Where is space? It doesn't appear to have a location, so it must not exist. X-)

Earlier on, I said this:

You're saying that, if claim A is solely about experience B, and claim A is solely grounded in experience B, then A can't be non-veridical. That is to say, if I have experience B, I can't infer a falsehood about experience B solely from that experience. Do I have you right, or at least, mostly right?

I see a red triangle. Upon seeing it, I form the belief, "I am currently having the experience of seeing a red triangle." What is necessarily veridical here? Following the above quote, the necessarily veridical thing must be my belief that I'm having that experience. Which means that there's no room for error in the process of my forming a belief about an experience that I'm having, provided that that belief is solely derived from that experience.

Now, we want to say this: "For this class of beliefs, it makes no sense to say that they are non-veridical." We're not just saying that all such beliefs are veridical, but that it it is senseless to talk about them any other way. If this is true, then it must be logically necessary for those beliefs to be veridical, which is to say that "A belief of this class is non-veridical" must imply a contradiction. (You can substitute "claim" for belief here, if you like - I think TGW used that word a few pages back)

It seems to me that the most obvious way to get this result is to say that the experience in question is identical to the belief. My belief that I am currently having the experience of seeing a red triangle must be that experience. If you didn't want to say that, I guess you could appeal to an infallible belief-forming faculty.

Thoughts, anyone?

"That seeming led me to believe that I had that same seeming." I could question this claim, but, if it's true, then the belief (that I had that seeming) can't be false.

How's this: "It makes sense to talk of that belief as being unveridical because it makes sense to talk of the claim, "This belief was grounded in that seeming" being false."?

The whole point of non-veridicality, if you like, is that there was a seeming that led you to believe something that wasn't so. But if what 'was so' was merely the seeming, this possibility seems to become incoherent. Sellars seems to want to say that this makes veridicality incoherent too, but I'm not sure what leads him to think this. — The Great Whatever

Okay, I'm gonna conjecture a little hypothetical that might illustrate Sellars' intuition on this matter. I'm gonna ramble a little, but I'm still in the "clear the area" phase here. Let me see what I can do here...

Suppose I make this claim: "I experienced a red triangle." Where is the self-verifying experience here? The experience of the red triangle is not self-verifying, since I very well could have seemed to see a red triangle even if there wasn't one (bad lighting or whatever, to use one of Sellars' examples). You could say that it's not the experience, but the claim, "I experienced a red triangle," that is self-verifying, but that claim is grounded on my experience of remembering a former a experience.

But that isn't being completely charitable to what you've put forth (also with deference to your point about delusion/dream/linguistic skepticism not being relevant here). Let's try and push it a little further: while having the experience of seeing a red triangle, I say, "I seem to see a red triangle right now." You're saying I can't be wrong with that, yeah? Provided that the claim I'm making is totally grounded in just that experience, and nothing else, then I can't be wrong.

I can't think of a problem with this offhand, so let me fiddle with it a little. What would it take for me to be wrong here? I would need to have experience B, and infer something false about B, with only B as grounds for my claim. Obviously, I can lie about it, but I take it as implicit here that it's self-verifying for me only. I guess the only way out for Sellars here is to ask for an account of what it means for a claim to be grounded in an experience. Perhaps he could say that there is something a little fishy about saying, "For any experience I have, it is self-evident for me that I am having that experience." Does one have an experience of self-evidence here? Or is this more of a logical thing, inferred from what it means to have an experience?

Right, it occurred to me after typing that that I may have fallen into the exact same error as Sellars. Let me look a little further into this...

You are saying that the claim, "I saw a red triangle," is self-verifying if it's grounded in the experience of seeing a red triangle. My first instinct is to assert that we can be wrong about our experiences, but I sense that this would miss your point. You're saying that, if claim A is solely about experience B, and claim A is solely grounded in experience B, then A can't be non-veridical. That is to say, if I have experience B, I can't infer a falsehood about experience B solely from that experience. Do I have you right, or at least, mostly right?

EDIT: d'oh, seems like you edited your post! Lemme read it again real quick and re-assess.

Hmm. Why does Sellars think this? — The Great Whatever

Here, I'll take a swing at it. I think Sellars means something like this:

"I had experience x."
"I had experience x, and it was veridical."
If the former is the same as the latter, then the second clause in the second statement is vacuous and veridicality adds nothing to the discussion. If, on the other hand, the second clause in the second statement is not vacuous, then these are two different statements. It follows that "Having a veridical experience of P" is something over and above "Having an experience of P." But this implies that veridicality is "optional" - it makes sense to speak of the experience as lacking veridicality.

So, ontological holism, ontic pragmatism. I can accept this, or some flavor of it, provided it still allows the possibility of philosophy (not a big fan of quietism anymore).

Let me paraphrase you here - I want to make sure I got it right. You're saying that proper pragmatism is an ontic inquiry; you can always ask "why," but once you do this past the point of universal invariance, you hit a wall because there's no answer in terms of a more general kind of invariance. Since scientific pragmatism, on your definition, is about explanation in terms of more general kinds of invariance, it follows that the pump runs dry once we get to universal invariance. Basically, a qualified Principle of Sufficient Reason with a restriction on the kinds of explanations allowed, viz. they must be in terms of more general invariance.

Now I want to talk about something else here: why that particular restriction? I would assume that this is motivated by the success of natural science, but that's a guess because you have not yet said so. Does this methodology bootstrap itself out of scientific pragmatism, from "Let's do this because it works" to a more general method, a sort of conceptual ascent? Or is it some other reason?

I think that two people can share a motive. That's why we can cooperate. And if you're certain that you don't share a motive with someone else, trying to find out what they want, by your lights, is pointless.

Good! I think we've gotten deeper into the part of your thinking that interests me. You appear to believe that such activity is pointless, but you freely admit that you are not certain of that. You do entertain the possibility that they might give you a good reason. And this suspicion of yours that there is a possibility (albeit a remote one) that they may have a good reason for what they do, is enough to drive you into discussion with them. I see.

I will venture a conjecture here, that you may tear apart or affirm as you see fit. You are willing to engage in discussion with the lunatics because you are not 100% certain that they are lunatics. That is to say, you are willing to entertain the idea that there could be a transcendental answer, or at least, a good reason to seek one. And the lunatics do their loony stuff because they believe the idea that you are only willing to entertain as a remote possibility. Have I understood you?

Augustino, I sense a tension in your thinking here, inasmuch as there seems to be some fracture (which every philosopher has). I want to try and diagnose it, in order to open up this discussion a little.

You seem to take the attitude that the transcendental nutbags will not be satisfied because there is nothing that can satisfy them, and the only winning move with such questions in not to play. You also appeal to personality and context, saying that such things are personal and different between different people.

Here's the issue, though. You are engaged in a discussion. You say things like this on the internet, where they're meant to be read by many other people. If I make it a point of saying that people who seek some kind of transcendence ought to stop, then, if I am arguing in good faith, I really am trying to get at least some of them to stop. But, as we've seen in philosophy since Wittgenstein, this never actually happens, because the transcendental types keep doing their thing. So shouldn't the Wittgensteinian be the one to halt das maul?

(Not that you should, of course. I'm talking to you for a reason, after all.)

I anticipate (perhaps wrongly) that your response on this point will be "Well, they can do whatever they want! Meaning is personal, so it's not my problem." I don't think this response works, though, because if you really thought that, then why bother engaging in the discussion at all?

Yeah, but we have to cooperate in groups, and any group that cooperates needs a collective "why" if it's gonna function over the long term. More importantly, even if it's personal, it's still about my relation to reality - that big fluctuating-but-always-there thing that doesn't go away no matter how I define my terms. And that requires that my purposes reference something outside of me.

As to imagining an answer to the question - well, what of it? "I can't imagine it" isn't gonna satisfy any of those transcendental nutbags, now will it?

Also, I said "Wittgensteinians," not Wittgenstein, although there is no philosopher with whom I fully agree, besides myself, and even that one is sometimes doubtful. Wittgenstein was my favorite for a long time, and I don't deny that he was head and shoulders above most philosophers of the past few centuries, but he's not perfect.

Wittgenstein's problem comes from his references to "mysticism" (wink) and stuff beyond language (wink wink) and general sentiment along the lines of "This is all you can say about this and as far as you can go, and there's no more to it, except there is," (wink wink wink.) Nobody has destroyed him, it is true, but did he succeed in ending philosophy? No. And nowhere is this more aptly illustrated than in his modern-day followers, who have taken his supercilious attitude toward philosophy as a career and made a career out of it. Poor bastard must be spinning in his grave.

Not to be the bearer of bad news, but this is where the bare swearing about bears and werebears is barely something I want barreling down on me, even from behind a barricade. It's as if I were being berated with ball-bearings the size of berries.

Plato. The rest of them try to escape him and fail.

any truth about the world is necessarily a truth that depends on the world. You may be right, but you have yet to offer an argument to demonstrate it — aletheist

A statement is only true about the world if the world is a certain way, and thus depends on the world. "The world contains elephants" is true iff there are elephants in the world, and false otherwise.

Ah! So was that sentence appropriate because it would eventually translate into the English "The sun rises in the East," or for some other reason? Also, what makes those two sentences bearers of the same truth?

Ok. So how do you put sentences into a world? Truth appears not only to be mind-dependent, but linguistically-capable-mind-dependent.

In that case: presumably, Julius Caesar believed that the sun rose in the East. But he didn't speak English, because English didn't exist then, so he didn't believe the sentence, "The sun rises in the East." Looks like sentences can't be your truth-bearers.

No dice. Does the paper have words on it or not? Keep in mind that we want to know if there are sentences in a world here. How do you put sentences in a world?

So, let's take it a little further.

Two more statements:

R1: "If there were no minds, there would be no truths."
R2 "If there are no minds, then there are no truths."

These two look to be logically equivalent, inasmuch as both say that a world without minds also lacks truth. Recalling that Q = "There are no truths," we have R2 as: "If there are no minds, then Q."

Let W be a world without minds. Q lacks a truth value in W, but "There are no truths in W" is true in the actual world.

It looks like our theory of truth comes into play here. On a deflationary account, we're in trouble because "Q" = "Q is true" in deflationary theories, i.e. "There are no truths in W" = "It is true that there are no truths in W." Maybe we should adjust our theory to say "Q" = "Q is true in the actual world." This lets us say that "It is true in the actual world that there are no truths in W."

So the best way to phrase it is that a world lacking minds also lacks truths. Now, why would we want to say that? Presumably, because sentences are the things with truth values. Worlds without minds lack sentences, so they lack truth.

Here's where it gets interesting: what does it mean for a world to contain sentences? We can imagine that W contains a scrap of paper with this post written on it. Does W then contain truth, despite lacking any minds?

I am not sure how to make a conclusive argument here, but the whole position looks more shaky - the presence of a piece of paper with some letters on it ought not to bring truth into a world.

I suppose you could say that Q would not be true if there were no minds, since there would be no truths. But now we've got these two statements:

Q1: "Q would not be true in the absence of minds." (note that this does not come out to "Q would be false."
Q2: "If there were no minds, there would be no truths."

Q = "There are no truths."

Would Q be true, in the absence of minds?

This isn't a recoil argument. I want to look at the relationship between counterfactuals here.

I'm not filled with suffering or sadness. I'm too busy expanding my base in Factorio.

Have you ever thought, when seeing one of those starving child infomercials, "Hey, why doesn't the film crew give that kid a Hot Pocket or something?"

Maybe I'm just not getting it, but it seems as if you're just saying that we ought to define our terms first. Fair enough, but is there a kind of substantive philosophical discussion outside of term-definition that is logically prior to the realism/anti-realism debate?

(It may not be logically prior in a strict sense, but I find that realism about abstracta, or the rejection of same, says a lot about what sort of philosopher one is, and seems to be prior in some way to this discussion. Vague, but it's a long story.)

Quick question: if realism and idealism are secondary, what are the primary questions that generate them?

It's a signal. Rather than saying, "The father gets mad because his daughter keeps asking 'why'," I once heard a philosophy professor say, "The father's anger is indexed to his daughter's repeated questioning." The purpose of the jargon is to say to other people, "Ah, yes! I, too, can do the philosophy!"

I suspect that this happens because learning jargon to use as a merit badge to display to other people that you've been exposed to academia is much easier than having any worthwhile or original insights.

This thread wouldn't exist if we were all comfortable that sexism isn't a problem. The issue will be around for a few more decades.. maybe a century. So if you're tired, I'd suggest more naps... — Mongrel

Strawman.

Had the female soccer team been rating the men, what would the appropriate response have been?

I can already anticipate the answer to this - "Only the men should get suspended because patriarchy." But that old argument is slowly running out of juice, so-to-speak. Eventually, people will get tired of hearing it.

the humble person deals with the philosophical bigot by graciously offering him their spade to dig his hole, but steadfastly refusing to join him there. — Baden

Perfect.

Something long and hard that I can wrap my talons around? — Sapientia

I have a tree branch you can use. By which I mean MY PENIS.

One thing that tangles me up when thinking about other minds is that the whole question seems to assume that my experience of my own mind is unproblematic.

For example, if I am a solipsist, then I believe my mind to be the only reality. Other people are objects in my mind, so they're real, too. :s Whoops! Looks like this whole concept of "my own mind" ought to be examined.

If what the ascetic is doing is insulting, it still isn't objectionable in any significant sense. "This guy doesn't like hamburgers - I bet he thinks he's too good for them." So what?

More to the point, in a society of functional alcoholics, abstinence from alcohol might look "obnoxious." That doesn't mean it's a bad idea.

Your statement was not qualified, so neither is my question.

What is the difference between this and a simple refusal to criticize feminism?

Beethoven's Grosse Fuge is mind-opening - better than drugs for that purpose. Music is a higher revelation than philosophy.

Also, I think that metal is art:

Transcendental, beeyotch.

The existence of abstracta. Are numbers real? How about universals like green and scarlet? Are tokens fundamental, or is there such a thing as a type?

More importantly: if abstracta do exist (and I think they do), what does this mean for us? What does it mean that they exist?

Seems like an airy fairy question, but I find that it lies beneath nearly every philosophical position I have.

Ad hominems and motte-and-bailey arguments are the bread-and-butter of the social justice movement. Sanctimony is liberally applied in both cases.

So far, this exchange has looked like this:

Me: "The social justice movement is composed of people who want to increase their own social status by advertising that they have the right opinions."

You: "No, you're wrong. Not only are you wrong, but people who have the same opinions as me are more secure and virtuous than everyone else, and people who don't have those opinions are insecure and terrified of change."

I rest my case.

That said, with the particular (minority) brand of feminist we've been describing, it is important to understand it as an inherent feature of their rhetoric which stems from their focus on "identity" as a source of valid opinions. Virtue signaling is a defense to the standard intersectional feminist position which vilifies and denigrates non-victim classes by blaming them for all problems and further goes on to exclude their ideas on the basis that their identity invalidates them. It's pretty much necessary to do if you want to participate in their discussions as a white male. — VagabondSpectre

If the door price is undergoing a lot of irrelevant posturing, then maybe the people in question are not worth speaking with.

Classical liberals can do whatever they want. I'm not particularly concerned with their philosophy. Your use of "classical liberal masses" is noted, however. Those low-status plebs!

Praising the men who understand and respect feminist arguments is about status —

And if you happen to be one of them, there's a nice status bump in it... For you.