Thank you for the reference to the Wang paper, which I will read with interest. For now, though, you quote him as saying that conceptual relativism does not involve “confrontations between two conceptual schemes with different distributions of truth-values over their assertions, but rather confrontations between two languages with different distributions of truth-value status over their sentences due to incompatible metaphysical presuppositions.” I understand the distinction – language A may countenance T-or-F evaluations over a different set of sentences than language B – but why would this make them distinct conceptual schemes?

If there’s no short answer to this, no worries, you’ve referred me to Wang and I’ll see what he has to say.

I've read Kuhn but not Rouse. I think Kuhn is wrong in his understanding of the scientific project -- see Donald Davidson, "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme".

I take it Rouse concurs with what he calls the postmodernist view (different from Kuhn, of course)? If we can "never get outside of language," this presumably includes that very statement. So what would make it true (or false)?

In any case, the point was really about bias, and I think this usage is eccentric. I may want to claim that water is H2O, but this doesn't mean I'm biased in favor of this belief. It only means that I hold it.

Why not say that ‘objective’ is the view with biases more or less shared among a normative community? — Joshs

Because this won’t work for almost all of our uses of “objective”. It’s objectively true, I presume, that water is composed of H2O. Do we want to describe this statement as a “bias shared among a normative community” -- of scientists, presumably? What would motivate us to call this a bias?

What we want in moral realism, then, is a sense of “objective” that at least resembles what we find in science – or daily life, for that matter. And those who deny moral facts are indeed saying that the best we can do is “biases more or less shared.” But I don’t think that’s a reasonable synonym for “objective.”

T. M. Scanlon is good on this:

"Accepting science as a way of understanding the natural world entails rejecting claims about this world that are incompatible with science, such as claims about witches and spirits. But accepting a scientific view of the natural world does not mean accepting the view that the only meaningful statements with determinate truth values are statements about the natural world." (from Being Realistic About Reasons, 2011)

Also this, from Thomas Nagel:

"It is not one of the claims of natural science that natural science contains all the truths there are." (from Analytic Philosophy and Human Life, 2023)

These philosophers are drawing attention to one of the most common misunderstandings of what science does. There is no "completeness theorem" for truths either entailed or revealed by science -- only scientism would try to make such a claim.

I wonder if a fundamental cause of the controversies is that the concept of free will is poorly defined — Art48

I’ve been following this discussion with some bemusement. Would one of you be willing to put forward a target definition of “free will” -- one that makes sense to them – so that we can have some idea what we’re debating, and all focus on the same concept?

Science is implicitly understood as the arbiter of what should be taken seriously — Wayfarer

I don’t know if you’ve read Walker Percy. He makes an interesting distinction between “knowledge” and “news.” Knowledge would be the sort of thing that, broadly, science investigates. News, on the other hand, is information that you can’t deduce or discover for yourself; someone has to tell you. This would include religious revelation, for Percy. And he says that the “credentials of the news-bearer” are important evidence for whether to trust the news.

This may be too black-and-white, but I see what he’s getting at and I think it’s a valuable insight. I wonder what Aquinas would say, getting back to the OP. He made a distinction between natural and revealed religion, didn’t he? And I'm sure Kierkegaard, that champion of subjectivity, would agree.

Maybe a "Personal Spiritual Experiences" category could be added to the Forum. I don't want to derail this interesting thread by going on about my own. I appreciate everyone's open-mindedness, though.

Have you ever tried LSD? — wonderer1

Have I ever! Don't get me started . . . :starstruck:

I don't mean to make this just about me, but the (non-LSD) experience I had, some 35 years ago now, has stubbornly resisted being reduced to psychological categories. I certainly tried, as did most of my concerned friends. The main reason I call it strong evidence is that it changed my life in a way that was immediate, profound, and long-lasting, and made sense of all the previously senseless God-talk I'd heard. I think William James has the best descriptions of this sort of thing in Varieties of Religious Experience, but there are many Eastern accounts as well.

Could I be wrong? Sure -- no certainty, as I said. But I'm satisfied to have found the most likely explanation.

That leads to the dessicated social religion that Christianity has become - 'belief without evidence' as it's usually described here. — Wayfarer

I think the "dessicated social religion" part is very true, provided you're talking about mainstream U.S. Christian denominations -- perhaps not the best sample.

"Belief without evidence" is trickier. There's all kinds of evidence for the existence of God and even the divinity of Jesus, but none of it is rock solid. As in so many areas, we're left with beliefs that fall far short of certainty, but are hardly as bereft as "belief without evidence" sounds. In my opinion (and experience), a direct encounter with the mystical is extremely powerful evidence in support of theism. It isn't self-validating, but the "God hypothesis" can be compared critically with other explanations for the experience, and I can decide that the other explanations aren't as plausible -- as indeed I have.

I'm not sure where this leaves us. — Banno

As I read him, James isn’t saying that the “simples” -- of whatever level of simplicity -- are objects of perception at all. Certainly it’s a question for physiologists to decide at what point something is in fact perceivable, but James (and Flanagan, who has updated a lot of James in his own accounts of consciousness) is concerned with something a bit different. His point is that a constitutive or foundational or quiddity-ish description of object X is unlikely to coincide with what we can perceive. Mind you, this is using “perceive” in the way I suggested, as a term for phenomenal experience. There are certainly ways you could use it that would allow for “perceiving” atoms, I guess, but that’s hardly common. What J & F & I find interesting here is the disconnect between “what is X” understood as an ontological question, and “what is X” understood as a question about what I’m perceiving. Just for funsies, I ran this by a physicist friend of mine. He didn’t understand how there could even be a debate here. “The fundamental entities of existence don't look anything like what we perceive with our senses,” was the gist of his reaction. I think that’s what James meant.

As for the question about Jupiter: We don’t do either of the things you’re asking about, it seems to me. We can’t build up Jupiter as such, unless we know its name. What we can build up is a description of what we see, and perhaps get to “an object with characteristics A, B, C...” but a name isn’t perceivable. Upon being told that our object is called Jupiter, we can add that info to our knowledge, and refer to it by name, but no one thinks we can see Jupiter in the same way we see a color. Otherwise, we would have known the name from the beginning. “Jupiter” isn’t a raw feel, an element of (sorry) sense data. The analysis is the same working in the other direction, from Jupiter to the bands and patches.

Not to be repetitive, but this all seems to hinge on disambiguation of what we mean when we say things like “I see Jupiter.” Are we naming a sensible object, or the using the name of a sensible object? Funnily enough, in a way that Austin might well appreciate, the “common man” has no trouble making this distinction whenever it’s needed; we philosophers seem to get in a muddle about it and insist that there’s only one right way to speak.

6. What, exactly, a "perception" consists in remains obscure. — Banno

I agree with Austin that using veridical vs. illusory as way into the question isn’t promising. The insight from James that I quoted earlier seems much more on target. There are phenomenal experiences – let’s call them perceptions – and these same experiences can refer to, or be of, objects in the world which have names and, often, are constituted in interesting ways by smaller, more fundamental components.

James wants to say that neither names nor fundamental components are perceived, in the sense given above. So it’s a handy and reasonable distinction to make: We can give the term “perception” a job to do by letting it refer to the phenomenological experiences, but not the names or the components. If we want to refer to them, it’s easy: The direct object in the sentence “I see the red patch on Jupiter” is “the red patch on Jupiter,” a name which clarifies our perceptual experience of “I see red,” but isn’t synonymous with it. The direct object in “I see red” is the color red. Since we don’t see names, the distinction must be a valid one. And surely it conforms with our ordinary talk about these things? We know the difference between “I see a tree” and “I see a tree which I also happen to know is called an elm”. Indeed, James would say that we could take it all the way back, and say, "I see 3-dimensional colored object of a certain shape which I happen to know is called a tree."

This might help, from William James via Owen Flanagan: "the idea that our simple perceptions are in fact generated by the binding of even simpler units is compatible with these simpler units making no phenomenological appearance whatsoever. We need to beware of imposing our views about how experiences are generated onto the phenomenological surface."

In other words, what something is, in terms of its deep structure or physical reduction, isn't necessarily perceptible at the phenomenological level. The church looks like a barn. My group-of-molecules looks like a bottle. Wouldn't Austin agree that this is just common sense? The confusion, if there is any, stems from the fact that we often fail to disambiguate perception-words like "see"; sometimes we want "see" to refer to the phenomenology, other times to the "simpler units" that create the phenomenology and, often, provide a reductive description. This latter use often gets combined with a view of how object X "really" is, scientifically.

I dunno. This doesn’t strike me as one of Austin’s better points. Suppose I said, “I see a collection of 7 to the 112th power molecules that looks like a bottle.” Am I being accurate? In a way: This is (let’s say) the exact number of molecules it takes to form the bottle. And go ahead and specify something about shape if that helps. But in another way it’s wildly inaccurate: I don’t, I can’t, see those molecules. So surely the right answer is, “I see a bottle, not a collection of invisible particles.” The bottle is constituted by the particles but we’re talking about perception here, not quiddity or whatever.

So with the barn and the church. What I see is a barn. You’d have to tell me about the church disguise before I could even loosely claim to “see” it, just as I need to be told about molecular structure before I could, loosely, claim to see it. And in both cases, it's a use of "seeing" divorced from ordinary perception.

I don’t think there’s a right or wrong way to talk about this, necessarily, but I do think a defender of the value of ordinary language is going pretty far out on a limb here.

The argument for sense perceptions, or data, and qualia (and appearances, and particulars) have in common that we are problematizing sensing in a particular way—by abstraction from any setting—and creating one answer because we believe there is always a problem (and that we want to buffer ourselves from the possibility of any). — Antony Nickles

That would be one way of seeing it, but actually I was saying the opposite. “Pure sensation” or “qualia” or whatever term you prefer is what we call the unabstracted perception, the unconceptualized sensation specific to one setting and one time. We then go on to “see X” based on what we’ve learned about how to see. I think Austin considers this issue of “seeing as . . .” later in the book.

But I may not be understanding you. How does any of this problematize sensing? I was hoping to make the problem diminish or even disappear, working in parallel with Austin rather than against him.

Well put. The problem, then, is not whether there’s only one way vs. at least one way, but whether the (one or many) ways can be constructed without sense data.

I hope I’m not just conflict-averse, but I really believe there’s less here to dispute than might first appear. Do we agree that “qualia” refer to actual phenomenological experience, and that the word can be used in meaningful sentences that describe those experiences? If so, let’s try out the idea that this is what Ayer, Austin, & Co. are arguing about – whether there is a separate layer, or filter, or “raw” experience, that is not identical with the eventual object that we say, perhaps too breezily, that we “see.” Even for ordinary perception, a great deal of “how to see” has to be learned. I think the “indirect perception” advocates (and that’s a terrible term, very misleading, but we’re stuck with it) are saying that there’s a meaningful distinction to be made between the sensory information I receive at time T, and the identification of what I’m seeing at time T+1.

Does such a position involve believing in sense-data? Perhaps, but what it doesn’t entail is believing we see sense-data as opposed to the object in question. The sense-data are what permit the seeing, at least in almost all ordinary cases where we’ve learned to pick out relevant objects from the blooming, buzzing confusion of “pure sensation” (James).

Some might now replace "sense datum" with "qualia". Not quite the same. — Banno

Agreed, though I think qualia are problematic for Austin in one important respect: In the passage you just discussed, Austin sounds as if he believes there’s only one correct way to see something. “The straight stick in water looks just how a straight stick in water should look - slightly bent.” But this is a sophisticated result, one which a child would probably not reach without some coaching. How something “should look” has to be grounded in, and educed from, what it does look like, at any given moment of perception, and this is arguably what “quale” refers to.

Later, Austin seems much more aware of this. Not to jump ahead, and I won’t elaborate the point till we get there, but see pp. 100 – 102. For instance, this: “When something is seen, there may not only be different ways of saying what is seen; it may also be seen in different ways, seen differently.” (Austin’s itals.)

J why is the shape “correct” and “actual”, and not just roughly? — Antony Nickles

I don't quite get your question. Could you say more? Do you mean that it would be more accurate to say "roughly correct" or "very good approximation of the actual shape"? If so, no problem.

Thank you!

I don't think Russell believed he was using "real" in a special or technical sense; he probably thought his use was obvious. Turns out, it requires a bit of interpretation. And of course he wasn't trying to provide a comprehensive metaphysics in the passage in question. (I always aim for the most charitable and sensible reading of any important philosopher's thought.)

I guess the idea that a word like "chair" could be ambiguous doesn't sit too well with you, but is it really so arcane or "speculative"? "Chair" can refer to any given perception of a chair -- which, as Russell points out, may or may not give us a good sense of the chair's true shape -- or "chair" can refer to the composite, hopefully correct, idea of the chair which we put together based on those individual perceptions. We could certainly debate whether this ambiguity is a good thing, and perhaps recommend that one or the other sense of "chair" be changed to a different term, but the distinction being made really isn't all that speculative, is it?

Thanks for the secret knowledge behind the ellipsis!

I linked above to the text that is Austin's target. — Banno

Many thanks. I don't see Russell as arguing for the impossibility of direct perception, but maybe Ayer does; I'll read him and find out. Russell's "real" table is only the composite, and hopefully accurate, view we create after many sense impressions of the object. That table is not directly perceived, but that's not the table Austin or anyone else should be worried about. The key here is that "real" is a technical term Russell uses without defining it very clearly. Or so it seems to me.

A lame question, but I'm fairly new to the forum: How do I make those arrow+name graphics that mean "view original post"?

Thanks, and that'll teach me to review the material before posting! I'd forgotten that Ayer is his primary antagonist -- a worthy opponent back then, I guess.

As for the Russell quote . . . I don't think he's being quite as villainous as Austin or some others might paint him. Most of what he says is unexceptionable, merely pointing out the difference between how an object may look to us, and what shape it may actually have. And it is certainly true that we construct the correct shape from a multiplicity of individual "takes." By the time Russell starts to make his point, "real" appears in quotes, meant to contrast with appearance, as in:

experience has taught us to construct the ‘real’ shape from the apparent shape, and the ‘real’ shape is what interests us as practical men — Russell, The Problems of Philosophy

But the ‘real’ shape is not what we see; it is something inferred from what we see. And what we see is constantly changing in shape as we move about the room — Russell, The Problems of Philosophy

Again, I think this is uncontroversial. We may or may not see the "real" shape at any given moment, but Russell doesn't mean the object itself is somehow unreal, or that the object's true shape must permanently elude us. In Russell's sense of "real" -- a perception that corresponds fortuitously to an actual shape -- and in that sense alone, the object can be said to be "not immediately known to us at all, but must be an inference...."

Notice, lastly, that this Russellian sense of "real" suggests the basis for distinguishing between veridical perceptions and familiar illusions.

Glad to see this thread starting up. Austin is always worth rereading.

This talk of “not directly perceiving objects” makes me wonder, not for the first time, who Austin believed he was arguing against. Did he think that Idealism in general, or versions of Kantianism in particular, entailed such a view? I don’t think that’s a very charitable interpretation of what I take Kant and others to be saying.

Kant wasn't a Christian apologist but he was a Christian, and not just in name. His ethical philosophy is impossible to understand without including his view of Heaven as a "Kingdom of Grace" in which our "highest good may be attained." (from the CPR, A812/B840). This was, in his opinion, the only successful theodicy.

By this I mean not that there must be some premises that are forever unrevisable but, rather, that in any process of reasoning or argument there must be some thoughts that one simply thinks from the inside--rather than thinking of them as biologically programmed dispositions. — Thomas Nagel

I don’t want to overlook this important quotation. Nagel is telling us that, as @Wayfarer says, the epistemological buck stops with what Nagel calls “thinking from the inside” -- that is, from within rationality rather than from an alleged viewpoint that claims to somehow evaluate rationality from outside. In order to claim, for instance, that reasoning is a biologically or evolutionarily programmed activity, you would still need reasons for the claim, which can only be discovered by, once again, thinking from within rationality, because that’s the only place you can find reasons.

However, I think there’s an equally important insight here that can get overlooked: Nagel’s claim is an epistemological one, not a metaphysical one. He’s not saying that “there must be some premises that are forever unrevisable,” that is, metaphysical discoveries that are incorrigible and which can be used as foundational premises. That would be a misunderstanding. I’ve read a lot of Nagel and I think he’s agnostic on the question of basic ontology. But he firmly argues that the only way to approach the question is from within rationality.

Put another way, a metaphysic is a statement of what must be the case, in order for the world to be as it is. — Wayfarer

That’s a great description of the kind of metaphysics based on transcendental deduction, of which Kant was the master. I think it’s possible to invert it, though, and describe metaphysics as the investigation of whether basic structure can be discerned in Reality (substitute for this term whatever you think comprises the widest possible field of investigation). This is an inversion because it puts into question the term “the world as it is,” and asks whether a correct metaphysics might change our understanding of that world.

contemporary Aristotelian philosophers who make the case for a revisionist form of metaphysics in full awareness of the scientific worldview and of Kant's criticism of metaphysics. — Wayfarer

An excellent contemporary philosopher (not an Aristotelian, I don’t think) who does this is Theodore Sider. His Writing the Book of the World is a bravura performance and really shows what metaphysics can look like today.

Walking, eating and thinking are activities we engage in — Ciceronianus

You’re right, and I may have placed the emphasis misleadingly on the idea of an “activity” in general. Walking and eating are unproblematic examples of activities, because understanding them seems to begin and end with some description of how our bodies work, and why we perform the activities. But thinking or, more controversially, “having a thought” has a lot of room for questioning. Like you, I’d welcome some definitive input from a neuroscientist, but that’s probably decades away. Even without it, we can recognize that the activity of thinking has aspects – namely, the thoughts themselves – that don’t easily reduce to process-level description, and in fact invite the analogy with creating something or bringing something into being – namely, the intentional object of the thought. I agree that this is often misleading, but I think we have to acknowledge the difficulty of accounting for the “contentful” aspect of subjective experience.

We might be in agreement here, I'm not sure. Some folk would read the above as diminishing the import of verbal disputes. — Banno

Right, I don’t at all mean to diminish the significance of identifying and, if possible, resolving verbal disputes in philosophy. Ordinary language philosophy, practiced in the modest way that I believe its originators intended, can be enormously helpful. So can metaphysical investigation, though I know you’re less enamored of that.

But take the question up a level. How do we decide the meta-question of “Is this merely a verbal dispute, or is there some genuine issue that could be settled by further thought and/or empirical investigation?”? What I’m saying is that this question can’t be settled using a result obtained at the original level. That would be arguing in a circle, or elaborately begging the question. Rather, it’s a genuine fresh question requiring a new argument.

"Thinking about a cup" seems to me a fairly good description of thinking about a cup. — Ciceronianus

Well, but only fairly good. Put it this way: Before time T, I'm not thinking about a cup. At time T, and for a certain time after, I am thinking about a cup. Let's stipulate that no new "thing" has come into the world at time T. The question is, What has changed? To reply, "I've thought about a cup" doesn't help enough. We know that; what we want to know is, How are we to understand this thought event if it isn't a thing and it isn't an image? (though I think it is, sometimes). Again, it won't do to keep saying, "Thinking about a cup" or "It's a process" in reply. Surely a neuroscientist wouldn't be satisfied with such an answer, and I'm suggesting that a good old metaphysical phenomenologist wouldn't be either.

That said, your description of how we use thinking about a cup to find a cup is accurate and well reported -- which for me only adds to the sense that we know very little about what's going on here.

We may think of a cup, certainly, but no "thought of a cup" results — Ciceronianus

This means, I take it, that “thought of a cup,” understood as some sort of object or newly created ontological entity, doesn’t exist. Very well. What language would work better to talk about thinking of a cup? Might we call it an event? A process? A heebeejeebee? (that is, coin a new term?) Using “existence” in a particular way that privileges thing-hood doesn’t change the fact that we still need some designation for what happens when we think of a cup. Thinking of a cup is no less real because it doesn’t qualify as “existing-like-things-exist.” Or, if you want to put it in terms of quantifier variance, “Ex” requires an interpretation at the quantifier level, not just the domain of possible Xs.

It's a question of preference, of what "parlance" one chooses, but I'll go with there being one table, described in two ways, participating in two language games, and hence that the table one sits at is the space mostly strung together with forces. — Banno

This response nicely sets up what for me is a key meta-philosophical problem. Traditional metaphysics, in my understanding, isn’t willing to concede that basic ontological questions are verbal disputes. And by “traditional,” I don’t simply mean historic; I think this is still the case with people like Kit Fine, Karen Bennett, Ted Sider, and many others. Of course the other position is attractive: Maybe there isn’t really a fact of the matter, and we are simply faced with a choice of parlance, a preference among various ways of assigning words to concepts and/or objects. Which position is true, I’m not sure. At a guess, I’d say it varies depending on the ontological topic. But the point I want to make is that this very question remains philosophically meaningful. It requires argument, in other words, to demonstrate – if one can – that problem X is a matter of terminology and hence not worthy of metaphysical argument. Or the reverse, of course.

the intelligence of philosophers was bewitched by means of language, as Wittgenstein said — Ciceronianus

Interesting answer, thanks. Though I can't help thinking that something so clearly absurd (in this telling of the story) would have been noticed long before Wittgenstein . . . Pretty strong enchantment! Also, now that LW has unbewitched us, wouldn't that kind of put an end to serious metaphysics? Yet all the phil. journals I read still haven't got the memo, apparently. Or does the anti-spell only work for some philosophers? What do you suppose makes the difference?

this adventure in the preposterous — Ciceronianus

the remarkably silly task — Ciceronianus

which although it is in all respects a chair as I understand a chair to be and I use it as such, cannot be known — Ciceronianus

This is a little off topic, but I’m always curious about positions like this. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that your position is true, i.e., Kant and Descartes were engaged in a preposterous, silly task involving, among other things, denying that a chair could really be known as such. In your opinion, then, what accounts for the fact that thousands of first-rate philosophers have taken D & K seriously, devoted enormous scholarship and brainpower to investigating the pluses and minuses of the Cartesian/Kantian tradition, built upon this tradition to explore many modern philosophical questions, etc.?

You see what I’m getting at. If D & K are not merely wrong – as they may be – but preposterous and silly, how can you explain so many other philosophers’ inability to grasp this, which ought to be very obvious, as most preposterous things are?

I’m not being snarky. I’d really like to know what the truth of this position would entail about the history of philosophy, and the intelligence of philosophers. You’re not the first philosopher I’ve put this question to, and have garnered some remarkable answers over the years! (My favorite is, "The only good philosophers are the ones that agree with me!") What’s yours?

I like simple. I don't understand "bedrock Existence-with-a-Capital-E". — Banno

I like simple too. "Simplistic," the word I used, means something different. What I meant, more or less, was that Kant's impressive philosophical system can hardly be reduced to "denying that things exist outside my mind." That would be simplistic -- because it misses all the nuances that Kant tried to explore about concepts like "thing" and "existence."

As for capital-E Existence, this was my whimsical way of referring to Kant's noumena. You can substitute "noumena" for my Capitalized Phrase if that helps.

Not to butt into someone else's argument but . . . aren't we getting a little over-simplistic here?
@Banno, surely Kant didn't "deny that things exist outside the mind" -- he merely sought to discover the limits of our knowledge of them. And I think he was quite sure his chair existed. What he questioned -- rightly, in my opinion -- was whether "My chair exists" is a statement about some bedrock Existence-with-a-Capital-E (the Ultimate German Noun! :smile: ) which would have the same qualities if it did not appear as a phenomenon to us. Indeed, what we now learn from physics seems to support this.

Been paying attention, haven’t you. — Mww

Attention is one of the few things I enjoy paying!

Under the assumption X is some empirical condition, and negative knowledge regarding X is obtained according to judgements such as, “I know X’s are not this or that”, such judgements are “….inane and senseless; that is, they are in reality purposeless and, for this reason, often very ridiculous…”(A709/B737). — Mww

I have a different interpretation of this passage. Kant is talking about the distinction between negative judgments “which are such not merely as regards their form but also as regards their content.” Negative formal judgment is not a problem; “we can make negative any proposition we like.” The task is different for a negative judgment of content, however. Such a judgment is meant to be “rejecting error” (Kant’s italics). So a negative formal judgment can’t do this, since “no error is possible – [such judgments] are indeed true but empty. . . “ And now comes the rest of the lines you quoted: “that is, they are not suited to their purpose, and just for this reason are often quite absurd” (sorry, I have a different translation). But Kant is not talking about negative content judgments here; he’s saying that a negative formal judgment that pretends to add to our knowledge is inane, absurd, etc.

The example he gives makes this clear, I think: “Alexander could not have conquered any countries without an army.” In other words, this is a negative formal judgment that seems to be offering a piece of knowledge, but in fact it merely restates a logical truism (if you stipulate, as Kant probably would have, that an army is necessary for conquering). So it's "true but empty."

It’s never easy to grasp Kant, of course, and I welcome your thoughts if I'm off track.

So you might reconsider your first argument. Folk have experiences that do not imply that something exists - hallucinations, dreams, illusions and so on. Your conclusion is not justified. — Banno

I don’t think Bob Ross meant that the experiences we have are necessarily veridical. Nor does this question have anything to do with our more sophisticated scientific knowledge, compared to Kant. The Enlightenment thinkers were well aware of hallucinations, etc.

Rather, when Bob Ross gives his first two premises:

1. There is experience, therefore something exists.
2. That something, or a part of it, must be producing experience. — Bob Ross

I take him to mean that the “something” which must exist and be producing experience could just as well be whatever process produces illusions. The point is that, veridical or not, something is going on.

I am asserting that all final causes are reducible in the above sense. — sime

This is very clear and helpful. I’ll let Leontiskos pursue the evolutionary biology question, but I want to raise a problem concerning the more common use of “final cause” -- that is, as a reason for doing something. Are you saying that a proper analysis of the first three causes, taken together, would also eliminate or correct a statement like “I raised the flag to show my support for our troops” as an answer to the question, “Why did you raise the flag?”?

I think we could recast the statement, "X is true, therefore you ought to believe it," with, "X is true, therefore you ought to see that it is true (and then you will believe it)." — Leontiskos

This nicely captures the problem. I agree that the recasting doesn’t ask us to create any “rational space” between understanding and believing. So my misgivings about whether such a space really exists are avoided. In the recast version, “and then you will believe it” is meant to describe a (necessary?) consequence or perhaps even a definitional identity between “see the truth” and “believe it”. We’re not left wondering whether we can still not believe!

But what is the force of the “ought,” in the recast statement? Is “You ought to see that X is true” the same thing as “You ought to believe X”? I don’t think so. I read the two statements as saying quite different things. “You ought to believe X” wants to claim that the truth of X gives us a reason to believe X, a reason that should be heeded. Whereas “You ought to see that X is true” could be saying a couple of different things. It could mean, “If you understand X, then you ought to accept its truth.” Or it could mean, “You have an obligation, under the circumstances, to understand X so as to affirm its truth.” What sort of obligation? Perhaps an important decision is at stake; perhaps time is running out on an ethical dilemma.

The point is, neither interpretation of “You ought to see that X is true” is offering a reason to believe it, in the way that “You ought to believe X” does (claim to) offer a reason for belief. The original, unrecast version is claiming that a space is available between truth and belief, and from within that space a person can be adjured to choose belief on the grounds of an allegedly compelling reason, namely that X is true. The recast version doesn’t make this claim.

I remain uneasy about whether such a space makes sense, but I don’t think we can eliminate it in the manner you were suggesting.

"This is true, therefore you ought to believe it." This is a uniform claim which is intended to apply to both sorts of cases (e.g. self-evident truths and obscure truths; necessary truths and contingent truths; etc.). — Leontiskos

Just to pick up this thread for a moment: The unease I was describing above has to do with whether it makes sense to use "ought" in this way. You've persuaded me that the claim is indeed a uniform one, not separated into "Nagel truths" (self-evident, apodictic) and more complex inferences. OK, so the idea is that, if X is a true statement, I ought to believe it. But what I now wonder is: Exactly what would the alternative be? Does the phrase "disbelieve a truth" make sense? In psychological terms, sure -- we all know how hard it can be to really take on board a difficult truth. But I don't think that's what either of us is talking about here. We want a situation in which I understand and acknowledge the truth of statement X, but also claim that I don't believe it. And if you begin to sympathize with me about how hard this can be sometimes (perhaps X is one of those "difficult" truths), I deny that this is the problem. I'm not experiencing any inner resistance of that sort, I reply; I simply do not believe X.

Is this thinkable? If you then asked, "Why not?" what could I reply? This hypothetical situation is meant to evoke a rational response. And if I've excluded any personal, subjective reasons for disbelief, then we seem to have hit bedrock. What more can I say except "I just don't"?

So, this suggests that belief follows from truth, and Nagel is right not just about self-evident logical principles like the law of non-contradiction, but about any truth that is understood as such. If so, then in such a case "you ought to believe," even though it seems to be a good English sentence, is meaningless, since I already do. Or, more accurately, its only meaning would arise in urging me to investigate and overcome whatever non-rational, psychological reasons are preventing me from believing what I acknowledge to be true. Does this make sense to you? Is this what you have in mind when you imagine saying to someone, "You ought to believe X"? If so, I can certainly go along with that.

A final, interesting point about a statement like "I acknowledge X to be true but I don't believe it": Is this self-validating in some way? Do I have direct, introspective knowledge of what I believe and don't believe? Must it be the case that, if a person says, "I don't believe X", they really don't? Or may they be mistaken? We can be mistaken about "I know," "I remember," "I see," and even "I feel," sometimes. More subtly, we can use "I wish," I desire," "I promise," in circumstances where it's reasonable for a listener to doubt our self-knowledge. Where does "I believe" fit, in this collection? J. L. Austin probably has this somewhere; perhaps I can find it.