The judgment and the fact that satisfies it are still distinguishable in kind. — Esse Quam Videri

Special pleading. The judgement and the fact are the very same.

Error is only impossible in this case because answerability is immediately fulfilled, not because it has disappeared. — Esse Quam Videri

An answer that repeats the question is not an answer.

Calling it a limit case is correctly identifying it for what it is. — Esse Quam Videri

Such judgements appear to be a limiting cases because they are constitutive of the background that makes judgement possible.

Norms of truth are constituted in practice as norms of answerability to reality. — Esse Quam Videri

Norms are constitutive of what is the case as much as what is the case delineates norms, as is shown by "what is right" being itself a judgement.

Practice and reality are mutually dependent and inseparable.

Back at you — Richard B

Ok. That's fine. Is a glass of 99.8% H2O, 10ppm Na, 30 ppm Ca, 2 ppm Mg, 5 ppm SO4, 25 ppm Cl, 30 ppm HCO3, 0.1 ppm Fe, 300 ppm HDO, and 20 ppm D2O, a glass of 99.8% water, 10ppm Na, 30 ppm Ca, 2 ppm Mg, 5 ppm SO4, 25 ppm Cl, 30 ppm HCO3, 0.1 ppm Fe, 300 ppm HDO, and 20 ppm D2O?

I say yes. What say you?

. , what if we revers the wording - is a glass of pure H₂O a glass of water?

I say yes. What say you?

I can't follow that. Is there a typo?

Something is necessarily true iff it is tru in every case. Hence, if it is false in a given case, it cannot be necessarily true. I can't see you disagreeing with that.

And if something is contingent, then it is not necessary. I can't see you disagreeing with that.

Both Kripke and the Tractatus would agree here.

...he appears to reify necessity as a worldly fact — Richard B

Not at all sure why you would suppose that. Possible worlds are arrangements of how things might be, in logical space, which is pretty exactly in keeping with the Tractaus.

It's not up to others to explain "Kripke’s metaphysical framing doesn’t violate Tractarian structures" so much as up to you to show how it does, if that is what you think.

I don't believe you address how a proposition with sense implies something about a proposition without sense? — Richard B

If you want a reply on this, you are going to have to explain what you are claiming. Are you trying to say something like: "If 'The cat is on the mat' is false (a proposition with sense), how does this imply anything about 'The cat is on the mat or the cat is not on the mat' (a tautology without sense)?" If so, the answer is straightforward: it doesn't imply it in the usual sense. Rather, the tautology is true independently of whether the contingent proposition is true or false. The relationship isn't one of implication but of logical independence—which is precisely the point about necessary truths being "empty" of empirical content.

I think your reply helps move the discussion forward, so thank you for spelling it out. — Esse Quam Videri

You are welcome, as Americans say, but I didn't do any more in that last post than repeat myself.

I don't think the “reading” case provides a counter-example to my claim that judgment presupposes answerability to how things are. On the contrary, even here the judgment is true because things are a certain way, and would be false if they were not. — Esse Quam Videri

I'll try one more time. You are reading this now. We ask, "what is presupposed by the judgement that I am reading?" And the answer is, exactly and only, that I am reading. What is judged to be the case and the presupposition are the very same. No explanation has been provided that was not already at hand. Also, you said previously that "judgment presupposes answerability to how things are and the intelligibility of error.". I'll italicise the latter. Now how can one be in error about your reading this, here, now? There seems to be no such possibility.

If the answer is the same as the question, no "presupposed answerability" has been provided.

It will not do to try to maintain all judgment presupposes answerability to how things are by saying "limit cases" are simply trivial instances; that's indulging in special pleading. That you are reading this now is not obviously a limiting case in any special sense.

And indeed such are not limiting cases so much as constitutive cases. What you are now doing counts as reading, now. If what you are now doing is not reading this, then what could we mean by "reading, now"?

You are assuming that fulfilment of your conditions requires something outside the judgment itself but this is precisely what is being questioned by the reading example.

Truth would be normatively grounded in reality, not practice. But it seems that practice alone can provide the criteria that constitute correctness. This is a fairly direct consequence of Wittgenstein's considerations of rule-following.

Yep, spot on. Searle was Austin's student, but took Austin's ideas in an interesting although perhaps overly formal direction in the interest of making them clear.

's account is fair. Searle might downplay conditions of satisfaction in favour of intentionality as the way content is "fixed". When one looks at a ship, the intentional content (what the looking is about) is not an image-of-ship; it's a ship. Overstressing “content” risks sliding back into precisely the mental-image / representationalist picture that both Searle and Austin reject.

Now we are well into all the usual muddle that the idea that what we see isn't the thing but a mental-image-of-the-thing brings with it.

Folks, when you look at a ship, you see the ship, not some mental image of the ship.

And when you hallucinate, you don't see anything - that's kinda the point.

Those half-baked philosophical ideas of things-in-themselves and mental images are leading you up the garden path.

Austin sorted this stuff out int he middle of last century.

Ok, think about the logical space of the Tractatus. In that space, any proposition can be stated. Amongst those propositions are some which happen to be true, given the way things are, and a whole lot that happen to be false. Now some of those false propositions might have been true, had things been slightly different. that's what modal logic seeks to make coherent.

1. Saying that "....then this fact about the world is a necessary one" seems incorrect. A fact about the world is not because of the nature of logical structure, but whether a possible state of affairs is true or false. — Richard B

There are some statements that could not be false, no matter how the things in logical space are arranged. Mathematical and logic truths are amongst these. These are in a relevant sense independent of how things are. These are among the necessary truths. They are true in every state of affairs.

2. Saying that, "Well, if something is false, it's obviously not necessary true." How can proposition that that says nothing, follow from a proposition that says something? From a proposition that says something about the world, how is it obvious that it implies a proposition that shows logical form but states nothing about the world. — Richard B

Necessary truths are true in any arrangement of logical space. So if a statement is false, at the very lest, it is not true in every arrangement of logical space. But that doesn't mean that is says nothing. That it is not true that the cat is on the mat does tell us something about how things are arranged in logical space.

Or are you thinking of necessary propositions as saying nothing? That's one notion form the Tractatus. "Well, if something is false, it's obviously not necessary true" is consistent with this. A proposition that is necessary tells us nothing about how things are arranged in logical space, because t is true in every arrangement. A statement that is not necessary will be false in at least some arrangement, and so will tel us something.

The exception is contradictions, which are of course the negation of necessary truths, and false in every arrangement of logical space. Together tautologies and contradictions form the boundary of logical space.

The logical space of the Tractatus is a precursor to possible world semantics. It consists in different arrangements fo the things in the world, and each of these arrangements can be considered a possible world. In those terms, the Tractatus presaged possible world semantics.

Does that help?

However, when we bring in the metaphysical talk of possible worlds and rigid designation, I start to squirm. — Richard B

Yes, I can see your discomfort. Can we perhaps work on that?

§80 and §81 concern the extensibility of language. In §80 he is showing how natural languages are open to the unexpected. In §81 he is pretty much expressly rejecting the idea from the Tractatus that our natural languages are approximate to some more perfect formal language, in part because formal languages do not have the openness mentioned. §80 is about how we use natural languages effectively despite the absence of rules that will guide us in every case, and §81 is about how formal systems ought not be considered as showing the true form of our natural languages.

Now this is quite compatible with what Kripke is doing. He's saying that if we are to keep our talk of possibilities consistent, then we must keep our use of proper names and kinds consistent. This is the point made previously, that when we consider how things might have been had Nixon not won the '72 election, our considerations are about Nixon, and not about someone else.

Formal language does not perfect our natural language, but it can guide it.

That seems to me, again, to be unnecessarily hanging on to an outmoded presentation of what is going on.

As does the indirect realist. — Michael

Yep. The difference in science is not in the basic physiology. At least you now agree with me here.

...but the direct realist argues that there's a much more substantial relationship; one in which information about the mind-independent nature of the ship is given in the sensory experience... — Michael

Scratch out "mind-independent" and you have it.

"the phenomenal character of experience is determined, at least partly, by the direct presentation of ordinary objects" — Michael

Are you willing to claim that the character of experience is not determined, at least partly, by things in the world? Surely not.

Your ideas of token identity might be interesting, but I wasn't able to follow what you were arguing. Neural nets are not representational, so it might well be that notions of tokens are irrelevant, covered by the Markov blanket, as it were.

We don’t really know what mental phenomena — or as scientists of perception call them, percepts — are, — Michael

Percepts, in such an account, would be some stage in various layers of Markov blankets, just one of the levels of the internal states within the nested, hierarchical Markov blanket architecture. The perception is inside the Markov blanket, but not disconnected from what it outside. Crucially, The system does not “see” the percept; rather, the system sees by being in that state.

But frankly the percept is an oversimplification of what is going on.

I believe most indirect realists believe — Michael

Indirect realism is still realism, so I don’t understand the relevance of those references. — Michael

They're not intenced as such. Your claim concerned what "most indirect realists believe", but there is no evidence on which this might be based.

Here's another account. A direct realist believes that when we, say, look at a veritable ship, what we see is the ship. They hold that light is reflected from the ship, focused by the eye and incites certain neural pathways associated with things of that sort, and that this process is what we call seeing a ship.

An indirect realist, in contrast, holds that what we see is not the ship, but something else, sometimes called a "mental image" of the ship, that is presented to us by the process of light being reflected from the ship, focused by the eye and inciting certain neural pathways associated with things of that sort.

The most obvious difference here is that the indirect realist one way or another relies on a homunculus, a mind being presented with various stimuli, while the direct realist is embedded in the world. (Edit: I've bolded this, since it seems to me to be at the very heart of the issue)

We could, if it were deemed worthwhile, re-write the distinction between direct and indirect realism in terms of Markov Blankets.

Indirect realism effectively treats the Markov blanket as opaque, the system having only access to internal states in the form of the mooted "mental image". External states are inferred, never directly encountered, and what is “perceived” is confined to what is inside the blanket (representations, images, models).

Direct realism treats the Markov blanket as causally, but not epistemically, isolated, the system having access to external states through the mediation of the blanket. Seeing the ship is an interaction, not an appearance, and perception is a skilled engagement with environmental states across the blanket;
there is no inner object that perception terminates on.

Now on this account, I take direct realism as telling the better story.

China's general influence in South America? — jorndoe

:rofl:

This suits China down to the ground!

Xi says major countries should take lead in abiding by int'l law, UN Charter

I don't see it. Can you explain how?

Ok. The problems for your position remain: mental phenomena as entities; phenomenology as representational; non-identity as epistemically problematic. You've reiterated them and then insulated them by an appeal to sociology. The challenges raised remain unanswered.

You've retreated back to the sociology, to "most indirect realists believe...", and there is little empirical data one way or the other. What we do have is evidence that philosophers overwhelmingly accept realism.. The same is unsurprisingly the case for physicist.

Philosophers appear to have moved past the direct/indirect realism dichotomy, and indeed past the realism/anti-realism debate. The deflationary arguments have brought a rejection of grand dichotomies, and a focus on local questions about representation, perception, normativity, explanation, and practice - to small, close conceptual work.

Mental phenomena are either reducible to neurological phenomena or are emergent. — Michael

Why should we think this covers all the possibilities?

Again, with phenomena, and the presumption that somehow I observe "what occur when we dream, and what don’t occur when we are unconscious".

I don't observe my dreams; I have them. What doesn't occur when I am unconscious is consciousness, which is again not something I observe, so much as something I do.

You are taking these "mental phenomena" as granted. I would question them.

And along with them, the characterisation of direct realism.

I am interested in your opinion on the following and how you would think Kripke would reply. — Richard B

But

Kripke pointed out that if water is H₂O, if they are indeed identical, then necessarily, they are identical. If they are the very same, then they are the very same in every possible world. — Banno

I'll try explaining this again.

See the "if"? that makes it a conditional. If as you seem to think, science did not find that water is H₂O, then ◇water ≠ H₂O.

Kripke is not asserting that water is H₂O; although he, like most folk, took this as granted. He is not telling physicist what water is made of. He is making a point about the interpretation of modal theorems, such that such equivalences, if true, are necessarily true.

So the question concerning air is misbegotten.

Do mental phenomena exist, and if so are its properties the mind-independent properties of things like apples (or do they in some sense resemble them)? If mental phenomena do exist and if its properties do not resemble the mind-independent properties of things like apples then indirect realists are correct and there is an epistemological problem of perception. — Michael

This is better - we are getting closer to the presumptions underpinning this picture of the world.

DO mental phenomena exist? Well, what sort of thing is a mental phenomenon? What is to count as mental phenomena? Once we decide that, we are on the way to being able to quantify over them and include them in out discourse. Whatever they might be, they are not apples. But can the notion be set out clearly?

Now I know what an apple is - at least well enough to cook apple crumble. Is there something I can do with, say, a mental phenomenon of an apple that I can't do with an apple? Well, I can post about them on a philosophy forum, I suppose.

Are we going to say I can use my mental-phemonenon-of-apple to make mental-phenomenon-of-apple-crumble?

And if I did so, what have I done that is not equally well set out by saying I used apples to make an apple crumble?

See how the mental phenomena loses its puff? That's the deflation mentioned above.

It's all in the crumb.

SO, this is all going to work out well...

There are legitimate phenomenological and epistemological differences between direct and indirect realism that can only be addressed by a scientific study of the world and perception, and that cannot be deflated by some semantic argument that "X is red" means "X causes such-and-such an experience". — Michael

So you claim. Yet the deflation is set out before you. Hmm.

Ok. That still looks to be a misunderstanding of Kripke, and of implication. He's not attacking physics.

we know from observation that metals expland more than wood, for example does with heat, and wood more than metals with moisture. — Janus

You're just layering theory on top of theory here. And thinking that the indigenous understanding of the land is separable from what they say about the land is absurd.

Why are you so wed to this idea - that observations are somehow inviolably non- theoretical? Intuitive realism? Anti-relativism or fear of epistemic circularity? Habit?

My guess is that he has them lined up already, since he has stated an agreement publicly. — Questioner

:grin: I doubt there was such forethought... and the recent news indicates otherwise. Hitting someone generally results in their getting their back up, rather than their becoming more cooperative.



Edit: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-05/nicolas-maduro-allies-take-power-in-venezuela/106198570

A lot of the foofaraw here seems to hinge on "in contact." — J

Yep. It helps to talk of the other senses - a suggestion from Austin. We already used the taste of sugar being sweet - the contact is pretty direct there. Touch provides an alternate example, rough against smooth.

Perhaps the problem is the expectation of certainty.

The analogue thermometer is based on the observation that things expand when heated, an observation which does not rely upon a theory of the nature of heat. — Janus

Yeah, it does. In order to determine that something has expanded on heating, we have to compare it to something else, and assuming that the something else has remained unchanged. Nor was it wrong for Martin Horký and Francesco Sizzi to ask if telescopes distorted the images of Saturn and Jupiter. The acceptance of these observations came along with the development of the theory of optics. Aboriginal people embed their understanding of the world in stories in order to make sense of them, in much the same way as Aristotle and Newton. Calling one set of stories "theory" and the other "myth" is pretty arbitrary.

The Duhem–Quine thesis stands. Observations are embedded in our overall understanding of how things work.

No oil company will invest in infrastructure in the circumstances Trump has created.

Again, his response to a problem is achieving the exact opposite of the desired outcome.

What a fool.

Yep.

You have a penchant for telling naive realists what they think. I'm not sure that they would agree with you. But then, it's not all that clear who "they" are.

Extensionally, being sweet is the very same as having a chemical structure that activates T1R2/T1R3 GPCR on taste cells.

It's not clear what the intensional difference is. We talk in very different ways in cooking and in biochemistry. Yet the two meet. Intensionality might be no more than a different language game.

Here I am purposefully deflating the phenomenology.

There doesn't seem to be any plan for exactly how they are going to "run" Venezuela. — Questioner

There seems to be an odd mindset - the belief that somehow the way to change Venezuelan policy is by kidnapping the guy at the top - as if he acted alone.

That's the illusion of every autocrat: "I alone make things happen". It ain't so.

The Venezuela government has said it will not comply.

So what now - kidnap the next leader? And the next?

Stupidity on a grand level.

I’ve already addressed this point several times. — Esse Quam Videri

Yes, you did. I marked "what judgment itself presupposes" specifically because of the central place you give it.

I'm concerned to make sure I am using your somewhat difficult language, so as to be sure we are not talking past each other. So let me adopt your language yet again, and go over what seems to me to be a central difficulty with your account:

...judgment presupposes answerability to how things are and the intelligibility of error. — Esse Quam Videri

and your concern with:

an infinite regress of conditions— — Esse Quam Videri

So let's set the trilemma up again, using the changed language you are here adopting: we suppose that if someone judges something to be true then they presupposes answerability to how things are and the intelligibility of error, in order to so judge; but then they must either again explain that presupposes answerability to how things are and the intelligibility of error; or they must take them as fundamental; or they must rely on circularity, where judgements form the conditions for themselves.

And your answer is that there must be something that exists necessarily in order to ground judgement.

Now my rejection of this framing is based on an example of a judgement that does not fit that framing. First, I assume that you will judge with me that you are reading this post, here, now, and that this can act as a point of agreement. The question, then, by your account, is what that judgement presupposes, by way of answerability to how things are and the intelligibility of error, and how it avoids an infinite regression.

Now I don't see how we can make sense of being wrong about your reading this post, here and now. There is no possibility of error here, apart from our being mistaken as to the use of words like "EQV, reading, here, now".

So were you say

Practice determines what would count as being right, but it does not (and cannot) itself make a judgment right. — Esse Quam Videri

I would instead point out that the example shows that the practice counts as making the judgement. Your reading this thread counts as "EQV is reading this tread" being true.

If you like, the extensional equivalence overrides any difference in intensionality. But that's not a very clear specification.

You take yourself as

...reflectively identifying what inquiry itself presupposes in order to function as inquiry. — Esse Quam Videri

Perhaps we agree that there are things that are taken as granted in order to enact an inquiry. But were you say these things exist of necessity, I point out that they are instead aspects of our practice.

Gödel, of course, is used metaphoricaly. But

Notably, this presupposes a notion of truth that is not exhausted by system-relative coherence — Esse Quam Videri

is not quite right, since the underivable truths are true within the system. Truth is a part of the things we do with language.

I think we have reached the point in the discussion where further clarification is unlikely to be productive. Thank you for the interesting discussion. — Esse Quam Videri

Cheers. You are of course under no obligation to respond to my posts.

Seems you are doing what is appropriate, working with what your clients want and providing for them as needed.

Carer training and interaction is usually, mostly medical, as it should be; but this leaves them with only the language of the medical model with which to explain the complex human interactions that they have to deal with directly - doctors and other medical professionals are usually able to abstract themselves from the nitty gritty, nurses and carers have to deal with bed pans and tears.

The social model, and especially the capabilities approach, provide language that can be used to deal with the humanity of those one cares for, in a more "holistic" way. That is, it emphasises the ethical dimension.

It's a different way to think and talk about what you already do.

I think the science clearly shows that colour, taste, smell, etc. are the product of our biology, causally determined by but very different to the objective nature (e.g. the chemical composition) of apples and ice creams. — Michael

We had this chat previously. Let;s look again at some philosophical weasel-words.

So the idea is that sugar is not really sweet, it just tastes that way to us.

See the word "really" there? what's it doing?

If we take it away we have "sugar is not sweet, it just tastes that way to us"...

Something has gone wrong here. sugar is not sweet, it just tastes sweet? Well, yes... that's what being sweet is - a taste.

"No, no, the sugar isn't sweet in itself!"

See the words "in itself" there? what'r they doing?

If we take them away we have "sugar is not sweet", which is false. Sugar is sweet.

Sugar has hydroxyl (–OH) groups which activate the T1R2/T1R3 GPCR on taste cells, triggering a calcium-mediated signalling cascade form which the nervous system learns certain activities, including seeking out sweet tastes and calling them "sweet" in contrast to "bitter" and "umami".

It's the chemical composition of sugar that makes it sweet, in interaction with a human. Being sweet is having a chemical structure that activates T1R2/T1R3 GPCR on taste cells.

Now nothing in this last, bolded paragraph implies that being sweet is not a property of sugar in itself or is not real.

Being sweet is not an illusion or hallucination. Sugar really is sweet.


So, Michael, is there anything in this with which you disagree? I hope not.

Your diagram... why the potato? :wink:

Yes, yours did that, which is what my argument about the age of consent demonstrates. — BenMcLean

Ok. No, it didn't. my post was pretty clear. Your argument, somewhat less so.

Ha! Folk think there's a plan...

What's in dispute is what's perceived - the world itself or mental states — Clarendon

When you see a boat, it' a boat that you see. If what you see is not a boat - if it is an illusion of an hallucination - then by that very fact what you see is not a boat.

But when philosophers say "perceive" instead of "see" they quickly loose track of what is going on. "Perceive" tries to treat veridical vision, hallucinations and illusions as if they were the same; it often presumes that there is a "something" that is being perceived, even when this may not be so; and it tries its best to be a private inner process.

Picking up on these observations: By starting with the idea of "looking at a ship", we can be misled into believing that to perceive a ship is always to do so under that description.. A child has to learn, quite literally, to look at a ship -- to learn what to look for, how to recognize one, what the fuzzy cases are. Direct perception would instead be something like "bare colors and textures" -- a very unnatural thing for the human species to experience, past infancy. I think that to defend direct realism, you have to argue that those unmediated (?) experiences are what we perceive, full stop. — J

Why not just say that the babe has not yet learned to see the ship, and doesn't do so until they do so under a description? That "seeing a ship" just amounts to applying that set of games and rules. Before learning, the baby sees shapes, colours, textures — not “ships”. After learning, the baby sees ships, and not by constructing an internal model or representation, but by participating in a set of practices: naming, recognising, sorting, using ships.

Seeing the ship is unmediated... Seeing it through a telescope might be called unmediated. What we call a "ship" just is the sort of thing that we see. We don't see it "indirectly" in any ordinary sense.

So the claim is: when I see a ship, I am directly in contact with the ship itself, not with a representation, sense datum, or mental model of it. And what "the ship itself" is, is an aspect of the games we play with words and the world.

Summarising, when a babe learns to “see ships” it is learning to participate in the practice of identifying them. And seeing a ship is direct: you are in contact with the ship, not a mental model. What counts as a ship is socially and linguistically mediated, but that mediation does not make perception indirect. Direct realism = contact with objects; practice/learning = the conditions under which contact with conceptually-defined objects is possible.

I'm puzzled.

What you argued was that observational knowledge was true, but that theoretical knowledge might be dubious.

What you pointed out , in agreement with my post, is that our observations are justified by theory.

...a thermometer works reliably as attested by experience — Janus

Does it? Try setting that out. Sometimes it's 22ºC by the thermometer and feels cold; sometimes, too hot. The water freezes at about 0ºC, but only more or less - and boils at a bit under 100ºC....

And all these have theoretical explanations...

Are we to say the thermometer works because experience certifies it, or are we only interpreting our experience so as to show that the thermometer works?

:wink:

To perceive something is to be in unmediated contact with it. — Clarendon

There's a lot going on in that. Why should we accept it?

Isn't such statement ruling out representationalism, sense-data theories, intentionalist and inferential accounts by fiat?

And "unmediated" is doing a lot of work. I hope no one will deny that vision is mediated by light, hearing by sound.

And we know that perceptual content is structured, that we see a chair, not bare colours and textures.

And what is that relation, being in contact? spatial? causal? intentional? normative?

I think most contemporary philosophers will want to describe themselves as direct realists of one sort or another. — Clarendon

Maybe not in those terms: Survey Results: Metaontology: heavyweight realism, anti-realism, or deflationary realism?