So, I'll ask again: what is the difference between universals existing, and not existing? Can you describe two scenarios, one in which they do, and one in which they do not? If you cannot do this, why should I believe you understand the claim or its denial? — Snakes Alive

The problem is that the world we experience is going to be the same with or without universals. That is the debate. You could have someone become enlightened and realize the truth of universals, for what that's worth. Or maybe you could try and depict a world where they don't use universal concepts, demonstrating that it's unnecessary and nominalism is correct.

But I don't know how you would actually "show" a universe with or without universals other than just stating it or having a philosophical discussion inn the book. Universals aren't a matter of the senses, whether they exist or not, so you can't just describe that world.

Did you read what I wrote about the Matrix above? I do think the claim that we live in the Matrix is intelligible, but that's just an empirical claim about robots and vats and so on. Idealists do not mean things in this concrete way. — Snakes Alive

It's only empirical if you can unplug. Otherwise, your senses are going to tell what the Matrix shows them. The universe being a simulation would be one where we can't unplug, since we're part of the simulation. Idealists would mean it that way, except there's no bottom-level physical world running the simulation.

It's easier to come up with a fake reality scenario to base a story one than a universals one without plagiarizing Plato. Would have to think about that.

The point is, again, not jus that the question is difficult, but that one does not know what it would be to answer it, in principle. — Snakes Alive

I did edit my post to add a sports analogy. Fans will debate endlessly who's the best in a sport. It's meaningful, but is there a right answer? That's one possibility for some metaphysical claims. Not that they're meaningless, but that there isn't a right answer, because there is no clear criteria. Which is often the case in sports debates. Just throwing that out there.

Or just a paragraph, or short story, or anything. For example, can you write or imagine two scenarios, one in which there are universals, and one in which there aren't? Conversely, if someone else wrote two such scenarios, could you tell the difference between them at better than chance? — Snakes Alive

We have stories like Plato's cave, the Matrix, Inception and what not. Metaphysics is difficult because often claims are being made of reality beyond experience. So then you kind of have to rely on metaphors.

Because an argument is just an exchange of words, and one can use words in whatever way one pleases. It's evident that metaphysicians go back and forth forever without understanding anything, because they do nothing but shuffle words around. Shuffling words around is precisely not an index of understanding, as the history of the discipline shows. — Snakes Alive

But as I tried to point out before, you will find this sort of thing with any popular unsolved question. But maybe a sports debate like who is the greatest athlete or team across all eras is a good analogy. Sports fans will endless debate that sort of thing. It's meaningful, but is there a right answer?

Demonstrate you understand them using the novel-writing test. — Snakes Alive

You want me to write two novels, one where the plot demonstrates one side of metaphysical claim, and another where it demonstrates the other? As interesting as that sounds, I'm not a writer and don't have the time.

Why isn't demonstrating that one understands an argument for or against enough?

Whether a claim is meaningful to someone depends on whether they can understand it, yes. — Snakes Alive

Here's the rub. I've said I can understand metaphysical statements. But then others of your persuasion will come along and claim that I don't really understand, because the statements aren't meaningful. I argue that they're wrong, and indeed it is possible to understand metaphysical claims. But the oppositions persists in being skeptical

So then what?

I think philosophy should be studied externally, by anthropologists, and that meaning should be studied by linguistic semanticists. — Snakes Alive

Assuming they can stay free of philosophical assumptions.

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

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

What is the difference between there being universals and there not being universals? — Snakes Alive

Whether there exists universal categories which material things take their form from. There are different possibilities. Nominalism says nope on one end and realism says yep on the other. A nominalist might put forward tropes or sets as an explanation for our use of universal concepts. Or they just consider them arbitrary. A realist thinks universal language is describing nature as it's carved up by the forms.

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

The mind-independence part is substantive enough for Berkley to declare materialism incoherent. Whether he succeeds is another matter. But we can just look at Nagel's view from nowhere, or Kant's noumena to get an idea of mind-independence taken seriously. Also Tegmark's mathematical universe and speculative realism.

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

Okay, well let's take universals. What Platonists are tying to do is explain why it is that our language is populated with universals, while particulars are the only things in experience. So they postulate forms which give structure to particulars, and that's why particulars have similarities, which reminds us of the forms. Or something. The point is to make sense of the dichotomy between how we think and talk, and our experiences.

What would make this false is if no theory of universals makes sense of the actual world, and if all the theories present infinite regressions or other fatal flaws. What would make it true is if there is no other way to account for similarity between particulars, and our use of universal concepts.

I should note I started a thread a while back debating the meaningfulness of universals, and there was no agreement reached as to whether they are meaningful.

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

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

[quote="Snakes Alive;422603"It should describe some state of affairs such that the one to whom it's meaningful can somehow tell the difference between that state of affairs obtaining or not obtaining.[/quote]

Is that not verificationism? The thing here is that there if you don't agree that meaning depends on verification, then there's no reason to dismiss metaphysics as meaningless just because it can't be verified.

Which is a metaphysical dispute of it's own.

OK, but what does that actually mean? — Snakes Alive

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

Try the test: can you write a novel in which idealism is true, — Snakes Alive

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

Chemistry for the constitution of ordinary matter and convergent series for Zeno's paradox.

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

I think it has naive realist claims.

What then is the difference between these things existing outside of perception or not? — Snakes Alive

Material things would be different since their properties and behaviors are not exhausted by our perception of them. Arguably, our perception of material things are correlated with the environment based on the kind of creatures we are. The material things themselves would not have the properties of color, sound, taste, etc.

This is completely different for idealism. Things just are as they are perceived.

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

I'm not sure. Some old philosophical questions have been answered by science or math. Of course new ones have come about as well.

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

Right, of course the real world in the Matrix is presumably physical. Another version of this would be an interpretation of QM where consciousness collapses the wavefunction, and everything is in a superpositioned state when not being perceived. Which I suppose you could say is physical, but it's not like any sort of traditional materialism, and certainly way outside human experience.

So yes, I would say indeed that things like global idealism, and the idea of the world as a dream, as typically intended, are not literally significant. All you are doing is taking the world as it is, and deciding to call it a 'dream' or not, but this does not change how you take the world to be. — Snakes Alive

But that's not quite right. The unreflective way we take the world to be is physical. As in there's this material stuff we perceive and interact with that continues to exist pretty much as perceived when we're not around. A more reflective view would acknowledge that material things are not entirely as we perceive them.

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

But the problem is not just that intelligible, difficult questions were asked, like 'how many stars are in the sky?' — Snakes Alive

That's just an empirical question. It can be investigated by careful observation.

Rather, no inquiry was ever performed other than the conversations held, and even in this arena, where nothing was ever looked into and people apparently felt that nothing needed to be looked into, it was impossible to make any headway. — Snakes Alive

It's often enough the case that many examples are used. Lucretius used erosion as a justification for atomism. Metaphysics isn't just a language game. It's also looking around at our experience of the world and asking how things are the way they are, and whether our concepts about those things make sense.

The first set, it seems, has a puzzling status, where it is not just unclear whether they are true or false, due maybe to epistemic limitations, or vagueness in the language, or ambiguity, or what have you, but it is unclear whether they are meaningful, in the restricted sense that it is unclear whether they in principle determine any truth conditions at all. That is, as competent speakers of English, we typically do not know what would make the statements in the first class true or false, and so we cannot extract a 'descriptive' meaning from them. It is for this reason that metaphysicians are able to argue about the claims endlessly, even without any 'materials' for argumentation other than conversations they take part in – because if even the sense of the expressions are unclear, one can always deny or affirm a claim, by construing the words in a certain way or marshaling and endless array of supplementary hypotheses or hermeneutic and argumentative techniques, themselves undetermined or underdetermined for meaning. In other words, conversations about such metaphysical sentences are in principle endless, because they have in principle no way of being resolved, because their structure, despite being grammatically like a claim with coherent (if sometimes vague or ambiguous) truth conditions, do not have any such that the speakers can converge on. — Snakes Alive

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

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

All that social distancing....for what? — NOS4A2

I don't know, but everyone outside where I live has pretty much stopped practicing it. Inside to some extent as well. We'll see what happens. The spread seems to vary quite a bit. If this were NYC, people would be a lot more cautious. But things are opening up there as well, and I'm guessing all the protests have somewhat relaxed many people's concerns about the virus.

leepy Joe might get votes from Republicans, but don't think this means that they will go then all progressive. — ssu

Sleepy Joe isn't a progressive anyway.

Using the word know as Moore used it, is senseless, in fact, it creates bogus philosophical problems. Many so-called philosophical problems are just as senseless. The way we talk about free will and determinism, time, knowledge, and a whole panoply of other philosophical ideas, propositions, and words are also just as problematic. Once you come to understand what Wittgenstein is saying, or trying to do via his method, then many of the problems of philosophy simply vanish as pseudo-problems - many, but not all. — Sam26

I don't understand how Wittgenstein's method makes these problems go away. In our language game we say we have could have done otherwise. Thus, we're responsible for our actions. But then there are reasons to doubt we actually could have done otherwise. So what to make of that? It would seem our language game has created a paradox.

Or take Hume's critique of causality. We talk about causes all the time. And yet the actual cause never presents itself in experience. So why is causality part of our language game?

Is it really the case that philosophers are abusing language? Or are they pointing out the questionable assumptions used to create our language games?

Did skepticism originate with misuse of the Greek term for doubt? No, it arose because of illusions, hallucinations, dreams, madness, perceptual relativity, sophistry and what not.

The backdrop of reality grounds us, if this wasn't the case, then the skeptic would have an argument. — Sam26

True, but what is this reality? Is it the stuff of everyday experience which populates ordinary language? The skeptic finds various problems with this.

The problem with "showing" is the question of what is being shown? That our experiences of the world are veridical? There are many examples which call this into question. The ancient skeptics had multiple arguments to demonstrate that. Modern science provides even more.

The very act of sitting at a computer and typing shows my belief that there is a keyboard; that I have hands; that I am controlling my fingers; that what I type is saved to a hard drive, etc, etc. I don't even think about it, i.e., I don't think to myself and say, "Is this really a keyboard?" After all there is no reason to doubt it, and even if I did doubt it, would that doubt really amount to anything? That I am certain of these beliefs is reflected in what I do. We all act in ways that show our certainty of the world around us. Occasionally things do cause us to doubt our surroundings, but usually these things are out of the ordinary. I am referring to our sensory experiences, i.e., generally we can trust our senses even if occasionally we draw the wrong conclusion based on what we see, hear, smell, etc. — Sam26

This is either naive realism or pragmatism. All it establishes is that we have a consistent experience of a world. It's not a defeater for skepticism, because the skeptic begins here, and then goes on to point out everything that leads to the problem of perception.

SO to the methodological point: don't start a philosophical conversation with "First let us define our terms".
— Banno

24. The idealist's question would be something like: "What right have I not to doubt the existence of my hands?" (And to that the answer can't be: I know that they exist.) But someone who asks such a question is overlooking the fact that a doubt about existence only works in a language-game. Hence, that we should first have to ask: what would such a doubt be like?, and don't understand this straight off.

Moore's "I know I have a hand" needs to remove all doubt; but "I know" is not strong enough to do this. "I am certain" suffers a similar fate. But "It is certain..." does not. You might agree that I think I know, and still maintain that I am wrong; but if you agree that it is certain, then you cannot then say that I am wrong. (probably needs unpacking... complicity is achieved in the move from first person to third person). — Banno

This seems confused. The idealist doesn't doubt the existence of hands. They would agree that Moore can show that he has hands. What they doubt is the move from waving hands about, or "it is certain", to saying hands are physical.

The objection to this would be that "physical" is part of the language game. Yes, but physical means real, as in hands are material, not mental. And this is what Moore is trying to establish against the idealist. That his hands are proof of a material world.

Again the objection would be that is how the language game is played. Hands are used as being part of the material world. Sure, but this is means language is used in a naive realist manner. The idealist presumably has reasons to reject naive realism, and thus to suppose that everyday language is mistaken.

For the idealist, waving hands about doesn't mean your hands are physical, it just means you have a consistent experience of waving hands about. You don't get to make that epistemic leap just by pointing to an experience.

Biden can just run on, "You ain't black if you vote for Trump", and, "I promise you, the president has a big stick. I promise you."

I'm looking forward to the debates between the two of them.

That was an amazing and sympathetic post!

Here's a little more progress:

A proposal: tie federal funding of police departments to incidences of use-of-force complaints, as assessed by a third party civil rights (i.e. non police) department. — StreetlightX

That would have a big impact very quickly. But why would Trump ever do that?

US police kill more in days than other countries do in years. This is of course ridiculous, but not for the reasons you state. — StreetlightX

Not all countries. Brazil is #1 followed by Venezuela. In terms of rate per 10 million, there are 32 countries higher than the US.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_by_country

Of course it's still absurdly high, but not the most murderous police force.

Facts don't care about your feelings — StreetlightX

Facts also don't care about your extremist, all or nothing way of thinking.

he US is orders of magnitude more barbarous than the rest of the world, when it comes to their cops, as reflected in their social policy, quite specific to the US. — StreetlightX

That's a ridiculous statement.

We should also remember that cops are also murdered. — NOS4A2

That is true. They do sometimes have to deal with dangerous situations.

Cops are racist and bad and overwhelmingly violent. — StreetlightX

Some of them, not all.

Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer announced the decision to relieve Conrad on Monday afternoon during a news conference, where the deceased was identified as David McAtee. Conrad had been set to retire later this month." — StreetlightX

That's good news. Needs to be an independent investigation into what happened. And yeah, I noticed it was a black business owner.

Biden is hardly ideal. He's just not the inflammatory, race-baiting fool that the alt-right loves.

Another really dumb thing Trump is doing is making enemies out of governors and mayors.

The previous president would have. So would Hillary. Unfortunately, we don't have either. There's some mayors talking about reform.

Good list of demands. Imagine if Trump had started this out leading with this as an offer and expressing solidarity.

Of course he can't do that sort of thing.

Trump praising Tiananmen Square is the worst possible thing to say. How can he be so monumentally bad at leading? No way he survives to another term.

What?! Come on man. I'm sorry. Surely you meant they don't want anything destroyed. Right? — Outlander

A little bit of hyperbole. And probably it would mean a few broken windows and a dumpster fire here or there, and the occasional scuffle with police. People getting a little bit worked up at night is different than the systematic looting. But mostly not anything destroyed. The Minny police precinct and some squad cars was understandable at the time, long as nobody was inside.

Trying to be a reasonable about people being understandably pissed off. And sure a Target might get looted in a couple places. But keep the local stuff safe. Beyond that, yeah peaceful, no destruction. It seems like there are elements looking for an excuse to break shit on a much bigger level. That's where it crosses a line.