Because my version is better.

Realism asserts that the existents in question are extra-mental/independent of mind. — Terrapin Station

Per Fine, it's a belief in a definite world structure and belief in epistemic access to this structure. Language regarding the mind-independence of worldly stuff is limited to "..to a large extent." I think Fine allows that the issue boils down to truth.

You could be an anti-realist materialist if you were to think that only minds exist, — Terrapin Station

I don't think so. An anti-realist denies that a statement of materialism can be truth-apt.

NOTE: No one seems to be able to agree on what exactly the word “realism” actually means. — Aaron R

It probably calls for some narrowing down, otherwise pitting this nebulous realism against a very specific sort of idealism (the consequences of which are necessarily solipsism) is kind of odd.

He’s no better or worse than the idealist who ultimately does the same. — Aaron R

I think that statement would make you a neutral apologist. To be a realist apologist, you'll have to make the case that realism is more successful or explains more.. or explains better... right?

What's the difference between realism and materialism, btw?

So just be aware that although you may not like the concept of ontological dependence, that may be the concept in play in someone else's thoughts. I'm sure you wouldn't intentionally cause confusion. People who do that are cursed souls.

There's an SEP article on ontological dependence.

True. Maybe I could formulate it a little better... I'll work on it.

I wouldn't call it co-dependence because that term has a significant psychological meaning. Interdependence... yes. I disagree with you there. Probably best to get regular ontological dependence under control first, though.

Well that's a challenge. Maybe write a play that starts off really well, things go really well and then the ending is joyous. Wouldn't it put people to sleep?

But that is the point; if everything is thought to be nothing more than dreams within dreams then there could be no reason not to push the button since the quality of experience would be so much better for everyone. — John

But pathological situations are dramatic. From a certain point of view life is drama.

1. If someone says 'No' then they could not be committed to anti-realism, or phenomenalism.
2. if someone says 'No' then they could not be committed to truth relativism.
3. If someone says 'No' then they could not be committed to the Postmodern notion (a la Baudrillard) that reality is a simulacrum. — John

But why not? Could the nay sayer believe in dreams within dreams?

Distress may or may not be harmful. It's a reaction to something (at least potentially) harmful. Respiratory distress, for instance, means the body is trying to cope with something bad. Toward the end, there's no distress... The body no longer has energy for that. Cuihuilain ties himself to a tree and quietly says peace out. What were we talking about?

We could start a thread to explore different sorts of ontological dependence.

It's not so much about consequentialism, as it is about believed consequences of an infant's (or other innocent child's) death. Neither is it about throwing Abrahamic religions in the bin. It's about analyzing real-life beliefs, irrespective of any (perceived) controversy. — jorndoe

The world's most famous perpetrators of infanticide were Chinese atheists under communist rule. Apparently buckets of water were kept at the bedsides of delivering women for the purpose of dunking female infants to their deaths.

Despite the reasoning you point out, neither Christians nor Muslims are particularly known for infanticide.

Sometimes it's more informative to analyze "real-life" actions versus "real-life" beliefs.

How could the fleece be hay-independent if the hay is part of the fleece. — Metaphysician Undercover

If the fleece could persist beyond the removal of the hay. It's not the definition of "world" you should be preoccupied with here. It's "dependent."

It was suggested that the world is something which exists independent of minds, and also that I am a part of this world. To begin with, that appears contradictory to me, unless I don't have a mind. — Metaphysician Undercover

A bit of hay may adhere to the fleece. It doesn't mean the fleece is hay-dependent. (I'm shopping for a spinning wheel. Woo Hoo!)

What is this "world" which I am supposed to be part of?. — Metaphysician Undercover

I'm not overly fond of your wording here. Partitioning the world invites questions about whether its boundaries are finite or infinite. World here means a domain and I believe it's an abstract object because it's a set.

That's what I am asking. I'm not the one claiming the reality of "the world", I'm the one asking what that means. — Metaphysician Undercover

In what context?

Just stipulate a definition and move on. What's wrong with that?

Leftist are just more sensitive to the possibility of crimes being committed against Muslims who live in their communities.

That was all pretty standard stuff per Scott Soames.... check out Understanding Truth. Awesome.

Why on earth did I used to think you were a cool person? Tendency to spout nonsense, I guess.

I remember my father giving me propaganda booklets made by the KGB when coming back from a trip from the Soviet Union. — ssu

That's cool. I didn't realize how much of my life I spent just continually psychologically pushing back against US Cold War propaganda until I read a history of Russia. The chapters covering events of the 20th Century just about gave me a nervous breakdown. The author (Hosking) explained that the average westerner has no frame of reference for understanding how bad it was, but it wasn't until halfway through it that it dawned on me that US propaganda about how insane the Soviet Union was didn't begin to convey the truth.

What was wrong about US propaganda was its depiction of the Soviet Union as a hive-like society that would eventually far outstrip the US in productivity and wealth. Turns out Russia is in some ways what it's been since Peter the Great.. partly western, partly medieval.

They do have a lot of coal, though.

Show me 1 actual inmate who was sentenced to 7 years in prison for simple pot possession — Hanover

Don't really have to.

"It's a terrible thing to lose your mind, or not have a mind." -- Dan Quayle

I agree.

I transcended your epistemic conditions, Sapientia. I discovered that you're a lot better off than you think you are.

But what's probably mind-dependent is whether something is a sentence, or whether a sentence expresses a certain proposition. So, if you were to define a notion of sentence truth, it would be mind-dependent whether a sentence is true, in virtue of its being mind-dependent what proposition it expressed. — The Great Whatever

Yea. But there's another category of objects: abstract ones. Numbers are abstract objects, not mental objects. That distinction is supposed to express the otherness of such entities. But maybe the assumption is that minds reside in skulls. My mind is separate from yours, so the number seven transcends both our skulls.

A proposition, being an abstract object, doesn't need to be expressed.

Second, defining truth in this way is, as I've already said, not relevant to the point of what I was saying to begin with. — The Great Whatever

I would be interested if you'd want to explain it again. You were saying that there's an aspect of truth that is mind-dependent and an aspect that isn't?

Says who? — The Great Whatever

Frege.. in a brick shithouse of an argument.

So 'true' could be defined as a relation between sentences and contexts. — The Great Whatever

Truth is unanalyzable.

Then you can just define the relation with an argument for context, and have truth of a sentence relative to a context. This isn't important to the point. — The Great Whatever

I still don't know why you're using the word "relation." But yes, we can persist in trying to have sentences act as primary truth-bearers and pin them to context of utterance. If that's your cup-a-tea, great.

I recall Jostein Gaarder writing such a thing in one of his books. — Michael

Cool. I got it from a german friend who I haven't seen in a long time. Maybe she got it from that book?

Just as the existence of a fake reality is generally considered unlikely, it is also unlikely that your trustworthy friend Aleksey would mislead you. Nevertheless, your first instinct might be to believe that Aleksey is mistaken, rather than to believe that you are a Powerball winner, since it is logical for you to favor the least unlikely explanation for the unlikely events that have occurred. — Josh

I think I understand your point. But Good Luck tends to reinforce the ideology that existed at the time it happened. So, for instance, King David had a series of victories. A side-effect is that the Hebrew religion is invigorated. The Romans are transported over a period of 50 years from minor player on the world scene to the Last Superpower. They took it as a sign that they were on a divine mission. And I'm sure we could think of other examples of peoples who fell ass backwards into incredibly good luck and subsequently assumed that they must be loved by God Almighty. Um... I'm looking out the window... I think I know of one.

If you find yourself entertaining solipsism after winning the Powerball, I'll put it to you that you love yourself. Which is fucking awesome. Keep that up and never lose it. A person who has no self-love would have the opposite situation. Winning the Powerball would be proof that solipsism is wrong.. see what I mean?

Suppose I win the powerball lottery with a single ticket. The odds of this are 1 in 292,201,338. If I win, isn't it more reasonable to doubt reality than to assume that I actually won the lottery against such enormous odds? — Josh

Unlikely things happen pretty regularly. Just think of all the events that had to go just so in order for you to be born at all. As a friend of mine explains: 'Just by being born, everybody is a lottery winner.'

We need to clone this guy.

It really doesn't matter. If a sentence has a conventional semantic content that can be modeled as a proposition, the sentence can express the proposition in that any utterance of it will express that proposition. — The Great Whatever

This is wrong because determining what proposition is expressed by the utterance of a sentence requires knowing something about the context of utterance.

Say you walk in a library and you see a poster pinned to the wall that reads "Physicists are imported." As you contemplate the meaning, a host of fascinating insights open up for you. You subsequently find that the poster is part of an art installation in which the artist is having posters made from computer generated sentences. This is one of them.

You think to yourself: "See! The sentence expressed a proposition all on its own.. without any help from a human mind."

No. It didn't. You derived a proposition from it by projecting a context of utterance. You were the speaker. As I told you: some sort of shenanigans will be required to take sentences as primary truth-bearers.

You're just defining the relation arbitrarily narrowly — The Great Whatever

What relation?

To deny this would be to say that for any arrangement of things in the world that logically or conceivably could be interpreted, according to some imaginary linguistic system, in a certain way, in fact already is: and so you'd be forced to say that basically everything is a sentence, and everything expresses every conceivable proposition, always (since there will always be a logically conceivable linguistic convention that could be so arranged). — The Great Whatever

No sentence (even imaginary ones) express propositions. Speakers express propositions by the utterance of sentences. Propositions can also be expressed by utterances which do not strictly speaking contain sentences.

Where sentences are identified as the primary truth-bearers, it's probably some artificial system like Tarski's. Using propositions as the primary truth-bearer may get us closer to ordinary language use, where the same proposition can be expressed by the utterance of a multitude of sentences.

This discussion was created with comments split from Religious experience has rendered atheism null and void to me — Sapientia

I didn't look at that thread, so if my comment is wonky.. sorry. The question of whether anything at all is mind-independent is one that can be debated. Those who say nothing is (mind-independent) are positing that the average person is deluded. But independently of that situation, we frequently use the concept of truth to speak of the unknown.

"No one knew who killed the butler. The detective sought to reveal the truth."

This implies some proposition regarding the butler's killer which is true, but unknown. In this case, it's clear that "truth" does not indicate a mind-dependent property.

Dude.. do you really think sex is ugly or were you just being silly?