"There-is-no-objective-truth" is self-inconsistent if understood to be a universal proposition. The same is true of any negative universal proposition that is self-applicable, since this leads to a liar sentence.

Rather than viewing the liar sentence as a proposition possessing inconsistent static meaning, instead consider it to be a performative speech-act that when repeatedly applied to itself creates a dynamic alternating sequence of unstable outcomes. This way the liar sentence is no longer interpreted as being in conflict with itself, but as merely yielding instability.

The "spirit" of any word isn't it's definition.

Suppression of doubt is critical for a good performance, especially when hecklers are in the audience. And the sense of any proposition is in relation to it's performance.

An image is ideal if it is the image of one's striving.

For example, this imagined polygon doesn't satisfy my striving for symmetry and smoothness. So i imagine a "limiting polygon" that I call a "perfect circle", where "limiting polygon" is my vague imagination of the Sun which is sufficiently vague and unstable that I cannot make sense of counting its sides. The image satisfies my craving, but not the striving.

I can certainly imagine a "perfect circle", an "infinite extension", an "ideal body" and so on.

But "perfect", "ideal" and "infinite" aren't passive and objective descriptions of my observations, rather they are expressions of active speech-acts I commit (including cravings I may have) in relation to my observations. For example, If I am hungry then A Big Mac might seem the "perfect" burger.

Presumably, this is how the later Wittgenstein understood ideality. Any advice he gives is therapeutic advice whose objective is to prevent cravings for cravings sake.

I think therefore I am. You think therefore you are. Hence solipsism is wrong. Simple. — Devans99

To me, your thoughts exist in a different sense to mine. Certainly the word "solipsism" does not possess a shareable public sense (hence the lack of solipsism conventions), but that is of course of no concern to the solipsist.

What valid reasoning/logic allows for solipsism to not necessarily be true? — gsky1

Well, can't you fathom the vibe of the extrovert's mindset when he says "the world exists without me"?

Is there really more to it than that? (The issue here being about the sense of an expression rather than truth)

I am under the impression that those who discount presentism do so, because they interpret presentism as a variant of realism about time and causality, where the ontological basis of that temporal realism is the present.

But if so, this is a strawman argument, for there is no indication that presentists are realist about time and causality. I think that a presentist can interpret any statement presently, including any statement asserting temporal realism and eternalism. So in some sense I think the presentist would find debates about presentism pointless. For he would interpret both sides of the debate as a construction of the present.

Presentism is certainly a dramatically different viewpoint upon the meaning of the past. But in a sufficiently simple universe, presentist understanding of the past would be perfectly aligned with physical understanding of the past.

For example, suppose we lived in a very simple universe in which only the earth and the sun existed. Then looking at the appearance of the sun through a telescope, a presentist and a physicist might both say "We call this appearance of the sun "eight minutes ago". "

In reality, the reason why neither the presentist nor the physicist are prepared to say that "eight minutes ago" is the merely a name for the appearance of the sun, is because "eight minutes ago" is a holistic and open-ended collection of inferences in relation to our entire lives and anticipated experiences that we cannot call into mind simultaneously. Hence we are unable to define "eight minutes ago" in terms of our experiences, even though we are readily prepared to judge some of our experiences as referring to "eight minute ago".

Yet in a sufficiently simple and closed universe, "eight minutes a go" would be definable as an adjective referring to immediate experience, like "reddish", "circular", "rough-looking" etc.

Realists are right to point out that the meaning of past-contingent propositions transcend individual acts of verification or constructions out of sense-data. The anti-realist (including the presentist) should concede this, without feeling forced to conclude that the concept of the past transcends the entirety of experience.

Hence like the logical positivist Ayer, the presentist ought to be skeptical of any particular doctrine of verificationism, but not necessarily the spirit of verificationism.

If you look at the difference between past eternity and future eternity, the the first is a completed infinity whilst the 2nd is not. — Devans99

If the present is considered to be the origin of one's spatio-temporal coordinate space, then there is no reason to consider past eternity to be any more complete than future eternity.

For example, a constructivist and anti-realist interpretation of time might consider both the past and future to be ongoing constructions that are semantically reducible to sense-data and memory. This view does not imagine time to be a completed and directed cartesian axis, with the past and future occupying opposite ends.

The same is also true of certain models of cosmology, for example the Hawking-Hartle Model that does not single out any point of space-time as being the unique causal-origin.

What is the point of that question? You could play that game with any profession: what is a lumberjack without their cutting down of trees, what is Chris Froome without his bicycle, or Serena Williams without her racquet? — andrewk

What distinguishes the practice of psychiatry from the above, is that the the reason for the practice of psychiatry isn't politically neutral, either on the side of the patient who requests a diagnosis due to failing to conform to the social values of modern society, nor on the side of the psychiatrist who is diagnosing according to an illness ontology that is based on a narrow conception of an individual that serves capitalist interests in endorsing a particular system of moral judgement.

In the criminal justice system and the welfare state , psychiatrists and psychologists play the role of priests who in effect deliver a moral judgement of an individual in the guise of the presence or absence of a mental illness diagnosis, that is largely subjective with respect to unreliable and incomplete proto-scientific evidence. Of course the psychiatrist will claim to be only giving the best possible objective psychological diagnosis, but he is rarely paid for this reason, for his diagnosis is used by other institutions and juries to reward or punish a 'weakly performing' individual in relation to society's values.

In case anyone hasn't read Quine's Word and Object, I'd recommend reading it simultaneously with PI, especially for the clarity of Quine's behaviourist arguments regarding the indeterminacy of translation. The challenge is then to reconcile the two philosophers. (I think any conflict is mostly a style issue, for Quine's definition of "science" was a very broad and immanent church)

It sounds like you are describing the problem of clustering; for any collection of elements that are pairwise related by some measure of similarity, how many clusters are there, and where are the boundaries?

One potential criticism of this formulation, is that it assumes the notion of an element as an axiom from which the cluster-membership of elements is inferred, as well as an a priori metric of similarity. It is a logically atomic model that models clustering as a type of induction.

Perhaps this could be circumvented by treating elements as being another type of relation that is itself a relation between similarity relations(!), such that every subset of relations is understood to be a sub-configuration of a semantically inseparable whole structure. I'm thinking of Tensor Algebra here, as is used in Quantum Field Theory to describe entanglement between an undetermined number of particles that are themselves defined in terms of a global field fluctuation.

I think of potential infinity as iterative processes carried out in time and then as actual infinity as the result of carrying on these iterative processes 'forever'.

Or potential infinity is like the limit concept from calculus and actual infinity is like an infinite set.

Potential infinity is unbounded, actual infinity is out of bounds. — Devans99

What does imagining "forever" consist of? For example, I imagine walking for some time along a row of trees that has no end in sight. Then I say to myself "this is forever", and then I abruptly stop imagining walking along the row of trees in order to get on with the rest of my life.

But i could have imagined exactly the same thing when imagining potential infinity. Perhaps the only difference, is that in this case I might include my stoppage of the imagined scene as being part of my meaning of "potential infinity".

This seems to imply that the distinction between potential vs actual infinity is arbitrary.

It is the term 'Potential Infinity' that comes to mind when thinking of computers. I don't have a problem with potential infinity, its 'Actual Infinity' that is the problem. — Devans99

But is it even possible to define a difference between actual vs potential infinity? Supposing you were confronted by a skeptic who doubted the semantic distinction between these concepts. How can you force the skeptic to accept that there is a semantic distinction without appealing to circularity or falling into infinite regress?

have you considered interpreting infinity to mean an under-determined finite number?

For in practice, (as in the software engineering application of infinite loops), infinity is only used to denote the absence of an a priori stopping condition. But an a priori absence of a stopping condition is not the same thing as failing to stop in practice.

This paradox is related to Markov's Principle:

"if it is impossible that an algorithm does not terminate, then it does terminate."

Sounds undeniable right? But then what does "does not terminate" mean exactly? After all, the phrase "does not terminate" has only ever been uttered in the presence of an event that is interpreted and verified according to a linguistic convention - therefore, according to constructive semantics "does not terminate" must refer to something observable (for example, the C syntax while(true) {...} )

Conversely, an event which is literally absent, namely termination, cannot have caused the utterance "does not terminate". Therefore according to constructivism, "does not terminate" can only refer to the absence of an a priori predictable stopping condition, for example as in the piece of syntax as in the example above, which when actually executed is invariably terminated eventually.

So if "does not terminate" is interpreted to mean "termination is not predictable", then we can rephrase Markov's Principle to mean:

"If the non-predictability of an algorithm's termination isn't predictable, then the algorithm terminates"

Which is clearly a deniable assertion, since that the premise is purely epistemic in nature whereas the consequent is actual. Consequently, infinity should, at least according to constructivism, be interpreted as a purely epistemic notion in reference to finite numbers or iterations.

No it doesn't. This is not how assessments work. We take into account all external as well as internal factors that could contribute to a persons dysfunction. I'm seeing a lot of you guys make assumptions here without any real support. When I evaluate my clients I take into account all factors. — Anaxagoras

But how is it possible to take these factors into account? What does this analysis consist of? Could an analysis of a patient's cognition, behavior and social welfare by any honest measure be called objectively scientific? Wouldn't you need to observe the patient in situ?

In my personal experience as a psychiatric patient for ADHD and depression, "taking external factors into account" consists of the psychiatrist diagnosing purely on the basis of self-reports that cannot be crosschecked and that are potentially wildly inaccurate, especially considering the political pressure there is on the patient to obtain a supposedly "objective" medical diagnosis for obtaining sick-notes.

Imagine if a dentist operated on teeth purely on the basis of questionnaires and self-reports...

At least in the UK, my experience with the NHS tells me that the cognition and behavior of mental-health patients is not evaluated by clinical psychologists - not even a stroop test - and that psychiatrists only provide superficial consultation services with respect to googleable psychopharmacology.

If the question as to whether or not one's personal identity has changed over time is answered according to experience, then doesn't this demonstrate the philosophical uselessness of the idea of personal identity?

Isn't the Bayesian position that there is no qualitative distinction between assumptions and knowledge? It's all just probabilities with different values. — Echarmion

Even frequentist probability doesn't require a qualitative distinction between assumptions and knowledge, for assumptions can be represented as "pseudo frequencies" to augment actually obtained frequencies and applied to a given likelihood function. No frequentist statistician would reject to this, provided one can provide a real-world justification for those pseudo-frequencies.

The reason Bayesian probability has been so controversial is in it's non-frequentist interpretations and usage of "prior" distributions, for when "prior" distributions are non-controversially applied they ironically represent objective posterior knowledge. And it makes no sense whatsoever to interpret flat priors as representing the state of ignorance of an experimenter, unless that prior is redundant in playing no role whatsoever in subsequent inferences.

If an assertion of ignorance was to influence the calculation of an expectation, then by definition the assertion isn't of ignorance but of knowledge or assumption.

The are two distinct ways of understanding timelessness and immortality. One is to identify timelessness as infinitely extended duration, which many point out is unthinkable or a contradiction. The other is to identity timelessness with tenselessness, designating propositions for which the assignment of a temporal index or duration is nonsensical.

For example, every perceivable event (or even every conceivable event) might be regarded as necessarily having finite duration in being otherwise unperceivable or unthinkable; yet at the same time it might be conceded that the abstract types associated with such events are nevertheless tenseless.

For example, it make sense, at least to my mind, to insist that the actual Elvis Presley, in the sense of a particular rock-star who grew fat bingeing on burgers while living in Graceland, was mortal. Yet the concept of Elvis Presley must be tenseless, for otherwise how can I currently make sense of the claim that "Elvis no longer exists"?

An informal way of expressing this is to say that the King can never die... Perhaps a better way of expressing this is to say that one's private imagination only acquires tense indirectly through it's practical application in the world, via calibrating it's imagery to the world's public convention of temporal semantics.

Firstly, in my opinion, Bayesian probability should be interpreted as being reducible to frequentist statistics. For ultimately the empirical distribution in front of us is all there is. A so-called 'prior' is what happens when an observed empirical distribution, say f(x,y), is mathematically represented as a product g(x)h(x,y). From this product it is clear that the so-called 'prior' g(x) is nothing more than a factor of the observed distribution f, and that g does not possess meaning that is independent of the "likelihood" h (and vice versa).

Yet in scientific practice Bayes' rule is usually used for prescriptive induction; it is often the case that g is derived from a different data-set from that used to derive h, such that the product of g and h constructs an unseen joint-distribution that is used to make novel inferences. As with all induction, no statistical justification for this can be given and Bayesian statisticians should remain silent.

Of course, g and h are rarely known explicitly and are more naturally represented in terms of computer programs representing our physical knowledge and assumptions from which we can simulate a distribution of pseudo-data for comparison against new real-world data.

But none of that should detract from the fact that g together with h are synonymous with empirical knowledge + empirical assumptions ; for whatever we are ignorant about can play no role in our predictions or calculations.

Returning to your question, it is under-determined without reference to a distribution correlating independent witness reports to the identity of lottery winners. Of course, we might say that we know this intuitively and are prepared to make an induction, but this further serves to illustrate why Bayesian statistics is pretty useless as a formalism for directly expressing prescriptive induction.

But even an anti-realist must have an opinion on whether sensory input data from the past/future actually exists in the same sense as 'nows' sensory input data? — Devans99

From a meaning-as-use perspective, the difference between a past-referring image - such as a photograph of a deceased historical figure, versus a presently-referring image - such as a live-streamed web-cam image, is how those images are used, which is to say that the images activate very different inferences in the mind or behaviour of an observer.

Presumably a realist concerning the past will insist that the difference between these sets of inferences are of a different underlying type in being representative of an underlying commonsensical ontological distinction between past , present and future that transcends an observer's use of the images.

The anti-realist concerning the past will refrain from drawing this ontological distinction, for example because he might understand all inferences as being ultimately present or future referring. For instance, the anti-realist might argue that the very concept of an evidence-based account of history refers to the future possibility of making certain empirically verifiable discoveries by historians and scientists.

At the very least, if commonsense realism concerning temporal semantics is rejected, past present and future in the psychological sense becomes a mixed up place.

Presentism (believe that only now exists) is the opposite view of eternalism (belief that past, present and future are real). — Devans99

Not necessarily. Consider the anti-realist's interpretation of time:

Definition: "Now" is a tenseless designator that refers only to actually occurring sensory input (including thoughts and memories).

Premise: The meaning of "physical time" is reducible to sensory input translated according to the linguistic conventions of physics.

Conclusion: Physical time is tenseless.

But why would the conclusion need to explicit something that already has been said in the premise? I mean, in "P⊃Q", for instance, if you analyze only the consequent, you'll see that "Q" permits "¬P", which is denied by the antecedent. I'm not quite sure what kind of analysis are you doing but I think that analyzing only the conclusion without considering what was stated in the premise isn't the right way. — Nicholas Ferreira

P⊃Q doesn't permit Q⊃¬P in a consistent logic. That case is different to the set-theoretic case, where Fx ∨ Gx permits Fx ∧ Gx and is therefore a weaker statement than the latter.

Of course, in a sense your antecedent might be said to contain your "conclusion" as a weaker premise, but i think it is a mistake to think of your right-hand side as a conclusion because it must forever remain tied to the antecedent if it isn't to be misinterpreted as allowing F and G to be overlapping sets containing multiple members... assuming of course, that you want to represent the number 2 as a union of pairwise disjoint singleton sets.

sime
This is said in the antecedent, not in the conclusion — Nicholas Ferreira

Correct, hence your conclusion permits a possibility denied by your premise.

Why does the conclusion permits "(x or y) or (x & y) to be F & G" if it is said that nothing is simultaneously F and G? — Nicholas Ferreira

Your stated conclusion

(∃x)(∃y)(((Fx∨Gx)∧(Fy∨Gy))∧(x≠y)∧¬(∃z)((z≠x∧z≠y)∧(Fz∨Gz)))

does not say that X or Y cannot simultaneously be F and G.

Therefore your conclusion is weaker than your premise.

The conclusion "exactly two beings are F-or-G" does not follow from

"exactly one being is F and exactly one being is G and nothing is F-and-G"

Because the conclusion permits (x or y) or (x & y) to be F & G.

From a presentist perspective, one's notion of an 'after life' or lack of, refers to one's present state. This is also true from a behaviourist's perspective, since the behavioural semantics of any thought or uttered sentence consists of one's response to one's immediate environment.

Ordinary thinking considers death to be a state of the individual very much like sleeping or being happy. This leads to the commonly accepted but inconsistent assertion that the individual continues to exist in some sense after his death, albeit in a terminal dead state.

A typical atheist might deny asserting this, but this assertion is implicit in sentences like "Elvis is dead", which would not have sense unless Elvis was in some sense still referable after his death.

One way to salvage the meaning of the sentence whilst denying the existence of individual souls, might be to interpret "Elvis is dead" as saying "The name Elvis no longer refers to a public object". The problem is, the sentence now has sense but at the cost of only referring to the name "Elvis".

The mathematical field of Homology (and by extension Cosmology) runs into a similar problem, namely the problem of how to define a hole in a surface purely in terms of the substance of the surface. It gets around this problem by formulating a constructive definition of holes in terms of the cycles that characterise the surface. That way a hole can be described without resorting to a transcendental ontology containing a 'nothing substance'.

Nevertheless we see that Donuts contain 'nothing' in the middle. Which is equivalent to remarking that a sphere cannot be made into Donut unless we tear the middle.

Observing young children can be enlightening in this respect. My nieces appear to agree with one another for the sake of establishing fairness and equality. Wars can happen in any situation in which they perceive that fairness and equality is no longer possible.

As you've demonstrated, to determine is a verb relating two objects; namely a process called a determinator and an object determined through the actions of the determinator.

What if these two objects are considered as constituting a single object? Doesn't the relation of determination disappear?

Suppose that a process we have no understanding of, i.e. an oracle, produced a sequence of a hundred numbers that we do not recognise as following a mathematical law. In which case we might identify the sequence with the oracle's actions. For to say "the oracle determined the sequence" wouldn't say anything over and above the fact that it outputted the sequence. We could have equally said that the oracle performed a miracle. In other words, it would make no sense to say at this point in time that the sequence of numbers that the oracle produced was either random or non-random.

Suppose that we later recognised the sequence as being the Fibonacci sequence. Then the sentence "The Oracle determined the first 100 numbers " has a sense it previously did not have. For in this case we are indicating that we are interpreting the oracle's outputs using at least one additional external process, such as a calculator, that is independent of the oracle's actions and that we might externally appeal to if predicting the oracle's future actions. In which case we might then say that our calculator determines the oracle's actions, or equivalently, that the numbers the oracle produced are non-random.

But what if we considered the calculator and oracle as constituting a single object? Does it now make sense to say that the joint outputs of the calculator and oracle is either random or non-random? The answer is yes, assuming we live in a culture of mathematics that interprets this joint system using external criteria for 'checking' the answer.

But what if we considered all of that together with the oracle? Now the answer is no. For the concepts of determination and randomness are purely representational concepts that are relational and have no universal applicability.

But is it also conceivable that there be a language in which a person could write down or give voice to his inner experiences - his feelings, moods, and so on a for his own use? —– Well, can’t we do so in our ordinary language? - But that is not what I mean. The words of this language are to refer to what only the speaker can know - to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language.
— PI 243

I have no criterion of correctness. — Luke

Curiously, he only directly refers to "private language" in three passages:

259. Are the rules of the private language impressions of rules?—
The balance on which impressions are weighed is not the impression
of a balance.

269. Let us remember that there are certain criteria in a man's
behaviour for the fact that he does not understand a word: that it
means nothing to him, that he can do nothing with it. And criteria
for his 'thinking he understands', attaching some meaning to the word,
but not the right one. And, lastly, criteria for his understanding the
word right. In the second case one might speak of a subjective understanding. And sounds which no one else understands but which I 'appear to understand'' might be called a "private language".


275. Look at the blue of the sky and say to yourself "How blue
the sky is!"—When you do it spontaneously—without philosophical
intentions—the idea never crosses your mind that this impression of
colour belongs only to you. And you have no hesitation in exclaiming
that to someone else. And if you point at anything as you say the
words you point at the sky. I am saying: you have not the feeling of
pointing-into-yourself, which often accompanies 'naming the sensation' when one is thinking about 'private language'. Nor do you think
that really you ought not to point to the colour with your hand, but
with your attention. (Consider what it means "to point to something
with the attention".)

259 appears to reject an a priori approach to understanding first-person phenomenology in terms of privately defined linguistic definitions (e.g. as in Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Husserl's Logical Investigations)

275 Nevertheless attributes a meaning of sorts to thinking of first-person experience in terms of a private language, namely "the feeling of pointing into yourself when one is thinking about private language"


269 Attributes sense to the notion of "private language" when referring to third-person behaviour.

The arguments against a private language have a more general form that argues against private rules. A rule that is only understood by one person does not count as a rule. — Banno

Only according to Banno and Banno's Wittgenstein :)

Morals are rules to live by; but if rules cannot be private, morality cannot be private. — Banno

But Wittgenstein stressed the very importance of ethical and aesthetic judgements and railed against the very understanding of aesthetics and morality in terms of linguistic convention. See Wittgenstein's Poker. He in fact rejected the utility and sensicality of reducing ethics and aesthetics to mere linguistic conventions.

To take a non-moral example, Wittgenstein didn't conclude that a private understanding of redness is impossible because redness is a term belonging to public language whose meaning therefore must refer to public convention. Rather, he concluded that one's private use of the word "red" within a language game cannot be given a meaningful a priori definition in terms of one's immediate sensations, due to such a definition being a circular tautology that is superfluous to, and likely unrepresentative of, one's actual private use of "red", as well as saying nothing informative to oneself or others.

This doesn't rule out a person discovering, a posteriori , an implicit rule that he discovers to be descriptive of his actual private word usage, only that such a rule cannot be the prescriptive force of his use of the word, due to Humean considerations that reject the platonistic conception of logical necessity.

As an ex-phd student I saw scant evidence to suggest that neo-liberal universities, whose main object was to retain fee paying students, were truth motivated. As rational consumers, students don't want truth per se, they want to secure jobs and status by the easiest route possible.

All i experienced was an authoritarian power structure consisting of a hierarchy of line managers going all the way up to the vice-chancellor, few if any who were continuing to publish as first authors due to skills obsoletion and the fact they weren't rewarded for being academics, and none of whom seemed remotely interested in real academia that had long since surpassed their academic knowledge.

Outside of a few well-funded and prestigious universities, many universities provide education services only in the spirit of it being a 'necessary evil' delivered reluctantly in the most efficient manner possible (via copy-pasta) in order to receive student fees. Truth is whatever information retains the fee paying students who don't know any better.

If a hard Brexit precipitated a national collapse of the UK university system, I'd take a Thatcherite view that the industry shouldn't be bailed out and needed to go any way, and let the market sort it out.

If we neglect the concept of time as a medium and instead directly define a position in time in terms of the phenomena associated with it, then what are the resulting implications for the interpretation of false memories?

It seems to me that if one accepts this conceptual deflation of time in terms of phenomena, that a false memory would only be false in terms of convention.. For the time referred to by a memory would then be identical to the memory content, say the memory-image. Therefore to say that the memory was 'false' would be equivalent to saying that the position in time previously associated with this memory-image was to be redefined in terms of a different memory-image.

Are there non-empirical claims we can know for certain by way of proofs that do not rely on empirical claims?
— Nils Loc

Yes, all mathematical and logical proofs are an example. — Terrapin Station

Don't we ultimately define the correctness of a proof by it's agreement with consensual opinion or with the output of an implemented computer program?

Consider 2+2 = 4. We can take it as being a necessary truth, in which case we are not making an epistemological claim, but are asserting our attitude in relation to our intended use of the formula.

But if we do not take it to be a necessary truth, then it is a truth contingent upon our actual use of the formula. In either case, in what sense is our actual use, or intended use of the formula, not empirical?

How can I define myself if reality can be faked? — pbxman

what is the difference between faking something versus changing something?

Does the past necessarily have to be viewed as being fakeable but not changeable?

Consider Orwell's 1984, where all documented history is destroyed or altered. We should say that the real past remains the same. But what if all potential evidence of the past was lost? Are we still forced to conceptualise the past as unchanged?

If you could remove your identity or your past how could you know that you chose to do that in the past if that past and that choice could potentially be faked? — pbxman

so presumably you mean, how can one rely upon one's own memory when classifying false memories?

Firstly it has to be asked: What does it mean for a memory or a photograph to refer to something past?

In other words, how is a memory or photograph different from a mere image?

Can an individual photograph without any additionally provided context be meaningfully said to refer to anything past?

Or is the concept of a 'past referring photograph' a holistic concept involving the use of an image, for example it's comparison to other images?

I claim that there is no difference between reality and "dreams " . I tried so hard to define or to catch what really makes night time dreams any different from the so called"objective physical reality" and couldn't find anyone in terms of the "substance " of it or the "actuality " of it..therfofer reality and dreams are identical. — Nobody

You seem to suppose that an inability to define a distinction implies a rejection of the said distinction. Is that implication valid? When a child starts to appreciate fiction, do parents first need to protect the child's sanity by supplying them with definitions for fiction and non-fiction? Doesn't the child have an innate sense of the distinction without necessarily having an ability to verbalise it? Aren't we the same as the child when it comes to our inability to verbalise most of our distinctions?

Consider a related problem; someone says "The set of images that I call "The Eiffel Tower" cannot be the real Eiffel Tower". We will ordinarily accept his thesis, yet how is it possible for him to know that his images are mere representations? If we demand answers from him, won't he invariably beg the question, or perhaps worse, contradict himself by supplying a counter-example image referring to his so-called "real" Eiffel tower? It seems that we must accept his conclusion, after all, he doesn't act insane to us, yet we cannot accept any of his verbalised arguments.

To conclude, the notion of reality shouldn't be considered to be a signifiable object, but rather the medium in which signification occurs. The notion of dreaming however, can be practically signified by the common phenomenal and behavioural hallmarks of dreaming as exploited by lucid-dreamers performing "reality checks" and the psychologists who study their rapid-eye movements.

383. The argument "I may be dreaming" is senseless for this reason: if I am dreaming, this remark is being dreamed as well and indeed it is also being dreamed that these words have any meaning.

676. [...] I cannot seriously suppose that I am at this moment dreaming. Someone who, dreaming, says "I am dreaming", even if he speaks audibly in doing so, is no more right than if he said in his dream "it is raining", while it was in fact raining. Even if his dream were actually connected with the noise of the rain. — Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty

The testable phenomena of lucid dreaming appears to fly directly in the face of Wittgenstein's arguments, yet the phenomena of false-awakenings within a lucid-dream is in support of his comments. Perhaps it is fair to say, that "I may be dreaming" can have context specific sense in a given situation relative to whatever criteria at the time is considered to constitute "wakefulness". Nevertheless, this doesn't imply any absolute sense of a distinction.

Guy across the street threw the snow from his driveway into the street because he didn’t want the road treatment chemicals on his lawn. He told the cops he thought the plow would take it away. Although true, the plow would take the snow away, and true, road chemicals don’t belong on lawns, still the unreasonableness of the behavior itself remains.

Understanding doesn’t necessarily alleviate illusory reason, just exposes it for what it is.

Unless you meant something else, maybe? — Mww

The contention here seems to be that ordinarily people understand reason as being prescriptive, such that a reasoned argument tells us what we ought to do in a situation, but by that understanding a rational argument involves appealing to emotions and ethical intuitions in a way that transcends mathematical formalism and the conventions of semantics. A difficulty of this view is how to justify a distinction between the coolness of logic and the passion of rhetoric.

The same is also true of logically minded Platonists who identify reason with physically transcendent and convention-transcendent standards of deduction and induction whose perfection the human logician only adheres to on rare occasion. They might say to a failing student who wrote 2+2=5 that he ought to realise that 2+2 necessarily equals 4 because it is a necessary fact, and not merely a preference of the mathematical community. To me, these platonists also identify reason with ethics although they would probably disagree with me, in their failing to pay attention to the role of their own emotions when they insist upon the correctness of a proof they view as being necessarily correct.

On the other hand, naturalistically inclined philosophers identify reason as describing the optimal course of actions an agent has to perform, given assumptions concerning the agent's preferences, their available courses of action and the state of the world. Unless these philosophers are platonists or are happy to reduce reason to emotion, they have no means of supplying reason with a normative dimension, since their understanding of an agent's preferences is in terms of the agent's average behaviour, while their understanding of the agent's reasoning is in terms of what the agent actually does. Hence the naturalist's distinction between an agent's rationality and the agent's preferences is purely a matter of convention.