Whether a claim is meaningful to someone depends on whether they can understand it, yes. I can't speak to your mind, but I doubt you understand it either.

Because I don't know what it means.

Assuming they can stay free of philosophical assumptions. — Marchesk

Decent sciences tend to converge on conclusions even starting from widely diverging prejudices. And I don't think philosophical prejudices matter much, because again, I don't think they're meaningful.

So basically your criticism is, metaphysics is empty because it’s not physics. — Wayfarer

No.

It sounds like nonsense to me.

Fair enough. But that's a fundamental problem, isn't it? We can't even agree on what makes a statement meaningful. I don't know what that means for philosophy and whether we have to nail down a theory of meaning first before having these debates. — Marchesk

I think philosophy should be studied externally as a kind of folk religion or practice, by anthropologists, and that meaning should be studied by linguistic semanticists.

I'm not doubting that philosophers have written books in which they deny or agree with various claims. The question is whether any of those denials or agreements have any descriptive substance.

Anyway, this is turning into a tired defense of basic positivism, rather than focusing on the Lazerowitz model, which I'm interested in. These discussions have all been had a million times before.

What is the difference between there being universals and there not being universals?

And idealist can make this move for experience, but that differs significantly from the move the materialist is making. Let's take the double slit experiment. What does the idealist say? We have two different kinds of experiences depending on how the experiment is setup. What does the materialist say? Well, they come up with things like pilot waves and multiverses. — Marchesk

But the point is that those additional posits can also be cast in either framework. You will never find a substantive difference between the two.

Cognitively meaningful ones, yes – ones that attempt to tell us 'how the world is.' Of course 'meaningful' can mean lots of other things, too, but we're interested here in figuring out 'how things are.' And that is what metaphysics purports to do.

Are you saying that all meaningful things are descriptions? — creativesoul

Meaningful statements describe the world in some way – that is the purported aim of metaphysical statements. They distinguish, if you like, between ways the world might be. If no such distinction is made, then the statement cannot 'pick out' any way the world might be, and so its being true or false could not possibly hinge on the world being some way. Hence it cannot describe anything.

It means other animals can perceive things we can't. It means X-Rays can pass through solid objects. It means a beam of photons can produce either a wave or particle pattern depending on whether you detect which slit they go through. And so on. — Marchesk

An idealist can simply accept all that is so, and say those things' truth is to be cashed out in terms of their experiential effects. Indeed, you cannot possibly find a difference, since an idealist can always in principle make this move.

Is that not verificationism? — Marchesk

It doesn't necessarily have to do with the means of verification – it does mean that one has to be able to know what it is, in some way, for the statement to be true as opposed to false. If you don't know that, then you can't tell what makes the sentence true or false, so the statement can't be cognitively meaningful to you. No verification is actually required, even in principle – you could simply describe or imagine something, or read them in a novel, showing the difference, so you could, say, tell in a trial at better than chance level which of the affairs holds in that description.

I think it has naive realist claims. — Marchesk

I don't think naive realism is meaningful. We'd behave the same way and do the same things regardless, and I cannot imagine what a 'naive realist' world would look like as opposed to any other.

Material things would be different since their properties and behaviors are not exhausted by our perception of them. — Marchesk

OK, but what does that actually mean?

Try the test: can you write a novel in which idealism is true, and another in which realism is true, and have the reader be able to tell which is true, from the plot?

What is the minimum criterion for being meaningful? — creativesoul

For something to have 'cognitive significance,' it should describe some state of affairs such that the one to whom it's meaningful can somehow tell the difference between that state of affairs obtaining or not obtaining.

If you do not have an example, I will not take the claim seriously.

But that's not quite right. The unreflective way we take the world to be is physical. — Marchesk

I don't know what you mean by this. I don't think unreflective experience of the world has metaphysical consequences, since metaphysical claims have no consequences.

Idealism would say the perceiving is all there is to it. And things only persists when we're not around if there is someone like God or a universal mind to perceive. There is no mind-independent material stuff that may or may not be like what we perceive. — Marchesk

And if you think this view through to its conclusion, and account for every possible contingency, you will find that you just recreated the old view, and given it a different name.

For instance, you might say 'ah, but the idealist can claim things don't exist unperceived!'

Aha, but does that mean anything? Well, not really, for the idealist has to say 'ah, but they pop back into existence under all the exact same circumstances that a realist would expect perceptions of them to pop back into existence due to their existing outside of perception.'

What then is the difference between these things existing outside of perception or not? And if you cannot tell the difference, or give any criterion by which they're differentiated, then you cannot coherently distinguish the hypothesis. 'But one view has things popping back into existence when we look, while the other has them persisting!' Ah, ah, ah...but what is the difference between those things? Do you know? The ultimate answer, if you turn it over, is nothing, because you must construct them so as to make the world exactly the same.

Indeed you cannot help but do this, since by nature you are entertaining two hypotheses, both of which must conform to the way tthe world is, and neither of which in principle is distinguishable by any means. So how is it surprising when you end up with two hypothesis that are literally indistinguishable? That's all they can be. 'The world is a dream – but by dream I just mean what people ordinarily call not a dream, possessing all the ordinary nondreamlike qualities.' Ah, but then you didn't mean much of anything, did you?

I should also note that there are two defenders of metaphysics in this thread right now, one of whom says metaphysical questions are not (by definition?) empirically verifiable, while the other says they are.

Curious! So we cannot decide on that either.

Lucretius used erosion as a justification for atomism. — Marchesk

Sure, but it actually isn't such evidence, as we know. Hence why such arguments are in principle ineffective, since some alternate account can always be constructed.

Metaphysics isn't just a language game. It's also looking around at our experience of the world and asking how things are the way they are, and whether our concepts about those things make sense. — Marchesk

Metaphysical questions cannot be decided by empirical means. Do you have any examples to the contrary?

A counter point might be that if you take any popular unsolved mystery, there will be endless argumentation spanning many different theories. Take Fermi's Paradox and the question of whether technological alien life exists as a good example of this. There are even debates over what to search for. The problem is that we don't know the answer, not that it's meaningless. — Marchesk

That's right, but the difference is that one knows in principle what it is for such alien life to exist. One does not know what it is, for instance, for universals to exist versus not exist.

What would it mean for there to be no physical objects? It would mean everything exists as an idea in someone's mind. What does that mean? Dreams are a good example. Everything would have the same fundamental status of dreams, except as different kinds of experiences. Experiences themselves would exhaust what a thing is. — Marchesk

I think that if you continue questioning this, you will find that the positions collapse into one another. For if 'everything' is a dream, then dreams are ispo facto those things which had all the qualities attributed to waking life anyway, and as such the hypothesis is indistinguishable from its negation. So yes, I would say indeed that things like global idealism, and the idea of the world as a dream, as typically intended, are not literally significant. All you are doing is taking the world as it is, and deciding to call it a 'dream' or not, but this does not change how you take the world to be.

You could find a way to make them significant, for example by saying 'no, I think we literally live in a Matrix world, and we could wake up tomorrow in a pod controlled by robots.' That is an intelligible claim, although one that might be hard to prove. I know what it would be to wake up in such a situation – and in fact, such a thing can even be coherently depicted, as it is in the Matrix.

What support do you have for that assertion? It simply sounds like an assumption to me, an 'everyone knows that...' statement. — Wayfarer

The history of metaphysics is one of argumentation without any particular decisions made or consensus reached over any of the core issues. This is at least definitive in showing that metaphysics as a purported science was unsuccessful in its aims (since even if someone along the way got something right, the discipline itself is a failure insofar as it is impotent to communicate and establish that conclusion).

But the problem is not just that intelligible, difficult questions were asked, like 'how many stars are in the sky?' and people came up with differing answers to it before giving up. Rather, no inquiry was ever performed other than the conversations held, and even in this arena, where nothing was ever looked into and people apparently felt that nothing needed to be looked into, it was impossible to make any headway. This shows that there must be some defect in the discourse itself.

As to what that defect is, we can take specific metaphysical examples and use diagnostics to test whether they have any descriptive criteria. Here's one: take metaphysical hypotheses A and B. Can you write a story in which A is true, but not B, and have it be distinguishable from the plot itself, from a story in which B is true, and not A? If not, then it is likely you do not have the ability to intelligibly describe what it is for A or B to be true, and hence you are not debating matters with coherent criteria of application that you can comprehend.

Let's go back to the 'first layer' and 'second layer' model. It makes a valid point - that metaphysical enunciations (or claims or whatever) appear to be meaningful, but on analysis, they're actually not. Whereas if we say 'the sun rises in the East' or any other purely factual statement, this can be validated by observation, metaphysical dicta cannot be, often by definition. (This leads to the positivist position of 'verificationism'.)

But I think this is well understood in metaphysical traditions themselves. — Wayfarer

So what are you taking issue with, then? This seems to contradict your previous claims.

it is literally meaningful because it is lived. But those outside that 'domain of discourse' will not be able to understand the references or meaning, and will be inclined to say that they don't refer to anything, or mean anything. But I think it's a very presumptuous attitude. — Wayfarer

If it were meaningful to the participants, then they should be able to articulate that meaning internally among their own practice, but they cannot do this either. For example, metaphysicians cannot agree on what their propositions mean, under what circumstances they would be true, what their scope is, or what the criteria for figuring out whether they are true look like. So the whole 'you have to believe to see' line doesn't work for metaphysics, because the metaphysicians believe, but even by their own internal criteria, they don't see – which is why they can't have productive discussions.

magine a visitor from another planet which has developed without any conception of music. — Wayfarer

OK, but we're not visitors from another planet. We're natives of the very tradition being criticized, and have grown up with it from birth in the same way that the metaphysicians do.

But I do think viewing things 'externally,' as if an anthropologist or an alien visitor, could be a good idea. The fact that a population is enculturated into something does not show that it's meaningful, and someone who has already bought into it will, in many cases, be unable to meaningfully criticize it.

The fact is that something's efficacy is not reducible to how it's seen from inside – the genre may be 'objectively' free even of the sense that its practitioners take it to have from the inside. This is, I believe, the case with metaphysics. To show that, you'd have to first make a case for what sense metaphysics does have, so that it can be shown not to have this sense, even on its own terms.

But this discussion interests me less than the discussion of the actual model of metaphysics by Lazerowitz I've posted, which you don't seem to be talking about.

So, sure, for those with no understanding of the original significance of such discourses, — Wayfarer

The point is that those engaged in the discourse also seem to have no understanding of it. That is why it is puzzling as a genre of discourse.

Of course a genre of discourse can have social effects and be associated with political and religious opinions. That doesn't mean that it has 'cognitive' or 'descriptive' content. Of course discourse in general is used towards many non-cognitive ends (and in fact that is admitted by the account here).

It doesn't take into account that there might be a truly intellectual and experiential foundation to metaphysics which has been deliberately bracketed out of philosophy by modernist thinking, which then completely forgets what it originally referred to, and simply declares it all 'meaningless talk'. — Wayfarer

I don't think it 'doesn't take that into account' – sure, it comes to a different conclusion. But I don't think those that do metaphysics or have done it in the past have ever internally been able to get clear on what its supposed significance is. Hence the fact that it is 'empty talk' is an observation, not a prejudice – people cannot, as a matter of fact, make sense of it.

Not sure what the comments about quantum mechanics have to do with anything.

The three works across which Lazerowitz articulates this position and applies it to specific examples are:

-The Structure of Metaphysics
-Studies in Metaphilosophy
-Philosophy and Illusion

Unfortunately these are all collections of papers, so there is a lot of overlap and you have to sift through it to get the whole picture.

I think it still starts from essentially positivistic presuppositions, that presume that naturalism describes the world as it really is — Wayfarer

As I understand it, on this view naturalism itself is a metaphysical position in Lazerowtiz's sense (I can't remember him saying this specifically, but it was the default view among positivists, which is where his career began, before he branched out).

Alright, here's the deal. You can't really define philosophy any way you want, since it's a historical discipline that has had actual content and concerns in the past. To that extent, defining it as not concerned with answering first-order questions about reality is not something I'd allow, since it flies in the face of what philosophers have always actually done, and what they've understood themselves as doing.

Second, even if you define it as only about second-order questions about how methodologically to answer first-order ones, then even to the extent philosophers have done this, they also have made no progress in this domain.

I think it is fair game to offer the answer 'no' to a question when someone asks it. The fact that Pfhorrest did not like the answer and refused discussion when it was given, wondering why anyone would ever answer in this way, shows that he was not serious in asking.

'Woah, woah! When I asked the question, I didn't mean I wanted an answer!'

What's interesting is that [1] when asked to defend itself from the discipline's apparent shortcomings, philosophers resort to the very same sophistical moves used in philosophy itself – increasing the level of abstraction, moving the goalposts, demanding unreasonable definitions, insisting on a continuum fallacy, and so on, and [2] this prevents us from asking the interesting question, which is why philosophy makes no progress: what is wrong with its methodology, and is there some way we might inquire into the questions we're interested in better (or is this fundamentally a confused or hopeless endeavor)? But we'll never do that, because philosophy is systematically structured so that it can always make use of one of the tiresome rhetorical tricks in its small box, and so will never seriously critique itself.

It's telling that when defending itself, philosophy is pulled in two directions.

On the one hand, it insists it has made progress. On the other, it asks, 'Well, what is progress, anyway? We can't even know!'

Well? Which is it?

Any real scientist will tell you you’re “doing science” wrong, not actually doing science at all; and if they give you the time of day further, may tell you some reasons why that is an inferior way to do things than the proper scientific way. At that point, they are doing philosophy, even though they’re not a professional philosopher. — Pfhorrest

No you're not. Philosophy is in no way responsible for any of these vague epistemic virtues. It has had both proponents and opponents of them, and continues to do so, and their adoption (to the extent they are adopted) is never done on philosophical grounds. At best, philosophy tries (and fails) to retroactively justify those virtues by 'grounding' them.

The most influential physicist of the scientific revolution was Isaac Newton, who titled his seminal work as being about “natural philosophy” — Pfhorrest

Newton was not a philosopher. You're just punning on the term "natural philosophy," which is what people used to call things like physics. Newton is not (nor Einstein, get real) seriously taught in philosophy curricula, nor can philosophy students or professors (unless they study physics on the side for professional reasons) understand his works with their training. You were taught his 'philosophical ideas about space and time,' by which is meant, you've done what philosophers do, talk about his work in superficial terms out of context after the fact. Philosophers' education does not equip them to understand any of these scientists.

Look at the definition of philosophy the OP begins with: it’s about trying to figure out HOW to “figure out broad truths“, not necessarily figuring them out itself. — Pfhorrest

Alright. It hasn't done that either, though.

That is a sign that progress has been made, a satisfactory answer had been found, and all that’s left are minor quibbles. — Pfhorrest

To the extent that 'an answer was found,' philosophers didn't do it.

If you think this is not an accurate definition of philosophy in the OP, maybe take it up over at the What is philosophy? thread that this thread spun off from. — Pfhorrest

I don't care. You're just going to keep moving the goalposts. The problem is, on no reasonable moving of the goalpost will philosophy have made any progress anyway. So move them wherever you want.

If you were to justify your origin story for science, would you do so by appealing to science? — path

Probably not. You'd probably have to have a decent historian to answer the question in any interesting way. A philosopher would definitely NOT give you a good answer.

But any argument about why to do things the scientific way instead of some other way is philosophy. — Pfhorrest

No it isn't. Philosophy has never succeeded in 'grounding' the sciences, and the sciences don't take seriously any attempts it's made to. Scientific method (to the extent there is such a thing) develops from cultural and economic pressures on the one hand, and methodological disputes internal to the sciences on the other.

And the sciences spun off from natural philosophers — Pfhorrest

No they didn't. The important physicists and chemists weren't important philosophers, and vice versa. The closest that ever came to happening was Descartes, maybe. Even if this were true, it would just be a historical quirk about the relation of two disciplines – still. philosophy would have made no progress with respect to what its methods and goals have always been (goal: figuring out broad truths, method: talking).

I don't know why you need to be told this, but the physical sciences are not philosophy.

Well, provide any instance of philosophy ever figuring anything out, or doing anything interesting.

It pretty obviously doesn't. This is the straightforward answer, and denying it requires lots of cognitive dissonance and moving the goalposts, so I don't see what the appeal is.

I think any definition that's not historical is not going to cut it. An actual summary of analytic philosophy would be somewhat boring, and would resist cliches about its 'style' or grand narrative pictures, because that's not actually how the world works.

If I tried to give a unified definition, I'd say it's the philosophical movement whose outgrowths roughly mirrored the various personality traits of G E Moore, much in the way Hellenistic philosophy was the movement whose outgrowths roughly mirrors the various personality traits of Socrates.

That stayed on until ~1968, at which point, the 'new analytic philosophy' occurred, which is still going on now – this really has no unifying features, but is more just a cultural zeitgeist, employing a bunch of roughly commensurate formal tools, journals, vocabulary, and the English language.

If your position forces you to accuse people of not thinking unless you accept some intuitively absurd proposition like 'actually, the enforcement of power is what is necessary for freedom,' stop and have a think about the coherency or good faith of your commitments.

This is an excellent way to hedge your position and avoid thinking. — fdrake

Ah. It seems we cannot even think without doublespeak.

how do we know that "All sets that do not contain themselves as subsets" is a set? — EnPassant

It follows from the assumptions of a certain kind of naive set theory. The point is that it's not a set, but from the naive set theory it follows that it should be. Hence the problem.

In practice, though, I think we all understand what is meant, and what lies at the end of the road. I'd prefer if people just specify who they want to tax, kill, etc., instead of doing the whole "X is actually not X" thing.

Definitely. War is peace, too – people just don't get it!

First of all, to be clear: you are for PII, — QuixoticAgnostic

I'm not 'for' it, I doubt it's even a substantive question. I just think it's a matter of what kind of language you want to use, and using a language that doesn't admit it is pointlessly complicated and serves no purpose.

That there is some substance underlying the properties that gives things their identity? — QuixoticAgnostic

You don't need any commitments to substance. You just say one, call it A, has the property of being A, while the other doesn't, because it's not A. You cannot say: but in virtue of what is it not the other? Well, you tell me – you imagined the scenario! If you insist there is nothing, not even one's being A and the other not being, then you cannot even coherently stipulate the very scenario you're trying to prove your point with. As soon as you admit one is not the other, I have the property distinguishing them.

Secondly, and this is a rudimentary question, but what do you understand properties, predicates, and relations to mean, and how are they related or unrelated to PII? — QuixoticAgnostic

That's just a question of what language you want to engineer. In the regular first order logic, a propetty is the denotation of any predicate symbol, and any predictable symbol is definable in terms of which individuals it applies to. So as soon as you admit a domain with two distinct individuals A and B, I can define a property that holds of A and not of B – indeed this is all defining a property consists in, specifying to which individuals it applies or doesn't.