:up: Nicely put! I do see Kant as being, essentially, a phenomenologist.

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Yes, all that. And as you seem to note, what is experienced is the world. We should avoid Stove's gem - the false argument that we only ever taste oysters with our mouths, hence we never tase oysters as they are in themselves... — Banno

I agree. We experience the world, not our experience of the world, and not our experience of our experience of the world, and not our ...

For me the way to avoid the oyster problem is to contrast the oyster-for-me with the oyster-for-anyone. Objectivity is just the lack of bias, lack of individual rather than species distortion. It might not make much sense for humans to worry about species or human distortion.

If you like; I've no clear idea of what the difference between an oyster-for-me and an oyster-for-anyone might be. Isn't it all just oysters?

Or, I can't make sense of the idea of a private oyster, beyond one consumed without company. I'm not keen on qualia.

We experience the world, not our experience of the world, and not our experience of our experience of the world, and not our ... — plaque flag

Worthy of Monty Python. Have you a view as to the sense of "we experience representations of plants and animals"? Seems much like experiencing our experiences...

If you like; I've no clear idea of what the difference between an oyster-for-me and an oyster-for-anyone might be. Isn't it all just oysters? — Banno

More generally, think of a juror listening to testimony. Everyday we try to see reality through the people we talk with. That thread about media bias is relevant here. The 'objective' truth is something like the balanced end of inquiry or the way a human ought to describe the situation. This would include reports on the quality of the oysters at a restaurant. Maybe Bobby has always hated seafood or resents the owner of the joint for dating his exwife.

, , Surely Quine put the analytic-synthetic distinction, if not in its grave, at least in mortal peril. Or are you both closet Chomskyans?

It's not a perfect distinction, but there's no need to treat it badly for all that. I studied math, and it's relatively analytic/syntactical. As with so many distinctions, we mostly need to simply remember they are historically evolving and imperfect tools.

The 'objective' truth is something like the balanced end of inquiry or the way a human ought to describe the situation. — plaque flag

I'm puzzled by folk differentiating 'objective' truths from truths. Prefixing "subjective' or 'objective' to truth seems to me to do no more than muddle the nature of truth. Neither "the balanced end of an enquiry" nor "how someone ought describe a situation" lead inevitably to truth. So, a balanced enquiry might well reach a false conclusion, and sometimes one ought describe the situation untruthfully (Kant's murderer at the door...)

Worthy of Monty Python. Have you a view as to the sense of "we experience representations of plants and animals"? Seems much like experiencing our experiences... — Banno

I agree with you that we just experience the plants. I think 'representation' works best in an interpersonal situation. Like a cop quoting a witness. 'Buy you said [re-presented (what had happened) ] that Joey threw the first punch. ]

People sometimes like to talk as if they could see around human cognition (but of course necessarily with it.) So somehow the lifeworld gets reduced to a representation of the scientific image (Sellars) which is paradoxically a mere part of that lifeworld.

I'm puzzled by folk differentiating 'objective' truths from truths. Prefixing "subjective' or 'objective' to truth seems to me to do no more than muddle the nature of truth. — Banno

I agree. The truth is the truth. Claims can be more or less objective, more or less biased. Private toothaches can function in the inferential nexus, as explanations for being rude, etc. They are still in the world at large, the lifeworld. What-it-was-like-for-Sally is not meaningless, has a role in the always public language. But 'subjective truth' is misleading. Claims about Sally's experience can be more or less true, but that's different, because Sally's experience is a piece of the world.

All roads seem to lead back to the co-given-ness or logical interdependence of self-world-others-language.

Animals move around and plants don't move around, although they may be moved by wind, while remaining in the same places. — Janus

This is as a good a thing as any to quote because it's the opposite of something you seem to suggest now and then that bothers me a little, roughly that we "piece together" the world out of our various bits or sorts of experience.

I think the whole ought to have some priority -- even the blooming, buzzing confusion is a whole, within which we make distinctions and so forth.

My thinking is that when it comes to oysters, say, it's not a matter of acquiring the oyster concept by having the oyster experience, as if that could be perfectly sui generis and then you stick a name on it and add to a list of things that are part of the world. Rather I'm thinking that you'll experience oysters as like and unlike other things, in various ways, and make a place for them within the distinctions you already know, but also -- and this is the main point I want to get to -- modifying your total conception of the world by making room for oysters. To find out there is something on the taste gradient between fish and -- I don't know, doesn't matter -- crab or whatever, that alone might be a surprise and change your conception of what else oysters relate to in your experience, because now fish are also on the oysters gradient, and all the others that criss-cross there, texture and smell and look and origin and presentation and how they pair with beverages and which condiments are best and worst, all that foody crap.

So I want to say you're always remaking the whole world while you acquire new experiences that don't come to you in neat packages, just being exactly what they are, but experienced from the beginning as like and unlike things that already belong to your world. I think you're always working on the individual concept and the whole battery it belongs to, the system it's part of.

Obviously there should be similar dynamics with the accrual of facts rather than concepts, although the structures at issue will look more narrative.

On the great big other hand, how all this happens is clearly a matter for proper research, and there's been plenty of neat work done on concept acquisition, so my preference for a decidedly holistic take only counts for so much. Some of what it counts for might be that the piecemeal assembly of the world ought to turn out to be incoherent, and Sellars strolls around this territory sometimes, like a good Kantian. It's batteries and clusters and systems and hierarchies of concepts, never just one at a time, that we deal with, and so some of the back and forth here that treats the experience of oysters as this perfectly self-contained sui generis qualia-in-waiting strikes me as misguided. Unless I'm completely wrong.

Not, by the way, ascribing the view attacked here to you, but you've said a few things a little like that so I'm just highlighting the issue.

Neither "the balanced end of an enquiry" nor "how someone ought describe a situation" lead inevitably to truth. — Banno

I agree. No guarantees. But we do trust some reports more than others. 'Objective' has a use. I myself strive to be objective. It's a key philosophical virtue, right ?

So it's about what we might believe, not what is true.

A distinction antirealists (and pragmatists) have lost.

Surely Quine put the analytic-synthetic distinction, if not in its grave, at least in mortal peril. Or are you both closet Chomskyans? — Banno

I don't hold a low opinion of phenomenology, as you apparently do, so I accept that we can reflect on experience or perception and identify its inherent characteristics. I said somewhere recently that the idea that space and time are the pure forms of intuition is an example of this. Once we come to think of it, the idea that any perception could be neither spatially or temporally given just seems wrong, incomprehensible. So we can say that the idea is synthesized from experience, but once realized, does not need to be checked against subsequent experiences to be confirmed.

I also said that it could be looked at another way; that analytically speaking anything that could count as an experience. must be spatially and/ or temporally given or it would not qualify. Again, an example of two different ways of thinking about the same thing. That said, it is not tautologically true that all experiences must be spatially and/ or temporally given; to say that there could be an experience which is not so given is not a purely logical contradiction.

Philosophers of mathematics argue as to whether it is analytic or synthetic; maybe there is no definite answer to that; it could be both or either, depending on how you think about it. We always seem to fall into thinking there is a fact of the matter with such questions.

It's batteries and clusters and systems and hierarchies of concepts, never just one at a time, that we deal with, — Srap Tasmaner

:up:

I find nothing at all to disagree with in what you say here. I think we are always going to simplify things, even egregiously so, when we attempt to piece together, from our armchairs, how we come to experience a coherent environment of things, relations and events. And yes, of course, nothing in isolation...

I agree that it's about what's best to believe. But William James would probably agree with that.

I don't know if you'd count me as an antirealist. Probably? For me the Lifeworld is primary. Promises are as real as pebbles. Norms permeate human experience. I don't see how they can be boiled away, because logical norms are what give claims of reduction any authority they might have in the first place.

How external is reality supposed to be for the realist ? If it's external to the species, then I don't know how much sense that can make within a human inquiry (allowing for the weird glitch where our mathematical models point before our emergence. ) If it's external to individual agents, then that's fine. The world was here before me and will outlast me.

I've edited together my notes on realism and antirealism in an attempt to set out my view.

Speaking very roughly, just to get started, realism holds that ...stuff... is independent of what we say about it; anti-realism, that it isn't.

"Stuff", because the content makes a difference. For instance, if the content is aesthetic, then anti-realism is the view that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder; an aesthetic realist might hold that beauty and ugly are a part of whatever it is we are beholding; an anti-realist, that beauty and ugly are attitudes we adopt, or some such. An ethical realist might say god and bad are as much aspects of the world as matter and volume; and ethical anti-realist, that no observation of the world will reveal good or bad, because they are not 'out there' to be found.

While "realism" has a general use, it's ontology that is often of interest. Stealing blatantly from my Rutledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, a realist may hold to things like that correspondence to the facts is what makes a statement true; that there may be truths we do not recognise as such, do not believe and do not know; that the Law of excluded middle holds for things in the world; and that the meaning of a sentence may be found by specifying it's truth-conditions. An anti-realist may in contrast hold that truth is to be understood in sophisticated epistemic terms, perhaps as what a "well-conducted investigation" might lead us to believe; that there can be no unknown truths; that we need include "unknown" as well as true and false in our logical systems; and that the meaning of a sentence is to be found in what it might assert.

I've usually characterised my own ontology as realist. I've argued against typical examples of anti-realism such as pragmatic theory, logical positivism, transcendental idealism and Berkeley's form of idealism. I have however also defended a constructivist view of mathematics, an anti-realist position; and sometimes off-handedly rejected realism in ethics and aesthetics, only to change my mind later.

Changing this to a linguistic argument, realism entails that there are true statements; while an anti-realist would not make that commitment.

So a realist says the ball has a mass of 1kg; the anti-realist might say that saying that it has a mass of 1kg is useful, or fits their perceptions, but will not commit to its being true. The anti-realists failure to commit amounts to a failure to understand how language functions; "the ball" is the ball.

There's a mission to Mercury by the ESA and JAXA. Part of the mission is to decide if there is water at the poles - something hinted at by previous observations. Both the realist and the anti-realist will agree that we do not know that there is water at the poles of Mercury. A realist will say that either there is water at the poles, or there isn't - that either the statement or its negation is true. An anti-realist may say that the statement "There is water at Mercury's poles" is neither true nor not true, until the observation is made. Which is the better approach?

I wonder also if Anscombe's direction of fit works here. It's the difference between the list you take with you to remind yourself of what you want to buy and the list the register produces listing the things you actually purchased. The intent of the first list is to collect the things listed; of the second, to list the things collected. The first seeks to make the world fit the list, the second, to make the list to fit the world. Is it that anti-realism applies to ethics and aesthetics because we seek to make the world as we say, while realism applies to ontology and epistemology because we seek to make what we say fit the world?

We (note the plural) talk in terms of mass and balls and so on. The direction of fit here is that we intend these words to be about whatever it is that is "out there". And when we do this we find that we can construct coherent and useful accounts of what happens. It's not luck, it's a process of eradicating versions that are dysfunctional. A language community in part imposes its language on the world. We talk in terms of balls and stuff that is not balls. Like Anscombe's shopping list, we use the words to pick out things in the world, or we use it to to list the things we have. Both are equally legitimate, and each relies on the other.

How many planets are in our solar system? The number of planets is both an observation and an imposition.

Reality is such that it can be divided up into tables and not-tables. As Davidson (and others…) suggested, the world is always, already interpreted. I would add that the interpretation is put in place by our use of language. We need to put aside the notion of an uninterpreted reality - there is no alternative to imposing an interpretation. In admitting this we deny the dualism of framework versus reality. There are no alternate frameworks. That's a direct consequence of our living in the same world. What look like an alternate frameworks needs must be interpreted in such a way as to merge.

So the world is not what we experience, it is what is the case. That's a difference that few here seem to have picked up on.

Consider Fitch's paradox. Anti-realism holds that stuff is dependent in some way on us, that thinking makes it so. That is, some statement p is true only if it is believed or known to be true. For anti-realism, something's being true is the same as it's being known to be true. Now a direct implication of this is that if something is true, then it is known - that we know everything. Anti-realism is apparently committed to omniscience. The problem does not occur in realism, which happily admits to there being unknown truths.

Consider Fitch's paradox in the case of aesthetics. The anti-realist claim is that beauty is in the eye of the beholder - for all (a), (a) is beautiful if and only if (a) is thought beautiful. It follows, fairly innocuously, that everything that is beautiful is thought to be beautiful. In Ethics, ethical anti-realism holds that what is good is exactly what we know is good. It follows that we know everything that is good.

Consider mathematics. The anti-realist thesis is that for a mathematical proposition to be true is for it to have been proved. So it seems to follow that all true mathematical propositions have been proved. If p is a true mathematical proposition, p has been proved.

An alternate is to adopt a trinary logic. For mathematics, we might borrow from Kripke, and suppose that there are three truth-values for mathematical propositions - true, false and otherwise. We assign "true" to some set of tautologies, "False" to contradictions, and "other" to everything else. When a proof of a proposition is found - a deduction from other truths - we assign "true' to that proposition.

Only proven mathematical propositions get to be called "true" - the main point of constructivism. But I'm guessing the more mathematically literate will find fault with this proposal. The implication is that the conjecture that every prime greater that 2 is the sum of two primes is not true, and it is not false.

I'm amenable to giving consideration to a paraconsistent anti-realism. So I don't think the “middle way” is absurd. The question may be were it is appropriate to apply anti-realism rather than a blanket acceptance or denial. Realism is about there being stuff. Whether our statements about that stuff are true or false is incidental to realism. Whether we understand things about that stuff is also incidental to realism. A realist might well adopt a three-valued logic with regard to statements. Nothing in realism locks the realist into a particular logical system. That is, it seems what is loosely called semantic realism, the view that realism must make use of a correspondence theory of truth, is a bit of a straw man. Or if you prefer, antirealism is a theory about belief, and has little to do with truth.

So the argument usually portrayed as realism vs antirealism is perhaps better thought of as about whether we should best make use of a bivalent logic, or use some paraconsistent logic. And for my money the best way to talk about the various bits and pieces of our everyday use is with a bivalent logic.

That might not be the case in other specific circumstances, nor in ethics, aesthetics or mathematics.

How external is reality supposed to be for the realist ? — plaque flag

That emphasis on internal/external is a derangement from phenomenology. In it's place I might put bivalent logic: there is ice on the poles of Mercury, or there isn't, and that both exhausts the possibilities and is independent of our propositional attitudes towards the presence of ice on the poles of Mercury.

So a realist says the ball has a mass of 1kg; the anti-realist might say that saying that it has a mass of 1kg is useful, or fits their perceptions, but will not commit to its being true. The anti-realists failure to commit amounts to a failure to understand how language functions; "the ball" is the ball. — Banno

That is to say, realists take the context of claims for granted, and pretend there isn't one, while everyone else admits that truth is relative to exactly the sort of framework you deny exists. Even Tarski is pretty clear that truth is truth within a given (formal) language under a given interpretation -- never just truth straight-up. (And when model-theoretic semantics is extended as possible-world semantics, you also get 'true at w'.)

It's going to be the same issue for facts, observations, what-have-you. You can follow Quine and plump for holism -- and that means some whole "framework" of some kind, however you make that palatable -- or you can explain how this atomistic approach to truth is at all defensible.

...the sort of framework you deny exists. — Srap Tasmaner

Who, me?

The sort of truth we are talking about here is that occasionally ascribed to statements. Of course these sit within a framework - the language and form of life. What is it you think I am denying? Be clear.

I've edited together my notes on realism and antirealism in an attempt to set out my view. — Banno

Thank you and very interesting. I shall mull over them.

I've usually characterised my own ontology as realist. I've argued against typical examples of anti-realism such as pragmatic theory, logical positivism, transcendental idealism and Berkeley's form of idealism. I have however also defended a constructivist view of mathematics, an anti-realist position; and sometimes off-handedly rejected realism in , only to change my mind later. — Banno

Your change of mind here is worth noting. What brings you back to realism in ethics and aesthetics?

I'm amenable to giving consideration to a paraconsistent anti-realism. So I don't think the “middle way” is absurd. The question may be were it is appropriate to apply anti-realism rather than a blanket acceptance or denial. Realism is about there being stuff. Whether our statements about that stuff are true or false is incidental to realism. Whether we understand things about that stuff is also incidental to realism. A realist might well adopt a three-valued logic with regard to statements. Nothing in realism locks the realist into a particular logical system. — Banno

Useful. I don't think this is well understood. In other words, people may be making hasty judgements.

So the argument usually portrayed as realism vs antirealism is perhaps better thought of as about whether we should best make use of a bivalent logic, or use some paraconsistent logic. And for my money the best way to talk about the various bits and pieces of our everyday use is with a bivalent logic.

That might not be the case in other specific circumstances, nor in ethics, aesthetics or mathematics. — Banno

I suspect ethics and aesthetics (and possibly maths do function differently. I personally don't know how you could talk about aesthetic realism, the notion of beauty, say, unless you were a type of Platonist. I don't really understand the logic models you are referencing well enough to make comments on the first point.

I should be out moving soil, but...

I don't think this is well understood — Tom Storm

The relation between logical systems and antirealism? I gather that this is what produced the swell in antirealist theory in the 90's. Especially Kripke throwing his hat in the ring. Seems to have subdued over time - there is nothing recent in the Journals of the AAP.

Or that the difference between realism and anti-realism is more one of choice of grammar than profound ontology? But that is all philosophy is - wordplay.

What brings you back to realism in ethics and aesthetics? — Tom Storm

It just seems to me that certain ethical statements are true - that kicking puppies for entertainment is wrong, for example. And that this is not just an expression of my outrage, nor how things are, but simply and directly how they ought be.

I should be out moving soil, but... — Banno

I'm typing this while I'm liaising with the government about funding for the end of financial year acquittals. It's like shoveling dirt but not as much fun...

Or that the difference between realism and anti-realism is more one of choice of grammar than profound ontology? — Banno

This. We jump to profound ontology rather quickly sometimes.

It just seems to me that certain ethical statements are true - that kicking puppies for entertainment is wrong, for example — Banno

I'd like to agree and mostly do. What does it rest on other than the obvious?

And which culture did you inherit your scientific realism from? — Joshs

That's a long twisty story that might be said to have begun with my being born a few months after JFK's moon speech. I'm not sure what you are looking for in an answer, or whether you really are looking for an answer.

So while I'm waiting for an explanation as to what you might consider a reasonable answer, I have another question for you. Are you familiar with Stephen Law's notion of Going Nuclear?

Suppose Mike is involved in a debate about the truth of his own particular New Age belief system. Things are not going well for him. Mike’s arguments are being picked apart, and, worse still, his opponents have come up with several devastating objections that he can’t deal with. How might Mike get himself out of this bind?

One possibility is to adopt the strategy I call Going Nuclear. Going Nuclear is an attempt to unleash an argument that lays waste to every position, bringing them all down to the same level of “reasonableness”. Mike might try to force a draw by detonating a philosophical argument that achieves what during the Cold War was called “mutually assured destruction”, in which both sides in the conflict are annihilated.

liaising with the government about funding for the end of financial year acquittals — Tom Storm

What fun.

We jump to profound ontology rather quickly sometimes. — Tom Storm

Oh, yes.

What does it rest on other than the obvious? — Tom Storm

I'm presently entertaining the view that the obvious will suffice. So, if we came across someone who thought it acceptable to kick puppies for fun, I suspect we would agree that there was something wrong with them, that they would make such an error.

Perhaps we jump to profound ethical foundations rather quickly sometimes, too.

Anti-realism holds that stuff is dependent in some way on us, that thinking makes it so. — Banno

As I see it, it's our statements about things that depend on us and the world out there. An awareness of the contingency of our frameworks can make one reluctant to insist that a statement must be true or false if it is meaningful. Meaningfulness is not trivial, either.

Apel adds to this perhaps.
Apel argues that the most important contribution of philosophical hermeneutics, Gadamer's in particular, has been to show that interpretation is not another method of investigation in addition to the methods used within the hard sciences, but an unavoidable dimension of all understanding.
https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/apel-karl-otto-1922

Hegel summarized idealism as the emphasis of the unreality of the abstract. We can try to imagine the world stripped naked of all the things we say about it: an unreal abstraction, which may be useful. We imagine the planet before we got here, but we can do so only because we are here, etc. But also the self without a world to be in is an abstraction. A Turing machine with infinite memory, etc.

That emphasis on internal/external is a derangement from phenomenology. — Banno

Perhaps you don't give phenomenology enough credit. Husserl alone is already great. Also the realism/antirealism seems like an echo, with realism favoring the external.

A realist will say that either there is water at the poles, or there isn't - that either the statement or its negation is true. An anti-realist may say that the statement "There is water at Mercury's poles" is neither true nor not true, until the observation is made. Which is the better approach? — Banno

I suspect that most will agree that a binary approach makes more sense here. It's on that side of a continuum.

On the other side there's the issue of whether a given Turing machine will halt on a given input. Part of me wants very much to say of course ! But there's no upper bound on how long it could take to find out.

Am I an antirealist because I start to suspect there's no obvious answer here ? I find the realism/antirealism debate itself somewhat murky. Popper's realism appeals to me. But tentative hypotheses (held self-consciously fallibly) and instrumental hypotheses are practically the same.

You might be too hard on pragmatists. To me, anyway, the original spirit of pragmatism is about not wasting time on differences that make no difference. It's a reaction against a tendency to get bogged down.

And for my money the best way to talk about the various bits and pieces of our everyday use is with a bivalent logic.

That might not be the case in other specific circumstances, nor in ethics, aesthetics or mathematics. — Banno

I agree. In everyday life, the framework is relatively transparent and trustworthy.

I'd add metaphysics and epistemology to your list in the second sentence.

How many planets are in our solar system? The number of planets is both an observation and an imposition. — Banno

Great example. The criteria for membership in the planet category are contributed by us, though clearly within various constraints that we did not choose. So statements about planets depend for their truth on our own semantic and logical norms as well as upon a world that constrains us.

Are you familiar with Stephen Law's notion of Going Nuclear? — wonderer1

So asserting the Kuhnian proposition that empirical knowledge has a paradigmatic structure which makes Popperian progress incoherent is just a kind of temper tantrum designed to lay waste to every position? I gather Stephen Law is more sympathetic to Popperian realism than to Kuhnian relativism, but perhaps one can counter his ‘Going Nuclear’ model with one that posits someone named Stephen who, in getting over their head in a philosophical discussion, decides to impugn or psychoanalyze the motives of their interlocutor rather than attempt to revise their own construction.