And the point I was making is that some people don't use the word "world" to refer to all there is. Plato distinguished between the world of substance and the world of Forms. The religious distinguish between the world and heaven.

The thing I took issue with was your claim that "If someone claims that the world isn't all there is, I would make the claim that they are misusing terms". You're saying that it's wrong to not use the word "world" to refer to all this is. This assertion needs to be defended. — Michael

Re-read my post. I acknowledged that people may use different terms for "everything that exists". As I have tried to show you before "meaning" is what words refer to. You refused to define, "meaning". The OP was particular about the word, "world", and the way it was used - "of the world" - which I took to mean "everything". In my first post I pointed out the inconsistency of someone who means/refers to "everything that exists" when they say, "world". If that isn't what they mean/refer to, then there isn't an inconsistency, but they would still need a term that means/refers to "everything that exists". We could use universe, multi-verse, reality, etc. Take your pick. It's not the word you use, it's what you are referring to when you use the word.

Are you seriously suggesting that there is as clear a dichotomy as that? There is no part of science based on authority and tradition? No part of religion based on experiment and observation by peers? I'm sure it is very comforting to live in this black and white world of yours but it is clearly a delusion. — Barry Etheridge

To make such claims about science without any examples severely dilutes your argument.

In my first post I pointed out the inconsistency of someone who means/refers to "everything that exists" when they say, "world". — Harry Hindu

No, in your first post you said "To me, the world is all that is" and "If someone claims that the world isn't all there is, I would make the claim that they are misusing terms."

You're saying that it's wrong for someone to use the word "world" to refer to something other than "everything that exists". I'm asking you to defend this assertion.

As I have tried to show you before "meaning" is what words refer to.

"The President of the United States" and "the husband of Michelle Obama" mean different things even though they refer to the same person.

And to bring up an earlier example, "human" and "intelligent species" mean different things even though they refer to the same things (assuming no extraterrestrial life for the sake of argument).

Although I don't see how this is relevant to this discussion.

↪Harry Hindu
science is in no way related to religion. They are different methods of seeking truth. One is based on authority and tradition, while the other is based on experiment and observation by your peers.

I know all of that. However, science is now normative, with respect to what ought to be believed, in the way that religion once was. It takes itself as the 'arbiter of reality'. — Wayfarer

Religion is subjective which includes seeking truth through faith and revelation. Science is objective, making use of methods of investigation and proof that are impartial and exacting. Theories are constructed and then tested by experiment. If the results are repeatable and cannot be falsified in any way, they survive. If not, they are discarded. The rules are rigidly applied. The standards by which science judges its work are universal. There can be no special pleading in the search for the truth: the aim is simply to discover how nature works and to use that information to enhance our intellectual and physical lives. The logic that directs the search is rational and ineluctable at all times and in all circumstances. This quality of science transcends the differences which in other fields of endeavor make one period incommensurate with another, or one cultural expression untranslatable in another context. Science knows no contextual limitations. It merely seeks the truth. Combustion works in every part of the world, in every culture, in every time. The same cannot be said about the "discoveries" of religious revelation.

Try having several of your peers test the "truths" you find through revelation and question you on how you arrived at your conclusion. You'd be offended because your experience of revelation isn't to be questioned and it's subjective - not prone to be tested by others. It is taken at face value based on your already preconceived notion that spirits and a spirit world exists.

Science can't be normative for most people are religious which makes religion the norm, not science. When I was religious and questioned the validity of my beliefs - that wasn't being normal. I was going against the grain.

What claims? I asked you if you could honestly say that there were no examples of the alleged methodologies crossing the rigid boundarioes you have set for them. As you've avvoided that question I can only assume that you cannot!

Religion is subjective which includes seeking truth through faith and revelation. — Harry Hindu

Science is objective, making use of methods of investigation and proof that are impartial and exacting. — Harry Hindu

Meanwhile, back in the real world, away from this idealised notion of both that you seem to have ...

The standard cosmological model is so sacrosanct that it is necessary to invent propose dark matter to maintain its authority whilst Deuteronomic theology is subjected to a rigorous critical peer review (Job) and then rejected entirely when observation (the exile to Babylon) proves it counterfactual.

The logic that directs the search is rational and ineluctable at all times and in all circumstances. — Harry Hindu

Hardly! It has been known for many years that the majority of published papers even in peer reviewed journals contain errors, false inferences, or conclusions that are not justified by the data and that far from being objective are biassed by all manner of subjective forces such as the pressure to succeed, the need to impress funders, personal ambition, and of course the simple reluctance to be proved wrong. (See also Reproducibility: A tragedy of errors in Nature this year)

Science knows no contextual limitations. It merely seeks the truth. Combustion works in every part of the world, in every culture, in every time. The same cannot be said about the "discoveries" of religious revelation. — Harry Hindu

That is the precise attitude of 'science-as-religion', or scientism, that I was referring to. The Western scientific method was a development of the general Western intellectual tradition; much of the groundwork was laid by the medievals. And it culminated in the advent of what we now know as the modern scientific method. It is indeed a powerful thing, but it's not all-knowing, and it's not applicable to every aspect of existence. For example, scientific method is basically restricted to questions which are amenable to quantitative analysis and measurement. So, science is indeed normative, for all the many things for which it is useful

In any case, back to the OP, I think 'the world' in many pre-modern traditions, simply denotes the domain of sensory perception - basically what is perceptible by the senses (the 'six sense gates' in Buddhist lexicon.)

In Greek philosophy, you can find the same general scepticism about the reliability of the senses, as you do in Descartes - a willingness to ask the question, what if the world we know through the senses is an illusion? (Nowadays the same kind of idea is expressed in science-fiction movies like the Matrix or Inception.)

So, for example, in Eastern religions - Vedanta and Buddhism - the discipline of meditation is very much aimed at detachment from 'the world' in the sense of being detached from reliance on sensory stimuli. In the Yoga Sutras it is said the yogi withdraws the senses 'like a tortoise draws its feet into its shell'.

Now if you look at modern, post-Enlightenment philosophy, it rests on the assumption of empiricism and naturalism - which generally boils down to 'only sense data which can be mathematically qualified provides the basis for valid knowledge'. So from that perspective, it is literally impossible to 'doubt' in the way that traditional philosophers did. Ours is a thoroughly worldly attitude, in their terms - we are so embedded in our naturalist perspective, that it would take a much stronger emolient than mere argument to soften it up.

(I think Wittgenstein intuited this. He was taken by the positivist movement to be endorsing positivism, but I don't think he was at all. When he said 'that of which we cannot speak...', and 'I am my world', he actually was speaking from the perspective of traditional philosophy in the sense meant above. He wasn't saying that nothing existed beyond what could be emprically verified, but was drawing attention to the limitations of language. )

No, in your first post you said "To me, the world is all that is" and "If someone claims that the world isn't all there is, I would make the claim that they are misusing terms."

You're saying that it's wrong for someone to use the word "world" to refer to something other than "everything that exists". I'm asking you to defend this assertion. — Michael

...and in my next post, I admitted that people can use the term, "world" to mean/refer to different things. When are you going to get over something I said before and then corrected myself in my next post and start defining what you mean when you use the term, "meaning", so we can then get on with the discussion?

As I have tried to show you before "meaning" is what words refer to.

"The President of the United States" and "the husband of Michelle Obama" mean different things even though they refer to the same person.

And to bring up an earlier example, "human" and "intelligent species" mean different things even though they refer to the same things (assuming no extraterrestrial life for the sake of argument).

Although I don't see how this is relevant to this discussion. — Michael

You keep bringing it up. I'm trying to get you to understand the point I was making in the actual thing that people refer to when they use some term to refer the entirety of what exists. Who cares what symbols people use to refer to it?

If there is a causal relationship between some "world" and another "world" then logically, "world" doesn't refer to the entirety of existence. They must use some other string of symbols to refer to the entirety of existence.

You keep bringing it up. — Harry Hindu

When? All I said is that some people don't use the word "world" to refer to everything that exists, and that you must justify your (since corrected) assertion that this amounts to a misuse of terms.

I'm trying to get you to understand the point I was making in the actual thing that people refer to when they use some term to refer the entirety of what exists. Who cares what symbols people use to refer to it?

If there is a causal relationship between some "world" and another "world" then logically, "world" doesn't refer to the entirety of existence. They must use some other string of symbols to refer to the entirety of existence.

I don't see how this addresses my criticism. You said that a phrase's meaning is its referent ("As I have tried to show you before "meaning" is what words refer to."). I provided you with examples of phrases which have the same referent but mean different things.

But, again, I don't see how this is relevant.

When [Wittgenstein] said 'that of which we cannot speak...', and 'I am my world', he actually was speaking from the perspective of traditional philosophy in the sense meant above. He wasn't saying that nothing existed beyond what could be empirically verified, but was drawing attention to the limitations of language. — Wayfarer

Have to agree. I presume that's part of the reason why at one time he wanted the Tractatus to be republished in the same volume as Philosophical Investigations, to show the relations between his philosophical selves.

Self reference alone leads to an ill defined infinite regress..
That is to say that founding metaphysical assumptions upon the notion that we only access self experiences is not a logically consistent position.

To reference the self requires that there is a distinction of the self from that which is not self.
Without such a distinction it is not clear what the term self is meant to reference.

Not only is the self not well defined as something which is distinct from the not self but there is the problem of infinite regress.
The self observes the selfness of self.
How does the self know?
The self observes that the self observed the selfness of self.

I can make no sense of the notion that we should found metaphysical assumptions upon the idea that the only access to information possible is self generated information from subjective experience.

Not only is that position logically inconsistent it defies common sense;

Clearly the mind has access to information which was not generated by that mind.
This is how we learn new things and discover when our beliefs are mistaken.
Sure you might argue that in order to grasp that information a mind must process that information but that processing alone does not negate the fact that information exists independent of any given mind.

Thanks to everyone who's been posting lately, I just had a busy couple of days.

I agree with Moliere that it's often unexplored, what 'world' is or represents: sometimes people feel they need to imply an ontology by incantation of 'world' when, perhaps, it only needs to be provisional, for the purposes of present discussion.

And with Cava I have been thinking about those two Sellarsian 'images'. Why only two? I had a fad, a year or two ago, in that way we self-taught folk do, for Nelson Goodman's 'ways of world-making' where worlds can be multiple, and I still roll the idea round my head fondly. In his conception a world didn't go over to relativism just by being not the only world there is: each world in his 'irrealism' had to have clear rules, bounds, definitions. I imagine such multiple worlds like a map on which you can overlay different properties - here's the geological way of seeing, here's the Google Street Views, here's the population of non-humans, and so on.

Lately my preoccupation is much more with emotion and with power. If you imagine 'the world' as an incredibly complicated 3-D map of what matters to each person, for instance, you can begin with a kind of Heideggerian approach - basic three elements being Dasein or selves, the present at and the ready to hand - and sketch out an immanent world of worlds, one where the 'objects' lack objectivity or even object-ness, yet truths are represented there that wouldn't be represented by the supposedly objective world, and all the known objects would still be in such a world yet strangely changed.

Or again, imagine a 3-D map of possession- and power-claims. This would show up a sort of political landscape beginning in the household/family and spreading out geographically across a locality and imaginatively through communities. My cup, my land, my society, my job. Our this and that.

The phrase "of the world" indicates that there is information which exists independent of any given observer experiencing that information.

The argument often goes that what ever is that information it must first be processed by a given mind before that given mind can verify the existence of that information.

Again suggesting that all information a mind encounters is self generated is not a logically consistent foundation for metaphysics because the self recursion leads to an ill defined infinite regress.

If the term self is not logically distinct from not self by definition then it is not clear what the term self means.
And if we do not first assume that the self is distinct from the not self then there is an infinite regress in the steps to prove the proposition that the self can verify selfness by consulting the self, which consults the self, and so and so forth ad infinitum.

Once again I think people conflate the notion that information that exists independent of the self with the problem of that information existence must be processed before the existence of that information is verified by a particular mind.
We can use logic to demonstrate that there is information which exists independently however.
If there were no such information which existed independently of the mind then we would never learn new things or discover that our beliefs were wrong.
There is no way to account for this phenomena if the term self is not distinct from term not self.

For me I see no great controversy to suggest that metaphysics be founded on the notion that there is a distinction of self and not self.
Once having done this, then by definition not self exists independently of self and there is nothing interesting to debate.

Simply put, that information which you do not know and which your mind has not processed is independent of self in every way.
That you can process such information and that the information can be made aware to the self is not the equivalent of therefor you can conclude that such information was never independent of the mind.
So there is no big metaphysical controversy at all.

The whole debate to me is not philosophically interesting considering the dilemma at hand.
The term self can be ill defined and ambiguous such that there now exists a metaphysical dilemma.
Or, the simple solution, define the term self such that it is logically distinct and exists independently from the term not self.

I have been thinking about those two Sellarsian 'images'. Why only two ?

Sellars established two broad conceptual frameworks, which are analogous, not equal or parallel but are related. He suggests these views are like viewing though a stereoscope, where the two distinct views become one vision of the world. Neither framework is reducible to the other but each is in dialogue with the other. Neither can completely explain the other without leaving something out, He does not dismiss the fact that there can be multiple conceptual frames within each view, such as physics and biochemistry in the scientific image or between ethics and behaviorism in the manifest image.

His essay: http://selfpace.uconn.edu/class/percep/SellarsPhilSciImage.pdf
is short and concise.

Information can't exist without observer. We gain information and process it by watching, listening, feeling, etc. You see there, information is about something. It's not a material thing like tree or dog. But color of the dog, her size and behavior patterns, which are stored in your mind, are information. There's a great essay about that at college homework help site.