logical rules, although made necessary by human convention, are suggested by contingent facts of experience

That is something that I would agree with, but I would not readily grant that those facts that suggest logical rules are contigent, it could be that they are necessary. But that is another debate and it could be that Husserl has something more specific in mind that is indeed contigent, so I will just grant it.

If these facts and/or our purposes were different, we might engage in entirely different language-games.

Agreed.

The critical analyses of the principle of non-contraction I have in mind were conducted by Witntgenstein, phenomenologists like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, and poststructuralists like Heidegger, Deleuze and Derrida. — Joshs

Overall, I do get behind that, and of course if the facts of reality were different we may have come up with completely different logical laws. I think the matter here is that, in your argument, "metaphysics" and "ultimate nature of reality" are one and the same. Hence, if metaphysics (ultimate nature of reality) changes, so does logic, right? That much I can agree with, but for me those two are not one and the same, but I guess that is the point of this thread, "What is your definition of metaphysics?"
I dislike this cliche, but I think that equating metaphysics and ultimate nature of reality is confusing the map for the territory.

Wittgenstein's point is that a contradiction may be given a use and hence acquire a sense.

But with this statement I have an issue. If that line was a Wittgenstein quote, he says "purpose" and nothing else. It is not necessary that sense always follow from use.

When people commit to action they do so based on whatever that deep personal commitment is. — Pantagruel

Is it? A mathematician surely believes in the laws of probability more than he believes in physics (being fallible and all) or most other things, and yet, it may be that in a Quiz show for one million euros, nervousness may take over and he may answer to the Monty Hall problem that he does not want to switch based on common sense and instinct, but probabilistic analysis will give us that you should switch each time:

Being that there are billions of billions of billions of billions of stars in the observable universe alone, and that let's say, one-millionth of those stars have orbiting Earth-like planets, and one thousandth of those planets may sustain life in one way or another, we will still have billions of billions of billions of planets where life may evolve in the observable universe alone. So in our current knowledge of the universe, there is likely extraterrestrial life out there.
Though it is possible that in our galaxy Earth is unique.

Except, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get it to say that the earth is flat. — TonesInDeepFreeze

Those are hard-coded, just like anything revolving sensitive western politics.

That much is fine, as our actions often reflect our common sense rather than our rationally held (so to speak) beliefs, but let me explain myself. When I said "contradiction" or "logically contradict" in the post above, I am alluding to this exchange we had:

That the discussion in this thread pressuposes a belief in a real world outside our minds, my comment is a rebuttal exactly to that claim.

I guess the upshot is that it is somehow quite implausible to question the existence of a world around you, whilst all the while participating in it. — Banno

I would go as far as to say that, even if we outright deny the existence of the outside world, it is not a performative contradiction. You do not need to be agnostic about it to have consistent beliefs.

In the case that I think there is no world, it follows that I believe that everything around me is merely a projection of my mind (or simply is my mind). If I also believe that I am here discussing for a purpose, it could very well be that I believe that I am interacting with the very contents of my mind and, upon investigating them, I might arrive at a conclusion regarding the topic. Upon talking with you lot (aka investigating the contents of my mind), it could be that I change my mind and now believe that there is indeed an outside world, or it could be that I strenghten my previously belief that there is no world.

You can say it is an unhinged perspective, but so is solipsism, albeit there not being a logical contradiction in the view, remaining within the realm of possibility.

As to your points regardings agreement, novelty, and others, it might be that Michael has satisfactorily addressed them (not for me to decide, since the doubt (:razz:) is yours).
As as far agreement and disagreement goes, it can simply be that I hold two pieces of information in mind and I come to the conclusion that they contradict each other, and, since the mind is not perfect, it is fine to have two beliefs that seem to contradict each other as result of a lack of some information or some other imperfection.

If a mind progresses through time, it may use the information it holds as premises to reach new conclusions, hence novelty. From this explanation of agreement and novelty, we may realise our errors.

You may say "A floating mind that changes through time? This is fantasy.". And it is fantasy, because I just made it up, but I am just defending that solipsism does not entail contradiction. "But then time is the outside world!" Well, that is a question that I don't wanna tackle, but it could be.

Metaphysics can’t put into question the law of non-contradiction? — Joshs

I am aware of the existence of para-consistent logic. I would not call that metaphysics, I would not even say that it hinges on metaphysics. It is simply a different syntax.

Maybe you can enlighten me, is there metaphysics that uses or validates para-consistent logics? I looked it up online and clicked the first thing that showed up: On the Possibility of Metaphysical Dialetheism, from 2021. It says there:

Metaphysical dialetheism is the belief that there are contradictions in the world. I will argue that metaphysical dialetheism is, rightfully understood, the most controversial form of dialetheism, and further that it remains an open possibility.

Someone from the 16th century talking about dialetheism would be deemed as insane or a moron (I imagine). So I am open to new horizons, but it seems that these horizons have not been sailed yet in 2024, as only three years ago they are still deemed "controversial" and hardly an "open possibility".

By that logic every adjective can be used as a noun.
Why call for Grammar in Artistic License's house?

What's worse, a population of palm trees in a city, or a city in a population of palm trees? — TonesInDeepFreeze

Depends. Do you like city or palm-trees more?

This thread is a fever dream. I hope no one reads it while microdosing.

The question is split into two: "Why is it because of the nature of our experience that we believe things remain there even when we are no longer seeing/hearing/feeling them?" and "Why is it not because of the nature of our experience that we believe things remain there even when we are no longer seeing/hearing/feeling them?"

I think you are supposed to argue from two different points of view, perhaps one rationalist and the other empiricist, or one from naïve realism and the other from indirect realism, or more likely one from an inductionist perspective and the other from a skeptic perspective (the question is about the problem of induction after all). But until OP comes back to clarify, we can't really know.

As an observation, like other users I noticed the question is ambiguous in its syntax; there are two possible readings:

• Do we infer the unperceived existence | of what we perceive from the nature of our experience?
• Do we infer the unperceived existence of what we perceive | from the nature of our experience?

The first question is asking whether we infer X of Y out of Z, the second about whether what we do infer comes from Z.
Of course the supposed reading is the second one, but quaint still.

Are we great because of a few great men such as Cyrus the Great, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Nietzsche, George Washington, or Donald Trump or are we great because we are united and socialized so that together we can imagine and manifest great things? — Athena

I recall a similar thread from about the same time (or maybe I am confusing it with another website), and the replies were, reasonably, "both".

At least you came out of this with a compliment. It is better than whatever I have ever gotten here.

The condition that there is nothing is however different from the condition that there is something. — MoK

Naturally. If your definition of nothing includes that it has no property, there are only two scenarios, it either stays as nothing (no change), or acquires a property (change), becoming something (creation ex nihilo). The first possibility is analytic because it purely follows from your definition.

That is true since spacetime is needed for the creation of spacetime. — MoK

Now your argument is morphing from "nothing to something is impossible" to "spacetime cannot begin to exist", which would be an argument for eternalism of spacetime.

It is a fact that we need to have an idea of what these things are to talk about them productively. That is the point that all our knowledge begins with experience, we have acknowledged that since Kant (introduction KrV B). But logic is not semantics, it is syntax. Is mathematics metaphysics now too?

It does relate to Hume, it is just worded goofy, likely out of a wish to make the essay question seem "marketable" as a one-liner.
See: https://academic.oup.com/book/33680/chapter-abstract/288253803

What do you think about the placement of logic outside the circle of metaphysics? — Joshs

Valid, no metaphysics can make a married man a bachelor.

The question is basically asking "Is it because of the nature of our experience that we believe things remain there even when we are no longer seeing/hearing/feeling them?".

That sounds like something whose answer would be in the class' slides. Has she researched those?

In any case — and I will get some hate for this — I would also ask AIs.

Analytic philosophers, whose tradition derives from Hume, have great trouble recognizing that. Hence discussion of it is not academically respectable. — Ludwig V

More on that?

The discussion in this thread, like all discussions, presupposes the existence of an "external" world in which the discussion is taking place... — Banno

You can argue the same thing about many philosophical beliefs. Every determinist acts as if there is free will, or rather, it does not matter to him, because if there is free will he is choosing to act as such, but if there is not, he is not concerned, as he is predetermined to follow this course of action.

This presupposition of the existence of the outside world is not needed for the discussion to happen, as the discussion could be a projection of the mind; but it is needed to believe that there is any point to having the discussion, which most of us certainly believe¹. If we don't believe that there is an outter world but yet are here talking, that would be a case of contradictory beliefs or cognitive dissonance.

I think the subject-matter is the same as the (mostly pointless) 11 pages of this thread, where the definition of 'atheism' is fought over.

It is not that the topic here states that there is no outside world, but brings to question whether there are any strong argument for the belief of the outside world. By that metric, we can still call into question the existence of the outside world while holding a weak belief that it exists which justifies our discussion here.

I am an atheist because I don't think there any convincing arguments for the existence of God, not that I don't think God exists (even if these two might collapse under some epistemologies).

1 – Or is it? After all, what is wrong with interacting with the projections of our own mind?

I would suggest you send an e-mail to the SEP and cc Antonella Mallozzi, Anand Vaidya, and Michael Wallner, who wrote https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/modality-epistemology/

I believe the solution to Russell's paradox is in here:
http://godisallthatmatters.com/2021/05/22/the-solution-to-russells-paradox-and-the-absurdity-of-more-than-one-infinity/ — Philosopher19

Honestly, I am having trouble dissecting the arguments used here.
Thoughts, @jgill ?

Metaphysics is the study of the metaphysical. The metaphysical encompasses entities (purported to be) beyond the physical. — LuckyR

Metaphysics is the study of everything beyond what physics explains, that is a satisfying enough answer for many people, especially laymen. After all, when we talk about possibility, the modality of metaphysics encompasses the modality of physics.



So as a separate subject from physics, metaphysics would have to talk about whatever is inside the circle of metaphysics and outside the circle of physics.

That opens the questions: for physicalists, is there such a thing as metaphysics as a separate discipline?

And empirical observation isnt grounded in any kind of presuppositions — Joshs

For sure, but so are the alternatives.

The hammer as a persisting thing with attributes and properties is secondary to, because derived deom our actual use of the hammer in goal oriented activities. — Joshs

That is funny, because some time (a few years) ago I briefly wrote exactly about "what is a hammer?". The conclusion was overall the same — to put it in Aristotelian terms, the definition of 'hammer' is in nothing but its final cause, though the definition of 'steel' we would all agree is in its material cause (iron and carbon).

To me, nothing is a condition that there is no thing, no spacetime, no material,... There is no thing in nothing therefore nothing does not have any property — MoK

And what is change? When something loses, gains, or changes a property. Everything with a property is something. By your definition of nothing, it cannot undergo change. The argument then becomes analytic, which is uninformative.

If you grant that nothing somehow undergoes change, a property is attached onto a substance that was not there previously and thus we have creation ex nihilo, which is counter to your original argument that nothing can't become something.

So we either have an analytic statement or a refutation of your thesis.

I have seen some ultrafinitists go so far as to challenge the existence of 2 100 2 100 as a natural number, in the sense of there being a series of “points” of that length — Harvey Friedman, Philosophical Problems in Logic

That reminds me of intuitionists or at the very least of psychologists in the ontology of mathematics, where the number 2^100 does not exist until it is thought up.

I like the one on the top, but not the one on the bottom. I enjoy big cities more than the next guy, but something about pools with sunbathing beds (and worse! palm trees) ontop of a building on a big city rubs me the wrong way.

What do you think? Or is "I don't know what Canberra is" foundational? — Banno

You can justify that by saying that the symbol Canberra does not elicit any thought in your mind, but that is just equivalent to saying you don't know what Canberra is.

What justifies believing "I don't know what Canberra is"? Isn't that question somehow inept? — Banno

Beyond the circular justification above, it is close to a brute fact, somewhat similar to the cogito.

My cousin has an infinity pool because he thinks that if he swims in it he will live forever. — TonesInDeepFreeze

That is typically called an open compound noun in English. If we are doing a semantic analysis, infinity pool, the 'infinity' qualifies 'pool' implying that it looks endless, so 'infinity' would stay a noun and be in the similative case — English does not have grammatical cases morphologically, but semantically that is what it would be. English does not have morphological rules for adjectives (or for any word class I think), so the '-y' ending does not stop 'infinity' from one day becoming an adjective, but it is just not used as such today.

Wouldn't that you don't know the meaning of "Australia" be the background for your doubt? — Banno

In that sense, yes. Then your original argument would have to go into more detail regarding what "foundation" exactly means. We can concede that every belief or every though requires a reason or justification, but then we either go into infinite regression or hit some groundrock, typically the law of identity — and if we don't concede it, perhaps that belief/thought is the groundrock.

Word salad aside, if it is the case that "I don't know what Canberra is" is my foundation for doubt, do I need a foundation to state that? Isn't it an immediate assesment of my mental contents (aka knowledge)?

In order to doubt that Canberra — Banno

I think it depends on how you define "doubt". If by doubt you mean "it is ◇¬P", yes you need a foundation to doubt it; but if by doubt you mean "I don't know if", you would not need a foundation for doubting, in fact the very lack of foundation would justify your doubt.
I don't know if Canberra is the capital of Australia (P) because none of these terms are known to me, I don't know if P, but I can't say that ◇¬P because perhaps it is □P.
The way Descartes uses 'doubt' is more akin to the weaker statement.

But this is not the argument in this thread. That is specifically about not believing that something continues to exist, unperceived. — Banno

The OP does look different from what I remember, perhaps it has been edited since my first reply.

except it can be used as an adjectiv — Vaskane

:brow:

What is one sentence where "infinity" is used as an adjective?

We've tried the friendly educational method for decades. — Christoffer

We who? Educational? You have shown that you do not even know statistics, how are you going to educate anyone?

Of course not. You are just asking legitimate questions about the science and trotting out fashionable lines from climate “skeptics.” Carry on. — Mikie

"The science". There is no "the science". This is a phrase that is only ever used by people who have last touched an equation more than five years ago — mathematics is the language of science as we know.

My posts at no point were arguments against climate change or environmentalism. My posts were successful attempts at showing how you and others posters here do not know nearly enough, but just parrot what Lindsey McNuggets (intern in communications at BBC) says on her news article. Lindsey, like me and many people on this thread, are not knowledgeable, but Lindsey in special is the kind of people to cause this kind of tragedy. Who is more like Lindsey overall?

I actually yet have to meet a climate activist who doesn't give the impression that he/she doesn't actually care about the planet and who doesn't give the impression that he/she doesn't actually care about people. A climate activist who doesn't give the impression that all he/she really cares about is himself/herself. — baker

Because they don't exist.

And yours. Because he’s right. So maybe it’s worth taking the feedback. — Mikie

Seething frustration and false accusations are not feedback.

You can reply or quote people by highlighting their text and pressing the blue button that shows up.

Sure, 'brain in a vat', like other minds, is downstream from the central problem which is solipsism. Not the best article I could have linked to, so I will do a quotation instead:

Second, solipsism merits close examination because it is based upon three widely entertained philosophical presuppositions, which are themselves of fundamental and wide-ranging importance. These are: (a) What I know most certainly are the contents of my own mind—my thoughts, experiences, affective states, and so forth.; (b) There is no conceptual or logically necessary link between the mental and the physical. For example, there is no necessary link between the occurrence of certain conscious experiences or mental states and the “possession” and behavioral dispositions of a body of a particular kind; and (c) The experiences of a given person are necessarily private to that person. — IEP

From a, b, and c, everything that I experience could be very well fabricated by my own mind, "floating" in the nothingness of existence that is beyond-my-mind.

This is the best I can do at 3:00 without posting the first three meditations of Descartes.

A collection of semantic games — some based on reality and empirical observation, others based on fantasy.

On another note, I did not understand what Collingwood is trying to say. That sounds to me more like poetry than philosophy, evenmoreso than Nietzsche.

The philosophy of mathematics is a rich area. — TonesInDeepFreeze

Not only that, but when we think about almost anything we are quantifying. Does this action bring about more welfare than the other? Is a pantheist god encompassing of the whole universe? Do our beliefs have different percentages of certainty?

Mathematics spans our thoughts just like language, those are perhaps worthier of investigation than metaphysics — dependent on the former two.

Isn’t that like saying that we know an organism exists but we dont know if the organism’s environment exists? — Joshs

That would be a valid analogy, yes.

If the organism is a self-organized system of exchanges with a world, then any line we attempt to draw between inside and outside is arbitrary — Joshs

Within Cartesian philosophy, the boundary is clearly drawn when the body and the mind are two distinct substances. What Corvus was making was a semantic argument of equating our minds with the world (or part of it), we know our minds exist, therefore we know that at least a part of the world exists thus the world exists. But the semantic premise for the whole brain-in-a-vat argument is that when we say "world" we refer specifically to the world outside of our minds — that was the distinction I was trying to point out.

The mind is not the brain, it is the reciprocal interactions among brain, body and environment. — Joshs

Right, the way I think about it (and it is a really silly argument at face value) is that the simple fact that we can tell where we are being touched just by feeling it hints that our mind has extensionality (it is not a substance without dimensions, 0D). It is not just that the mind has the idea of extension within it and that some interaction with our organs causes some idea of spatial localisation¹, but that experience itself can be located with coordinates x,y,z — we can isolate sight and smell and hearing to operations or projections of our 0D mind, but we can't do that with touch. Our mind would not just be a point of volume 0 in our "pineal gland", but extend everywhere where there is sense perception, from our scalp to the tip of our toes.

¹ In the everyday sense of the word.

A bit of a performative contradiction, no? — Banno

Brain in a vat.

I'll believe that he has anything when I see it. Especially, does he purport to offer an axiomatic system? I don't recall, but perhaps he rejects the axiomatic method. — TonesInDeepFreeze

Honestly, I don't know. I only brought up Wildberg because it is the first name that came to mind when it comes to non-standard mathematics. The last time I heard of him was years ago in some science board where discussions about him were common.
In hindsight I should have brought up intuitionistic mathematics but the connection to infinity is not as straightforward.

How can you tell, since most of them are ironic or sarcastic anyway? — baker

Not sure where you got that sample from, Google shows me otherwise.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/5224/mathjax-tutorial-typeset-logic-neatly-so-that-people-read-your-posts/p1 — Michael

Very nice, that should be pinned imo.

Therefore, there can be infinite infinities because the word "infinity" is an adjective. — RussellA

The fact that you can stack a property onto a substance to make an object does not mean that that object is instantiated in real life, especially because many objects are contradictory and cannot exist (rectangular circle or blue orange).

Where can one see the project? — TonesInDeepFreeze

No clue, I could not find it, I only know that he works on it lol

I will say that for diagonal paradoxes, this thread is much better.

Relevant: Lawvere's fixed point theorem.

Did you read anything from the link I gave you? — Philosopher19

I skimmed through two pages. It seems to be a collection of semantic games. I am more concerned with what issues you solve with your beliefs. That your beliefs are not contradictory (big claim) is not a selling point for others to adopt it.