f you're equating "other minds" as something given in experience then the types of mind that you're thinking of aren't the type that solipsists deny. — Michael

The types of mind that they deny are the private kind that you also seem to deny, which makes me wonder how your view is distinct from solipsism. — Michael

The point to philosophy is to realize that and, at some point, cease/desist the search — Agent Smith

The words "positive" and "negative" have connotations good (ethical) and bad (unethical). Do these auxiliary meanings have mathematical origins or is there some other nonmathematical explanation as to why? — Agent Smith

The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience. A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field. Truth values have to be redistributed over some of our statements. Re-evaluation of some statements entails re-evaluation of others, because of their logical interconnections -- the logical laws being in turn simply certain further statements of the system, certain further elements of the field. Having re-evaluated one statement we must re-evaluate some others, whether they be statements logically connected with the first or whether they be the statements of logical connections themselves. But the total field is so undetermined by its boundary conditions, experience, that there is much latitude of choice as to what statements to re-evaluate in the light of any single contrary experience. No particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field, except indirectly through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field as a whole.

If this view is right, it is misleading to speak of the empirical content of an individual statement -- especially if it be a statement at all remote from the experiential periphery of the field. Furthermore it becomes folly to seek a boundary between synthetic statements, which hold contingently on experience, and analytic statements which hold come what may. Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system. Even a statement very close to the periphery can be held true in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws. Conversely, by the same token, no statement is immune to revision. — Quine

For vividness I have been speaking in terms of varying distances from asensory periphery. Let me try now to clarify this notion without metaphor. Certain statements, though about physical objects and not sense experience, seem peculiarly germane to sense experience -- and in a selective way: some statements to some experiences, others to others. Such statements, especially germane to particular experiences, I picture as near the periphery. But in this relation of "germaneness" I envisage nothing more than a loose association reflecting the relative likelihood, in practice, of our choosing one statement rather than another for revision in the event of recalcitrant experience. For example, we can imagine recalcitrant experiences to which we would surely be inclined to accommodate our system by re-evaluating just the statement that there are brick houses on Elm Street, together with related statements on the same topic. We can imagine other recalcitrant experiences to which we would be inclined to accommodate our system by re-evaluating just the statement that there are no centaurs, along with kindred statements. A recalcitrant experience can, I have already urged, be accommodated by any of various alternative re-evaluations in various alternative quarters of the total system; but, in the cases which we are now imagining, our natural tendency to disturb the total system as little as possible would lead us to focus our revisions upon these specific statements concerning brick houses or centaurs. These statements are felt, therefore, to have a sharper empirical reference than highly theoretical statements of physics or logic or ontology. The latter statements may be thought of as relatively centrally located within the total network, meaning merely that little preferential connection with any particular sense data obtrudes itself.

As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries -- not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. Let me interject that for my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.
— Quine

In the Construction of Social Reality, Searle is concerned with the logical structure of social reality. It aims at offering an understanding of this reality that accords with the idea that we live in one world, one that is described by physicists and that is made of particles, electrons and mountains. Social reality seems not to fit very well in this world because it is composed of objects — money, judges, kings, marriages, etc. — that seem to be irreducible to particles and electrons. The striking difference between these two kinds of objects is how they relate to our intentional states, i.e. to our beliefs, judgments and representations. Unlike mountains and electrons, money, judges, kings and marriages would not exist if we did not represent them as existing. They are, in Searle’s words, observer-dependent. The problem that Searle ultimately addresses is, therefore, how do objects that are observer-dependent fit in a world that is fundamentally composed of observer-independent objects.

Flipping (reflecting) alias rotating (turning) by π radians is a good geometric way to grasp what negative numbers are. — Agent Smith

Of course I don't live solipsistically, but neither did Hume live like a good empiricist, by his own admission, right? — GLEN willows

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. The “objectivity” requirement in Popper’s account of basic statements, by contrast, amounts to a rejection of the view that the truth of scientific statements can ever be reduced to individual or collective human experience. (2002: 25).

Popper therefore argues that there are no statements in science which cannot be interrogated: basic statements, which are used to test the universal theories of science, must themselves be inter-subjectively testable and are therefore open to the possibility of refutation. He acknowledges that this seems to present a practical difficulty, in that it appears to suggest that testability must occur ad infinitum, which he acknowledges is an operational absurdity: sooner or later all testing must come to an end. Where testing ends, he argues, is in a convention-based decision to accept a basic statement or statements; it is at that point that convention and intersubjective human agreement play an indispensable role in science:

Yes I think we can end here. Sorry that you'd usually "not bother discussing it" but that seems to be the prevailing attitude. Thanks for engaging me and providing good reading and videos. — GLEN willows

Hume and Kant imply it, yet it's far out? That's one of my points. These massive figures in the philosophical canon, Hume, Kant and I would add Descartes, all have theories that diffuse reality, and can logically lead to solipsism. And yet it is still considered a "far out" option. — GLEN willows

Not even "Sense organs and brains locked in skulls" - those could be mere sense-impressions too. — GLEN willows

Eventually solipsism becomes a parlour game. One's engagement with others puts the lie to the pretence. — Banno

Yep. It can't be proofs all the way down; at some stage there must be an acceptance. — Banno

I know it's counterintuitive but so is much of philosophy. — GLEN willows

It seems to me you're assuming outside minds in your attempt to prove they exist. Is this not a flawed thesis? What I'm arguing is how can you prove they exist in the first place, BEFORE we even get to social settings and language? — GLEN willows

I translate "faith" as making a fetish/idol of ... — 180 Proof

How would we know this is what's happening? — Tate

Pie why is that incoherent? — GLEN willows

And what I envied most about him was that he managed to reach the end of his life without the slightest conscience of being burdened with a special individuality or sense of individual mission like mine. This sense of individuality robbed my life of its symbolism, that is to say, or its power to serve, like Tsurukawa’s, as a metaphor for something outside itself; accordingly it deprived me of the feelings of life’s extensity and solidarity, and it became the source of that sense of solitude which pursued me indefinitely. It was strange. I did not even have any feeling of solidarity with nothingness. — javi2541997

Atheists are just as capable of love and a sense of the numinous as any fundamentalist or New Ager. — Tom Storm

theism generally holds that there is no good reason to believe in any gods. It does not say there are no gods (a positive claim). That's all there need be to it. There is no faith in 'no god' just as you or others do not have faith in 'no Loch Ness Monster'. — Tom Storm

Empiricism taken literally. Formal construction of an umwelt from sense data. — bongo fury

That's a lovely bit of writing. It does suggest a kind of progress (rather than an emerging truth) any further thoughts on this? Are we able to say the conversation becomes more useful over time? — Tom Storm

This criticism (of speculative philosophy) , he argued, presupposes a conception of reason is a cognitive faculty of the individual thinking subject that is employed as an instrument for apprehending truths. He aimed to show ... that reason is one and the same in all thinking subjects, that it is universal and infinite, and that thinking (Denken) is not an activity performed by the individual, but rather by “the species” acting through the individual. “In thinking”, Feuerbach wrote, “I am bound together with, or rather, I am one with—indeed, I myself am—all human beings” (GW I:18).
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Unlike sense experience, thought is essentially communicable. Thinking is not an activity performed by the individual person qua individual. It is the activity of spirit, to which Hegel famously referred in the Phenomenology as “‘I’ that is ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I’” (Hegel [1807] 1977: 110). Pure spirit is nothing but this thinking activity, in which the individual thinker participates without himself (or herself) being the principal thinking agent.

In order to appreciate the anti-subjective emphasis of play, it is helpful to understand its “medial” (Truth and Method, 103, 105) nature: players do not direct or control the play but are caught up in it. Play has “primacy over the consciousness of the player” (104), follows its own course, and plays itself, so to speak. Play is not played by a subject but rather absorbs the player into itself. Gadamer’s primary concern is to elucidate what it means to be caught up in the game in a way that diminishes the subjectivity of the player. In fact, the subject of the game is not the player but the game itself.

Philosophy presupposes nothing; this can only mean that it abstracts from all that is immediately or sensuously given, or from all objects distinguished from thought. In short, it abstracts from all wherefrom it is possible to abstract without ceasing to think, and it makes this act of abstraction from all objects its own beginning. However, what else is the absolute being if not the being for which nothing is to be presupposed and to which no object other than itself is either given or necessary? — Feurbach

For instance, Bakhurst (2011, 2015), following McDowell and Brandom as well as Vygotsky, characterises Bildung as a process of enculturation during which the child, by means of acquiring conceptual abilities, is transformed from being in the world to being a subject capable of thinking and acting in light of reasons, thereby taking a view on the world and herself. As Bakhurst points out, this ‘gradual mastery of techniques of language that enable the giving and taking of reasons’ (2015, p. 310) is an essentially social process, because in acquiring concepts the child essentially learns to participate in a social praxis. Similarly, by adopting an approach to pedagogy that draws on both Vygotsky and Brandom, Derry (2008, 2013) emphasises the importance of a normatively structured learning environment in which adults provide opportunities for children to engage in the social practice of giving and asking for reasons in order to gain understanding of the inferential relations that govern our use of concepts.
...
It is also very close to Brandom's view, which interprets intentionality as a fundamentally social phenomenon, namely as the ability for deontic score-keeping, that is the ability to ascribe and acknowledge justifications to others and oneself. Thus, on this view, human thinking, understood in terms of the possession and use of concepts, consists essentially in the ability to participate in the—necessarily social—game of giving and asking for reasons.

The essentially social nature of the development of human rationality is also stressed in recent empirical research, in particular in Tomasello's (2014) influential evolutionary and developmental account.11 On Tomasello's view, human rationality is essentially characterised by what he calls ‘we-intentionality’. He claims that our ability for objective-reflexive-normative thinking is the result of a ‘social turn’ in cognitive evolution, which was necessitated by the need for increasing social cooperation. This ability is thought to have developed in two steps over the course of human evolutionary history, which are thought to be mirrored to some extent by human ontogeny. The first step consists in the development of shared intentionality, which children acquire around the age of 9–12 months. Shared intentionality is characterised by the ability to take into account another's perspective (without necessarily explicitly distinguishing one's own perspective from that of the other), for instance when jointly attending to an object with a caregiver. Ultimately, this enables children to engage in cooperative communication and two-level collaboration with another person. The second step consists in the development of collective intentionality. Thus, from the age of about 3 years onwards, children begin to be oriented not just towards a specific other, but towards the group and they begin to communicate conventionally. That is, they learn to evaluate and justify their reasoning according to the standards of the group. Taken together, the development of ‘we-intentionality’ is thought to have provided early humans with crucial survival advantages over groups who were not able to engage in reasoning of this kind (Tomasello, 2014).

For Brandom, Kant’s central insight is that "what distinguishes judging and intentional doing from the activities of non-sapient creatures is not that they involve some special sort of mental processes, but that they are things knowers and agents are in a distinctive way responsible for" (p 32). Since Brandom’s Kant also holds that an entity is responsible for its judgments and its acts just in case it is capable of taking responsibility for those acts and judgments, Brandom’s Kant is committed to the view that having a mind is a matter of the minded entity taking responsibility for what it believes and does. Put in slightly more Kantian terms, Brandom’s Kant is committed to the view that the unity of apperception is achieved through a process in which an agent unifies her judgments by coming to believe what she ought to believe (has reason to believe) given her other judgments and the content of the concepts ingredient in those judgments.
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It is not merely the case that to be an agent who is responsible for what she believes and does an agent must acknowledge that responsibility. As Kant saw, it is also the case that that agent must be recognized as standing under that responsibility by other individuals, and that this requirement of mutual recognition allows, in a proto-Wittgensteinian fashion, for the possibility that we might be wrong regarding just what we have committed ourselves to. This possibility is in turn central to the independence of the content of concepts from our own application of those concepts.
Brandom argues that for Hegel the content of all of the concepts that we are responsible for applying in judgments gets fixed in a way that is analogous to the way in which the content of the concepts used in the common law get determined:

The judge must decide, for each new case, both what to endorse — that is, whether or not to take the concept in question and apply it to the situation as described — and what the material incompatibility exclusions and consequential inclusions articulating the content of the concepts are. And for both of these tasks the only raw materials available are provided by how previous cases have been decided. (p 84)

In making these decisions, the judge in the common law tradition and the concept user in general is responsible both to the other contemporary (authorized) users of the concept in question and to the history of the previous uses of the concept; she must submit reasons for using the concept in the way that she does that appeal to those previous uses as justifications and are acceptable to her current, and future, colleagues. In doing so, and responding to other contemporary uses of the concept by either recognizing or failing to acknowledge them as appropriate, each current concept user is situated as part of a contemporary community that is perpetually interpreting, extending, and clarifying the tradition from which the community has arisen by applying to new cases the concepts inherited from that tradition.

One of the many possible ways to be deceived is to make me think there's an external reality, — Agent Smith

Quote out of context, mon ami, quote out of context. — Agent Smith

Why would "if all this is an illusion?" make no sense. — Agent Smith

But that's not the sense of "public" that you're using in this discussion. — Michael

Your own arguments seem to entail that if some things are public then some things are private. — Michael

The notion that words can only refer to things that are publicly accessible seems evidently false. — Michael

What behavior, then, is Jones seeking to explain by the postulation of something he calls, “thoughts” and “thinking”? Namely that people sometimes engage in purposive, intelligent behavior when silent. Sometimes, that is, people engage in what we call, “thinking out loud,” where they speak about the intelligent behavior they are engaged in. But sometimes the behavior itself is present, with no accompanying verbal commentary, as it were. (Imagine someone changing the faucet in their kitchen, with instructions before them, sometimes reading aloud the instructions, sometimes declaring an intention to do something next, followed by periods of silence). What exactly, Jones wonders, is going on when people engage in such intelligent behavior when they are completely silent?

According to his theory, during all these occasions of intelligent behavior there is something going on “inside” people, in their heads if you like, some of which gets verbalized, some of which doesn’t. The way to explain such intelligent behavior is to see it as the culmination of a silent, inner type of reasoning, an “inner speaking” going on inside of people. Jones reasons that this intelligent behavior involves the occurrence of hidden episodes which are similar to the activity of talking. Jones says, in essence, “Let’s call it ‘thinking,’ and though it is like talking, it is silent, or covert inner speech. Thinking is what is going on in us, which lies behind and explains our intelligent behavior and our intelligent talking.”
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Returning to this myth, we note that at the culmination of this first stage, Jones has only postulated the existence of these inner episodes—“inner” in being under the skin. In the second stage, Jones teaches his peers to use the theory to explain people’s behavior, in the absence of their “thinking out-loud.” Finally, and here is the crucial transition, Jones teaches people to apply the theory to themselves.

Having mastered the theory for third-person use, that is, people begin making inferences about themselves: “I just uttered such and such, so I must have been thinking such and such, (though I was not aware of it).” Eventually, by training and reinforcement from the community, people come to be able to actually report not just that they are thinking, but also what they are thinking, in a direct, non-inferential manner. Just as people can be trained to make immediate, non-inferential judgments about the nature of public objects, Jones’ pupils come to be able to issue non-inferential reports of their own thoughts, what is going on inside them, in a way that others aren’t. They can report directly about what is happening in their own minds, though according to Sellars, this has proceeded entirely within the constraints of Psychological Nominalism. Jones’ peers developed awareness of their own thoughts only after, or at least concurrently with, mastery of the public concepts (i.e. words) of “thinking”, “believing”, “wishing”, and so on, that comes with the learning of Jones’ theory itself.

Yes, what's wrong with that? There are plenty of words and phrases that work this way. — Michael

That's exactly why seeing other "people" is no indication that these "people" have a mind, a self, a will, thoughts, private sensations, etc. — Michael

too much faith in Wittgenstein's private language argument. — Michael

I also don't think that these are things that can be reduced to any public, physical thing, e.g. brain activity. — Michael

I, personally, have no trouble understanding what words like "mind", "self", "will", "thoughts", "private sensations", etc. mean and refer to — Michael

Do you reject the notion of the philosophical zombie?

Do you not think it possible that the exact same public behaviours that we associate with other people can occur in the absence of other minds? — Michael

he meaning of our words or concepts is established necessarily within a social construct, and it necessarily follows that meaning is not a function of an individual’s privately derived sense of meaning; — Sam26

Solipsism basically boils down to cogito ergo sum (re René Descrates). The only truth that we're absolutely sure of is our own existence as minds. The rest of what we experience, the so-called material world, including but not limited to other minds, could be a hallucination/illusion.

How do you respond? — Agent Smith