They are supposed to be objections to Aristotle, so yes, of course they do. You might as well have objected to Mr. Rogers by telling us that you prefer people who put on shoes. Mr. Rogers puts on shoes in every episode. — Leontiskos

I don't exactly object to classical logic, though -- I'm saying it has limitations, not that it's wrong in every case.

To clarify -- the wiki on syllogism has a clear rendering of what I mean by classical logic:

There are infinitely many possible syllogisms, but only 256 logically distinct types and only 24 valid types (enumerated below). A syllogism takes the form (note: M – Middle, S – subject, P – predicate.):

Major premise: All M are P.
Minor premise: All S are M.
Conclusion/Consequent: All S are P.
The premises and conclusion of a syllogism can be any of four types, which are labeled by letters[14] as follows. ... — wikipedia

etc. etc.

Notice how these can be rendered in predicate logic in that article. These things aren't at odds, exactly. It's only that they are different.

And so it goes with non-classical logics. These aren't opposed, per se -- they rely upon a different set of assumptions and look for the patterns of validity after that.

Now in a given philosophy we'll want a particular logic, or particular logics for particular ends, but the logician need not adhere to one philosophy. Why would they? What would the point be, given that here the logicians are doing their thing without Aristotle's assumptions?

As has been pointed out numerous times, this is just gibberish. What do you mean by (1)? — Leontiskos

It's the name for a sentence.

A name denotes an individual.

The individual is an English sentence.

The sentence is "This sentence is false"

(1) is a shorthand to make it clear what "This sentence" denotes.

In a logical sense there's no reason to exclude this individual if we want our theories of logic to be entirely general -- to apply to all individuals. Denoting a sentence is surely not violating logical possibility -- it's the nefarious choice of self-reference with the "... is false" predicate which breaks the logical ambition and creates a paradox that calls for an answer.

One answer, which you've provided, is that the sentence means nothing.

It's not the only one though.

I am not sure if you can have an "epistemic endeavour," that is unrelated to being though. What is our knowledge of in this case? Non-being? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'll quote Gillian Russell here from the opening of her One True Logic?:

Logic is the study of validity and validity is a property of arguments. For
my purposes here it will be sufficient to think of arguments as pairs of sets and
conclusions: the first members of the pair is the set of the argument’s premises
and the second member is its conclusion. An argument is valid just in case
it is truth-preserving, that is, if and only if, whenever all the members of the
premise-set are true, so the conclusion is true as well.

The domain of logic, then, might be thought of as a great collection of
arguments, divided into two exclusive and exhaustive subcollections, the valid
and the invalid, the good and the bad, and the task of the logician as that of
dividing one from t’other. — Gillian Russell

Suppose we had a formal system that answered all our questions about physics, or maybe some area of it like fluid dynamics. How could it have "no relation" to being? At the very least, it would have a relation to our experiences, which are surely part of being. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Humean skepticism comes to mind -- it could be that our logical discourse is constrained by our mental habits rather than by being. So it goes with causation: We cannot help but to draw causal inferences by our habits of thought, but the inference we draw is unjustified (insofar that we accept Hume's notion of causation, at least - but here I'm trying to point out how an anti-realism is possible, so that's enough).

I'm more tempted to say that if we have no more questions about physics this says more about our lack of curiosity than it does about our knowledge of being.

I want to do leap year physics. You get a nice three year break. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Here's the bit where reality kicks in: You can do leap year physics. But you won't be paid for it.

What you'll be paid for is tracking patterns which people like to track, which usually involves manipulating the world in some way which we perceive as regular. It's this social bit that stops the infinite possibilities, though that's not exactly a pure rational reason or a philosophical gatekeeper.

A good example of how re-thinking how we phrase the apparent paradox can provide new insight. We have "This sentence is false". It seems we must assign either "true" or "false" to the Liar – with all sorts of amusing consequences.

Here is a branch on this tree. We might decide that instead of only "true" or "false" we could assign some third value to the Liar - "neither true nor false" or "buggered if I know" or some such. And we can develop paraconsitent logic.

Here's another branch. We might recognise that the Liar is about itself, and notice that this is also true of similar paradoxes - Russell's, in particular. We can avoid these sentences by introducing ways of avoiding having sentences talk about themselves. This leads to set theory, for Russell's paradox, and to Kripke's theory of truth, for the Liar.

Again, we change the way we talk about the paradox, and the results are interesting.

And again, rejecting an apparent rule leads to innovation. — Banno

Right!

And far from rejecting classical logic it seems to me to give clarity to its underlying intuitions. These extensions of logic aren't so much an Undermining of All Thought, but in the critical tradition which explores terra incognita.

Super cool stuff.

But these are so far from counterexamples to Aristotle that they are all things he explicitly takes up. — Leontiskos

Do they need to be counterexamples to Aristotle?

I don't think so. I think that I'd simply have to want to utilize some other logic -- and there are some good reasons for putting Aristotle aside in these cases. First and foremost because we're not strictly utilizing Aristotle's logic here. The Logical nihilist or pluralist or monist isn't putting together All/Some statements into the classical forms -- The Background here has incorporated parts of Aristotle (classical logic is still taught!), but isn't appealing to Aristotle's commonsensical intuition about the logic of objects.

But I don't think statements behave exactly like objects do (and I am terribly allergic to commonsense -- it's not that I don't get it, but if the appeal is to commonsense then one need not study logic in the first place. There are far more lucrative and stable careers than academia)

Basically we don't need to explicitly refute Aristotle in how we do logic. We are free insofar that we create something interesting.

Every time I have seen someone try to defend a claim like this they fall apart very quickly. The "Liar's paradox" seems to me exceptionally silly as a putative case for a standing contradiction. For example, the pages of <this thread> where I was posting showed most everyone in agreement that there are deep problems with the idea that the "Liar's paradox" demonstrates some kind of standing contradiction. — Leontiskos

(1) is false. (1)

Read that as (1) being the name of the sentence so that the sentence references itself like we can do in plain English.

At face value it's clear to see that if 1 is false then it is true. And if it is true then it is false. If we combine this with the law of the excluded middle we must conclude that (1) is both true and false.



This is the notion of a dialethia. I went for a review before posting here and want to reference the SEP bit on paraconsistent logic in the liar's paradox article because just below it has an entry on dialetheism.

Priest (1984, 2006) has been one of the leading voices in advocating a paraconsistent approach to solving the Liar paradox. He has proposed a paraconsistent (and non-paracomplete) logic now known as LP (for Logic of Paradox), which retains LEM, but not EFQ.[10] It has the distinctive feature of allowing true contradictions. This is what Priest calls the dialetheic approach to truth.

He has some interesting examples, but this would take us very far astray.

It's more that here seems a reasonable approach to the liar's paradox that produces interesting and novel results in logic.

What if in place of Kant’s Transcendental categories we substituted normative social practices? Doesn’t that stay true to Kant’s insight concerning the inseparable role of subjectivity in the construction of meaning while avoiding a solipsistic idealism? Don’t we need to think in terms of normative social practices in order to make sense of science? — Joshs

That's a lot closer to home to my way of thinking -- and why I like Feyerabend's deconstruction of Popper as a kind of object lesson for all philosophies of science which try to encapsulate the whole within some system: what I'd call totalizing.

Though at that point we would be kind of in the realm of both Hegel and Marx -- the historical a priori looks a lot like those big theories of history to me. And that's getting close to a similar totalizing project, at least on its face.

Sure, if by "pure" we mean "ignoring the content and purpose of logic." But even nihilists and deflationists don't totally ignore content and the use case of logic. If you do this, you just have the study of completely arbitrary systems, and there are infinitely many such systems and no way to vet which are worth investigating. To say that some systems are "useful" is to already make an appeal to something outside the bare formalism of the systems themselves. "Pure logic" as you describe it could never get off the ground because it would be the study of an infinite multitude of systems with absolutely no grounds for organizing said study. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The difference I intend between pure (as such) logic and applied (transcendental) logic is that we can do logic without addressing questions of being, whereas the latter gets into the weeds of various philosophical questions (but simultaneously presupposes a logic to get there). Logic is an epistemic endeavor dealing with validity whereas the question of the relationship of logic to being is getting more into metaphysics rather than logic.

One might push back on Aristotle's categories sure, but science certainly uses categories. The exact categories are less important than the derived insights about the organization of the sciences. And the organization of the sciences follows Artistotle's prescription that delineations should be based on per se predication (intrinsic) as opposed to per accidens down to this day....

That said, if all categories are entirely arbitrary, the result of infinitely malleable social conventions, without relation to being, then what is the case against organizing a "socialist feminist biology" and a "biology for winter months," etc ?

They certainly wouldn't be useful, but that simply leads to the question "why aren't they useful?" I can't think of a simpler answer than that some predicates are accidental and thus poor ways to organize inquiry. — Count Timothy von Icarus

And to highlight why this is difference -- this line of questioning you're exploring here will be an interesting question whether we are logical monists, logical pluralists, or logical nihilists. Deciding the first question doesn't necessitate a relationship between logic, the mind, being, and knowledge. We could be logical monists on the basis that there is one true logic, but we don't know what that one true logic is yet -- inferred from the conflicting accounts of logical laws -- but retain the notion that there must be One Logic to Rule them All (or, that, in fact, one logic does rule them all, if you just incorporate this already implicit Lemma....)

And simultaneously hold that there is no relationship between logic and being -- i.e. that the One True Logic is the result of the structure of knowledge requiring this or that axiom, but could still be anti-realist projections which have no relationship to being.

The purpose and scope of logic is certainly being considered by logicians, it's just that these are different questions. (also -- I, for one, am all for a socialist feminist biology for the winter months :D )

I'd put it that the question which asks about the relationship between logic and being is no longer doing pure logic. The distinction I think of that makes sense of what you're saying is Kant's distinction between logic as such and transcendental logic: Logic as such deals with the forms of inference, whereas transcendental logic deals with the application of logic to our sensible intuition (which turn out to be the categories, much in the vein of Aristotle)

For my part I don't see much need for a transcendental logic because I don't think our sensible intuition conforms to the categories in the manner which Kant seems to believe -- in some sense what Kant does is define the absurd as outside of the scope of cognition, and yet the world remains absurd for all that: We can choose the categories we want to use in describing the world, and they change far more than what is desirable in a logical system.

As evidence of this I reference the difference between Kant's categories and the most general scientific theories -- I don't see any need for a group of categories to make sense of science. I don't think the structure of the mind or the minds relationship to being is the site of knowledge, but of comfort.
 
Basically I see the appeal of Aristotle and common sense as a mistaken appeal -- it makes sense of the world, but need not hold for all empirical cases: There are times when a person is in contradiction with themself, or an organism has a contradictory cancer, or a social organism is composed of two opposite poles (hence Hegel's use of contradiction in attempting to understand a social body or mind).

And I, for one, take up the liar's paradox as a good example of an undeniable dialetheia: A true contradiction.

Especially because the liar's sentence gives justification to P2 in the original argument: No principle holds in complete generality.

I agree.

Being wrong, and realizing it, is like removing a splinter which also gives me a new perspective.

At one point I thought it a pain but I've come to see how being wrong is the better joy than being right.

pretty sure the cracked pots are an exponential function such that if you allow 3 or 4 it's containable, but 6 or 7 might make all the non-crackpots become pots that can be cracked.

F(x) = x^C where "C" is the cardinality of the set of "pots"

That's a super cool video.

More research must be done, but if the idea survives the test of criticism it seems to support punctuated equilibrium.

Right.

So there exist some modern cynics, or some rough equivalent there -- all social backgrounds include people who want drugs or are mentally ill because social backgrounds, or philosophies, don't select for those things.

The rest just want drugs or are mentally ill. — Shawn

I don't think one needs a philosophy or lifestyle to want drugs or be mentally ill.

The discussion would then be ongoing, keeping Logicians in paid work... — Banno

Given the benefits of the various logics I see no downsides.

I am not so confident to become a cynic as of soon. — Shawn

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutter_punk is the modern phenomena I associate with ancient cynic philosophy.

Overwhelmingly this thread has focused on the foetus, without consideration of the person bearing it. What is at stake in the discussion of abortion is the dignity of the person who is to cary the foetus. Now unlike a blastocyst, there can be no doubt as to their humanity, their personhood. — Banno

That's where I end up in my thinking -- the personhood of a foetus is more in question than the personhood of the mother, and so the rights of personhood should favor the mother when considering which rights to favor.

Personhood is where I start, but in the end I don't think that you can defend the notion without a notion of ensoulment when it comes to the foetus. And, while that is a perfectly respectable position to live it's not good for law because not everyone believes in ensoulment, and the removal of a mole or cyst ought not be a moral conundrum from a materialist point of view.

To answer the titular question:

Post on others' posts. If you start a new topic in the main forum try to utilize some resource or other -- you'd be surprised how many people of thought about similar things to yourself and usually they have insights. Even news articles or wikipedia pages are fine for this.

And The Lounge is pretty free-range -- most anything goes other than explicit rule violations.

And if you think some decision is wrong then that's what the feedback forum is for -- reversing decisions that were wrong.

Any questions?

I'm wrong in saying you're here to promote your website, given what you've done thus far. You convinced me here:

Is it ok if I refer to "Bubblespeak" in the future? I don't mind.
I can unpublish my website, I don't mind.

But people are asking for more information about my project. Even in this thread, unenlightened was asking more. How should I handle that? Earlier I said, look at my profile, you'll find a link. Mentioning that was allowed, according to jamal. I said a few times Google "Babelspeak", maybe that I shouldn't do?

I am reasonable. But please give me a workable solution. — Carlo Roosen

You came up with reasonable solutions and followed through on them. That demonstrates willingness to cooperate, which is good!

As I said, I'm a friend to odd ducks. I'm typing these things to you in the hopes that you can get along with the bunch.

We're all odd ducks, to be frank. And some of your thoughts aren't as original as you think.

But they are philosophical, which is good!

Sounds like my life!

I want you here. New minds and new ideas are good.

We're just trying to teach you how to do it, is all. As philosophers do.

No, I did not read your SEP article yet. I will, a bit later. — Carlo Roosen

Cool!

Let me know what you think after reading it.

I'm here as a friend to odd ducks, and my posts are meant to help.

Some persons are able to put 2 and 2 together in a way that doesn't make sense to others. I'd call this sense-making: Your post had NO mention of your website, but we took a peek at your website before responding and saw how much of it was like your posts.

Changing the name is a good sign, IMO. It means you're not here to simply have the name repeated to make it more popular on the 'net.

Did you read the SEP article I linked?

Your website can be online, it's the promotion of it that's forbidden on the front page. You can keep the website in your profile too! If you look at my profile I have my twitter linked.

One of the things here is -- you're not the first person in the world to have thought about a Super Artificial Intelligence. Especially amongst philosopher-enthusiasts. We are challenging your ideas, in the spirit of philosophy, and it seems you want to double down more than discuss.

No worries. I have my own odd obsessions that I try to avoid in talking to others, too, because I've found that hearing others' viewpoints helps me more than "preaching the word"

And, if you want to "preach the word", at least on a philosophy forum, you ought use philosophy resources. It's not like philosophers decided to stop thinking this whole time, so you could learn something from them. As I noted, they've even been thinking about AI. The thing you're supposedly interested in.

People on the forum said it is not allowed to talk about fundamental reality... — Carlo Roosen

It's allowed, though I'm at least skeptical of the notion.

Others have pointed out how your book has expressed ideas that philosophers have alread thought over.

"What is Fundamental Reality?" would at least be a question to explore.

Talking about "fundamental reality" like you're the one who knows the AI-Human system will SEE THE REAL -- well, philosophers have thought about this before, and this is part of the resistance you are receiving.

Did you read the SEP article I linked?

Is it ok if I refer to "Bubblespeak" in the future? I don't mind.
I can unpublish my website, I don't mind.

But people are asking for more information about my project. Even in this thread, unenlightened was asking more. How should I handle that? Earlier I said, look at my profile, you'll find a link. Mentioning that was allowed, according to jamal. I said a few times Google "Babelspeak", maybe that I shouldn't do?

I am reasonable. But please give me a workable solution. — Carlo Roosen

I think you came up with some workable solutions here. It would be a lot harder to make the argument that you're here for self-promotion if you didn't promote your website, and instead stuck to things like this encyclopedia page, or other sources aside from your website.

Basically if you use philosophy articles to explore the questions you're good, but if you use your website then it seems like you're here to promote your website rather than discuss the philosophical implications of your ideas.

Just because I have a different opinion, that is no reason to ban me. — Carlo Roosen

This is not the reason banning is being considered.

The reason is from the Site Guidelines:

Advertisers, spammers, self-promoters: No links to personal websites. Instant deletion of post followed by a potential ban.

One Simple Trick that Kantians hate!

I said "the opposite is true" because I don't think any experience is inherently the same as another.

A quote buried in II. THE FACTICITY OF THE FOR-ITSELF that seemed to relate to the original question

...
The billiard ball which rolls on the table does not possess the possibility of being turned
from its path by a fold in the cloth; neither does the possibility of deviation belong to the cloth; it can be established only by a witness synthetically as an external relation
...

My thinking here is that insofar that you could establish that a given beast can establish the possibilities of objects like above then perhaps then we'd be dealing with the class of mind to which Being and Nothingness applies. But then there's a part of me that realizes this part is deeply respondent to Descartes, given the context, which makes the question of beasts pretty interesting.

But I think it'd be the sort of thing that needs further research to really ascertain. It's not an easy question you can just look up the answer to.

Makes sense. Truth be told I'm not sure EiH is exactly any of those either or if it's just a softer expression of the same. Part of why I'm revisiting him is to get a clearer understanding between this aspect of existentialism and the phenomenology of Levinas who is softer, but is also linked to Heidegger

(plus I think Sartre's metaphysics get along with absurdism fairly well -- the being-for-itself as human world, and being-in-itself as the absurd, meaningless plenitude)

There is a time for harshness on the path to kindness, I think, so these things aren't totally at odds. What if I'm a natural asshole and it feels good to be an asshole, after all? Then we could say that insofar that we are an authentic asshole we are in good faith. But insofar that this criticism puts kindness above authenticity then the harshness needs to be directed towards that impulse of cruelty.

I'm not sure. I've heard it claimed that he walked back his position from Being in Nothingness in Existentialism is a Humanism because the existentialism of B&N is not as soft or warm and inviting -- i.e. humanistic -- as the existentialism of EiH. Thus far I agree, but I'm also at the beginning parts which are all about the self reflecting on the self, and harsh ("authentic") self-analysis is kind of the uniting theme of the beginning of the book. But there are later chapters which deal with Being with Others which I'm curious if they slot in with EiH.

That's close to my understanding of Being and Nothingness's description of bad faith. Bad faith seems to me to be a uniquely human phenomena, or at least described from that vantage point in the book, because it's all about wondering how a singular self can lie to themself -- if one says to themself that they perform like a waiter because they are a waiter is to reduce oneself to an object-like thing, which is to not recognize one's freedom as a reflecting conscioussness -- or, to frame the explanation that explicitly ignores being-for-itself in favor of being-in-itself, to use the basic metaphysical terms he's developing.

The beasts aren't being considered in the book, at least with where I'm at now. (I just finished the bit on bad faith)

At least in Being and Nothingness Sartre doesn't begin with whether or not God exists as a basis for our freedom. It's a metaphysical question which calls into question Descartes' Cogito by developing a distinction which separates the reference of "I" in "I think" from the reference of "I" in "I am" (rendering "I think, therefore I am an equivocation between being-for-itself and being-in-itself)-- so insofar that animals could use language to confuse themselves into think they are either purely an object or purely a thinking creature and therefore not responsible for their actions because of either belief then we'd be talking about bad faith and the curiosities that Sartre brings up about a being who is in conflict with itself as its being.

The question of animals would be an empirical one, I believe.

Laws are not invented wholesale. Laws are based on an inheritance. Most of that inheritance comes from a time before the United States.

I'm tempted by 's position as a negotiable middle ground.

I reduce the question of abortion to the question of personhood when we want precision in our laws and so forth: But mostly I don't think the law is well equipped for the contexts of life, and so should be permissive. In addition I believe in bodily autonomy: I don't like to phrase it as ownership, but in the legal frame I think every individual owns their body.

Further, most of the laws have been written by men -- I don't see our representative democracy as a palliative for the history of patriarchy that has dominated women's bodies so that men knew that their fucking made a kid.

Somewhere along the line the past women got treated like property, and that still echoes today. The way men look at children isn't the same as women look at children, and I bet the laws would be different if women were the ones with say on the laws (especially if the matriarchy won, but even if we simply restricted such discussions to thems who are more effected today I think)

:D

True.

Good analogue. I had similar thoughts with respect to

Though, to split the difference, I agree with

If someone points out, as @Tarskian did, that the set of unexpressed sentences is larger than the set of expressed sentences I'd agree, but would not come to the conclusion that the title of the OP states.



And I wouldn't bother with making statements about "the overwhelmingly vast majority" after that, as obviously those are the words of the bean counters who want a ledger to prove a point, which philosophy doesn't bother with (when it's good).

I like Erich Fromm's theory of love in The Art of Loving because he casts it as an art that one can learn.

A paragraph on Wikipedia summarizing:

Fromm contrasts symbiotic union with mature love, the final way people may seek union, as union in which both partners respect the integrity of the other.[24] Fromm states that "Love is an active power in a man",[26] and that in the general sense, the active character of love is primarily that of "giving".[27] He further delineates what he views as the four core tenets of love: care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge.[28] He defines love as care by stating that "Love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love", and gives an example of a mother and a baby, saying that nobody would believe the mother loved the baby, no matter what she said, if she neglected to feed it, bathe it, or comfort it.[28] He further says that "One loves that for which one labours, and one labours for that which one loves."[29]

Also, I got many good references the last time I broached this topic, and even though I followed up on those readings the question of love is still one that is philosophically interesting to me.

I wonder if we can get past these factors? I'm framing it as a question, not as a claim. — Tom Storm

I'm hesitant to reduce philosophy to psychology -- whether or not our psychology allows us to examine our own beliefs, it's still a part of philosophy to attempt to do so. The image of philosopher here is of Love as described in Symposium

...
The truth of the matter is this: No god is a philosopher or seeker after wisdom, for he is wise already; nor does any man who is wise seek after wisdom. Neither do the ignorant seek after wisdom. For herein is the evil of ignorance, that he who is neither good nor wise is nevertheless satisfied with himself: he has no desire for that of which he feels no want.'

'But who then, Diotima,' I said, 'are the lovers of wisdom, if they are neither the wise nor the foolish?'

'A child may answer that question,' she replied; 'they are those who are in a mean between the two; Love is one of them. For wisdom is a most beautiful thing, and Love is of the beautiful; and therefore Love is also a philosopher or lover of wisdom, and being a lover of wisdom is in a mean between the wise and the ignorant.
... — Plato, Symposium

Where, as I read it at least, the philosopher is explicitly one who doesn't overcome their folly, but is somewhere between the state of the Gods who know wisdom and the self-satisfied fools.

I don't know how to tell exactly when that's the case, though. Symposium is a mythic dialogue, and the section I'm quoting is explicit myth-making where the philosopher is compared to Love, a god birthed.

On the whole, though, it seems that others' are more inclined to pick apart my beliefs than I am, so the idea of an individual overcoming their biases isn't even necessary because the individual doesn't do that alone.

Well there is no metric for measuring if a belief is correct or not and that is the reason why being neutral while making a decision is important because only 1 belief or a few beliefs regarding a certain topic can be correct and most beliefs are wrong and that's why mathematically being neutral and making decisions without showing baisenes towards your own beliefs is the best option in most of the cases — QuirkyZen

How is "being neutral" not a belief? Is it not a belief of yours that it is better to be neutral in making decisions?

So it seems you have a belief without a metric for measuring your beliefs correctness, in which case you should be neutral towards that belief, which would seem like you ought not have a belief at all about whether one ought be neutral, or let their personal beliefs influence their decisions, or to not let their personal beliefs influence their decisions.

Insofar that scientific description is taken as a basis for ontology: Why not make the claim that the photon demonstrates that we don't need mass for something ot be physical?

That's the attitude I try to adopt. If I find a philosopher uninteresting but others find them interesting I try and figure out what it is about them that's interesting -- usually there's something there and I've just missed it.

But, on the other hand, I can understand people making a choices because there's just a lot of philosophy, so if you get bitten by the bug you'll eventually have to decide what is more or less interesting to you.

But that seems to just come down to preference. I'm not sure there's a reason why this or that is interesting to me outside of my own background or what-have-you.

Though, upon reflection, that indicates that when I learn I learn about something.

I'm not skeptical about realism: only still thinking it through, and mostly tempted by absurdism.

If I were raised by wolves, or not raised at all -- feral children come to mind for me -- then I think my beliefs about directionality would be different, even though I believe there's a non-imaginative, realist metaphysic that I don't know how to articulate.

I think I'm tempted to put that in the same category -- unless someone showed me which was my north hand when then... absolute or relative, I would not have known it without that showing.