But that is much nearer to phenomenology and transcendental idealism than it is to direct realism. — Wayfarer

:wink: No. It is direct realism, in that there can be no gap between the talk and what we talk about.

That's why i haven't participated in @Srap Tasmaner's new thread - there is no model.


Edit:

At a certain point we can realize that we now have a pretty adequate conceptual map... — J

There it is again. I have to go with Davidson here and deny that a map sits between us and the territory.

But real life calls. Later.

Yes, if I thought there was a hope of ever settling it. But using the "existence" terminology to do so just doesn't seem to get anywhere. Instead, let's talk about the ways that rocks show up in our lives, and what we can say about them -- also the ways that justice shows up in our lives, and what we can say about that -- and whether there might be various grounding relations obtaining between physical things and values -- but do it all without trying to award the Grand Prize of Existence to anything. — J

Is it justice that shows up or merely actions that are deemed to be just or not? It is common parlance to speak of injustices, but we don't generally speak of justices, which is itself a little strange, and speaks to the inconsistency of language usages.

In any case instances of both justice and injustice do appear, and that seems somewhat disanalogous with rocks since we don't speak of instances of rock showing up. Language is not a thoroughbred, though, but a mongrel.

I'm comfortable with saying that rocks exist and that ideas and instances of justice exist.

Language is not a thoroughbred, though, but a mongrel. — Janus

Ok... Can you explain that? I'm willing to be charitable to your intentions if you're willing to be charitable towards my intentions. Deal or no deal?

I always aim to be charitable towards others' interpretations. But no matter how comprehensive explanations are from both sides the possibility of diagreement remians. Doesn't mean one is right and the other wrong of course.

Language is not a thoroughbred, though, but a mongrel.
— Janus

Ok... Can you explain that? — Arcane Sandwich

I mean language usage has evolved not in an ordered and planned (selective breeding) way, but in an ad hoc (free for all mating) manner.

Sure. That does not make the world only the result of those "acts of coordination and correlation between events and schemes which assimilate them". Not just any "acts of coordination and correlation between events and schemes which assimilate them" will do. There remains novelty, agreement and error, embedding us in a world that does not care what we believe. — Banno

That’s right. We don’t simply fabricate the world according to our wishes. And yet, the only access we have to the world is through our aims and purposes. Care is indispensible to the connection between us and world, in the form of relevance , mattering and significance. Isnt this the basis of the normative power of language games? No matter how strange and surprising things can strike us , they are always, at a more fundamental level, already familiar to us thanks to the fact that even the most unanticipated event is recognizable on the basis of a background intelligibility. This is what precludes radical skepticism and doubt.

↪Arcane Sandwich
I always aim to be charitable towards others' interpretations. But no matter how comprehensive explanations are from both sides the possibility of diagreement remians. Doesn't mean one is right and the other wrong of course.

Language is not a thoroughbred, though, but a mongrel.
— Janus

Ok... Can you explain that? — Arcane Sandwich


I mean language usage has evolved not in an ordered and planned (selective breeding) way, but in an ad hoc (free for all mating) manner. — Janus

But that is literally the same for biological evolution. Scientifically speaking, evolution, in the biological sense of the term, is purposeless.

Yes, but the response doesn't really act as a good counterpoint. We might very well use a PC desktop as a doorstop. However, we wouldn't turn into into a soup and serve it for dinner, wear it as an earring, attempt to drink it if we are thirsty (seeing as how it is not a liquid), use it as a sledgehammer to replace our sidewalk, ask it out on a date, hire it as our attorney, take it home as a pet, etc. Just as we wouldn't use a hunting knife to clean our ear and just as, while there are pastoral societies all over the world that raise animals for their meat and milk, none raise animals to consume their feces.Nor do any pastoralists mate sheep to cattle, goats to horses, etc.

A series of connected lines and curves made out of sticks doesn’t shape what we do with the this ‘object’ all by itself.

Obviously. What's the assumption here, either things determine what we do with them or we decide how to interact with them? But that's simply a false dichotomy. "Everything is received in the manner of the receiver," nothing is read without a reader or eaten without an eater, etc.

What makes the screwdriver a screwdriver for us is not inherent in the object all by itself but in this totality of chains of ‘in order to’s’ that belongs to and on the base of which it was invented.

A screwdriver is an artifact. It's built to purpose. Rorty's point, aside from being a bad one (one he expunged from the transcript he published of the debate), also gets things backwards. Of course you can do many things with a screwdriver, open boxes, etc. But try loosing a Torx screw with anything but a Torx screwdriver and you will be in for some frustration. You can use a computer as a doorstop, but good luck trying to use a doorstop, or anything but a digital computer to run Windows. There can be many ways to be right and still always very many more ways to be wrong.

If it's impossible to be wrong, philosophy/science is worthless (another point Eco makes, echoing Socrates in the Theatetus).

Do the world, and truth, impose themselves on how we deal with things? Yes, but only in and through how we deal with things.

Right, how else would it work? Sort of like: "does the shape of my feet impose itself on how I walk. Yes, but only in how I walk."




Re: the whole quantification thing, this just seems like equivocation.

Consider:

Brutus: Wow Cassius. I saw your results to my survey. I had always thought you were an atheist and a materialist, but I see here that you marked down that you think that both God and ghosts exist.
Cassius: Well of course they do Brutus. Both can be the subjects of existential quantification! But no, I am an atheist and I don't believe in ghosts.

Well, does Brutus have a right to be miffed over what seems to be sophistic equivocation here?

It's a red herring at best. It would be like if the thesis under consideration was: "do subjects determine what can be meaningfully predicated of them?"

Brutus: I think this is so. Consider, only numbers can be prime.
Cassius: Au contraire! I ate a "prime" rib just the other day.

Re: the whole quantification thing, this just seems like equivocation. — Count Timothy von Icarus

:wink: Quite the opposite. It's the clearest definition hereabouts. Your Cassius is being a prat.



Edit: I should add, quantification is only one part of the explanation offered - it includes predication and equivalence and domains of discourse. Quantification tells Brutus and Cassius that we can talk about ghosts. Predication might be used to further say that ghosts are immaterial, imaginary or superstition. Cassius is mistaking quantification for predication.

Yes, but the response doesn't really act as a good counterpoint. We might very well use a PC desktop as a doorstop. However, we wouldn't turn into into a soup and serve it for dinner, wear it as an earring, attempt to drink it if we are thirsty (seeing as how it is not a liquid), use it as a sledgehammer to replace our sidewalk, ask it out on a date, hire it as our attorney, take it home as a pet, etc. Just as we wouldn't use a hunting knife to clean our ear and just as, while there are pastoral societies all over the world that raise animals for their meat and milk, none raise animals to consume their feces.Nor do any pastoralists mate sheep to cattle, goats to horses, etc. — Count Timothy von Icarus

All of this can be explained from the POV of Object Oriented Ontology, IMHO.

Re: the whole quantification thing, this just seems like equivocation. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, indeed, it is an equivocation, and to equivocate, in that sense, is an informal fallacy.

All of this can be explained from the POV of Object Oriented Ontology, IMHO.

Really, it should be explainable by any metaphysics worth its salt. Explaining why we don't drink rocks when we are thirsty or give our babies razor blades to play with shouldn't exactly be a big hurdle. Once one removes any notion of "human nature" or of the "essence/quiddity" of objects, however this becomes a much more difficult task.

Once one removes any notion of "human nature" or of the "essence/quiddity" of objects, however this becomes a much more difficult task. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Which is precisely why OOO doesn't even remove it to begin with. It just declares that such essences or quiddities are unknowable, and necessarily so. Every object has an essence. It does not follow from there that the essence of an object is knowable by any human being or animal. In fact, it's not even directly accessible for inorganic objects. A meteor has an essence. The Moon has an essence. When the meteor impacts the Moon and forms an impact crater, it does not follow that the meteor has any more access to the essence of the Moon any more than we do when we look at it in the night sky, or when we look at pictures of it, or when we theorize about its physical properties in a peer-reviewed journal or a web Forum like this one.

Mathematical Platonism.
So platonism is the idea abstractions exist.
I don't see how abstractions as non-physicals can exist. If they are non-physical they don't exist. What is the alternative?

If abstractions are mental content that's different and it should be acknowledged. And the infinitesimal as mental content is one possibility out of many.

Brain; ( number system 1 )
Brain; ( number system 2 )
Brain; ( number system 3 )
And so on.

If abstractions are mental content that's different and it should be acknowledged. And the infinitesimal as mental content is one possibility out of many. — Mark Nyquist

Good luck. Beware of serious babble on this thread. :roll:

I didn't want to neglect this, in the flurry of posts here.

Call these your axioms:

Existence is a property.

All material objects have this property.

To exist is to have a spatio-temporal location.

All material objects have the potential to change their spatio-temporal location.


So my question is, Is this further statement:

Only material objects have the property of existence.

a conclusion drawn from some subset of the above axiomatic statements, or is it a separate axiomatic statement itself? If the latter, it’s what I was referring to as a coincidence. It seems to demand further explanation.

Only material objects have the property of existence. — J

Yes. That is correct. Only material objects have the property of existence. Ideal objects do not have that property. So, ideal objects do not exist. Again, what's the big deal here? No one care.

a conclusion drawn from some subset of the above axiomatic statements — J

Indeed. Again, I'm not going to give you a "Medal of Honor" for something so trivial.

or is it a separate axiomatic statement itself? — J

No mate, it's a theorem. You just said so yourself, because a theorem is literally what you deduce from some set of axioms. You make me angry when you ask that sort of question.

If the latter, it’s what I was referring to as a coincidence. It seems to demand further explanation. — J

But it's not the latter mate, it's the former. Again, you're making me angry.

But notice that nowadays even reason is relativised; it is social convention, it is a useful tool, it has nothing to do with the way the world is. To even appeal to reason is nowadays covertly regarded as an appeal to authority — Wayfarer

Granted, there are many versions of an appeal to authority, including the argumentum ad baculum (check your Thomas)! Those who regard an appeal to reason as illegitimate on that ground are wrong, I think, but so are those who want to say that the ancients nailed down the meaning of all our key philosophical terms.

My friend, there's nothing here to be angry about. We all use the forum to question and debate each other's ideas. I think you haven't gotten my point, but that's OK, and please feel free to move on.

Those who regard an appeal to reason as illegitimate on that ground are wrong, I think, but so are those who want to say that the ancients nailed down the meaning of all our key philosophical terms. — J

Then I challenge the latter camp to explain to me, in Plain and Simple English, what this phrase means (these are Heidegger's literal words BTW): remanens capax mutationem. I know for a fact that Heidegger made that up. And I'm not even sure that's even correct from the POV of the syntax of Medieval or Classical Latin.

↪Arcane Sandwich
My friend, there's nothing here to be angry about. We all use the forum to question and debate each other's ideas. I think you haven't gotten my point, but that's OK, and please feel free to move on. — J

I apologize. These discussions have to do with my profession (philosophy), and I studied at Academia, and I work in Academia. It is only natural for me to be passionate about such things (philosophy). And, since I'm aware that I might be wrong (in addition to being ignorant in general), I have joined this forum seeking wisdom, a greater intellect, and a terrain for philosophical discussions.

In other words, I would wish to hear the explanation of language, from your own First-Person Perspective. Or, tell me what your philosophy is, as a set of axioms, and highlight any particularly important theorems, please. Thanks in advance.

Apology accepted.

Thank you for accepting my apology.

EDIT: What is an apology? Did Plato apologize for Socrates? Like, literally?

I could respond to some of your specific points (I could say, Well, in a way we do speak about instances of Rock showing up, categorically), but what matters in this overall discussion is the kind of thing you're doing, which is exactly what I think we should do. You're looking at what we say, comparing it to what we experience, considering various ways of thinking about it. Does it make more sense -- is it more conducive to good thinking -- to speak of "justice" or "instances of justice"? A good question! "Do rocks exist in a superior way to justice?" Not a good question!

At a certain point we can realize that we now have a pretty adequate conceptual map...
— J
There it is again. I have to go with Davidson here and deny that a map sits between us and the territory. — Banno

I hadn't thought about a conceptual scheme of the sort that Davidson denies when I articulated this idea. But you raise a good point. Let me think on it.

Well, there's a quibble here about what it is to express something. I don't think we've said something that is ineffable. We might have waved at something ineffable. That was the reservation I wanted to capture, when I said:
If something is inexpressible, then by that very fact one cannot say why... Doing so would be to give expression to the inexpressible.
— Banno
In that spirit, we haven't explained its inexpressibility as much as exhibited it. — Banno

This subthread shouldn't get left behind. Some of this was sounding familiar to me, and I thought it might have jogged a memory from Nozick's Philosophical Explanations. So I spent a little time searching (it's a big effing book) but couldn't find anything that specifically addressed explanation versus exhibition/illustration/waving-at a la Wittgenstein. But Nozick's idea of what an explanation is in general might be relevant. He thinks a good philosophical explanation addresses the question of modality, of how some given X is either possible, or necessary, or would be the case if, etc. He contrasts this with proof, which is non-modal (given the premises). And he points out that transcendental arguments are an admixture of both approaches. He's in favor of what he calls philosophical pluralism, because he thinks that while explanations can be ranked in order of plausibility (hence not relativistic), they usually can't settle a given question.

That's an interesting OP in itself, but the relevance here might be: Nozick seems to draw a clear distinction between explanans and explanandum. He doesn't think that p is necessarily going to be explained in terms that derive from or relate to p. So -- and again, he doesn't say this directly -- if p is "Why is q ineffable?", we can talk about p without needing to talk about q.

I still want a good example of this. Was my "meaning of life" example any help? I feel like there's some obvious way we handle this in ordinary life that I'm not thinking of . . .

Yes, but the response doesn't really act as a good counterpoint. We might very well use a PC desktop as a doorstop. However, we wouldn't turn into into a soup and serve it for dinner, wear it as an earring, attempt to drink it if we are thirsty (seeing as how it is not a liquid), use it as a sledgehammer to replace our sidewalk, ask it out on a date, hire it as our attorney, take it home as a pet, etc. Just as we wouldn't use a hunting knife to clean our ear and just as, while there are pastoral societies all over the world that raise animals for their meat and milk, none raise animals to consume their feces.Nor do any pastoralists mate sheep to cattle, goats to horses, etc — Count Timothy von Icarus

We are not disagreeing that the world poses constrains on what we can do with objects, so I have no problem with your laundry list of all the things we can or cannot do with specific things. What I am arguing is that our perception of of what we can or cannot do with a thing is based on HOW we understand what that thing is, how it works, and that understanding is not static, it evolves
over time. When our understanding of a thing changes, due to shifts in scientific and technological knowledge, it is not simply a matter of reconfiguring our knowledge of the external causal associations between objects. What also changes is the ‘core’ concept of object as center of properties and attributes. The reason that this core concept of objectness does mot remain stable in the face of changes in under is that it is an abstraction derived from a system of relations not only between us and the world we interact with, but between one part of the world and another.

Beware of serious babble on this thread. :roll: — jgill

:grimace:

So platonism is the idea abstractions exist.
I don't see how abstractions as non-physicals can exist. If they are non-physical they don't exist. What is the alternative? — Mark Nyquist

It seems the thread has drifted well away from the main topic. I'm more interested in that.

This approach doesn't work, I think for at least two reasons.

If numbers are just abstractions, how do you distinguish "3" from "The second even prime". The first "exists", the second doesn't. What distinguishes these two abstractions?

Second, how do you account for numeric laws? If numbers were all in the head, how are laws discovered that were most certainly not in anyone's head until they were discovered?

The "All in one's head" model is a thing known to physically exist.
Brain; (Numbers)
Brain; (Numerical laws)

And numbers just as non-physical abstractions doesn't have an explanation.
Give it a try if that's your position.
Prove it.

Those who regard an appeal to reason as illegitimate on that ground are wrong, I think, but so are those who want to say that the ancients nailed down the meaning of all our key philosophical terms. — J

Of course - but there's another 'sub-theme' here which is deeply connected to this whole debate. That is the belief in the pre-modern world that the Cosmos was animated by reason. The Logos was in some sense the reason for everything, and in that view, everything existed for a reason (also the belief behind the principle of sufficient reason.) Aristotle's fourfold causation was an expression of this. Over the course of history, though, as Greek philosophy became incorporated into Christian theology, the logos became identified simply with 'God's word' and finally with the Bible simpliciter. The idea of natural or scientific law itself is called into question, or said to be human inventions superimposed on an indifferent universe. Mathematical Platonism is intrinsically connected to this issue, as it seems to suggest that the Universe is itself mathematical, which empiricism generally will reject as a matter of course.

The reduction of reason to a consequence of natural selection is a whole other set of arguments, including Platinga's EAAN, Lewis/Rapport's 'argument from reason' and Nagel's 'Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion'.

If numbers are just abstractions, how do you distinguish "3" from "The second even prime". The first "exists", the second doesn't. What distinguishes these two abstractions?

Second, how do you account for numeric laws? If numbers were all in the head, how are laws discovered that were most certainly not in anyone's head until they were discovered? — hypericin

:clap:

. Does it make more sense -- is it more conducive to good thinking -- to speak of "justice" or "instances of justice"? A good question! "Do rocks exist in a superior way to justice?" Not a good question! — J

Right, I wasn't asking the second question. I don't think in terms of superior ways of existence—I am not a fan of hierarchical notions of being.

Rocks and justice exist in different ways—rocks are spatiotemproally existent and justice like goodness is conceptually existent. So, depending on circumstance you could have good and bad rocks—if you are trying to build a certain kind of ashlar wall, for example.

If numbers are just abstractions, how do you distinguish "3" from "The second even prime". The first "exists", the second doesn't. What distinguishes these two abstractions?

Second, how do you account for numeric laws? If numbers were all in the head, how are laws discovered that were most certainly not in anyone's head until they were discovered? — hypericin

Primeness, evenness and oddness can be observed in the ways that groups of objects can and cannort be divided up.

Primeness, evenness and oddness can be observed in the ways that groups of objects can and cannort be divided up. — Janus

However, one has to grasp the concept to make such distinctions, so it is not something that can be ascertained by observation alone. It is deduced.