I don't want to play a simplistic game of 'words' chasing 'words' round the houses.
At the risk of being heckled by the traditionalists, I quote Derrida...'there is nothing beyond context'.
That for me means every word we use, including 'objective' and 'confidence' takes its meaning from the real life contexts of its usage, and not from artificial 'word play' which I like to describe occasionally as 'seminaritis'.

The thesis is presented in the title of this thread. It up to you to decide whether it is 'worthwhile'.
It is for me because it exposes the futility of many so called 'philosophical debates'.

You don't ! All you have is confidence levels of expectancy.

The first level of measurement is 'nominal' i.e. naming of 'the thing to be measured'. The naming of 'space' or 'time' is no exception. 'Space' and 'time' are 'things' by virtue of being useful concepts fof some human endeavours.

There is no point in arguing about naive realistic axioms. The thesis rejects them by definition.

I suggest you read up on nonrepresentationalism.
A child who first aquires the word 'cat' in situations of experiencing furry toys, or real animals, or picture books is quite likely to initiially use that word for what adults call 'dog'. What matters is social agreement about expectancy. Meaning resides in expectancy which is open to negotiation.

Keep up the mission Frank ! :smile:

Since words are socially acquired and the currency of what we call 'thought', I heartily dismiss your idea that 'meaning is subjective and in heads'.

Physicality is mearly one aspect of 'thinghood'(expectancy of interaction) based on our common physiology. Try an 'abstract thing' like 'friend' or 'problem' as counter examples

You may see three separate topics. I suggest the thesis implies not.

No. Its meaningless because we are not engaged on any mutual, everyday project. Its what Wittgenstein called 'language on holiday'. Words like 'mind' are irrelevant to a thesis which ultimately implies that 'observers' with 'minds' are inseparable from the so-called 'objects' they appear to contemplate. That point is precisely why Heidegger for one, needed to resort to neologisms

The reference to 'human' implies that different species with non human physiologies might be able to communicate different expectancies. We might conceive of dolphins, say, with specialised acoustic systems being able to co-ordinate their hunting activities through what Maturana called 'languaging' which promotes 'structural coupling'.

Only the nonrepresentationalists would appear to be going 'deeper' ! They are implying that 'meaning' resides in potentially shifting social consenus about joint projects. There have even been moves to proscribe the word 'is' as being misleadingly absolutist in situations involving non physicality. (See the 'E prime movement'). And the limitations of static set theory, with its fixed set membership which form the basis of classical logic, have been questioned from the pov of the dynamic 'fuzzy sets' approach.

....and presumably you would also disagree with more recent scientific writers like Rovelli, and with the prevalent 'nonrepresentationalist' view of language which has became iconoclastic with respect to traditional (analytic) philosophy.

By assertng that 'a concept' is not idential to 'the object it conceives' you are immediately dismissing the relativity thesis by stepping back into the naive realism of 'objects'. Bohr was suggesting that what we call 'objects' are focal aspects of agreement about our experiences denoted by 'words'. Common species physiology tends to imply large areas of agreement which we tend to call 'objects'.

Try thinking of 'the senses' as being a human concept useful in some contexts. The biologist, Maturana dismissed 'sense data' as necessary for his 'autopoiteic, systems view of the life process'.
Obviously, normal biology and physiology is functional from a medical pov, but there is quite a lot resistance to a total mechanistic view. We of course use the naive realism of 'an external world' in our human urges to 'predict and control', but I suggest any supposed 'permanencies' in that world boil down to 'persistences of expectation of events' relative to our lifespans.

You still havn't worked it out have you Frank ! There is no way of 'testing' the thesis because it is transcendent of lay concepts of 'reality' (which the thesis also renders 'relative') against which normal testing is judged.And that is why your obsession with the word 'guess' is vacuous in this matter.

I will spell it out for you, on the basis of 'the relativity of existence'...
God 'exists' relative to believers, for whom it is a functional concept, but does 'not exist' for atheists, for whom it is a useless concept

Thanks for the welcome !

No. I quoted you !
Maybe you quoted someone above.

I would say regularity is in the eye of the beholder

Correct ! And an interesting speculation in that respect is about the concept of 'orde-disorder' involved in the second law of thermodynamics. In my opinion, that issue supports the view that 'time' is a psychological construct bound up with the human cognitive urge to 'predict and control'.

?
The original quote about 'definite truth value' was yours not mine.

My reconsideration of 'syntax was based on my understanding of 'syntax' as the linguistic one of 'rules governing combination of components', sometimes called 'grammar'.
Thus
Does the dog bite the man?... has the same syntactic structure as... Does the man bite the dog?
The common syntax implies a yes/no answer, but the particular answer is based on semantics.

I don't want to get involved with Frank's mission about 'belief'. I merely remark that in ordinary situations (not philosophical discussions) words like 'atheist' are rarely used even by atheists themselves ! i.e. For them, the word 'God' has zero functional personal significance, except in social situations where they might feel it is socially expedient to attend or respect the rituals of religious conformists. For them 'God exsts for others' in as much that it is a functional concept for others, who also don't actually need to label themselves 'believers', any more than atheists need to do label themselves. in normal interactions,
But there is no 'belief issue' going on in non - philosophical exchanges. The varieties of 'atheist' that Frank wants to discuss for his own purposes are meaningless in the contexts of 'normal life;.

Wittgenstein might say..examine how the word 'reality' is used in everyday circumstances.

e.g. She thinks she dresses well but in reality she looks terrible
or
In reality, an electron can behave as both a particle and a wave.

Note that the 'objectivity' we might or might not associate with these uses merely equates to a claim for consensus.
The point is surely that 'objective reality' is a metaphysical extrapolation from real usage to what W might call 'language on holiday'. The solipsist issue is a red herring from that pov.

Yes, The response makes sense except for your last sentence in which you appear to single out 'reality' as fixed or non-negotiable. IMO 'reality' denotes a concept open to negotiation like any other.

Your concentration on 'words' is in accordance with die Kehre or 'the turn' to linguistics in philosophy, illustrated by the later writings of Heidegger and Wittgenstein. I suggest that you may be missing a central point that words, being socially acquired, are primarily communicative, i.e. with others, or between facets of 'self' in that internal dialogue we call 'thinking'. You may also be unaware that recent views of words is that they are non-representational, i.e. they evoke contextually modifiable 'concepts' rather than being isomorphic to independently existing 'objects'. Little wonder that die Kehre was considered iconoclastic to mainstream analytical philosophy !

Of course, talking about language with language is always problematic, and that is one reason why meditators (etc) resort to the word 'ineffable' in their attempts at transcendence.

Greetings Wayfarer. You correct about 'mental image' and 'concept'. Indeed Rorty argues that Western philosophy has suffered from 'predominance of visualization' inherited from the Greeks.

" I’m an ubermensch and a mystic".....:grin:

Thankyou for explaining why are all wasting our time with you !

How does your philosophical evangelism which relies on classical set theory, reconcile with aspects of QM in which classical set theory is inapplicable ?Even Einstein had trouble with that one ! David Bohm tried going down Einstein's 'underlying order' suggestion, but he was sidelined by most of the profession as being 'a mystic'.

It seems to me that your one-liner about 'philosophy being in a dark place' is merely a fear of being forced to swim without a traditional buoyancy aid.

Yes. I agree on Heidegger. Temporality does indeed appear to be inextricable with Existenz

The Rovelli point of interest to me is that 'order of events' could be 'local' not universal. i.e.'before and after' are no more universal than 'up and down'. Now this in turn seems to have an impact on rationality which is based on 'causality''...in other words both causality and teleology may become parochial.
Rovelli does indeed stress 'observer reference frames' and my own thoughts have involved extension of of that to the very perception of 'order/disorder' itself which underpins 'times arrow' (2nd. Law of Thermodynamics').

If you get the chance, have a look at Rovelli 'Order of Time'.

"CH has a definite truth value. It's either true or false. That's semantics. But syntactically, we have no proof".
I'm not clear what you mean by 'syntax' here. The 'semantic point' is that the phrase 'definite truth value' automatically invokes the semantic context of classical binary logic.

....on further consideration, I assume you mean 'rules governing what constitutes a valid form of answer'. On that assumption we are touching on 'Zen Koan' territory which forces the pupil to consider the assumptions regarding the structure of 'the question'.. In that case my identification the inapplicability of the rules behind the assumptions of classical logic could be regarded as a 'syntactic' point

"Modern scientific discoveries in particle physics support the existence of a non-local substratum to reality, for in terms of the phenomenon of quantum entanglement,"

No they don't. Some descriptions of phenomena are consensually more useful (in terms of prediction and control) than others in particular contexts. No description is any closer to a nebulous 'reality' than any other. (Nietzsche). The 'reality debate' is rejected as futile by Pragmatists like Rorty.

Its a bit ironic that the 'authority' to which you object was the one who identified the 'language on holiday' you produce in your objection.. Only you know what you are talking about when you speak of your quasi-religious 'final destination'.. If you know the apocryphal tale of "turtles all the way down" it seems to apply to you.

The linguist John R. Ross also associates James with the phrase:

The following anecdote is told of William James. [...] After a lecture on cosmology and the structure of the solar system, James was accosted by a little old lady.
"Your theory that the sun is the centre of the solar system, and the earth is a ball which rotates around it has a very convincing ring to it, Mr. James, but it's wrong. I've got a better theory," said the little old lady.
"And what is that, madam?" inquired James politely.
"That we live on a crust of earth which is on the back of a giant turtle."
Not wishing to demolish this absurd little theory by bringing to bear the masses of scientific evidence he had at his command, James decided to gently dissuade his opponent by making her see some of the inadequacies of her position.
"If your theory is correct, madam," he asked, "what does this turtle stand on?"
"You're a very clever man, Mr. James, and that's a very good question," replied the little old lady, "but I have an answer to it. And it's this: The first turtle stands on the back of a second, far larger, turtle, who stands directly under him."
"But what does this second turtle stand on?" persisted James patiently.
To this, the little old lady crowed triumphantly,
"It's no use, Mr. James — it's turtles all the way down."

— J. R. Ross, Constraints on Variables in Syntax 1967[10]

Thankyou. I stand corrected on the technicalities of Cohen's work. But as an example of 'problems' with classical logic I still claim validity.
I have no idea where you are hoping to go with my alleged 'confusion' between syntax and semantics etc. As far as I'm concerned the contexts in which you want to differentiate between those terms is nothing to do with the context of my anti-classical logic position.
'

Thanks for that. I didn't know Piaget had an interest in religious teleology.

Since we've touched on the topic of 'time' via 'progression' I am also interested in recent views about time from authors like Rovelli. I would be pleased to hear any thoughts you might have on the matter.

I agree. Transitions of 'self' and 'world' is a two way semi-continuous process.
In fact, the constructivist Piaget, who initially applied this to child development with the terms 'assimilation-accommodation', extended the idea using the phrase 'genetic epistemology' to encompass to the progression of 'human knowledge' in general. By extrapolation we might for example compare Piaget's 'developmental stages' in the child to Kuhn's 'paradigm revolutions' in science. I use the term 'semi-continuous' since transitional states tend to have periods of relative stability before shifting.

I've not read much of the above. I merely comment that I seem to remember that Russell's Paradox was dismissed by Wittgenstein as being 'aberrant language'. IMO the substantive issue is breakdown of static classical set theory in the context of dynamic perceptual states. If, for example, we consider 'fuzzy sets' in which 'the law of the excluded middle' does not apply then the so called 'paradox' disappears because 'set membership' is fluid.
A similar issue seems to be the suggested of Cohen's award of the Field's Medal, for proving both that there was and was not 'another infinite set of cardinality between Cantor's infinite sets.
Classical logicians beware ! :cool:

I consider all absolutism to be religious, (absolute truth being the mythical crock of gold at the end of the rainbow), and it is you who appears to have the learning deficit.
Lets face it, your knee jerk reaction to post-modernism, which is largely embellishment of pragmatism, is a bit of a give away! I suggest you take seriously Rorty's warning that 'philosophy' per se has zero authority in epistemological matters relative to that of the sciences. This is particularly pertinent when considering the comparative physiology of perceptual system, or the Copenhagen iinterpretation of QM in which there are no 'things', only 'interaction events'. But then you may come to understand that when you extend your learning.

My apologies. I'm new to the forum the post was to TheGreatArcanum

Good luck with your religious mission !
Forums of course constitute soapboxes for those preachers who prefer the comfort of their armchairs !

Okay. I take it you quoted Jabberwocky in the misguided view that since Lewis Carroll concerned himself with 'nonsense' then his significant observation about 'power' regarding meaning should be ignored. (The fact that Carroll was perhaps linguistically ahead of his time in recognizing the significance of syntax for semantics, of course deflates the simplistic label 'nonsense poem' but such analysis would do your mission no favours, woud it ? :wink: )

I consider myself a pragmatist and view 'axioms' as merely 'assertions which may contextually work up to a point'..
This is in accordance with the spirit of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem' and a view of 'truth' as 'that which is good or useful to believe'. In addition, since language is. the currency of thought, and currency involves social agreement for its 'value' then philosophy which ignores those linguietic and social (paradigmatic) issues is vacuous. A final nail in the coffin of 'axioms' could be considered to be covered with Derrida's point, that every assertion is merely a 'focal privileging' which entails the backcloth of its negation for its semantic import. (His point that 'context is everything' has also been covered above)

Sorry, but your absolutist/naive realist stance equates merely to 'religion' for me.

If you follow my replies on other threads you will find multiple references which support my position.

Thankyou for the conversation so far.

"TheGreatArcanum;290688"]
You don't appear to be familiar with the prevalent view amongst philosophers of the 'nonrepresentalist position' on language. For me, this opposes the naive realism of 'things in their own right' and is in line with 'things are thinged by human thingers' ( and that includes the thing we call 'existence' !)

On another thread I wrote...
...... 'thinghood' is what humans ascribe to some focal aspects of their perceptual interactions. In other words 'existence' is a word we use for those recurrent interactions we consider to persist in our interaction history. The naming of such functional interactions reinforces such persistence by the abstract persistence of a word or object name. And since words are socially acquired there tends to be agreement i.e. understanding about the expectancies. encasulated by 'object names'.
Simple Reference...quantum theory...'there are no 'things'....only interactions..