But I would defend pragmatism against subjectivism. Just because we must accept consciousness of the world is indirect, it doesn’t mean that some methods for structuring experience couldn’t also have the goal of being more true, or more objective, or more realistic, or however else we can operationally define a notion of maximal directness.

So conceding the epistemic argument that perception is not direct, does not mean we can’t turn around and have directness as our epistemic ambition. Not all subjectivism has to be equal.

Bully for you.

Where is the evidence that spoken language isn’t enough?

I’m sure a good a case can be made for how the creation of texts was a big step up in terms of cultural semiosis. Having a sacred book that encodes the right way to think means civilisations of millions can become focused on the shared project of saving their eternal souls.

But equally, anthropologists study hunter-gatherer tribes that rely on oral memory to transmit metacognitive thought habits. There is simple proof your assertions are fallacious.

Are you saying hunter gatherers aren’t properly human?

Repetition is not answering, its evading.

Again, how do you define facilitate in the above context? Was my suggestion right or wrong?

There are both subjectivising and objectivising language games. So we have some great epistemic theories to underpin our ontological commitments.

Pragmatism works. Neither realism nor idealism can.

Again you evade giving an answer. You won’t explain how your distinction between speech and writing is a difference that makes a difference in the context of any claims about metacognition.

That distinction is not one I’ve seen being held up as crucial in any metacognition texts. So you will have to be the one to justify it.

The fact that you will continue to try to worm your way out of doing so says everything that needs to be said.

You are welcome to your opinion. But the argument to support it would be nice.

For instance, on what grounds would you be claiming that it is not the corruption of neo-liberalism that is the systemic issue, rather than neoliberalism itself.

And are you familiar enough with social enterprise theory to say it wouldn’t work as neo-neoliberalism? Can you spell out why.

Just repeating a failure to explain is not helpful.

Why writing as a necessary step? Why wasn’t speaking already enough?

Am I suppose to understand by “facilitate” that you mean only to say writing helped sharpen what speaking had already got started?

In that case, writing become a redundant issue. It is not a critical fact here.

Again you seem determined to put obstacles in the way of any discussion. You won’t reference, you won’t answer directly, you use weird terminology with meaningless redundancies, you make secret sauce claims of understanding a mystery that no one else gets.

Getting straight answers from you is like blood from a stone.

Unless humans have always been linguistic creatures, it seems to me that there is a progression of complexity at work. — creativesoul

Strewth. Yes of course. Language had to evolve. And the modern symbolic human mind with it. That is what paleoanthropology studies. Go read a book about it.

Utter bullshit. Where have you explained to me why writing is a necessary difference? Why isn’t speech itself already enough?

But you are stressing the subjective tree - the one that appears to us even in our dreams. It is tree-ness in all the ways we could possibly imagine.

And the concern here is with the objective tree, the mind-independent tree, the Kantian tree-in-itself.

This is where those peddling Wittgensteinian quietism are being disingenuous.

The language game tree is the social tree, the one that appears to a community of minds connected by a web of linguistic relations. There is a right way of speaking about trees because there is a social level of subjectivity or semiosis.

But then the Witti-ites smuggle in their realist claims under the language game smokescreen. Scratch them and you find they believe that makes perception direct. The language game tree is the objective tree - being now defined in terms of the limit of the speakable.

It’s a laughable ruse. But there you go. They probably believe it themselves.

On this forum, no one, but there's not many right-wingers here. I'm tempted to say apokrisis, but not sure if it's best to identify him as right-wing. He sounds like neither. — Agustino

Left~right doesn’t really apply as I take a natural systems view of politics/economics. So what is to be encouraged is the balance of competitive and cooperative behaviours. You have to have both working together in a feedback fashion which is then in turn intelligently responsive to its environment.

Neoliberalism gone wrong is the muddle headed promotion of competitive behaviour - market freedom. If you check your history books, the 1938 Paris meeting where the term neoliberalism was coined was in fact the attempt to fix laissz faire liberalism by given the state a stronger hand in market creation.

Neoliberalism as theory has plenty of natural logic to recommend it. As much as possible, barriers to individual creative striving ought to be removed and collective norms allowed to self organise. That is just democracy.

But for collective norms to become established and then function as social constraints - market regulation - requires strong institutional memory. Somehow the right ways of behaving must be captured as social capital.

So it is pretty easy to spell out the right theory.

In practice, neoliberalism became just an excuse for Thatcher and others to flog off state institutions for cash. It was a straight transfer of public wealth into private hands. It was oligarchy, although not as crude as what was going to come with the eastern bloc later.

Good social/economic theory has just been applied corruptly all along.

The financialised economy had a rational basis. Derivatives were meant to be financial instruments for taming risk. But packaged risk could easily be mis-sold in a market where the watchdogs had been muzzled by elite interests.

Financialisation was meant to be the democratisation of capital. Anyone could be an entrepreneur as the capital to enter into speculative ventures could be freely pulled out of thin air by the banks. But all that capital got invested into the speculative bubbles the banks then created - tech stocks, housing, etc. All the democratisation of capital achieved was interest paying serfdom on asset classes. Very little real productive uplift was created. Ordinary people were turned into speculating mopes to allow a transfer of their wealth into the hands of those able now to create money.

So yes, right wing philosophy - the competition championing, de-institutionalising, philosophy - has become the modern orthodoxy. But let’s not pretend the theory itself was ever properly applied. The practice has been utterly corrupt. The new self-organising social institutions promised have not really emerged. Unless we are talking Goldman Sachs or Davros.

Neo-liberalism could still be done right with another crucial shift - if it is founded in a clear understanding of the limits to growth.

In the business world already - not in the US perhaps, but elsewhere - there are new models like social enterprise that are a rational response. Alternative economic thinking does exist. Business can consciously pursue social and environmental outcomes.

Who needs Trump, his generals, and the fascist regime in waiting? Augustino, is this the future you are supporting? Are you aching for the strongman junta that steps in to restore public order as the GFC proper kicks in?

You seem so caught up in a meaningless triviality - the non-difference of whether the Clintons or some Republican stooge of big business is nominally in charge of protecting the corruption of the elite. Look up, lift your head and see just what dark force you are backing.

Do you think Trump and his generals are going to be able to act against the now off-shore elite in the same way they will be able to do what they want with all the little men?

Again, just answer a direct question. Why are you insisting on written language as necessary to metacognition?

Your refusal to answer on small but important details is a big problem. Why do you go out of your way to be opaque?

It just means that our physiological sensory perception has limitations and as such doesn't perceive everything. — creativesoul

But my argument has been that the limitation is fruitful, purposeful - the feature and not the bug. So the indirectness is critical to the design. It creates the epistemic cut by which the mind separates itself from the world so as then to be able to assert control over the world.

What you treat as an interruption to directness that doesn’t do too much damage, I am saying is the interruption that is foundationally necessary so that a self can be introduced into the equation. The world must be filtered in a way that represents already the self-interested self.

So you are motivated to argue for directness, despite the evidence, because you seek to defend a mistaken notion of processing.

Yours is essentially a representational ontology where the brain turns sensory input into a conscious state of experience - that some homuncular self then experiences. The usual confusion.

I’ve argued the embodied and Bayesian brain view where the brain instead does its best to predict its inputs. Success is defined in terms of how much the world can be afforded to be ignored. So the self interest exists from the get-go. And the epistemic cut is enforced by the mind only having to read reality in terms of its own privately constructed system of signs.

Not all perception requires language. — creativesoul

This is an example of your nonsensical replies. Where have I ever said all perception requires language?

Monbiot did a nice article on the theory vs the practice.

Yeah, I’m just not following your line of argument.

First up, the psychologists who talk about metacognition don’t really get the linguistic scaffolding approach. They are treating those human skills as if they were further genetic functions, not socially constructed and language based skills.

Then still, what has written language got to do with it? Just have a mind structured by oral speech is plenty. Kids don’t learn metacognitive type skills from a manual.

This is all getting a little too weird now.

What? Perception is what we call the generation of sensory experience. It is the primary mediation in question here.

That we see the tree's appearance does not mean that the tree 'is' an appearance. It simply means we see what can be seen of the tree, itself. — StreetlightX

In what sense would our sensations be exhaustive of the tree? That’s taking the direct realist position.

Or maybe the sentence is just badly worded? You mean we see the kinds of things we can see due to our perceptual habits. Other habits might see something that appears very different. Like think of how a spider might see the tree.

Metacognition requires written language — creativesoul

Citation? Explanation?

Your experience of the world. That is why folk were talking about indirect vs direct perception.

You can google the dictionary definition if you like -https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/mediate

technical with object Bring about (a result such as a physiological effect)
‘the right hemisphere plays an important role in mediating tactile perception of direction’

Do you have an example/candidate of meaning that does not require and/or consist in/of what I just wrote? — creativesoul

Is @Sapientia messing around with people’s quotes again? :)

Because indirect perception is mediated,... — creativesoul

Perception isn’t mediated. It is the mediation. Radiant energy gets turned in colour experience. Floating fragments of organic matter get turned in the scent of a rose.

The gap or epistemic cut is between the physics of the world and the qualia of the mind. Perception is our way of talking about the fact that “we” - the linguistically constructed introspecting observer - have to accept basic experience as brute fact. That part of what our brain does - processing the world as a pattern of sensations - is hardwired.

So perception is the primary mediating step. Then secondary linguistic habits can mediate that biological level experience. We can talk about lovely sunsets and try to put a name to the particular variety of rose we might be smelling.

So, we arrive at the following conclusion:No creature without written language has indirect perception. — creativesoul

Nope. Metacognition is dealing with already mediated experience.

And crickey, why written language?

The correct answer is both, depending upon the notion of perception. If it is based upon a minimalist criterion, then it would not involve language, and it would be a more physical notion. If it is based upon a criterion that requires complex linguistic notions, including awareness of our own fallibility, then our perception would most certainly be indirect, because it would amount to the affects/effects of one's worldview and would be a more mental notion. — creativesoul

Finally you spell out a position. And I agree with the gist. It is why I say humans introspect but animals extrospect. Animal perception is direct in the sense that they have no choice but to be plugged into the here and now. Their minds are run by their immediate environment and the circumstance it presents. The capacity to detach from that is very limited - even if chimps, dolphins and ravens can do some planning, some abstracting, some deeper level of analysis.

Then humans can completely detach from the world to have a socially-constructed inner world due to the semiotic mechanism of symbolising language. Language creates an epistemic cut. Mentality gets divided into linguistically scaffolded notions of self and world. Consciousness becomes a self-consciously regulated thing. Introspection adds a further internal dimension where a “self” resides.

So it is the epistemic cut, the semiotic machinery of a symbolic code, that makes human mentality and perception indirect compared to the “trapped in the moment” directness of the biological animal mind.

Yet then, the thread is really about computers only aiming to achieve a conscious animal level of perception. DeepMind claims to replicate something of the neural architecture of brains, not the socially-conditioned being of human minds. It is only the programmers who know DeepMind is seeing cute kittens. No one pretends the machine is making a linguistic classification in unsupervised learning fashion.

So that is why your attack on my usage of “perception” was so out of place. It suggested you didn’t really understand the meaning of my language within the context of the thread.

But anyway, I also then would make the further point that animal perception is still indirect even in its directness. It remains the case that animal consciousness is also founded on an epistemic cut - the mediating semiotics of neurons.

So the whole semiotic argument applies with equal force, just at this more foundational level. That is why while it is true human consciousness is even more indirect than that of non-linguistic animals, here that is inessential to the indirect realism position.

Thoughts? — Agustino

How has that not been the case since Thatcher and Reagan. Can you think of any leader of either country winding back the neoliberal project in any meaningful fashion since then?

The wheel seems ready to turn though. Growth is stagnant. Financialisation - speculative money - has been allowed to corrupt all markets. The environmental costs of the basic industrial-era economy are coming home to roost.

Trump feels like society nervously making the first preparations to turn fascist and statist when the current economic illusion actually collapses. The winners and losers are being lined up in readiness, the social lines drawn, for when it all turns inward and nasty.

So yes. Neoliberalism remains in great health as an ideology. But the degree to which the actual global economy is then just a speculative illusion is the big question.

As well as the question of how best politically to manage the puncturing of the illusion. What system of control should best kick in there?

What appeals to me especially is getting behind or around all the pre-interpretedness that we don't think to question (since it's almost invisible as we use it) that traps our thinking in certain loops. — t0m

I really like the way you’ve been expressing this. But I think the weakness is that it depends heavily on the metaphysical truth of some communal or shared state of being, when the phenomenal mind is so completely private and unshared.

So it is both an appealing notion - expressed in many philosophies - but also fails unless we can define the “ground state” in something other than the usual mentalistic terms.

Alluding to the divine kind of works for me if it again has nothing to do with anthropomorphic creators, or creating forces.

There is a mathematical magic at the heart of Peircean metaphysics, a self-making relation that can call forth being from its pure inescapable logic. And then that meaning-forming, structure-creating device points deeper to its own ground, its own precondition, in the “not-being” of Apeiron, of Firstness or vagueness.

So reality swims into existence. And it condenses out of neither some ur-substance, nor some rarified divine mind - ur-phenomenology. The ur-potential of the Apeiron has to be a still more subtle concept.

Yet I can see that that approach to metaphysics is by-passing phenomenal being, which is actually the basis of our particular being as humans. So to match the ur-objectivity of the pansemiotic metaphysics I just described, there is then the ur-subjective description that would formally complement that.

There is here the possibility of two complementary metaphysical projects.

Well and good, but it's a different matter to the metaphysics of meaning. What interests me, is the idea that rational and mathematical truths are real but not physical. — Wayfarer

So you want a definition of meaning. And you don’t think it useful to first have a definition of the meaningless?

Mathematical truths seem fundamental in some crucial way, yet you don’t seem impressed when two such opposed things - information and entropy - are shown to be mathematically the same?

You’re a tough crowd. :)

Do you have any kind of definition of the semantic as yet? My impression is that anytime meaning is mentioned, your mind skips immediately to the necessity of a self experiencing that meaning. That is where all he mystification begins. Meanings can’t be just acted upon. They must be felt. They are not just states of interpretation or information that constrains, they are understood, appreciated, perceived, known to be.

So a meaning encodes a point of view. Yet points of view are then by definition particular, personal, individual. That is why sharing meanings is a fraught business. Likewise any claims to be able to measure meaning in any objective or scientific fashion. Your way of thinking about meaning - as rooted in the subjectivity of the singular point of view - already defeats any possibility of all attempted objective descriptions.

You’ve set up a nice fortress of presumptions to protect your view of semantics. So you don’t need to take the generalisations of the philosophy of semiotics, or the science of information, seriously.

Even though that generalisation project is arriving at its mathematical terminus. Somehow you can hold mathematics in the highest regard, yet ignore it completely when it comes to the generalisation of semantics.

Even if this was "in" the Matrix (and it sorta is in terms of mediation), it would still be 'real' in the most emotionally relevant sense, at least for me. — t0m

I see your point better I think. There is an assumption behind idealism~realism which is about being an immaterial soul locked in a material body, a physical world. So selfhood is taken for granted. It is all about starting with the bare givenness of experience. Then we have to work out what is really real.

And a corrective to that is instead not making self primary. The real first ground of being is the communal one. We are already in a world - the social tribal one. Our first experiences as babies is human contact. It is everything. So the communal mind - in some very important sense - is there before the private self becomes individuated (and aware of being trapped in a body that is trapped in a world).

So this seems to go against Heidegger. Maybe you will correct me on that.

But it is definitely pragmatism - Peirce's ultimate theory of truth being based on "that judgement towards which a community of thinkers would eventually tend".

And it is completely in line with my social constructionist viewpoint of human psychology. We are not born selves, but become individuated beings via the shaping constraints of our family, our tribe, our culture, our era.

I would point out how it is theistic notion of supernatural spirit or soul - the Romantic notion of human psychology - which is at odds with this view. So while you talk about it in an appealing warm and cosy ways, the emotional value, that fits quite happily with a naturalistic perspective.

I have no problem at all in first experience being about the raw feelings of human contact, being drawn into the human web of relations. So first there is you. Then later I discover I.

Babies of course are also busily discovering their own hands belong to them, and that the world exists in its various recalcitrant dimensions. But the emotion of social interaction could be primary in a way that the idealism~realism debate manages to by-pass.

You could ask the question of how would that change the game?

All thought/belief consists of mental correlation(s) drawn between 'objects' of physiological sensory perception and/or the agent itself(it's own state of 'mind' when applicable). — creativesoul

Coherence also has a part to play. Concepts can be justified on the grounds of their rational coherence. So it is not just a correlation between generals and particulars, or ideas and impressions. The internal rational coherence of a thought is another grounds for belief. (Kant might have had something to say about that.)

Correlation presupposes the existence of it's own content. — creativesoul

Coherence kicking in already?

'Objects' of physiological sensory perception are external to thought/belief. — creativesoul

The big assumption. It seems necessary for the sake of logical coherence. Observation of correlations give it inductive weight. Or otherwise.

All meaning is attributed by virtue of drawing mental correlation(s) between that which becomes symbol/sign and that which becomes symbolized/signified. — creativesoul

Signs mediate interpretations. So semiotics. But so far you are talking dyadically and not triadically. A weakness is emerging in the world being interpreted via signs is now left out of the equation, removing the functional constraints (the fact that the whole show has to work in terms of achieving some real world goal beyond mere "representation").

All philosophical positions presuppose the existence of an external world. — creativesoul

They presuppose coherence, intelligibility, rationality. That is the first place it starts. So the self is presupposed as much as the world. For there to be externality, there must be internality. And so to get to internal/external, the very coherence of the logic of dichotomies must be the true pre-supposition in play.

That is why we can indeed doubt the internal/external as an actual thing. Though Descartes' cogito is decent argument for protesting "there is a self". Although - being a linguistic claim - you run into new difficulties with animal selves, or foetal selves.

Thought/belief is not existentially contingent upon language. To quite the contrary, it's the other way around.

Thought/belief formation happens prior to language. Thought/belief is accrued. — creativesoul

Err, nope. Sure, animal brains can perceive and conceive. Chimps and ravens can do smart, intentional and planned things. But given you seem to want to make a hard distinction out of human "thought/belief" in your discussions with me, the evolutionary story would have to be more the other way around.

Language is a new level of semiotic code that just doesn't exist for animals (in the wild). So if we are pointing fingers at the cause of the crossing of this intellectual Rubicon, the development of the new constraint of syntactical speech has got to be the prime cause of something becoming different with humans.

Thought/belief begins with drawing rudimentary correlations(think Pavlov's dog) and gains in complexity in direct accordance with/to the complexity of the correlations drawn between object(s) and/or self. — creativesoul

The slippery slope fallacy. No amount of complication would have changed the animal mind. Dolphins have huge brains. Chimps too. But nothing new to report there. Just an increase in what was already going on.

With Homo sapiens, quite different. And that can be explained by pointing to what was new in a semiotic sense. Speech as a new level of encoding the signs that underpin the mental business of correlating and cohering, or differentiation~integration.

This is too rich. Pots and kettles. I'm not interested in your rhetoric apo. — creativesoul

Evasion, evasion, evasion.

You've been haranguing me for definitions. I've given them. To the degree I could given your refusals to clarify what it is exactly you might question about those definitions.

And now - as has always been the case - you run for cover when I insist on some kind of sensible definition of your own terminology.

I'm actually fascinated in a horrible car-crash way. I want to see what you come up with eventually.

Vanishingly constant or constantly vanishing? — Janus

All quantum mechanics can tell us is that it sure started small yet intense.

But then under a thermodynamically extended view of QM - decoherence - we could predict that the joke/applause will indeed evolve state from the vanishingly constant to the constantly vanishing. It will spread, yet dilute, as time passes.

Ah physics jokes. Surely the best!

Actually, the "latest/most recent" was me. — Sapientia

Oh right. So I was punk'd on that one. :)

Apologies to Creative there. But it was so believable...

An astute reader can look to the above example that apo has somehow judged to be rightfully applicable to the situation at hand, and clearly see that it is an example that doesn't apply to what I've written. Kant's explanation looms large... — creativesoul

But where is the astute reader who can make sense of your linguistic quirk? If Kant is there beside you, can you put him on the line?

Otherwise, I can only call upon you again to stop being bashful and explain yourself at last.

Vanishingly my dear planck. — Janus

Ah, but the more localised the applause, the more immense is its energy. Heisenberg's principle rules.

Indeed, the grand and only use of examples, is to sharpen the judgement.

Given you don't seem to take Kant's meaning here, the point is that you do have to internalise the proper habits of conception. Just being able to parrot words is meaningless. You have to come to understand them in a way that is intentional.

Which would be why you can't reject what you haven't mastered. You can't reject the words of scholarship because "they just don't make sense to you". You have to show first that you understood what those other guys really meant to say. And then communicate - unfortunately, also through the skillful use of language - your own "better" way of conceiving of whatever that thing was.

Philosophy and science rely on logical or mathematical language to ensure the maximum possible level of correct communication. Ordinary everyday speech carries too much ambiguity when the going gets tough.

So it really is a scholarly game with its rules for communicating. There's things you do, and things you don't do, because that is what has been found to work.

I'm calling you out for not accepting those rules ... even after posting Kant's own words.

The fact that you bolded and highlighted any passing phrases that you felt gives licence to your claim not to need to connect with active scholarship, or follow norms of philosophical writing, goes straight to your state of mind.

Kant wasn't actually whispering down the generations, "Creative, go you good thing. Stick it to the unbelievers in your special language."

It's not redundant Sap. Greater understanding results from being able to talk about something in more than one way. It increases the ability of a reader to relate. — creativesoul

So let's stack that up against a more scholarly view - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleonasm

Pleonasm (/ˈpliːənæzəm/; from Greek πλεονασμός (pleonasmós), from πλέον (pleon), meaning 'more, too much') is the use of more words or parts of words than are necessary or sufficient for clear expression: for example black darkness or burning fire. Such redundancy is, by traditional rhetorical criteria, a manifestation of tautology. However, pleonasm may also be used for emphasis, or because the phrase has already become established in a certain form.

...Some pleonastic phrases, when used in professional or scholarly writing, may reflect a standardized usage that has evolved or a meaning familiar to specialists but not necessarily to those outside that discipline. Such examples as "null and void", "terms and conditions", "each and every" are legal doublets that are part of legally operative language that is often drafted into legal documents.

...as is the case with any literary or rhetorical effect, excessive use of pleonasm weakens writing and speech; words distract from the content. Writers wanting to conceal a thought or a purpose obscure their meaning with verbiage.

So any standard notion of good writing would cross out your redundant terms as being more confusing than enlightening.

You may think it is a habit that makes your thoughts clearer. But for me, the redundancy just halts the flow.

I don't know which/what word/term I/myself am/are meant/intended to/at be/am attending/focusing on/at at/on any/every particular/specific moment/instant.

[Phew. Small round of applause please.]

Once again, rather than focus upon the substance of the post (that time it was Kant) some would rather talk about others on a personal level... — creativesoul

Stop feeling sorry for yourself. You are making your own credibility central to any discussion as you admit this is all your own personal theory, your own terminology, your own concepts.

You are welcome to ad hom me. It's against forum rules but I think it is a big part of the fun. I won't complain.

However the difference is that I always have some kind of citation to show where any claim might be coming from. So if you attack my views, I don't have to take it personally. I can show you the context within which those views arise. And that is just basic scholarship. If you don't like what I say, I say well go attack these other guys. Come meet my big brother. :)

Although, I do the same thing when I want to express the same thing in multiple ways, and/or show different ways to say much the same thing... — creativesoul

So why is saying the same thing two different ways of any importance? What does that idiosyncrasy mean?

Clear that up. Then you can tackle mental correlations/mental ongoings. If you can't point towards some basis in standard scholarship when it comes to that jargon, you really do need to make an effort to explain yourself.

Join in there apo. — creativesoul

It's your private theory that the whole world doesn't understand. I remember now your recent lament that you can't seem to bring the academic world to proper account for its failings in your eyes.

So if there is a key to your code, you can just reveal it right here. I don't mind if that involves you having to go cut and paste that answer from wherever you might have done just that in your best honest fashion.

But I am tired of chasing you around in circles. This has been going on for quite a few years, hasn't it?

Yes, can anyone here explain what creative means when he doubles up his terminology. I've asked him so many times, but he can't/won't explain. (Or is that explain/confabulate?)

So we have as our example...

This seems/appears like the perfect time to allow/permit Kant to place/put apo's latest/most recent ad hom's in proper/rightful perspective and/or point of view.

Now take seems/appears. Is one the animal level of perception, the other the human level? Is that what Creative hopes to signal? Or is one the proposition, the other the truthmaker? Does one imply some generality, the other some more specified circumstance?

Why should I be forced to be kept guessing like this? Does Creative actively require that I don't understand him for some reason of his own. That is certainly what it seems/appears like to me.

What about allow/permit, place/put, latest/most recent, proper/rightful. Then now even "perspective and/or point of view".

Aren't these all synomynous pairs with nary a meaningful difference? Or can someone else crack Creative's linguistic code, find a rule behind it?

There is no logical link of 'non-realism' to solipsism. If there were one, it would have been published by now, — andrewk

Didn't Descartes write that book? Anyway, to the degree that doubt is possible, belief in turn becomes uncertain.

The logic is the usual reciprocal one of dialectical argument. So you are right that this is a pseudo-problem of a sort. Most folk don't move swiftly on to the synthesis - the realisation that if belief is fundamentally limited, then ... reciprocally ... so in fact must be the doubt.

They call it dependent co-arising out East. Each extreme arises only in presence of its "other". So any limitation on one is going to be mirrored in some formally true sense that further thought ought to be able to uncover.

That is the path which leads to Peircean pragmatism and scientific reasoning. We start the whole game going by just being willing to hazard a best guess. So we claim a belief in axiomatic or hypothetical fashion. Then do our damnedest to doubt it and see if the belief survives. Our degree of belief because reciprocal to the weight of inductive evidence. Our doubt and uncertainty can be quantified in those terms.

So there is definitely a logical argument to be had at the core of this important epistemic debate.

My attempt to explain this is that people who find it important do so because they believe that non-acceptance of the 'realist' (ie materialist) account logically entails solipsism, which in turn seems to signify ultimate loneliness, and that one's closest and most important relationships are a delusion. — andrewk

It shouldn't have anything to do with people's emotions - their desires or wishes.

I can see that you might suspect people of picking the philosophical side that seems to best confirm their pre-philosophical understandings of themselves. Of course folk want to be standing on the side of the right answer.

But that isn't why idealism~realism is of foundational importance to philosophy itself. Once it is accepted that somehow reality is an appearance, a point of view, for us, then a can of worms has been opened.

We can be just as sure from the outset that the doubting can't actually slither all the way down the slope to solipsism. As you say with the Matrix, even the solipsists attempts to imagine what that would be like lack convincing detail.

It sounds fine in a general way, until Berkeley has to start muttering about us all being minds within the mind of God. Solipsism is self-contradictory when you really get into its own necessary ontic commitments.

So we know solipsism can't be a final destination we could arrive at just on those kinds of logical (not emotional) difficulties. The alternative is not a well-worked out one.

But that still leaves the big issue of how we resolve the epistemic tension between doubt and belief. And what could be more mission-critical for philosophy? We actually need a robust method, a robust "theory of truth".

And if that has to boil down to induction more than deduction, dialectics rather than predicate logic, then I guess that is when we will discover how emotional the logicians can be. :)