These arguments both, can only remove the potential of the underlying matter or substance, by replacing it with something actual. This is the actuality of God. The problem though, is that the reality of potential cannot simply be replaced by the actuality of God, because this produces determinism, which is inconsistent with our experience. Therefore to maintain the reality of free will we must maintain the reality of potential. However, since the concept of free will in human beings cannot account for the agent involved in the selection from the possibilities which underly the natural dispositions you refer to, such as molecular structures, we do not avoid the need for the Will of God. — Metaphysician Undercover
I agree that scepticism is a fundamental starting-point for this debate. But there's a question of the burden of proof. Your challenge to me is to provide a reason for believing that the cup that holds your coffee exists when you don't perceive it. Do you accept that if you were to turn and look at it, you would see it? Is that not a reason for believing that it still exists? — Ludwig V
So what is more rational? I would say stopping believing in something when there is no ground, warrant and reason to believe it would be definitely more rational than keeping believing in something when there is no ground in believing it. — Corvus
The problem of course is how do you distinguish between what is real and what is not real. And if you cannot make the distinction you cannot know that what you are seeing isn't real, at any given time, nor that what you are seeing is real at any given time. — Metaphysician Undercover
I mean we have no ground, warrant or reason to believe in the world, when we are not perceiving it. — Corvus
Blinks don't take long time enough to make the world to totally disappear. Does yours?And yet both you are Hume write for an unperceived public.
How long must the lights stay out before this form of skepticism takes over? Do you doubt the existence of the world each time you blink? — Fooloso4
There are at least three aspects to this problem - it's really a series of problems. First is the problem overtly addressed in the present essay: how is it that we can move from the evidence of our senses, on which empiricism is supposedly grounded, to making true statements about the world? Second is the problem of induction, how we can move from a series of such observations to a general principle, a "law". The third problem is to do with when we might correctly say that one even causes another.
When I say “This is an apple” and only see the front of the apple, then what I say goes beyond what I see. It includes the back, which I do not see. Therefore it is possible that I walk around the ostensible apple and discover that there is no apple. Now, no sum of perceptions can exclude that later perceptions will show that despite appearances there is no apple. Like a general judgment, the judgment “There is an apple” goes beyond everything that we will ever have perceived. . . . If what is sensibly given in itself falls under the category of substance . . . then empirical knowledge always already contains general knowledge, which therefore is not inferred inductively from the former.
-Categories of the Temporal: An Inquiry into the Forms of the Finite Intellect - Sebastian Rödl
For a long while Popper's falsification was the winner
(For my part, that this discussion should take place at all shows something of the poverty of the sense data theory)
... when you are not perceiving it, there is no more the ground, warrant or reason to believe it. — Corvus
I would say stopping believing in something when there is no ground, warrant and reason to believe it would be definitely more rational ... — Corvus
Since appeals to Hume and Kant and academic skepticism will take us too far from the topic of this thread I won't pursue it here, but I would be interested to read what you have to say if you start a thread on Hume and Kant and their connection to Academic Skepticism, and more specifically your claim that: — Fooloso4
I think that abstraction and generalization (which, despite Berkeley, I do not think are the same thing) are also sources of truth. So let's not over-generalize about it. Pragmatism is probably the best policy here. — Ludwig V
it would... ...involve you in a performative contradiction when you go on to council us unperceived beings... — Fooloso4
After all, saying it is "meaningless" to even talk of certain things is, in an important way, to make a metaphysical claim about them. — Count Timothy von Icarus
A rather famous quote on this problem: "....Therefore it is possible that I walk around the ostensible apple and discover that there is no apple...." — Count Timothy von Icarus
. I take that as meaning that you think there is something wrong with the question. Could you explain?Do you accept that if you were to turn and look at the cup that is holding your coffee, you would see it? Is that not a reason for believing that it still exists? — Ludwig V
I am not sure if there is any point to trying defend anything against someone who didn't understand what self-contradiction statements are, but claim to understand performance contradiction. I was under impression that he was going to go through all the arguments that I went through with Banno AGAIN with the whole load of self-contradicting questions, and was wondering what the point was.In defense of Corvus, he says he has on order Catalina González Quintero's — Fooloso4
I am not sure either. But I thought it would be interesting to read somebody whom I have never come across as Kant commentary scholars before. I was presuming maybe there might some new interesting insight in the book. Will be able to tell more once I finish the book. Who knows.I do not know this work or what he will get from it. Perhaps after reading it he will modify his claims or give us reason to rethink some of our own. In any case, even if we disagree with what he will say or Catalina González Quintero says, it demonstrates an attempt to become better informed about such things. — Fooloso4
You repeat your claim three times but don't answer my questions.
Do you accept that if you were to turn and look at the cup that is holding your coffee, you would see it? Is that not a reason for believing that it still exists?
— Ludwig V — Ludwig V
But here I am talking about generalization from a single case or two (in the sense of without objects). Abstraction is a harder practice to justify. — Antony Nickles
Not taking into consideration multiple examples (the practice in multiple situations, contexts), as it were, of how things "are" (as Dewey might say I believe), is to intellectually theorize separate from actual cases (an event with attendant circumstances). — Antony Nickles
Of course, I see the cup when I turn and look at the cup. — Corvus
So if not because of problems with illusions, what are Ayer's reason for holding to sense data?The conclusion that I have now reached is that in order to account for our perceptual experience, it is not necessary to maintain that any of our perceptions are delusive — Foundations, p.19
Quite so. That's the essence of what the "analytic" philosophers believed, and explains why they spent their time talking about language.
Does Sebastian Rödl consider the possibility that I might walk round the apple and discover that there is an apple?
You still don't answer the question. So you still believe that you would have to accept the counterfactual if you did and that you would then have to admit that it is a ground for believing it exists when you don't perceive it.
The next question is whether you accept that you exist when you are perceiving an object and whether you perceive yourself when you are perceiving an object. — Ludwig V
You still don't answer the question. So you still believe that you would have to accept the counterfactual if you did and that you would then have to admit that it is a ground for believing it exists when you don't perceive it. — Ludwig V
So here's a question for anyone who cares to delve deeper. That seems to me to be the argument in Foundations, found on pp 24-25. If not that argument, then which? — Banno
(@Banno even feels Ayer might be misrepresented). — Antony Nickles
This was Philippa Foot's criticism, wasn't it? The boys want certainty, so they can avoid responsibly. The War overarches all of these considerations - it's hard for young folk to understand the way in which it provides the foundation for this whole exercise. All of these men served with distinction, and all had to find some way to come to terms with what they had to do. What's true of Hare is true of Austin and Ayer and Wittgenstein. They fundamentally need to understand why they set aside personal responsibility ot the greater cause. It's an unfair question - addressed in The Cain Mutiny....we want a moral rule or goal so that we don’t have to be good, we can just do what has been determined is good, and thus we are absolved because we can just claim, “I followed the rule!” — Antony Nickles
I think the conclusion, after Austin, is that this whole framing of the issue is muddled. However if we do take the framing as granted, then "statements about objects just are statements about sense data" is not an observation or conclusion but a piece of what is variously called metaphysics, or definition, or invoking a rule. That is, statements about object just count as statements about sense data. In those terms it cannot be false, or even wrong, but is rather misplaced.So can we not conclude that the two versions are not equivalent and hence not inter-translatable? — Ludwig V
A rough example, the ubiquitous cup...(This collection of sense-data statements) is true IFF (this statement about a material object)
Now I hope it is plain both that this is the consequence of Ayer's position, and that it is absurd. A cup is not equivalent to a collection of sense data. And it's not just that it is entirely possible to have the sense data and not the cup, or the cup and not the sense data, but that the supposed equivalence is between entirely different things. The analogy is not like the mistake in saying chalk is a type of wood, but like saying chalk is a type of democracy. Material objects are not sense data.(I see a red quadrilateral and a red ovoid and another ovoid) is true IFF this is a red cup.
I think it clear from Austin that there are not here two differing senses of "see". But I take it you are setting out what Ayer is claiming, rather than evaluating it?...different senses... — frank
Yes, that seems to be his argument. It's dreadful.In the first case, what I saw does not exist as a material object. Therefore, it's a sense datum. — frank
Ok.In other words, he's saying that the sense data theorists isn't offering us any needed revisions to everyday speech, but rather offering jargon that's helpful for special purposes. — frank
The point is that we are talking about a logical ground to believe in the world when not perceiving the world. Please ask yourself, what is your logical ground for believing in the world when not perceiving the world. Please don't say the world exists even when you are not perceiving it, because it is not what we are talking about here. We are talking about the basis for scepticim regarding the external world. — Corvus
Good argument, but Lakatos' research projects or Watkins' "Confirmable and influential Metaphysics" had the potential to overcome this problem. The real knock-out blow was Feyerabend's careful historical falsification, for philosophers, and Structure of Scientific Revolutions for everyone else.The biggest knock against Popper's theory.. — Count Timothy von Icarus
The biographic accounts I have read put this approach, at least in Oxford, firmly on Ayer. Before the war the Dons were apparently beset and confounded by earnest young men clutching Language, Truth and Logic, interrupting their lectures on Kant and Hegel with "But I do not understand what you mean by..."....saying it is "meaningless" to even talk of certain things... — Count Timothy von Icarus
...different senses...
— frank
I think it clear from Austin that there are not here two differing senses of "see". But I take it you are setting out what Ayer is claiming, rather than evaluating it? — Banno
Of course, it is not logically contradictory that things should cease to exist and then come back into existence again, but considered against the whole body of science and everyday observations it is highly implausible. — Janus
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