Logical form or syntactic structure does not have to issue from inborn powers in our brains, nor does it have to come from a priori structures of the mind. It arises through an enhancement of perception, a lifting of perception into thought, by a new way of making things present to us.

What does the bolded phrase mean, exactly? And is this what happens for an infant (which was my original question)? I hope you can fill this out a bit more; it sounds interesting.

Hmm. Well, some things are conscious and some are not, unless you're a hardcore panpsychist. Understanding why this is the case seems perfectly legitimate to me.

Consciousness is the processes of interaction by which both world and subject are revealed — Joshs

Yes, but only to some beings. These processes do not occur for a grain of sand (again, leaving aside strong arguments for panpsychism). Chalmers wants to know why, as do I.

In any case, I don't think infants "replace" anything under the theory. — Dawnstorm

"Replace" may not be quite the right word. I'm asking into whether an infant, when she sees a shape, is already constrained by the textures of "flow" to see it in a particular manner, quite apart from how the human community (which she will join, but has not yet) sees it.

scientific objectivity also excludes the qualitative dimension of existence — the reality of Being. This exclusion lies at the heart of the hard problem of consciousness, which is inextricably linked with the Cartesian divide. Scientific objectivity seeks to transcend the personal, but it does so at the cost of denying the reality of the subject¹⁰. — Wayfarer

I agree with nearly everything you're saying (very well!) in Part 3. I would slow down a bit for the above, however. Can we differentiate between "consciousness" as a possible object of scientific knowledge, and "consciousness" as a lived experience of a particular subject? I think we can. Good science can remain noncommittal about subjective experience while pursuing an understanding of the Hard Problem. Chalmers isn't saying that solving the Hard Problem will require an objective account of what it's like to be a subject. He only (!) asks that we discover what consciousness is, and why it necessarily arises in the way that it does, and no other. Must we insist that only an account of subjectivity itself will answer this? I'm willing to give science a lot more leeway here.

What's key is your phrase "denying the reality of the subject." Obviously that is not what I mean by remaining noncommittal! Good science can and should acknowledge the experience of subjectivity, perhaps bracketing the question of the nature of this experience, which would leave room not only for philosophical description, but even for an argument à la Churchland and Dennett that the experience is an illusion.

Perhaps we might use "tautology" only for analytic necessities, such as that there in every possible world there is a number greater than seven, and not for synthetic necessities, such as Hesperus = Venus? — Banno

That might work. Or "tautology" may be more trouble than it's worth, since it has two common usages that are easily conflated. In logic, a tautology is meant to be true by virtue of the logical connectives alone, so very similar to analytic necessity. But when we ask if two statements are tautologous, we usually mean something different. We're asking if they "say the same thing", a much looser conception. "9 is greater than 7" is analytically true, and so is "10 is greater than 7", and for the same reason. It would be impossible to understand one without understanding the other. But do they say the same thing? Kinda sorta -- depends on how you want to frame "the same thing". They surely say the same thing about arithmetic.

This is perhaps a good place to pose two related questions that I think we ought to try to answer, if we're serious about a Husserlian "underlying reality" that is formless but has features such as texture, consonance, and dissonance.

1) Is this theory meant to be a psychological description of how infants begin to constitute objects? If so, how do infants replace the shared-lifeworld aspect that seems so necessary to the description? Some equivalent of a Chomskian universal grammar?

2) Does Husserl mean that what we encounter in the lifeworld must be as he describes, or only that it may be, for all we know? A similar question can be posed about Kantian noumena: Do we know that noumena do not resemble phenomena at all, or is it merely the case that we can't know either way?

Another version of this second question, posed by a realist, would be something like: If we grant that consciousness plays a vital role in constituting the objects and events of our experience, must it be the case that the result is different from what might obtain in the absence of consciousness? Suppose objects like trees are "really out there"; we couldn't know this, of course, but do we know they aren't? Do we have a transcendental argument that can show this?

While refreshing my memory, I stumbled on a pretty interesting article about this, which I'll save here for myself (and I hope it's interesting for the topic at hand):

Being a Body and Having a Body. The Twofold Temporality of Embodied Intentionality - WEHRLE, Maren — Dawnstorm

Thanks, I will check it out.

At what moment does the air in your lungs become part of you? This feels like a pretty silly and inconsequential question, but if we assume "entities", we'd need to answer that, or at least figure out in what we can't — Dawnstorm

It isn't silly at all. Along with many other similar questions we could ask (what about all those microbes that live inside us?), it reveals that entity-talk is always going to be loose talk, more or less appropriate for particular contexts. A pulmonologist may need a very specific answer to the question you pose; ordinarily we don't need such an answer; our sense of "human as entity" varies accordingly.

Does this give indirect support to the Husserlian flow? Possibly, as it suggests that even our rough-grain constituted objects ("your body") are not as obvious or "common-sense" as we suppose them to be.

Very interesting stuff, thanks.

Returning to my question about "accidental necessity," let's consider your example of the rock and the window.

If you throw a rock through a window, it will necessarily break (physical necessity), but the window is not "necessarily broken" per se. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This introduces a concept of "necessity" that is unclear to me. Which of these two things are you saying?:

1) The act of throwing a rock through a window is, by definition, the breaking of that window.
or
2) If a rock is thrown at a window, the window will necessarily break.

Since you use the phrase "physical necessity," I'm guessing you mean #2. A definitional necessity such as "'through a window' means 'breaking a window'" presumably isn't to the point here.

If I've got that right, can you explain the necessity in #2? Why must the window necessarily break? Is there some sort of ceteris paribus series of premises built into the necessity? Would we equally want to say that "The sun must necessarily rise tomorrow"? These necessities, if that is indeed what they are, seem very different from either "9 is necessarily greater than 7" or "Water is necessarily composed of H2O". Why would all three be described as "necessary"?

whereas I'm inclined to grant the subject a kind of ontological primacy. — Wayfarer

My remarks above about ontological primitives shouldn't be read as excluding this possibility as well. Subjectivity may be as primary as "flow".

The nature of the flow that Husserl described is not without order, even though it lacks formal features. How can this be? Husserl is not the only philosopher who has depicted the primordial basis of reality in these terms. We find such thinking also in Nietzsche , Deleuze, Foucault, Heidegger , Derrida and others. What is common to them is the idea that no entity in the world pre-exists its interactions with other entities. The patterns that arise obey no analogies or categorical placements. Things are not identities , they only continue to exist the same differently. — Joshs

I've bolded the question above. We want to understand how something called a flow can have order and patterns while lacking formal features. We also want to understand how this flow is not an entity, nor is it composed of entities. Would an analogy with water help? -- it's the first thing that comes to mind when I think of "flow." The problem here would be that water is composed of entities, and the ways in which water is ordered and patterned give rise to features such as depth, velocity, waves, eddies, etc. (Arguably, these are not formal features, but then we need an account of what a formal feature would be.) We could say that the "entities" of which water is composed -- I'm thinking of molecules -- are themselves composed of smaller entities, right down to the subatomic level, at which it's unclear whether we can speak of entities at all. Might this level be closer to Husserlian "flow"? But do we really perceive that flow? If we could imagine -- and I'm not sure we can -- an epoché that bracketed everything, would we get the quantum world?

We cannot ignore events which thwart our purposes, even though what stands in the way of our goals emerges by way of those very goals — Joshs

OK.

The subject is itself produced as a continually shifting effect of organism-environment interactions. The person-world dynamic isnt a subject-predicate propositional structure, with a subject representing a world to itself. Instead, both the subject and the object ‘inhere’ as the result of their interaction. — Joshs

There's some unwitting ambiguity here, I think, brought on by the term "subject". I didn't mean "subject" as opposed to "object". Let me rephrase without that term:

Is it possible, e.g., to have “texture” without its being of anything? Texture is meant to precede our constituting any specific intentionally constituted object. But surely textures and consonances need to inhere somewhere. We can't say that they begin to appear after the act of intentionality, since they are precisely supposed to be the material out of which such an act is constituted. — J

This now looks like a version of the first question about flow. We might ask, Is flow ontologically primitive? That fits with @Wayfarer's remark above about chaos. It may also fit with current scientific speculation about how to represent an abstraction such as "quantity" in strictly physical terms. Here's a very good recent paper on that. The question discussed is whether quantity is simply a primitive property of the physical world, or whether it can be explained in non-mathematical terms. The relevance here would be that quantity might be an example -- like texture and consonance -- of something that appears ontologically primitive, part of the "flow" we encounter in the lifeworld. But maybe not, as the paper discusses.

Mary's usage is entirely non-standard, and if she chooses this definition, it needs to be stated up front, else she is indeed just plain wrong. . . .

In philosophy, words like 'exist' might have more definitions than you'd find in a dictionary. — noAxioms

Yes, I think we're on the same (or closely adjacent) page. The proliferation of definitions/usages of "exist" in philosophy makes it a poor candidate for dispute. Arguments about existence quickly become wrangles over terminology, which is a shame, because I'm convinced there are important things we can understand about metaphysical structure without trying to plug in the "existence" terminology and argue for it, in the hopes that someone will finally agree with us! Theodore Sider's Writing the Book of the World is in that spirit, I believe

And BTW, a bachelor is a device to sort a large collection of laundry into workable batches of like colors that fit in the wash machine.
The term is also used in the old mainframe days, a process to submit batch jobs to the mainframe at a pace that it can handle.
Sheesh, don't you know anything?? :) — noAxioms

:lol:

I'll get out my heidigger and see if I can get to the bottom of it . . .

"The evening star' is a description, picking out the brightest star in the western evening sky, which for half the time is Venus. Of course, many objects might satisfy the description - Jupiter and Saturn, perhaps, when suitably positioned and Venus is visible in the morning; or Sirius, the brightest of the stars, might all be suitable candidates. But The Evening Star - capitalised as a proper name, and also called "Hesperus" - is Venus; that very thing, and not Jupiter, Saturn or Sirius. "Hesperus", then, is a rigid designator, as is "the Evening Star". — Banno

I think you're saying that "the evening star" (description) is not a rigid designator, but "the Evening Star" (name) is? So "the evening star" is like "President of the US in 1970"; another celestial body could be the evening star (the celestial body in the west), but only the Evening Star can be the Evening Star, just as only Nixon can be Nixon. And this plunges us right into questions about possible worlds. We know what we mean when we say "Someone other than Nixon might have been president in 1970", but do we know what we mean when we say "Something other than the Evening Star (aka Venus, Hesperus) might have been the evening star"? That is not the same as saying "Something other than the Evening Star might have been the brightest object in the evening sky" -- as you point out, other objects could satisfy this description; we know what that would mean. We seem to want the term to function both as a description and -- in upper case -- a name. Whereas "Nixon" is only a name; "Nixon" doesn't describe him in any further way.

In that small subset of possible worlds in which Socrates is sitting, necessarily, Socrates is sitting, and modal collapse is avoided by not considering those worlds in which Socrates is not sitting, and so avoiding the situation where he is both sitting and not sitting.

But for any other set of possible worlds, Socrates will be both sitting and not sitting, and modal collapse will ensue.

Necessity can be understood as "true in all possible worlds that are accessible from a given world", and if we then restrict accessibility to only those worlds in which Socrates is sitting, then (by that definition of necessity) necessarily, Socrates is sitting.

So I think that Quine is mistaken, if he thought that collapse occurs regardless of the domain... or of accessibility — Banno

OK, I can see that. Going back to the integer domain, though:

As explained above,
(30) (∃x)(x is necessarily greater than 7)
will result in modal collapse if the domain includes more than integers. — Banno

I'm not sure why including more than integers would be the same kind of domain change as the one involving Socrates sitting. In the latter case, the domain has been restricted to certain possible worlds; what would be an equivalent (or similar) restriction for integers?

mis-post

If two people have different definitions of some word they're both using, they will end up talking past each other, but with neither of them being wrong. — noAxioms

I take the point about definitions being sometimes non-truth-apt, but in the case you cite: Joe defines "bachelor" as "unmarried male", while Mary defines it as "a fir tree". In ordinary usage, we would say that Joe is right and Mary is wrong. Granted, either can simply stipulate a definition, but we would say that Joe is stipulating the dictionary definition and Mary is not, so there is some kind of wrongness attached to what Mary is doing. But what kind? What allows us to go from "Mary is using an unconventional definition" to "Mary is wrong about what a bachelor is"? I don't have a ready answer, but the question underlies why I think "resolution of a dispute by definition" is more problematic than you do.

OK. I will think about this vocabulary of "textures," "consonances," "dissonances," and "affordances." These terms pose some obvious problems, as you are well aware. But I'll see if I can clarify them for myself before posing questions.

Indeed. In this matter, we're in much the same position as 18th century scientists speculating about Democritean atoms. We don't even have a vocabulary in which to form the questions.

Granted we don't understand how [consciousness] happens, but the question being asked is perhaps an impossible one. If it is to be answered, I can't see how it could be anything but science that answers it. If it is unanswerable, then what conclusions could we draw from that? — Janus

Agreed. Or as I said in the "Mind as Uncaused Cause" thread:

"[We need] a completely different understanding of what terms like "physical," "mental," "subjective" et al. mean. The "hard problem," I think, has all the hallmarks of a question that has to have been stated incorrectly, though it's the best we can do at the moment . . . we shall see."

I would be astonished if consciousness as a phenomenon didn't turn out to be biological, and capable of scientific explanation. Subjectivity -- what it's like to be conscious -- may be a different matter.

I looked for a juggler emoji but couldn't find one! So I'll just smile :smile: I hope you do come back to this discussion. Obviously I don't think I'm doing anything semantically dodgy, but happy to hear your thoughts, which are always interesting.

As explained above,
(30) (∃x)(x is necessarily greater than 7)
will result in modal collapse if the domain includes more than integers. — Banno

Welcome back.

As Quine explains it, doesn't the collapse occur regardless of the domain? It has to do with existential generalization itself, no? But maybe I'm missing it.

You want to know what is out there as the underlying reality for Husserl, apart from iintentionally constituted objects? An utterly formless, structureless flow of change. — Joshs

This was posted seconds before my post above, responding to a similar concern. So now I can ask: Is the utterly formless, structureless flow nevertheless constraining, in some degree, of what we can constitute as an object or event? How is this flow not "whole cloth," as it were?

Through intentional acts, [the subjective pole of consciousness] constitutes the objects as what they are and how they are. This does not mean that it invents them out of whole cloth — Joshs

I think this is largely correct. And it foregrounds the conceptual challenge: If we do not invent objects out of whole cloth, what are the constraints put upon the way we constitute them? Will the lifeworld allow anything? Or, said another way: If we did invent objects out of whole cloth, how would we be able to tell the difference between doing that and merely constituting them through intentional acts? What would mark one or the other description of what we do as being the correct one?

Husserl saw that rather than being a passive recipient of external data, the mind actively participates in the process of knowing shaped by underlying structures of consciousness. — Wayfarer

Here's a good description of what Husserl opposed, from The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (also quoted by Bernstein in the book you cited):

What characterizes objectivism is that it moves upon the ground of the world which is pre-given, taken for granted through experience, seeks the "objective truth" of this world, seeks what, in this world, is unconditionally valid for every rational being, what it is in itself. It is the task of episteme, ratio, or philosophy to carry this out universally. Through these one arrives at what ultimately is; beyond this, no further questions would have a rational sense. — Husserl, 68-69

Bernstein goes on to make an interesting point. He says that Husserl "fails to stress the dialectical similarity" between objectivism and transcendentalism:

Both share the aspiration to discover the real, permanent foundation of philosophy and knowledge -- a foundation that will withstand historical vicissitudes . . . and satisfy the craving for ultimate constraints. — Bernstein, 10

What Bernstein makes of this would throw us off course, so I'll stop here, as the discussion has been nicely focused thus far.

Let's slow it down a little. I think you're assuming that the binary "embodied/disembodied" is clear enough to cover all the cases we're interested in. But self-reflection shows me that, in fact, I would find it very difficult to answer the question, "Is J embodied or disembodied?" I want to say, "Neither. It's a type of category mistake. In one sense, I'm embodied, since as far as I know, I need my body in order to be here. But in another equally important sense, I'm not embodied at all. My mind or self seems to have almost nothing in common with what I understand the physical to be. I supervene on my body, perhaps, but is that obviously the 'embodied' part of the embodied/disembodied' binary?"

Now this is a problem, not an explanation. I'm only trying to suggest that "being disembodied" doesn't have to mean being a ghost, or a ghost in the machine. We should use the most charitable interpretations possible when we try to understand why this problem isn't dissolved by physicalism (sorry, Dan Dennett!).

A "definition" is a statement without a truth-value and therefore cannot be used to "resolve a disagreement"; rather, in a given discursive context, it's either useful to some degree or not at all. Mary's conceptual definition is either more or less coherent consistent & sensible than Joe's. Afaik, only better, more sound, arguments can resolve rational disagreements. — 180 Proof

Why doesn't a definition have a truth-value? You probably mean something simple that I'm overlooking, but I would have thought that "a bachelor is an unmarried male" has a truth-value in L. It's a truth about language, not the world, if that's what you mean -- and that's part of my point about the difficulties Joe and Mary will have using a definition to resolve their disagreement.

As to "coherent, consistent and sensible": Joe's doctrine about existence can be all of those things, while still being false -- if there is a truth of the matter. That's the question I'm trying to highlight.

I agree about better, sounder arguments. I just believe it's difficult to find a non-stipulative terminological place to stand, when it comes to arguments about "what existence is." I ask again, if two people disagree about the terms, how can they resolve the disagreement? Wouldn't they be better off noticing how "existence" is used in philosophical (and ordinary) discourse, and then coming up with sharper, more specific terms to cover the various cases? Indeed, isn't this what Meinong tried to do, in part?

Subjectivity — or perhaps we could coin the term ‘subject-hood’ — encompasses the shared and foundational aspects of perception and understanding, as explored by phenomenology. The personal, by contrast, pertains to the idiosyncratic desires, biases, and attachments of a specific individual.

It is difficult for me to understand this. Isn't it some kind of a big mind or trascendental ego? — JuanZu

Compare the difference between psyche and pneuma in Classical Greek, or "soul" and "spirit" in Christian theology.

In fact, this might be two distinct difficulties. First, as you say, subjectivity appears to be left out of scientism.
— J

I'm not sure what you mean by "scientism" here. Do you just mean science or the obviously incorrect idea that everything about humans and other living beings can be explained by physics? — Janus

Closer to the latter. Good science should say, re consciousness and subjectivity, "We just don't know. Stay tuned." Scientism, in contrast, rules out the non-physical, and favors mechanistic bottom-up explanation.

What does it mean to "have an opinion" if there is no subject to judge?
— J

There obviously are subjects (individuals) who make judgements, so what's the problem? — Janus

Well, it seems obvious to you and me, but it's very difficult for a physicalist to explain how or why this can be. What sort of thing is a "judgment"? Does it have propositional content? Truth-value? But what could such things amount to, if everything is physical? BTW, it's still a problem even if we agree that subjects are real -- the Hard Problem, in fact.

But then doesn't that prejudge the question of whether there could be anything else other than embodiment that characterizes a self and its attributes? Something that is mine would not necessarily be embodied, if I myself am not (entirely).

Very good OP (Part 1), thank you.

The difficulty with the strictly objectivist approach is that it leaves no room at all for the subject— for us, in fact, as human beings. Viewed objectively, instead, h.sapiens is a fortuitous by–product of the same essentially mindless process that causes the movements of the planets; we’re one species amongst many others. — Wayfarer

In fact, this might be two distinct difficulties. First, as you say, subjectivity appears to be left out of scientism. But we could still view homo sapiens as merely one (mindless) species among many. The additional difficulty is that, without an account of subjectivity, nothing homo sapiens may allegedly learn about the world and themselves can have any claim to justification -- there can be no reasons, since reasons are not part of the objective world. This seems to rule out any view of h. sapiens that purports to be true. At best, we could point to the physical factors that cause us to have the opinions we have. But that circles us back to the first difficulty: What does it mean to "have an opinion" if there is no subject to judge?

If embodied (i.e. mine/yours), then "experience, or subjectivity" is physical (i.e. affected by my/your interactions with our respective local environments). — 180 Proof

This assumes that the only way to be "mine" or "yours" is to be embodied, doesn't it?

Moreover, a mind can be affected by our interactions with the local environment without itself being part of that environment, surely. This is what the supervenience concept is trying to get at, I think. We can postulate a one-for-one mapping between brain and mind/subjectivity without also postulating causality.

As you know, calling it the hard problem is misleading, because it suggests every other problem is easy. So free will is easy, brain science is easy, physics is easy, sociology is easy, but we know that's not true. — Manuel

Chalmers was contrasting his "hard problem of consciousness" with what he called "the easy problem of consciousness": finding the places in the brain that correspond to various subjective experiences. This, as we know, is indeed getting easier.

Yes, good summary. The question of how experience, or subjectivity, can be "in the world" if the world is understood physically is currently unanswerable. But if I had to bet on the next Copernican Revolution (let's check back in 200 years), it would consist of a completely different understanding of what terms like "physical," "mental," "subjective" et al. mean. The "hard problem," I think, has all the hallmarks of a question that has to have been stated incorrectly, though it's the best we can do at the moment . . . we shall see.

It's just difficult to understand how subjectively bounded subjects could perceive objects without their subjectivity filtering the perception. — philosch

It certainly is. I don't know what your philosophical background is, but this is one of most entrenched questions in philosophy. Often, it's not a question of mere "filtering" but a challenge to whether there could ever be contact with objective reality at all -- Idealism, very broadly. A good overview of this issue is The View from Nowhere by Thomas Nagel.

I like the concept of intersubjectivity for many reasons, but does it always fit? Do we want to say that when physicists describe the quantum world, they are working toward intersubjective agreement rather than truth? At the quantum level, with its notorious perplexities, perhaps we should say that. But since we know that any intersubjective agreement can be challenged, this still seems to leave room for asking, But is it true? Similarly, describing the Law of Non-Contradiction as "intersubjectively agreed upon" doesn't seem to do justice to what we mean when we assert that law. So, I don't think one can abandon objectivity in favor of intersubjectivity in all cases without explaining why the "is it true" question would be incoherent. Which many philosophers have tried to do, of course. But we can't simply assert it.

say you used X logic to get to a definition of a word... a word that had 8 ways to be used across the different parts of speach it could cover...

All 8 definitions would rest in row 3 of this pyramid we just constructed...

That doesn't mean each definition can be used as a reference for the word in the sentence. — DifferentiatingEgg

OK, except the last sentence? When you say "reference for the word" do you mean intension (in logic)? Some words presumably wouldn't have any extensions.

Yes, a diagram would surely help but I don't want to put you to any additional trouble.

I'm afraid this is over my head, but I appreciate your response.

I have admittedly been slow to reply to the topic as I am busy looking up pages and trying to not just give flippant replies without thought. — noAxioms

God bless you! (or substitute "the Universe" if you prefer). If only more posters did the same.

It is perhaps becoming clear how two somewhat different uses of "necessity" are at work here. One has necessity as opposed to analyticity, the other has necessity as opposed to possibility. — Banno

To which we can add a third wrinkle, as I referred to earlier: necessity as opposed to tautology. '9 is greater than 7' is presumably analytic and likely necessary, but is it a tautology?

Thank you, this is very clear. I think @Banno is right that the issue being raised in the Quine essay strongly resembles de re / de dicto. Referential opacity is the connecting link.

If something is a fact, then to report that it is the case is to report that it is necessarily true. If Socrates is sitting, "Socrates is currently sitting" is true by necessity, but this is necessitas per accidens. By contrast, "man is an animal" is necessitas per se, de re (assuming for the sake of the example that all men are necessarily animals.) — Count Timothy von Icarus

A question about this, though. "Necessity by accident" has an odd ring. Is the idea that, if "Socrates is currently sitting" is true, then as long as it remains true, it is necessarily the case that Socrates is sitting? The necessity would arise from the fact that there is only one way (allegedly) for a statement to be true, and that is by its stating something that is the case? I'm struggling to phrase the necessity in some understandable way -- maybe you can help.

"Man is an animal," in contrast, would be a good example of a Kripkean synthetic necessity. There is nothing analytic about the notion; it so happens, though, that we have discovered it to be true. And Kripke would go on to point out that we don't need this necessary truth in order to designate "man" -- we were able to do this quite well before we knew any science. Had it turned out that humans were not in fact animals, we would not have said, "Oh, we we were wrong in our identification of what a human is. We'd better call them doomans instead" Rather, we would have said, "We thought humans might be angelic or unique, but that is not so. They're still humans, just different from what we thought." (This is Kripke's "gold" example in a slightly different wording.)

Didn't mean to scare you, lol. :wink: — philosch

No problem, I scare easily! Had to go to urgent care after reading Derrida.

We are 100% subjective beings. No part of any human knowledge or understanding or experience can be a part of or close to an "absolute objective reality". Our experience of the universe around us is subjective by definition. — philosch

Let's grant, ex hypothesi, the first and the last sentences. Why would the second sentence follow?: that objective reality is unreachable by subjective knowledge? That seems to import a lot of preconceptions about how objectivity and subjectivity relate, preconceptions which to say the least are controversial.

What we call objective reality can be considered true in the context of human experience but it's not true in an absolute sense. — philosch

And that may be good enough. Intersubjectivity often makes more sense than "absolute objectivity." Certainly the idea is good enough to establish the distinction I want to make between ambiguous, controversial terms like "existence" and every-day words for things we can verify. We don't need to engage in a debate about whether a table is "objectively a table," as long as we can agree that, unlike "reality" or "being", we know how to verify whether object X is a table or not. And also, we shouldn't be distracted by the fact that any noun can be subject to bizarre exceptions or quibbles. Again, the point is that the problem with "existence" is not bizarre exceptions to an otherwise clear concept; the baseline concept itself is unclear. So while I agree that there is a sort of continuum of imprecision involving language, as you suggest, it doesn't amount to saying that everything is imprecise (or "subjective") in the same way.

I'm not too up on the de dicto/de re distinction, ↪J but it should be one of those that is amenable to formal description. — Banno

OK. I quickly read through the SEP article and remembered why I'd never completely understood it in the first place. :smile: Glad to have some help from @Count Timothy von Icarus or anyone else.