Agreed, but does to exist carry the same meaning as to be named? I maintain that the objects in pictures meant to demonstrate human perception shouldn’t have names. Objects don’t come pre-named, right? — Mww

That's a tricky question. Some, like Heidegger, would say that we see things as things, like we don't see a shape which we subsequently call a bridge, we just see a bridge.

It seems there must be a pre-cognitive level of perception, the sense just being initially affected, which we do not have conscious access to, which would be prior to naming. Naming is not merely cognition, but re-cognition, or even post re-cognition, so it's gets complicated.

How does "shared experience" even make sense to you? — Metaphysician Undercover

Say you are with someone and she says, "See that dog over there; what kind do you think it is?". Say it's a very large dog, maybe a Great Dane. Do you think the other person is likely to say "Oh, it's so small, maybe a Chihuahua"?

Have you had many experiences something like say you are with some people in the city and you see a car speeding towards you and another person says "Oh, look the waves are breaking well, and there's a lovely dog running towards us; let's go for a swim"?

Wake up and smell the roses, dude...it's a shared world if it is anything.

If you don't think we can generally agree about what objects are where, what kinds of objects they are, how large or small, and so on, then I don't know what planet you are on.

You, and I honestly think ↪Manuel, and perhaps ↪Janus may well agree, that all those pictures on this thread that show objects outside the human skull, depicted as actual named objects, is catastrophically wrong. — Mww

I do agree if the pictures of those objects being outside the skull are intended to demonstrate that the objects, exactly as they are perceived, exist outside the skull. On the other hand they are perceived to exist outside the skull, obviously; but that is not the same thing. The skull does not exist, exactly as it is perceived, outside the skull; and this is a fact which might cause some confusion in some quarters. :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

The unknowable itself is semantically empty, but the fact that there is an unknowable is what enables and enriches the infinite scope of the human imagination, so it could not be further from being semantically empty.

As your boy would have it:"What can be said at all can be said clearly and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence." This assumes that there is that which cannot be talked about, which cannot be dealt with by propositional utterances. This is not to say that it cannot be evoked by poetic language, or the visual arts or music and so on.

And then there is this:"The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists"

This is plainly asserting that value, the most important aspects of human life, cannot be part of the normatively derived collective representation that is the empirical world.

"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." Your boy recognized the importance of the unknowable, so at least that much can be said in his favour.

I think I got you on this one. Who ever said Shakespeare or Cantor were great? That sounds like an appeal to authority to me. — green flag

The thing is that the importance of mathematical and literary contributions are easier to assess than philosophical contributions. As you note there are probably many philosophers who don't think Wittgenstein is all that great; all that is needed is the existence of radically different starting assumptions than his, and his relevance will be as nothing.

Can you say the same about mathematicians who don't think much of Cantor or lovers of literature who don't think much of Shakespeare? The other point about Shakespeare and Cantor is that the former's importance has not diminished over around five centuries and the latter;s over nearly two. It is too early to know how Wittgenstein's philosophy will be assessed in the centuries to come.

Take the old fraud down a notch. — green flag

I haven't said he was a fraud, and I don't have the influence to "take him down a notch".

The way I'd try to solve that kind of problem is to say that the world seems to offer such richness and complexity that we'll never run out of novelty. I find it implausible (unimaginable?) that humans will ever be a loss for further inquiry. So the world is infinite, one might say, with no bound on the depth of its detail and so on. — green flag

I agree that the potential scope for knowledge within the bounds of human experience and judgement is infinite, but it doesn't follow that there is not also an infinity that will forever remain closed to us.

Of course I like Wittgenstein. But that's like liking Shakespeare. To me it doesn't make sense as a polemical thing. One disagrees with this or that, but denying the quality altogether ? That'd be bold. Sort of like denying Cantor. — green flag

This reads like an appeal to authority. I don't think Wittgenstein's contributions to philosophy can be compared to Shakespeare's contributions to poetry and theatre or Cantor's contributions to mathematics.

I don't think it can be said that he was an artful writer, contributions to mathematics are much more clearly important, and if his philosophical ideas don't gel for you, then you have no reason to acknowledge anything but his influence, an influence which can legitimately be seen as largely unfortunate in my view.

Still, all these layers are confusing. — green flag

All what layers? There is an imaginable logical distinction between the world as experienced and the world in itself is all. Would you want to claim that there is nothing beyond what can possibly be experienced and articulated by us?

I haven't said it is a fake world. The real world independent of human experience produces the real world of human experience is how I would characterize it.

Isn't it weird though to believe so passionately in something so methodically empty? — green flag

Perhaps there is a different kind of (non-discursive) fullness in that emptiness. In any case it is a matter of personal predilection, not something that could ever be settled by argument.

My position is that we see and touch and describe the world but can still say something wrong about it. The world is not constructed from private images of the world. Appealing initially, it makes no sense upon closer investigation. So how does it stay so popular ? Its tempting feature is perhaps The Given. — green flag

Of course we do see and touch and describe the world: the world of human experience. But there is something apart from, beyond, outside the ambit of, human experience, something that produces the world of human experience, and we don't and cannot know what it is. This seems incontrovertible to me.

"The Given" has nothing to do with that idea, in fact the "myth of the given", unless I am mistaken, is that the world is just as it is given to us, and the refutation of that is a Kantian point. Sellars was a Kantian.

Yes, but I'm not talking about desktop icons and computer files. I don't think it's a good analogy.

How does the 'occult sphere' of Consciousness figure into this ? Why are people attracted to a position which I'd say is refuted ? — green flag

It's not clear what position you are saying has been refuted.

Is the wall-of-sensation or wall-of-representation vision of reality attractive because it offers certainty ? — green flag

I'm not sure if you're referring to the idea that the empirical world is a collective representation or something else. If the former i would say that it is only within that representation that we can have discursive certainty and truth.

But something like ineffable Enlightenment is also possible in this vision of the possibility (perhaps the necessity) of privacy. In the secrecy of my immaterial soul I can know God and nobody can tell me wrong. — green flag

I think the literature of many cultures attests to the subjective reality of mystical or religious, or whatever you want to call it, experience. No discursive certainty can be inter-subjectively corroborated from such experiences though as far as I can tell.

Chatbots 'must' not have consciousness, even as they threaten to explains themselves better than we can. The pre-solipsist 'must' have an interior which is invisible to 'physical' technology. — green flag

I don't see any reason to think that chatbots are conscious. They don't act on their own accord or report caring about anything. They act only in accordance with how the algorithms they are programmed with allow them to act.

bout how to navigate the world fairly smoothly. But does it follow our perceptions give us accurate information about the world? Don't optical illusions, criticisms of naive realism, etc. show it does not? — Art48

We know there is a world that gives rise to our perceptions and understanding of an empirical world of objects. Anything we say is going to be framed in terms that derive from our shared experience and understanding of the empirical world as well as our intuitions and speculative imaginations.

We can learn to navigate the empirical world more or less effectively, but if our perception and understanding of the empirical world were at odds with the underlying real nature of things it seems reasonable to think we would not do well.

So it seems reasonable to conclude that there is some kind of isomorphism between the world we perceive and whatever world production, beyond and independent of human experience, that is really going on.

I'm not sure if you are agreeing or disagreeing with what you've quoted there...

The way I read Heidegger, the experience of persisting presence is a kind of illusion , or better yet, distortion, flattening, closing off of the what happens when we experience something as something. Experiencing the world is not accomplished by a subject directing itself toward objects. Dasein is not a consciousness but an in-between. Heidegger traces the modern idea of being as persisting presence to Descartes: — Joshs

Sorry I missed your response earlier.

I understand dasein as "being there"; it must be a kind of awareness, even if not reflexively self-aware. I agree that the separation of subject and object only obtains discursively; it is not the primordial nature of human experience.

Well it depends on what kind of thought. My junk thought doesn’t seem dualistic in any sense. When I’m contemplating myself or my world I’ll schematize the world that way, but that’s not my typical state. — Mikie

I agree; I think our experience is not dualistic, but is inevitably discursively framed to be so due to the inherently dualistic nature of language.

I think the point is that being is being-in-the-world-as-time-spirit-etc. Equiprimordiality may be the key thought ? — green flag

"Being-in-the-world-as-time-spirit" is dualistic: Being as X: substance and mode. I don't understand what you mean by saying equiprimordiality may be the key thought.

What exactly is the "metaphor" and the "pseudoproblem" you think it "structures" you are trying to get out of? What exactly does structure mean in this context?

You say that you don't deny that language can refer; if it can then why would it be a "difficult problem"?
Are you saying that language is inherently somewhat fuzzy? If so I agree with you, but it's all we have to attempt to communicate, and it seems determinate enough. Is there some arcane method we might discover that can we employ to make it more determinate? If not, then why bother and why not instead just focus on our actual communication and try to make it as clear as possible,

So, it seems you believe in philosophical progress; I don't; I tend to think philosophy by and large has gone backwards roughly since Kant.

What "theory of our shared situation" do you think I've offered? And what are the difficulties you've point out and the challenge you've presented? It's not clear to me. Surely you don't mean this:

How do my words get to your control room ? Please give me the entire journey from my control room to yours. Where are these control rooms, please ? — green flag

I haven't said anything about control rooms. I hear or read your words, and I believe I understand what you are saying, a situation which itself would be understandable if we experience the phenomenal world in similar enough fashion, which it seems obvious to me that we do.

I'm not seeing any point here to respond to, which you should understand, even if only on the basis that you seem to think language so indeterminate.

What is a 'command of language' ? Another metaphor, this 'command.' — green flag

A command of language is simply the ability to communicate adequately. If we didn't have command of a language we would not be having this conversation.

(1) No one denies that you can go on with your life and chug along in the usual idletalk and its average intelligibility. You might end with more money in your bank account and more friends.

(2) I claim that most of the real work in philosophy is semantic. You can prove God is dead or blue or made of numbers. Fine. But I want to know what you've proved exactly, as exactly as a finite human can manage in a finite time. Of course even here we have to choose what is worth clarifying in the first place.

(3) If the clarification of meaning is the essence of philosophy, then it makes sense to clarify clarification (seeing its own metaphorically, for instance) -- and to get a better sense of what sense is. This is fairly obviously Heideggarian, but that just means he found a good path to explore and not authoritative answers. — green flag

If we cannot do more than "ideltalk" then philosophical discussion would appear to be a waste of time, and the meaning of anything anyone says will be indeterminable beyond the banality of "average intelligibility".

If most of the "real" work (whatever that means) in philosophy is semantic, which means "to do with meaning", then we would appear to spiralling down an infinite helix of regress. I suffer from vertigo, so I won't be joining you in that endeavour.

As to choosing what is worth clarifying, is that not inevitably an individual choice? Or is there some authority...?

The clarification of the clarification of meaning? How about the clarification of the clarification of the clarification of meaning? There you go slippery sliding down that infinite helix again!

The later Heidegger did not seem to clarify much, but then poetry doesn't aim for clarification but rather for evocation of the unclarifiable nature of our situation, which is much more fun.

Well, I mean, it's not that we "can just be naive realists" - it's that we are naive realists the vast majority of the time, despite how incoherent it may be to us.

We don't have a choice.

Maybe if someone us mystical or something, maybe they can avoid being naive realists most of the time, we can't.

The funny thing is that really simple arguments begin to show how weak such belief actually is. — Manuel

Yes we are naive realists in a sense because we naturally and pre-reflectively just accept the phenomenal world as a given. We are truly naive realists if we believe that the way we experience and understand the world to be is exactly the way it really is independently of us.

And I think you're right: really simple arguments do show how weak such belief actually is.

I don't think you are seeing the issue.

Do you think are all trapped in individual control rooms ? Locked forever in sensations and concepts ?

Where do other people exist for you ? Only on your screen ? Is the idea that other people are trapped behind there screens something you see on your screen ? Or the truth about screens that transcends your screen ? — green flag

You seem really confused; I haven't claimed any of the things you are saying here. And the confusion seems all the more deep since you also seem to claim that language cannot refer to things in the phenomenal world; that meaning is endlessly deferred and hence indeterminate, a la Derrida, and these are claims which seem to be at odds with your naive realism.

You claim that we "represent" an X that is otherwise completely unknowable. But somehow you believe there is a we in the first place, that we all represent this weird X. This, sir, is itself a claim about the world. — green flag

It's a claim about the ordinary everyday world of experience. I'm not claiming that we represent any particular X, or anything weird; we don't know such things. I'm saying that the empirical world is a collective representation constructed upon inter-subjective communication about the commonalities of individual human experiences, which consist in sensations, images and impressions, and which seem to reveal an ordered, differentiated world of more or less invariant phenomena.

We don't know what gives rise to this phenomenal world based on human experience and judgement: we cannot get outside our experience of it to see what whatever is causing it is in itself. That seems to me to simply be the primary fact about the human situation. Why else would there be such a long history of argumentation about metaphysics and ontology?

Of course we can just be naive realists and take the world to be just as it appears, and that is arguably the default. This is fair enough, since the in itself reality is unknowable, but consciously taking that stance is also showing a kind of willful blindness to our actual fundamental ignorance.

Your account leaves out how we have contact with one another in the first place. Do we have Kantian bodies in the thing-in-itself ? If so, we shouldn't be able to know that. If not, how do we 'meet' to create the intersection of our private representations of the one X that we seem to call the world in your account ? — green flag

We know how we make contact in the phenomenal world; it's no mystery because it is all going on within our basic human communication of experience and understanding. That is to say that we of course know how things seem to us, but intellectual honesty dictates that we should not extend that seeming beyond its limited ambit.

Our perceptions of the world need not resemble the world in any way, in order for us to develop some sort of understanding. All that is required is consistency in usage. For example, the words we use, and mathematical symbols we use, do not resemble in any way the things they refer to, yet the usage of words and symbols develops into an understanding. This is the nature of "meaning", it is based in consistency of usage, not in resemblance. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are jumping from perception to the symbols we use for communication. Of course symbols, unless they are icons or pictographs, don't resemble what they symbolize, but that fact has nothing to do with the point that, since our perceptions allow us to navigate the world fairly smoothly, it is reasonable to assume that they are giving us more or less accurate information. For example if when standing on the edge of a cliff you saw instead a beach with a very inviting lake before you, leading you to decide to take a swim you would not live long.

Yep. I was asking what those grounds actually are, in this case. I'm aware they will only ever be those grounds which 'seem to one to be grounds' but I haven't had any such grounds yet.

Saying "it seems to me" only tells me that there exist such grounds (in a rational person), it doesn't tell me what they are. — Isaac

Here is the exchange in question:

. It seems clear to me that many of our perceptions have specific, enduring sources, and that specificity grounds our property concepts. — Dfpolis


Since when does "it seems to me" constitute grounds? — Isaac

The point made by Dfpolis seems reasonable enough. If you disagree with the actual point why not say why? Then you might have a discussion.

Since when does "it seems to me" constitute grounds? — Isaac

The "grounds" that support what seems to you are the "grounds" that seem to you to be such. It is the same with everyone; you're nothing special.

The question as to whether thoughts exist eternally could be approached from the perspective that any thought I might think is a logical, physical and metaphysical possibility, otherwise I would not be able to think it. Would it follow that it has enjoyed such triune possibility always? If any thought I might think exists now in potentia, then why not say that it has always existed in potentia?

Perhaps in order to justify saying that we would need to commit to a determinism so strict that we would have to think that everything that has ever happened, including every thought ever entertained was inevitable, and that every thought that will be entertained is inevitable.

On the other hand if indeterminism were metaphysically fundamental, then what would be potentially possible would expand considerably, perhaps infinitely, as well as constantly changing. Then true novelty would be possible.

Cute joke! How could music be better than it sounds? I guess it could be intellectually, harmonically sophisticated even though being unlistenable.

I agree with you that wisdom like aesthetic quality is not an "all or nothing" thing.

But 'cause' and 'event' are terribly blurry. — green flag

I don't see that they are any more blurry than anything else. Speaking for myself, I, at least,
have a clear idea of cause and effect.

The sign (the sentence) gets its significance from the system of signs, from the language to which it belongs. Roughly: understanding a sentence means understanding a language.... As a part of the system of language, one may say “the sentence has life”. But one is tempted to imagine that which gives the sentence life as something in an occult sphere, accompanying the sentence. But whatever would accompany it would for us just be another sign. — green flag

All you're saying is that one must have some minimal command of language in order to understand what words refer to and what sentences mean.

That said, even my dogs understand what "do you want to go to the beach" means.

I don't imagine "something in some occult sphere" that gives meaning or "life" to sentences; it's just a matter of habitually instilled association as I understand it.

Whaever gives rise to the collective representation of a world does so reliably, else there could be no collective representation. That is all we know about the "in itself".

So, if you read carefully you would see that I am not arguing against a "shared languageworld".

I don't find Hoffman's arguments convincing. The criticism that his position cannot be consistently derived from, or supported by, evolutionary theory holds in my view.

If the world in itself were nothing at all like the world we perceive, then fitness (or anything else) would seem to be impossible to explain.

But he may have rejoinders for this criticism: I haven't delved into his ideas enough to know, just on the face of it his philosophy seems unsupported and inconsistent.

You are displaying an obstinate refusal to understand the actual claims made by some forms of idealism. What would be the point of debating someone who refuses to understand or acknowledge what his interlocutor is actually saying?

How does one establish or verify that X is the true form of wisdom without having that true form of wisdom ? — green flag

One might have an intuitive feel for identifying true wisdom without possessing it oneself, just as one might intuitively recognize great music, art or literature without being able to produce it oneself.

I made a similar point above but...surprise, surprise!...it remains unaddressed.

I think we can make true statements about the unobserved tree, based on our other observations. — Banno

Sure, but that's not the same as being able to make true statements about the unobservable aspects of what gives rise to the appearance of the tree.

How can one reconcile the scientific view, say that the the universe is billions of years old or that natural selection functions on individuals, with the idealist view that nothing exists without a mind to believe it exists? — Banno

Easy, just posit a universal mind or consciousness.

:up:

I am neither an idealist nor a materialist, but I object when proponents of one or the other show their prejudice by attempting to dismiss the view that is unfavorable to them by declaring it to be incoherent.

I'll be generous and say that you have a generous sense of humour. (Although it depends on whether you are laughing at or with :wink: ).

No real disagreement but how does this reflect on our capacity to talk meaningfully about ontology and metaphysics? Nevertheless it often does seem a metaphysical puzzle that we are able to understand each other at all. No wonder some religious folk consider God foundationally necessary for intelligibility. — Tom Storm

It seems we can talk meaningfully about the ideas that come to us when we try to imagine what the world might be like in itself. I would just say that we cannot meaningfully assign truth or falsity to those words, because truth and falsity are established either logically or empirically, I don't see truth and meaning as being joined at the hip.

Are you coming at this as a Kantian? — Tom Storm

I do generally agree with Kant regarding the limitations of thought.

What exactly do you mean by 'causal' or 'mechanical' though ?

The problem of meaning haunts everything, which is not to say that it itself is not haunted in return. But that gets us back to the structuralism half of my point. — green flag

We all knows what 'causal' means in the ordinary sense. Same with 'mechanical'. The meaning of both just consists in one thing acting on another to bring about effect, change, event or process.

If we think that if we don't know what words mean or refer to, then we cannot understand ourselves to be asking the questions about meaning or reference in the first place.

Yes, that seems to be the hub of it to me - what correspondence is there between the world and language? It's a pretty tentative connection and interpretive and context dependent, but there's certainly an illusion of signifier and signified mating to produce meaning, even if the post-structuralists have demonstrated the limitations of this relationship. — Tom Storm

For me what you say invokes another layer, another wrinkle in the fabric.When we ask for correspondence between language and world, are we asking for stable, but hidden, lines of connection, like unseen electrical cables, between words and the world "as it really is"?

I see no problem with correspondence between language and the phenomenal world, since I see the latter as a paradigmatically familiar, collectively linguistically generated illusion that we all find it impossible not to be inducted into. I hear someone say "it is raining" and I know exactly what to look for, simply because of the association of these words with an everyday experience almost everyone would be familiar with.

It is correspondence between language and the noumenal world which is inscrutable, even impossible. And I think it is that impossible correspondence which is really being asked for. It is impossible because language can correspond only to what we commonly experience, simply by association, on account of the fact that we take it to correspond, but nothing beyond that.

So, the idea that language could correspond to the noumenal world is neither correct nor incorrect, but is a "not even wrong" category error; we don't even know what it could mean for them to correspond to the noumenal world.

It seems to me that the issue regarding how words refer and mean is troubled by a necessarily doomed search for a causal or mechanical explanation, for an actual empirically discoverable causal link between the sound or the visual symbol and the object it signifies.

My own view is that words refer to things, or mean something just because we take them to. We simply associate the sounds or the visual symbols with what we have learned to associate them, and there doesn't seem to be any great puzzle in that. The real puzzle is the consciousness that allows us to make those associations, and that there can be a shared world for us.

The Katz books look interesting.

I hope and trust we are actually talking about the world and not our individual 'images' of the world. — green flag

"The world" is nothing more than the idea of what our individual images and ideas of a world seem to have in common; it is a collective representation.

No, it's just a piss-poor analogy.

The icon is as good a candidate for being the "real" word document as are the things in RAM, on the hard drive, on paper or emailed. — Banno

The real word document is the one we can read; the icon is merely a shortcut,

Just a suggestion. Let's call whatever it is that is behind the appearance of the rock, a "rock". — Banno

Why? In order to create the illusion of knowing what is behind appearances?