomism, you ought to be a little uncomfortable with that. Besides which, this is not how philosophy usually treats aggregates of statements: we and them all together, and if any one of them is false, the story as a whole is false. ― At least that's how we're used to dealing with arguments. Even if it's defensible there, it looks pretty bone-headed for dealing with anything but deductive arguments. Admitting that a story can fall somewhere on a spectrum between true and false, as people often do, is clearly more sensible.

And then there's (b), where you've gotten some of the truth, but not the whole truth. Obviously this doesn't mean treating every speech as an account of the entire universe; it's usually a judgment that something importantly relevant has been left out. "Yes, I did all the things you say, just as you said, but you don't know why, so your story is incomplete in a way that makes a difference." Something like that.

I think this is, to some degree, central to @Wayfarer's approach. A materialistic account of life or consciousness, for instance, is fine so far as it goes, but it leaves out something important. This is what @Wayfarer says about science broadly, that it leaves out the first-person perspective and this is no incidental omission. There is some truth in natural science, according to him, but not the whole truth, and not because we're just not finished, but because we are excluding something important. More than not looking for it, when we stumble across it, we push it back out.

So that's a defense of the idea of 'degrees of truth'. My previous post attempted to straightforwardly apply the idea, and forthrightly say there's more or less reality in an account or a discussion, and I think that would work in both the (a) and (b) senses.

It doesn't seem to have much to do with the hierarchical ontology @Wayfarer is talking about, but I wanted to see if I could find a use on my own for something we might call "degrees of reality".

I am little surprised that so far no one has suggested another approach ― maybe again because it tends to be treated as a binary. That would be claims that there is a hidden reality, a deeper reality than the one we know. I suppose people don't usually say that makes this one less real, but simply illusion. Always the binary. But if there's a reality behind or beyond this one, couldn't there be another behind that? Why assume there are exactly two, rather than admit that if there's more than one, there may be any number? In which case, it seems to me more natural to assume such realities are on a spectrum. (Even scientists sometimes seem to talk this way, if not in terms of reality then in terms of "what's going on": it seems to us one thing, but it's really something else; and behind that there's something even stranger; and we don't know what's behind that, but maybe the universe is a simulation, or a calculation, or something else quite different from what we expected a hundred years ago.)

Now if you hold such a view, your ontology of the entities in this "plane" might also be hierarchical, because some creatures are sensible of the other reality (or realities) and some aren't. Or at least have that capacity. Some can leave the cave of this reality and experience a higher or a deeper reality, and some can't. Most Christians seem to believe something a bit like this: we're only in this reality temporarily, and this whole reality is itself temporary; rocks and plants don't have an afterlife ahead of them, but we do, and we're not sure if Fido does. Entities here are of different 'ranks' because they have a different relationship to the deeper reality.

And so the question remains ― and I suppose this is for you, @Wayfarer ― whether the great chain of being and related ontologies are inherently religious in nature.

I've sketched some pretty mundane uses for 'degrees of truth' or 'degrees of reality'. Is there anything in between, any use for the idea that isn't religious or logico-linguistic?

I am little surprised that so far no one has suggested another approach ― maybe again because it tends to be treated as a binary. That would be claims that there is a hidden reality, a deeper reality than the one we know. I suppose people don't usually say that makes this one less real, but simply illusion. Always the binary. But if there's a reality behind or beyond this one, couldn't there be another behind that? Why assume there are exactly two, rather than admit that if there's more than one, there may be any number? In which case, it seems to me more natural to assume such realities are on a spectrum. (Even scientists sometimes seem to talk this way, if not in terms of reality then in terms of "what's going on": it seems to us one thing, but it's really something else; and behind that there's something even stranger; and we don't know what's behind that, but maybe the universe is a simulation, or a calculation, or something else quite different from what we expected a hundred years ago.) — Srap Tasmaner

Doesn't that construe degrees of reality like degrees of accuracy of its representation? The scientists aren't going to think that tables are less real than the compounds that make them up. Whenever people with science backgrounds say stuff like "People can't really touch each other because our atoms can't be in the same place" they're just zooted.

Maybe. But there is a certain sort of discourse that says things only appear to be a certain way, but are actually another way, but says so non-lazily, offering an explanation for why things appear to be a way they aren't really. It gives a bit of 'substance' to the appearance itself, doesn't treat it as just a mistake. (Which is an option for everyday cases of taking an illusory view of something ― you're mistaken, indefensibly so.) The only reason I thought you might settle on degrees here ― rather than just appearance/reality ― is if you make this move more than once, so there are layers.

It's not important. Insofar as it's just a manner of speaking, it's probably not independently interesting but borrowing from our culture's religious conceptual inheritance. I guess.

Here’s a suggestion I don’t usually make: Do a classic ordinary-language investigation of the word “real.” After you list and explain the 986 different usages, pick the one you think is most useful for your philosophical purposes. End of story. Moral: “real” doesn’t have any single meaning whose correct application you can argue about.

(OK, maybe not quite "end of story" :smile: )

Moral: “real” doesn’t have any single meaning whose correct application you can argue about. — J

Not quite in the spirit of the enterprise though.

I've taken two approaches so far: one is to see if I might have any use for saying something has a higher degree of reality than something else, and I can imagine this being so, although it's a little weird; the other is examining what @Wayfarer in particular might find interesting about it, as he understands it, beyond it being something people used to think.

If it's just a marker of the difference between religious and secular worldviews, it is not interesting in itself. But if it is, at least in part, constitutive of that difference -- that is, if it makes more sense to say you're religious because you have such a belief than to say you have such a belief because you're religious -- then the idea has independent interest and could conceivably find a place in a hybrid worldview, or even in a secular one. But if it can't be made sense of without the support of religious conviction, I don't know that there's much to talk about. Philosophically.

Not quite in the spirit of the enterprise though. — Srap Tasmaner

True, and I admit to a lifelong dislike of the term "real". But when you say that you want to see if "I might have any use for saying something has a higher degree of reality than something else," this seems like a good way to go. One of the things we philosophers do a lot of is recommending or stipulating or otherwise offering a use of a term that makes sense for an interesting purpose. We can certainly treat "real" like that, as you're suggesting.

It is curious that the substance/mode or subject/predicate thing somehow gets tangled up with an historically somewhat religious question about whether there is some deeper, truer reality behind the reality we experience. And it's hard not to associate that tangling with Plato, and whatever cultural currents Plato was in touch with. (It comes up in Kimhi, I think, in discussing why we say mortality is a property of Socrates rather than saying Socrates is an exemplar of Mortality.)

The Kimhi connection is interesting. Are you thinking of the passage starting on p. 100 about "Socrates is wise / Diotima is wise"? So associating a person with a property would be Kimhi's functionalism, and associating a property with an example of it would be factualism? Or maybe you have something else in mind, but I like this. And I think I get what you're saying about how the ascription of an exemplary subject as partaking of a property makes the property look primary, and hence perhaps "realer" in the sense you're exploring.

Oh I never got nearly that far!

It's an old question. I think he mentions it in connection with negation because there's an argument (attributed there to Geach, I think) that we pick Socrates as the subject and mortality as the predicate because mortality can be negated but Socrates cannot. Which is a stupid argument, and also entirely misses Frege's point about force.

But that's a sideline of a sideline.

Yes, I'm talking about Forms. Why not say Mortality is manifested in, among others, this little temporal object called "Socrates", but Mortality is itself more enduring, more perfect, more real than such objects?

I think, in discussing why we say mortality is a property of Socrates rather than saying Socrates is an exemplar of Mortality.) — Srap Tasmaner

Exemplification's got the same kind of weirdness with existential import as the application of predicate to subject does, right? Socrates is mortal either takes a already individuated object with the name "Socrates" and predicates "is mortal" of it. Or alternatively you take the property "Mortality" as primary and somehow zip up a chunk of it into Socrates. Though such a property also does not admit of degree, surely, as beings are either mortal or they are not.

Spinoza in Ethics has a claim that the more real an entity is, the more attributes it partakes in. Which are like essential parameters of all that is.

The more reality or being a thing has, the greater the number of its attributes (Def. iv.). — Spinoza, Ethics Book 1,Prop IX

: for nothing in nature is more clear than that each and every entity must be conceived under some attribute, and that its reality or being is in proportion to the number of its attributes expressing necessity or eternity and infinity — Spinoza, Ethics Book 1, Prop X, note

The degree of reality there seems to be a bit like a volume switch between 0 and infinity, where 0 is those entities which partake in no attributes, and infinity is substance, God or nature. We're stuck on 2, thought and extension, rocks are at 1, just extension.

Another being-ish degree concept I'm familiar with is from Manuel De Landa, he conceives of individuation in a parametrised way. How diffuse or crisp are the borders between entities, how distributed is it in space or over a concept? Like a nation state with an open border vs a patrolled one, or who is granted a what type of keycard to buildings in a industrial estate respectively. Though an entity with little to no internal boundaries would still exist, like the components of a single element gas. (eg here for DeLanda using the concept).

The degree of reality concept thus seems to require a measure, an origin point, from which discrepancies are marked, and special graduations on that scale. For Spinoza this seems to be nature or God as the most real, at infinity, and entities are more real if they partake in more of God's attributes. 0 attributes being the origin point, and attribute participation counting being the measure.

The subject/predicate way of construing it doesn't seem to require a privilege regime of properties, like attributes, nor does it have an origin point by which all entities have their predications' realities measured.

To contrast the two, DeLanda's approach has degree properties that express the configuration of a given being, as does the subject-predicate approach. Whereas the Spinoza one has degree properties that just count how many attributes an entity partakes in.

Yes, I'm talking about Forms. Why not say Mortality is manifested in, among others, this little temporal object called "Socrates", but Mortality is itself more enduring, more perfect, more real than such objects? — Srap Tasmaner

I think what Srap's done as quoted is blend those two ideas together, in which a Greater Exemplification of a single Property (which properties?) makes The Exemplar more real. Spinoza had a good answer for which properties (predicates) make an entity more real, when you can say they partake in more attributes. So if X participates in attribute X1 and X2, but Y only participates in attribute Y1, Y is less real than X since it's only got one attribute. What's the answer when you've got one property and you're measuring how well something exemplifies it? How do you relate different strengths of exemplification of different properties? Is Everest more real than a dust mote on the count of Everest's largeness and mass?

Another, tangential thought about exemplification, is that if X is a maximal exemplar of P, then it will be minimal exemplar of P's antonym Q. Eg, the dust mote might be "maximally real" for smallness, and Everest might be "maximally real" for largeness, but that gives us no means to distinguish degrees of realty between entities measured on the same axis, without another theory that links properties together and tells you how their combination induces the degree of reality of the entity they apply to.


.

What's the answer when you've got one property and you're measuring how well something exemplifies it? — fdrake

Quick note: some of what you say about Spinoza suggests "is God" or maybe "is like God" as an interesting predicate, and then you get @Wayfarer's great chain of being by asking of each entity "How close to being God are you? How much of God is manifested in you?" something like that. One predicate to rule them all, one scale with which to measure being

One predicate to rule them all, one scale with which to measure being — Srap Tasmaner

It isn't a very good scale. It jettisons the distinctions between all properties. It's exactly the same scale which would let you answer "What's a bloody mary made of?" with "7" and be totally accurate.

If your intent is to make shit up, it's an excellent scale, imposing minimal constraint on your creativity. "Like our Heavenly Father, Everest is great ..."

If your intent is to make shit up, it's an excellent scale, imposing minimal constraint on your creativity. "Like our Heavenly Father, Everest is great ..." — Srap Tasmaner

I do really like the idea of trying to come up with a continuous graduation reality concept, which isn't an accuracy of a representation, or a way of counting things that already apply, or a way of saying how individuated an entity is. But I don't think it's possible, honestly.

I think the latter idea, parametrising individuation, is about as close as you get. But you still need a background of individuating processes for it. The origin point is an analytical posit rather than an ontological ground.

Or, in pastiche of Berkeley, everything exists in the mind of God. And then what? Does He care more about some of His thoughts than others? Find some more interesting? Forget some?

There really is no deciding between the world being one or being many, and some of this overlaps that. I think.

There really is no deciding between the world being one or being many, and some of this overlaps that. I think. — Srap Tasmaner

The oneness of the many is the manyness of the one, or something like that.

they're just zooted. — fdrake

Thanks. Another new word for me.

You can thank my students.

I think the latter idea, parametrising individuation, is about as close as you get. But you still need a background of individuating processes for it. The origin point is an analytical posit rather than an ontological ground. — fdrake

Why dont you build a giant paddock, and collect all the furniture of the universe inside of it. Then you can determine degrees of reality among the objects

Not sure about degrees, but of amount of confidence. As Russell said (forgot where) the highest degree of confidence belongs to my percepts. The second "lower" confidence would be the report of other people's percepts. The last would be our confidence in our theories about the world.

Why dont you build a giant paddock, and collect all the furniture of the universe inside of it. Then you can determine degrees of reality among the objects — Joshs

They were all real!

Why dont you build a giant paddock, and collect all the furniture of the universe inside of it. Then you can determine degrees of reality among the objects
— Joshs

They were all real! — fdrake

That was quick work! I was still trying to build my paddock.

And therein lies a considerable proportion of semiotics, among other things.
— Wayfarer

Could you spell this out a bit? — Srap Tasmaner

You mentioned that a collection of three sticks can make a triangle - which is a form. It signifies. A simple example, but the same principle is behind hylomorphism (matter-form dualism) and semiotics. A sign or symbol has an identity that transcends the material constituents from which it is composed.

I am little surprised that so far no one has suggested another approach ― maybe again because it tends to be treated as a binary. That would be claims that there is a hidden reality, a deeper reality than the one we know. I suppose people don't usually say that makes this one less real, but simply illusion. — Srap Tasmaner

That was the impulse behind my clumsy analogy of degrees of sanity. The delusional subject doesn't see 'what is'. But there's a sense in which, in much of pre-modern philosophy, even up to Spinoza, that by default, we're ('we' being the hoi polloi, the w/man in the street) not able to see 'what is', a mark of sagacity.

And so the question remains ― and I suppose this is for you, Wayfarer ― whether the great chain of being and related ontologies are inherently religious in nature. — Srap Tasmaner

It is associated with religion, but really it's a metaphysic, which is a separate matter, although in practice they're often closely associated. In this case, maybe a picture really is worth a thousand words.



Historically, as I mentioned, the idea of the great chain of being was associated with Ptolmaic and Aristotelian cosmology, with the superlunary spheres and so on. Which of course all came crashing down with the Scientific Revolution., and along with it the idea of an hierarchical ontology, replaced with the single dimension of matter-energy-space-time.

The Great Chain of Being was also a book published in the 1930's by Arthur Lovejoy (turgid read, by the way.) But that book is said to be the origin of an academic sub-discipline namely, History of Ideas, which identifies fundamental concepts that persist over time and shows how they evolve, recombine, and influence different cultural contexts across disciplines and historical periods.

But heirarchical ontologies are never going to go away, various iterations of them are already percolating throughout science, philosophy and religious studies.

Two readings of that idiom come to mind: (a) some of what you say is true, and some of it is false; (b) some of the truth is encompassed by what you say, but some of it isn't. — Srap Tasmaner

The more I think about it the less I seem to be able to distinguish between these two options, except perhaps in the second option there are not only or not even falsities, but in addition or instead, irrelevancies.

There is some truth in natural science, according to him, but not the whole truth, and not because we're just not finished, but because we are excluding something important. More than not looking for it, when we stumble across it, we push it back out. — Srap Tasmaner

@Wayfarer and I disagree on this point. I find The Blind Spot in Science to be making a point which is either trivial or irrelevant (or maybe those are the same). I have made the analogy with the epoché in phenomenology where the question of the existence of the objective world is "bracketed" for methodological reasons (since what is being investigated is the nature of our experience of things). In science the subjective nature of experience is bracketed because its aim is to investigate the attributes of the things themselves rather than the attributes of our experience of them.

There is some truth in natural science, according to him, but not the whole truth, and not because we're just not finished, but because we are excluding something important. More than not looking for it, when we stumble across it, we push it back out. — Srap Tasmaner

So, I think this view is mistaken. Of course science is not the whole truth and nor is phenomenology. They are investigations in two different paradigmatic contexts. How would you incorporate for instance subjective experience into the study of physics, chemistry, geology or even biology? Such an attempt, even if possible, would not be helpful, to say the least; or at least I can't imagine how it could be. I have made this objection many times to wayfarer, but he never attempts to address it. If you have any ideas along those lines l'll be interested.

Now if you hold such a view, your ontology of the entities in this "plane" might also be hierarchical, because some creatures are sensible of the other reality (or realities) and some aren't. — Srap Tasmaner

This is the nub I think. Religions come with a built notion of hierarchy. The shaman who knows things the rest don't. The prophets who have received revelation from on high. The angels and archangels and God himself, the absolute. All of this can be understood in terms of the human propensity for power over others, for unquestionable authority.

That said, I don't doubt that different people have different kinds of consciousnesses, and that it is possible to enjoy altered states where novel insights seem to abound. But they always remain subjective insights, there is no way to measure them such as to make the intersubjectively compelling. As a guru you would always be preaching to the converted, and people believe what they believe for their own reasons no doubt.

All in all the study of so-called higher consciousness cannot be made a science, even if reliable techniques to alter states of consciousness can be found and employed. There is no way , outside the intersubjective contexts of things that can be measured, to determine if my insight is more real or true than yours. And even if there were could that mean that my very being would be more real or true than yours?

One area I do see what appears to me at least a real difference is in the arts. Different works of art. music. poetry and literature seem to be more alive or more 'true to life than others, in multifarious ways. But again, this is not something that can be definitively determined or perhaps even determined at all, intersubjectively speaking.

I do really like the idea of trying to come up with a continuous graduation reality concept, which isn't an accuracy of a representation, or a way of counting things that already apply, or a way of saying how individuated an entity is. But I don't think it's possible, honestly. — fdrake

What if we returned to one kind of common talk about reality, where "real" means something like "vivid," "solid," "experientially impressive" -- that whole collection of descriptions?

So my written-down account of the dream I had last night isn't very real, relative to what I'm trying to describe. My memory, on which basis I write the description, is a little realer but still quite far from the dream itself. The dream, when I had it, was considerably more vivid, more real. And the subject of the dream -- a trip I took to Venice, let's say -- far exceeds the dream-images in reality. Until I reach the Form of Venice, or some other heavenly realm, it's the realest Venice I can know.

Something like that? I think this is different from "accuracy of representation" because the important parameter is "vividness of impression," not accuracy.

The Blind Spot in Science — Janus

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262553032/the-blind-spot/

I've already read the preceding article as you should know from our discussions. Why should I read the book? Is there something there that is not adumbrated in the article? If there is why not lay it out?

a reference for the benefit of anyone interested.

:ok: