So let's cut to the chase, Aaron. Do you adhere to Correspondence Theory? — Mongrel

I'm undecided. I tend to think that correspondence has some role to play in the theory of truth, but I don't think it works on its own.

You're pressing this point, so I'll press back. If you assert that Harry Potter married someone, I would answer that this can't be true because Harry Potter doesn't exist. — Mongrel

So you don't acknowledge a difference in truth-value between "Harry Potter married Ginny Weasley" and "Harry Potter married Lord Voldemort"? How could you ever hold a discussion about a fictional story?

The claim that there are unstated statements is peculiar to realism. It's a very odd metaphysics that suggests that there are no truths which have not yet been stated. — Mongrel

How so?

Most common among philosophers? Yea. Most common in everyday speech? I don't know. When you speak of truth outside a philosophical discussion are you thinking of speech acts? Or the way things are? — Mongrel

In every day speech I most commonly hear the word truth being used in sentences such as "well, yes, I suppose that's true", "that is so true!", "you tell me the truth, or else!", "but if that were true, then...", "is that really true?", etc., in which the referent is some claim that has been made. That's not the only way to use the word, but I find these to be very common indeed.

A deflationist is likely to admit that truth is a property of statements. They just don't attempt to define truth. — Mongrel

Yes and no. A deflationist will say that truth is a property only in the "thinnest" possible sense. SEP explains this better than I can:

It is commonly said that, according to the deflationary theory, truth is not a property and therefore that, according to the theory, if a proposition is true, it is mistaken to say that the proposition has a property, the property of being true. There is something right and something wrong about this view, and to see what is wrong and right about it will help us to understand the deflationary theory.

Consider the two true propositions (5) and (6):

(5) Caracas is the capital of Venezuela.
(6) The earth revolves around the sun.

Do these propositions share a property of being true? Well, in one sense of course they do: since they are both true, we can say that there both have the property of being true. In this sense, the deflationary theory is not denying that truth is a property: truth is the property that all true propositions have.

On the other hand, when we say that two things share a property F, we often mean more than simply that they are both F; we mean in addition that there is intuitively a common explanation as to why they are both F. It is in this second sense in which deflationists are denying that truth is a property. Thus, in the case of our example, what explains the truth of (5) is that Caracas is the capital of Venezuela; and what explains this is the political history of Venezuela. On the other hand, what explains the truth of (6) is that the earth revolves around the sun; and what explains this is the nature of the solar system. The nature of the solar system, however, has nothing to do with the political history of Venezuela (or if it does the connections are completely accidental!) and to that extent there is no shared explanation as to why (5) and (6) are both true. Therefore, in this stronger sense, they have no property in common. — http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-deflationary/#TruPro

This issue can easily be resolved without rejecting truth as a property of statements. — Mongrel

Perhaps, but my point was more that a statement can be true even if what it is about is not actual. I can't see how that would be possible if truth and actuality were equivalent.

What's interesting to me is that if we insist that truth is a property of statements, then it appears that there are statements which have never been stated which are true. The unstated statement problem is a plague to a realist. — Mongrel

This is a peculiar claim:"there are statements which have never been stated which are true" (emphasis mine). To my mind, a statement that has never been stated does not and has never existed, by definition. If truth is a property (ontological) of statements, then there are no true statements that have never been stated.

Of all the possible worlds, the actual world is the most possible. — Mongrel

Ha! How does one measure possibility, anyway? :)

I think you're illustrating why truth as a property of statements is a confusing way to think of it. — Mongrel

I agree that thinking about truth as a property of statements is confusing. Nevertheless, truth is something that is most commonly ascribed to statements/propositions. There's ways of accommodating this fact without theorizing truth as a property. That's what deflationary approaches are all about, right?

The actuality is that a story is told involving a character named Harry Potter. In the story, he marries somebody (I assume? I never got that far.) There's the way the story is actually told, and the way it could have been... for instance the story could have been told that Harry Potter emigrated to Zaire and became a malachite dealer. — Mongrel

Yes, but the events described by the both the actual Harry Potter story and the non-actual Harry Potter story are non-actual events.

If you describe a tree in your backyard as "actual," what do you mean by that? I would assume you mean what is (as opposed to what could have been.) — Mongrel

I am being a little loose here. In philosophy/modal logic the word "actual" is commonly used in opposition to "possible", but the word is also commonly used in opposition to "fake", "fictional", "imaginary", "abstract", "deontic", etc. So the actual tree in my yard is the one that I believe to be "there right now" as opposed to trees I might plant in the future, or trees that I might have dreamt about last night, or the plastic tree that my neighbor discarded in my yard while I was out getting groceries, etc.

When someone says "I'm seeking the truth" or "We fear we'll never know the truth about what happened to Bill..", what's meant by "truth" is actuality: of all the things that could be, what actually is.

This is pretty intuitive, but I think it would generally be dismissed as an example of the flexibility of language. Truth as a property of statements is supposed to be the meat and potatoes of philosophy. I think this preoccupation with truth as a property results in the adoption of weird externalist approaches where, for example, scientific knowledge arises simply from noting reliability.

Imagine that truth as actuality is closer to the heart of the matter. The truth of statements is the oddity of language use and the conundrums that arise there are the result of missing the use of metaphor.

I'm looking for challenges to this view... to help me think it through. What am I missing? — Mongrel

It seems like truth and actuality are conceptually distinct. Statements that describe non-actual states of affairs can be true (e.g. "Harry Potter is married to Ginny Weasley"), and things can be actual without being true (e.g. I would not describe the actual tree in my back yard as being "true"). Seems like a category error to equate the two.

I remain puzzled about the supposed primacy or focal importance of 'objects' in this actual world. — mcdoodle

The word "object" is being used by Brassier and others in an entirely generic sense, and is intended to subsume anything that anyone (i.e. "the subject") could possibly think of or come to know. This includes such things as properties, qualities, processes, etc. The discussion is (arguably) being had at a level of abstraction higher than even metaphysics, though Brassier is perhaps not as clear-cut on this point as, say, Wolfendale is.

So I'm reading up more on Sellars, and I don't see how quale are addressed really. Rather, he seems to focus more on higher order thought whereby language shapes how we apperceive quale as it is entangled with rule-based languages and thus shapes how we make distinctions between objects, etc. The quale itself, still seems like a brute fact- even if ill-defined until language shapes it and enmeshes it with ever higher order concepts. — schopenhauer1

Hi Schopenhauer. Sellars distinguished between the "mind-body" problem on the one hand, and the "sensorium-body" problem on the other and held that, though the two problems are related, the solutions to them are different. Sellars tackles the the "sensorium-body" problem most thoroughly in his Carus Lectures. He ultimately proposes a rudimentary form of emergence-based process metaphysics as his solution. His solution is compelling and somewhat original, but also highly speculative and clearly incomplete. Sellars was well aware of this, and even surmised that the conceptual tools necessary to flesh out such a solution would not develop within his lifetime.

Brassier's paper is (arguably) concerned primarily with the "mind-body" problem rather than the "sensorium-body" problem. Again, that is not to say that the two problems are unrelated, but just that the latter is not the topic of focus for this particular paper.

Although what Brassier understands by conceptualization is not too clearly spelled out in the paper, it's safe to assume - given the passing references to Sellars and Brandom, as well as his work elsewhere (the video "How to Train an Animal that makes Inferences" in particular) - that to conceptualize is to be able to make an inferential move in a game of giving and asking for reasons. In other words, to know is to conceptualize, and to conceptualize is to be able to give reasons for a claim about this or that. But I can't help but feel - as do legions of others who have called Sellars out on this point - that this is an incredibly limited, if not debilitating account of what it means to know. I have no doubt that this is undoubtedly a kind, or a 'species' of knowing, but I cannot accede to the idea that it constitutes knowing tout court.

[...]

What in particular concerns me is the exact status of sensation and affect, and the way in which the sensible relates to the rational machinery of rational conception. — StreetlightX

You might find this interesting, if you haven't already read it:

http://bebereignis.blogspot.com/2011/07/brassier-and-sellars-on-sensation-and.html

No problem mcdoodle.

As for Wolfendale's preoccupation with objects, you have to be able to appreciate the distinction he's making between the transcendental and the metaphysical in order to understand why he's not actually obsessed with objects. So one way to think about this is via the following question: how can we define the real without lapsing into vicious circularity? If we define the real in terms of something we already take to be real, then we will not succeed. So one of the purposes of his paper is to circumscribe a domain of discourse that is non-ontological (i.e. doesn't entail any ontological commitments) from which we can answer the question "what is it to talk about the real?" such that the answer that it provides entails that it itself does not qualify as talk about the real. That's one of the roles of transcendental discourse, to answer the question of what metaphysical discourse consists in without actually engaging in metaphysics.

It's not that I think that your "pluralism" necessarily needs unpicking, so much as I am just trying to understand what you think "pluralism" means with respect to the real. You've sort-of explained it, but I've found the explanations you've so far provided to be somewhat unclear. It seems like you are really defending something like an "explanatory" pluralism rather than a metaphysical pluralism, but I'm not really sure. So I'm stuck too, which is fine. It wouldn't be philosophy if we didn't get stuck sometimes, would it?

Thanks for the clarification, Streetlight. Some thoughts for consideration:

1. You seem very keen to avoid leveraging the concept of representation, and I wonder if the abandonment of this concept is strictly necessary. I wonder if we can resurrect a servicable account of representation on the back of something like your concept of significance (i.e. representation as a species of differential meaning). Why would we want to do this? My worry is that if we abandon the concept of representation then we have to abandon anything like a correspondence theory of truth. Now, you're probably thinking that this is exactly what we should do because the correspondence theory of truth is a lost cause, but I'm not convinced that this is the right move for anyone who wishes to defend a genuine metaphysical realism (but perhaps you don't(?)).

More on the correspondence theory of truth: I'm not suggesting that we ought to try to explain truth entirely in terms of correspondence. We can make true statements about fictional entities like Harry Potter, and we wouldn't want to try to cash out the truth of those statements in ontological terms. I tend to think that the theory of truth needs to be split across ontological and semantic dimensions. So the semantic dimension deals with what it is for a claim to be correct - to satisfy certain norms of discourse - and then we can identify a subset of claims where the norms governing their correctness dictate that we cash that correctness out in ontological terms (e.g. in successful representation). This is, perhaps, where we could appeal to something like Terry Deacon's dynamical theory of representation, which roots it in a specific, 'substrate-independent' dynamical form (i.e. teleodynamics) to explain what it is for one process/state to represent another. I'm still digesting Deacon so at this point I can't say that I completely endorse his account, but I think it seems promising (as do some others that I have encountered).

But why bother? I guess I'm not convinced that metaphysical realism can survive without something like a correspondence theory of truth. If we can't cash out truth in ontological terms at least some of the time, then it seems to me that our ontological claims will be left spinning in a self-contained semantic void, and it won't help to appeal to "the world" since all such appeals will ultimately bottom out into that same void.

2. A word about normativity: the notion that language-use (and even perception) has a normative dimension doesn't seem to be too popular on this forum, but I can't see how it can be avoided. To make a claim is to implicitly have a stake in the specification of how things "ought" to be done. Not only can we make claims, but we can make claims (argue) about claiming (arguing) itself - that is, about how we "ought" to argue or make claims. So why does this matter? It matters because, in accordance with Hume's law, I don't think that the normative dimension of language-use can be naturalized, ever. If this is correct, then language (syntax, semantics, prgamatics) cannot be fully naturalized, ever. And that's where I tend to think that we simply cannot avoid developing something like a transcendental account of thought/language, as much as we might wish to avoid it.

Hi mcdoodle. Sorry for the delayed reply. Here are some thoughts on what you wrote in your last post:

I think I am agreeing with the McDowell position mentioned in the paper, eventually to be disagreed with: — mcdoodle

I hope this doesn't come off as completely dismissive, but literally the whole point of Wolfendale's paper is to explicate a legitimately "thick" notion of "reality" in contradiction to the McDowell claim. For Wolfendale, truth simpliciter isn't sufficient. He thinks objectivity is required as well and explains why.

if I get swept up in the game of make-believe, nevertheless in my heart I know it's 'really' just a rug. — mcdoodle

Wolfendale is just trying to make explicit the logic that is implicit in this statement of yours.

They're plural ways of describing real properties in different contexts. — mcdoodle

This could mean many different things, so I'm not exactly sure how to respond to it. Wolfendale, again, is not denying that the word "real" can have different meanings in different contexts. He's concerned with a particular context. Neither do i get the impression that he would claim that physics and chemistry have a monopoly on reality. I think he'd happily admit that other empirical disciplines such as biology, psychology, sociology, economics, political science, etc. or even swathes of "ordinary" discourse can have purchase on the real.

I'm interested in how your narrowing down of the 'real' to a 'set of objects' deals with the notion of facts as events that 'really' happened. Take a detective's investigation or a statement in a court of law, for instance, where 'real' might be used. How is that to do with objects? (I think the 'entities' in Wolfenden's terse summary of McDowell's position is an attempt to summarise some ideas that also include events) — mcdoodle

It's important to understand that Wolfendale doesn't take himself to be doing metaphysics here (fwiw, I believe that Wolfendale actually subscribes to some kind of a Deleuzean process-based metaphysics). So the word "object" is intended to have a transcendental, rather than a metaphysical, function in the context of his discussion. It is rooted in the Hegelian concept of "natural consciousness" which, contra Hegel, he takes to be the best transcendental description of thought/consciousness available, for reasons he tries to make clear.

Hi Michael, you might be right. I think there is some decent textual evidence to support the conclusion that Streetlight intends to claim that meaning-production itself extends beyond the limits of language-use:

What if meaning exceeds the bounds of language, as it so regularly does with respect to gestures, body language, and even - if the phenomenologists are right - perception? — StreetlightX

Instead, the production of meaning bleeds beyond the bounds of language and spills over into world from the very beginning. — StreetlightX

In his third paragraph he also questions the idea that language-use can be thought of as the "ultimate context" of meaning production.

Hopefully he'll clarify.

Hi Streetlight. Thanks for the great post! I've been wrestling with similar questions for a while now, and while I find the idea that meaning production extends beyond language-use to be compelling, I think it raises some hairy questions about the limits of theorizing. What you seem to be proposing is that meaning be thought of as something that can be produced outside of linguistic contexts, that language is simply one form of meaning production, and you also alluded to the claim that perception might be an example of a non-linguistic form of meaning production. The problem I see here is that this approach to meaning seems to entail that a theory of, say, perception is impossible. In other words, how can the proposed theory explain what it is to talk about non-linguistic processes of meaning production if the meaning that is produced in, say, perceptual contexts transcends the meaning produced in linguistic contexts?

But the theatre can be a forum for entering into the space of reasons and for making claims. Claims do not have to be expressed verbally, they can be articulated through movements, gestures, dances, etc. Just think about what you yourself wrote:

nevertheless you seem to be saying that the nature of 'reality' can somehow be decided upon in the space of reasons and the news of that decision brought back to the other spheres - say to theatre, where the nature of 'reality' is constantly being brought into question (emphasis mine) — mcdoodle

Calling something into question is a move in the space of reasons. I think you're getting hung-up in the formality of Wolfendale's style and falsely concluding that his position requires the belief that the only legitimate forum for asking and answering questions about the nature of reality is academic philosophy and science.

In this way the object is made real or otherwise *by* attitude, not made real by being attitude-free. — mcdoodle

Do you believe that the chemical composition of your rug is dependent upon your attitudes toward it? Are you claiming that when you and the kids treat the rug as if it were a cashmere magic carpet that it literally becomes a cashmere magic carpet, and ceases to be the polyester rug that it previously was? If you answered "no" to either of these questions then I believe you are leveraging the very distinction that Wolfendale is trying to describe.

I'm saying that a description of the apple as we perceive it is not a description of whatever mind-independent things explain the occurrence of such a perception. — Michael

I am saying that there's no good reason to believe this insofar as there's no good reason for accepting the reductionism on which it is based.

But the apple you take yourself to perceive is not just the electro-magnetic radiation and subatomic particles that you claim "explains" the perception. I tend to think that neither perception nor apples can be fully explained in those terms; that's the reductionism I reject.

I'm still not sure what it could even mean to say that a perception is veridical while at the same denying that anything like the ostensible object of perception actually exists. That seems incorrect almost by definition.

By "found himself" I meant to suggest that this is what he experienced. One person experiences himself waking up in a post apocalyptic world and another doesn't. Who is having the real experiences and who is having the false ones? — Michael

Hi Michael. I must apologize in advance for the length of this post. I usually try to keep my posts to a more modest length, but this issue is complicated enough that, in order to do it some kind of justice, I felt I had to be somewhat explicit in explaining my take on it. So here goes...

In my opinion, the question of which world is real cannot be answered in a justificatory vacuum. We have to have reasons for thinking that our perceptions might be in error. So the man who wakes up in the post-apocalyptic world might initially question the veridicality of his perceptions just in virtue of the sheer incongruity between what he currently thinks he knows to be true about the world and what he is now perceiving. Each new perception confronts him with a new reason for either revising or persisting in what he already takes himself to know.

After a while the contents of what he takes himself to know will inevitably be altered by what he has subsequently perceived and inferred. At some point he will presumably learn about the "matrix". He'll learn that the matrix is a computer-simulated reality that is used by an artificial intelligence for the purposes of harvesting humans to generate electro-magnetic energy, and he'll learn that his previous perceptual experiences had all occurred while plugged-in to the system. He'll may or may not come to accept this story, but if he does, he'll likely come to regard the objects that he perceived while plugged-in to have been "virtual" as opposed to "real" and, again, this assessment will be based on what he takes himself to know about the kinds of things those objects are.

So for instance, he takes himself to know what kind of thing an apple is, and nothing he has perceived so far has prompted him to revise his criteria for what does and does not count as an apple. He now knows that the "apples" he had perviously encountered while plugged-in were, in fact, patterns of electro-magnetic fluctuations coursing through the channels of some ultra-sophisticated computer system, and as such, were not really apples at all (again, according to his understanding of what kind of a thing an apple is). And in general, he will upon this basis likely come to regard the beliefs of those still plugged-in to the matrix to be in error insofar as they take themselves to be perceiving and interacting with real, rather than simulated apples, etc.

So in order to answer the question of which world is real, we each need to ask ourselves who's reasons we'd be willing to endorse and defend. To me this seems like a perfectly legitimate question, and this is where I can't really make heads or tails of @The Great Whatever's position on this matter. He apparently wants to deny the coherence of the distinction on the grounds that the man who took the pills could have just as easily persisted in his initial skepticism regarding the veridicality of his perceptions, and could have alternatively interpreted each new perception as just another reason for thinking that the post-apocalyptic world he now finds himself in is, in fact, not real. So we're faced with a kind of equipollence regarding the hypothesis that this world is real and that these perceptions are veridical, etc., and it supposedly follows from this that there is no grounds for making the distinction in the first place.

But I don't see how that follows. For one thing, the argument seems to be premised on the very possibility that it seeks to deny, namely the possibility of questioning the veridicality of one's perceptions. But, perhaps more fundamentally, equipollence is something that can be achieved by asserting the negation of any claim whatsoever, so if we're prepared to reject the legitimacy of one distinction on that basis, then we ought to be prepared to reject the legitimacy of all distinctions on that basis, which, as far as I can tell, amounts to a reductio of that position.

I am definitely open to the possibility that I am fundamentally misunderstanding what's being said. So, if you have any insight into the matter please feel free to share it. I'd be interested to get your take on it.

I didn't say that the other world is a computer simulation — Michael

I don't mean to be nit-picky, but I think you did:

However, The Great Whatever's point is perhaps better explained with a different hypothesis; we have one person who has taken some pills and found himself waking up in an apocalyptic future where his previous life was a computer simulation and we have another person who hasn't taken any pills and has found his life continue as he's accustomed. Which is the real world? (emphasis mine) — Michael

Perhaps you did not mean to say that?

It's exactly because a true description of the objects we encounter are not the ones that (always) describe the thing(s) that causally influence our sensory organs (and so experiences) that direct realism fails and indirect realism is more reasonable account. Direct realism entails reductionism — Michael

Hmm...I'm not convinced that's right, but I need to think it over a bit.

If you type "Reality Without Reference PDF" into google you'll find a link to a PDF copy the book "Inquiries Into Truth and Interpretation" which contains "Reality Without Reference" as a chapter (see attached image). I encountered success, but as always, please proceed at your own risk.

If this is not an appropriate thing to post here, please accept my apologies and feel free to delete.

This is turn means that, given any experience could be a hallucination, there is no way in principle for you to have ascertained, and so draw, the very distinction that you are relying on. — The Great Whatever

I know this was directed at Jamalrob, so I apologize for butting in and ruining the flow of the discussion, but I can't resist...

We can't have any idea of what it would mean to say that every experience could be a hallucination unless we can understand what it means to say that an experience is an hallucination. That's where the argument falls down, in my opinion, since it has to leverage the distinction between veridical/non-veridical perception in order to present the possibility that all perception could be non-veridical. So the argument from the possibility of global hallucination can't conclude that the distinction is meaningless/incoherent without undermining the meaningfulness/coherence of its own premises.

But if your 'real' body was generally invincible in daily life, but damaging your 'virtual' body had terrible, painful consequences, you'd take liberties with your 'real'
body, not the virtual one. (And so functionally, the 'virtual' one would begin to take its place as 'real'). — The Great Whatever

Right, but the distinction is not grounded in the fact that the one body is invincible and the other is not. It's grounded in my understanding of what kind of thing each body is.

I think we need to distinguish between the two senses of the word "real" that are in play here. On the one hand we have an ontological distinction between "real" and "virtual" which is grounded in differences of kind. On the other hand we have a transcendental distinction between "appearance" and "reality" which is grounded in the way we justify our claims. Both distinctions seem perfectly legitimate to me. Could people disagree over what things to call real and what to call virtual? Sure. Is it possible that our claims could be wrong no matter how we justify them? Sure. I guess I don't see how either of these considerations undermine either distinction. In fact, it seems like neither of these considerations even make sense unless we are already making these distinctions. So like, @Jamalrob, I guess I just don't understand how you are connecting the dots.

I'd have thought that quantum mechanics has already shown that our sensory apparatuses are not causally related to anything like the objects we take ourselves to be perceiving... — Michael

I don't think that follows from quantum mechanics so much as it follows from reductionistic metaphysics/ontology: that is, from thinking that the objects that we encounter on a daily basis "are nothing more than" the parts out of which they are constituted at the smallest levels of scale, and that the only true descriptions of those objects are the ones given by a particular, "fundamental" physical theory.

we have one person who has taken some pills and found himself waking up in an apocalyptic future where his previous life was a computer simulation and we have another person who hasn't taken any pills and has found his life continue as he's accustomed. Which is the real world? — Michael

Well, if we are defining "real" as "not computer-simulated" then clearly the apocalyptic future is real and the other world is not. This is how the distinction between real and virtual objects is typically made and, in fact, it's kinda become the definition of the word "virtual". The distinction is an ontological one that is grounded in what we know about the causal structure and material composition of the respective objects. Real apples are things that grow on specific types of trees, virtual apples are things that you program into computer systems. When you eat a real apple your real body will be nourished, when you eat a virtual apple your real body will not be nourished. Etc., etc.

Now this doesn't mean that someone couldn't come to regard virtual apples as "real" and real apples as "unreal". The point is that there is a distinction to made here, and that it is not a phenomenological distinction but a causal/physical one.

Hi Michael. You raise some good questions, but I don't have time to reply at the moment. I'll try to get to it soon...

If you were from the non-Matrix world, you might say so. But then, they would tell you you're in error about not being in a 1990's metropolis — The Great Whatever

I don't think this matters. The statement of yours that I initially responded to argued that we ought to drop the distinction between the real and the virtual because they are phenomenologically indistinguishable. You said there was "no reason" to treat them as "metaphyiscally" different, and that we interact with virtual and real objects in the same way. I am arguing that this is false, and that phenomenological indistinguishability is irrelevant. We actually don't interact with virtual and real objects in the same way precisely because we think of them as "metaphysically" different. For example, I would almost certainly be willing to take liberties with a virtual body that I would not be willing to take with my real body, and the reason I am willing to do so is because of the causal story that I base that distinction upon. Now, being able to tell such a story doesn't guarantee that I've made the distinction correctly. Something might happen that calls the truth of my causal story into question, prompting me to re-evaluate the way I have made the distinction. That's fine, but it's beside the point. The point is that we do have good reasons for making the distinction, and those reasons are not phenomenological ones.

That doesn't seem right. The person living in the Matrix would deny that they are lying in a vat of goo attached to an electro-magnetic power generator amidst the ruins of some long-since-destroyed human city, etc. They are in error about that, are they not?

But we weren't initially considering the possibility of being in "opposite-land", were we? We were initially just discussing the distinction between the objects we encounter in every day life vs. those we might encounter while hooked up to some virtual reality machine. That's where the causal stories will differ and ground the distinction between real and virtual objects.

As for the possibility that we are all living in the matrix, the possibility of global error is intelligible only against the conceptual backdrop of the appearance/reality (unreal/real) distinction. So I don't think you can leverage that possibility in order to invalidate that distinction without undermining your own argument.

But it would be just the opposite: unplugging would be going into the 'fake' world. You see? — The Great Whatever

That's precisely what is under discussion, ins't it? I've proposed that the distinction between 'real' and 'fake' ought to be grounded in whatever causal story we are able tell about the circumstances of perception. So whether or not the unplugged world is considered to be 'real' is not a simple matter of whether it happens to be the world that we spend the majority of our time in, nor is it (necessarily) a matter of the discernment of some phenomenological distinction between the two. If the unplugged world is deemed to be fake, it will ultimately be deemed so on the basis of some story about how our sensory apparatuses are not causally related to anything like the objects we take ourselves to be perceiving.

But if you were born 'plugged in,' and saw 'unplugging' as the exception, the roller coaster we deem 'real' would be the 'virtual' one, and vice-versa. — The Great Whatever

Do you think so? If one believes that roller coasters are made out of thousands of tons of wood and metal, then to become unplugged is to be confronted with the realization that the roller coasters one had hitherto encountered were not real.

But regardless, the point remains that there'd be non-phenomenological reasons for distinguishing between real and unreal roller coasters.

It's the "different things" part that is relevant, though, isn't it? The reason we call the virtual roller coaster "virtual" rather than "real" is because it is not the same kind of thing as the real roller coaster. It's not 200 feet tall and made of 50,000 tons of wood and steel, and we know it's not

The point is, they are not in principle phenomenologically different, and there is no reason to consider them metaphysically different. — The Great Whatever

Don't we treat them as "metaphysically" different precisely on the basis of what we know about how the two experiences were causally mediated? We call the one object "real" and the other "virtual" because of the different stories we can tell about the causal circumstances in which they were perceived. Phenomenal indistinguishability seems irrelevant.

Sorry for the delayed reply. Haven't had as much spare time over the last couple of days...

I meant to say the obverse which is that knowing (or more realistically, stipulating) what kinds of things are real (and not what particular things are real) tells us what distinguishes talk about the real from other kinds of talk. — John

That doesn't seem quite right. If someone were to stipulate that unicorns are real, would you just accept that without a challenge? It's through such challenges that concepts are revised and refined. And when it comes to the question of what is real/unreal there needs to be some non-ontological considerations that motivate the distinction or else you end up going in vicious rather than virtuous circles.

As to your second paragraph I do agree that, as per you example, talk of "water covering 70 % of the earth" commits us to the logical (which I think also entails the ontic) reality of water, earth and so on; but I am not convinced that it commits us to their ontological reality. But again it depends on what you take 'ontological' to mean, and that's not so easy to clarify with examples. — John

Sure, but there is a reason we are committed to the real existence of water and not, say, the real existence of unicorns, and it has to do with how claims about those things are justified. I didn't throw the water example out there as a matter of stipulation, it was meant to be hypothetical - if that claim qualifies, then we are committed.

As for the ontological/ontic distinction, I don't really recognize it insofar as it is presupposes an equivocal conception of Being. Excising that presupposition collapses it into a more conventional distinction between formal and regional ontology, or the inquiry into Being as such and the inquiry into what kinds of beings there are. There's a lot more that could be said here, but I'll leave it at that for now.

I think that community just is commonality of usage, and I think what constitutes 'correct usage' can only be established after the fact by thinking about examples of kinds of usage. It is thus more a matter of 'empirical investigation' than "rational dialogue". — John

I think you're overlooking the fact that linguistic communities are defined as much by their disagreements as they are by their agreements, and I'd say that disagreements are what primarily drive the revision and refinement of what does and does not constitute correct usage. Correctness is therefore not primarily something that is determined by rarefied, post-hoc reflections upon usage (though it does have a role), but is something that evolves organically through acts of praise and censure as the members of a community respond to instances of actual usage.

Is being fundamental to reality or merely to existence? Or is (as with both Derrida and Deleuze) difference fundamentally real, with both being and existence being derivative? Is it possible to establish any particular way we should talk about these things? — John

These are great questions, and to say that they're worth asking doesn't necessarily mean we're committed to the possibility of actually determining final, incontrovertible answers to them, but it does seem to imply setting that as the ideal goal such that we strive to achieve it even if we know that we never fully will.

I think I understand what you're getting at, but I still think your criticisms are a bit off the mark. Wolfendale is specifically concerned with discourses that revolve around the making and justifying of claims. So Wolfendale's argument does not apply to any discourse that does not purport to make claims about anything. Of course, Wolfendale would say that the upshot is that those discourses are not rational, strictly speaking. Insofar as artistic, spiritual, ordinary, and public informational discourses purport to make claims about anything, they have entered into the "space of reasons" and fall somewhere within the architectonic of rational discourse based on their justificatory structure.

I feel it's really important to understand that he's not arguing for the devaluation of non-objective forms of discourse. For Wolfendale "non-objective" does not mean "irrational". In fact, his own essay is an example of non-objective discourse by way of his own classification! He is simply arguing that people brandish the word "reality" without bothering to make explicit what they mean, and more often then not when you dig in you'll find that the notion being employed is more-or-less vague and/or incoherent. That might be good enough for ordinary discourse where the question of what is real just doesn't really come up very often, or for spiritual discourses in which everyone simply agrees to apply the word so that it includes their favorite deity or personal spiritual experience, but it's not good enough for philosophy where making things explicit is the name of game. So he argues for an explicit concept of reality that is to be understood in terms of a particular justificatory structure, and he thinks that it aligns well with the way the concept is intuitively applied in less explicit forms of discourse. If someone thinks that his concept is inadequate, incoherent or in some other way deficient then they are free to argue against it and propose alternatives, or else they are free to step off the stage of rational discourse. In my opinion, that's really all he's saying.

In response to your first paragraph, I'm not sure the substitution of "kinds" for "particulars" makes a difference. I still think that the one question can be answered separately from the other. Knowing what distinguishes talk about the real from other kinds of talk does not, in itself, tell us what kinds of things are real any more than it tells us what particular things are real.

In regard to your second paragraph, I don't agree that we cannot talk about the real itself. Basically I have been arguing that the concept of the real is a non-eliminable part of the normative structure of rational discourse. The upshot is that insofar as we achieve that ideal through actual practice we will find it impossible not to deploy that concept and thus talk about the real itself. That implies being committed to the reality of the things referred to by such talk. So for instance, saying that the claim "water covers roughly 70% of the earth's surface" qualifies as talk about the real implies commitment to the real existence of "water" and "the earth", etc.

In regard to your third paragraph, I guess I am not sure what the appeal to contextual differences and different usages is intended to establish. Do you deny that communities can reach consensus on the correct usage of words through rational dialog? I would agree that absolute consensus is an ideal that cannot be reached. That said, I would say that to engage in rational discourse is to implicitly take aim at that ideal (and others as well), and so the fact that you have come here to toss around ideas finds you implicitly committed to the achievement of that goal.

As for the hermeneutic circle, I agree with you in spirit if not in detail. As mentioned, I don't think that existence and reality are equivalent, and so I think that the concept of reality can be examined without having to bracket the concept of existence. This means we can employ the concept of existence in order to explain the concept of reality, if need be, without engaging in vicious circularity. More generally, I agree that we cannot think thought without thinking. Some see this as inherently problematic, but I'm not convinced it is. Arguments that attempt to show that we cannot think thought always seem to end up having to think thought in order to show that we can't think thought. So, in my experience those kinds of arguments are non-starters (not to imply that you're making that kind of argument).

I still think you're kinda missing the point. Again, he's not describing actual practice, he's describing the norms of rationality. He's arguing that to talk about the real is, ideally, to justify one's claims in a certain manner, and he's trying to make explicit the rules that he thinks implicitly govern what we ought to be doing when we talk about the real.

Hi John. In regard to your first point, I think there's a difference. The first question is about discourse, and the second question is about the real. Prima facie, I'd say it's possible to answer the first question without answering the second, but only if the first is answered in a non-ontological way. How is this possible? Well, suppose we argue that talk about the real is talk that does not bottom out into claims about anyone's attitudes. This leaves unanswered the question of what the content of such talk actually consists in. Furthermore, it leaves open the possibility that that very claim itself does not qualify as talk about the real, in which case it also does not qualify as ontology insofar as ontological talk is a subset of talk about the real.

To your second point, yes I have seen people make that distinction between existence and reality, but I've found that they'll often end up sneaking existence in the back door in order to explain what they mean by "real".

To your third point, I'm not sure I understand what you mean when you say that there terms are not "univocal". Do you just mean that they are often used in different and inconsistent ways depending on context?

Welcome John! So, I think there needs to be a distinction between the questions "what is real" and "what does it mean to say that something is real". The questions are obviously intimately related, but I think that we really ought to try to give an explicit answer to the latter before attempting to answer the former. My reason for saying that is that I believe that any answer we give to the former necessarily presupposes some kind of answer to the latter, and if we never attempt to ask or answer the latter question explicitly then our presuppositions will remain implicit, vague and, more likely than not, incoherent. I would say that this is precisely the kind of thing that you have encountered in your discussions. Someone has some half-arsed idea of what it means to talk about reality motivating their claim that numbers constitute a non-material reality. More than likely they haven't asked or explicitly tried to answer the latter question at all, and so their supporting argument is likely to be appeal to vague notions of existence, truth and reference without situating any of those concepts with respect to a fleshed-out concept of reality (i've been guilty of this myself).

Now, I happen to agree that the concept of existence applies to, well, just about everything. This follows in virtue of having to use some form of the verb "to be" in order to discuss any object whatever, be it fictional, functional, logical, etc. However, I would not say that we are thereby committed to the real or actual existence of all those things, and that's because I think that the word "real" has a special role to play in the structure of rational inquiry. I've already attempted to explain that special role in previous posts, but if you don't find it convincing or feel that I have not responded adequately to something you've written so far let me know and I'll be happy to discuss it further!

I do have some sympathies with ontic structural realism, though I wouldn't endorse the manner in which it is typically motivated, and I'm not sure I'd be willing to endorse any particular brand of it. But it's a reasonable comparison in some ways.

As for Wolfendale, yes, your critique does make sense to me. That said, I don't agree with it. The thing to keep in mind as you read Wolfendale is that he is not attempting to describe the way that human beings actually think, argue or communicate. He would say that that is the job of psychology, sociology, etc. Instead he's attempting to describe the normative structure of thought, or, what is sometimes called "transcendental psychology". What good is that? Well, it's an attempt to work out what we ought to be committed to solely in virtue of being rational subjects. To be a rational subject is to occupy a place within the "space of reasons", or to be the type of subject that intrinsically makes a claim about something. As such we have a set of responsibilities that we are bound to, regardless of whether or not we actually fulfill those responsibilities or even fully understand them. His goal is therefore to work out the implications of claiming itself, to explicitly identify what it means to make a claim, and what it means to be the type of subject that makes claims. He's not saying that this form of subjectivity exhausts what it is to be human, or that the actual interactions between human beings ever actually satisfy the ideal structure he has uncovered. In fact, he doesn't even think that rational subjectivity is real! Instead he is basically just saying, "insofar as you take yourself to be a rational subject, here is what you ought to be committed to".

So, I'm not sure if that helps at all, but let me know if you want to discuss it any further.

Thanks for the response. I would agree that the boundaries of the real can vary depending on the shared assumptions of the people communicating in any given context, but the very fact that we can talk about "the boundaries of the real" seems to suggest that there is a common conceptual thread circumscribing all of the contextual differences. For example, the shared assumptions undergirding some discursive context might include a (perhaps implicit) commitment to the "reality" of abstract objects such as numbers. Now suppose someone who doesn't share that implicit assumption enters the discussion and starts saying things like "...but this only follows under the assumption that numbers are real, but I don't think they are real because...". The original discussion is now bracketed until the question of the reality of numbers is resolved, but the possibility of resolving that question is dependent on there being a shared concept of "reality" in play. In the absence of such, the discussion will inevitably shift to the question of reality itself (e.g. "what do you mean by 'real', anyway?"). That discussion now brackets questions about what particular things are or are not real and asks after what it means to attribute reality to anything at all.

In other words, the ensuing discussion will set out to determine how we "ought" to think about the general formal structure of reality. So whereas you seem to be saying that the fact that the content of "reality" varies by discursive context precludes the possibility of there being anything like a "formal structure of reality", I would argue that it is actually a condition for its possibility. Discursive contexts are not hermetically sealed with respect to one another, anyone can come along at any time and challenge the shared assumptions undergirding any given context, and that is part of what makes the debate over the content of those underlying assumptions possible.

If you're interested and have the time, check out Peter Wolfendale's "Essay On Transcendental Realism". It situates the argument that I have presented here in a broader dialectical context, which may (or may not) help clarify it.

The problem is not that these individuals in the future literally are fictional characters rather that we cannot refer to them. So when think we are talking about them (as individuals) we are really just talking about and feeling empathy towards fictional characters, as we fail to refer. — shmik

In your initial post you had stated in reference to the actual denizens of future generations that "we cannot actually refer to them (as beings)...we can care about them in the same way that we can care about the characters in Harry Potter". I think it is interesting to consider whether, in order for your statements to be true, they must not do the very thing they claim to be impossible, namely, refer to the set of actual individuals that our statements allegedly cannot refer to.

Leaving that quandry aside, I would take issue with the claim that we can care about future individuals only in the way that we can care about Harry Potter. In the spirit of responses already given by both @Baden and @Sapientia, I would argue that the main difference is that I can take actions today that have causal implications for the well-being of the denizens of future generations in a way that is obviously not possible with respect to fictional characters like Harry Potter (and therefore we might also feel responsible for what happens to those individuals in a way we wouldn't with respect to fictional characters).

Consider the case of the billionaire mogul who grew up poor and in the midst of extreme harship. Despite the adversity he managed to graduate high-school with honors, attend a public university on full scholarship and found a company that he sold 25 years later for a sum or $25 billion. Despite his success he feels extreme empathy toward those raised circumstances similar to those in which he was raised, and as a result he sets up a private foundation in his home town on the basis of an initial donation worth $1 billion. Any young person who graduates in good-standing from any public high school within the limits of that town will be eligible to recieve a full-ride scholarship to any public, in-State university of their choice. With proper investment and stuardship, the donation upon which the foundation was established should never become depleted.

We can't do that kind of thing for Harry Potter. I would say there is a legitimate sense in which this man's empathy is directed at the actual denizens of future generations, despite the fact that he will never meet the vast majority of them, will never know any of the details of their particular stories and may even be long-dead by the time most of them recieve their scholarships. That's because the establishment of his foundation is also the establishment of a causal relationship between himself and every actual student that eventually receives money from that grant, and I would argue that this is what both constitutes the difference between our empathy toward fictional and future individuals, and also allows for the possibility that our empathy and our thoughts might, in some sense, legitimately refer to the latter.

Thanks!

One thing I'd like is to see someone clarify the distinctions they make between cognition, mind and consciousness. — jamalrob

I'll take a stab. First, it might be worth briefly reviewing the way that Chalmers makes the distinction. For Chalmers, the distinction between consciousness and cognition is basically the distinction between the qualitative and the functional aspects of "mind" respectively. We've probably all read his "Facing Up to the Hard Problem of Consciousness" article where he basically defines the qualitative aspect of experience as that which can't be described in functional/physicalist terms, and we're probably all familiar with how he has leveraged the "philosophical zombie" and "qualia" concepts in order to motivate that thesis. He has put forward many complex and nuanced arguments in support of his claims and I certainly don't mean to trivialize all of the work that he has done in that regard, but at base I think his consciousness/cognition distinction boils down to the qualitative/functional distinction.

For my part, I'm not convinced that the qualitative can't be reduced to the functional. I personally don't find Chalmers's zombie and qualia based arguments convincing. Not only are there too many holes in those arguments, but I find that Metzinger has argued persuasively for the reduction of the qualitative/phenomenal to the functional/representational in his book "Being No One" by actually performing the reduction. That being said, I'm actually not convinced that functional descriptions themselves can be naturalized. That's because functional descriptions are fundamentally dependent on normative concepts (e.g. "error", "correctness") that can't be reduced to the strictly counterfactual logic that undergirds naturalistic descriptions of the world. The upshot, in my opinion, is that functional descriptions of consciousness and cognition are normative rather than naturalistic descriptions, even if they can be mapped onto naturalistic models of physical systems. Whether or not any given causal system satisfies the requirements of some functional schema is always, to some extent, a matter of subjective evaluation, and therefore, I would not consider functional descriptions to be descriptions of the real (i.e. are not descriptions of what consciousness and cognition really are).

So where should we look to find descriptions of what consciousness and cognition really are? In my opinion we should look to the intersection of dynamical systems theory and the biological sciences, shorn of any and all normative content in order to achieve maximal objectivity. On this view, the regional ontology of consciousness and cognition becomes a species of the formal ontology of dynamical systems in general, and questions regarding the essential features of consciousess, the spatio-temporal boundaries of consciousness, and the distinction between consciousness, cognition and mind are to be answered by reference to the explanatory resources available within that framework. That said, it's not clear to me at this point whether or to what degree the categories of "cognition" and "consciousness" are still applicable, or whether it might make any sense to talk about the precisely delineated spatio-temporal boundaries of either consciousness or cognition within the context of that framework. My hunch is that the words "consciousness" and "cognition" will continue to be used, and that the class of "cognizant" systems will in some sense be understood to be a subset of the class of "conscious" systems, but I suppose that remains to be seen. I think that much of the work that is currently being done within this field is still heavily tinged with the vestiges of normativity. For example, I recently read Terrence Deacon's "Incomplete Nature", which I found to be brilliant in many respects, but also (in my opinion) needlessly committed to the prospect of finding a place for normativity within the causal fabric of nature. Digging deeper one finds that what he is really making room for is something like a causal role for "possibility" or "virtuality", which (in my opinion) he merely equivocates into an account of normativity by draping it in heavily normative language.

So I guess what I am really saying here is that the distinctions between "cognition", "consciousness" and "mind" may not make much sense outside of a theoretical framework that allows for their clear seperation (such as the qualitative/functional paradigm that Chalmers works within). That said, I doubt that those words will ever fall out of usage insofar as they are conceptually wedded to the idea of subjectivity as a normative status that we grant to certain systems in virtue of their satisfying certain behavioral criteria that prompt us to interact with them in certain ways (namely, as subjects). Beyond that, I'm not really sure what place those words might have within our descriptions of the ontological or metaphysical structure of reality.