When I say universal, I am referring to that which is — curiousnewbie
No, but it would make sense to state that it is universally true that observers view events differently. — curiousnewbie
[My reformatting.]1. World exists objectively, independently of the ways we think about it or describe it.
2. Our thoughts and claims are about that world. — Harry Hindu
world exists objectively, independently of the ways we think about it or describe it
our thoughts and claims are about that world — Pattern-chaser
Can you prove that an empirical claim was made? If so, how do you do it if not empirically? Is it an fact that people make empirical claims and have feelings about things that influence their thinking? Is that a fact regardless of how people, or any mind, feels about that? Is it a fact of reality that you have feelings and preferences that may differ from others? Whenever we are referring to some state of affairs that we expect to others to agree if you cancel out our subjective differences (like our location in space-time and personal feelings and values), we are making objective statements about the world.We can't prove empirical claims period. It's just a matter of whether there are good reasons to believe one option over the contradictory option there. — Terrapin Station
world exists objectively, independently of the ways we think about it or describe it
our thoughts and claims are about that world — Pattern-chaser
Can you prove that an empirical claim was made? — Harry Hindu
Lol, you can only know that you believe something, empirically.No, you can't. And yes, that's an empirical claim. Since you can't prove empirical claims, you can't prove that an empirical claim was made.
Again, the take-away should be: "Don't worry about proof. Worry about the reasons there are for believing P versus ~P." — Terrapin Station
Lol, you can only know that you believe something, empirically. — Harry Hindu
How about trying a more “down-to-earth” definition of what is true and what is false. For example: Any system of human thinking, doing, and governance which promotes and enhances the physical, biological, and mental health of the human race is true; those which do not are false.
Hopefully, this will get us away from focusing exclusively on overly abstract semantical arguments and dry propositional analyses. — charles ferraro
That seems fair enough. I would add that the infinite series of "I believe that..." collapses to a single one because it is what mathematicians call an 'idempotent operator'. That means that applying it any number of times in succession has the identical effect to applying it once.
The link gives an example of a physical idempotent operator: an On button on an electric device. This contrasts with an On/Off toggle, whose effect depends on the initial state and on whether the number of times it is pressed is odd or even.
A mathematical example would be the operation of rounding to the nearest integer. Doing it once has the same result as doing it a million or infinitely many times. — andrewk
It depends on what one means by 'I believe that P'.That's an interesting solution, but I'm not sure that "I believe that" really is an idempotent operator here. Saying that I believe that P does not mean the same thing as saying I believe that I believe that P. The former asserts that I think that the world is a certain way. The latter states that I think that I possess a certain mental state; that of thinking the world is a certain way. And of course, the more "I believe that"'s we add, the more the meaning will diverge from the original "I believe that P", until it gets so complicated that I can't understand it. — PossibleAaran
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