I can hardly understand the metaphysical thesis that there is in the world, beyond our practices, a brute fact that makes a statement true. — Almagro

:up:

I also think it'd be best to avoid this notion, precisely because it's so unclear. The world is (or perhaps ought to be described in terms of ) all that is the case, as a system of facts.

It's very tempting to try to talk about (invent! using talk ) something that can't be talked about.

This might be more relevant to the latest discussion, from the same source:

If you don’t understand the sentence “The surgeon performed a cholecystectomy,” I can explain it to you by telling you that it is true just in case the surgeon removed the patient’s gall bladder. And we can say more general things, such as: Any claim of the form ~p is true just in case p is not true. But it would be a mistake to infer from this sort of appeal to truth conditions to express propositional contents that one can explain what propositional contents are by appeal to the conditions under which sentences are true. That would be a possible order of explanation only if one can make sense of the notion of truth prior to and independently of making sense of the notion of propositional content. And there is good reason to think that that cannot be done.

He goes on to endorse the prosentential account.

According to the prosentential theory of truth, whenever a referring expression (for example, a definite description or a quote-name) is joined to the truth predicate, the resulting statement contains no more content than the sentence(s) picked out by the referring expression. To assert that a sentence is true is simply to assert or reassert that sentence; it is not to ascribe the property of truth to that sentence.

This is an appealing approach if it can be made to work.

Here's another theme, appropriate to Pilate not staying for an answer. Is truth important ? Or do we really (only) care about warrant and justification ?

Suppose you are standing in a darkened room, and seem to see a candle ten feet in front of you. I attribute to you the belief that there is a candle ten feet in front of you. And so long as you have no reason to think anything funny is going on, I take you to be justified in that belief, since you can see it. So I take you to be committed to there being a candle ten feet in front of you, and entitled to that commitment: to have a justified belief. Nonetheless, I will not take it that you know that there is a candle ten feet in front of you if I don’t believe that—if, for instance, I, but not you, can see that there is an angled mirror five feet in front of you, and that the candle you see is actually quite close to you, hidden from you by a curtain. My assessment that your justified belief is not true is a way of expressing the fact that under the circumstances described, I am not willing myself to undertake commitment to the claim I attribute to you. Assigning some belief the honorific status of knowledge is important, because in doing that I am classifying it as being of the kind that I think everyone should employ as premises in their own inferences, should appeal to in their own reasoning. These are the beliefs that I take to be eligible to serve as reasons on the basis of which to form further beliefs. For I take it both that any good inference in which they figure as premises is one whose conclusions I should endorse, and I take it that good reasons can be given to believe them, in turn. Thus, these are the beliefs that I take it deserve to spread.
...
Truth is not a concept that has an important explanatory role to play in philosophy. Appearances to the contrary are the result of misunderstanding its distinctive expressive role. The word ‘true’ does indeed let us say things that in many cases we could not say without it. But when we understand what it lets us say, and how it does that, we will see that the very features that make it expressively useful make it completely unsuitable to do the sort of theoretical explanatory work for which philosophers have typically enlisted its aid.

The expression “…is true” looks like a predicate that ascribes a property. If it were, it would be a very special kind of immediately and unconditionally normatively significant property: a kind of “to-be-believed-ness” property. No wonder metaphysicians, ethicists, and especially epistemologists have regarded it with fascination. Nor is its normative weight exclusively of an abstract, disinterested, ethical sort—a high ideal that is a suitable object of selfless commitment by those of good character, lofty aspiration, and sufficient leisure. For, we are assured by the philosophical tradition, the truth of our beliefs is the touchstone and sole possible guarantor of the success of our practical endeavors—including the lowest and most narrowly self-interested. Having beliefs with the special, desirable property of being true is the only reliable way to get what you want—to imbue your desires with the most important and desirable property they can aspire to: being satisfied. So truth is of supreme practical importance.

Besides its central significance for both the most ethereal principles and the most egoistical practices, truth has also seemed to hold the key to our inmost, ownmost nature. For ... we are not merely sentient creatures, but also sapient ones. That is, in addition to consciousness in the sense of having feelings and sensations—awareness in the sense that underwrites a distinction between being awake and asleep—as our mammalian cousins such as cats do, we have states with conceptually articulated contents that can be expressed in sentences. We can believe that the international monetary system needs to be reformed and desire that it be reformed. These are the propositional attitudes that can constitute knowledge. And the standard way to understand the propositional contents that distinguish these states from the images and raw feels that are the contents of merely sentient states is that they can be assessed as to their truth. The meaning of a declarative sentence, expressing the content of a possible belief (or desire, or intention), consists in the circumstances under which it would be true. To grasp or understand that meaning or content just is to know its truth conditions: how the world would have to be for it to be true. So the sort of mindedness that distinguishes us from the beasts of the field—the sapience that gives our species its very name—consists in the relations we stand in to the very special property of truth: that we can think things that could be true, desire and intend that they be true. Take away that relationship to truth and you take away our sapience, relegate us to the cognitive torpor of mere sentience. This sapience- constituting directedness at truth is the essence and the motor of our ascent out of that primeval sea into the broad highlands of thought. Philosophical concern with us, our nature and our spirit, is philosophical concern with truth.

This familiar philosophical scene, with truth at center-stage and in the leading role, is no doubt uplifting and inspiring. But I think it is deeply confused and almost totally wrong. Consider to begin with the idea that truth is the property of beliefs that conduces to the success of practical projects based on those beliefs. This thought is so deeply entrenched that some pragmatists have even sought to define truth as the success-producing property of beliefs. But even those not inclined to endorse such an order of definition have felt free to appeal to the intimate connection between the truth of beliefs and the satisfaction of desires for other philosophical projects—for instance when scientific realists argue that the at least approximate truth of our scientific theories is the only possible explanation for the practical success of our technologies: the extent to which they provide powerful instruments for getting what we want (at least, for some kinds of things we want).

The idea is that it is the truth of my belief that there are cookies in the cupboard that explains the fulfillment of my desire for cookies. This is an intuitively compelling thought, but we need to be careful with it. The truth of that belief will not lead to satisfaction of my desire in the context of the collateral false belief that the cupboard is in the kitchen, rather than in the pantry. And, to vary the example, the false belief that one can tan leather by boiling it with birch-bark will result in practical success if it is combined with the false collateral belief that the oak in front of me is really a birch. So the practical utility of a belief’s being true is wholly hostage to the truth or falsity of the collateral beliefs with which it is combined.

Well then, perhaps one should only talk about the truth of a whole set of beliefs—indeed, of all one’s beliefs. The requirement that we banish all error from our beliefs is a tall order, and probably not very realistic. But surely that would reliably produce successful, desire-satisfying actions? Not really. For the effects of collateral ignorance are just as bad as those of collateral error. If I am unaware that wet weather has swelled the cupboard door so that it cannot be opened, all my true beliefs about the location of the cookies and of the cupboard will be of no practical avail. But banishing ignorance as well as error seems over the top: is truth really only of practical use to the omniscient?

from "Why Truth is not Important in Philosophy"
https://sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Texts%20Mark%201%20p.html

But this is back to the ghost story ! Sensations aren't the inputs of inferences. We need claims.

In essence, basic statements are for Popper logical constructs which embrace and include ‘observation statements’, but for methodological reasons he seeks to avoid that terminology, as it suggests that they are derived directly from, and known by, experience (2002: 12, footnote 2), which would conflate them with the “protocol” statements of logical positivism and reintroduce the empiricist idea that certain kinds of experiential reports are incorrigible.
...
Experiences can motivate a decision, and hence an acceptance or a rejection of a statement, but a basic statement cannot be justified by them—no more than by thumping the table.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/#BasiStatFalsConv

On an intuitive level, I see the temptation...but I'm also wary of this prelinguistic blob. I think awareness ought to be understood linguistically. The ineffable doesn't get us anywhere. If you, on the other hand, start talking about objects in your room and light hitting your retina...we can all work with that.

Like this:

Statements can be justified only by other statements, and therefore testing comes to an end, not in the establishment of a correlation between propositional content and observable reality, as empiricism would hold, but by means of the conventional, inter-subjective acceptance of the truth of certain basic statements by the research community.

Tentatively warranted and therefore jointly accepted premises.

We see N. I'm in my room, I see lots of things about it but I don't describe them. — Michael

There's the written sentence "the cat is on the mat" and then there is the cat on the mat, which is an animal sitting on some fabric. — Michael

Does this mean there exists $f : \mathbb{E} \to \mathbb{N}$ such that f('the cat is on the mat') = the cat's being on the mat ? I take $\mathbb{E}$ to be the set of English assertions and $\mathbb{N}$ to be the set of non-linguistic reality bits. But what do we ever see of $\mathbb{N}$ but transformed English assertions ? It's like the thing-in-itself. Is this just an issue with use versus mention ?

It seems that we basically have f('P') = P, so that f removes quotes, transforms mention to use.

Yes, but it doesn't boil down to "P". That's the point. — Michael

But surely we don't intend P as 'P.' Else why invent the notation for mention rather than use ?

Nor is 2 + 2 = 4 intended as a fact about numerals rather than numbers.

One might be tempted to talk of the meaning of 'P,' which is fair enough. But we might also consider an equivalence class of intersubstitutable expressions.

Are we forced into talk about something 'behind' our expressions ? Perhaps 'mind' is right there in them and as them (not singly but their relationships.)

I don't need to be able to point to it for it to be the case, just as I don't need to say "the cat is on the mat" for the cat to be on the mat. — Michael

OK, but what is it to be the case ?

To me, it all boils down to P.

P is the case. P is true. P.

Or is there a difference that makes a difference?

The grand old Correspondence Theory (of truth)...

If nyet, there really is no point to...anything, oui monsieur? — Agent Smith

But that is merely to assume the CT, and to therefore think there's only void and darkness without it.

Qui ?

I do not suggest that nothing is true...only that maybe being true is radically simple thing, like some kind of default intention in communication (but that's not quite it, just exploring.)

"What you say is true because it corresponds to that [the thing I point to]". — Michael

This also takes us into the ineffable, the gestural. I grant that it's probably the intuitive source of the CT.
It deserves credit for what it gets right.

I could just point to the cat on the mat and say that your statement is true because it corresponds to the thing I'm pointing at. — Michael

I agree that you pick a case where correspondence is more plausible, but this is like choosing the little pieces of language that conform to the otherwise broken nomenclature theory.

To what would "truth is correspondence" (if true) correspond ? The concept of truth ? Perhaps. But one could not point.

I feel like the alien or the cat. i’m not sure I know what a human-like belief , or a proposition is. I don’t think it’s simply my own ignorance, but the fact that when concepts like ‘belief’ and ‘proposition’ are analyzed rigorously in terms of their conditions of possibility, we find no ‘there’ there. — Joshs

I really am open to what you say, but my theme lately is that...here we are public with only words to trade. I don't know how else to settle belief rationally. It's a fact that AI is pretty good at translating simple speech, and these models are built on mountains of scraped data, actual human conversation...so there is a strong pattern in our doings, strong enough for a machine to catch on.

I don't deny that there is stuff in our box of arbitrary complexity and richness, but I don't see how it can play a direct role.

Some argue that human intentionality is continuous with animal intentionality, more a matter of difference of degree than of kind. — Joshs

I love animals, and I'd like to believe this. I guess it hinges on how we take 'degree' and 'kind.' If it is only a degree, that degree is so substantial that we are currently alone in the conversation.

You could always re-read the correspondence theory as saying that a proposition is true if it corresponds to some object/event that exists/happens in the world. — Michael

My issue with this is ....to what does it correspond...if not the reiteration of that which it is supposed to make true ?

"The cat on the mat" is true if the cat is on the mat.

I guess I want to avoid some weird stuff that is and is not language at the same time, some kind of quasi-physical cat-on-the-mat-ness. It's as if we are tempted to say too much, to merely muddy the water....

I'm not sure if this is compatible with correspondence or redundancy theory, but I don't think truth is as absolute as most people think, I guess. — Jerry

I'd only say that truth seems grammatically absolute, in a way that I hope to articulate further.

It's like a knight on the chessboard.

I think I am using 'fact' in a biased way (accidentally taking for granted a point of view which is not yet established.) I would 'like' to understand facts as true claims.

I want something like facts to serve as the inputs of inferences.

Me writing "the cat is on the mat" isn't the cat being on the mat. The writing isn't the thing being written about. — Michael

:up:

I agree that a string of letters is not a cat on a mat.

My first thoughts on the matter of truth is that truth seems to be a human construction. — Jerry

In my view, there's some truth in this. I'm reluctant to say that there is truth without assertions. Ignoring rational aliens, it seems that truth is not apart from us.

It is when you introduce a human or some sort of human-like observer that we start carving up the world, identifying real things that happen (truth?) and things that don't (falsehoods?). — Jerry

One of the problems is this carving-up: the world-carved-up as opposed to the world-not-carved-up. It seems that the raw or uncarved world is just Being, which is basically Nothing (no distinctions make it a ineffable clump). To say anything about it is to carve carve carve.

The issue with the first is that it entails that all propositions exist: — Michael

I'm not 100% comfortable with the move from English to symbolic logic, but your using 'means'
looks pretty good. "P is true" basically means "P" (the "is true" doesn't add anything.) (I guess that's how I understood your #1 in the first place.)

Not that we have to acknowledge truth-makers corresponding to truth-bearers. Just flagging up the likely misunderstandings coming down the line. — bongo fury

You mention one of my concerns, truth-makers, which seem like unnecessary entities.

Could we all just drop "state of affairs" and "proposition"? Serious suggestion. Because even the former ends up standing for "sentence". With those perhaps disavowing correspondence but prone to having it both ways. — bongo fury

You probably know that I agree. I want things public. Enough with the hidden.

Or is it a property of a state of affairs, whether conceived as a concrete event (region of space-time) or something more abstract? Which latter might be what many people mean by proposition. What a quagmire! — bongo fury

:up:

It is a quagmire !

Could you say more ?

When I was in my twenties, evading the Union Army as it burned Atlanta, I became an existentialist, — jgill

:up:

For any named reason one will reduce said reason with the above "just" operator, categorizing the reasons people give as apparent.

The real, here, is . . . well, what, precisely? — Moliere

:up:
It's nice to see someone else call out this effervescent real.

Kant would never have lasted as long as he has, as the GoTo Guy of epistemological metaphysics, if he insisted the will and pure reason occupied the same legislative chair. — Mww

He hasn't lasted though. We owe the model T our respect perhaps, but we don't drive one today. Even in his own time he had his critics, as documented in Beiser. He was (justly) accused of idealism (in a self-subverting way), while also obviously trying to have his Jesus and his Newton at the same time (which doesn't age well, not for those who are comfortably godless). I'm pretty sure you can out-nerd me on Kant, and this isn't the thread for a detailed discussion, but I can't resist challenging this 'go to gut' characterization.

The ermit. This is the card which features your portrait today. Why? Because he carries his Lamp of Truth, used to guide the unknowing, — javi2541997

Nice pick, friend !

I love the image.

....and at the very end of that “scholar” summarizing, is a get-out-of-jail-free card, or, as I already mentioned, suited himself for his own ends: — Mww

Like you perhaps ? Or me ? We present the claims that seem most reasonable to us for criticism. The individual has a role to play. We settle which beliefs are warranted together, in clashes like ours right now.

Need I remind you that I insisted that Kant himself can eat worms ? Except inasmuch as he offers reasons that bind us all...

which is fitting, insofar as perusal of the various translations of the texts themselves, say nothing about reason’s autonomy. — Mww

I hope your point doesn't hinge on the choice of a synonym.

"Autonomy is an individual’s capacity for self-determination or self-governance."
https://iep.utm.edu/autonomy/

"It is requisite to reason’s lawgiving that it should need to presuppose only itself, because a rule is objectively and universally valid only when it holds without the contingent, subjective conditions that distinguish one rational being from another." Kant

"Kant further developed the idea of moral autonomy as having authority over one’s actions."
https://iep.utm.edu/autonomy/

You can of course assert Kant scholarship featured on the IEP is all wrong.

You’re doing that; reason must accept that which is for that which is not, in the simplest non-contradictory way possible. That which is accepted into the system is nothing but representation, for acceptance of the thing itself is absolutely impossible. An entity for an entity, pure and simple. — Mww

Prove it. And I don't mean prove the triviality that the metaphor of representation is strong indeed in the tradition of philosophy. Nor do I deny that this metaphor is both tempting and even useful. Do we not compulsively employ a metaphors of vision, of seeing.

The thing-itself is a problematic concept. Tempting, I admit, but problematic. I reject the idea that we have no choice.

Do we need the mountain-in-itself ? Is that not already just the mountain ? Perhaps the world just 'is' that which is the case. What I'm skeptical about is whether there's much or even anything to say about truth, and/or about what makes a claim true rather than warranted. The grammar here seems to be absolute and vanishing. If true claims can be unwarranted and unwarranted claims true, perhaps we muddy the water by looking for something behind what the claims claim to be about.

......is mere sophistical subterfuge. — Mww

If we allow for your 'private' 'Cartesian' (pseudo-)concepts, then only Kant really knew or ever could know what he really-really-really meant and his kangaroo cousin may well have devised a Critique of Pure Kangaroo Reason without being vain or dexterous enough to write it down --- or perhaps it was scratched in turf of Tasmania, unnoticed by us.

Our minimum rational epistemic situation must includes the possibility of discussion. Just as reason is one and universal, so must be the language in which it occurs. The philosopher as such is 'primordially'/'grammatically' in a (shared) language-world, subject to a universal, autonomous reason. I claim that this is implicit in any concept of the philosopher that we can reasonably recognize as significant and binding.

Which Tarot card features my portrait today ? Is it grizzly Scientism or spooky Mysticism ?

The gist of my plaint was what I saw as a knee-jerk Kantianism that should maybe doubt itself, taking itself as it does for the figment of a dream. That we should justify our beliefs, and hold them fallible, is almost to be taken for granted among philosophers. No need to dress it up with Kant/Hoffman, both indulgently ornate theorists, to make such a point. As I've been arguing in other threads, doubting the world while taking the self for granted, however traditional, is not so sensible. The concept loses its intelligbilty just as 'it's' body has its ears and eyes and nose dissolve into the theory's pixels ---without only made sense as the output of those worldly devices, battered by light and air, the real stuff.

But of course, as I explained, the meaning of "0", as it is commonly used by mathematicians, is ambiguous. — Metaphysician Undercover

Only in the sense that they have so many exact, formal systems that successfully employ zero that you'd want to know which successful specification of the concept was context relevant.

It's like the cat calling the potty blank when metaphysicians chide mathematicians for ambiguity

I've more recently witnessed writers claim that certain species of crows somehow performed some sort of language less 'Bayesian reasoning'. — creativesoul

It seems pointless to guess at what-it's-really-like-for-a-crow. If a model agrees with the data (I don't know the details), that seems like progress. Some physicists thought of atoms as mere aids to calculation, not really there, just useful for prediction, etc.

What is needed is a bare minimum criterion for what counts as thought and/or belief. — creativesoul

It'd be fun to find such a thing, but it seems indeed like a tall order. Does an ameoba have its reasons ?

Something like this ?

...is to be the kind of antiessentialist who, like Dewey, sees no breaks in the hierarchy of increasingly complex adjustments to novel stimulation – the hierarchy which has amoeba adjusting themselves to changed water temperature at the bottom, bees dancing and chess players check-mating in the middle, and people fomenting scientific, artistic, and political revolutions at the top (ORT, 109).

When we try to parse the cat's belief in propositional terms, we're confusing the contents of our report with the content of what we're reporting upon. — creativesoul

It need not be confusion. What if we tried to understand aliens who seemed to have a language ? Less confusion there, intuitively, but we are still trying to model behavior using postulate internal entities ( attributing human-like beliefs to a non-human, probing for explanatory/predictive power.)

Reliably true conclusions about the thought and/or belief of others requires more than just outward observable behaviours. — creativesoul

What if selves are thought of as being constituted by their doings and sayings ? Above you suggest a box that cannot be looked into by others, an approach I consider to have been shown wanting.

Given that there are any number of possible reasons why we may exhibit some behaviour or another, behaviour alone cannot always reliably inform us of anothers' thought and belief. — creativesoul

I suggest inferentialism.

And with all this talk about "little ghosts" and "pineal glands" which has nothing to do with what I'm saying,I really have no idea what you are talking about. — Janus

I'm teasing all you quasi-Cartesians for not seeing the logical disaster, despite it's having been pointed out long before me.

I'll try again; concepts are not public; usages of them as expressed in communicative language are. — Janus

Concepts, koncepts, khancepts, conecepts. @Mww already tried this. Given the context, our minimal epistemic commitment as foolosophers, the theme is clearly public communication. In your doctrinal subjectivism, 'concepts' must be understood as something in the ectoplasm. Very well then. Keep that word for yourself, asking 'usages' to the lifting. (Or maybe we can have a ladder of 17 species of concept-like entities. ) All I care about is the 'surface layer'...the public language that philosophers must use to settle beliefs rationally together. Cling if you must to your ontology of secret things, but you must propose and defend it publicly (with words that don't mean whatever you want them to mean) to play philosopher rather than mystic. Try the game yourself. What is necessary for the concept of a philosopher to make sense ?

It is always individuals that understand concepts, and they each have their own unique understandings which is the result of natural diversity and the diversity of experience and circumstance that brings with it different associations and affects, — Janus

I grant this, just as I grant that the nearsighted person and the colorblind person see the same tree differently. Who ever claimed otherwise ? As a rule, we never stop mastering concepts, often adding new ones to those we are mastering. As a tribe, new concepts are forged and some old concepts are discarded, fall out of use. There's no need to deny the central role of the self in all of this. Here's a metaphor that seems rightish to me (note that gap between the minimal epistemic given and more adventurous conjectures, please) : members of the tribe run slightly different versions of the same softwhere, trading updates, keeping one another 'honest' in terms of syntax/concepts/usage as if on a more organic type of blockchain. No one need to dance the Charleston or Justice perfectly for it to be a working concept.

Now admittedly I am basing this on my own understanding of my own experience and extrapolating to assume that it is more or less the same for others. I don't know this, just because their experience is private and inaccessible to me except to the extent that what they tell me is accurate, but this just goes to reinforces the point. — Janus

I am familiar with that view, but I find other theories more plausible. 'Experience' names a ghost. I don't deny it's utility in ordinary language, but I question its epistemological use in more careful talk. Perhaps it's better to just note that we believe people when they say they have a toothache, and that we accept certain inferences involving the concept. "He couldn't sleep, because he had a toothache." 'Experience' has a public grammar or its nonsense. Some would treat it as a useless X, denying it to the arbitrarily convincing P-Zombie and attributing it to the otherwise identical Real Boy -- missing the absurdity of an epistemological concept without public criteria for its application.

I add what I consider backgrounding of the OP, from, as might be expected, the philosopher who got me thinking about our minimal situation, along with our ability to articulate that situation, to make the norms that were already binding more explicit.

...Discursive commitments (to begin with, doxastic ones) are distinguished by their specifically inferential articulation: what counts as evidence for them, what else they commit us to, what other commitments they are incompatible with in the sense of precluding entitlement to. This is a reading of what it is for the norms in question to be specifically conceptual norms. The overall idea is that the rationality that qualifies us as sapients (and not merely sentients) can be identified with being a player in the social, implicitly normative game of offering and assessing, producing and consuming, reasons.

I further endorse an expressive view of logic. That is, I see the characteristic role that distinguishes specifically logical vocabulary as being making explicit, in the form of a claim, features of the game of giving and asking for reasons in virtue of which bits of nonlogical vocabulary play the roles that they do. The paradigm is the conditional. Before introducing this locution, one can do something, namely endorse an inference. After introducing the conditional, one can now say that the inference is a good one. The expressive role of the conditional is to make explicit, in the form of a claim, what before was implicit in our practice of distinguishing some inferences as good.

.

That's why we need to be reminded by thinkers like Kant and Hoffman, that we have no way of knowing Absolute Truth. — Gnomon

I see. So is that an absolute truth ? Or just a guess ? Just 'appearance' or 'phenomenon' ? Does the person a in private dream somehow figure it out ? And assume that everyone else must also be in a private dream ? But isn't this just more of that private dream ? Mere illusion ?

The trick is its vainglorious humility, its wilting arrogance.

But they always— always — ignore externalities. That’s not an accident. We’re supposed to forget about the outside world, the community, or other people altogether. What matters is ME and MY transactions. — Xtrix

:up: .

While technically not a fascist, we can all see the way the wind is blowing and given half a chance he'd be only too happy to rule as a fascist - a prime example of "fascist creep" in US society. — Benkei

:up:

we stopped treating mathematics as uncovering truth about the world or as something real, and more as a formal set of rules that we stopped treating negatives as something spooky. — Jerry

:up:

I dabbled in nonstandard analysis for a week or two, but induction on hyperreal integers was so unintuitive that it felt like cheating. In case you haven't looked into it, a hyperreal is an equivalence class of sequences of real numbers which are equal on an ultrafilter (a weird kind of subset of $\mathbb{N }$, and you can't actually construct one of these ultrafilters but only prove they exist somewhere out there.) Anyway, there are all kinds of infinities and infinitesimals in this system-- and it's just as solid as the ordinary real numbers logically. Cool..but I couldn't take it seriously, lost heart. Too weird, too unreal.

(Well, shucks, Mr. Bill. If you’ve seen enough injustice, you know what justice is, because it isn’t that.)

It isn’t that ad infinitum still doesn’t tell you what it is, and if you are not informed as to what it is, you cannot explain why it seems otherwise. So the lackadaisically disinterested end up with, “well, damned if I know. It just is”, then go about their day kicking the cat or running over the trash barrel some fool left in the driveway. — Mww

This is a bit sentimental.

Is it not a triviality that justice is one of the broader and more ambiguous concepts ? Yet rationality is also broad. Is it justice for the guilty to go free and the innocent to be punished ? I think not. Now ask me who the guilty are, who the innocent. Those who did and didn't do the crime. And what is crime ? A violation of the law. And what is law ? ...

Personally I find Rawls plausible.

Rawls's theory of "justice as fairness" recommends equal basic liberties, equality of opportunity, and facilitating the maximum benefit to the least advantaged members of society in any case where inequalities may occur. Rawls's argument for these principles of social justice uses a thought experiment called the "original position", in which people deliberately select what kind of society they would choose to live in if they did not know which social position they would personally occupy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rawls

.....which implies the concepts used in private thought don’t actually matter here. That’s fine, concepts are nothing but notions in a speculative theory with respect to human cognition. Something makes private thought possible, or, there is no such thing as private thought. Pick your own preferred bondage, right? Would you saw off the limb you’re sitting on, by allowing that humans think, but find no authorization for allowing it? — Mww

There's no need to deny private thought...or the necessity of brains and hearts. The point is just that public 'koncepts' are a sine qua non in a way that private concepts are not. Naturally I think we do have private concepts, and I 'know' (intuit) what people are trying to say when they talk about the hard problem. But I can also see the logical disaster in any denial of public concepts...direct self-contradiction, not even subtle, as in the related case of thinking one's virtue is behind and not constituted by one's virtuous acts. 'Trust me: this music is better than it sounds.'

Conceptions refer to something represented by its object, but there are concepts that refer to something that does not have an object that represents it. Cause is a concept, but there is no representable cause object, but only objects represented as being caused or causal. Beauty is a concept, but there is no beauty object, only objects that are beautiful. — Mww

Representation isn't the only possible metaphor here, and we don't have to have to accept an entity for a noun. In lower level math, students are taught to use interval notation like $( - \infty, 23]$. We have a symbol/word for infinity, but it's not in the real number system, despite being written down just like numbers that actually are.

Must we assume that 'the' has a referent ? Must we assume that words are tags for immaterial entities in the first place ? Or are thoughts just patterns in our doings...which are also (along these same lines) not to be understood in terms of some 'pure' materiality, a mere shadow cast by a sheet with eyeholes cut in it.

I will grant that this is one of the temptations toward some kind of Platonism, and Sellars treats it specifically, trying to do justice to our intuitions without multiplying entities unnecessarily. I don't pretend that anyone has said the last word. I only mention that we have options, that the issue is open.

Sellars often described his realistic naturalism as ‘nominalistic,’ but the point is not so much to deny that there are abstracta as to tell us what language that uses abstract singular terms is doing for us and how differently it functions from language using concrete singular terms. If we understand how abstract singular terms function, the claims of the Platonist metaphysician seem an elaborate (and perhaps misleading) way to make a simpler, more pragmatic point. First, Sellars argues that the then-prevalent standard of ontological commitment —being the value of a variable of quantification— is mistaken (GE, NAO). Such a criterion makes the indeterminate reference of quantified variables more primitive than any form of determinate reference. This is incompatible with Sellars’s understanding of naturalism, and he claims it also gets the grammar of existence claims wrong. (Sellars construes quantification substitutionally; see Lance 1996.) Sellars proposes a different standard: we are committed to the kinds of things we can explicitly name and classify in the ground-level, empirical, object-language statements we take to be true.

In ordinary language we often talk about meanings, properties, propositions, etc., thus apparently committing ourselves to the existence of such abstracta. Sellars interprets such talk as material mode metalinguistic speech about the functional roles of expression-kinds. Thus, a sentence such as

Euclidean triangularity entails having angles that sum to two right angles
conveys information about the function of the •triangle•, namely, that its use (in Euclidean contexts)entitles one to a •has angles summing to two right angles•. Similarly, Sellars interprets fact-talk as material mode metalinguistic speech about truths. The only things to which we are ontologically committed by the use of abstract singular terms are linguistic items: specifically, expression-tokens that participate in complex causal systems which involve, inter alia, normatively assessable interactions between language users and the world. In Sellars’s reconstruction of it, talk of abstract entities does not have explanatory force, but is involved in making explicit certain linguistic norms.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sellars/#Sema

Pre-given carries a temporal implication. Pre-....what? — Mww

I just mean that humans slowly extended their concept system and that individuals do the same. I don't think humans are born with all the concepts that humans might eventually use explicitly. Concepts are invented. Individuals master more and more of them as they develop intellectually. Using concepts is perhaps best thought of as a skill.

but thought so because dividing by 0 gives infinity, and going smaller would have to mean going past infinity. Strange indeed. — Jerry

I think this supports my case that the lack of formalization of real analysis was part of the problem. Of course we can't divide by zero, but we can take limits, which is more reliable when they've actually been strictly defined. Weierstrass is one of my heroes.