Phenomenalism is the view that physical objects cannot justifiably be said to exist in themselves, but only as perceptual phenomena or sensory stimuli (e.g. redness, hardness, softness, sweetness, etc.) situated in time and in space. In particular, some forms of phenomenalism reduce all talk about physical objects in the external world to talk about bundles of sense data.

I compare any antiphenemenological stance to interplanetary civilizations; in a sense phenomenology is, to put it mildly, mundane, restricted to, let's just say, (a) special case(s). Mind you, I'm not disagreeing with ya. — Agent Smith

I'm glad you approve. It'll be good for your soul to return to your your Hegel, Heidegger and Derrida etc. :wink: : analytic philosophy is too anal, and if one keeps at it too long one disappears up one's own arse. — Janus

Some time later: it’s actually pretty good. First I read only the posted excerpt, hence the disagreement, only later the whole link, which helps the context of the post. — Mww

And through all that, the subject remains the subject: the limit of your world. — Tate

It is when philosophers began attempting to take account of meaningful human experience that things went awry. — creativesoul

Biological machinery is internal. Oranges are external. Meaningful experience involving oranges consists of both, internal and external things. — creativesoul

When you think about it, ideas and sensations are the most familiar thing to us. — Olivier5

The absurdity of the question is readily apparent to anyone and everyone first hearing it. — creativesoul

I'm fine with that, because it does not imply an observer. — Olivier5

Right you are! Good job! — Agent Smith

Yep, it doth not make any sense at all! — Agent Smith

Sounds like you've got some identity issues. — Tate

Or imagine that it were usual for human beings to have two characters, in this way: People's shape, size and characteristics of behaviour periodically undergo a complete change. It is the usual thing for a man to have two such states, and he lapses suddenly from one into the other. It is very likely that in such a society we should be inclined to christen every man with two names, and perhaps to talk of the pair of persons in his body. Now were Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde two persons or were they the same person who merely changed? We can say whichever we like. We are not forced to talk of a double personality.

But it seems to me that you want the solipsist to explain what it means to exist whilst simultaneously claiming that other minds and mind-independent objects can be known to exist, which is clearly special pleading. — Michael

What norms; what is a norm and from whence do they arise? — Mww

As I understand his work, Kant’s most basic idea, the axis around which all his thought turns, is that what distinguishes exercises of judgment and intentional agency from the performances of merely natural creatures is that judgments and actions are subject to distinctive kinds of normative assessment. Judgments and actions are things we are in a distinctive sense responsible for. They are a kind of commitment we undertake. Kant understands judging and acting as applying rules, concepts, that determine what the subject becomes committed to and responsible for by applying them. Applying concepts theoretically in judgment and practically in action binds the concept user, commits her, makes her responsible, by opening her up to normative assessment according to the rules she has made herself subject to.

The responsibility one undertakes by applying a concept is a task responsibility: a commitment to do something. On the theoretical side, what one is committed to doing, what one becomes liable to assessment as to one’s success at doing, is integrating one’s judgments into a whole that exhibits a distinctive kind of unity: the synthetic unity of apperception. It is a systematic, rational unity, dynamically created and sustained by drawing inferential consequences from and finding reasons for one’s judgments, and rejecting commitments incompatible with those one has undertaken. Apperceiving, the characteristically sapient sort of awareness, is discursive (that is, conceptual) awareness. For it consists in integrating judgments into a unity structured by relations of what judgments provide reasons for and against what others. And those rational relations among judgments are determined by the rules, that is the concepts, one binds oneself by in making the judgments. Each new episode of experience, paradigmatically the making of a perceptual judgment, requires integration into, and hence transformation of the antecedent constellation of commitments. New incompatibilities can arise, which must be dealt with critically by rejecting or modifying prior commitments. New joint consequences can ensue, which must be acknowledged or rejected. The process by which the whole evolves and develops systematically is a paradigmatically rational one, structured by the rhythm of inhalation or amplification by acknowledging new commitments and extracting new consequences, and exhalation or criticism by rejecting or adjusting old commitments in the light of their rational relations to the new ones.
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But the minimal unit of responsibility is the judgment. It is judgments, not concepts, that one can invest one’s authority in, commit oneself to, by integrating them into an evolving constellation that exhibits the rational synthetic unity of apperception. Accordingly, in a radical break with his predecessors, Kant takes judgments to be the minimal units of awareness and experience. Concepts are to be understood analytically, as functions of judgment—that is, in terms of the contribution they make to judgeable contents. To be candidates for synthesis into a system exhibiting the rational unity characteristic of apperception, judgments must stand to one another in relations of material consequence and incompatibility. So if one is to understand judging also as the application of concepts, the first question one must ask about the contents of those concepts how the use of one or another concept affects those rational relations among the judgeable contents that result. This methodological inversion is commitment to the explanatory primacy of the propositional.
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I read Hegel as taking over from Kant commitment both to a normative account of conceptual doings, and to a broadly pragmatist approach to understanding the contents of our cognitive and practical commitments in terms of what we are doing in undertaking those commitments. I see him as taking an important step toward naturalizing the picture of conceptual norms by taking those norms to be instituted by public social recognitive practices. Further, Hegel tells a story about how the very same practice of rational integration of commitments undertaken by applying concepts that is the synthesis at once of recognized and recognizing individual subjects and of their recognitive communities,
is at the same time the historical process by which the norms that articulate the contents of the concepts applied are instituted, determined, and developed. He calls that on-going social, historical process “experience” (Erfahrung), and no longer sees it as taking place principally between the ears of an individual. — Brandom

But it also follows that "the set of all true claims" is also a representation, a "map". It would be the map of an omniscient, supernatural entity. — Olivier5

Our human maps are gross simplifications of their territory, always. That's why they are useful to us, feeble humans. There is such a thing as "too much information". — Olivier5

The world is the real thing, the ground of being. It is. — Olivier5

OK, but debating what 'exists' means is fair game, no? — Pie

Yes. — Michael

Sartre devotes a great deal of effort to establishing the impersonal (or “pre-personal”) character of consciousness, which stems from its non-egological structure and results directly from the absence of the I in the transcendental field. According to him, intentional (positional) consciousness typically involves an anonymous and “impersonal” relation to a transcendent object:

When I run after a streetcar, when I look at the time, when I am absorbed in contemplating a portrait, there is no I. […] In fact I am plunged in the world of objects; it is they which constitute the unity of my consciousness; […] but me, I have disappeared; I have annihilated myself. There is no place for me on this level. (Sartre 1936a [1957: 49; 2004: 8])

The tram appears to me in a specific way (as “having-to-be-overtaken”, in this case) that is experienced as its own mode of phenomenalization, and not as a mere relational aspect of its appearing to me. The object presents itself as carrying a set of objective properties that are strictly independent from one’s personal relation to it. The streetcar is experienced as a transcendent object, in a way that obliterates and overrides, so to speak, the subjective features of conscious experience; its “having-to-be-overtaken-ness” does not belong to my subjective experience of the world but to the objective description of the way the world is (see also Sartre 1936a [1957: 56; 2004: 10–11]). When I run after the streetcar, my consciousness is absorbed in the relation to its intentional object, “the streetcar-having-to-be-overtaken”, and there is no trace of the “I” in such lived-experience.

Maps have to represent something... What's the use of a map about nothing? — Olivier5

It doesn’t seem to be anything like what is usually meant, which concerns the existence of objects that are independent of my mind. — Michael

What.....you don’t? That can’t be right; you’ve already admitted to it, calling it “one and universal”. — Mww

think it's probably a mistake to take Wittgenstein as advocating any particular metaphysics. I've been taking him as just exploring the mechanics of climbing the ladder. — Tate

As I keep saying, we can make claims about things that don’t exist, and about things that do exist but that cannot be known to exist. — Michael

As I keep saying, we can make claims about things that don’t exist, and about things that do exist but that cannot be known to exist. Your arguments just don’t seem to address the claim being made by solipsists, which is just about the limitations of knowledge. — Michael

"Inference or proof is parasitic; it requires knowledge by other means which it can then use to extend what is known." — Sam26

5.632 The subject does not belong to the world but it is a limit of the world. — Tate

I don’t know what you mean by asking who it’s true for. It’s just either true or false. — Michael

he just argues that it cannot be known to be true. — Michael

A mathematical antirealist will reject the independent existence of mathematical entities — Michael

Sure we do, but it is never necessary that we do, with respect to the aforementioned minimally rational intelligible epistemic situations. — Mww

Can’t blame the late Renaissance or Enlightenment folks that removed the deistic impediment to human intellectualism — Mww

It's like Hotel California: you can check out any time you want, but you can never leave representation. — Olivier5

And root 2 is irrational even if I’m the only man alive. It’s even irrational even if nobody is alive. — Michael

It’s “independent” in the sense that we can be wrong when we do maths, but mathematical entities don’t have some “external” existence in the way that atoms or Platonic ideas are said to have. — Michael

I'd rather preserve my mental resources for more creative, poetic pursuits, in the interest of intensifying the richness of the stream of imagery that is my phenomenal life. — Janus

it's just too anal. — Janus

Not it doesn't. It says that knowledge of other minds (and an external world) is impossible. — Michael

Maths and logic are something "other" than the subject, but I don't think it right to think of them as being "external" (in the sense that the material world is said to be external). — Michael

That's a false dichotomy. It's not a case of either a) mathematical realism is true or b) I am maths. — Michael

Death is the ending of life, not a state. — unenlightened

The external world, for us, is an inferential extrapolation from the repetition and commonality of experiences of everyday things. We have very good reason to think that it exists, but we only know what it is for our inferential imaginations, nothing beyond that. — Janus

There is thus a polar opposition between mind and matter, an oppos-tion which is often brought out as follows. Material objects are situated in a common field, known as ‘space’, and what happens to one body in one part of space is mechanically connected with what happens to other bodies in other parts of space. But mental happenings occur in insulated fields, known as ‘minds’, and there is, apart maybe from telepathy, no direct causal connection between what happens in one mind and what happens in another. Only through the medium of the public physical world can the mind of one person make a difference to the mind of another. The mind is its own place and in his inner life each of us lives the life of a ghostly Robinson Crusoe. People can see, hear and jolt one another’s bodies, but they are irremediably blind and deaf to the workings of one another’s minds and inoperative upon them.

What sort of knowledge can be secured of the workings of a mind? On the one side, according to the official theory, a person has direct knowledge of the best imaginable kind of the workings of his own mind. Mental states and processes are (or are normally) conscious states and processes, and the consciousness which irradiates them can engender no illusions and leaves the door open for no doubts. A person’s present thinkings, feelings and willings, his perceivings, rememberings and imaginings are intrinsically ‘phosphorescent’; their existence and their nature are inevitably betrayed to their owner. The inner life is a stream of consciousness of such a sort that it would be absurd to suggest that the mind whose life is that stream might be unaware of what is passing down it. ... Besides being currently supplied with these alleged immediate data of consciousness, a person is also generally supposed to be able to exercise from time to time a special kind of perception, namely inner perception, or introspection. He can take a (non optical) ‘look’ at what is passing in his mind. Not only can he view and scrutinize a flower through his sense of sight and listen to and discriminate the notes of a bell through his sense of hearing; he can also reflectively or introspectively watch, without any bodily organ of sense, the current episodes of his inner life. This self-observation is also commonly supposed to be immune from illusion, confusion or doubt. A mind’s reports of its own affairs have a certainty superior to the best that is possessed by its reports of matters in the physical world. Sense-perceptions can, but consciousness and introspection cannot, be mistaken or confused.

On the other side, one person has no direct access of any sort to the events of the inner life of another. He cannot do better than make problematic inferences from the observed behaviour of the other person’s body to the states of mind which, by analogy from his own conduct, he supposes to be signalised by that behaviour. Direct access to the workings of a mind is the privilege of that mind itself; in default of such privileged access, the workings of one mind are inevitably occult to everyone else.

For the supposed arguments from bodily movements similar to their own to mental workings similar to their own would lack any possibility of observational corroboration. Not unnaturally, therefore, an adherent of the official theory finds it difficult to resist this consequence of his premisses, that he has no good reason to believe that there do exist minds other than his own. Even if he prefers to believe that to other human bodies there are harnessed minds not unlike his own, he cannot claim to be able to discover their individual characteristics, or the particular things that they undergo and do. Absolute solitude is on this showing the ineluctable destiny of the soul. Only our bodies can meet.

As a necessary corollary of this general scheme there is implicitly prescribed a special way of construing our ordinary concepts of mental powers and operations. 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. 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. Only his own privileged access to this stream in direct awareness and introspection 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. 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 logical geography 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.
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It is an historical curiosity that it was not noticed that the entire argument was broken-backed. Theorists correctly assumed that any sane man could already recognise the differences between, say, rational and nonrational utterances or between purposive and automatic behaviour. Else there would have been nothing requiring to be salved from mechanism. Yet the explanation given presupposed that one person could in principle never recognise the difference between the rational and the irrational utterances issuing from other human bodies, since he could never get access to the postulated immaterial causes of some of their utterances. Save for the doubtful exception of himself, he could never tell the difference between a man and a Robot. It would have to be conceded, for example, that, for all that we can tell, the inner lives of persons who are classed as idiots or lunatics are as rational as those of anyone else. Perhaps only their overt behaviour is disappointing; that is to say, perhaps ‘idiots’ are not really idiotic, or ‘lunatics’ lunatic. Perhaps, too, some of those who are classed as sane are really idiots. According to the theory, external observers could never know how the overt behaviour of others is correlated with their mental powers and processes and so they could never know or even plausibly conjecture whether their applications of mental-conduct concepts to these other people were correct or incorrect. It would then be hazardous or impossible for a man to claim sanity or logical consistency even for himself, since he would be debarred from comparing his own performances with those of others. — Ryle