How does the word "future" refer to something that is necessarily inaccessible? — Michael

At a minimum, it plays a role in inferences.

"John expected a big check, so he paid for the drinks."

We can't, hence skepticism. Knowledge of private matters is impossible. — Michael

This is not an empirical or a metaphysical discovery. It's a language trap.

"We each contain a box that no one can look into but ourselves."

"Why do you say that ?"

"I see it in my box."

you’ve been convinced by something like Wittgenstein’s account — Michael

Wittgenstein is one of many. I even tend to invoke Sellars, Ryle, and Brandom lately, all too dry and careful in their exposition to be taken as a guru or taken as taken as a guru. I take Wittgenstein to have showed how broken some of our philosophical thinking about mind was, without being all that interested in building a positive theory. Sellars put on his gloves and went to work, building one of the more coherent stories I'm aware of, managing to include both marriages, explanations, and electrons in the same tale, all hanging together reasonably well.

given that you seem to understand the conceptual difference between a genuine loving relationship and a convincing act, why wouldn’t your “semantic” contemplation lead you to agree with the sensibility of my position? — Michael

Pray tell how we might evaluate from the outside whether Harry loved Sally, having met her? Or how 'love' could have a public meaning if its referent is infinitely private.

I am merely asking what you are referring to when you say ‘X is good’ or ‘Y is bad’. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Are looking for some Entity like goodness or badness ?

--It's raining.
--What is ? What is raining !?!?

Why need there be one? — Isaac

:up:

Moral realists claim that moral facts are objective in the sense that the speed of light and the existence of Mercury are objective. — Michael

Is it not that certain statements about the speed of life are objective ?

The meaning of a word in a language is objective. We don't all have our own personal meanings, we couldn't talk if that were the case. — Isaac

:up:

Folks forget that objective is just unbiased.

TLDR : Justifying or asking others to justify norms-in-general is absurd.

FWIW, I got to my position by contemplating semantics, what us being able to talk implies.

No I wanted to be pulled out of the fiery pit of solipsism, ha! No worries, I respect your arguments. On to other hills to die on! — GLEN willows

:up:

Why not worry though that you have cancer or were adopted or will be attacked by a Venusian cloudshark in the shower three weeks from now ?

No, because I think and feel and see things that I never talk about or “act out”. I dream, I imagine, I lie, and so on. — Michael

Sure, this plays a role, but the more you emphasize it...the less it should and can interest us as philosophers. Or as the public. Even lovers share their worlds. "You can never understand my secret heart." Very well then. Next topic.

The ontological commitments of the Official Doctrine lead to the mind-body problem; the epistemological commitments of the Official Doctrine lead to the problem of other minds. According to the traditional view, bodily processes are external and can be witnessed by observers, but mental processes are private, “internal” as it is metaphorically described (since mental processes are not supposed to be locatable anywhere). Mental processes or events are supposed, on the official view, to be played out in a private theatre; such events are known directly by the person who has them either through the faculty of introspection or the “phosphorescence” of consciousness. The subject of the mental states is, on this view, incorrigible—her avowals of her own mental states cannot be corrected by others—and she is infallible—she cannot be wrong about which states she is in.[6] Others can know them only indirectly through “complex and frail inferences” from what the body does.

But if all that is mental is to be understood in this way, it is unclear how we are justified in believing that others have the requisite episodes or mental accompaniments. It would be possible, on this view, for others to act as if they are minded, but for them to have none of the right “conscious experiences” accompanying their actions for them to qualify as such. Perhaps we are in much the same position as Descartes who thought it made sense to wonder whether such creatures are automata instead.

The problem of other minds is compounded by even more serious difficulties given certain assumptions about the way language works. Proponents of the Official Doctrine are committed to the view that mental discourse serves to designate items that carry the metaphysical and epistemological load of that doctrine.

The verbs, nouns and adjectives, with which in ordinary life we describe the wits, characters and higher-grade performances of the people with whom we have do, are required to be construed as signifying special episodes in their secret histories, or else as signifying tendencies for such episodes to occur. (1949a, 16–17)

Ryle’s criticism of the Official Doctrine begins by pointing out an absurdity in its semantic consequences. If mental conduct verbs pick out “occult” causes then we would not be able to apply those verbs as we do; so something must be wrong with a theory of mental phenomena that renders so inadequate our everyday use of these verbs. For, according to the Official Doctrine

when someone is described as knowing, believing or guessing something, as hoping, dreading, intending or shirking something, as designing this or being amused at that, these verbs are supposed to denote the occurrence of specific modifications in his (to us) occult stream of consciousness. (1945, 17)

Ryle’s criticism of the view is that if it were correct, only privileged access to this stream of consciousness could provide authentic testimony that these mental-conduct verbs were correctly or incorrectly applied. “The onlooker, be he teacher, critic, biographer or friend, can never assure himself that his comments have any vestige of truth.” And yet,

it was just because we do in fact all know how to make such comments, make them with general correctness and correct them when they turn out to be confused or mistaken, that philosophers found it necessary to construct their theories of the nature and place of minds. Finding mental-conduct concepts being regularly and effectively used, they properly sought to fix their logical geography. But the account officially recommended would entail that there could be no regular or effective use of these mental-conduct concepts in our descriptions of, and prescriptions for, other people’s minds. (1949a, 17)

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ryle/#EpiSemCom

And by an exception you mean a coherent example of there being a private mind behind the public expression that cannot be known? Then what left is there to say? The case is proved. — Michael

I don't think you mean to do it (and maybe I'm guilty of it as well), but it's way too easy to jump back and forth between common sense and serious philosophy. Indeed, Ryle's big point is that the absurd ghost story is parasitic on common sense.

No one disputes the ordinary gab about secret thoughts or the possibility of a hustler accessing Mrs. Robinson's bank account by feigning desire. But you seem to think you can go from this triviality to doubting the world in which your point makes sense (and from which it derives its sense) in the first place.

I could be getting you wrong but....What norms compel you to found your norms in terms of atoms and void ?

"2+2=4 or Spoigle is a blothik" is true. — Banno

:up:

Obviously your belief is that no solipsistic one-mind existence could ever contain the illusion of a language, communication and conversations. I think we've hit the nub of it. You see I do think it's possible for it ALL to be an illusion, and you haven't proven it impossible. — GLEN willows

I grant that people sometimes dream without knowing they are dreaming. But is that really all you wanted ?

Obviously the dude in the dream who tells you you're awake is part of the dream. Grammatically, tautologically, trivially.

Again consider the example of a genuine loving relationship compared to a convincing act. — Michael

I totally get that, but that's a tangent, an exception. By your account, I can't know that my wife loves me. For her 'true' self is 'behind' all the nice things she does. Is it not better to say that we are constituted by all we do and say ? That the self is what the body does and says and the way its tracked by a community for honesty, decency, creativity, productivity ? What is objectivity? Why reason toward consensus at all ? Defer to the better reason ? Is philosophy not anti-self inasmuch as the self is the stubborn, selfish, superstitious child with no regard for the good of the tribe?

Without using, social, you and me, communication which all imply other minds, which you still haven't proven in the first place. — GLEN willows

The concept of 'proof' already drags in a world of folks who share a language in which they can make claims which might be wrong.

Don't expect us to prove you aren't dreaming. That's a different issue. People are known to dream. I vaguely remember asking myself in a dream once whether I was dreaming.

There is no thinking linguistic part; there is the thinking part, and the linguistic part, from which arises the old adage, “think before you speak”, or, “for that which you don’t know you cannot speak”. — Mww

As I see it, and I don't intend rudeness, you merely assert the old, 'theological' tale of Forms. I don't claim that thoughts and language are strictly equivalent. We can postulate nonlinguistic thoughts as we can postulate neutrinos...and see whether the theory is useful. But 'self-evident' non-linguistic thoughts sounds like mysticism. We might as well claim to hear the voice of God directly...or witness the flicker of an Inner Light.

The use of them is public, as a means to an end. The origin of them cannot be public, iff they are the product of an individual intelligence. — Mww

But I dispute very much that they are the product of an individual intelligence. Even the idea of an individual intelligence is problematic. I don't mean that a man can't write poetry in the woods. I mean that language is tribal software that an individual keeps with him.

The implications were obvious to the ancients, merely uncomfortable for the post-moderns, who would prefer to be told this thing is a basketball, rather than think about how it came to be one. — Mww

A strange claim ! The pomo cool kids love genealogies. Also, FWIW, much of my thinking in this thread was inspired by the self-contradiction I found in pomo. "Communication is impossible." "There is no truth." Blah blah self-subversion.

Yes, they do, otherwise, logical systems, and therefore human knowledge, is impossible. How the concept is represented.....the name assigned to it......may be contingent, but that which is named, is perfectly definite. — Mww

I consider this an extravagant claim. P, else squares are circular ! I'm no stranger to pure math, and I'll grant that, in this tiny corner of human life, we have relatively exact concepts. But that's because we've invented a beautiful formal game, a realm atypically subject to precise law, a generalization of chess.

From the understanding that we cannot know what someone's private thoughts and feelings are there can then be the understanding that we cannot know that someone has private thoughts and feelings. They might just be a philosophical zombie, engaging in the same public behaviour and making the same public expressions as a thinking, feeling person. — Michael

:up:

Recall that I said earlier that the P-zombie is the shadow cast by the ghost story. What, sir, is this mysterious X that separates the convincing P-zombie from the genuine article?

"There is a there there," I swear I swear I swear. "I know it but I cannot say." We are reduced to a minimal mysticism, a negative theology of Being.

Such thoughts and feelings might be expressed, but the private thoughts and feelings nonetheless exist and are prior to the public expression. — Michael

This is just the ghost story that Ryle mostly demolishes...the idea that the self is hidden behind everything it does. To be sure, we sometimes 'talk to ourselves.' No one denies this. But recall that it was an accomplishment once to read silently. We come at the end of a long development, and we are tempted to put the result at the beginning.

Your view (implicitly) takes lying as prototypical rather than anomalous, features the "seems" operator as if it came before simple assertion. I think Sellars has shown that this doesn't work, that 'seems that P' depends on the grammar of the simpler assertion 'P.'

Doesn't matter to what? To the practicalities of everyday life? Sure. But the philosophical questions regarding perception and ethics and epistemology and realism and so on can still be worth discussing, and likely have true and false answers.

At the moment your position amounts to saying that solipsism might be true but doesn't affect how I (or we) live. — Michael

No, sir, that's not at all the point. I like philosophy. Practicality be damned ! But getting to the truth about these concepts requires considering their origin in practical life. We need bread and government before the priests have the leisure to talk about talk about talk.

That seems quite psychopathic if I'm being honest. I don't just want my partner to "go through the motions" of a loving relationship. — Michael

You should of course infer then that you misunderstand me. Read charitably, friend. Please.

So whether or not someone is lying or being honest isn't important? It doesn't matter what they think or feel, only what they say and do? — Michael

Of course it matters. We can both speak with the vulgar and think with the wise.

Note please that what people think is still linguistic.

Perhaps 'feeling is first,' but justification is going to involve reports or ascription of feelings, typically used as the premises or conclusions of inferences. 'John's mad because Sally lost the car keys again.'

I don't know what you mean here. — Michael

What happens if we drop the assumption that concepts are something immaterial ? And along with that the whole material/immaterial distinction ? We can grant a sort of continuum. We don't have to pretend to forget ordinary uses of 'material' or 'mental.' But, as philosophers, we can try to consider the evolution of this distinction as an historical contingency, as a metaphor that became so dominant in a conversation that questioning it was literally unintelligible at first, except by a few weirdos. I take Wittgenstein, Hegel, Derrida, and others to have questioned it, shown its flaws.

Let's say that you and I agree to meet up at the gym. I then have to cancel. We then never realize that we misunderstood which gym we were to meet up at; I thought the one on the east side of town, your on the west.

There's stuff that goes on in our head that is never made public. — Michael

I don't object to the ordinary version of privacy. But note that both of us can be explained in terms of unexpressed beliefs attributed to us. Our driving or not to the gym is explained by our beliefs. They are in the same explanatory nexus. (We could also explain beliefs by sense organs being exposed to photons.) Private meanings (metaphysically private meanings, hidden from public concepts) do not make sense for this role...or any role, except as a mystified X marks the not, for there can be nothing to say about them.)

I asked you because the inner workings of your mind are private and I need to you publicly express them. — Michael

The 'important' part of my mind, as I see it, is the thinking, linguistic part. 'My' version of green doesn't matter, but my use of 'green' does. Even my secret use of 'green' in private inferences is manifest eventually in public assertions and the way I react to others' talk.

What is it that makes an individual valuable and interesting to the tribe ?

Why did you ask me what it means to exist if existence is a public concept? — Michael

How did you ask me why I asked you what it means to exist if existence isn't a public concept?

There wouldn't be misunderstanding. — Michael

If no one is wrong, no one is right. There wouldn't be misunderstanding. Just screeching primates who could no longer coordinate their doings in the world.

If that were the case then we wouldn't have to ask people what they mean. — Michael

Concepts need not be perfectly definite. Roughly speaking, they are patterns in what we do. We perform concepts. Away from practical life, such performances are less rote. It's not so clear which inferences ought to be licensed in terms of them. Tentative, exploratory uses compete for wider assimilation.

It's as if you are saying there is no law unless the law is so perfectly unambiguous and final that it does not require continuing interpretation and adjustment.

It is the ripping off of this natural view that is truly alien to us and thus strange: an unanimated, dead world, without any meaning, where beds don't have any intention whatsoever, is not our natural way of thinking of it. — Olivier5

Excellent point. Sellars' project is somehow bringing the 'living' world of parents and children into coherence with the scientific image (the dead world, sketched by equations.) How can we put norms and electrons in the same causal nexus, convincingly ? Heal the rift? Just as the German Romantics like Hegel wanted to do...

Doubting the real world is just escapism. It's like dreaming that your parents adopted you, and your real parents are in fact Tigger and Winnie the Poo. — Olivier5

I think it's also that, but philosophers were also, more respectably, trying to figure out the 'lens' and its distortions. Granting the metaphor that the 'real' world is mediated, it's natural to worry about the reliability of this mediation. It's a small step to an 'optics' of mediation (epistemology).
For instance:

The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects, in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate. — Bacon

Central to the solpisism subissue here is that of whether concepts are public or private. I claim it's incoherent to say they are not public.

"Concepts are private !"
"What's that you say ? I can only guess that you mean that the telephones on Neptune are made with real butter. "

The notion of "other minds" requires a degree of inference that comes after self-recognition. To understand that other people have minds you must first understand that you have a mind. — Michael

I doubt that in turn. To the degree that this is an empirical question, I defer to more serious students. But my prejudice is that differentiation is learned.

A typical example of this is a teenager finally getting around to questioning tribal norms. Another is just the philosopher who builds on and even turns against the common sense that makes him intelligible to his fellows in the first place...such as a reasonable theory of sense organs and sensations being extended to doubting the existence of those very organs, promoting meanwhile those sensations to the given and indubitable itself.

Anyway, all I have been trying to do here is explain that the claim "it is impossible to know that other minds and mind-independent objects exist" is different to the claim "no proposition is truth-apt". The solipsist claims the former, not the latter, contrary to Pie's misrepresentation. — Michael

I grant that we can both interpret terms so that either of us is right.

I've tried to argue that epistemological solipsism is 'toothless' if understood in a way that makes it (more) coherent. It's either a claim about knowledge as a pubic, self-transcending concept (a feature of the external world it pretends to doubt), or it's just about (paradoxical) private concepts.

Yet, it was an “I” from which that notion of primordial is given. — Mww

This is a deep issue, so I don't pretend to have some final theory. That said, as a start, I think it's incoherent to deny that concepts are public, for how or why should I trust that I understand what you 'intend' 'behind' the concepts 'privately'?

Language is tribal software. I don't deny that the individual organism is necessary as a host for this software. It's dance we do together. The 'I' is (roughly) a token used for scorekeeping.

The solipsist's position appears to be contradictory, saying: I can know that we both understand the meaning of the word "exist", but I cannot know that there is any "we" who both understand this meaning. — Luke

:up:

The 'we' is 'deeper' or more 'primordial' than the (linguistic) 'I.'

I realize now that I misspoke regarding analytical philosophy causing one to disappear up one's own arse; this is not correct at all; it causes one to disappear up the public arse, a far nastier place to be. — Janus

I think you are trying to have your cake and eat it too. If you are indeed a great poetic soul, too cool for anal discussions of epistemology, then...good for you, sir ! But I'd believe it more readily if you weren't wasting your time with an even greater triviality like indulging in hackneyed 'defenses' of The Poetic Soul, as if your the only one among your peers that's ever had a finger in.

You don't have to, unless you feel insecure, justify your ideas to anyone. — Janus

This is one of the most irrationalist assertions I've ever seen on a philosophy forum (if you mean the typical role of ideas in social life, Mr. Anti-Up-My-Arse ) or the tritest (if you mean that the checkout girl at Costco doesn't care about the books I've read.)

That's interesting. What do you understand to be the "phenomenological version of the myth of the given"? And how do you see it relating back to Aristotle? — Janus

Improvising: it's basically a version of the 'ghost story.' 'Pure' meanings glow for it, infinitely intimate, unsoiled by the particularity and historicity of (social, worldly) experience. Presence. I'll find a good Derrida quote on this. But here's an historical source. (This is what Derrida quotes in Of Grammatology. )

Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words. Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images. — Ari

http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/interpretation.1.1.html

In my opinion, this tempts us to think of a set of universal, pre-given, immaterial concepts... for which we only have to invent conventional phonemes/tags (which Saussure rejects as the nomenclature theory.) This helps set up the veil-of-ideas.

Here's some of Derrida's response to the quote above. Note that the critique of phonocentrism (putting the voice closes to meaning than writing) is driven by a critique of the ghost.

The feelings of the mind, expressing things naturally, constitute a sort of universal language which can then efface itself. It is the stage of transparence. Aristotle can sometimes omit it without risk. In every case, the voice is closest to the signified, whether it is determined strictly as sense ( thought or lived ) or more loosely as thing. All signifiers, and first and foremost the written signifier, are derivative with regard to what would wed the voice indissolubly to the mind or to the thought of the signified sense, indeed to the thing itself ( whether it is done in the Aristotelian manner that we have just indicated or in the manner of medieval theology, determining the res as a thing created from its eidos, from its sense thought in the logos or in the infinite understanding of God) . The written signifier is always technical and representative. It has no constitutive meaning. This derivation is the very origin of the notion of the "signifier." The notion of the sign always implies within itself the distinction between signifier and signified, even if, as Saussure argues, they are distinguished simply as the two faces of one and the same leaf. This notion remains therefore within the heritage of that logocentrism which is also a phonocentrism...

...absolute proximity of voice and being, of voice and the meaning of being, of voice and the ideality of meaning.We already have a foreboding that phonocentrism merges with...the meaning of being in general as presence, with all the subdeterminations which depend on this general form and which organize within it their system and their historical sequence (presence of the thing to the sight as eidos, presence as substance/ essence/ existence / ousia, temporal presence as point [stigme] of the now or of the moment [nun], the self-presence of the cogito... — Derrida

One way to think of presence is in terms of self-evidence, the given. The mystic says that God is right here. Or the person who is sure sure sure he knows what he's talking about, even if he's run out of words. His meaning is right there, glowing and present and perfect, independent of the network of other public concepts. Is Derrida not making a Hegelian point that everything is mediated, mediated, mediated, or a Brandomian point that awareness is linguistic ? For we who are not thermostats?

Neil deGrasse Tyson (astrophysicist, science educator, author) said something to the effect that the universe isn't in any way obligated to make sense to humans - it (the universe) can, it looks as though, do whatever the hell it wants; to hell with humans and their silly standards! :snicker: — Agent Smith

I agree that we shouldn't be surprised if the world surprises us. We are even looking for surprises as we extend our knowledge, no? But our sense-making theories should make sense to us, no ?