About a year ago, there was a magazine article on global warming that scared the bejesus out of me. Still can't shake the graphic. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html — Wayfarer
For the many unfortunates who are already climate-change refugees or fleeing over-populated regions - the Rohingya come to mind - environment catastrophe and overpopulation are already catastrophes. — Wayfarer
As Kelly Ross puts it 'Universals exist precisely where possibilities exist'. So the rational mind is able to infer the nature of mathematical and ideal possibilities, — Wayfarer
From the science articles I have read, it seems clear that the rainforests have been diminished by human agency. The Amazon rainforest isn't in danger of disappearing, but it is shrinking at a time when the more forest we have, the better. — Bitter Crank
How does a necessary being become necessary and what warrants that? — GreyScorpio
Most definitely the designer needs a designer. — GreyScorpio
The only truly godless idealism that I'm familiar with tends to talk about permanent possibilities of perception being what underlies claims to the effect that unperceived/unknown facts/object etc exist. — MetaphysicsNow
Yes, with God in the picture, Berkeley's idealism becomes a kind of realism, at least insofar as bivalence can hold of propositions that human beings could not even in principle come to know the truth of. — MetaphysicsNow
By means of science, we have made some progress towards understanding the world as it is in itself—we can point to ways in which scientific descriptions of the world are improvements on the description based on our bare perceptions, so our aspiration to know the world as it is in itself cannot be dismissed as an incoherent longing. But insofar as this aspiration is coherent, "in itself" cannot mean "without reference to the perceptions of any being."
https://www.iep.utm.edu/dummett/ — IEP
IBerkeley tried to deny that his idealism ran counter to common sense, but was way off target if you ask me. — MetaphysicsNow
How does an anti-realist account for this fact? I guess the response will be that it has meaning because we at least have some idea (perhaps many) of what would count as providing evidence for accepting it to be true. — MetaphysicsNow
An anti-realist theory of truth as justification would seem to be offering rather more to say about what truth is than a deflationist would be comfortable with — MetaphysicsNow
I suppose if you take the Wittgensteinian approach to language and argue that meaning is use and then look to how the word "true" is used you'll see that it's used to refer to sentences that satisfy some standard of justification. — Michael
As far as I'm aware anti-realism about truth boils down to the idea that the truth of a statement consists in its justification (where what counts as justification will vary from domain to domain). — MetaphysicsNow
Isn't it more along the lines that whilst both the anti-realist and realist can accept that weather reports/general facts about tree stability in the face of high winds etc can justify the claim that the tree fell over during the night, for the anti-realist the truth of that claim actually consists in those justifications whilst for the realist, those justifications allow one to infer the existence of a state of affairs that makes the claim true regardless of those justifications? — MetaphysicsNow
303
Incidently, if one is an anti-realist about truth in general, wouldn't that entail anti-realism for all domains about which true statements can be made? — MetaphysicsNow
An ontological existence assertion has an objective truth-value if its truth-value does
not depend on a context of utterance or a context of assessment: that is, if every ontological utterance of the same sentence has the same truth-value, and if the truth-value of these utterances do not vary with different ontological contexts of assessment.
What would be an example of a statement which was not meaningful? — Pseudonym
I think ‘a domain of discourse’ is a better expression than ‘language game’. Words are used in domains of discourse in which they have shared meaning/s which the participants understand even if they disagree about their meaning. In fact in order to disagree, the discussion needs to be confined to a domain of discourse or ‘language game’. Otherwise you end up with incommensurability [which is frequently encountered in current culture.] — Wayfarer
I'm waiting for an elucidation upon the criterion for what counts as being meaningful. — creativesoul
or its is not a metaphysical statement at all since we can resolve what the term 'meaningful' means and at that point it becomes and entirely falsifiable empirical claim. — Pseudonym
Yes, but the issue is decidability not meaningfulness. I for one, already said the LPs went too far in saying that metaphysical statements are meaningless. Decidability is not all or nothing either; as I said earlier it is on a continuum. Statements have to be decidable enough, that disagreement over them (not the statements themselves, mind) can be meaningful. — Janus
Maybe, but it's not relevant to what is being argued by those to whom it is directed. — Janus
You not going to pull the old "If all metaphysical arguments are meaningless, then yours is too" card are you? — Janus
We need to address another issue in considering verificationism, the persistent criticism that it is self-undercutting. The argument for this claim goes like this: The principle claims that every meaningful sentence is either analytic or verifiable. Well, the principle itself is surely not analytic; we understand the meanings of the words in it perfectly well because we understand our own language. And we still do not think it true, so it cannot be true in virtue of meaning. And it is not verifiable either (whatever we choose ‘verifiable’ to mean).
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logical-empiricism/#EmpVerAntMet — SEP
Correspondingly, what Carnap called metaphysics is then treated as though it is, as a matter of brute fact, unintelligible. But what is announced thus dogmatically can be rejected equally dogmatically. Once tolerance is in place, alternative philosophic positions, including metaphysical ones, are construed as alternative proposals for structuring the language of science.
~ a couple paragraphs down — SEP
If it is possible for someone of my intellect and knowledge to be wrong about the way things are, how do I know that it is not me? — Pseudonym
but really I think its just the latest story we came up with to explain the chaos of our senses, and there's no sense in saying my story is better than yours because it 'feels' right. There's no sense in telling someone else their story is 'wrong' because it doesn't 'feel' right to you. — Pseudonym
So how do you determine whether someone is "pretending" to not understand. Is this not just narcissism?, Failure of a theory of mind? "how could anyone possibly think differently to me?" — Pseudonym
Of course, and the exact same argument has been used against atheists. "I can't believe they don't really feel the presence of God, they're convinced it's just their conscience or something but they do really feel it" — Pseudonym
So, given that is right, I am left wondering how we would go about gauging the explanatory power of metaphysical theories. — Janus
Nagel thinks there's something it's "like" to be us and calls this consciousness, others disagree that there is something it is 'like' to experience being us and equate consciousness directly with awareness. — Pseudonym
Oh, and Carnap was wrong as a result of working from an utterly impoverished criterion for being meaningful... — creativesoul
This takes out the sort of questions you are asking with respect to metaphysics and knowledge. There is nothing to say on the level of verification. — TheWillowOfDarkness
takes an instance we know to be unverifiable... then supposes to address the question of whether it's veritable or not. The supposed "metaphysical" condrum being tackled, to have some verfied account of what is true or not, is directly obliterated by its definition. — TheWillowOfDarkness
So it is verifiable in principle but not at the present time? — Janus
Oddly enough there are mamy examples of what we count as knowledge which are not verifiable even in principle unless time travel were to turn out to be possible. Any claims concerning the past, for example. — Janus
Whether or not there are aliens is not a metaphysical question, though, is it? — Janus
Of course they have meaning, just as poetry does, which is to say that they are more or less rich in conceptual and perceptual associations. It's a question of aesthetics, not of truth. — Janus
Christianity is a dead religion. It's a vestige of a world now gone. It's absurd stories and ridiculous requirements have been superseded by secular authority and science. Good riddance. — frank
That is, if something I took for reality turns out, in the final analysis, to be 'just an appearence', doesn't this passage from one to the other already presuppose reality? Isn't the 'result' the same? i.e. appearence-talk is tributary to is-talk? Or put yet otherwise: the problem of appearance is that it is not-reality. Reality here wears the pants - there is no reification of appearance into a quasi-standalone-entity. — StreetlightX
We're accustomed to think our experiences are "of" things, but there's no reason to think that's so. — Snakes Alive
Right, and there was an analogous kind of self-awareness when the empiricists noticed that you could come to 'see' things as just rearranged as different sizes in the visual field, instead of representing objective distances. We just naturally see these things as distances, but we only do this by means of the visual field being stimulated in this way, and when one turns to epistemology one 'sees' this again. Usually one sees 'through' it. — Snakes Alive