Our Minimal Epistemic Commitment (Fixing Descartes' Cogito)
Thanks to Descartes and many others, it's surprisingly common to meet with the assumption that the external world, the one beyond 'my' experience, is merely a more or less reasonable hypothesis. On this view, hairdryers and toothpicks are just handy ways to organize sensations...and electrons and quarks are just handy ways to organize hairdryers and toothpicks. I seem to see other people, but I can't be sure, because what I mean by person is roughly what I mean by 'I,' this existence I know 'directly.' My states of mind, my thoughts and sensations, are phosphorescently present for me, infinitely intimate. I can no more be wrong about what I mean by a word or how I see a patch of color than 2 + 2 can equal 5. And so on. I extend the same courtesy to you out there, behind the mask of your face and its smiles and grimaces, just in case you exist back there. What's the attraction ? Start somewhere that's obviously safe (certain) and extend from there, testing everything new in the light of what's already passed a test.
Let me offer an alternative, hopefully featuring this original selling point (starting somewhere safe.) It doesn't make sense for us to doubt whether there is something for us to be right or wrong about in the first place. It doesn't make sense for us to use logic and concepts to a argue against the bindingness or publicness or force of logic and concepts. I claim that the minimum rational intelligible epistemic situation is a plurality of persons subject to the same logic and together in a world that they can be right or wrong about. I intentionally leave open the details of persons and world and logic here, for these are very much part of what's discussed, just as I'm doing now. How do I support my claim ?
I point out that any attempt to deny it assumes what it would deny. Since I expect objections, I'll stop here. We can get into the details together...
Let me offer an alternative, hopefully featuring this original selling point (starting somewhere safe.) It doesn't make sense for us to doubt whether there is something for us to be right or wrong about in the first place. It doesn't make sense for us to use logic and concepts to a argue against the bindingness or publicness or force of logic and concepts. I claim that the minimum rational intelligible epistemic situation is a plurality of persons subject to the same logic and together in a world that they can be right or wrong about. I intentionally leave open the details of persons and world and logic here, for these are very much part of what's discussed, just as I'm doing now. How do I support my claim ?
I point out that any attempt to deny it assumes what it would deny. Since I expect objections, I'll stop here. We can get into the details together...
Comments (461)
Yep, fair enough - I think this point has also been made by others here in passing.
I've generally held to the presuppositions that I live in a reality that appears to be physical and there are others who share this reality with me who have similar experiences - capacities and vulnerabilities - and that while I can dismantle any ideas I might have about all this and play a bunch of games about what is real and what is not real, in practical terms, in making life choices and going about my business, it makes little sense - and there are no advantages - when these presuppositions are doubted.
:up:
I think my points go back at least to 'commonsense' philosophy, which reacted to Hume.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/philosophy-of-common-sense
Quoting Tom Storm
:up:
I basically agree, though I like philosophy enough to want to find the best way to make sense of 'appear' and 'physical.' But that's just fine-tuning the details.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by this. Are you saying that solipsism assumes other minds, that idealism assumes an external material world, that eliminative materialism assumes mental states, etc.?
Yes, well this seems to be where the fun is found.
We need to go back to the absolutely minimal notion of whatever there is to make correct or incorrect statements about. We might annoyingly write this as [s]world,[/s] with the under-erasure gimmick functioning as a reminder that it's not atoms-and-void or medium-sized-dry-goods or synchornized monads that's intended, but the X that plays the role of target for our claims. Philosophers make various claims about the nature of this inherently/implicitly public/shared X.
For instance, if I claim that "idealism assumes an external world," I'm arguing for the truth or at least the warrantability of a belief about this space that we share.
It's good clean neurotic fun.
What is implicit in a philosopher's arguing a claim ?
What is the claim about ? An otherwise radically unspecified world. 'The world is atoms and void.' 'The world is overlapping dreams.' 'John did that out of greed.'
What is the difference between reckless assertion and an argument ? Conforming to a logic that binds or ought to bind all rational participants to assent the conclusion, if the argument is sound.
It's about what does or doesn't exist, and the nature of what exists.
Quoting Pie
Which logic? Classical? Free? Paraconsistent?
Regardless, I'm not sure what this has to do with either solipsism or idealism. Neither of these positions are anti-logic.
OK, but debating what 'exists' means is fair game, no?
Excellent question ! But you have not yet caught me off guard. Philosophy is, among other things, figuring out WTF rationality is in the light of our best guess so far.
It seems to me that everything is up for debate except that there is something we can be wrong about. Or am I wrong about that ?
Yes. And that something can be the existence of other minds, or an external material world, or God, or the soul, or mind-independent mathematical entities.
So, again, I don't really understand what you're trying to say here.
If 'external material world' means something very specific like atoms-and-the-void that bang on our sense organs, then I consider it reasonable or sensible to doubt that. We can doubt that the world-we-share is like that.
But if 'external world' means 'that which we can be wrong or right about,' (the world-we-share) it's incoherent to deny or doubt it.
The solipsist says : It's wrong to think there's something we can be wrong about.
If he's a rational solipsist, his logic is binding for you and me too.
Given that the solipsist says that solipsism is right and non-solipsism wrong, and that the idealist says that idealism is right and materialism/dualism wrong, and that the anti-realist says that anti-realism is right and realism wrong, this clearly isn't what any of these positions mean by "external world".
But also your claim above is ambiguous. Which of these are you saying is incoherent?
1. "there's nothing that we can be right or wrong about"
2. "none of the things that we can be right or wrong about exist"
It makes perfect sense, for us, taken as a community of identical intelligences. It makes no sense for each of us, individually, with respect to ourselves alone. The intrinsic circularity of human reason, formerly called its illusory nature, in the most basic construction and use of logic and logical principles a priori, has been exposed for centuries.
Quoting Pie
How to know that, without the antecedent conditions for making correct or incorrect statements. Getting back to the minimal notions for that which justifies the conditions for the correctness of statements.....
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Quoting Pie
The absolutely necessary ground for the possibility of skeptical opinion, the very thing said to not make sense for us, insofar as any one subject operating from congruent logical form yet employing dissimilar objects premised by his own logical principles, can readily, and possibly successfully, argue against any other subjects logic.
Affirming cogito, while not doing much to fix it.
More cart-before-the-horse metaphysics.....
Please clarify. Do you claim that it makes sense to argue against the force of logic ?
I think you miss the point. It's not 'I think' but 'we think.' Or is it just you who thinks I haven't fixed it ? But why should I be bound by such idiosyncratic babble ? Unless of course it's not just babble...and you appeal to a reason or logic that binds us both...
Quoting Mww
That's what I might say about any approach that starts with an isolated subject.
I hope it's not rude if I request that you use complete sentences. This stuff is complicated enough already.
This one. "There's nothing that we can be right or wrong about."
I put it this way, just to sharpen the point : "It's wrong to think there's something we can be wrong about."
Who makes such a claim?
It's a satirical translation of solipsism.
Solipsists don't make such a claim though. Epistemological solipsists only say that we can't know that there are other minds and ontological solipsists say that "there are other minds" is false.
I'm trying to dig to the gist of the appearance / reality distinction, which seems tied in to the concept of the self.
So epistemological solipsists say that we might be wrong to think that there's something we could be wrong about ?
Then I think you're drawing an invalid conclusion and so your reductio ad absurdum is a non sequitur, because nothing about saying that only one's mind and mental phenomena exists entails that no claims are truth-apt.
Quoting Pie
I don't know what you mean here. They just claim that we can't know that there are other minds, just as agnostics claim that we can't know whether or not God exists, and I claim that we can't know what will happen in the distant future.
Consider though : their claim is about other minds. 'Other minds can't know whether there are other minds.' The keyword is we. They make assertions about norms, about whether it's reasonable or not (in this case not) for other minds to assume or assert without justification that there are other minds.
If the solipsist is arguing a thesis as a philosopher, he's implicitly describing our shared situation, if only minimally in what assumptions or inferences are appropriate for all members of the rational community.
Yes. What's wrong with that? Just as there can be an agnostic theist there can be an epistemological solipsist who isn't an ontological solipsist. They just accept that we cannot know that there are other minds, but nonetheless believe that there are.
"Other minds cannot know there are other minds." They are describing an essential feature of the thing they simultaneously doubt.
We can try to repair this: "If there are other minds, then those minds can't know there are other minds." But this is a statement about the very minds that might not exist. At the very least it's a claim about shared conceptual space. The public concept of mind is in play, even if there's purported doubt about its appropriate application.
And? If there is the Christian God then he is a dick. The statement is about the very God that might not exist. What's the problem? The existence of something is not entailed by there being some true claim about it.
Edit: In fact, I think it can be correct to say that the Christian God is a dick even if he doesn't exist, and so it can be correct to say that others minds cannot know that there are other minds even if they don't exist.
To me that's a misleading analogy. If I claim there is a God, I'm saying that for both us there is a God. It's a fact about our world in common that there's a God in it. Maybe I'm wrong. The world is there, and maybe God isn't in it, despite my claim.
If I say, on the other hand, that it's a fact about our world together that we might not have a world together, that's different. I'm not making sense. Let's try this : It's a fact about our world that there might not be facts about our world. Still doesn't work.
Simpler: it's a fact that there are no facts. Or it's fact that there might not be facts.
You seem to be saying that if p ? q is true then p is true, but that's an invalid inference. p ? q is true even if p is false. In this case, p is "there are other minds" and q is "these other minds cannot know that there are other minds".
1) Modern skepticism. The problem of judgment, based on a theory of ideas or mental representation.
2) Descartes' doubt, which serves both an epistemological as well as protective rhetorical function.
1) The things we see are not present in the mind. What we see are representations. The problem of judgment arises because we cannot compare these representations to the things themselves in order to determine whether the representation is true to what it represents.
2) Under the guise of finding something indubitable, by doubting everything, Descartes could indirectly call into doubt the authority of the Church. He usurps of the authority of the Church with the authority of the thinking self.
He does not doubt because of some existential crises. It is deliberate and methodical:
Descartes did not doubt that the Church was a threat. It is worth mentioning that he took Ovid's motto as his own:
If we are to understand Descartes we must discover what he is hiding in his apparent agreement with the Church on matters of the soul and God. The 4th Meditation, "Of Truth and Error", is a good place to start. In short, the Cartesian enterprise is about the perfection of man.
Funny you mention that. I was thinking about the edge case of the last survivor of a nuclear war. But then it's just a contingent fact that other minds don't exist. We're not in the original situation of worrying about apparent minds that might be p-zombie or fantasies.
Another point: I'm guessing that some people imagine the solipsist as living in a world like ours that 'may' be just his fantasy, and they imagine him (problematically, in my view ) being able to make claims that are wrong or right about this fantasy world.
This is the 'veil of ideas' I had in mind. It only becomes plausible in the first place from because one person can sees the eyes of another point at an object, weaving both into a single explanatory/causal nexus. Then the trick happens. The sense organs are implicitly made their own product as we pretend we can start intelligibly behind this veil.
You stipulated Descartes cogito, so it follows from the original French (1637) Discourse on Method, Pt 4.....
... je pense, donc je suis....
.......and subsequently in First Principles 1. 7., 1644.....
....So this item of knowledgeIm thinking, so I existis the first and most certain thing to occur to anyone who philosophizes in an orderly way....
....that ol Rene intended it to be understood cogito relates to individuals, even if speaking in general regarding all individuals. So...it is I think, not we think. You know.....philosophizing in an orderly way.
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Quoting Pie
I do so appeal, but only insofar as it is at least counterproductive, and at most utterly absurd, to suppose we are not of the same intellectual character. In whatever form that character manifests, does nothing to detract from the fact that there is one, and it is common to all of us. Otherwise, one relinquishes his claim to being human.
That being said, philosophizing in an orderly way completely destroys.....
Quoting Pie
.....insofar as the external world in toto is the ground of my experience, which makes explicit the external world beyond my experience, is no less the external world, but only of my possible experience. What the external world beyond my experience, and thereby the possible experience of it, can be....is a reasonable hypothesis. Conditioned by changes in time, not the permanence in reality.
Philosophizing in an orderly way reduces our minimal epistemic commitment to.....granting that for which the negation is impossible. Which, ironically enough, gets us right back to Descartes philosophy that everybody hates.
But then, in an orderly way is a subjective judgement, so, there is that.......(sigh)
That's one the main points I've been making, friend ! Reason is one and universal or we are just babbling here.
This is what needs 'fixing.' We rational ones ought not care at all what lil' Rene smarty pants figures out just for himself.
I persist, sir. It's 'we think' or you and I babble.
Your view is so close to mine. Do you not see that ?
I'm bothering to fix Descartes because I think he was almost saying the right thing. He didn't emphasize what was implicit...that reason and language (norms for applying concepts) transcend his little ghost driving his little machine from up in its pineal gland. They must. Or the whole thing's ghost babble.
I hope this is relevant.
I once started a thread called "You don't need to read philosophy to be a philosopher." Turns out I was at least partly wrong. You may not need to read books, but you at least need to watch videos.
Philosopher Fredrick Copleston was interviewed by Brian Magee on Schopenhauer's philosophy. He said that Schopenhauer carried on Kant's examination of the unknowable thing-in-itself, nomena. Schopenhauer wrote that there is no way we can directly experience noumena. He qualified that somewhat by saying that the only place we can approach such an experience, though partially and imperfectly, is through our personal experience of ourselves - each of our "phosphorescently present," "infinitely intimate" personal experience of ourselves.
Yes, indeed. I think Schop called it an X and decided it was Will (if memory serves.) I liked Schop for lots of his scaffolding, not so much for this particular theory, except as poetry or myth perhaps.
This 'veil of ideas' has proved to be a seductive metaphor indeed.
I take the metaphor to be that we look through lens, never at reality directly. Taken in a limited sense, this is not problematic. The nearsighted person sees the tree differently than the eagle. But taken absolutely, we cast an unspeakable void behind the lens...and then find ourselves debating if we can be sure that other people aren't p-zombies or illusions...
I think a good understanding of the Philosophical Investigations and especially On Certainty should dispel one of the notion that our internal states of mind, [our] thoughts and sensations are things which we know directly. We simply have these experiences. In other words, we dont learn that we have these experiences, as if we discover them through some investigation.
To know means to have an understanding of what it means to know, and what it means to not know in a given context. Otherwise, we could infer that someone knows based on their claim that they know. So, how would a doubt arise in this context? The very act of doubting shows a particular state of mind (shows that it exists). If you cant doubt someones claim to knowledge, then you cant know that it is knowledge. Its not a matter of knowing at all, no more than I know Im having a pain in my foot, as I scream out holding my foot, which is bleeding profusely.
The act of knowing is not a private matter, which is what this quote implies. I know based on my direct experience with my inner self. As if knowing is directly connected with some inner thing. This is an easy mistake to make. Its a confusion between my subjective certainty and objective certainty (knowledge). Its as if we equate feeling certain with being objectively certain, or knowing. They are not the same, but they are often confused.
Yes. I tried to present a version of a picture that holds many philosophers captive even now. I understand Sellars to have shown that even sensation words, used often in noninferential reports, still get their meaning from claims linked to those reports inferentially. For instance, I might explain running the red light in terms of thinking the light was green. I might explain Joe's reports of flashes of white light by the pressure he's putting on his eyes with his finger.
I also agree that knowing involves understanding how 'know' ought to be applied. A thermometer can reliably 'answer' a simple question, but it's not making a claim in the space of reasons.
Regardless of what brings about the situation where only one mind exists (it could be that there were other minds but they died, or it could be that only one mind ever came into being), the claim that just one mind exists (or that only one mind can be known to exist) is coherent, contrary to your objection.
Quoting Pie
I don't know why you think it would be a fantasy. Experiences are real, not made up.
I think this may be part of where you're going wrong. I can talk about things that don't exist. Even if atheism is true I can talk about God, and if I claim that God exists then my claim is false. Even if solipsism is true I can talk about an external material world, and if I claim that such an external material world exists then my claim is false. Even if solipsism is true I can talk about other minds, and if I claim that other minds exist then my claim is false.
I can also make true or false claims about my experiences. I can feel pain and yet claim not to feel pain. So even claims about my "fantasy" world are truth-apt.
Quoting Michael
As a categorical statement, the conclusion does not follow from the antecedent hypotheticals.
Circular fiat. :roll:
Without all of the premises being true, your argument is not a sound one, sir. And, as pointed out, even (your) reliance on logic normative rationality presupposes selves-other-than-yourself (i.e. discursive community), which shows that your apologia, like "the solipsist's claim" itself (as well as Descartes' "Cogito"), is a performative contradiction.
It's not supposed to be a sound argument. It's supposed to show that the claim "only one mind exists" is coherent.
Quoting 180 Proof
I don't understand this. Classical logic (and others) doesn't depend on there being other people. Even if I'm the last (or first) man alive, the various axioms and rules of inference hold. The law of noncontradiction doesn't just fade away in a nuclear holocaust where I'm the only survivor.
As I've pointed out, your argument doesn't even do that.
Non sequitur; I neither claimed nor implied as much. Your / solipsist's reliance on logic, however, presupposes others. Read what I actually wrote again.
Quoting Pie
I can be right or wrong about the world all by myself, thank you very much. So, no, I don't see it, sorry.
If...
I guess I'll grant you this edge case (that there can be a last rational agent in the universe), but this is a mere crumb.
My primary point is that epistemological solipsism is incoherent as a claim about other minds in general, namely that they ought not just assume that such other minds exist.
I take this as a claim about the norms that apply to all rational agents, a claim about a world that transcends the claimant, one he could be wrong about. 'One ought not assume that there are others.'
Or, put it this way, 'one ought not assume there are norms.' Do norms make sense without a world in the most general sense to govern, potential/general agents to which they apply ?
I refer just to the usual, practical distinction of what seemed to be the case and what is the case. 'I thought I paid the rent, but that was just a dream.'
I don't see what grip we can give 'real' or 'experience' is there is just one blob of world-truth-experience-dream-reality-self. I can of course imagine a sole survivor. So the issue is the status of rationality, whether it makes sense for an inside without an outside to proclaim and justify norms.
Yes, granted. That's not the issue.
:up:
I don't dispute that rational agents can make true or false claims. Much of what we do (so runs the theory) is keep score on the noninferential claims and inferences of others. But I don't think the notion of a private language makes sense, so you are running pirated software, sir. Do we not bark and hiss in these inherited norm-governed, sound patterns known as English ?
I think this leans on psychologism, as if logic were mere facts about human cognition and not normative, a thesis that can only be established if it is false.
We've found where the boot pinches. The essence of my position is that rationality is normative, implicitly about a world beyond the philosopher. "One (in general, as a rational agent) ought not to assume that there is a world one can be wrong about...or a world beyond one to which norms apply."
The epistemological solipsist says that one cannot know that there are other minds, he doesn't say anything about what one should or should not assume.
I can't know that I won't die tomorrow, but I'm going to assume and live as if I won't.
In fact, assumptions entail skepticism. If I knew something then it wouldn't be an assumption.
This is a non sequitur. Even if the solipsist's "reliance" on logic presupposes others (which you have yet to explain), this "perfomative contradition" doesn't refute their argument. I live as if I won't die tomorrow, but I don't know that I won't die tomorrow. The solipsist can argue as if there are other minds, and still claim that he doesn't know that there are other minds.
Quoting 180 Proof
So you think that it's incoherent for a single mind to be the last survivor? Either everybody dies or at least two don't? Or conversely, when the first mind(s) came into being, you think it incoherent to suggest that the first mind was alone? It must have at least been a pair?
These seem like unreasonable claims. If the number of minds is finite then some cardinal number n is the number of minds. I don't see why it would be coherent for n to be 2 but incoherent for n to be 1.
Nice ... On that point, I yield. :sad:
Who is this one ? Is this not the issue ? Is he saying that he cannot know ? Or that it's the nature (psychological) of other minds that they can't know ? Or that it's irrational or unjustified (normative rationality) for such an other mind to claim to know ?
Given the context, I think the last option makes most sense. But both of the last two seem problematic, with the first being irrelevant.
He's saying that knowledge of other minds is impossible. Therefore, he cannot know that there are other minds, and if there are other minds then these other minds cannot know that there are other minds.
How is this any different to saying that knowledge of anything is impossible?
It's different in that it doesn't make such a claim? I don't understand your question. If I claim that knowledge of the distant future is impossible am I saying that knowledge of anything is impossible?
The problem is when the solipsist tells me that I can't know there's a world beyond me.
I think we are neglecting the 'external world' theme, which I see as just important.
ES claims that it's irrational to assume that one can be irrational, wrong to assume there's something one can be wrong about (an 'external world' as a target of claims.)
I mean why pick it out? Do we have epistemological hat-denial, where I make the claim that we can't have knowledge of hats?
'Other minds' has been picked out as a thing we can't have knowledge of, but the case you're presenting just seems to be a generic case against knowledge of any sort.
To which the counter argument would be that you've misunderstood the meaning of the word 'knowledge', since we use it quite felicitously on a daily basis.
Not really. The solipsist can claim to know that he exists, that he is happy, that he sees a tree, that the square root of four is two, that modus ponens is a valid rule of inference, and that knowledge of other minds is impossible.
Well, not everybody buys into such a Wittgensteinian interpretation of language. Many philosophers think that there is some greater substance to the meaning of such words as "knowledge", "truth", "good", "other minds", etc. than just conventional use.
It doesn't. It just claims that knowledge of other minds is impossible. I honestly don't know how you keep inferring the above from that.
The "external world" as you mean here isn't what the solipsist (or idealist) means.
So it claims that I can't know there are other minds ?
Quoting Michael
How do you take external ? We don't want to be too specific, in my view. One need not have a settled metaphysical view on the nature of our world (that it's really X or actually Y).
Normative of psychological claim ? And isn't this a claim about something beyond him ? The world is such that, if there are other rational minds, then those minds will have a nature such that ....(or be bound to rational norms such that ...)
For me the issue is that the claimant wants to bind or makes a normative claim on all possible rational agents, the rational agent as such. This claim seems to transcend the claimant, seems to be aimed beyond his experience.
Maths and logic are something "other" than the subject, but I don't think it right to think of them as being "external" (in the sense that the material world is said to be external).
We can make claims about things that don't exist. p ? q is true even if p is false.
The only thing that matters to this discussion is the truth or falsity of the proposition "knowledge of other minds is impossible". Forget the solipsist and his actions. They're irrelevant. You can't argue against the claim that it is wrong to kill by pointing out that the person who made the claim is a murderer.
My post wasn't really about what the solipsist can claim. I mean, I can claim to be the king of Spain.
We're engaged in philosophy here and like any other game, there has to be rules of engagement. Otherwise we're just writing unconnected posts at each other, which seems pointless.
So, although vague, we examine claims made in this game using rules like 'coherence', 'consistency', etc.
The point is that the reasons the solipsist uses to argue against other minds apply to those other claims equally, so they cannot make those claims and remain consistent, which is (vaguely) one of the rules.
Of course they can make them anyway, but they'll just no longer be playing the game of 'making a rational argument', they'll be playing some other game.
Quoting Pie
Yep, it doth not make any sense at all!
But it starts to get a bit silly, for now we have a subject who 'is' all of mathematics, and the epistemological solipsist is therefore only making normative (?) claims [s]about him[/s] which are himself ?
In case it helps, I don't think 'material' is easy to cash. I intentionally generalize 'external' to 'something I can be wrong about' to minimize my presuppositions and maximize the generality of my conclusions.
Consider the thread's theme, our minimal epistemic commitment. We can argue endlessly about the nature of the 'space' we share, about the meaning of 'material' and 'mental,' but it doesn't make sense to say we can't be right or wrong, for that is to say that it's wrong to think we can be wrong.
The point is that it's a claim about norms, about constraints on possible rational agents. It's a thesis about the world, that it contains such norms.
To me the issue is just as much about an 'external' world.
ES says : It's wrong to assume there is something we can be wrong about.
And, again, nobody is making such a claim.
Not it doesn't. It says that knowledge of other minds (and an external world) is impossible.
That's a false dichotomy. It's not a case of either a) mathematical realism is true or b) I am maths.
I know...so what do you make of external world ? How do you cash that out ? It's 'outside' the self, different from the self.
Quoting Michael
In what sense, then, are they external ?
Quoting Michael
We don't need Platonism. That would be one of those claims that could be right or wrong. It suffices to see that math is normative, that a proof that [math] \sqrt{2} [/math] is irrational is also a proof that all mathematicians as such ought to regard it as such, recognizing a fact about the real number system, independent of any metaphysical theory of something 'behind' this system.
And root 2 is irrational even if Im the only man alive. Its even irrational even if nobody is alive.
Quoting Pie
I dont think external is the right word. Its independent in the sense that we can be wrong when we do maths, but mathematical entities dont have some external existence in the way that atoms or Platonic ideas are said to have. It is this external existence that solipsism denies. It doesnt deny truth-aptness.
I basically agree, and it seems to be a truth about something external to our epistemological solipsist, for it doesn't die with him or need him around. And "we can't know there's a world" seems to be about the world in the same way.
Quoting Michael
This is problematic. You are retreating into figurative uses (putting them in quotes ) of the words I'm asking you to clarify in the first place. Independent of the subject might as well be 'external,' unless the spatial metaphor is important.
Not everyone says that atoms are "external." Consider Mach's weird views, which are adjacent to solipsism. Platonism is widely challenged. The main point is that those setting beliefs together rationally understand that they can be right or wrong.
That I make empirical mistakes relative to the eternal world says nothing about a private language nor about whatever normative reports....or even internal rationalizing excuses.....I may offer following from such mistakes.
Quoting Pie
Sure we do, but it is never necessary that we do, with respect to the aforementioned minimally rational intelligible epistemic situations.
Quoting Pie
Quoting Pie
Smarty Pants paved the way for disappearing the problem. Even if a good god or a bad demon rather than a merely foolish solipsist is the source of your apparent deception, there is recourse, and you are it. Nothing more than, hey!! I jumped the shark, so can you!!!
Cant blame the late Renaissance or Enlightenment folks that removed the deistic impediment to human intellectualism, for the nonsense of the post-moderns who, in fancying their supposed progress, did nothing more than install a different one.
Do you believe in some kind of wordless angelic 'language' of 'pure' concept, unsoiled by the filthy outerworld ? I suggest that no particular language is necessary but that some language is.
Quoting Mww
I love the moderns, and I think some of them embraced the veil-of-ideas paradigm for good reasons, such as to escape 'inner lights' and innate ideas that 'proved God.' As long as sensations reports are kept in the same causal nexus as worldly objects affecting sense organs, there's no problem. But it's absurd to doubt the sense organs and our separate human bodies then babble about a 'self' that's made only of babble and sensations.
'Experience' is a ghost story (See Sellars' 'myth of the given.')
I think theres a difference between saying that something has an independent existence and saying that the truth of something is independent of what I say or believe. A mathematical antirealist will reject the independent existence of mathematical entities but can accept that we can get maths wrong.
The solipsist argues that we cannot know that anything exists independently. He doesnt argue that claims dont have a truth-value. In fact, the solipsist can accept that there is a material world and there are other minds is true; he just argues that it cannot be known to be true.
He or she will say that such entities don't exist independently...which is true of or a fact about what world ? And for who ? Our world, for us, those jointly subject to the same rational-conceptual norms. And it's not just those who are contingently alive now, but also for those who might be here in the future or in a hypothetical scenario.
To me this is a claim about the very world that supposedly cannot be known to exist. 'All rational minds ought to assent to the logical/normative impossibility of their proving that there is something beyond them.' If epistemological solipsism is aimed at elucidating a self-transcending concept, what's it doing ? "If others exist, they are bound by such norms." This is a statement about the 'external' world, a claim that should be valid after the death of the philosopher making it. It doesn't matter if the others exist. The (external) world is such that, if there are rational agents in it, they are bound to acknowledge that they cannot be certain that there is a world.
The 'external' world here is basically a public concept or set of concepts, about which claims are made.
My point has been that the minimal version of the world (of the 'external') as opposed to the self (the 'internal') is something we can be wrong about.
Is the 'self' understood as something that can believe things, make claims, or not ?
Does it makes sense, in your view, for a mathematical realist to deny an external world ?
Are the limitations of knowledge part of the (external) world ?
Indeed, sir, indeed. But claiming that X doesn't exist is a claim about something, about our 'external' 'world.' What is the target of the claim 'God doesn't exist' or 'the world doesn't exist'? What's it about ? If not our shared situation ? Which I claim is fundamental, however underspecified..for the rest is absurdity. "It is not the case that we are in a shared situation. (Our shared situation fails to include a shared situation.)" It's the nature of concepts and rationality to do target this 'space of reasons.' ES makes the claim about our shared situation that we should not assume we are in a shared situation.
Again, it doesnt say that we shouldnt assume that there are other minds. It says that we cannot know that there are other minds.
If you accept that we can only ever assume that there are other minds then you accept the solipsists skepticism.
Quoting Pie
Its a claim about X. I dont understand this external world concept of yours. It doesnt seem to be anything like what is usually meant, which concerns the existence of objects that are independent of my mind. Thats the kind of external world that solipsism says cannot be known.
What.....you dont? That cant be right; youve already admitted to it, calling it one and universal.
Quoting Pie
Yes it is, as are all such abstracted explanatory devices regarding proposed speculative methodologies. So what? Must it be said, then, that there is no such thing as experience, simply because talking about it removes it from its occurrence which isnt and cant be talked about?
Even if there isnt, as the cognitive neurobiologists are wont to insist, still we are predisposed by our very nature to call out by name whatever it is that seems to be happening in us, not to judge an obtained internal understanding, but iff such internal speculative mechanism is accompanied by a wish to promote an explanation of that judgement.
Nice try !
I do believe that norms govern our claims, yes indeed, but neither of us is foolish enough to infer from this that the dove can fly in a vacuum. The possibility of translation from German to English need not force us to take 'meaning' to have (its only) existence in some ghost, 'behind' the signifiers.
The ghost story remark was meant to emphasize that it's superfluous. Inferences have assertions as inputs and assertions as outputs. To be sure, James can assert that "the stoplight was red," but the ghostly redness-in-itself does not appear in our reasoning, except as a sort of phlogiston.
I'm asking you make some kind of sense of this 'independent of my mind' that's better than 'something I can be wrong about, something I can misunderstand or perceive.' A philosopher making claims about knowledge in general and not just his knowledge seems to be talking about public concepts, external to his understanding of them.
As for what it means for something to exist, presumably it means what it means when the non-solipsist claims that mind-independent objects and other minds can be known to exist.
If you think the very notion of existence isnt clear then I dont think you can claim that other minds exist and so you must be quiet on the matter.
This sounds a bit like 'if you think a thesis is incoherent or ambiguous, it's your fault! ' Please recall that I've offered a theory of the minimal epistemic situation. It does not make sense for a philosopher to assert, as a philosopher, that there isn't necessarily a world to make an assertions about, for this assertion is either about a world (ours) or just fundamentally confused.
Recall also that we discussed the ambiguity of 'exist' earlier. Do you not recall ?
Quoting Pie
Quoting Michael
It's seems absurd to forbid philosophers the further clarification of fundamental concepts. Indeed, your solpisist makes claims about (further clarifies) the limitations of (the concepts) knowledge and reason...which either exceed him into an 'external' world, lending his claims their force...or fail to concern us, because he's not talking about you and me and any potential rational agent ?
So as I said, if you think that the meaning of exists first needs to be explained then you must be quiet on the debate between solipsism and non-solipsism.
But it seems to me that you want the solipsist to explain what it means to exist whilst simultaneously claiming that other minds and mind-independent objects can be known to exist, which is clearly special pleading.
Whats superfluous? Experience? The remark? Doesnt matter; Im not interested in the superfluous.
Quoting Pie
What norms; what is a norm and from whence do they arise? And for that in which you merely believe, what governance can there be?
That's a good question, and, as you might expect, philosophers haven't forgot to speculate. But as philosophers, their speculations are already subject to the very norms they make explicit. Our minimal situation seems to include, along with us of course, shared conceptual and inferential norms (language/logic) and a 'world' or shared situation we can be wrong and therefore right about.
I'm on a Brandom kick lately, and I'm hoping you'll enjoy what he makes/takes of Kant.
[quote = Brandom]
As I understand his work, Kants most basic idea, the axis around which all his thought turns, is that what distinguishes exercises of judgment and intentional agency from the performances of merely natural creatures is that judgments and actions are subject to distinctive kinds of normative assessment. Judgments and actions are things we are in a distinctive sense responsible for. They are a kind of commitment we undertake. Kant understands judging and acting as applying rules, concepts, that determine what the subject becomes committed to and responsible for by applying them. Applying concepts theoretically in judgment and practically in action binds the concept user, commits her, makes her responsible, by opening her up to normative assessment according to the rules she has made herself subject to.
The responsibility one undertakes by applying a concept is a task responsibility: a commitment to do something. On the theoretical side, what one is committed to doing, what one becomes liable to assessment as to ones success at doing, is integrating ones judgments into a whole that exhibits a distinctive kind of unity: the synthetic unity of apperception. It is a systematic, rational unity, dynamically created and sustained by drawing inferential consequences from and finding reasons for ones judgments, and rejecting commitments incompatible with those one has undertaken. Apperceiving, the characteristically sapient sort of awareness, is discursive (that is, conceptual) awareness. For it consists in integrating judgments into a unity structured by relations of what judgments provide reasons for and against what others. And those rational relations among judgments are determined by the rules, that is the concepts, one binds oneself by in making the judgments. Each new episode of experience, paradigmatically the making of a perceptual judgment, requires integration into, and hence transformation of the antecedent constellation of commitments. New incompatibilities can arise, which must be dealt with critically by rejecting or modifying prior commitments. New joint consequences can ensue, which must be acknowledged or rejected. The process by which the whole evolves and develops systematically is a paradigmatically rational one, structured by the rhythm of inhalation or amplification by acknowledging new commitments and extracting new consequences, and exhalation or criticism by rejecting or adjusting old commitments in the light of their rational relations to the new ones.
...
But the minimal unit of responsibility is the judgment. It is judgments, not concepts, that one can invest ones authority in, commit oneself to, by integrating them into an evolving constellation that exhibits the rational synthetic unity of apperception. Accordingly, in a radical break with his predecessors, Kant takes judgments to be the minimal units of awareness and experience. Concepts are to be understood analytically, as functions of judgmentthat is, in terms of the contribution they make to judgeable contents. To be candidates for synthesis into a system exhibiting the rational unity characteristic of apperception, judgments must stand to one another in relations of material consequence and incompatibility. So if one is to understand judging also as the application of concepts, the first question one must ask about the contents of those concepts how the use of one or another concept affects those rational relations among the judgeable contents that result. This methodological inversion is commitment to the explanatory primacy of the propositional.
...
I read Hegel as taking over from Kant commitment both to a normative account of conceptual doings, and to a broadly pragmatist approach to understanding the contents of our cognitive and practical commitments in terms of what we are doing in undertaking those commitments. I see him as taking an important step toward naturalizing the picture of conceptual norms by taking those norms to be instituted by public social recognitive practices. Further, Hegel tells a story about how the very same practice of rational integration of commitments undertaken by applying concepts that is the synthesis at once of recognized and recognizing individual subjects and of their recognitive communities,
is at the same time the historical process by which the norms that articulate the contents of the concepts applied are instituted, determined, and developed. He calls that on-going social, historical process experience (Erfahrung), and no longer sees it as taking place principally between the ears of an individual.
[/quote]
https://sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Texts/From_German_Idealism_to_American_Pragmat.pdf
I grant the possibility of the last actual rational agent, dying of radiation poisoning, deciding not to bother writing a sad poem about his self-annihilating species.
I don't expect philosophers to ever finish clarifying what it means for something to exists. I have suggested that a minimal, neutral understanding of 'external world' is that which (the) 'I' can be wrong about, and this is basically the appearance-reality distinction. The epistemological solipsist says that it is wrong for any rational agent to assume this dichotomy,for things might be different than they appear. Despite appearances, there might 'really' only be appearances.
I take it that you don't accept my 'translation,' but what else could a solipsist be denying of any interest ? Isn't the appearance distinction itself the target ? And is it not absurd to be cautious about this distinction ? Be careful ! One can be wrong about the possibility of being wrong...
:up:
Not bad. Dont agree with much of it, but then....I aint got no letters after my name, so what ta hell do I know.
Some time later: its actually pretty good. First I read only the posted excerpt, hence the disagreement, only later the whole link, which helps the context of the post.
:up:
Nice to hear !
Is it not inconsistent for the solipsist to acknowledge that they share an understanding of what it means to exist with another person/mind, and to claim that other minds can't be known to exist? How can the solipsist acknowledge that a shared meaning can be known if they don't acknowledge a shared world with other minds can be known? The solipsist's position appears to be contradictory, saying: I can know that we both understand the meaning of the word "exist", but I cannot know that there is any "we" who both understand this meaning.
:up:
The 'we' is 'deeper' or more 'primordial' than the (linguistic) 'I.'
I doubt that. If we look to non-human animals, and perhaps babies and people with certain developmental disabilities like autism, I suspect that they have a greater difficulty in understanding that other animals/people have minds and thoughts and feelings like their own. The notion of "other minds" requires a degree of inference that comes after self-recognition. To understand that other people have minds you must first understand that you have a mind.
What hypocrisy? I don't see why the non-solipsist would not "demand it of himself", or admit to a known shared understanding of the word "exist". But if the solipsist admits to it, then...see my previous post.
Yet, it was an I from which that notion of primordial is given. If the other way around, how come we is at the top of the second column of pronouns, while I is at the top of the first?
If the (linguistic) I, what qualifies the we? What is a linguistic I anyway?
The non-solipsist says "it is possible to know that other minds and mind-independent objects exist".
The solipsist replies with "it is impossible to know that other minds and mind-independent objects exist".
The non-solipsist then says "but what does it mean to exist"?
Why is the non-solipsist asking that? Presumably he knows, or has some notion of, what it means to exist which is why he claims that it is possible to know that other minds and mind-independent objects exist.
This is a deep issue, so I don't pretend to have some final theory. That said, as a start, I think it's incoherent to deny that concepts are public, for how or why should I trust that I understand what you 'intend' 'behind' the concepts 'privately'?
Language is tribal software. I don't deny that the individual organism is necessary as a host for this software. It's dance we do together. The 'I' is (roughly) a token used for scorekeeping.
I grant that we can both interpret terms so that either of us is right.
I've tried to argue that epistemological solipsism is 'toothless' if understood in a way that makes it (more) coherent. It's either a claim about knowledge as a pubic, self-transcending concept (a feature of the external world it pretends to doubt), or it's just about (paradoxical) private concepts.
I doubt that in turn. To the degree that this is an empirical question, I defer to more serious students. But my prejudice is that differentiation is learned.
A typical example of this is a teenager finally getting around to questioning tribal norms. Another is just the philosopher who builds on and even turns against the common sense that makes him intelligible to his fellows in the first place...such as a reasonable theory of sense organs and sensations being extended to doubting the existence of those very organs, promoting meanwhile those sensations to the given and indubitable itself.
"Concepts are private !"
"What's that you say ? I can only guess that you mean that the telephones on Neptune are made with real butter. "
If that were the case then we wouldn't have to ask people what they mean. We wouldn't have to ask them to clarify their position. There wouldn't be misunderstanding. Why did you ask me what it means to exist if existence is a public concept?
How did you ask me why I asked you what it means to exist if existence isn't a public concept?
Quoting Michael
If no one is wrong, no one is right. There wouldn't be misunderstanding. Just screeching primates who could no longer coordinate their doings in the world.
Quoting Michael
Concepts need not be perfectly definite. Roughly speaking, they are patterns in what we do. We perform concepts. Away from practical life, such performances are less rote. It's not so clear which inferences ought to be licensed in terms of them. Tentative, exploratory uses compete for wider assimilation.
It's as if you are saying there is no law unless the law is so perfectly unambiguous and final that it does not require continuing interpretation and adjustment.
I asked you because the inner workings of your mind are private and I need to you publicly express them.
So why did you ask me?
Quoting Pie
I don't quite know what you mean here (quite nicely proving my point).
What I'm trying to get at is this: let's say that you and I agree to meet up at the gym. I then have to cancel. We then never realize that we misunderstood which gym we were to meet up at; I thought the one on the east side of town, you thought the one on the west.
There's stuff that goes on in our head that is never made public.
The 'important' part of my mind, as I see it, is the thinking, linguistic part. 'My' version of green doesn't matter, but my use of 'green' does. Even my secret use of 'green' in private inferences is manifest eventually in public assertions and the way I react to others' talk.
What is it that makes an individual valuable and interesting to the tribe ?
I don't object to the ordinary version of privacy. But note that both of us can be explained in terms of unexpressed beliefs attributed to us. Our driving or not to the gym is explained by our beliefs. They are in the same explanatory nexus. (We could also explain beliefs by sense organs being exposed to photons.) Private meanings (metaphysically private meanings, hidden from public concepts) do not make sense for this role...or any role, except as a mystified X marks the not, for there can be nothing to say about them.)
So whether or not someone is lying or being honest isn't important? It doesn't matter what they think or feel, only what they say and do? That seems quite psychopathic if I'm being honest. I don't just want my partner to "go through the motions" of a loving relationship.
Quoting Pie
Doesn't matter to what? To the practicalities of everyday life? Sure. But the philosophical questions regarding perception and ethics and epistemology and realism and so on can still be worth discussing, and likely have true and false answers.
At the moment your position amounts to saying that solipsism might be true but doesn't affect how I (or we) live.
What happens if we drop the assumption that concepts are something immaterial ? And along with that the whole material/immaterial distinction ? We can grant a sort of continuum. We don't have to pretend to forget ordinary uses of 'material' or 'mental.' But, as philosophers, we can try to consider the evolution of this distinction as an historical contingency, as a metaphor that became so dominant in a conversation that questioning it was literally unintelligible at first, except by a few weirdos. I take Wittgenstein, Hegel, Derrida, and others to have questioned it, shown its flaws.
Of course it matters. We can both speak with the vulgar and think with the wise.
Note please that what people think is still linguistic.
Perhaps 'feeling is first,' but justification is going to involve reports or ascription of feelings, typically used as the premises or conclusions of inferences. 'John's mad because Sally lost the car keys again.'
You should of course infer then that you misunderstand me. Read charitably, friend. Please.
No, sir, that's not at all the point. I like philosophy. Practicality be damned ! But getting to the truth about these concepts requires considering their origin in practical life. We need bread and government before the priests have the leisure to talk about talk about talk.
The point is that the thinking, feeling part is private. Such thoughts and feelings might be expressed, but the private thoughts and feelings nonetheless exist and are prior to the public expression.
And given the concept of lying, we cannot know that someone's public expressions are an accurate representation of their private thoughts and feelings. We often assume it, and might even often be correct, but skepticism is warranted all the same. From the understanding that we cannot know what someone's private thoughts and feelings are there can then be the understanding that we cannot know that someone has private thoughts and feelings. They might just be a philosophical zombie, engaging in the same public behaviour and making the same public expressions as a thinking, feeling person.
This is just the ghost story that Ryle mostly demolishes...the idea that the self is hidden behind everything it does. To be sure, we sometimes 'talk to ourselves.' No one denies this. But recall that it was an accomplishment once to read silently. We come at the end of a long development, and we are tempted to put the result at the beginning.
Your view (implicitly) takes lying as prototypical rather than anomalous, features the "seems" operator as if it came before simple assertion. I think Sellars has shown that this doesn't work, that 'seems that P' depends on the grammar of the simpler assertion 'P.'
:up:
Recall that I said earlier that the P-zombie is the shadow cast by the ghost story. What, sir, is this mysterious X that separates the convincing P-zombie from the genuine article?
"There is a there there," I swear I swear I swear. "I know it but I cannot say." We are reduced to a minimal mysticism, a negative theology of [s]Being.[/s]
The use of them is public, as a means to an end. The origin of them cannot be public, iff they are the product of an individual intelligence.
That named things are given to us as a matter of course, from the day we individually began learning what things are, obscures the fact that, originally, nothing already named was ever given to anybody.
The implications were obvious to the ancients, merely uncomfortable for the post-moderns, who would prefer to be told this thing is a basketball, rather than think about how it came to be one.
Quoting Pie
You first need to grasp the categorical error of conjoining what you understand, with what I intend, upon which is found trust has nothing to do with it. You understand, or you do not, regardless of what I intend, which reduces to similarities in experience, and nothing more, insofar as the mechanisms of our respective intelligences are sufficiently similar, if not exactly identical, to each other.
Quoting Pie
Yes, they do, otherwise, logical systems, and therefore human knowledge, is impossible. How the concept is represented.....the name assigned to it......may be contingent, but that which is named, is perfectly definite. If this were not the case, then a square circle could be an object of experience.
Quoting Pie
There is no thinking linguistic part; there is the thinking part, and the linguistic part, from which arises the old adage, think before you speak, or, for that which you dont know you cannot speak.
Were so inescapably surrounded by people, that weve forgotten ourselves.
This was my point in the other thread - since this thread seem to be talking about the same thing.
The private thoughts and feelings and perceptual sensations that might go unexpressed, or that can be contrary to the expression (i.e in the case of lying).
Again consider the example of a genuine loving relationship compared to a convincing act.
But I dispute very much that they are the product of an individual intelligence. Even the idea of an individual intelligence is problematic. I don't mean that a man can't write poetry in the woods. I mean that language is tribal software that an individual keeps with him.
Quoting Mww
A strange claim ! The pomo cool kids love genealogies. Also, FWIW, much of my thinking in this thread was inspired by the self-contradiction I found in pomo. "Communication is impossible." "There is no truth." Blah blah self-subversion.
Quoting Mww
I consider this an extravagant claim. P, else squares are circular ! I'm no stranger to pure math, and I'll grant that, in this tiny corner of human life, we have relatively exact concepts. But that's because we've invented a beautiful formal game, a realm atypically subject to precise law, a generalization of chess.
I'm begging you!
As I see it, and I don't intend rudeness, you merely assert the old, 'theological' tale of Forms. I don't claim that thoughts and language are strictly equivalent. We can postulate nonlinguistic thoughts as we can postulate neutrinos...and see whether the theory is useful. But 'self-evident' non-linguistic thoughts sounds like mysticism. We might as well claim to hear the voice of God directly...or witness the flicker of an Inner Light.
The concept of 'proof' already drags in a world of folks who share a language in which they can make claims which might be wrong.
Don't expect us to prove you aren't dreaming. That's a different issue. People are known to dream. I vaguely remember asking myself in a dream once whether I was dreaming.
I totally get that, but that's a tangent, an exception. By your account, I can't know that my wife loves me. For her 'true' self is 'behind' all the nice things she does. Is it not better to say that we are constituted by all we do and say ? That the self is what the body does and says and the way its tracked by a community for honesty, decency, creativity, productivity ? What is objectivity? Why reason toward consensus at all ? Defer to the better reason ? Is philosophy not anti-self inasmuch as the self is the stubborn, selfish, superstitious child with no regard for the good of the tribe?
The concept of 'proof' already drags in a world of folks who share a language in which they can make claims which might be wrong.
You did it again. Obviously your belief is that no solipsistic one-mind existence could ever contain the illusion of a language, communication and conversations. I think we've hit the nub of it. You see I do think it's possible for it ALL to be an illusion, and you haven't proven it impossible.
I grant that people sometimes dream without knowing they are dreaming. But is that really all you wanted ?
Obviously the dude in the dream who tells you you're awake is part of the dream. Grammatically, tautologically, trivially.
And by an exception you mean a coherent example of there being a private mind behind the public expression that cannot be known? Then what left is there to say? The case is proved.
I don't think you mean to do it (and maybe I'm guilty of it as well), but it's way too easy to jump back and forth between common sense and serious philosophy. Indeed, Ryle's big point is that the absurd ghost story is parasitic on common sense.
No one disputes the ordinary gab about secret thoughts or the possibility of a hustler accessing Mrs. Robinson's bank account by feigning desire. But you seem to think you can go from this triviality to doubting the world in which your point makes sense (and from which it derives its sense) in the first place.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ryle/#EpiSemCom
No, because I think and feel and see things that I never talk about or act on. I dream, I imagine, I lie, I ignore, etc.
And I assume that there are others to whom this is also the case. Although the solipsist will argue that I cannot know this.
Sure, this plays a role, but the more you emphasize it...the less it should and can interest us as philosophers. Or as the public. Even lovers share their worlds. "You can never understand my secret heart." Very well then. Next topic.
:up:
Why not worry though that you have cancer or were adopted or will be attacked by a Venusian cloudshark in the shower three weeks from now ?
FWIW, I got to my position by contemplating semantics, what us being able to talk implies.
What I think is actually going on is that youve been convinced by something like Wittgensteins account of how language is learned and that you think such an account of learning doesnt work with my position. Which I think should just show the limitations of Wittgensteins account, or at least with your interpretation of its implications.
If anything his argument is a refutation of the causal theory of reference rather than its intended target of metaphysical realism.
Pray tell how we might evaluate from the outside whether Harry loved Sally, having met her? Or how 'love' could have a public meaning if its referent is infinitely private.
Wittgenstein is one of many. I even tend to invoke Sellars, Ryle, and Brandom lately, all too dry and careful in their exposition to be taken as a guru or taken as taken as a guru. I take Wittgenstein to have showed how broken some of our philosophical thinking about mind was, without being all that interested in building a positive theory. Sellars put on his gloves and went to work, building one of the more coherent stories I'm aware of, managing to include both marriages, explanations, and electrons in the same tale, all hanging together reasonably well.
We can't, hence skepticism. Knowledge of private matters is impossible.
Quoting Pie
I don't know how it does. How does the word "future" refer to something that is necessarily inaccessible? We're just clever people that are somehow able to do clever things with language.
This is not an empirical or a metaphysical discovery. It's a language trap.
"We each contain a box that no one can look into but ourselves."
"Why do you say that ?"
"I see it in my box."
At a minimum, it plays a role in inferences.
"John expected a big check, so he paid for the drinks."
I don't understand what you mean. The phrases "the future" and "your private thoughts" each refer to something that is necessarily inaccessible to me. What's the problem?
Both play a role in inferences. Both have meaning. I don't have to know your private thoughts to reason about private thoughts in general. The norms for their application are not hidden.
It's as if you are amazed that humans can speak of ignorance, of the unknown as such, yet your solipsist makes claims about ignorance.
The norms for the application of the phrases aren't hidden but the referents are hidden. I can talk about the future and your private thoughts but it is impossible for me to know what will happen in the future and what your private thoughts are.
So, again, what's the problem?
If you leap from the boring, typical talk of private thoughts to the 'official theory' of the ghost, then the only difference between a P-Zombie and a real boy is ... nothing at all.
We must pretend to admit that possibility that Hitler actually loved the Jews. Or that the guy who beats and rapes his wife 'actually' loves her, because the truth is behind or other than any evidence we can summon for this or that judgment. Along these lines, concepts 'really' mean ...whatever I in my secret heart think they mean. So all the Cantor cranks are right, because they can't grok lamestream infinity or rather 'their' infinity is a round square.
"He ate children for breakfast, but let's not rule out that he was a kind man in the privacy of his soul. " Or "he spent his life trying to square the circle, but it may be he was a mathematical genius." And so on. Our actual criteria, the ones we live by, depend upon public performance. It seems better to understand the self as constituted by its doings and not hidden behind the mostly public self as a ghost with spectral and secret feelings and thoughts which are detached from our actual, practical explanatory nexus.
"Kind" and "smart" and "loving" are either in or out of the causal nexus. I think you are trying to have it both ways.
"I'd call it a diary, bro, because it's just your private thoughts."
"I'm putting this money away for a rainy day, because you never know (the future)."
The difference is that the p-zombie doesn't have the private thoughts. You keep switching between accepting that there are such things to then not? I don't understand it.
Quoting Pie
Yes, it is possible. But a case can be made that it is incredibly unlikely because one's private thoughts are what motivate behaviour. So as I said before (either in this or another thread), the only suitable argument against solipsism is to claim that something without a mind wouldn't behave in this way. Trying to argue against the coherency of solipsism is just wrong.
I don't see where the last question enters into it. I was criticising your point or assumption that the solipsist and non-solipsist have a shared understanding (of the word "exist", or anything you please) despite the fact that the solipsist claims it is impossible to know that other minds exist. If the solipsist does not accept that other minds can be known to exist, then neither can they accept that they have a shared understanding with any other minds.
Such is your prerogative. So what are they a product of, or, from where do they originate?
Quoting Pie
How would it be problematic, if the individual writing of poetry presupposes the individual intelligence of the writer? Is the writer using an intelligence that does not belong to him alone? Perhaps it is the case that writing poetry requires no intelligence, which makes the individuality of it, irrelevant.
Quoting Pie
.....would seem to follow from your individual intelligence. Conditioned by others, maybe, but the thinking, as such, must be your own else in saying my thinking, you contradict yourself.
Quoting Pie
Relatively exact. Cant be both simultaneously. Up is relative to down, but up and down are each exactly representative of their part in a logical relation.
Quoting Pie
Metaphysics carries a less pejorative implication, but, suit yourself.
What would you count as evidence for a private thought ?
Is a private thought just something we might quietly 'say' to ourselves ? Is it something that, in principle, could be detected and translated by a sufficiently advanced neuroscientist from Venus ?
Or is it on another 'plane' entirely, untouched and untouchable by the 'non-mental'?
I don't know, hence the hard problem of consciousness.
I can speculate, but why go down this road ? It's like a theist asking how the world got here if God didn't create it. I don't need to have a settled theory to find 'they got here as if by magic' unsatisfying.
"Well if they didn't magically appear, then how did they get here, smarty pants ?"
"I'm not sure. What are the prominent theories among those who specialize on this issue?"
Quoting Mww
In 2020, the analogy is simple; bodies are hardware and 'minds' are software. Humans are animals with exquisitely developed 'second natures.' We 'grow' cultures in our doings together. Part of our culture is the partial autonomy of the individual. This makes great sense. We need pioneers, specialists. If I can't take the software away from the tribe for a little while, the 'tentacles' or 'antennae' of the tribe aren't as long. It's 'fingers' aren't as specialized.
Quoting Mww
To be sure, you can't get much more exact than a single bit of information, but mathematics is a bit more than that. The completeness axiom is disturbing. It says that every nonempty subset of real numbers with an upper bound has a least upper bound. So it 'creates' or guarantees the existence of a
number in terms of a set of such numbers. Or, starting from below if you prefer :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impredicativity
Quoting Mww
That's just it. It's not about suiting myself, because I'm not writing poetry in the woods. I'm trying to do philosophy, settle beliefs rationally. I'm arguing against certain traditional theories of basic situation. There's more to life than philosophy, but that's the game we're here for, no?
I claim that the hard problem of consciousness is a language trap. What's a operational definition of consciousness ? What's a criterion for its presence in the first place ? If 'mysterions' want to hide it 'behind' every typical reason we have for ascribing it, they dig the very hole they complain about. "Well, a P-Zombie could do that too." The unjustified and absurd assumption is that there is the 'same' thing we all know 'directly.' If it's private, we can never know if we all mean the same thing by "conscious."
I can think of a number and not tell you or anyone about it. It is impossible for you to know what number I am thinking of, or even that I am thinking of a number.
I don't know what else to tell you. This really is a self-evident fact. If your understanding of language and the world denies this very fact then your understanding of language and the world is wrong.
That's a silly objection...as if anyone disputes that individuals make claims, as if I didn't share a Brandom quote about the self as something like a set of claims that ought to cohere. You pretend that I contradict myself, supporting my point, hoping to discredit me in the light of this coherence norm.
The 'scorekeeping' notion of rationality features us as all keeping one another relatively honest.
But is it possible, in principle, for timetravelling scientists from Neptune to figure it out with scanners ? With 99.875% accuracy over 100000 trials ?
In other words, that's a time-bound empirical claim. At the moment, it's implausible. We aren't aware of the technology for that. But I don't believe in some radical separation of mystical mind stuff and equally mystical (complementary) pure matter.
I don't know. That depends on how the hard problem of consciousness is solved. If your only argument against solipsism is that some hypothetical people with a sufficiently advanced technology might have the means to detect either mental phenomena or the physical phenomena which necessarily gives rise to mental phenomena then this doesn't refute the claim that you, right now, cannot know what number I am thinking of, or that I am thinking of a number at all. But I still might be thinking of a number.
Concepts are public ? I can use them incorrectly ? But what I mean, behind my rashly chosen words, is correct. You can't see into my box, but I give you my word. I do mean the right thing.
Who would bother to refute it ? Who doubts it ? The issue is whether you take the essence of mind to be so radically immaterial and apart from the causal nexus that it's impossible, even in principle, to discover that number.
It's impossible in principle to discover what is happening outside our light cone, but (at least according to the realist) stuff is happening outside our light cone.
It's impossible according to one of our best empirical theories. That's not the kind of 'absolute' (grammatical, metaphysical ) 'in principle' I'm talking about.
The X that, when sprinkled on a P-Zombie, produces a real boy....has no definition at all. It's an empty concept, basically mystical. Or am I wrong ?
"You know it directly. It's unmediated. It's just there. Pure presence. "
"But how do I know if my 'pure presence' is your 'pure presence' ? Don't signs get their meaning from their positions relative to other signs and what people do ?"
"No. Meaning is present. It is given directly. You know it better than anything else. Words are just conventional tags on the Eternal Forms and Sensations which shine in the darkness...except not for P-Zombies."
And the same could be true of solipsism. It is an empirical fact that knowledge of other minds is impossible, in the same way that it is an empirical fact that knowledge of events outside our light cone is impossible. Or it could be that knowledge of other minds is only impossible in practice, since we lack the technology to detect mental phenomena.
I'm not saying that knowledge of other minds is grammatically impossible. I don't even know what this means. Whereas you seem to be trying to argue that there being other minds is grammatically necessary, which is absurd. You can't define things into existence. It doesn't work with God and it doesn't work here either.
Alrighty then.....
Sorry if I offended you. I did not intend to be rude. I tend to drink too much coffee.
As Saussure might saw, each individual language user carries around some imperfect copy of the language system with him. I can survive in the woods for months perhaps, because I have a few great survival books with me, which concentrate centuries of human trial and error.
This individual body is trained into the language system, which includes developing the skill of making a slew of reliable noninferential reports such as "this banana is brown" or "that coffee is hot." This body is also taught to use the public, norm-governed token 'I' and to be 'responsible' for itself. "One is one around here." "Your hand smacked your sister, so your body stands in the corner." From this POV, it's a mistake to think the self or ego is just given, and this mistake is part of the general approach of building the world from the first-person POV, forgetting its reliance on the third-person POV. We would never dream up a veil-of-ideas if we didn't see sense-organs and medium-sized-dry-goods causally connected in a social world first.
This seems problematic.
How does one prove impossibility empirically ?
Does this mean that our best psychological theories don't currently allow for ESP ? Confirmation of consciousness ?
Does empirical science work with concepts without an operational definition ? Presumably psychologists like to know what it is they are talking about ? @Isaac
If there is such a definition, it's bye bye hard problem. If there isn't and can't be, then that's precisely the grammatical impossibility I've been talking about.
Note that grammatical impossibility is just logical impossibility minus the superstitious sheen that takes Forms or something like them for granted, as if tautologies were deep truths about the universe and not just community speech norms.
Psychologists always know what they're talking about!
Note that rational is important here. We rational ones need not assume (cannot assume?) that insanity or irrationality it impossible. For me the issue is what a philosopher can afford to doubt coherently, which is to say without lapsing into irrationalism and dropping the ideal or possibility of rationality itself.
The philosopher is an individual among others, offering and justifying claims presumably because others are possibly unaware of either those claims as possible truths or of their justifications as possibly warranting their adoption as beliefs. The philosopher as such (and this is especially manifest on a text-only site) exists largely 'as' this set of beliefs and justifications. Such online philosophers are, to some degree, whatever they take themselves to be. Their self-presentation...their public claims...are not secondary or superfluous in our making sense of them...but rather what we have to go on. Just as important, however, is how and whether that philosopher assimilates criticism, whether they abandon refuted beliefs or loosen their grip on beliefs with absurd implications.
Crucially, I can be incoherent when asserting P without you having to be incoherent in asserting P, because I may have a personal commitment/belief Q such P & Q => Z, where Z is something I cannot believe (something absurd, for instance, or something contrary another of my commitments.) You, however, having not adopted Q, do not obviously implicitly commit yourself to the absurdity or outrage Z. Or perhaps you have adopted Q, but Z does not contradict any of your beliefs.
The big point here is that we have to track the rationality of the players individually. Nothing forbids our individually constructing extravagant, differing systems of conjectures --so long as they are cohere.
Thinking is public. The negation of this statement is unintelligible. But claims that the 'we' has priority over the (linguistic) 'I' are easily misunderstood to deny a central role for (the concept or the performance of) the self.
[quote=Brandom]
One of Hegels big ideas is that creatures with a self-conception are the subjects of developmental processes that exhibit a distinctive structure. Call a creature essentially self-conscious if what it is for itself, its self-conception, is an essential element of what it is in itself. How something that is essentially self-conscious appears to itself is part of what it really is. This is not to say that it really is just however it appears to itself to be. For all that the definition of an essentially self-conscious being say what such a one is in itself may diverge radically from what it is for itself. It may not in fact be what it takes itself to be. But if it does mistake itself, if its self-conception is in error, that mistake is still an essential feature of what it really is. In this sense, essentially self-conscious creatures are (partially) self-constituting creatures. Their self-regarding attitudes are efficacious in a distinctive way.
For such a being can change what it is in itself by changing what it is for itself. To say of an essentially self-conscious being that what it is for itself is an essential element of what it is in itself entails that an alteration in self-conception carries with it an alteration in the self of which it is a conception. Essentially self-conscious creatures accordingly enjoy the possibility of a distinctive kind of self-transformation: making themselves be different by taking themselves to be different. Insofar as such a difference in what the essentially self-conscious creature is in itself is then reflected in a further difference in what it is for itself perhaps just by in some way acknowledging that it has changed the original change in self-conception can trigger a cascade. That process whereby what the thing is in itself and what it is for itself reciprocally and sequentially influence one another might or might not converge to a stable equilibrium of self and conception of self.
Because what they are in themselves is at any point the outcome of such a developmental process depending on their attitudes, essentially self-conscious beings do not have natures, they have histories. Or, put differently, it is their nature to have not just a past, but a history: a sequence of partially self-constituting self-transformations, mediated at every stage by their self-conceptions, and culminating in their being what they currently are. The only unchanging essence they exhibit is to have what they are in themselves partly determined at every stage by what they are for themselves. Understanding what they are requires looking retrospectively at the process of sequential reciprocal influences of what they at each stage were for themselves and what they at each stage were in themselves, by which they came to be what they now are.
Rehearsing such a historical narrative (Hegels Wiederholung) is a distinctive way of understanding oneself as an essentially historical, because essentially self-conscious, sort of being. To be for oneself a historical being is to constitute oneself as in oneself a special kind of being: a self-consciously historical being. Making explicit to oneself this crucial structural aspect of the metaphysical kind of being one always implicitly has been as essentially self-conscious is itself a structural self-transformation: the achievement of a new kind of self-consciousness.
[/quote]
https://sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Texts/SDR%2009%20Brandom%20071389.pdf
:up:
https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/voices.uchicago.edu/dist/f/106/files/2011/04/Autonomy-and-Community.pdf
https://brinkley.blog/2019/05/15/the-autonomy-of-reason/
Quoting Pie
.....it does not deprive the speculative philosopher of his just title to be the sole depositor of a science which benefits the public without its knowledge. This can never become popular and, indeed, has no occasion to be so; for finespun arguments in favour of useful truths make just as little impression on the public mind as the equally subtle objections brought against these truths. On the other hand, since both inevitably force themselves on every man who rises to the height of speculation, it becomes (a) manifest duty (...) to enter upon a thorough investigation of the rights of speculative reason and, thus, to prevent the scandal which metaphysical controversies are sure, sooner or later, to cause even to the masses. It is only by criticism that metaphysicians (and, as such, theologians too) can be saved from these controversies and from the consequent perversion of their doctrines. Criticism alone can strike a blow at the root of materialism, fatalism, atheism, free-thinking, fanaticism, and superstition, which are universally injuriousas well as of idealism and scepticism, which (....) can scarcely pass over to the public.....
(CPR, Bxxxvi)
Quoting Pie
Having the books with you and surviving, does not prove you could not have survived if you didnt. Which immediately transforms the implied causal necessity of language into a mere conditional possibility. Cum hoc ergo proper hoc doncha know......
And by including the relational qualifier perhaps, only turns the cum hoc mistake into a post hoc mistake. I did survive because of having the books becomes if I do survive it will be because of having the books. Neither condition is necessarily true in itself, conditioned by merely having the books.
All Im saying is hopefully there are formal pro-language arguments less susceptible to self-destruction than that one. And the first thing required for that, is a commonality of presuppositions, which is missing in your proposition. You have the books and your presupposition is that you read them and transform the contents into the physical means for your survival. I, in merely reading your proposition, have no such presupposition, insofar as Im concerned, you have the books, and although as books their primary purpose is to be read, I have no ground to presuppose you actually did read them merely from the fact you have them and perhaps survived.
Your thinking, given its presuppositions, and my thinking absent those presuppositions, makes explicit each ends in a private determination belonging to an individual subject, which in turn contradicts the notion that.....
Quoting Pie
The negation of that statement, re:, thinking is not public, or, no thinking is public, is both logically sustainable and intelligible, given the axiomatic principle thought (the process of thinking) is cognition** by means of conceptions
(CPR A69/B94, my parenthetical; **knowledge in Kemp Smith, 1929, cognition in Guyer/Wood, 1988)
The totality of private thinking, the compendium of all subjectively determinable cognitions by means of conceptions, does not authorize thinking as being more public than private. Even if it is true that everybody thinks, in itself such is no justification for the claim that thinking is grounded by communal necessity. Communication of private thinking by means of language, on the other hand, requires reciprocity, which in turn requires a more than singular private subjectivity, but mere expression of private thinking, also by means of language, requires neither reciprocity nor community and only a singular private subjectivity. It follows that absent both communication and expression of private thinking, language has no absolutely necessary function whatsoever.
.....if some of the moderns have thought to enlarge its domain by introducing psychological discussions on the mental faculties (...), or anthropological discussions on (cognitive or personal) prejudices, their causes and remedies: this attempt, on the part of these authors, only shows their ignorance of the peculiar nature of logical science. We do not enlarge but disfigure the sciences when we lose sight of their respective limits and allow them to run into one another....
(CPR Bvii)
Quoting Pie
Yeah.....no. The idea is, upon reception of your shoes untied!!, the body immediately proceeds to go through the motions of rectifying the implication of the received language. The body first yanks the strings to gather the requisite material for tying, crosses one string over the other, etc., etc., etc. But none of those actions are contained in the given language.
So the argument is that all those actions were trained into the body at some anterior time, given by their own anterior language reception. Now arises the absurdity that the body can never go through the motions of tying shoes if it hadnt been trained in a language system.
A body could never have a shoe to tie if not for a language system that trains it as to what a shoe is?
(A protective covering on the foot is only possible because of language training?)
A body could never have a foot to cover if not for a language system that trains it as to what a foot is?
(That one thing is to be contained within another thing can only happen because of language training?)
.....and through the series of deductive inferences, at last is concluded the absolute necessity that even given all the conditionals dependent on language training, there is nothing whatsoever in any of the training, that assembles the manifold content of it into an activity perfectly satisfying the training. There just isnt enough language to be trained by, nor precise enough language quality to promise strict compliance with, to facilitate the exchange of every empirical occasion with another. Something else is requisite, antecedent to and more powerful than language, such that tying a shoe is accomplished, but after three or four steps, that damn tying is not again undone, or that tying a shoe is accomplished but not with that by which the tying can never be undone.
Where in the language game is it that the guy, howsoever trained in the language system for shoe-tying, walks around with them untied, simply because he cant be bothered with his training.
The links concerning Kant are full of holes, as the respective original texts would show.
If nothing else, I appreciate being given the subject matter and thereby the opportunity, to talk too much. As you say: mass quantities of my sole remaining vice......exceptionally good coffee.
:up:
Excellent. Let the game continue then.
Quoting Mww
Irrelevant, it seems to me. The point is that of course the individual is an individual. Once out of nature, trained in the lingo of the tribe, I can wander lonely as a cloud, keeping a journal. The grand interior monologue of Hamlet is impossible without its humble beginnings in a child's making a poo poo in his mouth. Or is it a boo boo ?
Here's the real Descartes: https://historyofyesterday.com/dina-sanichar-the-feral-child-who-was-raised-by-wolves-32dec8e22e8d
Quoting Mww
Concepts are public. For the negation might as well mean the toast on Pluto is diaphanous. This does not mean that something some would call 'thinking' wasn't going on in wolf-boy Descartes above. Consider also Sellars' Jones. We could invent 'thoughts' as postulated, explanatory entities. But the concepts that matter, as a minimal epistemic given, are public. The rest is a mute soliisism.
Quoting Mww
It arises for you perhaps, but I never made such a claim, nor should such a claim be inferred from what I did say. Is it so hard to grasp what's almost trivial ? That children learn language, including the proper use of 'I' and 'my' and 'yours' and 'hers' and 'shoes' as bodies in a world together, handling the objects they speak about, encouraged and discouraged in their usage ? Am I to think that you imagine the possibility of a Kant without some rich culture that birth and trained him, gave him the very languages of his art ?
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-9752.12407
But who said the world or learning was all just language ? It's my understanding that the brain is the most complex worldly object we humans are aware of (until we finally build that moon-sized supercomputer.) The human hand isn't bad either. My focus on language is simply that of an epistemologist trying to figure out a philosopher's minimum commitment.
Was it not clear that my point was about language acquisition ? I oppose the view that (most) concepts are 'pre-given', as if existing fixed and eternal somewhere, graven on the soul or hid away in Heaven, apart from the doings of the animals who perform and refine them simultaneously. That we can arrange utterances into functional equivalence classes (translate 'hello', etc. ) need not force upon us obscure doctrines of spiritual entities or 'hard problems' that may be merely language traps.
Quoting Mww
To me that's no issue, for Kant (he won't like this) is a mere means here. Brandom has his motives for presenting his own philosophy in historical terms (themselves presented historically).
We learn from others, and it feels like cheating not to credit those who first got the piece of progress down, and we forgive them their absurdities as we hope our descendants will forgive us ours.
:up:
Same here !
Not much point, really. I am he who unabashedly rises to the level of speculation, you are not, by your own admission.
Quoting Pie
Nahhhh. Here is the real Descartes:
https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/descartes1637.pdf;
https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1008&context=philosophy#page50
https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/descartes1644part1.pdf.
Quoting Pie
As with thinking, no, they are not. They may have public exhibition, but they are not themselves public.
Quoting Pie
....which merely asks how inventions are possible. The common mistake of confounding the thing with the use of the thing. For those bent on misappropriation of logical systems, it is unintelligible that the thing IS its use.
Quoting Pie
......but in each case of the claims you do make, what I say may follow without violating the LNC. Not for refutation of, but as expansion on, such claims.
From the fact that 'existence' is a public word it does not follow that existence is a public concept. We each have our own range of associations, intuitive feelings and idiosyncratic understandings of the meaning of the word. What is a concept if it is not understood? And who understands concepts? Individuals.
It seems we are similarly constituted beings, so why would we not share, in the sense of, at a minimum, "find understandable", the understandings others have of concepts? You seem to be conflating understanding, which is of the individual, and private in the sense that no one will know what it is unless she tells them, and use, which is obviously public.
There is a certain limited number of ways of imagining what existence could be. and it seems to me plausible that that is likely to be the determining factor that establishes the range of publicly manifested interpretations, and maybe some others we haven't heard of because those who imagined existence that way didn't speak about it (make it public). Your claims seem to be deploying a very strange interpretation of "public", although it is not one I haven't heard before. :wink:
On what grounds do you claims a private understanding of 'exists'?
I get the distinction you're making between our mental activity (which is private) and our language use (which is not), but then you make this jump to saying that some of that private mental activity is privately packaged and delineated as being the private mental activity which constitutes the private concept 'exists'.
How would you know that? Or even suspect that? I can't see any link at all from saying that mental activity is private to saying that the categorisation of mental activity is private.
I have my own understanding of what it means and you won't know what that is unless I tell you. Of course in telling you my understanding will be made public, even if only to a limited audience
Quoting Isaac
I haven't said that categorization is necessarily private, although of course it can be. Initially it is individuals who categorize things in the ways imaginable, and other individuals who follow such seminal categorization, and thus render them conventional. Note, seminal understandings have already become public once the seminal understanding has been communicated for the first time.
.
Do you? How would you know?
Quoting Janus
OK, but you said that we have a private understanding of the concept 'exists' and your argument seems to be that mental activity is private. That's insufficient. To show that we have a private concept of 'exists' you need to show not only that mental activity is private, but that the grouping of some of that mental activity into a clear concept called 'existence' is also private.
Don't you agree that mental activity can be thought of as private in the sense that I can be thinking or imagining a whole plethora of things and not tell anyone about it. Take that sentence I just wrote; it's perhaps plausible that that precise sentence has never previously been uttered. And in that case, that precise thought, formulated in precisely the way it is in that sentence would be private. I'm not denying that much, or at least some, of our thinking relies on a public language to make it possible. But the fact that a private(ly formulated) language is impossible doesn't logically entail that experience,judgement, thought and understanding are public (although as I said, of course they can be).
We don't formulate sentences that way. We can actually see sentence formation and have a pretty good idea of the way it works from various cases of patients with damages to the language processing areas of the brain. You don't form a sentence first, then say it. It doesn't exist in your mind prior to being spoken (or going through the motions). It's created as it's being said. The idea that it pre-exists is a post hoc construction of you memory.
The point being that the privacy of mental events is hinging on a preliminary scientific understanding (no ESP, no thought-sharing spookiness, mental events take place in brains, etc). So having gone that far, it's incoherent to then deny further scientific understanding about how those brain actually process thoughts.
What you think is happening in your mental events is not what's actually happening. It's a post hoc construction made up after the event. That's a scientific fact (insofar as such facts are obtainable). If you're going to ignore it and say that phenomenologically, mental vents just are how they seem to you to be, then you cannot simultaneously say that they are private. It sometimes 'seems to me' as if my wife knows what I'm thinking. It sometimes 'seems to me' as if a crowd are of one mind on a matter. It's only my scientific understanding of how brains work which tells me that cannot actually be the case.
So it seems either mental events are private because of the way brains work (in which case we don't have private 'concepts' floating about in there), or we say that mental events are only loosely correlated with brains, in which case there's no reason at all to think they're private.
I haven't said that sentences are preformulated; that has nothing to do with what I have been arguing. I've been arguing that categories are initially created by individuals who first imagine them, and that they are , in that sense, private until communicated publicly.
And the evidence you have for this is?
In any case, it doesn't affect the argument that the judgement that constitutes the category was initially private, and remained so until made public. And even then a new idea has to command wide assent in order to become canonized and part of the public store of judgements, even if only among a significantly sizeable groups. How large would the group have to be to be considered significant, do you think?
I don't think so, no. It can be created collaboratively by process of trial and error. I can merely live my life, including using words to get others to do things, and then observe the categories which emerge from those interactions.
Quoting Janus
Insofar as any given moment in time, I'll grant this, but judgements are also not things which float about neatly packaged in the brain, they are moment to moment inferences updated, often as frequently as every few milliseconds. If asked, if engaged in, say, philosophy, a social practice, you'll try to construct a meaningful report of those judgements that your other community will understand. You'll use social meanings to do that. Prior to this exercise, you had no unified 'judgement' only a continually changing flow of updating inferences.
Quoting Janus
From birth, I think two. Just another person, but obviously, for ethical reasons no-one's been able to test that.
After a while though, one is sufficient because we can engage the social imagination and use the public concepts we imagine are available, even if they aren't.
Let's call concepts that people think with privately, according to your or Sellars' Jones' theory. Let's call koncepts what philosophers use to talk and make claims. Then koncepts are public and what actually matters here.
I suggest that it's not confusion but simply a matter of replacing a broken theory with something better. Instead of what's essentially a theology of mystic Forms, we develop the insight that meaning is use, talking instead of second nature and norms.
I'm not so sure about your logic there, but I don't need that assumption. I hope at least a few people are enjoying their popcorn as you lecture me on the proper way to understand concepts, while insisting that they are private, that they mean whatever they look like to the little ghost in our pineal glands. Once you see it, the self-contradiction will be so glaring that you'll be amazed how cozy you were with it for so many years. Repent in sackcloth and ashes ! For you call black white and one zero. (Kidding.)
Quoting Janus
No one needs to dispute this. Just as some of us are nearsighted and colorblind and we don't see the world in the same way but do see the same world, there are also varying levels of mastery of using a concept, along with idiosyncratic uses that are sometimes adopted more widely.
I speculate that it's the very background theological bias I'm criticizing that's tempting my opponents to insist that concepts must be crystalline and perfectly definite to be public. That's like thinking the Charleston (the dance) is perfectly definite or that there's one exactly right way to perform a song.
This is a good point to stress. Our Robinson Crusoe Cartesians like to take a result as if it were the given itself. I may end up a taciturn Heraclitus too wise for the company of others, but I started as a baby who couldn't lift my neck and (presumably) without even a concept that I was this self as locus of responsibility, tracked for what becomes 'my' promise-keeping and the reliability of 'my' wolf-reporting.
Typically, some metaphysical version of 'private' is intended in these cases. I take it to be grammatical, in that it's, by definition, not empirically decidable. The arbitrarily convincing P-Zombie is ( by definition ) all science can ever touch with its scalpels and scanners. What we end up with is a mystified X, with no content save the thereness of the there itself. We are back to building shrines for tautologies.
From Ryle's SEP entry:
There seems to be this sense that because we can imagine a horse, the concept of a horse must be private (I needn't tell anyone what colour it is...shhh!)
But we cannot simply derive the concept of a horse. All we're doing in imagining one is rehearsing the various mental events which took place when we had a horse pointed out to us, and then experimentally changing abstracted properties (which we also had pointed out to us) like the colour or the shape.
But the point is, to paraphrase Wittgenstein, if we kept on, in isolation, repeating that rehearsal, making small errors each time, until our imagined horse looks remarkably like a hippopotamus, then we'd all agree that we'd got the concept wrong. What we're imagining is not a horse, it's a hippopotamus. So my imagination cannot be the concept 'horse', otherwise it couldn't be wrong. Something else has to actually be the concept. My imagination seeks to practice it, correcting its errors by reference to the actual concept in all its dynamic, ever-changing, public, glory.
Precisely. The trivial possibility of keeping a secret (which isn't always so easy, by the way) is radicalized into an quasi-mathematically NSA-proof beetle-box (infinitely encrypted, robust against the high-tech prying of the Neptunian secret police circa 4059.
Quoting Isaac
Exactly. The OP is about our minimal rational epistemic commitment. If words mean whatever we think they mean, we can't even begin to settle beliefs rationally.
Just as keeping a secret is radicalized into an inaccessible ghost as that alone which is given, so is the fact that mastery of a concept varies radicalized into an absurd essential privacy of concepts.
.
Perhaps elaborate ?
Wrong within the dream of the solipsism or wrong for any rational agent ? If the concepts he discusses do not transcend the epistemological solipsist (play the role of something external), then his claims seem to lose their status as genuinely philosophical.
I do not deny that madmen can fear they are caught in a dream. I dispute that the philosopher as such (willingly subject to the force of the [non-subjectively ] better reason) could coherently impugn the 'externality' of their own concepts, essentially asserting, if an epistemological solipsist, that it's wrong to assume we could be wrong.
If you're going to continue to argue against this strawman then there's no point in me continuing. The epistemological solipsist doesn't claim that no claim is truth-apt. How many times do I have to explain this?
What can truth-apt mean for a philosophical solipsist ? ( But we can drop if if you want.)
How can I make a statement that's true or false without something I can be right or wrong about ?
I can be wrong about things that don't exist. If I claim that God exists then my claim is false if God doesn't exist. If I claim that you have private thoughts and sensations then my claim is false if you don't have private thoughts and sensations. If I claim that mind-independent objects exist then my claim is false if mind-independent objects don't exist.
What is it that we could be wrong about, according to the skeptic (in this case the epistemological solipsist), who makes an assertion about us ?
Any thinking thing, whether there be just one thinking thing or two thinking things or seven billion thinking things.
Is this just the solipsist's conception of a thinking thing (a 'private concept,' if that makes sense) ? Or do his claims aim at truths about a concept that binds all rational agents ?
I claim that that concept itself is either external or not worth talking about. His statements about the concept are either truth-apt (and can thus be wrong) or not. If truth-apt, then external.
I have no idea what it means to say that a concept is external. Is the concept of a horse something that I can encounter and pick up?
FWIW, I don't think there's a perfectly 'right' answer here. We are clarifying concepts as we debate an edge case.
Why do you assume that the external is an object? It's just a spatial metaphor.
I've already suggested a 'safer' more neutral understanding of this metaphor.
Because that's the kind of external thing that the solipsist says cannot be known to exist. If you mean something else then you're not addressing the solipsist's claim.
Quoting Pie
Could you explain it without using a spatial metaphor?
Is it something you can be right or wrong about ? Can one be wrong about the square root of 2 ? Or whether a promise was made ? If not, why not ?
I've suggested that we look to the appearance/reality distinction that probably informs this issue in the first place. Reality plays the role of the 'external.' Appearance (the given, the internal) can deceive me, so I can mistake (have incorrect beliefs about) the external.
The skeptic seems to need this picture, this distinction, to get off the ground.
Yes. And one can be wrong about the square root of two even if one cannot know that other minds and mind-independent objects exist. Which is precisely why it is wrong to say that epistemological solipsism entails that no claim is truth-apt.
But note that I'm accusing the solipsist of conceptual incoherence, which is to say wrong in terms of the universal rational norms that bind the philosopher as such. The very notion of philosophy binds its participants to something self-transcending.
If I can't be wrong about the concept of knowledge, it's not external to me. If I can be wrong about the concept of knowledge, it is external to me. If I assert, in the name of reason, in its authority, that knowledge of the external is necessarily uncertain, I present knowledge that's intended to transcend me toward the very concepts that secure my role as philosopher. The madman can say it, but the philosopher cannot.
I can't prevent you from softening the meaning of 'external' to make your case. I just think that you simultaneously diminish the significance of the claim, as if the solipsist is merely denying a particular metaphysics of the external world (such as Epicurean atomism, or the 'reality' of everyday objects) --- as opposed to the external world itself.
I believe the square root of four is one. But it isn't, it's really two.
The belief is in my mind.
Where's the real fact?
But that soft externality is the kind of externality that the solipsist denies can be known. They dont deny knowledge of the metaphorical externality that you apply to such things as maths. The solipsist accepts that we can get maths wrong.
Its not anywhere. I reject mathematical Platonism.
So against what measure am I comparing my belief that the square root of four is one, in order that it is wrong?
To me the tricky part is that the solipsist is making claims about any rational agent, existence or not. Your counter might be that 'If X exists, then X has nature N,' but this is still a claim about what is possible and impossible in the world. It can be framed like this : It is this case that it's impossible that a rational agent both exists and is legitimately certain that ...
There is no measure. Its just either right or wrong.
Do you understand the difference between mathematical realism and mathematical formalism? The solipsist says that we cannot know that mind-independent mathematical entities (as per realism) exist. He doesnt say that we cannot get string manipulations wrong (as per formalism).
Yes. Its no different to saying no human has two heads which is true if Im the only human or if Im one of seven billion.
I disagree. The form is similar, but I claim that concepts are special. Consider the claim: Its no different to saying no human has two heads. It's a claim about norms that bind us both, that either transcends you or has no force.
How about no human can know the future. Thats true whether I am the only human or one of seven billion. The same with no human can know that another thinking thing exists. And the same with no human can know that mind-independent objects exist.
OK, so how do we know if not by comparing the wrong belief to the right one and finding it not to match?
Quoting Michael
I believe so, yes, though I'm far from expert on the matter. But I don't see how formalism rescues the solipsist.
I can manipulate the symbols assuming the square root of four is one. I can find some outcome from going so. How does that outcome show I'm wrong? Maybe it's the outcome I'm supposed to get from that operation.
How do you know which belief is right so which to use as a comparison? At the moment you seem to be arguing that any knowledge (of maths) is impossible?
Quoting Isaac
The point is that being wrong doesnt depend on the existence of mind-independent entities. We can get maths wrong even if mathematical realism is false. So the claim that the solipsists position that we cant know that mind-independent objects (or other minds) exist somehow entails that no claim is truth-apt is evidently wrong.
The one used by mathematicians is right. We just ask.
Not a course open to the solipsist.
Quoting Michael
I'm enquiring as to how. If not by some sort of comparison to the right answer, then by what means?
What....you never heard the expression thinking outside the box? What is a culture if not a box? Being in a culture and conditioned by it, does not necessitate being restricted to it.
Quoting Pie
......but theres nothing in that that says the philosophers minimum commitment has to be language, which implies youre focus is misplaced, or, being an epistemologist is not the proper discipline for figuring a philosophers minimum commitment. I would say a philosophers minimum commitment, is understanding. What can any philosopher accomplish if he understands nothing? Which means he must understand something, which means he must possess a fully functional faculty for understanding. As it so happens, a transcendental metaphysician is more adept at figuring a philosophers minimum commitment than an epistemologist, who actually is only interested in the philosophers minimum knowledge, which he could never determine anyway.
Quoting Pie
Pre-given carries a temporal implication. Pre-....what? Most are not pre-anything, arising spontaneously with initial perception of a given real object, but some are pre-cognition, according to one specific view. Pretty obvious, I should think. Conceptions refer to something represented by its object, but there are concepts that refer to something that does not have an object that represents it. Cause is a concept, but there is no representable cause object, but only objects represented as being caused or causal. Beauty is a concept, but there is no beauty object, only objects that are beautiful.
Quoting Pie
Nope....I musta missed it. My impression has been that youve merely presupposed it, at least for all intents and purposes. What was your point about language acquisition?
Quoting Pie
.....which implies the concepts used in private thought dont actually matter here. Thats fine, concepts are nothing but notions in a speculative theory with respect to human cognition. Something makes private thought possible, or, there is no such thing as private thought. Pick your own preferred bondage, right? Would you saw off the limb youre sitting on, by allowing that humans think, but find no authorization for allowing it?
Quoting Pie
Something better and broken theory are subjective judgements. Who says its better, and, better than what? And whats broken about some extant theory? The insight meaning is use just changes the location of use, from the internal, rational with respect to a system, to the external, empirical with respect to a language. Left out of the insight, and solving the riddle of possible human cognitive extravagances, is.....time. Doesnt matter that meaning is use, insofar as no use of any linguistic representation is prior to the concept to which it belongs.
Quoting Pie
So....you know what justice is because youve experience things that seem just or unjust to you? How does an experience of an unjust incident inform you of how it could be so, if you didnt already have an idea what form justice itself must have?
(Well, shucks, Mr. Bill. If youve seen enough injustice, you know what justice is, because it isnt that.)
It isnt that ad infinitum still doesnt tell you what it is, and if you are not informed as to what it is, you cannot explain why it seems otherwise. So the lackadaisically disinterested end up with, well, damned if I know. It just is, then go about their day kicking the cat or running over the trash barrel some fool left in the driveway.
There are plenty of unsolved problems in maths, e.g the Reimann hypothesIs. Are you saying that the Reimann hypothesis isnt truth-apt because it hasnt been solved? Or does its truth (or falsity) depend on mathematical realism? Or perhaps its true (or false) despite mathematicians not having solved it and despite mathematical realism not being the case?
Quoting Isaac
How what? How we can know that were wrong? Maybe we cant (a point in favour of skeptical positions like solipsism). But we dont need to know that were wrong to be wrong.
Is that an empirical claim ? Or a metaphysical claim ? If it's a metaphysical claim, it's a claim about the concepts knowledge and future, it seems to me.
I dont know. Does it matter? I dont need mind independent objects to exist to have the concept of numbers. I can be the last man alive and yet have the concept of whatever newly mutated monstrous plant emerges from the wasteland. This notion of yours that concepts depend on there being multiple thinking things or mind-independent objects is very wrong.
Although I still don't know how you account for the fact that there is the concept of private thoughts and sensations.
Of course. Clearly the box is extended by intellectual pioneers...and more literal pioneers who bring back moon rocks or deepsea lifeforms. Clearly concepts are extended, introduced. No one disputes the role of individuals in our 'open source' communal operating system (the language itself and the concepts we've adopted and mastered together.)
Quoting Mww
Your version of understanding, if we grant a nonlinguistic version of this in the first place, isn't enough. What sense can 'philosophy' have if no conversation is possible ? If no beliefs can be settled publicly and reasonably ? Understanding without language is pointless, unless you really are happy with some kind of paradoxically solipsistic or mute theory of rationality and science. Here we are, sir, trying to settle the way we ought to conceive the minimal epistemic situation, mostly in English, our jointly inherited and even largely-self-constituting software.
Quoting Mww
We settle it, the rational community as a whole. We make and defend claims, presenting candidate beliefs for the tribe. Our second-order tradition takes no claim or claimant to be sacred As Kant saw, reason is autonomous, one and universal, and we 'rational ones' (who acknowledge only reason(s) as an authority) hash it out, as you and I are doing here, playing our relatively tiny roles.
I claim that what Ryle calls the 'official story' is indeed broken, essentially passing on the (old) news that a strong case has been made a certain metaphysical tradition. 1781 was a very good year, but it was not the end of philosophical history.
Quoting Mww
I've mentioned quite a few issues already. I understand that folks think Wittgenstein is trying to steal their soul, so I'd recommend Ryle. I recall that you hate linguistic philosophy, but language is what you must make your case in. If you hide from this simple fact...the humans make a case for their beliefs in a shared language...then you seat yourself at the children's table. It's fine to postulate something like Platonic-forms, God-given Concepts, whatever...but a case must be made in the language we share, in the 'koncepts' we share. The rest is escapism, mysticism, diarykeeping....
Quoting Mww
Are you so sure that AI couldn't be train to predict with high accuracy whether the description of an action as unjust ? Does it have an idea ? Especially as translation software gets better, we should pull back on our theological certainties about our divine source. Or can kangaroos have their own kangaroo Kant, spelling out their eternal structure of kangaroo experience ?
We could actually talk about semantics if you want. The best story I've heard lately is inferentialism, which I'd call a structuralist approach to meaning. For instance,
https://sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Texts/Pragmatism_Inferentialism_and_Modality_i.pdf
It's true if enough mathematicians agree that's the way things will be. Otherwise they might say (of the proof) "Ah if 1+1=2, the the Reimann hypothesis is true...we'd rather 1+1 no longer =2 and the Reimann hypothesis be false" If they all (or mostly) agreed, then that's what maths would be. A person on their own could not possibly be wrong because they could just decide which it was to be (having discovered the proof for the Reimann hypothesis) and make either the hypothesis true, or the axioms on which the proof is based false. How would they decide which?
Quoting Michael
No, but you need to show that it's possible, to support a hypothesis that a solipsist can be wrong. You can't just declare they can and then when asked how say "don't know". If there's no plausible means by which they can be wrong, the rational conclusion is that they can't be wrong.
You're not asking for a plausible means by which they can be wrong. You're asking for a plausible means by which they can know that they're wrong. That's not the same thing.
The means by which they can be wrong is just being wrong. If they believe that the Reimann hypothesis is correct, but it isn't, then they're wrong. If they believe that the Reimann hypothesis is not correct, but it is, then they're wrong.
But you've not given an account of what it would mean to be wrong for a solipsist. It's not about them knowing.
I gave the example of comparing one's own belief to the state of the world as measure of being wrong (or one's own answer in maths to the right answer of the mathematicians). One needn't carry out the comparison. One could remain entirely in the dark about it. The fact remains that I've given an account of what it would mean to be wrong (that your answer doesn't match the right answer). What is the equivalent account for solipsism?
Believing that the Reimann hypothesis is correct, but it isn't. Or believing that God exists, but he doesn't. Or believing that there are other people with private thoughts or sensations, but there aren't. Or believing that the world will end in 10,000 years, but it won't.
Quoting Isaac
If it's not about knowing then why are you asking about measures?
I'm asking about the "...it isn't", "...he doesn't", "...it won't" parts. What do any of those propositions mean for a solipsist? How are they any different to the belief in the first place?
Quoting Michael
Because a difference in measure is a plausible account of what it means to be wrong. No one need check, or know that such a difference is the case. It's just that if there were such a difference, you'd be wrong. I'm asking for such an account for the solipsist.
I have no use for OLP, but I have no choice but to use language, iff I wish to make a case. As I said....or maybe I deleted because I decided not to make that case.....expression which requires only a singular subjectivity, or communication, which requires a plurality of subjectivities, are only possible through a medium that is not subjective.
Quoting Pie
It is enough for what it does; it is not enough for that which is beyond its power. My version of understanding represents the biggest wheel in the set of cognitive gears, nothing more, nothing less. It can do nothing by itself, but nothing can be done without it. Thats how systems work. Theoretically.
Quoting Pie
Yeah, well....in Kant, autonomy does not relate to universality, but causality, so whoever said Kant said, or meant, that, has merely suited himself to his own ends. And as you say, we are entitled to interpret, but we do not have license from that entitlement, to subvert.
Quoting Pie
No need. I just presented an opportunity for you to ask yourself a question. Shouldnt be any more difficult, or use any other faculties, than asking yourself what would be nice to have for dinner.
Quoting Isaac
I just don't understand your question at all. Consider the simple disquotational account of truth:
"God exists" is true iff God exists.
If the solipsist claims that God exists then he is wrong if God doesn't exist.
I don't understand why you think the solipsist's claim that knowledge of other minds and mind-independent objects is impossible entails that he can't be wrong (or right) about God's existence. There is literally no connection between these positions. So please, help me understand your reasoning, because there is none as far as I can see.
There are two sides to that expression. One is currently a proposition, but we're assuming that it is a proposition representing the belief of the solipsist. The other is what? Another belief of the solipsist?
Even if we abandon the assumption, we could say one is a proposition, the other is about what is the case. But even in this restricted definition, all you've demonstrated is that the solipsist could lie (say "God exists" when in fact God doesn't exist). That's not the same as being wrong.
A falsehood isn't a lie.
Exactly. But if the solipsist says "God exists" when God doesn't exist, then they are just lying, not telling a falsehood because God (and his existence) is entirely in their mind, and so saying "god exists" is giving a false report of the contents of their mind - lying.
No, they could honestly believe that God exists. They're just wrong if he doesn't.
How? If God is in their mind, how can they possibly believe one thing about him, when in fact another is the case. What would it mean for something in your mind to be the case, but for you not to believe it is (or vice versa)?
You'd have to separate the mind into two halves - that which holds what is the case, and that which holds beliefs about the other half (which can then be wrong).
But if that's the case then you've still got one half inferring hidden states. The very state of affairs the solipsist is using to deny the external world. So they'd have to deny the 'hidden half' too. Thus leaving them with no theory.
Why would God be in their mind?
Because all that exists is their mind, and so God must be in it.
The epistemological solipsist claims that we can't know that other minds and mind-independent objects exist. He doesn't claim that other minds and mind-independent objects don't exist. That would be ontological solipsism.
Yes, I understand that (primarily because you explained it earlier). But to claim we can't know that other minds and mind-independent objects exist, it must be plausible that they don't. Otherwise we can know. If it is implausible that X doesn't exist, this is one way we can know that X exists.
So if it is implausible that God is in your mind (because that would mean you couldn't be wrong...etc), then we can know that god cannot be just in your mind. We can rule out that option and so 'know' that what is the case must be one of the remaining options.
OK? And the solipsist is wrong he believes that God exists but God doesn't exist. What's the problem?
I thought I'd explained that. If it is implausible that things only exist in our minds, then we can know that mind-independent objects exist. They must, we've just concluded it's implausible that they don't.
If the solipsist agrees it is implausible that they cannot be wrong, and we also conclude that the only way they can be wrong is if there are mind-independent objects, then they 'know' there are mind-independent objects... to the extent anyone knows anything...
It is implausible that God exists in my mind, therefore I know that God exists independently of me.
Obviously this is wrong.
That doesn't follow. I don't need a mind-independent object to exist for me to be wrong when I claim that God exists.
No. It's implausible that if god exists he only exists in my mind therefore if god exists he must do so independently of me.
The only way out of mind-independent objects from there is that nothing exists.
Yes, but this doesn't entail that he knows that God exists.
So simply saying that if mind-independent objects and other minds exist then they do so independently of me doesn't entail that he knows that mind-independent objects and other minds exist.
We're going round in circles. We've just demonstrated that. If god (should he exist) only exists in your mind, then it is impossible for you to be wrong about his existence because you know your own mind.
If you don't know your own mind, then you cannot prove the existence of the part of your mind you don't know (and so it falls under the same bus as the external world - assumed not to exist and so can't form part of a theory about how the world is). So all we're left with is that I know my own mind, and god (if he exists) is in it. Thus I cannot be wrong about god's existence. I simply examine my mind. If he's there, he exists. If he isn't he doesn't. Since I must know my own mind (to be sure it exists) I cannot be wrong about its contents.
Quoting Isaac
No we haven't. We've demonstrated that a mind-independent object (specifically God) needs to exist for me to be right when I claim that God exists.
What mind-independent object needs to exist for me to be wrong? Obviously not God otherwise I wouldn't be wrong. Perhaps a tree? Why must a tree exist for me to be wrong about God existing? Or must God's non-existence exist? That makes no sense at all.
None. As I said, one way out is that nothing exists. I don't think solipsists make that claim though.
Barring that, you must know your own mind. that means you know both what's in it and what isn't Which means you know God isn't so you can't be wrong. If you say "god exists" you're just lying because you already know he's not in your mind - you know what is and isn't in your own mind.
As such, there must be mind-independent objects in order for you to be capable of being wrong about the existence of anything. Or... nothing actually exists.
Again, this makes no sense. The solipsist can claim that God exists, and that he is wrong if God doesn't exist. Nothing about this entails that the solipsist knows that God exists.
You're just restating your original claim, you're not addressing the argument.
1. We must know our own minds entirely - what is in them and what is not. If we don't then we cannot prove that part (the part we don't know about) actually exists. It must go exactly the same way as the external world, as it cannot be proven on exactly the same grounds.
2. If we know our own minds - what is in them and what isn't, and all that is the case is in our minds, then we cannot be wrong about anything being the case. all that is the case is in our minds and we know our own minds, so we know what is the case.
3. If the solipsist want to retain the ability to be wrong about what is the case then they must reject either 1 or 2.
Which point do you dispute?
The epistemological solipsist rejects the part that says "all that is the case is in our minds". They only say "all that can be known to exist is in our minds". I've made this clear several times now.
Yes, which reverts to my point made earlier. If the epistemological solipsist were to entertain 2, then they cannot be wrong. They want to be able to be wrong. therefore they must reject 2.
They do, that's why they're only an epistemological solipsist. I don't understand what you're trying to argue here.
2 says that all that is the case is in our minds. To reject 2 either some things which are the case are not in our minds (mind-independence), or nothing is the case (nothing exists).
:up:
This was basically the insight that inspired me to define the world (minimally) as that which a self can be wrong about. The concept of a self is hard to stabilize without such a non-self. A man trapped in a video who doesn't know what's around the next corner is in a world.
That's a false dichotomy. I've shown that with the example of God's existence. Under 2, whether or not God exists depends on my mind, which is false. But we don't then say that if God's existence depends on the existence of some mind-independent entity then God's non-existence depends on the existence of some mind-independent entity.
God's non-existence doesn't depend on the existence of anything.
Yeah. I went through that as well. You can answer that nothing exists. If you want to say that anything exists (and all that exists is on your mind) then you cannot be wrong.
The solipsist entertaining the notion that "all that exists is in my mind" cannot be wrong (in that scenario) about whether God exists. They would merely check the contents of their mind. If they find God, he exists, if they don't he doesn't.
The solipsist wants to retain being wrong, so they must reject that notion, therefore they do know it cannot be the case that "all that exists is in my mind", it must be one of the alternatives.
The only alternatives are that "something exists outside my mind", or "nothing exists"
That's wrong. See here.
They do know, because if scenario 1 is the case then they cannot be wrong (we must know the contents of our own minds, as they conceive them) they find not being wrong about anything implausible, so they must reject 1. Therefore 2 is the case.
Of course they can. If scenario 1 is the case then God doesn't exist and so their claim that God exists is false.
That non-subjective is the language we are sharing right now. Even our secret monologues occur in a public language.
Quoting Mww
I'll grant the possibility that you are right about Kant, but your mere assertion is worth no more than mine or Brandom's. The key point for me is not the force of Kant's reputation but the force of reason itself, which lends Kant whatever value or authority he himself has as a philosopher.
That said, I will defend the association of Kant with autonomy and not mere causality.
[quote = Kant]
Enlightenment is the human beings emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use ones own understanding [= reason] without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. Sapere aude! [Dare to be wise!] Have courage to make use of your own understanding [= reason]! is thus the motto of enlightenment.
It is requisite to reasons lawgiving that it should need to presuppose only itself, because a rule is objectively and universally valid only when it holds without the contingent, subjective conditions that distinguish one rational being from another.
...
Reason must subject itself to critique in all its undertakings, and cannot restrict the freedom of critique through any prohibition without damaging itself and drawing upon itself a disadvantageous suspicion. For there is nothing so important because of its utility, nothing so holy, that it may be exempted from this searching review and inspection, which knows no respect for persons [i.e. does not recognize any person as bearing more authority than any otherGW]. On this freedom rests the very existence of reason, which has no dictatorial authority, but whose claim is never anything more than the agreement of free citizens, each of whom must be able to express his reservations, indeed even his veto, without holding back. (A738f/B766f, translation slightly modified)
...
To make use of ones own reason means no more than to ask oneself, whenever one is supposed to assume something, whether one could find it feasible to make the ground or the rule on which one assumes it into a universal principle for the use of reason.
[N]ot even the slightest degree of wisdom can be poured into a man by others; rather he must bring it forth from himself. The precept for reaching it contains three leading maxims: (1) Think for oneself, (2) Think into the place of the other [person] (in communication with human beings), (3) Always think consistently with oneself.
[/quote]
Notice that the coherence norm is foregrounded in that last quote.
And here's a scholar summarizing:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-reason/#ReaArbEmpTru
Their claim that God doesn't exist is lie, not false. They must know their own mind, so they must know whether God is in it or not.
Are you really asking me how I'd apply a concept ? And that's supposed to prove some kind of Platonism ? No one is denying the existence or the application of concepts. The issue is how best to think of them. Functional equivalence classes in an inferential context is one approach. For instance, the words 'and' and 'und' are used pretty much the same way in English and German. Let me be clear that I'm not denying the existence in some sense of abstractions. But I don't commit myself to platonism because I have concepts like 'function' and 'equivalence class.' As I mentioned earlier, these concepts can be understood to be co-performed (in the inferences we allow, etc.)
Wrong in terms of what ? Your own opinion ? Or something that exceeds and compels us both ? If the latter, you support my point that philosophers as such embrace an externality.
They claim that if God exists then he is external to their mind, and they claim that God exists. If he does then they're right, if he doesn't then they're wrong, and they don't know which. It's very simple.
See here. It's as simple as I can make it.
I think we are stuck on this particular issue for now, but I have enjoyed the battle so far, and I hope to break a lance on some other issue at some point.
Right, but being wrong about that entails being wrong about solipsism.
I'm arguing that they cannot be wrong about claims assuming "all that exists is my mind" (or some variation of that).
If they can't be wrong assuming "all that exists is my mind" (or some variation of that), and they want to retain the possibility of being wrong, they must reject the assumption.
Again, consider the two scenarios:
1. Only my mind exists
2. Only my mind and God exist
God's (non-)existence is mind-independent. Whether or not God exists has nothing to do with what I believe. As such, I can be wrong. According to you, if I can be wrong if God's (non-)existence is mind-independent then something other than my mind exists. Therefore 1 is false and 2 is true. Therefore, if God's (non-)existence is mind-independent then God exists.
Obviously this is fallacious reasoning. Being wrong doesn't depend on the existence of something other than my mind. It is possible that 1 is true and so that God doesn't exist, and so I'd be wrong if I claimed that he did.
I just mean that humans slowly extended their concept system and that individuals do the same. I don't think humans are born with all the concepts that humans might eventually use explicitly. Concepts are invented. Individuals master more and more of them as they develop intellectually. Using concepts is perhaps best thought of as a skill.
Representation isn't the only possible metaphor here, and we don't have to have to accept an entity for a noun. In lower level math, students are taught to use interval notation like [math] ( - \infty, 23] [/math]. We have a symbol/word for infinity, but it's not in the real number system, despite being written down just like numbers that actually are.
Must we assume that 'the' has a referent ? Must we assume that words are tags for immaterial entities in the first place ? Or are thoughts just patterns in our doings...which are also (along these same lines) not to be understood in terms of some 'pure' materiality, a mere shadow cast by a sheet with eyeholes cut in it.
I will grant that this is one of the temptations toward some kind of Platonism, and Sellars treats it specifically, trying to do justice to our intuitions without multiplying entities unnecessarily. I don't pretend that anyone has said the last word. I only mention that we have options, that the issue is open.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sellars/#Sema
There's no need to deny private thought...or the necessity of brains and hearts. The point is just that public 'koncepts' are a sine qua non in a way that private concepts are not. Naturally I think we do have private concepts, and I 'know' (intuit) what people are trying to say when they talk about the hard problem. But I can also see the logical disaster in any denial of public concepts...direct self-contradiction, not even subtle, as in the related case of thinking one's virtue is behind and not constituted by one's virtuous acts. 'Trust me: this music is better than it sounds.'
This is a bit sentimental.
Is it not a triviality that justice is one of the broader and more ambiguous concepts ? Yet rationality is also broad. Is it justice for the guilty to go free and the innocent to be punished ? I think not. Now ask me who the guilty are, who the innocent. Those who did and didn't do the crime. And what is crime ? A violation of the law. And what is law ? ...
Personally I find Rawls plausible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rawls
Under 1 it is impossible to be wrong about anything. If only your mind exists you would know everything there is to know, including whether only your mind exists.
The solipsist wants to retain the possibility of being wrong, so must reject 1.
Once the solipsist has rejected 1, they know 2 must be either possible (or necessary if you're imaging mutually exclusive scenarios).
You can be wrong about things other than your mind existing, e.g. God.
I think you're falling into some kind of dogma. Sounds ilke you're speaking about religious conversion. And with all this talk about "little ghosts" and "pineal glands" which has nothing to do with what I'm saying,I really have no idea what you are talking about. So nothing to respond to.
Quoting Pie
Again this has nothing to do with what I've been saying. I'll try again; concepts are not public; usages of them as expressed in communicative language are. It is always individuals that understand concepts, and they each have their own unique understandings which is the result of natural diversity and the diversity of experience and circumstance that brings with it different associations and affects, none of which can be separated from the understandings they are associated with, and all of which is private unless publicly expressed. And even then, no public expression can capture all of an individual's private experience.
Now admittedly I am basing this on my own understanding of my own experience and extrapolating to assume that it is more or less the same for others. I don't know this, just because their experience is private and inaccessible to me except to the extent that what they tell me is accurate, but this just goes to reinforces the point.
I think I understand your misunderstanding.
Let's say that a number of coins are hidden in a house. I search the house and find 10 coins. If there are only 10 coins then I know where all the coins are, but I don't know that there are only 10 coins. As far as I know, there may be an 11th coin that is still hidden. Whether or not there is an 11th coin is independent of the 10 coins I have found, even if there are only 10 coins. And I'm wrong if I claim that there is an 11th coin.
So one or more things exist. I know that I exist. If I am the only thing that exists then I know of everything that exists, but I don't know that I am the only thing that exists. As far as I know, there may be something other than me that exists. Whether or not something other than me exists is independent of me, even if I am the only thing that exists. And I'm wrong if I claim that something other than me exists.
1 specifically states that nothing exists other than my mind. So how can I be wrong about the existence of other things under that assumption? I've already declared (by assuming 1), that no other things exist. I can't simultaneously hold a belief that some do (so as to be wrong about that).
I can be wrong about assuming 1, but even without any further data about the rightness or wrongness of 1, I can say that if I assume 1, I can't be wrong about anything else, following from that assumption.
Since I want to retain the possibility of being wrong about things I must reject that assumption.
Quoting Michael
This is just saying that the solipsist could be wrong about solipsism. That's not my argument. My argument is that the solipsist cannot be wrong about anything else, if they are right about solipsism.
If nothing exists other than my mind, and I am not conscious of all its contents, then I could be wrong about some things.
I would take this further. It seems to me that if the solipsism is correct, then how is it that there is a language (PLA)? There would be no argument about other minds, language is logically dependent on other minds, if W. is correct, and I believe he is.
The solipsist doesn't know which of 1 and 2 is true. Your claim that if 1 is true then the solipsist knows that 1 is true is false.
Quoting Isaac
And that doesn't follow. If the solipsist is right in saying that they cannot know which of 1 and 2 is true then even if 1 is true they are wrong if they believe that 2 is true.
Absolutely. But if there's a part of your mind that you're not consciously aware of then it suffers from exactly the same problem that the external world suffers from, for the solipsist. It can't be proven to exist. So it's inconsistent for the solipsist to use it's existence in a theory explaining how the external world might not exist (and yet they can still be wrong). If the external world is doubted because it can't be proven, then so must the unconscious mind be.
Yes, I agree. I think the notion that one could even consider whether there's an external world or not is nonsense. The very grammar of '... or not' implies some external measure of 'rightness'. I think (though I defer to your expertise on Wittgenstein) that his rule-following paradox applies here. Being 'right' is about following the rule, but (McDowell's version) we must use the rule to understand it. Here I take successful use to be distinguished form unsuccessful use necesarily by an external arbiter (otherwise we're back in the paradox again). So we cannot understand s rule without external arbitration.
I don't see how.
Quoting Michael
If 1 is true, they cannot believe 2 is true.
Of course they can. Why wouldn't they?
Because if 1 is true, then nothing else exists other than their mind. It follows from that, that if a thing is not in their mind it doesn't exist. Therefore they already know (under the assumption of 1), that no other things exist.
They might be wrong about 1, but they obviously cannot be wrong about 1, assuming 1 is true.
Your logic makes no sense. Consider, either one of these two scenarios is the case:
1. Only my mind and seven billion other minds and a material universe exist
2. Only my mind and seven billion other minds and a material universe and God exist
Your reasoning is that if 1 is true then nobody can believe that God exists. Obviously that's wrong.
Nobody who is assuming 1 is true can, yes.
Assuming 1 is true, is the same thing as assuming god doesn't exist (the use of 'only').
One cannot coherently assume god doesn't exist and believe god does exist.
The epistemological solipsist isn't assuming 1. It's the ontological solipsist that assumes 1.
An epistemological solipsist can believe 2, and he's wrong if 1, or he can believe 1, and he's wrong if 2.
I'm teasing all you quasi-Cartesians for not seeing the logical disaster, despite it's having been pointed out long before me.
Quoting Janus
Concepts, koncepts, khancepts, conecepts. @Mww already tried this. Given the context, our minimal epistemic commitment as foolosophers, the theme is clearly public communication. In your doctrinal subjectivism, 'concepts' must be understood as something in the ectoplasm. Very well then. Keep that word for yourself, asking 'usages' to the lifting. (Or maybe we can have a ladder of 17 species of concept-like entities. ) All I care about is the 'surface layer'...the public language that philosophers must use to settle beliefs rationally together. Cling if you must to your ontology of secret things, but you must propose and defend it publicly (with words that don't mean whatever you want them to mean) to play philosopher rather than mystic. Try the game yourself. What is necessary for the concept of a philosopher to make sense ?
Quoting Janus
I grant this, just as I grant that the nearsighted person and the colorblind person see the same tree differently. Who ever claimed otherwise ? As a rule, we never stop mastering concepts, often adding new ones to those we are mastering. As a tribe, new concepts are forged and some old concepts are discarded, fall out of use. There's no need to deny the central role of the self in all of this. Here's a metaphor that seems rightish to me (note that gap between the minimal epistemic given and more adventurous conjectures, please) : members of the tribe run slightly different versions of the same softwhere, trading updates, keeping one another 'honest' in terms of syntax/concepts/usage as if on a more organic type of blockchain. No one need to dance the Charleston or Justice perfectly for it to be a working concept.
Quoting Janus
I am familiar with that view, but I find other theories more plausible. 'Experience' names a ghost. I don't deny it's utility in ordinary language, but I question its epistemological use in more careful talk. Perhaps it's better to just note that we believe people when they say they have a toothache, and that we accept certain inferences involving the concept. "He couldn't sleep, because he had a toothache." 'Experience' has a public grammar or its nonsense. Some would treat it as a useless X, denying it to the arbitrarily convincing P-Zombie and attributing it to the otherwise identical Real Boy -- missing the absurdity of an epistemological concept without public criteria for its application.
....and at the very end of that scholar summarizing, is a get-out-of-jail-free card, or, as I already mentioned, suited himself for his own ends:
....Such an account depends on a particular interpretation of Kants texts, and is both ambitious and highly complex in its ramifications...., which is fitting, insofar as perusal of the various translations of the texts themselves, say nothing about reasons autonomy. Kant would never have lasted as long as he has, as the GoTo Guy of epistemological metaphysics, if he insisted the will and pure reason occupied the same legislative chair.
But I understand the derivation of the interpretation, in that, for Kant, autonomy is complete freedom from outside influence, and Kant says reason is subject to its own critique, which is not outside influence, hence someone reads autonomy into it. Which is either fine and worthy, or fast and loose, depending on how much the genius himself is respected.
-
Quoting Pie
Nope; just wanted to see how youd respond to a direct inquiry. I wouldnt know and hardly care about how you do whatever it is you do.
Quoting Pie
Youre doing that; reason must accept that which is for that which is not, in the simplest non-contradictory way possible. That which is accepted into the system is nothing but representation, for acceptance of the thing itself is absolutely impossible. An entity for an entity, pure and simple.
But youre correct: we dont have to accept anything, and in our dialectic, one theory over another. But whatever we do accept should be completely examined, understandable and not infringe on the natural order. With yours, I must say, stuff like....
Quoting Pie
......is mere sophistical subterfuge.
I'm assuming you're referring now to your previous 1&2? Otherwise I can't make much sense of this.
He is assuming 1, when he entertains 1.
He entertains 1 and finds that if he were to believe it true he would not be wrong about anything (bar that initial assumption)
From this he can deduce that he could not plausibly believe 1.
Thus his claim that he doesn't know whether either 1or 2 are true is false.
He's just established that he cannot plausibly believe 1, so 1 cannot be true.
Like you perhaps ? Or me ? We present the claims that seem most reasonable to us for criticism. The individual has a role to play. We settle which beliefs are warranted together, in clashes like ours right now.
Need I remind you that I insisted that Kant himself can eat worms ? Except inasmuch as he offers reasons that bind us all...
Quoting Mww
I hope your point doesn't hinge on the choice of a synonym.
"Autonomy is an individuals capacity for self-determination or self-governance."
https://iep.utm.edu/autonomy/
"It is requisite to reasons lawgiving that it should need to presuppose only itself, because a rule is objectively and universally valid only when it holds without the contingent, subjective conditions that distinguish one rational being from another." Kant
"Kant further developed the idea of moral autonomy as having authority over ones actions."
https://iep.utm.edu/autonomy/
You can of course assert Kant scholarship featured on the IEP is all wrong.
Quoting Mww
Prove it. And I don't mean prove the triviality that the metaphor of representation is strong indeed in the tradition of philosophy. Nor do I deny that this metaphor is both tempting and even useful. Do we not compulsively employ a metaphors of vision, of seeing.
The thing-itself is a problematic concept. Tempting, I admit, but problematic. I reject the idea that we have no choice.
Do we need the mountain-in-itself ? Is that not already just the mountain ? Perhaps the world just 'is' that which is the case. What I'm skeptical about is whether there's much or even anything to say about truth, and/or about what makes a claim true rather than warranted. The grammar here seems to be absolute and vanishing. If true claims can be unwarranted and unwarranted claims true, perhaps we muddy the water by looking for something behind what the claims claim to be about.
Quoting Mww
If we allow for your 'private' 'Cartesian' (pseudo-)concepts, then only Kant really knew or ever could know what he really-really-really meant and his kangaroo cousin may well have devised a Critique of Pure Kangaroo Reason without being vain or dexterous enough to write it down --- or perhaps it was scratched in turf of Tasmania, unnoticed by us.
Our minimum rational epistemic situation must includes the possibility of discussion. Just as reason is one and universal, so must be the language in which it occurs. The philosopher as such is 'primordially'/'grammatically' in a (shared) language-world, subject to a universal, autonomous reason. I claim that this is implicit in any concept of the philosopher that we can reasonably recognize as significant and binding.
I believe that God does not exist
I am wrong if God exists
Therefore either God exists or I cannot be wrong
The conclusion doesnt follow. And the same for:
I believe that an external world does not exist
I am wrong if an external world exists
Therefore either an external world exists or I cannot be wrong
The conclusion in both cases should be:
Either X exists or I am not wrong
Your mistake is in going from "I am not wrong" to "I cannot be wrong" because in modal logical p ? ?p is invalid, and so p ? ¬?p ? ?¬p is valid.
If X's non-existence is not necessarily true then it is possible that X exists even if X doesn't exist, and it is possible to be wrong about X not existing even if I am not wrong about X not existing.
This latter point should be obvious because when I say I believe X but I could be wrong Im not saying I believe X but I am wrong. My claim that I could be wrong is true even if I'm not wrong.
He hasn't lasted though. We owe the model T our respect perhaps, but we don't drive one today. Even in his own time he had his critics, as documented in Beiser. He was (justly) accused of idealism (in a self-subverting way), while also obviously trying to have his Jesus and his Newton at the same time (which doesn't age well, not for those who are comfortably godless). I'm pretty sure you can out-nerd me on Kant, and this isn't the thread for a detailed discussion, but I can't resist challenging this 'go to gut' characterization.
1. it is raining
2. it is not raining
If I entertain 1 I will find that if I were to believe it true I would not be wrong about it raining. Therefore, if I can be wrong about it raining 1 must be false and so 2 must be true.
But then the exact same reasoning will lead to the conclusion that 2 must be false and 1 true.
Obviously this is wrong.
This (and the other) are not examples of the same sort because the neither the assumption that it's raining, nor the assumption that God exists have any bearing on knowledge.
The assumption that only my mind exists has a bearing on knowledge (I must know everything there is to know if all that exists is my own mind). It is that assumption which changes the options. Neither rain, nor god do that.
I believe that something other than my mind does not exist
I am wrong if something other than my mind exists
Therefore either something other than my mind exists or I cannot be wrong
The conclusion doesn't follow for exactly the reason I explained in that post. "I cannot be wrong" doesn't follow from "I am not wrong".
The conclusion "I cannot be wrong" doesn't follow from "I'm not wrong" in my argument either. It follows from the logical consequence of all that exists being in one's mind. If all that exists is in one's mind one cannot be wrong about anything.
I believe that something other than my mind does not exist
I am wrong if something other than my mind exists
Therefore either something other than my mind exists or I cannot be wrong
The conclusion doesn't follow.
It does.
1. I believe that something other than my mind does not exist
2. I am wrong if something other than my mind exists
If 1. is the case I cannot be wrong about anything (else).
What is the case is either 1 or 2
Therefore what is the case is either something other than my mind exists (2) or I cannot be wrong (implication of 1)
It doesn't, and I explained why. I'll simplify the logic for you:
Bp ? I believe p
W ? I am wrong about p
1. Bp
2. ¬p ? W
3. ¬p ? ¬?W
The conclusion doesn't follow. The actual conclusion is:
¬p ? ¬W
It doesn't matter what you substitute for p. It could be "it is raining" or it could be "God is a man" or it could be "only my mind exists". The rules of inference don't change.
You're ignoring what p implies. Why?
It doesn't imply what you're saying. You can't get from "only my mind exists" to "I cannot be wrong".
Of course you can. If only your mind exists then you must know everything, therefore you cannot be wrong about anything.
No. If only your mind exists then you know of everything that exists. But it doesn't follow that you know that no other stuff exists.
Remember the examples of the coins. If only 10 coins exist and if I know that 10 coins exist then I know of all the coins that exist. But it doesn't follow that I know that there aren't more coins.
Bp ? I believe that p
1. Bp (premise)
2. ¬?p (premise)
3. Bp ? ?¬p (from 1 and 2)
3 is just what it means to possibly be wrong.
I know I said I'd drop this issue, but this caught my eye.
(1) If it exists, I know of it.
Now assume that something I don't know of exists. Then I know of it, by (1), and yet don't know of it, by assumption, a contradiction. Hence I cannot fail to know of anything that exists, and I can be confident that there are no entities unknown to me.
Maybe I'm missing something.
1. John knows that 10 coins exist
2. Only 10 coins exist
3. Therefore, John knows of every coin that exists
However, John doesn't know that only 10 coins exist. This is where Isaac gets it wrong.
I think the coins are a different scenario. It's possible that the inference I actually challenged was not your considered position.
To me the issue looks like semantics, what we mean by our terms.
Quoting Michael
Quoting Isaac
I prefer understanding 'mind' in a way that agrees with @Isaac. But this isn't math, we don't have a formal definition, and so we basically have to make a case for this or that understanding. In that spirit, I hope to at least shift gears from trying prove there is a Correct choice here to untangling our individual preferences and presuppositions.
We can imagine a person mistaking a dreamscape for public reality. The dreamself bangs on a door, sure that the princess needs rescuing on the other side. Can he be wrong ? If he can, we seem to be making the dreamscape an 'other' to the dreamself, about which he can be wrong. To me, this would make it a kind of world. But the dreamself has a mind that is 'in' this world as a mere part of it. Can the dreamself say 'this is all just my mind' ? It gets messy, because there are two minds here. The one that's basically what Wittgenstein calls the limit of the world and also the conventional one which does not know what's on the other side of the door.
The logic is the same, regardless of what X is.
1. John knows that his mental phenomena exist
2. Only John's mental phenomena exist
3. Therefore, John knows of everything that exists
However, John doesn't know that only his mental phenomena exist. 3 doesn't entail that John knows 2, just as it didn't with the coins.
OK. John doesn't know that he knows of everything that exists. I'll add that to my computations.
And I'll add, knowledge isn't just knowledge of what does or doesn't exist, so even if it could be shown that the solipsist knows everything about what does or doesn't exist it doesn't then follow that the solipsist knows everything.
Whether or not Hitler would have been executed had he not killed himself has nothing to do with what does or doesn't exist. Whether or not I will be sad tomorrow has nothing to do with what does or doesn't exist. Whether or not the Reimann hypothesis is correct has nothing to do with what does or doesn't exist.
So even if the solipsist cannot be wrong about what does or doesn't exist, he can still be wrong about counterfactuals, predictions, and maths. The truth and falsity of these things does not depend on the existence of something other than one's mind. This is where some are conflating two different senses of "mind-independence".
But could that-which-exists not be understood as including tendencies and relationships ? What of the conception of an entity as essentially relational ? An electron 'is' what it might do with what other entities might do and so on.
'Exists' seem to be quite an open concept.
I have no idea what it means to say that a counterfactual scenario exists. I suppose that I could understand what it means for the future to exist (i.e. eternalism), but I don't think eternalism is required for me to be wrong about the future. And I don't think mathematical realism (or a bunch of other mathematicians) is required for me to get maths wrong.
How do you feel about Hamlet ? Or Charlie Brown ?
I feel no loyalty to any definition of the real. I don't take a vision of elementary particles 'behind' things as the really real, for instance. Sidewalks and promises and electrons and Snoopy and even sensations and thoughts exist.
They don't exist, but books about them do.
That might explain some of our talking past one another. To me, electrons and marriages are just characters in a story too.
We call some stories true.
Nor I.
But I speculate that it doesn't make much sense to get math wrong if you are the only being.
I suppose we must allow the edge case of the sole survivor finding the zeros of polynomials, but this is just the guy in the woods writing poetry.
I would say that pi is irrational even if I'm the last man alive and even if I believe otherwise.
I understand why one would. But if no one else had ever existed, it'd be hard to find a meaning for 'pi.'
Of course there'd be no language in the first place.
Someone coined the term "pi". He was quite capable of coining it without assistance.
I learned what [math] \pi [/math] was in the context of an axiomatic system, as intimately related to the first positive zero of a famous trigonometric function. Its existence is proven within a complex system, developed over centuries. Is math still math if I make it all up myself ?
So for you it preexisted us...and you are not a platonist ?
My take is that the 'I' is logically/semantically an appendage of the 'we.' The self that speaks and thinks is fundamentally tribal, social, other-directed, and self-transcending. But I don't expect to be believed without justification. I'm just abbreviating my position, for context.
I think that the truth of "God does not exist" is mind-independent. And I think that "God does not exist" is true. But I don't think that God's non-existence "exists" as some Platonic fact.
And the same with maths.
I can maybe relate, but I think we still have to resolve the ambiguity, because there are versions of God (fixed versions) that I might accept (and that traditional theists would not accept.) Mathematical facts might be like facts about norms...about a community. The irrationality of root 2 seems about equivalent to the fact that mathematician ought to endorse the claim. [math] \sqrt{2} \notin \mathbb{Q} [/math] is (approximately) "there is an acceptable proof for [ the irrationality of root 2 ]." And this is approximately a fact about what mathematicians do and/or ought to accept (as a function of the familiarity of the theorem.)
Norms can apply to a single person, too. Even if I'm the only man alive I ought to endorse the irrationality of root 2.
To me, his not knowing about his own mind...gives him something external to that mind. If a man has a Freudian unconscious, he has an unexplored basement, an other to him as ego.
I prefer to join 'world' with 'something I can be wrong about.' Otherwise, the mind that knows is not the mind that is unknown...or at least things get messy.
What is the 'I' ?
As I've said before, there's a difference between saying that I can be wrong about something and saying that something other than my mind exists. From here:
Even if only my mind exists I can be wrong about whether or not God exists.
So forget the word "external". Your claim is "we can be wrong about things" and the solipsist's claim is "only my mind can be known to exist". These claims are not incompatible as I have been trying to show.
Oh I know we see this issue differently. I think the concepts are loose enough here, unanchored as they are by any practical application, that it's pointless to talk of right or wrong, for we'd just be asserting our preference again.
For me the issue was always essentially about whether there was something other than the mind, which is how I took 'external.' The solipsist seems to contemplate the possibility that there is only appearance and nothing behind it, collapsing the appearance-reality distinction. I take this to also be a collapse of the the parallel or equivalent mind-world distinction.
[quote = Witt]
Here it can be seen that solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism. The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality coordinated with it.
[/quote]
True, if solipsism is defeated by my lack of omniscience then it is defeated simply by the fact that I don't know what will happen in the future, or even simply the fact that I don't know whether solipsism is true. The epistemological solipsist could retort that what I experience could be explained by either the existence of an external world or unconscious dimensions of my mind, which could be thought to place both hypotheses on equal footing.
More attempted dismissal by lame ridicule? I thought you were concerned with rational argument. @Mww already "tried" it, and it failed...to do what... convince you? Big surprise! Try convincing the theist there is no God... You will never convince the dogmatists to go against their beliefs, or one who pays attention to their own experience,,,by mere "rational" argument. And this is for quite different reasons in the two cases.
Quoting Pie
I know there are secret experiences, so I don't have to defend anything. I actually don't care if you agree with me or not; I'm just reporting my own experience; you can (and no doubt will) think whatever you like about what I report; it means little to me.
And that's the problem with this normative rationailty ideology: it's a horrible idea, it's the fantasy of the machine men, the thought police and the political correctiphiles. It's a misapplied transposition of Kant's categorical imperative: the 'rationality normalizing imperative'.
People will always have differing worldviews: it's a phenomenon of natural diversity. The Peircean notion of the truth asymptotically approached by the "community of enquirers" is a sick fantasy; another sad attempt, like many religions, to devalue and stamp out our animal natures.
What is necessary for a philosopher to make sense? To speak coherently and in terms that anyone prepared to make the effort can understand,,,although obviously not necessarily agree with.
I think it's more plausible that we all understand what "experience" means (in our own unique ways of course, although most likely roughly enough the same to understand one another) just because it is obvious to anyone who reflects on their own experience that we do have experiences. It is (sufficient commonality of) personal experience that underpins public usage, not the other way around, in my view.
Quoting Janus
I see.
Quoting Janus
We can joke too. We do want to be machine men. Was it not you who introduced folk psychoanalysis, calling Brandom and Sellars 'anal', railing against a paradoxically up-your-arse concern with justification, in defense of the soul's imagery ? I try to mirror the tone of the person I'm talking with. I am willing to change course if you are.
Quoting Janus
But this is obvious. Why should we worry about settling beliefs rationally in the first place if there weren't so many candidates to choose from ? It's because you and I and the other folks are free that we can ask for reasons, demand justifications for claims. Where we might agree is that a rational person can be a hypocrite or a fanatic. Is Ayn Rand a hero of rationality ? Quite the opposite in my view. A boxer gets in the ring, and philosopher suffers exposure to difference, tarries with the negative.
Like Milton and Spinoza and Kant and others, I think free speech is crucial, so don't count me an enemy of diversity simply because I seek the best beliefs like everyone else.
[quote = Kant ]
It is requisite to reasons lawgiving that it should need to presuppose only itself, because a rule is objectively and universally valid only when it holds without the contingent, subjective conditions that distinguish one rational being from another.
...
Reason must subject itself to critique in all its undertakings, and cannot restrict the freedom of critique through any prohibition without damaging itself and drawing upon itself a disadvantageous suspicion. For there is nothing so important because of its utility, nothing so holy, that it may be exempted from this searching review and inspection, which knows no respect for persons [i.e. does not recognize any person as bearing more authority than any otherGW]. On this freedom rests the very existence of reason, which has no dictatorial authority, but whose claim is never anything more than the agreement of free citizens, each of whom must be able to express his reservations, indeed even his veto, without holding back. (A738f/B766f, translation slightly modified)
[/quote]
Quoting Janus
I think Peirce's idea is worthy, but my own view of truth, a descendant perhaps, is deflationary. I claim that the 'religion' metaphor is misleading. It's a bit absurd to conflate faith and rationalism. What's that leave you with ? What's your just-right porridge with so much proscribed ? Or do you insult reason to make room for faith as well as an unleashed animality ? Are we talking The Crucified or Dionysos ?
http://reflectionsonlandusetranslationsmorebycew.com/FrenchinAmericadelaSalleandVoltaire/VoltaireRousseau.html
Quoting Janus
:up:
And that means the need a common-public language to be in together, which is to say [also] a common-public world for that language to be about. You left out normative rationality. The first two requirements (arguably just one language-world) are those for any kind of communication.
I think this is the natural way to think of it. But I take it to be one of the great discoveries of philosophy to have flipped things around. This flip, this revelation of the priority of the 'we' before the 'I' and the 'external' to the 'internal'...I take to be what's great in Wittgenstein and Heidegger. As I see it, one is one before one is someone in particular. Everyday Dasein is Anyone, tribal second nature incarnate.
No, I was saying that I personally find Brandom and Sellar's approaches too anal, too concerned with "getting it right" in some objective fashion. I said that my concern is that if you follow that path you will disappear up your own arse, and then corrected that to "disappear up the public arse".
Quoting Pie
I'm not worried about that. I'm here to present my views and hear the views of others, and see if they seem plausible or interesting to me; that's all. I'm not here to thrash out some normatively mandated consensus, because I think think rationality is only a matter of consistency with what follows from the essentially groundless starting assumptions we all make on the basis, not of cogent argument or observation, but of what seems most plausible to us personally; in other words rationality mandates only validity, not soundness once the boundaries of the empirical realm have been crossed.
Quoting Pie
You're assuming that there are "best beliefs"; the same for everyone: I don't share that assumption.
Quoting Pie
I don't "insult reason"; I just don't seek to corral it. I also think we all indulge in faith of one kind or another, and I don't think there is anything wrong with that.
Quoting Pie
Of course there is a natural normativity at work in that we all use the same words; albeit in different combinations. The only normativity I see as being appropriate and necessary to rationality is consistency and validity (conclusions following from premises) as I already said.
Quoting Pie
Quoting Pie
Of course there is way in which that is true. But I disagree when it comes to diversity of ideas; our cultures should not be straitjackets. I think Heidegger was very concerned about authenticity, about living one's life and thinking one's thoughts in accordance with individual experience, judgement and resolve, not following "das Man"; not doing and thinking "what One does".
I've read some anthropological work that suggests that hunter/gatherers (ironically) honour the autonomy of the individual, even children, more than modern western culture does. That said, of course we, in fact all people who live in societies and communities, are all, more or less socially conditioned. So I don't deny that the range of human experience, the range of possibilities open to us are determined to some degree by culture and language, and also by geography and circumstance.
All I can muster with what I know is superb questions.
:up:
For some of us, getting it right is the job. Objective is good.
Quoting Janus
I don't think atheism would suit my mom. Perhaps it's best not to believe there are best beliefs ? I'm kidding. But I would like to have true beliefs, justified beliefs, reasonable beliefs.
Quoting Janus
I still think it's either a bad metaphor or a dilution of 'faith' into something insignificant. If everybody is X, no one is, because nothing is picked out.
Quoting Janus
But who would say otherwise ? Is the Enlightenment to be understood as more of a prison than a release ?
Quoting Janus
It's as if you think I'm advising human beings to be thrown in interpretedness, to have prejudices they don't even know they have (co-revealed with the other in the interpretation thereof, as Gadamer described.) Given your seeming 'Cartesian' leanings, it's my opinion that you are missing some good stuff, which I locate in Dreyfus on 'the who of everyday dasein.' "Language speaks and not the human."
It's not that the 'we' ought to have priority over the 'I.' It's more like the 'I' is an appendage. Language is the 'water' we swim in as 'spiritual' [cultural, self-made, historical] beings. We're in it as much as it's in us. That's my claim, anyway.
Language, world, us ...equiprimordial shamrock trinity....
You don't seem to be responding to anything I've said.
Assume your mind is all that exists.
Imagine that world (the one where your mind is all that exists). You know everything. You must do since all that exists in that world is your mind. You, in that world, might not know, in that world, that all that exists is your mind, but we, in this world can logically see that you in that world would know everything there is to know.
Thus we, in this world (the would be solipsist) reject the possibility of that world as implausible.
Having rejected it as implausible, we can't then coherently also claim not to know if it's the case.
Quoting Michael
Yep. Because you've changed minds to coins. Coins don't contain all that is thought of.
The contingency "If only 10 coins exist..." has no implication for knowledge (we might not know as much in the possible world we're imagining). So when you use coins, your example is correct. The possible world in which there are only 10 coins is almost identical to ours in terms of knowledge, truth and wrongness. It just contains fewer coins.
The contingency "If only minds exist..." does have implications for knowledge because knowledge is about the external world. In the possible world where only minds exist we have to change the whole definition of what it means to know something, we have to change the whole game of having justifications, the whole meaning of 'truth', the whole matter of what it is to be 'wrong'. In that world (with us assuming that world is true), all of that has to change.
I'm trying to cash out some of those changes. There might well be better ways, but what you can't do is ignore those changes and treat the language around knowledge, truth, and wrongness as if they were unaltered by the new fact of your possible world, as if they applied in the same way with the same meanings.
For some of us, right: I can agree with that. Perhaps for all of us, we only believe what we feel we have gotten right. But the feeling of getting it right in areas where getting it right cannot be precisely determined is an individual matter. It's also a private matter: someone might say they feel they have got it right, but be lying.
Quoting Pie
I would say we very often don't, and cannot, know if our beliefs are true or justified, and we can only know they are reasonable if they are consistent with our preferred set of starting assumptions.
Quoting Pie
I think that is a non sequitur: if everyone is human, then no one is...?
Quoting Pie
Depends on how you look at it. I'd say it's a mixed bag. Is scientism better than religion? I think the notion of normative rationality is a form of scientism; the idea that philosophy can and should emulate science.
Quoting Pie
I don't have Cartesian leanings, so I have no idea what you are referring to. It seems to me that you are tendentiously interpreting what I say through a Cartesian lens, all the better to dismiss it by.
Quoting Pie
I don't disagree with this. I fully acknowledge that having language opens up new avenues of experience. Recall that all I've been arguing is that there is private experience, and that language can never capture the whole of experience, not so much because it is ineffable (although I think that is part of it, since parts of experience cannot be captured by language at all), but because it is too complex and subtly nuanced. To argue that experience is impossible without language would be to argue that every animal on Earth bar us does not experience anything at all; and I find that thought absurd.
I take it as a given that we aren't sharing diary entries here. You can 'know' that you have a closer walk with Jesus, 'know' that your third eye is opened, 'know' that AI will destroy the world. Plenty of people 'just know,' but surely that's not the ideal here. You indeed don't have to defend anything, but philosophers, at least one version of them, like defending their claims, care about incisive criticisms, and improve their system of beliefs. But obviously you can do you. I just don't see why you bother with debate given what I take to be almost an irrationalism. *Maybe it's just this one issue you are talking about. Hard to say.
No offense. But by my lights you do. The key point (what I refer to) is the emphasis on the internal as the given.
I think you know not what you say. Or maybe you really are an irrationalist. There are some fun versions of it.
I think we can have some sense of whether they are justified...or what are controlled experiments for ? We decide what counts as justification after all. Normative.
Consider practical life too. Metaphysics is full of doubt and ambiguity, but ordinary life is full of conjecture and refutation and confirmation.
You're not listening. I am open to criticism, but any criticism will be parsed through my own critical filter and accepted or rejected depending on how I judge its plausibility. I want to improve my ideas, but I don't judge them against some notion of normative rationality. I like hearing other express their views and make their arguments, but again they are always assessed by me according to my own particular understanding of things. I would like to think it is the same for others.
Quoting Pie
"The internal"; my thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations are what is most immediately present to me. Your thoughts, feelings and sensations are present to me only insofar as they can be conveyed by what you say about them: if you are being honest. If you are lying or hiding your thoughts and feelings then I may have no idea; unless I feel your actions are giving you away, and I could be wrong about that. None of this has anything to do with Descartes.
Controlled experiments are the province of science, not philosophy, in my view.
I'm familiar with Kant's version, and I have little argument with it; but I don't think he has the same thing in mind that you do.
Yes, I think that makes sense. One way or another, in order to retain talk of 'knowledge', or 'truth', or 'wrongness' at all, the way we understand it, the would be solipsist has to have something external to the system doing the inferring, in order that some of those inferences could be wrong.
The question then is why reject the external world?
In my view, rejection of the external world is absurd, and solipsism is absurd. I find the idea that I could be the only mind in the universe, not only implausible, but completely untenable. That said, I also acknowledge that what people find plausible depends on their foundational assumptions. if people "flatten everything out" such that they assess plausibility only in terms of what they believe is absolutely certain, then I can see how they might adopt solipsism.
They can argue that only their own mind is immediately present to them, and therefore either that it is certain that there are no other minds, or that it is at least more plausible that there are no other minds, or minimally that they cannot know there are other minds, so the safest thing is to live with that conclusion; which of course they will fail to do. It seems a ridiculous performative contradiction to me, but then what do I know?
My question is what could they possibly mean by "other minds", or even the expression "... there are", if all there is is their own mind. If we're to ask "is there an external world?" I'm not sure what to make of the question. To me asking the question "is there...?" assumes there's an external world and I'm enquiring as to its contents. If we're to remove that assumption, I don't know what "is there...?" could mean. Of whom/what would we be asking the question? From where would an answer come?
Quoting Janus
Ha! Yes. By far the most compelling argument against solipsism.
Then I don't know everything.
And as I said to Pie, there's more to knowledge than just knowledge of what exists. In such a world I might not know the square root of two, I might not know what I would have seen had I chosen a different course of action, I might not know what I will feel tomorrow, etc.
You are conflating "X knows of everything that exists" and "X knows everything". These are not the same thing. The former would be true, the latter not.
But this really just comes down to some straightforward logic:
p ? only my mind exists
Bp ? I believe that p
1. Bp (premise)
2. ¬?p (premise)
3. Bp ? ?¬p (from 1 and 2)
3 is just what it means to possibly be wrong.
Perhaps you'd indulge me by putting this into logical form for comparison.
1. The world is such that I know everything.
2. The world is not such that I know everything.
Either 1 or 2 is correct, but I don't know which.
Under 1, do I know everything?
Yes, because it explicitly says so.
Right. My argument is that "all there is is my mind" just as explicitly says so. It is impossible for you to not know everything if all there is is your mind. Therefore the claim "all there is is my mind" is equivalent to the claim "I know everything".
Quoting Isaac
And as I mentioned above, there's more to knowledge than just knowledge of what exists. In such a world I don't know the square root of two, I don't know what I would have seen had I chosen a different course of action, I don't know what I will feel tomorrow, etc.
You are conflating "if Y exists then X knows that Y exists" and "X knows everything". These are not the same thing. The former would be true, the latter not.
I disagree. In a world where all there is is your mind, there's no uncertainty. You know exactly what the square root of two is, because it's available directly to your conscious mind. Same with what you'll feel tomorrow.
There can be no source of uncertainty other than from some state external to the system carrying out the inference.
No it isn't.
And again, no.
Well. I'm sold. Super convincing argument. Well done. Have you considered a career in politics?
I could say the same about your bare assertion that the square root of 2 and my future feelings would be directly available to my mind.
Quoting Isaac
And again, you refuted your own argument here. I don't know that all that exists is my mind. This, in fact, is epistemological solipsism.
It's not a bare assertion. I followed it with the argument...
Quoting Isaac
My argument is about the version of us doing the assessment about the feasibility of those possible worlds.
The square root of two is mind-independent even if only my mind exists. You conflate mind-independence with mind-independent existence. The solipsist rejects (knowledge of) mind-independent existence.
And there's uncertainty because of the logical argument I gave above:
1. Bp (premise)
2. ¬?p (premise)
3. Bp ? ?¬p (from 1 and 2)
The soundness of this argument doesn't depend on something other than my mind existing.
Quoting Isaac
And yet you admitted that if only X's mind exists then X doesn't know that only his mind exists. I don't know what else I can tell you; you just admitted to epistemological solipsism.
Just stating it doesn't help. Look...
The square root of two isn't mind-independent even if only my mind exists.
Did that help?
Quoting Michael
No, because the epistemic solipsists can further analyse what it would mean for X (that even if X didn't know they know, they would, in fact, know) and thereby need to reject the option. Having found they need to reject the option, they cannot coherently claim to also not know if it's true.
I must agree. And....good series of comments.
Your reasoning is faulty.
1. If Y exists then X knows that Y exists
2. X knows that if Y exists then X knows that Y exists
1 does not entail 2. And nor does it entail any of these:
3. X knows that he will be happy tomorrow
4. X knows that the Riemann hypothesis is true
5. X knows that the Riemann hypothesis is false
6. X knows that had he chosen some other course of action then he would have been sad
7. X knows that God doesn't exist
I don't know how much simpler to explain this to you so if you can't understand this then we're never going to progress.
Indeed. It's not a rendering of my argument.
1. render all that is the case as the set {Y,Y,Y,Y....} for all Ys
2. if Y exists then X knows all properties of Y (a consequence of all Ys being in X's mind)
3. X therefore cannot ever be wrong about what is the case (since what is the case is entirely constituted of all the Ys)
4. Z (our epistemic solipsist) entertains a possible world in which 2 is true.
5. Z then has to admit that in that possible world X cannot be wrong about what is the case (whether X knows this or not is irrelevant)
6. no X is ever in a situation where they cannot be wrong about what is the case.
5 and 6 are a contradiction. Z has to either reject 5 or reject 6.
Maintaining 6, Z rejects 5.
If Z rejects 5, they cannot also coherently claim scepticism about whether 5 is the case or not.
You're equivocating. As per 1 and 2, "what is the case" is restricted to "Y exists". Hence you are only concluding:
If Y exists then X knows that Y exists
God's non-existence, the Reimann hypothesis, and being happy tomorrow aren't one of the Ys defined in 1 and assumed to exist in 2 (what would it even mean to say that God's non-existence exists?).
How are such boundaries established ?
:up:
Indeed, and we want that filter to be a good one ! Surely you update it in terms of what it lets through. Your 'I'-filter isn't static.
From Wiki:
As a reader of Heidegger, you may find this relevant. (I prefer it from the horse's mouth, but I'm not going to type up piles of prose for something so established.)
https://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Cont/ContCuce.htm
Here are some Dreyfus-translated passages from Heidegger (from Being-in-the-World). I recommend especially the chapter "The Who of Everyday Dasein."
While it's beyond the minimal epistemic given to just assert these things, I read them as gesturing toward something similar, toward our being-in-a-world-in-language-together as our basic human situation. I am not some ghost viewing a spectacle. That's an example of 'interpretedness,' which is to say historical baggage, taken for granted unquestioningly.
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
The one as that which forms everyday being-with-one-another...constitutes what we call the public in the strict sense of the word. It implies that the world is always already primarily given as the common world. It is not the case on the one hand there are first individual subjects which at any given time have their own world; and that the task would then arise of putting together, by virtue of some sort of arrangement, the various particular worlds of individuals and of agreeing how one would have a common world. This is how philosophers imagine these things when they ask about the constitution of the inter-subjective world. We say instead that the first thing that is given is the common world -- the one.
...
Dasein, in so far as it is, has always submitted itself already to a 'world' which it encounters, and this submission belongs essentially to its being.
...
Primarily Dasein is 'one,' and remains so.
...
As a "one's self," the particular Dasein has been dispersed into the 'one' and must first find itself.
...
"[The one] is the 'realest subject' of everydayness."
From the horse's mouth (and he is/was a genius) :
[quote= Descartes]
Now that I have convinced myself that there is nothing in the world no sky, no earth, no minds, no bodies does it follow that I dont exist either? No it does not follow; for if I convinced myself of something then I certainly existed.
But there is a supremely powerful and cunning deceiver who deliberately deceives me all the time! Even then, if he is deceiving me I undoubtedly exist: let him deceive me all he can, he will never bring it about that I am nothing while I think I am something. So after thoroughly thinking the matter through I conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, must be true whenever I assert it or think it.
But this I that must exist I still dont properly understand what it is; so I am at risk of confusing it with something else, thereby falling into error in the very item of knowledge that I maintain is the most certain and obvious of all. To get straight about what this I is, I shall go back and think some more about what I believed myself to be before I started this meditation.
Well, then, what did I think I was? A man. But what is a man? Shall I say a rational animal'? No; for then I should have to ask what an animal is, and what rationality is each question would lead me on to other still harder ones, and this would take more time than I can spare.
...
Since now I am pretending that I dont have a body, these are mere fictions. Sense-perception? One needs a body in order to perceive; and, besides, when dreaming I have seemed to perceive through the senses many things that I later realized I had not perceived in that way.
...
Thinking? At last I have discovered it thought! This is the one thing that cant be separated from me. I am, I exist that is certain. But for how long? For as long as I am thinking. But perhaps no longer than that; for it might be that if I stopped thinking I would stop existing; and I have to treat that possibility as though it were actual, because my present policy is to reject everything that isnt necessarily true. Strictly speaking, then, I am simply a thing that thinks a mind, or intelligence, or intellect, or reason, these being words whose meaning I have only just come to know. Still, I am a real, existing thing. What kind of a thing? I have answered that: a thinking thing.
Well, then, what am I? A thing that thinks. What is that? A thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wants, refuses, and also imagines and senses.
Isnt it one and the same I who now doubts almost everything, understands some things, affirms this one thing namely, that I exist and think, denies everything else, wants to know more, refuses to be deceived, imagines many things involuntarily, and is aware of others that seem to come from the senses? Isnt all this just as true as the fact that I exist, even if I am in a perpetual dream, and even if my creator is doing his best to deceive me? These activities are all aspects of my thinking, and are all inseparable from myself. The fact that it is I who doubt and understand and want is so obvious that I cant see how to make it any clearer. But the I who imagines is also this same I. For even if (as I am pretending) none of the things that I imagine really exist, I really do imagine them, and this is part of my thinking. Lastly, it is also this same I who senses, or is aware of bodily things seemingly through the senses. Because I may be dreaming, I cant say for sure that I now see the flames, hear the wood crackling, and feel the heat of the fire; but I certainly seem to see, to hear, and to be warmed. This cannot be false; what is called sensing is strictly just this seeming, and when sensing is understood in this restricted sense of the word it too is simply thinking.
[/quote]
This is basically a 'speculative' theological vision. Descartes 'is' 'thinking' or language. It's our being jointly 'enworldled' and 'enlanguaged' that is 'given.' Descartes and Kant seemed to have got tangled up in the 'I' and its social function. 'I think' is attached to 'P' within a normative, scorekeeping game. But 'P' is is,in its intelligibility even to its user, prior to that user, deeper than that user. Descartes implicitly asserts the autonomy of reason by striving toward presuppositionlessness. So I claim, and so I claim Hegel and Heidegger claim, to name just two. The assault on the Cartesian subject is, as I understand it, one the big events in relatively recent philosophy.
[quote = Feuerbach]
Taken as an intelligible (geistig) or an abstract being, that is, regarded neither as human nor as sensuous, but rather as one that is an object for and accessible only to reason or intelligence, God qua God is nothing but the essence of reason itself. But, basing themselves rather on imagination, ordinary theology and Theism regard him as an independent being existing separately from reason. Under these circumstances, it is an inner, a sacred necessity that the essence of reason as distinguished from reason itself be at last identified with it and the divine being thus be apprehended, realised, as the essence of reason. It is on this necessity that the great historical significance of speculative philosophy rests. The proof of the proposition that the divine essence is the essence of reason or intelligence lies in the fact that the determinations or qualities of God, in so far as they are rational or intelligible and not determinations of sensuousness or imagination, are, in fact, qualities of reason.
God is the infinite being or the being without any limitations whatsoever. But what cannot be a limit or boundary on God can also not be a limit or boundary on reason. If, for example, God is elevated above all limitations of sensuousness, so, too, is reason. He who cannot conceive of any entity except as sensuous, that is, he whose reason is limited by sensuousness, can only have a God who is limited by sensuousness. Reason, which conceives God as an infinite being, conceives, in point of fact, its own infinity in God. What is divine to reason is also truly rational to it, or in other words, it is a being that perfectly corresponds to and satisfies it. That, however, in which a being finds satisfaction, is nothing but the being in which it encounters itself as its own object. He who finds satisfaction in a philosopher is himself of a philosophical nature. That he is of this nature is precisely what he and others encounter in this satisfaction. Reason does not, however, pause at the finite, sensuous things; it finds satisfaction in the infinite being alone that is to say, the essence of reason is disclosed to us primarily in the infinite being.
...
The necessary being is one that it is necessary to think of, that must be affirmed absolutely and which it is simply impossible to deny or annul, but only to the extent to which it is a thinking being itself. Thus, it is its own necessity and reality which reason demonstrates in the necessary being.
[/quote]
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/future/future0.htm
I'm arguing, as per my premise about the sources of uncertainty, that...
Quoting Isaac
As to...
...it's a property of the entire world. The world is such that it contains nothing answering the description of god.
You can't go from:
1. If Y exists then X knows that Y exists
to:
2. If Y does not exist then X knows that Y does not exist
Ontological solipsism only entails 1. Your reasoning to 2 is fallacious.
Seeing as I haven't, I'm not sure why you're mentioning this.
Here's my argument...
Quoting Isaac
It mentions neither of the propositions you used.
Ontological solipsism claims:
1. If Y exists then Y is a facet of my mind
2. If Y is a facet of my mind then I know that Y exists
3. Therefore, if Y exists then I know that Y exists
That's it. You, somehow, want to say that this entails:
4. If Y (e.g. God) does not exist then I know that Y does not exist
And even:
5. I know what will happen tomorrow
6. I know what would have happened had I done things differently
7. I know whether or not the Reimann hypothesis is true
But these are all invalid inferences. Ontological solipsism just doesn't entail that I know everything. It only entails that if Y exists then I know that Y exists. There is more to knowledge than just knowledge of what exists.
Just saying it over and over is pointless. You're not my teacher. We're equals here, having a discussion (or supposed to be). I've tried to explain why I think they are valid inferences. I've even referenced that explanation twice now. You've not even acknowledged it, let alone addressed it. If you're just here to lecture me I'm not interested.
We have to use free logic for this (classical logic doesn't allow for "p does not exist"):
1. ?p: ?x(x=p) ? K(?x(x=p))
2. ?p: ¬?x(x=p) ? K(¬?x(x=p))
There is no rule of inference that lets you derive 2 from 1.
We're going round in circles. Nowhere in my argument do I claim, imply, or require deriving 2 from 1.
You're saying that if ontological solipsism is true then I know that God doesn't exist.
No.
Here's my argument...
Quoting Isaac
If you've no interest in it, that's fine, but it's pointless ignoring it and refuting something else.
Quoting Isaac
If I don't know that God doesn't exist then I don't know everything.
As I said before, you equivocate on the meaning of "what is the case". Given 1 and 2 it just refers to what exists, and so your conclusion is only that X is not wrong that Y exists. But that he is not wrong that Y exists isn't that he cannot be wrong. As I have repeatedly said, there is more to knowledge than just knowledge of what exists. There is knowledge of what doesn't exist, there is knowledge of what will happen in the future, there is knowledge of what could have happened, there is knowledge of maths. None of this knowledge is accounted for in your argument.
No, I specifically included the properties of what exists. And I've been through all this. You even asked me what it would mean and I replied that I consider God's nonexistence to be a property of the world (which exists). It is such that there's no thing in it matching the description of god. You ignored my reply completely and are now acting as if I hadn't said anything on the matter.
The future is not a property of things that exist in the present. Neither are counterfactuals. Neither is the decimal notation of pi.
You can't go from "nothing I know of is God" to "I know that God doesn't exist".
Of course it is. X is such that it causes Y. Some collection of states in the world are such that Z will happen in ten minutes. Those are properties of X and {those states} respectively.
Quoting Michael
X is such that it cannot lead to Y. Z, X, and C are such that if C were removed they would no longer lead to Y.
Quoting Michael
Mathematics is such that pi is 3.14... People are such that they consider pi to be 3.14... Mathematical equations are written such that... And so on.
Quoting Michael
A third party can say it of you under the assumption that all that exists is your mind.
Even if X is a property of something that exists in my mind it doesn't follow that I know that it will cause Y. You're just asserting that the solipsist will have knowledge of the future without explaining how you came to that conclusion.
And it isn't a given that ontological solipsism entails hard determinism. It could be that probabilities/randomness is involved in mental phenomena.
Quoting Isaac
Same with this. It doesn't follow from X being a property of something that exists in my mind that I know that it cannot lead to Y.
Quoting Isaac
Yes, but it's not a property of things that exist. You don't find the decimal notation of pi, or the truth of the Reimann hypothesis, written onto atoms or whatever, or on sense data, and mathematical realism is false.
And I'm not talking about the decimal notation of pi to some arbitrary number of decimal places.
Quoting Isaac
They'd be wrong.
1. John knows that Joe Biden is President
2. Joe Biden is 79 years old
3. Therefore, John knows that Joe Biden is 79 years old
Obviously the conclusion doesn't follow. The same with:
1. John knows that X, Y, and Z exist
2. Only X, Y, and Z exist
3. Therefore, John knows that only X, Y, and Z exist
The conclusion doesn't follow. And if John doesn't know that only X, Y, and Z exist then it doesn't follow that if he knows that none of X, Y, and Z are A then he knows that A doesn't exist.
I said that my thoughts ,feelings and bodily sensations are what is most immediately present to me, and I should have made explicit that I think this includes the experience of being in the world. For me subjectivity just is being in the world, but being in the world is a bodily sensation. If I close my eyes, I don't see the world, If I am deaf I don't hear the world, if I has no sensation in, or proprioception of, my body I would not know how my body was disposed in the world. If I die my world disappears with me.
Of course I experience the world as being external to my body and that is why I say that there is no reason to doubt the externality of the world, looked at from that bodily perspective.
So I'm not claiming there is any "I" that is, or could be, experienced as being somehow separate from being in the world.
I don't agree with Descartes as this represents him. 'Non-physical" doesn't mean much unless interpreted as "not an object of the senses". We know our own existence as body, not as some "non-physical" self. I agree with Heidegger's idea of the "mineness" of being in the world, of being with others. This "mineness" is what I have in mind when I speak of subjectivity, not some attenuated, ghostly "I".
Sure, but that's still an 'internal perspective' on the issue (your prerogative, obviously), talking of the sensations as more present than the objects associated with those sensations.
I never accused you of being a solipsist, just on the build-from-the-inside ('Cartesian') side of the continuum.
Quoting Janus
:up:
I think we agree that your 'opening' on the world closes upon death, while the mighty world rolls one.
Quoting Janus
The ghost I joke about is mostly just the guy behind all the sensory monitors, alone in the skull's control room, who grasps the world primarily as spectacle. I see it as a powerful part of the tradition. The other part of the ghost is the elusive X featured in the hard problem.
We only know those objects as images and sensations. The objects are present "in" the sensations and images. Of course we also think of them as independently existent, which is also natural enough given their persistence, and invariant commonality. I think these are nothing more than habits of thought, useful enough for everyday purposes. Can we tease out a non-contextually "true" perspective re external objects, or are all perspectives just more or less fit for purpose?
Quoting Pie
I agree that is a kind of caricature; but it's not how I think I, and I imagine we, experience the world. I think the "hard problem" is misguided if it is taken to prove the separate existence of mind as a non-physical "res", because we have no justification beyond prejudice for thinking that experience could not possibly emerge from what we think of as the physical matrix. For that matter I think the idea of the physical as a "res", a 'brute' material substance, is also misguided if taken to be more than just a perspective within its proper limits. These ideas of substance are derived from the experience of materiality, of tangibility, and I see no reason to think we know anything beyond that fact of experience.
Anyway, thanks for questions that have led to further clarification of my thoughts on these issues
That's precisely the view I was describing as 'Cartesian' (or 'Lockean' or 'Kantian'). It takes the subject as more real or present or certain than its objects. This is the 'veil-of-ideas.' It's precisely what I take the early Heidegger to be attacking. So it's hard to make sense of your invocation of his phenomenology, which obviously informs Derrida's complementary attack.
In case it's not clear, I assert that the we and the world are prior to the 'I' who gazes on the spectacle. I take this subject-centered view to be a late development. As a child, I lived in a world of objects. I was later convinced that it was sophisticated to reframe all of this as spectacle, not noticing the holes in the plot. This 'official story' features the sense organs as their own product or creation, an absurd infinite loop. In short, the sensation theory is fine, is reasonable, only in a context that takes the (social) world as just as equally given. Sensations make sense only as part of a causal-explanatory nexus that includes genuine worldly objects (red balloons and mouse turds) affecting worldly sense organs which then are understood to involve 'sensations.' 'The doctor dilated my eyes and the world was painfully bright.'
Heidegger is clearly not constructing the world from the 'I' below. I don't use him as an authority. I just think he's relevant to the minimum epistemic situation..and our tangential conversation.
:up:
I'm not saying the subject is more certain than it's objects ("objects" that is taken as "being sensed"). Being in the world consists entirely in sensations and images (including the sense of one's own body in an environment. The body cannot, except in thought, be separated from the environment. But the locus of "my" experience is right here being the body in the world.
This is covered in Heidegger in the notions of 'being in' and 'being with'. We are always already being in the world and being with others, but we are not being the world or being others; we are being dasein as "mine".
Quoting Pie
Right, the world is constructed (in the sense of experientially constructed) by being in the world with others. As Dreyfus often points out Heidegger allows that, in the "present-at-hand" sense of thinking about the world there is a universe which is prior to being in the world, but he sees that notion as secondary to, and derivative of the bodily experience of "ready to hand" being in the world with others
:up:
The way I understand Heidegger is that, indeed, we don't experience the world as Descartes might tempt us to think. We are in the world in language with others. There is no boundary, not really. I take Wittgenstein to make the same kind of point in a very different style. The beetlebox is his own little joke on the ghost, on its epistemological-semantic nullity.
Sorry to offend. I guess we just understand Heidegger differently.
Thanks for the kind words. It's great to talk about this stuff.
No need to apologize; no offense taken. I'm just a bit impatient at times is all. I imagine Derrida would agree there is no privileged reading of Heidegger (or any text).
Regarding the beetle in the box: I don't think W denies it, but sees it, in its ineffability as dropping out of the conversation. The others cannot show me their beetle and they can't tell me about it either. So the beetle becomes irrelevant, but the fact that there is a beetle is most significant. Not all of being in the world with others partakes in "disclosedness".
:up:
Agreed. No denial implied or necessary or sought.
Hence only
Quoting Pie
which implies that meaning is [essentially ] public.
(I agree that no one possesses exactly the 'same' English as anyone else in a certain sense.)
I think the beetle implies that there are private meanings; significant nameless images and feelings, also, that cannot be made public. That is according to my own experience. But we'll probably have to agree to disagree about that
To me, private stuff (non-meaning) is certainly allowed or hinted at, but private meanings are exactly the rhetorical target. Because people might have all kinds of different things in their one box, because what's in an individual's box can even change continuously, and because such a box could even be empty, it makes no sense to think of a word as a name for 'the' beetle in the box. So 'pain' does not make sense as a name for something radically private. It's more like a can opener. The word has a public function. I explain why I called the dentist with it, why I don't feel like going out with friends, why I'm asking for an apisirin, why I don't believe in public meaning... Note that Google Translate can use the word, presumably without having even a box, let alone a beetle in it. Statistics ! There are strong patterns in our traces.
Even if one allows or postulates some ineffable painstuff (which I 'believe' in in the usual sense), it's misleading (so Wittgenstein seems to imply) to think of 'pain' having its meaning anchored in the ineffable. I connect this with Saussure's structuralism. Signs get their meaning positionally, contextually---from within a system of differences without positive elements. They aren't tags on pregiven intuited meanings (references to entities shown in a private theater.)
Now this is just my current take.
The word "pain" would mean nothing to someone incapable of feeling pain. Your feeling of pain is not accessible to me. The word "pain" in its public usage gets associated with people saying they feel unpleasant sensations, and because we all feel our own (and only our own) unpleasant sensations, we get a sense of the meaning of the word 'pain'.
I think those senses of meaning are roughly the same, because each person's experience of pain is plausibly roughly the same, but it also seems reasonable to think that each person's sense would be associated with various experiences and feelings, and thus be uniquely individual also, or so it seems to me.
With respect, I think that this intuitively plausible view is just what is being challenged. What you say seems to 'anchor' meaning in something private. The background theory seems to be that we act the same because something on the inside is the same. Wittgenstein, in my view, is flipping this scheme over, inverting it.
It seems that we are so convinced we feel the 'same' pain (while insisting that pain is private?) because of the routine common machine-learnable use of 'pain' public life..and not the reverse. We don't want to explain outward synchronization (the place of 'pain' in our public grammar) in terms of a hypothetical inward synchronization (as beetle/beetles/no-beetle). We want instead to explain the popular concept of this 'inward' something in terms of a useful but misleading substantive.
I take this, correctly or not, to be a relatively standard interpretation.
I don't think linguistic meaning is anchored in something private, but is enabled by both private feeling and experience as well as public expression.
Quoting Pie
You can't feel my pain; that is obvious, and in that sense pain is private. We all feel pain, or at least most of us do if our neurological machinery is "normal", and we all behave similarly and say similar things when in pain, so it seems reasonable to think that the experience of pain is not so different for different people. But we can't be certain, just because each individual's pain can be felt only by them. Do you disagree with any of that and if so, which part and why?
I given this one some thought, and discussed it with others. The following may or may not be helpful or persuasive.
When fitting a linear model to a scatterplot, we assign one measurement to the independent variable and another to the dependent. We then plot the best least squares line and check R^2 for how well the model fits. In this case, we are simply missing either the dependent or independent variable. Because pain (itself) is (grammatically) ineffable and 'invisible' to scientific instruments, we have no data whatsoever to test the thesis you suggest, which indeed seems reasonable. More broadly, we have and can have no data that will support that the same neurological machinery will result in the same ineffable 'output.' I agree with Ryle that most of our everyday talk of mind (when we aren't being metaphysical) does indeed draw the mind into the inferential nexus, in terms, however, of a state's constituents (not its indicators.) (My love for my wife is not hidden somewhere within in me but is out there in the way I treat her, though I don't deny a feeling component that we can't do much with on its own. ) As long as we have an operational definition of pain or sorrow, we can measure the postulated entity that way. In other words, we can look at the relationship of reports of pain and brain scans, etc. But the ineffable thing itself is like a black hole which is only visible through its effect of everything public around it. Pain itself is the hole in a doughnut, and the hole depends on the dough for its meaning.
Agreed, in principle. Just depends on which act of the play......which step in the method..... is under consideration.
Quoting Janus
Agreed, this time wholeheartedly. Meditations II, where all this originates, is titled OF THE NATURE OF THE HUMAN MIND; AND THAT IT IS MORE EASILY KNOWN THAN THE BODY, so are we then to accept that the nature of the human mind is subjective reality. I dont.
All the rest is just folks figuring thats what he really meant, and would really have said, if only he thought like us.
Quoting Janus
Yeah, pretty much. I as representation is logically superior to I as existence. You know.....no category can be a predicate in a logical proposition, so it is said. Biggest deal is, even so, the I qua conceptual representation, is never present in thought as such. When I say, I think....., the thinking has already been done.
Anyway....carry on.
C'mon, give me something to disagree with...
I agree with all of that. From an inferentialist perspective, pain as a concept gets its meaning from the network of inferences which we allow and disallow. For instance: 'I flushed all my aspirin, because I was in terrible pain' does not make sense for us. Unless we are missing context, the person does not speak our language correctly. "The trip was pleasant and ever so painful!"
Cool, so it seems reasonable to think that people's experience of pain is similar at least to the extent that they generally find it unpleasant and seek to avoid it. The lack of hard data, to me points to the private nature of pain, When I talk of "private meaning" I don't mean private semantic meaning, but pre-linguistic affects that it seems reasonable to think we have in common with animals.
The lawyer with behaviorist tendencies in me would talk of a clear tendency to avoid what's called pain (and a clear tendency to pursue what's called pleasure.)
Quoting Janus
I agree. I'd say (with my philosopher hat off) 'of course raw feels exist' and those 'raw feels' include an empathy that finds itself mirrored in pets. There's a strong feeling or hunch with the feeling that the feeling is shared, that love is one, basically.
HA!!!
Sorry... I messed up. Posted a minor point I disagreed with, but that wasnt what you asked for. Ill have to think about it.
Quoting Pie
"Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts." C S Peirce
[quote=Brandom]
Thinking of conceptual content in terms of inferential role, and of understanding correspondingly as practical mastery of such an inferential roleas the ability to sort into good and bad the inferences in which the concept appears in the premises or conclusionshas other advantages as well. It is a powerful corrective to the philosophically unilluminating and pedagogically damaging cartesian picture of the achievement of understanding as the turning on of some kind of inner light, which permits one then to see clearly. This is what the elementary-school kid thinks happens in math class when the girl next to him gets it, and he doesnt. He is waiting for the light to go on in his head, too, so that hell understand fractions. In fact, hes just got to practice making the moves, and distinguishing which ones are OK and which ones are not, until he masters the practical inferential abilities in question. It is not unusual for teachers of technical material to have students who can do all the problem-sets and proofs, can tell what does and doesnt follow from some situation described using the concepts being taught, but still think that they dont understand those concepts. A feeling of familiarity and confidence in knowing ones way around in an inferential network often lags ones actual mastery of it. The important thing is to realize that the understanding is that practical mastery, and the feeling (the cartesian light) is at best an indicator of itoften an unreliable one.
...
One might ask whether the inferentialist approach does not require overestimating the extent to which we are rational. Are we really very good at telling what is a reason for what? How often do we act for reasonsand in particular, for good reasons? The question betrays a misunderstanding. We are rational creatures in the sense that our claims and aims are always liable to assessment as to our reasons for them. How good we are at satisfying those demands doesnt change our status as rational. And it must be kept in mind that on this way of thinking about the nature of semantic content, it makes no sense to think of us first having a bunch of sentences expressing definite propositions, which accordingly stand in inferential relations to one another, and only then having there be a question about how many of those inferences we get right. For it is our practices of treating what is expressed by some noises as reasons for what is expressed by other noises that makes those noises express conceptual contents in the first place. Once the enterprise is up and running, we can certainly make mistakes about what follows from the commitments we have undertaken, and what would justify them. But there is no possibility of us massively or globally getting the inferences wrong (for very much the same Quinean reasons that Davidson has emphasized).
I have been arguing that it is better to think in terms of understanding than knowledge, and better to think of meaning-and-understanding (which on this approach are two sides of one coin) in terms of inference than in terms of truth. So far, I have approached this issue largely from the point of view of semantics and the philosophy of language. But there is more at stake here. For this way of thinking about semantic content goes to the heart of the question of what it is to be sapientto be the kind of creature we most fundamentally are. It says that we are beings that live, and move, and have our being in the space of reasons. We are, at base, creatures who give and ask for reasonswho are sensitive to that force of the better reason, persuasive rather than coercive, which so mystified and fascinated the ancient Greek philosophers. Crossing that all-important line from mere sentience to sapience is participating in practices of giving and asking for reasons: practices in which some performances have the pragmatic significance of claims or assertions, which accordingly, as both standing in need of reasons and capable of serving as reasons (that is, of playing the role both of conclusion and as premise in inference) count as expressing propositional semantic content.
This semantic rationalismwhich goes with thinking of content in the first instance in terms of inference rather than reference, reason rather than truthflies in the face of many famous movements in 20th century philosophical thought. The American pragmatists, above all, John Dewey, used the possibility of explaining knowing that in terms of knowing how not only to assimilate our sapient intellectual activity to the skillful doings of merely sapient animals, but at the same time to blur the sharp, bright line I am trying to draw between sapience and sentience. Wittgenstein famously said that language does not have a downtown: a core set of practices on which the rest depend, and around which they are arrayed, like suburbs. But inferentialism says that practices of giving and asking for reasons are the downtown of language. For it is only by incorporating such practices that practices put in play propositional and other conceptual contents at alland hence count as discursive practices, practices in which it is possible to say anything. The first Sprachspiel, language game, Wittgenstein introduces in the Philosophical Investigations has a builder issuing sorderss to an assistant. When he says Slab! the assistant has been trained to respond by bringing a slab. When he says Block! the assistant has been trained to respond by bringing a block. From the inferentialist point of view, this does not qualify as a Sprachspiel at all; it is a vocal, but not a verbal game. For the assistant is just a practical version of the parrot I considered earlier: he has been trained reliably to respond differentially to stimuli. But he grasps no concepts, and if this is the whole game, the builder expresses none. An order or command is not just any signal that is appropriately responded to in one way rather than another. It is something that determines what is an appropriate response by saying what one is to do, by describing it, specifying what concepts are to apply to a doing in order for it to count as obeying the order. Derridas crusade against what he calls the logocentrism of the Western philosophical tradition has brilliantly and inventively emphasized all the other things one can do with language, besides arguing, inferring, explaining, theorizing, and asserting. Thus we get the playful essays in which the key to his reading of Hegel is that his name in French rhymes with eagle, his reading of Nietzsche that turns on what Derrida claims is the most important of his philosophical writings (a slip of paper that turned up in his belongings after his death, reading only I have forgotten my umbrella,), and the unforgettable meditation on the significance of the width of the margins of the page for the meaning of the text printed there. But if inferentialism is the right way to think about contentfulness, then the game of giving and asking for reasons is privileged among the games we play with words. For it is the one in virtue of which they mean anything at allthe one presupposed and built upon by all the other uses we can then put those meanings to, once they are available. Again, the master-idea of Foucaults critique of modernity is that reason is just one more historically conditioned form of power, in principle no better (and in its pervasive institutionalization, in many ways worse) than any other form of oppression. But if giving and asking for reasons is the practice that institutes meanings in the first place, then it is does not belong in a box with violence and intimidation, which show up rather in the contrast class precisely insofar as they constrain what we do by something other than reasons.
[/quote]
I think I'm into this pumpkin pie now.
Nope, I explained my reasoning for that conclusion a while back too, but it too went by unremarked on.
If all that exists is one's mind, and if this is asserted or entertained on the grounds of scepticism of indirect inference, then there cannot be any hidden states in the mind. That means that the full properties of any entity must be known. 'All things it will cause' is a property of an entity.
Quoting Michael
It is, because, as above, if a part of the mind is not presented directly to our awareness (there's a source of uncertainty, then that source must (consistently) be doubted in the same way as the external world is. If some aspects of my world seem random I'm not directly aware of the forces involved, therefore I must doubt the existence fo the forces involved.
Quoting Michael
It follows from all possible causes of all possible events being in your mind.
Quoting Michael
Whether mathematical realism is false is another discussion, I put in all the possible explanations for any given approach to mathematics.
Quoting Michael
Of course it doesn't because none of those premises are the premises I used in my argument. For fuck's sake will you please stop wasting everyone's time refuting arguments I'm not even making just because they have the same conclusions.
And your versions are not even representing what we're arguing about. They should go...
1. John knows that Joe Biden is President (and Joe Biden is a figment of John's mind)
2. Joe Biden is 79 years old (and being 79 years old is a figment of John's mind)
3. Therefore, John knows that Joe Biden is 79 years old (and 'knowing' anything is figment of John's mind, the 'truth' of anything means whatever john thinks is means because it's also a figment of John's mind)
or..
1a. X, Y and Z, all their properties, all their effects and all laws governing them are properties of John's mind because all there is is John's mind
1. John knows that X, Y, and Z exist and all other things that exist
2a. Jim (who is entertaining the possibility of such a world) knows that therefore...
2. If John claims "Only X, Y, and Z exist" - John cannot possibly be wrong because (unbeknownst to John), if John can't sense it, it doesn't exist. He only needs to check all he can sense to answer this question correctly, even if he doesn't know that's all he need do
3. Therefore, John knows that only X, Y, and Z exist (incorrect) but Jim knows such a world where John might exist is nonsense.
You're really reaching with what you mean by "property". I wouldnt say that that the vase will fall off the table tomorrow and break is a property of the vase, or of the table, or of the floor, or of whatever.
But if you want to use the word "property" to refer to this sort of thing then I reject the assertion that solipsism entails that all "properties" of mental phenomena are known. See below.
Quoting Isaac
Even if it is impossible for me to not know that I am in pain it is possible for me to not know that I have been in pain for 30 minutes. And this is true even if only my mental phenomena exists. I don't need for something other than my mind (e.g. another mind or a material universe) to exist for me to have been in pain for 30 minutes, or for me to not know that I have been in pain for 30 minutes.
There are facts about mental phenomena that might not be known even if the mental phenomena themselves are known.
Quoting Isaac
He can possibly be wrong. I provided the argument several times:
Bp
¬?p
Bp ? ?¬p
What you should say is:
2. If John claims "Only X, Y, and Z exist" - John is not wrong
All you have argued is that if ontological solipsism is correct then the ontological solipsist isn't wrong.
Quoting Isaac
If John doesn't know that only X, Y, and Z exist then he doesn't know everything.
Quoting Isaac
But it's not nonsense. It is a perfectly coherent situation. Only X, Y, and Z exist and they are all features of John's mind. He knows that X, Y, and Z exist but he doesn't know that only X, Y, and Z exist. He doesn't know what will exist in the future, or how X, Y, or Z will change. He might not know what existed in the past, given the limitations of memory. He might not know whether or not the Reimann hypothesis is true. He doesn't know what could have happened had he chosen a different course of action.
Then why did the vase fall off the table, if not because of some property of the world prior?
Quoting Michael
I don't see how. What you say is true in our world because timekeeping is external and your memory is not always accessible to you. Two external features. I don't see how it would be the case in a world where all there was was your consciously aware mind.
Quoting Michael
That's ignoring the implication of the entire world being in John's mind.
Quoting Michael
Those are the matters we're disagreeing over
The rules of inference dont change. You can only avoid the conclusion by rejecting one of the two premises. Either I dont believe that ontological solipsism is true or ontological solipsism is necessarily true.
Quoting Isaac
Lets assume that only my mind and your mind exist. I have been in pain for 30 minutes. According to your reasoning, either it is impossible for me to not know that I have been in pain for 30 minutes or that I have been in pain for 30 minutes is a property of your mind.
Or lets assume that only my mind and seven billion other minds and a material universe of superstrings exist. I have been in pain for 30 minutes. According to your reasoning, either it is impossible for me to not know that I have been in pain for 30 minutes or that I have been in pain for 30 minutes is a property of one or more of these seven billion other minds, or of the material universe of superstrings.
I dont think either of these scenarios make sense. So the conclusion is that either that I have been in pain for 30 minutes, although true, isnt a property of anything, or something can be a property of my mental phenomena but not known.
Quoting Isaac
Because of stuff that happens in the future. I dont understand whats difficult to understand about this. Stuff that will happen in the future isnt a property of things that exist in the present.
If only a material universe of superstrings exist it doesnt follow that the future state of that universe is a property of that universe in the present. If only your mind and my mind exist it doesnt follow that the future state of your mind is a property of your mind in the present (or a property of my mind in the present).
Nonsense. You writing only two premises doesn't confer some kind of magical power. You've not listed all the premises which are being assumed by the argument.
Quoting Michael
30 minutes has no meaning at all if only your mind and my mind exist. 30 of your minutes, or 30 of my minutes?
Quoting Michael
It's not difficult to understand. I disagree. What's difficult to understand is why you can only seem to make sense of disagreements in terms of your interlocutors failing to understand something.
Quoting Michael
Then what causes that future state?
One of these is true:
1. Bp ? ?¬p
2. Bp ? ?p
3. ¬Bp ? ?¬p
4. ¬Bp ? ?p
Which of these is true if ontological solipsism is true?
You haven't specified your terms. I can look up the notation, but I can't look up what you mean by Bp or p.
p ? ontological solipsism is true
Bp ? I believe that p
So
1. I believe that ontological solipsism is true and it is possible that ontological solipsism is not true
2. I believe that ontological solipsism is true and ontological solipsism is necessarily true
3. I don't believe that ontological solipsism is true and it is possible that ontological solipsism is not true
4. I don't believe that ontological solipsism is true and ontological solipsism is necessarily true
...?
1. I think.
Why are you asking?
Then you accept what I said here as part of this exchange:
Quoting Isaac
Quoting Michael
No. In my example, John is not the solipsist. John is a person in the possible world the solipsist is entertaining.