I can disagree with your statement that "Unicorns have pink tails" by simply stating that "Unicorns have blue tails". At no point does my ability to do this indicate anything about my understanding of you use of the term 'Unicorn' — Pseudonym

Come on! Unicorns aren't hard to understand, anymore than drgaons or wizards are. They're just fictional creations. That doesn't make them meaningless.

Now an Invisible Pink Unicorn has an inherent contradiction in what sort of thing it's supposed to be, so that falls under the umbrella of incoherency, which was the point of the term (to parody incoherent religious concepts). Just like a four sided triangle is an incoherent concept. But a triangle in a time travel story isn't incoherent, it's just part of a fictional story.

I think that is really the issue; not that such speculation is meaningless, because it is obviously meaningful in that it involves using words and phrases that mean something to us; the issue is that it is undecidable. The mistake of the Logical Positivists was to conflate 'undecidable' with 'meaningful'. — Janus

That might be so. Colin McGinn postulated this is because we lack the cognitive makeup to answer such questions, although we can ask them somehow.

For the point is specifically that observational knowledge of any particular fact, e.g. that this is green, presupposes that one knows general facts of the form X is a reliable symptom of Y. And to admit this requires an abandonment of the traditional empiricist idea that observational knowledge “stands on its own feet.”" My own attempt to paraphrase this was to say that "one cannot simply 'read off' a claim of knowledge from a state-of-affairs". — StreetlightX

Seems rather obvious on the face of it. Did empiricists really believe that the raw sensory datum could be used to construct an understanding of the world? On what basis?

if two people arguing understand one another, and can articulate eachother's position -- then it's just true that the debate is not nonsense. — Moliere

That's what makes sense to me.

If two people can disagree while being able to explicate the position of who they disagree with then that's a good indicator that the terms are being used the same. — Moliere

I suppose a third person could come along and claim the disagreement is meaningless, as what happens in this thread. But then how do you decide whether the third person is right, or the other two are right that it's meaningful?

If one group claims a statement is meaningful, and another claims it is not, then what determines who's right? An argument about the definition of meaning? And what if there is no consensus on meaning?

It seems to me that the claim to meaninglessness tends to undermine itself.

The problem then isn't that we can't know reality prior appearance, but we can't even discuss a reality without appearances. — Hanover

We can and we do with science.

so to ask how can I know the rock without reference to how it looks, smells, or taste seems nonsensical — Hanover

The properties that don't depend on how we perceive the rock are how science describes a rock. But really, it's the objective account of things, where we remove the perceiver dependent qualities. A rock's mass, size and shape, and molecular arrangement don't depend on how humans perceive a rock.

Your ''substance'' would be incomprehensible without properties. It's the way the world is.I don't like it but that's how it is. — TheMadFool

Hahaha, funny! Do you wish you had an essential substance that didn't rely on properties?

Is that really so odd? I'd say it's the rule rather than the exception! — Aaron R

Sure, and no doubt that is ammo for the anti-metaphyics side. Questions raised about meaningfulness in this thread:

Can a debate be meaningful if the different sides can't agree on what constitutes an acceptable answer?

Can a statement be meaningful if it's imprecise?

Is meaning grounded in the empirical and analytical such that you can't make meaningful claims about that which is beyond experience?

Is meaning a precise term or is it fuzzy?

Is a statement claiming that all statements of type X are meaningless a member of X?

I don't believe we could coherently imagine what such a reality could be except that it consists in some kind of timelessly existing Idea (Platonism). But the notion that there is a timeless somehow independently existent idea for every generality (and there would need to be a unique idea for every individual similarity and difference) leads to absurdity. It's a really overloaded, top-heavy, cumbersome and in the final analysis, incoherent, ontology, so why should we adopt it or even bother with it? — Janus

I think essences in the things themselves would be an alternative to Platonism, but it's not without it's own difficulties. So sure, what you said is a standard criticism of realism about universals.

As on poster in this thread pointed out, the odd thing about this debate is that none of the positions is without problems. I don't think this is because of lack of meaning in the dispute.

There are ongoing debates in matters like unsolved crimes where there isn't a question about meaning. What's questioned is the interpretation of the known or alleged facts and related matters for the case.

Yes, and such debates are meaningless. If the two sides do not agree on the meaning of the term 'better', then how is it different to debating which player is the most 'flibertyjibit' - another term which neither side agree the meaning of, yet we would easily see the sentence Michael Jordan is the most flibertijibit player as being nonsense. — Pseudonym

Better already exists as a comparison in language. There's no problem saying that MJ or LJ are better than the average player. You will get consensus on that. And better here means superior statistics, MVP awards and all-star selections, championships, and a general recognition of rare ability while watching a player play the game.

So better is not like the made up word flibertijibit. The problem with better is that it's not precise enough when you have two players close enough in career achievements to fix the criteria for determining who is better. And so then people are free to choose what criteria they wish to use.

This isn't a matter of better being meaningless, it's rather imprecise and opinionated.

That is still much too vague. — SophistiCat

Well then:

Universals are a class of mind-independent entities, usually contrasted with individuals (or so-called "particulars"), postulated to ground and explain relations of qualitative identity and resemblance among individuals. Individuals are said to be similar in virtue of sharing universals. An apple and a ruby are both red, for example, and their common redness results from sharing a universal. If they are both red at the same time, the universal, red, must be in two places at once. This makes universals quite different from individuals; and it makes them controversial.

Whether universals are in fact required to explain relations of qualitative identity and resemblance among individuals has engaged metaphysicians for two thousand years. Disputants fall into one of three broad camps. Realists endorse universals. Conceptualists and Nominalists, on the other hand, refuse to accept universals and deny that they are needed. Conceptualists explain similarity among individuals by appealing to general concepts or ideas, things that exist only in minds. Nominalists, in contrast, are content to leave relations of qualitative resemblance brute and ungrounded. — Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Do you find that also too vague?

. But in any case, to paraphrase Crispin Wright, identifying your position with one of the above labels accomplishes about as much as clearing one's throat. — SophistiCat

I listed the well established positions in the debate, about which much has been said. My argument is that the problem of universals is an example of a meaningful debate, not that universals are necessarily real (I don't know).

A class in object-oriented programming (OOP) is not a good analogy for the general idea of universals. In OOP two objects with the same functional properties are not necessarily instances of the same class. — SophistiCat

I wasn't demonstrating polymorphism with the simple example. The general idea of class-based OOP languages is that the class defines the complex data type for any instances of that class. The data type has bundled with it the methods which can operate on any instance. The properties available are defined in the class along with the methods.

This serves as a good example for universals, and indeed introductions to OOP often use the example of an Animal, Shape or Person class, claiming that it's modeled after the world. The class defines the type of object for a bunch of instances.

Now it's true that you can create a hierarchy of Shape classes and treat them the same when you want to perform the same kind of geometric function on them, or have them draw to the screen (the actual implementation might differ form class to class). That doesn't mean that the Triangle or Circle class are somehow less universal to their instances.

It's also true that some languages let you mutate individuals and change the inheritance relationships at runtime, and other wild stuff. Some languages don't really care about the class of an object, only if it behaves like a type it expects.

And similarly, the real world is more complicated than simple examples of universals. That doesn't change the question of how individual things can be similar. But it does illustrate the concept in a simple manner.

Why, if the mind is a real aspect of nature, must something be mind-independent to be counted as real? — Janus

Good question. It's the contents of the mind which are not always real. We can both perceive a tree, which means there is a tree independent of your mind and mine. But if you dream, imagine or hallucinate a tree, that's your mind generating it. You can also lie or be mistaken about seeing a tree.

When we say that Harry Potter isn't real, we don't mean the literature, which is obviously real, we mean the character and the story is fictional.

This might lead to thinking that only the perceive is real, but then we do make both everyday and scientific inferences to things unperceived, such as the tree falling when nobody is around, or the majority of the EM spectrum we can't see.

The problem is you can't say what sense "real" could have in what you are trying to articulate, and you fall into the error that Wittgenstein warns against of trying to say what cannot be said. — Janus

Real in these discussions means mind-independent. Objects of perception are generally taken to be mind-independent things that exist without humans perceiving them, unless one is a subjective idealist.

An abstraction like universals, numbers, or possible worlds would be real if they aren't created by the mind. It's true that we don't perceive abstract forms, but if argument showed that they have to come from somewhere other than our minds, then they would be real.

Let's take a sports example. Is athlete A greater than athlete B in a sport?

Is Lebron James better than Michael Jordan? (pick your athletes and sport)

There is a consensus that both players are all-time greats at basketball, but there isn't a consensus as what counts as being greater between the two (which often means the best ever).

And yet there are many discussions on this. What happens is that the Lebron James supporters will list criteria that supports their claim that Lebron is better, and reasons why Jordan is not. And the Jordan supporters will do the same.

This isn't because they don't understand each other, it's because they don't agree. Similar to political debates where a conservative and a liberal will base their arguments on their political persuasion. They can usually understand each other, but they don't agree on the politics of the other side's position.

So with science, you may say that there's no definitive shared metric, and you'd be right, but the correlation of some theoretical proposition with empirical measurements is sufficiently shared and just specific enough to allow meaningful debate. It's not so shared that people like Kuhn can't highlight its reliance on paradigm, but they're shared enough. — Pseudonym

At least until you get deep in the theoretical physics weeds. Does superstring theory, or colliding 11 dimension branes in the multiverse count as a meaningful scientific debate? I think so, on a theoretical grounds, but some have said it's pure metaphysics and shouldn't be in science.

I'll tackle this first. This falls into the same error I've tried to explain to Marchesk, but it just gets ignored. Proving that people can make coherent sense, and derive meaning from, the question, or an answer offered is not sufficient to make the debate meaningful. To make the debate meaningful it is also necessary that some methods can demonstrably determine which of the competing answers has the greater merit by some metric agreed on by the contributors. — Pseudonym

The thing is you can accuse political debates of having this problem. Does that mean the issues being debated lack meaning?

From my experience of also being involved in political, religious, sports and true crime debates, people often don't agree as to what would count as settling the debate. Each side has their own criteria.

Take the Dyatlov Pass Incident for example. 9 Russian Hikers were found dead in 1959. According to investigators, they cut their way out of the tent at night in the middle of the Siberian winter, hiked down to the tree line poorly dressed, and attempted to survive the night there unsuccessfully. The head investigator concluded that some "unknown compelling force" caused them to do this.

There are many theories as to what happened. Several books have been written in recent years, each with their own conclusion. Some say they were forced out of their tent by other humans on the mountain that night, and their injuries revealed in the autopsies are consistent with this being attacked and killed. Others will say that no, their injuries are consistent with natural causes that happened to them after leaving the tent, such as a snow den collapse, and falling out of a tree, the broken limbs of which were used in a small fire, or falling face first on the rocky terrain in the deep snow.

So what would count as settling which theory is true in a case like this, if no new evidence comes to light? But they did abandon their campsite without proper clothing for some reason. One of the theories is probably close to the truth.

Now I take it that if we can detail not just our own beliefs but the beliefs of others, and others can do the same for us, then that demonstrates that what people are saying is meaningful -- it's not just a nonsense that an individual has come up with. — Moliere

Exactly.

So now all the functions you ascribe to universals can be satisfactorily ascribed to a comparison to your ideal dog, which we've just established does not exist.

Is there any feature of our universalism in language that you're having trouble ascribing to an imagined ideal? — Pseudonym

That sounds like conceptualism, which is one answer to the problem of universals. It doesn't really matter for this discussion if universals exist. It's whether the debate is meaningful.

My view is that universals and the like exist in the structure of our experience of the world. They are intrinsic to the way we interpret experience and construe meaning. So they're elements or aspects of reality, but they're neither subjective nor objective. They're neither 'out there' in the world, nor 'in here' in our minds, but are part of the structure of mind; but prior to any sense of 'mind' in a naturalistic sense, as the whole notion of what constitutes 'naturalism' relies on that structure. That is why nature exists in mind, more than vice versa. — Wayfarer

So basically Kantian? Did Kant think that on Hume's account, knowledge was impossible? That these categories of thought have to already be there because they can't come from the senses. The senses are just blobs of color, random noises, smells, etc that need to be categorized, fit into a conceptual framework or what have you.

. What's the difference between "universal talk of something" and just regular talk of something? — TheWillowOfDarkness

So I can talk about a particular dog, call him Beast, who happens to be bigger than most dogs. Notice that Beast is grouped into the category dog. All dogs are unique individuals, but there is something about dogs that motivates us to put them into the dog category. Now beast is taller and weighs more than most dogs. Notice how we can compare across the class of individuals.

We can also use the dog category to talk about a generic dog, or draw the shape of a dog. So a no dogs allowed sign has an outline representing any dog.

Now the question becomes how we're able to do all this if we all perceive are individual dogs. We never do experience the dog category, the average dog, the image of a generic dog, etc. It's a concept we form related to all dogs.

We "see" the casualty of a ball breaking a window because the causality of interested is of those things-- the causality of a ball braking a window (if someone is present), involves the sight of the ball and window in a certain reaction/relationship. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Right, but we go one step further and assume there is something necessitating the relationship, such that any future ball will break any future window, all else being equal (same glass strength, same speed and weight of the ball, etc).

(1) It is not clear what motivates the questioning, (2) what it is that you actually want explained, and (3) what kind of an explanation you require. (4) And of course there is no answer either, despite your insistence otherwise - and (5) how could there be when there is no real question? — SophistiCat

I'll go ahead and answer these directly (numbers my addition):

(1) The difference between the individual things we perceive, and our universal talk about them.

(2) Whether there is something in the world which matches or supports our universal talk.

(3) An argument for something in the world or in our concepts that explain the universal talk.

(4) There have been at least 4 possible answers given to this question: nominalism, conceptualism, moderate realism (Aristotle), and realism (Platonism).

(5) No real question if one agrees with Carnap, Hume or Witty on this. But if not, then there is a real question.

The question of whether there can be meaningful metaphysical statements is essentially a debate over meaning.

Well, I explained why your question makes no sense — SophistiCat

You did so on the grounds that anti-metaphysical statements are meaningless. You even stated as much in the first sentence of the previous post.

See, right away you show me right. What you came up with is a pseudo-question: although it has the grammatical form of a question, it is actually quite senseless — SophistiCat

That's exactly the sort of starting point Carnap wanted to argue from.

See, right away you show me right. What you came up with is a pseudo-question: although it has the grammatical form of a question, it is actually quite senseless. — SophistiCat

Can you explain in what way it's senseless? Because I'm failing to see how it is.

The only sense I can make of the claim that it's senseless is a preexisting commitment to the argument that metaphysics is senseless.

If by definition all such statements are without sense, then of course no example will convince you otherwise. If only everyone would agree to that definition, then we could be done with wasting time on metaphysics!

Every time you use or think the terms ‘is equal to’, ‘is’, ‘is not’, ‘is more than’, ‘doesn’t mean’, ‘must mean’ then essentially you’re relying on universal abstractions in order to arrive at a judgement. Even in order to arrive at a ‘neuroscientific analysis’ [or any scientific analysis] you need to do this. But you don’t notice you’re doing it, and if it’s pointed out you don’t see what it means. — Wayfarer

Or someone will cry out that it's meaningless to point this out, because metaphysics.

Hume was wrong; he was tricked by his tendency to reduce perception to the visual; of course it's true that we don't actually see causality. — Janus

That's an interesting thought. Philosophers do seem rather focused on the visual. Makes me wonder what would happen if we met aliens whose primary sense was smell. How would their philosophical views differ from ours?

What sorts of claims are (1) and (2)? Are they empirical? — Srap Tasmaner

Good question. Revisiting:

(1) We can only think about what we have experience of.
(2) We only have experience of particulars. — Srap Tasmaner

I would say they are claims about epistemology. Can epistemological claims be settled by psychology (or neuroscience)? I don't know. Not yet, anyway.

Hume provides an example of a concept that is neither in experience nor from logic: causality. Psychology might someday explain how we came to form that concept. I don't know what implication that will have for philosophy. There might be a good reason we formed the concept.

Yes, thank you. The problem for empiricism if (1) is false is that non-particulars are often about things in the world (dog, tree, planet, force, society), and not just logical constructions. So empiricism needs a mechanism whereby the mind turns particulars into non-particulars.

I submit this is impossible, unless the particulars have similar properties and relations, which then requires inquiry into what it means for individuals to be similar.

ou need to spell out why these two conditions give rise to a problem. What problem? — Srap Tasmaner

How our language comes to have universal concepts when the world is full of individuals. What is it about the individual things that leads us to form universal properties and relations such that we can group them into categories?

One possible answer is that universal properties and relations exist in the world in some manner.

Take E=MC^2. This is a universal relation between mass and energy that science has discovered. One interpretation of this is that science was able to discover this equation because there is a law of nature forming a causal relationship such that matter always converts to the energy in the same manner.

Now if the world was made up of individual bits of matter and packets of energy (both matter and energy are also universal concepts), then how is it we can formulate an equation across all of them?

A different interpretation would be that all the bits of matter just so happen to form a regularity whereby they always convert to the same amount of energy given their mass. This regularity becomes it's own universal pattern that we notice and form an equation from. So the world has at least universal patterns to it, even if they're just regularities.

Ray Kurzweil has called himself a "patternist", which I suppose is an alternative to universal categories (or classes). This is probably similar to Dennett's use of the Game of Life whereby the starting conditions and a few simple rules can generate complex patterns, or Wolfram's cellular automata.

Let's take a related topic. Our ancestors realized the could count different things. Three rocks, three sticks, three birds, etc. From this they generalized to the number three, and from countability, math was born. We can ask two questions about this.

1. How does the human brain from the abstract concept of number?

2. Is there something interesting about the world that lets us do this?

Question two is best exemplified by asking why math has been so useful for the sciences. Does that imply a mathematical structure for the world?

The third question isn't empirical, it's an ontological question.

And that is the root of Marchesk's problem: after so many pages of discussion, not only can he not explain the answer and how it actually answers the question, he cannot even explain what the question is and why it needs to be answered. — SophistiCat

I have it explained it. But some of the posters pretend that they can't understand it to support the verificationist argument against metaphysics.

The question and proposed answers can be boiled down to this observation:

We perceive a world of individuals, yet our language is full of universal categories of properties and relations. So how do we reconcile the two?

As for the verification argument against metaphysics being meaningful, it falls prey to the same objection, since it's neither analytic nor verifiable.

By the protagonist of a life-experience story, of course a physical world is perceived. Your experience is of being a physical being in a physical world. So, what else would you expect, than to experience a physical world that produced you, and is consistent with you. — Michael Ossipoff

Right, so from that I infer that I'm a physical being. However, the mental is not so easily subsumed under the physical, so maybe I'm not entirely physical.

At any rate, a question does arise as to whether the world is physical, a combination of physical and mental, mental, or something else. This is a metaphysical question, and it's easy enough to see how it came about. It was being debated in one form or another in the ancient philosophical world of several independent cultures.

The dispute over the theories of time doesn't make sense to me — Snakes Alive

How is it that the dispute doesn't make sense to you?

Now it's just a matter of time before Quantum Mechanics makes its introduction into a metaphysical dispute.

We can meaningfully discuss gravity because we all agree on our experience of it, — Pseudonym

Oh but we all know that gravity is so much more than our experience of it, from bending spacetime to relativistic frames. And before Newton, there was no concept of gravity, despite our experiences in common of falling things.

How else do you account for differences of opinion on metaphysical matters? — Pseudonym

The same way I account of differences of opinions on anything. It doesn't make the disagreements meaningless, the questions that led to the disputes, or the potential answers provided.

And so it seems we're back to where we started. Yes, it may lead to "the question", but none of this shows any reason to believe we can provide a meaningfulanswer to it. — Pseudonym

The answers provided are meaningful, but it's not a settled manner which one, if any, are true.

This is better than the situation in philosophy; vague terms are meaningful, but meaningless ones are not. — Snakes Alive

Any dispute on any topic will require moving beyond vague terms. If I ask whether Thor is more powerful than the Hulk in the Marvel Universe (comics or movies), then this is going to lead to a discussion of who's physically stronger versus who has access to what powers in various incarnations of both characters such that you won't end up with a simple answer.

but we can have virtually no meaningful discussion about something like universals or tropes because we do not even begin to agree on the nature of the experience that they are attempting to define. — Pseudonym

Actually, we can do so by noting that while we perceive individual things, our language is full of universal talk. This is at least partly based on the further perception that some universals have the same property values. This leads to the question of what is it about the world or ourselves which results in creating universal concepts.

The SEP entry spells this out in detail. There's nothing so incredibly esoteric or mystical about the debate that any person of average intelligence sufficiently motivated can't understand.

Some aspects of the various positions and disputes might be technical enough to present difficulties in understanding for non-philosophers, but that would likely be the case for any long standing philosophical discussion.

You're begging the question. How do you propose to demonstrate that the disagreements are 'understood'? — Pseudonym

This is a silly game to play. How could they not be understood once one is well enough versed in the debate?

What possible reason do I have for thinking that an analysis of the sentences used in an argument about those terms will actually yield some information about the way the world actually is? — Pseudonym

Well hopefully one isn't just talking about linguistic analysis when asking questions about the world. Seems like that's what the anti-metaphysical crowd would prefer to do. But when someone like David Chalmers is talking about consciousness, he's not interested in only the words being used, but rather whether subjectivity can be accounted for by an objective view of the world (whether it be physicalism, functionalism, behaviorism, etc).

It's a perfectly ordinary question with a perfectly ordinary answer – anyone will tell you that a human is conscious much of the time, but a plant never is. — Snakes Alive

LOL! That's just the very, very beginning of the discussion, and people are going to want to know what you mean by a human being conscious. It can mean more than one thing. A little bit more discussion, and you'll find out that people don't always agree on what it means for a human to be conscious.

That's the thing with ordinary language. Everyone can agree when the term is sufficiently vague. But once you start discussing it in any depth, differences emerge, along with difficulties raised by what everyone thought was simple concept on the face of it.

And then lo and behold, you find out some people think that plants are actually conscious (along with rocks and everything else).