Comments

  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    If Wittgenstein is right then the person with synesthesia wouldn't describe numbers as having colours, given that his language community doesn't use colour vocabulary that way. — Michael

    I don't accept that inference.
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    As I asked before, how does the person with synesthesia come to describe numbers as having colours, given that nobody else in his language community uses colour vocabulary that way? — Michael

    How does a heretic decide that God is love or tolerates incest ? We can postulate causes, and we'll need premises and inferences to do so.
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    The meaning of "the apple tastes disgusting" has nothing to do with whether or not Suzy throws the apple out of the car. — Michael

    I very much disagree. I don't think one can found meaning on private experience. Clearly bots can learn the structure of our language.
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    And I would say that how an apple tastes (or smells or looks) to Suzy concerns what's going on in her head (specifically, with her brain). — Michael

    I think Wittgenstein has already made a good case against that kind of representationism.

    Chatbots are the nail in the coffin.
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    Especially as there are any number of reasons that can explain 2): — Michael

    :up:

    Yes !

    So it's no single inference that gives 'disgusting' its meaning. It's all possible inferences involving claims involving 'disgusting.'
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    That's odd, because my attacks on conventionalism are precisely an attack on representationalism, including the idea that conventions tell us about what speakers mean. — sime
    I claim that meaning is public. Claims don't represent claimant's meaning-as-hidden-stuff.

    How do you reconcile your commitment to inferential semantics with your apparent claim to know the propositional content of speaker's utterances? — sime

    'Content' sounds representational again. The point is to look at which inferences tend to be accepted. Let me emphasize that these norms are 'liquid', unfinished, an infinite task.
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    ↪Michael

    To make a claim is to assume a responsibility.

    Ethics is first philosophy.
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    What does the word "disgusting" mean in the sentence "Suzy thought the apple tasted disgusting, so she threw it out of the car"? — Michael

    In my view, concepts are not semantic atoms. They get their meanings from the claims that include them.

    Which inferences are allowed ?
    To me that's central.

    [ Also which premises are allowed ? ]
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    Then how are we able to disagree on how an apple tastes? — Michael

    Fair point. Hopefully addressed above.
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    It's no different to saying that apples taste sweet. — Michael

    I agree that everyday language is very squishy. I probably shouldn't emphasize the anti-dualism too much, because I can assimilate a folk-psychology of what the apple tastes like to Suzy. But the meaning of the-apple's-taste-for-Suzy does not get its meaning from a quale. I say instead that it gets its meaning inferentially. 'Suzy thought the apple tasted disgusting, so she threw it out of the car.'
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    ↪sime


    A flat-earther would be committed to the implications of their view. So one could ask them what happens if one keeps going West forever.

    We can look at what statements are accepted as premises and also at what inferences are tolerated. Concepts get their meanings from the claims they are used in in this approach.
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    If you accept that the Earth isn't flat, then you presumably accept that a flat Earth cannot be the physical cause of a Flat-Earther's beliefs. In which case, how and in what sense can he be said to be referring to the Earth? — sime

    Here's an alternative view of meaning.

    The master-idea of semantic inferentialism is to look instead to inference, rather than representation, as the basic concept of semantics. What makes something meaningful or contentful in the sense that matters for sapience (rather than the mere sentience we share with many nonlinguistic animals) is the role that it plays in reasoning. The primary vehicle of meaning in this sense is declarative sentences. Those are symbols that can be used to assert, state, or claim that things are thus-and-so. The kind of content they express, “propositional” content, in the philosopher’s jargon, is what can both serve as and stand in need of reasons—that is what can play the role both of premise and of conclusion in inferences.
    ...
    Pragmatism in general is the claim that pragmatics is methodologically, conceptually, and explanatorily prior to semantics—that one should understand the meaning or content expressed by linguistic locutions in terms of their use. The later Wittgenstein, who counseled “Don’t look to the meaning, look to the use,” is a pragmatist in this sense (though he didn’t use that term). Normative pragmatism is the idea that discursive practice is implicitly, but essentially, and not just accidentally, a kind of normative practice. Discursive creatures live, and move, and have their being in a normative space. What one is doing in making a claim, performing the most fundamental kind of speech act, is committing oneself, exercising one’s authority to make oneself responsible.

    Understanding someone’s utterance is knowing what they have committed themselves to by producing that performance, by saying what they said—as well as knowing what would entitle them to that commitment, and what is incompatible with it. Those commitments, entitlements, and incompatibilities are inferentially connected to one another. The space discursive creatures move about in by talking is a space of reasons, articulating what would be a reason for or against what. That is what connects normative pragmatism to semantic inferentialism.
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    To a different organism (or a human with an uncommon body) sugar might not taste sweet, and that is no more or less correct. — Michael

    In case it helps, I don't think of words like 'sweet' getting their meaning from this or that quale. Instead concepts are norms, even if in some sense they are aimed at quale (inferentially linked to 'quale.')
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    ↪Michael

    I think what you say makes sense --- within your framework which I don't share.

    It's just the case that, given the way the human body is, apples look red to most humans in most situations. — Michael
    To me red is a concept that's applied according to certain norms. Saying the apples look red sounds to me like dualism, as if one peels off the redness and leaves the real apple behind.

    I've tried to summarize my metaphysics in a new discussion ( I invite you to join.) Our conversation has been great for me, by the way.

    I embrace a flat ontology, no dualism. I lean toward understanding consciousness as just the world for a 'discursive' self. So consciousness is not its own thing. It's just the being of the world, which an organism is aware of with the help of eyes and noses, etc. But even dreams of organisms are in the world. We can talk of anger or any entity X as long as it's inferentially linked to all other entities.
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    But can this justify elevating the status of convention to the ground or justification of meaning? For don't our conventions often mislead and betray us about the facts of truth and meaning? — sime

    Our conventions continually evolve, precisely because they continually fail us in some ways. I think it's important to call them norms to emphasize their use. I appeal to norms in order to challenge them. I play some norms against other norms. Think of Kinsey offending sex norms by appealing to scientific norms. Think of an atheist when it was riskier to be one offending community religious norms while protected by the norms of individual freedom and rationality.

    It'll be hard to understand me if you stick to a representationalist semantics. I like inferentialism, which I connect to something like neorationalism, (resource linked earlier in the thread if you are interested.)
  • How the Myth of the Self Endures
    The subjective is the private self realm and it is a perspective. — Andrew4Handel

    It's a weird situation. We see the same world from different places. I can see you seeing the world from across the room, but I can't see the world as you do ( as if from across the room. )

    What gets called consciousness looks to me like the being of the world for a person. We think of the world from a certain perspective as if it were an unreal dream. But what is the real world ? A world from no perspective ?

    This might be Wittgenstein said that the world is all that is case. It's the totality of what true claims mean. It's something that we articulate together, a kind of infinite project.
  • How the Myth of the Self Endures
    ↪frank

    Speaking of the software metaphor and timebinding spirit, I think it's worth adding that it's not just quantity of cultural memory that matters. It's also the quality in the efficiency and compactness of our models. From another angle, when we grow philosophically we integrate more and more tightly what we know. It's somewhat like a finite amount of memory (what the individual stores in 'RAM' versus what's externalized in libraries) being given a more and more efficient algorithm within the same space/memory constraints.
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    Consciousness looks like reification of the world existing for an organism. The world is seen with the help of ('through') particular pair of eyes. But it's the world that's seen and not an image of the world.

    What's strange and yet familiar is that this same world is seen with the help of ('through') so many different pairs of eyes.

    We have thinkers like Democritus brilliantly postulating that all the stuff of the world is made of indestructible pieces too tiny for us to see. So Democritus himself is made of such pieces. But this does not make the person or his reasons an illusion under which atoms hide. A tree is 'made of' leaves and branches, but the tree is no less real because we can consider it as a unity.

    The redness of an apple is a property of that apple within an unshattered lifeworld that includes norms for the application of concepts. Some people mistakenly (or imprudently) insist that 'atoms and void' are on some separate and deeper and realer plane of existence like a substrate. But this forces us into a confused dualism and a reification of consciousness. Our concept of atoms-and-void in the normative realm is somehow supposed to also be radically other than concept.

    ↪Moliere
    ↪RussellA
    ↪Michael
    ↪creativesoul


    Also, even 'private experience' happens within the world, as if in a room that only a particular room can access. This is because we include it in our inferences (folk psychology i the manifest image.) We explain a divorce in terms of a headache.

    If one looks for meaning in terms not only of use but more specifically in inferential use (normatively governed), then all entities are 'obviously' in one and the same world.

    The world is that which is the case. This ineluctably minimal concept of world is that which philosophers can be right or wrong about. It's the apriori target of claims. To deny this is to tell me I am wrong about something -- about what is the case ---which is only to support my point.

    I suggest that we look at what the philosophical situation always already accepts (without noticing it) and work outward from that.
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    It is true that "The world is all that is the case", but is this the world of Indirect or Direct Realism.

    In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein studiously avoids addressing this question.     — RussellA

    The world is whatever we as philosophers are talking about.

    'Deeper' than this or that contingent metaphysical thesis is the necessary or 'primordial' structure of philosophers articulating how it is whatever is the case.

    The philosopher's intention to articulate the truth is intrinsically social and worldly in a strategically indeterminate sense. The details are what we philosopher's debate, and we can expect claims to be abandoned, revised, synthesized. Wittgenstein is trying to dig deeper, say something about 'eternal' logical-linguistic structure.
  • Ontological arguments for idealism
    ↪180 Proof
    :up:
  • Inmost Core and Ultimate Ground
    To paraphrase Witty: the body is the best picture of 'consciousness'. — 180 Proof

    :up:
    [ including its marks and noises ]
  • How the Myth of the Self Endures
    I think of selfhood as being like music with themes, particular scales and rhythms, and like music, one is always progressing through an arc, and it's arcs within arcs like days within weeks, weeks within years, and years within a life. — frank
    :up:
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    I literally just said above that colour is composed of strings. — Michael

    Something is fishy here. According to you, I'm guessing your last post was strings, but I shouldn't be able to see such tiny things. You are basically pretending that meaning doesn't exist. While one might say that the normative realm of meaning depends on strings (or atoms) and maybe even reducible to complex motions thereof, it has to be accounted for in any serious theory.

    It seems to me that your view has collapsed into a monism of strings. The representative image is strings and yet represents still more strings. The meaning of your theory is...strings ! Logic must be strings too.

    This is like when it became clear yesterday that scientific realism doesn't exist according to scientific realism.
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    Does it require having seen red before? — creativesoul

    And really it can only be reports of having seen red, I'd think, which is the application of a concept requiring language.
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    ↪Michael

    You are willing to project strings on all of reality but not color. Yet both are just the brain being tickled.
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    A red colour occurs when the appropriate areas of the occipital lobe are activated. Roses don't have occipital lobes. — Michael

    Presumably the concept of a string occurs when the brain is tickled just right.
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    I see Geist as nature doing a particular kind of dance with part of itself.

    So maybe our views aren't so far off.
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    Is the idea of strings also strings ?
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    So what was so wacky about me saying that roses are red ?
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    ↪Michael

    Is color strings ?
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    Is consciousness strings ? (If string theory is correct?)
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    Then everything is strings, which is what string theory argues. I don't understand what you're getting at. — Michael

    So pain is strings ?
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    ↪Michael

    I'm not seeing how you get around dualism exactly.
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    If images are just brain activity, and brain activity is strings... ?
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    ↪Michael

    Do you believe in consciousness ?
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    No, because I'm saying that sensation is a type of brain activity. In the case of visual sensation, that brain activity involves the primary visual cortex. — Michael

    Indirect realism has (1) images and (2) reality itself, right ?

    https://iep.utm.edu/perc-obj/
    When I look at the coffee cup there is not a material candidate for the yellow object at which I am looking. Crudely: there is nothing in the brain that is yellow. Sense data, then, do not seem to be acceptable on a materialist account of the mind, and thus, the yellow object that I am now perceiving must be located not in the material world but in the immaterial mind. Indirect realism is committed to a dualist picture within which there is an ontology of non-physical objects alongside that of the physical.
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    Sensation is the mediation. — Michael
    Yes. Which is basically dualism, it seems to me. You experience sensation which you refer to (which represents or mediates) some forever hidden real.
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    So you agree that math is brain activity, but you say that your hand is strings (or some entity of that kind.) To me this is like saying your hand is math.
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    No I don't. — Michael

    Isn't indirect realism about a mediating image or consciousness which is not the Real itself ? Presumably created by the nervous system ?
  • Is indirect realism self undermining?
    That the entities described by our scientific models are real and discovered rather than just instrumentally useful fictions. — Michael

    I know that. I mean the claim is indeterminate in the context of dualism. I've studied some physics. It's a bunch of math and abstract concepts.

    The issue is that you call everything brain activity except math and physics concepts, not explaining why this stuff is truly real but color and smell isn't. I understand there are pragmatic reasons for caring about one aspect of an object rather than another. But I don't see the metaphysical justification for letting math off the hook here.

    Personally I think your hand is made of atoms and has a color. But I'm not a dualist. Color is a normative concept, not a immaterial experience in my view. A blind person could infer that an apple is read or that it weighs 230 grams or that it's radioactive from sitting in a bucket of uranium.
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